Apathy and Other Small Victories

by Paul Neilan

  Luckily it was dark and she couldn’t see the shock on my face, or the panicked happiness that came after it. She wasn’t looking at me, but I was still glad it was dark.

  “When I was seven years old,” I said, “I thought I was a superhero. My name, was Leaf Man.”

  “Clever,” she said.

  “I wasn’t the brightest kid on the block, but I had the most faith.” I let that stand alone for a few seconds. It sounded like it was supposed to. “My superpower was that I could jump from the top of a tree and float down like a leaf, even if there wasn’t a breeze.”

  “Your superpower was floating?”

  “Have you ever watched a leaf land? They don’t even bend a blade of grass on impact. They’re like ninjas. They’re better than cats.”

  She said nothing.

  “So I’m up in the top of this tree in my back yard, the kind that has the helicopter seeds that fall in October, and I’m just about even with the roof of my house, two stories up. Until then I’d only been Leaf Man jumping off my bed or the coffee table into a pile of pillows, but I wasn’t afraid. I remember being absolutely sure that I could float. So I stepped off the branch, and I was gone. Everything came real fast and I was getting slapped by branches and tumbling like a fucking pinball and my head was spinning and then wham I hit the ground. I busted some ribs and broke my leg in two places. The doctor said I was lucky. My mom said I was a horse’s ass. And I knew I wasn’t a superhero.”

  She was silent for a long time.

  “Did you have a costume?” she said finally.

  “Just my GI Joe Underoos. I didn’t wear a shirt. I had a cape though.”

  “Did your mom sew it?”

  “No, I made it out of taped together St. Patrick’s Day napkins.”

  She was silent again.

  “Did you really jump out of a tree?”

  “Yes,” I lied.

  She was silent again. I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t until she told me to. So I waited. This was all making a statement of some kind and I knew I’d figure out later what it was and tell myself that I’d done well under the circumstances, and that I was still cool.

  “You should go.”

  I was careful not to hesitate or betray anything more as I got dressed and left, and I don’t think that I did.

  I stole fourteen saltshakers that night and woke up withered and seasoned and tenderized the next morning.

  Detective Sikes must have given some hand signal that I missed, because the lights had gotten noticeably brighter and the room was fucking roasting. I didn’t say anything though. I was nonchalant as always. But I could feel the sweat on my neck.

  “How well did you know Marlene Burton?”

  “I told you. I talked to her a few times in the office during my appointments. That was it.”

  “What kind of relationship did you have with her?”

  “We were friends, I guess.”

  “So you’re admitting you had a relationship with her.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Did you see her last night?”

  “No.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I told you. At a bar.”

  “What bar?”

  “This bar by my house. They have happy hour from seven to ten in the morning.”

  “I’m talking about last night, not yesterday morning.”

  “I know. I was just telling you.”

  “Why don’t you stick to answering the questions I ask you.”

  “Okay.”

  “What’s the name of the bar?”

  “Sooj,” I said.

  “The bar is called Sooj?”

  “No, Sooj is the owner.”

  “I’m going to ask you one more time,” and he folded his hands on the table, clenching his fingers so the blood rushed to the tips. “What is the name of the bar?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “You’re not sure,” he repeated, then opened his manila folder and wrote something down. “So you allegedly spent all night in this bar while a girl you had an intimate relationship with died, and you don’t even know the name of the place?”

  I had to admit, it did seem a bit suspicious.

  “We weren’t intimate. I just knew her.”

  He opened the folder again and wrote something else. Then he flipped through some papers and pretended to read them. I knew he was doing it just to rattle me, and it was kind of working.

  “How long have you lived around here?”

  “About four months.”

  “Where were you before that?”

  “Moving around mostly.”

  “Moving around mostly,” he repeated. “You have proof of residence from these other places you lived?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I ride the bus.”

  “You ride the bus,” he repeated. It was pissing me off. “You ever have one of your other girlfriends disappear on you right before you left town?”

  And there it was. “Pin it on a drifter,” Brooks mouthed beneath his mustache, fogging the tinted window. The Chief was already picking out his tie for the press conference. By the time they were finished they’d have me convicted of every unsolved murder in the country since 1994. The victims’ families would finally find closure. Sikes and Brooks would get promotions. The Chief would be governor. The sacrifice of one man for the salvation of so many would be justified. It would be right. I was like Jesus after all.

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend,” I said, whining like I was in fourth grade. “Why are you asking me all these questions? You should be talking to her husband. He’s probably the one who did it.”

  “Did what?” Sikes said innocently, enjoying himself.

  “He hits her,” I said, and that made me feel like a coward all over again only worse, because I was running to tell the teacher about a bully instead of taking care of it myself.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “She had a black eye last weekend. She called me and said she needed help. I met her on the waterfront.”

  “I thought you hadn’t seen her since your last dentist appointment?” He looked down at his notes. “ ‘A month ago, maybe longer,’ you said.”

  Fuck.

  Chapter 4

  In a lifetime full of humiliations, great and small, getting to that insurance company every morning was by far the most wounding.

  I couldn’t ride with Gwen because she said it wouldn’t look professional. I think she was ashamed of me being just a temp. It was better this way. I couldn’t stomach talking to her sober anyway, especially not in the morning. Riding the bus was too bourgeois and expensive, and it made me homesick for Greyhound. It was too far to walk and I was too fragile to run.

  So I bought a bike. I’ve always liked the idea of riding a bike. It has something to do with childhood, the sound of baseball cards stuck in the tire spokes ratcheting as you pedal home just before it gets too dark. That’s how I like to think of it, even though I’ve never seen a kid do that in my entire goddamn life. It was big back in the fifties though, when kids were stupid and didn’t know how much baseball cards were worth.

  But it was more than just the stupidity of an older, greater generation and the mythic nostalgia for something I’d never had. Bicycles are the perfect harmony of man and machine. You work the pedals, use your muscles to create motion, pump your legs and grip the handlebars. And then there’s speed. The wind whips around you so it’s the only thing you hear, and once you get going you have your own momentum and you can take your hands off the handlebars and raise your arms over your head like you’re the featherweight champion of the world, or swing them at your sides like you’re sprinting really fast with hardly any effort, or spread them straight out like you’re flying or being crucified, like you’re Meg Ryan in that movie about angels right before she gets plastered by the logging truck.

  And that’s exactly how I felt riding my bike. I felt like Meg Ryan, seconds from a tragic death. It
was fucking harrowing.

  I bought the bike from a junk shop for twelve dollars. It was an old-fashioned cruiser with a high aristocratic seat and handlebars, the kind beautiful Italian girls with perfect posture ride in films set in the 1940s, pedaling past olive groves and waving, never suspecting that war will tear their family apart and that they’ll bear the child of a stoic yet kind American GI who will die heroically saving her country from itself. Something about it didn’t look right, but it was the cheapest one they had and I didn’t feel like shopping. I knew I had made a mistake when some dirtbag kid yelled after me on the street, “Hey faggot! Nice cruiser! My little sister has one just like it!”

  It was a girl’s bike. So that was a shame.

  Still, I could handle the taunts of dirtbag kids, even though they really fucking pissed me off. But besides being humiliating, my Italian woman’s bike was also a death trap. No matter how tight I screwed them the nuts and bolts were always loose and rattling. The handlebars shook going downhill and sitting on the too-high seat it felt like I was riding a slinky down a flight of uneven stairs. Only the front brakes worked so whenever I stopped short I was almost thrown over the handlebars, and the front brakes didn’t work in the rain so I had to stop by dragging my feet on the ground like fucking Fred Flintstone.

  And it rained every day I worked at that goddamn insurance company. I was forced to buy a pair of rain pants and a slicker from Goodwill. The pants were black and three sizes too big and long, and I had to pull them up to my armpits to keep them from catching in the chain. The slicker was yellow because my piece of shit bike had no reflectors and I didn’t want to die riding home at night. Visibility is important. The only helmet they had was designed for an eight-year-old pinhead and the strap was already worn thin, but I bought it anyway because of safety. It’s the law.

  I looked like a hobo sight gag with my mix-and-match rain gear and my junk shop bike, but for a while I thought I had some local color, some neighborhood folk hero charm. People in their cars would wave and give me the thumbs-up whenever they saw me, and they wouldn’t scream curses out their windows or even honk as I slid through an intersection dragging my feet, unable to stop on the slick road, causing minor traffic accidents as cars swerved to avoid vehicular homicide. I was something of a celebrity.

  Until the day I caught my reflection in a storefront window. Sitting high on a girl’s bike, my bulky rain pants yanked up to my neck, my shiny yellow Gorton’s fisherman slicker, my tiny child’s helmet like a vulcanized yarmulke on top of my head. Those smiles and thumbs-up were really saying, “Look at that retarded boy riding his bike in the rain. And all by himself too! Good for him!”

  And I wept as I sailed through those intersections, the pissing rain washing away my tears. I was something of a celebrity, a neighborhood folk hero. Just not the kind I would choose.

  If Tolstoy were alive today and working as a temp at Panopticon Insurance, he’d say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth-story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity.

  I worked on the eighteenth floor, but the windows were too thick.

  It was all cubicles and narrow walkways formed by the walls of cubicles, so it really was all cubicles. Their paneled walls were upholstered in heavy burgundy fabric that looked like it had been cut from medieval death shrouds, and the carpeting was mausoleum headstone slab gray. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling filtered a basement morgue pallor over everything, and the frenetic light panels screwed under the cubicle shelves to illuminate the desktops were like the caged bulbs in suburban backyards that bugs fly into to die. The thick windows didn’t open, so there was the constant hum of stale air being recirculated through the vents. It sounded like nighttime on a transatlantic flight, one where you’re getting screwed on the time change but it doesn’t matter because the plane is slowly, almost imperceptibly descending right into the fucking ocean.

  These people, my teammates, they had to have known. They had to have realized, in their own small, terrified way, that something about it all was horribly wrong. That’s why they packed their little cubicles with old Mardi Gras beads and postcards from far-off Hard Rock Cafes, with signs saying “You Want It When?” that had little cartoon men underneath bent over laughing at your unreasonable request, with trinkets, with framed certificates saying they’d been certified in CPR, with photographs of confused babies with big heads in frames titled “Spit Happens!” and school portraits of awkward kids with braces smiling in front of sky blue backdrops and Polaroids of dogs and fucking cats, all the shit that people and pharaohs surround themselves with to make it seem not so bad.

  I knew why they did it, but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. They seemed like nice enough people in their own creepy way, and I’m sure they meant well, but that just wasn’t good enough. They’d probably made some bad decisions along the way, decisions they’d long since rationalized to themselves to keep from suicide. Or maybe they’d just done what they thought they had to do to pay the bills. And that’s fine. People have families and mortgages and other responsibilities. But that doesn’t excuse all the goddamn misplaced enthusiasm.

  Nobody there hated their job nearly as much as they should have. That always bothered me. I heard them complain sometimes, but it was the ineffectual bitching of people who didn’t expect anything about their situation to ever change, and who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if it did. They were all older, rounder, more compromised versions of each other, all of them middle-aged, if not in years in appearance and aspiration. It was like time-release photography of humanity in slow decline. The mushroom cloud was Hawaiian shirt day. It was depressingly easy to picture the new girl, with her bright scarves and flipping hair thinking she was only there until she found another job at a non-profit, ten years later wearing a business suit and white sneakers as she power-walked around the building on her half-hour lunch break.

  That’s what I thought on a bad day. And since every day you’re temping at an insurance company is a bad day, that’s what I thought. It’s easy to lose faith when your weekdays are draped in death shrouds and your only respite is to sleep on a toilet. It is very easy to lose faith then.

  And whenever I thought I was being too hard on them, I remembered Inspiration Alley. There was proof that nice, well-meaning people would politely and eventually rob the rest of us of any reason to live. Inspiration Alley was a row of cubicles stretching from the boss’s double-cube office to the inner walkway around the elevators, and it was lined with quotations. They were printed on company letterhead in large type and tacked up on the burgundy walls like mirrors in a funhouse. These were my favorites:

  Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not—Robert Kennedy

  Do not hurry, do not rest—Goethe

  Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible—Mao Tse-tung

  I looked around, waiting for someone to do something. Then I realized that I was someone—Anonymous

  Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together—Vincent Van Gogh

  The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world—John F. Kennedy

  When the way comes to an end, then change—having changed, you pass through—I Ching

  If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it—Albert Einstein

  And the coup d’etat:

  If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well—Martin Luther King

  That one took two pages of company letterhead, but it was worth it.

  I sometimes saw people standing there, moving
their lips as they read, nodding, really understanding, clenching their fists at their sides, “Yes. Yes!” Then they went forth to be the best insurance agents the world had ever seen, for the glory of God and Panopticon. And I sat in my cubicle making a miniature gallows out of paper clips, and waited for my legs to work again.

  The boss’s name was Andrew, but he didn’t like the term boss. He referred to himself as the team facilitator. He was blond and slight and soft-voiced, with that managerial style where you speak quietly and ask your employees to do things, prefacing every request with, “Could you do me a favor?” or “If you have time . . .” or “Whenever you have a moment . . .” and ending with “At your earliest convenience, of course.” It’s the kind of shtick where if you’re a parent who tries it on their kids they grow up to be crack whores and gang-related murder statistics with no respect for anything. But it works on defeated adults because they don’t have the backbone to say “Fuck you Dad” and make the obviously wrong decision.

  Andrew was always nice to me. So nice that every time he saw me he’d say, “Hi Shane.” He once, in a span of six minutes, said “Hi Shane” eleven times. I fucking counted. He just kept walking past my cubicle “Hi Shane . . . Hi Shane . . . Hi Shane . . .” Finally, after the tenth time, I was on my way to the bathroom. He was standing talking to somebody and as I passed he turned his head—while the other guy was in mid-sentence—and mouthed Hi Shane, then turned back to the conversation. It was very unsettling.

  When I returned from the bathroom I went back to work on my gallows. But it is hard to make a full-size noose out of paper clips, and it takes a very long time. As it’s set up, the world encourages you to do things in miniature.