The Broom of the System (42 page)

“The story behind that has to do with this girl who was just such hot shit that I let her run the show, for a bit of time,” Lang said, crossing and uncrossing his legs on the plastic bench.

“Not Lenore Beadsman.”

“No, course not Lenore Beadsman.” Lang signalled for another beer, and the bartender over there in his white hat gave him a thumbs-up. “My wife,” Lang said to Obstat. “The girl who’s my wife.”

“Really hot, huh?”

“Don’t want to talk about it.”

“Sure.” Obstat sipped his Twizzler. “But you mentioned something about Lenore Beadsman, when you called.”

“Did I?”

“Positive.”

“Huh. Well she works at the place I’m workin’ at, translating your wild shit for you.”

“Stuff is wild, isn’t it?” Obstat squirmed on his seat. “Boy I’m excited, is all I can say. This is the sort of thing a corporate chemist just dreams of. I thought I’d be spending all my time testing pH levels in creamed fruit.”

“I just can’t believe the shit works. Does it really work at all like y‘all are havin’ us say in this ad?”

“Really looks like it does, guy. The Chief has been ga-ga for months. Kids are talking months, maybe years before they would have, in limited tests. We’re talking not only eventual market domination, but a potentially really significant insight into the relation between nutrition and mental development, between what the body needs and the mind can do.”

The bartender, coming over with Lang’s fourth beer, slipped on a strategically placed maraschino cherry and pitched headlong into Ginger’s chest. He missed his eye with his thumb, but did manage to crack his head nastily on the plastic table. Beer flew everywhere.

Obstat laughed and clapped with everyone else, “Aww, Gilligan.” He bent and quickly tied the bartender’s shoelaces together.

“What about my beer?” Lang was saying.

“Coming right up,” the bartender murmured. He was on his feet and moving when the shoelaces got him. He somersaulted into and off of Mrs. Howell’s hair, ending up draped over her pince-nez.

Obstat giggled.

“Immature fucker,” Lang grinned.

“Got to get into the spirit of the place.”

Lang sucked off the last bit of beer in his bottle. “But you say you do know this Beadsman girl, then,” he said to Obstat.

Obstat got serious. “Do I ever,” he said. “I went to high school with her, when we were kids. I’ve had a crush since I was this high. She’s maybe even a reason why I went to work for Stonecipheco. Unconscious or something. Except I had no idea she didn’t like her Dad and didn’t want to go into the Company. I’m pissed. I only got to see her in person again the other day, when we were all in the Chief’s office. The Chief is her Dad. And one of their relatives got us going on the whole pineal project, and now she’s trying to rip us off. But I can still pull it off. Except I think Lenore’s frigid. I made a bit of a dick of myself over her in school, and I was going for heavy eye contact, in the Chiefs office. But she always just looked right through me. I think she’s frigid.”

Lang accepted another beer without looking up. “But hot, though, too.”

Obstat fingered his tie. “Don’t know what it is about her, Wanger. The girl’s just always slayed me. The way she dresses, the not incidental gazonga factor. And her legs. The single most out-of-this. world pair of legs I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“I was noticin’ those legs,” Lang said, nodding.

“I’ve had this wild fantasy, for who knows how long, about doing her out in the G.O.D.,” Obstat said, looking faraway. He looked back at Lang and blushed a bit. “You been back out there, lately, at all? I’ve been dying to go. I still remember when we planted cacti.”

“We can go any time you want,” said Lang. “I’m gonna buy some sort of car for out here tomorrow, I decided. Lenore’s little boyfriend’s paying me like the money hurt his hand.”

“Boyfriend?”

“This guy named Vigorous, owns the firm we’re at, or at least part of it.” Lang looked off over Obstat’s shoulder, at the Skipper.

“I remember the Chief saying something to her about a Vigorous, in his office,” Obstat said, narrowing his little brown eyes. He dug at his Twizzler’s plastic pineapple jug with a straw.

“He’s a interesting little dung beetle. Doublest chin I ever did see on a human being.” Lang drank deeply. “How’d he get hold of Lenore, I wonder, if she’s so all-fired hot as you say.”

“There is no God in the universe, Wang-Dang,” Obstat said, shaking his big head.

“So I keep getting told. Even though the girl herself owns this wild-ass bird that’s gonna be on religious TV, with padre Sykes, who’s my own personal Daddy’s favorite.” Lang held up a bandaged finger. “Little Fucker damn near took my digit off, yesterday.”

“You were at Lenore’s house, with her bird?”

Lang stared silently at Obstat.

“Well, we know all about the bird thing,” Obstat said, looking away and shaking his head. “We’re shitting all kinds of different bricks over that one. We think what happened was this relative who got us going on the project slipped the thing a pineal mickey. Which means maybe they’re going around slipping it all over the place. Which means other companies could get hold of it. Which has the Chief shitting bricks, believe you me—that along with the fact that the retards in Jars have made something like three times as many jars as we need, or have lids for, even, so the Chief has to try to sell some jars to this chain of medical laboratories, and he‘s—”

“This crap can make animals talk?” Lang interrupted.

“Well, our understanding is the bird doesn’t talk, so much as just repeat.”

“... remember Candy did say something about that.”

“Who?”

“They got peanuts in this bar, at all?”, Lang said. They both looked around. “What kind of self-respectin’ bar doesn’t have peanuts?”

“Coconut I know they’ve got. It’s a mood place.”

“Shit on fire.”

“But anyway we don’t really know what it can do. You ought to hear some of these kids. They can sing like birds.”

“Some joke.”

“No pun intended.”

Lang stared absently into Ginger’s décolletage. “So she’s hot, then, and things with her Daddy aren’t too good.”

“My impression is they aren’t close at all.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Listen, you want to see a picture of her?” Obstat dug for his wallet in the back pocket of his Chinos.

“I know what she looks like,” Lang said. Then he looked up at Obstat in surprise. “You carry her picture?”

“The little lady has smitten me from afar, since way back who knows when,” Obstat said, shaking his head and flipping through his credit cards. “I admit it’s a pitiful situation.”

“This an old picture you got?”

“High school yearbook.”

“Give it here, then.”

Obstat handed over the little wallet photo. In the picture Lenore was sixteen. Her hair was very long. She was smiling broadly, looking off into the nothing reserved especially for yearbook photos.

Lang stared down at the picture. He brushed away a bit of beer foam from the border with a thumb. Lenore smiled at him, through him.

“Looks to be her, all right.”

Obstat was bouncing up and down in his seat. “Listen, stay a few more minutes. It’ll be time for another gag in a while. And have a look at that one over there, at Mary-Ann, with the little guy in the beard and steamed glasses. Looks a little spacey, but talk about your basic gazongas.”

Lang kept looking at the photo. He seemed to be about to say something.

“Maybe even inclined to say big mistake here, Rick.”

“Don’t be silly. It’s an absolute inspiration. I was positively writhing with excitement at the prospect of telling you, last night. And then of course you conked out. Again.”

“But I like the switchboard. You know that. And it even looks like the lines are going to get fixed soon. They’re going to do tests.”

“Lenore, you are in a position to do me a favor. Actually to help both of us, I think. This will be deeply interesting, I promise. I’ve seen that you’re chafing, at the switchboard, deep down.”

“Beg pardon?”

“You can save me valuable weeding-time.”

“How can Norslan translations take so much time? That’s not a long thing.”

“....”

“And what’s with the light in here right now? This is creepy.”

“Frigging shadow ...”

“We need to have a serious talk about the windows in the lobby, too, mister. I’m starting not to care one bit for the way the—”

“Come here a moment. See the way the lake looks like rotten mayonnaise in the shadow-half of the window? Doesn’t that look like rotten mayonnaise?”

“Oh, that’s just sick.”

“But doesn’t it?”

“It really does.”

“I thought so.”

“OK, so what does this involve, then?”

“What?”

“This hopefully very temporary
Review
job.”

“It simply involves screening a portion of the back submissions to the quarterly, for a time, the time I’m to be frantically busy with the herbicide thing. You’ll be weeding out the more obviously pathetic or inappropriate submissions, and putting asterisks on those that strike you as meriting particular attention and consideration on my part.”

“Hmm.”

“We’ll need to make sure your tastes are keened to the proper pitch for our particular publication, of course ...”

“You’re going to keen the pitch of my tastes?”

“Relax. I’m simply going to have you read briefly through a batch I’ve already exposed myself to, and we’ll just see what happens, taste-pitch-wise. You’ll be having a preliminary look at ... these.”

“All those are submissions?”

“I shall say that most are. Some few might for all you know have been sent to me by friends for scrutiny and criticism. But I’ve effaced all names.”

“So it’s not all just troubled-college-student stuff?”

“The bulk of it is, to my ever-increasing irritation and distress. But the average collegiate material you should be able to spot a mile off.”

“How come?”

“Oh, dear, many reasons.”

“....“

“What shall we say? Perhaps that it tends to be hideously self-conscious. Mordantly cynical. Or, if not mordantly cynical, then simperingly naive. Or at any rate consistently, off-puttingly pretentious. Not to mention abysmally typed, of course.”

“....”

“It tries too hard, is really all we can say about most of it. There is simply an overwhelming sense of trying too hard. My, you’re looking particularly lovely in this half of the light.”

“Rick, how am I supposed to know if something’s mordant, or simpering? I don’t know anything about literature.”

“A, the vast majority of the material that passes through here is not even potentially literature, and b, good!”

“What’s good?”

“That you ‘know nothing about literature,’ or at least believe that you don’t. It means you’re perfect: fresh, intuitive, shaking the aesthetic chaff out of your hair ...”

“There’s something in my hair?”

“It’s when people begin to fancy that they actually know something about literature that they cease to be literarily interesting, or even of any use to those who are. You’re perfect, take it from me.”

“I don’t know ...”

“Lenore, what’s with you? Isn’t this the person who sees herself as almost by definition a word person? Who snarls when her literary sensibility is even potentially impugned?”

“I just want to try to keep my personal life and my job as separate as I can. I don’t need Walinda going around saying I got a cushy deal because of you.”

“But here’s your chance to be out of Walinda-range for whole periods of time.”

“And plus, Rick, I just have a bad feeling about the whole thing.”

“Trust me. Help me. Look, let’s take a couple of examples. How about this pathetically typed little item right here? Why don’t you just read the very first bit of it, here, and we’ll ...”

“This one?”

“Yes.”

“Let’s see: ‘Dr. Rudolph Carp, one of the world’s leading proc tologists, was doing a standard exam one warm July morning when he suddenly remembered that he had forgotten to put on an examination glove. He looked down with horror at ...’—oh, gak.”

“Gak indeed. Material like this can simply immediately be put in the rejection pile, on Mavis’s desk, and she will Xerox a terse little rejection slip to go with the returned manuscript.”

“What’s with these titles? ‘Dance of the Insecure’? ‘To the Mall’? ‘Threnody Jones and the Goat from Below’? ‘The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer’? ‘Love’? ‘A Metamorphosis for the Eighties’?”

“That last one is actually rather interesting. A Kafka parody, though sensitively done. Self-loathing-in-the-midst-of-adulation piece. Collegiate, but interesting.”

“ ‘As Greg Sampson awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he discovered that he had been transformed into a rock star. He gazed down at his red, as it were leather-clad, chest, the top of which was sprinkled with sequins and covered with a Fender guitar strapped tightly across his leather shoulders. It was no dream.’ Hmmm.”

“Read it over at your leisure. There are some interesting ones. There’s one about a family trying to decide whether to have the grandmother’s gangrenous feet amputated—you should vibrate sympathetically with that one. There’s one about a boy who puts himself through prep school selling copies of the
Physicians’ Desk Reference
in the halls. One about a woman who hires herself out at exorbitant rates as a professional worrier and griever for the sick and dying ...”

“ ‘Elroy’s problem was that he had a tender pimple, on his forehead, right in the spot where his forehead creased when he looked surprised, which was often.’ Gak. Rejection. ‘So it finally happened. Bob Kelly, busy checking out the rear end of his neighbor. Mrs. Ernst as she bent to retrieve a mitten, ran over his son, Miles, with the snowblower.’ Double gak. Double rejection.”