One Step

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I'm in my office scraping my lecture notes together when a thought strikes me and I decide at that very moment to teach a surprise class on Soren Kierkegaard in today's philosophy 210 lecture. I'll blow my undergraduates' minds with the dizziness of freedom I'll take my little disciples to the roof-top of the hulking cancer center and have them all stand on a line made of duct tape. I'll walk along behind them and show them that they can easily keep their place, even with a little push. Then I'll tell them to walk to the very edge of the building, to step over the short wall and put their toes on the concrete edge, twenty-seven stories above the filthy city. I know that only a few will be brave enough to walk to the edge.

And only a few are.

The ones who don't look more terrified than the ones who do. Stephanie Grayson looks away with her hands on her face like a pair of horse blinders.

“Why is she anguished?” I ask. Below, the cars look like cells in blood vessels. “We know they won't fall.” I point to Jessica, on the ledge. “And she's on the edge but isn't upset.”

“Because it shows us how close death is,” a student says.

“Yes,” I say, “because beyond the edge is oblivion, doom, and it's around us, all the time, but we don't want to see it.” From the roof it feels like the earth curves away from me and I think I can even a catch a sliver of the ocean, a ripple on the horizon. “But that's not the whole story. The reason Stephanie cannot go to the edge is because she is both drawn to it and dreads it. The edge exposes her utter freedom, the freedom to die, to self-destruct, or ... continue living. With one step Jessica can kill herself, without a doubt. Do you want to kill yourself Jessica?”

Without warning a sharp gust of wind swirls and rips across the top of the building. Several students gasp and the three on the edge jerk back. It snags a baseball cap off Jason's head and for many moments, silent, we watch it flutter, tumbling visor over cap, to the street. I call them back from the edge. 

"They put my hand in a vise...

     It's the size of a 

fucking cantaloupe"

 

“There's the other side,” I say, “One step away, and our freedom to go there terrifies us. We can always put a barrel in our mouth and pull the trigger, or drink the drain cleaner, but here just a whim is enough. I've only highlighted our freedom.” I wait for a moment, for the concept to absorb. “Kierkegaard exemplified anxiety as this,” I march to the edge, plant my feet on it and lift one foot up, my hands, palms up and widespread, as if saying it's nothing. Stephanie covers her face, muffling a wail. The other students gape. “The 'dizziness of freedom',” I say. “Who wants me to jump?”

A couple of the boys have horrid shocks on their faces, but one smiles shaking his head.

“Doctor McKinsey. Please stop it,” Stephanie says, nearly crying.

I give a dramatic pause and step from the edge. “But Kierkegaard also said that whoever learned to be anxious correctly, had learned the ultimate.” I stroll to the students. “Will anyone posit a guess on what that means?” Nobody volunteers. “Well, he didn't mean you can learn how to jump and survive.” Jessica flicks her hand up from her waist. I point to her.

“He could have meant that living well requires acknowledging your freedom for both improvement and self-destruction.”

“Acknowledging. Or mastering it perhaps?” I raise my eyebrows.

I meander back to the humanities building, smiling over all the shocked faces. Ihead to the break room down the hall from my office. I stand in front of the plate glass windows that make up two sides of the room, and survey the city. Houston traffic crawls along 249 and Route 45.

“Hi Stockton,” a colleague, Alison, says to me. She's nice. And she's weak, and she's not quite a colleague.

“Ally,” I say. She isn't the youngest tenured professor in the humanities department's history. She says something back, or so I think, I'm not paying her much attention.

The automatic coffee maker drips and I pour cream and sugar into a mug while absentmindedly watching a crew dig up the asphalt on the west side of the building. They look unreal like the little plastic figurines on the football game that my brother, David, and I played as kids. The one that vibrated, making the players scuttle across it—another one of the games I always won. Something in the window catches my eye. I change to close focus and find myself looking at my reflection in the smoked glass. There's something strange, I think, about my face. My reflection peers back with a flat expression, but I swear there's an ever so slight smirk behind it.

Not having time to wait for the carafe to fill, I pull it from the machine and slosh coffee into my mug. A stream of brown, thin liquid hisses on the hot plate. Alison looks up from the paper. I smile and bop my eyebrows.

“Listen to this,” Alison says. “This guy got twenty-two years for robbing a convenience store. He didn't even have bullets in his gun. The owner tackled him after he pulled the trigger, repeatedly.”

I snort, recalling as kids when David and I would play bank robber; how, when it was my turn to rob I'd jump up on the counter and sweep the gun in a wide arc yelling for all the trembling patrons to hit the dirt. He'd always manage to tackle me in our imaginary parking lot but I'd always shot him well before that. Now he and I work together. He sets up the transfers and I don't touch a goddamn thing.

“I guess the Mexican cartels bought up all the bullets,” Alison says.

In a business like ours one can get busted getting too close, or as I like to say, handling tools. No, that was for the plastic figurines of the world, those who couldn't wield the most powerful tool in the universe: the human brain. “The world's full of morons, Ally.”

I don't even know what we ship. I'm just an investor, one step farther removed than David. Stockton! David would say on the phone, there's an unbelievable investment opportunity, his pitch rising throughout, but only until four o'clock tomorrow. In particular of course it was Mexican weed or Colombian coke, or maybe the latest serotonin reuptake inhibitor or cholesterol lowering statin, but it could have been dolls or corn for all any brain-dead district attorney could prove beyond a reasonable doubt. And if it ever went that far I'd be out. Simple. I'd stop. I'm opportunistic, not greedy.

Alison huffs. “He didn't even have a get-away car.”

“To be expected,” I say. “People won't take the time to think things through.”

No yachts or sprawling mansions for me, none of those entrapments. I relish having a tidy house—cleaned by a happy, chubby Mexican maid. On Saturdays I work from my desk all day, eat huevos rancheros in the morning and chicken and rice for lunch and have linen pants and a Guyabera pressed and ready for a night of dancing. Let me tell you, the good life is more than just living well, it's being staunchly creative and independent in thought and action.

“You're assuming a lot,” Alison says.

“Huh?”

“You're assuming he had time to think things through.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I say absently while heading back to my office. I think about how it's only October, two months into the semester, and I can already see the cult forming about me. I bet Alison's jealous. I'd be if were as talentless as her. As I enter my office, David calls and he's in a state. I have no idea what it's all about. At first my heart pounds but then I settle down able to make out some of it.

“I fucked up, I fucked up.” He cries it, over and over, in monkey squeaks. I ask him if he's alright but he won't stop his refrain. It reminds me of the time he and I were cliff jumping and he nearly drowned. He sounded just like this when I dragged his ass to a ledge.

“Stop blubbering!” I finally yell. I feel like hanging up.

“We lost a shipment.”

“Don't be stupid.” He knows better than to say that over the phone.

“I didn't tell you. I thought I could make it up on the next trip.

“I don't know what you're talking about.” I hang up.

I sink into a leather chair facing my desk.

He calls right back, and he's back to blubbering. I stand up and pace across my office.

“They put my hand in a vise,” he says.

This freezes me. Or more precisely, stops me in front of a plate glass window as an icy thread winds around my intestines. My mind rushes through its metaphysical space and it feels as if its swooping down over the toy cars and figurines below, the way the ball-cap fluttered over the wide boulevard. A woman, walking her toe-headed boy looks up, directly into my mind's eye, and grins. I can't quite see her clearly but her voluminous hair, which appears carelessly tousled from my window reveals itself—upon closer inspection—to be a matted nest. Were her teeth rotted black?

“It the size of a fucking cantaloupe,” David says. “I'm sorry. I couldn't hold out. You have to believe me. I held out as long as I could.”

“So they want the twenty-five?” I ask, referring to the $25,000 I gave him last month. “We'll split it. Stop crying. I can get twelve right now.”

“I put in twenty-five myself.

I pull the phone from my ear and stare at the drop-ceiling tiles. I'm taking deep conscious breaths. I always carry 100 percent in reserve, obviously David doesn't. “The best I can do is twelve today and then maybe later in the week.” I don't tell him about the rest. I can't have my reserve down to nothing.

“Stockton...it's a sixty-five grand.”

“Sixty Five thousand!” My voice carries down the hall.

It takes me a second to translate his miserable cries. “Fifty plus interest.”

“I told you from the start, I can't be held responsible for your—“

“That's what they need. Sixty-five. Right now.”

I tear a leaf off a potted peace lily.

“I ought to call Dad,” he says.

“No!” The idea of that bastard (with a told you so scrawled across his face) handed the chance to come to the rescue once again, makes me nauseated. I'd bet my frontal lobe I'd have to hear another goddamn slow and steady.

“They're going to your office or your house. You don't deal with guys like this, Stockton.”

I say something about seeing what I can do and hang up. I have to admit the exchange certainly elevated my oxygen consumption. I'm surprised by the speed with which I collect my laptop, a couple books and a notepad, shoving everything in my briefcase before locking the door. I find myself scanning the hallway. It's clear. When I step from the elevator and into the shiny granite tiled lobby the security guard twists his head towards me. Then he points at me. He's speaking to a well-dressed squat man with a cane, no one I've ever seen. There's a moment when, the elevator doors still open, I could jump back in. But a great portion of myself is loathe to consider this spastic action. I am a man of forethought not re-action, and the squat man looks to be a reasonable man of means. He must be open to sensibility and logic. And with just a little time I can get my share of the money.

He hustles, limping towards me, kind of sideways, in the way a guard on a basketball team might approach an attacking forward. He twitches his head first back to the security guard, then down a broad hallway in front of us and next to his cellphone on which he's pressing buttons. He's sweating heavily. “We're going to your office,” he says, pointing to the elevator.

“I know the situation,” I begin.

He shoos me along brushing his hand in the air. I tell myself to appeal to his hope of recouping all the money and to use logic. Ironically I actually feel a little calmer seeing him in such a state. Plus he couldn't be more than 5'5” tall. I press the up button and watch the elevator numbers on the wall light in descending order.

“I'm sure we can come to a satisfactory solution ... for both of us,” I say.

The man checks his watch.

Standing in front of the elevator I watch the numbers alight and darken. The number two stays lit longer, likely people getting off for the parking garage. Then the first floor light illuminates with a chime and the doors open. Inside is a colossal bald, but bearded, Hispanic man with a face like a mastiff. He makes no move to leave. The little man says something and I'm stepping onto the elevator. Now the door's closing. The Hispanic man approaches the door and hits the seventeenth floor button. He's wearing an expensive suit that looks like it's been slept in. Through the closing doors I watch the security guard watching us. I have the distinct impression that a world is shutting on me. For several floors nobody says anything.

“I can get you eight grand today,” I say.

The little man's face is twitching. “You owe sixty-five!”

“With out a doubt I can give you twenty, my portion,” I lie. “I'll just need a few days—”

“Today. Today by three o'clock.” He paces with his dark wood cane, a cast metal lion head atop it. One step back, limp, swivel, one step forward, limp, swivel.

“If David had let me know then certainly I'd have it ready. Just give me some time to—”

“I don't have time to give.” He rubs his hand violently down his face. The big man hasn't said a thing and only looks on with threatening placidity.

“But we've done so much business with you,” I say taking a guess.

“If you don't pay now then he's going to have to start parting you out.” He points to the colossus, but still fixing on me. “How much a kidney bring?”

“Eight thousand. Give or take,” the colossus says in Spanish, as if it were the price of bread.

I look at the big man. His expression hasn't changed. At least I don't think it has, but now it looks nothing even remotely placid. I press my spine into the corner. It feels like they're getting closer to me but I can't be sure. I can get you forty thousand. But today, it's impossible.” I just want the little man to calm down.

“Hey idiot! It's sixty-fucking-five!” The little man throws up a hand and paces back across the elevator.

A feeling, my emotional nemesis, begins filling me: stupidity.

“How about family, friends, anybody,” the little man says.

I shake my head, but an image of Dad's face looms—with his patented concerned-yet-smug expression. I realize I'm breathing heavy and have my hands behind my back covering my kidneys.

The elevator doors open on floor fifteen and a female undergraduate starts to climb on.

“It's under repair,” the big man says in English and holding up a hand.

She halts and for a moment her expression seems identical to Stephanie's from the roof. The door closes. Now I'm certain that the colossus is closer. “Look, David has—”

Slap! The little man swats me across the face. “Think!”

“Now look,” I say. I feel my chin and lips trembling.

“You keep cash in your office?”

I shake my head.

“Fucking dud,” the little man says. “He's worse than his brother.” Furiously he rubs his hands back and forth across the top of his head. Then he stops and wags a finger at me. I expect him to yell but he says, “You're gonna rob a bank,” with the musical tone of an idea just surfacing.

“No, no,” I say and look above his head at the mesh ceiling grate.

“How the hell's he gonna rob a bank?”

“It's either him or us,” he says to the colossus.

“He might get us busted, man.”

“When we get back to Nuevo Laredo either I give la Voz the sixty-five or it'll be our kidneys they're selling.”

The door opens for the seventeenth floor. The small man presses the first floor button, the doors glide closed, and the elevator lurches heading down. I watch the numbers light up. Thoughts elude me but I strain for them like a parched man scooping water with a sieve. I hear myself saying, “No, no, no,” while trying to connect how events in my life came to this. The colossus has draped his arm across my shoulder and it hangs on me like a timber. The number four lights up, then three, and then the door is opening on the second floor and we're going to the parking garage. A few people mope around the entrance, and I think of saying something or yelling out. But what would I say, and where would I go? Stockton McKinsey in hiding? To the police? What would I tell them? My drug deals didn't go as planned?

When we enter the parking garage the little man, with a remote, unlocks a tinted window, silver, four-door luxury sedan. The colossus ducks into the back seat with me. We drive in silence.

An image of David cuts through my mind, him as a boy falling from the open door of a hay loft and onto sun-baked dirt. He only jumped once, well not really jumped. I had pushed him, and he ended up with a sprained ankle the size of a grapefruit. I cast away the image. I'm breathing heavily, heaving in and out. The air feels sharp and crisp in my lungs, as if laden with menthol. I want everything to be over. Thoughts swim through the murk in my head, but don't reveal themselves. The little man pulls out a gun, a pistol, from the small of his back, and hands it back to the colossus. Through the rear view mirror I see the little man wipe sweat from his brow. The colossus pulls a sliding mechanism underneath the gun barrel and it clicks. He looks into the chamber and releases the slide. He puts the gun on my lap.

“I need a mask, or something,” I say.

“Too late,” the little man says.

“Get ready,” the colossus says.

The idea of killing them both enters my mind. But what would I do? Surely I would be caught at noon in downtown Houston. How many people saw me leave with them? I'd spend the rest of my life in jail. I'd do less time robbing a bank. I'm pulling off a sock and tying it around my head at eye level but it won't fit. “Please, your tie,” I say to colossus.

“Give him your tie,” the small man says.

The colossus unknots his tie and hands it to me. I tie it around my head over my eyes but have to tilt my head up sharply to see from beneath it. The colossus pulls out a hunting knife, long and sinister and with jagged saw teeth on the back edge. He yanks the tie from my face and cuts two holes close together at the fat end, and hands it back. I tie it on and it seems to work, obscuring some of my face but offering good vision.

We stop against a curb. If you go anywhere but directly into that bank,” the colossus says, pointing at a red, white, and blue bank sign a block and a half away, “It's liver, kidneys, cornea, and heart.” He thumps my chest. “If you try to run, I guarantee we'll find you. No more university job, no more address, no more sleeping. He pulls the tie off my head and hands it to me, untucks my shirt, and jambs the gun into the small of my back, behind my belt.

More than once the little man says, “Sixty-five.”

“A bag?” I say.

I've run up to the edge, with David and these drug shipments, and now I've got a delicate balance to maintain, but not for long. Actually these men are my edge. Only a fool would be convinced that to cross them would not result in just another headless body rotting on a Mexican border town dirt road, one more corpse added to the thousands in President Calderon's drug war—a war that's nicely boosted my investments, until now.

From the front seat the little man passes back a dime-a-dozen, translucent, brown bag, the kind you get at the grocery store. I'm about to take when he pulls it back and looks directly into me. “A well-to-do young man with all the doors open to him. I'd of pegged you with at least one wealthy and discreet uncle. No?” He probes my face looking for clues. “You're not cut out for this game, Stockton. Do you even know how to hold that?” He points to the gun. “Let's make a phone call and you can walk into that bank with an account number instead. “We've still got three hours.”

I can't ask Dad. I won't. I'd rather die than further elevate his righteous superiority. This is it, I think. This is your trial, though not the one you expected. No jurors, no attorneys. Just you and no options.

The little man holds a phone out for me. “Cut the charade. Make the call.”

I'm done with shipments now. I'm out. I'll rob this bank and I'm out for good. Circumstances were beyond my control, I tell myself. I'm not stupid, it's David fault. “I'm my own man,” I manage.

The little man is shaking his head. Then I'm pushed out the door. I seem to be transported to the bank on a conveyor belt. These life trials, they happen rarely, and only concentration, intelligence, and bravery will save you. You must apply them with utmost intensity but only for a few moments and you'll be able to reap the benefits for the rest of your life. Just keep your head. You're smarter than everybody else.

Outside of the bank entrance I crouch down and position the tie on my face. It's difficult, shaking as much as I am. A thought occurs to me: if I pull this off, I'll still have my $25,000 reserve. Hell, I might even get a little extra for my trouble. This makes me chuckle. Finally the tie's in place and I burst into the bank pulling out the gun. I don't yell anything and at first nobody sees me. Two middle age women, housewives probably, stand at the end of a short line, one laughing at something the other said. On her friend's face is a genuine smile.

Slowly everything stops, the tellers first and then the customers. Then I do it. I jump up on the counter-top howling, just like I'd fantasized as a kid. Then I see someone that stops me dead: Stephanie from the roof-top class this morning. Her hands are thrust up against side of her face and she's wide-eyed with terror, or recognition, or both, I can't tell.

I jerk my eyes from her and yell for one of the housewives give me her I.D. “This here Mrs. Margaret Lynch of 411 Lark Drive,” I bellow, “I'll kill all her fucking runts. I swear on my mother's life I will. It's her you'll have to answer to if you dare sneak-a paint bomb in the bag, or mash the alarm! You all got me!” Margaret, the housewife is mortified. It just all came out with out thinking. It's awfully clever though. I make them open the vault and put in $75,000—a little extra for me. Before I know it I'm heading out. Stephanie's on the floor face down with the others. On the sidewalk, stuffing the tie into a pocket, I exhale. I did it and nobody was hurt. I had no choice. I had no choice. The sedan screeches up next to me and I'm yanking on the back door handle with the hand holding the bag of money, the gun in the other. But the door's not budging. The back window motors down and the colossus' hand pops out and snatches the bag from me. The car peels away into traffic.

I stand there stiff-armed. Behind me someone is screaming. To my left a woman has stopped on the sidewalk. She's frozen looking at the gun. The downtown skyscrapers loom above me ever higher as if I'm receding from them. An image of Stephanie's face—laughing before the surprise Kierkegaard class—cuts through my mind. I yearn to be her, average and free. I find myself putting the gun barrel in my mouth. I squeeze my eyes shut and then I squeeze the trigger. Nothing happens. A second pull and still nothing. Click, click, click, click. Nothing. ***