Wakefield (4 page)

Surprisingly, Zelda's teaching was not wasted. Wakefield practiced on his next flight and the one after that. Soon he no longer felt embarrassed: he let his breaths in and out, he moved his body in small, often imperceptible ways, and started believing in this flying yoga. It helped, it helped a lot. He did become more attentive, more careful, more responsive to the world around him, and not only when he was flying. He was grateful to Zelda and wouldn't dream of replacing her with an ordinary travel agent. He wouldn't mind sleeping with her, for that matter. That was out of the question, however. Ever evolving, Zelda had become a dedicated “sapphist,” as Ivan was wont to call lesbians. Her life partner was a beautiful but icy specialist in infectious diseases at the city's university hospital. Together they traveled to spiritual sites and wretched parts of the world where the rarest infectious diseases rage.

When Zelda calls back, he answers the phone.

“Take something warm,” Zelda says. “It's twenty degrees and snowing up there. Do you even have a heavy coat?” she nags.

Wakefield waits for her to quiz him about why he is going to a town called Typical, what the job is. When she doesn't ask, he volunteers. “I'm going to Typical to speak about money and poetry and art to the biggest tech corp in the world.”

Zelda laughs. “What the hell do you know about money, Wakefield?”

“I know a lot about art and I'm poetry in motion.”

“You don't know a thing about anything. But you do know how to fake it. I guess that's your art. Too bad the pay is so mediocre. For such a great gift, I mean.”

“Okay, Zelda, you've had your fun. Just give me the flight info, please.”

While she brings it up on the computer, he listens to her breathing. He imagines her breath descending down her throat, rounding her breasts, filling her Catholic-flamed heart, hurtling down her flat tummy, Funneling to her pubis. He hears the voice of her red-haired assistant answering another line, “Crossroads Travel. How can I help you?” and he feels cozily enveloped by an odd kind of domesticity, achieved by phone.

“Remember to breathe, Wakefield. We have a deal,” Zelda reminds him, and the word
deal
evaporates his cozy reverie. Well, yes. Wakefield has made a lot of deals, and now he's made the Big Deal. Suddenly he feels dizzy.

The Devil is lying at an angle on the roof of the cathedral, playing hooky from an “important” meeting. There's been an annoying increase in demonic meetings lately, and he can't stand the din of loudmouth upstart devils making huge deals out of all kinds of crap. The Internet? Who cares? He's had Internet since the beginning of time and it doesn't bother him in the least that humans use it now. They'll never get up to the speed of thought, no matter how fancy their technology gets. He lazily scans the airwaves and picks up Wakefield and Zelda's phone conversation almost by accident. It worries him. Maybe he's made a deal with a shell, without touching the nut inside. An unshelled chestnut is a favorite symbolic object for the Devil, a lesson, really, about the mistakes even experienced demons can make. You mistake the wrapping for the entire package and then, surprise, the shell falls away and the innocent shiny nut emerges. The whole point of making deals is to harvest souls that are no longer innocent. The payoff is the twisted object the world has made of a person. That's the art he collects. When he hears Zelda tell Wakefield, “Remember to breathe,” a drop of cold sweat drips from between his horns and lands on his furry belly. If Wakefield hasn't yet learned to breathe, he may be unborn as well, innocent. The Devil wipes his belly with his triple-jointed fingers and thinks for a moment about turning them into a long-barreled pistol and firing the starting shot. It would be so easy. Wakefield would see a brick fly out of the wall and land with a loud bang at his feet. Or
on
his feet. There would be no mistaking it. In a panic, he'd begin the race against time. No, not yet, thinks the Devil, let him stew a while longer. Let him think he'll get the better of me. There is no way a fresh new creature shiny with the foam of innocence and transcendent irony is going to emerge from a middle-aged motivational speaker. Never happened before. The Devil grabs a passing leaf and puts it to his lips. He whistles through it: “I Did It My Way.” A street painter looks up to see who's whistling. The leaf drops on his head.

Crossroads. Wakefield will find the crossroads and then take another direction. If he'd engaged the services of a shaman before Zelda left for Siberia to find her own, he might have improved the weather and saved their relationship. The thought makes him giddy. He could wave a magic wand of amnesia over Zelda and go back in time: He picks up Zelda after her class at the college. They sit outdoors at their favorite restaurant. Not a cloud in the sky. Over rigatoni he hands her a ring. The ring doesn't fall into the noodles. They walk arm in arm to an after-dinner place for an after-dinner drink. Not a breeze. Nothing ruffles Zelda's shoulder-length tresses. His hat and tie stay on. They drink on the terrace. The stars appear, undimmed by city lights or clouds. The sickle moon stays screwed to its velvet pillow. They speak to each other clearly, lazily; no sudden gust of wind snatches syllables away, no cloud bursts on their conversation. They get married and sit on the porch of their little farmhouse, watching their plump baby sleep in his cradle. All is still. A rooster crows in the next village. A dog barks.

He feels himself gag. What schmaltz! It's ridiculous, the road not taken. Corny. And impossible. Whatever happens now will happen for the first time, and whatever choices I make will be the road taken, period. I'll never know if one way is “truer” than another.

The Devil is enjoying himself enormously.

PART TWO

TYPICAL

In a large airport half way to Typical, Wakefield is looking to juice up his laptop computer. All around are others like him. There's one now, a little man with a goatee. His eyes roam greedily around the concourse, searching. Then he takes a few determined steps forward, then a leap, and he's there! He crouches, he grins, he opens his shoulder bag, and out come his cords. He plops down on his knees and plugs in his laptop and his cell phone. The devices begin to glow. He closes his eyes. Silence! The vampire is feeding. He's not alone for long. A young woman approaches swiftly. She acknowledges the other curdy, drops down, and pulls out her own vampiric implements.

That's it for this particular feeding station: the outlets are full. Other vampires pass, disappointed. They've come too late. Feeding stations are few and far between. Vampires often must roam the length and breadth of an airport before they find a place to feed.

Wakefield keeps hunting. An inconsiderate lamia is using six outlets for as many devices. She's watching a DVD, oblivious to the world, the juice flowing through her. Wakefield curses her and moves on. At last he spots an outlet under a dangerous-looking sculpture of something vaguely aeronautic. He leaps to it, his cord is out in a flash, he's in. He checks the glow light on his laptop. It's dark. Egads! It's a dead station! He looks around, momentarily disoriented by a sudden drop in his blood sugar level. He sees another vampire grinning at him. That one knew! He tried it and failed and now he is delighting in Wakefield's distress. Wakefield yanks the cord out roughly and resumes roaming, giving his cocreature the evil eye. You'd think our common need would give us compassion, but sympathy does not plague the individualistic, hungry beasts of the computer age. We don't share juice.

Finally, at a deserted gate dangerously far from his connecting flight, he is able to feed. The moment he plugs in, he can feel the lifeblood flowing into his chips. He dials a faraway place and the juice lets him hear the messages in his mailbox. Ex-wife, agent, attorney, Ivan. The icons light up on his desktop, e-mail invites him to grow his penis, enlarge his breasts, refinance his house. All is well in the world. Vampires pass by, hungry, needy, jealous. Let them pass. He has a full hour before boarding.

Suddenly Wakefield remembers a downside of his deal with the Devil. In his year of grace, nobody'll notice that he's gone. How could that ever have seemed attractive to him? If nobody misses you, you might as well be dead. Wasn't that partly why the other Wakefield, the man in Hawthorne's short story, left home? To see if he would be missed? It was vanity; the guy wanted to feel important. Wakefield hugs his laptop, squeezes the cell phone in his pocket, hard. Lord, protect me from what I want. I never want to hear that starter pistol.

At home, Wakefield is master of his universe. Away from home, he's just a frequent flier, an anonymous drudge, a … chronically—What? Here's an announcement. His flight has been delayed, he's adrift among the hurrying, inconsiderate, demanding, pushy, self-absorbed crowd. No one sees him; everyone is talking on cell phones, blindly pacing. He sends Zelda a bombastic e-mail: “Your familiars have failed. I'm stuck in the middle of nowhere.”

When the flight is finally called, he finds he's in a middle seat, squeezed between a large woman and a larger man. Their flesh spills over and under the armrests. By American standards, they aren't all that fat, but Wakefield prides himself on staying trim and abhors gluttons. He trembles as their tentacular flesh adheres to his sweater, sending unwelcome heat through the knit.

After takeoff the man turns on his laptop and a pie chart appears on the screen. Wakefield crosses his arms, but the man's elbow reaches past the armrest and pokes him. The woman shifts her thigh next to his, absorbing his leg. Americans get larger, the seats get smaller, it's demonic, seethes Wakefield. Blue-jean manufacturers have figured out that the average American bottom has grown considerably, so why can't the airlines?

Wakefield does the deep breathing Zelda taught him, trying to relax, then escapes into his book. He carries Mark Twain's
Innocents Abroad
on all his trips for precisely this purpose. In the 1860s Twain went with one of the first organized group tours of Americans to Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Land, traveling by steamship and telegraphing his reports back to an American newspaper. Tourists, who live by guidebooks rather than by their senses, received their first entomological analysis at his hands. He nailed the pathos of tourism in its early bloom. Travelers' conveyances in Twain's time were at least more comfortable than your average commercial airplane.

The same grinch that has made it possible to work anytime and anywhere via electronics has also been quietly shrinking personal space. Wakefield sinks ever smaller in his middle seat, balancing the paperback on his knees, but there is no escape from the waves of neighboring flesh. They keep coming, a surf of fat beating against the tender shores of his body. There is an active geometry of evil at work: while airplane seats are miniaturized, airport terminals expand to the size of cathedrals. Walking from the ticket counter to the gate has become a lengthy pilgrimage through soaring atriums and mighty temples of commerce, as if the space taken out of aircraft has been added to the airports themselves, just as nutrients flow at an ever increasing rate from animals and plants into the mouths of greedy humans.

The simultaneous machinery of gluttony and greed works to sacrifice the individual to corporate ego, imprisoning the body in a cell of fat, and every inch stolen from the body's ease ends up in corporate space. Once, there were luxurious staterooms on ships, lovely sleeping cars on trains, and airships with elegant lounges where thin women conversed with handsome men, sipping cocktails from crystal glasses. Travel itself was an enviable adventure, though of course only the wealthy could travel. The ungainly masses stayed home. What happened? When did change come? That's a no-brainer, thinks Wakefield. Two world wars redesigned trains, airplanes, and ships to efficiently transport soldiers, weapons, and prisoners. Efficiency became the ideal of design, and increased profit its overarching peacetime goal.

Wakefield has the creepy feeling that this room hurtling through the sky at thirty-seven thousand feet is zooming toward a reality that will soon make his complaints completely trivial. The future, close as it always is, cannot be known, but Wakefield, listening with one ear cocked for the sound of the Devil's starter pistol, can hear it whispering.

The lights of the runway blink feebly on the vast, dark prairie. The plane touches down near a frozen lake. Wakefield has arrived in Typical, headquarters of The Company, the largest purveyor of software on the planet. He is met in the terminal by Maggie, a Company representative and his escort for the next few days. She's blue-eyed and friendly, wrapped in an ankle-length coat, and her hand is warm from being cuddled by a mitten. Wakefield shakes it firmly and follows her to the parking garage. The wind blows fresh snow around, but Wakefield feels warm enough in his sweater, vintage overcoat, and the broad-brimmed felt hat he thinks makes him look like a gangster.

Maggie's ice-encrusted sport utility vehicle pushes dreamily across the white prairie. She hands him his schedule. Tonight is free. Noon tomorrow, lunch with corporate muckety-mucks; 8
P.M.
, speech: “Money and Poetry (with a detour in Art).” Next day: lunch at restaurant with more muckety-mucks, early afternoon visit to Company headquarters, flight out that evening. He's gripped by déjà vu. How many Maggies have handed him this same schedule over the years?

The hotel looks like a Bavarian castle; there is tinsel on the doorman's cap, shiny red apples in a bowl at the front desk; the phone booths are gothic confessionals strung with little white lights. People with name tags on their jackets mill about the lobby, some wearing Santa Claus hats. Maggie tells Wakefield she'll wait while he goes up to his room, and then they can have a drink “or something.”

He drops his bag on the king-size bed, looks out the window at his view: nice parking lot, a solid mass of snow-covered SUVs; then he inspects the bathroom: big bathtub, good. There is nothing like a long bath, hot toddy in hand, while it snows outside; that's his idea of heaven. A hunting dog drags a duck by one wing in the print over the bed. Wakefield splashes some water on his face and goes downstairs to meet Maggie.