Failure

During his first few weeks in the city Harold Fetch was generally turned around. He arrived in New York in the middle of a rainy, eerily warm winter, and when he emerged from the subway onto streets smoking with steam, and covered with dribbles of red light, it was often without knowing uptown from downtown. He would ask directions of a man and later on in another part of town believe he recognized that man's face. But there are perhaps fewer faces to go around in a large city than there are people, and he could not be sure.

The offices at which Harold worked were on Irving Place, and every morning of the work-week he walked east from the 14th Street stop of the 1-9 line, and there he returned every night, late or early, sober or half-drunk, through the same set of turnstiles. Meanwhile he grew familiar with the shabby lateral mall of 14th Street, where men in thin shirts touted wool hats as he passed, if they saw he was cold, or pressed umbrellas at him when it rained. One evening a salesman looked at Harold with a look of recognition, but Harold couldn't place the man and didn't care for the umbrella he was offering. He wanted a solid, expensive, wooden-handled umbrella; he hated the pitiful look, like a crow's broken wing, of those cheap black umbrellas, reversed in a flaw of wind, you saw people hanging onto at street corners, getting soaked.

The next night, Harold went to the Virgin MegaStore across from Union Square to buy a CD as a birthday present for his mother. He would have liked to find a gift rarer and more deliberate, but tomorrow was his mother's birthday—even if he overnighted the gift in the morning, it would arrive late—and there was no time for inspiration. Feeling obscurely harried, he bought a Cat Stevens box-set—the largeness of the gesture (approximately $50.00) might make up for its vagueness—and had it wrapped at the store. As he watched the clerk sullenly wrap the box-set in shining gold paper printed with the Virgin logo, Harold experienced the tiny familiar fear that any gift will bear a inexpungeable psychic trace of its origin, and would, in this case, release an air of sullen perfunctoriness as soon as it was opened back home in Eau Claire. Harold's parents had long ago been hippies—hence the Cat Stevens—but now they were just a man selling insurance and a woman selling real estate who bought organic tomatoes and listened to NPR. It could have been worse: Cat Stevens himself was now Yusef Islam, the ayatollah fancier.

Harold took the package, thanked the clerk, and, when he turned to go, saw, some ten feet away, behind a rack of T-shirts, a man regarding him with an ironical half-smile. Failure! This was Failure, with his wet vague eyes and a large pink scalp, like a newborn's, pressing up through thinning hair. Harold somehow recognized the man as Failure without their having been introduced, just as one knows the meaning of a cry of pain or exultation without having to look it up. "Hey man," said Failure, as if he might ask Harold for a light. "Hi, how are you?" said Harold, in general a polite person.

Walking away in the pixellated rain, Harold strung half a dozen faces into a unity: it was Failure, then, who had given Harold directions one night and whom Harold had also seen standing in a subway car, and seated at a table at El Famous Burrito; Failure who'd peered slyly at him from the steps of the public library, and who just two days ago had looked at him with ugly frankness from the other side of a bagel cart.

Harold decided to skip the subway and indulge in a cab-ride for the trip uptown. Harold lived near the corner of 109th and Central Park West, alone in a large rear apartment of a gut-renovated building populated mostly by students and professionals, as these were called. He rented the place for $1,600 a month. His occupation had been delayed by the eviction of the previous tenant. "This is one of the really up-and-coming neighborhoods in Manhattan," the realtor had told him. Harold's building enjoyed an awning and a part-time doorman; but looking out his bedroom window he had twice seen a shirtless black man snort something off the table in a dingy kitchen. The neighborhood was mixed, as Pam the realtor said. "New coffee bars, old dives. Chinese take-out stand, sure, but then a new bistro." Police cruisers nosed quietly through the neighborhood while now and then you could witness a drug deal transacted with imperfect stealth beneath blue scaffolding.

"No question an up-and-coming neighborhood," Pam had said. "Nice thing is, the shock troops of gentrification already did their work. You'll hear it being called SoHa—South of Harlem. Myself I'd look here if I hadn't already bought in Murray Hill where I'm happy. You know what a place top-floor like that would go for ten-fifteen blocks south? Practically on the park?" She'd squeezed his hand in an odd consoling way. Harold went ahead and signed the lease. "Congratulations!" Pam said. "In on the ground floor. You should buy yourself a bottle of Veuve Cliquot which I would recommend as a very nice champagne."

So there Harold was. He had been in the city for ten weeks, in his apartment for six, and today he and Failure had recognized one another in a giant corporate music emporium. So what? A meeting like that didn't constitute intimacy. Harold was doing fairly well for himself: in addition to monthly aid from his parents, he had, in his capacity as junior communications director for Synergos, almost $40,000 a year. Many of Harold's college friends, who had collected in New York as in an enormous funnel, were not making so much (when they asked how much he paid in rent, Harold always claimed to be paying $400 less), and in addition to his salary there were, tied to performance, the possibilities of stock options and a raise.

The encounter with Failure had jarred him somewhat—Harold stood in the kitchen pouring himself three fingers of scotch—but it was not such a big deal. The thing was probably overdue. In fact it was a relief to have Failure in plain sight; he wasn't as monstrous a figure as Harold had always imagined. If Harold was careful—this was his undefined idea—he ought to be okay.

+

Harold's life didn't especially change after the sighting. One morning he saw Failure standing on the opposite subway platform, reading a tabloid; this was during the bombing of the Serbs and the expulsion of the Kosovar Albanians: the headline read RUN OR DIE! So Failure reads the Post, thought Harold. He checked his watch; he might be a little late.

He usually arrived at work at 9:30 and left at 5:30 or 6:00. Afterwards he often had dinner or a drink with a friend. There were a number of friends in New York, people he knew from school. With Toby he rented, one Saturday, a sea-kayak from the Downtown Boathouse, and paddled around the bristling lower tip of Manhattan, its towers so bright and smooth that his thoughts seemed to squint and clutch at them with no result. The day was crisp and light as freshly printed money coming in uncut sheets off a press, and like new money these hours out on the brackish green water—clean for all the eye could see—seemed brilliant with possibility. It was as if Harold could come ashore as anyone, and do anything there. He fell behind Toby, paddling ineffectually and imagining himself as an Indian, with fringed leather pants and long hair.

"We should definitely do that again," he and Toby said to each other afterwards. A month later they hadn't so much as spoken. It was like that here. Harold had other people to see. Any number of them were here in consulting or new media. Harold went to their parties, where he made jokes and offered aperçus, was ready with a laugh or smile, and would speak, earnestly or with amusing cynicism, as the case required, about his job.

He could claim to be doing good work or bad at Synergos—"A disgusting name, I know," he'd say. "And you have no idea what it might mean: emerging markets, independent film, the internet, bio-tech—" As for being junior communications director: "I've become one of those people I always used to meet whose titles sound like euphemisms."

The idea of Synergos, which it was Harold's job to sell, was to combine product development with charity: to wit, Synergos sponsored two camps, one in upstate New York, the other in southern Georgia, where troubled or challenged young urban men were fed and housed, offered leadership seminars and a small stipend, in exchange for helping to develop visions of new products. Not only had several saleable story-lines, one of them already turned into a film, unexpectedly come out of the camps, but a number of popular products as well. The new army-radio style cell-phones were one such product: large and padded, they were a rebuke to the slick discretion of the cell-phones preferred by professionals. Sprint had marketed them to young people of color with considerable success. The camps had led also to the development of Jiggy Juice, the popular if controversial carbonated malt-liquor beverage. Another result of Synergos's symbiosis of profit and philanthropy was the rhino-style jacket, with its heavy plates of stiffened vinyl around the shoulders.

Of course very few of the young men employed by Synergos won permanent positions as visionaries. Harold knew that, and knew that the products developed were often unaffordable to those who'd conceived them. And, himself, he would like someday to be doing something else. But he was making $40,000 a year (as he never said except when asked) and doing a conceivable good (as he sometimes said but was never asked). It could have been very much worse, and he was still young.

"And what do you do?" he said one night after retailing his professional life to an attractive young woman. They were standing on a tiny Juliet-balcony looking out onto the street; the air was salmon-colored with streetlights.

"I'm in FX."

"Wow," Harold said. "Very cool. And it's nice you don't have to be in LA for that. Did you see The Matrix? I was really impressed with what they were able to do there, digitally."

"I don't do special effects," she said. "I do foreign exchange."

"Ah," Harold said.

"Currency." (She turned out to be Monica, and six days later she and Harold went on the first of many dates.)

"That's very impressive too," Harold conceded. "I mean I suppose particularly if you live in like Russia or Venezuela, you know, a catastrophic currency devaluation can be very impressive."

"So what are you a Marxist publicist?"

This seemed unanswerable to Harold. He asked Monica if she would like another vodka gimlet. At the bar, at unnervingly close quarters, he saw Failure again, pouring someone a drink. This was a surprise. Failure was wearing a bartender's tuxedo and looked as if he had somehow de-greased his face and focused his eyes; in all, he looked much better than before.

"Hey," said Harold, meaning to be brave.

Failure nodded. "Hey, man." It seemed his recognition of Harold had been delayed an instant. He handed the drink to a young woman. "Here you go."

Then to Harold: "What's your name again?"

Harold did not want to give his name; it might be like opening the security-grate and inviting the vampire on the fire-escape to come in. "I don't think we've been introduced."

"We must know some of the same people. You know Roger? Tammie?"

"No," said Harold. Those were his parents' names.

"Do you know anyone in Denver?"

That had been Harold's last city, where he'd publicized a microbrewery, gone skiing and sat in traffic on the weekends, and lived in the Edgewater section until loneliness got the better of him.

"Well, I extend my hand whether or not you give me your name," Failure said, mock-courtly.

The touch of the hand shocked Harold; it was not cold at all, or clammy, but dry and warm, and the grip was as firm and confident as a politician's.

"You all right?" Failure said. "Well, see you later. Have a nice night."

"Fuck your with you insinuations," Harold said and made a fist. "You fuck! And if you so much as—"

"Whoa," said Failure looking around the small staring crowd. "Some-one"—this in a scandalized sing-song—"is a just lit-tle bit touchy this evening."