by Jason Porter
Don Ables was in my cubicle fishing through the basket of surveys. His back was to me. Under a striped corporate-casual shirt, he had the shoulders of a sea mammal. Rounded and hydrodynamic.
He said, still facing the other direction, “I don’t agree with what I wrote yesterday.”
“Did you wake up knowing more about yourself?”
“No.”
I was disappointed.
I could see that he had located his survey. He held it up and looked it over and shook his head in disapproval.
“I’ll bring this right back,” he said, and left.
The light on my phone was flashing. It was a voice mail from Brenda: It’s me . . . Why aren’t you at work yet? Did you stop off and watch a movie or something? . . . How are you able to keep a job? . . . Did you open the envelope? . . . I was wondering how you are feeling . . . and . . . you know . . . how it felt to read the letter . . . Call me if you need to . . . Love you . . . Bye.
I thought about what she said long enough to forget what she said, and then started working on a drawing for a bedside table that doubled as a doghouse. I wasn’t doing well. The dog looked like he was losing his vision. His eyes looked glazed and dumb. The nightstand/doghouse was flimsy. It was like a shanty out on the far edges of an overgrown capital; there was no infrastructure for this poor dog, or for all of the farmworkers who had moved to the big city on a false rumor. Just a cheap house that I couldn’t draw very well.
I looked up at the photo of the African boy with the gun and said, “Can you imagine having a credit card in your child soldier name and buying a house for your dog made out of particleboard on borrowed money that you would have to pay back at a twenty-two percent annual percentage rate?”
He said, Hell no.
Then he just looked like he wanted to shoot me.
Sometimes I can’t sit still. Particularly when the little soldier is staring at me. At those times I go get coffee or potato chips, or I wash my hands, or I contemplate taking up smoking, or I walk outside to the parking lot and sit in my car and listen to music, or lately just listen to the parking lot, since my stereo was stolen.
I passed Don’s cube on my way to the parking lot. There were photos of Alan Alda pinned to the walls. He looked to be hard at work on the survey. When he became aware that I could see him, he shielded the survey even though there was no chance I could read it from the edge of his cube. I leaned in across the threshold without technically entering and said, “Don, if you want to talk about the survey, I am here for you.”
For a moment I got caught in the gaze of his sister in that terrible photo. It looked like she was trying to wink but didn’t know how. Because Don was still silent, I said, “Do you think there are people who are unable to wink?”
He kept on writing. I could see he was crossing out large sections of the survey.
He said, “Are there any more blank copies of this?”
I said, “I don’t know. I’d have to ask Jerry.”
He had a large black marker in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other. Blacking out and writing new answers and blacking out. I didn’t know whether to stay or leave. I thought it was sad that we never really had conversations about anything real or true. The only things we talked about were the latest e-mails about sick leave policy and whether we had a favorite freeway.
I said, “Any word on what they are serving for lunch today?”
“Don’t know.” He wrote some more; I hovered waiting for something. I thought about inviting him out to my car, but then decided against it.
“Ray, who reads these surveys?”
“I think it is a project that Bob Grasston is heading up.”
“Then why are you collecting them?”
“Doctor’s orders,” I said, and shrugged like it was all part of a needlessly bureaucratic protocol that would be a waste of time to try to understand.
“But you aren’t going to read them, are you?”
“Me?”
“Yeah. Who reads them?”
“I don’t know. I could barely read mine, it was so boring. Maybe this is something they have to do for insurance purposes. Maybe it’s a way of covering their tracks or something. You know, physical evidence that they at least once asked how we’re doing. I don’t really know. They probably picked me because I’m at the end of the aisle.”
Despite an obvious dissatisfaction with my explanation, he handed me his survey.
“I’ll add it to the others,” I said, and gave him a salute as if we were both in the military. I hated myself for making the gesture.
His survey was a mess. The original answers were blacked out. I ducked into the men’s bathroom and attempted to decipher the answers in one of the stalls. It was quiet and clean in there. Almost unused. Nothing was written on the putty-gray walls that divided the toilets. I had to tilt the paper at just the right angle so that the light would reflect the grooves of the original ballpoint answers, which were now covered in wide swaths of ink. It was difficult to make out all of it, and Don’s penmanship wasn’t great to begin with.
NAME: DON ABLES
Are you single?
I live with my sister, Geraldine.
Are you having an affair?
I am not married.
This is where his revisions began, the original, crossed-out answers followed by the new ones.
Are you who you want to be?
I always wanted to be a surgeon in the Korean War.
Yes.
Would you prefer to be someone else?
I wish I had a nickname like Eagle Eyes or Sonar.
I am perfectly fine being me.
Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?
I thought I would end up in a prison. I always thought I would wake up and my parents would be dead. And then I would owe the money on the house and car and would be sent to prison because I couldn’t pay off their debts with my newspaper-delivery earnings, and I feared that in prison they would me or I would until I couldn’t anymore.
I imagined keeping a job and having an apartment, so yes.
Why are you so sad?
I don’t hang out with a group of pals. I long for camaraderie. Somebody to play practical jokes on.
I am not sad.
When was the last time you felt happy?
When my was and I loved so much, it felt so good it hurt me in my , but in the nicest way. But that was such a long time ago.
Driving to work this morning.
Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?
Are temporary things pure?
It seemed fine.
If you were a day of the week, would you be Monday or Wednesday?
“M.A.S.H.” is on both nights.
Both.
Somebody entered the bathroom. I feared, though I knew it to be highly unlikely, that somehow the other occupant would know that I was sitting on the toilet with my pants on. Nobody had ever peeked in on me in all my years of sitting in bathroom stalls, but I noted a minor rise in internal panic. The occupant hovered quietly over a urinal and then washed his hands. He lingered in front of the mirror. I could see through the crack, between the stall door and the wall, that the stranger was wearing a pink oxford shirt and had brown hair. I waited quietly. I made no noises. Is that what I would do if I were really using the toilet? Should I be making fake noises? I wasn’t sure. At last, he left.
I returned to my deciphering.
Do you realize you have on average another 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?
I look in the mirror and think about another forty years of people simply finding me in their field of vision and then making excuses about something they have to do.
I don’t spend a lot of time in front of the mirror.
Do you think people will remember you after you die?
No.
Yes.
For how long after you die?
.
As long as those people who remember me live.
Do you believe in God?
If God existed, why would so very every time I ? And also, wat bout or and the complete absence of ?
Yes.
Do you believe in life after God?
I don’t understand the question.
Here he stuck with his original answer. Perhaps I should rephrase that question.
Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?
I am afraid of taking drugs. Alcohol makes me feel out of control. That is the only drug I have tried except for allergy medicine.
No.
Do you think we need more sports?
Sports have only and .
If it is good for the country or the company, why not?
I was both encouraged by Don’s initial openness to the survey and discouraged by his revisions. It corrupted my results. I had naively anticipated a certain level of honesty. I wondered what Don would do if I started calling him Sonar. I wondered if I shouldn’t use the toilet since I had already been there. I dropped my pants, and did the things we do—unnecessary to elaborate on, I’m sure. Let’s say that I found a peace. I played a game I like to play with my memory, where I insert fantasized memories back into my life, altering its course, but feeling deeply that it’s almost real, or certainly would have transpired that way, had I just made a few different moves. I rolled back in time. Instead of a life with Brenda—with whom I still allowed myself a short-lived, sex-filled fling in my revised past, just not one that involved marriage—I asked Hope Crestwell out on a date, which, because I did so in such a charming way, led to much, much more. Hope had been the most talented artist in the life-drawing class I audited at the art academy. She had this way of confidently not caring about anything. Like the teacher would tell her to change something, to make it more proportionally faithful, but she knew she didn’t need to listen to the teacher, and she continued to draw the models both as they were and also in ways they were not. So a thin woman in her thirties with small, pear-shaped breasts would in Hope’s drawing look larger than a bear, maybe even with fur, but still exactly like herself. And the idiotic teacher would tell her not to do that. The point is that this made Hope irresistible. She knew who she was, or maybe didn’t give a shit about who she wasn’t. And I pictured us living in France with our very quiet, well-mannered child, who liked to entertain herself in the outdoors collecting butterflies while Hope and I made love in a rustic but charming farmhouse filled with exotic canvases where we were each making really bold, fearless brushstrokes. Then my daydream came to an end when I noticed there was only a cube and a half of toilet paper left on the roll.
Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?
No. My favorite fantasy was that I was going to invent trains that would let me see the world, and that something to do with this invention would allow me to be a wealthy, train-riding philanthropist. I hadn’t worked out the economic feasibility of this daydream. I was only ten. I knew the train would be silver and purple and that it would have different recreational cars—a jungle gym car, a swimming pool car, a trampoline car, a milk shake car. To get between the cars you would have to crawl through orange plastic tubes. One of the cars, the aviary car, would be made entirely of glass and be full of talking birds that could tell jokes even if they didn’t know what the jokes meant. The train would be able to go anywhere, but mostly it would go through wild monkey reserves and futuristic cities. I would invite beautiful women along and there would be something romantic or affectionate in these invitations and their company, but at ten I didn’t understand exactly how this romance would function. Mostly it involved the beautiful women being impressed with me and the monkey reserves, and possessing an enthusiastic willingness to play any game that I wanted to play.
At my desk, more thoughts of Don soared on the shifting air currents in my head. The life he probably lived. Nights in front of the television. Geraldine, a quiet presence. Her eyebrow arched with concern for wartime medicine. I imagined they kept their rooms dark. That they read magazines to the light of the TV. That they wore custom slippers. I entertained these thoughts while I worked on a drawing for a combination CD rack/shoe organizer. In my drawing the rack was beginning to look like an accordion, an instrument I’ve always admired. I gave it a face. The face had big cheeks, ready to puff out stale air. I put the drawing aside, looked at my phone—no messages—glanced at the photos on the wall—still there. I blew my nose. Cleared my throat. Cracked my knuckles. Played a game of online poker. An e-mail came, asking people to give blood. Another arrived, alerting us to a health insurance deadline that involved a date and a form. A third warned that they were spraying pesticides along the campus pathways over the weekend, which should not constitute a health hazard except for any employees who might be pregnant.
I left my desk to hide out in my car for a while. I sat there wishing I still had a stereo, thinking I ought to buy a new one, then talking to myself, putting my head in my hands, putting my hands behind my head, adjusting the seat backward, and then forward a bit, and then too far forward, and then back a little. A small motor buzzed in the direction of my car. A man in a jumpsuit and hard earmuffs was wrangling leaves with a leaf blower. It was still summer. I don’t know why he thought there would be a lot of leaves. His machine was loud. It hung from a strap that went over his shoulder. The exhaust from the blower danced upward in translucent heat. I watched him weaving through the sea of cars, back and forth, like he was a shark circling for chum. Then he came out of the water and started to blow nearer the building. As I tracked his movements I noticed Robin Lipsk sitting at the picnic table next to the wheelchair ramp. She had been watching me. Robin was the one female member of tech support. They were a cartel. They kept their own schedules, and they all agreed to act with a casual concern toward everything. They had all the power.
Robin was an enigma. A convergence of science fiction enthusiasm, confrontational tattoos, and computer fluency. She wore strange beads around her neck. Maybe they were teeth and not beads. It looked like she had paid disabled children to cut her hair. She had dyed it pink and green, probably without realizing those were also the company colors.
She walked up to my car. Stared through the window. I smiled and raised my eyebrows to acknowledge her, hoping she would walk away. She opened the door and got in.
“Let me smoke in your car.”
I didn’t respond. I tried to look uncomfortable, which didn’t take much effort.
She said, “I’ll bump you up on the waiting list for the new machines.”
“Smoke away.”
“It’s kind of dirty in here,” she said, pulling a glass pipe out of her army surplus pants, followed by a sizable green bud that was silhouetted in miniature orange hairs. It was the professional athlete of the plant world. It looked like it had been meeting with a trainer who fed it a cocktail of illicit enhancements in preparation for the competition that was about to take place in Robin’s head. She groomed the bud like a Zen butcher who could carve a shank with her eyes closed, never hitting the bone. And then the car filled with smoke. She offered me some. I declined. She started looking through my glove compartment.
“Can I help you find something?”
“Don’t you have anything to listen to?”
“Just the leaf blower.”
She smoked some more. We watched the leaf blower through the rearview mirror. The man didn’t smile. He was smoking a cigarette while he worked. He wasn’t even looking at where he was blowing, as far as I could tell.
“He has a rad mustache,” she said.
“It will not blow away,” I said.
She looked at me like I had said something special, something heavy, instead of realizing I was just trying to get through this.
“I like your car.”
“Thanks.”
“My mom has one like this.”
“Is your mom happy?”
“I don’t know.”
We sat. She started to complain about the leader of the tech support cartel, Kyle Blanks. He was a real selfish dick. I asked if he was happy. She didn’t think he was, or more accurately, she hoped he wasn’t. Then she was transfixed by a passing cloud that she thought looked like a bagpipe. She thought bagpipes were freaky but also beautiful.
“It sounds like they are crying, ’cause they can never get rid of that one note. It drones on, like a broken key.”
I started to like her. This was better than e-mail.
She made the flame of her lighter curve toward the bowl as she sucked in more drug. It made a crinkling sound: baby sticks on fire. As the smoke came out she said, “Do you think time has a shape? I mean, duh, of course it does, but what shape do you think it has?”
“Maybe like Kansas? I don’t know. I never thought about it.”