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  Then a solution occurred to him: From his pants pocket, down at his ankles, he fished out his cellphone camera and aimed it at the toilet. Three digital clicks later, he verified the turd’s glory with the camera—it looked as majestic, in five-megapixel resolution on a 2.5-inch LCD screen, as it did in the bowl—before flushing it all away, wincing then sighing as it collapsed and splintered in the cruel vortex of water. Walking back downstairs, to where his in-laws were gathered around the big-screen, he felt a sense of accomplishment that he hadn’t felt in weeks, a proud, delighted buoyancy that was evident to everyone, even his dense mother-in-law, who remarked, as he settled back into his chair in the living room, that he looked like the cat who’d eaten the canary.

  “Canaries? I thought we ate turkey!” exclaimed her husband, persisting in the geezer-slash-bumpkin routine he enacted whenever he and Sara’s mother came east from Ohio, which they pronounced “Oh-HI-ah.” Dave knew he was supposed to laugh at this, if only to be polite; just two years (re)married, he remained within the statute-of-limitations period in which he was obligated to care, or pretend to care, about what came dribbling from his in-laws’ mouths. This time, however, he let everyone else do the laughing for him: Sara’s older sister Liz, who’d recently cut her blonde hair short and shaggy like a schoolboy’s, confirming—aesthetically, anyway—Dave’s longstanding suspicion of ulterior lesbianism; Liz’s husband Jeremy, a skinny nailbiter who worked for a nonprofit something-or-other (nonprofits also striking Dave as vaguely lesbo); their twelve-year-old son Aidan, who Sara claimed was autistic but who Dave suspected was just weird; and Bev, his mother-in-law, who chuckled loudest of all, punctuating it by grabbing her husband’s knee and giving it a good hard lovey-dovey wiggle. “Ohhh, Raymond,” she said.

  “Well, they do things differently back east,” said Raymond. “Didya eat a canary, Dave?”

  The temptation, properly resisted, was to flip out the phone and display the snapshot he’d just taken: Yes, Raymond. As a matter of fact I did. Then, courtesy of my astounding, amazing, even miraculous bowels, I turned it into . . . this. Truth was, however, Dave actually liked his father-in-law, who struck him as the most hypoallergenic human being he’d ever met: Mortimer Snerd reincarnated as a (retired) suburban schools administrator. Sure, you’d never want to share a battle trench with him, and you’d definitely want him on the other side of a business deal . . . but sharing a couch with him on the holidays, once or twice a year: eh, not so bad. Dave’s former father-in-law, on the other hand—there was a ball-buster, a Brooklyn vice cop who knew every angle, was always glaring narrow-eyed at Dave as if just about to place his face from an old Wanted poster. Always pissed off and sourheaded, as if begrudging the fact that he’d been born a few hundred years too late to earn dowries on his trampy daughters, the trampiest of whom Dave had squandered six years of his life on. So Raymond Tetwick was an upgrade—corny jokes and all. Dave let the canary inquiry slide.

  “What’d I miss,” he asked Raymond instead, nodding his chin at the television while reclaiming the glass of beer he’d left on the side table.

  “On the game?” said Raymond. “To be honest, now, my mind wandered . . .” As if Dave couldn’t make out the digits on his own eighty-two-inch LCD screen, Raymond leaned forward, squinting, and reported, “Looks like the Cowboys are up by, looks like fourteen.”

  “Felix Jones just ran it in for forty-six,” muttered Aidan, who was sprawled on the carpet, his head propped against his father’s shins.

  “That’s right, Aidy,” said Jeremy, a long shock of gray-brown hair flapping forward as he patted his son on the shoulder with a degree of pride more suited to Felix Jones’s father, high-fiving Jones on the sidelines. “That’s great. You knew his name and everything.”

  Dave rolled his eyes. No wonder the kid was a freak. And why, he wondered, did liberals all sound the freakin same? One part Mister Rogers, one part Jeff Spicoli, condescending and vacuous at the same time. Like the way homos all sounded the same, Dave thought, exhuming an old barroom disquisition: why sticking dicks in your mouth resulted in a lifelong lisp. Did cocksucking tear some hidden, hymen-like membrane in the male mouth, thereby altering the air-to-saliva ratio (as in the gas-to-air mixture in a fuel injector) so that the words came out all wet and slushy-swishy? Were scientists studying this? Probably not, Dave guessed. Too incorrect to address. Global warming, on the other hand: That was an open-and-shut case, as clear and tidy as a prime-time whodunit. But this—this was just, ooooh, a wiggly mystery. Dave made a mental note to bring that up with Jeremy sometime, as a verbal noogie, when he was feeling less charitable (and accomplished) than at present. He enjoyed watching Jeremy stammer; it made the holidays bearable.

  Dave’s eye-roll hadn’t gone unnoticed. Aidan smirked at him, commiseratively, as if in agreement about his goo-gooey father, thereby confirming Dave’s suspicion that whatever was wrong with the kid—up to and including the various food allergies that had forced Sara to more or less cook two separate Thanksgiving dinners, one of which went more or less uneaten—wasn’t clinical.

  The Raiders fumbled on the Dallas twenty-four. Though he’d claimed to be rooting for Dallas, Raymond went, “Ohhhh,” and shook his head, as if heartbroken by the brute injustice of it all; Dave got the feeling that in Raymond’s vision of the perfect world—call it Raymondville—all games ended with a hunky-dory tie, and the only legal sexual position (here Dave’s mind was wandering) was the even-steven sixty-nine, although, as he assessed Raymond and Bev from that unsavory mental angle, Dave highly doubted that they’d ever graduated from the mild injustice of missionary position. Because he’d neglected to call his bookie in time, Dave didn’t care about the game’s outcome. He suspected no one else in the room cared, either—certainly not Jeremy, who seemed frustrated that his offers to help Sara with the dishes kept being rebuffed, and who was presently molesting a thumbnail in a way that didn’t suggest he was anxious about the Raiders’ chances. Maybe Aidan, but then, with that kid, who the hell knew? “I’m saying this sucker is over,” Dave announced.

  “You never know, Dave,” said Raymond, which is what passed, in Raymondville, for a heated rebuttal.

  “I do,” Dave said, with an incontrovertible snort, then slid his almost-empty beer glass off the side table, swirled its skimpy contents to signal his purpose, and stood up. The self-satisfied groan he released, upon rising, was loud and carnal enough to cause his sister-in-law Liz to glance up in jumpy alarm. Her semistricken expression, which she quickly hid by turning toward the television screen, brought a pleased simper to Dave’s face, as if he’d whispered boo and she’d promptly drenched her panties. He knew she despised him, probably had from the start. He didn’t know why—he considered himself a solid guy, a more-than-decent provider with a business that was ka-chinging in this weakening economy, who took primo care of Sara and her daughter, bought ’em whatever they wanted, rubbed Sara’s feet when they were achy from jogging, drove to the Rite Aid at midnight when the girls ran out of tampons; solid, right?—but figured it might have something to do with him being Republican and her being a liberal feminazi-slash-closeted-lesbo who talked, openly, about her two youthful abortions—two!—the way Sara talked about her old TV commercial jobs: disparagingly, but with what Dave sensed was secret pride. As if she’d endured something, come through fire or someshit, and was stronger and wiser for having done so, unlike (thought Dave) the two babies she’d flushed without even as much fanfare or feeling as he’d accorded his recent super-turd, two babies denied the chance to be strong and wise or at least, like Aidan, autistic and allergic. Fair enough: She didn’t like his kind, and he didn’t like hers, but at least he could be civil about it. Civilly, he asked, “Anyone need a refill while I’m up?”

  A bland chorus of nopes answered him. Jeremy felt compelled, naturally, to apologize for his nope, citing the long drive back to Port Washington, to “the Island,” which Dave ignored, saying “Suit yourself” to no one in particular.

&nb
sp; “Where’s Alexis?” Raymond asked.

  “Still in the bathroom,” muttered Aidan, his tone strangely vituperative, as if he’d been waiting forty minutes for the potty to clear.

  “Be kind,” Jeremy hissed at him, and this time, instead of patting Aidan’s back, gave the boy’s neck a two-fingered massage. The tactile line between approval and disapproval, Dave noted, was awfully slight. “Alexis,” Jeremy informed him, “has Irritable Bowel Syndrome.”

  “What’s that?” Aidan said.

  “Means Lexi’s no good at pooping,” Dave explained.

  Aidan said, “That’s funny.”

  “It’s actually very serious,” Jeremy corrected.

  “It’s a little funny,” said Dave, striking off toward the kitchen. Along the way he noticed a tiny curl of mud on the carpet—must’ve fallen out from between someone’s boot treads—and scooped it up, then dunked it into the foamy dregs of his beer glass. He was trying to remain unbothered by all the disarray that houseguests engender: the multitude of drippy boots in the mudroom, the coats heaped upon one another in wayward piles, the sink overrun with coffee mugs and egg-encrusted plates, the trail of abandoned newspaper sections charting his father-in-law’s creaky passage from room to room. Dave was big on a clean house, a clean car, believing you could tell much if not everything about people by the state of their furnace filter, the organization of their freezer, and the level of rinse aid in their dishwasher. He considered these things—the house, the Cadillac Escalade in the garage, the furnace filter, the subzero freezer, all of it—testaments to his success, showcases for what he’d achieved, at the age of forty-six, via a mixture of sixteen-hour workdays, savvy timing, the investment capital spending spree of the mid-’90s, a rare and precious grasp of human frailty, and (even he would admit) deliciously loose federal regulations.

  Dave was in the collections business, though the term he preferred—insisted upon, actually—was “debt acquisition,” which had a much more gilded, Wall Street-y ring to it than “collection agency,” or, worse (though more accurate), salvage or junk debt collection. The word collection had a dirty taint—trashpickers, ragpickers, stamp and baseball-card nerds, that sort of thing—which was why, publicly anyway, he banned its use at ARC (Acquisitions and Asset Recovery Corp.), the company he had founded in 1996, except in the required legalese (“This is an attempt to collect a debt and any information obtained . . .”).

  Privately, however, the ban was intended to position Dave farther upfield from his father, who was a collector, and nothing but—a toll collector on the New Jersey Turnpike who’d blown his twenty-eight-year career by offering a boozy-looking carful of coed-looking girls (Catholic high schoolers, as it turned out) a free pass through Lane 8 of the Bayonne tolls if one of them (the daughter of a state senator from Neptune, as it turned out) would flash him some fresh white tit. Ordinary night-shift hijinks on the Turnpike, but this marked Sal Masoli’s tenth such complaint, plus the senator wouldn’t stop huffing and puffing, so the Turnpike Authority eased Dave’s father out with an early-retirement package and a listless farewell party conspicuously unattended by management. Now he spent his nine-to-five hours dialing and redialing sports call-in shows to complain about the various “bums” spoiling athletics in the tri-state area. Once or twice, in the car, Dave had heard his father on the radio. It was a miserable experience, like happening upon a photo of your mom on the internet with a schlong up her tush. “Sparta Sal,” the hosts called him, and usually tried to hurry him off the air. “Breathe, Sal, just breathe,” they sometimes advised. After pulling the plug on one of his rants, a host pondered aloud: “What’s the opposite of a fan? Is there a word for that? Anti-fan, maybe?” His cohost added, “I think Sparta Sal actually hates sports,” to which the first host said, “I think Sparta Sal might hate life. Bennie in the Bronx, what’s shakin . . .”

  Dave’s memories of observing his father at work were suffused with shame and disgust, not from his behavior—the old man enjoyed showing off for his son by flinging pennies back at startled drivers, skimming a dollar here and there for the boy to stuff into his jeans pocket, shouting Fuck you very much to drivers of Mercedes or BMWs as they passed beneath the gate arm—but from the job itself: the cramped little booth with its fogged-up windows and its grease-whorled cashbox and its squeaky vinyl-clad chair from which yellow stuffing leaked like the split guts of a woodchuck on the Palisades Parkway, the air around the booths layered with bands of leaden smog that choked tears from Dave’s eyes, the way drivers ignored his father (many of them used their tollbooth intermission as an opportunity to pick their noses) as though he were a vending machine or some other nonhuman coin-sucker, the sad ceaseless sameness of the transactional exchange: dollar-thirty, like strophe and antistrophe, dollar-thirty, dollar-thirty. This, to Dave, was collection, and he wanted no part of it; like his father, it felt below him.

  Acquisition, however: That was different. He loved the word—“I’ve got an acquisitive mind,” he was fond of saying—nearly as much as he loved the word asset, which scored double bonus points for containing the word ass and thereby evoking his number-one favorite female attribute. ARC, which Dave had spun out of a one-man bounced-check collections company he’d founded as a Rutgers undergrad, specialized in stale debt portfolios. Not the “firsts,” the industry term for delinquent accounts that hadn’t yet been charged off, and which sold for twelve cents on the dollar; these were too pricey for Dave, plus the big boys, the publicly traded outfits, kept an exclusive grip on those. And not even the “seconds,” the charged-off accounts that had stymied prior collection efforts. Dave’s forte was in acquiring packaged portfolios of dead debts—years-old, out-of-statute consumer credit accounts, which he could usually score, en masse, for less than a penny on the dollar—then, using a proprietary algorithm he’d developed for sifting out probable payers on those accounts, extracting payment on those debts.

  The profit percentages were outlandish, as unfathomable as unicorns: math at its giddiest. The Cashomatic PayDay eLoans deal, for instance: $12,750 for $1.3 million in abandoned accounts. His “acquisition teams”—forty-seven employees working out of a giant phone bank in a Sparta office park, using scripts (written by Dave himself) that were notorious industry-wide for the way they strained the legal boundaries established by the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act—had already wrested more than $285,000, mostly in arbitrary settlements with the debtors, from those so-called dead accounts. Dave adored doing the numbers, dancing his hairy fingers across a calculator’s keys: a 2,235 gross profit percentage, and still growing. Water squeezed from a stone. Financial Lazaruses, called forth from their tombs. There’s profit everywhere, he was fond of saying, so long as you know where to look.

  At least once a week—more frequently if he was feeling down—Dave would roam the phone banks, dispensing backslaps and thumbs-up signs to the good employees (the “acquisitors,” in ARC-speak) while scouting for the weak ones. The weak were easy to identify: Their mouths were closed. They were the ones nodding—patiently or impatiently, it didn’t matter—while Mrs. X from Milwaukee or Mr. Y from central Ohio (Raymondville, possibly) tried to explain why the debt was no longer valid or why he couldn’t pay now or why the account belonged to an ex-husband who’d absconded to Orlando with that chippie from the Meineke muffler shop, etc. This was where Dave liked to swoop in, commandeering the employee’s computer mouse to click the TERMINATE CALL icon, then removing the headset from the employee’s head and fitting it onto his own head, coolly adjusting it like an astronaut prepping for liftoff. Leaning across the desk, he’d click INITIATE NEXT CALL. “Take notes,” he’d command.

  Because Dave could work miracles, on the phone. Fiber-optic cables were like a frizzy extension of his will; by the power of his voice, he could move people’s hands toward their checkbooks, dictate the numbers they scrawled, could extract from them their bank and routing numbers as easily as a cane-pole fisherman drawing bream out of a farm pond. Not through cha
rm (though his arsenal included a salesmanish version of that) and not through its antithesis, coercion (though browbeating was an old specialty of his), but through a counterbalanced combination of the two that called to mind an expert dog trainer, with the sit and stay commands swapped for shut up and pay. The key, he’d discovered, was never to listen to the debtors, because listening only complicated what was in essence as simple and choiceless an exchange as passing through the Bayonne tolls. You had to let them talk, of course—they hung up if you didn’t—but you couldn’t listen to them talk, because then some empathetic instinct might kick in, causing their problems—the ex-husband gone south with his chippie, the disability preventing them from working, that sort of thing—to infect your problem, that being how to most efficiently convince them to pay money on a debt they had every liberty to ignore. Because, if you kept your focus and your distance, you could get them to do almost anything. Not all of them, of course—but enough of them.

  This was a lesson Dave had learned young, as a college student, when he’d taken a part-time job with a 1-900 psychic hotline. A killer student job: flexible hours, fair pay, crazyass stories for the amusement of his Kappa Sig brothers. All he’d had to do was answer a dedicated phone line between the hours of, say, 4 P.M. and midnight, and bend the callers’ questions and dilemmas into a set of provided scripts. One night an old woman called. She’d lost her brooch. The “Lost Objects” script—he had scripts for everything: love, death, illness, sports predictions—instructed him to tell her the object was in a “place of meaning,” and to walk her through the history of the loss without ever asking, as a parent advises a child with a misplaced toy, the last place she’d seen it. But Dave was bored. “Did you look under the bed?” he asked her. When she said yes, he told her to look again. “Now?” she said. Now, he answered. He waited six minutes—with the meter running at $3.99 per, though, since he didn’t work on commission, this was insignificant—until she returned to the telephone, panting, to say nossir. “Check behind the refrigerator,” he told her next. It was so friggin beautiful, listening to her grunt as she heaved the fridge forward, that Dave had to bite his sleeve to muffle his amazed laughter. For the next seven weeks Dave experimented with increasingly absurd variations on this theme, persuading people to throw away their toasters, mail him nude Polaroids (that worked with two chicks, both of them ferociously ugly, but he’d kept the photos anyway), rename their pets, bet their savings on racehorses with eleven-letter names, and, in one instance, urinate into the scotch bottle of an abusive and potentially unfaithful husband (to which he also listened, until he heard the presumed husband enter, midstream, and heard the caller say “ohmygod” before the line went dead). It was like long-distance puppetry, and Dave excelled at it.