experimental fiction

Political Operative III

STEVE BIERSDORF

You’re on your way down to the pool, where you’ll intermittently read and doze off, listening to the heave and sigh of the nearby waves. Your phone starts its three-note xylophone cha-cha of a ring and you see on the face of your phone that it’s Jen. Jen has a request for anything you have on Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute, “cross-referenced please, they only want information on the two together.”

The Laken Institute is taking credit for new Right to Work legislation, lauding the bill’s passage on their home page. Fresh off that victory they’re pushing for a prevailing wage bill, ostensibly on behalf of taxpayers, preserving the wealth of their donors the real objective, a fraction more of which will find its way to the Laken Institute in support of these efforts. A fraction in this case being seven figures.   

Senator Lowell Stamms did a fifteen-month stretch for felony misconduct, for ghostwriting news releases and fundraising letters (lobbying activities) for the Laken Institute while Majority Leader of the state Senate. When proof leaked to the media Stamms was brought up on ethics charges. It was thought both he and the Laken institute were finished, but here now, years later, the Laken Institute is on a mission to marginalize organized labor. It’s bareknuckle time.

You have a trove on the Laken Institute, including their annual reports and profiles of each member of their Board of Directors and officers. Not that these profiles are damning in what they reveal about these mostly upstanding women and men, they’re more impactful in drawing conclusions from their affiliations, where they work, the things they’re responsible for professionally, what their companies have or haven’t done or supported or didn’t, detailed enough to reveal where they worship on Sundays, if they do.

“Offer them both profiles, the full profiles, Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute. They can do their own cross-referencing.”

“Okay,” Jen says dutifully. She’s respectful of your vacation, but both of you know you should handle this. Jen is a data management specialist. RDBMS or NoSQL databases, Oracle certification, these are her wheelhouse. You’re the pitchman.    

On your way down the other elevator in Sandcastle Tower I, not the glass one but the other with padding hanging over the walls, as if the elevator is for transporting bulky furniture or the violently deranged, and the synthesized ring again. Jen tells you in a remorseful tone that the client doesn’t want both profiles and is insisting you cross-reference Lowell Stamms and the Laken Institute.

“Otherwise it’s too much extraneous information. That’s what they said.”

What they think is extraneous you see as a rich vein, but that’s your projection. They don’t understand the potential of what you’d be providing. Or if they do, they’re looking past it for something easy. Damning and easy. Damning takes work.  

“Text me the guy’s name and number, I’ll take care of it.”

You’re sitting on the beach looking out at the Gulf of Mexico with your AirPods in and you make the call. You introduce yourself, and invite him to lunch, Gary with an impossible to pronounce Polish last name. When you ask him spell that he says most people call him Gary W. You’ll be back on the eleventh.

***

You meet at Mo’s Irish Pub. Late morning, plenty of empty tables prior to the lunch rush. You’re on time, curious to see if Gary W. will be there. Being early implies diligence, whereas late implies indifference or disorganization.

Gary W. is sitting in a booth with a woman, sitting on the same side of a booth in an otherwise empty dining area, leaving the other bench for you, the woman on the inside. Gary W. is thick and takes up more than his share of their bench. He’s wearing a polo with slacks, labor management casual, around your age, while the woman looks younger, in her thirties and dressed formally, like she could go from here to a campaign event, interview with an editorial board, $10,000-a-plate fundraiser. They’re a mismatched pair. Their political interests might be aligned, but their agendas are a Venn diagram.

After introductions, a deferential pause, and you ask directly, “So what is it you’re after?”

They blink at you and exchange a look.  

“Information,” Gary W. says, and you almost respond with “no shit?”

“Is that something you normally ask of prospective clients?” asks Melissa Beauchamp, deputy campaign manager with Ellie Hendrix for US Senate.

“You know what they say. Don’t ask questions you don’t know the answers to.”

“Meaning?”

“Connecting Lowell Stamms and Laken is hackneyed. Old news, not old enough to be forgotten so too soon to recycle. Whatever you take to the media will be met with indifference. They like being surprised.”

“Our understanding is you traffic in information. No offense, but we’re not looking for a consultation,” says Gary.   

“Sure, I can give you what you’ve requested. The way I look at it, I have a vested interest in the outcome. If you pay for this information and it does you no good then I’m a purveyor of not inexpensive, useless information. If I give you what you’ve asked for, for what I charge, ultimately you’ll be dissatisfied.”

 Melissa asks, “What do you have in mind?”

“Ellie Hendrix is very likely going to be running against Joe Van Meter. My understanding is Van Meter is comfortably ahead in the polls.”

“Correct.”

“Van Meter is supported by the Laken Institute. Your idea is to tie him to nefarious money. Link him to some impropriety. Let’s start there. See if there’s a better way.”

“The Laken Institute has a stable of candidates,” explains Gary.   

“Unless they’re secretly financing a eugenics project, what they are and who they support is baked in. They’ve been around a long time. Weaken them by picking off their candidates.”

“We were kind of hoping to do both. Kill two birds with one stone. Cut off the head, kill the body,” from Gary. “Okay, I’m out of clichés.”

You smile, they smile.

“The press won’t care. When you bring them old news, they’ll tune you out. The next time you bring them something they’re less likely to listen, or if they do run it you won’t get the wattage.”

A server in a green Kiss Me I’m Irish t-shirt walking slowly by stops at the pause in conversation.

“Give us a few more minutes please,” Gary says.

“Are we going to eat?” Melissa wonders.

“A few more minutes,” Gary tells the server so he’ll go away.

“What’s the alternative,” Melissa asks.

“I’m not sure yet. Give me until the end of the week, Monday at the latest. I’ll give you what you asked for if I can’t come up with anything better. However you want it.”

“Cross-referenced?”

“Sure.”

They look at each other. 

“Make it worth our while,” Gary the union boss tells you. You shake hands.

No one stays for lunch. You hang back, watching them in the parking lot, walking to their cars, slowly pulling away from one another. She says something, he gesticulates, she says something else, he gesticulates again and she nods. You can guess what they’re saying by watching them. Subtitles aren’t necessary:

“So what do you think? Will he give us something we can use?”

“It’s what he does. I guess at some point you have to give that a chance.”

“And if not, we’ll just get what we wanted in the first place.”

“Exactly. I hear his information is good.”

***

You’re a human algorithm, your ability to decipher patterns. You can put your music playlist with over seven hundred songs on shuffle, and after listening to five songs you can figure out the shuffle pattern and correctly predict every song played after that. It’s a game you play sometimes when you’re out. Someone won’t believe you can really do that and bet you, and you always win. Once they bet you a hundred dollars, you couldn’t correctly predict the next song after listening to only three, on someone else’s phone. You had to count the number of songs in the queue, and after the third song you counted some more. It was an educated guess, but you were right. So your wife Jo leaving you for another woman, something you didn’t see coming, is one of life’s great paradoxes. Relationships have been patternless for you, you’ve always had your work and your gift, when all else fails.   

***

You caught on early that information is the new currency and developed your contextual niche. You tracked who gave money to who, at first through the Federal Election Commission (FEC), then through the many sites that track this, looking for patterns. Like, for example, politicians who might be friendlier toward insurance companies than toward the ranks of their insured. You were startled at how apolitically and abundantly insurance companies contributed, particularly after the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v FEC decision. With health insurance at the forefront of policy debate, with policymakers peddling their influence, unholy alliances were inevitable. Rampant’s a strong word; pervasive?   

The National Association of Insurance Commissioners website provides tracking of complaints to every state’s insurance commissioner going back three years. Every six months you or Jen review the number of complaints made, by state, for every insurance carrier, crosschecking those with their complaint index. Where one is the baseline, if an insurance company hits four or higher on the index, even three or higher, it’s red flag time.

You have press credentials and so you file a request for public records under the Freedom of Information Act, requesting all individual complaints to a particular state insurance commissioner when you notice a high complaint index number, or a high number of complaints with a particular state insurance commissioner about a particular insurance company. When you get the individual complaints, Jen archives them.

You peruse the Joe Van Meter for US Senate website and discover he was state insurance commissioner, for a longer than normal tenure, going back several years. Right before he went into politics.

In sifting through the archives you discover twenty-seven complaints about XYZ Health Insurance billing its customers for treatment of hypertension, at three hundred dollars a crack, for routine blood-pressure screenings, where hypertension was neither diagnosed nor treated. Insurance Commissioner Joe Van Meter denied all twenty-seven complaints. It isn’t a surprise when you research Van Meter’s past campaign donations and find that XYZ has been a consistent and generous contributor. In some years his leading contributor.

You’re friends with reporters at two of the state’s largest daily newspapers and know several TV news producers well. They’ve quoted you as an anonymous source. Were you to provide this information directly to the media, that would imply bias, and you’re an apolitical mercenary. You sell it to the Hendrix campaign and they leak it to the media. You charge a lot. They can afford you. Since Citizens United v FEC they’re all well-funded campaigns. Your friends in the media will know where the information came from. 

Political Operative II

STEVE BIERSDORF

A pink While You Were Out slip is on your keyboard when you return from lunch, Jen’s oddly masculine handwriting, Ray Sears and Ray’s cell number, no elaboration. In your business people rarely leave voicemails. Ray is calling to let you know he contributed $7,500 to the Midwestern governor’s presidential campaign per your arrangement. The governor has just announced, so from this point on campaign contributions are a matter of public record.

Four years prior, the Midwestern governor established a state-run economic development corporation to provide loans and tax credits to small businesses, appointing himself chairman. Under the charter, in exchange for financial assistance, these businesses must provide payroll records as evidence of job creation for any tax credits or loans they receive. Any going concern could get bank financing, so the businesses coming hat-in-hand to the governor’s economic development corporation tended to be sketchy. The tax credits issued would be a pittance compared to the economic development corporation’s loan portfolio, the risk management side of the portfolio. 

Ray Sears Construction had been on the verge of bankruptcy. It was easy to get him to agree to everything. Ray Sears Construction received a back-channeled $200,000 infusion from the Lease On America Superpac backing one of the Midwestern governor’s rivals. Seed money that enabled Ray Sears Construction to procure a $2.5 million loan from the Midwestern governor’s economic development corporation. To get this money, Ray Sears signed an agreement to do the following, failure to do so resulting in revocation of the $200,000 infusion: a) neglect to pay the origination fee to the economic development corporation, which would be discovered in a Legislative Audit Bureau audit of the economic development corporation, b) neglect to provide payroll records so the economic development corporation could demonstrate that the money it lent created jobs, and c) contribute $7,500 (the max allowable) to the Midwestern governor’s campaign after the governor formally announced his intention to run for president. You were confident the economic development corporation would not press for the origination fee, or bother Ray Sears Construction for their payroll records. The previous year’s audit cited several instances where the economic development corporation neglected to charge an origination fee or obtain payroll records.

Ray wanted to celebrate when he was approved for the loan from the economic development corporation. You remember his almost desperate gratitude, insisting on paying for drinks. If he knew he was a pawn in high-stakes political subterfuge he didn’t care. 

When the Ray Sears card is played there will be documented evidence that a) Ray Sears Construction never paid a loan origination fee, b) Ray Sears Construction never provided payroll records, and c) Ray Sears contributed $7,500 to the governor’s presidential campaign. So the Midwestern governor’s job-creating economic development corporation looks like a slush fund, using taxpayer money to forward the governor’s political ambitions while failing to comply with its charter.

Political Operative I

STEVE BIERSDORF

What you remember best about Representative Bender, before he was Rep. Bender, were his expressions. Easy to know when Rep. Bender was in full disdain, haughty contempt or mocking disapproval, his go-to’s. Big eyes that hid nothing, small head, hawk’s beak of a nose, and a high-pitched, stinging laugh. Rep. Bender, informed, heartless, over-qualified, looking to eviscerate you in the public domain, to make you fear sharing your views if they conflicted with his. Your carefully researched positions made you a worthy opponent, and you had common decency on your side, which in retrospect may have been a disadvantage. You didn’t engage him as often as you disagreed with him because it was too despairing, chimeric scenes of first-strike violence crisscrossing your impetus. Rep. Bender would want to go for cocktails after work, as if taking every opportunity to refute any contention you made was routine in the course of any day. Nothing personal, just Rep. Bender doing Rep. Bender. For the first two or three drinks he’d be personable, even amiable. You knew to be gone by the third drink, before the magma buildup inside him became irrepressible.  

You’d forgotten about him when there he is one day, on the home page of the local daily newspaper, rumored to be the next assembly majority leader. From the pictures on his Facebook page he’s proportionally larger, as though inflated via compressor and intake valve. Same round predatory bird face with tired, gilded eyes, cataracts of excess. Pics with a cocktail in his mitt, from fundraisers at Nice Ash. You know Nice Ash, a popular and relatively new cigar bar, part of the downtown reclamation, probably something Rep. Bender helped engineer. Old brick buildings rediscovered, gutted, repiped and resewered, stone mullion windows, ceilings torn out and rafters painted over, refinished woodwork and inadequate ventilation.

You wander in on a Saturday evening, making your way to the far end of the bar with the other solo acts. Fight night on pay-per-view, one of the undercards about to begin, faces along the bar upturned to the flat screens bolted high on the walls. Two women in an octagonal chain-link cage, disrobing, walking to the center of the cage, close-ups of both women glaring death at each other (you try to spot fear or determination in their eyes as if this might portend anything). Referee imparting instructions, both women nodding, bumping gloves, back to their corners, the bell, and it’s on. The fight is over in less than a minute, one woman with a vicious roundhouse kick to the head of the other, knocking her unconscious. “Ho!” From several guys around you, shouted in unison more or less, another laughing like this, “who-who-who-who,” loud falsetto.  

You’re more of a cigarette guy, so you ask the bartender for a cigar recommendation. He comes back with a pressed Nicaraguan Viaje Robusto, ten dollars a stick, clipping it, presenting it to you with solemn reverence, lighting it, and you herf away on that slow-cooking monstrosity for what seems like half the night, inhaling sometimes.

Nice Ash fills up with resort-casual, above-average wage earners. Rep. Bender in the hizzy, you didn’t see him come in but you hear the laugh powering through the din. Loud and ridiculing as ever, emboldened. You didn’t expect him to have found an off-switch from then to now. Self-restraint was never one of his talents. You spy him through the cigar smoke and cluster of people, he’s nearer the entrance, centermost of a cluster of local A-listers, holding forth, throwing his head back and laughing, his laughter like a rider’s whip or sharp spurs to your flank.

Creeping up on last call and the crowd is thinning. You’re hoping he won’t see you. He’ll want to buy you a cocktail or a stogie, introduce you to his, what, associates? Sycophants? Hangers on? Groupies? If he has friendships they’re transactional, if or when he screws up they’ll lay claim to any spoils. Grab a shovel and throw some dirt on the box before the body’s stiff. And serial vetters they’ll be, wanting to know what you do to see if you’re worth the bother.

When your eyes are watering, they open the front door to let the backlog of smoke escape into the bitter night. Rep. Bender’s up from his bar chair, pulling a topcoat over his shoulders, putting his gloves on, throwing his head back and laughing, parting salutations, patting each other on the shoulder, and there he goes. The moment you’ve waited for. You’re up, slowly, studying your I-phone as you saunter out, brushing by someone. When you’re outside, you see his car isn’t far, you watch him get in and pull away and call 911, providing the make and model and plate number, eastbound on Sunset about a half mile west of 164. Driving erratically.

Avoiding as best I can the inherent danger of invisible, microscopic spittle

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m on one of my walks through the Lighthouse Pointe subdivision, down to the Santa Rosa Sound and back. Past brick ranch houses, slab houses, some with screened-in pools in the back. A nondescript stroll until I get to the Sound, where the waterfront houses are to be quietly envied with aching restraint. 

Ordinarily not many people are about, landscaping crews leaf-blowing or cutting grass or edging, or sitting in their trucks smoking. It being trash pickup day, my biggest concern are the receptacles. A pair, their lids hanging open, twin receptacles as inseparable as their long-together proprietors, sometimes and often lying on their sides courtesy of a rambunctious wind, scavenging black bears, or petulant sanitation workers. I pass these lidless receptacles with at least six feet of distance between me and their openings, hoping to avoid an unseeable puff of rogue droplets, hovering in wait of their next host.

I’ve gotten an early start this particular morning, off at a brisk pace when I come upon a broken liquor bottle and glopping of dried vomit infiltrating my six-foot perimeter. I feel a surge of anger as I step away, rushing by, turning my head, holding my breath as if that does any good (it may, I’m just not aware that it does). People believing themselves immune and immortal, hovering indefinitely in their physical primes, out and about, driving around and getting hammered. Wantonly spreading contagion. Further on I step over a green placker I’d have maneuvered around if I’d had advanced notice, irritated that people are driving around picking their teeth and leaving the rest of us with the fallout. When I get home I’ll take my clothes off, put them in the washing machine and help myself to a scalding hot shower. I’ll leave my shoes outside on the welcome mat, wipe down my sunglasses, phone, reading glasses, reading glasses case, keys, the inner and outer knobs on the front door and the deadbolt switch with disinfectant wipes.

I make it to the manhole cover in the cul-de-sac at the end of Winding Shore Drive, halfway, and I’m on my way back when I spot three bogies at twelve o’clock. Three women brightly dressed, gesticulating, engaged in lively conversation, headed right at me. I cringe as they laugh loudly and musically in unison, thinking of the ample bursts of invisible droplets their laughter has just emitted.

They’re on the left side of Winding Shore Drive, my left, their right. I cross to my right, their left. We’re outside, sure, and it’s breezier here by the water, but there’s three of them and their combined invisible wake of microscopic spittle. One woman notices me getting out of the way and thanks me, presumably for keeping my droplets out of their harm’s way, waving and smiling. She’s tall, with an unusually long, stringy arm and kite-like hand. I smile convivially, “no problem,” as if I’m being magnanimous. 

Hindsight and 2020

STEVE BIERSDORF

I’m twenty-five pounds overweight. I have a stomach. Not a belly or potbelly. Not basketball-ish, more like sloppy-distended. Neglected, toneless. Harder to obscure or diminish by sucking in if I’m shirtless. 

I plan to attack the problem at some point. Before turning sixty. A lot of things I plan on starting or being consistent with by the time I’m sixty. Sixty seems like a crossroads between I’m over it, and dying before my term policy runs out makes better economic sense, or fuck my heirs, I’m going to run this thing out as long as I can, eventually rotting away forgotten in a nursing home that accepts Medicaid.

What I’ve done so far, I’ve cut out the occasional key lime pie, quit the blueberry muffins, and I’ve saved several posts on Facebook for various abs or core exercises I’ll get around to. The effect of ten thousand steps a day has been negligible, other than a distressed spine and hip joint and intermittent back spasms. My pants and shorts are still difficult to fasten, even though I averaged four point eight miles per day last week, four point five the week before.

There’s a floor to ceiling mirror I pass on my way to my office. I watch myself. I move like the upper and lower portions of me are articulated. My upper body looks relaxed, my lower body looks jolting and distressed, like I’m walking with a prosthetic leg to my hip joint and I’m only now getting the hang of it.  

***

I mall-walk around the outside of the Viejo Mall. Late winter, in the fifties, not much wind, blue skies, so I’ll get a little sun on my face. A pinkish hue that will become ruddier in a day or two. Anything but pale. We white people, we hate being pale. 

As I’m walking I see my shadow, diagonally and slightly ahead of me. I wonder if I’ve seen this shadow in my dreams, when I was younger. I feel like I have. The shadow I see as I walk around the Viejo Mall is herky-jerky and misshapen. I have on a jacket that’s zipped, and protrudes more than does my protruding stomach, so the shadow looks neglectfully overweight. 

If I’d seen this shadow in dream when I was young, I’d have refused to believe this was me. And what if, in this predictive dream, I’d been able to infiltrate the body and mind of this man in his fifties? It would have seemed worse than it is, to a young man. The hip pain, the tweaked back, shortness of breath, enervation, I’m accustomed to it, I make it work. As a young man I would have been horrified to know this was my fate. Or destiny. 

Which leads me to wonder. Why not allow this to happen? If I’d been able to see this cartoonish shadow when I was young, or temporarily inhabit this fifty-something body, long enough to internalize its afflictions, maybe I’d have become obsessed with my health. Maybe I’d be better off these days. Just a thought. A suggestion for anyone listening.  

***

Her latest apothegm: “I’m going to stab myself in the neck with a fork.” Examples of its application: Trying to schedule an appointment with the workman’s comp doctor; attempting to get AT&T Uverse fixed remotely (‘have you tried unplugging the modem?’); toilet paper and mask scams on Facebook. The empty aisle at Walmart where anything to wipe your ass is normally stocked, Huggies or the local newspaper your best remaining options. Or a bottle of Fantastik 409, hold it under you and spray upwards, a kind of do-it-yourself bidet, if you can live with the burning sensation.   

Usherette

STEVE BIERSDORF

Pulling up to a double wide, parked in a clearing inside a mangrove thicket. An old maroon pickup truck on tires nearly flat, you might make it to the nearest service station to put air in those tires, might, depending on how close the service station is. Walking to the door, knocking. Knocking again. Greeted with the sound of vehement hacking from behind the door, “just a minute,” managed between hacks. Entering the trailer, a deteriorated woman accessorizing with a portable oxygen tank and clear tube to her nostrils. 

“Hi dearie. Come in.” Hack, hack, hack. Full-body wracking. Tears in her rheumy eyes. Kasha thinks about asking “how are you,” but she can’t be doing well, Mrs. Ackerman.

Inside is dark, red drapes over the windows like oversized doilies defraying sunlight. Cigarette smoke has infiltrated everything. When she leaves, wherever she goes the rest of this day, her patients will think she’s been smoking. Chain smoking. Mrs. Ackerman sits in a tartan plaid recliner. Kasha assumes it reclines because there’s a wood lever on the lower left side of it. She sits on the matching sofa that smells like eight thousand smoked cigarettes.  

“How’ve you been?” Mrs. Ackerman asks Kasha with her incinerated voice. On the phone, people mistake her for a man.

“I’m good. What can I do for you today, Mrs. Ackerman? How about a shower?” Mrs. Ackerman smells worse than normal, her hair grease-flattened, split-endy. She’s the only person willing to help Mrs. Ackerman with that shower. Alicia the nurse won’t, her kids, son and daughter, no chance.

“Well, I don’t know.”

Mrs. Ackerman glances longingly at a pack of Virginia Slims on the battered-antique round end table next to her. The ashtray’s been emptied in anticipation of Kasha’s arrival. A glass of something clear, stagnate, probably room-temperature water with a dash of dust particles.

There’s really nothing Kasha can do for her other than to try to make her more comfortable.

“It’d make you feel better. Let’s get you all nice and clean.”

“Can I have a cigarette first?”

Kasha mock frowns at her.

“Will you at least smoke outside?”

She stands, holding out her arms.

“Come on, I’ll help you. It’s a beautiful day. Come outside and enjoy it some.”

***

The Kellers are new. Kasha’s given the address, and instructions from Clemenza, her supervisor and de facto dispatcher for in-home hospice care CNAs and nurses, to “see the Kellers.” She pulls into a middle class neighborhood of ranch homes on slabs, fenced-in patios and enriched-soil backyards, some with screened-in pools. She parks at the curb, goes to the door and rings the bell.

The Kellers answer the door together. Neither looks deathly ill, or anything other than lamé in their golden years. 

“Hi, I’m Kasha.” She takes a step forward but they don’t part and let her through, or invite her in.

“Nice to meet you,” says Mrs. Keller. Mrs. Keller locks on to her eyes and studies her. 

“Let me ask, you…Kasha did you say?”

“Yes, Kasha.”

“Have you been saved?”

“I hope so.”

Mrs. and Mr. Keller exchange a look.

“This is for you.” Mrs. Keller hands her a brochure. “I don’t think we’ll be needing you today. I thank you for stopping by, though, and God bless you. Find Jesus before it’s too late. He’s waiting, but frankly he’s losing patience.”

***

Into the brightly tiled Florida room, Mrs. Calpysa smiling at her as she enters. Mrs. Calpysa sees herself as a younger woman when she sees Kasha, or similarities. Kasha is older than she may realize.

“Kasha! Come here.” She’s lying on the indoor-outdoor sofa, propped up with pillows. She holds out her arm. Kasha hastens. She bends when she gets to her, Mrs. Calpysa taking her some of her hair between thumb and forefinger.

“My. Such beautiful curly blonde hair,” she says, as if seeing it for the first time.   

***

Dani’s out back by the screened-in pool. Kasha lets herself in. Dani’s Lhasa apso, Tammy, hopping up on her hind legs, yapping excitedly, clawing Kasha’s shins. Dani’s in her wheelchair, in the shade of eaves. A glass pitcher with a pale green concoction, almost empty, on a round, mottled-glass table beside her.

“I thought you’d never get here.” She says this like a single, long word. She holds up the glass pitcher.

“Replenish, my Lady.”

Kasha takes the pitcher, heads off to the kitchen.

“And when you’re done with that, please run to Mariachi’s, I’m completely famished. Shrimp quesadilla with black beans and Spanish rice, please. Here.”

Kasha, halfway to the kitchen, pitcher in hand, stops. Dani is holding up her Amex, waving it in the air over her head.

Over the clinking of the ice as she stirs in lime juice, she hears, “Oh, and Tammy needs a bath. She stinks. I’d have thrown her in the pool if I knew she could swim.”

***

Mrs. Young isn’t responsive when she gets there. She knocks on the door, no answer, rings the bell, nothing, so she tries it, it’s open. She lets herself in as she’s done before. The TV is blaring from the bedroom. The View. The women are worked up and shouting over one another.

Mrs. Young is lying in her king-sized bed, propped by several pillows, eyes open, with an open-mouthed amused look.

“Good morning,” Kasha says brightly. Mrs. Young doesn’t respond. Kasha looks for the remote, to turn the sound down. She’s forever turning the sound down. She hates loud TV, commercials especially.

“Mrs. Young?”

Nothing.

“Mrs. Young,” she says loudly, although loud is relative with the ladies on The View in background. “Shit.”

No pulse. She pinches Mrs. Young’s nostrils shut, no reaction.

Mrs. Young’s late husband founded a resort town to the east where they filmed The Truman Show. They’re wealthy. People will be keenly interested to know Mrs. Young has passed. Significant assets will transfer. 

***

His house smells of him, old man, unwashed clothes, accentually of urine. She opens the windows and turns on the ceiling fan. He lives in Florida and he has the windows shut and no A/C. She’s there long enough to get the clothes washed and into the dryer or hung. He has a skin allergy he attributes to electromagnetic hypersensitivity. She washes his clothes with an organic detergent that fails to leave his clothes smelling clean and fresh. 

She knows what Pastor Adams should look like, or did, from his pictures. Him in the Marines, crew cut, big ears and proboscis, toothy grin, calm blue eyes. A black and white of his wedding, in a white jacket tuxedo, feeding his new bride wedding cake. She imagines When I Fall In Love as background music (the Nat King Cole, Natalie Cole sound-mixed duet). It’s the distance from then to now, how optimistic they were about the life ahead of them, coming to this at last.     

First order of business is toiletry. He’ll have soiled his adult diapers. Get those off, get him in the shower if she can, restore a little dignity, make him tolerable to be around. She can see gratitude in his eyes, in his expression, when he’s attended to and settled in, resting on the old sofa near the front window. She can tell he resents the lack of autonomy, and sometimes he resents her because she does these things for him, as if he could do them for himself if it wasn’t for her. His pride is less of a glimmer by now, still flickering. 

With each visit she becomes like a bartender for his thirsty conscience, a repository for his regret. His voice is a hard whisper. Sometimes he’ll exhale as he talks and his words burst forth in what must have been his normal voice.

“When they’re little you just don’t know what they’ll become.” When she next comes, “he never read my books. Not one of them.” His hand rifles through his hair, an old habit, a faint echo of youthful vanity. 

“We haven’t spoken in five years, other than when he calls me on my birthday. Once he called and it wasn’t my birthday. Why are you calling? I asked him. Is it my birthday?” 

“What did you talk about?”

The Pastor turns his head to the side, toward the window, not answering. Something gnawing at him and he’s near the end. Kasha ushering him to eternity’s doorstep. She might be someone to relay these last few messages, as if from the beyond, to whoever they’re intended for. 

The next time he has more to say.

“I wanted them to find their own way. To be their own people. Learning from example. My father never explained things to me, I figured it out for myself. I found my calling. I would say none of them did. They found vocations.” A pause. “They work a lot. One thing I’ll say about them, all three of them, they’re hard workers.” 

When next she arrives, an ambulance is there. Parked in the driveway, lights off, back doors open. Everyone is inside the house. The EMTs have Pastor Adams on a bariatric gurney, ready to wheel him away. Wearing an oxygen mask, he sees Kasha and pulls the mask away from his face so she can hear him. She leans in to hear, turns her head and throws her hair to a side, holding it away from her ear, her other hand lightly on his forearm. Looking imploringly at her, wide-eyed, “tell them to read my books. Do that for me, please. Please.”

Because imagining the absolute worst-case scenario is my default setting

STEVE BIERSDORF

Beach and the Gulf of Mexico on this side of the island, waterways on the other, walled off by an impenetrable mangrove thicket infested with things that bite and constrict, uncompromising, vicious, camouflaged things. I see how the island could be taken, overrun then fortified with only the beach side to defend. Not much potential for resistance or insurgency here, where aggression is getting up at sunrise to find the good shells before anyone else does. The local police cruise the beach in jeeps, looking for open containers or enough nudity to offend public decency statutes.

In quick succession take out the local cell tower wherever it is, inland somewhere, easy to find because its exact location can be googled, detonate the concrete stanchions that prop up the causeway so it buckles and keels over into the bay. There aren’t two, the only way on or off the island if you’re driving. An amphibious assault from the ocean in the new moon cycle, storm the condos and resorts, evacuate the residents top floor to lobby, set up MANPADS with SAMs on the roofs of the taller complexes, heat-seekers.

I’m well acquainted with the view from the balcony, the beach and ocean and our building’s identical twin across the way, its pool, green tennis courts and driveway on the grounds in between. Almost straight down to the crown of a several-stories-tall royal palm, with its full head of yellowish fronds and branchless beneath, fronds like dying plants in a pottered vase, its trunk like a cylindrical sculpture hewn by the elements, steady inbound breeze, torrential downpours, rain delivered sideways, glazed by the tropical sun. I estimate the top of this royal palm to be slightly more than halfway to the ground from the tenth story balcony I peer down on it from. I wonder if it could be possible to land atop the crown, but suspect only with a running start. It looks like a step off the rail and I’d be able to hit the mark. What I can’t know is if the crown is substantial enough to impede my fall or if I would tear through it, two hundred pounds hurtling down and the fronds a matador’s cape.  

The invasion force overrunning the twin tower to our north, lining up on opposite balconies and systematically clearing the condos in this building by unleashing automatic weapons fire covering every square inch of visibility into these condo apartments in the southern tower. These condos are glass-walled facing out but there are two obstructed views, on the other side of the kitchen and the full bathroom by the guest bedroom and not the master. Everything else is in the line of fire. Behind the kitchen wall as the torrent of automatic weapons fire swarms every inch, shredding glass, chewing up the plaster walls, splintering wood, devouring furniture and creating flurries of lighter material, foam rubber, feathers, dust, dismembered bits of cloth, pieces of everything scattered under a deafening rain of hellfire. Systematic shock and awe, floor by floor, so by the time the invasion force moves in behind the covering fire, any resistance has been obliterated.

When the unleashing ends my ears ring with it, what’s left of a cabinet door dropping to the floor, a piece of glass table falling and breaking in half. I make a break for it, straight out and over the balcony, bits of glass crunching under every step, jumping the rail, realizing I’ve overestimated how far out the royal palm is, I won’t land dead center in the crown, crashing through the fronds and I grab desperately as I come ripping past, I feel a sharp pain in my upper chest and my arm feels like something’s tried to remove it from its socket with a violent tug. The momentum of my fall disrupted enough to blunt the impact. Landing in a blink. One of my arms is useless. I slither. It feels like something’s been threaded through my pelvis so I can stand properly only with the assistance of fishing line at the behest of a manipulating hand. I spit out teeth. My jaw barely opens so that when I spit blood and broken teeth tumble reluctantly out, blood, saliva and teeth fragments coating my chin. On the left side of my mouth are gums or broken teeth, same side as the useless arm. I blink blood from my eyes, drops on my eyelashes. I make for the nearby dumpster, not walking but partially erect, dragging what doesn’t work and over-relying on what does, lean over and fall in and close the lid over me with a hollow, metallic boom, hoping no one saw.  

At the Ballpark

STEVE BIERSDORF

The ballpark has a retractable roof with a giant glass greenhouse façade, giving it the look of a massive, self-contained biosphere. Our team is in the early stages of a rebuild, so if they lose today we can chalk it up to better days ahead. Every twenty seconds or so they play a short blurb of a song, “Wild Thing,” “Let’s Get It Started,” “Plush.” “Day-O,” daylight come and me want to go home. Turns out (google search) they have a forty-song playlist.  

Between innings a group of young men and women down on the field shimmy laterally to centerfield with a huge inflated sombrero upside down, with writing on it, presumably some local restaurant or restaurant chain. The inflatable sombrero and the sideways-moving legs of those carrying it resemble an immense and deformed crustacean scrambling desperately in search of a return to the sea, stuck and enclosed by the walls around the field and the leering, hollering masses.

Beneath mammoth ads for Southwest Airlines, Bud Light and Larry’s Shoes, above the Target bullseye logo plastered to the outfield wall, someone walks to the edge of the outfield stands with a much smaller inflated object I take for a replica of a pillow-sized taco, throws it in the general direction of the upside-down sombrero, the taco bounding off the brim of the sombrero and falling to the outfield grass, to the collective, unconvincing “awwww” of the stadium crowd. The leftfielder jogs out to his position, observing it all, pounding his glove with his fist with what can only be disdain.

A left-handed batter stands in and swings at a pitch like a blur, redirecting the blur, slower-moving and looping and askew and high into the glowing stadium lights. The ball is a small darkening object, a tiny pin-prick eclipse of the candlepower, rising impossibly high and on its descent angled straight for where we’re sitting. A man in the team regalia stands and the ball falls to him as if hit to him intentionally, or at him. He lifts his hands together to catch it, but it bounces off his hands with a meat-slap and skips to the row directly in front of us. As if the baseball is a priceless trinket dropped from the sky, something that if procured would inexorably alter the life of its new possessor, as one body and then another and another hurtle directly over us, diving headfirst, knocking us from our seats to our knees, spilling beverages. A pile of bodies in the row in front of us, a scrum, a compilation of legs and arms and torsos and grunts and jostling, and a woman walks up to the scrum, reaches in and magically produces the fouled-off baseball, holding it aloft, triumphantly, and the entire section erupts, as she turns and curtsies to the rows higher up.

Phone Scammers

STEVE BIERSDORF

They were working an old IRS scam. Googling phone scams you could find out what people were hip to, so he invented his own messages. The women quickly copied him when they saw his results.  

“You are hereby notified that we need to speak with you or your attorney immediately regarding an ongoing investigation. In the event we do not speak with you in our office today, we will document that you waived your rights to counsel and submit your file to the state.”

“This telephone number is linked to a questionable financial transaction that is now under investigation. It is possible that your name and social security number could be involved. I need you to call me or one of my associates immediately.”

He would make two hundred calls by lunch. Rarely, if ever, talking with anyone on the initial call. The calls were local but came from scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes. He’d eat lunch, take a solid forty-five minutes and peruse shit on the Internet. The women hammered the phones nonstop trying to get someone, skipping lunch or eating at their cubicles between calls. You had to scare people with the messages you left. They had to call you.

Early afternoon the callbacks started in earnest. Sometimes he couldn’t keep up, the women gladly handling his overflow. Mary Stewart took the inbound calls. From the number on caller ID she would know which agent had placed the call, confirm the caller’s name and social security number and transfer the call to him if it was his, or if he wasn’t on another call. He’d reconfirm the social security number with the caller. Knowing their social security numbers was like holding their babies out a window ten stories over a sidewalk.

They purchased call lists from payday lenders, storefront or online. It was the afraid callers with sketchy credit histories who gave up their card numbers. The standard charge was payback of the fictitious loan for $400 and a $35 processing fee. He went for more. Sometimes he’d say the loan was for $1,500 or $2,000 and they’d want to mail him a check, he’d tell them if they gave him a credit card number he would waive the processing fee and come down $300 to settle. Sometimes with the bigger amounts the card number wouldn’t go through, and Mary Stewart or Mr. Anderson would send it through for less, whatever they could get.

The women were using his scripts, but they didn’t have his deep, resonant voice. They had weird accents. Sometimes they would go out into the empty warehouse together, Denise Meyers, Susan Jones, Ann Johnson and Mary Stewart. Susan Jones and Ann Johnson smoked. They would converse in a foreign language. After five minutes of his standing there awkwardly with his hands buried in his pockets, Mary Stewart smiled apologetically and gave abridged translations. When Mary would translate, the other women would stop talking in the strange language, looking at him by turns. The next time he followed them out into the empty warehouse they spoke English.     

They could hear each other. They had earbuds and weren’t right on top of each other, but the offices were tight, formerly the administrative offices of a defunct propane gas concern. The women would threaten the callers if the callers weren’t taking the bait or were confrontational, “get a good lawyer,” “I’m forwarding this information to the three credit reporting agencies.” They took the confrontational calls personally. You couldn’t. If there wasn’t any money in it get off the call quickly, hang up if necessary.  

Denise Meyers was the most egregious. If Denise Meyers called a blocked number, she would continue to call using all twenty-nine scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes and leave her message, or her version of one of his messages. She would call the same cell number from all thirty scrambled lines until she was completely blocked, each time leaving increasingly menacing versions of the original message. If she knew where the owner of the blocked cell phone number worked she would call that person’s work and leave messages with a receptionist that the owner of the blocked cell number was facing a grand jury indictment for embezzlement. She would look up family members and call them, telling the family members their brother, sister, son or daughter was facing fraud charges. He would listen to her being awful in her weird accent and disaffected tone. He’d listen to her and want to fuck her. Fuck her hard.

Taking Inventory

STEVE BIERSDORF

Yesterday when I checked the National Debt Clock was $20,493,703,619,404. It’s like a never-ending telethon run amok. Watch it for five minutes and it’ll go up another million dollars. Can’t sleep, check in on the National Debt Clock, and it’s still going up at two in the morning. Checking it just now and it’s up to $20,493,874,732,187. I wonder, how do we borrow $171 million in little over twenty-four hours? Do we borrow that much every day? We’re not really planning to pay all that back, are we? We can’t be.   

I live in what was once a quarry pit. At some point they ran out of rocks to pulverize, and now there are townhouses and single-family homes where once were mountains of rubble. It’s a valley now with an imported horticulture, low-maintenance roadside flora that can thrive out of a gravelly, nutrient-deficient subbase and thick flowering trees growing from patches of sod. The people behind me live a little higher up on the western ridge. At the back of their yard is a bulwark of white boulders, leftovers from those old quarry days. I live alone, in a two-level two-bedroom townhouse with a two-car garage. Beneath the kitchen sink, I have an array of household cleaners to tackle the most stubborn stains or waxy buildup. 

My neighbors to the right, a retired couple, we’ve never exchanged a word. We haven’t made eye contact. For the husband, waking up each morning without a meaningless job to go to has been an awkward transition. His driveway is always the first one shoveled when it snows. He uses a snow blower for the main stretches and fine-tunes the edges with one of those ergonomic shovels curved in the middle like half a parentheses, so he doesn’t have to bend. In summer he handpicks the weeds in his yard and punches aerating holes in his lawn with a long, thin-handled implement with a three-pronged metallic claw. During summer days when I’m home I sometimes hear the discharge of a pellet gun – pop-pffft – coming from his backyard, followed by the frenzied scattering of birds from the vicinity of his well-stocked birdfeeder.

I have this gnawing feeling I should do I’m not, not sure what that would be. My leg bouncing frenetically or if I’m lying down, my foot moving side to side like I’m waving at someone with it. I should feel better having my time at my discretion. I feel like I’ve fallen into one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios. Sometimes I watch the ceiling fan for a disturbing amount of time. Every revolution the slats disappear and reappear. There are six of them, only three visible if the setting is on high. I know how many floor tiles there are in the front bathroom. I wonder how I came to have thirty-three forks.