Person

by Sam Pink

  After I park I punch the steering wheel hard, three or four times and my hand hurts and I feel better.

  The word “yeah” moves through my head in neon letters.

  One of the windows on the first floor of the office building is lit.

  A cleaning lady wears a back-mounting vacuum and cleans a cubicle.

  I realize that the amount of distance between where you are standing in relation to someone else determines a lot about your behavior and feelings.

  And eventually I wake up from a nap I don’t remember taking.

  I’m in my roommate’s car in a parking lot in front of a dark office building.

  I drive home.

  At the apartment, my roommate is sitting on the carpet trying to get batteries into the tv remote control.

  When I sit on the couch I notice how bad the couch smells.

  It is a smell that in my mind looks big and formless like a cartoon cloud of two cats fighting and it laughs like a monster and it oinks too for some reason.

  My roommate struggles to put the batteries in.

  “I’m tired,” he says.

  “I took a big nap in your car so I probably won’t be able to sleep tonight,” I say. “Usually I can’t sleep after a big nap.” I make a motion with my forefingers meant to express circular motion, and I say, “One big nap after another like that.”

  Then I yell, “Big naps!”

  “Good job,” he says. “Did you get the hangers.”

  “Yeah they’re great. Thanks again.”

  My roommate continues trying to put the batteries into the television remote controller.

  He looks determined.

  In the hallway outside, someone screams, then laughs.

  Other people laugh too, walking down the hall.

  “Big naps!” I yell.

  My roommate drops the batteries and one goes underneath the couch.

  He gets the battery and returns to work.

  I slap both hands down on my legs and I yell, “Big naps!” again.

  My roommate says, “You’re awesome.”

  Then he snaps a piece back into place on the tv remote controller.

  “Do you want to split an orange again,” he says. “I need something to do.”

  “No, I’m good,” I say.

  He nods and turns the television on and the lights off and we lie down on different couches.

  The room is dark except for the tv.

  There’s a show on about bridges.

  A narrator talks about bridges and I wait to fall asleep, feeling poisoned by the hand of some bad magician, like, all the time yeah.

  This is the third time this week I’ve sat in my room and thought about what I’d buy if I won the lottery—ultimately admitting that I’d use it all to pay NASA to rocket my entire apartment (with me in it) deep into outerspace where the sun’s pull had no effect, or to where there’s this other sun with the exact opposite effect on growth.

  Something else I do more and more is I sit on the Blue Line train and I ride around for a few hours not-looking for jobs.

  It feels comfortable.

  I make sure to direct my sight towards my feet so I don’t accidentally see a job.

  It’s nice to just listen to the sound the train makes against the track.

  It’s just nice.

  The best part is at this certain point downtown. The train takes a long curve and the sun and this billboard with a funny looking frog on it both come out.

  I love it!

  Right now, I’m the only person in my section of the train.

  There’s an advertisement for a junior college along the inside of the train.

  The ad features a smiling man holding books.

  He looks nice.

  One day I will figure out which stop the junior college is at and then I will go there and meet this man and we will help each other through life.

  When I return to the apartment tonight, the first thing I do is I wash my hands in the sink.

  Usually I forget.

  Any time I don’t wash my hands after riding the train and then touch my eyes in my sleep, my eyes burn real bad.

  It’s terrible!

  I dry my hands on the couch and then I go to walk down the hallway to my room.

  At the dark entrance to the hallway I almost bump into my roommate.

  He’s just standing there quietly.

  “Hello,” he says. “Did you just get back.”

  “Yes,” I say. “You know that. You just said that because you had nothing else to say and you wanted to say something.”

  “Did you find a job,” he says. “Anything. Where did you look today.”

  I put my hand against the wall, blocking the kitchen from my roommate.

  And I position my face close to his.

  “Yes, another good day,” I say.

  He stretches and uses the stretch to step backwards a little, somewhat into the darker area of the hallway.

  He is looking at my mouth.

  “Well, good,” he says. “I knew you’d come back.”

  “Of course. I pay rent here.”

  “Oh,” he says, “I forgot. I have a job for you. I totally forgot about this but I have a job for you if you want it. Can’t believe I forgot about this.”

  I laugh.

  “Oh yeah—what’s the job.”

  “Uh I have, an opening for, someone to uh—” He sniffs, then he yells, “Eat my fucking shit.”

  He yells it right in my face.

  He laughs and I laugh too.

  And yes, we are people.

  He says, “So, if you are the right person for the job, let me know.”

  We laugh together.

  Everything looks exactly the same except we are laughing.

  It is good.

  I like it.

  Then my roommate slowly stops laughing.

  “Hey, but really though,” he says. “I do have a job for you. No joking now.”

  I’m still smiling.

  “What is it,” I say.

  “No really, I have a job for you,” he says. “I will pay you five-hundred dollars to kill my dad. I can give you the address and a little under half of the money right now. He lives like two hours away from here.” He points between us and he says, “So if you’re that person, let me know.”

  There is a pause in which I imagine a puppy falling out of the ceiling onto my head, then landing in my loving hands.

  “I’m being serious right now,” my roommate says. “I will give you the money if you kill him. Make it hurt too.”

  He pinches at his t-shirt, scratching his chest.

  He yawns.

  “Hey,” I say, taking my arm off the wall.

  I allow a pause.

  “Give me a hug.” I say.

  He smiles.

  We hug.

  The hug is somewhat long and it feels nice.

  Then when it’s over I walk down the hallway and go into my room and I call it a day and it calls me something else.

  Sometimes I can hear my room laughing at me when I go into it.

  The Blue Line train stop by my place is the stop I like the best because it smells the most harshly of piss.

  There is no equal.

  All the other stops aren’t as harsh.

  It’s like, this stop has the best piss smell, because no other piss smell tries this hard to be so condensed and so—just so new.

  And I get off the train to walk home, enjoying the piss smell.

  I made sixty dollars doing a study on smoking after lying about smoking.

  At home, my roommate is sitting on the counter in the kitchen playing a video game on his calculator.

  He sets the calculator down on the kitchen counter.

  “Battery died,” he says.

  I’m with this girl I had sex with a few months ago (and then now again just recently).

  She lives in a first floor apartment here in the same building.

  I have my head in he
r lap, and we are on the couch in her livingroom.

  Her apartment smells like garbage, just like mine.

  It’s afternoon and the room is lit but not too bright.

  It’s nice to be with her.

  My head is burnt badly from trying to shave it last night without shaving cream and her legs feel nice and cool against the skin on my head.

  “Your head looks bad,” she says. “Does it hurt.”

  “It hurts.”

  She leans in different directions to see more of the flaking.

  She is nice to me in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

  That’s probably why I mostly avoid her.

  And anyone like her.

  “Why didn’t you put lotion on it,” she says. “Or like, you could’ve dipped a t-shirt in water and then wrapped it around your head.”

  “I don’t think I’d like having a wet t-shirt over my head, even in private. When I think about doing that, I mean, I see myself shrugging,” I say.

  I wince.

  She takes her hand away.

  “Did that hurt,” she says.

  “Yes, pretty bad.”

  “It hurt when I touched it just now,” she says.

  “Yeah that made it hurt,” I say. “What did you do.”

  “I pressed my finger into it a little. I’m just trying to fix it. Do you want me to fix it even?” She presses her finger in again and she says,

  “Boop.”

  “That makes it hurt more. Much much more. Think ‘badly,’ but even more.”

  She presses her fingers lightly into my head.

  “Boop. I can’t imagine anything more than badly,” she says. “I get lost after that.”

  I move away from her hand.

  “Think of a piece of black construction paper,” I say. “And like, someone jabbing a pen through it a lot, all mad.”

  I stare at the carpet between her feet.

  “The flakes peel right off,” she says.

  She drops a piece to the carpet, past my face.

  “Did that hurt.”

  “I couldn’t feel it, actually.”

  She lets another piece of skin fall to the carpet, past my face.

  “You were being a baby then before,” she says.

  I watch the piece of skin hit the carpet and become a part of the carpet.

  “Yes I was,” I say. “A big baby.”

  “You fucking baby,” she says.

  I begin to make up a song in my head.

  The song is about being a big fucking baby.

  She continues to peel off pieces and drop them to the carpet and I watch each piece fall.

  “It’s a snow-day,” she says.

  She drops a few more pieces.

  She laughs.

  The laugh is small.

  It seems like she did it out of fear no one else would.

  “It’s a snow-day,” she says. “Let’s have a snow-day here. We’ll stay in.”

  She peels off more flakes and I see them fall in front of my face, to the carpet.

  This is the moment I realize that she is a real human being and I will never be what she needs to have.

  This has happened before.

  Another piece falls.

  “Soon I will be too small to see,” I say.

  “Be thankful for what’s left of you,” she says.

  I watch more flakes.

  I say nothing.

  Which means I agree.

  Yeah, and we are there for three-million years.

  Still there right now, three-million years later.

  Yeah, and the room is still the same size.

  And so am I.

  I can’t sleep.

  I’m too hungry.

  It’s really late but the way the traffic is starting to sound outside my window means it’s almost going to be light outside.

  In my dreams now I walk through fields populated with much smaller versions of myself and they are easy to smash with my feet.

  Waking up hungry is shitty I guess but it doesn’t matter.

  I leave my room and go down the hallway to the kitchen.

  All we have in the fridge is some peppermint ice cream.

  If I eat it though, I might be able to fall asleep before I get hungry again.

  That could work.

  My roommate is sleeping on the couch in the livingroom.

  He looks dead.

  I imagine a plausible series of events that results in me being accused of killing him even though I didn’t, and then me accepting the accusation just because I’m too tired to fight anything.

  I get the ice cream out of the freezer and put it in a bowl and walk around the apartment eating.

  For a little while I check the peephole leading out to the hallway.

  No one is there.

  Where are the people coming to find me.

  My roommate breathes in quickly on the couch.

  I eat a bite of ice cream.

  “Hey, pssst,” I say. “Hey. Wake up.”

  I tap the spoon against the bowl a little.

  He wakes up and turns over.

  “What.”

  “I’m eating ice cream,” I say.

  Then I point the spoon at him.

  “And I can see you,” I say, kind-of singing.

  He coughs a little.

  “Do you like the ice cream,” he says. “Is it wonderful ice cream.”

  “Yeah, it’s really good. I had to tell you. You’re the first person I wanted to tell.”

  “I’m the only person here,” he says.

  There’s a pause.

  “I’m glad you’re not dead,” I say.

  “Me too.”

  He coughs more then closes his eyes to go back to sleep.

  I eat some more ice cream and stare at him.

  It looks like I could just walk into the livingroom and jump on his head.

  It looks like me and him are dust in someone else’s carpet and we can’t say hello for fear of having to come up with a good reason.

  When I leave the room there is just the dark quiet of the livingroom behind me and I have done nothing wrong.

  When I shut the door to my room, I’m safe.

  I imagine a large person playing with a replica of our apartment as a dollhouse—me and my roommate for dolls.

  I want to say to this person, “What’s bothering you, tell me.”

  And I’d be fine with a million tomorrows if I could plan them all out right now and if they all began with me jumping into a large container/vat of puppies with Dutch accents.

  A man and a woman share the platform with me waiting between trains.

  They are twenty feet down, doing that hugging-swaying thing couples do when they are still happy together.

  And they each have a fountain drink in their hands, hugged behind the other.

  I’m watching them.

  Don’t let them escape.

  Oh I won’t.

  No, I’m kidding.

  Sometime in the near future, I will have no money.

  I understand that.

  At that point, my access to the world will lessen even more.

  I understand that too.

  I also understand that if there really were a force of evil, it would make sure I lived a long life, since that would mean badness for other people and myself too.

  No, I’m just being dramatic.

  The couple disengages from their hugging sway and the man walks up to the tracks.

  He’s laughing and so is she.

  He pours some of his fountain drink onto the electric rails.

  The woman, staying behind, she cranes her head forward.

  “Nothing?” she says.

  The man says, “Nothing.”

  He goes and stands by her again.

  And the train pulls up and before it fully stops I say, “Nothing” and nobody hears.

  I smell sort of bad.

  My roommate is letting me use his car to go pay our electric bill.<
br />
  We did not mail our electric bill on time and now I have to pay at city hall because otherwise it will be late.

  His car smells bad and it depresses me but the fact that I am in a car going somewhere to fulfill a task that will have real consequences is enough to make me feel justified in having a day at my disposal.

  I feel ok.

  Pretty much the mega-champion of all conceivable tests.

  At city hall, the woman behind the counter doesn’t make eye contact with me while I pay.

  I like it.

  It’s ok.

  It feels like practice.

  I see the word “mega-champion” scroll through my head in neon letters.

  In the lobby, just before the street exit, there is a woman on a cell phone and she says, “Well then kiiiiill the bitch.”

  Back at the apartment, I park the car and sit in it, staring through a window into the empty laundry room downstairs.

  I don’t feel like getting out of the car.

  For some reason, I remember this one time when I was on a little league baseball team in fourth grade.

  In the dugout during a game, my teammate kicked the coach in the dick and then hit the coach on the back with a bat, and the coach was the kid’s dad.

  It’s funny for me to remember that.

  I try to smear some dirt off his windshield but I realize the dirt is on the outside.

  “You win,” I say. “You always win.”

  And I get out and walk across the parking lot.

  My landlord crosses the parking lot at the same time.

  The rent check is in my pocket.

  I forgot to drop it off before I left.

  Now, seeing her, I know I have to actually go into her office.

  She has some vague expectation of her tenants, where we all act like family, rather than people with no interest in each other.

  I’m trying to say she is delusional and I don’t identify with her as a human.

  She stops and she smiles at me and I hope in vain for a rattlesnake or some kind of poisonous snake to emerge and bite me.

  It wouldn’t be bad.

  I would accept it.

  I’m just an asshole.

  It feels like practice.

  “Oh hey, come on in to the office real quick,” she says. “I want to show you something. Come on.”