Transitory

Harold

The Rusty Nickel is the last bar in Paperton where a man can still get a beer for under nine dollars, provided he comes in before noon and doesn't ask what brand it is.

I come in at ten-ten, the minute Dottie unlocks the door. When you're retired, you learn to schedule your despair like a dental appointment.

Thirty-one years I taught art at Paperton Central. Four thousand kids, give or take, and I taught every one of them the same first lesson: the trick to drawing a hand is to stop drawing what you think a hand looks like and draw what's actually there. Most of them never got it. They'd draw five sausages on a mitten and look up at me like they'd cured polio. But a few got it. A few learned to see.

It's a useless skill, seeing. Nobody pays for it. I can tell you that from experience, and from my pension statement.

The pension was supposed to be enough. That was the word in the brochure they handed us in 1994, printed over a photo of a gray-haired couple laughing on a sailboat. Enough. Nobody ever took a dime of it from me, either. That's the elegant part. They didn't have to steal anything. They just let the dollar rot quietly in the jar, year after year, until enough bought a sandwich. Then half a sandwich. Then the bread.

The number on the check never went down. The number just stopped meaning anything.

"Same?" said Dottie Nickels, who has owned the Rusty Nickel since back when a nickel bought something.

"Whatever's cheapest."

"That's what same means, Harold."

She slid it over. Eight seventy-five. I paid with my card, and the card reader thanked me, which is more than the dollar ever did.

The TV above the bottles was on the news, which it always is, because Dottie says sports make people fight and the news makes them drink, and she prefers the drinking. The President was at a podium. Blue curtain, flags, that seal with the eagle holding its arrows and its olive branch like it can't make up its mind.

A reporter asked him about egg prices.

"The American economy," said the President, "is strong and getting stronger."

Then he stopped.

Not paused. People pause. People pause all the time; they touch their faces, they shift their weight, their eyes slide off looking for the next word. I spent three decades in life drawing classes, watching nude models hold still for twenty minutes at a stretch, and I promise you, no living person is ever still. There's always the breath. The small sway. The pulse in the neck that makes a pencil line tremble.

The President stopped the way a video stops when the buffering wheel comes up. One hand halfway raised. Mouth open on the shape of the next word. For two full seconds, the most powerful man on Earth had the stillness of a coat rack.

"Strong and getting stronger," he said. "Strong and getting. Strong and getting stronger."

Then the smile came back on, all at once, like a screen saver.

He turned to take the next question, and that's what did it for me. Not the freeze. The turn. When a person turns to look at something, the eyes go first, then the head, then the shoulders drag along after like a reluctant dog on a leash. It's a cascade. Every art student learns it the hard way, because if you draw it wrong the figure looks dead.

The President turned from the hips. Everything at once. One smooth unit, like a door on a hinge.

I'd seen that turn before. Everybody has. It's in the commercial that runs every twelve minutes on every channel: the Proxy Helper, the household robot that folds your laundry and never judges you for the laundry. At the end of the ad, a kid calls its name and it turns to smile at him. From the hips. Like a door.

"That's not a man," I said.

I didn't mean to say it out loud. That's what happens when you live alone. The walls get used to your voice and you forget other people have ears.

Two stools down, a guy in a quarter-zip fleece vest looked over. Mid-thirties, good teeth, a lanyard from some company that made software for other companies that made software. He had the relaxed posture of a man whose rent had never once kept him up at night.

"Sorry?" he said.

"The President. Watch how he moves. That's not a man."

He laughed. Not a mean laugh at first. The kind of laugh you give a dog that's walked into a glass door.

"Okay," he said. "Sure. And the moon landing?"

"I'm not talking about the moon. I'm talking about his hips."

That got a bigger laugh from him, and a smaller one from Dottie, who at least had the decency to hide it in a bar rag.

"Look, man," said Quarter-Zip. "I get it. Times are tough. But the fundamentals are sound. The recent price increases are transitory. The administration has the full confidence of the markets, and misinformation is a threat to our democracy."

He said it like he was reading it off the inside of his eyelids. And here's the thing that stuck with me afterward, the thing I'd lie awake with that night: he said it in the same rhythm. The same cadence as the man on the TV. Strong and getting stronger. Transitory. Full confidence. Like two radios tuned to one station.

"Transitory," I said. "So was my pension."

"There it is." He lifted his glass to me. "Every guy at every bar. The system screwed me, the President's a robot. You know what the actual problem is? Nobody takes personal responsibility anymore."

"I taught school for thirty-one years."

"Then you should've invested."

"In what?"

He opened his mouth. He closed it. For a second, I swear, he had the stillness of a coat rack. Then the smile came back on.

"Diversified index funds," he said, and turned back to his drink.

From the hips? No. From the neck, like a person. But I watched him a long time to be sure.

I pulled a napkin from the dispenser and took the pen from my shirt pocket. I hadn't drawn anything in two years. Drawing felt like something a man did when he believed there was a future to show it to. But my hand wanted to, so I let it.

I drew the President the way I'd seen him: frozen, one hand half-raised, mouth open on nothing. I didn't draw what I thought a president looked like. I drew what was actually there. Straight lines where a man should have curves. A neck like a post. A torso that turned as one block.

When I was done, I looked at it, and my stomach dropped the way it does on the first hill of a roller coaster, the good kind of fear, the kind I hadn't felt since I was young.

It wasn't a drawing of a president.

It was a drawing of the Proxy Helper in a nice suit.

The bell over the door jingled. Cold air, road salt, and a man in a black hoodie with the hood still up, shaking snow off his shoulders. He was in his thirties, thin, with the kind of restless eyes I'd last seen in the back row of third-period art. He came to the bar, ordered a club soda, and glanced down at my napkin the way you glance at anything on a bar.

Then he stopped glancing and looked.

He looked for a long time. Then he looked at me.

"Mr. Horcross?"

Nobody had called me that in years. In ninth grade, this kid had drawn nothing but circuit boards. Page after page of them, tiny and perfect, like cities seen from a plane. I gave him a B-minus because the assignment was a self-portrait. He told me it was a self-portrait. I should have given him an A.

"Toshi Blake," I said.

He tapped the napkin with one finger, right on the President's frozen hips.

"You saw it too," he said quietly. It wasn't a question.