Apex Hides the Hurt (8 page)

The whiz kid said, You manufacture this thing and call it flesh. It belongs to another race. I have different ideas about what color flesh is, he told them. We come in colors. We come in many colors. And we want to see ourselves when we look down at ourselves, our arms and legs. Around the table the men listened, and soon afterward they got to work. Somebody give this guy a raise.

At Ogilvy and Myrtle they knew the neighborhoods, some block by block, and they knew the hues of the people who lived there. They knew the cities and the colors of their mayors. They knew the colors of clientele and zip codes and could ship boxes accordingly.

They devised thirty hues originally, later knocked them down to twenty after research determined a zone of comfort. It didn’t have to be perfect, just not too insulting. What they wanted was not perfect camouflage but something that would not add insult to injury. In the modern style, the gentlemen of Ogilvy and Myrtle learned to worship databases, and linked fingers before altars of data. There was a large population of Norwegian Americans in the Midwest; O and M sent them a certain shipment. And there was a denomination of Mexican Americans in the Southwest; O and M sent them a certain shipment. The cities and hamlets had hues. The shipments were keyed, bands of colors were strategically bundled together. Given their particular business history, O and M possessed long-standing supply networks to poor countries—their cruddy craftsmanship demanded this—and to these poor countries they shipped appropriate boxes to their inevitably brown-skinned populations. The school nurses of integrated elementaries could order special jumbo variety packs, crayon boxes of the melanin spectrum, to serve diversity.

Even he had to admire the wonder of it all. The great rainbow of our skins. It was a terrain so far uncharted. Pith helmets necessary. The fashioners of clear adhesive strips almost recognized this but didn’t take the idea far enough. The world of the clear strip was raceless; it did not take into account that we sought ourselves, like sought like, that a white square of white cotton wadding attached to transparent tape dispelled the very illusion they attempted to create. Criminy—an alien square of white on the skin, well that was outside the pale of even the albinoest albino. The deep psychic wounds of history and the more recent gashes ripped by the present, all of these could be covered by this wonderful, unnamed multicultural adhesive bandage. It erased. Huzzah.

When the consultant looked down at his arm, what did he see? Was the man his color, something else, was he
flesh
-colored? When the man looked down at his arm, did he observe business opportunities, an unexploited niche, an overlooked market, or something else? The man saw the same thing he saw. The job.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

Friday morning he stood before the plywood fence, looking at the
COMING SOON OUTFIT OUTLET
sign. Head cocked, dumb gaze, stalled mid-step: any observer would have translated his body language into the universal pose of
lost
. Reception’s directions had led him to this spot. He looked up and down the street, but didn’t see where he could have made the mistake.

A door in the fence scraped inward, revealing a scruffy young white dude whose wrecked posture, rumpled clothes, and shallow expression marked a life of few prospects, and fewer misgivings about the lack of said prospects. An existence lived in the safety and hospitality of that protected nature preserve called the American Middle Class. The name Skip was embroidered over the left breast of his striped mechanic’s shirt, which meant in all probability his name was not Skip. Not Skip awkwardly steered a dolly onto the sidewalk, grunting.

He informed Not Skip that he was looking for the library.

The dude set the dolly level, his hand anxiously frisking the stack of boxes to ensure they did not tumble, and jerked his head toward the door. “They’re closed,” he mumbled. “But you can see for yourself if you don’t believe me.”

Not Skip struggled past him and he glanced up at the Latin phrase engraved above the Winthrop Library’s doorway. That was going to have to go, unless it was Latin for Try Our New Stirrup Pants. Probably not the first time one of his clients had displaced a library, and probably not the last.

On the rare occasions that he entered libraries, he always felt assured of his virtue. If they figured out how to distill essence of library into a convenient delivery system—a piece of gum or a gelcap, for example—he would consume it eagerly, relieved to be finished with more taxing methods of virtue gratification. Helping little old ladies across the street. Giving tourists directions. Libraries. Alas there would be no warm feeling of satisfaction today. The place was a husk. The books were gone. Where he would usually be intimidated by an army of daunting spines, there were only dust-ball rinds and Dewey decimal grave markers. As if by consensus, all the educational posters and maps had cast out their top right-hand corner tacks, so that their undersides bowed over like blades of grass. Nothing would be referenced this afternoon, save indomitable market forces.

Even the globe was gone. Over there on a table in the corner he saw the stand, the bronze pincers that once held the world in place, but the world was gone. Next to the stand he spied a small messy pile of books with colorful spines, which he momentarily mistook for a pile of This Month’s Sweaters, mussed by grubby consumers and waiting for the soothing, loving ministrations of the salesgirl.

“We’re not open,” she said. “Middle of next week we’ll be open around the corner.” She rounded a bank of desolate shelves, this young white chick with dyed black hair, the twenty or forty bracelets on her wrists jangling like the keys of a prison guard. Salesgirl or librarian? She dropped a load of children’s books on a desk, and wheezed loudly, out of proportion to her burden. Her clothes were dull gray where the light hit them, the faded favorite gray of jet-black clothes washed too many times. He didn’t peg her as homegrown talent, and she made an unlikely librarian, stereotype-wise. Nonetheless, he decided: One bracelet for every shush.

“Oh,” he said.

“Come back next week for all your shopping needs,” she said. “If you need to use the Web, you’re welcome to,” she added, brushing dust off her skirt. “They want us to keep ’em on until we have to turn ’em off.” Along the back wall there was a line of six computers, their cursors blinking impatiently. A pyramid of books anchored one side of the computer table, with one copy face-out on top in the apex, and he recognized the cover of Lucky Aberdeen’s autobiography,
Lucky Break: How a Small-Town Boy Took On Corporate America—and Won!
Above the computers, the bowed-over corner of a promotional poster obscured the final few words of Lucky’s motto, which, conveniently, was also the publicity tagline:
DREAMING IS A CINCH WHEN YOU
—

He asked if there were digital archives on the town’s history, which did not strike him as a funny question, certainly not worthy of a smirk. “No one’s ever asked that question before,” she told him, “not ever. All the stuff we have is in good old-fashioned books. And it’s in boxes. You have to come back next week.” Perhaps his face revealed something, although when he reviewed the encounter later, he felt confident that he had not slipped. It was ridiculous to think that he had registered disappointment over something as unimportant as a job. More likely, her librarian instincts had awakened after days of packing things up. She asked, “Is there something in particular you’re looking for?”

“I wanted to find anything about the law on changing the name of the town.”

She made the connection and her face brightened. “You’re that outside consultant, right? I heard about you.” He’d never heard someone say that particular c word with such relish. “What do you want to know?” she offered. “I’m the one who did all the legwork on that for Lucky.” She straightened, and if she wore glasses she would have slid them up her nose. “Who else are you going to ask but the town librarian?”

“Some general background on the switch to Winthrop from Freedom,” he said.

“It happened in this very room,” she said, suddenly center stage on the set of a public television documentary. “This was the town hall before it was the library. There were three people on the city council—Goode and Field, the two black guys who first settled here, and Sterling Winthrop, he of the barbed-wire fortune. Have you met Albie, yet?”

“He’s everybody’s uncle.”

She snorted. “It was basically a business deal, really,” she said. “The Light and the Dark had claim to the land. There—”

He interrupted her. “What was that Light?”

“The Light and the Dark were Goode’s and Field’s nicknames,” she explained. “Goode was the sunny-disposition guy and Field was the grumpy one. Like the Odd Couple. So that’s how they got their nicknames.”

The Light, the Dark. Freedom. My people, my people. Regina’s forebears were the laziest namers he’d ever come across. He grimaced and asked her to continue with her story.

The librarian told him that there were a lot of black towns in the state at that point in time. “If everything wasn’t packed up, I could show you some really interesting stuff about the all-black towns around here,” she lamented. “Winthrop comes along and falls in love with the area—that river traffic, at any rate—and so they decided to make it all legal. I think it was hard to argue with the kind of access Winthrop’d provide to the outside world—having a white guy up front—so they got together to incorporate the town. Drew up a town charter, elected themselves the town council, and got all their ducks in a row.”

“Might as well go with the devil you know.”

“He wasn’t going to hassle them or lynch them or burn them out or whatever, and at that point you needed a certain number of citizens in order to incorporate and be officially recognized by the state. There was a whole community already here to pump up the numbers. Both sides got something out of it.”

“So why the law, then?” he asked. “Why not go change the name outright? They were the village elders.” The question had been bothering him, and the previous night before going to sleep, he’d hit the books to answer it. While he’d learned plenty about barbed wire, and smelting patents, and the long-range vision of a certain entrepreneur, all he’d found of his quarry were suspicious don’t-look-too-close constructions.
They decided to change the name. The name was changed
. Wording and phrasing familiar as the essential grammar of modern business.

“I think the people liked the name Freedom,” she said, shrugging. “It sounds corny, but it meant something to them. A couple of years earlier, they’d been slaves. Now they had rights, they were official. They liked being citizens, and citizens have a government with rules and whatnot. The way I interpreted it is, Goode and Field wanted to do it right. Do it by the book. Made it a law, made it legal, and then voted to change the name.”

Something sounded off to him, but he didn’t pursue it. He heard Not Skip bang his way through the door. The librarian gave the kid a look and he rolled his way out of sight. “We’re going to be here all weekend at this rate,” she complained.

“What do you think of this name-change business?” he asked.

“Now or back then?”

“Now, Lucky’s thing.”

She shrugged, halfheartedly this time, her pure apathy undermining the very expression of apathy.
Slimpies
: Ready-to-Wear Shrugs for When You Just Don’t Have It in You. “He’s the boss man,” she drawled. It turned out Lucky had lured her to Winthrop a few years ago. There had been a file-sharing program Lucky was very keen on, and she was part of a team brought in to dig around in the kernel and try to figure out how it worked.

“Rip it off.”

“Sure. And we worked for a few weeks, and then Lucky informed the team that he’d bought the company outright. I had just moved down, and I didn’t want to go back, so I took this job.” She pursed her lips. “You can’t blame Lucky for being Lucky,” she said evenly. “It’s like blaming water for being wet. This job’s not so bad. Mostly I tell people how to use the browsers and make sure the kids aren’t looking for porn. When Lucky asked me to do a little background on the olden days, I was pretty happy to have something to do. ‘Can I get some intel on this name thing?’ ” she said, imitating him. “That doesn’t mean I’m all up in his Kool-Aid, if you know what I mean.”

“Yup.”

She sighed, her eyes drifting to the empty stacks, and she was reminded of her task. “Anything else?” she asked.

Something in her movements jostled a heavy-lidded thing in his brain stem, and he had a very concrete image of the librarian in her bedroom, on her bed, leaning back, bit of thigh, little feather of panties just visible. He realized it was his first sexual thought in months, not counting what had been wrought by that damned series of shampoo commercials. The shampoo commercial as arena for erotic play had alternately vexed and titillated him during his convalescence.

She said, “Hey,” and he said, “Sorry?”

“I said, the old archives are in the new building already, but if I come across the box, I’ll let you know. If you want to look for yourself.”

He thanked her and wished her good luck.

As he reached the door, she yelled after him. “You should try a cane. Canes are cool.”

He looked back and gave her a brief nod. “Maybe I will,” he said, even though he’d already done the cane thing, months ago. It didn’t take.

.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .

It was easy. Apex.

He had been saving Apex for a while. It had come to him in a dream that everything was Apex.

Of course the summit, human achievement, the best of civilization, and of course something you could tumble off of, fall fast.

Was: waterproof, flexible, multicultural, recommended by four out of five doctors in a highly selective survey.

Apex was a name you could rely on.

The little part on the top of the pyramid, tons of stone dragged across the sand to make this thing. The eye on the top of the pyramid as it appears on the dollar bill. He had heard this was a symbol of immense power according to mystics. What the mystics saw was Apex. It was the currency of the world.