The Endless Concord, Chapter 14

XIV. Charley the lamplighter


Rainy appeared on Friday and I buzzed her in. She was as tall and pretty as I had remembered and I wondered if I looked any different.
“You keep a good apartment for the depressed alcoholic you make yourself out to be,” she said, stepping over the downed refrigerator in the hallway and stepping into an appliance free room.
“Special muscle wine,” I said, flexing nonexistent muscles and smiling.
“What on earth?”
I poured us two glasses of the $4.00 whiskey and watched her swirl the glass and smell it.
“It has a shoe smell to it.”
“That’s the great Cambodian Alps you’re onto there.”
“What’s this bubbly paper residue?” she asked, pointing out the odd bloated cork material in the glass, although there was no cork.
“Those are flavor crystals.”
It felt good to be in the presence of a woman. I wanted to impress her somehow and I felt oddly capable of it, as if I had been hibernating, all the while stylish replies and airy topics swirled around in my sleeping head. She was anxious to laugh and that was good. We could say nothing at all. We agreed on everything under the sun.
We polished off the bottle of Special Muscle Wine sitting on the couch talking about Frank and Willis and Thom and every job she and I had ever had. She thought it amazing so much had happened to me in the last few months. She thought it good of me not to think ill of Frank for stealing the appliances. She said it denoted a lack of materialism and attachment to Worldly objects. I wondered if she were religious or not and she told me she wasn’t.
“Are you?” She asked, drawing closer.
I tried thinking of a joke I could tell, maybe tell her I am the reincarnation of the late reverend of Gods messianic kingdom, Jim Jones.
“Not really, no, not at all actually.”
“Good, I don’t want to get involved with one of those religious freaks. I had an ex like that.”
“How so?”
“Just over-the-top I guess.”
“What qualifies over-the-top?”
She brushed her hair behind her ears and sat up a bit on the couch to face me. I braced myself for something good.
“Nothing cultish or anything. He was a Scientologist.”
“I see.”
“It’s like religion meets business.”
“The Grand Inquisitor.”
“It’s oriented around maximizing your personal success.”
“How’s that?”
“The subjective can sometimes disagree with the objective, so instead of altering your perception on the events around you, you instead alter the events around you.”
“Sounds like a power meeting at a stock party.”
“In a way it is. But his problem was, he couldn’t alter his objective reality to reasonably suit his own ends.”
“Did he try to…maximize you?” I asked smilingly.
“It’s not funny! It was terrible. He just looked so pathetic. It’s like a homeless person trying to capitalize on his friends and somehow not getting it right. I felt sorry for him.”
“There’s the meek and humble and then there is the vain and self-involved. You expect one to look like what he is. When the first crosses over into the later it’s confusing. ‘Who does this guy think he is?’”
“I think that’s what pathetic means.”
“Yep, a man swimming in shit trying to look dignified. Maybe a top-hat or something.”
“Great, thanks for the metaphor.”
“Is he still an...uh...Scientologist?”
“No, he couldn’t afford to reach the next level. He sold his car and only had enough money to reach like, level 3 or something.”
“Is that how it works?” I asked, pouring us another drink.
“It’s like Dungeons and Dragons. I don’t know. Anyway, he went to that same church Brian Seabeck goes to in California. He went to visit. They wouldn’t let him in because it was on some other level and he wasn’t maximized enough.”
“Sounds like the story of my life.”
“…All the Travolta's in the World…”
“So were all those guys trying to ‘objectify’ movies like 'Cocktail' and 'Grease' and program them into our society?” I asked laughing.
“Yeah, have you ever seen ‘They Live’?”
“Yep. A masterpiece.”
“It’s just like that. Some kind of elitest mothership filled with little Cruises and Kidmans.”
“Jesus. Stepford life, Logans run, a Brave New World of little Hubbards running around with lavender hankerchiefs tucked in around their necks.”
“That kind of self-assurance scares me honestly.”
“They’ll tell you you’re weak.”
“And that’s what he did, he told me I was weak.”
“You’re not weak. The weak are self-assured. They wear disguises. They seek unity in the church or the office, some face to get behind. You are powerful in that you know your life will end. You will die and there won’t be any mother ship captained by Brian Seabeck soaring off into the omni-verse.”
“Who would captain your mother ship?”
“Woody Allen,” I answered without hesitation.
She smiled.
I did an impression of Woody Allen trying to give directions to Burt Reynolds using intergalactic anti-semitic coffee shops as landmarks. She got a kick out of it. I thought about putting on some music and starred blankly at the space where the stereo used to be.
“So tell me about your patients…or former patients, whatever. Have you had anything else exciting happen besides the masturbation and the dead guy?”
“Clients.”
“Whatever.”
I thought for a while. Suddenly I remembered that fourth person, the shadow sitting in the room at dawn I tried stifling when I was with Frank and intoxicated the other night, a memory of this man I had long tried burying. Willis had also mentioned it, right after my meeting with Team Teamwork, but I had ignored it. Bits and pieces began to come back to me and I wondered if it were far too depressing for the first date.
“Alright,” I conceded after some hesitation, “but it’s not something I break down into a synopsis.”
“Will I regret it?”
“Probably.”
“OK shoot.”
“What?”
She waved her hand in a rolling motion.
“I…”
“Wait, wait!” she interrupted, pouring out the rest of the Muscle Wine into the glasses and getting comfortable. “Continue,” she added in an English upper-class tone of voice and a roll of the hand.
“I was at the Golden Sun when I first started,” I began, sitting up in my seat and taking on a node of seriousness she seemed receptive to. “It was a place of long corridors that led to stockrooms and stockrooms that led to even longer corridors. The building served as a hotel years ago and had been around since the early 1900’s.”
She rolled her eyes.
“What?”
“Is this a ghost story?”
“No, now listen up…”
She saluted me.
“I only mention the atmosphere because it’s an important detail. The presence of some of these old buildings, not necessarily unique for that time period, carry a kind of well preserved force majeure. It’s this knowing static intensity that just kind of looms heavily, unmoving. It’s like a withered old black eyed woman in the rocking chair of a front porch in the middle of nowhere, the wrinkles between her skin just kind of gathering dust. There’s this isolation to the place. It’s at once a treatment facility, an aging hotel, and finally a depravation tank fallen off the edge of the universe. To work a graveyard in the place…I mean Jesus. They would have made some kind of reality fear show about it. There are no ghosts…just manifestations of something buried deep within us these environments conger up. It’s just a depth; a well of thoughtful hyperactivity. People have lived, cried, loved and died in these places. They resonate.
“This is the background of this building. At the very least it’s twelve stories high with two creaky old elevators, a flight of stairs, fire escape on the side of the building, about 150 bedrooms and a whole network of stockrooms and locked rooms and rooms with desks and rooms without them. We usually kept to the first few floors except for the occasional room check or some massive janitorial problem.
“So towards the beginning of my time there I worked graveyard. My job was essentially to sit there on the first floor and buzz people in and out and keep a log of faces I see and behavior...”
“The strange man in the white lab coat,” Rainy interrupted.
“Right. I sat there every night essentially watching and waiting. If something were to go wrong procedure was to buzz the office on the second floor and those guys would come down and assist me. At night there were usually three of us –two in the office and one at the front desk rotating every two and a half hours. I never really knew what I was waiting for really. I had an idea of why I was writing in the log but it was just an idea. You see, they are allowed to come and go. The purpose of the buzzer is one, to keep their drug dealing friends out, and two, to delay them long enough so that we might identify them and write that we saw them down in the log. If we don’t see someone for longer than three days we know there’s a problem. If the mark in the log says, ‘out’ we know this person is probably in jail. If it says, ‘in’ it means there was probably an overdose and we’re going to find a body in a room somewhere. This place is mainly a drug and alcohol facility, but moreover, it’s an old hotel where people pay rent with government checks. They pick up the meds we give them and that’s about it. We host a few meetings but no one really shows. They bring booze and drugs in all the time and, so long as we don’t see it, there’s little we can do, and the absolute least we can do is make sure we know whether or not these people are dead or in jail.
“The reality is this; people slip through the cracks…these people have been inside one of these cracks their whole lives. The building itself is a tear in the social fabric of things. None of this should be there. It’s an effect of things no one wants to see, no one wants to admit. Does the caretaker of nonexistence become nonexistent? We’re working in this hole and we know it! You can feel it. So you act accordingly. You let your mind drift; you disappear in the corridors for a while with the door ajar. You take thirty minute long cigarette breaks. We all did it…
“So naturally checkmarks were missing from the log and checkmarks were forged. When you’re doing close to nothing, in nothing, you might as well do nothing. The graveyard was the place to do it.”
“Did someone die in their room?” Rainy asked, noticeably interested.
“Not exactly,” I began again, feeding off her interest. “There was a client…I had met him briefly and only in passing. He looked pretty forgettable, I mean, in that kind of work. Deep in that crack. He was anorexic and had an elevated case of scabies…”
Rainy cringed.
“He had this slicked back oily hair saturated in nicotine and tuberculosis and wore this hunter green shirt perpetually covered in coffee…”
“What was his name?”
I thought about it for a moment. The name Lance Bennett danced on the tip of my tongue and I wondered why. It would surface every time I pictured the face of the man. Their names, the images of these men, seem to resonate at the end of a hyper-colored coil, the chemical makeup all busted out of shape and hysterical, melding into one another, forming a confused and twisted life-form. There are fish in oceanic trenches with glow-in-the-dark eyes.
Finally, from this depth, the name surfaced. “Charley Crane.”
“It sounds so innocent,” said Rainy, looking teary eyed.
I nodded gravely and continued. “After a few weeks of working there I finally decided to look over the past logs. I knew I'd be transferring to the Plaza soon and that I might as well make my mark somewhere. The logs would be a place to start. They were dusty, looking as if never read. Well, they hadn’t been. We had been so used to doing the check-mark thing and filing the sheets away we never bothered to really pay attention to them, aside from a few names that were on emergency watch…”
“For the high risk level patients?”
“Exactly, ones perhaps with noticeable track marks that hadn’t eaten in days and so on. Charley wasn’t on that list, his name rarely came up at meetings; his check sheets had floated by empty and unnoticed, and what I discovered when taking an interest and looking into them, unnoticed for three months.”
“Oh my God.”
“Most days there was nothing in the log about him, and other days there were a couple of words so no one would be alerted like, ‘Looked fine,’ or, ‘Self-talk.’ But that was just stuff filled in later because we hadn’t been paying attention; ‘He’s probably around here somewhere so I’ll just write this.’ Anyway, there were stacks of these papers, and finally none at all. The man had just been erased from our little register. It was possible for him; his meds were self-care and he wasn’t on room watch. He was the perfect candidate to disappear completely.
“I reported everything immediately to the other two on duty that night. They were tired but willing to investigate. We knocked on the door. Of course there was no answer. We filed an emergency entry form on the online register and we were in the room within half an hour…”
“Oh my God,” Rainy said again, burying her head in her hands, “I’m scared of the outcome.”
“The room was empty. Clean and empty. No note, nothing. It was puzzling. All logic would have suggested he was probably outside somewhere, staying with a relative, whatever. But it seemed impossible for this client…it was impossible. The second a guy like that steps out of that neighborhood red flags go up. He’d be in a holding facility within a week. These guys have fingerprints and they’re all registered with us. Blinking lights come up on computers at police offices. They can’t legally admit that type of person into a jail for longer than forty-eight hours.”
“What about family?”
“None. We were on that too: missing, dead, murdered. The more we dug up on Charley Crane that night, the more his absolute and total disappearance from our universe was confirmed. He wasn’t out there, it doesn’t happen like that. These people have been living with this identity for so long, they don’t just reverse one day. Medication, treatment, these things aren’t designed to make you get better, they’re designed to keep you neutral, static. Static Charley was a walking red-flag for police and healthcare agents.”
“What about social security money?”
She knew we could have tracked him based on account withdraws, I was impressed. “He had SSI, a kind of card, checks just went into that. We checked into that too. Can you guess?”
“Untouched.”
“Yup. Untouched. A crack in the universe and the man just crawled inside.”
“Is that it?”
“Nope. This is a building with three healthcare employees with nowhere to go and nothing to do. We can’t leave. For eight hours we’re just kind of stuck there, and we were on the case. For the three of us this was all there is. Men naturally become detectives. You don’t want the case to end, you don’t want the daylight to come through the windows. This would be a night without an ending, it seemed to us. We were ready. We made coffee, we searched his case files, we looked at pictures, we interviewed clients.”
“Wasn’t there someone you could call?”
“Of course, there’s emergency administrators. All the administrators from all the facilities become floating emergency staff on graveyard shifts. That night just happened to be Willis. Carla Black was off. We called him and remarkably he came. I hadn’t known him that well at the time. At the plaza I had only done a kind of preliminary shift, but still, there was enough dialogue shared between us for him to trust me enough to get out of bed and drive all the way downtown –which he was obligated to do anyway but they rarely did.
“So by two in the morning three became four. Willis picked up on the ominous significance of our task almost immediately. Although the man, at times, can be a lifeless empty space, there is a kind of cosmic rhythm to him. He is like an asteroid belt. There is mystery to this nothingness. Exploding asteroids in space make no sound. That is what he is, the point where they make no sound…” I paused, realizing I missed Willis.
“So we stood in one of the upper offices with the windows open and the cold air blowing snow into the room. We turned the florescent lights off just leaving desk lamps to light the room. Don’t ask me why we did this, there is no logical reason for it, but that’s what we did. Something phantasmagorical was happening, we were in the gloam and we knew it. ‘This is the gloaming,’ we told ourselves.
“Willis sent orders in all directions and we followed them without a moment’s hesitation. We knew he was in the building, we just knew it, but the circumstances surrounding his being there were something we couldn’t have predicted. That was perhaps this ‘gloaming,’ these circumstances. It was superstition, but this place, this place was like the gate to some other world, and in all honesty, in a way, it was just that. The resolve was to search every corridor, every office, every stockroom we thought had always been locked. Some rooms there were no keys for, others there were, some seemed to open in expectation.
“We split up and searched the building like a torch guided mob of overall wearing family men searches the forest for that invisible thing in the darkness, something they expect to find, this thing they know will be there but will never be fully revealed. The face of the marauder evades the marauded for fear that identification will be something altogether ugly; this darkness that stays deep beneath consciousness, something so totally beyond our comprehension. By this time…I don’t know, maybe it was just drowsiness and delirium, but we were expecting nothing short of the face of God...and we bounced this caffeinated affirmation off of one another accordingly. We would open the door to a room housing Armageddon. We were sure of it.”
“With this lead-in it better be,” Rainy said laughing shamelessly.
“You don’t understand this kind of hysteria! You put certain people together in a place like that, under the right circumstances, and you’re all delusional; the world our clients live in becomes our own. We’re all chasing ninjas and assailants.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing.”
Rainy emptied her glass and set it on the table.
“We ran into clients during our search,” I began again. “They seemed to pick up on the black magic of our task. The faces of dogs tell the story of a storm to come long before it comes. People were banging doors, others were screaming. Jasper was on the stairs vomiting and praying to God. No one really told them what was happening…they just felt it. Schizophrenics are conductive and far more finely tuned-in to the coming apocalypse than we.”
“So what happened?”
“I opened the door to a room and found Charley Crane.”
Rainy looked on with wide eyes red and glazed over.
“It was a boardroom companies used to hold meetings, now converted into a stockroom. Before Charley, the door to this room probably hadn’t been opened in years. He opened it once. I opened it again.”
Rainy cried. I held her and whispered in her ear.
“He had brought food in with him. There was a bathroom there in the room he used for several weeks. He never left. It was said later on he had survived in there for two months on whiskey, soda and dry food. He was dead, I knew it the second I entered the room.”
Rainy shivered and cried more.
“But there was something good about this. When I called the other three up, and we entered, we noticed, somehow immediately and in harmony, the window he sat facing was facing West. Don’t ask me how we knew but we were certain he died during sundown of the day before. And we were right. His medical analysis confirmed he died of starvation and malnutrition at somewhere around 6:00 P.M. Rainy, we discovered his body at sunup the following day. For two months he was locked in that room, and we opened it twelve hours after his death. We didn’t know this man, we were his caretakers and he was a ghost to us, but I speak for all of us when I say that in that moment we’ve never been closer to anyone in our lives than that man. He had somehow slipped out of that crack and into the four of us.”
Rainy sobbed some more and I held her. “Are there a lot of stories like this in your line of work?”
“There are very many.”
“Oh my God…” she said again.
We sat on the couch for a while longer. She sobbed more and I held her. I thought about the look on Willis’ face that night. He was the next in the room after me. He only nodded his head. The World was moved out of his reach with that nod. Willis seemed to have washed his hands clean of all of it in those few moments. The thought of Willis being this far removed and myself being present for that last straw, it was terrifying. Although I had hardly known Willis then, the feeling there were two people that died that day lingered.