Easy and Hard Ways Out (8 page)

Subject: Memorandum of 11/19 from “Pythagoras”

Who is this maniac?

S. Rupp

SR:dl

OCCUPATIONAL HAZARDS

Mostly, the supervisors were insipid and the work dull and demeaning, but there came times, perhaps once in two years or three, when Brank would be at his desk, mechanically entering equations in his notebook, when suddenly a final line of symbols would jump into his consciousness, as if typed on his brain by an invisible coach. A final form, a relationship between sets of letters, a bit of universe modeled—and understood. He'd rush then to fill in the intermediate mathematics, his mind pushing his hands to work faster, to nourish the spark of his intuition. In his cerebrum, vast, pulsating nets of twinkling, coruscating neurons flashed electrochemical messages in a billion complex and recirculating patterns. And then it would be finished and he'd sit back, conscious suddenly that his mouth had been open and that he was thirsty. And he'd think: Imagine, I've done something no one else has done before. I know something no one else knows.

And for those very rare and precious seconds, being an engineer did not seem quite so bad.

Being an engineer was terrible. A sentence without end, a condemnation to an eternal, clerical purgatory.

“… have to also write out those purchase orders again,” Wizer was explaining. “They said you forgot to get a purchase-order number from the new book.”

“What new book?” asked Brank exasperatedly.

Wizer plunged ahead without answering. “Also you have to plot up the data Ah took last week before Ah can go ahead. An' don't forget, you're supposed to hand in your daily progress report before three
P.M.
New rule.”

Brank looked up forlornly from his paper-strewn, atrociously disordered desk. “Elton, how can I make a progress report when I didn't do anything?”

Wizer grinned slowly. “That never stopped you before.”

“Elton, help me,” said Brank. “I can't cope.”

“Oh, Mr. Ardway was around before while you were out,” said Wizer. “He said our test setup was dangerous, that the wave guides weren't well supported, and that the whole thing could fall over. He wanted to know whose setup it was.”

“He's crazy,” said Brank. “That petty, nit-picking, mealy-mouthed, brillo-haired son of a bitch is just, is just … Look what he picks to criticize.”

“Ah told him it was Dorfman's setup,” said Wizer. He grinned as the tiny alarm clock on Brank's desk began to buzz, indicating lunchtime.

“Don't be too hard on old Ardway,” said Wizer, walking away. “He's not as bad as he seems. His heart's in the right place.”

“But his brain,” Brank called after him. “His brain is next to his bowels.”

Brank tore the tinfoil from his sandwich and wolfed down the bread, scarcely tasting what was inside. His wife had failed to include an apple in his lunch for the second day in a row, and he knew that could only mean that she no longer loved him.

“I'd like to just get in my car, head west, and never come back,” he said to LoParino later, in the parking lot, as he tossed his Spauldine in the air. “I'd like to abandon my wife and kid, forget engineering, and just lie on a sunny California beach working out my problems with some failed starlet.”

“You're hopelessly insane,” said LoParino, standing motionless next to Brank.

“Why?” said Brank, lunging sideways to make a great one-handed grab. “Is it such a preposterous dream?”

“I meant about heading west,” said LoParino. “A rational person would've chosen south. But you said west.”

“Your mind is what's headed south,” said Brank.

“I know,” agreed LoParino, reluctantly. “I've snapped. I shook water on Lubell this morning. That moron. Sits there all day with his head down, writing, using up good paper, festering like a wound in his narrow technical corner. All of them. All those engineers. Give them their In boxes, a desk, and a slide rule and they get erections. They're professional pieces of card-board when it comes to unpaid overtime, but they're bawled out for being six minutes late in the morning. And for what? For peanuts. They don't even understand … money. Money is what it's all about. You can do anything with money. They have the world by the balls, and they don't even know to squeeze. Idiots!”

Brank watched his ball against a cloud. “But Mario, you are one,” he said.

“I know,” said LoParino. “I know. I thought there was money in it. Such a shmuck, I can't believe.”

“I think it was the newspaper ads,” said Brank. “I mean, I could've been anything. I could've been an archaeologist. I think it was the ads.”

LoParino was staring straight ahead, his shaven half confronting Brank, who continued his solitary game of catch. “Hey, Harv,” he said. “You serious about that leaving your wife and kid business?”

“Nah,” said Brank. “Are you crazy?”

“It's not so crazy,” said LoParino. “I don't have kids, you know. It's not so crazy.”

“You moved again, didn't you, Mario?”

“Yeah. Apartment number eleven for this year. I didn't like the landlord in the other place. Sullen bastard. Hungarian. Wouldn't fix anything.” LoParino looked at Brank. “You weren't about to ask me what I'm running from, were you? Or to tell me ‘You can't run away from yourself? You say that to me, Brank, you get three quick message units right in the chops.”

“I wouldn't say that,” said Brank, unbuttoning his jacket as a car pulled up alongside the parking-lot fence. “I believe you
can
run away from yourself. Shit, I've been attempting it for fifteen years. You ever hear of people who are trying to find themselves? Well, I'm trying to lose myself. No, I was just going to say that you have a certain responsibility to Ellen, that's all.”

An elderly woman rolled down a window in the car. “Go ahead,” she shouted to Brank. “Get pneumonia. See what happens then.” She drove off without waiting for a response.

“Who was that?” asked LoParino. “Did you know her?”

“No.”

“Who was she?”

“I don't know. Somebody's mother, no doubt. A generic mother. It doesn't matter.”

“See, she felt responsible for you,” said LoParino. “My responsibility feelings to anyone for anything are getting less and less. They're almost zero now in fact.”

“I don't think they ever become zero,” said Brank. “I mean, I have almost no regard at all for what happens here and yet I can't intentionally do a bad job. It's ingrown, I think. In the genes.”

“You have to make a conscientious effort to shirk responsibility,” said LoParino, as the one o'clock back-to-work whistle sounded and groups of men began heading toward the building entrance. “See them? That's the kind of conditioning you have to break.”

Brank caught the ball and stuffed it in his pocket. He began to walk. LoParino did not move. “You mean you're not coming?” called Brank.

“I'm almost there,” called LoParino, motionless. “Soon, Harvo. Soon.”

“Well, I did mine this morning,” said Brank, quickening his pace. “One a day is all I allow myself.”

“Your talk is always about the past,” yelled LoParino.

“I heard Ardway's in a bad mood,” yelled Brank.

“The man's a human mosquito,” shouted LoParino, his voice beginning to fade. “He buzzes around, sucks the lifeblood of everyone he contacts. He's got paralysis of the mind, cerebroplegia. He's not …”

Brank couldn't hear. It occurred to him then that, of late, LoParino's sense of humor had seemed to diminish, the first sign of something really wrong. His usual jaunty cynicism was increasingly being replaced by something sour and whining, refreshing negativism slowly congealing into sulky, pointless defiance. The changes were subtle so far, but there nevertheless. Brank wondered if anyone else had noticed, if Ellen …

But she must have. He entered the building. LoParino remained in the parking lot, a lone figure now, still shouting at him, gesturing.

THE SEX PROBLEMS OF ENGINEERS

In the fall, Brundage, a grown man in his middle fifties, wore a peaked cap with earlaps. At first, he wore the earlaps over his ears only when his wife could actually observe him, later tucking them up when he was out of her sight. But as the years progressed, the small deception seemed to matter less and less until lately he'd begun to leave the flaps down all the time. Also down was Brundage's seedy overcoat, which came to below his knees, and his torn leather briefcase, which hung heavily on one side of center while Brundage swayed to the opposite side for balance. The effect created was of two distinct but inseparable organisms, Brundage and the briefcase, locked in a kind of shleppy symbiosis, different aspects of the same affliction. On Brundage's fingers, on the fleshy parts near the inside joints, were those special calluses peculiar to people habitually burdened with heavy objects. Calluses born not of vigor but stagnation, the choking off of blood, living flesh turned to fiber. And on the briefcase, the toll of chemical battle—smooth leather loop turned to mottled rot, Brundage's educated palm sweat eating at it like sour acid. Which only made the surface rougher. Which increased Brundage's perspiration.

Inside the briefcase was a thick sheaf of papers, which was Brundage's work, and a sardine sandwich on white, made without love, which was his lunch. Each day, Brundage ate his lunch in his car, sitting alone in the parking lot amidst the endless rows of automobiles, listening contentedly to the stock market reports on the radio and depositing another eight million bread crumbs into the cracks in the upholstery. Brundage had an unusual eating style, which involved gnawing a hole in the center of the food object and working his way toward the periphery. Because of the effort involved, his wife never cut his sandwiches in half, and an occasional passerby would sometimes stare for several seconds at Brundage's lips moving inside a Silvercup frame, as though part of a silent movie. During coffee breaks, Brundage would eat a blueberry pie in this same manner, twenty-five percent of the pie ending up below the neck, on the tie, the suit.

“He's eccentric,” explains the hapless Leon Peretz, who himself spends the entire day in the dark, Brundage's one friend.

Kenneth Brundage received the
BSEE
from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn in 1930, his master's in physics from Columbia University in 1937, and his doctorate from the same institution four years later.

Kenneth Brundage burps in the middle of conversations—conversations with anybody, no matter how important. His burps are loud and rounded, and he never acknowledges them in any way or says excuse me.

During the years 1944-1952, he worked at Bell Telephone Laboratories investigating the properties of thin semiconductor and magnetic films. During this time he published more than twenty technical papers and gave one lecture to the annual Electron Devices Conference of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers. During which he belched six times. And never lectured thereafter.

Brundage never bothers to wash his hands after defecating.

Since 1952 he has worked at Auerbach Labs as section head of their Advanced Devices Department. Although producing a steady stream of innovative, profit-making products, he has received only two raises.

He never combs his hair, which is still brown, long, and oily, and it lies on his head in a matted clump like dead grass. When his mouth is closed, his rosy cheeks are like swollen balloons taped to his face, his natural expression a moronic grin.

“For the life of me I can't understand why a man like you, with your background, can't advance himself,” says his wife.

“I don't know,” says Brundage.

“He's eccentric,” explains Leon Peretz, a man whom toilets fail to flush for, Brundage's one friend.

At the sound of the one o'clock whistle, Brundage shut off the radio, emerged from his Ford Falcon with its bashed-in rear fender, locked the door, and trudged through the parking lot to the main building. A car whizzed by, nearly knocking him down, as Bill Murphy, in Maintenance Department green, yelled “Hiya, Doc!” out the window. Maniac, thought Brundage. Maniac. This is what they let drive here. Maniacs without organization.

He threaded his way through the intricate corridor labyrinth, concentrating so that he would not get lost again. A fleeting recollection came, of that time, late, after hours, when Maintenance had painted over a key hallway sign and he'd missed his turn, and that fiend from the Accounting men's room had …

He reached the Advanced Devices area, opened the door, and walked in. He made his way past the techs, still lounging at their benches; the engineers, reading their papers or books at their sloppy desks; Amelia, his giant, aged, hunchbacked, woolen-sweatered secretary; and finally entered his glass enclosure, stealing just the tiniest peek at Chris—
Oh God, Chris, my lovely, hot-fleshed darling
—as he flashed inside and collapsed into his heavily padded swivel chair.

Chris.
Chris. Christine
. The magnified image of her soaked into the core of his consciousness, saturated his senses. He could see into her molecular structure, see the spaces between her atoms, the whirling electrons themselves. He could see into her soul, and more important, he could see down her bra. See her brown, puckered nipples like ripe coffee beans bursting with flavor, the delicately veined aureoles swelling juicily under—
Stop!
Stop.

Why go on? Why make himself sick? To dream of her was to dream of wishes granted by genies: to be appointed president of the World Bank, to be invisible and loiter in women's rest rooms, to be able to urinate and not feel the pee dripping into his shorts afterward. Miracles, he needed. Didn't he see the rest of them talk about her, the technicians joke with her and try to get chummy as she worked on the bell jar? The engineers escort her to the cafeteria, clump around her like blood cells at the coffee break? And hadn't he seen her résumé when he'd hired her eight months before?
Christine Parness, twenty-eight, married
. Why then did he torment himself with the impossible?