Deposing
the Witness
by David Barringer
Deposing the witness
in the conference room. Wall sconces cupping pale
emanations. Mr. Zetsche: “I beg pardon, but I
wish to preserve for the record my objection to this
line of questioning. Thank you.”
An incision of fury in the mind of Nino
DiCicco. Setting his molars. Fisting his pen. Aloud:
“Mr. McFarley, I apologize for the interruptions
of Mr. Zetsche. I will do my part to make this deposition
as brief and as unannoying as possible.”
Argus McFarley worrying his twelfth
finger, saying, “I beg pardon. It’s okay.
Thank you.”
“Oh, dear, Mr. DiCheeko.”
Mr. Zetsche leaning back, biting gold pen, then: chair-rolling
to shoulder-pat his witness. “Shall we not play
games?”
Argus McFarley stuffing his dozen fingers
into the red-flannel lining of his beige nylon jacket.
“Well?” The eyebrows of Mr.
Zetsche rising above his wire rims. “Mr. DiCheeko?”
*
Flight 319 to Detroit. Three rows up.
Taupe skirt-suit. Black heels. Nailclicking her superslim
Toshiba laptop. A blond as blond as a doe’s tail.
Let’s not see the face yet, let’s not spoil
the fantasy. A plastic cup of tomato juice from the
attendant. Can? Handing him the cold can, hip-bumping
the opened drawer back into the beverage cart.
Air currents travel a greater distance
across the humped surface of a wing than they do on
the flattened bottom, and therefore the air thins
out, and therefore the wing rises into that thinner,
lighter air. Hence: flight. Thank you, Jesus—thumb-pressing
the Cross into his solar plexus—keep it up, at
least for thirty-eight more minutes. Have faith in
lofty physics and the healthy tomato, in thin air
and thin blood.
Nino DiCicco is thirty-seven-years old
and afraid not of flying but of death. He thinks he
knows this but is afraid of feeling it, and he knows
this, or thinks he does, this slipperiness perhaps
a symptom of the fear, one of its manifestations,
and the knowing-this not helping a damn bit either,
and then: sublimating his fear into sexual aggression.
The result leaves something to be desired. What is
to be desired? “To preserve for the record.”
Nino turning his tomato can around and around and
around. . . .
Briefcase, cell phone, parking stub.
Nino beeps the keyless remote, fingers a fifty to
the parking attendant, hums toward the midnight superfreeway.
Mood preprogrammed to the piano of Bill Charlap. Slipping
through seamless concrete into the agony of black
infinity. Machiavelli wrote that princes could stand
alone only if they had enough men or money to make
an army equal to the challenge of any opponent. Zetsche?
The wire rims, mustache, suspenders, the accent pounded
smooth into some alloy whose base element might have
been German or Belgian or whothefuckknew. “Equal”?
Or “superior”?
Home. The glacier of early morning advancing
by degrees through the dark panes of custom kitchen
windows. His nightgowned wife sitting awkwardly spread-legged
on the island, leaning back on her hands, buttocks
spreading out upon the cream ceramic tiles that remind
him of graph paper, a réseau, a city grid.
His tongue lapping too furiously, as if working a
padlock. Slower—his wife’s name is Wini—please,
Nino. The safe-cracker resumes, pauses when hidden
mechanisms fall into place. . . . He has not been
home, practically speaking, for three weeks. Advancing
by degrees. His wife swallowing her pleasure away
from the ears of the children sleeping upstairs, then
spraying the counter with antibacterial disinfectant
while he showers. In two hours, Wini making sack lunches.
Nino already gone.
*
The deposition of Argus McFarley, a
petty klepto and potentially unreliable witness (for
the defense) in a class-action product-liability suit
against a manufacturer of (exploding) gas tanks for
buses, took place in Chicago, and lasted 3hr 47min.
It had not gone well. Incisions of fury, for the record,
etcetera. Mr. McFarley was born with twelve fingers.
He lives alone on an inheritance from his father,
this last being a financial fact the defense will
rely on to elicit sympathy for Argus’ sadly unjustified
kleptomania. Argus got yanked into this mess when
he stopped picking shoppers’ pockets for two
seconds on a corner of the Magnificent Mile and saw
one of the five bus accidents involved in the suit.
An exploding gas tank or a freak collision? In the
fiery aftermath a lot of startled tourists, a lot
of unguarded pockets.
From Nino’s firm, two associates
(one first-year, one fifth-year) had come to Chicago
to gawk. After the deposition, they invited Nino to
a late dinner: mussels and martinis at Gene &
Georgetti’s. They promised that the proceedings
would be removed to the jurisdiction of Tittybar County:
the fifth-year wagging jowls as if into proffered
bosoms. Nino saying, No, thanks, gonna grab a red-eye.
You sure? Enjoy. You’re the better man. Nino
padding heavily down the office hallway, the firm
having slipped by degrees to the bottom of the professional
hill:
Have. You. Been. Hurt. In a. Slipandfall. Accident?
I. Can. Help. Hi. I’m. Nino. DiCicco. Of. Smeckle.
Smegma. And DiCicco. I. Can. Get. You. The money.
You. Deserve. If. Your. Hip. Went. Ka-Boom. Or. Your.
Ass. Went. Ka-splat. Call. Nino. DiCicco. And. The.
Next. Sound. You. Hear. Will. Be. Cha-ching.
Cab to O’Hare. The smell of cumin
and tobacco. Mr. McFarley had no other documented
physical or mental deformities. He was a terrible
thief, his record disproving any de facto advantage
in extra fingers. The lighting had been so poor in
the conference room Nino had hardly been able to read
his blue notes against the yellow pad. He knew the
social-psych studies of eyewitness reliability, the
malleability of memory, the influence of circumstance.
He thought he could have gotten Argus to give a little
honest description, a little doubt about what he had
seen and not seen. An admission of how many pockets
he’d picked immediately after the accident as
evidence of preoccupied perception. But it had not
gone well. The cabby is an older black man who wears
some kind of floppy hat. Driving past bull statues
frozen mid-graze on the sidewalks of Chicago, City
of The Big Steaks. The cabby remembering, without
distress, picking cotton as a boy in Alabama. My God,
the wonder of living memory. Life is an error. No.
Man is the error. No. Woman is the only. . . .
*
The tomato juice because of hypertension.
160/100. Grape juice, too. White-bean salad, snap-pea
stir-fry, broiled haddock, soy nuts. Nearly two million
people every year newly hypertensing, and/or having
been hypertensing for some time and only torquing
their minds into the anxiety of it subsequent to diagnosis.
Ninety-percent of these hypertense people not having
causes identifiable. The physician assistant again
having trouble rooting the electrocardiogram electrodes
within Nino’s stereotypically thick chest hair,
the little white stickers floating high on the resiliently
springy follicles he’s been teased about—“Yo,
Vito!”—since sixth grade. Cans of the stuff,
its pulp puree constituting a volumetric measure of
emotional commitment. Jogging through the bark-chip
1.2-mile Fitness Trail in the woods behind the Civic
Center. Waving to the German woman who has apparently
chosen to retire into grey sweats and Fila sneakers
rather than into a Florida suburb. Sneaking up on
health a strategy long abandoned. This is a four-bugle
cavalric charge. Chase the beast, live forever. Giving
berth to a Great Dane immovably spanning two spaces
in the Civic Center parking lot. Systolic being the
first number referring to the pressure of the blood
when the left ventricle contracts. Diastolic being
the second number referring to the pressure of the
blood when the heart isn’t squeezing. Hypertension
can be inherited as a genetic predisposition, smuggled
as an unidentifiable cause into posterity and preserved,
as it were, for the record.
Reading in an old issue of The New York
Review of Books the phrase, “[e]ven before Beckett’s
death a decade ago,” a phrase that began the
third paragraph, a phrase whose dependent structure
belied its substance, a substance which began, in
the mind of Nino DiCicco, to unfold itself, heavily
unfolding, endlessly unfolding, slam slam slam, the
multilayered leaves of a trick trapdoor unfolding
in the mind—“death a decade ago”—the
ceaseless unfolding beginning to bury him alive, suffocating
him beneath impenetrable shallowness, beneath immovable
depths, a matchstick fumbled in a coffin. Holding
the paper in one hand, the other sautéing onions
in a tablespoon of virgin olive oil. He decides against
caramelizing, effected with sustained deliberate heat.
He rescues the translucent onion eyelids, dumping
them fluttering onto a plate. Staring into space:
into the awesome mind of pre-birth, into the vacant
mind of post-life. The glacier advancing by degrees
through dark panes. The cold sweet smell of congealing
onions. Death is an error. Life is an error. A thick-muscled
heart pumping thin blood to the farthest reaches of
one’s body. A systolic squeezing in the chest.
Close-set molars. Ten fingers: an accounting. A sitting-down
in an eighty-dollar chair made from the limbs of birch
trees grown in Denmark. He met Wini when he was twenty
and she was twenty-three and they had always been
in love.
Are you okay?
Fine, I was just reading something it
was about—
How can you read in here, it’s
so dark?
—Samuel Beckett.
What was it about?
Death, I guess, I didn’t finish
it.
Are you okay?
I didn’t finish it.
Let’s go to sleep at the same time
for once.
Okay. Help me up.
