by Jason Porter
She smiled at me as if the coincidence was a good thing. I smiled at her like it freaked me out a little.
A man at the bar was slowly crushing soggy coasters as he stared into space. There was no music in the bar, only the occasional sound of the bartender clinking glasses.
My French woman moved over so that she was directly across from me. “My name is Glenda Fellowes-Allbrecht,” she said. “I find you interesting.” She had a long, almost extraterrestrial neck.
I said, “None of us are interesting.”
“You are to me.”
“Interesting has been washed out of us.”
That made her coo in delight.
“I wonder if I can borrow you,” she said as she put her hands together in a kind of prayer. It wasn’t as bad as it sounds. She had nice hands. There were big silver rings on a few of the fingers. Bent and modern.
“I wonder if anyone can be borrowed.” I took a bite of mashed potatoes. They had soaked up the juice of the sausage and were delicious. I could feel my arteries wriggle.
She was eating a salad.
“I didn’t know they had salads here,” I said.
“I brought my own.” She showed me the plastic tub she had brought in.
She said, “I’m a conceptual artist.”
“I’m unemployed.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I’m not. It’s a leave of absence. But I don’t think they want me back.” I found some relief in telling her. She seemed interested. I had no idea why she was listening. I didn’t think it was necessarily for the right reasons, but it was still nice. “I don’t think I want me back either.”
“If you are unemployed, why do you have all this work with you?” She was looking at the stack of surveys.
“It’s a project.”
“What kind of project?”
I decided to tell her. She seemed like she could handle it. I said, “I believe we are all being sucked into a barely detectable cavity. A very slippery sort of crater. And once we realize we are down there, it will be too late.”
“Can’t we climb out?”
“Our hands and feet don’t have that kind of traction, and our hearts and minds will be half asleep.”
“We’ll be like one of those gangly millipedes who find themselves drowning in a toilet bowl?” she said.
“Except less panicky. If the millipede can be lethargic and defeated, then yes.” I clarified her analogy as if I was only mildly impressed, but in truth I loved what she had said. With an analogy like that, I could feel her burrowing into my heart. I didn’t know if the burrowing was like a kitten cuddling up to its mother or if it was like a chigger depositing its larvae beneath the skin of my ankles. It certainly felt like it could stick. Like most things, the feeling confused me. I wanted to walk away. I also wanted to elope, forgetting for the moment that I was already married. I wanted to propose a suicide pact. We could make love in a station wagon, parked in a garage with the engine running, and let the deathly exhaust slowly wash away all of the suffering; leave it for the living to contend with. I wanted to order another beer.
“So what do these”—she was looking at the surveys—“have to do with the toilet bowl?”
“Field data.”
“Can I take a look?”
“Only if you are willing to fill one out in return.”
I gave her one, and a pen, and then left her to it while I went to take a piss.
Above the urinal someone had drawn a smiling cock and balls with legs walking over nippled mountains. I thought we should have a name for these beasts. They were like those Greek man-horse people. Next to the strolling genitals someone else had written, “Hard drives cleansed, affordable prices! E-mail: porneraser@zipmail .com.” Closer to the top of the urinal there was a sticker that said, “Sex-Moms for Hire: 567-878-9878.” I took out a pen and wrote next to it: “Feeling like all paths lead down? Report your sorrow while you are still aware that you might care.” And then I put my e-mail address next to it.
On the way back to Ms. Fellowes-Allbrecht, I ordered a beer for myself and a manhattan for her. The bartender slid the drinks across to me without speaking.
Glenda was still working on the survey. I sipped on my beer and watched. Her brow concentrated into a series of ripples. A strand of silvery hair kept falling down into her eyes, and she would lead it back behind her ear with the hand that wasn’t writing. And then a little later it would fall again and she would correct it all over, but never looking up from the survey. I liked that she was taking it seriously.
She looked up and smiled and slid the survey over to me across the table. “Go ahead. You can read it in front of me,” she said.
NAME: GLENDA FELLOWES-ALLBRECHT
Are you single?
We are all single.
Are you having an affair?
We are all having an affair.
Why are you so sad?
Because sad is beautiful.
When was the last time you felt happy?
I feel happy right now.
Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?
It was temporal. It had to do with an idea. Finding a subject for my project. You. You will be perfect for my conceptual art piece. I came in here because I knew I would find somebody. I wanted that disconsolate posture in your face and shoulders as soon as I spotted it. It couldn’t be the woman in the corner who is waiting for somebody who died forty years ago, and it couldn’t be that man at the bar who is drinking because he is trying not to gamble, and it couldn’t be that bartender, because part of his sad appearance is intentionally ironic. You are the one.
I looked up at her for a moment. She smiled at me and bit into a radish. I gulped.
Are you who you want to be?
I am whoever I want to be whenever I want to be.
Would you prefer to be someone else?
When I do, I will be.
Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?
I never felt like a child. Even when it was ponies instead of horses.
Is today worse than yesterday?
There is no difference. But tomorrow should be pretty good, because you are going to help me with my project.
I looked up again. Another smile. I got scared and looked back down at the survey.
If you were a day of the week, would you be Monday or Wednesday?
I would be October.
What does it feel like to get out of bed in the morning?
It feels like a different category of dream. One where balance becomes a little more important and smells are much stronger.
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?
That’s only if you count forward. But for what it is worth, I think you find me attractive, and I don’t mind that you do. I am flattered, even. You have a funny bald spot on the back of your head, and I think it evokes a certain kind of worn-down innocence; it makes you sympathetic, which I think is attractive, as well as perfect for my project.
I put my hand on my head to feel the bald spot, but then realized what I was doing, and that she would realize which question I was reading, which even though we both knew I had read it, I did not want to acknowledge, because I did not know how to acknowledge it. I was scared, and excited. I was aware that my pulse was picking up.
Do you think people will remember you after you die?
I think I’ll die after people remember me.
For how long after you die?
[1/(year of death – year of birth)] x {[number of friends + press clippings + photos + (size of gravestone x popularity of cemeteries) + honorary bench at nonprofit theater] / national attention span}.
Do you believe in God?
I think God is a placeholder for the anxiety created by unsatisfying answers to unanswerable questions.
I was feeling something. No one else had taken my survey so seriously. She wasn’t promoting a falsely professional and compliant persona, nor was she trying to scold a spouse for trying to carve out a little truth in his life. There was no condescension. There was care and imagination in her responses. A boldness. A triumphant and evolved immunity, perhaps. If I didn’t love her, I surely loved her answers. I looked up to see if she was in fact as beautiful as her answers, and she was no longer sitting there. I panicked. I felt a dryness in my throat. I felt a loss. A separation. A desperate willingness to believe in ghosts, if that was what she had been, and the possibility of building a future around a ghost. I lost my appetite. I cut a piece of sausage and put it in my mouth. I pressed down on it slowly with my teeth, so that every bit of the juice would get its moment on my tongue. I tasted nothing. Finally, I turned around and spotted her with her purse on the bar talking to the bartender. She saw me looking at her and she gave a small, reassuring wave. She was as beautiful as her answers.
Do you believe in life after death?
I believe in egg at exact same moment as chicken.
Do you hear voices?
I think you have a very nice voice. My project will entail you reading with that voice. We will perform our piece in a shopping mall. I want to dress you in an orange jumpsuit and chain your hands together behind your back. A woman (me) dressed as a low-ranking military lackey will hold a megaphone up to your mouth, and you will be forced to read letters from children to Santa Claus through the megaphone. There is a small chance we could get arrested.
Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?
I like the way martinis are shaped.
Do you think we need more sports?
No, but I do like the outfits.
Have you ever fallen in love?
I keep love along my side, instead of falling into it.
Now, what do you say about participating in my art project, especially since you are unemployed?
I looked up and she was there again.
“I paid the bill for us. Would you like to walk me to my car?”
I nodded. I couldn’t really speak. I put all of the surveys in the folder and followed her out of the restaurant. There was a fluid confidence in her stride. The shining hoops that were hanging from her ears swayed in front of me, and something in me swayed too.
Under the towering security lights of the parking lot, I asked her how she could afford to be a conceptual artist.
“My daddy is rich,” she said. “I also apply for grants.” She went on to confess that her father had started the Anxiety Channel, the lucrative twenty-four-hour cable network that only broadcasts info-specials on fires, disease, and insect invasions. Apparently it appeals to all advertisers.
“People are vulnerable when they are afraid,” she said. “They will buy anything, especially insurance.”
I found this appalling.
She handed me her card and said, “Will you meet me at the Merchant’s Gate Commercial Center tomorrow morning at nine thirty a.m.?” She said it while leaning against a vintage automobile.
I said, “Can I pass out my surveys at the mall?”
She looked troubled. Torn. Like she was doing calculations in her head.
She said, “Would you like to kiss me?”
I said, “That is not fair.”
From here I will paraphrase:
She said, “I like your body language.”
I said, “I like your nail polish.”
She said, “I like your spending patterns.”
I said, “I like your lending policies.”
She said, “I like your glove compartments.”
I said, “I like your hood ornaments.”
She pulled on my pockets, forcing me to lean into her. I was close enough to smell that she had never sweat. Never in all of her life.
I let her let me kiss her.
It was a spangled, microscopic world. Entire villages were dancing and roasting pigs on spits. Families gathered around old clanky pianos and sang songs that brought tears to the elders. All the children playing games in all the streets scored goals in a flickering continuum of identical moments. Galaxies gladly collided. There were no tongues. Just four shy, curious lips. It lasted about six seconds.
She said, “I hope I will see you tomorrow,” and got in her car.
Do you think people will remember you after you die?
I believe the mortuary will keep my name on file so that they don’t accidentally dig me up when they make room for another dead person.
A) and
It must have rained while we were in Schlitzy’s. The pavement was darker and the cars were quieter. All the tires went shhhh. I had only a vague sense of the road ahead. The streets, the dangling traffic lights, the competing motion of vehicles, the pedestrians I might run over—all were part of a diaphanous curtain hanging in front of my memory. My concentration was on the kiss. The objects in front of my car were merely outlines on tracing paper. The real action was a loop in my head. We kiss we kiss we kiss. Lips touch. Hands clasp. Lips touch. I feel it in my elbows and knees. I am weak and blind and falling into her. I am alive and wanted.
A man at the side of the road was holding cardboard that said, “Too Many Wars. No House. Honest Sandwich Wanted.” I slowed and opened the window just enough to push through a dollar, and then kept going.
I replayed the kiss again. It was a mysterious footprint left fresh in mud. I circled and circled it, trying to calculate the size and shape of the animal that had left it in its wake.
I wondered if Ms. Fellowes-Allbrecht would introduce me to her father. Maybe his network could produce an info-special about the sadness. They could hire me, and I would give emotional weather forecasts: “Gusts of ambivalence threaten an otherwise temperate weekend . . . The long days of summer may cause a false and painfully fleeting simulation of euphoria . . . Self-esteem looks to be overshadowed by an unfulfilled searching for forsaken objects.”
I took the War of 1812 Bridge back across the bay. The bridge was striking at night, all of its promise glowing, the layers of grime and graffiti kept secret. The water below it was inky. The lights of the bridge were reflected and rippling in the blackness.
Just past the bridge, I merged with the northbound traffic. The river of red taillights curled down to the right and back around to a matching highway below. We followed each other like a string of ants. I thought again of her lips. The two of us leaning against that collectible car. The unpredictability of a stranger’s mouth. The heat. The warm desire. The blind trust. The inherent risk. I tried to remember a time when kissing Brenda felt like that, and my mind was an empty expanse. Our kisses had become a form of punctuation.
I almost missed my exit trying to recall the shape of Brenda’s lips. She no longer had a mouth. Her eyes were melting away. But then, reflecting again on the illicit kiss outside of Schlitzy’s, I felt that fading too. Only a sketch. A secondhand account from someone who knew someone at the scene of the crime. I was losing Glenda’s face, the way her eyes looked devilish right before contact, the taste of her mouth. I squinted my mind’s eye. I strained. It was all falling away.
A small leaf was trapped under one of my windshield wipers. I turned on the wipers, but it didn’t free the leaf. The wipers dragged the leaf back and forth, in arcs that said good-bye, and then good-bye again. It was leaving a party and could never get through the endless round of farewells. I turned the wipers off. The leaf, still pinned to the windshield, said, You don’t want to dress up in an orange suit. You hate Christmas. You hate malls. She isn’t safe.
Stop listening to leaves, I thought.
I was in the final leg of my return comm
ute, along the Birth of America Expressway that defines the western edge of my neighborhood. The Oil’N’Gas Fleximart advertising its perpetual sale on car deodorant. The abandoned warehouse with the broken windows. The decommissioned train depot that could never hold on to a business—not flowers, not donuts, not travel massages. I drove past True Horizons High School. The football bleachers held shiny puddles. A solitary car was in the school’s parking lot, its doors open, teenage music thumping. I drove past an Exercise Emporium and a Rebate Galaxy, and then turned into the thicket of suburban housing that makes up our neighborhood. Patterns of houses repeated themselves and eddied into cul-de-sacs. A tricycle sat abandoned at the base of a driveway. A basketball hoop stood netless. A fire hydrant was painted to look like a silver robot. The bushes in front of our house were scruffy orphans. The house looked unplugged and asleep.
The front door was unlocked. All the lights were off except for the imitation stained-glass fixture that hangs above our kitchen table. A note was waiting for me: You missed another good episode. Dr. Tillory has cancer again. Also, you still haven’t read the letter I gave you the other morning. I’m disappointed.
I sat at the table in the near dark and held my head. It was a bowling ball. Heavy. Holes you wanted to stick your fingers in, opening up a lust to hurl.
I looked around at my home, the familiar items coated in darkness: cupboards, spoons, telephones, bills, coupons affixed to the refrigerator, a cat toy on the floor. I felt entombed. My head, my marriage, my house—all felt unmoored. A clumsy tower of wooden blocks engineered by children. I put the surveys on the table, laid them out in front of me, and belched up sausage and beer. I knew then.
Einstein’s theory of relativity says that measuring all the smiles and frowns in a falling elevator will not reveal the speed of the fall. The surveys were useless. We were all plummeting at the exact same rate. I was out of a job and my project was impotent. I found that to be true in a brief moment of clarity that rang through a swelling headache. There was no world to save. There was no me to save it. For half a moment I thought I could go to the mall with Glenda and warn the shoppers through the megaphone. But I knew that all the shoppers and all their hot wives would put on headphones and listen to their own music to protect themselves from the ricochet of meaning. They would look at us like we were Hare Krishnas. Not asking “What is that important message they speak?” but “Why is there bird shit on their foreheads?”