The Voices in Our Heads (18 page)

Right. Busy principal. Always wore a headset.

Right. Cafeteria. Markowicz liked it better than the auditorium, brighter overheads, more personal.

And of course, to get to the boy’s room he had to pass right through the front end of it by the juice machine. A heavyset woman wearing a hairnet and carrying a pan from the steam table almost crashed into him. To his right, the faculty all sat according to grade level at round tables, their eyes drifting over, he could feel them. Markowicz was at the podium, and it was one of those moments between ideas. Silence, for all but his whispered “Excuse me,” after which he and the lunch lady did that little dance for a second where they each tried to go around but went the same way, his sheepish index finger up toward Markowicz,
“Just one more minute, please,”
and his damned wingtips clicking on the hard floor almost loud enough to make an echo. He heard a few polite giggles, and he ducked under the archway, turned the corner, and wrenched open the lavatory door.

It was dingy as hell in here, one of the plastic light panels missing from the drop ceiling, but at least it was clean, no water collected around the floor drain grate, no trash surrounding the industrial yellow container under the Fort Washington towel dispenser. Smelled like some high concentrate liquid cleanser, steep and ripe, the kind that gave you a quick headache. McFinn put his laptop case on the floor against the wall as gingerly as he could at this point and elbowed his way into a stall. He could have used one of the urinals, but besides the fact that they were knee-height and awkward, he’d been gunshy for some time now. Even with a gallon and a half like this to uncork, open spaces made him hesitate, and God help him if some fourth-grade teacher walked in and stood next to him, dick hanging out there in parallel as if it wasn’t a custom too sick to really be allowed for in public. The guy would probably be this friendly son of a bitch and start up a conversation, his healthy prostate blasting his proud stream into the receptacle hard enough to wear a layer clean off the urine cake, McFinn’s own tinkling down in a pathetic stop-’n’-start he’d have to nearly get a hernia initiating, no thank you.

He shut the door, used his shoe to flap up the seat, and tore open his coat. It was tight in here, and he had to work for a minute to pin the tails of his overcoat back behind him with his elbows. Now, he was short-armed, and he had this image of Barney the dinosaur in his mind as he struggled open his blazer button and fingered down the zipper, fingers feeling fat like his bladder, screaming, his eyes were screaming.

Then they were closed, and he moaned with it for a second. At the halfway point, the moan had been long cut off, and his eyes opened up, relief in sight, and everything was righted in the world again, manageable, winnable even. The wall in front of him was riddled with graffiti.

I hate it here.

Then go find another stall.

Tamika sucks donkey dick.

Lyle lets drunken monkeys give it to him in the butt.

Turn a promise to a lie and you will be the next to die.

Wait, where had he seen that before, that last one? It was written in a child’s block printing, right behind the peak of the toilet pipe’s elbow joint that looked like a leprechaun’s top hat that got stepped on. McFinn closed his eyes and thought back. Wasn’t that the urban legend over at People First? Something about a girl with a jump rope who died in the school and haunted the toilet? Something sounded different, and he opened his eyes. He wasn’t in the bowl anymore, that was it, he was pissing right on the wall-saying. His stream cut off immediately, and he still had a bit to go yet. Shit. Would anyone conclude that it had been him pissing on the wall? He squinted. The words weren’t the same now; in fact, the initial script wasn’t there at all anymore. Written in pencil and weeping down a bit in the middle where he’d partly erased it with urine, were the words,

Risk temptation

He blinked. Now those words were gone, and the saying read,

You only need fear what the wind may blow near
.

It had the same weeping and dripping down center, just a second or so more advanced than the inscription that had just read
Risk temptation.
 

McFinn looked over his shoulder in that dumb sort of knee-jerk response, and saw only the top of the stall door, close to his nose, slightly bent, a dent at the right corner with a bit of rust in it. He looked back. The original saying had returned now, wet with his spill, made nearly invisible dead center where the words
to a lie
had been. McFinn snorted. He spread his feet and unloaded the rest straight onto the polished block wall. It was nothing but a squirt at this point anyway, and fuck ’em if Mr. Janitor couldn’t take a joke, fuck all you witches, warlocks, and ghosts. That shit was for dumb-asses who lived in trailer parks, knocked on wood, had black cats named Sabrina, and bought into Amway. Cryptic shit on bathroom walls? Please. When was the last time he had been to the eye doctor, anyway?

He zipped up, backed out, and made for the mirror. He looked good, a little thick in the neck, but his color was back.

And glasses would be a plus. They’d make him seem more intellectual, more fatherly.

Bend over, Lyle. Let’s talk annuities.

He’d missed his slot, so Markowicz put him up in a tenth-grade social studies room where he could present to one small group at a time, two before lunch, and the rest during the afternoon session where downstairs, the rest of the educators would be responsible for evaluating core texts and coming up with ideas for the motto and mission statement. McFinn didn’t mind, small group was good, even better than the lecture hall set-up, even though there was no projector or computer hookup. No worries, he’d just read the presentation the way his forefathers had, or whatever.

Still, when he tried to pull it up, his laptop wouldn’t cooperate. Blank screen, nothing. He was sitting at the teacher’s desk in front of the white board, pre-class work scribbled on one side, a homework assignment about chapter five and the Constitution scribbled on the other. There was a world map on a corkboard to the right behind a table with old art projects on it, and a timeline pieced together and pinned to the drywall above the cubbies to the left, the section outlining the Industrial Revolution unstapled at one corner and curling down like the wing of some wounded bird.

“Everything OK? Need something?” one of the teachers said, front row, end seat, far left. He was a skinny bastard with windblown hair. He had a goatee to match the hair, and spoke with a slight emphasis on the s-sounds to make him sound sensitive and intelligent. Real save-the-day type. Probably wanted to stand side by side in the can talking politics, holding peckers, and comparing flow rates.

“No, I got it.” McFinn hit the Ctrl/Alt/Delete one more time, and the screen flashed light blue.

“No really, I got it,” he said. A smile started at the corners of his lips and then ghosted. Something felt strange all of a sudden, as if he were being pulled butt down, deeper into his seat, pressed, like the centrifugal force a Spider or Tilt-a-Whirl put on you at the amusement park, just without the spinning sensation. And what was this before him? There was no familiar “DELL” logo fading in on a slant, and his icons weren’t coming up. It was something else. Something he’d never seen before. At the top of the screen were the words,

“Human Websites.”

And below the heading were cartoon silhouettes, each a bust from the shoulders up, each colored in what seemed a blood orange.

McFinn blinked, but his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him and he knew it, the same way we all knew that the saying “Pinch me, I must be dreaming” was really horseshit, in that dreams often fooled us when they posed as reality, but when we were awake, it was clear as day which end was up.

The silhouettes matched the teachers sitting before him. Though the faces weren’t lined in like caricatures, the outer rims were perfect duplicates. Starting with “Windblown Hair and Goatee,” front row, far left, he was at the bottom of McFinn’s screen, front corner left, hair parted way over right, ears doing that little turn and curl, like potato chips, coming back in toward the skull at the top. The prettiest girl in the room, mid-twenties, tall, a bit too thin, sad eyes brought out with a heavy dose of purple eye shadow, curly ash blonde hair gathered and tied at the scalp with a thin cloth ribbon, then doodled straight up in a bizarre exploding corn husk, was mimicked on McFinn’s screen, all the curls identical in outer form and line, the ribbon trailing off to the right. There was a teacher in the back row wearing an old-school scrolled-up African headdress, her identical silhouette on the screen complete with the little tassel hanging out through the top crease, and the other fifteen educators were represented as well, each distinct on the screen, each a dead-nuts replica.

Absolutely incredible, Ripley’s, Amazing Stories, right here and right now, and the immediate physical effect that had been imposed on him, the press in his lap, was really rather pleasurable actually, like a screw being seated just flush, just right. And hell, he wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon, now was he?

McFinn began his pitch, began it mechanically, amazed that his mind could be working in about five different directions at once, but not so amazed, because this was a performance, and he was a consummate professional.

“First, I want to thank you for doing the most difficult and underappreciated job in this country. You are the real heroes, and it’s about time you did something for you, for your family, for your future.”

There was a “That’s right” offered over from the right, and a light smattering of applause. McFinn couldn’t reproduce all the numbers and tables, but he had done this pitch enough to hit the fatty parts. He looked up and made eye contact.

“First, know that I taught an accounting academy in Franklin’s upper school for eight years, and please be aware that I know what you do, how much you give, all you sacrifice for the sake of educating these children. Know that I am not some huckster, some snake-oil salesman. I have a decade of experience in the field as a portfolio investment manager, and I am hoping you can trust me as your students learn to trust you.”

So how did this thing get on his computer? Was it some sort of network foul-up? Government satellites? Online terrorism? A curse from the bathroom? McFinn smiled at that one and worked the expression into his speech.

“First, let me assure you that what I offer is security that has nothing to do with my own personal gain. The Career Builder Portfolio has been custom designed with no initial sales commissions, and fees as low as three dollars and seventy-five cents a quarter. To get technical, it is a tax deferred teacher’s retirement plan, formulated to combat this recession. It has been carefully drafted to insure that your hard-earned money will not just sit like an old car in a weed-infested parking lot. Under a watchful eye, it will sprout and develop. Safely. Over time.”

Actually, it was a variable annuity, a ragtag basket of half-a-dozen mutual funds wrapped up in a life insurance policy that only paid back the money put in. Moreover, the initial year was just the bait, and after three hundred and sixty-five days to the minute, the nine percent commission rolled right off the top. Then came the fees, and the kill penalties, and the smooth assurances that the roller coaster was bound to climb back up again. Trust the trends. Let us interpret them for you. Can’t reach me? I’ve got voicemail.

McFinn was moving the cursor, looking at his audience. He had to know, had to get in the game and play, and he rationalized it by specifically not looking at the keyboard, letting it fall where it might, like a Ouija board, like a bathroom prophecy. That almost made him giggle out loud, and he guided the arrow right to where he thought cornhusk girl might be, go figure.

He glanced down. Missed her by one. The arrow was right atop the guy sitting next to her, crammed into the student desk with his huge pot belly, comically trying to keep his legs crossed, fifty-something, black socks and sneakers, frizzy hair, veins in his nose.

McFinn eased the arrow one over to the left. It was as easy as lying, God, what movie was that from?

He clicked on cornhusk girl.

And what showed up on his laptop was well worth it.

The screensaver was cornhusk girl all right, real name Tiffany Fowler, naked as a jaybird, only her hair was darker and straightened, perky little tits, belly ring, heart tattoo on the left hip, shaved pussy for all but a little tease line straight up dead center, and long, beautiful legs, slight calves, but McFinn wasn’t complaining. She had a drink in both hands, both raised up and out like Tah-dah, surprise. Her expression matched this, eyes looking off right, head turned slightly, mouth open in a big smile. She was standing, one toe pointed, crossing that knee slightly over the other. Looked like she just jumped out of a cake and was basking in the applause.

McFinn looked up and met glances with her for a moment. Her eyes were attentive and polite, her expression flat and professional, and McFinn was half in love with her already, mostly
because
of the professionalism, and the
contrast,
and the way she was wearing her off-day clothes, and even those were sophisticated, or as sophisticated as a young woman could possibly be, living in what was probably an efficiency laden sparsely with furniture from IKEA and driving a car from a different decade. She had on Laverne and Shirleys, black Performance Capris, and a burgundy-collared cozy fleece sweatshirt. Elbow on the desk, chin on palm, undivided attention, sober respect.

“There’s also our 403 Double A plan, but before I review those specifications, I’d like to share with you a few testimonials . . .”

He was on auto-pilot, amazed that he’d even memorized the narrative shit, and he was looking back at the screen and the headings that were there available for download on either side of Tiffany Fowler’s screensaver image.

“Sexual History” was the one of them. “Biggest Secret” was another. Then were the odder ones, like “The Most Private Thing I’m Proud Of,” and “Sickest Fantasy,” and “That of Which I’m Most Ashamed,” “The Image I’ve Most Masturbated To,” and “My Most Destructive Lie,” and “Who I’ve Thought of Fucking,” and “Those I’ve Pictured Killing.”