Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

“I wanted to find anything about the law on changing the name of the town.”

She made the connection and her face brightened. “You’re that outside consultant, right? I heard about you.” He’d never heard someone say that particular c word with such relish. “What do you want to know?” she offered. “I’m the one who did all the legwork on that for Lucky.” She straightened, and if she wore glasses she would have slid them up her nose. “Who else are you going to ask but the town librarian?”

“Some general background on the switch to Winthrop from Freedom,” he said.

“It happened in this very room,” she said, suddenly center stage on the set of a public television documentary. “This was the town hall before it was the library. There were three people on the city council — Goode and Field, the two black guys who first settled here, and Sterling Winthrop, he of the barbed-wire fortune. Have you met Albie, yet?”

“He’s everybody’s uncle.”

She snorted. “It was basically a business deal, really,” she said. “The Light and the Dark had claim to the land. There—”

He interrupted her. “What was that Light?”

“The Light and the Dark were Goode’s and Field’s nicknames,” she explained. “Goode was the sunny-disposition guy and Field was the grumpy one. Like the Odd Couple. So that’s how they got their nicknames.”

The Light, the Dark. Freedom. My people, my people. Regina’s forebears were the laziest namers he’d ever come across. He grimaced and asked her to continue with her story.

The librarian told him that there were a lot of black towns in the state at that point in time. “If everything wasn’t packed up, I could show you some really interesting stuff about the all-black towns around here,” she lamented. “Winthrop comes along and falls in love with the area — that river traffic, at any rate — and so they decided to make it all legal. I think it was hard to argue with the kind of access Winthrop’d provide to the outside world — having a white guy up front — so they got together to incorporate the town. Drew up a town charter, elected themselves the town council, and got all their ducks in a row.”

“Might as well go with the devil you know.”

“He wasn’t going to hassle them or lynch them or burn them out or whatever, and at that point you needed a certain number of citizens in order to incorporate and be officially recognized by the state. There was a whole community already here to pump up the numbers. Both sides got something out of it.”

“So why the law, then?” he asked. “Why not go change the name outright? They were the village elders.” The question had been bothering him, and the previous night before going to sleep, he’d hit the books to answer it. While he’d learned plenty about barbed wire, and smelting patents, and the long-range vision of a certain entrepreneur, all he’d found of his quarry were suspicious don’t-look-too-close constructions. They decided to change the name. The name was changed . Wording and phrasing familiar as the essential grammar of modern business.

“I think the people liked the name Freedom,” she said, shrugging. “It sounds corny, but it meant something to them. A couple of years earlier, they’d been slaves. Now they had rights, they were official. They liked being citizens, and citizens have a government with rules and whatnot. The way I interpreted it is, Goode and Field wanted to do it right. Do it by the book. Made it a law, made it legal, and then voted to change the name.”

Something sounded off to him, but he didn’t pursue it. He heard Not Skip bang his way through the door. The librarian gave the kid a look and he rolled his way out of sight. “We’re going to be here all weekend at this rate,” she complained.

“What do you think of this name-change business?” he asked.

“Now or back then?”

“Now, Lucky’s thing.”

She shrugged, halfheartedly this time, her pure apathy undermining the very expression of apathy. Slimpies : Ready-to-Wear Shrugs for When You Just Don’t Have It in You. “He’s the boss man,” she drawled. It turned out Lucky had lured her to Winthrop a few years ago. There had been a file-sharing program Lucky was very keen on, and she was part of a team brought in to dig around in the kernel and try to figure out how it worked.

“Rip it off.”

“Sure. And we worked for a few weeks, and then Lucky informed the team that he’d bought the company outright. I had just moved down, and I didn’t want to go back, so I took this job.” She pursed her lips. “You can’t blame Lucky for being Lucky,” she said evenly. “It’s like blaming water for being wet. This job’s not so bad. Mostly I tell people how to use the browsers and make sure the kids aren’t looking for porn. When Lucky asked me to do a little background on the olden days, I was pretty happy to have something to do. ‘Can I get some intel on this name thing?’ ” she said, imitating him. “That doesn’t mean I’m all up in his Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean.”

“Yup.”

She sighed, her eyes drifting to the empty stacks, and she was reminded of her task. “Anything else?” she asked.

Something in her movements jostled a heavy-lidded thing in his brain stem, and he had a very concrete image of the librarian in her bedroom, on her bed, leaning back, bit of thigh, little feather of panties just visible. He realized it was his first sexual thought in months, not counting what had been wrought by that damned series of shampoo commercials. The shampoo commercial as arena for erotic play had alternately vexed and titillated him during his convalescence.

She said, “Hey,” and he said, “Sorry?”

“I said, the old archives are in the new building already, but if I come across the box, I’ll let you know. If you want to look for yourself.”

He thanked her and wished her good luck.

As he reached the door, she yelled after him. “You should try a cane. Canes are cool.”

He looked back and gave her a brief nod. “Maybe I will,” he said, even though he’d already done the cane thing, months ago. It didn’t take.

. . . . . . . .

It was easy. Apex.

He had been saving Apex for a while. It had come to him in a dream that everything was Apex.

Of course the summit, human achievement, the best of civilization, and of course something you could tumble off of, fall fast.

Was: waterproof, flexible, multicultural, recommended by four out of five doctors in a highly selective survey.

Apex was a name you could rely on.

The little part on the top of the pyramid, tons of stone dragged across the sand to make this thing. The eye on the top of the pyramid as it appears on the dollar bill. He had heard this was a symbol of immense power according to mystics. What the mystics saw was Apex. It was the currency of the world.

In its natural state, it possessed one of the great product kickers of our time. The holy ex . A classic.

Take it for a spin — it was good to go.

We try to give you a glimpse of your unattainable selves. Keeps you docile.

And when their skin was cut by roses or knives or lovers' words they reached for Apex.

That great grand plosive second syllable. Quite the motherfucker, that.

Not too bad for chanting, either, he thought. Repeated to fascistic crescendo, on flags around the square, streaming from streetlamps and across the backs of horses and flapping from the top of the elegant plaza in benign intensity.

The clients came to the office, genuflecting, this or that object on its velvet bed, polished of human fingerprints in the cab on the way to the meeting. None of those things deserved Apex so he kept the name tight, looking over his shoulder as he spun the combination to the safe to make sure it was still where he kept it. No one knew of his treasure and he thought: One day.