Night Ops
ALL-NEW PVC-coated, pressure-sensitive, UV-resistant flexible-face vinyl. A building wrap, a bulletin. Not a billboard. This plastic hugged and clung to the brick face. And it was enormous, the whole wall of a building, with one hole for the lone window on that side. It upset Henry that they couldn’t even bother with painting anymore. The quaint ghost signs still visible fifty years later on the old brick. No, this was a computer-generated image, sleek and instantly reproducible. But not, at least, immune to the effects of a Stanley knife, a pair of decent bolt cutters, or any bladed implement. In fact, it was a fairly low-tech endeavor to cut these vinyl wraps down. But physically it was demanding — the sheer size of the job, the time constraints on accomplishing it, the low light available to do the work required — all conspired to nearly undo Henry.
Three times Henry undid their ad: the beginning of May, the end of July, and on September 3, his birthday. And three times the same ad was restored. They were in a dialogue, a private battle of wills. Go ahead, Henry thought, I got nothing but time. But it wasn’t true. Clearly they would outlast him. And what would he have accomplished? It wasn’t an appropriation. A displacement. An edit. A postmodern modification or improvement. A détournement. None of that. It was just his get-gone will. And it was his undeniable, get-gone need.
PART THREE. 1972–1973
Speck in the Cosmos
BY THE TIME the bus reached Portland, Oregon, Mary had been Caroline for two days. Caroline had pulled her newly blond hair into a low ponytail. She pulled two tendrils loose over each ear and curled them into short spirals on her finger, blasting each with hair spray. She wore large round plastic sunglasses. It was decidedly different — she and Bobby always wore similar wire-framed National Health — type glasses, her hair always center-parted and pushed flat behind each ear. A carefully executed carefree look. Mary occasionally had snuck concealer here and there, but overt makeup was plastic, frivolous and shallow. Now, as Caroline, she put on some coral lipstick and felt unrecognizably safe. And as Caroline she hitched a ride south to Eugene and got the first job she applied for, cooking in a cafe. She would have made more money waitressing, but she wanted to be on the line cooking, hidden from view. And no one wanted a Social Security card or a driver’s license or even an address or a last name. They wanted to pay you under the table, in a white envelope of cash, just like the illegal Mexicans who prepped food and washed dishes and bused tables. And the apartment wasn’t so hard either, someone looking to rent out the space over his garage, a notice tacked to the co-op’s community board. All you needed was a security deposit, no lease, no credit checks required. And there was no reason not to trust her. She was hardworking and well groomed and inconspicuously average; and at night Caroline sat up in her bed and struggled to breathe, her throat tight and hard with fear.
She saw most-wanted posters in her head, her college picture. In her dreams she ran into people she knew, classmates and neighbors. She tried to say, No I’m not her, you must be mistaken, but then she would get confused and blurt out her name. Shout it, Freya, Mary. Caroline. She dreamt of jail cells and trials. Of Fred Hampton’s mattress. She even dreamt of telling them about Bobby, betraying him and saving herself. And she would wake up disoriented and ashamed. It would confuse her for a moment; then relief would start to come as she remembered that she hadn’t been caught, that it was only a bad dream, and then horror as she realized she was in hiding; that part was not a dream but her life now. She was Caroline from Hawthorne, California. Caroline Sherman. She had had a bad relationship. She had left Los Angeles to start over. This would suffice — people would find it quite reasonable for a woman to change her life over a bad love.
It had been fifteen days. Years would go by before she stopped counting days.
She cut vegetables in piles. She trimmed red peppers with wet hands until she became sore from it. She cut mushrooms, she piled them into prep containers for the line. My mise en place, she said, and the other line guys stared at her. “What, your Mr. Plas?” They laughed. She knew she was the garde manger, but they just called her the cold side. That’s me all right, the cold side. She threw lettuce in the stainless steel bowl with sprouts and sunflower seeds and just the right amount of dressing. She tossed it in the bowl with only one hand, just short jerks of her lower arm as she held the rim.
She made an odd discovery — no one asked her anything. She had her carefully worked-out tale of love lost — just enough Bobby to ring true. She realized or guessed that one day she would get to the point where she wouldn’t even know what was true and what she had made up. So she wouldn’t be lying any longer, even though some of it wasn’t true. Someday time would turn the lies into history. But she wasn’t there yet, a long way from it. Fortunately there was a kind of restaurant code that ignored people’s past. There was the dinner or lunch prep time, but talk was of baseball, or the song on the radio, or gas shortages, or the president, or how expensive rent was, or the guy in the news who killed his wife and two small children. No one said, “Caroline, why are you here?” “Where is your family?” “How old are you?” “What is your mother’s maiden name?” “What is your Social Security number?”
At the end of the shift some of the waiters and some of the kitchen staff would go next door to the Wheat Pub for a glass of thick, locally brewed beer or a cocktail. Caroline said no, she felt tired, and even that elicited barely a nod from the others. She was doing okay, she guessed. Twenty-eight days in and no problems except the airless terror that seemed to visit every evening.
Time just went by. There was of course the news. She hardly paid attention. She watched as the released American POWs from Vietnam walked down the steps from the planes and then fell to their knees on the tarmac and kissed the ground. The president seemed to be creeping toward disaster. It had nothing to do with her, nothing to do with them, any of it. She felt everything at a distance. She didn’t follow the Watergate scandal. But it was in the air she breathed. Breaking the law had become endemic. She saw the sweat on the president’s upper lip. She didn’t feel anything. No glee, no satisfaction. Instead she couldn’t stop thinking about Mrs. Mitchell self-destructing right on TV. Her sad, puffy hair. How even under all that stress and her obviously hysterical, perhaps drunk state, she maintained this elaborate, highly puffed coif. And then Mrs. Dean, also coifed, less puffy but equally blond, pale lipstick, shiny, polished face. Both of them stuck with their sweat-drenched husbands.
Faintly, barely, she told herself maybe no one cared about what she had done. She was like John Dean, who described himself to the press as just a “speck in the cosmos.” That was deeply reassuring, and it was also her worst fear. Time just went by.
Caroline walked nearly every evening to the food co-op. She bought bread and vegetables, a refillable plastic gallon jug of local beer. She found a glass of beer, or two, made the move from wake to sleep less fraught. She started a friendly rapport with one of the women at the co-op. She was a big blond girl, braless in a sleeveless T-shirt and proudly sloppy. She first smiled at Caroline, then started to say, Hey, how’s it going? An acquaintance like that is pleasant and then becomes tiring, as there isn’t much to say except Good. Just getting more stuff. How are you? And then you kind of wish the person didn’t work there anymore, so you could buy your things and not have the same conversation over and over. Caroline figured it would be like that. She was surprised when the woman introduced herself one day, about a month after the hellos began.