by Shane Jones
“Well?” he asks.
“Okay,” I say. “I’m ready.”
Fang Lu and Billy Krol connect me to more electrodes.
I am given a second packet detailing how my life should be lived in accordance to PER. When I’ll be waking up, what to eat, how to exercise, how to act in public situations like the grocery store or shopping, what time to arrive at work, what work I’ll be doing at my computer (data entry, surveys State workers hand out by the thousands at town halls, county fairs, job forums) is listed on twenty cream-colored pages.
Dorian says the 9-to-5 routine is the pendulum swinging low, and slowly, and further and further outward it swings into my morning routine and eventually my home life. He scoops the air back-and-forth, wider and wider. He looks like a performance artist of sorts, a mad dancer, a professional who has said all this before and is now a bit bored. Fang Lu and Billy Krol ignore him, but I can’t stop watching.
I bring up how my dog was stolen, isn’t that what the video considers “outside interference?”
I picture Rudy struggling for air as he walks the interstate behind the mall, then collapsing in a wooden clearing, and the trees bending inward. Strangely, I view this as viewing myself sitting in the Zone, seeing Rudy and the trees on my computer screen over my own shoulder. Dorian and Fang and Billy are right, I will have no problem with the training. I see birds swooping down from branches to inspect Rudy’s body. A rat, standing on its back legs, scratches at Rudy’s stomach, and I think some animals should be able to bring other animals back to life, but God lacked creativity.
Dorian assures me it will all become second nature, a blank slate, he says, walking backward toward the windows and wind-milling his right arm into a circle. Remember the film, the subconscious, off the ride and on the ride, he says. His lips are thin and pink, his skin today nearly transparent. A full circle, he says.
I’m walking to the Zone through a quiet office, typically this is the best type of office, but not now, no way, dog house for me, yes sir. It’s not that no one is here, everyone is, but they’ve heard me coming from the elevator, my ID card scanning, so they’ve stopped discussing how I forgot the cupcakes. They will never forget I forgot the cupcakes. I enter the Zone.
After the first batch of data entry tasks, entering numbers 1-5 into the PER System, which has the waterfall logo in the bottom right corner, I hear Michelle and Steve talking in his cubicle followed by her ringtone, which is Native American wind flutes. My name is whispered. Steve burps. Michelle laughs. Steve farts. Michelle laughs some more. I ignore it all and work the PER System.
Francesca sits directly outside my boss’s office, a kind of gate keeper who answers the phone, watches YouTube videos of soldier family reunions, and energetically makes coffee throughout the day. A tireless worker, eternally producing, never complaining, who is paid the least.
As State employees our salaries are available online to the public, but it’s not really for the public. Letting Steve or Michelle know they make more than Francesca adds an additional level of power to the structure. I’ve passed by their computers before and on their screens are hundreds of salaries. You get to see where you rank, what your worth is, in the wasteful eyes of the State.
Pouring myself a cup of coffee, which I’m not entitled to because I’m not in the coffee club after working from home – my name heavily scratched out in blue pen on the club chart tracking who purchases bulk coffee – I wish Francesca a happy birthday and explain how I left the cupcakes at home. I’ll bring them tomorrow, I say.
“Thank you,” she says, watching me sip coffee as I walk to the windows overlooking the plaza, much closer now that I’m not on floor twenty.
A man sunbathing on a roof throws a Frisbee to a poodle who nearly runs off the edge before biting it and bringing it back. The man, not looking, does the same, this second throw a bit harder, and the dog does the same, even closer to the ledge, but biting it and bringing it back to its owner.
“Good coffee,” I tell Francesca. I’ve always felt like coffee is a drug so you should buy the best, and what I’m drinking is the cheapest coffee available. I’m shocked how people with good salaries will put the poorest quality of goods into their bodies. My boss makes $175,000 a year and spends pennies per cup, complaining of headaches and acid reflux, his stomach gurgling over what he is telling you during meetings.
“Folgers,” says Francesca. “Master blend.”
“Great,” I say.
“The best,” she adds.
In the break room one morning there were two pieces of paper, one taped on the refrigerator, the other on the cabinet above the sink:
If you would like to join the COFFEE CLUB!
please see FRANCESCA. Otherwise, please DO NOT
“HELP YOURSELF” to coffee. THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
With the way Francesca is glaring at me I have no doubts this sign will return by day’s end. Only Wednesday and I’m on the outs. At least I have the Zone to relax into, my PER training, enter my ideal gate which, standing at the locked windows, listening to Francesca smack gum, this guy on the rooftop now taking his underwear off, seems impossible. Still, I’m moving forward with my life. I’m excited by what could happen to me.
“Nice day out,” I say, trying to sound pleasant. “Warm, but nice.”
“It was a nice day on 9/11 too,” replies Francesca.
I’m cleaning my bathroom, which I haven’t done in months. This isn’t a quick clean, but a deep clean where, with a wet-paper-towel-covered finger I dig up gray gunk between toilet and floor. This is an activity encouraged by Dorian because I think the idea is to kind of lose yourself in a bland project, just like my new 9-to-5 schedule will do to me, creating a blank slate so my gate will open.
After two laps around the bowl I find a hair. An Alice hair. How did it exist back there for so long? I think it’s no big deal and throw it away. But while brushing my teeth, guess what, the hair is in the sink. How’s that possible? So I turn on both the hot and cold water and flush it far away from me and any memories of Alice at this sink brushing her hair. Bye, see ya, I’m off to my future now.
Sometimes I imagine Alice doing something simple, like walking across the living room and smiling at me before sitting down with a bag of chips and I’m sick all through my body, nostalgia is worse than fire. Alice blowing out birthday candles while looking up at me. Alice at the beach squatting in the ocean to pee. Alice telling me to just leave her alone. It wasn’t always this way.
Before we got married, we spent a weekend in the Adirondacks and then on Monday afternoon decided to drive to Brooklyn for a house party. We had no hotel, no place to stay, we just went. I remember how exciting it was driving from the mountains and later across the Brooklyn Bridge framed with lights. This could be one of my final images, along with my boss drunk and sleeping in the bathroom stall, because I can still feel the way the air, those lights, felt while driving hundreds of miles with the windows down.
The house party was a Halloween party thrown in June, which made things interesting because no one had easy access to a costume. This was the point. The host had a sense of humor. Alice and I went as a bruise, black and blue clothing purchased cheaply at a Wal-Mart. I wore black sweatpants and an itchy turtleneck and Alice, she still looked amazing, wore a pear-shaped shiny blue dress found on the maternity clearance rack.
“A-ville sucks,” said a man with socks all over his body. Socks on his feet, socks on his hands, socks rubber-banded on his ears, socks hot-glued to his nipples. “Have you seen the condom?”
We spent most of the party alone in a back bedroom. We would have never done this years into the marriage because everything about me was still interesting. We joked about moving in together and even drunk it didn’t feel like a joke. It felt like the only necessary thing to do. We were both living alone and could barely make rent. I don’t remember much else about the party besides the sock kissed the condom. I think we passed out mid-conversation, in a heap, on the
host’s bed. I woke up hungover and excited.
“If you’re living together it doesn’t make sense not to get married.”
I hate to admit it, but this advice came from my boss and it made sense. I couldn’t stop thinking about being married to Alice and proposed in the kitchen. We didn’t need a big production. I was ringless and she said yes. Years later she said I never proposed to her.
I’m being sentimental again but I don’t care. When we had plans it was in bed together, reading, watching shows off my laptop, going out for Chinese. For dessert Alice would ask if I wanted “The Holy Trinity” and I’d say yes, of course, who wouldn’t want such a thing, and she’d come back with Doritos, diet Coke, and a Snickers. Then everything became routine. We didn’t need anything else until we did. For some reason, the music we listened to back then became embarrassing later on.
After our wedding she didn’t want to have sex. With me. She looked up from her reclined spot on the couch, the spot I’m in now, with an expression saying we were more friends than newlyweds. I don’t disagree with this now – we never had what you’d consider a sensual relationship. Because I’m not a sensual person, even though I would tell Alice that I was. But it became more and more important to her, a deeper, more intimate connection, bordering on the spiritual. I tried to be passionate but came off clumsy or creepy, and on occasion, both.
I stopped her from walking into the bathroom one night by pinning her against the doorframe because I had seen it in a movie. My fingers snagged her hair, yanked her head backward against the doorframe. She yelped, slapped my chest, and asked what I was doing. I answered, but it sounded like a question, that I was being sexual.
Or the night I rolled over in bed and went to whisper in her ear Let’s bang but something must have shifted in my body because I choked. I coughed hard into her ear and spit-up Cheez-Its, which, luckily, I caught on my shoulder.
But what really hurt didn’t have anything to do with Alice. The truth was I didn’t know how to be close to my wife.
For months she talked about sleeping with her ex-boyfriend. It’s only sex, she said. I never could argue with her. People were sexual creatures, and if our relationship was strong enough it could survive something merely physical. She said at least she was open about wanting to sleep with someone else, wouldn’t things be worse for her to do it behind my back?
You don’t own anyone. For men it’s ego wedged in the way, I think, and the inability to communicate feelings. My responses would be things like But we’re married and If we love each other we should sleep with each other not other people and But you’re my wife. And if you think about it, think really hard, those things don’t mean a thing. I spoke in clichés and hated myself. I told her to do whatever she wanted because a person could.
After it happened we had a talk where I didn’t talk. What could I say? I was mad and frustrated and she wore a black knit top that covered her jeans to her knees. I’m being superficial again. I’m the male gaze again. We tried working through it by attending therapy in a building that also housed a daycare center and a lingerie store. The therapist would ask how I felt and I’d say, “Bad” and she’d urge me to expand on the feeling. I’d stare at the bowl of M&M’s on the table until she moved on to Alice. I’d count the few blue ones. Maybe a therapist thing – track what color patients took, which was blue. I wonder what that means.
A few weeks after we stopped going to therapy, Alice and I watched a documentary about the Renaissance. One segment discussed women as the dominant role in the relationship – how the man wasn’t important and affairs were accepted because the institution of marriage wasn’t widely accepted. Alice said, “Guess I should have lived in those times.” I walked into the bathroom, fell to my knees, and punched the carpet around the toilet.
I’m being dramatic again. I’m not being honest. God could slap a lightning bolt through the window and into the cushion next to me but I don’t believe in God, maybe something else, a mystery terrifying enough to make me tell the truth. That entails seeing life from Alice’s point of view, how she felt in the marriage, trapped with me, how much she had to endure about my retirement, how it’s unheard of to leave a State job with the benefits being so good, the glorious payout at the end. I later realized that I only viewed her as parts, not a whole person with agency (thank you, Alice) not a reality severed from my own. She had dreams that didn’t include me. When she was offered the national Director’s position at RISSE in Chicago I told her I didn’t want to move and she replied she already knew that. I figured she wouldn’t make such a big move because I wouldn’t make such a big move. But she had already made up her mind.
After she left, Elderly said, “What goes around comes around.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said.
Some nights I have thoughts of growing really old and owning a cushioned toilet seat, reading glasses on a chain, a metal walker with tennis ball feet, and I’m alone and shuffling to the couch and where is Alice. Is she happy? Yes, she is very happy. Her ideal gate was leaving me.
During the marriage, I found her walking other cities – New York, Los Angeles, Chicago – on Google maps. She wanted a big interesting life and that required a big interesting city. She didn’t want a life my parents had already lived. Side-eyed, I watched her lurch forward on pixelated streets.
But are we just going to become wrinkled people living in different cities waiting to die?
Two new emails. One is from my boss, a welcoming kind of thing before tomorrow’s first real day back. The second is spam from someone named Crying Sub-God, whose avatar is an anime sumo wrestler with a single white tear stretched and falling to a blue mat. YEAH SHE RIDES HIM is the subject followed by non-sequential numbers and random letters in caps. The internet is a shithole but it’s thrilling. I’m disappointed the email isn’t about Rudy, who, with the exception of Tom Ruddles, I haven’t received one call about.
I get out of bed and pace around my apartment. I do laps. Outside, Elderly is attempting to push the Pontiac from one side of the street – no parking on Tuesdays and Thursdays – to the other side. The temperature has dipped into storm coming weather and he’s shirtless, body at a severe angle, head down and shoving the bumper that is ready to fall off, a corner scratching the pavement. It’s not exactly allowed by PER to go outside and help, I don’t think, but if tomorrow is the first real training day, of being back, I can still function fully in my reality.
“Who is Rudy?”
I don’t possess much strength, but somehow we move the Pontiac, crumbling home on wheels, to the opposite side of the street. The back end is easily four feet from the curb. Someone beeps as they pass, and Elderly screams to slow the fuck down. A garbage bag has been torn open by animals and Styrofoam food containers from Chinese restaurants and Dunkin Donuts cover the sidewalk and cling to the hills.
“My dog. My window was smashed out. Remember?” I point to my car across the street, the back window blacked-out in tape I stole from work.
“Nah,” says Elderly, out of breath, “but I owe you for dinner. I never forget a favor. I’ll get them back for you.”
“How’s that?”
“Thieves always return to the crime scene. Everyone knows that.”
“I don’t know that.”
“No? In Tehran they came back at night to watch the flames being put out by fire trucks with no water. The Shah had spent a million dollars on a party so they had no budget for emergency services.” Elderly pops the hood and studies the corroded parts. I wonder, because he’s so talkative, if he’s drinking again. Maybe I started something at the diner. Maybe I bought him too much Bud Heavy. “You drive me to the mall three days in a row starting right now and I guarantee they show up,” he says, still looking at the engine. “I’ll take care of them. Someone who breaks into a car to save a dog, they’re looking to do it again. And I don’t blame you, the mall is a great place to leave a dog in a car.”
“You’re in a mood.”
I don’t know if he’s joking or not.
“You have something else to do? Come on. You’re divorced. I could use a drive and so could you. Come on V, come on.”
On the drive to the mall we pass under the interstate ramp system, the only one of its kind in America. Before Alice, I commuted thirty minutes in rush hour traffic to campus and when I passed under the five curving ramps ascending fifty yards, maybe more, every inch of every ramp would be bumper-to-bumper with cars. Tonight as we go under the ramps there’s hardly anyone at all, only a tractor trailer on the top ramp driving under the moon.
“Trucks carry poison,” says Elderly as I take exit five into the mall. “There’s very little regulations now. It’s how they want it.”
“My coworkers eat nothing but Doritos and deli meat.”
“It’s because they want to die,” Elderly says. “Maybe not consciously, but secretively, inside.”
Slowly, I drive between the parked cars, many carefully backed in for no reason but to do it. If I’m seen backing into a spot come up from behind in the backseat and slice my throat open. Let my blood spray over the dashboard and onto the windshield. Elderly puts his feet on the glovebox, takes his right shoe off, and inspects a toe. He doesn’t smell like alcohol, but grass clippings and sweat. “We’re out on the town, V, soaking up American culture. Should we see a movie? Should we buy something at Best Buy?”
The yellow and blue lights of Best Buy are glaring. How do they get so much light in those letters? I drive another loop around the parking lot. Elderly keeps rambling about current events, how he’s so aware of them I have no idea. I want to ask why he’s so talkative, he hates chit-chat, but it doesn’t feel right. I let him talk until he gets it all out.