Amor and Psycho: Stories (13 page)

But children forget. They resent the pet that arrives as a test.

One day, the mother bites her daughter on the hand. (The daughter stuck a pencil in her ear, but still, the behavior crosses a line.) The doctor who puts in the stitches nearly convinces Froyd that she must be put down for it—there can be no excuse for biting a child. But she’s rather old already, taking into account the way the years accelerate, and Froyd realizes that he can’t bring himself to have his wife shot full of poison at the vet’s, or shoot her himself. She is his wife. He still finds her beautiful and desirable. He cannot even condemn her. Benign neglect seems the most humane solution, the simplest thing. He’ll wait a reasonable length of time, Froyd figures; then he’ll buy his daughter a puppy—a real family dog.

Months after our last paycheck, we no longer felt sure we could trust Federico. If he had lied about the first check (in the mail, he’d said, a reasonable argument) and again about the second one, and if he no longer returned telephone calls or e-mails, and kept his shade drawn and his office door locked all day, this did not necessarily reflect on his character.

“Trust me,” he’d said on the first day, and we had. After what he had told us about his mother’s downfall, how could we not? When Federico was a boy of twelve, in Lisbon, his mother had died before his eyes. She stood at the top of the staircase, a construction of rare Brazilian canarywood, her eyes shining down on him as he waited to hear her speak through the terrible cracking sound of the sky breaking open. Her look expressed embarrassment and a slightly excessive formality, as if she had forgotten his name. “This
is strange,” she said (in Portuguese); then she died. Her eyes spun out of focus and turned blue (they had always been a dusky green before) and her body rolled headfirst down the stairs. His first instinct was to laugh, Federico said. What could be more absurd than the death of one’s mother? It was an impossibility to imagine, he said in that English of his.
Uma intervenção divina—relâmpago
stopped her heart. The loss was
absoluto
, a hole in himself so wide that even grief could not live there, but blew through him violently and rearranged him. He became, at twelve, an
empresário
—a businessman—supporting his father, whose soul had become paralyzed, as well as his sister, a child of eight. The experience turned out not as a
tragédia
but a calling. Give him people on the edge of
catástrofe
, Federico assured us, and he would save them.

Given his qualifications, what could we do but embrace this savior, already hired by unseen and inaccessible forces?

One of us, Boxman, suffered a stroke and could no longer afford the medications he needed to stay alive. The faculty chipped in and bought him a bottle of absinthe. Boxman appreciated the terrible thoughtfulness of the gift. Our health insurance had been summarily canceled; the institute could no longer provide such perks. His former carrier rebilled Boxman for his medical expenses at 800 percent of the original rate—a sum larger than his entire accrued income over a lifetime. Imagine a man’s medical bills worth so much more than the man himself! Boxman said. We knew that Federico must appreciate the importance of adequate coverage; just
before the cancellation of the health insurance, he’d had a line of polyps removed from his colon. The diagnosis? Not cancer but stress, induced by our situation. Naturally, we sympathized. Our stress infected Federico—contact stress!

Like any great leader, Federico excelled in his early phase, when we knew him only by introduction and projection. It shocked us later to learn that this beach ball of a man, with his pasty skin, his golf shirts, his bald head, his seductive Portuguese accent, was vulnerable, and we began to trust him less.

How could we forget that day, now so many months ago, when the president had brought Federico to us as a last resort? We received him at first with chill hauteur, and Federico said, “What can I do to win your hearts?” Someone said, “Never underestimate the power of an apology.” Federico apologized immediately and from his heart for the injustices that had been done to us because of the institute’s financial position, which he was already on the point of correcting, well in advance of the final inspection that would decide our fate. He would not disappoint us, Federico promised.
Catástrofe
was his specialty. Not to say that our road would not be hard, but with our help, Federico felt confident that we could recapture the high opinion of the agencies that were about to shut us down.

So we worked harder than ever to correct the messes of the past, to find again the funds borrowed for fact-finding missions to Nicaragua, Iran, Miami and Montreal; to reprint the documents a disgruntled employee had urinated
upon; to correct discrepancies and account for unusual services—massage therapy, shock therapy, colonics—the institute claimed to have provided. We worked in the dark in our shadowy stalls (Federico had cut the lights to save electricity). Our mistrust of “the Man” (embodied in the abstract idea of the final inspection) united us. We believed in coalitions, organizing, empowerment, participation, collaboration. Many of us had traveled hard roads before, from Montgomery to Birmingham to Selma, from Cape Town to Cairo. We also felt it important that someone listen to the complaints and threats once the administration began to hide behind locked and shuttered doors. The administration feared for its safety, it said; the students and creditors had grown unreasonable, insane. The police department sent a SWAT specialist, who offered advice on how to handle angry or armed students, and how to behave in a hostage situation: We needed to imagine the institute as a battlefield. Every day, we should visualize and plot our escape route. Whenever we walked into a room, we needed to ask ourselves, “Where would I take cover under fire?” The SWAT specialist taught us to listen for the silence that folowed the discharge of a weapon. “That’s the sound you want to hear,” the SWAT specialist said.

“Why?” we asked.

“Seize that chance to assault your attacker. Never talk to your attacker, unless you’re in a hostage situation. A hostage situation, that’s a different story. Don’t stand out, but don’t
be afraid to ask for something—a blanket. You want to be perceived as human.”

Those of us with the capacity adapted to the situation.

Most of the students just wanted to transfer. They wanted transcripts, or letters of recommendation, or exculpatory letters for their banks. Federico explained that nothing could be put into writing. The ink on the institute’s letterhead had not settled and bled down the page, rendering void any legal communication.

A homeless man took up residence in our office. We found Neville Nevene, the security guard at the school, smoking a blunt in front of the parking lot while reading the collected poems of Arthur Rimbaud. We asked if he could help us escort the man out. Neville did this with uncustomary efficiency, because he hadn’t thought of that—he could live in our office. We had a couch; we had a bathroom, a shower, a sink and a coffeepot.

“But the shower doesn’t work,” we said.

Neville said, “That could be okay.”

The board continued to meet at unannounced times in locked rooms, whose windows it covered with a sad assortment of old towels. It did not report on its conversations, its strategies, its decisions. For its own safety (and because of the bleeding letterhead), it put nothing in writing. As weeks and months passed, the board began to detect hostility, even desperation, among the employees at the institute. Hostility and desperation became particulate in the air, like sugar in
the atmosphere of a doughnut shop. All the stories began to sound the same, dull rounds of complaints about lost wages and benefits, stories of foreclosure, eviction, the inability to procure life-saving medications, et cetera, as if the board were not already on red alert.

Still, the board took an optimistic view and declined to prepare for the possibility of failure, of institutional collapse. It held its power. It did not respond to questions because it had no answers, and besides, its great power lay in magisterial silence, in the way it sequestered itself in a cold fog of its own. Sometimes we heard, through some wall, the board giggle like a child hiding with its eyes squeezed tight, hysterical with excitement, imagining itself invisible.

Waiting for the board to take action was like waiting for Godot, Neville said. He now lived in our office full-time, carried the collected works of Samuel Beckett under his arm and read out loud part of the famous dialogue between Vladimir and Estragon about how everything depended on Godot, on waiting. He saw everything differently from the rest of us, as if we had all read the same book, but his contained different words, with different meanings. Instead of “Estragon,” Neville read “Estrogen” through glasses thick as prisms, slimed with sweat and oil from wiping them on his shirts.

In one thrilling moment, Federico—our savior—launched a coup and seized power. But the disgraced president did not leave. He became a ghost president, wandering the corridor of power—a narrow red-carpeted stretch
between his office and the executive toilet. Many of the people who had held positions of power at the institute, even positions of very little power, remained close to the ghost president. Together, they forged a comforting narrative about the historical community of leadership and the principles for which that community stood. What principles? The members of the historical community could not, for practical reasons, put them in writing, but Neville Nevene, who spent an hour a day discussing philosophy with the ghost president in the parking lot, mentioned
structurelessness
, the institute’s absolute refusal to tidy up its humanity to please the Man—the Man being the creditors, the final inspectors, the whole capitalist-military-industrial complex, and most of the faculty, including the activists and the union and the women of color, and the women in general, and the men of color, and the gender queers.

But, we asked (through our emissary Neville), didn’t our continuing presence at the institute prove our commitment to enlightenment, justice, a politics of meaning, a community of soul? Not really, the board shot back. The historical community functioned like a family.

Yes, we agreed. The institute was patriarchal and arbitrary, and we loved it for the same reasons people love a family: because we felt connected to it, and believed that in some imperfect and provisional way it loved us back, tolerated us and demanded our loyalty.

*   *   *

WAS THAT
the ghost president standing alone on the street corner, talking into a toy cell phone?

Was that the ghost president standing alone outside of the oxygen bar, playing an accordion?

FEDERICO NO LONGER
looked us in the eye when we met in (or near) the corridor of power. We waited in the shadows for him to emerge from the executive toilet. We held out scraps of paper for him to sign, excuses and apologies we ourselves lacked the authority to make. Occasionally while we waited, we saw the accountant, a shadow of her formerly robust self, moving quickly along the wall. When she saw us, she would shout in her heavily accented English, “Let me out! Let me out! I am kept against my will!” But the longer we waited in the corridor for Federico to come out of the executive toilet, our miserable scraps of paper damp in our hands, the more we pretended not to notice her Mandarin oaths and mutterings. The accountant had once produced charts and budgets, and we felt, still, that we needed her.

After the authorities contacted us regarding our missing pay, Federico refused to sign our slips of paper or acknowledge us. We would, individually, be held responsible for scheduled income, the authorities promised. No use trying to evade or equivocate. No paperwork had been filed on our behalf; they had our number; we would pay as scheduled, or they would throw us in jail! So we continued to work; even Federico, who had not been paid himself, continued.

In this way, we traveled beyond the realm of the heroic, and became contemptible to one another and to ourselves. We had no wages, no benefits; some of us had even grown sick and died. We were complicit in our oppression; we knew that. The conditions felt sickeningly familiar to some of us who had survived other experiences of humiliation. Yet we continued to show up.

It became difficult to know whether our presence helped or hurt. At the first cracking sounds, the ghost president and Federico cautiously opened the door to the executive toilet, where they now hid together. Because of the narrowness of the toilet, the ghost president could not see past the beach-ball form of Federico. “
É um milagre
,” Federico told him—a miracle—as the whole building began to rattle like dice.

The cracks widened. We mounted the beautiful walnut staircase collectively, and used simple tools—hammers, Phillips heads.

OUR OLD COLLEAGUE
O’Malley had always sung variations on one note: He represented an oppressed and colonized minority. O’Malley had worked as a Teamster, a merchant seaman. Colcannon and ale ran in his blood; he fought in and stewarded some union that did not apply to us. His face looked like fire and brimstone and he loved nothing more than the clarity of an enemy.

He fixed on Irene because, as part of the historical community,
O’Malley still defended the ghost president. Besides, he said, Irene was bourgeois—all the activists were bourgeois, not fighting for real things, such as living conditions, wages, and so on, but, rather, for luxuries, such as sexual freedom. But Irene had been in a union, too, up in Canada. She’d seen how sexist it was, how dominated by men, like everything in Canada was dominated by men—by bluenecks and blockheads and by the oppressive cold and by old fucked paradigms. O’Malley took exception to Irene’s characterizing the union as sexist and accusing him of being an old fucked paradigm, turning him into a stereotype because of his working-class accent. He knew this game, he said. He held his fists balled in his lap, as if he were trying to keep himself from leaping up and clocking Irene. “I won’t have my people slandered and reduced to cheap stereotypes,” O’Malley shouted, “the great working class who invented the lively language of slang, on whose backs this nation was built, by a bunch of old dyke Canucks.”