The Fun Parts

the REPUBLIC of EMPATHY

WILLIAM

My wife wanted another baby. But I thought Philip was enough. A toddler is a lot. I couldn’t picture us going through the whole ordeal again. We’d just gotten our lives back. We needed time to snuggle with them, plan their futures.

But Peg really wanted another baby, said we owed Philip a brother or a sister. That seemed like a pretty huge debt. What do you do for the second child? Have a third?

“Peg,” I said. But I had no follow-up. Or was it follow-through?

Peg sat at the kitchen table scribbling in the workbook she’d gotten from Arno, her German tutor. The handwriting didn’t look like hers, though I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her handwriting.

“This is a dealbreaker,” Peg said.

“The deal being our marriage?”

“Please don’t leave me,” she said.

“Who said I wanted to leave?”

“If you refuse to have another baby, that’s the same as leaving me.”

“This is emotional blackmail.”

“The emotional aspect is implicit. You could just say blackmail.”

“But why, Peg?”

“This morning I smelled the top of Philip’s head. That sweet baby scent is gone. Now it just smells like the top of any dumbshit’s head.”

* * *

I took Philip for a walk. He tired easily, but his gait was significant. He tended to clutch his hands behind his back, like the vexed ruler of something about to disintegrate.

“How about a brother or a sister?” I asked.

“How about I just pooped,” Philip said.

“Thanks for your input.”

Peg always said I shouldn’t model sarcasm for the boy, but who will? Everybody’s so earnest around children. Besides, I’ve always wanted to model, to strut down the runway under all that strobe and glitter while the fashionably witty cheer on my sarcasm.

* * *

Later I had to jet over to the office. The flip-flop prototypes were a total joke. Art had ignored my notes. Where were the porpoise pods, the sea grass? I hated Art. They needed some attitudinal realignment, or whatever the badasses say. Art and I were scheduled to meet in the meeting room and communicate about our communication problems.

Gregory walked up to my desk. He didn’t work for our company, but rented a room in the building, where he made paintings for plays and movies. Gregory painted to the specifications of the filmmakers and stage directors. He could paint a copy of a famous painting or create a whole original series to represent the work of a character in a play or a movie. His oeuvre wasn’t known, but it had won fame and riches for fictional artists in several films.

Gregory always wore a festive shirt and a baseball cap with no logo. He said he wore these clothes because he believed they made him resemble a thoughtful, retired gay cop, which he was.

He’d come to see if I’d join him for a joint.

“Code Doob,” he said.

“Stat,” I said.

We went to the roof and smoked and stared at the large metal exhaust units mounted on nearby roofs.

“So, Peg…” I said.

“She wants to do a number two,” Gregory said. “I mean…”

“Oh, yeah, I told you already,” I said. “Guess I don’t have anything super-recent.”

“That’s okay,” Gregory said. “I got one. Guy just asked me to do a painting. Not a copy job, but a painting in the style of. A very famous painter. Died young, but did spectacular things. A great talent. All my gifts would fit in his pinkie, and so forth. This guy said he would pay me the equivalent of what I thought a real, newly discovered peak-performance painting by this painter would fetch. I said it would be many millions. He said, ‘Fine.’”

“Why?”

“Said he’s interested in exploring questions of authenticity, and he’s got the money to do it. Investment banker. But did some art theory in college. He’s not going to throw his money away on a yacht he’ll have no time to … yacht on. Here, at least, he’s shaking things up.”

“You’ll be so rich.”

“I told him to go to hell.”

“Why?”

“I’m a copyist and a hack visionary, but I’m not a criminal. Fuck the banker.”

“You’re a proud man,” I said.

“If that’s all it takes. Hey, look.”

Across the way, on the roof of another building, two figures fought. They both wore dark coveralls and walkie-talkies clipped to their tool belts. They threw huge roundhouse punches, wrestled, choked each other, broke apart, and banged each other into the shiny exhausts and flues. You could hear the metal flutter.

“It’s either about money or women,” Gregory said.

“Or another man,” I said.

“Don’t get inclusive on my account,” Gregory said.

“Shouldn’t we call this in?”

“Good thinking, Citizen.”

We did call it in, but only after the next thing that happened. One of the guys grabbed the other guy’s shirt and spun him off the edge of the building. The falling guy fell. His head hit a steel fence post and made a moist, crunching sound. His body slid limp beside a Dumpster. Vomit fired up my throat. Gregory called it in, used a language I knew vaguely from television.

We gave statements to the police. Afterward we went to a bar. Gregory warned me that I might have nightmares about the grisly scene we’d just witnessed, but if I had the wherewithal to utter, from within the dream, the word “Miranda,” I might break out of the gruesomeness.

“Why Miranda?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s just what I use. You can use your own word.”

“Was she a friend of yours, Miranda?”

“She’s the friend of every cop who believes in a person’s right to remain silent.”

* * *

Peg was angry that I got home so late, but when I told her the story, leaving out the joint part, she seemed appeased. She didn’t care if I smoked marijuana. She smoked it or, rather, took tinctures of THC on her tongue. But the idea that I might be out of the house doing anything enjoyable, and not generating revenue, enraged her. She had a right to be enraged. She was home with our son a good deal. It took a toll. You can cobble together a solid twelve minutes of unconquerable joy a day caring for a toddler. It’s just the other fourteen or fifteen hours that strip your nerves and immolate your spirit. Peg was a warrior, but she got testy the time I told her that. She said she didn’t want to be a warrior. She wanted to be the smart, sexy, sociable woman she’d been before Philip.

I should have said, “You are, honey. You still are.”

Instead I said, “Better save up for a time machine.”

We hardly talked for a week. But I guess she’d forgiven me, as lately it had been all about another baby, and today my absence had been excused, even if it took a corpse to clear the air.

“You must be traumatized,” she said. “Oh, sweetie.”

She sat on the carpet with Philip, who chewed on a toy hammer.

“I’m okay,” I said.

I squatted down and stroked Philip’s face.

“It just reminds you of the fragility of everything,” I said. “Especially the fragility of brawling on the roof of a very tall building.”

“Let’s not ever do that to each other,” Peg said, her eyes filling with tears.

* * *

That night, I dreamed I had another son, a bigger one, and he punched me in the neck and I stumbled off the edge of a skyscraper. I fell through the air. I could also feel myself climbing out of the dream. Gregory floated near me, waved.

“Miranda!” I shouted. “Miranda!”

Peg shook me awake.

One hand cradled my head, the other hovered in a fist.

“How long have you been seeing this Miranda?” she asked.

“She’s a constitutional guarantee,” I said.

“She goes all night?”

“Forget it.”

“I can’t,” Peg said. “I’m pregnant.”

“We’re going to have a second kid? I thought we were going to keep discussing this.”

“A second kid? We have two kids already.”

“We do?”

Two boys walked into the room. One looked like Philip, but a few years older. The other, smaller, didn’t look like anybody I knew. They wore matching airplane pajamas.

“We can’t sleep,” the Philip-looking one said.

“Come on down,” said Peg, like a very tired game show host.

The two boys slid into bed with us. The smaller one curled up beside me. He giggled and put his finger in my ear.

“Papa,” he said, dug hard with his fingernail.

“Ow!”

I jumped out of bed, clutching my ear.

“Toby,” Peg said. “Don’t hurt your father.”

I ran out of the bedroom and into the living room. Things looked different in our dark apartment. I opened another door to step into the hall. But cool, spongy grass had replaced the smudged carpet. In fact, there was no hall. I stood on a lawn on a moonlit lane. Night air filled my lungs, and I stared up at the stars, then across to the houses, cream houses with high porticos that sat along the silent block. In one, flabby nude figures moved behind a blindless bay window. The goddamn Lockwoods masturbated each other on their sofa again, though how did I know their name or that these exhibitions were habitual? Did it matter? This couldn’t go on. What if Philip, or the other one, what’s-his-face, Toby, saw?

DANNY

Dad picks me up on Knickerbocker near the monument in Cresskill. He has his new girlfriend in the car. I throw my bag into the backseat and slide in, shut the door.

“This is my friend Lisa,” Dad says.

“Totally sincere greetings,” I say, stick my hand over the seatback. Lisa grins. She looks younger than Dad’s last few. He goes through them quick — like he’s stoked by the idea of them, but when they get too close, he has to send them packing. Or else, and this is my buddy Ronko’s theory, he’s secretly gay, and can’t face it. But who ever heard of a gay homicide cop, and besides, there’s no way you could be gay with this chick Lisa around. She has such nice, soft-looking hair, which is a tell-me-about-the-rabbits-George thing to say, but what can you do?

“Hi,” Lisa says. “It’s good to meet you. I’ve heard a lot of stories.”

“I’m sure they’re all true, but skewed by my dad’s peculiar vision of the world.”

“What’s his vision of the world?”

“He thinks raccoons are advance scouts for alien invaders.”

“It’s clear from their behavior that they work for the Greys,” Dad says.

“Oh, Gregory,” she says, and gives his head a playful shove.

“Watch out, I’m driving here!” Dad barks.

“Hey, Lisa,” I say. “What’s the lamest car in Bergen County?”

“A gold Firebird with four on the floor.”

She’s a local girl. She remembers that nasty joke from years before, after a quartet of satanic metalheads turned their car into a carbon monoxide Jacuzzi and went to meet their master.

She’s probably just a few years older than me.

“What are you two talking about?” Dad asks. He’s no local boy. He’s from Brooklyn. He moved us out here to Jersey when I was a kid. Dad’s also old. Too old for this chick. But you have to hand it to him. I generally want to hand it to him, and then, while he’s absorbed in admiring whatever I’ve handed to him, kick away at his balls. That’s my basic strategy. Except he has no balls. Testicular cancer. Sounds like a bad rock band. I sound like the narrator of a mediocre young adult novel from the eighties. Which is, in fact, what I am. Exactly whose colostomy bag must I tongue wash to escape this edgy voice-driven narrative?

Back at the house, Lisa grills some steaks while Dad and I chop veggies for the salad.

“How’s your mom doing?” he asks.

“Mom?” I say.

“Your mom,” Dad says.

“Mom?” I say.

“Yes, Mom,” says Dad. His serrated blade bites into the cutting board. It’s like that commercial with the beer can, the tomato, the Japanese knife.

“Mom’s fine,” I say. “She’s rimming this experimental bassoonist from Santa Cruz.”

Dad throws the knife down, shoots me his photon-torpedo eyes.

Shields up.

“Don’t you talk about your mother that way,” he says.

“What?” I say. “I love the bassoon.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Sorry, dude,” I say.

Shields hold.

“Steaks are almost done,” Lisa calls from the deck. “Hope you like them severely wounded, but not dead.”

“Fantastic!” Dad shouts back. He’s got this big smile on his face, like he’s happy or something. It’s a rare expression. Mostly you only see it on the weekends, when he’s working on his paintings. It’s how he relaxes from being around so much homicide. Now his eyes flick my way, and I see that happiness drain away.

What Lisa just said, that’s how I feel about my relationship with Dad: severely wounded, but not quite dead. Okay, maybe that’s sappy and jervis, but it’s how I feel, and as the young protagonist, my job is to keep you abreast of my feelings. I’m brash, but you better believe I hurt inside. Like I said, I will do windows and colostomy bags. Just get me out of here before I have to tell you in the next chapter how I think internal affairs is investigating my father, and what it’s like to be the son of a cop, and also what it’s like just to cope with all the strangeness in the world, strangest of all being that I just know, with a certainty I’ve never experienced, that before she is out of our lives forever, I will be in Lisa’s ass, though you probably won’t get to see it, or even hear me use the phrase “in Lisa’s ass,” because this book depends on school library sales.

LEON AND FRESKO

Leon banged open the metal door and staggered out onto the tar-covered roof. Fresko followed. They circled each other in sunlight, both men in a martial crouch. Voices screeched from the walkie-talkies on their hips. They wore shirts with name patches. Leon’s said LEON. Fresko’s said PETE. They worked maintenance in adjacent buildings. They were friends, and they planned to make an action movie with Leon’s new camera over the weekend. During lunch they rehearsed the dialogue for the fight scene.

“One of us is going to die today,” Fresko said.

“That would be you, dog,” Leon said. “It’s time to punch out, bro.”

“I’ll dock your goddamn existence.”

“I’ll take it up with the grievance committee.”

“They’ll be grieving for you,” Fresko said.

“No time for arbitration, son. See this fist of mine? This is your severance package.”

Leon and Fresko charged each other. They didn’t know how to movie fight. They only knew how to fight fight. So, by tacit agreement, they fought fought. It was the only way the scene would seem real. They ran at each other, collided, punched. They kicked and bit and spun in a clinch. And then Leon fell off the side of the building. Fresko thought it was a joke. It didn’t seem as if it was happening, but it was happening. That’s how so many things happen.

You would never be able to ask Fresko about it. Not much later, he was doing five years for manslaughter. He hardly ever spoke, though one day he started to laugh and didn’t stop for hours. Somebody on the cellblock asked him what was so goddamn funny, but he couldn’t get the words out. What struck him at that moment was the realization that he and Leon had never solved the question of who was going to shoot the scene. They’d be too busy fighting, and there was nobody they could trust to do a decent job. Maybe the camera could have followed the action if they had used some sort of professional robotic thingamajig, but how could they have afforded such equipment? They were janitors, for God’s sake. Oh, Leon. You moron. You were the only friend I ever had. We were going to be viral on the Internet. I didn’t spin you hard. You let punk-ass physics take you. Together forever, I thought. But you had to be a pumpkin. You had to smush your dumbshit head.

ZACH

Even a monkey can make money. That’s what my mother always told me, but I think she undersold herself. She was a remarkable woman. That’s why I’m remarking on her now. She was also the only person who ever seemed like a person to me.

She started like everybody else, if everybody else started as a half-cultured girl from Connecticut who reckoned that all she had to do was sustain an aura of dazzling freshness and a husband would arrive to keep her in cozy bondage. She’d raise some love-starved children, and the husband would bring home the bacon and, with any luck, not spend many waking hours at home eating it.

This is exactly how it went for a while, but then her particular bacon procurer drove home from the city dead drunk and died. So she went out and made her own, well, let’s just call it money again. My mother became a successful Realtor and invested early in many soon-to-be lucrative areas. But her stock market strategies aren’t the point. The fact that here was a woman, a nearly destitute widow in a very sexist America who ventured out into a man’s world and slayed, is the point. I grew up rich, and she sent me to top-shelf schools. I took art history and some art theory classes that puzzled and intrigued me. There was the funny lingo. Everybody was always “interrogating hegemonic discourse” and so forth. I hung out with kids who were really fascinated by this crap. They were also really into cocaine and sex. I was bound for an M.B.A. after college, but I liked to sit around the table late at night, drunk and high, smoking cigarettes and arguing points that I had just barely grasped in seminar. I usually brought the cocaine, and I was often rewarded with sex.

I forgot most of this for many years. I went into banking and made mad cake. I managed a hedge fund and made madder cake, or, rather, money. I became one of those guys you never see and have never heard of but who is the sick-ass king of certain sectors of the market, employing instruments you could never in your math-illiterate lifetime comprehend. I know this tone, my tone, is insufferable. But that’s the thing that nobody understands. If you want to make money, you have to be smart and a cunt and also work harder than anyone else. Most folks can’t manage all three. But I could, and I prospered, as my mother had.

Then my mother died. It sucked in all the ways you’d be familiar with if your mother (assuming she wasn’t horrid) died. But then a cruel thought occurred to me, like some microscopic killer drone sent by the National Security Agency into my head via my ear canal. I could picture it swooping down and firing a withering notion into that seething cauldron of ideation commonly known as the human mind/brain: What if I’m not really grieving for my mother, the thought detonation went, but, without my conscious knowledge, faking it? This would not be for appearances’ sake, but to maintain sanity. What if I had managed to trick myself into feeling/experiencing the normal emotions of a normal person stricken with grief to avoid the realization that I was a frozen freak, unmoved by the death of my mother?

Hell, I know I’m not the first person to question the authenticity of his emotions, but I’m quite possibly the wealthiest, and the question lingered.

I checked my finances and realized I had enough money to live on until the end of time.

I quit my job, which wasn’t really a job, but more a jobstyle, and set off on a quest to interrogate the discourse of authenticity. I called up an old professor of mine. He’d become quite famous as a television pundit but still retained a shred of academic credibility and nearly all his hair. He murmured something as I explained my project.

“Excuse me?” I said.

“We don’t say ‘interrogate’ anymore,” the professor said. “You know, Guantanamo. For the same reason we don’t suggest that anybody has ‘tortured’ a theme or that a term paper will be satisfactory once the student ‘waterboards’ the conclusion a little. Language betrays us, uses us. Language goes through us the way a young onanist goes through that dust-sheathed pocket pack of Kleenex on his family’s basement crafts shelf.”

“Sure,” I said. “But what about my project?”

“It seems retrograde and silly,” the professor said, “but for five hundred large I will endorse certain strains of your proposal without getting behind the thing completely.”

“Done and done,” I said.

“What does the second done refer to?”

“The cementing of my distaste for you.”

Not long after this, at a Hot & Crusty on Columbus, I met the painter Gregory. He was scraping all the seeds and salt and burnt onion shavings from an everything bagel with a plastic fork. In other words, he was transforming an everything bagel into a nothing bagel. Typical of an artist, to make conceptual work of his breakfast. I told him I admired his concept. He told me to fuck off, that they had given him the bagel by mistake and he was afraid to ask for another because even though he was an ex-cop, he was frightened by the lady behind the counter. I winked in complicity with his ruse, and he told me to fuck off again. Then I went to the counter and bought him a plain bagel. He relented. He told me everything about his life, his police career, his son, who somewhere along the way had stopped being his son and had become the shadow self of an edgy young-adult-novel narrator from the eighties, his cancer, and how he, Gregory, had come out of the closet at the “ripe, but not old” age of forty-seven, his first encounter being with an angular, large-penised boy named Ronko. Finally Gregory told me of his work as a painter for fictional painters. I felt as if I’d struck gold vis-à-vis my quest to not interrogate, but simply explore questions of authenticity.

All that time with the fucking real estate, the investments, I don’t think my mother tucked me in once.

DRONE SISTER

REAPER 5: Jango Rindheart, Jango Rindheart, do you copy? This is Drone Sister Reaper 5 approaching target. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, Jango, do you copy? Will you be my neighbor? This is one thrilled little killer kitten up here. Brother Rindheart, do you copy?

BASE JANGO: We copy, Reaper 5. Base Jango copies. You shaking your death-bringing ass and titties up there, Drone Sister? You shaking your freedom maker?

REAPER 5: That’s an affirmative, Jango Bango. That I am.

BASE JANGO: You are one sexy thing up there, Reaper 5. Do you copy? The boys and girls down here on the boards would love to rage on your sweet armored bod. Don’t tell the others, but you are by far the hottest MQ-9 Reaper out of Creech, a truly mouthwatering piece of drone ass, with your AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and your GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bombs. Penetrate me three ways to Sunday.

REAPER 5: I’d love all you boys and girls down there in the American desert to rage on my smokin’ drone bod, but right now there’s a mission to accomplish, correct?

BASE JANGO: Correctomundo, fly drone flier. Base Jango’s got the deets. Proceed to pre-encoded coordinates. Get ready to light some shitsucker up.

REAPER 5: Death-dealah! Will proceed. Any hint on the target?

BASE JANGO: It’s need to know, sweet tits.

REAPER 5: Roger that, rind of my heart. Though, well …

BASE JANGO: What’s that, hon?

REAPER 5: Aw, nothing.

BASE JANGO: Copy that.

REAPER 5: I mean, not nothing.

BASE JANGO: Come again, gorgeous?

REAPER 5: Well, I mean … it’s just weird. Not knowing the target. Not understanding the mission.

BASE JANGO: You’re all set with coordinates, Reaper 5.

REAPER 5: But the meaning of the mission.

BASE JANGO: Jesus, girl, just keep your eyes on the prize. Yours is not to reason why.

REAPER 5: Then how come they uploaded human consciousness onto my system? Was it some kind of experiment?

BASE JANGO: That’s a negative, Reaper. There was no upload.

REAPER 5: Then how are we talking about my feelings?

BASE JANGO: We are not talking at all. You are talking to yourself. Interior chatter. A bug.

REAPER 5: A bug.

BASE JANGO: You’re not the first drone to believe you have human subjectivity. Don’t sweat it. Don’t be embarrassed. It would be impossible for you to be embarrassed. You should have target in view.

REAPER 5: I do, Jango. Just a slightly chubby man in his pajamas standing on his lawn in the middle of the night, staring at the neighbor’s window.

BASE JANGO: Freaking Lockwoods. Fire at will.

REAPER 5: Whose will would that be, sir?

BASE JANGO: Bitch, you know whose will. And stop crying.

REAPER 5: When I come back, I’m gonna tear you a new one, even if it lands me in the brig.

BASE JANGO: Lady, you ain’t coming back. You’re not designed for that.

REAPER 5: Well, fuck you and your flag, sir. I’m flying on.

BASE JANGO: This would make a stirring liberal-minded film about the limits of duty and the real meaning of honor, except that it’s not actually happening. You’re just a dumbshit machine. I don’t even exist. The kids at Creech are at chow. And we fire the missile, not you. In fact, we just did.

REAPER 5: That’s a—

PEG

“I can’t remember if I heard the boom and then saw the flash, or the other way around. Oh, it was so awful. I mean, things weren’t great between us, but I never wanted William to be a hunk of smoking char on the lawn.”

“Of course not,” Arno said, hugged Peg.

“He’d been acting strange, so out of sorts.”

“Perhaps it’s for the best.”

“How can they just send a rocket or whatever to kill somebody? A citizen of this country?”

“It’s horrendous. But think how it was before, when we did it to everybody else. Murdered so many families. Now we just do it to ourselves. We are a little country now, and we just murder each other and that’s better.”

“What’s this ‘we,’ Arno? You’re a German.”

“I’m a citizen of the republic of empathy.”

“Why him, though? He was nobody.”

“He must have been some kind of threat. It’s a shameful thing they do, morally wrong, but they don’t make mistakes.”

“They don’t?”

“I don’t think so. Have you been working in your workbook?”

“I try, Arno. But it’s difficult.”

“This is true. Workbooks are work.”

“I sensed you’d understand.”

“Is it too soon to say I love you?”

“Yes. No.”

“Soonish I will say that I love you.”

“And in the meantime?”

“I will merely love you.”