A man carving a name into a child’s bare arm. A woman giving blow jobs to two men in army fatigues. A fat dick.
I closed my eyes for a moment, for several cleansing and replenishing minutes, then felt a familiar jab in my back. “Another hour before break time,” my supervisor said. “Don’t make me write a warning.”
A skinny dick. Men screaming slurs at a woman wearing a headscarf.
At times like these, I could almost understand why Zoe had done what she’d done; not that I condoned it, but as the months went by it became easier to imagine doing it myself.
After work I went home and took a long, hot shower, scouring my crevices with apricot body wash. A boy sticking a severed finger up his nose. I poured myself a glass of Merlot, the good stuff from Napa Valley, told myself I would only drink one tonight. A woman convulsing on the sidewalk, overdosing, while bystanders stand and watch.
I tried to avoid screens during my off time but I still checked my email at least once a day. Teeth being yanked out with pliers. My former classmate Marian, a modernist who specialized in Woolf, had emailed me. The subject line read “A Teensy Request” and she wrote in a self-deprecatory style, jokiness and exclamation marks imperfectly masking an underlying desperation, to ask whether I had any leads on a job. She detailed the twenty campus interviews she’d gone to without success and said she’d heard I worked at the app now. That I was thriving.
I closed the laptop.
I was gratified to hear people were speaking about my life positively—using the word thriving in particular thrilled me—but I knew I had to tell her the truth, to warn her not to make the same mistake I did. Part of me wondered if this situation was different than my situation with Zoe. After all, Marian had approached me. It wasn’t like I actively recruited her. A Pomeranian lapping up a puddle of bloody vomit. It would be passive, just letting something already in motion stay in motion. And from what I recalled, Marian was a resilient person, the first in our cohort to graduate, and I was pretty sure she’d told me she ran marathons and meditated. In many ways she would be the ideal candidate for the job.
Not that I would let her take it.
Still, I knew what it was like to be unemployed for a long time, how that uncertainty could be a kind of torture, particularly when you were simultaneously mourning the death of the life you’d always pictured for yourself. And the job really did have its perks. In a way, we were doing a noble service for the world—grunt work, dirty work, necessary, important and vital work.
I would write back and ask Marian to meet me for coffee so I could explain the challenges of the job. I would be as honest as possible; anything to help her make an informed choice about her future.
I tipped more Merlot into my glass and swirled it. With each sip, my mind felt cleaner.
The Unofficial Calculation Museum
+
George was worried about the calculators. They preferred a cool temperature, and the air conditioner—even after a few sound spanks—only managed a wheeze. Not yet nine a.m., it was already ninety degrees Fahrenheit outside. George called his sister Laurel and asked her to haul the rusty fan out of the garage. She didn’t answer. Typical. Probably giving her right arm a workout at the slots. He considered driving home himself but hated the idea of opening late, especially since his collection of abacuses, slide rules and calculators had grown more popular after a young man dressed like George’s grandfather—bow tie, tweed blazer, circular spectacles, corncob pipe—had posted pictures of George and his museum for a web page about unusual things to see in the area.
−
Two hours and three failed phone calls to his sister later, George was showing off one of his gems to a young couple. Sweat gathered under his armpits and collar, so he allowed himself to loosen his blue necktie.
“Check out the wizard!” the girl said. “He looks high!”
The calculator’s casing was predominantly orange with purple keys. The screen was surrounded by a purple cloud below which there was a Santa Claus–like wizard with his eyes closed. He was pointing up, lightning zigzagging from his fingers.
“It’s called a Wiz-A-Tron,” George said, remembering both times he’d stolen it.
The first: he pocketed it off the line at the factory and spent the rest of the shift imagining his sister’s reaction—her dimples big as hubcaps, a shriek of joy so loud it would set their mother’s budgie squawking.
The second: he swiped it from one of his sister’s cardboard boxes a few days after she’d moved in just to see if she’d notice, which she didn’t. She’d never truly appreciated it, anyway.
Not all the calculators were acquired this way, but George’s favourites were. Nevertheless, he didn’t consider himself a thief nor, he believed, did others see him this way. Stealing, in his experience, was simply the best method to cope with life’s disappointments.
“This place is surreal.” The boy spun around and George, confused by the remark, tried to imagine what the room would look like from his perspective. He could see nothing surreal about it. It measured roughly thirty square feet, and George prided himself on its maintenance. The walls were honeysuckle white and the floors were waxed grey linoleum. Each calculating tool had been lovingly hung with an accompanying description—model, make and year, sometimes with a fun fact or two—typed on a pink index card. George’s small desk stood opposite the door. Along the right wall were two boxy windows, one of which was mostly blocked by the useless air conditioner. They let in slashes of brightness, but overheads were still necessary to provide adequate reading light.
“So this Wiz was for kids?” the girl asked. George tried not to stare too hard at the tangerine glare of her lipstick. He didn’t understand her outfit: a loose, grubby, ruffled pink dress, men’s loafers and lime green socks.
“Yes,” George said. “It’s similar to the Little Professor but that one has a picture of a man with glasses under the screen. Both have the basic arithmetic functions. Add, subtract, multiply, divide.”
“Doesn’t this thing work?” The boy pointed at the air conditioner.
“Not at the moment.” At what temperature would the calculators’ internal functions be disrupted? The factory had been kept so frigid that George used to wear woollen socks and two or three extra undershirts beneath his uniform.
“Is it possible to open a window?” the boy said.
Wind smacked against the glass. “I’d rather not.”
“Andy, don’t you think we should do a documentary about this guy? Listen to this…” She looked down at an index card. Her voice became slanted and loud, on the edge of laughter. “Wiz-A-Tron helped my sister appreciate the joy of long division and was instrumental in enabling her to achieve a C-plus in grade four arithmetic. Fabulous, right? So earnest.”
“It’s literally ten trillion degrees in here, Sharon. How are you not dying?” The boy’s thumbs twitched over a tiny screen. “Damn. No reception.”
“Some like it hot.”
Do they think I can’t hear them? George wondered. And what was so funny about his sister getting a C-plus? He was starting to tire of this parade of young people, their assumptions, their seeming disinterest in calculators, their tattoos and stretched ear lobes. Why were they even here?
“Wait,” Sharon said as she moved toward the TI-108 and read its explanation. “This lovely piece is unusual for its bright blue casing, a colour I’d only ever seen before in my sister’s eyes.”
“Kinky,” Andy said, then turned to George. “Why do you only write stuff about your sister, dude?”
George was about to say something when there was a loud jangle and the door swung open. Clouds of rust-coloured sand ballooned through the shop. George rushed into the chaos and flung his arms open as though in a hug. Not my babies! he thought as he hopped up and down, praying his body could catch all the particles.
From within the haze a snout appeared, then two satiny ears; finally, a mane of gold and pink sequins: a horse’s head emblazoned on
his sister’s good luck sweater. She held a Big Gulp cup in her shaking left hand. Quarters spilled, plinking across the floor.
“The world is going to hell in a handbasket,” she said as sand drifted, coating George’s bald head, the boy’s thick glasses and the girl’s freckled shoulders.
George trembled with the thought of turning around and seeing the damage. Why would she open the door if she so much as suspected it might send sand swirling through his dream? Orange tears slid around his wrinkles. His sister could be such a thoughtless bitch.
×
George’s blood felt thin and hot inside his body. He should have put his collection behind glass but he wanted people to feel close to the calculators. They weren’t scary at all, not even the scientific and graphing ones. Not if you treated them properly and took the time to read the manuals. Got to know them.
He remembered sneaking up on eight-year-old Laurel as she sat cross-legged in the living room, holding the Wiz-A-Tron upright in one hand and a naked Barbie in the other.
“You’re so smart,” she’d said, jostling the Barbie up and down. “I love smart men. Let’s kiss.” She mashed the calculator and the Barbie together.
“I don’t think that’s how you use a calculator,” he’d said.
Unembarrassed by his sudden appearance, she continued directing her eccentrically cast love scene. “Yes, but it’s why you use one.”
It saddened and angered George to think of his sister when she was still young and full of potential, a cheeky girl who starred in school plays and wrote an advice column for the paper under the pseudonym “Loretta Lovely.” All that changed when she strutted into her first casino at eighteen on the arm of their married neighbour. She never did find a smart man of her own, settling instead for machines. Dumb ones, at that. Rather than answers or love, they provided whirls of apples, oranges, bananas and cherries.
To sate her addiction she’d spent all her inheritance and maxed out ten credit cards. She was always demanding money, even though he’d already let her move in with him; and besides, he was surviving on a pension and had the museum to keep up. It was disgraceful. But there was no solution as far as he could see. Therapy, self-help seminars, teary interventions: none of it worked. At least his calculators responded to his love and were their best selves around him, as long as he took the time to ask them some questions every so often.
÷
George began his inspection. The damage was extensive but not total. He blew on the casing of a T1-30 and could almost feel its weight in his pocket. He’d filched it the same day Laurel had graduated high school. Same night, that is. He’d begged for a night shift so that he could make it to the ceremony.
“Georgie Porgie,” Laurel said. “Aren’t you going to ask me why the world’s going to hell in a handbasket?”
“Are you the famous sister?” Andy said.
Laurel grinned, seemingly unfazed by the question. “The famousest. You want my autograph, sugar lips?”
“I adore your equine shirt,” Sharon said loudly.
“Thanks, sweetie,” Laurel said. “It’s my jackpot shirt.”
George tried to ignore the others and concentrate on making the rounds. Nothing could save the HP-38e, but it wasn’t one of his favourites. “At least dust can’t mess up the slide rules and abacuses too badly,” he said out loud, without meaning to.
“Too true, brother,” Laurel said. “Darn, I’m sweating like a hog.”
“Sharon, let’s go,” Andy said, moving toward George and the door. “This scene is starting to sketch me out.”
“Where did you get your shirt?” Sharon said. “That horse is just so perfect. It would be fierce on my style blog. I wish I had my camera. Would you model for me?”
“On one condition,” Laurel said.
“Condition?”
“Sweet cheeks has to be there, too.”
“Who?”
“Him.”
At this both Andy and George turned to see Laurel pointing in their direction. She winked her spidery eyelashes and blew a kiss, wiping the residual lipstick, a frosty pink, on the back pocket of her jeans. George felt his cheeks heat up. He was embarrassed, he told himself, because of his sister’s vulgarity.
“Leave me out of this,” Andy said. “I’m going.”
“You can’t go out there,” Laurel said. “There’s a tornado.”
George dropped the calculator he was holding, a TI-56, and it clacked on the floor. “What’s wrong with you? Why didn’t you say so?”
“I did. World. Going to Hell. Handbasket.”
“Where is it headed? Is it just a warning? Should we be going elsewhere? You’re unbelievable.”
“Well, excuse me for living. Al at the casino told me. That’s why I came here: to save you.”
The boy had his cell phone in his hand. He jabbed at the glowing screen. “Still no reception. Do you have a computer? We could check the news.”
“No,” George said.
“Isn’t this a calculation museum?”
“We have to open the windows,” Sharon said. “That’s what you do for a tornado, right?”
“Honey pie, do you recall my entrance?” Laurel shook her cup. “We’ll be getting big gulps of grit if we do that.”
“Shouldn’t we all be getting under the desk or going to a shelter, like in a school drill?”
“No shelter here,” Laurel said. “And if you think a desk’s going to save you, you’re even more naïve than you look.”
“We have to do something,” the boy said. “I can’t stay here.”
“I’m kind of scared,” the girl said.
Everyone stood in silence, sweating in the direction of the door. After a while George rummaged behind his desk and found a box and two rolls of toilet paper. He began removing the calculators from the wall, wrapping them in the toilet paper and then depositing them in the box. He would deal with the dust later. For the moment he had to busy his hands. Sharon and Andy conferred shrilly in a corner and Laurel headed for the back. The office chair let out an accommodating groan as she plopped herself on it and began counting out her winnings on the desk.
The wind bansheed outside and granules scraped the glass. It was soothing, putting away the calculators. It was as if he were on the line. Routine can be deeply therapeutic, he mused. Maybe that’s why Laurel likes her damn slots so much.
“Can we re-enact this for the documentary?” Sharon said loudly. “I don’t really go for reenactments, but this is wild.”
“Sharon, you are too obsessed with your camera,” Andy said. “It’s like you’re a witch and the camera’s your familiar.”
“I’m just making conversation so I don’t have to think about how nature is trying to fling us to Oz right now. And at least I don’t have a cell phone as a Siamese twin.”
Were he and Laurel guilty of this couple’s terrible pettiness? George asked himself. Is a camera to a cell phone as a slot machine is to a calculator?
Sharon sulked while Andy, perhaps bored with her, walked over to Laurel. “So are you one of the owners of this place?”
“Do I look like a cuckoo calculator nut to you?” The table was now covered in little piles of quarters, like silver buttons against the dark brown.
“Uh.” He left his mouth open.
“Don’t answer, handsome.” Laurel pinched the boy’s cheek, fuchsia talons digging into freckled flesh. “Just keeping looking pretty and we’ll get through this mess together. Damn, I’m sweating like a rooster in a henhouse.” Using a folded-up museum pamphlet, she fanned extravagantly beneath her armpits, causing the horse on her shirt to nod.
Andy rubbed his violated skin and took a step away just as George felt a tap on his back.
“What’s an imaginary budget?” Sharon asked. She twirled her blonde hair around her finger, and when she removed it, the hair remained in a frizzy helix.
“I’m sorry about my sister,” George stammered. “She can be too… too overly intimate with people. She
shouldn’t…”
“Who cares?” She rolled her eyes. “Andy can be too overly obnoxious with people. I want to hear more about this imaginary budget business.” She pointed at a TI-99 that George had stolen the day Laurel got her braces off. “See, this card thingee says, Mother would use this calculator to create imaginary budgets in order to teach my sister about finances.”
“Ha!” Laurel snorted. “Imaginary schma-maginary.”
Something large slapped the glass, momentarily obscuring the light. The girl yelped.
“It’s essentially a dream budget,” George said, not knowing how to reassure her. “You know, if she ever got rich, the things she would buy.”
“Like?”
“Jewellery, perfume, things she heard about on the radio or read about in magazines. Women’s stuff.”
“What a crock of shit,” Laurel said.
“Excuse me,” George said. “But could you please stop terrorizing my patrons?”
“Mother wasn’t making imaginary budgets.”
“You’ll have to forgive my sister. She’s not well.”
Sharon shuffled toward Andy as Laurel continued to speak. “She was adding up the damage of another spending spree, soothing herself that her debt wasn’t that bad and she deserved it and she’d worked for years and any day now Dad would get back and her debt would disappear and they’d waltz off into the sunset.”
“Why do you have to be so nasty? She was a good woman. She had her problems.”
“Understatement of the millennium.”
George wished he were the kind of person who could walk over to the desk and push the quarters to the floor in a glittering waterfall. But he just wasn’t that kind of guy, so instead he mumbled, “You’re just like her.”
Difficult People Page 2