PAUL PARK
GET A GRIP
So far as we know, Paul Park is the author of delightfully baroque and
rich
novels such as Celestis, The Gospel of Corax, and the Starbridge chronicles. An
e-mail
we received from him notes that this story appeared first electronically
in February in
Omni Online, but you'll forgive us if we wonder a bout the
veracity of all these facts once
you read this brief report.
Here's how i found out: I was in a bar called Dave's on East
14th Street. It
wasn't my usual place. I bad been dating a woman in Stuyvesant Town. One
night
after I left her place, I still wasn't eager to go home. So on my way I stopped
into
Dave's.
I used to spend a lot of time in bars, though I don't smoke or drink. But I like
the secondhand stuff. And the conversations you could have with strangers -- you
could tell
them anything. "Ottawa is a fine city," you could say. "My brother
lives in Ottawa," I
could say, though in fact I'm an only child. But people
would nod their heads.
This kind of
storytelling used to drive my ex-wife crazy. "It's so pointless.
It's not like you're
pretending you're an astronaut or a circus clown. That I
could see. But a Canadian?"
"It's a
subtle thrill," I conceded.
"Why not tell the truth?" Barbara would say. "That you're a
successful lawyer
with a beautiful wife you don't deserve. Is that so terrible?"
Not
terrible so much as difficult to believe. It sounded pretty thin, even
before I found out.
And of course none of it turned out to be true at all.
Anyway, that night I was listening
to someone else. Someone was claiming he had
seen Reggie Jackson's last game on TV. I
nodded, but all the time I was looking
past him toward a corner of the bar, where a man was
sitting at a table by
himself. He was smoking cigarettes and drinking, and I recognized
him.
But I didn't know from where. I stared at him for a few minutes. What was
different --
had he shaved his beard? Then suddenly I realized he was in the
wrong country. It was Boris
Bezugly. It truly was.
I took my club soda over to join him. We had parted on such good
terms.
"Friends, friends!" he had shouted drunkenly on the platform of Petersburg
Station,
saliva dripping from his lips. Now he was drunk again. He sat picking
at the wax of the red
candle. When he looked up at me, I saw nothing in his
face, just bleared eyes and a
provisionary smile.
We had met two years before, when a partner in the firm was scouting
the
possibility of a branch office in Moscow. Even in Russia he was the drunkest man
I ever
met. When we were introduced, he had passed out and fallen on his back as
we were still
shaking hands. Maybe it was his drunkenness that kept him from
recognizing me now, I
thought. After all, it had taken me a moment.
But we were in New York. Surely running into
me was not as strange as me running
into him. And why hadn't he told me he was coming?
"Sdravsvuytse," I said,
grinning. "Can I buy you a drink?"
What passed over his face was an
expression of such horror and rage, it made me
put up my hand. But then his face went blank
and he turned away from me,
huddling around his candle and his drink.
He had lost weight,
and his black beard was gone. In Russia he had worn a
hilarious mismatch of plaid clothes,
surmounted by an old fur cap. Now he wore a
tweed suit, a denim shirt open at the neck. The
cap was gone.
"Boris," I said.
In Russia his English had been absurd. I used to tell him he
sounded like a hit
man in a cold war novel, and he had laughed aloud. Now he spoke quickly
and
softly in a mid-Atlantic accent: "I think you're making a mistake."
And I would have
thought so, too, except for the strange expression I had seen.
So I persevered. I pulled
out one of the chairs and sat down. "What are you
doing?" he cried. "My God, if they find
us. If they see us here."
These words gave me what I thought was a glimmer of
understanding. In Moscow, in
the kitchen of his tiny apartment, Boris once had put away
enough vodka to let
him pass through drunkenness into another stage, a kind of clarity and
grim
sobriety. Then he had told me what his life was like under the Communists -- the
lies
that no one had believed. The interrogations. When he was a student in the
sixties after
Brezhnev first came in, he had spent two years in protective
custody.
Now maybe he was
remembering those times. "My friend," I said, "it's all right.
You're in America."
These
words seemed to fill him with another gust of fury. He tried to get up,
and I could see he
was very drunk. "I don't know you, I've never met you," he
muttered, grinding out his
cigarette butt. But then the cocktail waitress was
there.
"I'll take a club soda," I said.
"And my friend will have a Smirnoff's."
"No," he snarled, "that was the problem with that
job. Get me a bourbon," he
told the waitress. Then to me: "I hate vodka."
Which surprised me
more than anything he'd said so far. In Moscow he had recited
poetry about vodka. "Yeah,"
he told me now, smiling in spite of himself. "Tastes
change."
Apparently he had reassured
himself that no one was watching us. But he waited
until the waitress had come and gone
before he spoke again. "Boris," I said, and
he interrupted me.
"Don't call me that. It was
just a job, a two-week job. I barely remember it."
"What are you talking about?"
He smiled.
"You don't know, do you? You really don't know. Get a grip," he said.
"It's like candy from
a baby."
I saw such a mix of passions in his face. Envy, frustration, anger, fear. And
then
a kind of malignant grin that was so far from my perception of his
character that I stared
at him, fascinated.
"You never went to Russia," he said. "You've never met a single
Russian. You
were in a theme park they built outside Helsinki, surrounded by people like
me.
They were paying us to guzzle vodka and wear false beards and act like clowns.
'Sdravsvuytse,'
my ass?
He was crazy. "My poor friend," I said. "Who was paying you? The KGB?"
He knocked
his heavy-bottomed glass against the table, spilling bourbon on the
polyurethaned wood.
"Not the KGB," he hissed. "The KGB never existed. None of it
existed. None of this." He
waved his hand around the room. He was in the middle
of a paranoid breakdown of some sort.
I could see that. And yet the moment I
heard him, I felt instinctively that what he said
was true.
"They never would have taken you to Russia," he went on. "Not to the real
Russia."
As he spoke I brought back my own memories -- the grime, the cold, the
sullen old babushkas
with rags around their heads. The concrete apartment
blocks. The horrible food.
He put down
his empty glass. "Thanks for the drink. And now I'm definitely
getting out of here before
somebody sees us. Because this is definitely against
the rules."
Then he was gone, and I
walked home. And maybe I wouldn't have thought much
about it, only the next day I was
walking up Fifth Avenue on my lunch hour, and
I passed the offices for Aeroflot. I went in
and sat down with the people who
were waiting to be helped. We were in a row of armchairs
next to the window.
This is ridiculous, I thought. And I was about to get up and go, when I
found
myself staring at a travel poster. One of the agents was talking on the phone,
and
there was a framed poster of Red Square above her desk. And was that Boris
Bezugly in the
middle of a group of smiling Russians in front of St. Basil's?
The beard, the hat, the
absurd plaid?
The Aeroflot agent was a dark-haired, heavy-chested woman, dressed in black
pumps, beige tights, and a black mini-skirt. A parody of a Russian vamp. And
what was that
language she was speaking on the phone? The more I listened, the
more improbable it
sounded.
I asked the woman sitting next to me. She frowned. "Russian, of course," she
said.
How could she be so sure? Made-up gobbledygook, but of course once you let
yourself start
thinking like that, the whole world starts to fall apart. Not
immediately, but gradually. I
took the woman from Stuyvesant Town to a musical
on Broadway. Critics had pretended to like
it, though it was obviously bad.
Audience members had applauded, laughed -- who were they
trying to fool?
At work sometimes I found it hard to concentrate. I was representing the
plaintiff in a civil suit. Yet no actual client could have been so petty, so
vindictive. In
my office I sat staring at the man, watching his lips move,
waiting for him to give himself
away.
And of course I spent more of my time at Dave's. I would go there every evening
after
work, and in time I was drinking more than just club sodas. But it was
weeks before I saw
Boris again. He came in out of a freezing rain and made his
way directly toward me, where I
was sitting at a table by myself.
He sat down without asking and leaned forward, rubbing
his hands over the tiny
candle flame. "Listen," he said, "I'm in trouble," and he looked
it. He needed a
shave. His eyes were bloodshot. He wasn't wearing a coat.
"Listen, I can't
do it anymore. All that lying and pretending. I've screwed up
two more jobs and now they're
on to me. I can't go home. Please, can you give me
some money? I've got to get away."
"I'll
pay you fifty dollars for some information," I said. I took the bills from
my pocket, but
he interrupted me.
"No, I mean your watch or something. I can't use that bogus currency."
He pulled
some coins out of the pocket of his pants, big, shiny, aluminum coins like Mardi
Gras doubloons. In fact as I looked closely, I saw that's what they were. The
purple one in
his palm was stamped with the head of Pete Fountain playing the
clarinet.
"I don't even have
enough here for a drink," he said.
"I'll get you one." I raised my hand for the waitress.
But then I saw her at the
corner of the bar, talking with the bartender. As I watched, she
pointed over at
us.
"Oh my God," said my Russian friend. His voice was grim and strange.
"Give me
the watch."
I stripped it off, though it was an expensive Seiko. "Thanks," he said,
looking
at the face, the sweep of the second hand. "And in return I'll answer one
minute's
worth of questions. Go."
"Who are you?" I asked.
But he shrugged irritably. "No, it's not
important. My name is Nathan --so what?
What about you?"
"I know about myself," I said
uncertainly.
"Do you? Paul Park, Esq. Yale, 1981. But what makes you think you were smart
enough to go to the real Yale? Do you think they let just anybody in?"
Actually, I had
always kind of wondered about that. So his words gave me a
painful kind of pleasure. Then
he went on: "Twenty seconds. What about your
marriage? What was that all about?"
"I'm
divorced."
"Of course you are. The woman who was playing your wife landed another job. It
was never supposed to be more than a two-year contract with an option, which she
chose not
to renew. Last I heard, she was doing Medea, Blanche Dubois, and Lady
Macbeth for some
repertory company up in Canada."
Again, this sounded so hideously plausible that I said
nothing.
"Forty seconds."
"Fifty seconds."
"Wait," I said, but he was gone out the door. He
left only his Pete Fountain
doubloon, which I slid into my pocket.
Then in a little while
the police were there. A man in a white raincoat sat
opposite me, asking me questions. "Did
he say where he was going? Did he give
you anything?"
"No," I said. "No. Nothing."
But then
when I was watching TV later that night, I saw that Nathan Rose, a
performance artist
wanted in connection with several outstanding warrants, had
been arrested. There was a
photograph, and a brief description of his
accomplishments. Nathan Rose had been a
promising young man, recipient of
several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
The newscaster's voice
was sad and apologetic, and she seemed to look out of the television
directly at
me. She made no mention of the crime he'd been accused of. What was it --
impersonating
a Russian?
That night was the beginning of a quick decline for me, because success in life
depends on not asking too many questions. The patterns of illusion that made up
the modern
world require a kind of faith, a suspension of disbelief. The revenge
on skeptics is quick
and sure, and I soon found myself hustled out of what I'd
thought was my real world as
rudely as I might have been thrown out of a magic
show, if I had stood up in the audience
and explained the tricks while the
performance was in progress.
But of course at that time I
could only guess at the real truth. I conceived the
idea that the government had hired an
enormous troupe of actors, administered
and paid for by the NEA, to create and sustain an
illusion of reality for
certain people. At first I played with the idea that I might be the
only one,
but no. That was too grandiose, too desperate a fantasy. So much money, so much
effort, just to make a fool out of a single citizen. The Republicans never would
have stood
for it. Providing jobs for actors just wasn't that important, even in
New York.
I lost my
job, my friends, and my apartment. I refused to work long hours for
play money. And no one
could tolerate me. People I knew, I kept trying to catch
them in small lies and
inconsistencies. I would ask them questions. "If this is
just a job for you, why aren't you
nicer to me? Surely we'd enjoy it more. How
can we turn this into a comedy? A farce? A
musical?"
By the middle of December I was living by the train tracks, inside the tunnel
under
Riverside Park. Maybe it wasn't necessary for me to have gone that far.
But at a certain
point, I thought I'd try to penetrate down below the level of
deception. Because I imagined
that the illusions were raiser and more elaborate
the higher up you went, which is why so
many rich people are crazy. Wherever
they go, part of their brain is mumbling to the other
part, "Surely the actual
Plaza Hotel isn't such a dump. Surely an authentic Mercedes comers
better than
this. Surely a genuine production of Hamlet isn't quite so dull. Surely the
real
Alps are higher and more picturesque."
But that night in my tarpaulin tent next to the
train tracks, wrapped in my
blankets, it was hard for me to think that the real Riverside
Park was even
darker, even colder, even more miserable. I was dressed in a dinner jacket I
had
kept from my apartment. I was glutted with hors d'oeuvres, drunk on chablis,
because New
York provides many opportunities to a man in black tie, especially
around Christmas time. I
had attended office parties and openings all the way
from midtown, pretending all the way.
I had been an architect, an actor, a
designer, a literary agent. In each place as I grew
drunker, the lies I told
grew more outrageous, yet people still smiled and nodded. Why not?
They were
being paid good Mardi Gras doubloons to pretend to believe me.
In my tent, I slid
my hand down into my pocket and clasped my hand around my own
Pete Fountain coin, perhaps,
I thought, the only genuine thing I'd ever owned.
Drunk and despairing, I let the cold come
into me, let it calm me until I wasn't
sure if I could move even if I'd wanted to. My hands
and legs were stiff and
strange. I looked up the tunnel into the dark and imagined how the
world was
changing outside, how in the morning I would climb out through the grate into a
new world of heat and light and honesty.
As the hours passed, the walls of the tunnel
seemed to close around me. But yes,
there was some light down toward the tunnel's mouth,
too bright, too soft for
dawn. Yes, it seemed to fill the hole, to chase away the darkness,
and it was as
if I had left my body and was drifting toward it, suspended over the tracks.
There was heat, too, beyond my fingertips, and as I drifted down the tunnel I
felt it
penetrate my body and my soul. I imagined faces in the tunnel with me,
people standing
along the rails, smiling and murmuring. As I passed them I
reached out, especially to the
ones I recognized: my mother, my grandparents, my
childhood friends, and even Barbara, my
ex-wife. Yes, I thought, this is the
truth.
It couldn't last forever. I was sprawled over
the tracks, and the light was
coming toward me. I listened to the muffled voices and the
creak of the wheels,
and the light was all around me. It was so bright, I had to close my
eyes. As I
did so, I heard somebody say, "That's it. That's a wrap."
When I sat up, I was in
a crowd of people and machines. The big lamp had gone
out, replaced by a yellow fluorescent
line along the middle of the vault.
By its light I could see much that had been hidden from
me. For one thing, the
entire tunnel was only about twenty-five yards long. I could see the
brick ends
of it now, cunningly painted to look like train tracks disappearing in both
directions.
In front of me there was a lamp rigged to a platform, which ran on wheels along
the rails.
Now that the lamp was out, I could see the movie camera beneath it,
the camera man
stripping off his gloves and his coat; they had turned off the
refrigeration machines.
There was a whole line of them along the wall, and I
guess they had been making quite a
racket, because now I could hear all kinds of
talking from the crew as they finished up.
I threw aside my blanket and sat rubbing my hands. Nobody was paying any
attention to me.
But then I saw my mother coming toward me through a crowd of
technicians, and she squatted
down. "Congratulations," she said. "That was
great."
"Mother," I stammered, "is it really
you?" I admit I was surprised to see her,
because she had passed away in the spring of
1978.
She was wearing a silk shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. She was smiling.
"Yeah,
that's great. I tell you, these last few weeks you've made me proud I
ever got to work with
you. Proud you're my son, so to speak. The paranoia, the
anger, the disgust. It was all so
real."
"Mother," I said, "I can't believe it. You look so young."
She winked. "Yeah, sure.
You've probably never seen me without makeup. But let's
not get carried away. Somewhere
along the line you must have guessed. That was
the whole point of this game."
She stood up.
And now others were helping me to my feet. I recognized a few old
faces, and then Barbara
was there. "Your suit's a mess," she said.
I was stunned, overwhelmed to see her. Her
freckled nose. Her crooked smile. She
reached up to touch my damp bow-tie. When I'd known
her, her breath had always
been a little sour, a symptom of chronic gastric distress. Now
she was standing
close to me, and I caught a whiff of the mints she used -- the same old
brand.
At least that was for real, I thought.
Her little head was close to my lapel. Packed
with brains. I'd always said that
was the reason she so easily outwitted me. The space
inside her skull was so
small that her thoughts never had more than an inch or so to
travel, to make
connections. Her ideas moved faster, like molecules in a gas when it's
condensed.
And at the moment when I smelled her breath, I felt a little surge of hope. Even
if there
was no place for me in her old life, maybe now there might be some new
way for us to be
together in this new world. Cleverer than me, maybe she had
already had the same idea,
because I felt her arms around me, her head against
my cheek as I bent down. "I'm sorry I
was so mean," she whispered. "But I had
to. It was the script. Sometimes it broke my heart,
the things I had to do to
you. I'm not normally so promiscuous."
Mother and the rest had
disappeared, and we were surrounded by technicians
packing up equipment. "I just wanted to
tell you right away," she said. "Before
anybody else talks to you. Sex and betrayal are the
only things that keep the
yuppie games alive. The only reason anybody wants to play. So I
had to. That
thing where you caught me with your boss's wife -- I actually protested to the
writers. I cried for days when we were finished."
Then she took my hand and led me outside.
It was early morning. We walked
through a park that seemed all of a sudden only twenty-five
yards wide, and it
was rapidly disappearing as people rolled up the astroturf and wheeled
away the
papier-mache balustrades.
The night before, I had come down to the park the way I
always did, along West
98th Street. Now as we approached Riverside Drive, I could see as if
from a
slightly different angle the painted plywood facades of the buildings, all just
a few
inches thick. On 98th Street itself there was a huge crew striking the
set, so instead of
going back that way, Barbara led me north, uptown, and soon
we were lost among streets I
didn't recognize, although I'd lived on the Upper
West Side my whole life.
"Where are we?" I
asked faintly.
"Toronto. They always use it for the New York shoots. The real New York is
so
expensive. It's like American actors -- no one can afford them anymore. We use
Canadians
for everything."
"So what was this?" I asked. "A movie or a game?"
"Both. It's interactive
TV. A few hired professionals like me and your mom, and
then tons of paying customers. They
do most of the minor characters, the extras
and what-not. Then the whole thing is broadcast
live, with your thoughts picked
up on an internal mike as a kind of voiceover. That's what
made the show--you
were so innocent, so clueless. The show started when you were fifteen,
which
meant it took you twenty-two years to figure out what was going on. It's a new
record.
And in the end we had to give you massive hints."
"When I was fifteen?"
"Sure. All the rest
was just recovered-memory syndrome. Who wants to make a show
about a kid? I mean except for
all the shows within the show. Beaver Cleaver and
so forth."
"Beaver Cleaver?"
"No expense
was spared," said Barbara. "It's the information superhighway. But
you have to understand
-- this was a huge deal."
She was right. By the time we hit Yonge Street a crowd had
gathered. Old ladies,
teenagers, men, women, all wanting to shake my hand and get my
autograph. I was
a celebrity, like O.J. Simpson or Woody Allen, except of course I really
existed. I was a real person, and not just a collection of computer-generated
film clips.
"Mr. Park," somebody shouted. "When did you know for sure?"
"Show us the doubloon!"
demanded another, and when I took it from my pocket,
everyone laughed and clapped.
An old
man grasped my hand. I recognized him as the super of the building next
to mine. "I just
wanted to say you've given my wife and me such pleasure over
the years. Most of the shows
should be banned from the airwaves, if it was up to
me. But you never even raised your
voice. No violence at all. Not that you
weren't tempted," he said, giving Barbara a severe
look.
Then the limo arrived, small and sleek. Inside I could hear a small hum, as if
from a
computer. No one was driving. We pulled out slowly into the wide street,
and then we were
heading downtown. "So what was the show's name?" I asked.
"It was called Get a Grip," said
Barbara. And when she saw my face, she grinned.
"Oh come on, don't take it like that. Sure,
you were kind of a wimp, but the guy
is right. It was a wholesome show. Every day we found
new ways to humiliate you,
but you just soldiered on. Most of the time you didn't even
notice. I mean sure,
you were a total moron, but that was all right. It was your dignity
that people
loved."
We drove on through the unfamiliar streets. "I guess it didn't keep me
from
being canceled," I said.
"Well, to tell the truth it was all a little dated. And you
needed a good female
lead. That fat tart in Stuyvesant Town just wasn't doing it. People
seemed to
find your life less interesting as soon as I bailed out."
"I guess I felt the same
way."
Barbara patted my hand. "But you were still popular among retirees. You have no
idea
how bad most of the competition is. Like the guy said, they gave over most
of the twentieth
century to war games. Vietnam, KKK, Holocaust, Cold War,
Hiroshima. Those are all the
American shows.
Kids love them, even the minorities. But I can't stand them."
"Hiroshima?" I
asked.
She smiled. "Meanwhile, we thought it was a stroke of genius to work all that
into
the background of Get a Grip. To show what life in America might have been
like if it had
all really happened. Of course we had to change the footage and
the point of view --
reshoot a lot of it. Most of those shows are ridiculously
patriotic."
"Ingenious," I
murmured.
"But that's how we got into trouble. ABC claimed it was copyright infringement,
and the American ambassador protested. But Get a Grip was a satire, for God's
sake. Even
the U.S. courts ruled in our favor."
After a little while I said, "So what did really
happen?"
"Well, that's what I'm telling you. The Americans were furious for years. So ABC
finally made a hostile bid for Ottawa Communication, which produced your show.
The deal
went through last week, and Get a Grip was canceled. But there had been
rumors for months,
which was why the writers brought back all that Russian stuff
last fall. They wanted to
take the show to its own end."
"No. I mean, what really happened? In the world."
She
squeezed my arm. "Don't worry. You'll soon catch up. Besides, we're here."
We pulled up in
front of a hotel. "You'll love it," she said. "Czar Nicholas III
stayed here last time he
was in town."
So I got out and followed her up the steps. In through the revolving doors.
The
lobby was all ormolu and velvet and gilt mantelpieces. The elevator ran in a
cage up
through the middle of the spiral staircase. "What am I doing now?" I
asked as we got in.
"Goddamn it, Pogo, don't be such a dope." I hated when she called me "Pogo." It
was a
nickname left over from my earliest childhood, and she only used it to
annoy me. But as I
rode up in the elevator, it occurred to me that maybe no one
had ever really called me
that. Maybe all those painful memories had been
induced when I was fifteen. Maybe they had
all been covered in a flashback, when
Get a Grip first went on the air.
My eyes filled with
tears. "What's the matter now?" said Barbara. "Honest to
God, you'd think you were being
boiled over a slow fire. It's the best hotel in
town. I thought you might want to rest for
a few hours, take a shower, change
your clothes before the reception at the president's
house tonight. The Russian
ambassador will be there -- I tell you you're a star. A symbol
of Canadian
pride. Come on, is that so terrible?"
Then when we were alone together in the
jewel-box room, she said, "Besides, I've
missed you."
But I wasn't listening. I was looking
at my face in the mirror above the
dresser. The same curly hair and gullible eyes, as if
nothing had happened. "My
whole life has been a parody," I said, watching my lips move. But
then I had to
smile, because it was exactly what I might have said back in America, back
during the salad days of Get a Grip.
Barbara was behind me. In the mirror I saw her undo
the first few buttons of her
blouse, and then slip it off her shoulders. "Let me make it
okay for you," she
said. Then it was like a dream come true, because she was leading me to
the bed
and pulling off my clothes. I had thought about this moment so many times since
we
split up, directing us as if we were the actors in a scene. In my mind,
sometimes she was
harsh and fast, sometimes passive and accommodating. Sometimes
it took hours, and sometimes
it was over tight away. But none of my fantasizing
prepared me for this moment, which was
not sublime so much as strange. During
two years of marriage, I thought I had got to know
her well. But I had never
done any of the things she required of me in that hotel room; I
had never heard
of anybody doing them. But, "Things are different here," she whispered.
"Let me
teach you how to make it in the real world," she said, before I lost
consciousness.
Then I came to, and I was lying on the bed. Barbara was in the shower. I could
hear the
water running. I sat naked on the side of the bed, stating at the
television. It was in a
lacquer cabinet on top of a marble table, and the remote
was on the floor near my foot.
There were hundreds of buttons on it.
Then suddenly I was seized with a new suspicion, and
I flicked it on. I flicked
through several channels, seeing nothing but football games. But
there I was on
channel 599xtc, buck naked, staring at myself. Behind me the hotel room, the
tipped sheets and soggy pillows. And on the bottom corner of the screen, a
blinking panel
that said:
PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.
Then Barbara was there, toweling her neck, looking
over my shoulder. "Okay, so
it's not quite over yet," she said. "There are still some
things you ought to
know."