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.
HE 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.