Donald Antrim - The Verificationist

Leslie wobbled into position beneath Sherwin. You could see her eyes following her swinging man, this way, that way, like the eyes of a person watching tennis from center court. And, watching Leslie, with her blond hair cut short, her subtle, Anglican nose, her intent gaze, I was put in mind of our cat at home, Lawrence Mandelbaum, stalking, from the Persian rug in the living room, a catnip string toy held teasingly overhead — you never know when the cat will swat. I held tightly to Rebecca, and I felt Bernhardt adjust his grip around me: we were a team: we did not need to discuss matters. Together we braced to handle Sherwin, struggling and kicking in the space between Rebecca and Leslie.

“Don’t let him get away!” shouted a man in the crowd. It was Mike Breuer, who all along had understood the essential rightness of Leslie and his friend joined in matrimony or at least in some temporary congress.

“Jump!” another voice called, from over near the bar. The speaker this time was young. Was it the teenaged boy, recklessly getting in on the adult action? I felt that there was the potential for mob behavior. Everyone was roving around looking for something to do. It was that late, disheartening time in the evening when, at a different sort of party, dancing begins.

Sure enough, Konwicki’s child psychologists took up the chant. “Jump. Jump. Jump.”

What would Leslie do? She watched Sherwin swinging like a crazy pendulum over her. Leslie’s high heels gave her stature. She could easily reach up and grab Lang’s trouser cuffs, then climb his clothes, grasp him by the belt, and circle her arms around his waist. That was not, however, what she did. She reached up with one pale white arm and, in a move that showed, as they might put it in the sports world, athletic ability, caught one of Lang’s flying balmoral shoes, barehanded. There was a sound not unlike the sound made by a hard-hit line drive landing in an outfielder’s mitt. Thwack. She held him by the foot. “Got you!” she proclaimed in her London accent, the emphasis heavily on “got,” which sounded like “gaught.”

A cheer went up. “Way to catch! Excellent snatch!” shouted the teenager. This kid, I could tell, was going to become a nuisance before long. But what could I do about it? He had his arm wrapped around his girlfriend’s shoulders; they leaned into one another in that suggestive, suffocating way that kids will when in public, in order to let the unhappy adult world know that they sleep together for fun. I was high in the air, looking down and holding with all my might to the chain of humanity.

I could tell from Bernhardt’s breathing, his rapid, short gasps, that the new people were putting a strain on him. Leslie’s feet came off the floor. Her blue high heels dangled from her toes. People gathered in a close circle beneath her, side-coaching her to snag Sherwin’s other shoe and hoist herself up, to lock her arms around his ankles.

“The shoe is coming in on your left! Behind you! Wait until the shoe is in front of you! You want to make eye contact with the shoe! Don’t take your eyes off the shoe!” Mike called to Leslie. With his balding head and his wide, tooth-filled mouth, and wearing his plaid polo shirt precisely tucked into pleated, high-waisted pants, he looked to me like a study of a Little League dad. “I’ll tell you when to move. Ready? Here comes the shoe. It’s almost there. Now. ”

Leslie swept the air with her free hand, but missed the black shape darting alongside her face.

“Anticipate!” Mike yelled angrily. Then he recovered composure and explained, in tones that perfectly blended exasperation with patience, “Your hand must go to the place where the shoe will be. ”

Again Lang’s shoe swung past Leslie, and again she tried and failed to catch it. Lang’s shoe moved through the air as if it had a life and a mind all its own. With one hand, Leslie gripped Lang’s other foot. How long could she hold on? The man tried to shake the woman loose. I couldn’t watch what was happening. I worried for Leslie. Would it be somehow fitting, I wondered, for Sherwin Lang, the veteran alcoholic, the skirt chaser, to inadvertently, fiercely kick a woman in love?

This probability made me afraid.

Sherwin, stretched between Rebecca above and Leslie below, appeared to me to embody, in his concrete, physical situation, the classic predicament of a man devoted to seduction.

“Help me! For God’s sake! I don’t want to die like this!” he called out to no one and everyone, as the Englishwoman, in a courageous show of endurance and youthful exuberance, dragged herself up and began the difficult ascent of his leg.

“Don’t let go of my hand!” ordered Rebecca. Was she screaming at Lang or at me? Sherwin seemed more than ever to hang from a great and unsafe height.

And my friends on the ground had become, during the time while these things were taking place, farther and farther away. They receded, Dan and Elizabeth and the rest, and became, it seemed, tinier and tinier in size. This had been happening all night long. It was part of the whole psychic hallucination experience. It was as though the restaurant’s ceiling were continually, unstoppably rising. Up we went, the waitress and I, following beneath the pots and the bright, hot lights — and with us came Lang and Leslie strung out from our arms. And yet, even as we soared, I could see, as I had all evening, looking down at my earthbound peers — I could make out, in gross detail, people’s clothes and their hairstyles, their eyeglasses and the pens jammed into their pockets, and their watery eyes and skin blemishes and the outlines of veins running beneath the skin, all the movements and tics made by their faces changing expression, the minor though distinguishing material characteristics of their personalities.

I could hear their cries, their criticisms and whispers, including Peter Konwicki’s confidential speculations to his students gazing at Leslie clawing her way up Sherwin.

“Look closely,” the feral man said to the trainees, who hung, as they say, on his every word. “You’ll never witness a more dramatic instance of female sexual acquisitiveness.”

“It’s remarkable what people will do in order to procreate, isn’t it?” said Bob, Konwicki’s A student. The girl beside Bob, the girl named Katharine (who had earlier predicted, in a casual, offhand style, that my personal situation indicated a reorientation of sexual identity and a subsequent repudiation of socially binding mores … well, maybe — what about it?), commented, “I saw something like this on one of those television nature programs.”

“Was that the documentary on Madagascar, by any chance?” asked Bob.

“Madagascar? It might’ve been.”

“With the tree lemurs? Were there tree lemurs?”

“Tree lemurs? Yes. I believe there were tree lemurs. Do they have the pink noses and the incredibly long tails?”

“I don’t know about their noses,” Bob pronounced in deep, resonant tones. He sounded as if he were laying claim to something — as if he were really saying, “This discussion belongs to me.” In this spirit, and not unlike a hypnotist working a charm, he now intoned, “Their tails are long. Their tails are very long.”

“I remember the lemurs’ tails,” sighed the girl trainee. She was helping Bob by deliberately — or maybe unconsciously — acting dreamy, assuming the subordinate position and letting the young man effectively take possession of her intellectual property: it was, after all, she, not he, who had made the connection between Lang, Leslie, and a nature documentary.

At this point Bob stepped up and threw what I thought was a risky pitch. “Lemurs have sex all the time. They’re completely promiscuous. They have sex with their own relatives. They’re known to masturbate again and again. They’re just constantly having sex.”