NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Soon after Diddlie and I sat down the waitress interrupts us, with menus. At the same time Lou Waymarsh appears hemmed in behind the waitress and an adjacent table, with his strong square face showing a gray beard. The waitress looks over her shoulder at Lou and drops some of the menus as she tries to separate two from a stack she is carrying. Then noticing Lou behind her, she turns and asks if he wants to sit down. The bus boy is standing off to the right with a cart full of dishes, waiting for the waitress to make way. He can’t move back because of the lady with the walker waiting behind him. A large party to the left is getting up and the aisle between our booth and the adjacent tables is jammed. As I bend down to pick up a menu that has fallen by my feet I notice Diddlie’s jeans are gone. By the time I give the menu back to the waitress Lou is sitting in Diddlie’s place. His thick black eyebrows look like caterpillars basking in his thoughts while resting above his eyes. He is frowning slightly, as he so often has since his daughter, Lt. Waymarsh was killed in Iraq. I had forgotten, but realized what he meant at once with his first words.
“It was 3 years ago today.”
“Has it been that long already?”
“I am going to sell my firm to Fibonacci.” Said Lou without any change of tone, as if the two events were one.
“’I had no idea Lou! ‘The Fib.’ Congratulations, I am sure you got a good price.”
“Yeah the three of us made out okay. We didn’t close the deal until this morning. That’s when I called. It was an all-nighter.” Lou stifles a yawn, and looks into the menu. Seems as if he is absorbed by it. Perhaps he is still negotiating silently behind the caterpillars on his brow which have arched slightly as he concentrates squinting for a while until getting out his reading glasses with a sigh of resignation. He puts the menu down. A few caterpillar hairs are scratching the tops of his glasses as he speaks.
“That outfit is more like a network than a company. Sure they are incorporated, and have that non-descript building out in Fairfax, among others, but they have people from all over government, banking, media. Congress…I mean you name it.”
“Now they have taken an interest in your education consultancy.”
“Yes they want my data.”
“Your data?”
“You know.” he waved his hand over the menu as if to draw forth a genie or perhaps cast a spell. He speaks slowly, as always, with a low resonant voice.
“I was the education guy, but there’s data we had collected over the years.”
“I don’t understand Lou.”
Lou looked more serious than ever. I wonder, has this man been so constricted by the python of his job that he can no longer relax? I had not noticed this before, though it is striking now, after his daughter’s death he spent more and more time at work.
“Yea, education is where I started out but we drifted into waters Fibonacci is now interested in navigating.”
We had become friends over a Xerox machine; two graduate students working at the Library of Congress, thirty years ago, amusing each other with riffs on the genius of the Flying Circus. Lou has paused, fallen back into the depths he had conjured with his hands out of the menu’s plastic holder. He stifles another yawn.
“Sorry about this.” He puts down the menu and looks at me. ” I mean I can’t say any more about it. You know ‘the Fib’.. They like to stay out of sight, don’t think people realize how big they are. Like a kind of light house projecting all these pictures its clients want us to see, or someone wants us to see, on the op-ed page, or featured in a news magazine or even on TV. I mean TV is the thing now. You don’t see the light source only the pretty pictures it illuminates.”
Lou picks up the menu again but his eyes are closed. “I need a coffee” said Lou, and the waitress is there. I hadn’t noticed her arrival.
“Will that be all sir?”
Dropping the menu, Lou has a full yawn into both hands. The menu slides over the table towards me. “Excuse me” he says to the waitress, “That is all for now.”
I order the same and ask:
“Lou, do you have a neighbor called Diddlie Drates?”
“Diddlie, yes. She was there when we moved in. She is like a founding mother of the neighborhood.”
“ Did you see her ?”
“No, how do you know her?
“She introduced herself to me just now in the bar, after hearing me mention your name to the bartender.”
“Wonder what made her do that?”
“Don’t know, she was sitting here just now.”
“No I didn’t notice her going out, but I don’t notice much at the moment. By the way, did you contact Jake Trip?”
I told him I had. Jake remembered me from your barbeque, and invited me to visit him tomorrow.”
“That should be your first stop alright. Now you will see what the neighborhood is all about.”
