The fact psychic lives part-time in the world of fractious, boiling minutiae that no one knows or could be bothered to know even if they had the chance to know. The population of Brunei. The difference between mucus and sputum. How long a piece of gum has resided on the underside of the third-row fourth-from-left seat of the Virginia Theater, Cranston RI, but not who put it there or why. Impossible to predict what facts will intrude. Constant headaches. The data sometimes visual and queerly backlit, as by an infinitely bright light an infinite distance away. The amount of undigested red meat in the colon of the average forty-three-year-old adult male resident of Ghent, Belgium, in grams. The relation between the Turkish lira and the Yugoslavian dinar. The year of death for undersea explorer William Beebe.
Tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person’s weight, shoe size, bowling average, American Legion career batting average; he knows the dimensions of the room that person is in right now. Overwhelming.
§ 16
Lane Dean Jr. and two older examiners from a different Pod are outside one of the unalarmed door exits between Pods, on a hexagram of cement surrounded by maintained grass, watching the sun on the fallow fields just south of the REC. None of them are smoking; they’re just being outside for a bit. Lane Dean hasn’t come outside with the other two; he just happened to step out for air on the break at the same time. He’s still looking for a really desirable, diverting place to go during breaks; they’re too important. The other two guys know each other or work on the same team; they’ve come out together; one senses it’s a routine of long standing.
One of the men gives a sort of artificial-looking gap and stretch. ‘Jeez,’ he says. ‘Well, Midge and I went over to the Bodnars’ on Saturday. You know Hank Bodnar, from over in K-team at Capital Exams, with the glasses with the lenses that turn dark by themselves outside, what are they called.’ The man has his hands behind his back and goes up and down on his toes rapidly, like someone waiting for a bus.
‘Uh-huh.’ The other man, who’s perhaps five years younger than the man who went to the Bodnars’, is contemplating some kind of benign cyst or growth on the inside of his wrist. The heat is accumulating at mid-morning, and the electric sound of the locusts in the wild grasses rises and falls in the parts of the fields the sun is striking. Neither man has introduced himself to Lane Dean, who’s standing farther from them than they are from each other, though not so far away that he could be seen as wholly disconnected from the conversation. Maybe they’re giving him privacy because they can see he’s new and still adjusting to the unbelievable tedium of the exam job. Maybe they’re shy and awkward and not sure how to introduce themselves. Lane Dean, whose slacks have ridden up so far he’d have to go into a stall in a men’s room to extract them, feels like running out into the fields in the heat and running in circles and flapping his arms.
‘We were supposed to go over the weekend before, the what, the seventh that would be,’ the first man says, looking out at a vista with nothing really particular to hold the eye, ‘but our youngest had a temperature and a little bit of a sore throat, and Midge didn’t want to leave her with the sitter if she had a temperature. So she called to cancel, and Midge and Alice Bodnar worked it out so we all just moved it up a week, seven days to the day, that way it was easy to remember. You know how mama bears get when their little cubs run a temperature.’
‘Don’t have to tell me,’ Lane Dean inserts from several feet away, laughing a little too heartily. One shoe is in the shadow of the pod’s overhang and one is in the morning sun. Lane Dean is starting now to feel desperate about the fact that the break’s fifteen minutes are ticking inexorably away and he is going to have to go back in and examine returns for another two hours before the next break. There’s an empty Styrofoam cup on its side in the ashtray unit of a small waste can in the alcove. Being in a conversation makes the time pass differently; it’s not clear whether it’s better or worse. The other man is still examining his wrist’s thing, holding the forearm up like a surgeon after scrubbing. If you think of the locusts as actually screaming, the whole thing becomes much more unsettling. The normal protocol is not to hear them; they cease to register on you after a while.
‘So anyhow,’ the first examiner says. ‘We go over, have a drink. Midge and Alice Bodnar get to talking about some new drapes they’re looking at for the living room, on and on. Pretty dry stuff, wife stuff. So Hank and me end up in the den, because Hank he collects coins — seriously, he’s a serious coin collector from what I could see, not just those cardboard albums with circular holes, he really knows his business. And he wanted to show me a picture of a coin he was thinking about acquiring, for his collection.’ The other man had looked up for the first real time when the guy telling the story mentioned coin collecting, which is a hobby that to Lane Dean, as a Christian, has always seemed debased and distorted in a number of ways.
‘A nickel, I think,’ the first fellow is saying. He keeps lapsing into what seems like almost talking to himself, while the second man starts and stops examining the growth thing. You get the idea that this is the sort of interchange the two men have had on breaks for many, many years — it’s such a habit it’s not even conscious anymore. ‘Not a buffalo nickel, but some kind of five-cent piece with an alternate backing that’s well-known; I don’t know much about coins but even I’d heard of it, which means it must be pretty well-known. But I can’t think of the correct term for it.’ He laughs in a way that sounds almost pained. ‘Right out of my head. I can’t remember it now.’