Vincent and Alice and Alice

by Shane Jones

  I went door-to-door asking strangers to vote for so-and-so. Houses you don’t live in always feel like they are pushing you away, but most of the time people weren’t home. Entire neighborhoods of empty houses, people out working just so they can afford their home. Sometimes I would look through the narrow glass next to the doors and see a family eating dinner. One time a guy answered the door with a lizard clinging to his sweater and didn’t speak. Even as I did my little speech and asked questions he was silent.

  This call is from Jim, who says he’s married to Rebecca, they live near the mall and have four children, all girls. A personal touch is vital. During my volunteer days you had to use your first name, never a full. Be casual. Be relatable. The most common question was why the Governor was driving around in a Corvette when the State was $64 billion in debt. A pretty good question. Our instructions were to say the Governor’s personal expenses are his finances, not connected to State finances, and to add how classic cars were essential to American culture. This was printed on little scraps of paper, but I never read from it. I just said the guy liked shiny cars.

  “That’s nice,” I say to Jim, getting comfortable on the couch, head on pillow, legs stretched out. When Alice comes into the room making a “Who is it?” face I shrug. She walks into the bedroom and closes the door.

  “Rebecca,” says Jim, “sometimes gets carried away like all hell.”

  I play along. “I know what you mean, Jim.”

  He’s all nerves, whispering. I get the feeling he works in a huge office, surrounded by others in identical cubicles.

  Now it sounds like he’s walking, maybe moving through the office to a conference room, like I did when I’d call Alice from work and talk for hours.

  “Are you married?” he continues on script.

  “Yes,” I say. “Happily married.”

  “So you know what I mean.” He pauses. “I guess I don’t know how to say this, I’m sorry,” he says, so quietly, it’s eerie.

  I sit up. Alice is still in the bedroom with the door closed. “Wait, what’s this for again?”

  The phone is put down, maybe rubbing against a moving leg, before he says, “I found an old flyer about your dog.”

  Since Alice appeared I haven’t thought much about Rudy. Another effect of PER, mentioned during the training, is erased sections of your reality. What the film can’t cover can be taken-away to make room for the gate. So no matter how hard I think about Rudy running at the park, he’s pixelated and chopped into floating pieces.

  But PER can’t erase past feelings. My heart speeds up as I bring Rudy into cloudy focus over the baseball field while talking on the phone to a stranger named Jim. Rudy’s transparent tongue, seeping with blood, hangs over my face.

  “Listen,” says Jim. “I can’t talk really because she’s in the kitchen, she never lets me be by myself, but she’s the one who broke your car window. She’s nuts like that, all hell. Like, I’m hiding in the garage right now, that’s how bad my life is and, for the record, she had no idea your dog was sick. By the time she got him to the vet it was too late. I told her not to bring that damn dog in here. God, I’m sorry but –”

  I ask how he found the flyer.

  “I work at Rapp Road landfill. One was stuck to the door of the mall bin. Rebecca never said a thing. Why do I stay with her? Anyways, I felt like you should know. She’s coming for me.”

  I ask where Rudy is buried.

  “The vet on Pickett Ave,” whispers Jim. “They cremate them too.”

  They’re mopping the floors and the lights have been dimmed, but I’m knocking on the door anyways. The assistant from before is spraying a bottle of poison-yellow liquid onto a steel cage on the counter. With a white rag he cleans the metal bars and they shine. For a place so full of death it sure cleans up at night. I knock on the glass in annoying taps. The assistant puts down his spray bottle and walks to the door shaking his head.

  “No more appointments,” he says through an opening in the door. “Call in the morning.”

  “It’s Rudy,” I say, like in the past week he hasn’t seen a thousand animals. “The dog,” I add, for clarification.

  “I’m sorry,” says the assistant, putting one hand back on the lock. “We open tomorrow at seven.”

  If you would have told me, when I was eighteen years old, I’d be nearly forty-years-old living with a fantasy wife and knocking on a vet’s door, in the dark, about a dead dog, I wouldn’t have believed you. I wouldn’t have believed you if you told me I’d live my life working an office job, dreaming of retirement. But life doesn’t care if you work hard or live morally or have dreams. Life does whatever it wants to you.

  Mom said she never trusted a person over the age of forty because they had experienced too much nonsense. When I told her I couldn’t trust what she just said given her age, she locked herself in her bedroom for the rest of the day with her animals and blared Guns N’ Roses. That about explains Mom before the accident. How Dad was able to deal with her I couldn’t understand until I realized she was the way she was because she had to deal with Dad. It was the nonsense and absurdity of him, of being together, those summer vacations, his detachment from others including her, filling her up, shutting her down, for good.

  “The dog with the bleeding tongue,” I say desperately. “Someone brought him here. An angry woman, named Rebecca.”

  The assistant opens the door a few more inches, takes his hand off the lock, and sticks his head into the opening. “The dog who smelled like trash?”

  “Yeah. Can I have his ashes?”

  I follow the assistant to a back office with mahogany framed degrees from three different community colleges and a 1996 Chicago Bulls poster, the one with Michael Jordan hugging the trophy and crying. It smells like wet fur in here. The desk has loose stacks of papers, a miniature fan, and a Dennis Rodman figurine with green hair. On the floor next to a garbage can is a stuffed dog in a red sweater with white stitching on the back: PAXSON. The floor gleams like a hospital. I think that’s the point – for people to arrive with their animals and feel like their pets are on the same level as a human being. As the assistant rummages through the papers the more it smells like weed.

  “My boss’s office,” he says, moving around the desk and flipping up the papers. He reads from a sheet before reaching for the next. Behind the walls many dogs are barking. A plastic ball with a bell inside rolls past the door and a cat follows. “Hey, Rudy’s here,” the assistant says, excitedly. “I mean, not here, but here.”

  He flops down in a black leather chair on wheels and rolls himself to the side of the desk, legs spread wide, and pulls out a drawer from a filing cabinet helping support the desk. The drawer itself is the entire filing cabinet, endlessly deep, and inside are rows of mini Ziploc bags, each one with black Sharpie marker indicating a date, each one with animal ashes resembling pencil shavings.

  Walking his fingers up the rainbow edges of the bags the assistant makes kissing noises. His eyes widen as his face scans back-and-forth. I want to vomit. I should have stayed home with Alice who, being here now, doesn’t feel real. But it did happen, I know she is there. I am both in my gate and my reality and it’s blissful and awful. Is this how Aidan and Lucy felt? The assistant raises a bag to the ceiling light and says, “Here we go.”

  I carefully pinch the bag at the rainbow edge and thank him. The bag can’t weigh more than a few ounces. Rudy as a palm full of black dust and pulverized bones.

  The assistant leans back and throws an orange Nerf ball at the ceiling. “Thirty dollars,” he says catching the ball before throwing it again. “And you have to sign forms, like a bunch. Sheryl doesn’t really need to, but she tracks everything. Or you could give me forty, and no forms?”

  I text Alice: “Still out be home soon.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  I have exactly two twenties in my wallet.

  I’m driving at night with dog ashes on the dashboard. I’ll either bury him at the playground or
the woods behind my parent’s old house. I can’t keep dog ashes lying around my apartment. I don’t believe in burial for myself, but doing it for Rudy is important because no one did a thing for him when he was alive. So many animals are buried in those woods behind my parent’s place, and I don’t want to imagine what kind of legal action I’d face if I’m found burying him at a playground. Old house it is. When I turn the wheel, I do so slowly, watching the ashes, easing on the breaks.

  I pull into the neighborhood of big homes with lighted driveways that no one can afford, but it’s fun to pretend. In America no one real sees your debt so you can be whoever you want. What’s that quote… “We are what we pretend to be, we just better be careful what we pretend.” Marcel Duchamp? Lights for your driveway staying lit as you dream. I pass two men in reflective vests walking four dogs. Ah, yes, the suburbs.

  I’d be lying if I said being here doesn’t remind me of the accident. It comes flooding back in bloody colors. If I can speak openly about the podium incident, then I can speak openly about it. I drive pass two more people walking dogs, their flashlights crisscrossing higher-up on the pavement, floating briefly over my windshield.

  For months after it happened I would become either angry or depressed if anyone asked me about it. But if no one asked me about it for a stretch of time I would randomly start talking about it. It was an accident. Unusual because a drunk driver turned onto an off ramp, going in the wrong direction, and struck the only car exiting. All that glass. It was every news story because the drunk driver was an ex-Leader with a great smile, much beloved and ninety years old. He had a drinking problem no one talked about because he was charitable. My parents were occasionally mentioned as the people in the other car, but they were just an oddity, a pairing, “at the wrong place at the wrong time.” I became so used to telling the story it’s like how people discuss the weather. Why do some people say, when the weather is nice, “I’ll take it?”

  Where they were hit is an off ramp in downtown A-ville where on the fractured wall of a parking garage someone painted two gigantic bluebirds. Fractured because the spaces between the floors created massive rectangular openings in the bird’s bodies. I could have painted those birds. Not really. I like to think whoever did that painting did so in memory of my parents even though I know that’s not true.

  The woods are accessible from a back road. Walking in with Rudy in my pocket, the light in my old childhood bedroom designed with Family Guy memorabilia is on. A woman with perfect posture is sitting at a computer, probably watching Family Guy.

  I step through the woods, lots of stars in the sky above and insects moving below. Trees between houses feel out of place. Should be the other way around. I’m about a hundred feet from the house, but who knows exactly, all I know is that if I can see a woman in that room, she can see me in the woods ready to bury some dog ashes.

  I forgot to bring a shovel, but I don’t have to dig deep. How is the earth deep enough to bury everything once living? The sky is better off if heaven doesn’t exist.

  And it’s not that I don’t have to dig too deep, it’s that I don’t want to dig too deep. This area is a hidden graveyard of dead pets, and the thought of unearthing Lizzy or Bibb or Foxy or Helio, a decayed half-paw or tennis ball sized skull is unsettling.

  Using my hand in a little clearing of dirt, I scrape enough surface away to sprinkle the ashes in, swirl it around beneath the brightest star in the sky. I do an okay job but not great. In the distance, a leaf blower. People who own homes think those living in cities are fucked-up, but the suburbs is a different angle of weird. I don’t want to live like them, but I would if it was with Alice. The woman in the Family Guy room closes the blinds. I should say a prayer, but I just nod at the dirt and give my silence.

  I speed walk to my car, stepping over branches and through ivy and weeds, and into the dim glow of the suburban lights. These houses make everything around them darker. Someone walking their dog is standing across the street, watching me come out of the woods, their flashlight a tiny sun held to the pavement.

  “Where the hell were you?”

  “I went out,” I say nonchalantly. “You know, for a drive. I texted you.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  Alice is brushing her teeth again, which means she either ate something after I left or something is off in the gate. Alice repeating as Alice. Everything is identical to before when she was brushing her teeth before. Not déjà vu, but a feeling more accurate. A feeling that this is, without a doubt, the same experience. The tub contains the flamingo-pink water and the candles are lit again. I act like everything is normal when Alice repeats behind my back, “It’s like a spa, but in a Motel 6.” She says this while I’m looking in the bathroom mirror, washing my hands in the sink, and what I notice, what it looks like, is that her lips don’t move.

  “But where did you actually drive to?” she asks. “You didn’t do or get anything?”

  Early in relationships these types of questions are never asked, but later, one person always asks them. This is final year Alice for sure. I look her up-and-down for some physical inconsistency, a glitch in the gate, something, off.

  “Just drove around,” I shrug, “to clear my head.”

  “In a circle?”

  “Yeah,” I say spinning in place. “In a circle!”

  Alice is asleep next to me in bed. Time is passing and there is nothing I can do about it. I want to stop my life and be in the black hole with Alice. I don’t want to enter the void alone, but there isn’t any other way, we’re all leaving at split intervals. Do people who buy lots of things think they can take that stuff with them? In some countries when you reach a certain age you give everything away. Death cleaning. At the end, it’s just you, naked, waiting in an empty room.

  I count to twenty and life moves forward. Alice is here. Alice is here, Alice is here, Alice is here, Alice is here, Alice is here. The air from the open window turns cold. Alice is here, Alice is here, Alice is here, Alice is here. She rolls onto me and rubs her face into my neck. I can’t move, because Alice is here, her legs moving apart and to the sides of my hips.

  Her hair sweeps my face as she moves her lips to the other side of my neck and it’s pure skin-on-skin sensation, thrown forward into the darkness with my hands holding her ribs. However impossible, make this last forever, because I don’t care how smart anyone is, all secrets, the world, are with Alice. I pull her into me by her shoulders, kiss her forehead, and it’s everything.

  She’s trying to tell me something. I can’t understand what she’s saying. She speaks in a low grovel and it sounds like Dooooorrrrr or just Ooooorrrrr, but what it really sounds like as she sits back, eyes closed, skin coated with sweat as the wind consumes the room: Dooooooriiiiiiiaaaaannnnnnn.

  JUNE 27

  My office building is all water. It shimmers like an ocean. Ascends with each cloud dolloped into the sky. I ride the elevator in a single whoosh.

  The office floor is a desert road bordered with burning cactus and cubicles. Dorian stands on a Xerox, holding a firehose, extinguishing the flames. My coworkers aren’t here, just me walking, sand-waves blowing over my feet and under their cubicle walls. Strips of clothing cling to my skin in the dream, and it ends with me in the Zone, only my head and computer visible in the surrounding wreaths of smoke and blue static dots.

  I walk in on Alice making soup in the kitchen. Steam billowing up from a metal pot. She says it’s for a refugee potluck lunch at RISSE, but it’s not soup season. I’ll pretty much eat any type of soup if it’s hot enough. Let’s face it, most soup is just hot salt anyway, and as long as it’s hot, you’ll eat it. Listen to me. Ridiculous. Happy with Alice this morning moving around the apartment tracing crescent moons on my face, kissing my shoulder, saying deep shit about immigration, telling me, “Have a good day.” Who cares what Alice this is or how long she will last or what she was saying last night.

  Bell’s white Dodge Charger is parked up the street. The driver’s s
ide window is down with his forearm resting on the frame. Cops can have tattoos now. They like to wear short sleeves to show them off. But Bell is clean-cut as they come, he’s just an egoist who likes to admire his veins in the sun. Closer, I watch his beady eyes in the rearview mirror.

  “Vincent,” he says, twisting himself from the car, standing then walking to where I’m about to pass on the sidewalk. “Anything?”

  “No,” I say, still walking. “Nothing to report officer.”

  “Call me if you hear anything,” he says forcibly.

  “Sure,” I say, more to the air in front of me than to Bell. Something creepy about him I can’t describe. I bet he’s hairless. Dark stories in that head of his. Weird stuff he’s into late at night.

  “Good boy!” he shouts as I create distance between us.

  At a green light, a woman in her car is clutching the steering wheel while two shirtless men clean her windshield with newspapers. I didn’t notice it at first but the woman is sobbing, her chest against the horn. The men climb onto the hood and start humping and moaning and mock-licking the glass as she shakes her head. Bell’s white Dodge Charger zooms up with the lights on.

  Settled in the Zone, I complete three hours of data entry while my coworkers debate if Muslims should be executed. I don’t know where Sarah is. She has an instinctive knack for knowing when these conversations take place and leaves to move her car or walk around the plaza or sit in the cafeteria. On her computer this morning she was staring at a full-sized add with yellow text: 99 CENTS OFF. When I asked her if everything was okay, she just nodded and mumbled, “99 cents off.”

  Since Alice came back, I haven’t paid attention to the looting and violence, the increased fires set to convenience stores, mosques, anything appearing ethnic. The men cleaning that woman’s car looked Muslim, but who cares, there are a thousand other things to worry about. I’m listening to my coworkers because I can’t lock in. The general consensus is that every Muslim could be sent home today, and when I say from my cubicle that their home is where they escaped from, Steve exclaims, “Not my problem.” He adds that he believes in solitary confinement, and Michelle contributes, “Do the crime, pay the time.”