Tiny Crimes Read online

  Dorthe Nors

  42

  trouser knee and her with her eye on the Baileys, that she said, “We’re good friends, aren’t we? I know I’m stupid,” she said, “and it can’t be easy for you with all your brains to go around with someone like me,” she said. “So can’t we just be cozy?” And so we were. We sat there and were cozy, and I can’t account for how we got from the moment she took the last bite of cake to her lying there on the floor, halfway under the coffee table, eyes gawping, mouth, too, but even then, when it all was over and done, it felt as though she were forcing me, yes, she forced me, and I didn’t like it.

  Hygge

  43

  Exit Interview

  Christian Hayden

  Well, Tony, I’m glad we got this out of the way, as unpleasant as it was. I’m sorry we had to do it over the phone, but we really couldn’t risk you coming back to the office.

  . . .

  It’s never fun to dissolve a partnership, Tony, particularly one as fruitful as ours has been. But you have been a valuable asset to Healthcare Solutional Results over the years, and we wish you the best of—

  . . .

  What?

  . . .

  I see.

  . . .

  45

  Yes. Well. Let me say categorically that I deny these allegations, for you and for whomever else might be listening in.

  . . .

  Sure there aren’t, Tony.

  . . .

  Look, Tony, if there was a breach of sensitive material, if millions of electronic health records were stolen and sold to a variety of drug manufacturers, health-care marketing firms, and Chinese actuarial betting syndicates, then it was conducted without my knowledge, and in fact I’m shocked and dismayed to hear it.

  . . .

  You’re asking me what a Chinese actuarial betting syndicate is? Didn’t you bring that up?

  . . .

  Fine, fine. I guess I brought it up.

  . . .

  I don’t know if I should say.

  . . .

  I’m going to speak in purely theoretical terms, okay? Purely theoretical. I got this information from an article I read in Vice. It might not even be real. I can never tell if those are real or not.

  . . .

  Anyway. What I read is that there is a gambling ring, based in China, for rich people to bet on the life spans of others.

  Christian Hayden

  46

  . . .

  Well, essentially they pick a random person, usually an older person. They gather some information and then they put an over-under on them reaching sixty, seventy, eighty, etc.

  . . .

  Age, obviously. Country of residence. Smoker/nonsmoker. That sort of thing.

  . . .

  Right. So maybe you get a seventy-three-year-old American. There’s an 80 percent chance he’ll live to seventy-four. So you place a hundred-dollar bet that he’ll die in a year, wait that year, and if he lives you lose. If he dies you pocket four hundred bucks.

  . . .

  The bets are much bigger in real life. Nobody waits twelve months for four hundred bucks. I’m talking tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.

  . . .

  Can you really not put that together, Tony? Really? This is why you were dismissed from the board.

  . . .

  Where am I? I’m in the off—Oh, I see. I see your game. I’m overseas. I’m not saying where.

  . . .

  I’ll have you know I’m rerouting this phone call through a series of proxy phone numbers. BEE-BOOP-BEE-BOOP! Hear that? That’s me sending the call to Pakistan or

  Exit Interview

  47

  Bulgaria or wherever the fuck I want it to go. You can’t find me.

  . . .

  I am not at the office. I’m just making it look like I am. Fuck it—tell these FBI guys to kick down the office doors! They’ll see I’m not there.

  . . .

  Oh, really? They don’t need a warrant if I tell them to kick in the doors? I retract that. I retract that. Don’t kick down the doors, SEC or FBI or whoever you are.

  . . .

  You know what I think? I think the minute you got the boot you ran crying to whichever government agency was willing to give you immunity. Though why you’d need immunity in the first place, I have no idea.

  . . .

  I should hang up. But I feel a little bad, Tony, because this is your exit interview and it would be kind of déclassé to hang up on you while you’re trying to leave gracefully. Plus, why should I hang up? I have nothing to hide. Plus, I’m in the Maldives. Or am I, assholes?

  . . .

  Okay.

  . . .

  Yeah, you’re pretty dense, Tony. Just an FYI. This is part of why you were kicked off the board. You really can’t make that connection?

  . . .

  Christian Hayden

  48

  Think about it. If I’m betting on a man’s life, it would be pretty fucking great if I had his health records, wouldn’t it? Let’s run through the same scenario as before. There’s a guy, seventy-three, should live to seventy-four, no problem—but oh wait, he’s got Stage IV non-small-cell lung carcinoma. Survival rate drops to 5 percent. Pretty good bet, right?

  . . .

  So that is why a Chinese actuarial betting syndicate would theoretically want access to the health records of millions of people, Tony. Now, if you or your esteemed colleagues at the Justice Department are wondering how an actuarial betting syndicate got ahold of the health records of millions of people . . . I can’t help you there. It wasn’t through my shop. Wasn’t through Healthcare Solutional Results. And if documents come to light showing that it was through Healthcare Solutional Results, then those documents will also undoubtedly show that I personally had nothing to do with it.

  . . .

  Just because I’m the founder and CEO of Healthcare Solutional Results doesn’t mean I know everything that’s going on with the entire company. You know my style—I’m a macromanager.

  . . .

  “Solutional” is too a word, Tony. Add this to the list of reasons you were voted off the board: wouldn’t go with the

  Exit Interview

  49

  flow. Everyone else liked Solutional. We create solutions. Therefore, we are solutional.

  . . .

  You’re really harping on the Chinese actuarial betting syndicates. I should send you that Vice article.

  . . .

  Right. Yeah. That would be sort of like the seamy underbelly of Chinese actuarial betting syndicates. Sometimes you’re $20K in the hole on a sweet little ninety-seven-year-old Belarusian. Two percent chance he’ll reach ninety-eight. But uh-oh. It’s a week until his birthday and he’s still kicking. Rides a bicycle every day. Eats nothing but leafy greens. Looks like you’re out twenty grand. Unless . . . you make some calls. You get in touch with the local Belarusian criminal element. You pay $5K for a “bike accident.” Get my drift?

  . . .

  Or the other way around. You put $100K on a thirty-nine-year-old, hundred-to-one shot, and then you arrange for him to get polonium poisoning or whatever. Pay a million bucks for it; you still come out ahead. Not that I’ve ever done anything like that.

  . . .

  Hang on, Tony, I’m getting in the car. Give me a minute—I have to pull out on this tough hill.

  . . .

  No, it is not the tough hill right in front of the office. It’s a tough hill in Peru. Maybe.

  Christian Hayden

  50

  . . .

  Okay, back.

  . . .

  As a matter of fact I am thirty-nine.

  . . .

  Well, that’s a pretty stupid bet, Tony, since I’m a pescatarian and I elliptical eight miles every goddamn day. But, sure, waste your money. This is another reason you got dropped, T. Stupid fina
ncial decisions.

  . . .

  Hmm? Sorry, I’m a little distracted. It’s the weirdest thing. My brakes don’t seem to be working at all and—Oh, you son of a bitch, Tony. You son of a bitch. You’re going to rue the day, my friend. You’re going to rue the day you fucked with

  Exit Interview

  51

  Ratface

  Paul La Farge

  The next to last time I saw Polanski, he told me he had incurable stomach cancer and he was going to France to die. His rat face was set in an angry droop. “That way I won’t bother anybody,” he said. “I’ll just die on my own.” I wondered who he was afraid of bothering. His wife had left him, and as far as I knew he didn’t have kids. I’d seen him once with a little black dog, but that was years ago, and if it was still alive I figured it had ended up with his ex-wife. “What are you going to do in France?” I asked. “Does it matter?” Polanski said. “I’ll work in a bookstore until they put me in the hospital. Or I’ll just sleep on the bank of a canal.” I didn’t know if he was serious or not, but I said I hoped he would be all right. He wrapped up the copy of

  53

  Nabokov’s Glory I’d found on the shelf for an astounding eight bucks, and I went out.

  Later I heard that Polanski had cleaned out Brewer’s business checking account: fifty thousand dollars, which Brewer had earmarked for a renovation. He wrote himself a check and deposited it, and by the time Brewer noticed, Polanski was gone. The money put another light on his cancer story. Though in a way, not really. If all Polanski wanted was to steal Brewer’s money and disappear, there was no need for him to tell me anything. Probably he did have cancer, I thought, and he’d gone to France for a final spree. I imagined him staying in grand hotels, drinking champagne. A girl on each arm, and Polanski twitching between them, like a rat that doesn’t know which button delivers the electric shock. The whole scene shot through with the sadness of what was happening in his stomach.

  Brewer went out of business, so I bought my books at Nautilus, on the other side of the park. They had fewer bargains, but, on the other hand, a girl named Lisa worked there on Saturday and Sunday afternoons. We talked about Kafka, about James Thurber. We got married and had a kid. Ten years passed, for me a happy period, although I sometimes had the feeling that I was standing with my feet on either side of a fast-moving stream, which was washing away everything I knew. It was only a matter of time before I fell into it and got washed away in turn. Then I’d look up and

  Paul La Farge

  54

  absolutely nothing was wrong. To no one’s surprise, our kid was turning out to be a reader. He sat at dinner with his face in a book. Lisa and I agreed it wasn’t a problem, but we told him he’d have to put the book down before he learned to drive. “I’m never going to learn to drive,” he said. “Just wait,” I said. “You don’t know what’s coming.” He said he did, he’d read about it already. We couldn’t have loved him more than we did.

  In 1988, the Monday after Thanksgiving, there was a gas explosion at his school. The fire department saved nearly everyone, but not our kid. He’d locked himself in a faculty bathroom; by the time they broke the door down he was dead from smoke inhalation. We buried him next to Lisa’s parents, in a field off the highway. Lisa stayed out there and I went back to the city. The apartment was like a frozen mastodon, impossible to change, impossible to keep the way it was. That winter lasted five years. Then it was spring; trees were budding outside the window. I went to the park to read. I was just thinking that life was completely unreal, that there were no banks to stand on but also no stream rushing past, and that if you had to say what the truth of life was, you would say that nothing ever really happens, when this guy walks by with a little black dog. I look up and say, “Polanski?”

  He’s decades older, but of the two of us, he’s the less aged. He leans down to shake my hand. “What are you doing here?” I ask. He asks if I can keep a secret.

  Ratface

  55

  “Sure,” I say. There’s nobody I could tell. Polanski says he never had cancer. He never went to France, either. All this time, he’s been living around the corner. He spent Brewer’s money, and when it was gone he got a job at another bookshop, then another. “I don’t get it,” I say. Polanski smiles like he’s not surprised. “You book people never do,” he says. He lets me pat his dog. It tries to jump up on my lap, but Polanski tells it to behave and the two of them move on.

  Paul La Farge

  56

  Mary When You Follow Her

  Carmen Maria Machado

  In the autumn of Maria’s eighteenth year, the year that her beloved father—amateur coin collector, retired auto worker, lapsed Catholic—died silently of liver cancer three weeks after his diagnosis, and the autumn her favorite dog killed her favorite cat on the brown, crisped grass of their front lawn, and the cold came so early that the apples on the trees froze and fell like stones dropped from heaven, and the fifth local Dominican teenager in as many months disappeared while walking home from her minimum-wage, dead-end job, leaving behind a kid sister and an unfinished journal and a bedroom in her mother’s house she’d never made enough to leave—deepening the community’s collective paroxysm of anxiety, which made them yell at

  57

  their daughters and give out abstruse and nonsensical advice about how to avoid being a victim and boosted the sales of pepper spray and Saint Anthony pendants, and also prompted no action from the police, who said that the girls were likely runaways—the same autumn she finally figured out how to give herself an orgasm, right after the summer when she broke up with her boyfriend of two years, Ira, who had for their entire relationship been attempting to make her come with the grim determination of a pioneer woman churning butter and had failed one hundred percent of the time, and she got herself one of those minimum-wage, dead-end jobs because she was saving for a one-way bus ticket to Chicago, and she was finally hired at Phil’s Discount restocking cheap T-shirts and overstock home goods, and learned quickly to evade Phil’s hands, which always seemed to brush against her body when the two of them passed each other in the bowels of the store, which is also the same autumn that Maria had started taking a shortcut home at night—in spite of her mother’s warnings—through the unlit parking lot of the bankrupt, half-gutted strip mall where she’d once bought her quinceañera dress, and listened to the leaves rasping over the pavement and watched an owl dismember a mouse on the pavement and then slipped her Walkman’s headphones over her ears even though her mother had warned her that music would conceal an attacker’s approaching footsteps, and felt her ponytail bouncing against

  Carmen Maria Machado

  58

  the back of her neck even though her mother had warned her that a ponytail was little more than a handle for rapists, and felt thrilled to her trembling core much in the same way she felt when her orgasms ebbed away, and after she had gone to a party held in a foreclosed house and drank deeply of syrupy, mysterious liquids in paper cups and talked about the missing girls with Dolores and Perdita, whose own parents had forbidden them to walk alone or go out at night, and after her mother’s shitty station wagon broke down twenty miles away from home when she’d been on an errand to refill her brother’s asthma medication and she had to hitchhike back in the passenger seat of an eighteen wheeler while chatting manically to fill the dangerous silence, and after she went home with a co-worker who sort of looked like Ira and smelled a bit like him too (because even though Ira’d been bad at sex and kissing and so many other things besides, she’d found his presence comforting and stable and missed him a little), and after that co-worker turned out to have a foot fetish and wanted to rub his erect dick all over Maria’s boots and Maria let him because she didn’t know what would happen if she didn’t, and after she tried to clean them off with fallen leaves in that unlit parking lot of the bankrupt, half-gutted strip mall and while hunched over her project heard the sound of someone walking towa
rd her with exquisite patience, and she didn’t look back

  Mary When You Follow Her

  59

  but bolted like a deer and in her socks, leaving her boots (her favorite pair!) behind, and after Perdita showed up at her front door on a Sunday morning because Dolores had gone missing, too, and they’d searched and searched and eventually found Dolores’s keys in a ditch next to the road next to the elementary school but never anything else, and after Phil handed her a paycheck with his other hand shoved deeply into his pocket and didn’t let go right away when she tried to take the envelope, and after Maria told him to go fuck himself and he shoved her against the OSHA poster and called her a bitch and told her he’d let her keep her job under one condition, and after she ran home through the unlit parking lot of the bankrupt, half-gutted strip mall and looked up as she ran hoping to see a cathedral of stars but instead just saw a terrible darkness, and after she snapped at her mother that she was fine and collapsed in her bedroom wheezing and crying and then overturned her father’s old cigar box and counted her money, but months before a white girl from a rich neighborhood also disappeared and suddenly the police were combing through the snarled streets in full force and Maria’s mother said that she wished Maria was around to see them finally doing their jobs, and before the town was buried under four feet of snow, which no one could deny gave them a strange sense of relief, a sense that time’s terrible, ticking advancement had been stilled for a spell, and before a snowplow operator accidentally uncovered the