I was an Audubon Society Junior Birdwatcher. And I play the flute.
He was surprised. He’d heard a song coming from her headphones once in the break room. It was about drinking cough syrup.
Maybe we can go look at birds over lunch some time, she said. There’s that sanctuary.
Oh yeah I know it, he said. I would love to. There’s a breeding pair of pied-billed grebes.
I don’t get to do stuff like that much anymore, she said. Since I moved in with my boyfriend.
**
What about you, he asked. Which one.
I think vampires have too much to worry about, she said. He heard her snip the tape. She grazed him again as she left his cubicle. Zombie life seems more simple.
How’s Chad doing, he asked.
We broke up.
There was a bright light. For a split second everything looked like an X-ray. And he thought: oh God– they did it.
He saw the boss’s glass wall. Marcy come back here, he said. She didn’t hear. Her eyes just said what the fuck. He grabbed her arm and pulled her under the desk and she started to scream but then there was thunder and the building blew in. When the car alarms woke him she was gone.
Angel of the Morning
His buddy told him: try Seeking Arrangement. I put that I’m worth two million. I take them to a sushi place. But not one where the chef doesn’t let you order. Middle income place; I tell them I don’t have time for courtship. Too busy. With what they don’t ask. I tell them before we set an allowance I have to sample the goods. Easy pussy.
Yeah but I want someone to like me.
Well what else is there. Tinder’s dead. OKCupid, don’t get me started. No girls at the clubs and I promise you it’s from this shit. They all think they can get paid.
I’d sooner be alone, he thought.
Six months later he was at the ATM. The girl waited in the car. They’d met at the duck pond. He didn’t know where else to take a date. The coots had gone. Buffleheads and wigeons moved on to summer feeding grounds. But there was a kingfisher. Snowy egrets.
Like all dates she pretended to like the birds. Except the geese, which scared her. There was a pack of them around a churro a child had dropped. When you got close they’d hiss with oddly human tongues. A big one swung its neck at her and she jumped back instead of leaning into him. A bad sign. What would I do if it bit her, he thought. Would I still have to defend her. The Canada goose is primarily an herbivore. But its serrated bill is strong enough to crush small crabs and other aquatic arthropods.
They’d talked like normal. He still tried to impress her. Had no other way to speak. Her message had said she wanted revenge on the patriarchy. Then a picture of her tits.
They sat by a jacaranda. When she said white males he could tell it was capitalized. She hated Michel Houellebecq. Liked Slavoj Zizek, which she’d practiced saying. Her purse was open. He saw homeopathic extracts. Yes but Zizek is just a Houellebecq character, he said. An ugly man pretending to be deep for pussy. She said what kind of arrangement are you looking for.
I want you to be nice to me, he said. I want you to act like you love me. He’d practiced too.
What does that mean.
We’ll go to my apartment. You take off your clothes but you can leave your panties on. You tickle my back. Maybe whisper in my ear a little. I want intimacy. Like a lover’s touch. I won’t take my cock out. Sixty for the hour.
She had a hairy pussy and it smelled like oregano. She didn’t take her panties off but they were mesh and her grizzly bear muff hung out the sides. Once he’d seen his mother’s cunt hair emerging from dolphin shorts at the pool. It was just like that. White women. He’d put on Daphnis et Chloe by Ravel, remembering it being softer than it was. As she dragged nipples on his back and exhaled in his ear canal there’d be a too-bright horn ostenato, like something out of The Flintstones.
She didn’t talk much. Just how am I doing. Is this OK. It was; she was good at it. In character. He could tell she was getting hot from the oregano smell but when he tried to kiss her she said no.
The next day he didn’t want to hang himself. Thought: if I can get this with money, I won’t have to chase it and lose.
The next girl was black. Fat, 19, her big soft belly rolling over him like a slick wet pillow. Her little girl face made him wish he owned slaves. But she got horny. Suddenly he was working. Pushing his tongue into her salty asshole thinking: does she like this. Same with the next one. Chinese. Fat too; she had a condo from her green card marriage to some Shanghai oligarch. Why do you pay for this, she said. You’re so hot. He couldn’t then not lift up her Hello Kitty dress; climb on top of her with the minimum foreplay allowed by law. Asking can I cum in you. For weeks he’d wake up to texts from both of them. u up. wyd.
But it was the oregano girl he saw again. One night she texted: want me to come tuck you in. She got on top of him. The mesh panties with the soft beard hanging out and she asked: same as last time. One extra thing, he said, and she said I won’t fuck you.
No, can you talk to me. Like what, she asked. Can you say what you’d say if you loved me, he said. She made a face like he’d asked what’s 17 times 23.
Power Achiever
The Monday before Halloween there were vegetables in the break room. Broccoli and baby carrots.
It was a sign. The merger had closed. The company had therefore switched insurance providers. The new insurance emphasized preventive care to cut claims. A new poster in a black frame outlined the benefits of healthy eating for productivity. Be a Power Achiever, it said. A smiling woman climbed Western-looking rocks next to a lens flare.
Larry, from Wisconsin, Vice President, Global Sales, was helping himself to a free Activia. The yogurt, a client, was playfully marketed to women as a stool loosener. Larry was 6′ 3”, Norwood 6.5. Strawberry.
Happy Monday, Larry said. You still driving that old beater Benz?
How wouldn’t I be, he thought. You saw me leave in it Friday. He’d had to sell his $15,000 Subaru that he’d paid $9,000 on, owed $11,000 on, for $7,000, to accommodate a rent increase. Take his 1979 Mercedes 300SD out from under the tarp where it had awaited Craigslist buyers he couldn’t bring himself to call back. He said yes.
What kind of mileage you get with that thing?
About 30.
No way.
Yeah, the diesels are underpowered. Keeps ’em out of trouble.
It was true. The 300SD got excellent fuel mileage. Its 5 cylinder in-line diesel engine produced only 111 horsepower. It required a more cautious driving style. But the OEM 917.51 engine was well known among enthusiasts: the most reliable motor ever built.
Ever think about getting the one of the biodiesel conversions? See a lot of those around.
If it’s hot enough you can run it on vegetable oil as is.
That so?
Yeah. Biodiesel you have to swap the hoses out. As is it’ll run veg, kerosene, jet fuel– anything but gas.
Well you should get one of those stickers. I bet the girls melt.
I would get 0.0 more pussy advertising my car’s fuel flexibility, he thought. A woman who cares about biodiesel has her own interior design business. Her dog is her boyfriend. Meanwhile I had anal sex on the first date with an au pair in that car, Larry. Low sulfur #2 diesel notwithstanding. Back when girls liked me. Maybe I will, he said.
Believe me, they love it. My daughter loves environmental stuff, said Larry. Even people just ten years older still thought you could speak to women.
Now he’d forgot what he came in the breakroom for. Diet Coke maybe. One cold one left. He took it, dutifully put four more from the cardboard flat of warm cans into the fridge. That left one half empty flat of Diet next to 3 full flats of Regular. 95% of all soda consumed in this office, in every office, was Diet Coke. Corporate ordered the same amount of everything. Maybe the merger would change that too.
Back at his desk. He typed passwords. Spreadsheets blinked open. Two monitors angled ergonomi
cally. Top 5,000 advertisers in consumer packaged goods by annual spend. Key in-house and/ or agency decision makers for QSR mobile coupons, keyword: Hispanic. He would dial. Wait. I’d like to speak with you about data driven solutions for market leading brands.
**
He dreamed about his grandmother with the hose, mist hissing in the grass in the summertime. She turned the cool spray from the lawn to the rhododendrons and the cold water hit his bare chest and he laughed, and she laughed too. The flowers were impossibly big and bright, the bushes fifty feet tall, a hundred feet wide. Someone was touching him. A huge warm wet palm slithering up his knee, his thigh. Rough like a workman’s hand. A gargling voice sniffling help me… help me…
Two hands on him now in the dark and a ghoul with a slimy bald head coated in red and black dust. No face. Throaty voice slurring: I need help, I need help.
The sprinklers were going. The front of him was soaking wet. He slid back and hit his head on the lip of the printer table. His Hewlett Packard printer/ fax combo slid down the slick slanted pressboard and into his skull with a crack. He was awake. The fax handset flopped off but mercifully emitted no howler tone. It was Larry. The ghoul was Vice President, Global Sales. The back of his bald head looked intact but he’d dragged a blood smear fifty feet up the nylon carpet behind him. Black trail through a maze of collapsed cubicle dividers.
Larry. Relax, man, he said.
Please… helppp. Larry looked up. Where his eyes had been two oozing dark holes glimmered with specks of safety glass. His lips half hanging off, jiggling like nightcrawlers. Helllbbb me, he snuffled.
OK man. Relax. Take a deep breath.
The sprinkler water smelled like the men’s room at Fenway Park. They kept it in separate tanks, he remembered. It had sat untouched since the building was built. Larry, turn over, he said. Helllbbb meee snuffled Larry.
He grabbed Larry around the collarbones and got him halfway on his side. The front of Larry was gone. His black sport jacket and his broadcloth checked Oxford and his skin and his flesh– gone. What was left was bones. Red lumps. More safety glass, little cubes like diamonds, shot into the meat like cannonfire. He was scabbing over. It must have been a while. Helllbbbbb mmmmeee. The voice of the dead.
I’ll help you, he said. I’ll help you. Stay right here.
He had to uncrimp Larry’s bleeding hands from his shirt to stand up. He looked out the holes where the windows were. The sky red and lightning teasing dark clouds. Buildings skeletal and black and every alarm in the Valley shrieking like a tree full of sparrows. The sprinklers hissing, the water dirty and cold. I’ll help you Larry, he said.
Across from his cubicle wall where the poster urging DETERMINATION once hung, a fire extinguisher sat askew in its red box. He picked it up, held it, stepped back. Larry’s hands grabbed for his legs again. And he said: sorry man. He swung his hips like splitting wood, brought it down on the temple again and again until the skull broke.
**
He found her in the break room. After the fifth office with a flayed corpse or twitching burned thing in agony he’d stopped looking. He was at the fridge dumping cartons of Activia into a PWW promotional tote bag. The corpses of the women had shit themselves. Activia had worked one last time.
Water, he thought. I should take water. The flats of Evian, a client, were kept in a closet in back of the break room. Co-branding efforts with Angelina Jolie’s humanitarian work had dovetailed into an Ellen! advertorial campaign. For the first time, Evian was placed in 7-11 stores worldwide. He preferred the tap. He’d heard the plastic made you lactate.
When he swung the closet door open she was huddled by the mop bucket. Cold, wet, shaking, hugging her knees. Marcy Pendergrass.
Get up, he said. We gotta go.
Belinda
Are you surprised I’m here, said Belinda. Mexican girls don’t date white boys.
Au contraire, he said, I’ve had every one in town but you.
Not the real ones, she said. I bet their parents spoke English.
She’d fucked her tattoo artist for three years. He was 44, married, someone snitched to the wife who then called Belinda’s mother. I want you to know your daughter’s a whore, she said. I’m going to tell your whole family. I’m going to go around your neighborhood, tell everybody. She did.
The tattoo artist came in her every time. She thought she couldn’t get pregnant. He said he’d meet her when she got the abortion. He posted on Instagram from a bar instead. He had eight other women he was sleeping with. The wife still doesn’t know.
When she finished the story he went to move her hair to kiss her. And she said: not on the first date.
I Just Keep Losing
We can fix the stove, said the landlady.
OK Gre–
AT YOUR COST
How are you going to even say that
YOU told me that YOU broke it cleaning the–
That’s not what I said Maureen
Listen: to fix that stove I have to go in there, get the make and model number, call a repairman, wait for him, pay him for an estimate, wait for him to get the parts…
He didn’t care about the stove. He’d brought up the stove because she’d been in the apartment yelling at him about the mold and the closet sliding door mirror, which was cracked. It had been like that for two years since the last woman he cared about, who cared about him– two years– had got drunk and dived into it like a parakeet into a window. Maybe high on coke too. She’d stayed at his house to watch his cat while his father died back East. She’d invited a girl over to party with. Some Chinese YouTube ukulele player. He’d said OK because he wanted to sniff their Lesbian sex on his sheets after but they’d just got drunk and broken everything. The father died. The cat died. She left. The landlady wanted $300 for the mirror.
He thought if he asked her to fix the stove, which just broke on its own, it would be a wash. She’d back off. She was about 120 years old and demented. But she was like Mayweather. She could keep getting hit. Nothing connected. He would pay for the mirror and he would pay for the stove too and he would pay the $500 rent increase she imposed because it was true, there was nowhere for him to go. From the south Mexicans had consumed hundreds of miles and from the east New York people had swarmed in coating the block with boutiques. The Mexicali juice stand now sold fourteen dollar hot dogs and the sidewalks teemed with junior associates on Crossfit Indian runs. The rent went up and the taxes went up and the money sucking machine got closer to redline but didn’t ever seize up. Somewhere five Reptilians were building a space ark. They knew the secret date of the Yellowstone Caldera. It was the only explanation.
**
The day after he lost to the old woman he went to the gun shop. It was across from the office, next to the Flame Broiler Teriyaki Bowl. Fortunately he didn’t have to park. Even the handicapped space was taken. There’d been a school shooting. We expect the president’s remarks any minute, said NPR. For just a ten dollar monthly pledge you’ll have your very own collectible NPR mug. I’m Cassidy Brown Schwartzman.
You took a number like a deli. His was 70. He waited by a beef jerky display. At the counter three harried clerks explained they couldn’t sell the floor model of the Bushmaster AR-15, which hung dead center on the back wall. The gunman used one just like it. What was available was an AR-15 with an upper modified to fire .22LR instead of .556 rounds. Which even he knew was pointless.
They should fucking know this was going to happen, said the guy in front of him. He had red hair and a face like they’d pulled him out of a river. There’s gonna be a run on AR’s when you get an action like this. They ought to think ahead and order more. Hey man I’m Dusty, he said.
Good to meet you.
Hope you weren’t here for the Bushmaster.
I think a handgun, he said.
What kind
Something big.
That’s the spirit.
Maybe a revolver.
Well get a .357 and you can practice s
hooting .38 out of it, said Dusty. Much cheaper.
Cost’s not a concern, he said.
Well good for you man. But if shit goes down you’re gonna want more than six rounds. I’d get a sixteen round capacity.
I don’t need that much of a clip, he said. I just want it not to be complicated.
Magazine, said Dusty. A woman’s voice came over the loudspeaker. It said “23”. He decided to buy a rope.
The Sherman Oaks Outdoorsman
The gun shop door was open but half the ceiling had collapsed. The Sherman Oaks Outdoorsman. Here too hissing sprinklers, shrieking alarms. He had to press his fingertip into his left ear and still the back of his head rang with the sound of cicadas. Shelves fallen into each other. Tile floor covered with flashlights and Rambo knives, spreadeagled Guns & Ammo magazines. Soldier of Fortune open to honeypot ads in the back for hit men, all sopping wet. Marcy still catatonic in the ’79 Mercedes outside, in the handicapped space. He’d wrapped her in his picnic blanket. Strapped her in like a baby. Eased the seat all the way back so her head wouldn’t stick up. He’d thought about taking another car, a 4-wheel drive. But the hallway floor tilted in and the first burned corpse he checked for keys groaned when he tried its pockets.
FUCKING GET DOWN GET DOWN GET DOWN a man was screaming. A boom went off loud enough that the fire alarm seemed like nothing. Fluorescent light bulb glass and shredded foam ceiling tile fluttered down on his face.
All right! All right! I’m not–
WHAT DO YOU WANT
He was out of adrenaline. The question was insulting. Guns, he said.
Hey man– is that you?
Another insulting question. Yeah I’m me, he thought. Behind the back counter by the deli number dispenser the top of a red head inched up. Dirty white drowned corpse face, cut up. Dusty had on a tactical hunting jacket with the tags still hanging off. He’d dragged the beef jerky display behind a cash register and half emptied it into a black duffel bag. Also with tags. There was a crunch somewhere and the walls shook and the alarm squealed and stopped. In the distance many others. But no sirens. Fancy meeting you here, said Dusty. His hands were bloody.
Finally, Some Good News Page 2