Civil Disturbance

We’re sitting underneath the overpass, Molly and I, lights off, motor on, staring through the windshield at the row of houses up the hill. On Molly’s lap, propped against the steering wheel, is the clipboard with the street addresses, about fifty of them, listed alongside the pertinent info—name, age, etc.—culled from the Internet and written in her perfect handwriting, evidence that she had gone to a good school in the suburbs. It’s getting dark and it’s getting cold, and neither one of us has said more than a few passive-aggressive sentences to the other, like when I thanked her for putting her window up, as if she’d done me a big favor. “You’re welcome,” she said, but she only closed it halfway. The bickering had started after we both got home from work; first we were arguing, and then we were shouting, and then she disappeared into the bedroom and slammed the door hard, emerging fifteen minutes later, composed, dressed, and ready to go. Today’s particular conflict had been set in motion by the banal—who’d left a cereal bowl in the sink—but obviously indicated a wider problem. Plus, it was compounded by the latest poll numbers, which put our candidate three points behind, with three days to go until the election. “The personal is political,” Molly always says, implying that if we break up it won’t be her fault. Meanwhile, the future of the city hangs in the balance, things going from bad to worse—public transportation, mail delivery, garbage removal—thanks to the mayor, six terms and still nothing to show for it. “Look at the data,” she tells me, but I never know what data she’s talking about. She’s the one with the poli-sci degree in this relationship, socially engaged and crunching numbers, and I’m the former high-school jock, lettering in three sports at the expense of my G.P.A. Sometimes I’ll wake in the middle of the night and see her next to me, looking at her laptop, pie charts glowing up in her face. In the beginning, when times were good, this would have been something of an aphrodisiac, her passion and intelligence radiating beneath the covers. Now she’s all business. Now there’s no time to lose. She says, “The mayor is ipso jure unlawful.” She uses Latin. She uses words like “populace.” She talks as if she were composing a term paper with footnotes. Later, I’ll look things up and still not understand. “The only question that remains,” she says, “is whether the populace has the strength to take matters into its own hands.”

“I doubt it,” I tell her.

“Have faith,” she says.

It’s getting darker and it’s getting colder. Leaves are swirling beneath the overpass, with no trees in sight. According to the data, this is the ideal time to canvass—early evening, inclement weather. I want Molly to close her window all the way but that would mean asking for the same favor twice. Our silence has deepened into something existential. It’s not only the silence in the car—it’s the silence drifting toward us from the unknown neighborhood, winding streets with unknown homes, unknown homes with unknown residents.

In a sudden burst of awkward motion, I lunge across the center console, knocking the clipboard off Molly’s lap and accidentally running my elbow against her thighs. I press the button and the window glides up.

She snorts with satisfaction. “Dress better next time,” she says.

“There won’t be a next time,” I say.

She likes this, too.

The warm air from the vent is blowing around my head, trapped in the car, steaming up the windshield, obscuring the gloom outside. I put my seat back a notch, and then I put it back several more notches, and when I close my eyes I could be lying on a beach chair by the shore of the man-made lake, floating somewhere between awake and asleep. In my semiconscious limbo, I can feel the ghostly imprint of Molly’s thighs against my elbow, reminding me of when times were good.

I’ve been up since six o’clock this morning, eating my bowl of cereal before work at the high-end fitness center that’s in the strip mall between Walmart and a vacant lot. It’s a decent job, all things considered: weekends off, holidays off, also dental. That last one thanks to the mayor—or blood money for the populace, depending on where you stand. All day long, prospective clients stopped by my office, inquiring about signing up for a membership, first month complimentary. “You’ve come to the right place,” I told them, turning on the charm, a sales rep in athleisure. They took a seat across from my desk, surrounded by framed photos of me from my glory days, in high school, while I asked them personal questions about their bodies. Height. Weight. B.M.I. There I am in my football uniform. There I am on the pitcher’s mound. There I am holding the municipal trophy after the championship win. It was my manager who suggested that the photos would be good for sales. “Subliminal advertising,” he told me. He was also a standout high-school athlete, as was his manager before him. None of us had realized that by the time we were eighteen we’d already reached the pinnacle of our careers.

And suddenly I hear a hard knocking on my passenger-side window, a knocking so hard that I think the glass is going to break, and my eyes are open, heart racing, confirming what I already know—that we shouldn’t be sitting underneath the overpass with the lights off and the motor on. Through the foggy window, I can see the blurred outline of a man in uniform, enormous from my perspective, seven feet tall and out of a fairy tale, probably a police officer, or maybe paramilitary. He wants me to open my window right now, and the cold air blows in my face, along with a flashlight beam blinding me.

“Is there a problem, officer?” I ask from my prone position.

“I’ll tell you what to do and when to do it,” he says. He doesn’t want me to unlock my door. He doesn’t want me to show him my license. He doesn’t want me to sit up straight.

“What are you doing here?” he asks me.

“I’m canvassing,” I say.

“What does that mean?” he says.

“It means I’m here for the election.”

“The election is three days away.”

“I know,” I say. “I’m canvassing.”

“What does that mean?”

I can’t get past square one, which is where he wants me. He thinks he’s caught me in a lie. He wants to know what’s in the Walmart bag in the back seat. “Bricks from a vacant lot,” I tell him. “Why do you have bricks from a vacant lot?” he asks, because he probably assumes that I’m planning on breaking windows—political intimidation before the election. “Cleaning up the city,” I say. He’s not sure if he should believe me. His gun is on his hip, his hand by the holster. In a moment, he’s going to open the car door and tell me to run, give me a head start, and then shoot me in the back before I can make it out from under the overpass.

First, though, he’s shining his flashlight inside the car—clipboard, dashboard, center console, Molly’s face. I can hear Molly shouting, trapped and terrified in the driver’s seat, and then she’s out of the car without being given permission, running toward the officer, and he’s meeting her halfway, throwing his arms around her, lifting her off her feet, saying he can’t believe how tall she’s got, and Molly’s blushing, memories from the suburbs returning full force. He’s asking her how her mom and dad are, how her brother is. She’s catching him up with broad strokes. Since we’re underneath the overpass, everything has a slight echo to it, mom, mom, mom, dad, dad, dad. He’s seeing the little girl all grown up. He’s seeing the passage of time made flesh. He doesn’t care about me anymore. He doesn’t care what canvassing means or what’s in the Walmart bag. When they’re done reminiscing and hugging, he shakes my hand, no hard feelings. “Nice to meet you,” he says, his big glove swallowing my bare palm. Then Molly gets back in, cheeks flushed, smiling and waving goodbye, and we watch through the windshield as he walks off, fading into the darkness. She puts the car in drive. She lets the brake off slowly.

“Don’t worry, ” she tells me. “He’ll be the first to hang.”

Never mind what the pie charts say, canvassing in the cold, at night, is not optimal. This is dinnertime, this is couch time, this is prime time. We’re in one of those so-called modest neighborhoods, not yet all the way poor—thanks to the mayor. You can tell by the satellite dishes on the roofs. You can tell by the curbside parking. I grew up in a neighborhood not unlike this one—you can tell by my handwriting. Displayed on the rusting porches are campaign signs for the incumbent, orange and yellow, no text needed, everyone knows what the colors signify. We’re entering hostile territory, so to speak. Their candidate is not our candidate. At the first four houses, no one bothers to answer when I ring the doorbell, even though we can hear the TV. “I know they’re home,” Molly says, and before we leave she makes a notation on her clipboard.

“What are you notating?” I ask.

“Data,” she says.

By the time we reach the eighth house, I’m shivering in my athleisure and my thumb feels numb when I ring the doorbell, twice and then two more times. We can hear it tolling through the house, and just as I’m about to suggest that we get back in the car the door cracks open, chain still on, two faces staring at us, husband and wife.

“What’s this in regard to?” the wife asks right away. She sounds aggrieved. She looks concerned. As far as she knows, we’ve come here to strong-arm them into supporting our candidate or else. We’re living in the age of suspicion, after all, and I don’t blame her. It was done in the previous election and the one before that—neighborhoods of burned hedges and broken doors and stolen satellite dishes—and both times it managed to reduce voter turnout, if only slightly.

“We’d like a moment of your time,” Molly says, big, welcoming smile, trying to sound casual as she reads line one from the script in her head.

No, I’m wrong, the wife is not intimidated by us, and neither is her husband. “We don’t have time for this,” he tells us.

“Do you have time to make our city a better place?” Molly asks.

“What’s wrong with our city?” he wants to know. He’s glaring at me as if I’d said something to offend him. I’m still holding out hope that he will take off the chain and invite us inside, where we can chat politics more comfortably.

But Molly has her agenda ready to go: potholes in the streets, backed-up sewage lines, intermittent cell service, you name it, and that’s just for starters.

“Give them the brochure, sweetheart,” she tells me.

Through the crack in the door, I slip them the campaign brochure, with a picture of our candidate walking through a vacant lot that’s remained undeveloped for six terms—one of many vacant lots that the citizens have had to endure—his sleeves rolled up, his face airbrushed, above the catchall catchphrase “Take Back Our City.”

The wife unfolds the brochure halfheartedly. There’s our candidate’s ten-point plan all laid out, his professional accomplishments, his family history in the metropolitan area, beginning five generations ago, before the dam was built and the lake was made.

“What’s he going to do about the electricity?” the husband wants to know.

He’s going to fix the electricity. Of course he is. He’s going to get the garbage collected. Yes to everything, Molly says. No to nothing.

“How about the surcharge?” the wife asks.

This catches Molly off guard. She’s sputtering, blinking hard. She hasn’t thought about the surcharge because she grew up in the suburbs. No to the surcharge, she offers, but this is the wrong answer. Yes to the surcharge. But now it’s too late to backtrack. They’ve heard enough. They’ve made up their minds. We’re also letting cold air into the house.

The husband returns the brochure to me, pinching it with his fingertips.

“That’s yours to keep,” I tell him, my breath coming out in short white puffs.

“No, thank you,” he says.

Back in the car, I’m rubbing my hands in front of the vents while Molly jots down her notations on the clipboard.

“Ipso jure the surcharge,” I say. I snicker.

In one swift motion, Molly slams the clipboard on the steering wheel, making the car horn beep.

“I’d like to see you do better,” she says. She’s shouting for the second time today.

“Sh-h-h,” I say, “the neighbors are going to hear you.”

“Let them hear me!” she says, and right then a family of four comes walking by, carrying Walmart bags, but they don’t notice us, they don’t care, they’ve heard it all before. Molly’s pointing her red pen in my cold face. Her gaze has narrowed to murderous accusation, worse than the beam from the officer’s flashlight. I suppose we should have realized long ago that we weren’t right for each other, realized even on that first date of ours, eating dinner at Applebee’s, my choice, the one next to Starbucks and a vacant lot, where we sat across from each other in the big booth, feeling far apart, not unlike how it feels now. We were already on the mayor’s third term, but she didn’t mind how little I knew about local politics. I could name the governor and the important dates, like the year the city had been incorporated, the basics everyone learned in grade school, suburban or otherwise, but beyond the basics I was somewhere between apathetic and clueless. When Molly spoke, she used phrases like “et alia” and “post hoc.” When I spoke, I talked about high-school baseball. Meanwhile, we sipped our red wine, and as we did we got more compatible, until the Applebee’s booth seemed to shrink in size, and from beneath the table I could feel her knee pressing against mine. “The personal is political,” she said to me.

We drive through the neighborhood, in silence again, the only sound coming from the car bouncing up and down in the potholes. We get lucky at the next four houses insofar as the door is opened right away, but after that it’s the same routine: points talked, brochure returned. Twenty minutes later, it’s beginning to snow, and the wind blows off the lake into my face. This time when the door opens it’s a young couple about our age, ready for bed in their pajamas, and I cut right to the chase before Molly has a chance to say anything. “Do you want to take back the city?” I ask them. I’m going off script, sales rep that I am, gauging the mood, speaking the customer’s language, just like my manager taught me.

“Yes!” they say. “Yes, we do!” They’re eager. They’re interested.

I hand them the brochure with our candidate’s airbrushed face, and I tell them, confidentially, “He’s older than he looks.” They like this, of course, this frank admission of artifice. I’m doing what I do best at the upscale fitness center—undersell and then go high.

The first thing I bring up is the electrical grid, its flickering lights, weekend brownouts, and soon enough they’re sharing stories with me about the power outage five years ago, the one everyone still talks about, two months of hardship with no lights or water.

“No TV,” I say.

We’re laughing together now, the couple in the pajamas and me, and before I can even explain what our candidate is going to do about the surcharge they’ve made up their minds. They’re shaking my cold hand. They’re keeping the brochure.

As they do at the next house, and the one after that. In the instances when I do happen to fail, Molly makes her notations.

By the time we arrive at the last address on the list, it’s ten o’clock and there are two inches of snow on the ground, soaking my feet because I’m wearing sneakers. We can hear the doorbell chiming, and Molly tells me to press it again, but we catch the sound of footsteps approaching, then the door opens slightly, and there’s Bryce, of all people, staring at me, Bryce from high school, straight-A student in Mrs. Morrison’s class, where I would casually bully him from the back row, star athlete that I was.

“What’s this in regard to?” he asks. He’s still so skinny that it looks as if he could walk through the door crack without having to take the chain off.

“Bryce,” I say, “it’s me.” But he doesn’t recognize me. He’s blinking hard behind his glasses.

“How do you know my name?” he asks me.

“It’s on the clipboard,” Molly says.

“It’s from high school,” I say.

The snow is swirling in front of my face, but suddenly I seem to come into focus for him, and he’s taking the chain off, letting it dangle to the side, swinging the door wide open, and now it’s my turn to have a blast from the past, Bryce hugging me so hard that it feels like his thin arms might snap. Apparently, he has fond memories from Mrs. Morrison’s class, never mind that I would poke him in the neck with a pencil. But it was all in good fun, right? No hard feelings now. Now he’s letting me into his house, where I can feel the heat enveloping me—thanks to the mayor.

His living room is sparsely furnished—one couch, one chair, no TV—and the lone lamp casts dim light over the bare walls. If Bryce has managed to do anything with those straight A’s, I can’t tell by his home. When I sit down on the couch, it sags beneath me. When Molly sits down, it feels as if we might sink through the cushions. The snow is beginning to melt off my shoes, leaving puddles on the area rug, and this makes me feel bad, but Bryce doesn’t seem to notice. He wants to reminisce about the good times, which are mostly my good times, my face all over the yearbook, playing in the championship game at the City Coliseum, in front of three thousand fans, including the mayor, way back when it was only his second term, when the promise was still fresh.

“What game was this?” Molly wants to know.

“The baseball game,” Bryce says.

“I never liked baseball,” Molly says.

Speaking of the mayor, I tell them how he came into the locker room after the championship to congratulate us, wearing one of our team hats, with the logo of the sun setting over the man-made lake.

“Propaganda,” Molly says.

The mayor shook everyone’s hand one by one—teammates, coaches, school principal—and when he reached me, at the end of the line, I could barely lift my arm because I’d pitched six innings. He leaned in, bill of his cap touching mine, and whispered, as if I were the only person he had ever said this to, “The city needs men like you, son.”

Bryce shakes his head. “I never liked the mayor,” he says, which is what Molly’s been waiting to hear, of course. She manages, with great difficulty, to move herself to the edge of the couch, looking Bryce in his glasses, ally to ally, talking about the electrical grid and the garbage collection, and Bryce is with her every step of the way—plumbing, public transportation. Yes, yes, yes, they’re saying, full agreement. Bryce is telling us about how he once dreamed of moving somewhere else, maybe to the city on the other side of the lake. Instead, he works at Walmart, which is what straight A’s in high school will get you here. It just so happens that this is the same Walmart that’s next to my fitness center in the strip mall—one more surprise for the evening.

“Stop by and see me sometime,” I tell him. “I can get you half price on the first three months.” It’s the least I can do for all the times that he let me cheat off his tests. Blood money for the bully, I suppose.

“I don’t like to exercise,” he says, and shrugs. “Maybe I will,” he adds. But he probably won’t.

Molly’s done with small talk and sports talk. She’s trying to get us back on track. “Do you have time to make our city a better place?” she asks Bryce, which is my cue to hand him the campaign brochure, but before I can Bryce is handing me a campaign brochure—where it came from, I don’t know—and it’s for the third-party candidate, the one who has no chance of winning and who’s only going to complicate everything for everyone.

“Municipality First,” the brochure reads in big blue letters—whatever that means.

Now it’s Bryce’s turn to tell us all about how his candidate is going to do this and that, how he has a plan for the surcharge and the plumbing and everything that ails this city. His plans are not our plans. Molly is trying to explain what our plans are, but Bryce already knows about our plans. He seems to know more about our plans than we know about our plans.

“He has a plan for everything,” Bryce says.

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree,” Molly says. She’s already rising off the sagging couch, handing the brochure back to Bryce, all twelve points included, two more than ours.

“That’s yours to keep,” Bryce says.

“No, thank you,” Molly says.

Back on the front porch, with the snow coming down hard and the wind gusting off the lake, Molly makes her notations on the clipboard.

“He can’t be won over,” she says.

It snows all night and the next day, too, and then we get even more bad news: our candidate has gained only a point in the polls, maybe less, depending on which numbers are being crunched, while the third-party candidate has held steady. We haven’t said much to each other, Molly and I. We haven’t shouted or screamed, even though one of us left a bowl in the sink again. Neither of us has had the heart to escalate, and no doors have been slammed. Perhaps we’ve moved beyond arguing. Perhaps we’re on the downslope, heading toward the exit, with one day left before the election.

To make matters worse, the municipal plows have come through and cleared the streets of eight inches of snow. Ordinarily, this would be a positive thing, but according to Molly it’s a strategy by the mayor to make him look good and to make sure that everyone will be able to get to the polls. No voter suppression this time around.

“You shovel the streets when you’re winning,” Molly says.

As for me, I have no problem driving to work through the morning city, with the heat on high, and the windows all the way up, and the vacant lots empty. Thirty minutes later, I arrive at the fitness center to find Bryce standing in my office, waiting for me, dressed in his Walmart outfit—a blue vest with “Proud Walmart Associate” emblazoned on it. He looks even skinnier in his uniform.

“I’ve had a change of heart,” he says. He’s not talking about the election; he’s talking about exercising. He shakes my hand as if we’d already completed the deal, and it feels as though his fingers would break if I squeezed just a little bit harder.

“You’ve come to the right place,” I say, using my casual opening line. I tell him to take a seat. I offer him vitamin water. I’m ready to lay it on thick. But it turns out that he doesn’t have time for this.

“I’m on my lunch break,” he says. He eats lunch at nine o’clock in the morning.

So I cut the introductory sales pitch and take him straight upstairs, showing him the kettlebells, the barbells, the floor-to-ceiling mirrors. There are some people working out, sexy and sweating—you can’t buy that kind of advertising. “We have everything,” I say. I give a wide sweep of my arm, including the people working out. I’m starting with the soft sell for a Level A membership. Then I take him past the sauna on purpose. When he walks in front of me, I can see the Walmart logo plastered on his back, somewhere between an asterisk and a bull’s-eye.

“Is the sauna included?” he wants to know.

“That’s Level B,” I tell him.

I’m waiting for him to slowly climb up the ladder of price points until he reaches the uppermost rung, with laundry service and spa treatments.

“Is the shaving cream included?” he asks me.

Downstairs, in my office, I pull up the forms on my computer, quickly dispensing with the standard checklist.

“What are your goals?” I ask him. I suppose he could ask me the same thing.

He wants strength. He wants stamina.

“What about definition?” I say.

He wants to know how much things are going to cost.

“We can figure that out later,” I tell him, as though we’re in this together, but I already know the price.

I can see that he’s on the fence—the story of his life—with his lunch break almost over. Above our heads is the sound of the aerobics class getting under way, the thumping of twenty pairs of feet in unison. This is when I start doing the hard sell, because I get paid on commission, talking to him about testosterone, about how studies have shown that exercise boosts testosterone, about how testosterone allows you to achieve your goals.

“Look at the data,” I say.

He’s nodding along, as if what I’m saying makes sense, but, frankly, I don’t think he’ll take advantage of any of this. He’ll probably come every day for the first week of his membership, full of new beginnings and high expectations, then get discouraged and come less and less, then not at all until New Year’s Day. In the meantime, his credit card will still be charged monthly. None of that was my problem.

He’s sitting across from me, his eyes darting around behind his glasses, and we could be back in Mrs. Morrison’s class, me with my sneakers and my muscles, and Bryce with his sloping shoulders and concave chest. And suddenly I feel sad about everything. The politics. The mayor. The photos that surround me from my glory days. What I really want to tell Bryce is that he should save his money, that when his shift is over today he can go to the vacant lot and do ten pullups on a steel beam. If he can’t do ten, do one. And when he gets home he can do jumping jacks on his area rug with the soggy footprints that I left there. In other words, he can take matters into his own hands.

And that’s when the power in the building goes out and the sounds of the aerobics class stop, and even if Bryce did want to sign up I wouldn’t be able to print out the forms. “Thanks to the mayor,” Molly would say.

Bathed in the red glow of the emergency-exit sign, I open my desk drawer and remove a pack of ten razors, courtesy of the fitness center.

“Take them,” I say, “they’re yours.” Blood money from the bully, I suppose.

We’re sitting underneath the overpass, Molly and I, lights off, motor on, staring through the windshield at the row of houses up the hill, just as we did two nights ago, except now it’s almost midnight. On Molly’s lap is the clipboard with the notations, written in her perfect handwriting. It’s dark and it’s cold and the election is tomorrow, but I’m dressed right this time—coat, hat, and boots, because it just takes me once to learn my lesson.

Molly puts the car in drive, and we slowly make our way into the so-called modest neighborhood, the silence broken only when she hits a pothole by mistake.

“Sorry, ” she says.

The neighborhood is asleep now, but every so often we can see the flickering of a television behind a front window, people putting their satellite dishes to use.

At the first house on the list, Molly pulls over. This is the house whose residents couldn’t be bothered to answer the door, even though I rang the bell at least twice. From the Walmart bag in the back seat I take out a brick, and it feels oddly light in my hand, as if it might be hollow, and when I open the car door I hear Molly telling me to be careful.

“I will,” I say.

And standing there on the sidewalk, impervious to the chill coming off the lake, I hurl the brick and it disappears into the darkness, and for a moment I think that it’s landed in the hedge, but then comes the sudden concussive shattering of glass. Somewhere a dog barks, but other than that there’s no response, which is to be expected.

On we go, driving through the neighborhood, stopping at all the houses where no one answered the door, one after another, the sound of glass shattering, and then the house of the husband and wife who answered the door but couldn’t be bothered to take our brochure. “No to the surcharge,” Molly had said. She was only trying to do her best. As for the houses where people kept the brochure, those we pass by.

The reality is that it’s not so easy to throw a brick through a window, and soon I sense a dull but troubling pain in my hand and elbow, radiating up my arm and into my neck and down my back, and the bricks begin to feel heavy, and then very heavy, and then they feel as if they are five, ten times larger than a brick, as if I’m trying to throw a kettlebell, and it’s difficult for me to wrap my hand around them. Occasionally, I completely miss my mark and the brick lands with a thump on the porch, several feet short, and one time I throw it into a snowbank and have to dig around until I find it. But more often than not I hit the target, athlete that I was, breaking the window in one try, and sometimes there’s a shout of surprise, but usually there’s only silence, the residents understanding implicitly the significance of a brick coming through their window on the night before the election.

With the dark sky slowly beginning to change to amber, Molly pulls up in front of Bryce’s house, the last on the list. There is a little light in the living room, as if Bryce might already be up, getting dressed in his Walmart uniform and shaving with one of his free razors. I feel a burning sensation in my hand and elbow when I throw the final brick, and as the window breaks I remember how my coach used to counsel me that pain was temporary, son, but that pride lasts forever, and how this helped get me through the game, because I believed him, because I wanted to be a winner above all else. And, sure enough, he called me into his office at the end of my senior year, where I waited for him to give me the news that scouts had been in the stands watching me pitch in the championship game.

“Have you ever considered a career in the fitness industry?” he asked me.

When I get back into the car, I’m breathing hard, and Molly and I sit there together for a moment, neither of us saying anything, and after a while I slip my hand between her thighs, my good hand, and she lets the brake off slowly, and we roll underneath the overpass, back toward home, the sun beginning to rise over the city, where later today our candidate will win by half a percentage point. ♦