Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

The miles retreat and Lawrence says again, it is not much farther. Soon they will be in Talcott. Lucien has a patchwork idea of the town stitched by pop culture. He has borrowed elements of that idea on more than one occasion, to underscore the home-style virtues of a new home-style lemonade or to reconfigure a dull-witted celebrity’s platitudes into a front-porch wisdom that journalists will pick up on and in turn deliver to the people. To present things just so. Folks pick up on these flourishes very quickly. When he first started in this business and was coming to understand his facility for making people believe things and was much taken with the language of his therapist, Lucien thought he was tapping into the collective unconscious. But now he thinks it’s simply the atmosphere. That air is an admixture of nitrogen, oxygen, trace gases, and one of these trace gases is American cliché and we breathe it in with our first breath. Peering past miles they have yet to travel, Lucien pictures Talcott and sees the tall spire of the town church, a crowd of parishioners glad-handing with the pastor on Sunday morning, a blond child in a bright striped shirt waving a sparkler on July Fourth and a glass pitcher of lemonade pimpled by condensation. We know that the lemonade is homemade because there are seeds swirling in the bottom of the pitcher and that detail is what makes it true. Talcott is an American small town and contains virtues.

Lucien thinks, maybe the trick about doing a town is making the thing into the idea. He has never done a town before.

Thinks back. He treated Mayor Cliff as he would any other client. He did not talk down to the man just because he was from another neck of the woods and knew nothing about being seated at the best table. No one client is dumber than another; they are all merely clients. Mayor Cliff had just departed the matinee of a popular Broadway show and had sunset plans for the observation deck of the Empire State Building. He had rolled the Playbill into a grubby tube and from time to time during the discussion it unfurled and he rolled it anew. The mayor explained that the wife had never been to the Big Apple and this trip was a perfect opportunity to mix business with pleasure. The wife was out shopping, he said as he unzipped his purple track jacket to reveal a joke T-shirt. The joke was lost on Lucien. Something about woodchucks. Lucien did not allow this miscommunication, this symbol of their cultural difference, to alter his prepared remarks although perhaps he was a little sad that Mrs. Cliff had not come along as well, so that afterward the couple could discuss his words, and an hour or two hours from then, Lucien would feel his ears burn.

Lucien said to the mayor, “This is my office and that is my guest chair. We have a process we have to do now and I want you to be comfortable. This is what I do in the getting to know the client stage, you have questions and want to be reassured. Your time is valuable so I’ll be honest with you: I sell light bulbs. Yes. It generally takes time for the appropriateness of this analogy to settle in so I will ask you, do you know how fragile light bulbs are? It’s always the filament that breaks before the glass. You’ve knocked over lamps, I’ve knocked over lamps, knocking over lamps is the side racket of every American. They’re very fragile. It’s the filament. Fil-a-ment. Sounds like a word you’d use to describe a god. ‘A thousand lovely filaments falling down her divine shoulders.’ Fragile and yet they light up the whole world. These tiny crimps of metal. Hit the switch and a million electrons jump off the filament into darkness and light up the room. These are tiny electrons that are full of energy.

“My point takes a bit to get around to. I go, and what are we? We are energy too. This is Einstein talking here, not me. Just then. Now I’m back. Look at my hand. Yours will do just as well of course, but look at my hand. The knuckles here say that’s where the bones meet, so I have bones. The tendons stretch here and so I have muscles beneath my skin. If I pinch my fingertip like this it goes white because I cut off the blood flow. I have capillaries and veins and inside them blood. You understand my point. There are smaller and smaller systems, down to blood cells and the specialized tiny bits inside them and we can go smaller still into atoms. Blood cells and tiny atoms that you and I need to live and that’s energy. Split the atom and that’s energy. Energy to destroy a city or light it up or power a sun. These are natural processes. The windows of my office are tinted to cut out the UV — too much of that will give you cancer, but the point is that the sun is a giant light bulb. I’m reinforcing my opening gambit. It is a series of atomic explosions, a billion splitting atoms. The light of the sun takes a day or two to reach us, there is universal constant involved, but there it is. The sun is a big ball of splitting atoms that allows life on earth and in my hand I have atoms, I have a sun. We all have suns in our hands, inner light, every object, and all they need are a little something to initiate the reaction. That’s why I say I’m in the light bulb business. I’m just trying to let a little something out.

“I handle celebrities. I handle shiny new cars from Europe. These cars have a power in their names, these European imports, because to American ears they sound exotic and so they want them straight out the gate and this makes my job a little easier. They are already leaking light before I ever get my hands on them. Look into my eyes. Then some things come to me dull and I have to get to work. Otherwise they remain dim. The duller something is the duller you feel and that’s where the elbow grease comes in. I have handled paperweights and toasters and politicians. Organized events for them that are like setting up mirrors to reflect their inner radiance to best effect. No, I can’t name any of my political clients, I have signed nondisclosure agreements and such things are the holy word, but rest assured you have seen the light glinting off the teeth of my political clients and have pulled the lever for them, chum. A company that produces lawn sprinklers once approached me, and now I feel the satisfaction of a job well done when I drive through upstate suburbs to visit friends or clients and see rainbows caught in the spray of sprinklers I have helped out. This is missionary work. I’ve helped TV pilots get along. Some are still in syndication as we speak. I have never done a hubcap, but I hope with all my heart that one day I will. I’ve had my eye on a few and now it’s a matter of contacting the manufacturers. Pro bono. It sounds ridiculous but love is often ridiculous to those on the outside. Take the elevator down to the street and wait five minutes for a ridiculous couple to walk by, what are they wearing, something ridiculous, mismatched socks, you might have a little chuckle but you will envy with all your heart the inarguable adoration in their smiles. I am coming around to my point: I have never done a town before, sir, and I would love to. To give the world your light.

“What I want to do is establish the brand superiority of Talcott for all things Talcott-related. The name of your town, Talcott, Tallll-cott, it rolls off the tongue and that’s half the battle. The sound of things is half my job. Egon. ‘A coffee table is not a coffee table unless it is an Egon coffee table.’ How many times have you heard this phrase? Sounds so good and right you might think it’s Solomon that said it, it’s something from the Bible and handed down. I didn’t make it up, wish I had, but this is not an advertising agency I run here, those offices and cubicles you passed out there are not the offices and cubicles of an advertising agency, but I helped to get out the truth of Egon coffee tables to the people and now you know this simple truth about coffee tables as well as you know your wife’s maiden name. Her maiden name is what she was before. Now she is something else. Do you ever think about that? I’m talking about the lines that divide you from one stage to another. The natural image is the cocoon. Light bulbs, cocoons, I’m coming back to light bulbs, don’t fret. What I’m really talking about is the exact moment between the cocoon and the butterfly, the moment of change, the exact instant when the potential is released into light because that is what we are discussing at the moment. This is where we are now with your town. Would you like some water?