Burning Down George Orwell's House (21 page)

“I don't know,” Bud said. “You're fucking this monkey, I'm just holding it down.”

“Lovely.”

“Will it start?”

“I still don't know.”

“Did you bring the jumper cables?”

“No.”

“Then it better.”

He got out. The paint of the truck was very dusty, except for the Ten Commandments–shaped spot on the windshield that attested to the range of the wipers. That was strange. Some jokester had written “Warsh me” in the grime of the driver's side door. He unlocked the vehicle and climbed up
inside. The interior smelled funny. He switched on the overhead lights. A sports coat laid neatly folded on the backseat. He got out again and opened the back door. A tweed coat with professorial elbow patches. Definitely not his—it was way too big.

“What's that?” Flora asked out the window. She had moved up to the front seat of Bud's truck.

Ray held the jacket away from his body like it was radioactive. In the glow of Bud's brake lights it looked like a bullfighter's cape. Based on its size, it clearly belonged to Dr. Pentode.

Pentode had been driving his SUV? That meant that … Ray didn't even want to consider the possibility. It also meant that Helen was …? It was impossible, yet here was the evidence.

Dr. Pentode was fucking his wife.

That fat piece of shit was probably upstairs in Ray's condominium at that very moment with his pork-chop fingers all over Helen.

Ray tossed the coat back into his truck. Goddamn it. He got behind the wheel and it started up. He would check the GPS later to see where Pentode had driven. “What now?” he wanted to know, unsure whom he was speaking to.

“Let's go get some grub,” Bud yelled. “Meet us at McCrotchety's.”

“I'm not going to that yuppie hellhole,” Flora said. “I know a better place. Follow us, Ray.”

Bud took off with a squeal of his tires and Ray did the same. Pentode of all people. Goddamn it. He stayed on Bud's tail until they got to the bridge, at which point Bud ran a red light and dared Ray to follow him, but he chickened out. By the time the light changed, Bud was out of sight. Ray reached for his cell phone but instead of calling Flora for directions he powered it off, plunging the interior of the vehicle into darkness. He drove home and threw up in the elevator.

The apartment reeked of scotch and he felt sick from the booze and the thought of Helen's affair and the realization of just how drunk he was and that he had driven in this condition. The turntable's needle spun in the inner groove of an LP, kicking up an ambient, low-level static from the speakers. He ran to the bathroom and vomited until he cried, and then vomited some more.

H
E BINOCULARED HIS EYES
against the glass, but couldn't see anyone inside. The shop was empty, the hanging labyrinth of clothes gone. Only a local realtor's
FOR SALE
sign remained. He knocked a few times and then banged on the door with the butt of his fist. The counter and shelves and racks had been stripped bare. He took a step back. In addition to carrying his coffee-stained shirt, he had that fat asshole Pentode's sports coat draped over his arm like a blanket. He planned to return it, though he would've preferred to tear it to ribbons and tie them to the nearest maypole.

The appointment with Helen was in a little bit. They had a
lot to discuss. He would give her every opportunity to explain why Pentode's coat was in his truck. He walked around the corner, pushing through the morning crowd. Scores of plastic trash cans, each with a street number painted in sloppy white letters, had spilled their garbage all over the narrow alley that ran behind the row of shops. The names of the stores appeared on the back doors, but he didn't need the signs to find Kletzski's Kleaners. Two dumpsters halfway down the block overflowed with clean clothes. Hundreds of the bags inhaled and exhaled in the wind. The bins seethed with plastic. Mrs. Kletzski had thrown everything away, the entire contents of her store. His beloved shirt was somewhere in there.

He turned his cell phone on to check the time. Bud had left four messages, but Ray would catch up with them when he returned to work. Other things occupied his mind. Despite everything that had happened—and everything that hadn't happened—Ray still wanted Helen to let him move back in. He had made enough mistakes of his own and couldn't hold her adultery against her. Still, the word sounded acidic and vile in his mind:
adultery
. In forty-five minutes he would make one final attempt at reconciliation. She had to let him come home.

Late commuters and early loiterers filled the sidewalk while the automobile traffic wore him down with a circus-orchestra repertoire of horns and sirens. It was sickening—physically sickening—that he needed an appointment to see his own wife. The weather, however, remained perfect, as if the clear
sky above existed to spite the congestion around him. A half dozen new construction sites had appeared in the neighborhood since the weekend. The skyscraping windowpanes reflected a false, second sky adorned with video cameras that perched above every intersection. The authorities made no effort to conceal them. If anything, their ubiquity served as a threat, and a reminder that he lived within the confines of Total Empire, as horizon-to-horizon vast as language itself. Ray's every step, every phone call, and every keystroke was recorded, his spending habits, downloads, and library rentals entered into electronic databases housed somewhere in vast server farms. The commercial entities, like Logos, headquartered in these buildings predicted his ideas before he even thought them. It was too much. He felt
this
close to losing his shit. The whole city conspired against him. Chicago had become a police state with no need for policemen. On the grid, under constant surveillance, every individual was Big Brother incarnate. That was true of him too—he was made to feel corrupted just by living his life. He had built his career by exploiting all these poor proles, and he couldn't stop dwelling on those out-of-work assembly-liners up in Detroit. They were real people with real lives and families, and they were unemployed because of him. He couldn't take it anymore.

The pedestrian sea parted, and from it a homeless man appeared wearing a full bridal gown and a frilly white veil. He carried a pile of plastic-wrapped designer clothes. Ray stopped to take a photo. “What, you never seen a dude in a
dress before?” the man asked. He paraded past, the long train of his gown dragging coffee cups and debris behind him down the sidewalk.

The humanities building enjoyed a temporary stillness reminiscent of the atmospheric conditions that preceded a tornado siren. Classes were in session so the hallways were deserted save the stray bathroom-bound slacker. Fluorescent tube lights glared against the fishbowl exterior of the English office and the wall-mounted display cases half-empty with faculty publications. Ray stopped to use the men's room and collect his thoughts.

The time had come for him to straighten himself out. The most wonderful moments of his life had been spent in Helen's company, and he could be that person again. They both deserved to be happy, and he would commit every effort to making it happen, maybe even quitting his job. He was washing his hands when in the mirror Pentode emerged from a toilet stall.

“Hello, Dr. Pentode,” Ray said. He dried his hands on the sports coat and handed it over. “I found this in my truck,” he said.

“Raymond, oh, I—”

“Which is kind of strange, isn't it?”

“Listen, Raymond.”

“If the next words out of your mouth are not ‘I apologize for fucking your wife,' I will flush you down the toilet one fat body part at a time,” Ray said, but didn't stick around long
enough to hear what Pentode had to say. The temptation for violence was too great. Pentode of all people. It made no sense. It made no goddamn sense at all.

The hallway lights buzzed like a swarm of locusts presaging some half-assed apocalypse. The class bells rang, and faster than he could say Ivan Petrovich Pavlov the corridor teemed with rival tribes differentiated by the number of beats per minute throbbing around their precious heads and the corporate logos advertised on their too-tightly clothed chests. A hundred cell phones chirped all at once, a collaborative ringtone technique destined to put Schoenberg and Webern out to pasture.

Nan, the departmental secretary stationed next to the door, glowered at Ray without looking up from her video game. She had the restless look of someone standing in the rain waiting for her cocker spaniel to finish taking a steaming dump. Helen's office sat next to the mail room. He entered without knocking—she was on the phone.

The esteemed Dr. Maas, the departmental chair whose job Helen presently occupied, was recuperating from chemo; she kept a webcam next to her sickbed and every week she and her partner emailed updates to the entire faculty about the progress of her deterioration. Helen was scheduled to fill in for her through the summer and fall term, when either Maas would return from the living dead or the provost would appoint a permanent replacement. Helen had the inside track on the job, the financial rewards of which might have tempted less compassionate souls to cheer on the cancer.

More grey hairs had sprouted since he last saw Helen. She looked tired, but also—he had to admit—beautiful. Her hair was longer and it accentuated the shapely bones of her face. “Can you hold on a moment?… Thanks. Raymond, you can see that I'm on the phone.”

“Do you find it strange that I need an appointment to see my own wife?”

“Sorry, I'm going to have to call you back.” She hung up. “Listen, Raymond, don't make this any more difficult than it has to be.” She got up and closed her office door. A framed photo of Dr. Maas, completely and defiantly bald, hung on the wall.

“Why do people keep telling me to listen?”

“Everyone's trying to help you, but you won't let us.”

“I want to come home,” Ray said. “I know I was impossible to live with. I got a promotion and I'm learning to take on more responsibility, just like you wanted. I'll get some help.”

“That's … that's not going to happen.”

“Just for one month. If it doesn't work out, fine. I'll never bother you again. I'll go get a job somewhere else. Another state. One month—that's all I ask.”

“Please, Raymond. This is difficult enough as it is.” She wiped at her eyes with a wrinkled tissue. “I think we've had a breakdown in communication. You've put me in a very difficult position.”

“I've put
you
in a difficult position? I'm not the one fucking somebody else.”

“Oh no?”

“No! Though I freely admit that I wanted to.”

“See this is what I'm talking about. Some things are serious, Raymond. You come strolling in here and try to make my life as miserable as your own. You think you're so clever that you can just explain away your rotten behavior with some kind of clever mumbo jumbo, but you can't. This isn't some fictional Oceania or Eurasia, this is real. Your actions have real consequences in the real world. I'm sorry.”

“You don't even know what
real
means. It means nothing. You think reality is something objective and external, but that's delusional. Nothing is real, Helen, not my career or this university or that fat fuck Pentode. Not you or me, not our marriage. These are just constructs.”

“I filed for divorce,” Helen said.

“You did what?”

“We're getting divorced. I called Jacobson and started the process.”

“Why would you do that?”

“What do you mean why? You're a mess, Raymond.”

Through the window behind Helen's head, a large metal dumpster was being borne aloft into the heavens by hundreds of inflated plastic bags. Ray rubbed at his eyes. When he looked again it had floated upward and out of view.

He needed to leave. He needed to leave this office and he needed to leave this entire rotting, putrid city and this entire corrupt system that he had contributed to all these years. If
he was to stay, Ray would spend the next year working for Big Brother and espousing the benefits of fracking and then hate himself for the remainder of his life. He didn't want to be part of the problem any longer. He had been so wrong. There was no goddamn way he could fix it by himself, not from the inside and not with a thousand pro bono environmentalist campaigns. He stood and walked out.

“Where are you going?” Helen called after him.

“I don't know,” Ray said, but in fact he did. For the first time in his life, he knew exactly where he was going. Instead of heading straight home, he went to the front desk at Logos and handed in his company ID card. A week later, he was on the Isle of Jura.

Without Molly at Barnhill the bottles emptied at their previous, brisk pace. Ray woke up most mornings in a sitting-room chair. Days rolled by without direction or purpose. He spent more time in his boxers. He would wake up late, sometimes in Molly's bed or, once, on the staircase with a puddle of sixteen-year-old slinkied down the steps below him. After a week alone, another swan dive into the Corryvreckan whirlpool began to sound less awful. The irony did not go unnoticed: he had gotten off the grid for the purpose of eliminating all distraction from his life and to find some kind of inner focus. The email and social networking sites, the text messages, microblogs, and forgotten passwords. Yet now that he was alone again he found it impossible to concentrate.

Hours passed him by while he sat in the garden or hiked until his feet bled into the sneakers that weren't designed for long distances. The sheep grew accustomed to him and no longer regarded him suspiciously or drifted away when
he approached—they ignored him and the bells around their necks stayed quiet. He carried books with him and would stop in a shepherd's abandoned enclosure to try to read and sometimes snooze. He wouldn't return to Barnhill until it had grown dark, and, because he always neglected to leave the lights on, he arrived home to invisible, shin-bruising furniture and, every few days, another animal carcass on the doorstep.