Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

But consider her assets:

• She had citizenship. He needed a wife with citizenship.

• She wrote for magazines, so she had good secretarial skills.

• She had the kid. Two for one, a ready-made family. He needed a family, and starting one from scratch took too much time and money. The kid was smart enough, and seemed to like him, a big plus.

• Good homemaker. He liked the bird’s-nest coziness of #701: nothing too expensive or fancy, but it felt upmarket. Books, pictures, lot of classy-looking CDs. Everything in the apartment suggested money carefully, economically spent, and he appreciated that. Worst thing in the world was big-spendy women.

• That old car. She’d taken good care of it, not like most American women, who trashed cars in a year or two like they were flashlight batteries or disposable razors. Alfa Romeo — prestige brand, and another testament to the fact that, though poor, she had class.

• Her best asset: an insufficiency that he could smell on her like mold. Why else hang out with that fag actor? A real loser, with his cheap homo sarcasm and funny voices. Mr. MagiGro was a prime candidate for an eviction notice. No, to hang out with a half-man like that, a woman must be sick with loneliness, and Charles O could only begin to imagine her pathetic gratitude if she was to be rescued from this misery by an elite player. She’d be in his debt for the rest of her life. Thank you, thank you, thank you! He liked the thought of that a lot.

• What was the kid’s name? Mouse? No, Rabbit. He’d have to call her something else, like Nicole, or Meryl, or Marilyn, or Sigourney — a name already stamped with success. When the time came, he’d send her to college: East Coast, Ivy League. She’d need an MBA to help him in the business. “Speak to my PA, my daughter Sigourney…” That sounded nice.

The more he thought about her, the sweeter appeared the prospect of life with Lucy N. Bengstrom. Lucy Lee! She was made for the name — it fit just right, like the inevitable destination she’d unknowingly been headed toward all these years. Lucy Lee. Charles O. and Lucy Lee. Mr. and Mrs. Charles O. Lee. The Lee Residence. They were fated to be conjoined. It was meant. Once upon a time, he’d been full of superstitions — astrologers, feng shui, all that crap. Now, in spite of himself, he needed to find out her birth year. Water-dragon, water-pig would be the best of all combinations, and he had a powerful sense that Lucy N. Bengstrom would turn out to be a water-pig.

Thinking of her had given him a big hard-on, sticking right through the flap of his boxers. Fully awake now, he reached to the box of Kleenex on the floor beside the couch and pictured her pulling the flowery dress over her head…nice underwear, not like a hooker’s, but lacy, white, high-class intimate apparel from Nordstrom or some place like that. She stood before him in the darkness, strangely luminous, like the Indiglo lighting on his Timex.

“Please, honey, may I take you in my mouth?”

Big-bellied, old, grateful, she went down on him, wet lips busy, making little doggy whimpers of satisfaction as she sucked, cradling his balls in her hands.

Briskly, fastidiously, he jacked off into the waiting tissue. Not a drop spilled.

“God, you taste so good,” Lucy said, then faded into black.

He padded into the bathroom, where he flushed the balled-up Kleenex down the toilet and vigorously soaped his limpening cock in the basin. He checked his watch—4:30. By five he’d be out on the prowl in the F250, searching his lots for overnighters who’d failed to pay and display: 5:30 was the hour of the tow truck at Excellent Parking, and his 60/40 deal with the towing companies meant big profits even before the sun began to clear the eastern mountains. On a good morning he’d catch a hundred or so illegals and deport them to places as remote as Kent and Issaquah. What was funny was that the no-goods were almost never clunkers, but late-model Audis and Lexuses and Jaguars; poor people paid for tickets, and the rich tried to cheat him. Just yesterday he’d waved bye-bye to a new red Ferrari, its nose ignominiously hoisted up on the tow truck. Guy would’ve been legal if he’d paid $6.00, and now it cost him $334 and a $50 cab fare to get his Ferrari Superamerica back. That had made Charles O’s morning.

He set a cup of water in the microwave. The breathy, churring noise of the oven mixed with the clank and rumble of a freight train traveling northward through the city. Far ahead, he heard it bellow like a wounded cow as its locomotives trundled into downtown. They’d just about be passing the Acropolis. He wondered if Lucy heard the whistle, too.

Act with decision. The elite player never wavers once his choice is made!

He’d begin at the weekend, with those crates she had for bookshelves. Sipping his scalding Nescafé, he wondered whether along with his cordless drill he should take flowers.

AT A FEW MINUTES before five, the hand set off on its regular morning excursion from under the covers. The terrain was familiar as it snaked in the dark through the thicket of easily upsettable plastic bottles of aspirin, Halcion, St. John’s wort, melatonin, and protease inhibitors, then across the spine of the book that splayed facedown on the bedside table, a lurid kiss-and-tell memoir by the latest fugitive from the administration, the former Department of Defense chief of staff. Eventually the hand found the knurled volume knob of the elderly transistor radio, whose antenna had long ago been replaced by a wire coathanger.

KUOW was still relaying the BBC World Service, a British voice reciting soccer scores, something about the UEFA cup, a cricket match in Australia.

At five o’clock sharp, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition began with the first news of the day from Washington, D.C., and the sleeper roused himself to listen to the lead headline.

This was how Tad’s mornings always began, with the vague, routine apprehension of atrocity. Pacific Standard Time was in part to blame, for the world’s most shocking events usually happened while the West Coast was still asleep. By this PST, Cairo, Rome, Madrid, Paris, and London had survived the conventional hours of atrocity, while New York and D.C. were just about to enter them.

Bombs in Baghdad, assassination in Jerusalem…the hand embarked on its return journey to the radio. It —whatever it was, and Tad had only a very hazy notion of what it might be — hadn’t taken place today, at least so far. He rolled over on his left side and addressed the toilsome job of trying to get back to sleep. But sleep, as ever, was an artful dodger. Oscillating continuously between torpor and electric wakefulness, he chased it, touched it, lost it, caught up with it, only to have it again wriggle from his grasp. Whole hours would pass in its pursuit until, fractious and exhausted by the hunt, he’d haul himself out of bed and into Michael’s old sun-emperor silk kimono.

So it had been for Tad since September 2001, which now seemed an epoch ago. The overpunctual reaching of his wayward hand for the radio, reliable as an alarm clock, had grown over the years into a motor reflex. What prompted it wasn’t dread, at least not dread alone, but a sick avidity, a hunger for catastrophe. A secret longing for the Big One lurked in his inner core, and its renewed absence each morning must therefore bring it one day closer.

Struggling to sleep, he felt a rankling, rusty stab of shame. Ali, he thought. Think of her now. But even thoughts of Ali never quite freed him from this perversity. Somewhere out there, sooner than later, the catastrophe lay waiting, along with whatever it was inside him that wanted it to happen.