PAUL PARK

GET A GRIP

So far as we know, Paul Park is the author of delightfully baroque and rich
novels such as Celestis, The Gospel of Corax, and the Starbridge chronicles. An
e-mail we received from him notes that this story appeared first electronically
in February in Omni Online, but you'll forgive us if we wonder a bout the
veracity of all these facts once you read this brief report.

Here's how i found out: I was in a bar called Dave's on East 14th Street. It
wasn't my usual place. I bad been dating a woman in Stuyvesant Town. One night
after I left her place, I still wasn't eager to go home. So on my way I stopped
into Dave's.

I used to spend a lot of time in bars, though I don't smoke or drink. But I like 
the secondhand stuff. And the conversations you could have with strangers -- you
could tell them anything. "Ottawa is a fine city," you could say. "My brother
lives in Ottawa," I could say, though in fact I'm an only child. But people
would nod their heads.

This kind of storytelling used to drive my ex-wife crazy. "It's so pointless.
It's not like you're pretending you're an astronaut or a circus clown. That I
could see. But a Canadian?"

"It's a subtle thrill," I conceded.

"Why not tell the truth?" Barbara would say. "That you're a successful lawyer
with a beautiful wife you don't deserve. Is that so terrible?"

Not terrible so much as difficult to believe. It sounded pretty thin, even
before I found out. And of course none of it turned out to be true at all.

Anyway, that night I was listening to someone else. Someone was claiming he had
seen Reggie Jackson's last game on TV. I nodded, but all the time I was looking
past him toward a corner of the bar, where a man was sitting at a table by
himself. He was smoking cigarettes and drinking, and I recognized him.

But I didn't know from where. I stared at him for a few minutes. What was
different -- had he shaved his beard? Then suddenly I realized he was in the
wrong country. It was Boris Bezugly. It truly was.

I took my club soda over to join him. We had parted on such good terms.
"Friends, friends!" he had shouted drunkenly on the platform of Petersburg
Station, saliva dripping from his lips. Now he was drunk again. He sat picking
at the wax of the red candle. When he looked up at me, I saw nothing in his
face, just bleared eyes and a provisionary smile.

We had met two years before, when a partner in the firm was scouting the
possibility of a branch office in Moscow. Even in Russia he was the drunkest man
I ever met. When we were introduced, he had passed out and fallen on his back as
we were still shaking hands. Maybe it was his drunkenness that kept him from
recognizing me now, I thought. After all, it had taken me a moment.

But we were in New York. Surely running into me was not as strange as me running
into him. And why hadn't he told me he was coming? "Sdravsvuytse," I said,
grinning. "Can I buy you a drink?"

What passed over his face was an expression of such horror and rage, it made me
put up my hand. But then his face went blank and he turned away from me,
huddling around his candle and his drink.

He had lost weight, and his black beard was gone. In Russia he had worn a
hilarious mismatch of plaid clothes, surmounted by an old fur cap. Now he wore a
tweed suit, a denim shirt open at the neck. The cap was gone.

"Boris," I said.

In Russia his English had been absurd. I used to tell him he sounded like a hit
man in a cold war novel, and he had laughed aloud. Now he spoke quickly and
softly in a mid-Atlantic accent: "I think you're making a mistake."

And I would have thought so, too, except for the strange expression I had seen.
So I persevered. I pulled out one of the chairs and sat down. "What are you
doing?" he cried. "My God, if they find us. If they see us here."

These words gave me what I thought was a glimmer of understanding. In Moscow, in
the kitchen of his tiny apartment, Boris once had put away enough vodka to let
him pass through drunkenness into another stage, a kind of clarity and grim
sobriety. Then he had told me what his life was like under the Communists -- the
lies that no one had believed. The interrogations. When he was a student in the
sixties after Brezhnev first came in, he had spent two years in protective
custody.

Now maybe he was remembering those times. "My friend," I said, "it's all right.
You're in America."

These words seemed to fill him with another gust of fury. He tried to get up,
and I could see he was very drunk. "I don't know you, I've never met you," he
muttered, grinding out his cigarette butt. But then the cocktail waitress was
there.

"I'll take a club soda," I said. "And my friend will have a Smirnoff's."

"No," he snarled, "that was the problem with that job. Get me a bourbon," he
told the waitress. Then to me: "I hate vodka."

Which surprised me more than anything he'd said so far. In Moscow he had recited
poetry about vodka. "Yeah," he told me now, smiling in spite of himself. "Tastes
change."

Apparently he had reassured himself that no one was watching us. But he waited
until the waitress had come and gone before he spoke again. "Boris," I said, and
he interrupted me.

"Don't call me that. It was just a job, a two-week job. I barely remember it."

"What are you talking about?"

He smiled. "You don't know, do you? You really don't know. Get a grip," he said.
"It's like candy from a baby."

I saw such a mix of passions in his face. Envy, frustration, anger, fear. And
then a kind of malignant grin that was so far from my perception of his
character that I stared at him, fascinated.

"You never went to Russia," he said. "You've never met a single Russian. You
were in a theme park they built outside Helsinki, surrounded by people like me.
They were paying us to guzzle vodka and wear false beards and act like clowns.
'Sdravsvuytse,' my ass?

He was crazy. "My poor friend," I said. "Who was paying you? The KGB?"

He knocked his heavy-bottomed glass against the table, spilling bourbon on the
polyurethaned wood. "Not the KGB," he hissed. "The KGB never existed. None of it
existed. None of this." He waved his hand around the room. He was in the middle
of a paranoid breakdown of some sort. I could see that. And yet the moment I
heard him, I felt instinctively that what he said was true.

"They never would have taken you to Russia," he went on. "Not to the real
Russia." As he spoke I brought back my own memories -- the grime, the cold, the
sullen old babushkas with rags around their heads. The concrete apartment
blocks. The horrible food.

He put down his empty glass. "Thanks for the drink. And now I'm definitely
getting out of here before somebody sees us. Because this is definitely against
the rules."

Then he was gone, and I walked home. And maybe I wouldn't have thought much
about it, only the next day I was walking up Fifth Avenue on my lunch hour, and
I passed the offices for Aeroflot. I went in and sat down with the people who
were waiting to be helped. We were in a row of armchairs next to the window.

This is ridiculous, I thought. And I was about to get up and go, when I found
myself staring at a travel poster. One of the agents was talking on the phone,
and there was a framed poster of Red Square above her desk. And was that Boris
Bezugly in the middle of a group of smiling Russians in front of St. Basil's?
The beard, the hat, the absurd plaid?

The Aeroflot agent was a dark-haired, heavy-chested woman, dressed in black 
pumps, beige tights, and a black mini-skirt. A parody of a Russian vamp. And
what was that language she was speaking on the phone? The more I listened, the
more improbable it sounded.

I asked the woman sitting next to me. She frowned. "Russian, of course," she
said. How could she be so sure? Made-up gobbledygook, but of course once you let
yourself start thinking like that, the whole world starts to fall apart. Not
immediately, but gradually. I took the woman from Stuyvesant Town to a musical
on Broadway. Critics had pretended to like it, though it was obviously bad.
Audience members had applauded, laughed -- who were they trying to fool?

At work sometimes I found it hard to concentrate. I was representing the 
plaintiff in a civil suit. Yet no actual client could have been so petty, so
vindictive. In my office I sat staring at the man, watching his lips move,
waiting for him to give himself away.

And of course I spent more of my time at Dave's. I would go there every evening
after work, and in time I was drinking more than just club sodas. But it was
weeks before I saw Boris again. He came in out of a freezing rain and made his
way directly toward me, where I was sitting at a table by myself.

He sat down without asking and leaned forward, rubbing his hands over the tiny
candle flame. "Listen," he said, "I'm in trouble," and he looked it. He needed a
shave. His eyes were bloodshot. He wasn't wearing a coat.

"Listen, I can't do it anymore. All that lying and pretending. I've screwed up
two more jobs and now they're on to me. I can't go home. Please, can you give me
some money? I've got to get away."

"I'll pay you fifty dollars for some information," I said. I took the bills from
my pocket, but he interrupted me.

"No, I mean your watch or something. I can't use that bogus currency." He pulled
some coins out of the pocket of his pants, big, shiny, aluminum coins like Mardi 
Gras doubloons. In fact as I looked closely, I saw that's what they were. The
purple one in his palm was stamped with the head of Pete Fountain playing the
clarinet.

"I don't even have enough here for a drink," he said.

"I'll get you one." I raised my hand for the waitress. But then I saw her at the
corner of the bar, talking with the bartender. As I watched, she pointed over at
us.

"Oh my God," said my Russian friend. His voice was grim and strange. "Give me
the watch."

I stripped it off, though it was an expensive Seiko. "Thanks," he said, looking
at the face, the sweep of the second hand. "And in return I'll answer one
minute's worth of questions. Go."

"Who are you?" I asked.

But he shrugged irritably. "No, it's not important. My name is Nathan --so what?
What about you?"

"I know about myself," I said uncertainly.

"Do you? Paul Park, Esq. Yale, 1981. But what makes you think you were smart 
enough to go to the real Yale? Do you think they let just anybody in?"

Actually, I had always kind of wondered about that. So his words gave me a
painful kind of pleasure. Then he went on: "Twenty seconds. What about your
marriage? What was that all about?"

"I'm divorced."

"Of course you are. The woman who was playing your wife landed another job. It 
was never supposed to be more than a two-year contract with an option, which she
chose not to renew. Last I heard, she was doing Medea, Blanche Dubois, and Lady
Macbeth for some repertory company up in Canada."

Again, this sounded so hideously plausible that I said nothing.

"Forty seconds."

"Fifty seconds."

"Wait," I said, but he was gone out the door. He left only his Pete Fountain
doubloon, which I slid into my pocket.

Then in a little while the police were there. A man in a white raincoat sat
opposite me, asking me questions. "Did he say where he was going? Did he give
you anything?"

"No," I said. "No. Nothing."

But then when I was watching TV later that night, I saw that Nathan Rose, a
performance artist wanted in connection with several outstanding warrants, had
been arrested. There was a photograph, and a brief description of his
accomplishments. Nathan Rose had been a promising young man, recipient of
several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. The newscaster's voice
was sad and apologetic, and she seemed to look out of the television directly at
me. She made no mention of the crime he'd been accused of. What was it --
impersonating a Russian?

That night was the beginning of a quick decline for me, because success in life 
depends on not asking too many questions. The patterns of illusion that made up
the modern world require a kind of faith, a suspension of disbelief. The revenge
on skeptics is quick and sure, and I soon found myself hustled out of what I'd
thought was my real world as rudely as I might have been thrown out of a magic
show, if I had stood up in the audience and explained the tricks while the
performance was in progress.

But of course at that time I could only guess at the real truth. I conceived the
idea that the government had hired an enormous troupe of actors, administered
and paid for by the NEA, to create and sustain an illusion of reality for
certain people. At first I played with the idea that I might be the only one,
but no. That was too grandiose, too desperate a fantasy. So much money, so much 
effort, just to make a fool out of a single citizen. The Republicans never would
have stood for it. Providing jobs for actors just wasn't that important, even in
New York.

I lost my job, my friends, and my apartment. I refused to work long hours for
play money. And no one could tolerate me. People I knew, I kept trying to catch
them in small lies and inconsistencies. I would ask them questions. "If this is
just a job for you, why aren't you nicer to me? Surely we'd enjoy it more. How
can we turn this into a comedy? A farce? A musical?"

By the middle of December I was living by the train tracks, inside the tunnel
under Riverside Park. Maybe it wasn't necessary for me to have gone that far.
But at a certain point, I thought I'd try to penetrate down below the level of
deception. Because I imagined that the illusions were raiser and more elaborate
the higher up you went, which is why so many rich people are crazy. Wherever
they go, part of their brain is mumbling to the other part, "Surely the actual
Plaza Hotel isn't such a dump. Surely an authentic Mercedes comers better than
this. Surely a genuine production of Hamlet isn't quite so dull. Surely the real
Alps are higher and more picturesque."

But that night in my tarpaulin tent next to the train tracks, wrapped in my
blankets, it was hard for me to think that the real Riverside Park was even
darker, even colder, even more miserable. I was dressed in a dinner jacket I had
kept from my apartment. I was glutted with hors d'oeuvres, drunk on chablis,
because New York provides many opportunities to a man in black tie, especially
around Christmas time. I had attended office parties and openings all the way
from midtown, pretending all the way. I had been an architect, an actor, a
designer, a literary agent. In each place as I grew drunker, the lies I told
grew more outrageous, yet people still smiled and nodded. Why not? They were
being paid good Mardi Gras doubloons to pretend to believe me.

In my tent, I slid my hand down into my pocket and clasped my hand around my own
Pete Fountain coin, perhaps, I thought, the only genuine thing I'd ever owned.
Drunk and despairing, I let the cold come into me, let it calm me until I wasn't
sure if I could move even if I'd wanted to. My hands and legs were stiff and
strange. I looked up the tunnel into the dark and imagined how the world was
changing outside, how in the morning I would climb out through the grate into a 
new world of heat and light and honesty.

As the hours passed, the walls of the tunnel seemed to close around me. But yes,
there was some light down toward the tunnel's mouth, too bright, too soft for
dawn. Yes, it seemed to fill the hole, to chase away the darkness, and it was as
if I had left my body and was drifting toward it, suspended over the tracks. 
There was heat, too, beyond my fingertips, and as I drifted down the tunnel I
felt it penetrate my body and my soul. I imagined faces in the tunnel with me,
people standing along the rails, smiling and murmuring. As I passed them I
reached out, especially to the ones I recognized: my mother, my grandparents, my
childhood friends, and even Barbara, my ex-wife. Yes, I thought, this is the
truth.

It couldn't last forever. I was sprawled over the tracks, and the light was
coming toward me. I listened to the muffled voices and the creak of the wheels,
and the light was all around me. It was so bright, I had to close my eyes. As I
did so, I heard somebody say, "That's it. That's a wrap."

When I sat up, I was in a crowd of people and machines. The big lamp had gone
out, replaced by a yellow fluorescent line along the middle of the vault.

By its light I could see much that had been hidden from me. For one thing, the
entire tunnel was only about twenty-five yards long. I could see the brick ends
of it now, cunningly painted to look like train tracks disappearing in both
directions. 

In front of me there was a lamp rigged to a platform, which ran on wheels along
the rails. Now that the lamp was out, I could see the movie camera beneath it,
the camera man stripping off his gloves and his coat; they had turned off the
refrigeration machines. There was a whole line of them along the wall, and I
guess they had been making quite a racket, because now I could hear all kinds of
talking from the crew as they finished up. 

I threw aside my blanket and sat rubbing my hands. Nobody was paying any
attention to me. But then I saw my mother coming toward me through a crowd of
technicians, and she squatted down. "Congratulations," she said. "That was
great."

"Mother," I stammered, "is it really you?" I admit I was surprised to see her,
because she had passed away in the spring of 1978.

She was wearing a silk shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. She was smiling.
"Yeah, that's great. I tell you, these last few weeks you've made me proud I
ever got to work with you. Proud you're my son, so to speak. The paranoia, the
anger, the disgust. It was all so real."

"Mother," I said, "I can't believe it. You look so young."

She winked. "Yeah, sure. You've probably never seen me without makeup. But let's
not get carried away. Somewhere along the line you must have guessed. That was
the whole point of this game."

She stood up. And now others were helping me to my feet. I recognized a few old
faces, and then Barbara was there. "Your suit's a mess," she said.

I was stunned, overwhelmed to see her. Her freckled nose. Her crooked smile. She
reached up to touch my damp bow-tie. When I'd known her, her breath had always
been a little sour, a symptom of chronic gastric distress. Now she was standing
close to me, and I caught a whiff of the mints she used -- the same old brand.
At least that was for real, I thought.

Her little head was close to my lapel. Packed with brains. I'd always said that
was the reason she so easily outwitted me. The space inside her skull was so
small that her thoughts never had more than an inch or so to travel, to make
connections. Her ideas moved faster, like molecules in a gas when it's
condensed. 

And at the moment when I smelled her breath, I felt a little surge of hope. Even
if there was no place for me in her old life, maybe now there might be some new
way for us to be together in this new world. Cleverer than me, maybe she had
already had the same idea, because I felt her arms around me, her head against
my cheek as I bent down. "I'm sorry I was so mean," she whispered. "But I had
to. It was the script. Sometimes it broke my heart, the things I had to do to
you. I'm not normally so promiscuous."

Mother and the rest had disappeared, and we were surrounded by technicians
packing up equipment. "I just wanted to tell you right away," she said. "Before
anybody else talks to you. Sex and betrayal are the only things that keep the
yuppie games alive. The only reason anybody wants to play. So I had to. That
thing where you caught me with your boss's wife -- I actually protested to the 
writers. I cried for days when we were finished."

Then she took my hand and led me outside. It was early morning. We walked
through a park that seemed all of a sudden only twenty-five yards wide, and it
was rapidly disappearing as people rolled up the astroturf and wheeled away the
papier-mache balustrades.

The night before, I had come down to the park the way I always did, along West
98th Street. Now as we approached Riverside Drive, I could see as if from a
slightly different angle the painted plywood facades of the buildings, all just
a few inches thick. On 98th Street itself there was a huge crew striking the
set, so instead of going back that way, Barbara led me north, uptown, and soon
we were lost among streets I didn't recognize, although I'd lived on the Upper
West Side my whole life.

"Where are we?" I asked faintly.

"Toronto. They always use it for the New York shoots. The real New York is so
expensive. It's like American actors -- no one can afford them anymore. We use
Canadians for everything."

"So what was this?" I asked. "A movie or a game?"

"Both. It's interactive TV. A few hired professionals like me and your mom, and
then tons of paying customers. They do most of the minor characters, the extras
and what-not. Then the whole thing is broadcast live, with your thoughts picked
up on an internal mike as a kind of voiceover. That's what made the show--you
were so innocent, so clueless. The show started when you were fifteen, which
meant it took you twenty-two years to figure out what was going on. It's a new
record. And in the end we had to give you massive hints."

"When I was fifteen?"

"Sure. All the rest was just recovered-memory syndrome. Who wants to make a show
about a kid? I mean except for all the shows within the show. Beaver Cleaver and
so forth."

"Beaver Cleaver?"

"No expense was spared," said Barbara. "It's the information superhighway. But
you have to understand -- this was a huge deal."

She was right. By the time we hit Yonge Street a crowd had gathered. Old ladies,
teenagers, men, women, all wanting to shake my hand and get my autograph. I was
a celebrity, like O.J. Simpson or Woody Allen, except of course I really 
existed. I was a real person, and not just a collection of computer-generated
film clips. 

"Mr. Park," somebody shouted. "When did you know for sure?"

"Show us the doubloon!" demanded another, and when I took it from my pocket,
everyone laughed and clapped.

An old man grasped my hand. I recognized him as the super of the building next
to mine. "I just wanted to say you've given my wife and me such pleasure over
the years. Most of the shows should be banned from the airwaves, if it was up to
me. But you never even raised your voice. No violence at all. Not that you
weren't tempted," he said, giving Barbara a severe look.

Then the limo arrived, small and sleek. Inside I could hear a small hum, as if
from a computer. No one was driving. We pulled out slowly into the wide street,
and then we were heading downtown. "So what was the show's name?" I asked.

"It was called Get a Grip," said Barbara. And when she saw my face, she grinned.
"Oh come on, don't take it like that. Sure, you were kind of a wimp, but the guy
is right. It was a wholesome show. Every day we found new ways to humiliate you,
but you just soldiered on. Most of the time you didn't even notice. I mean sure,
you were a total moron, but that was all right. It was your dignity that people
loved."

We drove on through the unfamiliar streets. "I guess it didn't keep me from
being canceled," I said.

"Well, to tell the truth it was all a little dated. And you needed a good female
lead. That fat tart in Stuyvesant Town just wasn't doing it. People seemed to
find your life less interesting as soon as I bailed out."

"I guess I felt the same way."

Barbara patted my hand. "But you were still popular among retirees. You have no
idea how bad most of the competition is. Like the guy said, they gave over most
of the twentieth century to war games. Vietnam, KKK, Holocaust, Cold War,
Hiroshima. Those are all the American shows.

Kids love them, even the minorities. But I can't stand them."

"Hiroshima?" I asked.

She smiled. "Meanwhile, we thought it was a stroke of genius to work all that
into the background of Get a Grip. To show what life in America might have been
like if it had all really happened. Of course we had to change the footage and
the point of view -- reshoot a lot of it. Most of those shows are ridiculously
patriotic."

"Ingenious," I murmured.

"But that's how we got into trouble. ABC claimed it was copyright infringement, 
and the American ambassador protested. But Get a Grip was a satire, for God's
sake. Even the U.S. courts ruled in our favor."

After a little while I said, "So what did really happen?"

"Well, that's what I'm telling you. The Americans were furious for years. So ABC 
finally made a hostile bid for Ottawa Communication, which produced your show.
The deal went through last week, and Get a Grip was canceled. But there had been
rumors for months, which was why the writers brought back all that Russian stuff
last fall. They wanted to take the show to its own end."

"No. I mean, what really happened? In the world."

She squeezed my arm. "Don't worry. You'll soon catch up. Besides, we're here."

We pulled up in front of a hotel. "You'll love it," she said. "Czar Nicholas III
stayed here last time he was in town."

So I got out and followed her up the steps. In through the revolving doors. The
lobby was all ormolu and velvet and gilt mantelpieces. The elevator ran in a
cage up through the middle of the spiral staircase. "What am I doing now?" I
asked as we got in. 

"Goddamn it, Pogo, don't be such a dope." I hated when she called me "Pogo." It
was a nickname left over from my earliest childhood, and she only used it to
annoy me. But as I rode up in the elevator, it occurred to me that maybe no one
had ever really called me that. Maybe all those painful memories had been
induced when I was fifteen. Maybe they had all been covered in a flashback, when
Get a Grip first went on the air.

My eyes filled with tears. "What's the matter now?" said Barbara. "Honest to
God, you'd think you were being boiled over a slow fire. It's the best hotel in
town. I thought you might want to rest for a few hours, take a shower, change
your clothes before the reception at the president's house tonight. The Russian
ambassador will be there -- I tell you you're a star. A symbol of Canadian
pride. Come on, is that so terrible?"

Then when we were alone together in the jewel-box room, she said, "Besides, I've
missed you."

But I wasn't listening. I was looking at my face in the mirror above the
dresser. The same curly hair and gullible eyes, as if nothing had happened. "My
whole life has been a parody," I said, watching my lips move. But then I had to
smile, because it was exactly what I might have said back in America, back 
during the salad days of Get a Grip.

Barbara was behind me. In the mirror I saw her undo the first few buttons of her
blouse, and then slip it off her shoulders. "Let me make it okay for you," she
said. Then it was like a dream come true, because she was leading me to the bed
and pulling off my clothes. I had thought about this moment so many times since
we split up, directing us as if we were the actors in a scene. In my mind,
sometimes she was harsh and fast, sometimes passive and accommodating. Sometimes
it took hours, and sometimes it was over tight away. But none of my fantasizing
prepared me for this moment, which was not sublime so much as strange. During
two years of marriage, I thought I had got to know her well. But I had never
done any of the things she required of me in that hotel room; I had never heard
of anybody doing them. But, "Things are different here," she whispered. "Let me
teach you how to make it in the real world," she said, before I lost
consciousness. 

Then I came to, and I was lying on the bed. Barbara was in the shower. I could
hear the water running. I sat naked on the side of the bed, stating at the
television. It was in a lacquer cabinet on top of a marble table, and the remote
was on the floor near my foot. There were hundreds of buttons on it.

Then suddenly I was seized with a new suspicion, and I flicked it on. I flicked
through several channels, seeing nothing but football games. But there I was on
channel 599xtc, buck naked, staring at myself. Behind me the hotel room, the 
tipped sheets and soggy pillows. And on the bottom corner of the screen, a
blinking panel that said:

PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE.

Then Barbara was there, toweling her neck, looking over my shoulder. "Okay, so
it's not quite over yet," she said. "There are still some things you ought to
know."