By Sunday night, the news about Duke had gotten worse, and I found myself wondering whether Garrett could possibly take even this so coolly. While I was thirty-two thousand feet up, Duke got himself thrown out of that home game against the Dolphins. He’d played so little, made hardly any impact on the game, yet succeeded in disabling two Miami cornerbacks in ways that managed to trouble the fans—very hard to do, actually—making them wonder what exactly they were doing, watching this every Sunday instead of going to church.
The first incident was the more frightening of the two. I watched a replay of it on the washed-out flatscreen above the bar as I waited, double scotch in hand, for Rick to show. I was feeling a bit more composed now, after the nap on the plane I’d self-induced with liquor. After getting home, I debated whether to start in on my small stock of remaining Theria. Why exactly did Garrett want me to dispose of it? Reluctantly, though without throwing anything out, I decided for the moment to make do with booze.
The first of Duke’s transgressions had begun with a very bad pass from Skovksy. On third and ten, a Dolphin cornerback, last name Keller, easily picked off Skovsky’s hurried flip across the middle, which was thrown, curiously, from behind the excellent protection of an O-line that had held its own all day. Seemingly enraged by Skovsky’s stupidity, Duke speared the thieving cornerback right above the numbers, so forcefully you thought his own neck might break. Instead, it was Keller’s head snapping back into the turf. Nineteen took a defenseless posture penalty, putting the ball on Chicago’s own seven, and a quick Dolphins’ touchdown toss followed.
The injury report hadn’t been released yet, but to judge by the video, the way Keller’s helmet shot off his head on contact with the ground, and his jaw froze open unnaturally wide as he lay face-up, you thought the blood pulsing down from his mouth to his cheek must be the only motion his body was any longer capable of producing. Almost before Keller reached the ground, the players were signaling for the trainers. How many times had I witnessed this perverse communion over the weeks? As if no longer rivals, the players all sank to their knees and prayed together. Five minutes passed like this before the first signs of life emerged, though even then the cornerback never moved his mouth. It remained wide open, as if he were screaming, or permanently and terribly shocked, though you couldn’t really imagine what he’d seen to put this look on his face. The dislocated jaw would cost Keller two months at least; his mouth would have to be wired shut; he’d be fed sugar water through a drip.
The second infraction, coming in the third quarter, was both less life-threatening and more egregious. Duke was ejected without hesitation, though from the replay you could see he was already heading for the tunnel when the referee tossed him. This time the ball was in Duke’s sights, coming in on a fade route in the end zone. He’d just about secured this one, the ball was already nestled in his hands, when his cover man, the rare white cornerback, Wickes—a poor replacement for the man whose face Duke had shattered—fell down around his legs and dragged on Duke’s mask, which brought the ball out. Even though the penalty was going to get the ball placed inside the one-yard line, the destruction of this perfect play—the pass was a gem, the would-be catch as well—seemed to incense Duke. He struggled to his feet with the same bearing he’d had when Marcus told him it wasn’t his neighborhood anymore. Bad things, I knew, were inevitable from here. It was against the spirit of the game, to save a touchdown the way the Dolphins just had: I was sure Duke was thinking this. Yet nothing could justify what followed. After kicking the ball clear, Duke dropped his knee straight into Wickes’ guts. As he rose, he stripped Wickes’ head of its helmet. The Dolphin clutched his stomach, writhing, possibly exaggerating his pain, and so Duke bent down toward him, presumably to offer him some advice, but the cameras showed that the receiver’s lips never formed a single word. Instead, Duke straightened up and walked off—well, just after planting his foot firmly in the thespian’s face. Now Wickes would really have something to writhe over. The man began bawling, cradling his face with both hands and rolling over, back and forth, one or two turns in each direction, as though he were utterly inconsolable, had just heard his mother died in a house fire, and he’d been the one to leave on the stove. Wickes’ teammates surrounded him instantly, stopped his rolling and pulled the hands from his face. Everything was red—red leaking this time not in one big stream, as with Keller, but five or six little holes spouting rivulets of blood. The men by Wickes’ side soon tailed Duke, who was blithely strolling toward the tunnels on a sort of Sunday constitutional. Coach Cotter and his team intercepted the belligerent Dolphins before they could reach nineteen, who didn’t even acknowledge the scuffle breaking out just behind—and because—of him. No, he kept right on walking, not a care in the world.
A suspension for Duke was a near-certainty, I thought while sipping my scotch. His status with the team, with the league itself, had always been tenuous, which meant there was every chance he’d lose his spot with the Bears over the incident. Cotter wouldn’t—couldn’t—stand for this kind of thing, not if he wanted to field a functional squad. It should be said, the Bears did ultimately win the game, as the Dolphins suffered without their crippled cornerbacks: Chicago’s number one receiver, Creighley, profited mightily from their absence, scoring two touchdowns in the final quarter-and-a-half. Might Duke’s actions—one had to consider it—might they have actually been strategic, even if nineteen had never informed the team? A fringe hypothesis, yes—but just the sort of thing you couldn’t put past Duke. It’s why he was so morbidly appealing; you were energized even by his awfulness.
Garrett was the first of our group to address the matter, and I should have anticipated how: through that increasingly disturbing exclamation point, sent to me in a personal text. Paul chimed in later, far more troubled than Garrett with where our stealth spokesman’s actions were leading him and, in due course, when the connections were revealed, Arête itself. As I sat there, imbibing in preparation for Rick’s animadversions, which Duke’s deeds made newly urgent—as I tried to sort out where I stood in relation to these two figures—an email from Paul, addressed to all of us, told us the tale of Nike and Derrick Rose, the young NBA MVP who’d seemed destined to be a rival of Lebron’s, but whose career was lamed by injury right after he’d won the award. Nike had made lemonade, though; there was no such thing as a losing bet. They’d run campaigns that pitched Rose as a man who’d only known struggle his entire life, having been born into it: South Side Chicago, just like Duke. We ought to admire his perseverance, Nike suggested in a serious of black and white ads, even if he never regained himself.
Duke of course was a much harder case. He was no MVP, and he’d not grown up facing the same adversity (his mom was a professor, after all). Worse, he’d not suffered any physical misfortune, as Rose had, which might have made him pitiable. Rather, Duke had been other players’ misfortune. It was going to be a harder story to sell. Had there been campaigns for Mike Vick right after he’d been caught electrocuting dogs? I don’t remember any.
Rick showed up half-an-hour late, nicely offsetting my earlier cancellation: no apologies were in order. His tardiness also gave me time to get a couple of drinks in before facing his doubts, which turned out to be wiser than I could have known: he approached me at the bar with several others in tow, all uninvited. I wasn’t pleased, naturally—was he baiting me in some way?—but then, I realized, these unwelcomes could provide a buffer, preventing Rick from bringing up whatever he thought he knew about JG Chemical and Garrett. Technically, Garrett wasn’t even on the board of directors at the time of the controversy; it seemed he’d managed to put some distance between himself and the firm as the waters got murkier. But this wasn’t the sort of fact that would temper Rick’s pessimism. Probably the only person who could have helped me then in coming to grips with Garrett and the project was John. He was just the sort you wanted around when ambivalence prevailed, and solutions had to be improvised if they were to be had at all. Naturally he wasn’t here. He was back in Rapid City, according to Rick, dealing with the decline of Lenore, his half-Iroquois mother: a fact—his Indian heritage, I mean—he nobly refused to play up in his work. Being one-quarter Native wasn’t meaningless, of course, but it did mean something less in John’s case, as you couldn’t read it clearly in his skin; it simply hadn’t much inflected his life. Maybe he did have some greater right to his moral crusading, though, since he’d come by it more honestly than most.
It was strange to me how Rick, even now, was the painter I was closest to, despite our sharing little in the way of style, approach, or ethos. This probably just meant I no longer talked to painters. Was it merely his figureless line that held us together, the way he reliably found a current, an electricity, through the sludge of abstraction? It had been the first thing I’d noticed about him, in the crucible in which we’d come of age, back in school, and now it might have been the only thing I cared to notice. Ever since he’d started dating Lindy, less and less of what I liked in him seemed to remain. His shallower aspects had metastasized, as he turned his abstractions either to conceptual or ethical purpose, when quite obviously, looking at his work, what was strongest about it had nothing do with thought or goodness at all.
In days past Antral and its alleged transgressions would have been the least of his concerns. He would have been investigating referenceless experience—even the term formalism did him a disservice. At his best he was a phenomenologist of simple sensation, something no less real than anything else, and quite possibly more real than the things constructed on its basis. He was, if anything, a sort of hyper-impressionist who left the world and its water lilies entirely behind; certainly he was no expressionist. Truth be told, his work held real interest. Lindy, though, had turned him away from his greatest talent. These days, he’d become addicted to wall text and philosophically loaded titles. Worse, I’d even noticed figures and worldly things creeping into his paintings, generally as ham-fisted social commentary. I felt sorry, really, that I was partly to blame for his destruction.
Rick and five others arrived single file at my seat at the far end of the bar, near the television. Duke’s misdeeds were no longer on-screen, though SportsCenter being SportsCenter, it was only a matter of time till the program looped and he was back. I recognized only three of those with Rick, and only one was I pleased to recognize: Hasan, who picked up speed at the back of the procession when he saw me, almost pushing past the non-entities in front of him, his eyes glinting (his being always seemed concentrated in their shine). How nice it was to see him, especially now, this cognitive scientist turned playwright turned philosopher or philosopher manqué, as he preferred to call himself. He was much more than bearable, a real friend in fact, even if we didn’t see each other enough, mostly because we didn’t work on the same sorts of things. I think his operating in another discipline actually left more room for friendship between us; a purer, less rivalrous curiosity could take shape, something that was impossible with Rick. Indeed, Hasan admired my unwillingness to see myself as part of his project of investigating the mind, and in particular, of establishing the ways in which cognition, contrary to fashion, was truly disembodied, which is to say, Cartesian. He was a cognitive scientist with hardly any interest in the body as such, though he knew the ins and outs of the human vessel painfully well. It had led him on to all that evaded materialist capture, especially the arts. Occasionally I would see Hasan’s lectures around town, hosted by one or another interdisciplinary body, pitched for a semi-general audience beyond lay but well short of expert—a kind that really only existed in metropolises. He could justify a New York life. His plays, for instance, I’d read with pleasure, though they’d never been staged. He thought that wasn’t necessary, nor even desirable. The Cartesian theater was all you needed, I’d once quipped. I recall he didn’t laugh, but cited Charles Lamb on the glories of unstaged Shakespeare. That was Hasan.
Lately he’d been out of the country, mostly in Asia, lecturing and writing his mind-plays, as he called them. He earned plenty of money through all of this, though naturally a person who got up to what he did didn’t actually need to make a penny. He came from one of those Indian families, and he was probably the greatest introduction Rick had ever made to my social circles. I think he liked Rick’s abstractions, they fit well with his own subjectivist approach —before Lindy had poisoned him.
Hasan shouldered past the rest of the group and gave me a hushed, conspiratorial hug, his long, regal, blue-black blazer rustling against me. The first thing he said was the very thing on my mind: “Shame John couldn’t be here, isn’t it?” He meant it, too. We three always managed to have our fun. There was something wrong with each of us, in just the right way.
Two of the others corralled chairs as I moved us to a table. Suddenly I realized they were Terry’s rent boys, the ones I’d agreed to do a poster for, though they looked entirely different now, less like models and more like tramps. They were probably playing other roles today, switching them up like women. I’d thought I’d arranged the poster as a side deal between us, but perhaps now it was a Cosquer affair? Or maybe these two were just newish friends of Rick. I would never have known, given how little he and I talked these days. These two (what were their names?) were looking skittish. The one with short brown hair: unlike the last time, his locks were greasy and unkempt, as though he were playing a schizophrenic. In place of the all-black of our earlier encounter at the Ace, he wore a striped shirt with hulking bands of yellow and white, so that only three full alternations fit on his torso. The other one—I think his name was Jack or Jared, or else it was the other way around; let’s call him Jack, anyway—he no longer had any hair at all. He wore a heavy three-quarter length coat that would have made sense in January but now only made him look like a raincoater—which he might well have been, given the odd little winks he distributed randomly. The only other explanation for this was that he’d run low on Depakote. Whatever the case, I knew Terry would give him his medicine.
I assured Jared and Jack that their poster was coming along. They seemed delighted. In fact I’d done no work on it yet, knowing that Terry had no intention of staging anything with them, except perhaps a sex tape destined for TorChan. Hadn’t these rent boys given me total latitude, anyway, to get me to agree to their plan at all? They’d be paying for it with endless delays. What did it matter? I’d feigned familiarity with their work, and Karen had since sent me a few links on their behalf. Jack, the would-be prison-yard skinhead, was some sort of fabulist (possibly fabulous) nihilist: lots of blow-ups of stills from Kabul, or, more recently, night vision shots from the Levant, photo- and video-heavy, sometimes crudely marked up with sharpie. This was the technique he was onto lately. He’d actually volunteered, I understood, for one of the private armies fighting against ISIS in the Middle East, and it was in this manner he’d acquired some of his best photos. Frankly he deserved some credit for his commitment; it’s why I thought I’d do something for his never-to-be show. The picture, supposing I still drew it, could go instead on the cover of the sex tape, maybe. Although I would probably have had more admiration for Jack if he would have just dropped the documentary bit of the project. It tainted with mock seriousness what was, at least potentially, a meaningful aim, whether contesting territory in battle, or just suicide-by-war.
Jack’s appearance might have been of a piece with this, his tattoos near his neck perilously close to SS thunderbolts. On inspection they were swans. It wasn’t clever. With that heavy coat, which he’d had to loosen around his neck—the bar was kept hot—he seemed to be downplaying his persona, in deference to my skepticism, which he would have been briefed on by Rick or any other of Cosquer’s members. I was the very thing he was seeking to associate himself with, to help him pass some sort of test of legitimacy.
The schizophrenic-looking one, Jared, now he might actually have been sick. He was petrified and wan and immediately got himself a drink directly from the bar, presumably to counteract some of this, although I wasn’t sure what exactly would come out the other side. I’d not really looked at his art yet, which amounted to drawings done mostly in highlighter. Another artist, I thought, pursuing a signature at all costs. Maybe he wasn’t sick, just shrewd.
At the tables we made ours, I ended up far from Hasan and beside the women of the group, from whom I’d so far kept my distance. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident that they’d ended up next to me. They were subtle enough, not immediately engaging me, chatting instead with Rick about Cosquer’s pictures all over town—my pictures. I assumed he’d disown them, hint at his misgivings. Nothing of the sort. Rick was enjoying their attention, through a soft stance that could be read two ways. Modesty was one; but if anything were to come up later, any poor associations with Antral, say, Rick could spin this as neutrality or even silent inner objection. Lindy, notably—thrillingly—was absent today. I wondered whether Rick was starting to see the light about her, and whether one of these women might be her replacement. For a man who was spoken for, he certainly wasn’t declining their affections.
“Amazing how all of it’s unbranded,” said the dirty blonde to me, without introducing herself, as if I’d been a part of whatever conversation they’d all been holding on the way over to the bar. Annette was her name, freshly graduated from SFAI and new to the city—sharing a house with, among others, the Argentine girl next to her, Eva, who’d been in Kraków for some time now after abandoning Buenos Aires and Montevideo.
“And they’re totally in your style, too,” Annette continued, looking to Eva for support and only partly finding it. I had the feeling she didn’t know my work. And what was my style? I’d hoped I’d left signatures to second-raters like the schizophrenic with his Day-Glo sticks. But the man, Jared, could really drink, I had to admit. A pitcher of a rather dark beer soon appeared in front of him, sloshing onto the paper tablecloth and running in a single stream toward me before I dropped my napkin in it, stanching the flow. It wasn’t clear whether Jared would be sharing the pitcher with us. From the distress on his face, I got the feeling he should keep it to himself, it would do all of us some good.
Hasan was reading a paper copy of the Financial Times that he’d brought with him. He seemed indifferent to all else, Jack and Jared especially. As soon as I’d ended up out of range, Hasan had shut things down, waiting, I assumed, for certain parties to depart. Yet each time I considered whether he might have regretted coming out on a night like this (had Rick so much as told him what he’d be caught up in?), he would flash me a smile through pursed lips, so that there wasn’t even a glint from his teeth to match his eyes, which told me much, to wit, that even if his interest was cast narrowly, he was in fact happy to be here.
Rick kept checking the television while the women flattered the both of us. The screen, unfortunately, was directly in his line of sight. I should have taken the seat he now occupied, but in the incriminating clip to which SportsCenter inevitably returned, Duke was helmeted and there were no giveaway chyrons—or rather, the chyron had been overtaken by news of a fire at Bloomingdale’s, which filled me with relief. Nothing worth anything was going to be lost. The one occasion they showed Duke’s face, he’d been made over for the post-game press conference, with a foppish bowler, a high-cut turtleneck that seemed to be consuming his chin—I could easily imagine him pulling it up over this mouth for a robbery—and, somehow, a bandana covering much of his forehead. Without any help, who could possibly connect this face to the ones up all over town?
“I knew it was you pretty much from the start,” Annette said to me, although she turned to Rick and Eva without waiting on my response. What an odd way of holding a conversation, taking no risk of rejection by moving on as soon as you’d spoken. What she’d said, anyway, was evidently meant as flattery: you have a signature. Jared certainly would have taken it that way. What did she mean, exactly, though? That there was some bundle of formal traits my Arête pieces shared with my earlier, mostly painted works: my strokes, say, the intensity of their attack, their particular weights and arrangements; or else a compositional continuity, the way I relished certain imbalances and dissonances and not others? Or did this woman intend something deeper, to wit, the kind of signature you needed more than a pen to form? Yet wasn’t I now far removed from the concrete perceptual groundedness of my early work? Lately I’d given memory and thought, not observation, pride of place in my art—initially, of course, out of a new necessity: Claire was the first of my subjects to become suddenly inaccessible to me, while Immo, who stopped sitting for me after seeing the dark results, followed soon after. To carry on at all, I’d had to transcend the eye’s terrain to the higher ground of mind.
Ultimately, I knew Annette’s gesture toward signatures amounted to a kind of generic flattery. Unity of some kind was the aim of most artists. It let you become known, recognized, like a logo or a brand. Therefore to have a style at all, especially of one’s own devising and with some claim to depth, was precisely the privilege everyone but Hasan here was seeking for themselves, and why most of them were interested in engaging me. Rick may have been displeased about the ethics of the latest project, but for my past successes, and for my style, he could still show me off.
“Will you keep it that way?” Eva asked in accented English as she gathered her exceptionally long black hair behind her head.
“Who are those two?” Jared was now quite drunk and hence finally able to speak, though his question came out clipped and twisted with fear.
I kept peeking at the screen above us, wondering how many weeks remained until all the dots were connected with Duke.
“Were all the pictures your idea?” Annette asked.
“Mostly,” I pounced before she could shift back to the others.
“And is there... any point to them?” Eva said, leaning on the table with her forearms.
“Of course there’s a point,” Annette said, with a strained giggle.
“What I mean is,” Eva continued, “whoever is paying for it—why? Who are the two of them, in the pictures? The black man and the other one.”
Rick, who’d so far seemed aloof, intervened to prevent anything being revealed about the workings the project: “What the client wants down the road, and what if anything we’ll agree to do, we don’t know. It’s meant to run long-term, though.”
“The pictures are so sharp and clear,” Eva said, avoiding the substance of the drawings. “The printing must have cost a great deal.”
“I feel like I’ve seen that girl, too,” said Annette, touching my arm. Perhaps she was getting bored with logistics and sought my attention in some other way.
At all events, a barrage of questions ensued from the group:
What was Karen doing for the project?
Was that her text around town?
What’s coming next?
I left it to Rick to supply answers, which he did, although with a degree of interest that continually diminished. Meanwhile, I turned my chair toward the television, a brazen gesture of detachment I’d been working my way up to. The threshold now crossed, my responsibilities more or less disappeared. They’d all had their chance to sit with me, hadn’t they? The girls eventually started talking with Hasan. The rent boys would get their poster—perhaps. I’d have to talk with Terry first, see how he planned to deal with them. Annette would get bragging rights for having chatted with me, the vanished up-and-comer. And Eva got a bit of performance art out of it, watching me categorically sign off from the gathering while remaining in plain sight. All but she understood my detachment, as it dovetailed with what was now known of me in the city. She, not having been long in New York, took it as a personally hostile act, one that, to her credit, she appeared to enjoy, the more with each round of drinks. But before I could properly consider the possibilities between her and me, Rick disbanded the entire group with the excuse that he had Cosquer business to talk with me.
I assured Jack and Jared that I’d be thinking of their work, and of what sort of design might best suit their poster, while I smiled within at the buggery in their future. For their part, they remained flattered to the end that I was willing to work with them.
Hasan, the sophisticate he was, departed with the others, circled the block, and reappeared as if he’d just gotten there. Rick and I didn’t speak while this was happening, preferring instead to work on our drinks and get the voices of the other four out of our ears. It had been more taxing than he’d imagined, this meetup. He’d probably wanted to make my life hell through it, but I’d managed to make it just as painful for him.
Hasan brought over three shots of some sort of liqueur to us, holding the glasses in front of him with joined hands. Before he could even sit, I asked after John.
“I saw him just a weekend ago,” Hasan said dryly, “and he seemed entirely occupied with your little project. He was useless—I was only looking to get drunk that night.”
“He wants to do a run of silkscreens from your images,” Rick said.
“It’s bizarre,” I said, “that I don’t hear from him anymore.” I sipped at my drink without asking what it was: like flowers and wine, is all I could think of. Beautiful. Hasan probably fancied it a palate cleanser, in light of the rude company we’d just kept.
“Well, John’s got his hands full now back home, doesn’t he,” Hasan said to me. “Do you know what happened? His mother went on a rampage: tearing up the house, his childhood things.”
“Because he wouldn’t come home or what?”
“I don’t know what it was, exactly. But you know them.”
“How is his dad now?”
“Well, I think that’s what this might be about. She’s saying he hit her, but he’s telling John the usual thing—she hits him first, and he’s only trying to stop her. I believe that. I’ve met her once. I recall she didn’t like the looks of me, though we’re both a little Indian, right? Different kinds, of course, but whatever. Apparently John’s just putting out the usual fires with her. But she got hurt pretty bad this time, fell down.”
Hasan looked on thoughtfully with those pursed lips. He was one who didn’t speak for the sake of it. He might not say anything more tonight unless it felt worthwhile. I think we were all sorry for John, contemplating our own highly variable relationships with him. This seemed to me to pave the way for talking about Duke. What was the point in our delaying further, now that we’d shed the hangers-on? Hasan could be trusted absolutely, traveling as he did in circles that didn’t closely follow professional sports and weren’t likely to concern themselves with billboards and murals. They had the mind to worry over.
“Did you see what happened today?” I asked Rick.
“With what?”
60 Minutes had replaced football on television, otherwise I would have simply pointed back up to the screen.
“What Duke did,” I answered. “Check your email.” I’d forwarded Paul’s note. “I’m not sure why you weren’t on the list to begin with.” Actually I was entirely sure. Rick was a bit player on this project. He’d made it seem that this was so because of his own abstention, but I wondered sometimes whether he would have simply liked a clearer invitation, delivered at the right time, before Lindy had a chance to spoil him on Antral. Rick looked back at me wearily. Even without knowing exactly what Duke had done, he knew. He set his phone deep in his lap and pulled his head down low to the table, as if something terrible might be disclosed there and he needed a private theater for it.
“So who is he, then?” Hasan asked, fanning himself with the salmon paper.
“He’s the guy on posters and billboards they wanted to know about,” I said.
“So he is real.” Hasan’s eyes brightened another notch.
Rick started shaking his head with a restrained violence then, before actually standing up in disbelief. “This whole thing...”
“Is fucking strange, yeah,” I finished his thought. Why else do you think Garrett is putting this much money into a nobody?”
“I was hoping you’d know, because I have no fucking notion.”
“This is what he has going for him, Rick. Why else?” I presented this as knowledge I’d long possessed, as if I’d known it when I first undertook the project; of course it was an inference I’d only fully drawn yesterday, seeing Garrett’s bizarre yet convincing reaction to the things I had to tell him about Duke and his friends in Chicago, the life nineteen was looking to restart there.
“This? So Garrett’s looking for this to be a calling card for his company?”
“I don’t totally know,” I admitted, “but I know he’s not exactly opposed to the downside.”
“Paul sounds pissed—and he’s the marketing chief. His boss is losing it.”
“I don’t think Garrett’s surprised Paul’s struggling a little.”
“And what’s all this shit about Derrick Rose? My god, Paul’s psycho, too.” Rick sat down again, exasperated.
Hasan merely sipped at a new drink, a hot toddy I recognized by the cloves studding its lemon wedge. Rather early in the night for that, it seemed. My friend eventually turned his eyes to the silent screen. “There!” he exclaimed in a voice he used only once or twice a conversation, for real emphasis. Sure enough, the bar had switched the monitor back to ESPN, and the crawl along the bottom identified Duke and his sins on the field.
It wasn’t long before Rick, watching the screen, fell back into the very state of disbelief from which I’d just been helping him climb out. Now we’d have to do the whole thing again.
“So what exactly are we supposed to do with this?” Rick slurred slightly. “You’re supposed to be tracking this in some way, is how Karen put it to me. So Garrett wants a picture of a fucked-up face now?”
“He doesn’t really answer questions like that.”
“Oh, I know. I don’t hear back to half the notes I send him.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t send those, then. He’s gotten used to Karen and me.” What Rick resented most was being excluded from the decision-making at Cosquer, my growing significance to the financial fate of the studio.
“Oh!” said Hasan, his second exclamation, following uncommonly close to his first. Maybe Duke did have the powers Antral and I needed him to have.
“Look at that,” Rick said, “and tell me we’re working with the right people.” I turned—I’d chosen not to face the screen until then —and found Duke’s second victim, the one who stayed conscious through the strike, though he might have wished to have been out cold. Blood pooling in their hands, two teammates cradled the cornerback’s head, which was riddled with puncture wounds: one penetrated his right nostril, a second his upper lip, and another sat quite close to the ear. Only a sweeping step could inflict this damage, judging by the direction of the cuts to the man’s visage. The look on his face, too, it was as though he weren’t on a football field at all, being watched by millions; he was all alone, in a dark alley, there was no need and no way to keep up pretenses. Yet there was the sharp light knifing him in the face; there was the dirt on his jersey. It was all quite perverse of ESPN, but we were used to it by now, or should have been.
“So I guess now you’re going to do that face right over Times Square?” Rick snarled.
“It’s not the worst idea I’ve heard.”
“Oh, fuck you. This is just all wrong.”
“I’m sure Lindy hates it.”
“Don’t you goddamn make it about her again. I know the things you think. It’s Garrett who’s lost here. There’s people who’ve kept tabs on him forever, through some truly sordid shit. And I know you know what I mean.”
“I know he’s got principles, yeah.”
“He’s a law-and-order freak, is what he is. Hasan, tell me I’m wrong here?” he drunkenly implored, pointing at the television. The scientist shielded his eyes from Rick’s with the newspaper and shot me a look of solidarity beneath it. Here comes another of Rick’s hissy fits, it said. Hasan wasn’t one to be wrong-footed or discombobulated; he took pride in his composure, which we knew he’d not always had. It was hard-won, this taming of his mind, and he wouldn’t surrender it easily.
My sympathy with Garrett strangely waxed at moments like this. What did Rick actually know of Antral’s CEO, if I, who’d been working most closely with him, hadn’t yet managed to puzzle him out? My colleague’s discontent was merely reflexive, a function of his class as an artist. How could anyone doubt that Lindy had had this effect on him after coming into his life? Rick really didn’t want anything to do with the Antral account; he’d become terribly concerned about the origins of Garrett’s wealth, though Rick himself was hardly off-the-grid or anyplace else where you could at least try to mount the case that your life wasn’t implicated by modern trade. No, the money was always going to be dirty; there wasn’t any that was clean now. So, unless you knew yours to be a lot dirtier than average, what was the point of making a fuss now? Just because it was easy to complain when the usual suspects were involved? The police? The defense department? Rick objections were so obvious and unhelpful. Would it have changed anything if the DOD were taken off the roster of the thousands of businesses outsourcing Antral labor? In the end, Rick was like so many others I knew: ostensibly unflappable yet easily scandalized.
Garrett’s capital was only the first scandal for Rick, though. My less-than-realistic approach to depiction apparently was the second. He chafed at my rendering of the reigning mythos, my lack of fear over stereotypes, and my lack of interest in signaling somehow that I knew the score. What did the score matter in all this? The third scandal—yes, there was a third—was down to the very substance of the campaign, to wit, that we’d so much as chosen to work with subjects like Daphne and Duke. Here again, Rick wanted to ignore everything that actually turned the wheels.
Hasan had been drifting down the corridors of his own mind for the last few minutes, ever since talking heads had replaced on-field imagery. He was working out the kinks in one of his latest projects, I imagined, on animal thought, the possibility of which posed some threat, it would seem, to his interiority thesis. But the spat between Rick and me had brought Hasan back to us, hoping to offer us a bit of help, now that he’d sorted out some problem of his own. He wasn’t a man who needed much help; this was another thing he staked his identity on.
“Has Garrett said anything to you about what’s happened with Duke?” Hasan asked us. “Does he know?”
I hesitated a moment before confessing to the lone exclamation point I’d gotten from him. I wished I’d not had to admit to Garrett’s perplexingly glib response in front of Rick, who immediately turned triumphant—bitterly triumphant—so that he rose as if he really were going to walk out on us this time. Yet before he could do or say anything, Hasan cajoled him to sit, which he did, but in a chair much closer to mine than the last.
“Do you like where this is going?” Rick asked with breath of gin and Esprit de June—Hasan’s mystery liqueur. “How’s this supposed to sell whiskey or anything else?” His voice was lower, nearer my ear, and more cutting. Frankly I preferred his yelling.
“I guess you’d rather I fly solo on this one?”
He made no move.
“I mean, I hear his checks are going out to everyone.”
“Is that what you’re selling?” Hasan asked. “Whiskey?” He leaned in close, with renewed interest, his blazer buttons shining in the light as he steepled his hands. I should have known: as a man on the frontiers of consciousness, this part of our project, the consumer psych portion, fascinated him. It was also a debate that let him—perhaps this was his real aim—settle down his friends.
“I have to say, Rick,” Hasan said, slowly leaning back in his chair, “from everything I’ve seen, the strangest things can sell people.”