by Rahul Mehta
Part of the reason I am bad at my job is that I am fundamentally opposed to multitasking. I have been reading the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hahn, who says that to be happy you must do one thing at a time. He says, do the dishes to do the dishes, not to have them done. The goal isn’t to have clean dishes in the cupboards; it is to be present in the moment, to feel the water on your hands, the smooth surfaces of the ceramic bowl as you caress it. Doing the dishes shouldn’t be a chore, he says, it should be a joy.
He says, think of washing the bowl as bathing a baby. Treat everything you touch as though it were a baby: with attention and care.
I try to apply this principle to my most dreaded task at work: photocopying. I try caring about the things I copy. I imagine the leaves of paper as little babies I feed through the Xerox machine. And the papers the machine delivers on the other side are babies, too. They proliferate in ever-increasing quantities: ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred, five hundred. I place the copies in people’s mailboxes so that they can find them later, when they finish their afternoon meetings or the next morning when they check their mail. Surprise! There’s a baby in your mailbox! The mailroom, where the Xerox machine is housed, is full of babies of all different colors—lavender, cherry, orange, chartreuse—sliding in and out of the copy machine, peeking out of mail slots, crying because they have been left on the counter or need to be changed.
So many babies.
I start avoiding the mailroom. My boss finds other ways to get her copying done. I am not worried about losing my job. We are more or less resigned to one another, which I am beginning to think is the way most relationships work.
Carson thinks I am crazy.
I can’t disagree.
I have a habit of calling him from work in the afternoon, when I know he will be home from the bakery trying to sleep. It is bad enough that I wake him, but to make matters worse, I often have nothing to say. I only want to hear his voice. And since I have nothing to say, I meow. In the silence, I listen to him breathe. I meow for a full minute, maybe two. Then I hang up.
The co-worker who sits in the cubicle next to mine once poked his head in and said, “Is there a little pussycat in here?” He is large, in body and voice; he looks and sounds like a bulldog.
I scowl at him.
Soon we develop an unspoken understanding that we will pretend we cannot hear each other’s private conversations. In truth, the walls are so thin we can hear everything: the sound of papers shuffling from inbox to outbox, chair wheels scooting across the carpet, rubber bands straining to keep things together. We nod our heads amiably when we pass each other in the hallway and joke when we intersect in the restroom, as though he does not know I meow into the telephone, and I do not know that he is cheating on his wife.
In the same way, we pretend we cannot hear the staff accountant, whose cubicle is on the other side of ours, and with whom we both share a wall. Her four-year-old son is fighting leukemia, and between clicks of her calculator and computer keyboard, we can hear her cry. When we visit her in her cubicle, we are careful not to say, “How is your son?” because if the news were good we would already know. But rather, we say, “Wan-Chen, would you please cut this check, and mail it to the address listed on the W–9 form?” We do this not because we don’t care, but because we know numbers are safe and knowable; we see how they comfort and numb her.
I make bizarre grocery lists. I replace cereal with surreal, Glad bags with sad bags, coffee with sneezy, lettuce with let’s. The words stray further and further from what is really meant. My lists become so coded that Carson, pulling them off the fridge on the way to the store, cannot read them. He returns with shopping bags full of wrong products.
He shows me the list, and says, pointing, “How can anyone understand this?”
I shrug. No one can. There are days even I can’t.
Our house shares a driveway with the house next door. Our neighbor’s boyfriend, who visits his girlfriend frequently but doesn’t live with her, often parks his car in such a way that it blocks mine. Never Carson’s, only mine.
In the morning, after Carson has already left for the bakery, I walk across the lawn, knock on the neighbor’s door, and ask to speak with her boyfriend. I say to him, “I’m so sorry to bother you, but I need to go to work. Could you please move your car?” The first few times I am polite and gracious, but as time goes on I become more and more annoyed with the daily nuisance. I become shorter in my words and tone: “Move your car, please.” I get tired of looking at them—my neighbor, whose name I can’t remember, with her stub nose and chewed nails, and her unemployed boyfriend, with the gut and the crazy eyes, both of them still in their pajamas, angry at me for waking them—so, if I notice his car in the driveway the night before, I knock on her door and slip a note in the letter slot saying, “Neighbor’s boyfriend: please move your car.” Then, rethinking my tone and not wanting to be so curt, I replace “please” with “s’il vous plaît.” Sometimes I print it on my computer using fancy fonts and graphics, and sometimes, in addition to putting the notes in the letter slot, I put them on his car, under the wipers and taped to the driver’s side window: “Move your car, s’il vous plaît.” And because I think s’il vous plaît sounds a little like Sylvia Plath, I change it to, “Move your car, Sylvia Plath.” No one is listening to me, so why waste words? I shorten it even further to simply, “Sylvia Plath.” Finally, the notes devolve into a single exclamation, duplicated a hundred times, in the mail slot, taped to the car, under the windshield wipers: “Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia! Sylvia!”
Carson sees the signs and says, “What the hell are you doing? What must the neighbors think?” I say, “The neighbors don’t care. At least I’m amused.”
One morning I wake up and Carson has left his car keys on the kitchen counter with a note:
Sylvia dear, for God’s sake, use mine. Love, Ted.
From then on, Carson lets me use his car, while he takes the bus to work.
I think it’s sweet. I am grateful for the sacrifice, even feel a little guilty, but not too guilty, because Carson’s bus ride to work is much shorter than mine would be.
But I wonder about Carson’s note. Had he forgotten that Ted Hughes was no martyr; that he was not a faithful husband, would not have signed a letter “love” and meant it; that, after Sylvia’s suicide, women picketed his poetry readings, claiming murder? Perhaps Carson confused him with Leonard Woolf.
One day, after returning from the grocery store frustrated, a particularly cryptic grocery list in hand, Carson asks me why I act this way, why I play these games with words.
I can’t think of an answer right away. I say, “You’re a writer, you tell me.”
Several days later, we are fighting about little pieces of chopped onion that have spilled and stuck to the linoleum floor.
I tell him, “I cannot bear the things I must say, day after day, and the words I must use to say them.”
Our last summer together, we take a trip with our friends from New York, as we do every summer, to Carson’s family’s summer house, called The Camp. The house was built over a hundred years ago, before the Brice family lost all its money. Most of the family’s other properties were sold off long ago, but The Camp is protected by a trust.
When we are shopping for summer reading before our trip, Carson buys a recent issue of a literary quarterly that published one of his short stories, years ago, although its editors have rejected all his subsequent submissions. The recent issue is guest-edited by a woman who wrote a famous memoir about a sexual relationship she had with her estranged half-brother after they were both adults. The issue is called “The End of Love” and is filled with stories about couples breaking up.
Carson is into symbolism. During the trip, I hardly see him actually reading the quarterly, but he carries it around and places it next to him, face up, when he sits on the couch. He lies on the beach, hugging it.
This year, one of our old friends, Becky, has brought along a new girlf
riend, Laura, whom none of us likes. Becky is a writer and Laura is an artist. At the beginning of every month, Laura presents Becky with a blank book she has made by hand. At the end of the month, Becky returns the book to Laura, full of poems. They have been doing this every month for the seven months they have been dating.
I think it’s a bad idea.
In the car on our way to the beach, I ask Becky and Laura, “What happens when a month goes by and no one feels like making a book? Or what if someone has a busy month at work or falls ill? Or what if someone runs out of inspiration and has nothing to write about?” To emphasize my point, I start singing “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers Anymore.”
Becky looks at Laura and says, “That won’t happen.”
“But what if it does?” I ask.
Becky says, “It won’t.”
“But what if it does?”
Laura says, “Even if it does, maybe it would be for the best. At least there’d be a sign that there is a problem. There is nothing worse than stumbling along, with everyone knowing the relationship is over except you.”
The beach where we are driving used to be owned by the Brice family. It’s about two miles long, crescent-shaped, with rock jetties bracketing it on either side. Most of it was sold, fifty years ago, to the state of Connecticut, which turned it into a very popular public beach. But the family kept a sliver of sand, forty yards or so, partly to remind themselves of better times, and partly so that they would still have something to call Brice Beach, which has such a nice ring.
Neither the family nor the state erected any marker to separate the public from the private, so naturally, the crowds spill over onto Brice Beach. Usually, it isn’t a problem.
On this particular day, a noisy motorboat drops its anchor just offshore in the private part. The driver, who has a deep tan, which will surely turn cancerous, is lying in his boat with the motor running. Now and then he pops up, as though he is expecting someone, and then lies back down. The motor spews fumes, chopping the water, and preventing us from swimming.
Monique, who is Carson’s oldest friend, says, “Carson, maybe you should tell that guy to leave. It’s your beach.”
Carson is lying on a blanket with his sunglasses on, the quarterly resting open, page-down, on his chest.
“Yeah, Carson,” I say. “Tell him.”
Carson says nothing. Monique may have been joking, but I am getting angry.
“You’re not going to tell him, are you?” I ask. I walk over to where he is lying, and my shuffling feet kick sand on him. “That’s just like you. You want to tell him, everyone wants you to tell him, but you can’t.”
Carson says, “If you feel so strongly, why don’t you say something?”
He brushes the sand off his arms and legs and rolls onto his stomach.
When Carson gets up much later, he has marks on his torso where the edges of the quarterly have dug into his flesh.
Carson finally manages to leave me the following fall. I come home and find the dear john letter taped to the mirror in the upstairs bathroom. I read it once standing at the bathroom sink, from beginning to end. Then I close the toilet seat cover, sit down, and read it again.
He says he needs time.
He says nothing is definite.
He says he misses New York more than he knew.
He says he is going back to sort things out. He will be at Monique’s, but please don’t call; he will be in touch when he is ready.
He says it isn’t me.
The letter is all lies, especially the last part. If it were true, if it isn’t me, then why didn’t he leave the note somewhere else: on the kitchen counter, where the muffins should be, or taped to the screen of the television set, the one we bought when Sangeeta didn’t give us hers? Why did he leave it in the bathroom for me to read and have nothing to look at except myself in the mirror? Why has he left me alone?
I say alone, but I suppose I am not. Krishna is downstairs, thriving quietly. We have kept our promise. He is twice the size as when we got him, and his bluish hue has disappeared. Sangeeta was right about what the color meant.
Three weeks after the dear john letter, a month after the mind the deer, dear one, the animal I encounter in the road is not a deer, but a dog. He has a plastic trick-or-treat basket, shaped like a jack-o’-lantern, stuck on his head. He is stumbling around in the middle of the road.
Several cars in front of me swerve. I pull to the side of the road and get out, intending to remove the basket, but I can’t catch the dog. He is scared. There is no reasoning with him.
I decide the dog must belong to someone in the neighborhood, and I start ringing doorbells. The first two doors go unanswered; behind the third is a man who has not brushed his teeth. He looks at the dog through squinty eyes, thinks for a minute, and says the dog belongs to the woman in 152. He points down the street and quickly shuts the door.
I walk two houses down and ring the bell. A woman answers. She is wearing nice slacks and a thin leather belt and drinking a breakfast shake from a can.
“Is that your dog?” I ask.
She looks at it as though she’s never seen it before. After a minute she says, “How’d that get there?” She marches out to the street, grabs the handle of the trick-or-treat basket, and leads the dog back to the door. She asks me to hold her breakfast shake. She pushes the dog into the house, without removing the basket, and shuts the door behind him. She reclaims her breakfast shake from me and says, “I’m late.” She gets in her car, which is parked in the driveway.
I am late now, too, but I am worried about the dog. Perhaps there is someone inside the house to help him, though I wonder if that someone isn’t the one who put the basket on his head in the first place.
I walk over to the woman and knock on her car window. She is fumbling for cigarettes. She looks startled and annoyed. I motion for her to roll down her window, which she does.
“Do you need help getting the jack-o’-lantern off the dog’s head?” I ask.
She pauses and then says, “Mind your own business.” She rolls up her window and adjusts her rearview mirror.
As she is doing this, I notice in her rear window a high school parking sticker that identifies her as “FACULTY.” A smudge on the window obscures the letter “C.”
I understand, and I forgive her her faults.
I knock on her door and motion for her to roll down her window again. “What now?” she asks.
“Every day after work,” I tell her, “when I get in my car, I have to readjust my rearview mirror. For a while, I wondered why this was happening. I thought maybe someone was breaking into my car and taking it for a joy ride. Then I realized, it is because I shrink during the day. My life makes me shrink.
“I sit at a computer all day. I took an ergonomics workshop so I could figure out how not to shrink. ‘Your head is a balloon,’ they told me. They said, ‘To correct your posture, think of your head as a helium-filled balloon, pulling your spine upward.’ ”
The woman’s eyes have wandered to her front yard, where her dog, who has somehow gotten out of the house again, is stumbling around. He still has the basket stuck on his head.
“So the ergonomics people,” I continue, “installed software on my computer, so that every forty-five minutes a stick figure of a man sitting in a chair appears on my screen. The figure’s head is a balloon. The balloon makes his neck long and his spine straight. It’s supposed to remind me to do the same.
“But if I were the stick figure, I wouldn’t want the balloon just to straighten my spine. I would want it to carry me away, off the screen, as far away as it could.”
“Why are you telling me all this?” the woman says, looking angry.
“Because,” I say, “I am faulty, too.”
“I don’t have time for this,” she says. She shifts the car in reverse and peels out of the driveway, almost running over my foot.
I look at the dog, who is whimpering and pawing at the basket on his head.
&
nbsp; I try again to remove the basket. Now he is too tired and defeated to resist. When I get it off, he licks me.
It is no longer early morning. My boss will already be at work, as will my co-workers. Wan-Chen will be crying quietly at her desk, since mornings are hardest for her.
I have decided what to do. I will rescue the dog, which I have already, in my head, named “Lucky.” I will put him in the car, turn around, and drive home.
But when I bring the car over and open the passenger door, Lucky doesn’t want to get in. He looks at me and runs in the opposite direction. He dashes around the front yard, toward and away from the house, barking insistently. He sounds strange, not like a real dog, but more like a cartoon dog, or a stuffed dog with a speaker and a button that says, PRESS HERE.
What is he barking at? It could be anything: the sun, the tree, a squirrel or a bird he has glimpsed out of the corner of his eye. Or maybe he is barking at the small blue house itself. Or someone inside the house, or something that has happened there. How can anyone know what happens in houses?
I think of TV dogs like Lassie, Benji, and Rin Tin Tin. When those dogs bark, they are trying to communicate something vital. People who hear them understand. Someone is trapped in a burning house. Someone is tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse by the wharf. Someone is holding on to a branch in a fast-flowing river heading for a waterfall, and the branch is about to break.
Eight
Yours
1.
When Antwon was awarded an Individual Artist Grant from the NEA—back when the NEA was still routinely awarding such grants; before Congress, enraged by artists like Andres Serrano submerging a crucifix in a vat of piss and Karen Finley smearing her naked body with chocolate, threatened to defund it—Antwon used the money to hire men for sex and then write about it.
Don was one of them. Or so it would seem.