Colson Whitehead - Apex Hides the Hurt

They kept the plastic surfaces clean and everything was plastic. The shop was so immaculate that it looked like it had opened yesterday, but if someone pulled out a photo from 1872 showing palominos tied up in front, he would not have suspected monkey business. A degree of fastidiousness was a big part of the franchise agreement, one of the deep and numerous responsibilities of those in Admiral Java’s family. They had to stick to the rules if they were going to use the name. Even the farthest colony received weekly newsletters from HQ outlining the specials, the recent hairnet edicts, the latest volleys in the great sanitizer debate. Any customer might be an emissary from the home office come to check compliance, register corruption in tiny boxes on legal-sized paper. Spies were everywhere. My limp is a weak disguise, he said to himself. The medium Sumatra arrived superbly. He dropped audible dimes into the tip cup.

This was the world he moved in, a place of compacts and understandings. It was safe in that embassy. He knew how things worked again. Steam snaked out the sip hole. He commandeered one of the people-watching stools in the window and found that dangling there was more comfortable than the four-poster bed he had slept in the night before. Across the square he saw the dark entrance of the Hotel Winthrop, the frosted glass, the somber gleam of brass in the sick light. The rain had diminished and redoubled through the night, wishy-washy, and now murmured to a drizzle. But he knew it was going on for a while. His foot continued to throb. Since his misfortune he had a farmer’s ken and understood weather arriving.

Behind the window of Admiral Java, peeking past the name stenciled on the glass, he was able to take a more accurate survey of the town’s makeover. They had the new computer chain, the sneaker chain, the convenience-store chain, Admiral Java of course. Affirmations of a recognizable kind of prosperity and growth. More than half of them were clients of his (former) firm. If he had not suffered a misfortune, his heart would have swelled. He would have been the grandma stooping in her garden to check on how the tomatoes were coming along. Instead he had to settle for a recollection of pride, and heat through the recyclable container.

In between the chain stores and the old stalwarts, he found representatives of that contemporary brand of establishment, the kind that dressed itself in rustic sincerity but adhered to the rapacious philosophy of the multinational. They were easily spotted despite their camouflage. The homey flower shop run by women in long dresses who had forced out the previous mom-and-pop operation, the pricey home-furnishing store where expense crouched behind the subterfuge of calligraphic price tags, the restaurant that had changed hands but maintained the fifties furnishings and quaint original signs for the kitsch factor. Old-fashioned was a name after all, he had attached it to a new brand of lemonade or pie on many an occasion. The Hotel Winthrop was not the only holdout of what had been, but from his vantage point on the swiveling Admiral’s stool it was the axis. The tallest building on the square, the looming accusation.

They were even getting an Outfit Outlet, so he was implicated. At the end of the block, a brick two-story building was quarantined by blue plywood. While he couldn’t make out the letters on the posters along the fence, he knew what they said. COMING SOON OUTFIT OUTLET. The familiar stacked O’s were the giveaway, the slim ovals in the infinity configuration. If you didn’t recognize it, they had failed. Walk five blocks in any major city and you were bound to come across an Outfit Outlet. He had named the store a few years back. The parent company was a successful purveyor of low-priced low-quality goods that had decided it wanted a different piece of the action. So the same sweatshops stitched together flashier clothes from the same fabrics, and midwifed profit. The new member of the corporate family was doing well, due in no small part to the name, of course. Of course. Not that the work they did was shoddy. It was hard to walk into an Outfit Outlet and not find something, even if it was a lowly sock, that did not serve a purpose in your wardrobe or the persona you connived to project to the world.

It was nice when he thought something up and the marketing people ran with it, coming up with an appropriately smart logo or campaign or tagline or something that looked nice heaving on T-shirts. In the case of the Outfit Outlet infinity design, the marketers had even displayed a sort of coy self-consciousness about the business of the franchise. Whether everybody was in on the joke or not, it was hard to argue with a cotton T.

Would they demolish the old building rather than preserve the façade? No stopping the double O. They grew up fast. Such things happened in a blink, the things you name go on without you. Had the fence been there yesterday? He couldn’t remember. He felt reduced again, half erased. Instead of being comforted by the familiar stores and reliable logos, they reminded him that this was the longest he had been out of his house since his misfortune. When he left Winthrop in a few days, the store would probably be open for business, with the mandated pop CDs on shuffle, that month’s colors laid out for discovery of your size . Some people drive miles to watch foliage; he had heard of people who made regular pilgrimages to the windows of Outfit Outlet to watch the colors change.

Maybe that last part isn’t true, but it should be.

. . . . . . . .

Muttonchops saw him cross the threshold and poured a draft. He supposed the bartender wanted to let him off easy, after having witnessed the quick damage wrought the night before by the Winthrop Cocktail. When he reached for his wallet, the bartender sneered or appeared to sneer and informed him that everything was on the house, per instructions. The bartender nodded to the portrait of a Winthrop elder on the wall in confirmation, per his tic. The dust on old Winthrop’s face did not stir. Something still consumed the founding father’s attention outside the frame after all those years, a loping fox or an escaping slave. No, he corrected himself: there weren’t slaves this far west — the bartender himself had told him that the town had been founded by freed slaves. So it had to be something else. He tipped Muttonchops a buck. When he left the bar later, the dollar was still there, and one or two more, and for all he knew the bartender dropped them in the garbage once he was out the door.

The day had drained away without incident. He’d had his coffee and returned to his room, noting happily that the DO NOT DISTURB sign had kept the place free from intruders. He napped to the sound and flicker of a twenty-four-hour news station. There had been a bombing, and retaliation. No word from his sponsors. He ate dinner in his room and declared it cocktail hour.

Outside the bar, the lobby was busy with talk of names and how many nights, as tired pilgrims leaned at reception to deliver credit cards to the world of incidental charges. The quiet of the previous night was at an end. No more fretful scanning for the horizon; this ghost ship had found the shipping lanes again. There were six other patrons. They sipped and squeezed limes into their drinks and commented on the accommodations and the journey. Talking about details, giving them a hearing, helped tame the loss of beloved routine. Someone asked, “What time is it there?” The slang of everyday exile, of in-between places like airports and hotel bars.

He tried to figure out how old the coasters were and what sort of maintenance they required. Did human hands scrubbing attain that faded suppleness, or did dishwashers achieve it easily with a switch? A spray from an aerosol can, the name of it pointing to both the scientific and the traditional. Apply Weathertique for that lived-in look that will make your house into a home. Also a verb. Did you Weathertique the chair yet, dear? Too many syllables, he decided. He felt a bit Weathertiqued himself.