by Shane Jones
At the nurses station I ask to speak with the doctor treating Elderly. All the nurses chew gum and have ponytails and tired eyes brightened with make-up. If I had a daughter I would tell her: You will meet very few people in this world who love what they’re doing. So the trick is to be one of the few that has something inside them that needs protecting, but don’t let anyone else know it, just keep doing it, protecting it, letting it grow and giving you meaning.
A tall doctor, not too dissimilar to the veterinarian who treated Rudy comes walking down the hall, shakes my hand, and introduces himself.
“As his son,” says Omar. He guides me into a lounge area, off to the side of the nurse’s station, with enough space for one family. A TV sits in the corner on a Formica table. The news is on. More protests. More buildings curtained in fire. It doesn’t feel real, and I wonder if it’s PER, the fantasy covering what I’m experiencing and not working the way it should be. My reality could be poking holes through my film, but there’s no way to know without talking to Dorian.
“No, his neighbor,” I say, declining to take a seat. “He asked for me through Sergeant Bell.”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Bell,” I repeat. “The police.”
Omar sighs and flips through a chart. “Has no family and lives in his car, hmm,” he comments. “Maybe a month left, difficult to tell with circulation. Think you could convince him to live in one of the homes until hospice? His wife doesn’t seem open to any possibilities.” He closes the chart. Then he steps too close to me and peers into my eyes. “Sir, have you been drinking?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Your pupils,” he says, turning his head. “Highly unusual color and dilation. Would you mind?”
“I would.”
Two nurses who have been talking about skin grafts are now looking at us.
“Five minutes. Just take a seat over there and I’ll check your blood pressure,” he says, grabbing my wrist and guiding me toward a room.
“Please don’t touch me,” I say nervously. “I’m late for work and it’s extremely important I get there. I need to get to work because I have work to do, at work. Don’t you understand?”
I’m starting to sweat and trying to use my professional voice, but it doesn’t sound like me. Inside my own mouth my words echo. “I have to do my work today,” I continue. “I have to go to work because I have to, I have to do my work. I have days that add up to my retirement, and if I miss those days I won’t have any retirement.” Those visiting loved ones are walking from their rooms and into the hallway to watch. “It’s important, you know. I have to go to work. I have to be at my computer right now. Don’t you understand?”
“Of course,” says Omar, releasing his grip. He does the slightest of head shakes to a security guard approaching from down the hall.
“Thank you,” I say.
Omar keeps his distance following me to Elderly’s room. On the way I nearly trip over Graves, I have to do an awkward legsapart jump, and from one of the rooms, someone, only legs packed in ice visible on a bed, claps.
I walk into Elderly’s room, tell him he’s going to be released, and say that I’ve found Rudy.
“Lying is important,” he says, his head compressed backward into three soft pillows. “You have to have liars to make any of this work.” He waves his hand around the room to signify the “any of this” and sighs. “Thanks for the cans, V.”
His food arrives via a bald man in all white hospital scrubs with an American flag pin over his heart. The tray is placed on a swivel stand then positioned over Elderly’s lap. Taco salad. The bald man unfolds a napkin and begins tucking it into Elderly’s collar. It seems humiliating, so I’m surprised when Elderly smiles, exposing his neck.
Elderly asks about the training, and I tell him it’s Alice, all I see is Alice. I say the real Alice is trying to reach me, and I’m not sure what to do. Alice, I confess, isn’t exactly Alice. I’m not directly asking Elderly for advice, but it comes across that way.
“That’s funny,” he snorts, and blinks slowly. “There’s no way out.”
“The Tehran workers,” I say, placing my hands on the edge of the bed where his legs are. “Were they happy?”
“For a little while,” he wheezes, “but like everything else, it wore off.”
“I thought there was a connection between them and what’s happening with PER.”
“Why? Because you wanted it to?”
“I just thought.”
“V, I don’t feel so hot. V, I know where all this is going. My age, where I am, I know.”
With a napkin I wipe his chin that is covered in salsa and lettuce strands. He seems to have no feeling in his face. I tip the plastic cup of water at his lips. I adjust his pillows and the angle of the mechanical bed and I sit and put my time in.
I adjust his blankets when he says he’s cold even though it’s warm in the room.
I itch his leg where he has an itch that he can’t reach.
The last story he tells me is how he once saw an old friend’s name in the obituary. He walked five miles in a snowstorm to the wake. When he arrived he realized it wasn’t his friend, just someone with the same name.
Francesca asks why I’m here when I called out. As I pour coffee I flatly respond that my stomach is better. If you want to dominate an office power-shout, “Good morning!” when you walk in, and if you want to skip a day, say you have the shits.
Basically my email was that I needed a large amount of time to sit on the toilet. Disgusting, I know, I don’t like it either, but it works because no one wants to talk about what the body is capable of. So much shitting.
“Just be sure you correct your time sheet.,” says Francesca. “I heard the last one had mistakes.”
“Thank you,” I tell Francesca. “Thank you very much.”
“No, thank you very much.”
I’m in the Zone, head woozy with the day. I texted Alice I need to work late again. Settling into six hours of data entry will strengthen the support beams of my gate. What’s unusual is that she doesn’t respond. People looking at their phones look depressed and I’m sure I’m no exception waiting for her response, especially sitting in a cubicle. The little gray cloud with the flashing three dots appears, which means she’s alive and typing.
I texted the wrong Alice. It’s an easy mistake, given PER Alice was never saved in my phone, only the previous texts that I deleted. The real Alice answers with a long stream of question marks and, “Just wanted to say I’m coming to A-ville. Why won’t you answer?”
On more than one occasion I’ve fantasized about throwing my phone from an office window and here’s another.
My first reaction is to text back, “Wrong Alice.” My second reaction is what if they met, PER Alice reaching out to touch Alice. I stare at the picture of her in New York in front of the bodega mural. I slip my phone in my pocket, decide to go to floor twenty and get Dorian’s opinion. Maybe this has happened before. Once again, I run away from the real.
Dorian has his feet up on his desk with a picture of Ronald Reagan on his thighs. A salad more bleu cheese than greens wilts in a plastic container next to his laptop, a screensaver of a fighter-jet ascending with silver and gold exhaust. The carpet is filthy with lunch crumbs and coffee stains, and the windows, which I thought were locked on every floor, are wedged open with tiny wooden blocks, a warm breeze blowing through and flicking the corners of papers. He doesn’t say to sit, but I sit in the same spot as before, during the interview.
“The best social program is a job,” mumbles Dorian with his thumb on Reagan’s hair. “As a person with a job, do you believe that?”
I don’t want to answer because I want to ask about Alice. “I don’t know, but my gate –”
“Right,” he interrupts. “Everyone who participates wants things. Why are you so different?”
“I’m not sure,” I shrug.
“Well, you’re not the first. We had a woman before who saw bir
ds. I’m serious. Her entire house just covered, inside-and-out with birds, even splashing around in her sink.” Dorian smiles sadly. “Tremendous worker though. But it’s okay for you to continue. I don’t see any real serious problem. That’s why you’re here?”
“There’s something else.”
“I have to tell you something. We don’t plan on staying much longer. We’ve been very successful. The best social program is a job. Be honest. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “It’s over?”
He says they’ve hit their quota for participants, the office is full (I didn’t see a soul on the entire floor), not much for them to do now but sit and monitor. He shrugs in a manner to convey boredom. He has the drained expression of someone who has achieved something, relished it, and is now waiting for what’s next. C-ville is their next stop which he doesn’t seem to care for. He says Fang Lu and Billy Krol have already begun the screenings. He says pizza in C-ville is lasagna, but I don’t laugh or try to correct him.
Each time I try and speak he interrupts me.
“Pizza,” he repeats, “like lasagna.”
He’s in a good mood looking out the window while discussing his marital problems. But when I finally cut him off to tell him about the real Alice contacting me, there’s genuine concern. His expression, along with his head, snaps back-to-center, facing me.
“Wait,” he says. “What?”
“The actual Alice,” I repeat. “The real one.”
“Here? Now?”
“Maybe not right now.”
“Are you seeing her? Are you planning to?”
“I’m not sure. Can I?”
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Because of the rules. I didn’t want to mess up my gate.”
I mention the phone call. How Alice must have seen the incoming call, she was standing over it in the kitchen and I said it was Alice calling. I tell him how I texted the wrong Alice. How I broke one of the rules and she tried to destroy herself in the kitchen. I describe the glitches.
He looks a little sick, physically shocked by what I’m saying, but he’s interested, transfixed on everything I’m confessing, wanting more, questioning why none of this was caught by Fang Lu or Billy Krol or Kate Helms, a name I don’t recognize and then realize, my heart racing, could be Shawl Lady.
He wants to know why wasn’t any of this brought to his attention earlier, but too late for that, too late to worry, now he wants to know everything about Alice.
If I updated my bag of holes list it would look like:
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
“The wobbling of the gate,” Dorian says sorrowfully.
I try and smile but just exhale nervous air. “Sounds bad.”
“I’m thinking,” he mumbles. “My guess is you’ll have to choose, but hold on a second.” He opens a drawer.
I do my nervous cough. “Choose?”
“Decide which one you want. Together they could have consequences. Glitches we can fix, it’s still early, but this, hold on a sec…honestly…I’m not sure what…” He’s shuffling through papers on his desk now. “But I can’t see, I can’t see a positive outcome. Could lose both in the overlap. Wait here.”
Dorian returns holding a white binder with the waterfall logo on the cover. Inside is the article I found on the internet, and what appears to be other papers he has written. As he flips through, the articles separated by some sort of color coded tab organization, there’s the anime sumo wrestler Crying Sub-God with the white tear. “Hey,” I say, reaching over and pointing on the paper and stopping him. “I’ve seen that.”
He puts a finger on the sumo wrestler. “This guy?”
I tell him I received an email with the same picture after our first meeting.
“Oh, that’s nothing. Krol sends it on day one of training,” he says, and continues to flip through the pages while settling into his chair. “To see if you’ll click on it. Participants who watch porn never access their gate.”
At the end of the binder there’s an article that freezes Dorian. I look away, pretending to think about something else, suddenly feeling awkward. It’s odd to look out the door and see nothing but vacant office space, cubicle walls with no person inhabiting them. Either Fang Lu or Billy Krol had hung a Fourth of July banner. It’s still push-pinned, one corner only on the far wall, but now drooping into the water fountain.
Dorian puts his feet back on the desk and places the binder on his lap, not to relax, but to shield the text from me, I think. He hums and touches his lips as one eyebrow rises.
“Absolutely,” he says, tossing the binder back onto the desk, “too risky for both realms.”
“Both realms?”
“That’s right.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
I think about Alice at home, how she’s Alice at the end of the marriage, where the tension was so great that every sentence had the weight of a weapon. If Alice at the castle was the peak there’s only a decline coming. The glitches I could have lived with.
“I think the situation,” he says, now leaning forward, the storm clouds dimming the room, “is new and fascinating territory, but my concern is Alice viewing the real Alice while inside your gate, what her reaction would be in such a situation. And just the mental strain it would put on you, depending on the reaction, I mean, it’s already affecting you.” He smiles, proudly. “If Alice is shown herself…The interweaving of film and reality is where the wobbling of the gate, your entire atmosphere…Never had this come up before.” With both hands he smooths his hair backward. “My recommendation is to collapse the gate before it’s too much for anyone involved. Especially yourself.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll do anything.”
“It’s such an interesting case.”
“Lucky me.”
“Like something sent from outer space.”
I sign a release form with the PER logo watermarked in the center. He reaches below and to the far right side of his desk and opens the same drawer and out comes the white box again. I can’t imagine wearing a second gold watch, what would that look like, but I go along with it. With my arm extended across the desk he uses a twisted paperclip device with little teeth to unlock the watch from my skin. There’s a burning sensation so I turn my palm up and see a dot of raised blood on my wrist. Dorian hands me a cotton ball and clear tape. If I was drugged then it all makes sense. I have a sudden flood of anxiety because I don’t want to lose any version of Alice, I want all Alice. Another wave of anxiety. It’s already too much for me to handle.
“It was a drug?” I ask, blotting the blood.
“Not entirely. Technology and nature combinations have yet to be sufficiently explored, but we rely on what we know to get you into the gate. Are you familiar with visual completion theory? It was mentioned in the packet. That helps as well, once the desire is located, then the repetition training is what really activates it all,” he says, handing me another roll of clear tape because I can’t get this one to work.
The sky is dark and dreary, and I cover my small wound. If stars had eyes what would lightning look like to them? In the distance, three columns of black smoke. Did we set a record for thunderstorms yet? I want more records in my life. Fires are being extinguished by the rain and I’m going to lose Alice again.
“A-ville,” says Dorian, relaxed now and nodding at the window, “I’ve never seen such a place.”
“It will be fine,” I mutter, thinking about Alice. I’ve been saying It will be fine my entire life and it has gotten me nowhere.
“The collapse shouldn’t be more than a few days,” he says. “Because your traini
ng was so successful, shutting it down should be easy.”
I ask how he can be so calm now. He says there’s no other choice. He’s looking at the Ronald Reagan picture again. “We’ve had to collapse one or two gates before, clients who just couldn’t handle what they saw, like the bird lady. It became overwhelming. Birds stuffed in the plumbing. Birds in the water heater. Birds flattened under the mattress. Birds chewed-up in the garbage disposal. Who could live with all those birds? Plus, she couldn’t concentrate on her work, a major deficiency that you didn’t experience in the slightest.” He sounds like a cop, a politician, a lawyer, a Leader, no emotion, no compassion whatsoever.
“But this is a person,” I say.
He hands me a printed out PowerPoint slide with an lime-green background and white text illustrating how the gate will end.
The subtraction of the watch, the pills, the repetition work, all the methods, are important, but you also have to break the rules many times over for the gate to properly close. A side list is precautions to take, how to react properly to the vanishing film, which in my case is Alice leaving me again, Alice as a soon-to-be memory, soon-to-be fading into the first.
“I think we’re all set,” he says.
“Did I do a good job?” I ask, surprising myself at the question. It just forces its way out of me, the child-to-parent feeling of being in the presence of Dorian Blood, who seems surprised by the question as well, his face kind of scrunches up as he sits back. One time Dad said I could ask him any question in the world, I was seven maybe, so I asked what a blow-job was. I thought Dad was going to fly backwards through the walls of our house when he heard that question and I think Dorian might too. More lightning outside and more columns of smoke and fires smoldering throughout A-ville, making it anew.