Burning Down George Orwell's House (19 page)

ORWELL WAS AN OPTIMIST
. That was what did it. He had to accept Bud's offer. He could suck it up, bide his time, and ride it out. The fracking campaign couldn't go on forever and afterward he would partner with a wind farm or whatever would help him pay down some of his karmic debt. With his tech skills and the company's clout, Ray would be able to create the world's most effective campaign to raise awareness about global warming.

He was going to do it. Of course he was going to do it. Fuck. He would deal with the personal ramifications later. He took out his phone and texted Bud:

Even if he did hate himself for the rest of his life, there would be plenty of time to deal with that and plenty of scotch to help him do so.

Bud wrote back right away:

Ray powered off his phone and went home. The apartment smelled like old coffee. His face stared back at him from the metal door of the refrigerator. It had a million questions.
What is it you want? Where are you going?
It was insane—he had just received an enormous promotion and yet it was the worst day of his professional career. He filled a rocks glass with ice, covered the cubes with his first scotch of the afternoon, and stirred it with a finger, which he sucked dry.

T
UESDAY AFTERNOON ANNOUNCED ITSELF
with an excess of sunlight and another bad dream about some hooded figure hammering hot iron nails into his eyelids. An idea had come to him in the night so he texted Bud on his way out the door:

It wasn't really stealing, but Bud was more likely to help
if he thought there was something illegal involved. The response came right away:

In the sunlit coffee shop, serenaded by world music so goddamn redemptive it bordered on torture, Ray inched forward in line. Since moving to the neighborhood he had come in every morning on his way to work and had never seen the same barista twice. A gargantuan child strapped into a stroller behind him kicked at him while its mother negotiated on the phone with a series of unwilling nannies and babysitters. By her fifth call, she pleaded and tripled her usual payout, but to no avail. Zithers and harps and a chorus of ethereal female voices conspired in Icelandic or Welsh or Hindi to beat him into more senseless consumption. Steam hissed from a machine behind the counter as if the whole place was about to explode and take a city block with it. It would have felt so good to turn around and kick that little fucker right back. His pre-ordered coffee waited for him to get to the front of the line.

He sat in the front windows, the shop's sunniest spot. The table teetered and threatened to spill his drink. He removed his favorite, disintegrating white oxford and draped it over his chair. His T-shirt said
OIL HOGG
in dripping letters. He was halfway through his coffee when one of Helen's colleagues from the Department of English walked in. He had met Dr.
Walter Pentode at any number of department functions. He looked out of breath. The man sweated even on the most blustery days of winter, and on a day like this one the stains on his shirt looked like deflated basketballs tucked in his armpits. The sunlight made his freckled head glisten beneath his comb-over. A scholar of Victorian literature, Pentode insisted upon speaking in air quotes in order to maintain a winking distance from the world beyond his fleshy borders and to avoid intellectual commitments of any kind. He came from old money and was said to be worth millions. He was also counted among the nation's foremost experts on operetta librettos. He kept an apartment in Vienna and as a matter of routine flew around the globe for the sake of attending his prissy concerts. He oozed stable mediocrity; academia was a hobby that suited him perfectly. He squeezed past a few tables and joined the end of the line with a huff.

Ray didn't want to be spotted so he ducked his head and turned his chair to face the window, but a shadow fell over the table. Pentode loomed above, holding a grasso-sized iced chocolate-malt coffee and a trio of crumbling selections from the dessert case. Ray's table was one of the few with an unoccupied chair.

“Hello, Raymond. Fancy seeing you here. Do you mind if I sit?”

“I—”

“I'm so sorry I'm late!” Flora said. She maneuvered herself around Pentode, then dropped her messenger bag onto the
floor and flopped onto the chair. She had on a red hoodie and matching sweatpants. She had appeared just in time and read the scene perfectly.

Ray smiled at Pentode. “I'm terribly sorry, but this is my colleague Flora. We're holding an important business meeting right now.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Flora said. She had a habit of wearing multiple men's colognes at once, which she would rub on from magazine samples. Pentode's mouth twitched, sending wave-like ripples through his jowls. “And later, we're going to Ray's apartment to have consensual sex.”

Pentode dropped his coffee, splattering the sneakers at the surrounding tables with syrupy goo. People stopped mid-sentence to stare. Ray's white shirt took the brunt of the blast. Pentode stammered something incomprehensible through his bacon-greased lips.

“She's … she's only joking, Dr. Pentode, I assure you. Tell him you're only joking.”

Pentode stared down at the stains on his boat shoes. His mouth continued to open and close like that of a puffer fish about to be rendered into fugu.

“I'm only joking,” Flora said. She raised her arms to high-five Ray over the table. “It won't be consensual at all!” she yelled. “Woo, yeah!”

“That's … that's terribly inappropriate,” Ray said. He covered his mouth with his fingers, but a small laugh leaked out. It wasn't funny, but he couldn't help it. Pentode turned and
left a trail of coffee-colored footprints. Flora, fake pouting, dropped her arms. She had been out of line, but laughter rattled in Ray's lungs. “Holy shit,” he said. He couldn't breathe. He laughed because he could, and he kept laughing because he couldn't help it. Pentode's version of events wouldn't go over very well with Helen. “And aren't you supposed to be at work?”

“Aren't you?” Flora asked. “I snuck out to go to the gym.”

“I'm glad you're here—I'd actually like to talk to you about your future.”

“My future? That sounds serious.”

“I'm building a team for a new project, and I want to bring you on full time.”

“That's very sweet, but I have other plans. I've decided to quit. As soon as I can save up some money, I'm leaving the country. I want to open a battered women's shelter/art gallery in the slums of Caracas, maybe start a non-profit to hand out reusable feminine hygiene products to impoverished girls. Not to be rude, but I don't want any more part of your corporate death culture.”

“I respect that more than you probably realize, but can we at least talk about it?”

“I'll hear you out, but trust me—I'm going to say no. Let's get dinner tonight.”

“Dinner?”

“Yes, it's the meal that happens in the nighttime. I'll meet you at your place at seven.”

“My place? Are we really going to have consens—?”

“No. You asked me to hear you out and I will. I just want to see what you're like in your native habitat. Text me the address.” She stood and when she picked up her backpack Ray caught himself involuntarily looking down the scissored-wide collar of her sweatshirt. She had nothing on underneath. “I need some caffeine,” she said. “See you at seven.” With the line now gone, she stepped straight up to the counter. A little cloud of cologne lingered behind. The letters on the seat of her sweatpants advertised the sorority Alpha Sigma Sigma. Flora stood at the condiments bar, where she poured half of her coffee into the garbage and refilled it with soymilk and four packets of brown sugar. Ray waved to her on her way out the door, but she looked straight through him. Bovine splotches covered his shirt and they appeared permanent. He wrung some coffee onto the floor and stopped at the dry cleaner's on his way home.

R
AY SPENT THE REMAINDER
of the day trying to straighten up again. Even though nothing was going to happen between them, the idea of Flora coming over carried with it the fear of transgressing some boundary. He needed to stay on his best behavior. Pentode had likely already told Helen about the scene in the coffee shop and Ray's apparently sexual relationship with a woman over a decade his junior. Thanks to that asshole's flapping gums, she would assume that he was sleeping with Flora.

So that was it.

If Helen was so sure he was screwing Flora, the worst thing Ray could do was to confirm her suspicions. Not fucking Flora was the same thing as fucking Flora as long as his wife believed that he was fucking Flora.

Of course, there was no reason to consider the possibility that Flora was interested in that kind of relationship, and in the morning Ray would get the opportunity to set the record straight with Helen even if it meant lying to her.

Music—Flora would want to listen to music. Ray hadn't purchased a CD in five years and didn't like the idea of downloading songs because he found it difficult to spend money on immaterial products. Helen had maintained possession of all their jazz and soul albums. Another example of poor planning on his part. What little music he owned consisted of rap from his adolescence and college days. Time had relegated it to oldies stations and infomercials. Companies like Logos were now using the edgiest and most radical music from his youth in ads for luxury cars.

The sign above the windowless store said
P.M
., which served as both the name of the place and its daily hours of operation. Ray had walked past it a hundred times and never seen anyone come or go. Were it not for a tip from one of the interns he would have thought it was an exclusive nightclub or an illegal, happy-ending massage parlor. It looked like no music store he had ever been in. The shelves were arranged to form a maze and their immense height made it impossible to see other parts of the shop.

A series of round blinking lights built into the clear plastic floor tracked his movement. He followed them toward the checkout counter in the center of the shop, zigzagging past every manner of analog and digital recorded media, from vintage video-game cartridges to 8 mm movie reels to computer floppy disks in unrecognizable sizes. A tribal-tattooed fourteen-year-old sat at the counter attaching sticky notes to his knuckles with a stapler. “Yeah?” he asked.

“I need some music,” Ray said.

The kid blinked at him. “Good thing you're in a music store. Ow!” On his nametag, beneath
HELLO MY NAME IS
he had written in “Hello My Name Is.” He fingered the buttons of an unseen keyboard built into the glass counter. “Follow the red light. The upload stations have everything you need,” he said and dismissed Ray with a wave of his bleeding hand.

The white light at his feet turned red and then the subsequent ones did too, one after the other, directing him deeper into the maze.

“But I don't have anything to upload to.”

“Try your phone. Ow!”

“Why would I want to listen to music on my phone?”

The kid put the stapler down and twisted the buds of his nascent dreadlocks. “I'm guessing you're too old to spin vinyl.”

“Too old? What? I was spinning vinyl before you were ev—”

“Do you have a CD—excuse me, a compact disc—player at home?”

“Yeah, where do you keep the—?”

“The old-school hip-hop is in zone six. Follow the red light,” he said and returned to his stapler.

The bulb at Ray's feet blinked impatiently. He went the opposite direction and browsed the shelves. P.M. was equal parts record shop, museum, and graveyard haunted by the ghosts of technologies past. Not including the clerk, he heard at least three other people brush through other parts of the store, but he didn't see any customers. The sound of the stapler and the yelped obscenities helped him maintain his bearing. The whole place smelled like fruity air freshener. He went back to the checkout counter. A sticky note reading “Ow!” was stuck to the back of the clerk's hand. “How about some new music? What's current?”

“Kimagure.”

“Never heard of them.”

“I'm Kimagure,” said a scrawny bleach-blond Asian kid behind the cash register who Ray hadn't noticed. His skin was so pale that he looked translucent even in his ugly patterned T-shirt. He might have been standing there the entire time. “You need a turntable,” he said. “Follow me.”

The clerk glided through the shop without the slightest hint of bodily motion. The lights in the floor followed behind him like a trained pet. He stopped at a glass display case containing twenty-four record players of monstrous complexity. “This one,” he said, pointing. “Wait here.” He left Ray to admire the machines. The model he had
pointed to had a $1,200 price tag. It was the cheapest of the bunch.

Kimagure reappeared from the opposite direction and handed over a box with a label printed in a language Ray didn't recognize. “Follow me,” he said.

He led Ray through the store, plucking a dozen plastic-wrapped record albums from the sleek shelving units. Ray lost his breath and any sense of direction. His footsteps sounded labored, which made him realize that the place was silent: a music store that didn't play music. Kimagure twisted past miles of reel-to-reel spools and MP3 players and even a small section of player-piano rolls, and then stopped back at the cash register, where Ray charged $1,900 to a credit card he still shared with Helen.

“These will get you started,” Kimagure said. “It's all underground shit. Limited pressings. Very collectable.”