Extraordinary Adventures Read online

  “Mr. Bronfman?” she said.

  Maybe this was the reason. Maybe it was for this extraordinary adventure. Maybe this was a sign of some kind, getting this call from Carla D’Angelo. Because this man, Bronfman, was a man who had come home from work that day, as he did every day, and opened his mail (three invitations for low-interest-rate credit cards, a postcard offering him ten percent off his next purchase somewhere he’d never been, his water bill), made dinner (pasta with red sauce, steamed broccoli, a slice of bread), and had only just sat down in the chair facing the television, remote in hand, to watch a show about hoarders when he remembered the sunset, and stood by his window to watch it. He was still in the same clothes he’d put on that morning: gray slacks, pale-blue oxford shirt, red-and-blue striped tie, and black shoes. He had loosened his tie a bit and unbuttoned the top button. Somehow he always forgot how tight his collar was and, unbuttoning it, discovered, as he had the day before and would tomorrow, that for the first time all day he could actually breathe, could feel the oxygen moving to his extremities. Bronfman was thin. His physical angularity suggested faulty construction. Surely the arm wasn’t meant to be connected that way, so high on the shoulder. Couldn’t an inch or two be taken off the legs without any real loss of functionality? In its current state, the nose appeared to be more ornamental than functional. Could that be smoothed down, or removed entirely and replaced by another? He was an imperfect man. All that being said, he was, for the most part, inoffensive, and not without potential. It didn’t really matter what he looked like, though, because he felt so rarely seen. He was a man who was overlooked by everyone, maybe because he had been standing in one place for such a very long time.

  But this phone call. This Carla D’Angelo. Destin. Extraordinary Adventures. It meant something. Everything meant something. He yearned to believe things happened for a reason, and this was a thing. Thanks to Carla D’Angelo, there was a crack in the shell of his life now—an almost imperceptible crack, but one that let in a little bit of light, and one through which he could see a sliver of the world outside himself. The world he saw was a big place, a bright place, full of paralyzing possibility. Plus, it had a beach.

  Bronfman wanted to go there, and he wanted to go there with a companion.

  “Hello?” said Carla D’Angelo. “Earth to Mr. Bronfman? Are you still there?”

  “Still here,” Bronfman said. “Still here.”

  But not, he hoped, for long.

  DAY

  TWO

  ONE

  The sunshine snaked through the branches of a pine tree and in through the uncurtained windows, edging beneath his eyelids and blooming in a pool of light on the bedroom floor, waking him. Bronfman thought, That’s pretty. Black coffee, a single scrambled egg and a slice of buttered toast, a shower—the same thing he did every day, but this morning all of it was better. “We will be sending you a packet,” Carla D’Angelo had told him. “Please look for it in your mail within seven to ten days.” He assured her that he would. He did not tell her that he would be looking for it every day for the next six days as well, because the thought of getting mail of this magnitude was all-consuming.

  Bronfman walked out into the day and paused on his stoop, taking in the view, scanning for potential hazards. King’s Manor was a compound of barracks-like apartment buildings surrounding a vast black swath of cracking asphalt. Parking-lot lines had been hastily painted by hand. Strangers occasionally gathered in the parking lot at night. Bronfman saw them—half-human, half-shadow—laughing, spitting, pushing one another around in a playfully serious way. Beer cans littered what the manager of the complex called “the green space,” and that’s exactly what it was, a space of green little more than a patch of grass surrounded by a one-foot-tall wrought-iron fence. The dog pound was behind the last unit. All that separated the complex from the pound was a row or two of pine trees. His next-door neighbor was sitting on the stoop in front of his own apartment, in his boxers, his long, ropy arms dangling outside of his sleeveless red T-shirt. He was, of course, smoking. He was always smoking. On this April morning, he looked a little cold.

  “Good morning, Tommy,” Bronfman said.

  His neighbor’s name was Thomas Edison, but he insisted on being called Tommy because then there wouldn’t be any confusion between him “and the inventor of the fucking lightbulb.” Still, Bronfman could not think of him as anything other than Thomas Edison. The day Bronfman moved to King’s Manor, Thomas Edison volunteered to help him with the bed, the couch, a few of the boxes. Bronfman was thankful. Thomas turned out to be one of those men who knew how to angle a chest of drawers around a doorframe, how to find a wall stud to hang a picture, fix a persistent and maddening leaky faucet with a washer. Bronfman didn’t. Bronfman didn’t know how to do anything, really. He could work, eat and clean up after himself, buy new batteries when the old ones wore out, fill up his car with gas. But he didn’t have Thomas Edison’s vast knowledge of how things worked, and what was wrong with them when they didn’t. Bronfman could live successfully in a suburb of an American city; Thomas Edison could live anywhere. Anywhere. Give him a knife, a pack of matches, and a piece of string, drop him in the middle of a rain forest, and he could build a hut, make a fire, kill a boar.

  Considering how much his neighbor knew about the world, the real world, it surprised Bronfman when Thomas Edison told him that he didn’t have a job. A man who could have done anything, Bronfman thought, and here he was, doing nothing. He was tall, strong, and shaggy. His goatee—as thick as bear’s fur—could have been a full beard if he’d wanted it to be. When Bronfman tried to grow a goatee, his chin looked less like it was covered with hair than with metal filings. (Thus the ability to grow facial hair was, to Bronfman, indicative of a manliness he had yet to and might never achieve.) Sometimes Thomas Edison walked outside with his shirt off, beltless in tight-fitting, oil-stained jeans. Chinese tattoos, hard muscles, left arm half-tanned from short-sleeved driving. Again, this amazed Bronfman. He could not imagine going outside half-naked, not under any circumstances.

  But Thomas Edison wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot. He stayed up late and had friends who came over and laughed and drank and kept Bronfman up sometimes for all hours—literally, for all of the hours. People over there screamed and hooted and bottles broke, and one man would have words with another, threatening to break a bone or his entire face. Then it would all turn eerily silent. Bronfman could have complained, but no one liked a complainer, and who was he to insinuate himself into the good-time-Charlie life his neighbor was living? Bronfman had only been there a few weeks. Maybe Tommy would cut back on this lifestyle when he got a job, once he had a reason to get up in the morning.

  Thomas Edison barely lifted his unshaved chin in greeting. Sometimes he was gregarious and talkative, but on other days he was so fatigued that he opened his mouth only wide enough to stick a cigarette in it. That’s how he was this morning, which was kind of great, because Bronfman was tempted to tell him what had happened—that he had won this trip to the beach—and he didn’t want to tell him. The secret, in a way, was as valuable as the prize itself: both things were entirely his. And though in the sober light of morning he knew there was little chance he would be able to qualify for the offer, the mere fact that he had been chosen was a small good feeling, like finding a piece of chocolate in his pocket.

  With a sudden hack, Thomas Edison resurrected something thick and sticky from the bottom of his throat and spat it out, away from Bronfman, and then wiped his spattered lips with the back of his hand.

  “Well, I hope you have a good day,” Bronfman said, and waved. Still Thomas Edison said nothing. Only by some nearly imperceptible dip of his neighbor’s head could Bronfman surmise that the man had heard him speak at all.

  TWO

  The Cranston Building was Bronfman’s home away from home. He felt more at ease there than he did anywhere else. A structure devoted to housing businesses of various types in one centralized location, the Cranst
on Building succeeded as well as any building possibly could. It may not have been perfect (there were some airflow problems, the floor of the men’s room on fifteen was often damp and sticky, and the elevator was slower than molasses in January), but perfect wasn’t the point. Constancy—that was the point. So what if it was showing its age here and there. So what if the awning—the one that had been in place since Bronfman’s very first day, almost eight years ago—was worn and rain-streaked, torn in places. The way the words

  THE CRANSTON BUILDING EST. 1924

  had been carved into the concrete façade above the awning suggested that this was a significant building, a historic structure to which attention must be paid: Future archaeologists, take note! You have found the Cranston Building, home of many different businesses and support centers, a well-known plastic surgeon and a West Indian Trading Company, a data-collection center and at least seven legal firms. The marble columns on either side of the automatic doors were august and stately, and had what was perhaps the intended effect on Bronfman: they made him feel special. The columns made him feel that he was important, that his job was important, and that he wouldn’t be in this building if these things weren’t true. The Cranston Building—even more than his office on the fifteenth floor, even more than his own little cubicle—was his sanctuary, his Notre Dame. This is exactly what he thought he needed. Immutability. Certainty. The very same sameness from one day to the next, forever and ever and ever. How wrong he was.

  * * *

  Work! Work was work, neither more nor less, the perfect distillation of what it was meant to be. He turned on his computer and settled into his cubicle, but his mind immediately wandered to the beach. The beach was a place he had never really liked; now it was the only place he wanted to go. He had been to the beach only once in his life, as a child of ten. He had played at the edge of the surf, never venturing farther than the foamy border, while his mother—with her big hat and her sunglasses—smoked cigarettes under the umbrella. She applied sunscreen to him but in a haphazard fashion, so that he came away burned, scalded in streaks by the sun, tiger stripes in pink. He couldn’t sleep that night—the sheets had hurt him, and the edges of his shorts had felt as if they were cutting into his legs. They had never gone back to the beach again, and that had been fine with him.

  In the break room, he poured himself a glass of warm water. On the way back to his desk he checked in with all of his work friends, the men and women he felt close to—even intimate with—through the course of the day, but not for a moment afterward. Skip Sorsby occupied the cubicle on the other side of his wall, and Bronfman supposed that, of everyone, he spoke to Skip the most. Not that Bronfman wanted to, it was just that Skip Sorsby was impossible to avoid. Bronfman could hear him humming. Bronfman could hear him breathing. Bronfman could hear him snickering, and snickering, Bronfman felt, was an unseemly sound for an adult to make. Still, Skip Sorsby was someone Bronfman would “shoot the shit” with, as it were, talking about nothing of any importance at all, which was the tradition at his office, and perhaps at every office—killing time for as long as they possibly could before being compelled by some inner voice to sit down at their desks and actually do something related to what they were being paid to do. But it wasn’t the same today. Even when Bronfman said, “Good morning,” there was a question in it, a weird combination of joy and anxiety, which anyone who was really listening would have picked up on. But no one really listened. He could have said, “It is a good morning for me—an especially good morning for me, yet one that also fills me with a certain dread,” but that would have sounded ridiculous.

  Keeping the secret, however, became too much for him to bear. He felt as though a geyser inside his heart were on the verge of exploding. He continued to perform his daily functions: He made phone calls, sent emails, filed the light-blue copies, sent the pink ones on to accounts, placed three orders, put out one fire, started another … all the while feeling that he had to tell somebody. But whom?

  He thought through the possibilities at hand, in cubicles left and right. Gary Kazlow, Garrett Kenan, Jay Miller, maybe those brothers who worked in receiving, Mitchell and Alex Kahn—they seemed friendly enough—or even Skip Sorsby. He imagined telling each of them, one at a time, and gauged their suitability by closing his eyes and feeling the way he thought he might feel after having told them. Condo at the beach! But their imagined reactions weren’t sufficient to the news he would be sharing with them. Because he would have to tell them the hitch as well—the lifeline, as Carla D’Angelo had put it. The companion. Certainly he would have liked some guidance in how to make it all happen—the steps to take toward finding one, which, of course, entailed a series of actions he was, as far as he knew, incapable of. But someone knew, because it was done all the time. Like the names of constellations, or how electricity worked, or what, really, was inside the inside of a television set: someone knew. All he had to do was ask.

  THREE

  The elevator descended tentatively. It was full of people standing shoulder to shoulder, backside to front, and as soon as the doors opened to the lobby and they all poured out they were treated to the ebullient welcome of the receptionist, Sheila McNabb.

  “And the lunchtime exodus begins!” she rang out, like a joyous village crier. “Last one to the trough may be eliminated!”

  Sheila McNabb was the receptionist—not for him, not even for his floor, but for the building. She was the first person you saw when you entered the Cranston Building, the last when you left. “Welcome to the Cranston Building!” she said as you came through the automatic glass-and-steel door (it wasn’t a big building, and her expansive metal desk was only a few feet away from the entrance), and then, as you exited, “Have a nice day!” Between the coming and going of office workers, staff, and visitors—which included salesmen, the mailman, and various delivery services, from packages to pizza—she answered the telephone: “The Cranston Building. How may I direct your call?” And when there were neither phone calls to direct nor people to greet she could be seen with a pen in her hand, furiously scribbling, or sometimes reading a book or a magazine. She had no real power, of course, being just a receptionist, but her position at the desk, so close to the entrance, made her seem sacred, ageless. Bronfman looked at her and felt as if you could trace her position back to Egypt or Greece or wherever, where a priestess may have stood before a temple and muttered blessings as you came and went, maybe splashing you with water, encouraging donations for temple upkeep.

  Sheila McNabb was in her late twenties, perhaps, virtually unblemished, with chocolate-brown hair that hung just short of her shoulders, straining for purchase. She had a friendly and unguarded smile, and was objectively pretty, but not the kind of pretty that advertises itself as pretty. (Middle American farm-girl pretty, he would say, an observation that Bronfman could make even though he had been neither on a farm nor to Middle America.)

  He had established a relationship with Sheila McNabb, if that’s what it was, based on a few hellos and good-byes and a bunch of friendly waves. She knew him, he figured, as well as she knew anybody she didn’t know, maybe more so, maybe less. They had never had a real conversation, but he felt as if they could, they might, if only he would stop for a minute and make himself known to her. But he never did, because he was Bronfman.

  So around noon that day he exited the elevator and walked quickly past her desk, waving briefly, hurtling toward the doors leading to the outside world and a chili dog.

  “Have a nice day!” Sheila called after him.

  But then he stopped. And turned. Bronfman recalled what Carla D’Angelo, Operator 61217, had said to him: You have to open yourself up to life. He heard it again now as if it were a cosmic echo. Sheila McNabb was life. She was the epicenter of life. He saw that she had already opened up her notebook and was writing something down, but when she realized that Bronfman hadn’t disappeared through the automatic doors, as everyone else had, she laughed.

  “I thought you were leav
ing,” she said, “and then—well, you didn’t.” She laughed again. “I shouldn’t have said ‘Have a nice day’ until I was certain you were leaving. I was impetuous. That was an impetuous ‘Have a nice day.’ I should have nailed that by now.” Her head bobbed, not unlike one of those velour dogs people used to set up on the shelf above the backseat of a car, bobbed as if she’d said something she was agreeing with, or that she hoped he would agree with, so he smiled and nodded as well.