Sandy’s knock was yet firm and hopeful, but he was at the wrong door. I had lost all interest in the man after my daughter died, and I couldn’t care less about his life, or what he was wearing or doing in his goddamn garage. It was all totally meaningless to me, and my jealousy of his glorious life was just a departed memory somewhere in the desolate corners of my hateful soul.
Yet I still opened my door to the crippled bird out of neighbor’s duty, but I didn’t feel anything when he gazed at me sheepishly and said, “Man, life is so difficult. I don’t know what to do anymore. I am lost.”
I looked at him with dispassionate eyes and asked, “What do you want, Sandy?”
“I…I just want to talk to you about something,” he said quietly.
“Why?”
“Because I am a human being, and I need to talk to someone, OK?”
I was quiet for a moment and said, “OK, Sandy. Tell me what’s wrong.”
The sad crow looked straight into my eyes and said, “Lucy is gone. She wants a divorce.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I’m broke, and my libido is gone.”
“How did that happen?” I asked in a genuinely surprised voice.
“Uh, I was fired a couple of months ago. Didn’t meet the quotas and stuff. I’m about to lose my house now. I have nothing left, and I can’t keep up the appearances anymore. I just can’t.”
I sighed deeply, looked at his puppy’s eyes, and said, “Damn you, Sandy. Don’t tell me that this is true. Don’t you tell me that this is true.”
Sandy looked at his feet, closed his eyes and said, “It is true, man. It’s all true.”
I looked at his disgustingly healthy hair for a moment too long and asked, “You know what? You are a dick, Sandy. Don’t you do this to me. Don’t you do this to me now!”
He looked at me with startled eyes and asked, “What, why, why do you say things like that, man? I’m in pain. Can’t you see that? What is wrong with you?”
“No, Sandy, no. You can’t be broke, and you can’t be in pain. You can’t get a goddamn divorce.”
“What, what, man? What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean that you are a superwinner, Sandy. A superwinner! Don’t you know that?”
“What, a super what?”
“A superwinner! You are a superwinner, motherfucker!”
After I had said that, he started sobbing and whispered with a quivering voice, “No, God, no, you’ve got it all wrong, man. I am a loser. That’s what I am.”
“No, you are not. I refuse to believe you. You are lying! You are lying to me!”
Tears started flowing down his cheeks like cool morning rain on a broken barn window, and he said quietly, “Man, I was jerking off in the handicapped restroom at Walmart just this morning, and I cry like a little baby every night. Is that the man you are talking about? Is that the man you call a winner?”
I was quiet for a moment and said, “Jesus Christ, Sandy, you really ruined it for me, didn’t you?”
He raised his head and looked even more confused than before, and he asked with teary eyes, “What do you mean, man? How did I ever ruin anything for you?”
I sighed deeply and said, “You wasted my jealousy, Sandy. You wasted my goddamn envy. You tricked me, you idiot. I was jealous of you all these years, and now you march here and tell me that it was all smoke and mirrors. This is a goddamn disaster, man. At least tell me that you were happy before Lucy told you that she was divorcing you. Tell me that, you bastard! Tell me!”
Sandy looked genuinely frightened, and fresh tears surfaced from the abyss of his tired soul. Then he looked at me with defeated eyes and said, “Uh, no, man. I haven’t been happy for years. Lucy hasn’t touched me in ages, and my health is going down the drain. I am in pain all the time, and I can’t even sleep because my back hurts so badly. I have been on my feet for twenty years selling those Chevys for Mr. Cooper. I am a wreck, man. What can I say?”
I shook my head and said, “But what about your house, your pool, your car, and all those damn alligator shirts? What about them?”
“Man, I have more debt than the government, and the car is leased from Cooper—of course it is. They will come for it any day now.”
I didn’t say anything because I was in a state of total shock and disbelief.
Then Sandy asked, “What? Did you think that people actually own their damn cars? Are you stupid, or what?”
I sighed and asked, “And the shirts?”
“Shirts? What fucking shirts, man?”
“The alligator shirts, Sandy!”
“You mean the Lacoste shirts?”
“Yeah, the alligator shirts that cost a hundred dollars a pop. What about them?”
“Those are all fake, man. A friend of mine in Ho Chi Minh City keeps sending them to me even if I don’t want the shrinking, staining rags. They are all crap, worse than the cotton T-shirts Lucy buys me, uh, used to buy, from Walmart for five bucks.”
I looked at him sternly and said, “That’s it, Sandy. I can’t take this anymore. I just can’t. I bought my damn car because of you. I was obsessed about those alligator shirts, and I wanted to have your life. I wanted your garage and your fridge full of beer and food. I wanted your goddamn premium beef jerky, and I wanted Lucy. Tell me, Sandy, aren’t there any people left in this world who are genuinely happy? Are there any people in this cursed town who are as wealthy as they look, or are they all faking, too? Is that what you are saying, Sandy? Is that what you are saying, Goddammit? I deserved a true and authentic target of envy, and you stole even that from me by revealing the truth. I’m done with you, Sandy. I am done.”
The beaten man looked at me incredulously and said, “I don’t understand what you mean, man. You are not coherent. You are not all right. Are you stoned, or what?”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there and looked at him.
Then he glanced at his shoes and said quietly, “Screw you, man,” and walked away.
“Yeah, you fly now, little bird, you fly now. And try to remember that the sun will rise every goddamn morning, but it’s not guaranteed that we wake up happy and full of yummy food, OK?” I said and closed the door.
Sandy came back a few times after that night, crying and drunk, but I didn’t have much to say to him. He only talked about his personal troubles and never seemed to even remember that the curved black blade of the Grim Reaper’s scythe had licked me hard and almost taken my head off.
It didn’t take long before he stopped coming altogether, and that was the end of our little neighborly heart-to-hearts. I was fine with that, though, because I was busy planning for my curious future and trying to understand the new me. I simply had no time for Sandy and his homemade pain. In fact, I was getting tired of the whole damn neighborhood and slowly starting to realize that a change of scenery was the only way forward for me. I was no longer the same man who had lived in that dream house with my loving family. I wasn’t a father, a husband, or a math teacher anymore but a wretch of a man who had been forced to become so free that he had actually ended up in prison. I had no responsibilities, and I was accountable to no one, not even to God. I had been transformed into something that did not even have a name.
That new creature knew that he needed to move away from the adorable suburban people and their barking dogs, and live alone somewhere where silence was the only king in town. He knew that he was dangerous and unpredictable and no longer belonged among the happy and hopeful, the ones whose dreams were still alive. He was tired of being sad and didn’t want to live in that depressing house anymore and breathe its heavy, air every time he closed his badger’s eyes—every morning he opened those sad peepers again and remembered that his family lay in the wormy ground.
That creature didn’t, unfortunately, have the necessary money for the move in his bank account, but, fortunately, a pleasant surprise had arrived in the mailbox in the form of a life insurance compensation. Eden had always been very
kind to the door-to-door salesmen who rang our doorbell on hot summer days, and she had found it very difficult to say no to the incredible, once-in-a-lifetime offers they carried in their tawdry black briefcases. Sometimes she hid behind the curtains and refused to open the door altogether because she didn’t want to say no to the salesmen and disappoint them. On one occasion, she even ran upstairs and crawled under the bed and put her fingers deep into her ears until the salesman was gone.
I am not exactly sure what had happened on that evening when the lucky life insurance salesman rang our doorbell, but for some peculiar reason, Eden had decided to purchase a shiny new policy from him and keep it hidden from me. I think she did it more out of kindness and compassion for the hapless road warrior than for fear of the premature arrival of the Grim Reaper, but whatever the reason for buying that insurance was, I was its sole beneficiary, and the check was now safely in my wrinkled hand. It was a fairly decent payout, too, four hundred thousand dollars; more than enough to provide a new start for a confused man who was lost somewhere in the lonely hills of the posttraumatic world—a world where working for a paycheck was no longer possible.
I owed some money to the government and a couple of private lenders, but I decided that I would not pay them back—not a dime. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore, and I felt like I had paid enough taxes, interest, overdraft fees, handling costs, and whatnot already, so I was just going to keep all the money and tell them to leave me alone. It was a good and simple plan, but I knew that I needed to be very careful because the greedy pencil pushers would try to steal my money if I gave them even the slightest chance to do that. But I wasn’t going to.
To be honest, the IRS, the banks, or the goddamn municipal code, for that matter, didn’t intimidate me much after I lost my respect for death. They transformed into something that didn’t really concern me anymore; something that I didn’t give a rat’s ass about. After I had emerged from the sunny end of the meat grinder alive, all the almighty laws and regulations I had so much feared, and so meticulously followed my whole life, had become weak, even adorable. They were something that I wanted to squeeze and pat, like a puppy that amused me but didn’t deserve my respect or fear. The puppy, of course, tried to bite my goddamn fingers off because he—like all small dogs—thought that he was so doggone powerful and dreaded.
I had never been a big fan of bureaucrats because I thought that most of the rules they enforced were being used to feed their childish greed and audacious egocentricity. There were just too many bloody fools wandering in the government’s giant labyrinths who wanted to raise a glass of mediocre champagne to their deserving lips on a five-star cruise to nowhere and smile a guilty, but so cleverly and self-righteously justified, yet ostensible smile with their smug colleagues. Those same fools knew deep inside their deceitful souls that a giant load of crap would hit the fan one day and paint them all with greed’s reeky colors, but they still wanted to drink and dance a little more because fun times like that simply couldn’t be missed. They wanted to party until the dam of collective anger burst like a dirty soap bubble and released the bitter waters that had been flooding into it from that distant stygian world they so happily regulated without a hint of sense left in their machine’s minds. They wanted to frolic in their shiny shoes until the murky sludge full of deadwood and human excrement buried their little books, pencils, and red bookkeeper’s hats—until the angry men and women in beasts’ clothes started approaching them from all directions with torches and good old wooden pitchforks in their bruised hands. Only then, would they look at one another and get ready to repent, but it would be too late because the torches were already burning hot.
In addition to finding a new place to live, I decided to get a new identity. I needed it to keep the bank’s sticky fingers off my insurance money, and, more importantly, become a ghost. My rebirth wasn’t going to be complete until the old me had been erased from the government’s books. The machine had to believe that I had disappeared and presume that I had died, committed suicide, or just wasted away like an old newspaper. Only my death would allow the new me to breathe freely.
I was confident that my plan was going to work because any remaining family I had in the area was too distant to care about my disappearance, and I didn’t have any friends who would have stopped me in the street and asked what the hell was going on. I was, however, going to get some fake glasses, cut my hair, lose a couple of pounds and move to the next town, just to be on the safe side. I had learned not to underestimate people’s curiousness and their inexplicable obsession to start poking around when they noticed something unusual.
After two days of careful planning, I put the wheels of change in motion and cashed the insurance check. I chose a small local bank because I didn’t owe them any money and the manager knew about my tragedy. He was a decent, compassionate man, and I was sure that he wouldn’t ask me any unnecessary questions or put me in a tight spot. I was, after all, a man who had recently lost his whole family.
My intuitions proved right, and the money was soon in a sturdy, 29-inch hardside suitcase. It was a beautiful thing, and I couldn’t believe how happy those little printed pieces of paper made me. I laughed aloud because it just felt so goddamn rudimentary that we still used colorful toilet paper to pay for things, but I figured that the future was always a little further away than we wanted to believe. It seemed like everyone was eager to change the world, but no one really liked change. Everyone wanted to start a revolution, but no one really liked blood.
After the financial situation was taken care of, it was time to get my new identity. I had already planned the whole thing in my head, and it didn’t take long to find a homeless man on his last legs who agreed to sell his social security card to me for a fair price. He asked for nine hundred dollars with a voice and expression that told me that he was asking much more than he would have accepted. I gave him four thousand dollars in cash and five one-hundred-dollar gift cards to Morton’s. Carry out, dine in—his choice.
After getting the card of life, I drove to the DMV and entered the depressing perennial line that snaked around the crumbling building like a colorless serpent that was made of the unhappiest people in the world. I definitely wouldn’t take a nice woman there on a first date, but the wait paid off handsomely, and after a couple of hours of tolerable agony, I had a brand-new driver’s license in my pocket.
The license looked absolutely fantastic, and I felt proud that I had, once again, managed to fool the guardians of the government. I was a surprisingly capable criminal, and my new name and hairstyle complemented my transformation from a tame family man into an unexpected felon quite nicely. Even the fake glasses looked good on me, and they completely changed my appearance. I hardly recognized that crazy bastard who was staring at me from its plastic prison. The new man looked much younger and smarter than me, and I wondered if I should have cut my thinning hair years ago. Who knows, maybe that would have even lured out the sex beast in Eden and put my unemployed penis back to work.
It was satisfying to break the law, especially when everyone was so helpful and kind while I was doing it. Even the DMV folks had been in a great mood, and that was something that had never happened to me before. It almost seemed like they knew that I was doing something illegal, but because they couldn’t prove any of it, or didn’t have any extra energy to investigate further, they just did their jobs and avoided any annoying hoops that would have interrupted their daily routines and maybe put them under the dreaded microscope of the bosses.
After getting my driver’s license, I opened an account under my new name at a bank that I had never been a client of and deposited the insurance money in it. I told the manager, for a lack of a better explanation, that I had hit a small jackpot in Vegas on my second honeymoon. He seemed to like my feel-good story a lot, even if he clearly knew that it was total horseshit. The man would have probably agreed with me that it was possible to turn a negative image into a positive one by simply manipulating the labeling
process a little. It was, for example, much smarter to put an olive in a glass of vodka and say that you were going to enjoy a martini than leave the olive out and say that you were going to drink a glass of vodka.
Opening the bank account was the final thing I needed to do regarding my identity and money, and the new man was now ready to face the world and cannonball into the murky pool of humanity. I didn’t even bother getting a new passport because I knew that I wasn’t going to leave the country. It had been clear to me right from the beginning that my plan didn’t include the need to run away from anybody. Ever.
The next step was to get a new place to live and find a set of wheels that wouldn’t make me stand out from the crowd. I didn’t want to drive my old car anymore because it reminded me of Annalise and her silver car seat. In fact, I was scared to death of the damn thing, and I couldn’t even peek at the backseat without risking a total nervous breakdown. There was no choice: the Chevrolet had to go.
After a couple of days of reluctant house hunting, I found a small secluded place in the woods that was for rent. The quiet property seemed like a perfect refuge for my tired soul, and I signed the lease with my new name and shook the owner’s hand firmly without even seeing the house. I simply had no energy for stuff like that, and when the owner requested that I read the seven-page contract, I wanted to take the pen and stab him in the liver. I was, yet, extremely proud that I had been able to find a new home all by myself, and I allowed a tiny smile to enter my aging face when the owner said that he had known from the beginning that I was a good man.
The Sapphire Express Page 4