Andrew Ervin - Burning Down George Orwell's House

With nothing to bury, he felt no compulsion to attend the funeral mass. Becky and her husband soon moved in with their mother and — coincidence maybe — they were unable to conceive a child. He had become the last male Welter. The survival or cessation of the entire family name now rested with him. That was the kind of grown-up burden he had spent his entire life not thinking about.

That he stayed at his desk through personal tragedy brought him to the attention of the Logos corporate honchos, but what the board took for stoic dedication to the craft of strategic branding, Ray knew to be abject fear: of facing his father’s absence, of his mother’s heartbreak, and of the carcinogens in her water, of the distance he felt expanding between himself and his own good nature. He tried not to let his intense grief affect Helen, but from the look on her face while she slept he could tell that he was failing. He had snapped at her a few times, but had never known why. She continued to do everything in her power to help him march through each day.

The employees who had survived the explosion were offered and accepted work as day laborers, digging holes and filling them again until out-of-state demolition engineers arrived to peel acres of contaminated topsoil from what had been among the earth’s most fertile farmland, ground that now contained Ray’s cracked genetic code in the form of his father’s smithereens. The crew cemented over the accident site while every regulatory oversight organization dragged its feet, which were snared in red tape and a hundred-mile-long fence of glazed razor wire.

The aftermath was even worse: bright yellow lines painted upon the site to delineate countless parking spaces surrounding a mecca of convenient, one-stop shopping where his mother now bought aseasonal produce and the disposable electronics Big Brother used to track her movements and convince her to buy even more junk. Becky implored Ray to visit, but he just couldn’t. He had his own problems. For the first time in his life, Ray felt something less than indestructible.

Around that time, Ray also started to have some serious reservations about the whole Oil Hogg endeavor. He kept Flora’s email in his inbox, where he looked at it every time he powered on a computer or his phone. His depression grew in direct proportion to the sales figures. When he could no longer avoid the practical realities behind his success, he took to drinking more scotch. What he had done was morally reprehensible.

Helen urged him to quit and Ray considered it, but he simply couldn’t justify doing so. The money was too good; there was no way he could give those paychecks up. He could imagine what his father would have said. His old man would have been disgusted by the very thought of his only son and heir leaving a high paying job in order to save a few trees. It was unthinkable.

Whether the domestic strife resulted from his growing disillusionment with Logos or vice versa, he couldn’t say. Helen still sometimes managed to soothe Ray’s anxiety attacks with carefully chosen lines of verse, with CDs of Satie and Chopin, but she grew frustrated with his despondency and rededicated herself to her research, to her tenure portfolio, to the students she conferenced with from a treadmill at the campus rec center.

If she was asleep when he got home he would pour a glass of scotch or three to unwind on the balcony. The weather didn’t matter. Late at night, Lake Michigan looked like … like nothing. It was an enormous, black expanse and it reminded him that he lived every day at the very end of the world. A short boat ride and he could fall off the edge of the earth, down down down down down through the limitless oblivion of the cosmos, and that comforted him. He wouldn’t see his wife for days at a time.

During a particularly vindictive quarrel, Ray used a few words that once spoken aloud could never be revoked. She asked him to move out and for the first time in months there was no reason to argue with her. The next day, he leased a corner apartment on the fifteenth floor of a gutted and renovated 1927 high-rise pictured in every architectural guide to Chicago. The deposit and first month’s rent paid for the illusion of antiquity; behind the ornate, brick superstructure a network of coaxial cables and wireless receptors provided every manner of computerized and televisionary convenience. The place did not include a parking spot, however, so he left his SUV at the condo and for the next several months he was glad to not have to look at it.

HELEN CALLED VERY EARLY one Saturday morning, which was a bit odd. She didn’t leave a message. The coffee-maker had shut itself off and Ray poured a tepid cup. Bud had also sent a series of texts overnight imploring him out for an afternoon of beer and circus. There would be an important hockey game on TV, but Ray wasn’t much of a sports fan. He caught his reflection in the door of the refrigerator while reaching for the half and half: he needed a haircut and his face couldn’t decide if it was growing a beard or not. Don’t you own a razor? his dad would have asked, joking but not really joking.

She picked up after the first ring. “It’s me,” Ray said.

“I know,” Helen said. “Your name comes up on the screen.”

Good morning to you too. “What’s going on?”

There was some variety of crazy, avant-garde singing in the background. It sounded like an argument among three opera singers.

“I need you to come get your SUV. It’s an eyesore. I want it out of here.”

“We haven’t spoken in, what, three weeks and you call me at seven A.M. to talk about my truck?”

“Listen, would you please get rid of it?”

The singers shouted and chirped and barked. They might have had a broken harpsichord or piano and some kind of rusted horn accompanying them.

“What am I supposed to do, park it on the street?”

“That’s not my problem.”

It wasn’t like Helen to pick a fight for no reason. Everything had become subtext with her. Something was up her ass, but it wasn’t the truck. “What’s gotten into you?”

“It’s just that … Listen, let’s just forget it.”

“What is this about, Helen? Do you want me to come over? I can be there in fifteen minutes.”

“No! … No, I shouldn’t have called. I sent you an email,” she said and hung up.

He dumped the coffee onto the dishes piled in the sink and listened to a message from Flora. “Hi, Ray?” Her voice cheered him up. When her internship ended, Flora had, with some reluctance, agreed to accept a permanent position.

Bud had once admitted that his frequent fantasies about Flora involved them running away together to a Hawaiian island and taking with them a lifetime supply of tequila and birth-control pills. Ray thought she was attractive, yes, but that was due more to her considerable intellect than the perfect round butt that Bud wanted to “eat an Italian beef sandwich off of.”

“In retrospect,” she had told his voice mail, “I was wrong about something I wrote in the market summary I turned in today. I looked at the reports again and they make a lot more sense now. I hope it’s okay if I email you some revisions, because I already did. If you prefer I can get you hard copies this weekend. Let me know, okay? Okay. Bye!”

He switched his laptop on and deleted the spam that had accumulated overnight. He and Helen had taken to communicating almost exclusively via email. The situation was ridiculous, but for the short term it was best to abide by her wishes. Her use of his full name and the salutatory colon indicated the things that this email would not be: personal, apologetic, salubrious, tender, forgiving, decent. She wanted him to come to her office for an appointment and proposed a meeting time.