The MacGuffin (29 page)

And, hailing a taxi, read off Doug’s numbers to the cabbie from the book of useful addresses he kept like any old-timey salesman in a pocket of his suit coat. Thinking—he was Streets Czar, he was known to the cabbies—how nice, how pleasant it would be to be lectured, called to account, shoptalked, man-to-man’d. Though Druff didn’t think much of his chances. The town, with its high concentration of private cars and its network of interstates—over time, the city had become this sort of trade route—window to this, doorway to that, “The Nation’s Threshold,” according to the Chamber of Commerce—wasn’t the best place in the world to set up in the taxicab business. Street cabs didn’t ordinarily do well here, the only decent franchises being those at the airport and hospitals. And his driver, an immigrant, some refusenik type from the Eastern bloc, didn’t seem particularly interested. Druff examined his photograph, read the thick capital letters of his difficult name from the laminated hack license posted above the taxi meter. (And that’s another thing, Druff, fifty-eight years old, fifty-nine his next birthday, thought. Did they rig those things? On one of his father’s cars, a big, green 1947 Hudson after the war, he remembered a button right there on the floorboard. All you had to do to change the station on the car radio was press your foot on the button. Why couldn’t such a device be placed in cabs to jump the numbers showing in the little fare windows? Or maybe do something to the gears in the meter? The steady ticking that already sounded not like seconds clicking off but almost like the accelerated buzz of time itself? It was an ancient mystery to the City Commissioner of Streets. Like what geishas would do for you, whether they went down. Or the degree to which wrestling was fixed.) And sighed. And felt the tickle of his powerless old stupidity like the first symptoms of a chest cold.

And for the hell of it announced himself, pronounced his title. To see where he stood, to see what good it would do him. Willing to entertain questions. To take complaints, suggestions for his suggestion box.

The driver was not forthcoming. Druff pressed him.

“So what do you think?” he said. “As a country, do we live up to your expectations? Nationhoodwise?”

“Are you talking to me?” Edouvard Mrentzharev said.

“Yes,” Druff said. “I’m a public official. I’m trying to get a picture. I’m looking for input. Admittedly, I’m strictly Streets. I ain’t across the hall, or even just down a few doors from the hack bureau. Tell you the truth, I’m not even sure what floor they’re on. But what the hell, eh, Edouvard? Say I’m on a fishing expedition. Say I’m on a fishing expedition looking for input from the people, and, incidentally, don’t forget to give me a receipt for my taxes for the cab ride. But I’ll tell you one thing, if I’m to serve the public at least I ought to know what it’s thinking.” He dropped his voice. “Edouvard, I want you to know, this isn’t the way I usually come on to people. As a matter of fact, usually I don’t come on to people at all. Say I’m in a mood, say the blood sugar is low. Say what you will.”

Druff’s back sank into the cab’s plush, port-wine upholstery, his knees, compromised in the taxi’s close quarters, pressed almost gynecologically toward his chest. He didn’t weep or sob or cry out. Just felt himself awash in the deep sads, bobbing there in his loneliness and melancholy as if it were the universe.

“Of course,” he went on, “you don’t have to tell me a thing. I’m City Commissioner of Streets. Does that make me your ruler? It’s just, I don’t know, your name or something. Hell,” Druff said, “I can’t even
pronounce
your name. You could be a Sid in a suit. A dad from the thirties poking around in the back of a radio checking the vacuum tubes with a flashlight and duct tape. A guy whose kid is going to remember him fondly.

“Do you have any idea what I’m talking about? Tell me. Don’t try to humor me. Don’t even bother. Don’t count on my being a good tipper. I haven’t been in a cab in this city for ages. I probably tip for shit.”

“What do you want?” Mrentzharev said.

“Your blessing, little Father,” Druff said, somehow, even if Mrentzharev thought him nuts, even if he took down his statement and ran with it to the rest of the city’s taxicab drivers, meaning it, every word, all of it. A blessing, a peasant’s good word, a benediction from the salt and bread and garlic. Admiring this Edouvard Mrentzharev immensely, even envying him. His bravery, for one. For picking up and making a new life. For learning the language. For crossing the time zones to Druff’s city. Manifest destiny generally over now, a closed book, a done deal. Shut down with the heart’s and spirit’s white flight of the nineteenth century, a decade or so of the twentieth. Mrentzharev was a straggler, with boat people mixed, with
Marielitos,
all the forced marches of all the exiles from all the losing sides. “Hence, buddy,” he might have told him, “these tears ripe for the picking, and all the low, blunt blood of my fate’s mood swings.” Such boldness, Druff thought, examining Edouvard’s picture, imagining him throwing in his lot with other oppressed and ordealed folks as easily as a traveler in Oz. There had to be wisdom and the deep abidings in this fellow.

And debriefed him. Getting the goods. Comparative shopping digs in Mother Slavia against what was available here. What Mrentzharev thought of America’s stocked shelves, of the number, not counting cable even, of its TV channels. Warming up, practically rubbing his hands, feeling the return, just from fucking talking to the guy, to old Edouvard, of his energy. Of course, of course, Druff, nodding, agreeing, could barely keep up with him, with Mrentzharev’s volunteered, exuberant information, his won-over trust.

“Yes, yes, of course,” acknowledged Druff, a born-again sucker for the human-spirit thingy, “I understand about the curriculum, how every schoolboy is obliged to know English, but to learn how to drive? Professionally? At your age? This is something special.”

The cabbie looked at him.

“What?” Druff asked.

“What so special?” Mrentzharev said. “Is everywhere traffic.” And, laughing, began to boast to the City Commissioner of Streets of the small scams, what one did about tickets in the old country. “Oh,” he said, breaking off, “please excuse me.” And abruptly lifted a receiver. “Yes?” he said. “Yes?” And repeated numbers. Jotting them down with the stub of a pencil. “Fifteen minutes,” he said, and replaced what turned out to be his car phone. “You were saying?”

Who wasn’t saying anything. Who had lost interest. In the human spirit. In the black-and-blue marks on his own low melancholy. (Because this happened too. Life goes on. Indeed it did. It wasn’t only the brushing and flossing, the taking of pills and making sure you had stamps. It wasn’t just buying batteries for your wife’s hearing aid, or carrying a handkerchief, or any of the rest of the light housekeeping of existence. It wasn’t only coincidence or chaos or the scrambled random’s unbroken code. It was this.
Mostly
it was this. The deep, hidden peristaltics of mood. Its tidals, its sink or swims. Life goes on. Saving a specific threat to the system, its pull on adrenaline, there was no such thing as priorities. Life goes on. Having a MacGuffin didn’t change that. Who thought otherwise was a chump.) Who wished the ride over and was as good as his word about his shitty tipping.

Who hadn’t kept up, what it came down to. Simple as that. Not
even
stupidity. Who still operated by the outdated laws of an older dispensation. Well, damn me, Druff thought. Well, fuck me and damn me. Well, kiss my ass. Well damn me and fuck me and lick my wounds. Whose premises had collapsed like a bridge. Who in the back of a cab had suddenly awakened to discover that all of it was real,
all
of it, everything, each and every worst-case scenario, that disease wore you down, that death actually happened, that the goblins
would
get you, and that though everyone was expendable not everyone was expendable at exactly the same time. This was what made all tragedy inconvenient, inopportune. The world happened piecemeal to people. The best parts, the worst. Bad timing was what got you in the end. Not knowing what others knew when others knew it. Thus spake the philosopher king. He had traveled miles on fools’ errands on the streets he commissioned. And mourned his lost chances, his blown hope.

Changing his mind, turning back superstitiously to slip Edouvard Mrentzharev a few extra dollars. But it was too late. The fellow was already turning the corner, on his way to pick up a customer who had the number of the émigré’s car phone.

Well, here we are then, Druff thought, no longer sure why he’d come, and saw he’d been let off in front of a rather substantial-looking apartment building with two distinct wings angled to a central pile, vaguely Tudor, with a courtyard, and wide, tall stone urns on either side of each of its three entrances. It was, he realized, astonishingly like the buildings he’d grown up in himself, and he was disarmed, not nostalgic so much as bewilderingly at ease, as if he’d been given nitrous oxide by the dentist. It was in this mood (another reversal; this didn’t escape him) that he rang Doug’s bell and could almost have danced chipper in place while he waited for the answering buzz that would admit him.

“What is it? Who’s there?” Doug’s voice hummed and gruffed from the perforations in the dull brass speaker alongside the mailboxes.

“Druff,” Druff said. “Jeez,” Druff, usually not, waiting for the beep, at his best on answering machinery, the long-distance telephone, on intercoms (but this was different, he was at ease now) said, “what’s it been, a hundred years in the development and the bugs ain’t all worked out. Still sounds like we’re talking to each other out of our respective caves and sawmills.”

“Commissioner?”

“Mrmp mrmp. Nhhh. Mrump nhh mrmp.”

“Commissioner?”

“Because crackle there’s crackle phht crackle cellular even in taxis these days. I just drove over with a guy who has one. A simple immigrant. Two lines, little pink Princess speakerphone, answering machine, the works. Is this the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, or what? You say, Doug. You tell me.”

“Are you a little tight there, Commissioner?”

“Mrmp phhtt.”

“Hold on. I’ll buzz you aboard.”

Thinking as he climbed the two flights to his driver’s landing (since he really hadn’t any reason for coming here, that it was just some buying-time thing, not in his game plan, that he was running on instinct now, less than instinct, hunch, less than hunch, bald, gut-level opportunism, serendipity, chasing down his casual, pig-in-a-poke fate) that perhaps Doug had an idea there (since Druff had none of his own and it occurred to him that for an old campaigner—and this happened too: adventure, the whole MacGuffin thing, maybe even heroism itself, volitionless as a knee jerk—he was rather at odds with himself, with his very nature, what with his having no strategy and all, or even the paraphernalia of one—bumper stickers, campaign buttons, position papers, even positions, and, though he didn’t, he should have felt uneasy) with that drunk bit tossed in his lap, a ploy he could use. Sure, he’d play along. Doug wanted tipsy, he’d give him tipsy. Why not? He was already punchy.

“Ah, Commissioner there,” Doug, outside his apartment, called hollowly, leaning down over the railing at him. Sending his voice like a signal, some directional thing in the fog.

“That you, Doug?” Huffing and puffing. Laying it on.

“It is, Commissioner.” A broad smile in the guy’s voice, hearty as brogue, suspect as the good will of an announcer on the radio. Beaming all his heavy deferentials, chippered for the occasion as shined shoes.

“Where are you, Doug?”

“Right up here. Second-floor landing. Could you use a hand? I’ll come down and give you a hand.”

“No no. Just keep talking. I’ll find you.”

“Well then, to what do I owe the honor?”

“That’s it, you’re coming in clearer.”

“Careful there. Just a few more stairs.”

“My God, we could almost be in the same building, your voice is so clear. Huff puff, huff puff. What’s that? What did you say?”

“When? Nothing.”

“Thank God. I thought I’d lost you.”

“Very funny, Commissioner.”

“Crackle nhhh nhhh. Mrmp buzz. Snap crackle pop.”

“Here. Give me your hand.”

Druff, feeling like an asshole, put a finger to his lips. “Run silent, run deep.”

(He hadn’t playacted in years, he’d rarely bluffed this way. It was exhilarating, but it made him nervous.)

They shook hands. Doug, who was also in a suit—what was it today, the Easter Parade?—clapped an arm about the commissioner’s shoulder, and Druff, who liked him, suddenly remembered all the old conflicted vibes that seemed to collect about the fellow like a turbulent human steam. The doorman cop was a confection, a complicated candy, a bachelor more mysterious than a priest. Druff, still in Doug’s protective embrace, felt a sort of alarming reassurance, almost fatherly, as encouraging and skillful as the touch of a pederast.

“Oh,” Druff said, pulling away and indicating Doug’s spiffy clothes, “you were on your way out.”

“No I wasn’t.”

“Yes you were. I’m interrupting.”

“No you’re not.”

“Yes I am.”

“Not at all.”

“You’re all dressed up.”

“Well, so are you. Quite handsome you look.”

“Well, I was collecting my rents,” Druff said. It was an allusion to what Druff assumed was a general impression, that sense Doug gave off of an overtime heart. It was true. He wore his suit as if it were another uniform. How is it, Druff wondered, I like this agreeable, oleaginous hoverer? The commissioner risked the sweetest, lightest of hiccups, taking Doug in. Who, in turn, guiding him by the arm, covering his elbow like a leather patch, took Druff in. To the apartment. The commissioner attempted a soft stumble like a kind of stutter step and Doug, the blood of generations of crossing guards coursing through his veins, pulled him up quickly. He thought he knew what it might be about the guy. Then Druff, his boss years, who’d never been in Doug’s place before, or, for that matter, spent social time with him anywhere, whose habit it had never been to host picnics for the people in his department, or attend their weddings and baptismals if he could help it (and sometimes even their funerals), who had played his political career by some almost Draconian severity of the separation of powers, was helped into a soft, deep chair and smiled up at him sweetly. And Doug smiled back. And Druff put his finger on it. What he liked about Doug. It was the man’s asshole blindness. So much for it-takes-one-to-know-one. On the contrary, he thought, and realized he could continue in his assumed role forever, take it as far as he wanted, pull any stunt, go the distance with his act, that Doug would never challenge him. And this made him more nervous than ever.