Searches & Seizures (17 page)

He took a Vliet Avenue bus to Rosendale and transferred to the Koch-Demaret which took him up Glad Boulevard and by the park, then past Hebrew Union College and the University of Cincinnati whose tall twin buildings, Physics and Chemistry, faced each other like upended keys. The bus entered a narrow wedge of ghetto. Three blacks in big hats whose wide brims flopped down over their eyes stood down from the curb and waved at a request stop. The Phoenician knew the driver would not stop for them. He wondered how it would work out, what crises and bloodlettings were still to take place, and tried to imagine what assassinations of which leaders yet unborn would have to be endured, and conjured issues, slogans and even men as meaningless and dissociative as scores in a vacuum. He thought in headlines of distant centuries:
TRENT REPUDIATES GENNIS, CALLS FOR AMORTIZATION OF EPICENTER. INDIANA WIPPENITES STARCH SCARVES, MARCH ON STATEHOUSE. MERPEN PLEADS HUNDRED AND SEVENTH. REMEMBER NEBRASKA
!

But even these were built on analogue. He was depressed by language, the finite slang of his century.
SHOTCHKA QUENTZ VISARBLEMENTHS
. He needed new endings, new punctuation, a different grammar. There would be people, and they would believe things he could not even imagine. There would be two sides to every question. Trent would be right and Gennis would be right, though in its lifetime the public would never know the whole story. Amortization of the epicenter would be only a short-term solution to whatever problem it had been created to solve. A stopgap, at best only a first halting step. And it was all very well to remember Nebraska, but a time would come when it would be best to forget old wounds. There would be different holidays, epic festivals celebrating heroes who would not be born for a thousand years yet. And in all the countries in the world, on all the calendars the dates of their births would be in
red!
What would they have pulled off? What drugs were coming? What soups and styles, and how would the center line on the highway be made when the paint mines dried up and the pigments rationed? Or legislated against, green outlawed and blue controversial and orange repealed?

How he envied them, the man in the street, the pockmarked dropout of some future millennium, how he was sickened at the thought of the punch lines of jokes he could not understand even if they were patiently explained to him. What answers they would so casually have! Their 90 IQ’s would encompass wisdoms that the greatest minds of today could not even begin to comprehend. The more things changed, it was said, the more they remained the same. That was bullshit, just one more justification and excuse, another good word put in for death.

It was a terrible thing Oyp and Glyp had done. How I envy them! How glad I am I was there to see it!

It was his stop. He got off and walked the half-block to the Vernon Manor Hotel.

Although it was a residential hotel, with its wide horseshoe drive and massive quarter moons of carefully tended lawn, its groundfloor ballroom with its sequence of tall leaded windows like five big fingertips, the Vernon Manor had the look of a resort hotel of the Twenties. It might have looked more in place along the shore. Far from downtown, it seemed an awry speculation to the Phoenician whenever he came upon it. He rather liked the hotel, enjoyed the old ladies in their seventies with their clean thin hair that always reminded him of the fish-scale blue one sees in chemical toilets on airplanes. He enjoyed the big white uniformed colored women who pushed their wheelchairs or steadied them on their sticks as they bobbed along, or helped them into their cars and took the wheel to drive them to their doctor appointments. Not all the residents were cripples, but all seemed frail, their survivorship underscoring their frailty, their neatness and grooming a testament to the care they had to take of themselves. They seemed vaguely but limitedly moneyed, on budgets, their strict accountancy signaling necessity rather than a careful husbandry for the benefit of sons and daughters and grandchildren (they seemed as bereft of these as of husbands). It cheered the Phoenician to think of their clever economies, shrewdened them in his eyes. They were like hunters who killed to eat. He pictured them still awake, in front of their television sets or entering figures in ledgers from the financial pages, sipping hot water and lemon to outwit their bowels, warm milk their insomnia. What did they make of the world? (Mystery, mystery. He did not know them. Old ladies did not come to him for bail.)

In the lobby he moves toward the small bank of elevators where the night porter snoozes in a chair.

“Sir?” the night clerk says.

Main goes up to him, stands by the darkened candy cases, the low revolving tree of post card, the wide magazine rack, tomorrow’s
Enquirer,
the headline showing through a window in the yellow vending machine. He looks around at the glass signatures of the signs above the beauty parlor and dress shop, drained of neon and dusty as empty alembic. He glances past the night clerk into the message boxes, the few keys that spill out of their mouths like tongues.

“May I help you?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not a guest?”

“No.”

“I’m afraid the dining room is closed. We serve our last meal at ten.”

“That’s all right, I’ve eaten.”

“Are you visiting someone in the hotel?”

“Yes.”

“May I ask if you’re expected?”

“I’m not expected.”

“It’s almost one. I’ll have to ring up and announce you.”

“Tell Crainpool Mr. Main is downstairs.”

The clerk shrugs, goes to the switchboard, plugs into Crainpool’s room and speaks softly into the thin prosthetic gear that runs from his ear to his chin. He looks up at Main and frowns. “I’m afraid I woke him. He says he’ll be down as soon as he can get dressed.”

“I’ll go up.” The clerk is about to protest, but Alexander has already turned and shaken the porter awake. “Five,” he says. He has to repeat himself to the groggy man. In the elevator he glances at the framed menus high on the wall, reads the cheerful Good Morning! from the closed coffee shop. It is old news.

The elevator door opens in a cul-de-sac. There is gray and faded floral carpeting, hard upholstered benches where the old people sit while waiting for the elevator. He turns left and left again and goes down the long corridor past the housekeeper’s closets and old-fashioned hollow metal doors that belly the hall. Crainpool’s room is at the far end of the corridor. There are hotel offices across from him and a housekeeping closet next door. He turns the knob on Crainpool’s door, but it is locked. He bangs on it with his fist.

Crainpool, already in his trousers but still in his pajama tops and an old blue bathrobe, opens it. “Mr. Main.”

“It’s after hours, Crainpool. We don’t have to be so formal after hours.”

“Has something happened? Have there been mass arrests on the campus? I was sleeping; I didn’t see the eleven o’clock news. Do we have to go downtown? Just give me a minute to put on my clothes.”

“Nice place you got here.”

“It’s comfortable.”

“Small, compact, but I expect it meets your requirements. Just get lost in someplace larger.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Rattle around.”

“I guess I would.”

“Yet your needs are taken care of.” He pounds the swollen metal door. “Hotel has a laundry and dry-cleaning service, I suppose.”

“It does, yes, sir, but it’s pretty expensive. I don’t often use it.”

“Wash out a few things in the sink each night, do you? Hang ’em to dry on the rod in the bath?”

“Well, yes, sir, I do.”

“Yes. I see. I see you do.” He has strolled into the small bathroom. Underwear swims in the sink; two shirts hang on hangers above the tub, dripping water half on the tile and half in the bath; handkerchiefs stretch over the radiators like canvas on Conestoga wagons; a pair of pajamas dry on a wooden rack in the corner.

Main unzips his fly and pees into his employee’s toilet. He does not close the door or raise the seat. “These pajamas,” he says.

“Sir?”

“I was saying these pajamas,” he calls over the splash of his pee, “what happened to the nightshirt I gave you for Christmas? Don’t you use it?”

“Well, I thought that was meant as a joke, sir.”

He walks back into the room. “A joke? Why would you think it was a joke? And the nightcap, did you think the nightcap was a joke, too?”

“Well, sir—”

“The trouble with you, Crainpool, is that you don’t take things seriously. Playful yourself, you assume that everyone else has your sense of humor. A joke! That was a business investment, Mr. Crainpool, a business investment. I took it off my taxes. I thought that nightshirt and cap would solidify your image, help put you in the proper frame of mind for what’s wanted. A joke indeed! Like the garters, I suppose. Like the quill pens and the high stool. I’ve taken a great many pains, Mr. Crainpool—and gone to considerable expense, too, I might add—to reinforce your clerk’s ambience, to clericalize you. Yet you persist in your taste for the newfangled. I suppose you’ve been thinking in terms of electric typewriters and Xerox machines. What’s next, sir, conference telephones, gadgets that take your calls? ‘Mr. Crainpool is unavailable right now. Your message will be recorded and played back for him when he returns. Please begin speaking when you hear the electronic bleep…Bleep.’ ”

“No, sir.”

“ ‘No, sir.’
You’re damned right, sir, no sir.
And what happens to the thick ledgers with the careful rulings inked down the center of the page? The big gray and black cardboard boxes with their snaps and clasps and their colors running like a melted zebra? To the huge checkbooks like a family album? What do we do, throw
them
all out, I suppose?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Crainpool says, trying not to giggle.

“Yes, sir. I should think you would be. It isn’t as if I’ve tried to trespass in your private life…Well, have I?”

“No, sir.”

“No. You didn’t see the eleven o’clock news, you said. That implies that you have a television. Television is provided, is it not? You needn’t answer; I see it. Television is provided. Three networks and an educational channel at your disposal. There is the telephone. I see an air-conditioning unit. I rode up here in an elevator.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I was under no
obligation
to provide you with such lavish mod cons. None of the advantages you enjoy—there’s the electric light, there’s the flush toilet—were actually
coming
to you.”

“No, sir.”

“My first thought was to set you up in a boardinghouse. Such places still exist, you know, though admittedly they are scarcer now than when you first came into service.”

“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is trying very hard to keep a straight face.

“Go on, go on, continue dressing.”

“Then we’re going downtown?”

“Then I thought,
no,
though a boardinghouse would be the proper place for you and would go a long way towards bringing out those qualities in you which I was looking for, it might have certain drawbacks. You might not have liked your neighbors—or you might have liked some of them
too
much, fallen in with the wrong sort, made yourself vulnerable at the dinner hour or in the lounge on Sunday. You’d have had to share a bath, don’t forget.”

“Yes, sir.” Crainpool is buttoning his shirt.

“You wouldn’t have had your own phone. You’d have been roused at all hours to take other people’s messages. The walls in such places are paper thin. A fellow roomer’s radio could have kept you up half the night.”

“Yes, sir, I suppose that’s true, sir.”

“Then I found this place for you, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

“Yes. Then I found this place for you. A quiet residential hotel. Genteel. Yet with all the latest up-to-the-minute features you could possibly wish. Say, I like that carpet in the hall. Do all the floors have it?”

“Some do, but the patterns vary, I think.”

“You
think.
Only what you see when the elevator opens to take on a passenger. I take it, then, that you have no close friends in the hotel. Only the odd nodding acquaintance in the lobby and coffee shop.”

“That’s about it, sir.” He has begun to put on his tie.

“So I thought. No, don’t bother about the tie.”

“I’ll just get my jacket, sir.” He puts on his jacket and looks at the Phoenician. “I’m ready.”

“Ready?”

“To go downtown with you.”

“No, no, it’s after business hours; I already told you that. Shop’s closed. You’ll have to remember these things, Mr. Crainpool.”

“We’re
not
going downtown?”

“We’re not.”

“I see.” Crainpool leaves the hall where he has been waiting for the Phoenician and returns to the center of the room. “Would you like to sit down, sir?”

“Thank you, Crainpool. Too bad there’s only the one chair.”

Crainpool sits primly on his bed. “To what do I owe this honor?” he says at last.

“To bad dreams. To my poor scores in the hard subjects. To your vulnerable history.”

Crainpool blushes and it is the first time in years. Their cat-and-mouse had settled years before into a rhetoric, glancing off Crainpool like punch lines rained down on fools in comedy turns, touching him as little. Over the years he has become a stunt man, his bruises routinized, his flexible rubber bones deepsea’d fathoms beneath his skin and his nerves and pride Atlantisized, lost continented. The blush is not embarrassment but fear, and Main recognizes it because he has seen it once before.