Redeployment(89)

You can’t get there with pleasure. You can try, but you can’t.





? ? ?


“Think termites,” I told Ed-the-banker two weeks after the breakup. We were in his apartment in the West Village, drinking his Scotch. It felt very grown-up.

“There was a medical researcher named Lewis Thomas,” I said. “Thomas had something of a poet’s mind.”

“I’m sure that’s a useful trait in a doctor,” Ed-the-banker said, since he wasn’t the sort to let you complete a thought.

“Thomas says if you put two termites in a patch of dirt, they’ll roll it into little balls, move it from place to place. But they don’t accomplish anything.”

“Like poets,” he said.

“Thomas was the poet,” I said. “Not the termites.”

He was smiling broadly now. He finds all my problems amusing, which I guess they are if you’ve got the right perspective.

“They’re little Sisyphuses,” I said, “with their little balls of dirt. I’m sure for a termite, it’s a regular old existential crisis.”

“Maybe they need a termitess.” This is Ed-the-banker’s solution to most problems, and it’s generally not a bad solution.

“They need more termites,” I said. “Two won’t cut it. If they had enough brain cells to feel, they’d feel lost, awash in the loneliness in the heart of the universe or whatever. Nothing to depend on. Just dirt and each other. Two won’t cut it.”

“So what? Ménage à trois?”

“It doesn’t help to add only a few more termites. You might get piles of dirt, but the behavior is still purposeless.”

“To you,” Ed-the-banker said. “Maybe pushing around little balls of dirt is like, the termite version of watching Internet porn.”

“No,” I said, “they’re not excited until you start adding more and more termites. Eventually you reach critical mass, though, enough of the little f*ckers to really do something. The termites get excited, and they get to work. Thomas says they work like artists. Bits of earth stacked on bits of earth, forming columns, arches, termites on both sides building toward one another. It’s all perfect, Thomas says, symmetrical. As though there’s a blueprint. Or an architect. And the columns reach each other, touching, forming chambers, and the termites connect chamber to chamber, form a hive, a home.”

“Which would be the Marine Corps,” Ed-the-banker said.

“Two hundred thousand workers all yoked to the same goal. Two hundred thousand workers risking their lives for that goal.”

“Which would make the civilian world—”

“A bunch of lone little animals, pushing their balls of dirt around.”

Ed-the-banker laughed. “The civilian world,” he said, “or corporate law?”

“Either,” I said. “Basically, I’m not sure which little group of confused, hopeless animals I should join, and how I can possibly bring myself to care about what they think they’re building.”

“I told you,” he said. “You should have gone into finance.”





? ? ?


That was last fall. And now, two weeks after the phone call from Boylan that woke me up in the middle of the night, he’s here, trundling into Grand Central like an oversize toddler dressed in a hand-me-down suit he’s already outgrown. The breast pulls, the pant cuffs show too much of the socks, and his grin indicates a blissful lack of awareness of how absurdly his body has been crammed into the clothes of a lesser man. I’ve seen Boylan ripped, a hulking giant. And at the end of our shared deployment, I’d seen him a gaunt, enormous skeleton. But I’ve never seen him looking so soft—pudgy in the middle and fleshy in his face. He had a staff job in Afghanistan, and it shows.

“I got this at a thrift store for twenty-five bucks,” he says, grabbing his lapel and spinning to show off his sartorial splendor.

“Why are you in a suit?” I say, and his face registers a moment of confusion.

“You said you’d take me to the Yale Club.”

It takes me a moment, but I realize I had indeed said that, three years ago. Funny what people remember.

“You don’t want to go there,” I say. “You don’t want to be anywhere around here.” I raise my arms to indicate Grand Central, the teeming masses, the cathedral beauty of it, with its constellation map gilt backward on the ceiling and its tasteful Apple store discreetly occupying the top of the east staircase. “Midtown’s got no life to it. Just seventeen-dollar drinks and the *s that can pay for them.”