Burning Down George Orwell's House, page 15
“She’s … she’s only joking, Dr. Pentode, I assure you. Tell him you’re only joking.”
Pentode stared down at the stains on his boat shoes. His mouth continued to open and close like that of a puffer fish about to be rendered into fugu.
“I’m only joking,” Flora said. She raised her arms to high-five Ray over the table. “It won’t be consensual at all!” she yelled. “Woo, yeah!”
“That’s … that’s terribly inappropriate,” Ray said. He covered his mouth with his fingers, but a small laugh leaked out. It wasn’t funny, but he couldn’t help it. Pentode turned and left a trail of coffee-colored footprints. Flora, fake pouting, dropped her arms. She had been out of line, but laughter rattled in Ray’s lungs. “Holy shit,” he said. He couldn’t breathe. He laughed because he could, and he kept laughing because he couldn’t help it. Pentode’s version of events wouldn’t go over very well with Helen. “And aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“Aren’t you?” Flora asked. “I snuck out to go to the gym.”
“I’m glad you’re here—I’d actually like to talk to you about your future.”
“My future? That sounds serious.”
“I’m building a team for a new project, and I want to bring you on full time.”
“That’s very sweet, but I have other plans. I’ve decided to quit. As soon as I can save up some money, I’m leaving the country. I want to open a battered women’s shelter/art gallery in the slums of Caracas, maybe start a non-profit to hand out reusable feminine hygiene products to impoverished girls. Not to be rude, but I don’t want any more part of your corporate death culture.”
“I respect that more than you probably realize, but can we at least talk about it?”
“I’ll hear you out, but trust me—I’m going to say no. Let’s get dinner tonight.”
“Dinner?”
“Yes, it’s the meal that happens in the nighttime. I’ll meet you at your place at seven.”
“My place? Are we really going to have consens—?”
“No. You asked me to hear you out and I will. I just want to see what you’re like in your native habitat. Text me the address.” She stood and when she picked up her backpack Ray caught himself involuntarily looking down the scissored-wide collar of her sweatshirt. She had nothing on underneath. “I need some caffeine,” she said. “See you at seven.” With the line now gone, she stepped straight up to the counter. A little cloud of cologne lingered behind. The letters on the seat of her sweatpants advertised the sorority Alpha Sigma Sigma. Flora stood at the condiments bar, where she poured half of her coffee into the garbage and refilled it with soymilk and four packets of brown sugar. Ray waved to her on her way out the door, but she looked straight through him. Bovine splotches covered his shirt and they appeared permanent. He wrung some coffee onto the floor and stopped at the dry cleaner’s on his way home.
RAY SPENT THE REMAINDER of the day trying to straighten up again. Even though nothing was going to happen between them, the idea of Flora coming over carried with it the fear of transgressing some boundary. He needed to stay on his best behavior. Pentode had likely already told Helen about the scene in the coffee shop and Ray’s apparently sexual relationship with a woman over a decade his junior. Thanks to that asshole’s flapping gums, she would assume that he was sleeping with Flora.
So that was it.
If Helen was so sure he was screwing Flora, the worst thing Ray could do was to confirm her suspicions. Not fucking Flora was the same thing as fucking Flora as long as his wife believed that he was fucking Flora.
Of course, there was no reason to consider the possibility that Flora was interested in that kind of relationship, and in the morning Ray would get the opportunity to set the record straight with Helen even if it meant lying to her.
Music—Flora would want to listen to music. Ray hadn’t purchased a CD in five years and didn’t like the idea of downloading songs because he found it difficult to spend money on immaterial products. Helen had maintained possession of all their jazz and soul albums. Another example of poor planning on his part. What little music he owned consisted of rap from his adolescence and college days. Time had relegated it to oldies stations and infomercials. Companies like Logos were now using the edgiest and most radical music from his youth in ads for luxury cars.
The sign above the windowless store said P.M., which served as both the name of the place and its daily hours of operation. Ray had walked past it a hundred times and never seen anyone come or go. Were it not for a tip from one of the interns he would have thought it was an exclusive nightclub or an illegal, happy-ending massage parlor. It looked like no music store he had ever been in. The shelves were arranged to form a maze and their immense height made it impossible to see other parts of the shop.
A series of round blinking lights built into the clear plastic floor tracked his movement. He followed them toward the checkout counter in the center of the shop, zigzagging past every manner of analog and digital recorded media, from vintage video-game cartridges to 8 mm movie reels to computer floppy disks in unrecognizable sizes. A tribal-tattooed fourteen-year-old sat at the counter attaching sticky notes to his knuckles with a stapler. “Yeah?” he asked.
“I need some music,” Ray said.
The kid blinked at him. “Good thing you’re in a music store. Ow!” On his nametag, beneath HELLO MY NAME IS he had written in “Hello My Name Is.” He fingered the buttons of an unseen keyboard built into the glass counter. “Follow the red light. The upload stations have everything you need,” he said and dismissed Ray with a wave of his bleeding hand.
The white light at his feet turned red and then the subsequent ones did too, one after the other, directing him deeper into the maze.
“But I don’t have anything to upload to.”
“Try your phone. Ow!”
“Why would I want to listen to music on my phone?”
The kid put the stapler down and twisted the buds of his nascent dreadlocks. “I’m guessing you’re too old to spin vinyl.”
“Too old? What? I was spinning vinyl before you were ev—”
“Do you have a CD—excuse me, a compact disc—player at home?”
“Yeah, where do you keep the—?”
“The old-school hip-hop is in zone six. Follow the red light,” he said and returned to his stapler.
The bulb at Ray’s feet blinked impatiently. He went the opposite direction and browsed the shelves. P.M. was equal parts record shop, museum, and graveyard haunted by the ghosts of technologies past. Not including the clerk, he heard at least three other people brush through other parts of the store, but he didn’t see any customers. The sound of the stapler and the yelped obscenities helped him maintain his bearing. The whole place smelled like fruity air freshener. He went back to the checkout counter. A sticky note reading “Ow!” was stuck to the back of the clerk’s hand. “How about some new music? What’s current?”
“Kimagure.”
“Never heard of them.”
“I’m Kimagure,” said a scrawny bleach-blond Asian kid behind the cash register who Ray hadn’t noticed. His skin was so pale that he looked translucent even in his ugly patterned T-shirt. He might have been standing there the entire time. “You need a turntable,” he said. “Follow me.”
The clerk glided through the shop without the slightest hint of bodily motion. The lights in the floor followed behind him like a trained pet. He stopped at a glass display case containing twenty-four record players of monstrous complexity. “This one,” he said, pointing. “Wait here.” He left Ray to admire the machines. The model he had pointed to had a $1,200 price tag. It was the cheapest of the bunch.
Kimagure reappeared from the opposite direction and handed over a box with a label printed in a language Ray didn’t recognize. “Follow me,” he said.
He led Ray through the store, plucking a dozen plastic-wrapped record albums from the sleek shelving units. Ray lost his breath and any sense of direction. His footsteps sounded labored, which made him realize that the place was silent: a music store that didn’t play music. Kimagure twisted past miles of reel-to-reel spools and MP3 players and even a small section of player-piano rolls, and then stopped back at the cash register, where Ray charged $1,900 to a credit card he still shared with Helen.
“These will get you started,” Kimagure said. “It’s all underground shit. Limited pressings. Very collectable.”
“Thank you,” Ray said.
“I accept tips,” Kimagure said.
“Tips?”
“A hundred is standard. From you twenty looks correct.”
Ray removed twenty dollars from his wallet and handed it over. “Any advice how to hook this up?” he asked, but Kimagure had already faded soundlessly into the mood-lit gloam of the shop. He followed the blinking white dot back through the maze and, two grand poorer, got birthed onto the crowded sidewalk.
He stepped out of the elevator and turned the corner to find Flora sprawled out on the floor in front of his door. When she removed her headphones, the violins were broadcast all the way down the hall.
“How did you get in the building?”
“Nice to see you too, Ray.”
He put the record player down and unlocked the door.
“New turntable?” she asked.
“I went to buy some new music, but I don’t know what you like so I got some help.”
“I hope you went to see Kim.”
“He shook me down for twenty bucks.”
She poked him in the chest. “You got off easy. He supplies every decent deejay in the state. He must have liked you. Nice place—what do you have to drink?” Her tongue stud clacked against her teeth.
“Let’s see. Tap water, spring water, mineral water, vitamin-enhanced water, diet cola, milk, beer, and whisky.”
“Glass of milk please. Is your apartment always this clean? I had you pegged as a slob.”
“I only clean up when guests are coming over.”
“Do you entertain often? I bet you’re a regular pussy magnet.”
“You’re the first in a long time. Guest, I mean.”
“What is this?”
“It’s milk.”
“I was joking, dumbass. Get me a whisky. What kind of single malt do you have?”
“What do you know about single malts?”
“Enough.”
“Will a twenty-one-year-old suffice?”
She sat down. “That’s a loaded question. I’m twenty-one.”
“That didn’t come out right. It’s from the Isle of Jura.”
“Isn’t that where Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four?”
“I can’t believe you know that.”
“Make mine neat, please. Have you been there?”
He dumped the milk down the drain and poured Flora a whisky as old as herself. “Not yet.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“What do you mean what’s stopping me? I have other obligations. A job, a wife. I can’t just pick up and go.”
“Sure you can.”
“I thought the exact same way when I was your age. Everything was a lot simpler. I really want to see Jura, but I also worry about being disappointed. I mean, I have this image in my mind of the Scottish Hebrides being a kind of paradise—islands off the grid and away from the world. Everyone says that the Highlands hospitality makes their residents the warmest and most generous people in the world, but what happens if I get there and there’s just as much bullshit as everywhere else? Then there would be no place left I could dream of escaping to.”
The scotch tasted really good.
“If I ever start making excuses like you do,” Flora said, “I want you to hunt me down and slap me.”
“Why do I get the feeling that you’d like that?”
“Believe me, I get it. You’ve got it made. Good job, fancy apartment, a big SUV to cruise around town. They love you at Logos.” Her expression made it clear that she didn’t share his enthusiasm for the advertising world.
“Apart from being pure, concentrated evil.”
“Oh I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes you did—and you were right. You know, the reason I wanted to catch up with you tonight was I was going to offer you a job and a lot of money, but I’ve changed my mind. I can’t do that to you.”
“Are you aware that you’re not making much sense? You want me to stay at Logos? Start at the beginning so I can say no.”
“I’m putting together a team to work on a pro-fracking campaign.”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I can be and I am. Logos is going to do it whether I’m involved or not, so I decided that having someone with some common sense involved would be the lesser of two evils. I was going to offer you enough money that after a year you could take off for South America or wherever with enough cash to open your art gallery or homeless shelter or whatever it is you want to do.”
“It will be for abused women, not necessarily homeless people, and what you’re saying is total bullshit. You don’t have to choose between two evils. There are always other options. Always always always.”
“I want to believe that,” Ray said. “I really do. The more I think about it, the more I want you to get away from this bullshit I’m mired in. I want to get away too. I need a change.”
He poured another round.
“Yet you’re taking on a fracking campaign? You should tell Logos to go fuck itself.”
“I know it sounds crazy.”
“It’s worse than crazy, Ray. What is wrong with you?”
“My wife … my estranged wife … wants me to quit too.”
“So why don’t you? What are you afraid of?”
“I’m afraid of what my father would say if he was still alive and I’m afraid of admitting to myself that I’ve wasted my entire adult life pursuing some stupid career because George Orwell told me to. The truth is that I’m fried. I’m so burnt out I can’t even think straight anymore. I’ll put it this way: a few days ago, a building right here in the neighborhood got torn down. They must have had a wrecking ball, bulldozer, the whole scorched-earth deal. It took no time at all. The entire lot got cleared as if the building had never even existed. Now here’s the thing. Looking at the empty space, I couldn’t even remember what had been there. I could not remember. What kind of shops? Were there apartments upstairs? Were the tenants evicted? Where did they go? So I’m walking past the site and someone had graffitied the next building over. Big letters: ‘Orwell was an optimist.’ I couldn’t believe it—but it’s absolutely true. Orwell was an optimist compared to what we have now.”
“That was me,” Flora said.
“What was you?”
She took a drink of her scotch. “The spray paint. My friends and I did that. I finally read that copy of Nineteen Eighty-Four you gave me, and I see why you’re always raving about it.”
“I love that! I mean … As your boss, I can’t condone the wanton defacement of public property—”
“That’s the thing,” she said. “It’s not public property. It’s just a private business owned by some rich asshole who probably doesn’t even live in Chicago, and you’re not going to be my boss much longer. I appreciate the job offer, if that’s what this was, but I’ll be arriving in Quito two weeks from tomorrow.”
“That makes me very happy. I mean, I hate to see you go, of course, but it’s the right thing to do.”
“I’m super excited, obviously, but I’ll admit—and I haven’t told anyone this—that I’m also scared. Before I leave I need to go spend some serious quality time with my dads. They’re going to store my stuff in their basement, not that I have much.” She helped herself to the bottle and poured them each large measures. It was going down way too easy.
“Let me ask you a question,” Ray said. “Why are you here?”
“Chicago?”
“My apartment!”
“You asked me to meet you, remember? I wanted to see where you live—don’t read any more into it than that. It doesn’t have to be weird. As much as I hate Logos, you personally aren’t without one or two redeeming qualities. I bet that buried deep inside your miserable-ass self there’s a joyful and charming and funny human waiting to get released. Too bad I never really got to see it.”
“What if that’s not true? What if this miserable-ass me is who I really am?”
“I’ve wondered about that, but you’re one of the few men I know who has treated me like a person instead of as an object.”
“I’m sure I’ve done that too a little bit.” His phone rang in his pocket. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s Bud.”
“Speak of the devil—he’s a pig. Ignore it.”
“Sorry,” Ray said. “I really need his help with something tomorrow.” He took the call. “Hey, Bud … What do you mean you’re here? Here where?”
A loud knock came at the door. He got up and let Bud in. “What the hell are you doing here?”
“Ray-dicchio. I thought we were going to steal your truck.”
“That’s tomorrow!”
“Hello, Bud,” Flora said.
“Holy shit. How long has this been going on?”
“This is not going on.”
“She just got here.”
“Sorry to break up the party,” Bud said. He took a beer from the fridge and twisted it open. “Place looks great. You already got her cleaning up? Nice.”
“Fuck you.”
“Relax, missy. I’m just teasing you. If my daughter turns out half as smart as Raypunzel tells me you are, I’ll be very happy. Now I smell whisky. Pour me one and let’s go steal this truck of yours.”
“You just opened a beer.”
“We’re stealing a truck?”
“It’s in the garage at my wife’s place and I need to pick it up. On second thought, maybe it would be better if you stayed here.”
“No way.”
In the time it took to pour another round, Flora had hooked up the turntable and put on an LP that sounded like a series of vintage soul songs sampled down to incoherent syllables, their tempos warped and mashed, and then reconstituted again into songs that weren’t really songs, but weren’t really not songs either. It was a revelation. It made all the sense in the world.
