American Estrangement Read online

  No one is inside the store except the cashier, standing behind the counter, subsumed by silence, setting sunlight streaming through the big bay window. He’s probably been gazing into the middle distance of book spines since nine o’clock this morning. “Hello,” he says to me. H, e, l, l, o. I have the fleeting thought that I should do for him what the mailman did for me, make small talk, after which the cashier will offer a personal tour of his store.

  But the store is tiny, it’s musty, it’s the opposite of Barnes & Noble. No tour needed here. Here are the history books, the political books, the tell-alls. Here is Stephen King, six shelves for him, six hundred volumes, The Long Walk, The Dead Zone, to name two. The titles tell you everything you need to know about what you’re going to find inside—somebody in jeopardy—and so do the covers with their giant font, bold colors, silhouetted figures. Stephen King isn’t writing with metaphor and misdirection, he’s not interested in posing questions about the nature of life or art or society. The only questions the reader will be pondering are who’s going to die. Yes, this is the antidote I need to help undo the last nine hours, a good book, a fun book, a page-turner, something with straightforward prose, crystal-clear storytelling, something that goes down easy. But which of these six hundred volumes should I choose? The covers might be similar, but the subjects are wide-ranging: cats, dogs, clowns, authors, the list goes on. There’s one about little boys who are paralyzed and attacked by werewolves, and another about little boys who are killed and come back from the dead, and there’s yet another, the most famous of all, about little boys with special powers living in abandoned hotels being pursued by deranged men wielding mallets.

  As I go from book to book, gauging and appraising, I’m getting the sense that I’m being watched by the cashier, ten feet away behind the counter, increasingly suspicious, displeased, small-town smile gone, patience gone, too, about to call out to me, No more browsing! Let’s make a selection! But no one talks like this in Aspen, of course. In Aspen, you can stay as long as you like, friend, browse as long as you like. You can thumb through all six shelves until your mind has become so saturated with themes of violence and horror and degradation that you’re no longer even in the right section, but have unwittingly drifted into self-help, which, oddly, has been placed next to Stephen King. These covers are different, naturally, with thinner type, lighter colors, sometimes stock photos, and they have titles like a practical guide or a workbook. I am far away from art now, and I’m even farther from metaphor and misdirection. But the theme of Stephen King remains the same: Somebody in jeopardy. Depression, drug addiction, domestic violence. Who will cope? Who will recover? Who will be alive by the end? Come to think of it, it makes sense to have placed self-help next to Stephen King, two selections of horror side by side, one lived, one imagined. Death, disease, dementia. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for anymore. Still, I gauge and appraise, plucking at random one more book from the very top shelf with a title that I’m able to render only by its component parts: boys. abused. sexually.

  The big bay window is behind me, but I can tell that the sun has set on the snowcapped mountains. I can hear that the cashier is getting ready to go home, rustling and bustling. The book in my hand resembles all the other books, innocuous font on white cover, but the stock photo of a figure alone in a room, casting an impossibly long shadow, calls to mind Stephen King. The author is Dr. So-and-So, Ph.D., and he hasn’t written “a practical guide” or “a workbook,” but rather, according to the doctor, “an investigation into the long-lasting impact,” his words. He writes, at least in the preface, with an authority that I find tactless. He presumes to know his reader. He has the credentials to prove it. “Twenty-five years of clinical research,” he says. In summary, his assessment is unflinching: symptoms, everything; prognosis, grim. He claims he has the statistics to prove it. If there’s optimism in this book, the people of Aspen will have to slog through three hundred pages to find it.

  Basically, what the doctor is suggesting is that you shouldn’t be wasting your time with make-believe stories about boys being pursued through abandoned hotels by men wielding mallets—speaking of metaphor. What you really need to be doing is “coming to terms,” and you need to be doing it now. You have to start figuring out how the obsolete past is interfering with the inescapable present, ten, fifteen, twenty years later, particularly how it’s interfering with your attempt at happiness. But the main impediment, as far as the doctor’s concerned, is that you don’t know how to figure any of this out, and the other impediment is that you don’t know if you want to.

  This is when the cashier calls out, “Closing time,” in a voice so mellifluous, so apologetic, and for a moment I’m able to glimpse an abstract expressionist view of myself, where I’ve been reduced to my own component parts, standing bleary-eyed in a bookstore, a long way from home, sun having set, crumpled in my pocket fifteen dollars of ill-gotten gains. Beneath it all, I can hear the clacking of the typewriter as Stephen King pounds out yet one more bestseller on horror.

  The next day is cloudless and cool and all the streets by the funicular have been closed because Shaun White is in town. He’s just won some major snowboarding championship—I don’t follow his career—and now he’s come to Aspen with his flowing red hair to shoot a Pepsi commercial or a video game or “a show for Netflix,” someone in the crowd is saying. Anyone’s guess is as good as anyone’s. There are trucks and cables and cones, and a production assistant is standing in the intersection, arms folded, telling us we have to wait to cross the street. He likes telling us this. But when the light turns green, we still can’t go, and then it turns green again, and if it turns green one more time I’m going to be late getting back to the art gallery from lunch. Someone’s asking the production assistant if Shaun White is on the funicular now, if he’s coming down the mountain in one of the cable cars jiggling at three miles an hour, about to make an impromptu appearance. The production assistant has no idea. “I just do what they tell me,” he says. He’s one hundred degrees removed from Shaun White.

  There’s a little girl sitting on top of her mother’s shoulders, pointing up at the mountain, a ninety-degree slope of green topped with white, saying, “I can see Shaun White, Mommy!” No, she can’t. She’s craning her neck, shielding her eyes against the unchanging Aspen sky. She wants to get up the mountain. She wants to meet Shaun White. “Can I, Mommy?” she asks. She reminds me of my own unrestrained excitement when I was her age, specifically with a certain Denver skyscraper where my mother worked as a secretary. She’d started in a law firm on the twenty-eighth floor, and had then moved to the thirty-third floor, and finally to the forty-first floor, and each time she’d moved it had seemed to me that she was rising higher, both literally and figuratively.

  “No,” she’d tell me, “I’m only rising literally.”

  She’d brought me with her to her office once, as part of “Take Our Daughters to Work.” I was a boy, but the pedagogical benefits remained applicable. This was when I was six years old or maybe I was seven. We rode an elevator that went as fast as a train, skipping the first thirtysomething floors, and when the doors opened I could see the entirety of Denver. There was Mile High Stadium, there was Coors Field, there were ten thousand people crawling along the sidewalk. I’d spent the day helping my mother open mail, that kind of thing, but mostly I sat in a swivel chair beside her, swinging my legs and watching her type. I was mesmerized by her fingers. She could have been playing a piano sonata at the concert hall, which could also be seen from the window. When it was time for us to go home, her boss came out to meet me, a big bald man in a pin-striped suit, shaking my hand and asking the standard question: what was it I want to be when I grow up, “Now that you’ve seen the inner workings of a law firm.”

  Obviously, the correct answer was lawyer.

  “I want to be a secretary,” I’d told him.

  By the fourth green light, there’s a woman in the crowd saying to the production assistant, “This
is complete bullshit.” I realize it’s the same woman from the day before, the one with the brown eyes and the sunburned face, whose way I couldn’t get out of at the bookstore. This isn’t all that coincidental, of course, seeing the same person twice in a town of seven thousand. It’s not clear to me if the woman is suggesting that having to wait to cross the street is bullshit or having to wait to cross the street because of Shaun White is bullshit. Either way, it’s not the kind of talk you hear in Aspen.

  “I just do what they tell me,” the production assistant says, which apparently is his go-to for all interactions with the public.

  But the woman is not persuaded. “That’s no excuse,” she says.

  The production assistant is staring ahead, unperturbed, and the woman is staring at him, perturbed, and I’m staring at her. She’s dressed again for an office job in a skirt and heels, and her face appears to have become even more sunburned—or maybe she’s just pissed off.

  “He’s just doing his job, honey,” one of the bystanders is explaining to her, as if explaining this will settle the matter, and another tourist is saying that he can see Shaun White coming down the mountain on his snowboard, look, look, look, and everyone is pushing and pulling to look, and I’m pushing the other way, through the crowd, which has doubled in size. “Are you a prompt person?” the owner had asked me at my job interview. “Yes, I am!” I’d said with too-over-the-top conviction. I was doing my best to differentiate myself from the twenty other applicants, which is tough when fielding yes-or-no questions. In the end, it was the father of a friend of a friend who’d put in a good word for me.

  “Does Shaun White live in the mountain?” the little girl is asking her mother.

  “He will one day,” she says.

  I know I’m going to be late, and the owner will be covering for me at the front desk, sitting next to the typewriter, gazing into his gallery of unsold art.

  The next morning I’m at work, as per usual, one hour already gone by, waiting for something to happen, when the doctor’s preface pops straight into my empty head. I can see the word “preface” in all caps, Sans-serif, the words marching across my line of vision, across the paintings, shades and shapes without rhyme or reason, as if the artists gave up. I’ve been looking at these same paintings since day one on the job. Now, as I’m staring into the vastness of the art gallery, as large and pristine as a high-end hotel lobby without any furniture, an unformed idea is emerging over the horizon of my consciousness. The abstraction of the gallery dovetails with the abstraction of my memory: blotchy, indistinct, non-narrative, yes, childlike. I don’t remember the specifics of that afternoon in Denver when I was left with a neighbor. No date, no name, no face. In other words, nothing actionable. I was four or five, maybe I was six, maybe it was winter. I know the doctor would say the memory has intentionally been buried.

  Anyway, this is what I’m thinking when the IT guy walks into the art gallery unannounced, lugging his toolkit and his industrial-grade laptop. For some reason he’s been hired to come every couple months to update the computer we never use.

  “How’s it been running?” he wants to know. He’s speaking too loudly for what’s acceptable, but no one else is here.

  “It’s running fine,” I say.

  He seems disappointed. He takes a seat at my desk, peering into the monitor, waking up the computer from deep sleep, clicking around, checking this and that. He’s clearly meticulous about his work and I respect this. He’s also oblivious to the presence of the typewriter, sitting one foot from his elbow. If he were to lean a little more to the side, he’d hit the carriage return and make it ding. I don’t have the heart to tell him that this is the technology of choice for the art gallery.

  “I can’t find anything wrong,” he tells me. We’re in agreement. Even so, “I’m going to need to reinstall the firmware,” he says. “Just to be safe.” I know he’s trying to pad his time sheet. I respect this, too.

  I make a show of checking my watch, considering, mulling, as if I have things to do. I still have eight hours to go.

  While we wait for the firmware to reconfigure, the IT guy leans back in the chair, hands behind his head, and says, surprisingly, “I like that painting.” He’s pointing to a silver painting, all lines and inscrutable marks.

  “What do you like about it?” I ask him. I’m trying to be a pleasantly engaging receptionist, who “will be able to provide basic background information,” as stated in the job posting.

  “It’s pretty,” the IT guys says. “It’s nice.” He doesn’t know what else to say. “It would look good above my couch.” We laugh. He shrugs. He’s not concerned with context and history or metaphor and misdirection.

  “I’ve been getting into baroque lately,” he says. He’s showing off now.

  “So have I,” I tell him. I’m lying. I’m happy to draw this conversation out as long as I can.

  “What do you like about baroque?” I ask.

  “I like his use of color,” the IT guy says.

  “His?”

  “Yes.”

  I wonder if he means Georges Braque. Or if he could care less about art and is just trying to ingratiate himself to me, big man at the front desk. For all I know he tells the bookstore person that he likes books, and the florist that he likes flowers. I’m just the receptionist, I want to say to him. I can’t do anything for you except sign your time sheet.

  He looks around the gallery, elbows on the desk. “Do you have any Baroque?”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “You should get some.”

  “I’ll tell the owner.”

  And the next thing I know I’m giving the IT guy a personal tour of the gallery, a brief introduction to thirty-four works of abstract expressionism before the firmware can finish installing. We go from painting to painting, stopping so I can point out some of the details up close, explain the background of the painter, the significance of the brushstroke, the things you would never be able to see just by looking, the things that you have to know are there in order to be able to see them. I speak like an expert in the field.

  We arrive at the silver painting that he likes, and he stops and squints hard, an inch from the canvas, as if he’s about to discover something, something figurative maybe, the way we do when we lie on our backs beneath a passing cloud.

  “What is it that you’re seeing?” I ask him.

  He leans back. He leans close. “I’m not seeing anything,” he says.

  “I’m not, either,” I say.

  The owner needs me to stay in the art gallery all day the next day, from nine to six, no outdoor Aspen break, so that I can type up the same letter to sixty different collectors about Untitled X.

  “Lunch is on me,” he says, which is fair.

  “Dear _________:” each letter begins. “I believe I have something in which you might be interested . . .” It’s the same letter as before: provenance, importance, five-figure price. I would be done in an hour if I was allowed to use the computer.

  Today the gallery is filled with the sound of metal on metal, as if I’m laboring in a blacksmith’s forge, physical exertion necessary for the fabrication of every letter, space, and punctuation mark, including “:”. Nothing comes easy in clerical work. If the art gallery wasn’t air-conditioned, I’d be wiping my brow. The only pause in the pounding comes when the carriage bell dings to indicate that the edge of the page draws near. This is where the margins can become problematic.

  Maybe it wasn’t nepotism that got me hired over those twenty other applicants, most of whom came equipped with art history degrees. Maybe it was my ability to type seventy words a minute. This, thanks to my mother, but also thanks to my eleventh-grade typing teacher, who was earnest and exacting, who would spend five minutes before each class expounding to a room of mostly disinterested sixteen-year-olds on how we were developing a skill that would serve us in the real world. Hers was a strictly practical approach to education. “Never mind literature,” she’d tell us. “Ne
ver mind history.” She didn’t need to convince me about the efficacy of typing. I’d been made a believer on the forty-first floor overlooking those streets of Denver. I was getting Bs in those other subjects, anyway.

  Standing in front of the classroom, she would call out the keys of the home row, that row of gibberish without which communication would not be possible. “A, s, d, f, j, k, l, semicolon!” She was a small woman but her voice boomed over the din of twenty-five typewriters banging out an uneven rhythm. Again and again we students marched, back and forth across the keyboard, a room full of eleventh graders being drilled for a vocational army.

  “A, s, d, f, j, k, l, semicolon!”

  There was a soothing quality for me in the mind-numbing repetitiveness of a, s, d, f.

  “If you can master this,” the teacher would shout, “you can master anything!”

  She knew what she was talking about. One month into the semester, we’d advanced to a complete sentence, “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!” she would scream out, and as she screamed, so did we type. “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country!”

  We were never supposed to look at our fingers on the keys, we were never supposed to look at the paper in the carriage, we were only supposed to rely on muscle memory.