Four New Messages

by Cohen, Joshua

  Ronald Ray drives, Mom. Lights sparkle as they shoot across his glass. A compact car filled to spill with hemoglobinic wine. When do lights become light? Can something that sparkles also shoot? Mom, you used to be able to answer every question lightly. Ronald Ray passes trees. He passes a mailbox flagged with wilting balloons. Why do balloons wilt (I was six when I asked that)? How does the mail know how to get from Popop’s house to us (I was four when you took me out to meet the mailman)? He passes a theater marquee advertising the year of my birth, also the year of his and Patty’s for convenience. What is parkinglot and what not? Which is tree and which just pole for phones?

  Mom, he drives and I leave him driving to call you Hello, calling you not on your workphone because it’s too early for work but on the homephone because Fridays you don’t work but are up early out of habit and I listen to you talk, to your stories about your old friends I don’t like—who have children my age whose successes I don’t like—about your new friends whose names I don’t recognize, to what you’re cooking as if smell travels through newer model phones, I listen to recipes and your dairyfree, glutenfree modifications, about the trip you’re planning to the Santa Fe Aunts, the intermediate pottery class you’re taking and the inflammatory bowel disease support group you volunteer with and he drives. He is as lost as a 1:1 map—whereas I’m still only partly awake, despite this being a call I initiated, a call I now want to end, I have to be at work in an hour (and I’m fresh out of gunpowder—the tea).

  This is like the Ford, Mom, as it involves other names. It involves what I’ve told you and what I haven’t and just like mothers lie to children not only about where air goes to and mail and phonecalls come from but also about difficult subjects like death and God and can God die? most children lie to parents too, though my lies have been mostly moronic—mine have been lies of omission (and so you can understand why I’ve forgotten to tell you about them until now). I’ve told you I work at a pharmaceutical company, a few times I might even have said a pharmaceutical multinational—as if the sum of the countries malignly conspiring factor into my salary—but what I haven’t told you is that I work as a proofreader. That’s it, as a copyeditor, the lowliest of editors, a reader not even a writer, I’m not allowed to write, I’ve never met the writers. Their copy just shows up in my 9 AM email from close of business in Delhi or Lahore, and I’m supposed to go through it—the label materials, the innards instructions for use—and mark mistakes. It doesn’t take a native to spot misspelled symptoms and dropped articles the and an, but it does take a native to sweat being outsourced every quarter (will Lahore proof Delhi? or Delhi proof Lahore?).

  When I began my story I was proofing a drug called Nomenex, Mom—it’s supposed to make you “happier” (my word), maybe it does, probably doesn’t, but efficacy isn’t what irks me as Ronald Ray drives. What irks me is how people in the office still talk about it. If an officeperson is in a bad mood, Mom—say they’ve misfed their pets or their siblings have been imprisoned, leading them crying to handicapped toiletstalls and service stairwells to be used only in case of cardiac exercise or emergency, for private phonecalls to haute veterinarians and obscure lawyer uncles—they don’t say, She might need Nomenex, or, You might want to ask your doctor about Nomenex, they say instead, She needs to get Nomenexed, they say, Nomenex her, or, Nomenex the bitch, and people will even say that about themselves, Nomenex me, I’m a week behind, I assfucked my diet, can’t sleep, and Heather hates me. Heather or weather or whatever depresses, Nomenex my ex while you’re at it. My coworkers all have names like Heather, Mom. How can you be a person with a name like that? how could you expect to be an original individual? Names aggregate, exaggerate, caricature everything too explicit. Two Ricks in Accounting. We all know Ricks, even Rick knows what to expect from a Rick. Marketing Steve. It’s fairly obvious how to market a Steve. Tucson, indisputably itself (handles distribution), Trenton sweet Trenton, the transparent worst (“our” lab), Ronald Ray drives and Patty patters.

  Mom, I dress in whatever’s clean. Pants, shirt to which the tie’s always tied and buttoned into collar, jacket singlebreasted, all of it solidcolored except the tie hoisting miniature flaglike stripes, red fimbriated white, the pants dark to where I can’t tell blue or black, the shirt white disclosing dull stars of dribbled deli coffee, jacket matching pants whether exactly or inexactly depending on blue or black, socks definitely black, shoes definitely black (these last were bought together and the salesman gave his word)—what definitively coordinates this colorwise already possibly coordinated wardrobe is that all its brands are utterly defunct. Dad having brought them over the years to my apartment, Dad having bought them years ago, decades and waistline inches ago, these clothes—now covering the nudity of my apartment that’s only a closeted bedroom with bathroom reeking of clogged piping adjoining—mean zero to me, their designers mean zero to me, their normally significant tags giving no contemporary indication as to whether the signified article was once expensively fashionable or just cheap and extraordinarily lame. My other shirts have pips and flecks but no logos, Mom. My other pants are jeans—manufactured in sweatshops sequestered in purdah halfway across the innominate earth—and they certainly have their endorsements, but I purposefully purchase them hidden, to be hermeticized by my belt or within the inseam of the jean, facing the migraine strain of my erection—bet you’re glad to have that thought, Mom, as Patty jerks and shudders.

  I take the train moving faster than any car traffic moves, without stoplight, without stopsign, but still Ronald Ray is routed reckless and the body humps around. Mom, they remain lost, as do I. Working at a multinational means that I work in only one nation and cannot travel, I commute. There is a spire often passed. There is an office in the spire oft passed. Not only does this pharmaceutical multinational have a name but its subsidiaries also have names and some of these subsidiaries sell pharmaceutical products with names and other of these subsidiaries license for sale generic versions of pharmaceutical products and even these generics have names (generic names)—and the spire has a name too, and the name of the spire is the same as the multinational’s name but before the spire was named for the multinational it was named for a company that was acquired by the multinational and the company’s name was added to the multinational’s name and so the spire’s name, Mom, was accordingly changed, respired (names I cannot mention, names I wouldn’t even breathe).

  9 AM, booting my workcomputer, my morningcomputer, to remind me of where I’d stopped the night before (I’d never stopped): I didn’t know where to bring Patty’s body, Ronald Ray didn’t know what to say about the body, we didn’t know what our responsibility to it was, Mom, with even our tenses undecided. He ranged about their nativity. It was unbelievable that someone could call this fictional strip familiar, but it was also believable. Impossible and yet possible that someone could call this commerce home (I was thinking about home when I wrote that). All around him was Vacancy with the vowels themselves vacant, Vcncy: the local errata of burned connections, burnt bulbs, Free Cable TV! as if in advocacy—what was cable locked up for this time? (That’s a line I’d been saving.) Didn’t we already pass this pass, Mom? make that exit or eat a meal? Did we take our meds or no? and if so, shouldn’t they have been taken with a meal? Light blinking lights. Mom, does a light blink on or off? or does just saying It blinks cover both? This was what I thought about for a week. Blinkblinking go the correx, the corrigenda. 9:30 email, 10:00 new product slogan session (even us galley drones are polled), 11:00 email, hunger, boredom (which is another kind of hunger), still Ronald Ray was driven and Patty not ceasing to be deceased.

  Wednesday without breakfast, I realized he might be hungry too. Thursday with my 11:30 canceled (a standards review, the proctor had the flu), I’d had enough of being desked. I thought, find a place to eat. I thought, find a place to eat, you’ll find a place to gorge your story. Not a job to shirk, Mom. Existence was at stake, survival. My own. That of, in motoric italics, my story. Murder,
a hunger itself, gives such a hunger also. Both being matters of appetite, of denying yourself until you break. Of holding steady the wheel until the engineblock just cracks. Of going further—farther, Mom, or further? or are they interchangeable like signs, changing only their destinations over statelines? I refreshed my memory of the distinction before heading out to lunch. This was the last day of the first week I was blocked. I went farther than I regularly went, Mom, not to belabor this any further. I went blocks. I passed restaurantfood, passed barfood, he passed arcades serving arcadefood, passed billiardhalls and bowlingalleys offering billiard and bowling fare. But foodfood, Mom. You could’ve cooked for him, I could have if I cooked.

  Food, the bottomless metaphor. Food like, or as, an insatiable simile. A pocket of inmeats carved from a cart. That was my objective. Courtesy of a sanguine sincere Halali who liked to practice Spanish. The money from every pocket sold went to feed and clothe his wife and son deserted in Halalabad. He’d asked me, What are the foremost headphones to obtain for my heir? what is the most stable skateboard one may acquire? My answer had been to avoid him for a month. Regrets, Mom. I missed his rotisserie physique, the carbonating banter. Standing talking terrorist economies on the corner of 10th Avenue & Inanity—my cart wasn’t there, my Spanish Halali wasn’t there. I bummed a cig (secretary), a light (deliverer), stubbed. That invaginated pita pocket topped with pickled veg—I’d enjoyed it there before, I would always have enjoyed it there before. Back in the lobby without a meal but within the hour, I surveyed what foodstuffs my fellow spireists preferred. Security pumped dumbbell wraps and protein shakes. 12’s receptionist left the elevator at 12 receptive to water and a salad. None of that would do, Mom. Back in my cubicle—Ronald Ray at his windshield, my screen—it took another hour to understand how badly I’d been poisoned.

  Mom, I spent the next month stuffed, plugged, in the grip of a pathetic mogigraphia (I plucked a reference text from leveling the fridge in the office kitchenette to determine the technicalese for “writer’s block”)—unsure, or perhaps all too sure, as to where, precisely, my character should dine. Agonizing over why he would dine there, over what dining there would say about him/me—over which would be riskier: drivingthru a drivethru with Patty in the back? or just parking her carcass for a three course duration? Should he gratify the impulse to return to Patty’s diner? or could that be read as too safely laning tragedy between reassuring shoulders? Ronald Ray watched the backlit logos approach, every craven incarnation, every franchise of desire. So many amenities yet so many the same, so many ways to condemn them, yet all of them the same. Too many few choices: which restaurant I should go to? what to order at which restaurant he should go to? which suit to wear or wash? having skipped breakfast should I skip lunch too to write? I know nothing impresses you, Mom. During lunchbreaks I kept seated, kept him moving. Me suffering sedentary in a chair too crippled to swivel, him swerving for sushi prepared by Chinese, dialing ahead for Mexicali—but how would Ronald Ray dial, Mom? did he have a cell or would another payphone have to be implicated? I refilled the car with gas, kept his own tank unfulfilled.

  By workday’s wane when I was supposed to be reproving an unapproved attention deficit aid—“NAME [the Indipaks aren’t allowed to know the names of the medications whose materials they assemble by template: names are privileged, to be inserted only by us employees with miles of clearance] may cause side effects. Tell doctor if any symptoms is severe or does not go away: nervousness, restlessness, difficult falling or staying asleep, uncontrollable shaking of a part of the body, change in sex drive ability”—I was having difficulty, Mom, paying attention myself (which is “the cognitive process of selectively concentrating,” according to a collaborative website I edited when I should’ve been otherwise editing, anything but changing that entry to read: “the cognitive process of selectively concentrating on what happened to that shawarma stand on 10th?”). Misprints slipped by, slopping my copy. I was warned, I who typically issued the warnings (that’s all my copy was): do this, don’t do that, if you experience nausea or upset stomach, with Ronald Ray dromomaniacal. The dictionary definition for dromomania linked to a thesaurus, which suggested (advised/broached/commended) drapetomania (that quack syndrome that caused slaves to flee captivity). I searched that up, left a page on my screen when I wandered to pee, was reprimanded for my (the subtext was racist) violation of corporate IUP (Internet Usage Policy). At least mine wasn’t “painful or frequent urination,” though with all this stress—though affect is not effect—I was experiencing “unusual weakness,” which once arrived in an Indipak email phrased as “unusual weakedness”—I’d never be capable, no computer would be capable, of writing as beautiful as that, Mom. I’ll never get a raise, or a promotion, and we use what’s called the serial comma. I typed pages I trashed, then feeling anxious a cospirist might find them retrieved them for shredding into piñata entrails, which I bagged in a bag inside a bag to dump to the dumpster of a nonneighboring impasse (if I could’ve, I would’ve shredded the impasse).

  And this was every day, Mom, which is two words when talking about a repeated experience but one word, everyday, when speaking of the boring, the mundane. Anything on my workcomputer I’d email from: to: my personal email, delete. Once home I’d check email on my homecomputer, my nightcomputer, reread the day’s writing, rewrite. I’d skimp on dinner, email myself the night’s skinning and gutting then, tucked between bedsheets lined like obsolesced paper, turn off the light. Every day lived double, everyday duplicity. Nomenex us both, Mom, but read the smallprint first: Nomenex doesn’t exist, it’s an exemplar drug, a composite of composites—inspired by how an amphetamine can be combined with a dextroamphetamine into a single drug that both focuses your attention and helps you lose weight, which gives the attention of others something better to look at, someone slimmer on which to focus their own personal doses—a fictional surrogate for an array of antidepressants that actually do exist and that I would prefer not to mention for fear not only of legal reprisal (in case this is published), but also of being fired. I couldn’t sleep, Mom, but I didn’t need a sleeping aid—I needed a hamburger. I won’t be disingenuous, I needed a specific burger—buns and pattymeat indistinguishable, but the burger distinguished by other criteria. I could taste it, Ronald Ray could taste it—could taste its very ingredients active and inactive—but I could not prescribe him what he wanted, what I wanted even: I couldn’t Nomenex any of us with nonexistent Nomenex, I couldn’t name and by naming bring into being, Mom, I was a wreck.

  Ronald Ray, he will try this in third person. There’s nothing more efficient than third person (omniscience), and a story about fastfood should be nothing but efficient. The writer—J, say, the fictionalizing illeist, regular masturbator, and underemployee—can write but he cannot name, even though he knows what he wants to name, he knows what he wants to say, he knows the Word, he knows the letters that form the Word, he knows the sounds of the letters and the shapes of the letters, Ronald Ray, he knows them like he knows the word uxoricide, like he knows the hard and soft sounds and the shape of the J, but he cannot pronounce them or form them in order, he cannot assemblyline them into the … he can only have you cruise incommoded, making your mileage, your exits and turns, incarnating yourself and the grid, substantiating yourself within the grid as he maps his own failings—at night with his head centered on the white perfection of pillow that needs only a few scattered seeds and a moment’s toasting to resemble a bun—as wars and diseases roil around, bubbling up here and there like effervescing oil. He cannot do it, Ronald Ray, he’s sorry but even wretches must have standards, wretched fictional standards. He could invent a fictional restaurant for you to bite your burger at but any fictional restaurant would be, like Nomenex, a worthless simulant or inconcinne imitation, a placebic generic. Any burger restaurant he invents would obviously be based on a real burger restaurant, a real burger restaurant everyone knows and has been to and that even he’s been to (the writer has also taken the succedane
ous drugs on which Nomenex is based). Pity the burger outlet that must go up against a fiction? No, pity the fiction that must go up against a burger outlet! Ronald Ray, is the writer afraid to be seen as being in the pocket of his fake franchise’s competition? but can a chain that doesn’t exist have any competition? To invent one restaurant is to flatulate an entire chain? Yes, Ronald Ray, ridiculous! The writer would have to sit in his apartment unpublished (and lately the water pressure’s been stingy), and create a burger franchise, create a name and even a logo for it and falsely register and trademark and copyright the entire invention from its appearances exterior and interior to its gastronyms, the hammy neonames of its supersynthesized cuisine and why? only because he doesn’t want to be seen as endorsing any actually existing and beloved burger franchise in this crap creatic tale, apologies Ronald Ray, of your girlfriend’s hackneyed murder? Does the writer really think that if he mentions that existing famous burger franchise in his story he might help mayospread its fame—spread it like war and disease? like literary “influences”? Is he convinced he’d only further popularize its (he can’t decide on the one encompassing word) homogenization? is he convinced he’d only further homogenize the utter diversity of its damage? He shouldn’t be, he shouldn’t worry. This story will never be published, it will never survive—unlike plasticbags, unlike styrofoam, which will degrade forever. This story is closer to what’s packaged inside: unhealthy, produced by exploited labor (self-exploited), to be consumed or unconsumed, either way quickly gone, quickly forgotten. Excreted, excreated. Ronald Ray, you must be ravenous. Roll down a window and ponder the polysemy of “draft.”