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.”

First responder

STEVE BIERSDORF

When the non-dairy creamer plant explodes in the Valley Hulk is quickly on scene, walking through a crowd of onlookers on the outskirts and safely at a distance, the crowd parting to let him through, comments at his back as he passes:

“I guess it’s time to drink my coffee black.”

“I’d say. Imagine what that stuff does to your innards.”

“Look, there’s Hulk.”

“What’s he think he’s going to do?”

The Valley is a bad place for this explosion and resulting fire, other industrial facilities in proximity, a developer’s idea of tony, assisted-living apartments that have to be evacuated, one resident expiring from the commotion.

To any of the firefighters or first responders on the scene, no amount of damage from a miscalculated leap can overshadow what they see that day, and they’ll tell anyone who’ll listen. No one sees what the Hulk does beyond the first responders, and the things he does are what make him the ever-loving Hulk. Things he does and does gruffly, that no one else can do, never responding to praise or thanks with anything more than a harrumph, his gruffness taken for modesty, part of the Big Lug mystique.

He controls the fire as it tears across a dry plain of neck-high weeds toward an acetylene production facility, this done by hopping around the front perimeter of the fire and blowing it to a standstill, Hulk able to generate 30-40 MPH gusts of breath, holding up the blaze as firefighters attack it from both flanks.

He lifts a collapsed cinderblock wall, still relatively intact, a wall only a crane could lift, beneath which are several people badly injured though still alive, Hulk carrying each of them to safety. He works through the rubble, casting aside blocks and girders and other decimated sections of the plant until he finds each of the fourteen people killed in the explosion, and carrying out their corpses, holding the corpses limply in his arms, almost reverently, carrying them out one at a time.

The shame of it is no one gets pictures. Of Hulk facing down the angry blaze, hopping frenetically from spot to spot wherever the fire attempts further incursions across the empty field of weeds. Of Hulk lifting the huge wall, maneuvering beneath it, balancing it on his hands, walking with it until it’s clear of the site, negotiating the imbalance of rubble from the decimated plant, uneven mounds of cinder blocks and steel girders with the huge wall aloft, tossing it out of the way. Of sooty Hulk carrying out the injured, of Hulk carrying the corpses, of Hulk going back into the mess time after time until no one alive or dead is left behind. The firefighters and first responders have their stories, and great stories they are. How legends are made. 

For the media, the Hulk angle doesn’t have legs. The patchwork, decades-old plant standards, regulations of volatile chemicals that don’t stack up against those of other countries, lax inspections, testimony in a Senate chamber about how this could have happened in the first place more compelling news.

H

STEVE BIERSDORF

Dr. Banner is aware he’s a whale to his fanged prick of a business manager, H. H will never have a higher net worth client, and he lives more extravagantly than Dr. Banner, Dr. Banner wondering if he’s paying H too much, half-jokingly, half passive-aggressively. H understands and respects and even appreciates passive-aggressiveness. H is worth it, H with his PhD in the shitty and petty and amoral things people will do to get at Dr. Banner’s various holdings.

Dr. Banner sits across a desk from H as H is talking with an attorney representing the center Hulk dispatched at the Jets scrimmage, the center in traction for three weeks, with a dislocated hip forced to sit out the entire season, losing his starting job to someone younger and bigger. 

“Not our concern,” H says into the phone, glancing confidently at Dr. Banner. “Football players get hurt…you should anticipate that…with more guaranteed money…if I played in the NFL I would never hire you or your firm.”

Pause, as the attorney on the other end of the line rebuts.

“Did you read the waiver? The Jets signed it…again, not our problem…the waiver is ironclad,” pause, H listening, “go ahead, the firm that drew up that document will shred you.”

H grabs a piece of paper from his desk and slides it into a crosscut shredder behind him, holding the phone to the humming grind.

“Like that.”

It was smart, the waiver, the Jets waiving any recourse against the Hulk or Dr. Banner, waiving recourse on behalf of the organization and any of its employees. H thinks of everything. He might be a rabid attack dog, but he’s Dr. Banner’s rabid attack dog and Dr. Banner’s yard he’s protecting. Dr. Banner privately wishes people like H weren’t necessary, but they are, unfortunately, as he knows all too well.

“Not our problem,” pause, H listening, “iron clad, my man. It makes no difference if he didn’t sign it, the Jets did and he’s an employee of the New York Jets football organization,” pause, H listening, “then sue the Jets if you want but I expect this to be our last conversation on the matter.” 

H hangs up, happy with himself, cocky. Dr. Banner knows this is a prelude to something else, a performance meant to impress or distract, or to lessen the impact of not so great news to follow. H could have handled this without Dr. Banner’s involvement. Normally he would have. 

“We won’t be hearing from them again.”

“What else is there?”

“Just this. I’m not sure what the hell this is. What are they talking about?”

H tosses an opened envelope on the desk in front of Dr. Banner, from the United States Department of Defense, swallowing hard.

“Chamomile tea?”

There is always the risk of a Hulk tirade if something pisses off Dr. Banner. A Hulk tirade means H’s expensive office accoutrements are at risk. No doubt they’re insured. 

Dr. Banner reads the information and smiles and he can sense H smiling too, relieved and leaning back in his chair. Dr. Banner says nothing, only smiling, H, not sure what to make of the smile, commenting cavalierly, “that’s a lot of money,” easy for him to say. Dr. Banner could still get angry. Smiles can be angry. 

An invoice for $485,365 addressed to Dr. Bruce Banner from the U.S. Department of Defense, for the destruction of four Nano-Hummingbird Spy Drones, payable upon receipt of the invoice. Failure to remit payment immediately can result in IRS liens on property or other of his financial holdings. 

He could complain about the selective memory. When he’d been on contract with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission as a consultant came his exposure to drone technology, his input into the creation of harvester drones with the ability to detect airborne radiation, used to inspect nuclear facilities for fallout. The harvester drones could see and hear and go places people couldn’t or shouldn’t, but what the harvester drones couldn’t do was detect anything, and so Dr. Banner’s contribution was the equivalent of developing an olfactory sense in these harvester drones, converting them into mechanized bloodhounds hot on the scent of airborne radiation.

He didn’t collaborate to make money. He collaborated, performing his duties to the utmost of his capabilities, for the safety of humankind. He’d rather have left it at that. Someone is selling the harvester drones to someone else. The regulatory commission may have and probably has mandated that any sanctioned nuclear facility must use these harvester drones, so someone is profiting from this idea, an idea that wouldn’t have been possible if not for Dr. Banner’s collaboration.  

He could tell H about the harvester drones. H would want to sue for patent infringement or royalties or something. He’s not sure he’s up to that fight at the moment, the entanglement of it, bureaucratic tedium that will result in meeting in the middle somewhere. The back and forth, posturing, measuring of penises, where the middle is and whose side the middle is closer to. That’s what they’re counting on, that he doesn’t want the fight. What they’re not counting on is H, his well-compensated Rottweiler. 

Hulk and the drones

STEVE BIERSDORF

It’s first thing in the morning lucidity, unadulterated logic of a refreshed mind, reset-button clarity before the obfuscation of another day.

Hummingbirds are not indigenous, their migratory patterns are relatively provincial and they prefer humid subtropical. Not that seeing a hummingbird here is out of the question. And it’s the height of summer. Seeing four of them hovering around a red maple tree is unusual, nothing flowering there, no nectar to drink. If they were availing themselves of a flower bed they would be less conspicuous. They look enough like hummingbirds, though their bills are too short and their movements not fluid and the slightest bit too herky-jerky.

Regarding his reflection in the mirror, his face sleep-bloated, hair pushed from both sides of his head toward the center and pointed upward like a buzz saw, an inexplicable vertical crease beneath his left cheekbone. Downloading the grid map would have been a red flag, Dr. Banner accessing the grid map, and Hulk capable of breathtaking devastation, whatever his motives might be, and the appearance of the hummingbirds. He wonders what they know about what he knows about drones. If they’re insightful, they’ll assume correctly that the answer is plenty, but then they have four hummingbird drones hovering around a red maple and not flowers, betraying the level of competence with which he is dealing. He’s aware everything he does is under surveillance and has been, from the days of windowless vans and thumbnail-sized microphones in the receiver of his handset to now, every email read, every website visited like a muddy footprint, every inbound or outbound call or any text sent or received listened to, read, stored. Something about the drones makes him angry. Maybe it’s the unwarranted suspicion. Maybe it’s that they think he won’t know. 

Jade and Daley Hueman are bitmap images watching from behind a window screen, seeing Hulk backpedaling, lurching, dancing to some fractured beat, swatting at, what, huge flies? Giant mosquitoes?

“What on God’s green earth is he doing?”

“What are those?”

“Birds? Hummingbirds?”

“Why is he attacking them?”

“Maybe they’re attacking him.”

“Where’s my camera?”

Hulk wonders why the hummingbird drones don’t fly away under duress. Maybe the protocol for recalling the drones or overriding a command is more bureaucratic than it should be, or maybe the program’s too new for contingencies. Maybe no one has attacked these drones before and there isn’t precedence. It’s an algorithm missing from the program, making these drones better able to think on their feet. Not that they aren’t quick, impressively so. They dodge his slaps deftly, but they don’t fly away; they dart around him like giant bees, but they don’t attack. They’re half ingenious, prototypes, first or second generation in their evolution. It takes longer than it should, and Hulk feels like he’s waving at holograms. The first one rent into several semi-intact pieces, the next one ricocheting off his open hand and slamming into the wall of his apartment building, embedded in the aluminum siding almost intact. He catches one flush, looks it directly in its peephole, “film this,” and when he crushes it into bits, its guts explode from within his grasp like pulp from ripe fruit.

Hulk and the bank manager

STEVE BIERSDORF

At seven feet tall and a thousand pounds, entrances to most dwellings are a problem, the notable exception being bay doors. Hulk makes the effort when the mood strikes him, stooping, bending, contorting, shimmying. With his umbrella insurance policy, patience isn’t necessarily required of him, as long as he can stomach the escalating premium. What impatience looks like: steel or wood doors torn from their hinges and tossed aside like sheets of cardboard, plowed-through door frames. shoulder-contoured sections of missing wall, scattered glass fragments. 

Hulk isn’t happy with his bank when they EFT the funds from his account to cover the damages. For how much they assess his account for he’s paid up for future demolition. He doesn’t find out until he’s at the branch checking his balance, the teller nervously rifling her keyboard, a mad plastic scramble, pause, mad plastic scramble, circular mouse glide, mouse click, mouse glide, mouse click, mad plastic scramble, mouse glide, mouse click, mouse click, mouse click, mad plastic scramble, mouse glide, mouse click. He’s huge and full of muscles and he’s green for God’s sake, he’s gruff, none of the usual spry quips or weather-related banter, Hulk’s an economist of the language. The waterline rises perceptibly when Hulk’s in the pond and the fish are perfectly still, when Hulk arrives to the sound of shattering glass.  

The bank could have let him know. It would have seemed less like they were helping themselves to his funds, as if as stewards of his money the bank is entitled to some of it, or any of it, at their discretion. He has enough of it that they can’t resist, not offering him the opportunity to negotiate the amount or compare repair estimates.  

“Excuse me, Dave, the Hulk’s out here and he’d like a word with you.”

Dave the Branch Manager smiling absurdly, at how emaciated, how atrophied he is by comparison, as he introduces himself to Hulk. Dave apologizing, Hulk absolutely should have been notified, Dave politely denying Hulk’s request to transfer the funds back to his account, theoretically, numbers electronically transferred out, numbers transferred back in, a little 10-key action and a couple of mouse clicks to determine how much money he does or doesn’t have.

“I’m sorry, sir, I can’t do that.”

The words hang echoless and still in the air. People are listening and pretending not to, anxious to see how Hulk will respond, but he doesn’t, instead lumbering back toward the compromised entrance. Dave following hesitantly, not sure if he needs to, wondering if Hulk is leaving, hoping so, wishing it would be that easy even if it never is. Hulk pauses at the entrance, surveying the damage, looking over the twisted metal frame and jagged shards of glass, Hulk pointing out that there is no structural damage to the wall, yet. Though he refers to himself in the third person and speaks monosyllabically, eschewing adjectives or prepositions and disdaining conjunctions, he has Dr. Banner’s nuclear physicist brain. 

If this isn’t enough to sway Dave, Hulk gives him something else to consider.

“Hulk could make big stink.”

Ah, yes. Hulk the celebrity, a case to be made for the too-small twin doors as discriminatory toward people of stature. There has to be a would-be civil rights attorney ready to take up the cause, soliciting other Americans of stature to join a class action with Hulk as high-profile fellow plaintiff. 

Hulk isn’t just another customer, Hulk is one the bank’s highest net-worth depositors, with his paid appearances at poker runs and ultimate fights and MMA main events and tractor pulls, the endorsements, royalties from sales of Hulk-trademarked paraphernalia like beach towels, Christmas cards with Hulk depicted in Santa regalia, Hasbro Marvel The Incredible Hulk Talking Smash Bash Fists™, Hulk hands beer holders.

“Let me see what I can do.”

Dave knows if he promises to see what he can do he’s committed to doing something, as far as the customer is concerned, and it gets worse if he sees what he can do and it turns out he can’t do anything. Consulting Lisa the District Manager seems wise, Lisa as cover, let Lisa make the call, but then he picks up the phone and thinks a few moves ahead. Knowing exactly what call she’ll make, and who she’ll let deliver the bad news, Hulk a hulking mass of human capable of breathtaking devastation. 

Nearby in the lobby, on opposing sides of a desk too out in the open, the branch mortgage specialist trying to close a loan, the customer sitting back, arms folded.

“If you can’t tell me what the work gap fee is for, I’m out. Seems kind of outrageous that you don’t even know what you’re charging me for.”

“I understand, sir, I wish I could tell you, I don’t determine the closing costs. I have nothing to do with that.”

“You represent the bank and the bank determines the closing costs, so in my eyes you’re the bank.”

“We’re talking about a hundred and twenty-five dollars.”

They’re both looking down at a long list of closing costs and avoiding eye contact, the branch mortgage specialist referencing the hundred twenty-five by pointing to it with his bank-logo pen. 

“Okay, if you think that’s an insignificant amount, why don’t you waive it?”

“I meant in relation to the amount of your mortgage, or what you’ll save in interest with the lower rate we’re, I’m, offering you, or…”

Hulk wanders over and stands near and facing them and their negotiation suspends, both men turning to him, watching him from their sitting positions without a word. Where ordinarily they might wonder if they can help him, implying that he’s inserting himself into their private business. It’s the ever-loving Hulk, though, and Jesus he’s big up close. Hulk harrumphs like a buffalo about to charge. 

Dave knows, Lisa the DM will say, “DO NOT put the funds back in his account.” Hulk could react one of several ways and none of them good. Taking out the entire wall around the entranceway, charges of discrimination/negative media attention, taking his high net worth to a competitor, tanking the branch’s P & L and costing everyone their bonus, his included. If he isn’t fired. And always that threat, the unspoken possibility force-placing any directive no matter how poorly conceived, or for failing to meet assigned quotas for opening new checking or savings accounts or CD’s. 

“How are your numbers?” 

Always the first thing out of Lisa’s mouth when she sees him, when she calls, and she calls two or three times a day if she doesn’t visit. She calls between meetings, on her way in, at lunch, driving to her next meeting, on her way home, if she’s away at training. Checking accounts, savings accounts, CD’s, referrals to the investment guy or the mortgage specialist, more, more, more, more this month than last, more next month than this, grow or die, make the numbers go up or lose your job. Open more CD’s, when the branch pays less than one percent interest for balances of less than $25,000 with maturities under three years. Terrify then mollify them, tell them how risky the stock market is, the older they are the more risk averse they need to be, and CD’s are FDIC insured. As if that works.

“From now on, Dr. Ban…Hulk…I’d ask you to please approach at the drive-thru window rather than coming inside, that way we can avoid this situation,” his voice tailing away. Telling Hulk to do anything is absurd. Hulk ignores him, waiting on the teller to print a slip showing the credit back to his account, the teller fat-fingering the keyboard, oops, backspace, retype, “here you are sir,” the receipt tiny in his hand. 

Hulk ambles back through the open entranceway, squeezing daylight into corners as he passes through, ducking slightly, out into the parking lot and into a deep knee bend, disappearing into the air like falling up. Inadvertently destroying a section of parking lot where he pushes off, depressing the pavement and leaving a pothole that would bend any axle or snap any CV joint, ruin any expensive rim, flatten a tire, initiate a small claims action if not immediately repaired. 

Dave sighing as he surveys the damage, wondering what he’ll put for his reason for leaving this position on the application for his next one. They always want to know. 

As much as he does it Hulk enjoys leaping, launching himself, airborne bull soaring over a world of china, quickly being somewhere else from where he just was, sometimes as far as a zip code away. In much the same way as firing a bullet up into the sky, knowing the bullet will land, but where? As inconsequential as where the bullet might land, where Hulk might land surely isn’t. At half a ton, anywhere Hulk lands he leaves a mark. Dr. Banner calculates Hulk’s velocity at over a thousand pounds freefalling from an estimated height of three thousand feet, and the PSI when he lands is off the charts, registering at the lowest end of a base-10 logarithmic scale. 

Hulk knows where the parks are within the metropolitan area or the open spaces in the suburbs or outlying areas, cabbage fields, manicured lawns surrounding office buildings, golf courses, and he catapults himself to these places. To minimize the potential damage, wherever he lands is wherever he lands, no amount of flailing mid-air will change that. Hulk crashing into an OBGYN clinic at the edge of a park once, slamming down in front of a woman with her legs up in stirrups waiting to be examined.  

When he lands on soft ground, he leaves deep foot prints like tree stumps ripped from the earth, more than once on a golf course, the grounds crews opting to create bunkers wherever the Hulk may have landed, by digging out the impacted grounds and filling in the excavated area with imported sand, a finer grain. 

Quite the sight for the golfers, the green speck in the sky growing quickly in size and landing suddenly and with enough impact to deliver a tremor throughout most of the eighteen-hole course, leaves trembling like astonished murmurs, water hazards rippling like visible echoes from his abrupt arrival. 

He lands in an outlying area near the freeway and runs south on the freeway into the downtown area, crumpling the freeway like a mishandled bag of potato chips spilled in his wake. It takes forever to fix the freeway, an important artery to the downtown business district, traffic snarls at all hours and particularly suffocating during rush hour. 

Fuckin’ Hulk.