Chapter One
He stood in the niche of a wall in the back of the room, safe and unobserved, observing Reason, who clomped across the stage, towering over the heads of his supporters, shaking his long hair like a dog in from the rain and rambling about the great things he would do for the city. Gray watched as the giant preened, running his palm over those strands of questionable hygiene, and then offering that same hand in camaraderie. No one hesitated to take it, for in the folly born of emotion and hype, these people believed he would be Grand River’s next mayor.
Gray sensed his mouth hanging open and pressed his fingers up to shut it. He’d heard the man was tall, but this dude reached at least eight feet. Each of those clomps shook the floor all the way back to where he stood. He’d infiltrated Reason Wilder’s campaign fundraiser, seeking to learn about the newcomer and what made him so popular: how he looked, how he spoke, what he stood for. But what Gray discovered only raised more questions. This candidate was beyond unusual. More like unnatural. When Reason moved it came in spasms, the slab of his body stopping in mid-jerk as though posing for hidden paparazzi. His face seemed contorted in pain, even when he smiled.
Time for caution, or at least hesitation. The last thing Gray wanted was for someone to notice him staring. Best to stay in his crevice and blend in among the fake flora. He could watch the action from there; watch from a distance, as he always did.
As he studied the man the strangeness of the scene began to multiply. Nothing about this event felt right. Politics was not like this. Where was the band playing the blatantly patriotic? In place of trumpets and cymbals, and too many crescendos, a guy with a beard strummed an acoustic guitar, and a woman in paisley and braids with—my God—a tambourine, slapped her hip; and they sang not of marching and war, but about dancing and drinking and—did he hear that right—sex, as in the casual kind he had hardly ever experienced. Where were the walls dripping with red and blue bunting? No stylized stripes and stars dangled above the stage. Only a mesh filled with balloons hugged the ceiling, ready to spill out onto the party. When he looked up, he saw a rainbow of hues had replaced the America colors, and those taut spheres of air quivered like sperm, as though anticipating their role in an election climax.
He watched as Reason slowed and peered into the crowd, allowing him a better look. Gray’s eyes widened. In the heat of the packed hall the massive man’s pasty skin did not glisten. In fact it did not glow with life at all, did not belie blood pumping vigorously beneath, but had a static look, desiccated, a look that hinted at decay. From where he stood the giant seemed disoriented, unaware of what he should do, until a supporter reached up to touch his shoulder. Then Reason twisted around and flashed a grimace of a grin, crooked and confused, as if surprised to see a long-lost comrade he’d never met before.
“My friend!” the giant slurred. “So glad you could be here for me. And what is your name?”
From within that cubbyhole reserved for statuary, Gray watched the monolith nearly stumble as he started up again, displaying coordination so lacking it might be diagnosed as an epileptic fit. He listened as Reason’s speech continued to assault the air in squeals and grunts. He’d seen such afflictions before and fought to recall where. The images came back to him in grainy monochrome: a reanimated collection of body parts, a flattened head encasing a diseased brain; the whole awkward, aimless assemblage menacing villagers and little girls. But come on, Gray, childhood nightmares should remain in childhood, yes? The movie traumatized him as a boy of eight, and those fevered imaginations had stopped plaguing him long ago. Yet how easily they came back, supplanting the here and now with figments of the beyond. It couldn’t be real. Just couldn’t. Besides, if someone brought a cadaver to life today, it would be under controlled circumstances—in a lab at some university, with the media and religious protesters in attendance. It would go viral on the web. He would have heard about it.
Still, Gray couldn’t dismiss the possibility. His timid psyche often cleaved to the supernatural, if only to explain the failures in his life. And dead men had been elected before, although they typically stayed in their graves and didn’t campaign. He looked up at the hotel chandelier, its baubles now refracting light into untrustworthy images. He began to feel afraid. He began to think he shouldn’t have come.
But despite not bearing an invitation, he couldn’t stay away. The lure of loose lips, of campaign secrets revealed, had enticed him like a lover. At first he had only dared take a peek inside, to see if this event disappointed as badly as his own candidate’s a few streets away. The dinner portion was over. No one guarded the door; no rule-obsessed matrons with glasses on chains around their necks badgered him for credentials. A few tentative steps further and still no resistance. And when he felt the energy of the crowd surrounding the huge figure, he slid along the room’s perimeter as if drawn by their gravity and settled into this recess where he could spy. Who knew what nuggets he might unearth? Perhaps he’d learn how this unknown had Pied Pipered a following without a platform or a slogan.
At last Gray’s curiosity subdued his reticence and encouraged him to push an inch from the wall. He sidled out, urging himself to brave the crowd to get still closer to the man. But when the giant finished blathering, his supporters regathered around him, orbiting and eclipsing the candidate in a sycophantic group hug.
Gray recognized some of them: eggheads, activists, troublemakers. The city’s radical fringe. The wearers of black on black. The ones who never ate cow because they believed the beasts sentient, who lived outside the mainstream in warrens of subversion, and came out occasionally to lecture the rest of the world about their wasted, hypocritical lives. Naturally they would back a weirdo. But there were others as well, businesspeople from downtown, shop owners from the mall’s boutiques, people whose avarice was so pervasive you could smell it in their too-heavy colognes and parfums, see it in their entitled designer suits, their European cars of entitlement waiting for them at the valet outside. Typically these polar opposites never mingled, but here they were, getting along, drawn together by the colossus on stage as though they’d been chums for years. There was the head of a neighborhood association, talking to a young man who looked like the drummer in a grunge band. There stood the president of the Chamber, clinking plastic glasses with a college prof. That the object of their shared affections was so unlike any of them—so freakishly tall, so strangely uncool, so poorly dressed, poorly spoken, unaware, unattractive, so… unalive!—made no sense. Or did it? Of course the leftists would hitch their politically correct wagons to this bizarre star; of course the conservatives would proclaim their faux inclusiveness by embracing a golem of otherness.
Gray came out carefully from the potted camouflage, but kept his head down, refusing eye contact. Yet a woman, eager to share her euphoria, flitted over, blocking his path. “Isn’t he wonderful?” she said. Her body undulated under a loose smock of a dress, as though she’d just come from electroshock therapy and still had trouble controlling her movements. The tattoo on her deltoid of a bird of prey nearly made him recoil. “He’s going to turn this city around,” she said, swooning.
“There’s no doubt about that,” Gray muttered. He pictured Grand River rotating on an axis, spinning out of control, its inhabitants nauseated by the centrifugal force.
The woman clasped his hands in hers. “This is an amazing night,” she said.
“I couldn’t agree more.”
She floated away, and he began to weave a path through the few tables at the rear of the room. He didn’t get far before a man seated at one waved, and then pointed at his cup, as if by doing so he could convince Gray to fetch coffee. A pitfall of his outsider status. A pitfall of his lack of tribe, lack of affluence and fashion sense—his size forty Men’s Wearhouse off-the-rack special had conferred on him a waitstaff look, so that in this spectrum of lifestyles, where apparently everyone fit in, he did not. He and Reason did not. But they all adored Reason. The man waved again, more emphatically. In another time and venue Gray might have complied, but the therapy had at least helped him past such feelings of subservience and lifted, partially, his lifelong gloom over having a name like Gray. Now, with effort, he could act, go forward, rebuff that man and shelve his anxieties long enough to complete the mission he’d assigned himself.
Then the legs of the supporters onstage shifted, and he caught sight of Reason’s shoe. Not so much a shoe as a leather boxcar, a size twenty-three orthopedic sarcophagus, almost as high as it was long. No human sported a clog like this. Further evidence that the life parading before him might be artificial. He leaned forward to get a better look, but just as quickly Reason’s groupies re-obscured his view. If he wanted to see more, he’d have to coax himself all the way to the stage. Up there, next to the giant, he’d be able to confirm or deny these absurd imaginings. Perhaps he would find that the man was merely awkward, maybe handicapped in some way, but essentially human…unless he glimpsed a neck bolt or something.
Gray skulked past clusters of people sipping house merlot and munching hors d’oeuvres. While the guests chatted, he snuck glances at their faces. They laughed and noshed, enjoyed the goings-on, and in that respect, they bore no resemblance to his man Bob Boren’s handful of supporters. Those maudlin folks had looked at first like typical campaign well-wishers, but when they listened to Gray’s candidate blubber through his welcome speech, and then mangle the names of half the dignitaries attending, they abandoned Bob’s sinking ship for the safe harbor of their TV melodramas. By eight o’clock, only Bob and his wife and Gray remained, and they told him they would call it a night as well. He drove them back to their home for a consoling cup of joe in Bob’s study, where he eyed the gun room that contained enough firepower to arm a state militia, leafed through a stack of Soldier of Fortune magazines, listened to his client rationalize what had gone wrong, and then left them to their chagrin.
It was too early for Gray to retire for the night. If he went home, he’d have to watch as his wife, L’aura, with her psychedelic hairdo, pursued her psychedelic art—a combination of abstractions that made his head spin and stomach churn—and he just wasn’t ready for another evening of that. Then he hit on the idea of election espionage. But he couldn’t bring himself to drop by the soirée for the third candidate in the race, Elvis Vega. Yes, the event promised an open bar, and he sure could have used a belt, but the attraction stopped there. If the crowd at Reason’s were tough to bear, the clique at the yacht club would have been insufferable. Those silver-haired Brahmins, slathered with the tan of venture capital, always reminded him of how many digits separated his bank balance from theirs. And the condescension of Vega’s cronies—the crème of the city’s crème, the one percent of the one percent—would make him feel downright puny. So it had to be Reason’s. At least there he might feel less inferior to the other attendees. And if some of those people didn’t know how to keep their mouths shut, they would spill strategy and secrets, and he would lap it up because he needed some kind of edge to get Bob back in the race.
Gray closed in on the candidate, step by tentative step. He saw the cockeyed grin skewered into place between Reason’s nose and jaw, like a pair of wax lips on a king-sized Mr. Potato Head. He registered a pair of eyes that didn’t stop moving long enough to focus. This was no challenged candidate. This was weird science. The trembling of his adolescent nights might return at any moment, but curiosity and his client’s desperate situation, for now, held it in check. A few more steps and he would know for sure…
But another obstruction, this time a waiter hustling a tray of cheeses. The man had a compassionate look, as if he too saw Gray as another of the serving class. He thrust the platter under Gray’s chin.
“Here. Help yourself.”
It seemed like good advice.
Gray snatched a toothpick and stabbed. He lifted a cube of white, examined its geometry, and found it too perfect to be Swiss. He brought his nose—that Alp-like appendage with a sense as keen as a German Shepherd’s and which his family had once hoped might have commercial possibilities á la reality TV—into play and sniffed. He tasted. Ah, Monterey Jack.
Monterey Jack? Hmm.
Now there was a name. It bubbled with testosterone and reeked of sweat. Monterey Jack, he of the three-day stubble and flower-wilting breath, the meanest, toughest hombre who ever stalked the Sierra Nevadas in search of silver, women and whiskey. A man with a name like that ate raw horseflesh; he cleaned his toenails with a Bowie knife. He feared no man, no challenge; needed no sidekick to help him through. Monterey Jack was a name a man could wear like a bandana, a name that swaggered, that defied convention, and was so much more of a handle than his own, inanimate tag. Monterey Jack wouldn’t stand in the back of the room. He wouldn’t need a place to hide. He’d kick chairs and tables out of his way, and then the crowd would clear a path for him, huddling against the bar to let him pass. Monterey Jack would jangle his spurs right up to Reason, and stand, toe to boxcar.
But, no. He was Gray. Dull as a sunless, rainy afternoon. A product of his mother’s promiscuity and dyslexia. She had meant to honor her father, Gary. But it went down as Gray, and burdened him with all the dreariness the word implies. And Davenport to boot, as in, Ms. Davenport, are you sure of what you wrote on the baby’s registration? And when she answered yes, Gray Davenport was sentenced to a life as a blandly upholstered sofa, something to be sat upon by asses of all weights and configurations. From childhood on he endured the questions and the jokes. New acquaintances tried their best to be witty at his expense, turning his name into a weather report or an ad for cut-rate furniture. He always did his best to ignore it, sometimes laughed to show he could take the ribbing and get along with the ex-frat boys and sorority sisters who populated the halls of influence in this stratified city as he tried to claw his way up the ladder of political success. But inside, where it counted—where it hurt—he added these rubes to his “list”—an ever-lengthening mental inventory of those who’d offended him, and against whom he would someday, somehow, exact revenge in all its living-well-is-the-best-type glory. So far, however, that plan had disappointed, and Gray continued to hate them all for who they were, as they surely would have hated him for who he wasn’t, had they bothered to acknowledge him at all.
By the time Gray swallowed, two of Reason’s beefy handlers were guiding the candidate toward a back room. Those left on the stage began to applaud, and the rest of the crowd joined in. There was no time to deliberate, no chance to opt again for inaction. Gray moved fast, motoring around the throng just in time to block the exit. He thrust his hand toward Reason. The titan hovered over him and met the nervous fingers with a slab of dry flesh that hung limp from the wrist.
“My friend!” Reason slurred again. “So glad you could be here for me. And what is your name?”
His voice seemed different from just a few minutes ago, in a slightly higher register. When Reason spoke, his words seemed not in sync with his lips, like a movie off its soundtrack. He appeared even taller up close, with shoulders like a linebacker in pads. Gray looked higher, into the bleached teeth, into the twin wind tunnels of his nose, into the yellow eyes that scanned the room—independently, it seemed. A sharp, chemical mixture of smells wafted from the candidate. And the skin: to the touch it felt dehydrated, lacking the natural oils of living epidermis, as brittle as parchment, like the pages of an old book. Gray saw it now—a dead man walking. A dead man somehow charged back to life.
For a moment, Gray stood as tall as his body would allow, refusing intimidation. He could be the hombre: tough, proud, and filled with a bravado that would make them equal. But he only reached to the giant’s sternum and realized this wall of flesh could swat him like a mosquito if provoked. He felt himself shrivel as his courage started to drain away. In a second, all he wanted was to retreat to the safety of the niche in the back of the room. But the beast had asked him a question. He had to answer. Be strong, man. Be that Monterey fellow. And he stammered, “Jack… uh, Gray.”
“Well, Jack Gray, I am glad to meet you. Together we will do great things for this city.”
Gray peered at him from below. There had to be a scar, an electrode, some kind of definitive proof. But before he could find it he felt himself moving away from the door. One of the handlers pushed him to the side. As they departed, the other slipped a contribution envelope into Gray’s hand. The first put his palm on top of Reason’s head and reminded him not to run into the doorframe.
The lights in the room flashed. Someone gave a signal, and the balloons came down. Gray ducked.
Joe Ponepinto is the founding publisher and fiction editor of Tahoma Literary Review, a nationally recognized literary journal that has had selections reproduced in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, Best Small Fictions, and other notable anthologies. He is the winner of the Tiferet: Literature, Art & the Creative Spirit 2016 fiction contest, and has had stories published in dozens of literary journals in the U.S. and abroad. A New Yorker by birth, he has lived in a variety of locations around the country, and now resides in Washington State with his wife, Dona, and Henry, the coffee-drinking dog.
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