Behold the Dreamers(57)
“It’s the fear that kills us, Leah,” Jende said. “Sometimes it happens and it is not even as bad as the fear. That is what I have learned in this life. It is the fear.”
Leah agreed but said she couldn’t talk much at the moment. She gave Jende her home number to call later, which Jende did that night.
“What are you going to do now?” he asked her.
“Something really great,” she said, sounding more upbeat than she had in the morning. “I’ve got over twenty years of experience, honey. I’m not worried. I’m going to take a month and relax before I start a job search.”
“You should do that.”
“I will, maybe go see my sister in Florida. That’s the good thing about a life with no husband or children—no one to hold me back, make me feel as if I can’t go where I want, whenever I want, do what I want. I’m going to enjoy myself in Sarasota, and when I come back, I’ll dust off the old résumé.”
“You will get a new job very fast when you return,” Jende said. “Mr. Edwards will surely tell everyone that you were a good secretary.”
“He better.”
“When you come back, call me, please? You are going to let me know you are all right?”
Leah promised she would, and Jende wished her a good time in Florida.
The next day, as he drove to drop off and pick up the Edwardses, Jende thought about Leah and the ex–Lehman employees. He thought about the state of the city and the state of the country. He thought about how strange and sad and scary it was that Americans were talking about an “economic crisis,” a phrase Cameroonians heard on the radio and TV virtually every day in the late eighties, when the country entered a prolonged financial downturn. Few people in Limbe understood the origin of the slump, or what the government was doing to get the country out of it and prevent a recurrence, but everyone knew that it made buying food and other necessities beyond difficult, thanks to the evaporation of large amounts of money. Now it was happening in America. And it was bad. Very bad. No one could tell how long it would take before this avoidable pandemonium that Lehman’s fall had caused would end. It could take years, the experts on TV said. Maybe up to five years, some said, especially now that the crisis was spreading around the world and people were losing secure jobs, losing life’s savings, losing families, losing sanities.
But him … thank God, he still had a job.
His gratitude overflowed every time he picked up the car from the garage, knowing he could be jobless like many all over the country. He read of job losses daily in Clark’s discarded Journal and watched news segments about layoffs on CNN after work.
Every night he went to bed hoping it would get better soon, but it would only get worse in the coming weeks.
More jobs would be lost, with no hope of being found in the immediate future. The Dow would drop in titanic percentages. It would rise and fall and rise and fall, over and over, like a demonic wave. 401(k)s would be cut in half, disappear as if stolen by maleficent aliens. Retirements would have to be postponed; visions of lazy days at the beach would vanish or be put on hold for up to a decade. College education funds would be withdrawn; many hands would never know the feel of a desired diploma. Dream homes would not be bought. Dream wedding plans would be reconsidered. Dream vacations would not be taken, no matter how many days had been worked in the past year, no matter how much respite was needed.
In many different ways it would be an unprecedented plague, a calamity like the one that had befallen the Egyptians in the Old Testament. The only difference between the Egyptians then and the Americans now, Jende reasoned, was that the Egyptians had been cursed by their own wickedness. They had called an abomination upon their land by worshipping idols and enslaving their fellow humans, all so they could live in splendor. They had chosen riches over righteousness, rapaciousness over justice. The Americans had done no such thing.
And yet, all through the land, willows would weep for the end of many dreams.
Twenty-eight
THEY DROVE TO THE CHELSEA HOTEL AT LEAST A DOZEN TIMES IN THE first five weeks after Lehman fell. Clark seemed to need those appointments more as hysteria in the market grew and the weight on his weakening shoulders got heavier; he seemed to need them desperately, like a scorched land panting for rain. It was as if they were his sole path to aliveness, his sole means of feeling sane in a demented world—only when he called to confirm each appointment did his tone change from morose to expectant. Always, he confirmed the rendezvous on the way there. Always, he verified with the person on the phone that the girl would do the acts she had promised to do on the website. Always, he nodded, and sometimes smiled, as the person assured him that he would get his money’s worth, that the girl would make him very, very happy.
In the driver’s seat, Jende pretended not to hear anything. It was his job to drive, not to hear. Before every appointment he pulled up in front of the hotel, dropped Clark off, and searched for a spot on the street. There, he waited until he got a call from Clark to pick him up in five minutes. When Clark reentered the car, Jende saw a man who looked relaxed but, in other ways, was no different from the man who had exited. His hair was combed back, as when he left the car. His blue shirt was without wrinkles, his collar without a dent. No guilt was evident in his demeanor.
Jende drove him wherever he needed to be next and asked no questions. He had no right to ask questions. Sometimes when Clark reentered the car he made remarks about the weather, the Yankees, the Giants. Jende always responded quickly and agreed with whatever the boss said, as if to say, it’s okay, sir, it’s perfectly all right, sir, what you’re doing. And he could tell Clark felt that way around him; that Clark trusted him and knew that no one would ever know. Without speaking of it, their bond had been firmly established—they were two men bound by this secret, by their dependence on each other to move forward every day and carry each other to the achievement of daily and lifelong goals, by the relationship they had forged after almost a year of cruising on highways and sitting in rush-hour traffic.