Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

Cheered by the miniquake, he switched off the computer and went to bed, where he sank almost immediately into a leaden sleep.

THE PRESIDENT and CEO of Excellent Holdings, Inc., slept thinly, hardly grazing the surface of unconsciousness. He was afraid of sleep: whenever he allowed himself to fall into that deep, dream-haunted world, he found himself in the same place, inside the shipping container in which long ago he’d crossed the Pacific from Hong Kong to Seattle — and he always woke up screaming. Nowadays he maintained a vigilant nightly patrol along the dangerous border, forbidding himself to cross into the territory where the barely living and the freshly dead lay in wait for him, tumbled together by the ocean in a floundering, lightless box.

A Delta Airlines blanket he’d saved from a red-eye flight to Atlanta barely covered his body as he lay in his T-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks on the couch in his office. 3040 Occidental Ave. S., Suite #103, Seattle, WA 98134, his home and business HQ, cost him $450 a month: an “executive suite,” 150 square feet of white Sheetrock, including restroom, within close earshot of the rumbling shunts, groans, and mournful whistles of the Burlington Northern line. On the black metal table stood phone, fax, laptop, printer, and TV; in the cramped toilet, his clothes hung on the hook behind the door, sheathed in cellophane from the dry cleaner’s; a microwave was his kitchen and he didn’t bother with dishes, preferring to fork his food straight from the containers. When he made coffee, he heated water in a paper cup in the microwave and added Nescafé and whitener, both collected free from motel rooms that he visited for an hour most Sundays. Parked beyond the single window, whose blinds he always kept drawn, was his new white F250 pickup, a recent acquisition. The owner of a cut-price tow company had tried to get cute with him, so Charles O, as he now thought of himself, had driven his old beater to the guy’s home on the East Side, taught him a lesson in elementary business practice, and come away with the new truck, legal title, and a wad of bills that added up to $1,400—a nice evening’s work. The F250 was loaded: AC, leather, premium stereo with CD changer, heated seats, the works, and it still put a smile on Charles O’s face when he drove it — and never more so than when, caught in a jam in the Battery Street Tunnel, he spotted the tow-company guy at the wheel of his beater, honked, and gave that moron a thumbs-up sign. The guy had stared ahead, rigid as a statue, the veins in his face turning scarlet. What a loser.

The previous tenant of Suite 103 had left behind a four-shelf laminate bookcase, now nearly full, for Charles O loved to read. While the TV played the Cartoon Network on mute, he’d crouch over a Stouffer’s Yankee Pot Roast, picked up at the gas station minimart, eating with one hand and holding his book with the other. His lips moved continuously as he sounded out the words, and sometimes he’d speak sentences aloud just for the pleasure of hearing them — especially the ones that ended with exclamation points. “Who learns to adapt in time when he sees changing leads to something better !” That was sweet music to him — a tune he found himself singing under his breath at stoplights or on the stairs in his new apartment building.

The titles in the bookcase included Who Moved My Cheese? The Fred Factor, The One Minute Manager, Fish! Full Steam Ahead! The Secret, and Winning with People.

For Charles O, buying the Acropolis had been the kind of bold, innovative move that all the books said was the mark of an “elite player.” Go the extra mile! they said. Constantly reinvent yourself! Make yourself extraordinary! A lesser man would’ve stuck with parking lots for their low maintenance and deep, swift revenue stream, much of it in hard, untraceable cash, the many-times-folded ones and fives and tens that he and his team of Mexicans emptied from the boxes around the clock, moving ceaselessly from lot to lot. When he showed up at the bank with his pirate’s chest of crumpled green stuff, even the tellers, trained to never show a flicker of surprise, would go bug-eyed at the sight of so much money. Cutting deals with hotels and restaurants for valet parking, jiggling with prices for early birds and event and monthly parkers, he’d grown the business by more than 50 percent on every lot. Having mastered parking, he’d long felt a growing hunger for something more weighty, more intricate, more human.

Now he was going the extra mile, making himself extraordinary.

When he first saw the ancient brick and stucco of the Acropolis, it filled his shallow dreams as nothing and nobody had ever done before. He so craved it that he surprised himself when trying to beat down the owners’ attorney on the asking price. He’d believed he was fearless, but at the thought of the Acropolis escaping him, he felt a spasm of fear in his gut, as disabling as an attack of diarrhea, and paid $375,000 more than he’d meant to. That was a recoverable loss, but he was deeply shaken by the discovery of his cowardice.

The building was his great experiment. Its palatial seven stories of rooms and stairwells and fire escapes and hallways were his personal aquarium, and he loved to put his eye close to the glass and study the fish. Tap, tap, tap: how they swam away in fright! He enjoyed the neediness of tenants, their faces big with questions they didn’t dare ask, their “Yes, Mr. Lee,” and “No, Mr. Lee,” as they cast their eyes involuntarily on their unmade beds, their unwashed dishes, their untidy piles of garbage. Tenants always showed you what they most wanted to hide, so he was learning to take in all their secrets at a glance. No parking lot could give him the multitude of pleasures that were available to him in the Acropolis.

For now, he meant to do little except watch. Watch and wait. With the cash flow from the parking business, he could afford to sit tight and study up on how his new world worked. Beyond the Acropolis, he had a hazy, unformed vision of new condos, though it still amounted to little more than an image of cranes maneuvering slowly and deliberatively against the sky. Whenever Charles O saw a crane at work, he liked to stop to watch, in case there was, in this, an omen for his future. But he was in no hurry for condos. Master the Acropolis first, then move on. Who learns to adapt in time when he sees changing leads to something better!

Last evening had replanted in his mind the long dormant germ of an idea. The time was coming when he’d need a wife — not for sex, but other things. Sex was an itch to be relieved on Sundays when business was slack, on Aurora Avenue North in a rooms-by-the-hour waterbed motel. At $65 for oral — he disliked the other kind — it was like taking an expensive dump; he was always glad to get back to the truck afterward, and never used the same woman twice. But a wife would be different. The shogun authors of his favorite books all had wives: wives gave substance and background to elite players, making them more 3-D. Wives did accounting and also made food and entertained. Building up his holdings in parking lots, Charles O had treasured the airy lightness of his solitude, the trim and compact life that would fit inside the cab and flatbed of his old truck, let alone his new one. But as owner and ruler of the Acropolis, a landlord, he lacked the ampleness that only a wife could provide.

Of all his tenants, Lucy N. Bengstrom, apartment #701, had interested him the most since the day he first toured the building. Sure, she was old — fifty, maybe even more — but he wasn’t prejudiced: on Aurora Avenue, he picked old ones because they worked harder to please and made better noises. Fat, too. That evening, he’d eyed her thick ankles and the rotund swell of her belly under the loose dress that was meant to hide it. He was okay with fat.