Corey took out a pair of aviator sunglasses and put them on, probably the sole accessory in his arsenal that could approximate the coolness he had once exuded naturally.
“Well,” Bronfman said, not sure of what to say. “Mary Day and I hung out a little bit. You know the park, where the bands played?”
But Corey didn’t even look at him. “So fucking tragic,” he said. “So many assholes walking around happy as clams at high tide and this happens, a good person dies? I never believed in God, but I wish I did. I’d pee on a cross or something. Just to piss him off.”
Bronfman nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It is effing tragic.” But it didn’t sound the same coming out of his mouth. Corey could sell it; Bronfman, not so much. Corey looked at him, surprised: Corey hadn’t known he was there; he had been talking to himself.
“So … yeah. I’m going to say hello to Jeff,” Corey muttered, and backed away from Bronfman slowly, as if from a man with a gun.
“Good idea,” Bronfman said, and as Corey walked away he followed him.
Friends and family surrounded Jeff Creech, but when he saw Corey heading toward him he stepped out of the crowd, arms spread wide.
“Corey,” Jeff Creech said. They embraced in a real hug, gripping each other as if for dear life, clearly bonded by grief. So, this was interesting. Jeff Creech knew Corey Spaulding. How did that happen? Jeff Creech didn’t even go to Baldwin, so … somehow they must have—Well, small world, Bronfman thought. Then, Small club.
Bronfman waited until their hug was finished before introducing himself.
“I’m Edsel Bronfman,” Bronfman said. “I’m so sorry. For all of us.” Bronfman opened his arms and initiated a hug, which Jeff entered into reluctantly. Bronfman pulled back to look into Jeff’s eyes, for affirmation of the brotherhood, but there was nothing there. No recognition whatsoever. “Edsel Bronfman,” he said again. “I knew Mary Day. At Baldwin.”
“Oh,” Jeff Creech said. “Of course.” Still nothing. He was a total blank—and then—then—something. Was that recognition? Or something just short of it? “Thanks so much for coming. So many people from her high school came today. It’s just amazing. What a girl. What a woman. She—”
“What a fucking tragedy,” Corey said.
Bronfman persevered. He had come here on a mission. “You two know each other?”
And Jeff smiled. The first real smile Bronfman had seen today. Jeff winked at Corey as if they were partners in crime, and then sort of punched him in the arm.
“Do I know Corey,” he said. “Do I ever. Mary Day told me a lot about this wing-nut. More than I wanted to know! The star of Mary’s … past. I had to meet him. You been down here half a dozen times, right? And we went on that fishing … expedition.”
“Fishing expedition?” Corey said. “I didn’t catch a fucking thing.”
“Okay, for you it was more of a beer expedition.”
And they laughed.
But Bronfman had come too far to be put off so summarily. This was too important. “So,” he said to Jeff Creech. “Mary never … mentioned me?”
Jeff and Corey stopped laughing, returned from their short vacation from grief. Both of them looked at Bronfman as if he had asked them for money.
“Bronfman,” Jeff said, turning the name over in his mind, a little disgusted that he had been asked to, that was clear. There was nothing, nothing—but then, something. “Oh, Bronfman. Of course. Edsel Bronfman? Well, yes, once—she did mention you, one time.” He raised his eyebrows—everything was coming back to him—and almost smiled. And then Jeff looked at Corey, and Corey looked at Jeff, and a story unspooled between them. Both of them knew. Bronfman could see it. The day in the park with her, the journey to the apartment, Mary Day naked before him, the beginning of every dream he had ever had on the bed beneath him—and his complete inability to make the dream come true, his failure. Jeff laid a hand on his shoulder. “Hey,” he said, “at least you gave it a shot.”
Then Jeff turned to Corey in a way that totally excluded Bronfman, and the two of them started talking, engaging in some intimate shorthand. Bronfman stood there for a minute too long, then quietly backed off and away. He looked around for someone else to talk to but didn’t see anybody now—no one from Baldwin, anyway. Just about everyone had gone.
For another minute or more he stood there, alone on the blacktop, until the radiating heat warmed the soles of his shoes. He’d gotten what he came for, what he deserved. He knew now who he was. There had been no hiatus at all, just one long life of being singularly himself, pure as the day he was born. He had only to decide whether to tell Sheila the truth or to maintain his pathetic fiction day after day for however long they were together. Telling a lie was like having a baby: you had to take care of it for the rest of your life.
THREE
Bronfman considered taking the rest of the day off, but only briefly. He wanted to be at work. Work asked so little of him. He would sometimes look up to see that a half hour had passed and that he had done nothing at all, and that on his desk there were a dozen paperclips, twisted into indecipherable shapes. This is how the day went by: he worked a little and then took a vacation from himself, but he didn’t know where he went, just that he was in the exact same place when he came back as he had been when he left.
The traffic was heavy, though, and he didn’t get back to the Cranston Building until almost five. And on his desk was a small red ball.
“What’s this?” he said to no one. But someone heard and someone answered.
“That,” came Sorsby’s voice from beyond his cubicle wall, “is my stress ball.”
“You have a stress ball?” Bronfman said. He could not conceive of a world in which Skip Sorsby needed a stress ball. “Why?”
He sat down, but the ball claimed all of his attention. It was on top of some of his paperwork, and it blocked the middle of the lower half of his computer screen. “What’s it doing on my desk, Sorsby?”
Sorsby’s head rose above Bronfman’s enclosure: hair, forehead, eyes. “It’s for you, dear friend,” he said.
“Why?”
“It’s my bon-voyage present. I’m bon-voyaging.”
“But what does that mean?”
“It means I’m leaving my place of employment. This place. The place where we find ourselves now. I’m moving on, pardner. Skedaddling.”
Bronfman put it all together. “You’re quitting? Or did you get fired?”
The words just escaped from him. He hadn’t meant to say this. But Bronfman had always considered Sorsby to be “fireable,” chiefly because of his attitude. The way he loped around the office with his shirttail hanging out, looking for ways to make fun of other people, or to be sarcastic, to draw attention to himself. If Bronfman were in charge and he had to fire someone, it might well be Sorsby, because he didn’t seem to care whether he was fired or not.
“Yes, I did get fired,” Sorsby said. “But in my heart I had already quit. I quit before I was fired, just to stop my brain fluid from dripping out of my ears. Ever see little wet glistening spots of something on your desk, Bronfman? That’s your brain. It’s dripping drop by drop, like a leaky faucet, and it will keep dripping until there’s nothing left inside your head at all, at which time you’ll become the perfect employee.”
“You’re being sarcastic,” Bronfman said.
Sorsby shook his head. “I’m not,” he said. He pointed to a small spot on Bronfman’s desk. “That’s brain juice right there.” Then he winked, indicating that he was indeed being sarcastic.
“So … do you have another job? Any leads or … anything?”
Sorsby disappeared, threw something in a box, and then stood tall again, peering down at Bronfman like a god. “Absolutely not,” he said, seeming quite pleased that Bronfman had asked him this follow-up. “I’m just getting Out. Of. Here. Out of the fucking Cranston Building. I’m looking forward to it, honestly. To what comes next.” Sorsby paused, as if allowing Bronfman time to laugh unimpede
d. But Bronfman didn’t laugh, and Sorsby seemed to take it personally. “It’s surprising, isn’t it?” Sorsby said. “Because of the two of us I would have bet you would be the guy to find his wings first, make a break for it, the guy who wanted to build a whole new life for himself—no, wait. I mean me. I bet it would have been me. And it is me! So strike that. I guess I’m not surprised after all.”
“But you got fired,” Bronfman said. “You don’t get wings when you get fired.”
“Then I will fall to my death, I guess. Either way, I am not here, and that’s what counts.”
Bronfman realized why he had never liked Skip Sorsby that much: he was unlikable. Even the IKEA connection he had finagled for him could not overcome that fact.
Sorsby vanished again. The entire contents of a drawer—all the little things, the paper clips and pens and pencils and cards and tape measures—were dumped, and most of it seemed to find its way into the box. But not all of it. A marble rolled through a gap in the cubicle and stopped by Bronfman’s left foot. Normally, Bronfman would have picked it up and handed it to Sorsby, but not now. He kicked it and watched it roll across the hallway. Sorsby getting fired was the best thing that had happened to him all day. He would not miss him. He looked forward to what would surely be, for a few days at least, a cubicle bereft of life.
“So anyway,” Sorsby said. “Bronfman?”
The disembodied voice of Sorsby waited.
“Yes?”
There was a new tone in Sorsby’s voice now. It was softer, friendlier, or maybe it was just the sound of defeat. “I usually take the bus home, but I have all this stuff I have to take with me. I’m going to have to call in that favor I was talking about.” And there was Sorsby’s head, his eyes as sad as a dog’s. “I need a ride home.”
* * *
Skip Sorsby lived in Roebuck. Bronfman had never been to Roebuck before, and though it wasn’t that far from the Cranston, it felt far away. Nothing was in Roebuck but Roebuck. There was no reason to go there unless you lived there or needed a mural painted on your pickup truck. The last clump of third-rate shopping centers before the mountains took over, Roebuck could fall into a sinkhole and nobody would notice. Toward Roebuck Bronfman was uncharitable, though he didn’t know why. Probably something his mother had said.
All in all, though, once he got there he could see that it was a nice enough place. Sorsby directed him through the mazelike neighborhood streets, but apart from that he was quiet. Bronfman had expected an ongoing commentary on modern life and man—our flaws and our foibles, the sort of thing Sorsby was famous for—but got nothing at all. Bronfman glanced over at Sorsby at stoplights and watched him think, “worrying a thought,” as his mother put it. Sorsby was beginning to see the long road ahead, and it was weighing on him. Bronfman pitied him a little when he learned that he’d gotten fired, but by the time they reached the Roebuck city limits he would have given blood for him, and he hadn’t said much more than “turn left here, go right.” It was just so sad, a sad end to a sad day.
“This is the place,” Sorsby said, pointing to an apartment complex not unlike King’s Manor. Just one big brick building after the next, with ample parking and free first month’s rent. “This is cool. I’ll get out here.”
Bronfman pulled over to the curb and idled, waiting, but Sorsby didn’t get out. The box was on his lap. He was ruminating. He was a ruminant.
“So what happened?” Bronfman asked him.
Sorsby shook his head. “Why did I get fired, you mean?”
Bronfman nodded.
“Because I’m a shitty employee,” Sorsby said. “I’m always late and I do the work of half a man. I’ve got a terrible attitude. I’m resistant to authority. And I’m also kind of an asshole.”
Bronfman said nothing. He knew that he should have objected and said that Sorsby was none of those things. But Sorsby was all of those things.
“The straw that broke the camel’s back, though, was the whole IKEA thing.”
“What whole IKEA thing?”
“Getting the name for you. I had to do some fancy footwork. Dig into a couple of computer files I didn’t strictly have access to.”
“Oh, my God,” Bronfman said.
“Don’t sweat it,” Sorsby said. “They were just looking for a reason. Anything would have sufficed.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s not your fault; I don’t even know why I did it for you. I just liked the challenge, I think. That job is so fucking dull.”
“I can’t believe this.”
“Seriously, no worries. I’m glad it happened. I hope it helps your friend.”
“This can’t be okay with you,” Bronfman said. This new Sorsby was odd, hard to understand. He was deeper than Bronfman had thought, or wanted to think.
Sorsby had the look of a lost dog in his eyes now, empty and scared. “Oh, it’s more than okay,” he said. “I can’t say it’s not scary, honestly. But I was unhappy there. I was unhappy there, and that’s why I was such a sarcastic asshole. Remember that, Bronfman. All assholes are unhappy people. Not all unhappy people are assholes, but the opposite is always true. Be kind to them.”
“I’m kind to everybody.”
Sorsby smiled. “Yes, you are.”
It was still light outside, but dusk was beginning to hint at the tops of the trees, like dusty metal filings.
“The truth is,” Sorsby continued, “it’s not just that I don’t have a job. I don’t really have anything. No job, not much money, no wife or girlfriend or family. Nothing. I have this apartment where I live, but it’s just temporary. It’s all good, though. It’s Zen. I’ll land on my feet. Maybe I’ll go to grad school in … something. But it’s what I want, this situation. Yeah.” Sorsby nodded. “It’s what I want.”
“But no one wants that,” Bronfman said. “People live that way, I know, but it’s not a state of affairs we strive for.”
Sorsby appeared to be taking inventory of all the little things in his box. He picked up a rubber band and shot it into the windshield. “How old are you, Bronfman? I know I asked once, but I wasn’t paying attention.”
“Thirty-four.”
“Right. And I’m twenty-four. This is going to sound like such an asshole thing to say, so I’m sorry. But I don’t want to be where you are when I’m thirty-four. I don’t know where I want to be, but not here, and not there, on the other side of the cubicle wall from you.”
“But when you get another job—”
“I don’t want another job. Not now. I don’t want anything, really. Or, to put it in more positive terms, I want nothing. Nothing is like … infinite possibility. I have unlimited choices now. Because, face it, Bronfman. We really don’t get to make the important choices in our lives. Other people do. They make choices for us. From the second we’re born, most of the choices are already made. We’re born to one set of parents instead of another, and they give us our genes and teach us their idea of right and wrong, and we live in one town or city instead of another they have chosen, and we go to high school. Public? Private? Wherever they want. It’s not up to us! And we have this certain group of friends who basically come from the same place and want the same things and go to college—this really good college, not that shitty one, you hope, but whatever—and we learn about what everybody thought and did before we were born, as if that matters, and then they throw us out and we have to do something, so we get the first okay job that presents itself to us and slowly but surely we’re done, we don’t have any choices left. Then we die, also usually not our choice. No free will. We think we have it, but really, when you put it all together—all the shit I just mentioned and more—I mean, they’ve pretty much made all your choices for you. You’re a fucking robot. And by you I don’t mean you, though I do, I guess. Mostly, I mean the generalized-everybody-you.”
“Noted,” Bronfman said.
Sorsby’s eyes were full of fire now. He took a very deep breath and exhaled for as long as a person
could exhale. It went on and on. It took a long time.
“But I don’t want that life,” he said. “I want nothing—nothing—so I can start over with as close to a clean slate as I can get. I can fly. See?” Sorsby nodded. At least one of them was convinced. “Thanks to you and IKEA, now I can do anything.”
Bronfman wished he’d left that last part out; he had sounded so high-minded and philosophical until then. “Sounds good,” he said.
Sorsby seemed to have convinced himself of what he wanted to believe; Bronfman could almost smell his self-satisfaction, his complacency. Sorsby turned to look at Bronfman, his old cubicle mate, as if to get an eyeful of him before he was gone forever.
“So what about you, Bronfman?” Sorsby said.
“What about me what?”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want?”
Bronfman was speechless. No one had ever asked him that question before. Why was that? he wondered. Why had no one asked him that before? Why had he never asked himself? Was there a more important question?
In the dark of the car, they sat in a shared silence. A breeze pushed a piece of something down the sidewalk. When the headlights spotlighted it, Bronfman could see that it was a hamburger wrapper. It paused in the light, as if to be admired. Then the wind picked up again and sent it on its way. Somehow, trapped in this small car with the man he had always loathed, in the last part of town he ever wanted to be, watching a hamburger wrapper blow down the street, he knew the answer to his question.