Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“He collects railroad stamps.”

“Christ.”

“You’re telling me.” J. looks down at his soda and wipes away a wash of condensation. I’m glad the stamp collector was there, he tells himself.

One Eye stiffens, and the expression he had in the van and the Millhouse returns to his face. “It was a sign, J.”

“A sign I should chew thoroughly before swallowing.” J. isn’t sure he is ready for a conversation right now. He wants to crawl into his musty sheets and stare at the water stains on his ceiling until they align themselves into pools of sleep he might dip in.

“You can look at it that way if you want.”

“There something you want to talk about, One Eye? I should get some sleep.”

One Eye motions him into his room. J. glances back down the walkway to where Pamela had been sitting, but she’s disappeared. He sits down in the lime green vinyl seat by the desk and places his hands on his knees. “Not hanging out with Dave and the guys?” Custom calls for a night cap or three in someone’s room on gigs like this, bullshitting against the darkness. J. has a legitimate excuse, a near-death experience being a perfectly legit excuse, but what is One Eye doing hanging out solo in his room. He isn’t usually the sullen one.

One Eye deflects a spray of papers from his bed and sits down. “What I told you earlier about the List,” he says, his one eye blank and deep in the mesmer routine he likes to use from time to time. For effect. This time he’s cranked it up a notch to piercing. “I wasn’t joking.”

“You plan to take yourself off it,” scoffing, “might as well appeal to the pope for special dispensation.”

“I’m serious. I know who controls it. It’s Lucien.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I’ve been thinking about it for months. At first I thought it was a consortium. We talked about that, remember?” One Eye brings up his investigation from time to time, over plastic plates in vintage ballrooms and on couches along the walls of blood-red downtown lounges. He shares his suspicions about the architects of the List: are they a consortium of publicity firms or solitary and mean-spirited visionaries? J. thinks it is a game. Something to pass the time during the many dull moments at events. When One Eye abandoned the idea of a consortium on the grounds that the List possessed an aesthetic purity and a malicious logic that could never be achieved by committee, J. nodded his head and nibbled chicken saté off a skewer. Might as well be discussing puffs of smoke above the grassy knoll. And when One Eye decided that the likely suspects were Lucien Joyce Associates and Patricia Klein Public Relations, J. agreed and continued to nuzzle the bottom of his beer. It is talk to kill time. No one really cares. Do people wonder how televisions, VCRs and computers work, or do they care merely that they work, that they are good, that good folk in lab coats have fashioned devices to round our misshapen hours. The List keeps them working and that is the important thing. J. says he remembers their many conversations on the topic.

“It’s not PKR,” One Eye says, leaning forward in a posture that might have been described as earnest if one did not know him.

“You finally decided on Lucien.” Half of half a yawn executed just then.

“Patricia Klein didn’t feel right,” One Eye continues, trying to ignore J.’s slack expression. “They’re too specialized. They have big-name clients, but they’re not diversified enough. And I doubt Patricia has the cunning, to tell you the truth, for this kind of system. I had pretty much decided it was Lucien when I talked to Chester.” One Eye almost shaking; he needs to tell someone: this is big stuff. “I cornered Chester at an animal rights benefit in Beverly Hills. I figured it was time to interrogate him. It wasn’t a List event, I didn’t see any junketeers or the usual flacks around and Chester had been out two years. This was last month. He was circling the room, pressing the flesh, and I cornered him. He was glad to see me.”

“Good old Chester,” J. nods. “He knew how to liven up things.”

“He’s not dead.”

“You don’t see him at events. Same thing.”

“Yeah. It was like old times. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure Chester is happy out there in Hollywood. They have a different style and Chester is a little too …”

“New York.”

“Right, for them. Anyhow, I got him drunk and got it out of him. The lowdown. It took three martinis and a lot of the old One Eye stare, but I got it out of him eventually.”

“So spill it.” J. checks the time on the bedside digital clock. More common than Gideons in hotel rooms nowadays.

“It’s Lucien,” One Eye says. “It’s been him all along. He knew the game before he even started his own agency, from when he was a party promoter in the disco days. He knew the game from the street. He knew all the players from when he was just a wannabe dropping invites on tables in clubs. He had a perspective. Chester says he let him in on the List after he’d been with LJA a few years. Calls him into his office with this big production about earning trust and shows him the List. Then it became Chester’s job to do the routine maintenance, you know, addresses and contact numbers. Lucien still chose the names, but Chester kept it running smoothly.”

“Until he quit. Was he fired or did he quit?”

“He quit. He wanted to go to Hollywood. Go Hollywood. And Lucien didn’t take too well to that. He’s very protective of his boys and doesn’t like to see them leave the nest and get out from under his thumb. A few months ago for no reason — according to Chester — Lucien cut him off the List. He still liked to go to L.A. events for old times’ sake. They haven’t spoken since.”

“Mommy didn’t like it that he was running around with loose Hollywood starlets. So Chester talked.”

“Chester talked and here we are today.”

J. thinks about his throat. Is it swelling up? One Eye’s revelation is interesting in the abstract, but J. doesn’t have it in him to dwell on it. He is too enervated and wrung. “You could always not go,” J. says. “No one’s forcing you to these things.”

One Eye clucks his teeth. “You’re going for the record and telling me this.” J. doesn’t say anything. “It’s not about willpower. It’s beyond willpower. Deleting my name has a symbolic power that will sustain my decision.”

“They’ll just put you back on. They’ll notice and put you back on.”

“I’ll start with this one thing.”

J. stands to go. This can wait until the morning, after he suffocates on his own throat. In the raw minutes following the stamp collector’s rescue, Tiny retrieved the plug of beef and asked him, “You going to eat this?” Maybe he should have kept it as a souvenir. Get it bronzed. Don’t soldiers save as souvenirs the bullets and shrapnel cut from their flesh? Soldiers’ kids play with them. “And how do you intend to accomplish this Houdini bit?” J. asks.

“First, we break into Lawrence’s room.”

“What?”

“To see if he has the List. We’ll hit his copy, and then we’ll hit Lucien’s.”

“I’ll be in jail and you’ll get off scot-free,” J. says, backing away. “White people can get away with that, not black people. Not down here. We get caught, if they don’t string me up, I’ll get railroaded for sassing the judge or something. You’re laughing but I’m not joking. I’ll be laying asphalt with the work gang.”

“This isn’t Mississippi in the fifties, J.,” One Eye says, cocking his head.

“It’s always Mississippi in the fifties,” J. answers. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve checked it all out. Lawrence is leaving at noon to pick up Lucien in Charleston. Lay out the master’s slippers and pipe. Forty-five minutes there, forty-five minutes back, that’s more than enough time to get into his copy of the List. Lucien doesn’t trust anyone except his assistant, so they bring it wherever they go on their hard drives. Email and fax it from their laptops.”