The One-Eyed Man Read online

  “Forgive me for saying so, but you seem like you’re more than two drinks in,” I said.

  “That’s because I am,” she said. “I bring my own shooters when I fly.”

  “You can get those through security?” I said.

  “They’re under three ounces. It’s a lot cheaper than buying them for eight bucks a pop on the plane.” She nodded toward the galley. “Also helps when dealing with teetotaler flight attendants.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Nice job trying to change the subject,” she said.

  “Have you ever thought about why you drink so much?” I asked.

  “K., I want to talk about this,” Claire said. “I’m sort of freaking out, here, for real.”

  “We can talk about the ex-Spetsnaz,” I said. “I just wonder if you ever ponder it. A simple question. You know I’m not judging.”

  The flight attendant returned, thrust a small plastic cup into Claire’s hands, and walked away again without a word.

  “That was sort of rude,” the man across the aisle said.

  Claire turned toward him. “Why do you keep talking to me?” she asked. “Who are you?”

  “I’m nobody,” the man said.

  “Likely story,” Claire said.

  “You should maybe just drink your drink and try to relax,” I said. “Before we get into trouble.”

  Claire closed her eyes, sipped vodka through a tiny red straw, and exhaled. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes. You’re right. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Okay. Good.”

  “But did you detect any trace of an accent, with this guy? I thought maybe I heard something.”

  “Claire.”

  “I drink,” she said, still not opening her eyes, “because my grandmother had to hide her vodka in the toilet tank.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Well obviously I drink because I’m anxious and because it makes other people more palatable, until it doesn’t anymore. And also most likely because I have a genetic predisposition toward alcoholism. But it’s more complicated than that. Part of that complexity is the obligation I feel to my grandmother.”

  “This is interesting,” I said.

  “This is the sort of thing that they would call rationalization, at an AA meeting. Believe me, I know.”

  “Still,” I said.

  Claire pulled the straw from the cup and set it on her tray table, leaving a gleaming parenthesis of liquid on the gray plastic. “My grandfather was a drinker. The social mores of the time permitted him to be so publicly. My grandmother, like I said, had to hide her vodka in the toilet tank. She was not allowed to be a drunk fuckup in the open.”

  “Times certainly have changed,” I said.

  “And you know what killed her? The secrecy. Not the booze.”

  A mild ding sounded, and the pilot came on the PA to tell us that we’d be flying through some moderate chop and he’d appreciate it if we stayed in our seats with our seat belts fastened.

  “Have you ever noticed,” I asked Claire, “how frequently in American culture people give orders disguised as requests?”

  Claire clutched the plastic cup with both hands. “I really hate turbulence,” she said.

  “I mean, the pilot just said he’d ‘appreciate it’ if we stayed in our seats, as though we have an option not to. But if I got up right now and refused to sit back down, I would find myself on the floor of the galley, zip-tied and sedated, in short order.”

  The plane began to tremble, then rattled violently for several seconds. The passengers gave a collective gasp, some reaching out to steady themselves on seat backs and armrests.

  “Flight attendants,” the pilot said, “be seated now.”

  “K.,” Claire said, “we’re going to have to talk about something a lot more interesting and a lot less obvious to distract me from what is quickly becoming freak-out-level anxiety.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I mean, first the Stasi, and now this.”

  “Spetsnaz.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Getting back to your grandmother,” I said, “your premise is that drinking to excess in public is somehow healthier than hiding it?” I said.

  “Human beings are the only animals in all of creation who try to be something other than what they fucking are,” Claire said. “This is the source of all our illnesses and malaise and anxiety and stupid fucking personality disorders. Mind-body connection, K. Keep secrets and your heart will reveal them, eventually, by just giving out. That’s what happened to my grandmother.” She raised her eyebrows at me as she paused to take a drink. “It’s the contrast between what we are and what we appear to be that makes us sick. Everyone walking around pretending to be so put together, so perfect, when in fact they’re more often than not one minor misfortune away from a nervous breakdown.”

  “Not everyone,” I said. “But certainly many people, yes.”

  “The trick is to make your outsides match your insides,” Claire said. “You can be healthy even if you’re miserable—so long as you appear to be exactly the flaming eight-car pileup that you are.”

  Turbines sighed as the pilot decreased power. The plane suddenly began to rattle with the sort of force that if one were inclined to imagine rivets giving way and high-grade aluminum warping, one might well do so. Claire took one hand off her drink and used it to grasp my forearm. Her fingernails dug in as we swooped to the right like a Japanese Zero, whereupon a man behind us began reciting Bible verse at high volume.

  “Holy fuck,” Claire said.

  “Turbulence is almost never dangerous,” I told her.

  “Shut. Up. With. Your. Facts.”

  The pilot came on the PA again. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “no doubt you’ve noticed this patch of rough air has turned out to be worse than we anticipated. We’re going to descend a bit to find you a more comfortable ride, but in the meantime please remain seated with your seat belts securely fastened.”

  “You got it, champ,” Claire said.

  No sooner had the pilot clicked off the PA than the plane swooped again, banking sharply enough that the sky disappeared from the starboard windows, replaced by the green and heather checkerboard of Kansan crop fields far below us. Claire’s fingernails dug in deeper.

  “That hurts an awful lot,” I said, nodding toward her hand.

  Claire looked down, and then after a second, she retracted her nails from my flesh slightly. “Gosh, I’m sorry,” she said.

  “It’s no problem.”

  “Hurting people because you’re scared,” Claire said, “is definitely a problem. Believe me, I know.”

  “Can you tell me more about this philosophy of mind-body connection?”

  “Well it’s all bullshit, obviously,” Claire said. “I’m sure you were getting around to saying that, so let me spare you the trouble.”

  “I may be skeptical,” I said, “but I’m not at all convinced it’s bullshit. If I thought it was bullshit I wouldn’t be asking for elaboration.”

  “Oh, it’s bullshit, K. Makes about as much sense as believing the center of a carrot is poisonous. The rational part of my brain knows that. But the rational part doesn’t steer the ship.”

  “That puts you firmly in the majority,” I said. “If it’s any comfort.”

  The plane nosed up violently. A flight attendant’s arm—the rest of her, strapped into a jump seat, remained obscured behind the bulkhead—swiped at a coffeepot pinballing around the galley.

  “This needs to stop,” Claire said.

  “It will, eventually. You were saying.”

  She closed her eyes. “I was saying. What was I saying? It’s bullshit, but I need to believe it, because I feel beholden to my grandmother. You know that thing? We all do it, right? Convincing ourselves that somehow the dead give half a crap about how we behave?”

  “It’s not something I do,” I said, “but certainly I’ve seen it in others.”

  “Well liste
n, if you want the unvarnished, totally nonsensical truth, there it is. People feel obligations to the dead all the time. ‘I owe it to my father because he worked so hard.’ ‘I owe it to my great-grandmother because she came across the country in a covered wagon.’ Whatever. So I owe it to all the women who wanted to drink themselves silly but had to take nips off a bottle in the laundry room while folding their husbands’ tighty whities.”

  I looked at Claire. Her eyes were suddenly guileless, her face full of a pleading hope. She needed me to accept this, even though she admitted that it made no sense, even though she knew who I was. And I almost found it in myself, bouncing around at thirty thousand feet, to give her what she needed. To say: Yes, Claire, I accept your imperfect reasoning, your flawed logic. I even opened my mouth to tell her I understood, that it made perfect sense, but then I realized that the words I wanted to say and the words I was about to say were not at all the same.

  Before I had a chance to speak, though, an anomaly of aerodynamics interrupted.

  Later, when I talked to the pilot, he told me this event was not nearly as dramatic as I imagined. “Passengers always say things like ‘We dropped a thousand feet, just like that.’ Not true. Not even close. That was more like fifty feet. Maybe. Barely registers on the instruments.”

  But as Peggy had said, jabbing her Winston at me like a rapier: how our minds experience things is the important part. Just as I opened my mouth to tell Claire that her reasons for drinking so heavily and publicly did not pass the smell test, the plane fell out from under us like one of those drop towers at an amusement park. This happened so suddenly that no one had the opportunity to scream, even though the instant we started to fall time became elongated, stretching out like taffy until what took perhaps three seconds seemed like a full minute or longer. As the plane plummeted and the edge of the seat belt bit into my hips, I looked up and saw a baby lift slowly into the air three rows ahead of us. The baby was calm, his parchment paper eyelids just beginning to flutter open from sleep as he rose. He wore a hoodie sweatshirt decorated to resemble a giant panda, stark white with ebony eyes and two tufty black ears poking up from the top of the hood. He was at that early age when relative baldness and a lack of teeth sometimes conspire to make a child look paradoxically very old. Like a tiny astronaut in low Earth orbit he drifted, arms and legs weightlessly splayed and crooked at the joints, the eminently relaxed posture of snoozing infants the world over. As he continued to rise, a woman’s hands, slender and long fingered and bedecked with a multitude of rings and bracelets, reached up and snagged him by both ankles, and as these hands pulled the baby down I saw, over the phalanx of seat backs, dozens of drinks lift into the air. Not cups, understand—drinks. Beer and water and Coca-Cola all suspended in perfect cup shapes, hovering above the people to whom they belonged as though animated by malevolent spirits. Claire’s own drink had gone airborne as well. It floated directly overhead, both liquid and solid all at once, the sort of impossibility one might see in dreams on a night when the subconscious is particularly troubled. Claire watched her drink rise, all the fear gone from her face, her mouth open just enough that I could see the serrated ridge of her left incisor gleaming in the sunlight through the aft windows. Behind and below her incisor, the tip of her tongue barely announced itself. In her hand she still held the now-empty cup with the word DELTA molded into the plastic. Her other hand finally released my forearm, revealing deep half-oval indentations where her fingernails had dug in.

  Relativity maintained its grip. It seemed almost as though time had ceased passing altogether, that we’d been suspended in amber like so many prehistoric insects. I began to count the cup-shaped pockets of ice and liquid in the hypnagogic mobile that hung over us. Directly in front of me, one: the jaundiced green of a Mountain Dew. To the immediate right of that, two: water, maybe, or else seltzer; something clear, in any event, that refracted the sunlight into its constituent colors like a prism, projecting a tiny rainbow onto the overhead compartment. Up another row, three: the glutinous scarlet blob of a Bloody Mary. And so on. I made it to eleven—a tan translucence, whiskey probably—before the plane leveled off, gravity reasserted itself, and the drinks assumed both an appearance and a behavior more befitting airborne liquids, breaking free, finally, of the cup molds imposed by negative Gs, aerating into drops and globules, tracing streaks across the bulkheads. This, too, happened slowly, so slowly it seemed I could reach up and pluck a bead of Claire’s ice melt out of the air with my fingertips. We all watched now with a sort of comic horror, realizing as one what would happen next but helpless to do anything about it.

  And then came the flood, sure and swift.

  It was this rude baptism that caused time to finally contract again, returned people to their senses. As is usually the case with baptisms, there was much crying. Also a good deal of voluble if short-lived screaming. Also, here and there, some vomiting.

  Most of Claire’s drink had landed on her. She sat still and quiet, staring at the seat back in front of her while I picked several small bits of ice out of her hair.

  “Did you see that baby?” she asked, after a while.

  “I did,” I said.

  “I mean, my God,” she said.

  “Could have been a lot worse.”

  “That was … probably the scariest thing I’ve ever been through.”

  “I think everyone’s alright,” I said.

  “Everyone, K.,” Claire said, “is scarred for life. Except you, of course.”

  The PA dinged. “Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot said, “want to apologize for that last little bump. We think we’ve found some smoother air, here, but as a precaution we’re going to keep the fasten seat belt sign on for the remainder of the flight, with about an hour left until we reach Boston. Flight attendants, please remain seated as well. Thank you.”

  Claire reached down and slowly undid her seat belt.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Nowhere,” she said. She brushed wet strands of hair behind her ears and stood up.

  “Ma’am,” the frizzy-haired flight attendant said, peering out from her seat in the galley.

  Claire ignored her and reached up to pop open the overhead storage bin, from which she removed her green messenger bag, from which she removed three small bottles of Swedish vodka.

  “Ma’am,” the flight attendant said.

  “I’m sitting down, I’m sitting down,” Claire said. “Christ on a pogo stick, give it a rest, will you?”

  She took her seat again and, without fastening her seat belt, drank one of the bottles of vodka at a pull, then dumped the other two in the cup with the word DELTA molded into the plastic.

  “Feel better?” I asked.

  Claire turned and gazed at me for a long moment, looking suddenly very tired and much older than her twenty-seven years. “I love you,” she said finally.

  14

  INTOLERANCE WILL NOT BE TOLERATED

  America, You Stoopid debuted on Wednesday in Fox’s ten P.M. time slot—early enough to vie for the back end of the prime time audience, late enough that children were safely in bed. Owing to a promotion, featuring the Shaolin monk beating me purple, that ran for two weeks before the premiere, our first episode did reasonably well—or at least reasonably well by the standards of broadcast television in a time of relentless competition from media of every imaginable variety. But America, You Stoopid was not, with a 1.9 rating in the 18-to-49 demographic, a runaway success.

  “Nothing to stick your head in the oven over,” Theodore assured me, though I neither felt nor had expressed any suicidal impulse. “This show will have legs. People love seeing men get beaten up.”

  “Just men?” I asked.

  “Who else?” Theodore asked. “Toddlers? Grandmothers? How would that be good television?”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to get beaten up anymore,” I said.

  “I don’t want you to get killed,” Theodore said. “Of course I want you to get beate
n up. There’s a reason The Three Stooges has been in syndication since Moses came down from the mount.”

  And he was right. America, You Stoopid jumped to a 2.7 rating the second week, following voluminous online chatter about the Shaolin incident, as well as a promo that featured the air force chaplain rupturing my eardrum.

  The third episode concluded with me, viewed from Claire’s perspective, bloodied and prone on a Crown Heights sidewalk, Hasidim scattering as police sirens caromed off of brick and concrete. The next day, with a 4.7 rating in hand and much fanfare in the trade papers, Fox ordered a second season.

  Soon after, I came to learn something that I could have probably surmised: when you do well on television, television’s cross-promotional symbiosis can’t get enough of you, and so requests to appear on shows other than my own suddenly became more frequent than assaults.

  My first such appearance occurred on something called Crunch Time with Gil Meyer. Meyer was a comedian whose previous show had been canceled after he said on air that transgenderism might actually be a mental illness, and that maybe we weren’t all as wonderful and humane as we thought we were for applauding while sick people mutilated their bodies. Now he was on Showtime—safe, more or less, from the capriciousness of network television audiences. Meyer had three main panelists; I would come in halfway through the episode as a special guest, essentially to plug my own program, and perhaps offer a word about whatever timely subject Meyer and his guests were debating.

  Just before I was to go on, I stood stage right with Claire and Theodore, who’d both insisted on attending even though I’d repeatedly told them I required no support, moral or otherwise. Claire stood directly in front of me, fussing with my necktie after deeming the Van Wijk knot I’d fashioned “ridiculous.”

  “And so what are we discussing?” I asked Theodore.

  “I have no earthly idea,” he said. “They have a loose format to accommodate whatever might come up. But surely you’ll do fine, no matter the topic.”

  “I’m not worried about how I’ll do,” I said.