ANGUS: Right, look, I’m not looking to get on the bottling line. I’m talking about an idea that’s going to revolutionize the industry, understand. We’re—
ENERGY DRINK EXEC: I’m afraid I have another meeting in a few minutes, I’m going to have to ask you—
At this point in the transcript, the fibers began to scream and there was something in the background that might or might not have been scuffling.
Angus snapped the tape off a bit sheepishly here. “I could easily edit this out, but this is only for the purposes of courtroom evidence on the off-chance that they go off and develop a product and steal my idea.”
Anytime Angus and Sasha get together, Pete gets nervous because Angus is the exploding supernova of creativity and Pete more akin to a minor planet or a major asteroid in the Angus-verse. He’s paranoid that after Angus leaves, Sasha will be like “Who are you again?” But the reality when they all hang out is far different, as if Sasha and Angus are on the far sides of an awkward chasm which if not the size of the Grand Canyon is at least a midsized canyon. When he picks up Sasha, he will sometimes avoid mention of Uncle Angus because he is afraid she’ll beg and plead to see him, having outgrown her father like one of those shellfish that ditches its shell at the first sign of cracking. Sometimes he’ll ask her if she wants to see her uncle, a test. “Nah, not today,” she says. Maybe Angus is too out there, too weird. Maybe they butt heads too much for the alpha position because of her own headstrength.
Angus, he supposes, could be seen as a kind of an idea bully. Let’s say that Pete wanted to play pirates and Angus wanted to play Rooftop Apocalypse. The latter won out every time. If Pete was lucky, Angus would allow him to don an eye patch or deliver his lines in a vaguely piratical vernacular. Angus had this charisma, too, so that it wasn’t just with Pete that Angus reigned but also with the neighborhood kids. When Pete read the Great Brain books, he knew for a fact that he was J.D. and Angus was Tom, though he sort of felt that Angus could have benefited from a bit of Mormon discipline, something to balance out his largely-unchecked power.
The legends have it that their father was a genius in his own right. In his time, he’d invented a new kind of pickle that was, to the best of Pete’s understanding, inside out, and tried to start a company that would soundscape people’s homes. There were others, as well. None of these ventures came to a good end. It seemed as if Angus had picked up their father’s ingenuity, while Pete had inherited his patience and gumption. Everyone could see what a shame it was that these traits had been doled out to two distinct sons. Really, Angus and Pete’s father’s ultimate invention would have been a way to combine Angus and Pete. If you took all of Angus’s schemes and Pete’s persistence — his willingness to drive hundreds of miles just to show off a fancy new copier feature, to get down and boogie with the toner cartridge with a flamenco dancer’s passion and flourishes, a cumulonimbus of toner dust kicking up all about him, which he’d then proceed to mop up with equal precision, although segueing here into more of a waltz — combined with his diligence as a dad — the methodical child-support payments that trumped the need for hot water, his front and centerness at every parent-teacher conference, his good sportitude in being sole dad at the Thursday playgroup and the steady stream of birthday soirees and so forth, you’d have an unbeatable amalgam, Superman and Batman in a single body.
Needless to say, it didn’t work that way. Instead, Pete and Angus stagger around like severed halves of a whole. It’s like that parable about the blind men and the elephant, except that the blind men are right after all, they are all petting different things, and it is these disembodied autonomous quarter-elephants that are blind, too. And let’s face it, having these traits combined into one hadn’t worked out for their dad to begin with, so maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Maybe crossing Batman and Superman is an evolutionary dead end, a nonstarter, an übermule.
If Pete were looking to hop into another relationship — and let him be clear that he is not — he could find worse places to go than Sir Playalot! It is impossible to justify coming here when the weather doesn’t necessitate it, and yet he wonders what would happen if he were to become a regular, whether he’d find himself striking up conversations with other regulars. There aren’t all that many options for things to do with kids in this town, and so you will see the same four or five parent-kid units in successive places — the library for story hour, the make-your-own-pottery place, and this. Everyone is aware of what the place used to be, before the building burned down in a suspicious fire — nobody wants to suggest that in this family-oriented community there is a nonnegligible market for porn, no more than anyone here would use gasoline for anything other than filling up their car or lawn mower. But still. A SWAT team of forensic anthropologists wasn’t exactly called in to survey the aftermath and sift through the evidence. The owner of the adult store lived off in the city, and those who worked at the Inner Emporium were quickly rehired to work in the new stores that went up in the minimall.
Those new stores are morally unassailable — a high-end coffee shop (all organic, or “organical,” as Pete refers to it after Sasha), a carpet import store, a portraitist and podiatrist (oddly enough, side by side, so that one must pay extra-close attention or risk comic encounter), a couple of therapists, a standardized-test tutoring center. Pete contemplates what it would be like to work at one of these stores. It would be tolerable, he decides, if you rotated — on Monday, you serve up lattes; on Tuesday, you unfurl some carpets; on Wednesday, you are spitting out rapid-fire logic puzzles to overprepared high school sophomores and underprepared law school applicants. But to go to any one of these places day in and day out? He’s lucky, Pete is, that he gets to travel all over the place for the copiers, that he’s not penned in. But it’s not luck, it’s choice. Or is it? These days he’s been looking at the scant classified ads every morning, staring at the same ones again and again. How long will it be before he swallows his pride, untucks his chin, and marches without shame into each and every one of these stores with a stack of résumés (copied, at least, for free)?
For the next few Saturdays and Sundays and Wednesdays, Pete hopes for another rainy day so that he can maybe see her again, the woman. Hanh’s mom. Mrs. Hanh. Ms. Hanh-Beatrice-Kaminski-Thorunsson. Her name could be anything. It seems only right that the world should present her to him again, with or without Sasha. For he doesn’t need Sasha, right? Surely they can make conversation without the safety net of kookily endearing, incorrigible kids. He tries to find her online. Maybe she is a famous researcher. But typing in the name of their town (and the neighboring ones) and fungus and Hanh isn’t very helpful, although he learns some facts about athlete’s foot and that Hanh is a Vietnamese name.
In an effort to meet destiny halfway, he takes himself places he wouldn’t otherwise. He dredges up outfits that haven’t been dry-cleaned in eons, takes them in. If business picks up, he could need them as soon as tomorrow. Plus, he’s pretty sure the woman who works there is Vietnamese. If only they could get past the nuts and bolts of garment-readiness dates, he might be able to ask her about life in Vietnam, which could be interesting in its own right. Beyond that, he explores various veins of intrigue, actual or potential — in antiques, in tchotchkes, in cheese. If only there were a mushroom specialty shoppe. Maybe he ought to venture out into the woods.