Panorama City

by Antoine Wilson

  After some deliberation I decided to bestow the fries on the meekest customer of the day. When I first heard that the meek shall inherit the earth, I felt bad for the meek, because after the Rapture they would be left behind with the sinners, but JB said I had my stories mixed up and that in this particular speech inheriting the earth was a good thing. I don’t know if Panorama City is bolder than other places, but it took some time until a meek person stepped up to the counter. He was a skinny and pale man, bald except above his ears, and when he ordered he couldn’t seem to bring his eyes to meet Ho’s. I had to leave my station, I had to leave the french fry hopper to get close enough to hear him speak, he nearly whispered his order, which, fortunately, included french fries. I returned to my station in time to position the carton of abnormally long fries where Ho was sure to grab it, and everything went according to plan, as they say. In that moment, the moment of him walking away with the abnormally long fries on his tray but not having noticed them yet, I felt quite good about myself, I had given the meekest customer a preview of his future inheritance, french fries coming from the earth, I mean, via potatoes. I had not only solved the problem of my lack of freedom but also changed someone’s life in the process. I had not yet realized, or rather Paul Renfro had not yet enlightened me, that most people despise change, that most people, when faced with a change in their lives, will ignore it for as long as possible, until they are forced to face it. Most people are not thinkers like you and me, Paul’s words. The meek man went to his table with a preview of his earthly inheritance right there on his tray and, because he was so meek, there was no telling what his reaction was, or whether he even noticed.

  That disappointing attempt got me thinking that all of the energy I had put into selecting the right customer had been misplaced and that instead I should focus on putting together a carton of fries with more obvious impact, with what Francis would have called mainstream appeal. Which got me started collecting some shorter fries along with the longest fries. I had realized that an entire carton of long fries might look, to someone without a set of reference fries, unremarkable. I began to arrange for a customer, for a random customer, interesting or plain, meek or proud, a carton of fries expressly designed to highlight the single abnormally long fry, a carton that might replicate the joy of discovery I had felt upon finding that first abnormally long fry among the rest. When the carton was ready I turned to the counter. The customer standing there had what some people call a mousy face, people who have never looked closely at a real mouse. I listened to make sure she ordered fries, which she did, and then I personally delivered the special carton directly to her tray, which disturbed Ho, who was working the register, he scowled at me, he looked like he wanted to kill me. Ho did not respond well to having his space invaded, as he put it, he did not respond well to a lot of things, and sometimes he would be overcome by some kind of spell, and he would mumble nonsense words, his eyes staring at something in the distance, all of which was explained by the fact, Roger Macarona’s words, the fact that Ho was a refugee, or had been a refugee, from someplace in bumfuck Asia. In general, though, if you did not invade his space or catch him during one of his spells, Ho was a nice fellow, you could always talk to him about cards, he was a poker fanatic, and his shirts were always perfectly ironed, he did them himself.

  The woman didn’t notice the fries on her tray, and I almost lost hope that I could bring anyone to pay attention to their fries, and indeed she would later claim that she had not noticed them until she got to her table and sat down to enjoy a nice peaceful meal alone and without any disturbances, her words. From a corner of the dining room I heard a squeaking sound that I would accurately describe as mousy, and then she was at the counter again and Roger was asking her whether there was anything he could do. I heard her say that she had received a carton containing an obscenely long french fry, that she had looked at that fry alongside the others in the carton, and that she couldn’t imagine how a fry this long had come from a real potato. It was disgusting, she said. Her mind, she said, flashed immediately to an image from her childhood, which had been an unhappy childhood, though that didn’t come out until later, to an image from the Guinness Book of World Records, of the man with the world’s longest fingernails, and this image, which had come to her by involuntary recall, her term for it, this was not a laughing matter, her words, the image had so disgusted her, prompted by the obscenely long fry, that she had lost her appetite completely. She made a gagging sound that convinced me but that Roger later said was fake. She demanded from Roger Macarona that something be done, starting with holding accountable whoever was responsible. Together they looked at me, the tallest employee, six and a half feet tall, standing at the fry hopper, the evidence was my body itself, my height, I was making fries in my own image, as they say, and, her words now, I had picked her, I had singled her out for harassment, when all she wanted was to eat anonymously and in peace. Roger walked to where I was, it was only a few steps, really, he walked over and silently loaded a cardboard container with a bunch of average-length fries, with the freshest fries in the hopper I might add, though I wouldn’t expect her to know it, he loaded it up, not a word to me. Of course I thought I had ruined everything, I thought I was about to lose my job, I was trying to do the math, as they say, in my head and figure out where and when I had gone wrong, maybe I had not deserved the promotion after all, I thought, but I didn’t yet understand the nature of promotions, I couldn’t bear to face Aunt Liz, I thought, after she had so courteously arranged a real job for me and I had ruined it, especially while I was doing my best to apply myself to Aunt Liz’s plan for me, all of these thoughts were going through my head, and then I saw, I couldn’t bear to look directly at Roger, I saw out of the corner of my eye Roger, his back to the woman, wink at me before turning to deliver the new carton of fries. Then the new carton of fries lay on her tray next to the carton with the obscenely long fry sticking out of it. You could see now that the seemingly average bunch of fries in the offending carton were in general shorter than those in the replacement, further evidence against me. She stood there like she was waiting for an elevator, looking at nobody. Roger took the offending carton from her tray and threw it away. She said, I heard her say, her voice wasn’t so mousy, she said that Roger didn’t understand, she didn’t want new fries, her appetite had been ruined by the old fries, she couldn’t get the image of a horrifying spiraling fingernail out of her head, it was disgusting, she wanted Roger to do more than replace her fries, her problem wasn’t solved by new fries, what he was doing, her words, was trying to replace the heater in a building that had already burned down because of the original heater. Roger said that he thought they were talking about french fries, what did heaters have to do with it? This was a ruse, he admitted later, he had gotten her point completely. He declared himself responsible for the food only, he had no control or influence over what mental images popped into her head, and while he was sorry for, he used her words, her flash of involuntary recall, he couldn’t exactly go back in time to her childhood and prevent her from opening the Guinness Book of World Records. Kids are naturally curious, he said, what can I do about that? As a paying customer she declared herself entitled to compensation for her negative experience, she described the whole incident over again now, as if Roger hadn’t witnessed it and hadn’t heard her describe it already, and he listened patiently without interrupting her, nodding the whole time, which was when we heard about her unhappy childhood. After she re-detailed everything that had been said and done, Roger said that he was very sorry for what had happened to her, and if there was anything he could do to make up for the unpleasantness of her dining experience at the fastfood place, anything at all, she shouldn’t hesitate to ask.

  I didn’t realize it then, I didn’t even realize it when he did it a second time for a customer whose chicken bites weren’t cooked as well as they should have been, I mean they’d been precooked, they weren’t uncooked, that would have been dangerous, they just hadn�
��t completely unfrozen in the center, and Roger had done the same thing, he had offered to do anything at all to make it better. Even then I hadn’t understood, Roger had to explain it to me, he asked whether I’d noticed that nobody ever took him up on his offer to do anything at all for them. If he had offered coupons or vouchers or a refund, his words, they would have snatched them up, that’s what customers did, they wanted to hold on to their money, it was their nature. But by asking them whether there was anything at all he could do for them, he was in fact offering them nothing. He was telling them that if they wanted something, they would have to ask for it, and if they had to ask for it, Roger’s thinking, they would have to give up what Roger called the moral high ground, which customers cherished even more than money. If they managed to ask in a roundabout way, Roger explained, using words like compensation or recourse, he waited for them to ask directly for money or coupons, but they never did. The woman never got past the word compensation, she huffed and puffed and left without even taking her food to go, vowing never to return to the fastfood place in as loud a voice as she could muster, to which Roger replied in a calm and soothing near whisper, so that everyone in the restaurant had to quiet down to hear him, which they did, that she could make whatever dining choices she liked, that this was America, that she was free to go, and that he was sorry she was having a bad day.

  Once she was gone, he shrugged his shoulders and apologized to the other customers for the commotion, as if to say that she was unbalanced and overreacting and we were all better off without her, or at least that’s what it looked like to me, I had seen that look before, I didn’t like it. Roger had been cruel to the woman, I thought, and I said so. He explained that he had been nothing but accommodating with her, but that she was clinging to an unrealistic expectation of customer satisfaction, that the problem lay in her mind, not in his actions, he explained that individual customer satisfaction was not important, it had never been important, that the emphasis on individual customer satisfaction was only a strategy, a business strategy, a means to an end, and that it had become shopworn, customers had begun taking advantage of it, which was damaging the business ecosystem, like picnickers feeding the bears. I told Roger that I had only wanted to brighten the woman’s day with the same wonderful feeling of discovery I had experienced upon recognizing a very long french fry sitting atop a pile of otherwise normal fries, I had only wanted to provide a unique and exceptional dining experience, I hadn’t meant to cause any trouble or hurt any feelings. Roger shook his head at that, he said I hadn’t caused any trouble at all, what I had done was root out someone who was trying to take advantage of the fast-food place, I had eradicated vermin, his words, I had done a very good thing. But from now on I should maintain a consistent variety of fries in each carton, because people had certain expectations when they dined at the fast-food place, expectations that should be met, not exceeded or fucked with in any way, and consistency was the hallmark of the fast-food place, Roger’s words, it trumped quality every time. Even though Roger said I had done a good thing, I couldn’t help, I can’t help but be haunted by the image of the spiraling fingernail.

  GRACE

  A few nights later, I told Aunt Liz I was going to take a walk around the block to settle my stomach, to aid my digestion, not that her cooking hadn’t been delicious, it had been, I’d just eaten it too quickly. Which was entirely true until I started down the block and noticed a glow behind the sheets hanging in the window of the milky blue house. I had tried knocking on the door several times already, after work, to speak with the inhabitants about their lawn, or about their patch of wilderness, which took up the space where others would have kept a lawn, I wanted to introduce myself as a new neighbor, and let them know how much I appreciated their not cutting the grass to within a literal inch of its life, as Aunt Liz had done and kept doing, or as her gardener kept doing, I should say, on her orders. But nobody had ever answered. This time when I knocked a fellow who looked like a young Indian chief answered the door, his name was Chuy. I complimented him on the wilderness that was his lawn, but he said the place wasn’t his, he was just visiting. He asked me where the pizza was, what had happened to the pizza. I told him I was not the pizza guy. He asked me if I was the police, I said I wasn’t. A car pulled into the driveway then, which turned out to be the pizza guy. Chuy disappeared with the pizza and someone named Nick came to the door to pay. He invited me in, it was his house, or his grandmother’s house, or it had been, before she went into a home, she had memory and balance problems. Nick’s hair was slicked back and he had a goatee, or part of a goatee, on the point of his chin, and a tiny mouth compared to the rest of his face, it was fascinating to watch him eat pizza with it. Chuy lit what he called some Buddha and smoked and passed it on to the other guy on the couch, who passed it on to Nick, who put his pizza down to have a puff, who passed it on to me. When in Rome, wear a toga, your grandfather used to say. I took a puff, I inhaled and then let it out quickly. I am not a smoker, I have never been a smoker, but I could see immediately that one of the appeals of smoking is that when you let the smoke out of your mouth you feel like a dragon. A few moments later, or a few hundred, who can say, I couldn’t remember what I’d just thought, or what I’d said, or what someone else had said, and so I spent much of my thinking trying to chase down what I’d forgotten. I became uncertain about what these people really looked like. The harder I stared the less concrete their features became, like when you try to look at a dim star dead on and it disappears on you. The rolled cigarette came around again and I was offered some more, and I pinched it between my fingers as I had seen the others do and I held it up to my eyes and looked at it closely. I wanted to penetrate, with my eyes, whatever this thing was, whatever was burning in there, but it was impossible. I could feel, I mean I could sense, how this thing was connected to maintaining one’s yard in a wild state, I understood how these guys, or how Nick, specifically, might, were this something he smoked routinely, ignore many practical aspects of life, of which gardening, or landscaping as they called it down there, was only one. I asked Nick about his lawn, I asked him what his philosophy was. Chuy said, his words, Again with the lawn? Nick shook his head at Chuy. Plain and simple, he said, his grandmother’s gardener was an asshole, he had problems with some of Nick’s plants, strictly hobby plants, and so Nick had to fire him, which was why the lawn looked fucked, because also Nick had been too busy to mow it. Then he asked me to shit or get off the pot, his words, meaning pass the cigarette. As you can imagine, I was disappointed, as you can imagine, I was sad to discover that a respect for and fascination with nature in a natural state, or close to a natural state, was not the only reason someone might have a patch of wilderness around their house. I kept deciding to leave but my body felt like it had melted into the chair. I kept thinking I had come up with profound realizations but then found I couldn’t put them into words. I felt hungry despite my full stomach and ate a slice of pizza and watched them play a golfing game on their television. After a while, or a hundred whiles, I became concerned that if I didn’t leave soon I would never get up. On my way back to Aunt Liz’s house my mind spiraled in a million different directions as to how I would explain my extended absence, how I would explain that I had gone on an hours-long walk, how I had stayed up long past our bedtimes. Except Aunt Liz was sitting at the kitchen table doing her crossword puzzle, and she looked up and welcomed me back and asked me if I’d had a nice walk, without any concern in her voice whatsoever.

  I spent an eternity brushing my teeth. I stared at the picture with footsteps on the beach, trying to unlock its secrets. I kept having realizations, and then when I tried to remember them, or recall them, in words, I mean, I couldn’t seem to put them back together. Every new piece of philosophy in my brain revealed itself to be a mirage, and yet I kept feeling I’d discovered something profound. I couldn’t lie on the inflatable mattress, it was too wobbly, I lay down on the floor instead, I liked the way it felt against my ankles and calves an
d shoulder blades and the back of my head. My flesh felt like it was becoming part of the floor. I thought of your grandfather, I wondered what it had felt like to lie there while his body gave out, or whether his body had given out so completely that he’d never experienced lying there at all. I wondered what he would have said about me being down in Panorama City, I think he would have supported it one hundred percent, he had always wanted me to know something of the world. And yet I wished he had been there the other night at dinner with Aunt Liz, to confirm or deny what she’d had to say about my mother, your grandmother, and her destructive nature, which was supposedly half my nature, though I’d never felt destructive, I’d never been interested in destruction.

  That night I dreamed, Juan-George, that I could read as well as any scholar, everything clicked, like those dreams where suddenly you can fly, and you sort of think, oh, that’s right, now I remember how to fly. I had that feeling in the dream when I remembered, so to speak, how to read, and everything seemed clear to me, the world opened up like a book. Only to dissolve upon waking, as they say.

  On those days when I didn’t have to see Dr. Rosenkleig, I got into the habit of going to the Lighthouse Fellowship after work. Someone was always there, there was always a friend to make, and as part of my clinical trial of Aunt Liz’s plan I did my best to stop thinking, in the name of science I did my best to accept the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal savior. I didn’t reserve any part of myself from pursuing Aunt Liz’s plan, I didn’t go through the motions while my heart was somewhere else, I was genuine in my intention. And yet what I felt in my heart wasn’t faith so much as effort. When you feel only effort in your heart, Juan-George, you know you are on the wrong track, my philosophy. I met effort with more effort, I wanted to absorb as much as possible, Scott and JB had given me my own Bible, it was black and the pages had gold edges on them, you could see the gold when you had a bunch of pages pressed together, it was symbolic of the flock, JB had said, I wasn’t sure how. It also had a built-in fabric bookmark, no symbolic function, and in the New Testament some lines were written in red ink, which meant that Jesus said them. I would go to the Lighthouse after work, I would go to the Lighthouse and sit at one of the tables with a tall glass of ice water and open my Bible and listen to people talk. These were not always biblical discussions, in fact I was surprised by how few of the conversations were biblical discussions, to some extent it was a relief, I didn’t feel like people were going to pop-quiz me in front of everyone, but on the other hand I enjoyed hearing people talk about the Bible, if only because I became more and more curious with each passing day what lay between the pages of that book. Sometimes I sat alone, staring at the words, picking out a few here and there, trying to teach myself to be a stronger reader, and someone would see me concentrating very hard on my Bible and look pleased. I couldn’t get too far and I didn’t want to sit there always staring at the first page, so I turned to pages farther in and stared at the words there. Your grandfather used to say that my gift was gab, by the time I figured out a couple of words in a row, I would forget the words I’d just read, I couldn’t quite decode words and hold a sentence together in my head at the same time, I still can’t, it’s like the machinery is missing, I hope you won’t have the same problem, people tend to make judgments. Not Paul, of course, Paul helped me see the value in what I thought had been a handicap. Reading and writing are mankind’s greatest tools, Paul’s words, but we’ve abused them, we’ve managed to turn our own tools against ourselves, we’ve managed to bury ourselves with our own shovels, bury ourselves under piles of nonsense left behind by people from the past, nonsense that muddles our vision, that makes it impossible to see things as they are. Not reading and writing means not being muddled, and an unmuddled vision is invaluable, which means valuable.