Why Are You So Sad?

by Jason Porter

  Doreese gave me a nod that seemed to suggest only people who need help say they don’t think they need help.

  “Let’s start here,” she said, and handed me a brochure for a service called TheraRestore by Phone. “For many people TheraRestore is the first step toward a rejuvenating sabbatical.”

  I looked at the brochure. It had a photo of a woman smiling, talking into a phone like the phone was a little baby she wanted to kiss and tickle. She was pretty, with dynamic eyelashes, and her red mouth was so close to the phone it looked like she was going to smudge the receiver with lipstick. The brochure made being crazy and talking to somebody about being crazy seem sexy. I tried to imagine having a conversation with a real teletherapist. Not the woman in the photo; I knew better than to believe in her. But a pool of part-time mothers, working in cubicles just like my cubicle, but in India, breast-feeding their children or doing their nails while looking through magazines.

  “Many employees have found a lot of peace through TheraRestore, and LokiLoki is prepared to pay up to three quarters of the cost, not including prescriptions,” Doreese told me.

  Perhaps sensing I wasn’t sold on phone therapy, she said, “Nobody’s perfect,” as if the information was new to me, and would then help me feel less alone in my imperfections. She thought I was crazy. But I wasn’t crazy. Being aware of a deep hurting inside all of us isn’t crazy. Not being able to not hear things is not crazy.

  “That’s why we make our gods perfect,” I said, because I understood, especially in moments like this, the severe longing for a flawless father or mother hovering up in the clouds, with some authoritative, parentlike explanation for what otherwise felt like an intentionless heap of stinking chaos below.

  I said it and then I looked at the lapel of her power suit and noticed she was wearing a button that said “God made me.”

  I felt bad that I might have offended her. Then I felt mad for having to feel bad. And then I felt bad for feeling mad. It wasn’t her fault that they had her peddling these services. It wasn’t her fault that God made her. And yet I wanted to unsettle her. Because I was feeling indignant, being thought of as crazy. I was the lucid one. I was. I could see inside of her—right past her cardigan, through her rayon blouse, into her core. She had a blind and innocent heart that was protected in layers of fat. She adored her filing systems. She loved her family. She pitied me. I greatly resented the pity.

  I said, “Doreese, in the interest of reciprocity, why don’t you fill out one of these emotional well-being self-appraisal forms for me?” I still had some. I had lied and said I would give Lorraine all the surveys in my possession before leaving the premises. Instead I gave her a stack of instructions on how to assemble a bumper pool table.

  “We have a lot of paperwork to go through,” she said. “Maybe afterward we can look at your questionnaire.” Now she was being condescending. I could tell she looked down on questionnaires by the way she said it, as if she had some other preferred methodology. It made me want to antagonize her and her small, concerned mouth, and the photos on her desk of people who were probably good and kind. But then I also wanted to hold her, because it seemed that we all had big holes in our sides and really good things were slipping out, and that later the holes would heal into scars and the really good things would no longer be able to get back in.

  I said, “Lorraine, you don’t think I am coming back, do you?”

  “My name’s Doreese.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay.”

  Her eyes were like marbles. I had collected marbles as a child. Some of my best memories are with marbles. I had marbles made of blown glass. I had ceramic marbles with beautiful cracked blue glazes.

  Resisting the urge to touch her eyes, I said, “I think I am ready to go home now.”

  “Let me just put together the rest of your Leave Packet.” She turned around to consult several pink and green binders.

  I helped myself to some complimentary mints on her desk. A part of me wanted to stay and give her a chance to do her job so that she could feel good about herself, but that part of me didn’t win out.

  Do you believe in God?

  I waver. If there is a God, he or she is sadistic or bored. It is possible that God is depressed. I probably would be. Look at what a bad job he or she is doing. Everything falls apart or gets cancer. He or she makes lots of beautiful little things, and then he or she makes bigger things that destroy the littler things. People, for instance: Some would argue they are God’s finest achievement, but they have spun out of control, killing the lovely coral reefs and feeding the bees foods that are too perfectly shaped to digest. Bees cannot eat perfect hexagons. God knew this, but God did not think that he or she needed to tell people this, because people aren’t God. But when people started to think they were God, it didn’t work out so well. That was their edge, and their demise—thinking they could have a swing at being God, all the while praying to God, because this desire to be God was a little scary or didn’t feel right, probably felt presumptuous, or maybe they just wanted to hedge their bets. But this edge, this inventiveness that was inventive in the image of God’s inventiveness, screwed a lot of shit up, like feeding bees hexagons or engineering flowers that smelled like bacon. If God is so great and perfect, why did he or she go and make something as messy and hopelessly self-destructive as people? Which is why I mostly think there is no God, and we are merely a brief flash of energy that will be heard at the other side of the universe as the sound phhhhsshhpphhssshhppphhht.

  I had to cross that frightful expressway again to get to my car. I was carrying the artifacts of my career in a cardboard box: the surveys, a favorite mug, photos, some decent pens, HR forms. The traffic was no less aggressive than earlier that morning. If anything, it was more hostile. But my senses were heightened. I could not only see the approaching cars; I could hear inside of them. The sound of clenched hands tightly gripping steering wheels. The crushed breath mints. The banal chatter of minds searching for distraction. This elevated lucidity made me want to experiment. See if I could slip in between the seams without really looking. Return to my instincts. Sniff out the gaps in the flood of machinery. Which I did. I put one foot into the road, eyes closed, and began to move forward.

  There was a thought, and there were the screams of cars. I experienced both concurrently. The thought that dangled up above my body was, Maybe this is a bad idea. A wall of air decorated in shrill horns pushed me back to the curb without killing me. My clarity was, I’ll admit, a bit shaken. I felt the rage of the drivers. Blaming me for putting them in a position to kill me. Or maybe for almost making them late for dinner. I felt the honks. The middle fingers. The inevitable accusations. A crazy man in the road. They might have thought that. A man without a job. A man holding a box filled with personal research. Who knows what they saw? I couldn’t hear inside of their cars anymore. The clarity comes, the clarity goes.

  I tried crossing again, this time with my eyes open. The pavement was hot from a long day of rolling tires and exhaust. The sun was lowering at a glaring angle to my right, getting ready to make the evening pollution look like a gorgeous mistake. And the roadway was no less abominable. It was a dangerous dash, awkward from carrying the box; my ankles felt wobbly, but we did it. Reaching the median brought a familiar and welcome pause, though it was still loud as hell. I figured since I was there again, I might as well take a moment and see if I couldn’t find the photo of the frog and finally introduce it to the other photos that were now in a folder in my cardboard box of personal items. And I did want to find that frog; I was sad that it had hopped away. But truthfully, more than the frog, I wanted to look at that flower again. Reconfirm its beauty. Take comfort. It was like an anchor. Here we are, all of us, afloat, facing something too large to understand, but the flower remains a flower. It doesn’t matter what large thing it is you are facing. I was facing the burden of awareness. But it
could be something else. You may be dying slowly in a nursing home. A man you’ve never seen before, who the nurse informs you is your son, regularly sends you flowers. You know life will end and absolutely none of the nagging riddles will be answered. Were you meant to marry? Were you meant to divorce? Were you a good person? Does this man, this son, send the flowers out of love, or guilt? Or is it perhaps an excuse to flirt regularly with a florist? Is the afterlife a metaphor for adulthood or senility? Why are some people so poor? Why are others born without limbs? Every question you ask has no answer, but the flower remains beautiful. It is not an answer. You know this. That it is beautiful proves nothing. It is a purely random coincidence. But that doesn’t keep you from smiling when it arrives and the nurse puts it on the impersonal nightstand next to your folding bed. It’s like when the grandchild says something funny without knowing why it’s funny. The flower is just a beautiful series of combinations within a longer, less beautiful series. The longer series ripples on in endless variations. Some variations add up to the Holocaust. And some variations add up to wetting our bed until we are twelve. And some variations add up to the Crab Nebula. A flower is a nebula. Its color and shape are the most spectacularly beautiful nonanswer.

  I set down my box for a moment and looked in the same weeds where I thought I had seen the flower before. I looked by other weeds that I thought were not the original weeds. I looked under a flyer for two free extra-large Cokes with any purchase of two extra-large pizzas. I looked under a torn and discarded baby bib. I looked uncomfortably close to a mound of animal excrement. I looked next to a perfectly good running shoe. I looked up to the sky. I raised my fist in contempt. But then I looked down again, and there by my feet were three of them. Not one—three. Like before: fat little petals, yellow yoke edged in blood. All three essentially the same: brilliant, sad, leaning, struggling, unknowing. Each one the same story, but not at all the same.

  Do you think we need more sports?

  I think we should unify all sports into one and call it Ultimate Tango.

  PART TWO

  MULTIPLE CHOICE

  Schlitzy’s Haus was not big on lighting. The food came smothered in shadows. The walls were covered in shingles and the shingles were covered in dirt. I was at the far end of a long beer hall table, sitting with my stack of surveys. My thought at that moment was, What if I have one to five pints of beer before I get on to the business of alerting the world to the pending epidemic?

  I had stopped in on my drive home because I didn’t want to see Brenda yet. I didn’t even call her. It was Wednesday. She would be watching her hospital program on the television. That was my justification. She didn’t need me when she was with the doctors. She ate food out of cartons close to the screen and gave the medical staff advice on their relationships. They listened to her in ways that I couldn’t.

  Schlitzy’s was quiet. It was so lovingly dark and quiet. I felt safer in there. Like some bad weather was passing over outside and maybe the weather corresponded with our species being on the brink of something terminable, or maybe it was just bad weather. Either way, I had found a temporary shelter, and the storm could do whatever it wanted, because I was warm and safe and could smell animal knuckles melting into sauerkraut.

  Just a few seats to my left, a refined and lengthy woman, with the grace of a swan, glided into a seat on the other side of the table. It was as if she had fallen out of a foreign film. She was clothed in black, the cheekbones of her young face might have won a blue ribbon at a state fair—unless the judges were corrupt or blind—and she had the most elegantly silver hair, well ahead of its time, asserting a sophistication, shining around all of us, making clearer what was already clear: that she was not of this place. She was a magnet, and I decided she was French, because the women there, though I have no personal experience to support this, are at their most attractive when doing the simplest things, like reading the newspaper in bed or wiping pastry crumbs off their child’s tasteful wool coat. I began to read, or more accurately pretend to read, the TheraRestore brochure, because it was everything I could do not to stare at her with my mouth open like a child who cannot breathe through his nose, except then I realized openly reading a mental-health brochure might give the false impression that I was crazy, so I started to read one of the surveys instead.

  Todd Langley, an associate in Quantity Assurance, wrote:

  I am very happy. I have a family. I have a sweet car. I have a hot wife and a nice gun. I have a daughter who will one day be hot like her mother. I go to a great church. And a lot of people would kill for my job (and my hot wife—ha!). I am very happy. Who wouldn’t be?

  I read it and then was trying to remember who Todd was. There are those people you don’t work with but you work near. I never remember these people’s names. I think Todd was the big one who scared me. The one who wore the tight-fitting shirts made out of sports fabric that give a person’s chest the smooth plastic contours of a Ken doll. I think he is the one I stood behind once in the cafeteria who served himself an obscene amount of Tater Tots and then ladled Thousand Island dressing over them and then sprinkled some sort of protein powder supplement on top of that.

  “I don’t think they’re making a fortune off of the sausage,” the steel-haired woman said to me. This was not expected. I was at a loss. The one constant of Schlitzy’s is that interaction is never a probability. It was a temple for people like myself, who didn’t want to talk, who wanted to eat and drink and maybe sit under one of the few lights to read a book, or in my case surveys, without any risk of conversation.

  “You probably like that,” she continued, undeterred by my silence.

  I looked past her. A woman in one of the red booths near the unplugged jukebox kept checking herself in her compact. She was wearing a hat with a fake blue flower on it. The hat had fallen out of a different era. So had the woman. She was checking herself like she was preparing for company, but she was always in that booth and there was never any company.

  I looked back at my French woman. She smiled. She was patient. She knew I would eventually answer.

  I said, “The sausage or that they aren’t making a fortune on it?”

  “Both.”

  She was right. I loved the sausage. I actually liked the idea of all the parts I would have no business with in any other context—ears, lips, noses, something called recovered meat, all ground and seasoned with God knows what—encased in something else I don’t want to know about, and then boiled in beer. Some people smoke cigarettes, looking death in the face, sucking in tar and 419 other chemical reactions, killing themselves on their terms. I eat sausage.

  And she was right about the other part too; I liked that Schlitzy’s was only scraping by. It was selfish but true. I liked that there was dust on the tables. I liked that when I had to get up to piss out my two beers, I didn’t have to acknowledge another patron. There was never a risk of small talk, and I liked that. Everybody at Schlitzy’s knew they were miserable. It was how I imagined heaven. We’ll have something to eat and something to read and nobody will bother us. And the beer will come in big glasses.

  What had me confused and feeling a little vulnerable was that I was so transparent to this woman. It made me feel simple and obvious. I didn’t like that she was in my head. I should warn her: My head is working on some pretty big projects at the moment. And then also, she was trespassing. But she was, as I think I have made quite clear, attractive. Not just attractive in the physical sense, though she was that too, but I found myself drawn to her on some other level, a secret level that only becomes apparent forty years later, when you are in the back of an ambulance and all you have to think about is every single moment of your fading life. If she had been the man with the whiskers like corn silk who drooped and drooled near the front of the restaurant, I’d have given her an evil eye for speaking to me. But he couldn’t move that far. He also probably didn’t have the lingual coordination, nor the
teeth, to make intelligible sounds. And he wasn’t pretty. Nor was he French in my imagination. So in her special case, I allowed the talk.

  I said, “I suppose it does suit my purposes that Schlitzy’s isn’t exactly packing them in.”

  She said, “You want them to subsist,” but she said it at the very same time that I said, “I want them to subsist.” She was like an echo, if an echo could bounce back in nicer clothing.