A Kind of Compass Read online

  The room falls silent. They are all looking at her now, with pity or disdain, perhaps. She doesn’t know. She keeps her gaze focused on Pearse. She will not lower her head.

  ‘A candidate …’ he peers at her badge, ‘… Catreeownna … has just told me that she needs to leave to catch a flight. That leaves her team down one member. For this mission you need to be dedicated. You need to be able to deal with the unexpected … Well. Let’s all say goodbye and get on with our work.’

  Dark, despite pipes of light running cool as drains overhead. The air is thickened by the earth that must be muffling against the concrete, dulling the faraway chirrup of the trams. Cram of bodies teeming down and up the stairs and keeping to one side for the sake of order. Which side is it she should be on? She keeps veering to the wrong side. She needs to find a bin to stuff the conference pack in. Her badge, too. Remember to take off the badge.

  If she misses the flight it means using the credit card. It means inventing some excuse. Already she will have to explain the conference fee. As a chosen candidate, she was given a special rate, but it was enough to make a dent. Barry will notice it and ask and she still doesn’t know what she’ll say. When she squeezes between the sliding doors she is still holding the red folder.

  ‘Mind the gap.’

  So many people. Blank faces but she can tell their type by the way they dress and the things they have; a tall woman in an awkward blouse knitting with purple yarn amongst the crush of passengers; a bearded young man with a checked scarf, hugging a rolled canvas.

  Wobbling at his mother’s knees, hand squelched tight in hers, is a little boy in a camouflage jacket with a crest that says Army Man. He looks like the child in the hospital worker’s photo. Huge eyes and mouth shut small until it opens wide and lets a shriek. ‘Look Mummy!’

  He is pointing at the floor. Some of the conference pack contents have slid out, Caitriona sees; they are sprawled down amongst the feet.

  ‘Look! SPACE, Mummy! SPACE!’

  The mother’s face is flattened with a thick layer of dust-dull make-up. She rubs her son’s head, pulls it to her hip. ‘Shhhh …’

  There is no use trying to squat and pick them up. She will only drop other things if she tries. Panic starts in her lungs. What is it that they are breathing in and out down here? What is keeping them all standing, making the blood whoosh through, and how long will it sustain them? She clutches at a loop overhead to steady herself, jiggles to the pulse of the carriage. Only one tube stop and a bus. Then the plane and then her little boy’s face slotting into her neck, ears like the singing tunnels of seashells, fragrant scalp, the rippling cable of his spine.

  She tries to tidy the papers a little with her feet: the pictures of the galaxy and of the machine that will make the oxygen, and the blot of words she could not understand. She should have thrown them out right there in the conference centre. She has probably failed anyway. Of course she has.

  The child is on the floor now, trying to pick up one of the pictures he has seen – the solar system, which is not a sequence of eight as she once believed, but a blur of stars and planets too vast for her mind to map. Fat sticky hands like her boy; her boy who exploded from a tiny nook; a surge of blood thrusting her body into a new space and then his birth that threw open her sky. But she will close it up neat again, as she suspects all mothers do. She will grow away from him over the ten years it will take to train for Mars, and that is right of course. A curling beat inside her and then a cord. Then a breast and then a head in her neck. Then a hand in hers and then no hand because that’s how it is with time and space. Wider and wider the distance; the journey that began in her, and who will he be out there with no touch left between them?

  The door slides open.

  ‘Mind the gap.’

  She pours with the shoal of passengers out onto the platform and the crowd is gone, moving blind as maggots on the steps. At the top there is only a dull light for it is evening now. She has almost reached the open.

  ‘Hello lady.’ The child has grabbed the end of Caitriona’s grey jumper dress. A little shut mouth again, a little chin. Big bug eyes.

  ‘Shhh,’ the mother says, ‘sorry about that.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Caitriona, ‘No, I have a little one myself …’

  ‘So you know how it is?’

  And the woman’s smile is like the swell of a dying star, the disappointed climax and the heavy joy of it, and the relief because Caitriona knows it too – the terrible detail of accidental being.

  The child is thrusting a bundle of papers towards her: three sheets stapled together and on the front the picture of the home on Mars – a row of huts like silver polyps on the rust sand.

  ‘You keep that,’ she says, but the child shakes his head. The pin then. She pinches the back and pulls it from her chest.

  ‘Look,’ she says, ‘do you know what that is?’

  ‘Space,’ the boy says.

  ‘You keep that, OK?’

  On the plane she allows herself a sigh of relief. The smells she carries are of packed bodies and recycled air, a sweet, fruity broth of panic brewing from the cleaves of her flesh – but she has made it, and the evidence has been disposed of. The only thing she has kept is the big blue sticker: an innocuous thing, the kind of thing they might give out in playgroups for children’s names. But that too should go. She folds it into a half moon, sticky sides together, and then into smaller and smaller wedges, before tucking it into the pocket in front of her with the in-flight shopping magazine. No one will ever open it to see what is written there: Caitriona Dawson – Pluto.

  ‘Oh yes, Pluto. That used to be a planet didn’t it?’ Barry touched the hand-painted mobile, making it wobble clumsily above their sleeping child. The mobile was a gift from her sister. It has a sun and an Earth and seven other planets, but no Pluto. She didn’t notice until the day she returned from maternity hospital.

  Pluto was the precious livid piece in her solar system jigsaw, and she always slotted it in last. Today she saw the planet projected huge against the white parchment. It was exactly like the jigsaw; an unfathomable full stop spinning out in space, its surface blotched brightly like the skin of an unburied corpse.

  THE NATURALS

  Sam Lipsyte

  Caperton’s stepmother, Stell, called.

  ‘Your father,’ Stell said.

  ‘Larry?’ Caperton said.

  ‘He’s dying. You can say Dad.’

  ‘He’s done deathbed before.’

  ‘It’s different,’ Stell said. ‘The doctors agree now. And your father, well, no grand speeches about not going gentle, for one thing. For another, he looks out of it, pushed down. He shops online. He watches TV. I think you should be here.’

  ‘Command performance?’

  ‘Don’t be a crumbum.’

  Caperton took the short flight from O’Hare to Newark on one of the new boutique lines. Shortbread, cappuccinos, and sea-salted nuts in great jars sated travellers, gratis, at the gate. The in-flight magazine resembled an avant-garde culture journal Caperton once read with fervour. The cover depicted the airline’s female pilots as cockpit kittens with tapered blazers and tilted caps. It was blunted wit, but startling for a commercial carrier. Caperton took note. Among other things, he consulted for a living. That morning, he’d been in meetings about a redo for a small chunk of lakefront. They’d discussed the placement of a Dutch-designed information kiosk; one of the city-council guys kept calling it ‘the koisk.’

  ‘The koisk should be closer to the embankment,’ the guy, a boy, bony in his dark suit, said.

  ‘We can work on that,’ a rival consultant Caperton had not known would be present said. ‘The main thing is we’re trying to tell a story here. A lakefront narrative.’

  Were they supposed to make bids in the room together?

  ‘My opinions are vaguely aligned with that,’ Caperton said.

  ‘But what colour will the koisk be?’

  Caperton felt the surge of a st
range desire to shelter this apprentice politician from future displays of idiocy, as you might a defective son, though Caperton had no children. He liked kids, just not what they represented. He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but it sounded significant, even if Daphne had finally left him over it, had a baby by herself with some Princeton-rower sperm.

  Aloft in coach, Caperton found himself squeezed up against the trunk of a human sequoia. The man’s white t-shirt stretched to near-transparency over his twitch-prone pecs. His hair shone aerosol gold. His cheek pulsed with each chew of a gum wad he occasionally spat into his palm and sculpted. He winked at Caperton, pressed the pink bolus flat, and slit a crude face in it with his thumbnail.

  ‘I’m doing voodoo on the pilot.’

  ‘A good time for it,’ Caperton said.

  ‘Don’t be scared. The plane flies itself. I’ll cure him before we land.’

  ‘I’d appreciate that.’

  ‘What brings you up into the sky today?’

  ‘A personal matter.’

  ‘Fuck, I should hope so. Can you imagine wasting a minute of your life on something that wasn’t personal? Something that didn’t mean anything to you? And, I mean, especially if you’re helping other people. Like a mission of mercy. That should always be personal. Otherwise you’re just doing it for the likes. What’s your line of work?’

  ‘It’s tricky,’ Caperton said. ‘It’s kind of conceptual marketing, kind of design. I’m a free-range cultural consultant. But my passion is public space.’

  ‘Wow. Do you have all that bullshit on one business card?’

  The man’s enormous biceps jumped.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘That comment was a little aggro of me. The juice does that sometimes.’

  ‘The juice?’

  ‘I don’t hide it. In my field, I don’t have to. We’re entertainers.’

  ‘What’s your field?’ Caperton asked.

  ‘Dude, I’m a pro wrestler. What the fuck else would I be?’

  ‘A bodybuilder?’

  ‘Jesus, no! Those guys are pathetic narcissists. They were all abused by their fathers. Every one of them. Don’t you know me? I’m the Rough Beast of Bethlehem. I wrestle on the Internet. You don’t watch, I take it?’

  ‘No,’ Caperton said.

  ‘You think it’s stupid.’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘You think that, now that we’re post-kayfabe, it’s ultra-moronic, right?’

  ‘Post-kayfabe?’

  ‘Kayfabe was the code we followed. Don’t break character. Pretend it’s not staged. Now we wink at the audience and they wink back.’

  ‘Oh, when did that go into effect?’ Caperton said.

  The Rough Beast snorted. ‘You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.’

  Caperton studied him. ‘Somebody at my job just said that.’

  ‘It’s true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing – public space? I prefer private space, but that’s cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe.’

  ‘But doesn’t it seem kind of creepy?’ Caperton said. ‘All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?’

  The Rough Beast shrugged. ‘Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.’

  Caperton thought it might be the hard way out. The Beast slipped his gum into his mouth.

  ‘Gardening?’ Caperton said, after a moment, but by then the Beast had his earbuds in.

  Stell met Caperton in front of his childhood house, in Nearmont. She leaned against the doorway the way his mother once did. They were not quite the same type, but ballpark, as his father would say. Larry preferred tall, semi-controlling women with light, wavy hair. Stell preferred to smoke pot, laugh, cook, yell at Larry, read good novels, and watch her shows. She’d proved a perfect stepmother, and she and Caperton flourished in their family roles, except for the deal with the refrigerator – or, rather, Stell’s deal with Caperton rummaging freely in the refrigerator. ‘Deal’ was weak wording for it. ‘Nearly unassuageable rage’ seemed more accurate. Stell just thought it would be better if Caperton waited outside the kitchen area. She’d be more than happy to get him whatever he wanted. It would just be better, it really would, if he waited over there at the edge or even beyond the edge of the kitchen area.

  Caperton harboured a secret ancestral claim to what his forebears had known as the icebox. There had been only so much depredation and madness an American child could endure in the past century. That’s why the government had invented the after-school snack. But he supposed he’d evolved. This was Stell’s house now, and, whatever her idiosyncrasies about the accessibility of chilled provisions, she’d kept his father’s energy up for years, saved him from a fatal spiral when Caperton’s mother died, even, or especially, if she’d been his mistress at the time.

  For his part, Caperton’s father called Stell the Bossman. Whenever she left the room he would twinkle his snow-blue eyes at Caperton and, his throat choked with affection, say, ‘What a goddam cunt, huh?’

  Larry had been married three times, cancered twice. Now the liver, as he put it, was negotiating a severance package. Larry had spent decades on the road, and Caperton used to picture a bawdy shadow life for his father, whiskey sours at a sleek, cushioned bar, a woman with his tie in her teeth. These were bitter visions, but he knew, guiltily, that the anger wasn’t really for his mother’s sake. He just didn’t understand why the man seemed so antsy at home, as though he couldn’t enjoy even a few moments of family life, drinking hot cocoa and overpraising young Caperton’s tediously improvised puppet shows or the lumpy space soldiers he pinched without talent from bright clay. Why were there so few trips to the toy store, or the zoo, or the toy store at the zoo, or, better yet, the snack stand beside the toy store at the zoo?

  ‘First World problems,’ Daphne once told him.

  ‘That’s why they’re so painful.’

  Caperton had wanted to be, with his father, a team. But Larry had a team, his work buddies, gruff chums whose cruel whinnies carried through the house those Sundays they came to watch football or smoke cigars on the patio. Like Larry, these hard cases were not gangsters but grade-school-textbook salesmen. Larry worked his regions year-round, his returns heralded by the appearance of the exquisite red-and-gold Jade Dragon takeout cartons. Every business trip ended with egg rolls and spareribs and enough monosodium glutamate to goon them all into an animate diorama of menu item No. 14: Happy Family.

  His father would debrief them, long, duck-sauced fingers curled around a frosted stein. He’d sing of the specialty foods of the nation – the Cincinnati chillies, avocado-and-sprout sandwiches, and spice-rubbed hams of the culinary mosaic – or describe the historic hotels he’d slept in, name the ones with the tastiest pillow mints, the fluffiest towels, the most impressive water pressure. Caperton had found receipts in his father’s overcoat, though, and they all said Howard Johnson. Larry hardly mentioned the people he’d seen or what he and the other salesmen had done, unless they’d scored big on a sale. Many schools, he explained, still taught from textbooks that conjectured a moon shot. Once, he said, he told a school board in Delaware that he’d be delighted to inform Commander Neil Armstrong himself what passed for scientific knowledge in their district. Caperton and his mother whooped, and Larry grinned into his stein. A triumph for Enlightenment values, plus commission.

  After Caperton’s mother died, his father retired and built birdhouses for a while. He meant well, but to a grown Caperton these designs were rather Cabrini-Green-ish, huge and institutional, as though Larry meant to warehouse the local jays and sparrows in balsa-wood towers of utter marginalisation. It troubled Caperton to the point that he considered talking to his father about it, but then construction halted. Crises of the body beckoned. Lung i
nflammations, nano-strokes, mystery cysts, myeloma scares. Caperton raced home for it all. But Larry couldn’t deliver, until, apparently, now.

  Caperton kissed Stell and followed her into the house, past the foyer bench and ancient wall hooks. He saw the mauve sofa where he and his father watched movies while his mother died upstairs – Westerns and sports sagas, mostly. Larry loved the one about the ancient, pretty baseball player who steps out of some Hooverville limbo to lead his club in a pennant race. Bad fuckers bribe him to tank the big game, but the hero jacks one, as Larry liked to say, into the stadium lights. Sparks shower down. The republic is renewed.

  ‘In the book, he strikes out,’ Caperton once told his father.

  ‘I know. That’s why it’s a stupid book. Why go through all that trouble to make a great story and then give it an ending like that? That takes real bitterness.’

  Caperton had said nothing, but thought there might be something brave about the bitterness.

  ‘Your father’s sleeping now,’ Stell said. ‘Would you like some coffee? Maybe a sandwich?’

  He noticed a new strain in Stell’s face. Her hands nipped at each other like little animals. Could he stop himself even if he wanted to?

  ‘I can make one later,’ Caperton said.

  ‘I don’t think that’ll work. I can make one now.’

  ‘I can make it. I’ll just look around in the fridge.’

  ‘I don’t … that can’t …’

  ‘It’s no problem,’ Caperton said.

  ‘Just let me make you a sandwich now. No big deal.’

  ‘Exactly. I can make it, no biggie.’

  ‘But you don’t know what’s there.’

  ‘I can look.’

  ‘No, honey, please don’t do this. It’s hard to see what’s in the fridge. The bulb is out. But I know what’s there. Tell me what you want.’