by Nina Post
“Do you suffer from diarrhea?”
Eric looked to his left and saw a tall man with more gadgets clipped and roped to him than a home contractor. He was examining a tub of tapioca, and Eric thought he looked vaguely familiar. He was as tall as Eric, very clean-shaven and dressed in expensive fabric. His strawberry-blond hair was neatly combed back, and he smelled like a new car.
“Who, me?” Eric looked around.
“Because that pudding is for those afflicted with diarrhea.” Gadget Man said the last word like an evangelical preacher, flashing his blue eyes wide with a hint of an unnerving smile.
“Oh.” Eric looked closer at the multi-pack.
“But I highly recommend it. It’s the best-tasting pudding you can get, diarrhea or not. It’s made by Nidus.” He smiled, and it made the hairs on Eric’s arm stand up. “A family company.”
Gadget Man liked saying ‘diarrhea’ a little too much. Eric put the pudding in the cart to avoid further discussion. “In case I get it,” Eric said. “These things happen.”
“Excellent choice,” Gadget Man said. “It’s a family company, you know.”
“Great,” Eric said, unsure what kind of response Gadget Man was expecting from him. “A family company.”
“Dad.” Taffy tapped him on the back like he was a sugar maple tree and she wanted to bore a hole in him.
“Ow!” Eric rubbed at his back.
“Oh, is this your daughter?” Gadget Man said.
“I don’t have diarrhea,” Taffy said. “But listeriosis can cause diarrhea. I wouldn’t go to the deli counter, if I were you.”
“She’s charming,” the man said.
Taffy gave him one of her looks. “I gave you a food safety tip even though I don’t know you,” she said, eyes narrowed. “That’s a favor. You should be grateful, not condescending.”
Gadget Man smiled, the corners of his thin lips becoming even thinner. “Excellent point, young lady.” He held out his hand for her to shake, but she was already heading in the other direction. The man then angled to the left and Eric shook his hand.
“You have a lovely family. It’s nice that you and Taffy can do this for your wife,” he said, and left with his basket, his loafer soles quiet on the glossy floor.
Eric didn’t move. His skin prickled. Taffy circled back around and stood next to him.
“How did he know that?” Eric said. “How the hell did he know that we were shopping so Willa wouldn’t have to?”
Taffy looked up at him.
“Oh my God,” Eric said, heat spreading to behind his nose. “How did he know your name?”
Taffy shrugged. “A lot of people know my name.”
But Eric made her stay with him until they got back to Ed’s house.
Chapter Nine
Taffy pushed away her lunch and her three quiet friends attacked it like a trio of vultures. “Will you look at that?” she said. “It’s disgusting, but I can’t look away, either.”
Casey Combs, track star, ruled the next table over. She was loud, fierce, adorable – and ate and behaved in a way that offended Taffy’s very core.
Taffy gestured in the manner of a homeowner showing the police what the neighborhood kids did to his lawn. “Look at her lunch: egg salad, ground beef, feta cheese, strawberries, and custard. Is she trying to get listeriosis from the feta? E. coli from the ground beef? Salmonella from the eggs? Are the strawberries organic? And what, we’re just supposed to trust that the deli meat is less than three days old? We’re just supposed to trust the distributors and the school’s temperature management? Besides, that’s just gross.”
Taffy’s friends looked at one another and widened their eyes in a way that said, ‘Here she goes again.’
“Casey eats that kind of stuff every day,” one of the friends pointed out.
“I know. And she’s never sick,” Taffy said, marveling. “She never misses a day of school.” Taffy was glad about this, because it gave her something to look forward to every day: see what Casey is having for lunch. But she wanted to watch her all the time, too, at her locker, going to class, heading out after school to run. What was it about her?
Her friends resumed their chat about integers and Taffy sipped her drink.
“Oh my God, she’s coming over here,” Taffy said, clearing her throat and straightening in her chair.
“She probably wants to make a candy order,” one of her friends said. “By the way, you’re turning red.”
Taffy waved this off.
“Hey, Taffy,” Casey said.
“Hey.” Be cool, Taffy thought.
“Can I place a candy order?”
“Sure.” Taffy took out her order tablet. It’s just an order. It’s just business, she thought.
“I want a 16-piece order split three ways: pizza, cookies-and-cream, and cheddar,” Casey said.
“No problem.”
Casey lingered for a moment, and as she turned to go, Taffy blurted out, “I’d love to look at your gastrointestinal microbiota under a microscope.”
Her friends ducked their heads to burst into explosive giggles, putting up their hands to try and cloak it. Casey stepped back and gave Taffy a look that said, ‘You’re weird.’ She started to turn away, then stopped.
“You know, I would, too,” Casey said. “I eat some crazy stuff. My stepmom says I have an iron stomach.” She grinned, then went back to her table.
“Wow, Taffy,” her friends said, still laughing.
Eric gassed up the Princess, then ate a large protein and carb meal at Sammy’s, where he had to turn down a shift. Then he sat in the Princess out in Sammy’s parking lot and called all the stores on his list to verify that they had the Quantal Organic Yogurt brand in stock. He already had a map for all stores within a two hour drive that stocked the yogurt, and notes for what day the store restocked. He needed to stay ahead of his competition, who were acting crazy, yet who also managed to be surprisingly adept and single-minded foes.
Rex popped up in front of the passenger-side window and waved. He came through and settled in on the seat. “Road trip!”
“It’s not a road trip,” Eric said. “And where were you?”
“Not here. Look, I’m a free spirit, so to speak. I got a lot going on. And I’ve gotta warn you, Princess, I’ll probably sleep on the way.”
“Never call me that. And we’re not going to Disney World,” Eric said. “We’re going to grocery stores.” Like one of Willa’s nightmares.
Rex drummed his fingers on the seat. It didn’t make a noise. “You ever watch Kolchak?”
Eric navigated an intersection, turning the wheel like a city bus driver, putting his shoulders into it. “The Night Stalker? Maybe once or twice when I was a kid.”
“The first ten minutes of every episode was Kolchak just tooling down Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive, by himself.”
“So?”
“I think he was running a driving school for ghosts.”
Eric checked the view in the rearview mirror. “How was it a driving school if he was always driving?”
Rex rummaged through the glove compartment. “Maybe it was more of a therapy situation. Because ghosts prefer not to drive and like to be around the living.”
Eric glanced out the side window.
“I am tapped out,” Rex said, putting his feet up on the dash.
“Another poor shmuck hijacked?” Eric said.
“I resent that!”
“Oh? You didn’t spend the weekend living someone else’s life?” Eric said. “People like that Dominican polo player? The governor of Montana? I could go on.”
Rex put up his hands. “You got me. But this one was really good. Get this: he won a gold medal at Turin, has a hot Japanese actress girlfriend, and spends his days racing yachts and heli-skiiing. It was so awesome.”
Eric let out a controlled breath and recited his mantra in his head, as prescribed by a former therapist. He reached out to turn on the radio but Rex put out a hand to stop him. Eri
c muttered under his breath and put both hands on the wheel.
Rex put up the same hand. “I know, I know. I usually like to possess people like you, voids of confidence who go through life crippled by chronically low self-worth. That’s more of a long-term possession, because I enjoy the control.”
“Why do I still talk to you,” Eric muttered.
“But sometimes I just want to bust out of that for more short-term stays,” Rex said. “And even someone like Gold Medal doesn’t mind the occasional mental vay-cay.”
Eric pulled into Jamesville Beer & Redemption (‘We Have Beer’), and wondered, not for the first time, if that meant they didn’t actually offer redemption. Maybe that was a previous owner, and they just kept the sign. Eric had called them ahead, on a whim, and verified that yes, they sell that brand of yogurt, which a distributor aggressively sold them on, and yes, it was in stock. Very much so. Eric cheered, quietly, in his head. His competitors had no idea they could get Quantal Organic Yogurt there. But Eric did, and he bought all they had in stock.
“You’re serious about this contest, aren’t you?” Rex said as Eric dumped the yogurt in the DC-powered freezers in the bus.
Eric took out a yogurt to eat. “Very serious.”
“Let’s go over these game rules, then.” Rex opened Eric’s laptop.
“I already did. And since when can you use my computer?”
“Do it again. For me,” Rex said.
“Because I owe you so many favors.” Eric closed the fridge then put the coolers to the side. He stepped back up to the wheel.
“Point taken, but just humor me.” Rex said, bringing up the game rules on the laptop. “You’ve got a week-long game period. You’re aware of that, right? Because that seems short, but what do I know.”
Eric headed toward the next store on his list. “Yes, I’m aware of that!”
“All right, calm down. That’s just a super short time.”
“As you can see, I’m working on it as much as I possibly can,” Eric said.
“And what about these?” Rex took a lid and flapped it back and forth. “How do you expect to win a contest that requires you to spell a word using undecipherable glyphs? Because there’s no way your competitors can read this.”
“I can’t read it,” Eric said. “And I’m still pursuing it. I just thought I’d figure it out later, or get lucky.”
Rex smiled. There was a long pause.
Eric let his arms fall to his sides. “Wait, you can read the glyphs? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Rex dodged the question. “You know, people don’t give you enough credit.”
“Funny.” Eric pulled into Roy’s Candles (‘We Smell Fab, You Can Too’).
“Let me guess,” Rex said. “You want to use candles to communicate with a medium who can tell the spirit world to call me off.”
Eric ignored this. “I called by accident, but it turns out that Roy said I could have his stash of yogurt from when he was thinking of doing the contest.”
“But then he realized he couldn’t read the glyphs and reconsidered,” Rex said.
“Yep,” Eric put the small but helpful stash, about a dozen yogurts, into the fridge and took one of those to eat.
A half-hour later, Eric pulled into his next stop, the back delivery door of Mrowman’s Grocery.
“This doesn’t look suspicious at all,” Rex said as they waited.
“They restock this morning,” Eric said. “My contact should be here any minute.”
The contact, a middle-aged guy with a full dark beard and deep-set wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, showed up and helped Eric load the coolers. “We used to have pretty awful temp management at this store,” the contact said. “Not coincidentally, things improved when I started as Perishables Manager.”
Eric stopped transferring the yogurt and stared at the manager.
“Oh, don’t worry, it’s fine now.” The manager waved it off. “But Mrowman’s – including this store – was losing thousands of dollars every year. I straightened them out with some cold chain diagnostics.” He grinned and put his hands in his pockets, pleased with himself. “I’ve got them putting RFID temp tags on the outside of the pallet and case – your basic milk crates – for cold products like your yogurt here. We use the temp tags through the whole system: warehouse, delivery, store. You can get a lot smaller, of course, track the individual product through the packaging. But RFID tags are great for the residual shelf life.”
Eric put the last of the yogurts into the bus. “I really appreciate your help.”
“For Jamesville’s own Eric Snackerge? Happy to.”
Back at the bus, Eric ripped the lids off half of his containers and put them in the safe. Then he tossed a garbage bag full of empty yogurt canisters into the store’s dumpster.
“Are you eating anything other than yogurt?” Rex asked.
“Sure,” Eric said. “If I’m at work. But I’m eating a lot of yogurt.”
“Bring some to the party tonight,” Rex said.
“What party?”
“The sponsor party.”
“Do you have a meeting every night?”
“They’re there all day, all night.”
“Every day? I thought it was just Wednesdays at two pm.”
“Almost everyone stays there the whole day. If they’re not possessing anyone, what else are they going to do?”
Chapter Ten
Nathan could tell his boss was feeling more anxious than usual because it was barely the afternoon and DZ had already bought a table tennis trainer (to supplement the robot), a copper fire pit, a fancy beach towel, and a lead crystal panther, and he was still considering the canoe (Combat Edition), a Japanese griddle, and a rotary sander.
“Please stop buying things,” Nathan said.
“Wouldn’t it be great to have a canoe?” DZ said, caroming from one area of the office to another with nervous energy.
“Take a step back,” Nathan said. “You’ll get tired of playing with these things in an hour.”
DZ rested for the moment on a chair shaped like a giant hand, but his legs pistoned rapidly until he hopped to his feet and paced around the kitchen.
“Happy? I’m away from my computer.”
“Like you’re not buying things right now on your phone,” Nathan said, then went up to the kitchen island and tapped his index finger on the stainless steel. “You think that buying these things will make you feel secure, but it won’t. When you feel like you need the stimulation of making a large array of purchases, you should go for a run.”
“You and your running. You are no fun at all,” DZ said, looking in the fridge.
“Who, the fridge?”
“No, you. You’re an event horizon of fun. Tell me, what is it like to be you?” DZ went to his desk and picked up his bag. Nathan followed up to his own desk.
“It’s hard to say,” Nathan said.
“You should mix it up once it in a while,” DZ said.
Nathan fiddled with his tie. “I’ll have you know that I do ‘mix it up’. For example, sometimes I vary my flossing order: I’ll do the lower left quadrant first, not the upper right like I usually do; or I’ll floss from the back toward the front, or do a different quadrant with each tooth. When you floss at least four times a day, it’s kind of fun to change your routine.”
There was a stretch of silence as DZ stared at Nathan in horrified speechlessness.
“Sometimes I do one tooth in each quadrant, one quadrant at a time, starting from the back.”
“I’ve heard enough. Pack up, we’re going to Maritimania,” DZ said, and slung his bag over his shoulder.
“I don’t think so.”
“I already bought the tickets,” DZ said.
“The contest –”
“Technology! We’ll work from the road.”
While DZ drove, Nathan filed the quarterly payroll taxes, paid the liability insurance, and reconciled the credit card statement as he struggled to figure out
what his employer had ordered. There were twenty-eight separate purchases from FlightMall in the past thirty days, and Nathan had to close his eyes and picture the office to help him match the price to the item.
After they bought the tickets at the park, DZ had lunch and perked up. He took out his phone, checked his email, then watched a video of a cat attacking a cardboard box. A half-hour later, DZ and Nathan were working from a swinging pirate ship.
“This is a great place to attack your to-do list, isn’t it?” DZ said.
Nathan gave him a pained smile. He had popped a Dramamine from the tin that he always kept in his pocket as soon as DZ pulled him toward the ship. Nathan held the bar in front of them with a white-knuckled death grip as DZ tapped nonchalantly on his phone. “What are you doing? And why do we have to do it on a swinging pirate ship?”
DZ gave him a pointed sideways glance. “Since you wouldn’t help me tag Snackerge or get information, I had my new intern do it. I’m tracking Snackerge’s trail where GPS tracking doesn’t reach using an accelerometer, a compass, and a barometric pressure sensor. Then I use the data to monitor pretty much everywhere he goes. And I mean anywhere: if he takes an elevator or the stairs, or pilots a submarine, I can track him.”
Nathan took another desperate swig of water from the bottle.
“He’s pretty boring, like you,” DZ said.
Nathan sighed.
DZ checked his notes. “Mostly he just goes to grocery stores, buys the Quantal, and goes to work, either at that crappy diner or the place with the moose heads. He’s been to a house owned by his deceased father-in-law, and to a local school, but in the evening.”
“So he hasn’t piloted a submarine.”
“He hasn’t even taken the stairs, let alone an elevator!”
“If only an international playboy were intent on winning the Quantal grand prize.” Nathan took another gulp from the bottle. He was almost out of water and desperately wanted the swinging feeling to stop. It felt like his insides were undergoing a molecular transfer like on The Fly.
“I don’t get it.” DZ typed into his tablet. “I don’t know if you remember, but I rigged the tags in the yogurt packaging to report in when the container is opened. You know, when someone pulls off the lid.”