by Shane Jones
“You did,” he answers.
I settle into the Zone and don’t do a thing because I’m not sent any work. The PER System with the waterfall logo is no longer accessible. So I reactivate Facebook, and like a hummingbird jump from site-to-site. It’s so easy. I become distracted by people who don’t care about me. It’s enjoyable.
I need to concentrate on the real Alice. What would her ideal gate be? A $20 minimum wage, universal healthcare, a four-day workweek, no prisons, high-end grocery stores built in the poorest of neighborhoods. An ideal gate that doesn’t involve herself. Is peace an option, even in fantasy, if you live here? I’m being negative again. But the thickness and strength of such a film seems impossible.
My work day is a typical work day before PER, before the podium incident. Steve, from his cubicle and directed at no one in particular says he dislikes walnuts. Yes! Michelle slurs – sounds like she drank during lunch – that you either have a country or you don’t. Zing! Emily is into the Muslim ban, and how really it wouldn’t cost much to charter a thousand flights to send “all of them” back home. Ba-boom! I lower my head until my forehead is resting on the edge of my desk. There’s a lot of crumbs on the floor, and what appears to be a half slice of pizza. I guess ants can’t make it up this far, but one time we had a pigeon stuck in the wall and listened to it for weeks. Every morning Steve would slam his fist against the wall to see if it would chirp or be silent. They cheered when it went silent.
The tape comes off my wrist, and soon after the cotton ball falls, my wrist drips blood.
I wake up to Michelle saying, “At the funeral, she laid down in the casket to take a selfie.” In the reflection of my monitor I’m a self-portrait disappearing.
I’m in the bathroom and my phone is ringing from the living room. I took a shower because I walked home in the rain and my hair smelled liked smoke, according to Alice, who didn’t move from the couch when I came in. I rub a glob of clear-green lotion into my palms and cover my face. All things considered, I don’t look so bad.
On my walk home I considered the following: if Alice is divorcer Alice, and if PER can’t handle a person as the focal point of an ideal gate, and the real Alice is coming back for whatever reason, then what choice do I have? I don’t need to preserve my gate, I need to preserve my future. I need to move toward my retirement while working on my reality: the real Alice.
“What’s that?” I yell from the bathroom.
Alice is talking to someone in the living room. Maybe my eyes do look odd, Omar was right, a washed-out brown, the shape too is a bit squashed or, just, off. On the fogged glass I write GATE then smear it with my fingers. Alice shouts my name, and when I don’t respond immediately she shouts it again.
I walk out, rubbing lotion onto my arms, trying to act as normal as possible, and she’s in the middle of the living room holding my phone out to me. I haven’t decided when to begin dismantling the gate. She looks so real. She looks so alive.
“It’s Alice,” says Alice.
A tidal wave of anxiety washes over me. PER Alice can communicate with the real Alice.
“Hey you, it’s Alice,” repeats Alice.
“What?”
“Your wife,” she says, tapping the phone against my hand. “You haven’t been returning her calls?”
“I don’t know what any of this is,” I say, taking the phone like I don’t really want it. “Must be a wrong number,” I say glancing at the screen (it’s really Alice) “or a crank call, or, I don’t know. I’ve been getting a lot of telemarketers lately. Have you been getting a lot of telemarketers lately?”
“Stop being weird,” says Alice, “and talk to Alice.”
“I’m not being weird.”
“Then talk to Alice,” replies Alice.
I turn my back and whisper hello into the phone while walking toward the kitchen.
“Vincent,” says Alice, “why won’t you talk to me?”
One thought I had is that Alice previously called because one of her parents had died. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to talk to who had experienced losing a parent. When we were married, her mother had a dozen ailments and continued to live through the diagnosis. They could have ganged up. But this isn’t true. Alice is involved in the rebranding effort at RISSE around the corner and wants to get coffee. She wants me again. Saturday morning. She ignores the fact that herself answered the phone. Hiding in the bedroom, I say that sounds great, coffee, sure, I like coffee, great, perfect. She says, “I’m looking forward to it.”
“That was Alice,” I tell Alice walking into the living room. She’s on the couch, eating gummy worms. My first attempt at dismantling the gate feels wrong. “I’m going to see her again.”
She shrugs. “So?”
“I’m meeting Alice.”
“You already said that you fucking idiot.”
“You’re not Alice,” I tell Alice.
She gets up and walks toward the bathroom and her movements are lethargic. For a second, her left leg looks like a star-filled sky, and the skin on the back of her neck is a flaky moon-gray. I sit on the edge of the couch thinking this is it, the end, the collapse.
I run through the six rules in my head while itching my wrist.
Water is running in the bathroom and it runs for a long time, too long for her to still be washing her hands or her face or brushing her teeth. Outside, the sun is below the clouds now so it can do whatever it wants, but it’s raining in the light. Everything I see in my life is unbelievable. Maybe Alice is gone. But she comes out with a towel pressed to her damp face, and into the living room, smiling like Alice, and it’s impossible to believe she isn’t real and will ever leave.
JUNE 29
An electrician on a red ladder is installing ceiling lights in the breakroom. His steel workbox, open on a tray on wheels next to him, has a piece of cardboard taped to it with the following written in black Sharpie: ITEMS GAINED BY WICKEDNESS DO NOT PROFIT.
These new lights are a brutal level of fluorescent, I squint walking through the breakroom. How bright is a star close-up? A black hole actually contains color. When she leaves, will Alice experience pain? I don’t want to think about it but I am. Am I doing the right thing? Is there such a thing?
At the water cooler is a little girl in a baseball uniform – sky blue shirt and white pants and yellow baseball cap with ponytail pulled through – most likely the daughter of an employee in another office. I’ve never seen her before. Maybe Steve has a daughter he never mentioned before, which would be a very Steve thing to do.
“Big game?” I ask.
“I’m the catcher. What do you do?”
“I’m an office worker working toward retirement.”
“What else?”
Water is leaking from the blue jug and onto the floor. Standing in a clear puddle, the little girl stares at me. I really don’t have an answer. The janitor with the YEARS OF ABUSE shirt comes lumbering around the corner and throws down a Slippery When Wet floor sign.
“I just work an office job,” I say and flutter my fingers on an imaginary keyboard.
“I’m waiting for my Mom.”
“And what’s your Mom’s name?”
“Mom.”
“No, what does her Daddy call her.”
“Sarah.”
I’m walking from the bathroom and Sarah is coming out of the women’s bathroom at the opposite end of the hall. I had no idea she had a kid. In an office where everyone talks about every intimate detail, she has said nothing about being a mother. The electrician is humming a familiar song, and the little girl is throwing a ball against the wall.
“Vincent, you okay?” Sarah asks.
“I’m fine.”
She touches my stomach, palm flat, and leaves it there. “Okay?” she says, then looks embarrassed. She removes her hand. “I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m doing, I’m in such a weird mood, you know?”
I repeat, “I’m fine.”
“Everyone in the office thinks you
’re cracking up. I don’t know how to say it, but they’re saying you’re losing your grip.”
“Oh, because I am,” I try and joke.
“You could talk more. It helps to get stuff out. You don’t have to be like them, you know.”
I tell her all the mistakes I’ve made with Francesca which makes us laugh, even though I’m not sure it’s funny. Even the electrician, his head disappearing inside a removed ceiling tile, laughs. This is how the world works, if you let it. When you immerse yourself in an office life you end up laughing at things that aren’t funny in your life. And it’s not unusual, millions do it, everyday.
“I don’t know,” says Sarah. “I just felt like I had to say something. You’ve been so quiet in your cubicle since coming back. I mean, you were quiet, but most of the time no one knows if you’re here. You have such a great spot. Steve really wanted it. I got my kid back. After five years I have custody from…I’m just so happy.”
“Mom, come on!”
“I have to go. I’m worried about you. Take care of yourself.”
Sarah walks away, heading back through the breakroom.
I turn the corner, and a light tube is slipping from its sword-shaped box, raised by the electrician on the ladder. I start to lunge forward, mutter something, but I don’t really try to catch it. The light shatters on the wet floor.
“Goddamn it,” fumes the electrician. “Well, it’s not my money.”
“It is,” I say, “it’s taxpayer money.”
“Shit on me. Hey, you have that corner cubicle, right?”
I nod.
“I fixed your light. Put in one of these new high voltage babies.”
I walk back to the Zone.
“You look like Bert, from Bert and Ernie,” says Alice when I walk into the apartment. It appears she hasn’t moved today, the apartment surrounding her looks untouched. She’s dressed in what she wore last night.
“Thank you.”
“It’s the shape of your head,” continues Alice, who sits on the couch with her feet up on the table. The TV shows a man in a leather vest and American flag bandana with his outstretched arm aiming a gun at a crowd of forest-green ski-masks. In the background is a storefront framed in fire and people running in and out. Holding up one hand toward my jaw Alice pretends to turn my face in a deep study. “I don’t know if it’s because you’re getting older, but your head is longer and has a pinched quality to it now.”
“Like Bert’s.”
“Exactly,” she replies satisfied.
She screams from the kitchen. Sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, head down, Alice is scratching at the floor tiles, peeling them up. I sit down next to her and ask what she’s doing.
“I felt it from the beginning. The call confirmed it, but I don’t care. I’m not going.”
I wonder what hotel Alice is staying at. She could be at RISSE right now. The real Alice could go for a walk and Alice, looking out my apartment windows, could see herself. She could walk down the steps wanting to meet herself.
It’s excruciating, but touching Alice I tell Alice she can’t stay.
“I said I don’t care,” she repeats, this time with more force, glaring.
I break another rule. I agree with her, tell her yes, you aren’t real. Her skin dims. Her hair flickers white, three night stars suspended in the mess. Everything is fine. I take a deep breath and she slides across the floor like it’s suddenly been turned vertical. I flip onto my stomach and reach, but she’s dragged into the ether edges of my collapsing gate.
I scramble on all fours and dive at her outstretched fingers.
I slap my hands along where the wall meets the floor.
Losing any version of Alice again is too much. I run through the apartment calling her name, wishing her back.
The bed covers rise with the mold of two bodies embracing. Limbs are writhing, arms and legs entangled inside. I’m seeing things, this is part of the collapse. But we’re in there, I know it, those are our bodies moving under those sheets, Alice and I, forever. Before we were married, Alice and I never talked about the future. Before we were married, I woke up holding Alice. Stepping forward, I pull the covers off, but there’s only the beige-bare mattress, a cloud of hot air.
I cover the apartment three times, everything to the sides blurring and shaking, and I know I should be excited Alice is leaving when Alice is back, but I’m a mess.
Outside, I do two laps around the house in my bare feet, quickly becoming wet from the grass. My landlord, standing in the corner of the backyard, waves hello. The neighbor’s guitar playing is improving. A few backyards over kids on a trampoline are screaming over the low fences.
I walk into the apartment and Alice is sitting on the couch with her feet up on the table. She says, “You look like Bert, from Bert and Ernie.”
JUNE 30
Michelle said on her last summer vacation it was so hot she couldn’t visit the donkey sanctuary. I check my retirement fund. I should start smoking for the breaks. I should drive to work and move my car every two hours. I should come back from lunch completely wasted and pass out in the stall.
My boss is snoring in his office, a digital Las Vegas slot machine spinning on his computer, McDonald’s bags everywhere, box fan buzzing on the floor.
“A sanctuary? For donkeys?”
“They love ‘em.”
My boss wakes a little after two, and because he’s so bored he has us draw straws to see which one of us has to stay, everyone else can leave early. It’s the hottest day of the year and the Leader’s staff are working from home. The Dome offices don’t have air conditioning and let’s be honest, there’s really no work to do.
“What does a donkey even do?”
“What do you mean what does a donkey do?”
There’s a real Hunger Games vibe to everyone standing in a circle in the office. Before it even starts Sarah says she will just stay, the game doesn’t need to be played, but my boss says it’s not an option as he walks to us holding the straws and in his other hand orange scissors. Sarah has been redecorating her cubicle with pictures of her daughter. Donkeys had a purpose, like a hundred years ago, but now they just give rides at birthday parties.
We pull straws and Sarah loses.
One way to leave work is through the underground plaza, no windows, connecting the Dome to more office buildings and Mosby Avenue, which runs parallel to my normal route. On occasion, I do this when I’m tired of walking home in the same direction. Today I’m just scared. It feels like Alice will never leave. It feels like I’m doing something wrong.
The underground plaza is empty and the only light is coming from the tiny windows on the third floor terrace. It’s a massive marbled space with vaulted ceilings. The chandelier-like lights are kept off in the summer months, a fact routinely publicized in the Leader’s mailers. I walk slowly, repeating the rules in my head, coming up with a plan to erase Alice.
Three workers are roping off the Governor’s blue corvette for a display in the center of the underground plaza. Why this is so odd is that no one is around, here in A-ville, for any event. Normally everyone arrives from surrounding cities and villages during the fall and winter months. A display is usually assembled for the heavy traffic to come, not this time of year. But I guess even the Governor gets bored.
Did you know that the ex-Governor had one of the biggest art collections in the world, and when he got bored, do you know what he would do? He’d have a helicopter move his lawn sculptures to new places in his rose garden.
In the cold air, the marbled walls and limestone floor, the ceiling easily two stories high, a corvette roped off in near darkness. The workers sip Stewart’s coffee and check their flip-phones. One of the workers keeps scratching his dick. What a world. A sign printed from our office illustrating the corvette’s power compared to three hundred cartoon horses sits on an easel under a spotlight.
I don’t know what to do about Alice. I don’t know what to do about my life.
>
As I head home, turning right up-and-out of the plaza toward Mosby Ave, Shawl Lady sprints, then disappears around a limestone corner.
At home there’s no Alice. I call her name and check all the spaces again, do the walk around the house and come back in. Nothing. Not even a hair in the sink. Gone.
THE WEEKEND
The sky is low shelves of ultramarine blue clouds, and fluffy black clouds of mammoth explosions rise in the higher distance. The sky doesn’t even know what it wants anymore. I’m walking to a café to meet Alice. Sidewalks should be different colors. Confetti could fall for no reason at all, we don’t need a celebration every time, you could just put some over random doorways and make someone’s day. Life could be more exciting this way. My life is thrilling on a Saturday morning.
Sitting at a side table against the windows drinking from a white cup is Alice. She sees me coming through the door and stands up. It’s her. Physically, there is no difference between Alices, but the feeling I have as I get closer is way different, a great fire breathing in my head. I might have a podium incident on my hands again. My stomach is either upset or I’m hungry, I can’t tell, and my legs are weak.
“This is so nice,” she says giving me a hug, “it’s been awhile.”
I mumble, “Yeah.”
“You seem tired,” she says. “Go get a coffee and then we can talk.”
I walk to the counter and order a black coffee with no room. It arrives from a secondary barista, a tall teenager weighing a hundred pounds who walks on the balls of his feet. Alice is here. He places the coffee with two inches of room in front of me. Alice is here. I pay two dollars and leave a dollar tip. Four women in pant suits run into the café shielding their heads because it’s raining outside and the cashier says under his breath, “Get the wraps.”
“So you’re back,” I say, sitting down. “I mean, here we are.” For some reason, I extend my arms.
“Back in A-ville,” she says, wobbling her head. “Who would have thought? Not me.”
“Not me either.”