Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

Any way you looked at it, Ogilvy and Myrtle’s Sterile Bandages were shoddy pieces of work. It must have been those military contracts, he speculated — government money will lull the best of souls into short-shrifting, he’d seen it happen. Whatever the reason, poor craftsmanship was the star the company ship steered by, and they tacked expertly. Number one, he observed, the rectangle of folded cotton absorbed nothing, and immediately after application brown blotches soaked through. Might as well walk around with a spouting artery if that’s going to happen. And the not-Band-Aids had a temperament. The moment he put one on, it was overcome with an unbearable self-loathing and the edges rolled up on themselves, too shy for this world. Whereupon it was only a few seconds before the gummy sides were clotted with dirt and they were even more abject. In showers, they went AWOL first thing, abetted by the particularly water-soluble adhesive, leaping from skin for the safety of the drain. Afterward when you should have been drying, you had to root around amid the hair and suds down there to prevent clogging. Water or no water, they self-destructed after twelve hours regardless, so that when you reached into your pocket for your wallet, the bandage clung to the rim of the pocket and tore off, the pocket pulled the scab off, and you bled on your clothes and dollars. A person couldn’t win with those things.

In the fifties, they relaunched their brand as Dr. Chickie’s Adhesive Strips, hoping that a homey image might rustle up a little market share. These were the days before the advent of nomenclature firms, the Dark Ages. To people like him, the amateur namers of yore were like medieval doctors who never saw a patient unless armed with a bucket of leeches. Perhaps in its historical context, removed from modern cynicism, Dr. Chickie might have been a figure of apparent trust and authority, staring back at the wounded from the front of the tin box. He wore a white smock, lascivious grin bulging behind a white mask, and he peered through deep goggles that would not have been out of place on a World War Two flying ace. To his eyes, Dr. Chickie came off like a pediatrician who kept a box of special pictures in his desk drawer, the kind you had to send away to Amsterdam to get developed.

Dr. Chickie prescribed no special remedy for the unpopularity of O and M’s adhesive strips. The good doctor ministered to the same handful of loyal patients for years, doddering on until the overhaul that cued him onto the stage. When he got the assignment, the only mental association he had with Dr. Chickie was deranged relatives. When he went to visit his deranged relatives they always had rusting tins of Dr. Chickie in their medicine cabinets. O and M had stopped packaging their strips in metal tins only a few years earlier, as if the plastic and cardboard revolutions had never happened. Market research bore out his impressions. The only people who used the product lived in small hamlets where everybody believed Truman was still the president; on visiting their homesteads the mailman shoved in pitches for land deals in Florida and sweepstakes guarantees and little else. Mummies that they were, they didn’t need Dr. Chickie’s Adhesive Strips anyway. What was there to sop? What they needed were brooms, to sweep up the dust that fell out of the nicks in their bodies. These people were not the kind you tried to seduce through advertisements in tony magazines. Only the rise of managed health care kept the company in the black. The military, HMOs: O and M had a facility for finding those in need of bargains bought in bulk. Nonetheless, they wanted a leg up in the domestic field.

It was quite a situation.

Really, what else were they going to do?

They came to him and he saved them.

. . . . . . . .

No, Albie’s wife hadn’t taken everything in the divorce. She had left him his inappropriate emotional reactions to small things. Before they got back into the Bentley, Albie noticed the crushed toy in the driveway and murmured, “It’s a damn shame,” shaking his head as if rendering verdict on the entirety of cruel nature. A frankfurter made him smile, a broken toy sullen. He hoped that Albie’s melancholy might put an end to conversation for a time, but Winthrop Lane had other plans. It must be unfortunate to be so unsettled at the sight of your name. Particularly when your name was everywhere.

“This is the first road they put in,” Albie told him, “so that they could get supplies back and forth. Keep following it and you’ll hit the factory. Before that it was just woods. Maybe there were some Indians or something, but they didn’t have a road.” Albie winced. “Probably want to change the name of the road, too. It’s like they want to erase it all.”

“I don’t do roads.”

“It’s simple tradition. You know what it means to be a Quincy man — we’re all brothers. It doesn’t matter where you come from, once you walk into those ivy halls, you’re in the brotherhood. Women, too, now that they let women in. They got a right. I tell you, I go back to visit and I can’t help but say, Golly, look at how it’s changed! You got all kinds of people, from all over the world. Handicap access, so they can wheel up there, it’s great. But even in my day, there was that spirit. A community of like-minded people. Had a black fella lived in my dorm. There were only five or six, but you have to understand the times. Good fella, quiet. Milton, I think that was his name. Lived downstairs. Liked to swim, if I remember correctly.”

“Wow.” He had found, in his life, that it was always a good policy to flee when white people felt compelled to inform you about their black friend, or black acquaintance, or black person they saw on the street that morning. There were many reasons to flee, but in this case the pertinent one was that the reference was intended to signal growing camaraderie. He recognized landmarks on the road, and realized that they were almost at the hotel.

“Quincy days — they were good times, right? They mean something.” His eyes sparkled. “There is a bond. It’s the same thing here, that’s what I’m telling you — look! There’s old Gil and his little rug rats. Hey Gil! What was I — okay, okay, Winthrop means something. Goode’s people, sure, they’re the ones first settled here, sure. Can’t dispute that even if I wanted to, it’s a historical fact. But it was nothing ’til my great-great-granddad opened up the factory here. Just a bunch of trees until there was a Winthrop name to say: This is here. It’s tradition. Guys like you and me, we understand that.”

At the curb outside the hotel, a white shuttle bus disgorged passengers. Recruits fresh from the airport, dressed in the uniform of their kind, primary-color polo shirts and khakis. Albie pulled up and grimaced. “Will you get a load of that,” he muttered. “Marching in like a bunch of ducks. Ain’t that a kick in the pants — only time this place makes any money is when Lucky has one of his things going on.”

He slid out of the passenger seat and said to Albie, “Can’t stop progress,” without thinking. It was a catchall phrase of his, something to put out there when he felt too indifferent to come up with a more engaged response. He instantly regretted his mistake. He looked back into the car. There sat Albie, pooled in the front seat: privilege gone soft in its own juices.

“No, you can’t stop progress, can you?” Albie sighed. Did his eyes glisten, or was it a trick of the light? “Listen,” Albie said, “I know you have responsibilities. You got your job. But you’re here to be objective, right? You can see what they’re trying to do, can’t you? They’re trying to take away something that means something.”

They left it at that.

He found himself walking automatically to the hotel bar and stopped. He considered the situation, and then permitted his subconscious to have its way. He had only been away for a few hours, but there was no reason his afternoon could not be categorized as a hard day’s work.