Sneakers Read online

unusual. We don’t even take breaks at the same time. We joke that it is more of the Big Brother syndrome, but it’s probably some theory about efficiency which is proven by management analysts who aren’t really analysts and don’t really know how analysts work.

  Our boss’s boss, Paul Blockburger, a man who looks more like a mining engineer than a spook, came in after we were all seated, and he stood at the head of the table and looked at each of us in turn until we were more than attentive.

  “Murphy Dyring is dead.” He spoke with no inflection. Then he sat down. “He drove his Mazda Miata into an overpass abutment out by Dulles Airport at three Ayem Sunday morning. We are investigating.”

  Margie Keller, the least geeky of the group, said, “Suicide?”

  Mr. Blockburger pumped his eyebrows. “What makes you ask that?”

  Margie said, “The way you said it: drove his car into an overpass abutment—as if it were deliberate.”

  “We don’t know. There will be an autopsy. Perhaps he had a heart attack, or blacked out. He was traveling at a very high rate of speed. We can’t rule out a mechanical problem, a stuck gas pedal or accelerator pump.”

  “What did his wife say, if I may ask.”

  “They had been separated for a week. She has not been located as yet.”

  Jimbo Martin said, “He was a good boss. Who’s going to take his place?”

  “Omar Pillot from Resource Analysis will handle scheduling matters. I trust you all can operate with a minimum of supervision—you already do, and quite admirably, I might add. If you have technical difficulties, don’t hesitate to come see me. But use your judgment; we know you have a highly developed sense of self-sufficiency.”

  We broke after those words of encouragement. I noticed, as he left the room ahead of us, that Mr. Blockburger was also wearing black Air Jongs.

  We sat there in what fiction writers like to call stunned silence. Premature death never goes down easily. And when it’s a violent death (I had a vivid picture of an engine block in the driver’s seat of a Miata) it is all the more puzzling.

  Duncan McKeller said, “He got pretty smashed at the last Christmas party. You suppose . . . ?”

  Margie said, “Breaking up with his wife . . .”

  I said, “Let’s not speculate till the autopsy report comes back.”

  Jimbo said, “But will they tell us?”

  I said, “They’ll sure as hell tell someone in the Agency. I’d bet someone from the Agency will be observing the autopsy.”

  I went back to my cube and lit up my computer. Air Jongs had glommed onto another two percent of the athletic shoe market over the weekend. I ran several programs to chart their rise in sales in various ways, and it was during this exercise in futility that I had a twinge in my left foot. Ten minutes later (I was assuming it was my imagination; I hadn’t had any sensation in my extremities in five years) there was a twinge in my right foot.

  That night at basketball practice one of my teammates reached for a pass and came about two inches off his seat. I swear, he came off his seat. We wear what amounts to a seatbelt, though in practice no one cinches it real tight, but still . . .

  In the locker room after a scrimmage there seemed to be an extra amount of chatter. High spirits, even a little roughhousing. I went over to George, the guy I saw levitating or whatever it was and asked him how he felt.

  “Why are you asking?”

  I said, “I dunno, you seemed awfully frisky out on the court.”

  He looked at me for a moment. “It’s true. It’s completely weird. I think I gotta go see my doc, cause something’s happening inside me I can’t explain.”

  “Twitchy feelings in the legs?”

  “Yeah. How did you know?”

  I said, “It’s the same with me. It’s almost as if I want to get out of this fucking chair and boogie.”

  “Yeah! Boogie!”

  ҩ ҩ ҩ ҩ ҩ

  I am by nature a newspaper junky and my job gives me an excuse to read them daily. I read certain parts of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal daily, while I read The Economist pretty much cover to cover every week. All three have had pieces on the Chinese Sneaker Invasion and both Gail Collins and Charles M. Blow did op-ed pieces on them in the Times. She was funny and he was ominous, and I tend to go along with him.

  I did visit my neurosurgeon. He stuck my foot with the kind of needle acupuncturists use and I felt it. He put a tuning fork against my ankle bone and I swear I felt it. I told him I was getting a sore butt sitting in the wheelchair all day. I had this urge to get up and take a lap around the office.

  He had me close my eyes. “Which foot am I poking?”

  “Left.”

  “Now which one?”

  “Left again.”

  He asks again and I answer again, “Left.”

  “Dammit, O’Doyle, are you one of those guys who always wins at paper-scissors-stone, or are you a candidate for a clinical note in the Journal of Neuroscience?”

  He ordered an MRI. I took time off work to be scanned. Omar Pillot, also wearing Chinese sneakers these days, reluctantly approved my absence request. “You could take the time off after you solve the shoe mystery, you know.”

  I felt like smacking him, insensitive bastard, but I took the signed absence request and wheeled back to my cube. When I got there Margie Keller was coming out. “Take a peek at what I left on your desk.”

  I had a sudden urge to do something to Margie that didn’t involve smacking. But I set the urge aside (to contemplate at a future time) and looked at the tabloid she’d left me. On the front page was a photo of a prone teenager with a pool of blood around his head and—no mistaking—Air Jongs on his feet. The caption said there had been race related violence on three playgrounds around New York City this week.

  I call the Community Affairs Bureau of the New York City Police Department and a Sergeant Michelle Breslow, who is so new to her job she never asks me to identify the Federal agency I’m working for, but is totally forthcoming about the “Gym Shoe Homicides.”

  “Used to be kids shot each other to steal the other guy’s sneakers. Now we can’t find a connection. They aren’t stealing each other’s shoes, they’re pissed about something and just happen to be wearing Chinese Sneakers.

  “Every shooter and shootee, you betcha. And there’s been two more incidents since what the daily rags touted. Plus assorted assaults and brawls broken up. It’s the red Chinkers against the black Chinkers looks like. We got an epidemic out there and the only thing connecting the dots is a lot of cheap sneakers.” After a pause she said, “One detective told me some kid in Brooklyn got beat up because he wasn’t wearing Chinkers. Can you beat that?”

  All the while I was talking to her—listening to her, her diction Minnesota via New York, but a melodious voice—I noticed I was tapping the toe of my right foot. I thanked Sergeant Breslow and tried to tap my toe again. No luck. I must have been dreaming it. But a minute later, my mind off my extremities, it happens again.

  I call my doctor. I tell him about the toe-tapping. He tells me to come in the next day, and I go back to Omar Pillot to square away another doctor’s visit.

  “You can’t hack it, O’Doyle, so you’re using your crippling condition as an excuse.” He is shouting at me. He’s shaking with fury.

  I am very strong in the upper body. Propelling my chair up and down a basketball court several hours a week builds muscle: biceps, deltoids, pecs. If I grabbed the bastard by the throat I could snap his neck. Of course that would take some maneuvering in a wheelchair, and by the time I got positioned I would either have thought better of it, or shithead Pillot would have danced away. Only as I’m thinking of throttling him, I’m coming off the chair. Midway to his throat I fall on my face.

  “Jesus Christ, O’Doyle, what are you trying to pull?” He was still furious but now he was also afraid.

  I said, “You sign that goddam LQD or I’ll report you to Human Resources.” I said it flat on my face. �
�And help me up.”

  The doctor said, “It’s the goddamnedest thing.” He had hit me with a rubber mallet and got a reflex reaction. “Your nerves are regenerating. It’s a miracle.”

  I am of course elated, but the wheels inside the gyroscope of my brain are also turning at a furious rate. Twitches. Toe-tapping. Levitation. Chinese sneakers. Another gyroscopic revolution: suicide by bridge abutment, race riots on playground basketball courts, muggings without sneakers being stolen. Red Chingers versus Black Chingers. It’s the shoes.

  ҩ ҩ ҩ ҩ ҩ

  I have a friend who is a molecular biologist of the piled higher and deeper caliber. He is ensconced at Johns Hopkins. His name is Pat Mullarkey and he was a piper in the Air Force Pipe Band, a diehard Irishman and a serious student of things too small to be seen with the naked eye. I called him.

  “Patrick, me lad, could you be sparing me a wee minute?”

  He said, “I can spare you five. Then I have to give a lecture. —What’s up?”

  “Shoes. High top sneakers from China.”

  “I read about them. What have they got to do with the price of tea in China?”

  I said, “There is something about those shoes that is causing normally cooperative humans—even me—to do unusual things.”

  “Sneakers, boyo?” He employs an Irish brogue when humoring me.

  “It’s gotta be. You know my condition. I am getting sensation back in my lower extremities. The doc says my nerves are regenerating.”

  “And you associate this with sneakers? You are wearing the Chinese knockoff,