Vincent and Alice and Alice

by Shane Jones

  Driving northbound, the highway on the southbound side is on fire in one football field length section. We drive silently under the weaving ramp system with trucks above hauling poisonous goods.

  A block from home we pass a construction site with ten men in orange vests staring into a sinkhole. “It’s unbelievable,” she says into the window, “that everything is built by men.”

  JULY 3

  During a holiday, workers receive the day before off, and sometimes, the day after as well. Very typical State worker benefit. Hundreds won’t work this week, and the ones that will won’t have anything to do. They justify not doing anything by saying to themselves that at least they showed up. But I don’t know how I could get it so wrong and actually come in without realizing, last Friday, that Monday was a vacation day. I blame the nightmare weekend. I blame my life for fucking-up my life. It’s a minute past nine and I’m going home.

  Before leaving, I walk around the office. For the first time ever I enter each person’s cubicle without them. An office with no one inside it is so quiet. It feels impossible a human ever inhabited such a place.

  On Steve’s cubicle wall he’s hung a small banner RESPECT THE FLAG with an army ranger on one side and a person dribbling a basketball on the other. Three empty mayonnaise jars are positioned behind his monitor. On top of the jars are Diet coke cans stabbed with pencils. I circle his mouse and the screen lights up. His desktop is a picture of him holding a shark. I push the delete button on his most recent email.

  I keep going. Michelle has a job she hasn’t seen. The Governor needs a banner for his corvette display. I delete that. I go through her drafts folder, so many partial emails directed at her Lexus dealership, about how much she likes driving a Lexus. When she feels the timing is right she will purchase another Lexus, just, now is not the time.

  It’s thrilling to alter reality so I delete more.

  I stand in Sarah’s cubicle and look at the pictures of her daughter covering her cubicle walls. One is them in the underground plaza, smiling next to the corvette display. She has also put up older photos of when she was a girl standing between her parents dressed in black burkas, the background all desert, a distant flag with green stars.

  Emily’s cubicle smells like baby wipes. Several red white and blue Yankee candles and a large container of lotion. A tray of half eaten Lindt chocolates. I find her favorite horse picture, the one called Princess, and just before I delete it, I leave it.

  In my boss’s office I shred the time sheets. I find papers listing gambling debts where he owes unpayable amounts of money. This office life, there’s no fantasy here. I turn his computer on and delete emails, barely looking at the sender or subject line. It doesn’t matter, I just want them gone.

  I delete and delete and delete.

  I disconnect Francesca’s keyboard, which will confuse her for hours later this week.

  I get carried away. I go back and delete more work files that will get everyone in trouble. Any incoming jobs vanish. If my boss has any negative reaction, or really, any reaction at all, it’s when a Leader complains about a job not being fulfilled. And if the job isn’t completed, and the Leader, or staff, doesn’t remember the job, and the Leader doesn’t complain, all the better. It’s work that doesn’t need to be done.

  I change my mind when it comes to Francesca. I walk into her cubicle and look at her family portraits. She has framed her computer monitor with flag stickers. I find a drawer of Post-It notes, the ones she doles out by single stacks and tracks. Around her computer are endless job slips needing filing, too much work for three people, let alone one, and other papers my boss wants photocopied for no reason besides creating work for her. I find a calendar where she tallies how many pots of coffee she makes each day and how much of her salary, so minimal and insulting to begin with, she spends on coffee. Written on the back is a budget for what she pays for each person’s birthday. She has scratched out Emily’s surprise party and written next to it RUINED. On a Post-It note I write You deserve more and stick it dead center on her monitor.

  The weekend wasn’t enough time to erase Alice. I head to the elevator to go see Dorian. Give me advice on collapsing the gate, Blood, before the real Alice appears at my door.

  Disconnecting from the program and breaking the rules isn’t working. I could tell the real Alice to meet me somewhere else, but having her in the apartment again is crucial. It will spark what we had before, if she sees what she left behind.

  Shawl Lady is in the elevator again, her chin on her chest, shawl draped over her head. What I don’t do is compliment her shawl or say anything about the bus ride. Some people have experienced great traumas in life. When one of the holes in my bag was fear of driving over a hundred miles per hour, it leads to bouts of immobile road rage. A car would zoom by, cut me off, and take a sharp turn into a church. And Alice would say, “Maybe someone they know just died, ever consider that?”

  So sometimes it’s better not to say anything at all. Shawl Lady doesn’t acknowledge me and I don’t acknowledge her.

  The security door at floor twenty was deactivated – no red or green light on the black pad. The main room where Fang Lu and Billy Krol worked is empty with the exception of a cubicle wall – no thicker than an inch, but six feet high, seemingly hovering in the center of the room. How it’s upright with no support on either side, nothing fastening it to the ground, I don’t know. The slightest breeze should knock it over, and here it is, standing.

  I walk a circle around it. The blue carpeting I step on has paperclips and crumpled pieces of paper, a piss-colored power strip lays coiled up against the vents under the windows. The blinds are up, and for miles it’s storm clouds swirling.

  I knock on Dorian’s door. He doesn’t answer so I go in.

  Nothing in here but a desk and balled-up Post-It notes and the box of broken glass, which has been moved from its previous spot and is now leaning against the garbage can. He probably figured the janitor would empty it over the weekend or today, but didn’t consider the holiday. HQS never works the weekend before a holiday. HQS dislikes work in general. Five years ago they converted a storage facility into a self-described man cave, napping and selling weed while collecting overtime. The story was all over the news. Here’s something else you need to know when it comes to the State: a part of your taxes is spent on someone else’s vacation.

  The box itself is about two feet long and a foot wide, more of a top to a box than an actual box, I now notice, and the glass shards are skinny triangles stacked in layers. Something is glowing at the bottom. Slowly, I pull the glass out, piece by piece, placing them on the table.

  At the bottom are typed sheets, yellow and crusted in spots like liquid was poured on them. Carefully, smelling them first (no odor) I place them side-by-side on the desk.

  I start reading. It doesn’t quite make sense at first, but there’s an order. I re-arrange the pages, leaving squares of moisture on the desk.

  Holding the papers, my hands shake. It’s a follow-up report on Lucy and Aidan, the participants featured in the training video. Neither, says the report, was unable to adjust back to a normal way of life after their gates collapsed. They were, “unable to perform daily work functions” and were fired. The conclusion is that mentally they just couldn’t adjust to reality after experiencing their ideal life.

  Three suicide attempts in as many years listed in Lucy’s report, and mental health records for Aidan, endless prescriptions from specialists who couldn’t get him out of bed. No other follow-up reports are in here. Maybe the others are still in their gates.

  It doesn’t matter to PER, because once the gates are established, there’s no money involved. A single page of expense reports is included. A-ville is the only place so dysfunctional and average to ignore the warnings. Money, when you run a program like PER, exists when you receive the initial contract from the State. What Dorian leaves in his wake, according to this report, is only temporary, completely unsustainable, lasting weeks,
maybe months, then it’s back to your stupid life, which you can’t function in.

  Unless you can transition from your ideal gate to your ideal life. Unless you can move from one Alice to another Alice.

  In the elevator I hit the button for the ground floor, and when the doors close, I hit the button for floor eighteen, the Shawl Lady floor.

  The doors open and I enter a bright hallway with flower paintings hung on the walls. It’s an identical set-up to my floor. As I move down the hall the flower paintings become smaller, beginning with sunflowers, ending with roses.

  I walk into an open room of cubicles, one at the entrance, three in the middle, one in the far back corner. A Xerox in the direct center has the cord plugged into a ceiling outlet. All the lights are off, the only light comes from the windows. The floors uncluttered. Where I sit at in the Zone, located on my floor, someone I can’t see is typing. I’m surprised no one has designed a silent keyboard. Seems obnoxious everyone has to hear your work and feel your productivity.

  There are zero personal touches, the cubicles only contain a computer and chair in the relative darkness.

  The Xerox clicks on, hums, and begins printing pages. The typing stops, I don’t move, then the typing begins again fast and fluid. I glance at what’s printing – difficult to read they are shooting out so fast and sideways – but at the top right corner on each page is my name, date of birth, and social security number.

  Angling my head, viewing twenty pages or so I read a bulleted report of my weekend activities. There’s my coffee with Alice on Saturday and my trip to the mall on Sunday. Details like what I ordered at the cafe, when I laughed, what I tipped, and how I acted at the mall (talking into thin air, walked in circles, did one of those photo booth things) when multiple versions of Alice were present are written in shorthand followed by small symbols and strange code.

  A page shows the numbers 1 through 20, ascending and then descending.

  A page shows how the gate will close.

  Is Shawl Lady recording what I’m doing as I’m standing here right now? The typing stops. Maybe cameras are everywhere, pill boxes with a microscopic lens in every corner. But I’m not doing anything but thinking, re-reading the page showing how to kill Alice. Everything in my life is impossible. That’s not unusual, everyone thinks that, and how can billions think that way and still think we’re each unique?

  “Hello?” says Shawl Lady. “Dorian, honey?”

  I think she’s going to come out of the cubicle, but instead she starts typing again. I walk out of the office so slowly and head to the elevator. I know what I have to do now. There’s no door to make noise but I think about sneezing, and as I’m leaving, she’s typing.

  In the elevator I hit the button for the ground floor. The doors close and I’m falling. I sit on the floor and pull my thighs to my chest and shake until the doors open. Head up, I’m faced with rain.

  “I don’t care what happens,” says Alice, standing on the coffee table. She’s wearing a black robe with bees on the shoulders and sunflowers down the back, a cream colored bra, my blue mesh shorts. She kicks a ceramic mug off the table and against the wall, spraying it with coffee. The ceiling seems lower as I search for cameras. My head is spinning. Alice is still here and Alice is coming over. Turning back around, the coffee seeping down the wall is disappearing like washed-out watercolors.

  I mutter, “This isn’t easy for me,” which doesn’t mean anything, I just want to respond. This isn’t about me. It’s about gaining Alice while losing Alice and considering what Alice wants in life. Divorcer Alice said I viewed her not as a person, but a pliable piece in my reality, a thing to place meaning onto and it was unfair. It was unfair. The story’s center was always my viewpoint of her with me. I’m a bag scattered with a thousand holes all labeled Alice.

  “Go ahead,” she taunts. “Go ahead, whatever it is you want,” she continues, pacing from one end of the table to the other, which only allows two steps. “Whatever it is you want to do.”

  I break the six rules in thirty seconds. Speed is the requirement.

  There’s lightning just outside the windows as she crouches, covers her ears, and screams. Everything vibrates. Everything begins losing color.

  I smash the gate again and again as she fades, torso transparent, lungs faint-blue bags heaving, hands each a night sky pressed to her dimming head of stagnant white smoke.

  I stop and hope this is it, one Alice leaving and another about to arrive. A-ville leveling my life out. But she comes back in vicious vibrant color.

  “Let me see her,” she pleads. “I don’t care. Let me see what I look like.”

  I start going through the rules again and her body flickers, static-like, then moon-gray, before coming back, but this time incredibly faded. At the mall she didn’t look scared, but now she does.

  What I’m doing isn’t finalizing the collapse that should have taken place by now. I need another plan. “I’m staying until she comes through that door,” warns Alice. Escaping right now is a rule I haven’t concentrated on, so I run to the bedroom, grab what little paint and brushes I’ve kept in the closest over the years, and head to the door with Alice, half-clear, still on the couch, hoping by the time I come back this will all be over.

  “Vincent?”

  She’s standing at the front door of RISSE. Behind her is a hallway with wood floors. A room off to the right contains a circle of children playing. To the left, an office with a man in white pants, white button down shirt and gold rings, swiveling back-and-forth in a chair, reading a magazine on his lap. As I enter, he looks up with eyes only and exhales.

  “I brought my paints,” I say. “You know, for the kids?”

  She helps me set up in a back room with layered drop-cloths we fan out across the floor. The man wearing gold rings brings in easels with small blank canvases, shrink-wrapped and purchased from the dollar store. I haven’t painted in years, but this is important to Alice, so it’s important to me. It helps thicken my reality. We’re on the ground floor, and I keep looking out the windows for Alice.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” she says squeezing my arm.

  But the painting class isn’t for the kids, it’s for the refugee men who don’t have anything to do after working on their resumes. The kids have a structured program today because it’s Monday. Every thirty minutes is allotted for and today is a special guest – the man with the gold rings. Volunteers are on strict regulated hours, and my dropping by like this has thrown things off. So when Alice tells the Syrian men, most huddled in a side room playing cards directly across from the room I’m in that I’ll “do some art with them” they shrug, stand slowly, and enter the room.

  It’s obvious this situation calls for the professional, conference call version of myself. But it’s been so long. I’m still checking the windows for Alice. She has to be gone by now, enough time has passed, I have done everything required. The men from the burning gas station are here, they nudge each other simultaneously while glaring at me and picking lint from the drop-cloths.

  In my professional voice I say art produces compassion, so Alice, in the hall, can hear me. This is the version she fell in love with, so that’s who I’m going to be. It’s not my fault things changed. It’s not my fault I became a different version from what I was supposed to be. I just couldn’t figure out how to live.

  I paint a sloppy thunderstorm with a green field and continue discussing the benefits of art in my professional voice. I combine the old me and the new, and the me thinking about Alice being home and Alice being here. Life is vicious. Life is sweet. Alice checks in then walks down the hall calling names – Amena, Mohammed, Tarek, Kamar, Uri. I’m doing a pretty good job painting this rain.

  But I lecture the refugees. I tell them one belief is that art should be the center of our lives, we could work from the center of art to better understand our humanity. No one says anything. I even moved myself. I say that science and business and economics have failed us. Time we
try something else and art has been waiting. As I paint, I quote Matisse, “Creativity takes courage,” the old me flooding back over me, exciting me. “An artist can show things that other people are scared of expressing,” Louise Bourgeois. I add stars and a constellation in the top right corner, it doesn’t make sense, but I love it. “Everything you can imagine is real,” Picasso.

  Completing my first painting in years, I say a study showed a higher level of empathy in children when they grew up studying art. Adding one last drop of rain to the canvas, and a tiny black hole in the clouds, I’m proud of myself. I’ve needed this and now I’ve shared it with those in need.

  “Fuck you,” someone says from the back of the room.

  I turn and face the small crowd, feel light-headed with nothing to grip onto.

  Another voice from the middle: “Big bullshit.”

  Everyone is standing.

  “Wait,” I say desperately, “I’m trying to help.”

  A man in a black cap worn low across his eyes, he’s all chin and black mustache, steps forward like he’s going to hit me. “You don’t,” he says.

  Everyone is leaving the room.

  “What is it?” The black cap gestures vaguely toward the painting. He taps the painting with his knuckles like knocking on a door. “See? Does nothing.”

  I’m left alone with the realization that what my reality is – divorced, dead Rudy, dead Elderly, the office life, a retirement waiting after I’ve lived my best years – is too strong. I want to apologize, but Alice comes into the room.

  I tell her the painting idea didn’t go too well, they didn’t like my tone. She says it’s okay, slightly defeated, says they’ve had a long day, jobs aren’t happening because, “A-ville.” She adds they have very little chance of employment. So day and night they sit around RISSE, praying. Some have even considered returning home where they feel it’s safer. She shakes her head at this idea. The painting idea was a bad idea.