Adam Haslett - You Are Not a Stranger Here

“Yeah, I bet you want a piece of the action, buddy,” I say, which sends him back to his endive salad in a hurry. Graham listens as I elaborate the business plan: there’s start-up financing, for which we’ll easily attract venture capital, the choice of location for the manufacturing plant—you have to be careful about state regulations—executives to hire, designers to work under me, a sales team, accountants, benefits, desks, telephones, workshops, paychecks, taxes, computers, copiers, decor, watercoolers, doormats, parking spaces, electric bills. Maybe a humidifier. A lot to consider.

As I speak, I notice that others in the restaurant are turning to listen as well. It’s usually out of the corner of my eye that I see it, and the people disguise it well, returning to their conversations in what they probably think is convincing pantomime. The Westinghouse reindeer pops to mind. How ingenious they were to plant him there in the diner I ate at each Friday morning, knowing my affection for the Christmas myth, determined to steal my intellectual property.

Re: Chevy Chase incident. Look also into whether or not I might have invented autoreverse tape decks and also therefore did Sony or GE own property adjacent to my Baltimore residence—noise, distraction tactics, phony road construction, etc., and also Schwinn, Raleigh, etc., presence during Los Angeles visit.

“Could we talk about something else?” Graham asks.

“Whatever you like,” I say and then inform the waiter our entrees were twenty-six minutes in transit. Turns out my fish is tough as leather. The waiter’s barely left when I have to begin snapping my fingers for his return.

“Stop that!” Graham says. I’ve reached the end of my tether with his passivity and freely ignore him. He’s leaning over the table about to swat my arm down when the fellow returns.

“Is there a problem?”

“My halibut’s dry as sand.”

The goateed young man eyes my dish suspiciously as though I might have replaced the original plate with some duplicate entree pulled from a bag beneath the table.

“I’ll need a new one.”

“No he won’t,” Graham says at once.

The waiter pauses, considering on whose authority to proceed.

“Do you have anything to do with bicycles?” I ask him.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

“Professionally.”

The young man looks across the room to the maitre d’, who offers a coded nod.

“That’s it. We’re getting out of here,” I say, grabbing bread rolls.

“Sit down,” Graham insists.

But it’s too late. I know the restaurant’s lousy with mountain bike executives. “You think I’m going to let a bunch of industry hustlers steal an idea that’s going to change the way every American and one day every person on the globe conceives of a bicycle? Do you realize what bicycles mean to people? They’re like ice cream or children’s stories, they’re primal objects woven into the fabric of our earliest memories, not to mention our most intimate connection with the wheel itself an invention that marks the commencement of the great ascent of human knowledge that brought us through printing presses, religious transformations, undreamt-of speed, the moon. When you ride a bicycle you participate in an unbroken chain of human endeavor stretching back to stone-carting Egyptian peasants and I’m on the verge of revolutionizing that invention, making its almost mythical power a storable quantity. You have the chance to be there with me—like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He stared at the Pacific—and all his men/Looked at each other with a wild surmise—/Silent, upon a peak in Darien. The things we’ll see!”

Because I’m standing as I say this a quorum of the restaurant feels I’m addressing them as well and though I’ve slipped in giving them a research lead I can see in their awed expressions they know as I do not everyone can scale the high white peaks of real invention. Some—such as these—must sojourn in the lowlands where the air is thick with half measures and dreams die of inertia. Yes! It is true.

This seems to convince Graham we indeed need to leave.

He throws some cash on the table and steers me by the arm out of the restaurant. We walk slowly along the boulevard.

There’s something sluggish about Graham, his rounded shoulders and bowed head.

“Look, there’s a Japanese place right over there we can get maki rolls and teriyaki, maybe some blowfish, I can hear all about the brokerage, we might even think about whether your company wants to do the IPO on the bike venture, there could be an advantage—”

He shakes his head and keeps walking up the street, one of whose features is a truly remarkable plentitude of shapely women, and I am reminded of the pleasures of being single, glances and smiles being enjoyed without guilt and for that matter why not consummation? Maybe it’s unseemly for a seventy-three-year-old to talk about erections but oh, do I get ’em! I’m thinking along these lines when we pass the lobby of a luxury hotel convention center kind of place and of course I’m also thinking trade shows and how far ahead you have to book those things, so I turn in and after a small protest Graham follows; I tell him I need to use the bathroom.

“I’d like to talk to the special events manager,” I say to the girl behind the desk.

“I’m afraid he’s only here during the day, sir,” she replies with a blistering customer service smile, as though she were telling me exactly what I wanted to hear.

“Well, isn’t that just wonderful,” I say and she seems to agree that yes it is wonderful, wonderful that the special events manager of the Continental Royale keeps such regular hours, as though it were the confirmation of some beneficent natural order.

“I guess I’ll just have to take a suite anyway and see him in the morning. My son and I will have a little room service dinner in privacy, where the sharks don’t circle!”

Mild concern clouds the girl’s face as she taps at her keyboard.

“The Hoover Suite is available on nineteen. That’s six hundred and eighty dollars a night. Will that be all right?”

“Perfect.”

When I’ve secured the keys I cross to where Graham’s sitting on the couch.

“Dinner is served,” I say with a bow.

“What are you talking about?”

“I got us a suite,” I say, rattling the keys.

Graham rolls his eyes and clenches his fists.

“Dad!” There’s something desperate in his voice.

“What!”

“Stop! Just stop! You’re out of control. Why do you think Linda and Ernie don’t want to see you, Dad, why do you think that is? Is it so surprising to you? They can’t handle this! Mom couldn’t handle this! Can’t you see that? It’s selfish of you not to see a doctor!” he shouts, pounding his fists on his thighs. “It’s selfish of you not to take the drugs! Selfish! ”

The lobby’s glare has drained his face of color and about his unblinking eyes I can see the outlines of what will one day be the marks of age and then all of a sudden the corpse of my son lies prostrate in front of me, the years since we last saw each other tunneling out before me like some infinite distance, and I hear the whisper of a killing loneliness travel along its passage as though the sum total of every minute of his pain in every spare hour of every year was drawn in a single breath and held in this expiring moment. Tears well in my eyes. I am overcome.

Graham stands up from the couch, shaken by the force of his own words.

I rattle the keys. “We’re going to enjoy ourselves.”

“You have to give those back to the desk.”

By the shoulders I grab him, my greatest invention. “We can do so much better,” I say. I take him by the wrist and lead him to the elevator hearing his mother’s voice behind us reminding me to keep him out of the rain. “I will,” I mutter,