Songs for the Deaf, page 10
Armed with torches and clubs, the posse had marched first to the college, which for so long had stood with folded arms in haughty disregard for the world. The scientists, after all, had never loved the earth. They belittled her with theories conjured from the test tubes and copper coils and the rest of the pornographic hardware they secreted in their noxious, windowless, linoleum-floored laboratories.
The scientist and his little green consort weren’t there—the security guard thought he’d seen them drive off in the direction of the restaurant and an anonymous phone call confirmed it— but the angry mob sent a message, sweeping racks of colored chemicals to the floor, throwing beakers against the wall like Molotov cocktails, torching the control panels and melting the dials, burning notebooks and scholarly journals and other scientific smut, shouting and howling and clenching their fists in a climax of vengeance. The deputy had to pull himself together before he could collect the others.
Then they marched into the woods and up the hill, torches and fists raised to the hilltop fortress and the alien within. They climbed rocks and forded streams. Their shouts cleared away the nocturnal creatures before them, while a long trail of villagers scurried behind, some anxious to join the Cause, other curious to see the Effect.
“It’s about love,” repeated the deputy, the words directing his eyes to the hilltop, “love and a show of strength.”
4
Even in the restaurant’s dim light the sociologist recognized his thick safety glasses, his squarish coif, his weak jaw. And even now his classic features turned her on. The relationship was behind her, she told herself, and the feelings she had for him had moved on. She was having fun with the general now—well, not so much the general as the military. But in those last weeks with the scientist, there’d been something uncomfortably personal, some kind of sad, animal connection that transcended the idea, some kind of sticky Precambrian soup that flowed between them in the lab. It had scared them both. The general was just another uniform—granted, there were epaulettes—but a uniform just the same. And a uniform was simple and safe.
Now that the waiter had taken her order and her menu she watched with interest as the scientist grew more and more animated and giggly across the dining room. His date—a chilly, frumpy thing—sat stiffly, unresponsive but for the occasional wiggle of her ears—or were those lumps part of the scarf? What a homely outfit she wore—the scientist must have picked it out himself.
And when she tired of the military? When she’d completed her paper, “Womb with a View: Tanks and Gender in Today’s Military“? When she’d presented it at the ASA convention and published it in the Journal of Applied Sociology? What then? She’d done politics. She’d done sports. She’d done television, radio, and film. What was there left to do? “When will you settle down?” her department chair had asked her time and again. She’d scoffed at him but knew, too, that she was getting a reputation in her field—many of the colleagues who’d once dubbed her “The Naughty One” and found her gonzo, interdisciplinary approach groundbreaking and courageous now called her a “nympho-sociologist“ and found her studies showy, thin, and lacking rigor.
They were wrong, of course. The problem was her own failure to outdo herself. Revolutionary fervor is quickest to cool; only a more shocking revolution would quiet the critics and save her reputation. Then the doubts of many would ripen to affection.
So why hadn’t she taken the next great leap? Had she grown smug? Had she grown frightened? She could ask the questions, at least. The answers would show in her actions, as they always did.
And then she had a thought that made her gag on her cabernet. She could not deny that her feelings for the scientist transcended the idea of fucking his science. What if she let herself love him?
Love was the final barrier—of course. Love was the nebulous realm of warm, fuzzy subjectivity—the very antithesis of academic discipline. Could she love him and still write a paper like “Safety Glasses and the Volatility of Desire” (workin-progress) or “The Hermaphroditic Test Tube” (American Sociology Review, vol. 45 no. 1, spring 1995)? She had to admit some trepidation, for she was talking about a complete transformation of herself and her studies. Love, she knew, was often the kiss of death in her field; she’d seen the work of so many colleagues muddled by the vagaries of love. And loving the scientist—really loving him—meant, too, that the pleasures of the general’s tanks and artillery ranges and tasseled epaulettes—of fucking the military—might forever be lost.
She focused again on the scientist, who had leaned in toward his date, smiling dumbly, both hands under the table, playing a secret game.
That did it!
She threw down her napkin and strode across the dining room.
“Bitch, you keep your slut knees clamped and your paws off my man!” and she slapped the scientist’s date across the cheek, making a mental note of how cool and gummy that skin felt—a detail she might work into her paper, “Cat Fights and Doggie Bags: Public Displays by Jealous Women.”
5
The manager had just scrutinized and okayed some foreign traveler’s checks when the parking attendant rushed into her tidy, wood-paneled office with news of an approaching mob.
“PETA again?” she asked, shaking her head as she returned the checks to the patient waiter. “Just make sure he signs the back,” she told him. The local PETA chapter had threatened her over the phone and had once demonstrated in her driveway. They believed the rumors, apparently started by some disgruntled employee, that the restaurant served live monkeys in its banquet room for guests to club to death and eat.
“I don’t think PETA would carry torches through the woods,” volunteered the attendant. “Threat of habitat destruction.”
“Torches?” she asked, recognizing another daily threat to the thin stability she’d built from the wreckage of her divorce. Breathe, she thought, getting up slowly. Focus on your attitude. “You sure those aren’t just deer with flaming antlers?”
The attendant shrugged.
“That was a joke,” she said, breathing again.
The manager left her office and stepped out into the crisp night air just in time to see the torches bob over the rocks like flaming marionettes. And then she saw the arms that held them, and then the faces, and then, when they had fanned out in a semicircle in front of her, her ex-husband stepped forward. She swallowed, knowing this would be her greatest test yet. The torchlight showed off the ruddy complexion on one side of his face, left the other side darkened in mystery.
“Don’t make a scene,” she said instinctively.
“Honey,” said the deputy, “this is not a social call.”
“Oh,” she said, fists clenched tight to keep her in the moment. “I thought you’d brought the bowling league in for tea.”
“Let’s burn it down!” shouted a man in the crowd. “They’re killing monkeys in there!”
“Shut up!” yelled the manager. “There’s never been a monkey within a mile of here. Until now,” she added.
“You hear her!” the man responded. “There are monkeys!”
“Shut up!” said the deputy. “That’s not why we’re here.”
His voice was flat and resolute, as it was in their last months together, when the marriage had crumbled and he’d clearly given up, working late hours and then coming home to a pup tent he’d pitched in their garden. No matter how loudly she screamed, how many vases she broke, how many times she threatened to kill herself, he never once raised his voice or lost control. And that only made her want to scream louder, throw harder, show him a razor blade that she almost intended to use.
“Then why?” she asked him now. “Are you here to burn the place down? Is this part of your scorched earth divorce policy?”
“We’re here for the alien,” he said gravely.
She looked confused, then offended. She folded her arms self-consciously. “The kitchen staff all have their green cards,” she said. “I take no chances.”
“I’m talking about a guest,” he said.
She laughed, releasing the tension and spraying him, she noticed, with dots of saliva. “The little foreigner? He seems harmless enough.”
“He’s a threat to all we hold dear,” said the deputy.
“His traveler’s checks are good,” she said. “I’ll vouch for that.”
“Honey, I’m asking you on a personal level,” he said, covering his badge with three fingers. “Will you bring him to us?”
His oath would have seemed comical if he weren’t backed by dozens of glowering torches and strange, flickering faces. “You aren’t going to hurt him,” she said. “You’re just going to deport him or something, right?”
“That’s right, honey. We aren’t going to do to him what he’s done to so many of us. We’re humans,” he said, proud of the fact.
Their eyes locked for a moment, his gaze almost tender, until she looked away in fear. She couldn’t let him do it again. Her life had finally stabilized. She had to let go.
“Let’s burn it!” shouted the man in the crowd, and now a few others echoed his desire.
“As soon as he’s finished his cappuccino,” she told the deputy.
“Soon,” he said.
“You’ll wait,” she said, “like I used to,” and she spun and walked back into the restaurant, her steps decisive and her nails digging into her palm.
She closed and locked the office door behind her, pulled an egg timer from the top drawer of her desk, and cried for exactly three minutes. Then she returned to the dining room.
6
“Another cappuccino,” the foreigner called to the waiter, who paid no attention because he was busy breaking up a fight between two women. What the damn kind of place is this? he thought.
The foreigner used to receive prompt service and special attention wherever he traveled. That was when he had a country to love and when his love of country carried him to the upper echelon of international diplomacy. People respected him (“Can we getting you more béarnaise sauce, sir?” “Might you honor us by acceptance of a cappuccino gift, sir?”), and he floated with natural grace in the champagne of their diligent attendance (an urbane nod of the head, bestowing a courteous acceptance).
Then his country splintered, and the ennobled idea of his country crumbled into the basest kind of group attachments—religion, ethnicity, class, proximity—and for him the pride of patriotism, the hand-over-heart reverence and the high-stepping exaltation, was lost forever. Buildings, flags, constitutions, and bridges burned, and suddenly, in mid-diplomacy, the champagne stopped bubbling and the viewing stand collapsed and in the wreckage of his once-noble devotion a tuxedoed waiter stepped forward with an overlong leatherette portfolio: “Your check, sir.”
And now, a diplomat without a country, he wandered aimlessly from nation to nation and town to town, seeking out former haunts and cronies, hoping to recapture some of the glory—the velvet salons, the kitchen sink debates, the state dinners, the military parades—but most of the cronies no longer cared for his company, and most of the official state functions were now closed to him, and the white-gloved service revealed itself as just another paid performance that he could no longer afford. Which is how he ended up in restaurants like this— cock-a-hoop roadhouse diners staffed by pretentious bumpkins and patronized by belligerent women. Look at the one trying to strangle the other with the other’s scarf! America, he thought, always was I saying a doomed country was.
“Yes, another cappuccino for which I was asking,” he told the red-eyed woman who now approached his table.
“Sir, you’ll have to come with me,” she said.
“But I am not completed yet,” he told her sharply.
She touched his arm in an offensively familiar manner. “There are people outside who need to see you.”
There were two possibilities: either the intelligence splinter from his old country had cornered him for erasure, or some of his old diplomatic cronies had finally agreed to meet him. Either way, he was embarrassed to be found here.
As the woman rudely pulled him up by the arm, he thought he heard her say, “Forget the check.”
At least there was that.
7
The mob’s will had become one, and their fears fueled their passions. Their grumbles became shouts, and their shouts turned to chants, and the chants got crafted into a call-and-response:
“What do we want?”
“A-li-en!”
“How do we want it?”
“To go!”
Even the deputy sheriff joined in. At first, they laughed like collegiate tailgaters at their own cleverness, but as their impatience grew the song tightened into a sharp rhythm, and the blood thumped in their chests and their voices shrilled and their fears were overcome by lust. The nocturnal animals, who had edged up the hill out of curiosity, now scampered back to their dens in fear.
The mob edged closer to the double doors, fists, torches, and cudgels thrusting skyward, demanding satisfaction with their shouts and chants. Their distorted, angry faces glared in the torchlight, and the building trembled with their stomps.
Then, as if on cue, the heavy wooden doors split open and the foreigner popped out with a quick shove.
“What is this?” he seemed to mouth, but it was too late even to ask. The crowd converged, screeching through clenched teeth, their eyes wide with mindless lust.
The lawlessness! they thought. But when they grabbed the creature’s pinstriped lapels, their fists thought for them, bunching the fabric and strangling it in the name of the earth, though at that moment even the noble cause slipped their collective mind. They twisted and tore the fabric, hissing madly, gathering strength from the frenzy around them. They wanted to laugh and kill all at once.
To the extent they thought, they now thought only, Yes . . . yes.
And the foreigner looked up at them, eyes wide with terror, forearms offering meager protection, oiled hair spiking in disarray, bushy mustache stained with blood and mucous, split lips quivering, unable to speak. How could this be? he wanted to think. To die for no country, to give one’s life for no cause. The indignity! The humiliation! The senselessness! I cannot abide it, he wanted to say, or at least to think, yet the words could not form themselves out of the commotion of pain.
Just as he felt himself losing consciousness, he took a last look at his attackers and saw the deputy sheriff staring in slack-jawed astonishment at his own fists.
“It’s blood!” shouted the deputy in a voice so shocked that it roared above even the foreigner’s agonized screams and cut off the mob’s fury all at once.
“It’s human blood!” he said, still amazed, raising his stained fists for everyone to see.
And the foreigner, mouth open and drooling bubbles of blood, breath wheezing and hot, collected himself in the momentary silence and finally crafted a thought: No damn shit.
8
The parking attendant did as he was told, helping the manager to evacuate guests out the back door. “No need to panic,” the manager kept saying, which translated as, “Pay your bills first.” But when the guests tuned in to the shouts and the noisy scuffle outside, they panicked. Food was left uneaten and checks unpaid, chairs got kicked over, wine spilled on the carpet. And the staff panicked, too: a busboy dumped his tub outside the kitchen door, and cooks and dishwashers tripped over it, kicking its contents across the room.
The parking attendant did as he was told, distributing the keys quickly to the guests, opening doors when he could, accepting tips when offered, but thinking all the while, The light of justice will shine, and as the last guests wheeled away he grabbed his backpack out of the car and slipped unnoticed back into the restaurant. He rolled aside fallen tables, kicked a martini glass through the uprights of a toppled chair, then paused before the kitchen door, still swinging in and out, revealing the sauces still flaming on the burners, the soufflés beginning to collapse, the steaks now charring on the grill.
The kitchen was the inner sanctum of the evil that had thus far evaded justice. It had always been off limits to him. But now the light will shine, he thought, unzipping his backpack and pulling forth the video camera and flashlight that PETA had presented him when he’d secured a job in the restaurant.
It had taken months of demeaning labor, but tonight his patience would pay off. He would rip out the very heart of this evil and raise it to the light of justice.
He held the camera to his eye; he wanted to see it as the world would see it—the startled, shivering monkeys cowering from the light, their experience—yes experience, because monkeys think, monkeys learn—telling them that another one of them was doomed to have his neck clasped between the leaves of a table and his head malleted by sportive carnivores, his brains forked into the salivating mouths of his devourers. “What flavor!” the guests would say. “They must forcefeed them a spicy marinade!”
He pushed open the door and panned across the flaming steaks and saucepans, zoomed in on a half-cooked T-bone melting on the floor in a pool of its own pink juices, then zoomed out and tracked through the wreckage toward the stainless door of the walk-in. The staff had not only left the door unlocked but also cracked open, and the cold mist curled around the edges and condensed into droplets on the door’s bright surface. And now he heard the noises, too—the startled little grunts and gasps of their suffering, their fear of the light and the fate awaiting them. “No need to fear this light, little friends,” he said aloud, clicking on his flashlight, aware that at this moment his eye was the world’s eye, his voice the world’s voice, and his light the light of justice. “This is the light of justice,” he said, just to be certain his thoughts were the world’s thoughts, too.
