The Museum of Doubt Page 14

  When they reached the site fifteen seconds later with the extinguishers, there was a fair blaze going, and a good bit of damage done what with the flame, the smoke and the foam.

  I am making a citizen’s arrest, said Melvin, looking up at the three guards, on suspicion that you have been holding a quantity of a proscribed drug, namely tons of the stuff, with intent to supply.

  This is criminal damage, said one of the guards. We’ve got you on tape. Consider yourself nicked.

  After midnight, perhaps, said Melvin, waving his complimentary spliff confidently at them. After midnight, you’re captains of industry, serving the demands of the modern consumer. But that’s three hours away. Until then, you’re merchants of death, aiding and abetting the evil traffic in deadly narcotics.

  Well, said the leader of the guards, sitting down next to Melvin. We haven’t called anyone about this yet. And since we’re not in a hurry, I don’t think we’re going to for a while. And when we do, that’s you saying you broke in here at nine pm. And that’s three of us going to tell the police you broke in here after midnight. Wonder who they’ll believe? Eh? Three against one! He laughed, so did the other guards, and they stroked their moustaches.

  At this time Lester and Leila were lying naked together in the quiet warm lamplight of their bedroom. Lester was bruised and cut and his shaved upper lip was speckled with dots of clotted blood.

  They’ll be suspicious. They’ll think I gave in too easily, said Lester. Especially giving him the code for the door.

  Don’t worry, baby, said Leila. We’ll just say Melvin tortured you. And he did. If you want, I could torture you some more, to make it look extra real.

  He tortured me enough, said Lester, touching the red space where his moustache had been.

  Now that he’s taken your uniform, said Leila, maybe you could get a job doing something else.

  Maybe.

  And now that he’s shaved off your moustache …

  Oh but Leila. It meant a lot to me.

  I know, I know, but baby, baby. Without it, believe me, you’re a different man.

  After he was sentenced, Melvin re-enrolled in the writing course. One Monday morning, he sat at a PC, lit up a Marin, picked an aggressive font, set it in bold, and wrote:

  MANAGEMENT SECRETS OF THE NAZI GENERALS

  by Melvin Menimonie

  He sat back from the keyboard and took a reflective drag. He switched fonts, and began to type.

  Class Action

  Manhattan, Wednesday – The number of professional people among the disruptive mentally ill at large in the New York metropolitian area is underestimated by the public, two city agencies said in a joint report released yesterday.

  The Association of Special Housing Bureaux and Temporary Hostels, ASHBATH, and the Manhattan Authority for the Interception of Known Urban Risk Groups, MAIKURG, said that the popular image of violent or suicidal mental patients as coming from society’s underclass was wrong-headed and prejudiced.

  In a single day last month, ASHBATH and MAIKURG said, they had taken into care a writer who made regular contributions to national news magazines, while a lawyer once known as one of the keenest legal minds in America had skipped surveillance at a secure hostel and was last seen screaming obscenities outside the offices of an Iraqi émigré organisation.

  It proved impossible to reach ASHBATH or MAIKURG for further comment before this issue went to press. When contact numbers were dialled, a low, undulating, swishing sound could be heard, as if the telephone had been lifted from its cradle and laid on the summit of a high, windy mountain.

  East Village Weekly News, 25 April 1999

  I thought it was him. I wasn’t sure. But at three, the eveningfall of waiters’ day within a day, a fault of silence opened across the jingling clinking murmuring space of the bistro Melchior. All chewing jaws happened on the midswing at once, each wondrous thought and pip of gossip hit pause, each perspiring glass of Sauvignon chanced to have its dribbling hips untouched. The arbitrary gap of noiselessness ripped across the chequered hall like white space shot diagonal across a printed page by a freak of typesetting. Before the common rocks of bedlam closed the fault again, a single bar of sound crashed louder than it ever had or would on a trading day lunchtime in Melchior’s workspan: ice cubes lurching from a waiter’s stainless steel pitcher into a tumbler. The waiter, entranced by the music of the ice chonking into the water, let it run on, overfilling the tumbler and prickling me with drops of cold when it splashed my shirt. I was watching the man standing at the oyster cart. The sound of the ice in the silence caught him and he turned to look at me. I’d been right. He was the man. He was the man who had once been Maurice Mak.

  He’d been staring for so long at the oysters that the attendant had stopped asking if he could help. Mak was in a dark blue three-piece, hands in pockets and jacket open. In profile I could see a swell of belly restrained by the waistcoat. That was a mark of change. In the eighties the labour fitness thing’d filled out his image, got men like me and our breadgivers, the commissioning editors, interested. He’d unfolded into the highest value triptych: brilliant professional, establishment hate figure and guru of personal self, individual enough so you didn’t have to find three or four more like him to spin it into a new breed. He was 5,000 words with pictures by himself. The shot of him stripped to the waist at the ditch, mouth slightly open, sunred pecs ashine, leaning on the handle of his pick – really leaning on a real pick – with his cellphone in a stained sweatproof case hung from his neck with a really worn thong – Sony forgive me, some things you can’t fake – flew to its Beau Visage cover without dissent. Good for my story, but bad as well. If you remember Maurice Mak maybe that’s what you remember him for. You remember him as the health guy, not the finance guy, as you should. Labour fitness won him enemies. His credo that working out should be worthwhile communal labour, digging ditches or drawing water or generating electricity on treadmills – jogging, he said, was ‘energy masturbation’ – got him fascist and communist labels among his old corporate client base. The gym owners and personal trainers were up in arms. They got physios to denounce it as ‘a genocide against the musculature of America’. The unions said the last refuge of the honest working man, manual labour, was being bought up by dilettante white collar types. Roads departments started putting up signs saying No MBAs. Mak’s own road gang didn’t mind him taking pick and shovel work off their hands – most of the heavy stuff was done by machines they operated – but they resented his 7.30 to 8.30 am workshift and the way he showered afterwards, changed into a thousand-dollar suit and drove off in a grey Jaguar. Mak didn’t care. It kept him fit, marketed him, got him the personal brand image, rebel against the corporate mind, he needed for the main thing. The main thing being money, as I thought then.

  I was on my own in Melchior. I’d been spinning out a coffee with some mail after the guy I was lunching with went back to his desk. I got up and walked over to Mak, reminded him.

  He had a politician’s memory. Hi Bob, he said, shaking my hand and focusing on my eyes. He was tired and had me lapped aging but there was a transaction in him. It looked like he was about to hawk me a quantity of wisdom he’d optioned. It looked as if it was going to be cheap. What he knew in exchange for being able to ask for help. Even beg. Which was hardly more than a hearing since I was not a helping man. I saw he had white clay under his fingernails.

  He said: They reissued my license. I’m legal. I’m practising.

  Hey, I said. Back from the dead.

  His mouth shrank and his gaze flattened. He was shutting up the shop. Who told you? he said. Have you been talking to the gods?

  There are gods now?

  There are gods, said Mak. There are many gods. And they have finance.

  It hadn’t been a deep encounter with Mak before, when he was big. I never got the packaging off him. I had him for half an hour in a hotel suite where he sat like a movie star, taking writers off a conveyor belt. That was as close as you
could get in those days. It was the time when he’d frozen corporate America in its tracks with the first deployment of his device, the hostile class bid. He’d turned half a million grossly fat citizens into noble litigants and was about, they thought, to make them joint owners of the fried chicken franchise they were suing. Naturally they loved him. Some thought they’d be rich, some thought they’d be thin, some thought they’d be rich and thin and get free fried chicken for the rest of their life. This company’s been making the little guy eat its tainted chicken for thirty years, said Mak. Now the little guy’s going to eat the company. Not long after my story was on the newsstands the little guy found out Mak had been dining off him and HappyHen both.

  I’d fleshed out the piece with hangers-on and enemies and a public meeting he’d addressed. A thousand obese men and women came to hear him speak. Instead of coughing, the speakers were interrupted by gunlike reports as chairs cracked under pressure. Hipfat merged into solid waves along the intact rows. Love handles meshed like gears while the participants panted with the exertion of sitting upright without the aid of external cushions. Mak stood up with his weathered young face – and because of labor fitness, which only ever really worked for him, his leanness, smartness and rigour didn’t mock the balloon people in the audience, it seemed earned, struggled for, not a bought shape like the machined young execs from HappyHen – and told the hall that they weren’t the way they were because they’d been too greedy. No way. They were good, honest working people with good, honest working people’s appetites. OK. The government and the big corporations said they were extra large cause they ate too much. Ate too much fat. Didn’t that sound kind of strange? They started out as regular-sized Americans, they ate something that seemed like tasty food, something that didn’t have any warning labels, didn’t have any alerts or advisories on, and suddenly – woah! Size fifteen jeans! One moment they were nibbling on a few buffalo wings, the next, couldn’t get the bath on over their hips! Could they imagine another manufacturer trying it on? You drank a few beers, the next moment you were blind – the mother of all settlements! You ate your favourite candy and your hair fell out – that wouldn’t be litigation, it’d be a courtroom massacre! But when they ate HappyHen fried chicken, and before you could say barbecue sauce their good souls were wrapped up and weighed down by so much sudden flesh that the Lord himself would barely recognise his children, it was their fault! It was like the operators of the Titanic saying to those folks drowning in the ocean what, you mean you didn’t want it with the iceberg? Well, he was there to make sure HappyHen didn’t get away with it. Sure, they were going to sue the company. Sure, they were going to put whatever hotshot corporate lawyers HappyHen hired on to the griddle and flip ’em till they spat and sizzled and were done, both sides. But they weren’t going to settle for money. Mere millions, tens of millions, weren’t enough for the hurt they’d suffered. They didn’t want a handout from the company. They wanted the company. He, Maurice Mak, was going out to get HappyHen stock for every victim in that hall, and thousands more besides. They were going to take HappyHen over, or see it destroyed. From diners to owners, it’d be an American dream come true. In two years time, they’d be dining at the HappyHen table together – the boardroom table!

  After the applause one guy half-raised his hand and asked: If we win, do we still get to eat the chicken?

  My friend, said Mak, his voice catching. As long as there is justice in this country, there will always be chicken.

  He’d been focused then, and stayed focused right through the case, right through the triumphs in Missouri and on appeal, and then right through his own trial, the Chicken Stock trial, while they laid out his misdemeanours, how he’d begun loan-sharking to his clients on the basis of a successful outcome to the case, how they’d signed away their rights to a share in the spoils when they couldn’t keep up the payments, how when Mak won his great victory it was he who ended up taking control of HappyHen, how it turned out he’d been taking kickbacks from Chick-O-Matik all along so’s they could buy up their rival on the cheap. They convicted him on a technicality. It was enough to put him out of the game for a long time. When the judge sentenced him Mak looked alert and undefeated, listening carefully, as if the judge was a client explaining a problem to him. His wife, who was very beautiful, was there, leaning forward, intense. Because we’re weak we looked at Mak and told ourselves we’d known all along that he was a sleazeball, but we were lying, and when we looked at his wife we could see how badly she still wanted him and how weak we were.

  Now Mak had put on weight and the focus was dispersed. He’d been through other things, things I didn’t know about. I asked how his wife was.

  We split up a long time ago, he said. You remember her name, I know, because of the way she looked. You wouldn’t remember her if she’d been plain.

  Madeleine, I said, and smiled, which I wouldn’t have done if anyone else had been there.

  Yeah, Madeleine. I once thought she was fantastic looking too. Since then I met Inanna.

  Still doing the labour fitness routine? I asked, understanding that there was a connection between Inanna and Mak’s gods and hoping to keep the conversation on the useful side of psychosis.

  You can see the answer, he said, patting his stomach. I got a taste for eating clay when I was among the dead and I can’t shake it off. He twisted round and fetched a waiter over to check out the dirt of the day. But Melchior wasn’t serving clay that day, or any day. Mak sighed and ordered a double espresso.

  In a metal vessel, he said.

  We talked for a while about some cases we’d taken an interest in. Mak might have looked like a knife gone blunt but he still knew what was going on. He was quick, he was rational, he cut to the main thing. I found out he’d been separated from Madeleine for twelve months and was working mainly for private clients. He was about to file a suit against the federal government. And one of the reasons Madeleine left him was because he’d taken to wearing too much gold. I guess I raised my eyebrows because he undid the second top button of his shirt, pulled it apart and showed a gleam of precious metal, a thin gold breastplate flush against his thorax, embossed with what he said were representations of locusts. He buttoned up and shrugged. I got used to doing it for the clients, he said. They like to hang out in gold. They’re old-fashioned.

  What did Mak find out? That I was in demand. That I was working on profiles of some Hollywood players. That I had a new book in the works.

  I remember that piece you did about me, said Mak.

  Long time ago.

  I remember. It must have been good for me to remember.

  Most people remember the ones that say bad things about them.

  It was good. That thing about me being a triptych. I liked that.

  He was lying, I thought, but it was a nice kind of lying that was easy and pleasant to listen to, and I thought I’d let him lie some more.

  This federal suit, it’s going to be a big deal, the biggest, said Mak.

  Oh really?

  I was talking to Dave Filipchuk over at Madding Crowd. He was interested but I told him how much I liked your stuff. Which was kind of stupid cause I could end up with nobody writing a piece at all.

  I smiled. Mak clearly knew the truth about Filipchuk, what a schmuck the guy was, how he’d shouldered his way in between me and Jacko’s people when I was two thirds of the way to getting access.

  So tell me, I said.

  Don’t you want to take notes?

  Like you said, if it’s good, I’ll remember.

  Mak went pale and he looked to be struggling to swallow something. He shook his head and breathed deeply in and out. The spasm passed. It’d been fear, but fear he’d learned to live with, like indigestion.

  I was at a party when one of the gods appeared in front of me, he said.

  Like materialised?

  No, I mean he was one of the guests, I was turning away from someone I didn’t like and he was standing there, close, watching me, with
a glass in his hand. He was young but he looked wise. Seeing him, I don’t know why, I got this idea he could be trusted with a secret. You wanted to give him your deepest secret. There was something about him, he was wearing just a jacket and shirt but it seemed to me he was wearing the signs of other people’s secrets on him, like honours. That was Enki, Inanna’s friend. He told me he and his family had been impressed by my work on HappyHen. They wanted to retain me for a similar project. We went out on to the roof garden and he spelled it out. It was crazy. You won’t understand how I stood still and listened. I’d had a couple of Scotches. OK. It wasn’t only that. He had a way of speaking that made the world around you turn to a kind of fog, and the people round you to paper. You know what I mean, Bob. You must have met people like that.

  Maybe, I said. But they didn’t claim to be gods. They had imperfections.

  These gods have imperfections, said Mak.

  Oh yeah? Like what?

  Well, for instance, the male ones suffer from permanent erections. It’s painful for them, I think. It’s incredible they move so well, considering.

  I didn’t interrupt Mak again until his story was finished.

  Standing on the roof terrace with a glass of Pouilly-Fouissé Enki told Mak he was one of the gods of Mesopotamia. Way way back one of them, his friend Inanna, had made a move on the afterlife, where the Mesopotamians went when they died, and hung out for eternity, in a dusty twilight. Why she originally wanted control over the afterlife Mak didn’t understand but it seemed that the gods had conservative ideas about investment. They kept their holdings in land. They had the title to big properties on the Euphrates and the Tigris but that didn’t bring much in the way of income. Anyway, Inanna’s first attempt to mount a takeover of the afterlife was a fiasco, a real botched job, which, Mak pointed out, showed what happened when anyone, god or not, tried to do anything serious without a first class legal team behind them.