by Aimee Bender
He flashed on an image of a hamburger, at a drive-through near his home, in a tinfoil pocket.
“Right now it might be helpful,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
He wiped his hands clear on his pants. “I still think it’s hokum.”
“Okay,” she said. She opened her eyes. Her forehead relaxed. “That’s okay. I’ll stop. I just wanted to talk it through with you. I’m glad you stayed.”
He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. It was hot in her office.
“I apologize for being so stubborn.”
“You weren’t stubborn,” she said, leaning over and unpeeling the tape on a new box. “You were actually pretty open. In a way, in my book, we just did it.”
“Did what?”
“Prayed, in a way,” she said. “Wrestled with it.”
“Why do you say that?” He sat up taller. For some reason, the thought made him angry.
“Because you’re leaning in,” she said, unfolding the box flaps. “Because I am tired, in a way that I recognize. Because you seem to be fighting up from under some water. Into what, I don’t know. Into something. Because we were talking about it deeply,” she said. “I could feel it.”
“We were having an argument!” he said. He stood up, but her office was too small to pace, so he turned away, and stepped away, and found himself going through the door and going down the hall to use the bathroom. Down the long, dark, narrow hallway, with its closed office doors, and framed yarn art telling stories of the Old Testament. Once he was inside the bathroom, the motion sensor light clicked on; it was the end of the day, and no one had been in for over an hour. The space held the loneliness particular to an unused bathroom, the glare of fluorescent lights, the echo of sink and crumpling paper, the tired isolation of one person in an office building, alone, at night, working too late. He used up ten paper towels on his face and neck, until he was sufficiently dry. He washed his hands carefully in the sink. He took the back exit.
The rabbi sat in her office for forty-five minutes, unpacking the last donation boxes, to see if he would return, but he did not return, and so she shouldered her bag and walked the seven blocks home.
The doctor found his car in the parking lot, one of the last three there, and joined the flow on the street. He drove with his air-conditioner fan on full blast, into traffic as the sun set, into dusk, with the full moon rising in his rearview mirror, almost taunting him with her big presence in his car alone and every car around and none of it being how he liked to think or was interested in thinking. And yet. Why did he love the rabbi? He loved her. He got home and looked through the mail, and he had driven past the drive-through, so instead he sent out for a meatball sandwich, which he ate in pieces, because it was too unwieldy to eat all at once, and even the bread he cut into bite-sized parts. He could feel it, just feel it, the glimmer of something that he did not understand. He would never call it God. He would not call it prayer. But just beyond his sandwich, and the four TV shows he watched back to back, and his teeth brushing, and his face washing, and his nighttime reading of a magazine, and his light switching off, just the faint realization that there were many ways to live a life and that some people were living a life that was very different than his, and the way they lived was beyond him and also didn’t interest him and yet he could sense it. Comfort and fear rose together inside him. Like standing in the middle of a meadow, where no one had his back.
PART THREE
Wordkeepers
I can’t remember the words of things. The words for words. I have lost my words. What’s this from? Is it the Internet? Texting? E-mail? I see it in kids, too; it’s not an aging thing. An aging issue. I do know that at the supermarket yesterday, I asked the guy where the weighing thing was, the thing that weighs other things, flailing around with my hands, indicating, and he crumpled up his forehead and said, “You mean the scale?”
“Yes”—I said, beaming, pumping his hand—“the scale!” As if he was the winner of an SAT prize giveaway.
At the doctor’s office, I told my doc that it was sore.
“What’s sore?”
I pointed to my neck. “This.”
“Your throat,” he said.
“Of course,” I said.
We went over my symptoms. He gave me a subscription.
With hand gestures, you can fill in a lot of gaps, and the words thing and stuff and -ness also help: patientness instead of patience, fastness instead of speed, honestness instead of honesty. With these choices, many words can be indicated, and pointing or gesticulating usually works. At the shoe store, I watched a lady walk up to the mini socks and point right at them, and the salesguy knew just what she wanted. Plus, who knows what those flimsies are called anyway.
“Cavemen point,” said Susan, my neighbor, one Saturday morning. “You can always point at what you want, but you’d be returning to Neanderthal standards.”
“Well, maybe we’re going back to caveman times,” I said, pouring a circle of wet pancake into the pan. “Tech forward, language back.”
“Reverting,” she said.
“What?”
“Reverting to caveman times.”
“That’s not my word choice,” I said, picking up the flipper thing. “I said ‘going back’ on purpose. I don’t like that word, reverting.”
“If it was on purpose, then fine,” she said, standing a fork on its end.
I flipped the pancake. “Oh, fuck off,” I said.
Once the edges were all gold, I put one on her plate. A perfect goldy circle. She smiled at me. But not a thank-you smile, no: a self-satisfied one. She always looks so smug. Smug, smug, smug. I like that word very much, and I won’t forget it easily.
Susan calls social Web sites silly distractions. She refuses to even look at an electronic book, because she says she must have pages, must. Fine; I read pages, too. I too enjoy the book smell everybody goes on and on about. Time for the perfumists to wake up, right? A perfume called Book? With its cologne follow-up, Newspaper? The question is, does she have to be so goddamn righteous about it? Does she have to raise her eyebrows like that, when I mention an app? She looked over my shoulder once while I was texting, which was already annoying, and when I wrote lol she made a very clear point to me about how I was silent and not laughing out loud, not at all. I said it was just an expression, and that I was laughing out loud inside my own mind. She rolled her eyes then, way back into her head. She’s not even my girlfriend. We did sleep together once, right when I moved in, but then it sort of drizzled away. We both got busy and I woke up to the neighbor problem. The neighbor-lover problem. And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it’s better than smoking, that’s what I say. It’s the new, lung-safe cigarette.
“Those breathing things,” a student of mine said last week, gesturing at her chest. She was trying to explain to me why she had to miss the history test. I nodded. I got it.
“Pneumonia,” she said.
“You okay?”
“I think so,” she said. “The doctor gave me drugs.”
“Drugs?”
She thought for a second. She made that little wheeze sound. “Antirobotics?”
I couldn’t help smiling. “So you will not become a robot,” I said.
“Hope not,” she laughed.
In the daytime, I work at a school where I teach junior-high-school history. I have been working there for eight years, since I had a crisis of identity in law school and realized I hated reading red and beige books. Teaching’s way better. I teach American history, and, true, we do spend a lot of time on the Revolutionary War, more than on any other war, but junior-high-school kids like the idea of people throwing tea in the water.
You’d think in school it might be better with the words, but it’s worse. When we have a good class discussion, my students will sometimes raise their hands with enthusiasticness, jumping up and down in their seats, but by the time I get around to calling on the
m, most of them say, “I forgot what I was going to say.” A good 50 percent of the time. I have taught now for a long time and this did not happen even five years ago. It is new.
“Where did it go?” I ask.
“Where did what go?”
“Your point?”
They shrug. “Don’t know,” they say. They hold up their cell phones. “Sorry. We are holding a lot of small things in our heads.”
“What things?” I say.
“Things,” they say. “In our …”
They point to their heads.
“We are holding a lot of them.”
I’d be irritated, except as soon as they leave I have a thing I am planning to do and I walk into the center of the room to do it and whatever it was flies away. Half my days I find myself standing in the centers of rooms.
In some study, they say phones and computers are replacing our cerebral cortexes, externalizing our thoughts so that we do not need to think them—the same way certain couples will have one quiet, meeky person who trails off all the sentences and one overeager type who leaps in to finish. We’re the trailer-offer, Google’s our jumpy mate. Susan is worried about this, but is it so bad? Sure, Shakespeare knew ten thousand words, or a million words, just a lot of words, and he was real good at what he did, but also no women were allowed in his shows and if you got sick with pneumonia you’d just die, probably in two days, and only half the children made it to age ten. So it’s a trade-off, is what I say.
Susan shook her head. “It’s no trade,” she said. She was over again, with wine. “Meaning,” she said, “you can improve your vocabulary and still get your amoxicillin and vote. It’s not like there’s a checklist and for each era we only get ten helpful options, and everything else goes to shit.”
“I like that word, option,” I said.
“Are you kidding me?”
“Optional,” I said. “Opt. Opting. Nice.”
She poured herself a second glass of wine.
“I’m so sick of dating,” she said, leaning back in her chair and lifting up her legs to sit cross-legged.
“Online?”
“Yeah,” she said, sighing. “Even me. Even me, online. Fine. I hate picking a name for myself, you know? Yesterday I saw a man and his Internet name was Fido. What am I supposed to do with that?”
“What’d you name yourself?”
“Nothing.”
“You have to name yourself something,” I said. “Or they don’t let you on the site.”
She finished her wine. Eyed the bottle. I refilled both of us, so it looked like it wasn’t just her.
“Wordkeeper,” she said.
“Your dating name is Wordkeeper?”
“Shut up,” she said.
“Sex-y,” I said.
“Well, maybe to someone it will be.” She took off her glasses, and touched the middle top of her nose, a geste she does that I do like.
“It has a little bit of a dom tone,” I said, sipping. “Like you’re hoarding all the words and you’ll give them out when you feel like it. Some guys will like that.”
She had her eyes closed. She was thinking something private.
“Some guys,” she said.
I went to open a bag of peanuts and poured them into a bowl. Susan and I have talked about dating since that one thing, but I have always said no. I’m not completely sure why. We’re like the couple on the sitcom that has good sparks but never get together for the sake of ratings.
“You know I can’t,” I said, putting the bowl on the table. “I’m your neighbor.”
“So?” she said. She opened her eyes. “We get along. I see you almost every day.”
“Too risky.”
“That is such bullshit!” she said. She glared at the table. She began to shell peanuts. “Are you just not … attracted?”
Susan is a good-looking woman, I’ll give her that. She wears blouses with one button unbuttoned right where you’d want that to happen. Her glasses make her look like you want to take off her glasses. She gets plenty of dates, or she could, if she wanted.
“You’re smug,” I said. I laughed at myself, surprised.
“What do you mean?”
“ ‘Wordkeeper’?”
“Is smug?”
I winced. “Yeah,” I said. “Kind of.”
“I’m old-fashioned,” she said. She swept her shells into a little pile.
I smiled, but not an agreement smile.
She shook her head. “I don’t mean to be,” she said. “I just like the feeling of finding the right word in my mind and employing it. I get pleasure from that feeling. I prefer language to gesture. I figured other people might, too.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I don’t think I’m better than you.”
“It’s okay. You probably are.”
We sat there for a while. She liked to run her long nail down the length of each peanut and then open it up like a present.
“I suppose sex is all gesture,” she said.
“Not even really gesture.”
“I guess not. Not indicative at all.”
“No.”
She ate the peanuts. She was flushed from the wine. She wanted to take off her clothes, I could feel it, the same way she was undressing peanuts, and I felt it as cruel then, how I didn’t want to do anything with her. Maybe cruel to both of us. But the truth is, I just felt like I had e-mail to check. I could masturbate faster. It was easier, in terms of fallout. Who wants to be in an argument with a neighbor?
She held the bottom of her wineglass down hard with her fingers, like otherwise she might just fling it across the room.
I checked my phone. Sent a couple of quick texts. After a few minutes, she left.
The phone is about the same size as a cigarette pack. It’s no surprise to me that the traditional cigarette lighter in many cars has turned into the space we use to recharge our phones. They are kin. The phone, like the cigarette, lets the texter/ former smoker drop out of any social interaction for a second to get a break and make a little love to the beautiful object. We need something, people. We can’t live propless.
It wouldn’t bother me except it bothers me. In the shower I gave myself a test. That stuff I put in my hair for suds? Is called shampoo. The silver tray hanging over the shower top? Is a caddy. The string I use to get crap out of my teeth? Is known as dental floss. She’s in my head all day, Susan, so why have sex with her too? All day I hear her chiding me.
She doesn’t come over for a few days, which is unusual. On Saturday I walk up to her place. I had a dream about her and it was nice, and in the interest of living in the moment, I made a tray of chocolate-dipped strawberries. I made them Friday night. Good chocolate. Good with wine. Organic strawberries, because they are very high on the pesticide list otherwise. She opens the door.
“Yeah?” she says.
She looks tired. Her hair is less planned than usual. I step in. I give her the tray.
“You brought me these?” she says, suspicious.
“I did.”
“What for?”
I was in the middle of her living room. I had had a plan, I knew that. But the rest of it had vanished.
The Color Master
Our store was expensive, I mean Ex-Pen-Sive, as anything would be if all its requests were for clothing in the colors of natural elements. The duke wanted shoes the color of rock, so he could walk in the rock and not see his feet. He was vain that way; he did not like to see his feet. He wanted to appear, from a distance, as a floating pair of ankles. But rock, of course, is many colors. The distinction’s subtle, but it is not just one plain gray, that I can promise, and in order to truly blend, it would not do to give the duke a regular pair of lovely pure-gray-dyed shoes. So we had to trek over as a group to his dukedom, a three-day trip, and take bagfuls of rocks back with us, and then use them, at the studio, as guides. I spent five hours one afternoon just staring at a rock, trying to see into its color scheme. Gray, my head kept saying. I
see gray.
At the shop, in general, we build clothing and shoes—shirts and coats, soles and heels—we treat the leather, shape and weave the cloth, and even when an item isn’t ordered as a special request, one pair of shoes or one robe might cost as much as a pony or a month’s food from the market stalls. Most villagers do not have this kind of money, so the bulk of our customers are royalty, or the occasional wealthy traveler riding through town who has heard rumors of our skills.
For the duke’s shoes, all of us tailors and shoemakers, who numbered about twelve, were working round the clock. One man had the idea to grind bits of rock into particles and then add those particles to the dye-washing bin. This helped a little. We attended visualization seminars where we tried to imagine what it was like to be a rock, and then, quietly, after an hour of deep thought and breathing, returned to our desks and tried to insert that imagery into our decision about how long to leave the shoes in the dye bath. We felt the power of the mountain in the rock, and let that play a subtle subtextual role. And then, once the dye had reached ultimate intensity, and once the shoes were a beautiful pure gray, a rocky gray, but still gray, we summoned the Color Master.
She lives about a half mile away, in a cottage behind the scrub-oak grove. We summon her by sending off a goat down the lane, because she does not like to be disturbed by people, and the goat trots down the road and butts on the door. The Color Master set up our studio and shop in the first place, years ago; she has always done the final work. But she has been looking unwell these days. For our last project—the duchess’s handbag that was supposed to look like a just-blooming rose—she wore herself out thinking about pink, and was in bed for weeks after, recovering. Dark circles ringed her eyes. She is growing older. Also, her younger brother suffers from terrible back problems and cannot move or work and lives with her, lying on the sofa all day long. She is certainly the most talented in the kingdom, but gets zero recognition. We, the tailors and shoemakers, we know of her gifts, but does the king? Do the townsfolk? She walks among them like an ordinary being, shopping for tomatoes, and no one knows that the world she’s seeing is about a thousand times more detailed than the world anyone else is looking at. When you see a tomato, like me, you probably see a very nice red orb with a green stem, fresh and delectable. When she sees a tomato, she sees blues and browns, curves and indentations, shadow and light, and she could probably even guess how many seeds are in a given tomato based on how heavy it feels in her hand.