The One-Eyed Man Read online

  “And I’m sure you understand that people worry when you start talking crazy shit like this. Like even under normal circumstances they worry. But especially now when Sarah just died.”

  I did understand this, and said so.

  “Also, the fact that you almost burned down your house does not give the impression that you’re mentally shipshape.”

  “The house was never in danger of burning,” I said.

  “K.”

  “I’m just saying. To claim the house almost burned down is not an accurate description of what happened.”

  “And that couldn’t be more beside the point,” Tony said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning that after going on a drinking binge you took all your dead wife’s belongings and set them on fire in your front yard. That is the salient fucking detail.”

  “It was hardly a binge,” I said. “By the time I set the fire I hadn’t had a drink for hours.”

  Tony sighed. “What is it with you, lately?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, when did you turn into Mr. Roboto? It’s impossible to have a conversation with you anymore, you’re so goddamn literal.”

  “I’ve gone through some changes,” I said.

  There was silence on the other end for a few moments. “I mean, believe whatever you need to to get through,” Tony said finally. “Just don’t go telling my wife it’s okay her friend died because, you know, the speed of light and whatever.”

  “Roger that,” I said.

  Tony lowered his voice. “Tell me this, though, for my own sake. You don’t really think Sarah is still alive, right?”

  “Well, no. Not the way you mean it.”

  “How do you think I mean it?”

  “Like lying-next-to-me-in-bed-at-night, drinking-coffee-over-the-morning-paper alive,” I said.

  “That’s correct,” Tony said.

  “Then the answer to your question is no. It’s just me and the cat.”

  “That’s what I want to hear.”

  “I’m not crazy, Tony.”

  “Opinions vary,” he said.

  “But you should read about relativity. It really is amazing, if you can open yourself up to the truth of it.”

  “Maybe I will, bud,” he said in a way that made clear he would not.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You good?” Tony asked.

  “I’m good.”

  “Because I need to be able to tell Alice you’re good, so she’ll calm down.”

  “Fit as a fiddle,” I assured him.

  Another pause. “Okay, man. Basketball game Friday at Art’s. I’m grabbing barbecue from that place down on Wharf Street. You in?”

  “Count on it,” I said, and because I was not, in fact, crazy, or stupid, as I hung up the phone I resolved to stop talking about Einstein, as it had become clear that the reason people still believed time was absolute was because they needed to, and no amount of evidence to the contrary would free them from that willful ignorance. This was a resolution I wouldn’t break for months, until the liquid hand wash incident set my personal world spinning on an entirely different axis altogether.

  7

  FIFTEEN MINUTES, EXTENDED

  You’re the talent, K.,” Theodore said. “We came to you, not the other way around. This is your project, and we trust, as we do with all our talent, that the show will be its best if you are allowed to make it whatever it needs to be.”

  There was a pause, during which it seemed evident Theodore expected some sort of response from me. “Okay,” I told him.

  “That said, we do have some ideas.”

  “Before we get into that,” Claire said, “and I’m sorry to interrupt, but there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Of course,” Theodore said.

  “Does everyone call you Theodore?” Claire asked.

  “Yes,” Theodore said.

  “Like, all the time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even your wife?”

  “My dear, I am gayer than a pink suede sofa.”

  “Funny,” Claire said. “You don’t look it.”

  Theodore raised his meaty arms in a shrug. “I didn’t ask to be W. H. Taft’s twin brother. But who am I to quibble with the divine?”

  “Okay,” Claire said. “So no one in your life has ever called you Ted, or Teddy, or Theo.”

  “Not even once,” Theodore told her.

  “That’s remarkable,” Claire said.

  “It really sort of is,” I agreed.

  “Excuse me,” Theodore said, taking off his sunglasses for the first time despite the fact that we’d been indoors for twenty minutes, “but what is your relationship to K., again, my dear?”

  “Manager,” Claire said.

  “Just ‘manager’?”

  “We’re friends,” I told him. “New friends. She has no managerial experience whatsoever, as far as I know.”

  Claire punched my good arm, hard enough to give me a mild charley horse.

  “Any event, that’s between the two of you, I suppose,” Theodore said. “Though I like her, you know. Sharp tongued, pretty. She could make a good sidekick type.”

  “I’m sitting right here,” Claire said, “actively resenting being referred to in the third person.”

  Theodore made a distressed wheezing sound, and in short order seemed to stop breathing altogether. His face flushed, then cycled through rapidly deepening shades of red.

  We stared, Claire and I.

  After a few seconds Theodore finally drew a breath. “Don’t be alarmed,” he said, panting. “That’s how I laugh. I’m obese and my lungs don’t work properly. I haven’t made a sound you would recognize as laughter since 2003.”

  I nodded.

  “Alrighty then,” Claire said.

  “Which, coincidentally, was the year I won my first Emmy, as E.P. on Funeral Home Confessions.”

  “Graceful segue into your bona fides,” Claire said.

  Theodore wheezed again. We waited, somewhat less alarmed this time.

  “That’s good,” he said after recovering himself. “Maybe I should give you the show, my dear.”

  “Wait a minute,” Claire said. “Did you say Funeral Home Confessions?”

  “Yes,” Theodore said.

  “Someone actually made a show called Funeral Home Confessions.”

  “It ran for four seasons,” Theodore said. “I’m surprised, and perhaps a bit hurt, that you haven’t heard of it.”

  The waiter arrived with our drinks: vodka martini for Claire, Murphy’s stout for Theodore, Arnold Palmer for me.

  Claire lifted the very full glass to her lips. “So, your ideas,” she said to Theodore.

  “Of course. Actually, it’s less a set of specific ideas and more a general, mmm … aesthetic.” Theodore paused to sip at his beer. “If you would indulge me in an analogy?”

  “Why not,” Claire said.

  “I own a summer property on an island off the coast of Maine,” he said. “This island has deer, but no coyotes. Do you know what happens when you have deer but no coyotes?”

  “Lots and lots of deer?” Claire said.

  “Lots and lots of destruction,” Theodore said. “This property of mine, when I bought it, boasted voluminous flower beds, a vegetable garden spanning two acres, and a dozen dwarf apple trees. The flower beds were the principle and best landscaping feature. The apple trees dated back three generations, to when the land was part of a much larger orchard. The vegetable garden supplied our monthly barn dinners, which before the deer came were the highlights of the summer social calendar.”

  “Sounds very nice,” I said.

  “It was,” Theodore said, wiping foam from his upper lip with a bar napkin. “When I bought the property, there had been several harsh winters in a row, and that kept the deer population down. But then two very mild winters occurred back-to-back, and when I arrived for my second summer on the island I found the proper
ty ravaged.”

  “Ravaged,” Claire said.

  “Completely,” Theodore said. “Gardens torn asunder. Flowers gnawed off at the ground and not even eaten, most of them, but just strewn about. Wanton, pointless destruction. The apple trees, too. Low branches snapped off. Trunks worn raw by antlers. I was furious. Furious.”

  “Didn’t you have a caretaker?” I asked. “Someone to watch the place?”

  “We had groundskeepers,” Theodore said, “but they didn’t live on the property, and these white-tailed hooligans did their work under cover of darkness. Besides, the groundskeepers’ expertise was horticulture, not hunting.”

  “No more barn suppers for you,” Claire said.

  “Why do you think I was so angry?” Theodore swirled his beer around the rim of the glass. “So enter a gentleman named Rob Crockett. Like a lot of the island’s year-round residents, Rob wears many hats. He is the propane delivery man, and also drives the municipal garbage truck twice a week. He’s a skilled carpenter, a capable chess player, and, if a member of your crew is hungover or sick or dead, a top-rate deckhand on a lobster boat. Of course in this instance there were other skill sets for which I needed him. And no, that’s not innuendo.”

  “In your endo,” Claire said.

  Theodore wheezed. “Don’t I wish,” he said. “But no. Sadly, Rob Crockett is straight as the day is long. Rob Crockett also is a crack shot, and has a healthy disdain for poaching laws. Really, laws in general. This made him useful to me.”

  “Rob Crockett, deer slayer?” Claire asked.

  “Indeed,” Theodore said. “And his M.O. was remarkably simple: he scattered rice bran all around the yard and set himself up on a hill with an old Gewehr 43 rifle that his grandfather found in a Nazi bunker in Aachen. Every night for two weeks I sat inside, drinking wine in the dark and waiting, waiting. I’ve never been so nervous in my life, wondering when the moment would come. Wincing, for hours on end.”

  “Not for nothing,” I said, “but was it all that smart for Rob Crockett to be sitting on a hill basically aiming a rifle at you?”

  “That was part of the excitement,” Theodore said. “Such exquisite tension. I mean, he is an absolute madman. Would a deer’s life end? Would mine? And when? That was the biggest thrill. Not knowing when.”

  Claire looked at me. I shrugged.

  “So I waited,” Theodore said. “Poured Pinot with a trembling hand. Sometimes I’d go to the window and pull the curtain aside to see if there were any elegant four-legged figures in the grass. At times I was sure I could see them, then immediately thought it my imagination. I would have turned on the exterior lights, but I didn’t want to ruin the suspense.”

  Now Theodore closed his eyes, his jowls trembling with ecstatic reminiscence. “And then,” he said, “when the report finally came, I would startle, sometimes spilling my wine, sometimes crying out. It’s so quiet on the island—really, unless you’ve been there you can’t appreciate the enormity of the silence—and a gunshot can feel like the world is coming to an end. The release, I don’t mind telling you, was quasisexual. And as after sex, I almost immediately went to sleep with a smile on my face.”

  “Um,” Claire said.

  “What about the deer?” I asked.

  “Dead,” Theodore said, opening his eyes again. “Well, a dozen of them, anyway. Another ran off into the woods after being gut shot, and probably died. I offered to pay Rob Crockett, for his time, for his skill, and for the risk he was taking with the law. But all he wanted was to keep the carcasses. God knows what he did with them.”

  Theodore looked from me, to Claire, then back to me, his gaze obviously intended to convey something momentous. I had no idea what that thing might be, so I drank my Arnold Palmer and glanced around the dining room.

  “You were saying before,” Claire said, “this was supposed to be some sort of analogy?”

  “It’s not clear by now?” Theodore asked.

  “Not to me, I’m afraid,” Claire said.

  They both looked in my direction. I shook my head.

  “My goodness,” Theodore said. “You are Rob Crockett, K.”

  “I am?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t follow,” I said.

  Theodore pushed his beer glass aside and leaned forward, his elbows clomping the table. “K.,” he said, “more than at any other time in our lives, the world is full of destructive deer. Idiots, ideologues, blind followers of bureaucratic protocol. People who believe with frothy-mouthed intensity in all manner of nonsense, despite the fact that this nonsense has been conclusively and repeatedly disproven. Those who would try to convince us they understand the nature of God. Those who hate and kill on His behalf. Those who confuse being willfully ignorant with being populist. Those who can’t keep their mouths shut at the movie theater. Thieves, both petty and prominent. Chattering classes of all political affiliations. People living and dying within the comfortable, banal confines of online echo chambers. Serial self-affirmers. Those who believe traffic laws apply to everyone but them. Special snowflakes of every stripe. They have destroyed our discourse and stripped the gears of our republic. They are dragging us to hell.”

  Theodore paused, fixing me with a gaze, his eyebrows raised.

  “Despite their myriad differences, there is one thing all these people agree on. This point of concurrence is itself the ultimate bit of nonsense, the inevitable endpoint of our fascist, bankrupt political correctness: an unblinking certainty that simply because they hold a belief, that belief is sacrosanct.”

  The waiter glided up to the table and asked if we wanted another drink. Theodore nodded, then leaned back in his chair, examining the nails on one of his hands.

  “If a man tells you the sky is purple and ‘cat’ is spelled with a ‘k,’” he said, “what do you say to him in response?”

  “That he’s wrong?” I said.

  “Of course,” Theodore said. “And that’s what makes you different from everyone else. You’re a beacon, K. You stand for the critically endangered ethic that we do not have to abide bullshit just because someone else happens to believe it.”

  The waiter returned with a fresh beer. Theodore didn’t let it hit the table.

  “I’ve been trying to make this show for years, but could never cast it,” he said. “Of course there are plenty of people happy to play the contrarian, but that’s not what I want. I want something sincere. Something that comes from the heart, the gut. And then, as though sent from heaven, you appeared.”

  “Laying it on pretty thick, Theodore,” Claire said.

  “But I am not buttering anyone’s ass. Not that I wouldn’t like to butter your ass, K., in a more literal sense. But that’s neither here nor there.”

  “I have only a faint sense of what you mean,” I said. “Nevertheless, I’m glad that the literal buttering of my ass is not the topic at hand.”

  Theodore nodded. “I don’t care in which direction you aim your rifle,” he said. “I don’t care if a few rounds go astray. Contrary to the shopworn colloquialism, there are no innocent bystanders. Not anymore. Everyone’s guilty. Everyone’s complicit. So you start with me, K. All that I just said. Tell me why I’m wrong. Kill my sacred cows.”

  “Your what, now?” I asked.

  “My sacred cows.”

  “I’m a little confused,” I said.

  “About what?” Theodore asked.

  “What happened to the deer?” I said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You were talking about deer, and now all of a sudden it’s cows.”

  “You are familiar with the idiom ‘sacred cow,’ yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well we’re all deer, K., every last one of us. And the cows are our unreasonable beliefs.”

  “We’re maybe mixing our metaphorical ruminants in a way that’s difficult, for him,” Claire said.

  “That’s the essential problem, yes,” I said. “Too many ruminants.”

 
; “This is an example of why you’re his manager, I presume?” Theodore asked.

  “Manager,” Claire said. “Translator. Like Rob Crockett, I wear a lot of hats.”

  “K.,” Theodore said, “if you take this show, all I’m going to ask is that you do what you did with that girl at Big Buy. With that gentleman driving the pickup truck. I ask that you do what comes naturally, in other words. You’re not polite. You don’t mince or parse. You’ve demonstrated a constitutional inability to play nice. This is why we want you.”

  “I’m not trying to be a jerk,” I told him.

  “Which is what makes it so wonderful, so compelling,” Theodore said. “You come by it honestly. Unlike most rabble-rousers and self-styled iconoclasts—your Rush Limbaughs, your Mother Teresas—you, K., are free of artifice or agenda. You simply are. Just as Rob Crockett simply is.”

  We were all quiet for a moment.

  “So what do you say?” Theodore asked finally.

  I considered, then looked over at Claire. “She can have a job?” I asked.

  “She can be in the show,” Theodore said. “In fact, I insist on it.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  8

  THE LITTLE THINGS

  I got Sarah a bedside bell. At the time I thought it a way to spin horror into humor, an absurd bit of role-playing, me as her manservant, highly professional and dedicated, crisp in both uniform and manner, and she a pampered socialite who couldn’t be bothered to rise from the sateen sheets and cumulus pillows of her four-poster. In keeping with this theme I decided I couldn’t just buy any old steel handbell. It had to be fancy, though not necessarily ornate. So I spent the better part of a Saturday courting tetanus as I scoured the musty labyrinths of antique stores, salvage joints, and estate jewelers, until finally I found the closest approximation available of what I sought: a vintage dinner bell comprised of a single piece of sterling silver, with a wide shiny mouth and a handle carved with fleurs-de-lis.

  I lifted the bell and gave a few experimental shakes; it chimed high and true, sounding more like crystal than silver, sounding, in fact, like the most gifted soprano in the Vienna Boys’ Choir. It was a noise I would come to dread, then despise; it was a noise that on two occasions would reduce me to tears.