Backward-Facing Man (19 page)

The lawyer didn't finish his sentence. His prospective client stumbled through the doorway and dry-heaved in front of a watercooler across the hall. Other than Hammond, who stood watching with disgust from his doorway, there was not a soul around to help Chuck Puckman stand up, brush himself off, or find the elevators.

In early spring, when the EPA finally announced that the plume of trichloroethylene around Puckman Security extended no farther than the property lines, and the yellow police tape came down, Chuck's neighbors, who were encouraged to return to their homes, were jubilant. The U.S. prosecutor told the media that while the Puckmans might still be cited for violations of the federal Clean Water Act, their manufacturing operations appeared not to have introduced any more toxins into the groundwater than what was already there. It was the first piece of good news in over a month, and it caught Chuck off guard.

By then, the urgency and, in a way, the excitement had died down. The phones had stopped ringing; the old employees had stopped coming around; even the kids selling toner and copier paper, industrial coffee, and insurance had stopped showing up with their catalogues and their demonstration kits. Chuck seldom left the apartment, except to get his prescriptions refilled, to buy groceries, or to visit Rahim. A few times, he visited his dad at the nursing home, but Charlie Puckman was almost always either asleep or nonresponsive.

During the day, Chuck slept in the recliner, listening to jazz. At night, he watched TV and got high. In the beginning, he tried to sort out his thoughts. He started letters to old friends, which ended crumpled up in a corner of the kitchen. He shaved his head, and when his hair grew back, it was white around his ears. Neighbors noticed him—gaunt, hollow-cheeked, ashen—sweeping out the truck well and pasting handmade signs on the walls directing delivery trucks to nonexistent entrances. One weekend, he repainted lines for parking spaces. The next week, he laid duct tape across the shop floor as if he was rearranging workflow. He tried to remember a time in his life when he looked forward to something, but his memories were of empty gestures that would excite and then bore him—a new car or rivet machine, a fancy suit or a new TV, the closing of a big account—temporarily fulfilling, yet ultimately disappointing. As it got warmer outside, he took to walking until his feet hurt, noticing the neighborhood for the first time since he was a kid—its brutal plainness, its broken fields and dead-end alleys, its hidden commerce—muted transactions between generations of immigrants.

In May, Rahim got a fever that wouldn't go away, and his body erupted in sores. Ovella took as much time off from work as she could to take care of him. One bitter-cold night after bathing him and getting him settled in bed, she walked ten blocks to Chuck's apartment, climbed the fire escape steps, and took a deep breath. After a few minutes of pounding, Chuck opened the door and stood there blinking, huddled beneath a blanket. Ovella stared at him and shook her head. “You wanna come in?” he said, slurring.

“We need to talk,” Ovella said, stepping into the kitchen.

“Drink?”

She shook her head.

“I've been thinking, Ovella,” Chuck said. “Maybe you and Rahim oughta come live here. I got this big place, and you guys live in that shhhhhithole.” He made a flourishing gesture with his hands. “You can take the rooms downstairs—”

“You oughta think before you go running your mouth off. You made a fine mess out of your own life; now you oughta be more careful with other people's.”

“What?” He turned his hands upside down.

“Come on, Chuck. A man in the kind of trouble you're in has no business inviting people to join him.” Chuck walked into the living room and let himself fall onto the couch. “I got a brother who's sick as a dog and a sixty-three-year-old father with no job and no savings.”

“Sorry,” he said, looking away.

Ovella stared down at him. “I don't need you to be polite to me,” she said. “What I need is money for health insurance. Without that, Rahim can't get the drugs he needs to keep his immune system functioning. And if he gets pneumonia, he's fucked.”

Chuck winced.

“We need you to figure out a way we can make money.”

Chuck ran his hands over the top of his head and stared into the fish tank. “Let me ask you something, Ovella.” She rolled her eyes. “Do you think this whole thing is my fault? Do
you
think I'm responsible for Gutierrez, for everything being so fucked-up?”

She narrowed her eyes. “You feeling sorry for yourself, Chuck? You on some kind of guilt trip now? Of all people, you oughta realize how this happened doesn't matter—Gutierrez isn't gonna suddenly wake up and go home to his kids, and the factory isn't gonna reopen to business as usual—no matter how much penance you do.” She took a deep breath. “But there's a half dozen others who don't have the wits or the strength or the smarts to figure out what to do for a paycheck, for health insurance, for hope.”

In the glow of the fish tank, with jazz low on the radio and the aerator bubbling and the refrigerator humming, Chuck felt an almost overwhelming affection toward his old friend's sister, standing here in the middle of the night talking straight to him. “Do something, Charles,” she said with her hand on the door. “Do something.” Then she pulled the door shut, leaving him blinking in the dim light.

 

As the afternoons got longer, Chuck watched kids playing soccer, trucks rumbling down Aramingo toward I-95, and women in house-dresses hauling trash to the curbs. Toward the train station and back, along Allegheny Avenue, past the Polish cafeterias, past the hospital where Gutierrez lay, beside the hotels and the bodegas and back up to Frankford, stopping for a drink in one of the few remaining Irish bars, Chuck walked the neighborhood, slapping nickels into empty parking meters intent on redeeming himself any way he could. Without his tinted windshield, he began to see life differently. Billboards with earnest Latino faces and blazing white teeth promoting American products seemed hypocritical, and the razor wire that surrounded nearby factories seemed as much a warning for those inside as it was for intruders. The litter-strewn field off Castor Avenue, where kids might have played ball but for a locked gate and an eight-foot-high fence; little girls, standing on their stoops, experimenting with provocative poses, makeup, and cigarettes; a shelter for homeless people with broken windows and cops patrolling nearby; a graveyard for abandoned cars; empty storefronts and failed businesses; old people whose faces he might have known once a long time ago, now shrunken and softer in the eyes—all of it produced in him a deeper sadness than he'd ever known.

Shortly after his talk with Ovella, Chuck drove his Suburban to the car dealer near the airport and traded it for five grand and a 1985 Ford Escort. The same day, he drove it into Center City, parked near a porn shop, walked up to the cashier's window at the Blue Cross headquarters, and paid Rahim's insurance premiums for the next three months. The next morning, he picked up his friend and took him to breakfast.

“How you feeling?” Chuck asked Rahim.

“You know, most people have less than they want, but more than they need,” Rahim said, eating a piece of toast. He'd put on a few pounds over the past few weeks and was feeling strong enough to start rebuilding computers that he found in the trash or at shelters. “Take poor people, for example. We have no money, no land, no education, and no power, but we got kids, relatives, time, body fat, acres of decrepit property, and abandoned places to hang out….” Rahim had designed a Web site for his landlord, a Polish guy, who wanted to become a specialty-food importer. “We buy these computers with bazillions of megabytes of hard-drive storage. Do we need it? Fuck no! It's like a meal somebody serves you when you're not hungry. It just sits there until you scrape it off your plate and throw it away.”

“We need a lot less than we think,” Chuck agreed.

“What if we could redistribute it?” Rahim said, waving to the waitress. “Another glass of juice please, love…”

“You sound like Castro.”

“We could set up a system to collect excess computing power and make it available cheap to poor people.” He turned his place mat over and drew little boxes connected by wires.

“Like they do with electricity?” Chuck said. He hadn't had a conversation like this since his college days.

“Exactly,” Rahim said. The wires on his drawing extended to a box he labeled Puckman Security. “Think what the average person could do if they had the computing power of a corporation.”

“I give up.”

“Analyze stocks. Send tips to poor people. Collect news stories. Deliver information to voters.” Rahim smiled broadly, showing his gums.

“So you wanna change the world now?”

Rahim pushed the place mat with his scribbling to Chuck's side of the table and looked at him. “In Cuba, my father was a professor. My mother was a nurse. They came here thirty years ago for opportunity, and still we have nothing.” The two of them sat there, the smell of burnt coffee and cigarettes all around them. Something stirred inside Chuck, a connection between this moment and another, long ago. “I don't know how much time I have left,” Rahim said, “but I want to do something that matters.”

 

After breakfast, they picked up some old CPUs, screens, keyboards, and computer parts from shelters and thrift stores in the neighborhood; later that day, they started cleaning the offices under Chuck's apartment. Rahim directed Chuck, who pushed old filing cabinets against the walls, swept metal shavings and dust balls into piles, and took a stab at some basic rewiring, running a cable down the elevator shaft, tapping into the T1 line. The following morning, Rahim brought over a Zenith laptop and set it up as a server on the second floor. “We're live,” he declared an hour later, logging his laptop onto the Internet.

Before attempting to distribute processing power free to the ghetto, Chuck suggested they load the last backup disks of Puckman Security's computer system so as to print accounts receivables—invoices that hadn't been paid. It turned out that back in January, when Puckman Security was shut down, they were owed almost $12,000 from thirty-five different customers. The largest, $4,400, was from Powerplex, which they would never see. But of the remaining $7,500, Chuck guessed about five grand was collectible. He picked up the phone and struck up the old refrain. Meanwhile, Rahim hit up the search engines for details of convictions and prison sentences meted out to business owners convicted of EPA or OSHA violations. For the next several days, while Chuck drove around town in his Escort, picking up checks, Rahim played legal researcher.

“Last January, a guy who recruited homeless men to strip asbestos pipes without wetting the material was convicted of manslaughter.”

“Why is it the more somebody else has, the less we feel we have by comparison?” Chuck wondered.

“Some guy got five years on twenty counts of pesticide misuse and violation of the federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Acts.”

“Everything from public policy to people's fates is decided on the goddamned TV,” Chuck noticed. “Who needs judges and juries? The army's in the airwaves.”

“In Alaska, a CEO got a suspended sentence for the release of hazardous substances in connection with the outer rim of oil wells on Endicott Island.”

“Most human beings think in terms of abundance and shortage,” Chuck declared, returning to the factory late one afternoon.

“Indeed,” Rahim said, his face buried in printouts.

Chuck's collection efforts yielded almost four grand. It'd been a long time since he felt the rush of making money that had once been fundamental to his existence. Now, he was hard-pressed to spend it on anything other than food, health insurance premiums, and the fund he'd set up for the Gutierrez family. Rahim asked Chuck if there was anything else on the old computer that might have value to them.

“I don't know,” Chuck said. “There's the order history, backlog, production schedules, designs, payables, suppliers, customer lists.”

“Customer lists?”

“Yeah, every pawnbroker, taxicab company, and bank in the mid-Atlantic states,” Chuck said with pride.

Rahim stroked his chin. “Can't we sell the old customers something beside guards?”

“Like what? They already have safes, cash registers, electronics, lottery tickets.”

“If you were a pawnshop owner, what would you want?”

“A clean conscience.”

“You got that right.”

“And cash flow.”

“What do you mean?” Rahim asked.

“Some guy leaves his old lady. She waits a weekend, maybe two, then gets her son to help her load his big-screen TV and his hunting rifle into her sister's car, which she double-parks in front of Big Harvey's. Harvey charges her for storage, cleaning, ticketing, and interest, and then gives her cash, which she says she'll pay back as soon as the guy comes to his senses. She waits for her man to come back, gets her hair done, buys a new dress, flowers, maybe a bottle of perfume to make herself feel better. A month later, the boyfriend's still gone, so Harvey puts the big-screen TV in the window with a sale sign on it. He's got the merchandise, but he's out the cash.”

“So?”

“So all this stuff is sitting in a store nobody with money is going to set foot in. Harvey can't lend against it 'cause of banking regulations, and he can't advertise it 'cause it's mostly hot.”

“If it's such a shitty business Harvey's in,” Rahim said, “how come he's driving a Mercedes-Benz and we're eating diner food worrying about paying rent?”

“I'm not saying it's a shitty business—just that all these years we've been focusing on security, maybe we could be doing something about cash flow.”

Rahim wasn't biting. “Help Harvey steal from the poor and sell to the rich?”

“It isn't that simple,” Chuck said. “People run into trouble and decide to sell their shit for cash. Harvey isn't the cause of their trouble.”

“How did
you
feel selling your Rolex?”

“Maybe we could bring in the suburbanites—the Main Line housewives, the Center City professionals, Big Harvey's neighbors, rich kids—people who wouldn't be caught dead in a pawnshop.”