“Who the hell do you think you are?!” she thundered.
He stuck out his hand.
“Arlo Black. Pleasure.”
“Order up!” Joe Jr’s voice called from the pick-up counter. And just like that, Arlo lost her again.
A wave of confusion washed over Gillian’s face as she turned back toward the counter to grab the white paper cup with “Villain” written on the side.
Arlo groaned. Until a couple of days ago, he’d felt like every day of his life was exactly the same as the one before. But since becoming aware he’d tried everything he could think of to make her aware as well. His plan wasn’t going too good so far. Although, to be fair, Arlo couldn’t think of a whole lot of things to try. He was woefully lacking in the Imagination Department and the Brains Department was in the red, all outta vital office supplies and currently using recycled photocopies as toilet paper.
As Gillian breezed by with her burning hot brew, the barista set another, taller cup on the counter.
“Order up,” he said, nodding his head in Arlo’s general direction.
Arlo grabbed the obligatory java and darted out the swinging door after Gillian.
She was already seven Saguaro down the sidewalk before he caught up with her. He watched as she lifted one foot to step off into the street and almost immediately yanked it back as a bicycle blew by. A second later, she stepped off into the gutter and strode purposefully toward the sliding glass doors of the boxy structure that made up the medical billing firm where she worked.
Arlo shivered slightly as he watched her enter the office building. For one fleeting moment, he’d thought she might have remembered. That instinctual foot retraction had been interesting. But now, once again, he must follow her into the dreaded hall of dead-end temp jobs.
Arlo’s greatest fears in life included: high-waisted jeans, flip phones, dying alone, and getting stuck in a dead-end job. Not necessarily in that order. The façade of the billing office that stood across from him in the hazy light of Downtown practically screamed Dead End. It was blank concrete with no windows and only one set of doors. It covered an entire block with no quaint little shops on either side to soften the look. And it had a large billboard sign on top of the roof that proclaimed the business name: Forever Pharmaceuticals. Underneath the name was written their slogan ‘You’re going to die no matter what. Might as well be with a 4-hour erection.’
To Arlo, the billing firm looked almost exactly like the head office that fronted the factory back home in Calamityville where Arlo had grown up. Calamityville, a tiny town just outside Bleaksville, Mississippi, contained a large canning factory where 90% of the citizens worked, including Arlo’s mother, Constance Black.
The canners worked long hours at the Calamityville Cuttlefish Cannery. “Four tens,” his mother always said, “Are better than a sharp stick in the eye.” Arlo never understood why anyone, even his mother, would consider that to be a reasonable comparison. Quite a few things were better than a sharp stick in the eye, after all. Things like tepid coffee, or too-tight tennis shoes, or even a dull stick in the eye.
Arlo followed Gillian through the sliding doors and into the foyer of Forever Pharma. He caught up to her standing still before the door to the employee restroom, coffee cup clutched firmly in hand. She was staring in rapt fascination at the beige door to the unisex as though it was the most interesting passage on the planet. A veritable wormhole to wonderland.
“Gillian?” Arlo asked as he approached her.
She turned her head so fast that he feared she might get whiplash, the rest of her perfectly still form frozen in place.
Staring at him wildly from the corner of her eye, she whispered, “When is a door not a door?”
“Ummm,” Arlo mumbled, “I’m not too good at riddles.”
“I think that I might be going crazy…”
Arlo smiled, a gleeful giggle slipping out of his gullet. “Knowing is half the battle.”
Her brow furrowed as she pondered that.
“Of course, if it’s really a battle they’re talking about, then I suppose the other half is killing people,” he said with a shrug, his nervous chuckle filling the uncomfortable silence.
“What?” Gillian asked.
“Nothing,” Arlo said. “Do you need to use the bathroom?”
She clucked her tongue. “That’s a pretty personal question. I don’t even know you.”
“True,” Arlo agreed. “But you do know that a lot of interesting people have died on the toilet. You know… I find you interesting, Gillian.”
The full coffee cup suddenly dropped from her clawed hand to splash in a fountain of burning hot, brown java all over her legs and shoes, luckily not reaching high enough to drench her immaculate skirt suit.
A wordless cry of shock and pain escaped Gillian’s throat as the bare skin of her calves sizzled under the onslaught of 2,000 degree coffee.
“Woah, bummer,” Arlo said. “Looks like you’re going to need to use that bathroom after all.” He laughed.
Gillian’s shoes squeaked across the linoleum through the bathroom door, brown fluid squishing out from between her toes, cooled coffee drying slowly on her skin. Arlo waited in the foyer. He had just enough time to toss the cup in the trash can and plop a nearby Caution Wet Floor/ Piso Mojado sign over the puddle before she re-emerged. Barreling toward him, she stopped just out of arm’s reach.
“Who are you?” she demanded.
“I told you, I’m Arlo Black.”
“Yes, but… Who. Are. You?!” she practically screamed.
“I’m your new trainee,” he said.
Her eyes opened so wide they seemed to fill her face.
“My trainee…” she mumbled, the fear evident in the faint warble to her voice.
“Normally, we’d do this up in your office,” he said. “Supervisor Goodspeed Call Me Roger would introduce me. But today, I’m trying something different. What do you say, dreamland roomie? Wanna see how high we can blow up this popsicle stand? Because I’m definitely ready for some new dialogue.”
Now What?
Arlo sighed as Time reset and he found himself once again on a crowded stretch of concrete, surrounded by commuters headed to… wherever it was they all disappeared to every day.
A man in a yellow hat tapped him on the shoulder.
“Do you have the time?”
“It’s all relative, my man,” Arlo answered.
At the confused look on the man’s face, Arlo slapped his cell phone into the guy’s palm. “Here, use this,” Arlo said. “It’s not doing me any good.”
As Arlo approached the coffee shop, he took a deep, cleansing breath. He wasn’t sure how many times he’d entered Java Joe’s Coffee Haus, but his gut feeling was “a lot.”
Every day of Arlo’s life felt exactly the same as the one before… no matter how hard he tried to change things. His eyes roamed over the bulletin board on the door: ‘It’s okay to quit. Nobody really expected you to succeed anyway.’ Ouch. That one stung a little.
The old couple in the hula print shirts passed into the Coffee Shop at the End of the Universe and Arlo followed in their wake. Gillian was already seated at one of the tiny tables, waiting on her usual order. Arlo had tried to jilt her out of her stupor on a variety of “days” with a variety of antics, from surprising her in the java house doorway to crowding close beside her everywhere she went. Everywhere being here and the office since those were the only places she existed that Arlo was allowed to interact with her.
“Order up,” Jr called out.
As Gillian rose from the stool to snatch her paper cup of disaster off the pick-up counter, Arlo realized that there was one thing he hadn’t tried yet…
He reached out and squeezed the coffee cup in her hand so hard that it exploded. Burning hot coffee rained down on the both of them in a shared shower of agonizing pain.
Arlo’s incoherent cry of torment blended beautifully with Gillian’s caterwaul of curses in a carefully o
rchestrated symphony of damned souls. As the dark brew dripped from both of their noses and pooled in their shoes, Gillian gritted her teeth and glared at the man orbiting her sphere of influence.
“What the hell, Arlo?!”
He blinked, coffee droplets flicking off his eyelashes to land on his cheeks.
“You know me?”
“Of course, I know you! Are you crazy?!”
“Not anymore,” he said with a wide grin.
To be fair, Arlo was still a little bit crazy. He had been previously diagnosed with a Personality Disorder that ran so far past the Borderline that it was verging on immigrant status. He also loved himself in a way that his discount psychiatrist said exemplified the textbook definition of Narcissism. But, then again, Gillian wasn’t winning any medals for healthy coping mechanisms, herself. Possessing what Arlo would define as Acute Stick Up the Ass Syndrome, and People Are Gross Disorder, she didn’t like to be dirty. Or confined. Or touched. Or talked to. Or… everything that Arlo personified.
She was staring at him, apparently waiting for another or different response to the crazy question.
“Sorry,” he said. A strained laugh escaped his lips but he bit it back almost instantly. “I’m sort of on unfamiliar ground here…”
She watched him for a moment longer before sighing heavily and dropping her now empty coffee cup from chest height. The cup plummeted through space to land squarely on the counter where it wobbled for a second before coming to rest next to the taller cup with “The other one” printed on the side in black sharpie.
Gillian squelched across the scratched surface of the faux wood flooring to grab a giant stack of napkins. Clutching the rough rectangles of recycled paper, she turned to give Arlo a bitter look.
“Are you coming? Or are you just going to stand there?”
Arlo glanced around the shop. Time had done that weird thing again where everyone around them appeared to be straight outta Madame Tussaud’s. The only movement that of the ice queen in the squishy heels clacking and squeaking across the floor.
As she marched out of the coffee haus, Arlo entered her gravitational field, dragged along behind her through the vacuum of frozen time.
Arlo could have kicked himself for giving away his phone to the man in the yellow hat. If he had it now, he would be snapping pics left and right. He skipped along behind Gillian to a part of Downtown he hadn’t explored before, aka: someplace other than Java Joe’s, Forever Pharma, or general sidewalk/street.
They passed a bunch of cacti in plots, a crowd of frozen people that Gillian happily dodged, humming to herself in a wholly unfamiliar fashion because she was in no danger of being bumped, and a slew of bicycles with passengers perched precariously in place. Perfectly still life in the greatest of all photo ops.
“Where are we going?”
“Somewhere else,” Gillian answered.
The apartment building sat on what was generally the busiest stretch of Main Street but the normally zooming messengers were all conspicuously missing at the moment. The crowd of still-life pedestrians had thinned as they walked. By the time they reached the sliding glass patio door to Gillian’s ground floor apartment, the two of them were the only souls in sight.
Arlo waited anxiously as Gillian dug in her shoulder bag for the ring of house keys. Arlo half-hoped that she’d have a rabbit foot keychain. They could use some good luck. But alas, no, Gillian’s keys were individually color coded and neatly bound on one small ring. No keychain. Turning the blue painted key in the lock, she slid the glass door open just wide enough to squeeze through and waited for Arlo to follow her before closing the door behind him.
“Now what?” Arlo asked.
“I don’t know,” Gillian said.
Arlo glanced around the small space. Very tidy.
“You live here?” he asked.
“Obviously,” she said.
Arlo nodded absently. He was pretty sure that he didn’t really live anywhere. Arlo couldn’t remember the last time he’d laid his head down on anything, well except for that one time he’d woken up on the street after being mowed down by a messenger. Did that count? He was pretty sure that his entire existence revolved around bumping into Gillian over and over again.
He walked across the demarcation of carpet to linoleum, signaling that he was now standing in the “kitchen” or dining room maybe. Kitchen/dining room. Grasping the handle of the vintage-looking refrigerator, he pulled the door open to take a quick peek inside. Empty.
“What are you doing?” Gillian asked.
“Research,” he said.
He opened the freezer. One lonely TV dinner sat on the center shelf. The text printed on the small cardboard box declared the ‘healthy alternatives’ meal to be: vegan, low calorie, low sodium, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, and sugar-free. They forgot to include taste-free. He left the sad single-serving entrée in its designated spot and closed the freezer.
“Anything exciting to report?” Gillian asked snidely.
Arlo chuckled nervously. He wasn’t very good with passive aggressive.
“Walk me through your day,” he said.
Gillian looked taken aback. Glancing around the room she said, “Well first, I wake up.”
She walked through the open doorway beside the television and into the next room. Arlo joined her next to the neatly-made bed with the crisp, white comforter. A dresser and a single nightstand with an alarm clock and a pack of cigarettes perched on top sat close by. Other than that, the room was devoid of objects. No pile of dirty laundry in the corner. No artwork. No loose change or random receipts. It was so sterile and cold that Arlo felt goosebumps rise on his flesh. The chill seeping from his skin down to his vital organs came from more than the simple fact that it was freezing in the small space. It came from the complete lack of life that the room reflected.
Gillian was pointing at the nightstand where glowing red numbers told the time. 7:15.
“My alarm goes off at 6:00. At 6:01, I wake up, smoke a cigarette…” she cut off, staring into space with a vacant look. “No. I don’t.”
“Don’t what?” Arlo asked.
She walked through the doorway to the living room/dining room/kitchen and looked at the sliding glass door to her patio.
“I don’t smoke the cigarette,” she said. “I’m interrupted.” She pointed at the tiny table and chair visible through the glass doors. “I toss it in the gutter.”
Arlo walked past her to the slider. Lifting the latch, he stepped out on the 4 x 4 bit of swept concrete and bent at the waist to get a good look at the gutter. No cigarette.
“What next?” he asked.
“I get dressed, do my makeup and hair, and walk to the coffee shop.”
Arlo nodded. “Okay, we both know what happens there.”
“I am at my desk by 7:29 AM. And then Roger tells me I have a trainee.” She looked thoughtful as she said, “So what happens if I’m not at my desk at 7:29?”
Arlo giggled. “Guess we’re going to find out.”
Part III: Roger Goodspeed
Act III, Scene 1
The name Goodspeed is Olde English for ‘Go with God’ or ‘Farewell,’ or sometimes ‘Success,’ presumably because any endeavor accompanied by God must be met with success. Roger, however, was not a success. More like a miserable failure in every way imaginable. Goodspeed, therefore might seem like a rather ironic surname for a man who could never catch a break, and that would be because it wasn’t really Roger’s name at all.
The day that Roger was born, a terrible, unforgivable mistake occurred at a small-town hospital maternity ward. Two babies were born two minutes apart, two doors down both with the given name of Roger. A hapless candy-striper named Constance Black somehow managed to switch the name tags, and happy go lucky infant Roger Goodspeed became Roger Devland, an Irish surname that meant Misfortune. Two sets of parents left the hospital none the wiser, and the candy-striper turned in her apron for her day job at the canning factory across town
.
The trail of misfortune that followed Roger Goodspeed (nee Devland) was easy to catalogue if you knew where to look. For example, he was once stood up on a blind date with a woman who lived in the next town over. Unbeknownst to Roger, the acquaintance who’d fixed him up, had really just been desperate to force his anti-social cousin out of her house, so he lied to her and said that she was going on a museum tour. As soon as she discovered the truth, she went ixnay on the ateday and refused to leave her apartment again for anything other than work.
Roger went to see a therapist after this unfortunate dating disaster, who turned out to be a dog walker posing as a doctor in a storage unit. Undeterred by the unusual background and convinced that the half price coupon made the counseling session a deal in any case, Roger paid the young man $200 to learn that he suffered from clinical depression.
The diagnosis did not come as a shock. Nothing came as a shock to Roger, because nothing could outweigh the ennui that was his life. Every day of Roger’s life felt exactly the same as the one before. As assistant supervisor pro tem, he would sit at the desk in his glass box/office and wait for the agency to send in new temps. Yesterday, he met with a young man named Arlo Black. Strangely enough, Roger would have sworn that he’d met with Arlo before. In fact, déjà vu could not begin to describe the feeling that Roger got when he saw Arlo’s cheerful face pop up outside his office.
The face wasn’t overly remarkable. More like: average in every single way that mattered, and some that didn’t. And yet, Arlo’s face elicited images of a hundred yesterdays in Roger’s mind, all filled with an anxious chuckle. All trying so very hard to be special. Roger was beginning to worry that he might be suffering from paranoid delusions. Perhaps he should dig out his yellow pages and ring up his old shrink.
As a bit of light amusement, Roger had pawned Arlo off on… what’s her name… Janice? Talk about a match made in Hell: a woman who just wants to be left alone and a man who can’t stand to be ignored. Roger smiled faintly. That was almost fun.
Hell Is Other People Page 6