The Founder recently signed up for ketamine therapy. After the doctor administered the medication, handed the Founder a weighted eye-mask and put on some new-age music, he noticed that the doctor had a scowl, a strong nose, and a closely-trimmed beard. In his hand, the doctor held a cigar that he swore was really, truly just a cigar.
‘Have you been back to your house in Přibor’, the Founder asked. ‘When I drove by there in ‘93, a BMW was parked outside.’
The Founder lay back on the couch and wiggled his nose and ears to adjust the cloth of the mask. The weight of the mask was comforting, the way a heavy blanket can be comforting.
‘What brings you here’, the doctor said.
‘Could you put the cigar away’, the Founder said. ‘Maybe if you were a finance bro you could pull that off’.
‘I see’, the doctor said.
‘It’s New York State Insurance Fund audit time again’, the Founder said. ‘That’s why I’m here. They think I am in the business of filling out audit paperwork for them. Last time I spoke about it, I said it was like a colonoscopy. It’s as if being the insurer of last resort gives them license to inhabit my business and take it over like a parasite.’ The music was instrumental and new-agey. He felt that he was soaring through cloud formations the way they look in a plane, past the musical sounds. The horns were yellow, the piccolo was maroon and the thing that sounded like a stringed instrument was red. This is great stuff, he thought. Synesthesia in a can.
‘I think they gave me ketamine when I had my last colonoscopy’, the Founder said. ‘Whatever it was, it was amazing.’
‘Continue’, the doctor said.
‘It’s not just the workers comp audit’, he said. ‘I got a notice from the IRS today. They think that I didn’t file a Form 941 for Q4 2021. That was back when they had the pandemic-era extension to the form. Usually, it is just one sheet of paper, front and back. Back then, it was eight pages.’
‘I see’, the doctor said.
‘And I filed it, in a timely fashion. I pulled the return up from the payroll provider’s website, printed it out and sent it in. God knows if they will lose it again and charge me penalties and interest for late filing.’
The music did a loop-de-loop and hit an incline.
‘Do you have to file payroll tax forms for your business, Doc? The only way to get out of it is if you do all the work yourself or if you are Amish.’
The doctor was silent. The music split in three and wove itself into a braid.
‘Are you a one-man shop? That’s gotta be a weird way to make a living, sitting in a room listening to crazy people.’
The braid did a barrel roll and then banked to the left.
‘You must at least pay the chick who sits outside the door something. You handle that yourself, or do you use Paychex?’
‘Let’s keep this about you’, the doctor said.
‘She is a lovely girl’, the Founder said. ‘I mean, look at her. She could make planes fall out of the sky. Is she an actress and just does this to pay the bills?’
The Founder took a breath and dived deeper. The clouds flipped over themselves in an infinite manner like Jacob’s ladder. He thought of a woman he worked with once, who was French, older than him and now dead. She would have enjoyed playing in the clouds like this, he thought. It was a shame they couldn’t do it together.
‘Continue’, the doctor said.
‘About the NYSIF or about the IRS’, the Founder asked.
‘Either.’
‘Did I tell you about Earnie Lyle?’
‘I do not believe that you have.’
The Founder thought of Earnie Shavers’ head and remembered what George Foreman said about how hard Ron Lyle hit. He had read somewhere that Earnie Shavers now lives in the UK and makes his living as a preacher. It is a strange world we inhabit, Doctor, he wanted to say. He hoped that the synesthesia would not blend senses other than sight and sound and, maybe, taste. He was here for therapy. He didn’t sign up to take a pounding.
‘Lyle lived in my park in northern New York for a while. He trashed a park-owned home and we had to evict him. We ended up giving him cash for keys.’ As the Founder spoke, he thought about the empty land at the back of that park. The park itself was built into a hillside. This made plowing snow, grading lots and installing homes difficult. Since the earth in that part of the state was mostly shale, ground water would run off the hill and pool at the entrances to the park. But the plateau on the top of the hill – the fifty acres out back – was quite different. That land was undeveloped and flat, covered with high grass except for a few sections that were wooded. Trails big enough for an ATV, cleared with a brush hog, ran through the wooded sections. Behind the land, on the far side from the park and the road, corn fields stretched out to the horizon. The Founder rarely had reason to walk up there, but when he did, he thought of infinity. He squinted to adjust the mask and imagined riding over the plateau in a snowmobile on snow that looked like the clouds he had been flying through.
‘Is that a rare event’, the doctor asked. ‘Evictions?’
The Founder lifted the mask and looked at the doctor to see if he was taking the piss. He could not see him well, because the doctor had positioned himself in front of a window that was full of sunlight. He felt slightly dizzy and did not like the way the light broke the magic of the trip. He replaced the cloth and tried to dive back in.
‘No, that’s just Tuesday’, he said. ‘The strange thing is that, after we kicked him out, he came back. When we got rid of another problem resident, he bought that guy’s home from him.’
‘Isn’t that against park regulations?’
‘The rule is that a resident can only sell a home to a party who is approved by the park, but it is difficult to enforce that rule in a post Nakba environment.’
The Founder saw the word ‘Nakba’ and the date ‘June 2019’ written in black letters against a golden corn field and a blue sky. The letters melted and dripped into an orange Home Depot bucket. When he peered into the bucket, he saw black eels twisting around in a pool of snot. ‘Can we take this in another direction, please’, he said. ‘I don’t like where it is going’.
‘Of course’, the doctor said. ‘What else happened?’
‘Well, this guy Lyle got in a physical altercation with the manager of that park, Mike. He punched him out in plain sight. Mike is a kind, honest, hard-working guy who has overcome hardships to be where he is now. I think of him as a friend. As an employee, he is crucial to the business. I was very angry about that.’
‘He assaulted him?’
‘Yup.’
The Founder thought of what Larry Holmes said about Ali and Tyson. They both hit very hard, he said. Ali was so fast that you couldn’t see his punches coming. You could see Tyson’s, but you really, really didn’t want to feel them. Holmes’ jab, the Founder thought, should be put in the national archives.
‘And then, what happened’, the doctor asked
‘We tried to take him to court but the DA’s office sat on it. This was during the Black Lives Matter protests and law enforcement was pissed off and dragging its feet. Lyle eventually moved out and we thought that was that.’
‘And that’s it?’
‘No. That’s the fucked part. He called Mike this afternoon. He wanted to know if we had any available homes and whether he could move back into the park.’ The Founder removed some wet insulation from a riser pit. A family of garter snakes – father, mother, sister, brother, cousins, uncles, aunts, grandparents and grandbabies – wriggled at the bottom.
‘I really don’t like this’, he said. I’m going to blow chunks.’
‘You can use this, if you need.’, the doctor said. He pushed a plastic waste paper basket toward the couch where the Founder lay. ‘Tell me about the NYSIF audit.’
.
The Founder lay on his back with a pillow under his butt to ease the tension on his lumbar spine. He breathed deeply in through his nose and out through his mouth a few times. The nausea passed. ‘Siobhan is suing me’, he said.
‘Who is Siobhan’, the doctor asked.
The Founder clenched his eyelids together and saw the large flying saucer that sits on the highway entrance to Roswell next to the ‘Welcome to Roswell’ sign. It levitated, hovered, and then scooted away so fast you couldn’t tell if it moved or vaporized. ‘She’s the lady who claimed that space aliens mutilated her installer’s seal’, the Founder said. ‘She didn’t like that I charged her for the cost of replacing it. She moved, I withheld the cost of the new seal from her security deposit, she sued me and now I have to go to court to defend myself in two weeks.’
‘I see’, the doctor said.
‘You ever get sued, Doc’, the Founder asked.
‘You were talking about the NYSIF audit’, the doctor said.
.
‘And the water leaks’, the Founder said. ‘Don’t get me started on the feckin water leaks. You fix one section of pipe and the pipe you attached the new pipe to breaks. It’s like Groundhog Day or déjà vu all over again all day, every day.’
‘Are you on wells, or do you have municipal water’, the doctor asked
‘That park is on muni water. The guy who developed the park used thin-walled black PVC pipe, galvanized pipe, washing machine flex hoses and vacuum machine hoses for water mains. I mean, the guy was wasn’t even trying.’
‘After the water comes in at the curb, where does it go?’
Inside the mask, the Founder looked to his right and to his left, and he saw a bunch of water molecules. They were assembled in a long, dark cylindrical container that would be small to a human but that was big for him, now. He turned to the guy next to him. His O was roly-poly, but his Hs were ripped. ‘Haven’t I seen this before’, he said.
‘Of course’, the guy said. ‘It’s the sperm scene from Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask, only with water molecules instead of spermatozoa. Where do you think Woody Allen got it from?’
‘He’s a genius’, the Founder said, ‘but kind of a whack-job and, you know, the accusations.’
‘You remember when the black spermatozoon says, ‘How did I get here?’ And when they all say, ‘Turn back! It’s a blowjob’?’
The Founder noticed that the guy had interlocking benzine rings tattooed on his left H. There must be a story there, he thought.
‘How do we get our work assignments’, the Founder asked.
‘Slip the Soup a few bucks’, the guy said.
The Founder saw himself pushed through the water mains and up a riser. From a shower nozzle, he landed on top of Ronnie McCallum’s head. The landscape was populated by strands of thick auburn hair that swayed in the water like a mess of unmoored battle ropes at high tide. He passed over her nose, lips, chin and neck. He remembered that Ronnie was a nurse who lived alone with her golden retriever in a home on lot 49D and had trouble finding a man who paid his own bills. She was a little heavier than he usually liked, but she wore it well under hospital scrubs and he certainly didn’t mind it now. He travelled over her collar bone, through a crease below one of her breasts, down her stomach, between her legs, down the space behind her knee and then into the drain. I could really get into sweat gland duty, he thought. That would be a sweetheart assignment.
‘You didn’t pay the Soup’, Benzine Guy said. They were hovering suspended in the trap below the shower drain. A wave came in from above. The guys ahead of them in line were pushed over the top and out toward the sewer line. Benzine Guy hovered next to the Founder.
‘Are you Vergil’, the Founder asked. ‘You act like a guide.’
‘You new guys want the cushy jobs. You don’t want to pay your dues.’
‘What’s Orangeburg like?’
The Founder felt another wave building at the back of the line. He looked ahead and saw nothing separating him and Benzine Guy from the gunwale of the trap.
‘Stay loose when you go over the top, like you’ve had a few drinks’, Benzine Guy said.
‘What about the Orangeburg?’
‘You poor fucker.’
.
‘And the drinking water is only part of the problem’, the Founder said. He was not sure whether the doctor was still in the room. He had stopped hearing the doctor’s pen scratching on his legal pad some time ago. ‘The septic lines – fuggedaboudit.’
‘Please go on’, the doctor said.
‘They are made of Orangeburg. Orangeburg pipe is not plastic or metal. It’s carboard impregnated with tar. They stopped using it in the early eighties because it falls apart like, you know, paper, but it’s still in the ground. It bows, blisters, cracks and rots. When you dig it up, you can break it apart with your bare hands.’
The Founder was pushed over the top of the trap by the force of a rude stream. He travelled down a gentle run of PVC until he reached an elbow and the pitch became quite steep. He was reflecting on the warm spot between Ronnie’ big and second toe when he hit the Orangeburg. He looked for Benzine Guy, but could not see him. Around him a bunch of new-recruit molecules like himself were rushing forward in a scrum. There was no order, no instructions, no signposts, nothing – just heads, arms, elbows bumping up against each other and against the side of the pipe.
‘It never stops’, the founder said. He thought he smelled the doctor’s cigar, despite the building’s no smoking policy. ‘It’s like, another week, another septic backup. We had shit coming out of the clean-out between lot 26B and lot 31B and Mike had to dig up and replace the whole run. It cost me eight grand and pulled him away from projects that make money.’
‘I see.’
‘He’ll dig up the whole park piece by piece at this rate. Once he’s done, he can go back to the first septic pipe he replaced and replace it again like he’s inhabiting fecking Finnegan’s Wake, and I can die, like a salmon who has swum upstream and spawned.’
‘Hm.’
Inside the mask, the Founder travelled over a landscape punctuated by stalagmites as high as mountains, stalactites with razor-sharp edges, crevasses that bled into the abyss, and a sky-dome that was cracked and bowed. Uric acid molecules wore wide-lapelled suits, slicked-back hair, flashy yellow ties and pointed shoes. They smiled at him and spoke in a smooth patter trying to sell him a bridge, a time-share, some Bre-X stock, a crypto token or a Yugo. Particles of solid waste wearing football pads, helmets and Philadelphia Eagles jerseys shouted fraternity chants. Grease chunks zoomed past like buzz bombs. A few very rough-looking types, with neck, face and hand tattoos and studs in their tongues looked at the new guys as if they were a snack. Ground water molecules, the Founder thought. They don’t like domestics.
‘Tell me about the NYSIF audit’, the doctor said.
.
‘I don’t like this anymore’, the Founder said. ‘I want out’. He removed the mask to break the trip. The doctor still sat with the sun at his back, but he had shrunk to a dot inside of a circle that hovered at the place where the doctor’s head had been when the session had started. The cigar remained.
‘Dude’, the Founder said. ‘Re-think the cigar. Seriously. If you were a finance bro you could pull it off.’
‘What brings you here’, the dot said.
‘It’s the NYSIF audit’, the Founder said. I got into the business to provide clean safe and affordable housing to people who need it, but they think that my mission is to file chickenshit paperwork. It’s almost like they want to inhabit the business like a parasite.’
‘What makes you think that’, the dot said.
‘Should I settle my bill with the chick outside before we go any farther’, the Founder said. ‘I understand you have a pay-go practice.’
‘You can discuss payment arrangements with Milena later.’
‘She’s a knockout, you know. Is she an actress? I hope she doesn’t become a line segment or a ray of light. That would break my heart.’
‘Can we begin, please?’