A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  He was good at devising these problems and good at teaching them. His school’s test scores were some of the best in the province, and he shrugged his lumpy shoulders whenever the administration applauded his success. But he was proud, and he pictured himself moving into a government post, designing math courses for elementary schools, and because of him children would grow up with the skills needed to decode life’s bewildering universe of logic and numbers.

  But what was the rush? He kept asking himself, sitting up at night, ice cream tubs pinned between his knees. Why not have some fun for once?

  Wally bought a case of his dad’s favourite beer (Coors Light) and a box of his mother’s favourite doughnuts (Boston cream, one of which he ate on the way out of the store) before going to the weekend dinner he’d chosen as the stage for his announcement: he was going on sabbatical. Well, not sabbatical, exactly. He was quitting his job so he could travel for a couple years, just like he’d wanted to ever since he watched all those packages shuttle down the freight line so many years before.

  He broke the news while they sat in the living room before dinner, three pairs of legs converging from uncomfortable furniture on the tiny brown coffee table in the centre of the room. A curlicue of bright yellow custard issued from the rear of his mother’s doughnut and landed on the lap of her flower-print dress. She made no move to tidy it, just gawked with baffled eyes, cheeks bulging, rocking chair suddenly still, and the room’s overwhelming light catching the plain, silver brooch she wore in honour of her thirty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  “Sweet Christ, Wally,” his dad said. “You aren’t a teenager, man. You’ve got yourself a great job, with a couple months off every summer. Why not just go then? Or better yet, forget this nonsense entirely.”

  Nobody spoke for the rest of the evening. Over dinner, Wally stared into his plate. He shoved steamed broccoli from one side to the other. He flattened a mound of rice and cut into his mother’s dried pork. He was going, no matter what they said.

  Standing in the doorway at the end of the night, Wally’s dad reached out and clapped him on the shoulder. His eyes were filled with some kind of approval, maybe pride, and for a second it seemed like he might even tear up. “You give me something to tell the guys about at the depot, Wally. They’re always asking after you, you know. And I’m always telling them how hard you work.”

  This was strange coming from his father, who wasn’t much for praise, at work or at home. Wally tried to make eye contact with his mother, but she was fiddling with her brooch, smoothing the chest of her dress, bending over to straighten the boot mat. Wally swallowed. “You are?”

  “Of course. It ain’t easy running your own company, is it? You should take the summer off. Do some of that travelling you’re always talking about.”

  His own company? Wally was about to say something, but then his mom was hugging him and pushing him out the door, her fuzzy lips against his ear: “Your father’s just tired, that’s all.”

  Wally’s travel memories are a messy collage. In San Francisco, his gut bounced as he pedalled across the Golden Gate Bridge. At a punk show in Austin, a girl with a spiked collar spat in her boyfriend’s mouth. In Guatemala, he toured the Mayan ruins and took Spanish lessons from a woman improbably named Billy, and she pricked him with a cactus quill every time he failed to roll his r’s. In Ecuador, he met Melodie reading in the stairwell of their hostel, tips of her fingers covered in blue ink, and shiny black sunglasses holding her hair out of her face. They took a boat to the Galápagos; on the top deck, she grabbed his hand and lifted it into the warm, salty wind, and she kissed his cheek when he giggled. Then they bused to Peru, where they made hours of love in a San Pablo hotel, and when he told her Che Guevara volunteered at a nearby leper colony, she invited him into the shower with a beckoning finger. They paid way too much for a van, filled it with gas, and drove south to Bolivia and Argentina, then veered north, bouncing through Paraguay and into Brazil, where they camped and boiled water over the fire. Then Melodie crawled out of the tent one morning and invited him to live with her in France.

  A few weeks later, he settled into her Paris apartment, all moody lighting and impressionistic art. Wally landed a bit of under-the-table work teaching math to tony international students, and he envisioned a future with Melodie, the two of them a bohemian version of his parents. Because he liked coming home with a fresh baguette. Because he liked kissing her neck in the kitchen. Because he liked the way she pulled at the wispy hairs on his pale gut. He even liked it when she called him her grosse pâtisserie. Most of all, he liked how she was nothing like Amy, the only other woman he’d ever slept with, way back in teacher’s college; she’d kept her eyes closed the whole time, and he actually cried when she told him she did it on a dare. Melodie wasn’t like that at all.

  Except that she was. She didn’t share his feelings, at least not for long. The travel buzz wore off, and soon she was out late drinking and sometimes even bringing men back to the apartment, so Wally had to lie awake listening to them fumble and moan in the living room. He pulled his own wispy hair on his own gut, but it wasn’t remotely the same. Early one morning, averting his eyes from the naked limbs all twisted up on the couch, he quietly left the apartment and never heard from her again.

  Wally took a weepy journey to Namibia, to the Skeleton Coast, where he wanted to see bones, skulls, and ancient death, but instead wandered the beaches alone, drinking warm beer at night on his veranda, listening to boys and girls giggle through the thatched roofs and loudly itemize their itineraries over breakfast every morning.

  At one point, he almost went home, longing for his dad’s told-you-so look, his mother’s relief, his wise resolve to focus on what counts in life, whatever that turned out to be. But then he was at the bus station, buying a ticket to Zambia, and the journey was endless and uncomfortable, but finally he arrived at Mosi-oa-Tunya, where he was soaked in the waterfall’s ample, cold spray, which was more like a storm. With rivulets streaming from his chin, he met Blas, a Spaniard who also came to glory in the water, and was also travelling alone. They hiked the park to the main road and hitchhiked into town, where they drank cervezas and discussed la vida until they were both very borracho. The next morning, Wally sat up in bed, shirtless, stretch marks on his stomach, the details of the night forever lost to booze, but the sentiment still very clear, so he bought a bus ticket to Dar es Salaam, certain it was okay to travel alone, because there are people everywhere.

  After inching up the East African coast, then flying from Nairobi to Seoul, Wally found himself completely adrift in an alien alphabet, but he still managed to eat seafood and join tour groups to climb mountains. He booked cheap airline tickets to Beijing, then boarded the Trans-Siberian and rumbled into Moscow, before flying to London, where he remembered the geometry set and decided to track down the owner.

  The next part of his memory is slow and clear.

  The address came back to him easily. 11 South West Eleventh Street, London, England, SW1 1SW. Wally consulted a map, jotted directions on a napkin, and set out on foot. The place wasn’t hard to find. He’d been expecting something residential, but South West Eleventh Street was a blue-collar commercial stretch, with a string of stores selling vacuum cleaners, used sports gear, and discounted kitchenware. There was a dollar store at the address Wally was looking for. He entered the brightly lit building and drifted up the aisles, finding a compass in the school supplies section, which he decided to buy, because he wanted to repay his potential debt to eternity.

  The checkout clerk was a yawning old lady with an enormous hearing aid jutting out of her gauze-like hair. She nodded at his purchase, rang it up, and held her wrinkled hand out for payment. The movement had a quality of endless repetition, as if she’d been doing it since the beginning of time, and Wally just happened to witness it at that otherwise unremarkable moment.

  “Excuse me,” he asked her, “but was there ever a house s
tanding here?”

  She didn’t answer, just held her hand out, waiting for the money. Wally paid and left.

  He took his compass to a cafe full of books, magazines, and pretentious babble, where he drew perfect circles on a napkin and came to terms with the fact that his money had run out. If Wally saved $10,000 previous to his excursion, then spent $5,700 on airfare, $1,300 on accommodations, $700 on ground travel, $600 on street food, and $960 on tours, admissions, and replacement footwear, will the $500 he made tutoring in France contribute much to his anticipated resettlement costs of $3,000? The numbers were intimidating, but he consoled himself with the fact of his good credit rating. He’d be back at work before he knew it.

  But then he got home, and he wasn’t.

  Having given up his apartment, and unable to afford it anyway, Wally moved in with his parents, who seemed happy to have him, until he noticed his mother’s attitude was mostly a put-on, because there was something very wrong with his dad. The old man would show up to breakfast in his underwear. He’d forget to wash the shampoo out of his hair. He’d stare at Wally’s mother with terrified confusion, like he had no clue who she was. Up late one night in the kitchen, his mother poured them each a glass of milk and said his dad couldn’t go to work anymore. Tests were being done, and the outcome didn’t look good. She cried, and Wally put his ample arm around her shoulders.

  After a few awkward family meals, he called up the principal of his old school, who told him his job had been filled by a permanent teacher. Everybody missed Wally, they really did, but they couldn’t very well fire this lady because he decided to come home again, could they? Wally spent an evening choking back tears in his childhood bedroom, which his parents had transformed into a storage closet with a cot.

  He felt uncomfortable showing that kind of weakness to his family, so he brushed off the failure and reached out to other schools. He adjusted his glasses, cleared his throat, and dialed dozens of phone numbers. During the long and usually unfulfilled waits for someone to return his calls, he sat in the living room with his folks and watched his mother concentrate on crossword puzzles, her eyes occasionally shifting from the page to her son, at whom she’d smile if she caught him looking back. His dad, meanwhile, seemed increasingly unaware that there was anyone else around. He reclined in his armchair and read the newspaper, rhythmically clearing snot from his sinuses, belching when it took him, farting now and then as well.

  When a call was finally returned, Wally found the world of mathematical education had undergone a tectonic shift in his absence. Educators were now focusing on probability studies. His word problems, replete with practical arithmetic though they were, failed to impress.

  It took a month to accept this, during which time he obsessively organized and reorganized his growing collection of credit card statements. His mother baked sweets and left them first on the coffee table, and then, after he began truly to collapse, on the floor outside his room. With each delivery, she rapped her knuckles softly against the door, and he would picture her fuzzy ear pressed to the wood. “Everything okay in there, son?”

  Then came the day he had to borrow money from his father. It wasn’t that the old man was reluctant. On the contrary, he seemed to think he was investing in his son’s “business plan,” which he was sure would come to spectacular success. With a plunging shame he’d never forget, Wally did nothing to correct the impression. His father led the way to a corner store, where he inserted his credit card into an ATM and stared worriedly at the keypad, first trying one combination, and then another, and then, fingers hovering over the buttons as he realized his card would be sucked in after a third mistake, he began shouting at the shop clerk, a Southeast Asian man he accused of “stinking like torn-up shit.”

  They were kicked out of several corner stores that day, until Wally decided to bring his father home, a proposition the old man at first refused, lightly slapping his son to deliver the point. But after the fifth store, inside of which his dad went no farther than the potato chip display, he seemed to forget their purpose and, yawning, said he wanted to go home for a nap.

  Wally sent resumés everywhere, and with each application there was a moment of excitement, a moment when a whole new life seemed possible. He lay in bed with his arms behind his head and let his imagination get away from him. He could’ve been a lawyer, a private investigator, or a radio host. He could’ve driven school buses, moving trucks, or limousines. Eventually he applied to work in call centres, for cleaning services, and, finally, with the postal depot at the airport.

  All for naught.

  Wally was crying when Bolek Murzyn finally called. He didn’t remember applying at Burger Life Fitness, and it took him a while to penetrate Bolek’s accent, but eventually he understood he was being invited to a job interview. He rejoiced. And then he despaired.

  Burger Life Fitness smelled the way fast-food restaurants typically do, a mixture of sweat and puke made pleasant by the taste of salt. The dining floor was cramped and explosively lit, with the air conditioning cranked to arctic outputs and wooden chairs that pained him to behold. A man he assumed to be Bolek stood in the centre of the room dressed in a knitted brown sweater and impatiently tapping his foot. His glossy, bald head was creased with wrinkles, which ran the scope of his face. Great, ridge-like bags rose from his eye sockets and cast shadows across his features, and his tiny mouth was cinched in a frown, the disapproving vibe of which travelled throughout his hard, muscular frame, visible even under the sweater.

  “You know how to make burgers?” Bolek said, his voice like rocks in a crusher. “Or only eat them?”

  III.

  Wally, already dreading a full day dressed as a pickle, is alarmed when he gets to work the next morning and sees the freak boy standing in the lobby and refusing to take out his piercings, which can only mean he’s been hired.

  “Wally,” Bolek grumbles. “Meet Trevor. A boy with promise.”

  Bolek gives Trevor the unenviable job of cleaning the meat broiler, a huge column of grease-trapping elements fed by a conveyor belt. This must be some kind of distraction strategy, because Wally sees his boss blatantly hitting on the freak girl whenever she comes to drop Trevor off at work.

  “Examine Cindy,” Bolek says. “Half-sister of Trevor. Heart of Virgin Mary, I see it.”

  In the corner booth, they make an improbable pair. She scowls, flips through a dog-eared Noam Chomsky book, and glares through gallons of eyeliner, while Bolek, with the sleeves of his ubiquitous brown sweater shoved up his forearms, wears a surreal smile on his work-blasted face and pushes coffee refills at her from across the table.

  In the kitchen, Trevor and Wally get off to a conflicted start. It’s a small space, and entering it from the dining room is like exiting an air-conditioned car into the lowest circle of hell. The kitchen is comprised of a condiments-and-toppings counter, a trio of deep fryers, the mouth of a small hallway leading to Bolek’s office, and a steamer, which is basically a drawer full of hot water vapour designed to keep meat from rotting. But the broiler is the room’s stinking centrepiece, and it leaves very little space behind it, just room for two industrial sinks and a back door. Embarrassed, with no real place to hide himself, Wally flaps around the kitchen, struggling to squeeze his arms into the cut-outs of a pickle costume. He can feel Trevor studying his efforts, assessing them. Long minutes pass with Wally trying and failing and trying again.

  And then Trevor says: “Do you like rats?”

  Wally shrugs his round shoulders.

  Trevor sighs and lifts himself onto one of the counters used to assemble the various ingredients of Burger Life Fitness’s menu. A fleck of black grease is stuck to one of the green strands of hair hanging over his forehead. “You should, you know. Even when they’re fat, rats can squeeze into holes the size of a quarter. Imagine being that smart and flexible. You should try it.”

  Now the pickle suit rips as Wally’s
arm finally finds a passage through the cut-out. He winces, Trevor smirks, and Bolek bursts into the kitchen, strides past the deep fryers, and stands in front of his employees, one wiry hand gripping a thirty-five-pound dumbbell and the other waving a stack of flyers.

  He looks at the broiler and widens his eyes. “What? You are not finished? You are taking too slow. You need to work better and faster. Here is not preschool.”

  Wally has managed to stuff himself into the pickle suit. His round, spectacled face peers out through a hole in its upper regions, the sight of which causes Bolek to snort laughter, curl his dumbbell, and toss the leaflets at Wally, who fails to catch them. Bolek then turns to Trevor, tapping his foot expectantly, but when Trevor doesn’t jump off the counter and return to work, he merely sighs and turns his attention back to Wally.

  “Pickles,” Bolek says. “Pickles are sick-making. I hate them. But I have important announcement to make for Burger Life Fitness staff and employees. We have entered into citywide battle with our competitors. Whoever sells the most burgers this month, then this store gets to use the mascots of the other stores. You see? If we lose, Wally you become disgusting pickle or tomato slice across town. If we win, then crosstown Wally come here and disgrace themself on sidewalk. You hand these advertisings out this morning. All.” He sets the dumbbell on the counter and claps his hands, which are like hunks of bear meat. “Now get to work. And fast. And good.”

  By noon, the sun throbbing above him, leaflets flapping in the breeze around him, and the pickle suit hampering his ability to breathe, Wally staggers off the empty sidewalk and into the shade behind the restaurant. He tries to put his hands on his knees, but the suit blocks him from bending over. Nor can he sit down, because of its obstructive back end. But he desperately needs to take a load off his throbbing feet, so he wedges himself between the brick wall of the restaurant and the rusting dumpster pushed almost right against it. The suit catches and Wally sags, relief flushing through him as he congratulates himself on a successful wedging.