The Endless Concord, Chapter 3

III. Fanaticism

Three years prior I sat cross-bones-style in the exercise room of an urban community in Seattle watching Thom walk in place on the treadmill. He was wearing the necessary articles one adorns before entering an exercise room in an urban community; these being the headband and heart watch. He was checking his pulse and giving me suggestions for places to go and look for work. An empty coffee cup and a half gulped orange juice lie on the thin, light grey carpet that seemed to stretch over everywhere I went. I sat watching my older brother move forward and never get anywhere. I imagined the mechanics of the treadmill meant something, that the topic of discussion and the evasive destination of the treadmill somehow allegorized this move I was making. Life is a cycle, he would tell me, picking up the pace of the machine and rapidly pressing the arrows for an increased incline. Soon he would be almost completely horizontal and I would have to peel him off of the walls.
Our reunions meant it was necessary to contemplate the mysterious event of our father’s sudden disappearance all over again. After ten years the feelings of remorse, betrayal, resentment, and hatred have all long since receded. It’s just a quiet panic now and again when images of baseball games and home carpentry pass across the television screen. The very word, America, assured us we were fatherless. There is this network of good fathers. They associate themselves with the North American continent in numbers maternity could never possibly own up to. There is fatherhood in the soil, in the vegetation, in the mysterious cloud of progress hovering over the country.
Willis compared it, sometime after we had met, to a young man taking his son hunting in a vast prairie, approaching the ridge with his arm around the boy and confronting the evening with a hesitated violence, dealing out instructions and praise to the young hunter who bottles his emotions for the sake of his stolid father, reloading in the fashion he’d been raised to understand is the quickest, the most precise. The rest of the World is a bastard conspiring in smoky alleyways, clamoring over fence lines and endless rocky terrain. This, Willis would remark, is the sentiment of American fraternity.
“If that’s true,” I told him one window-viewing morning, “men without fathers, according to this ‘sentiment’, are un-American.”
“Precisely.”
Thom had no special feelings on our father’s disappearance, and certainly not on Willis’ contrivance of the significance of this event. My brother lived undeniably in the present, enacting rituals and patterns one could trace past him on into the future. He was linear. This would be a line eventually leading him to heaven, he was convinced. His convictions made me guilty for having none. And it was this sentiment that was awkwardly present as he jogged along the thin rotating strip of rubber focusing on a Christian channel infomercial that flickered on one of the many overhead televisions in the exercise room. I watched the feet lob forward, the timing of the watch, his nimble fingers on the pulse of his neck every so often. If this is conviction, I thought.
Willis also had a few ideas on Thom’s oddly flamboyant, positively spiritual outlook on things, conjuring up an entire person based solely on the few facts I had given him. It was necessary for Willis to make these guesses. He wanted to know who his friends were, in which area we survived, on autopilot, between the wheels and spinning things of his head.

Thom and I had grown up in Idaho in a cul-de-sac one might continue on past to streets with old broken down Ford trucks finally resting on a driveway littered with colorful toys and play things to other streets looking much the same. Cul-de-sacs turn onto streets that span across neighborhoods that span across the World. The languages change, the people change colors, the pavement stays much the same. We played cowboys and Indians on the front lawn. Our mother would ring a dinner bell she jokingly contrived to seem old timey, and we would reluctantly shuffle inside to clean up, finally sitting down at the table in pajamas for home cooked meatloaf and carrots she marinated in maple syrup. There were no specific day when our father left, it seemed. Instead he was always there, and then he was always gone. We would eventually go to college there in Idaho, and Thom, who is five years older, would move to Seattle to do PR work. I would experiment with the usual drug addictions one tries on for a short time before putting it away altogether and replacing it with the thirst for literature and tendency towards borderline alcoholism. Thom would inevitably keep himself remarkably clean and healthy, moving into a condominium somewhere at the edge of matter, drinking conspicuous amounts of mineral water. This period of my life would remain hazy and out of focus, lasting only two years and yet still leaving a lasting impression. I would move fast down the road in my mothers hatchback, music blaring out of the car stereo, making occasional stops in ethnic communities, assuming this is where drugs are purchased, only getting it wrong and pointed in the direction of communities much like Thom’s. There was this airy, fleeting glimpse at life and everything in it as a kind of hot air balloon in the night sky; untethered, unmanned. There were no causality, no algorithm pointing to the next necessary step. I would stop at baseball fields or large bodies of water and get out ahead of the headlights and skip rocks, or walk the bases with my hands in my pockets. I imagined Thom a different person and my father right there with me. I imagined this area of my life would probably dissipate and reconstitute into something totally contradictory. But it seemed right. This is the way things are done, I told myself.
A major turn came one day when I decided, although I wasn’t quite finished with general studies at the University, that I’d borrow our mother’s hatchback and go for a drive around the country. I had a bit of student aide money, no girlfriend at the time, no close friends, no real attachment to University; it just seemed like something I should be doing. I went all over, driving past open fields that led into small towns that led into big cities that kind of died out and started back to square one all over again. Highways seemed to defy gravity, doing barrel rolls and elliptical curves through white rock and sunlight. There were heat and rain, cold and snow, and depending on how fast you move the climate really sneaks up on you. This thought was immediately apparent after my first week of travel; how the sky could blow heat and black in billowing gusts and then suddenly cold white snow, endless miles of fence-line and white cold. This is something I could never finally wrap my head around. This idea that the road can go on, regardless of what’s on top of it, what’s moving around it. There are roads that cross the whole of Asia. It doesn’t end in Mongolia and then change over into a China road, it just went on. Road, that’s it, road. I thought it contemplative boundaries could be so illusory. There is no real border between America and Canada, it’s all just land. I wanted to look at a map and cross that border and suddenly think, here it is, I’m somewhere totally different. I realized on this trip that this idea is impossible; there will always be that one thing that bridges two places, whether it be a road, a mountain range, whatever. I wondered about people, what bridges us?

I first met Willis driving down from British Columbia. I saw a man wearing a brown leather hat and an overcoat holding his thumb out there in the rain next to the No Hitchhiking! sign. He looked like how I imagined Virgil from Dante’s Inferno would be; this solemn figure of rain and quiet torment standing still and withering down in the windfall of time. This thought struck me that if no one picked him up he would just go on standing there like that. So I turned around and picked him up, and there he was, there was Willis.
“You heading South?”
“I’m heading South, yes.”
“OK.”
“OK.”
We said nothing the rest of the ride.

Thom lowered the incline down to a two and slowed the pace, changing the channel on the television and wiping himself down with a big white feather down towel. I realized I would never own a towel like that. I fingered through my wallet and pulled out the business card of the strange man I had met a month before. He just kind of handed it to me with a polite nod and disappeared into the hyper-active foot traffic of Seattle. It was stained with ink and water and I had to turn it in the florescent exercise room light to make it out.
Willis Thomas, Program Administrator
Below the text there was a picture of a cartoon man being restrained by two large men in white coats, below this image there were more text but it was almost impossible to make out.

“Yes!” I heard Thom shout. I looked up and watched him position himself on the sides of the treadmill while starring up at the television nearest us. An infomercial was flashing on all of the screens at once. “I’ve been waiting for this. I caught half of it before…”
I put the card back in my wallet and got up to see what he was looking at.
“Do you know who you are? Do you know your environment? What is your purpose?”The voice echoed throughout the room. The man looked like an eighteenth century figure of Russian intelligence, and for the next fifteen minutes he sat in the armchair of some kind of talk-show setup bobbing his head from side to side and speaking about indisputable terms of progress. The set of the infomercial was orange and maroon and his arm-chair was of a thick wood with a burgundy backing. The lights on the set highlighted the shape of his skull. It all looked completely surreal.
“Hello, I’m Dr. Idleman,” he said, turning to the camera that was zooming in on him. “How do you know you know yourself? How do you feel you would feel if you knew you know yourself? How do you know…”
His head was beginning to fill the screen, magnified, as if in a fish tank. I anticipated bubbles.
“…I’m not selling you a cure, I’m selling you yourself. Because you are invaluable,” he was beginning to quiet down. “Buy my book,” he said in a whisper, the camera zooming in ever closer –into his eyes.
I laughed and looked over at Thom who was still standing on the edges of the treadmill gripping onto the railings. His mouth was wide open.
The book’s name was “Two Halves Don’t Make a Whole.” There was a picture of a cartoon man on the cover who was split in half. On one side the organs were disheveled and in all of the wrong places and on the other side it looked relatively normal. Arrows indicated that if you put the two halves together the man’s system wouldn’t function properly.
“This man is a lunatic,” I said, standing up and turning off the television nearest us.
“You shouldn’t dismiss this type of thing,” Thom said, getting back on the walking strip of the treadmill, “how do you know what the man is? You don’t even know yourself.”

I spent the next few days job-hunting in Seattle. Here began my relationship with Willis. I remembered the business card I had been playing with and thought it couldn’t hurt to call. Maybe he knew of some minor copy-writing job or some such thing. So I called him and sure enough he knew of a place. He said they had locations just about everywhere in the Northwest. The kind of work, he assured me, that would always have customers.
“Estate Healthcare you say?”
“Yes, all up and down the Northwest.”
“Where are you located?”
“I’m down in Portland.”
“I dropped you off in Seattle.”
“I was picking up chairs.”
“I see.”
“Yep.”
“Well…this might seem sudden, but you need somebody down there?”
“Maybe. I’ll tell you what, there’s a diner up there in Seattle not far from you, Rancy’s. Head over there, there’s an ad on the wall. Call them, they’ll set up an interview and I’ll put in a recommendation down here. It’s all the same computers, you’ll be fine.”
I thanked him and hung up. I knew Rancy’s. In fact, it was right across the street from Thom’s urban community. I had exchanged small talk with the counter girl one morning. She said business had gone downhill since the urban community set in because Rancy’s clientele works with a more modest budget. They can’t eat that close to the urban community, they’re embarrassed.
I took the bus back to Thom’s and dressed up for what I imagined might be a formal interview and walked down to the diner, going around the backside so the waitresses wouldn’t see me walking out of the condo, and found the ad of mention on the board near the restrooms.
Estate Plaza Behavioral Healthcare Center. Help yourself by helping people help themselves. Absolutely no experience helping people is necessary.
Apply immediately!
There was a cartoon picture of two men restraining another man who was holding an oversized cartoon knife to his head with lightning bolts and steam shooting out everywhere. A series of arrows and diagrams indicated the man would be fine.
The woman guaranteed no experience was necessary, but that the interview would be long.
“How long?”
“Very long…we want to be sure you’re mentally fit to deal with the mentally ill.”
“To deal with them?”
“Yes, to deal with them.”
The interview was in a pink building downtown. They had asked me to come in immediately. I was given an appointment slip upon entering the building.
Don’t have a cow! Mr. Roswell will be with you shortly!
There was a picture of a man holding a cow in his lap looking astonished.
“Come on in my man!” a very positive Mr. Roswell greeted me on my way in.
“Where should I sit?” I asked, standing in the doorway and looking around at the bean bag chairs and cartoon posters similar to the appointment slip, the business card, and the flyer at Rancy’s.
“Hop in one of the bags!” he hollered, vibrating with enthusiasm.
I sat down in a beanbag styled in the makings of a baseball and he pulled up a rolling chair a few inches from my feet. My line of site was angled directly at his crotch.
He sat like that for a few minutes with a big smile, nodding his head at me. I concentrated on one of the University degrees on the wall.
“Now let me rap it out for you here,” he began, chopping his hands out at the air.
I made a move to get up.
“No, no, no, you’ve come to the right place, this is the correct room,” he said in a more professional tone, lowering me back down into the bean bag with his hand on my shoulder.
“Let me begin by giving you a history of the Estate…”
We sat like that for a few hours. There was apparently a Martin something or other that began the whole private behavioral healthcare thing in the Northwest along with a group of concerned citizens. So many years later it is what it is today and people are happier.
“We’re willing to offer you $9.50 an hour,” he said finally.
“Does that include medical?”
“Depends what you mean by medical…”
“You mean…”
“…Yeah...”
I agreed and he stood up excitedly holding something called a teamwork ball. He said he does this with all of his new-hires. The object of the game, he said, is to motivate the other player while he makes to toss the ball in the can, and visa versa. There are no opponents, only colleagues. If the ball goes in the motivation was successful; we are successful.
“Go get em’ you got it! Okay! Yes go get em’ brother!” he yelled in my face.
I threw the ball in the trashcan and drove the hatchback back to the urban community, opening up the employee packet he gave me along the way and finding the address I was to go to for training, my employee number, and my id card. There were also several manila envelopes, a pen that said Mr. Roswell in cursive, and something called a teamwork award. This last article involved a picture of a man shaking the hand of another man and text that read, OK, go get em’! He said if I collect five of these awards I’ll be given a twenty-three cent raise.
I called Thom over a cup of coffee at Rancy’s and told him the news.
“There you go bud! You are dressed for success! That’s what I said, I’ve always said that!” I turned down the volume on the payphone. “You just marched right in there and said, ‘my name is Landers and I am a winner!’You go getter! You just walked in there and what did you do?”
“I got them.”
“That’s right! Absolutely! When do you begin?”
“Well…I have to move to Portland…”
“Maine?”
“Oregon.”
“Where?”
“Oregon…it’s six hours away,” I replied.
“When?”
“I have to bus down there tomorrow morning. I start training on Monday.”
“How long is training?”
“Two weeks. And then I go to this Golden Sun place for a month’s work or something, and then I’m going to this Plaza place.”
“Wow.”
“I guess.”
“Where are you going to stay?”
“The hiring guy recommended a motel right outside the city, Country Inn or something, said it was a good place.”
“Well…okay…I’m a little worried.”
“Why?” I asked, expecting what was coming.
“You like to do things on your own. I understand that. But no one’s truly alone Clem, there’s always someone there with you. You have to think about that sometime; ‘how do my actions hinder the actions of those around me?’ And in this new line of work you must be extra careful. Those are Sensitive people Clement…you can’t just go around attacking them with your ideas.”
“What ideas?”
“Your ideas on Jesus.”
“I don’t have any ideas on Jesus.”
“…That’s what I’m talking about…”

When I came home that evening there was a book lying on the coffee table near the Santa Fe style couch Thom had been letting me sleep on. The book was wrapped with a red ribbon. It was Two Halves Don’t Make a Whole by Dr. Idleman.