Just Pretending

by Lisa Bird-Wilson

  When I finally calmed down, we sat at the dining room table, me close enough to my dad to be able to smell his Old Spice, while my mom hovered over his shoulder. He showed me how it works. You take a number, and you do the square of it or its individual digits, if it’s more than one digit. And then you add the squares of its digits together, and you keep repeating the process until either you get the number one or the number goes into an endless repeating cycle. The numbers that end in one are happy numbers. The numbers that don’t are unhappy numbers. It’s really that easy, a logical mathematical way to come to a conclusion of happiness. That was one of the best days of my life, learning that. I still get a shiver.

  I uncurl my legs and stretch them out on the bed. Suddenly, I’m hungry, and my head and shoulders feel less leaden. I go to the kitchen and open the fridge so I can look at the near-empty ketchup bottle next to the empty box of “party cubes.” Some food was designed to try to make you feel better – as if the maker understood there are people like me out in the world, grasping at anything that looks even remotely promising, something as optimistic as “party cubes.” I grab the remains of a flat two-litre of cola, slam the fridge, and snatch up the box of stale crackers from the counter.

  I decide to play along with his game. I find a yellow crayon in the junk drawer and, with my crackers and Coke, sit on the bed to carefully underline my message. I underline word by word and, at times, letter by letter, with the yellow crayon that’s difficult to see, although not entirely impossible. It’s his own game; I refuse to go easy on him. Life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing is my reply, heavily plagiarized from Shakespeare. I intend for him to know who he’s playing with here. I want him to know I’m no pushover.

  Funny he should have chosen Heart of Darkness to play this game with me. I blame it for sending me into a dark hole of depression when I was just a kid – the first of many “episodes.” Back then, adults liked to tell me how smart I was, and for a while I enjoyed trying to prove it. In fourth grade I read all the books from the tenth grade curriculum and wrote a report on each one. My teacher was impressed, not so much with my intelligence and industry, but with my impudence. Someone’s too big for their britches was her uninspired bit of hyperbole. Over the summer I secretly completed the eleventh grade reading list, and in fifth grade I had the twelfth grade list done before Christmas break. Heart of Darkness was on the first-year university English syllabus, and that’s how I first came to it. By then I was in sixth grade. I think it was the density of the book, the images of the “dark other” and that fucking relentless river that pushed me over the edge. Even though I’m quite certain we didn’t go to “scool” together, I feel a connection to my homeless guy, who’s hit on one of my weak spots.

  I like the idea of having a stalker. And despite what Trudy might think, he’s not bad looking, once you get past the exterior. I’d never tell Trudy this, but when he looked at me, I saw something. Like he was paying attention, like he was thinking about what I was thinking about. Those eyes were looking at me, not through me or around me.

  I take the book to work with me and keep it in my bag by the checkout. They don’t like you doing that, taking your bag to the counter with you. You might steal from the till or something. But honestly, let the video surveillance catch me doing something wrong. I dare it. The video surveillance that they pretend is not trying to catch you stealing or picking your nose or whatever, even though everyone knows better. I know when he’s in the store because Jan suddenly appears, skulking about in my peripheral view, stalking my suspected shoplifter. I reach under the counter and take Heart out of my bag, trying hard not to glance at the camera that I know is capturing my every move. If I let myself think about that camera, watching me with the eye of a clinician, it will only discourage me.

  I heard somewhere that we are each captured on video as many as twenty times a day. Just the thought of that in the morning can be enough to prevent me from leaving my apartment. I want to ask someone this: Who is watching these videos? Just who has that god-like, god-forsaken, godless, god-awful, god-damned mundane job, I would like to know. But that’s the point, isn’t it? There is no one to ask, except maybe the cold all-pupil eye itself. I’m afraid I’ll never get an answer, but I decide to ask anyway. I turn my face up to the camera and mouth, “Is anybody in there, and if so, tell me what it all means.” I do it clearly so my lips can be read because I have no idea if there is a microphone attached to the surveillance system. I’m pretty sure there isn’t.

  I set the book on the counter a foot or so away from my station. When he comes through the checkout to buy his crumbly old-lady candies, I mumble into the neck of my sweater something about all the donkeys being dead and add, “But I don’t know about the less worthwhile creatures.” I mean it as a hint of where to start looking in the book. The less worthwhile creatures are, of course, people, a suggestion I think is well suited to my cynical nature. He snatches the book and rushes away, but not before I see a grin spread across his face. I feel strangely satisfied.

  Two days later Trudy is waiting for me when I arrive for my shift. She “invites” me to go into the mall for a “chat.” We sit in the deserted food court, and she sets a file on the table between us. It’s my personnel file. She asks me if I know what she wants to talk to me about. I open my eyes wide, press my lips together in a silly semi-grin and hold my hands up in front of me, wordlessly conveying a not-a-clue response. She flicks the corner of my file impatiently with her fingernail and looks over my left shoulder, trying to impress on me that she has a lot of better places to be right now.

  “The security camera?” she says suggestively, as if to jog my memory. I concentrate on keeping my features as blank as possible. Blank Man. Was that a superhero, or did I make that up? Trudy taps her nail impatiently against the green Formica tabletop. Then she decides the niceties are over and it’s time to get down to business. “It’s against store policy to talk to the security cameras,” she says as though scolding a truant child.

  “Policy?” I choke. “There’s a policy about that?”

  “There is.” Trudy narrows her eyes. Her tone challenges me to ridicule something as serious as “store policy.” Her expression is lethal, so I bite my top lip to keep from asking if she has, by any chance, received an answer for me from the god-opticon. This lip-biting technique, I know from experience, serves to make me look sincere. Maybe she’ll take it as repentance. We go back to the store in silence, but within the hour she’s decided to forgive me and offers me a piece of gum. We’re not allowed to chew gum on the floor, but I refrain from pointing out the irony of this to her.

  The next several weeks include the passing of the book underneath the watchful eye of the camera, our benevolent big brother. What started as a bit of a lark, a distraction, becomes a ritual that I look forward to more and more, even though I can’t help but be aware of Trudy in the background, ever watching, ever critical. I avoid going for lunch with her, making excuses about appointments and errands so I can, instead, sit on a bench in the sun by the river and manufacture elaborate messages for him instead.

  From his messages it’s clear he sees me as gloomy and sad and that he finds this to be endearing. I feed his mildly romantic image of me by building cryptic, nihilistic messages about the meaninglessness of life. Bored to death but I don’t seem to be able to depart, I write, stealing snippets from Godot, and then rush back to work to wait for him to come through my checkout line and retrieve the book.

  When he returns the book to me the next day, he replies by messaging, Everything doomed is more beautiful because of such a fate.

  Our exchanges occur exclusively within the book, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find a new colour of pen or highlighter, or a new method, to demarcate the intended words or letters. The book fills with different coloured lines, squiggles and circled words. It’s a challenge to decipher the messages, but always rewarding. I hope he sees that I like this game. I start a list for myself s
o I can keep each message and its corresponding colour or method straight, for future reference, should the need arise.

  When we pass the book back and forth, he never speaks out loud to me. After a while I realize he’s astonishingly shy; it’s a quality I find alluring. I start to anticipate each day at work with a new excitement. When I send the book back with the question What’s your name? he circles the Russian and puts a neatly drawn hammer and sickle beside it like a logo. Unfortunately, the Russian in the book is crazy. Interesting, but insane. We are all born mad. Some remain so, he’s added to his message.

  “Ahh,” I whisper to myself, a smile spreading on my lips. Since I sent him my stolen message from Godot, he’s figured out where it came from and gotten hold of a copy. For some reason his message makes me feel hopeful.

  In another message, he lets me know he hasn’t slept for the past ten nights. Whether literally or metaphorically true I don’t know, but I find it an interesting juxtaposition to my own condition, during the peak of which I can do nothing but sleep.

  Of course he already knows my name because of my nametag, but I want to respond similarly – to be able to identify with one of the characters. But there’s no one in the book I can relate to. Certainly not Marlow. Or the indigenous people, whom Conrad portrays as little more than incidental backdrop – inhuman and devilish. I wonder if he sees me as his Kurtz? Two ships rubbing in the night. I shudder and hope not. Kurtz, the quintessential colonial imperialist white bastard. Instead, I circle a dark and pensive forest, an impenetrable darkness where the sun never shines – and I draw a tiny black heart beside those last words. He gets that this is meant to represent who I am because when he replies he does nothing more than draw a single teardrop beside that black heart. Tears for my sadness. I curse and adore him for his sentimentality. For the first time in a long time, I feel understood.

  “You don’t actually like him, do you?” Trudy says one day, sneaking up on me as I watch my Russian lead Jan on a wild goose chase through the men’s wallets and novelties – items that are frequently shoplifted. I observe an elderly gentleman with a violent tuft of dyed red hair above each ear delicately slip a “Genuine Leather” billfold from its box and into his hip pocket as Jan single-mindedly pursues my bearded Russian into men’s hosiery. I ignore the scorn in Trudy’s voice. “Haven’t you heard about this guy?” she asks me. “He did the same thing to some poor girl in Aggie’s last summer. She was a dull little thing with sad eyes. Always had her nose stuck in a book.”

  I wait politely for Trudy to take her foot out of her mouth before turning to observe her slightly flushed cheeks.

  I raise my eyebrows at her and hope this will be enough to deter her. I know what she says about him isn’t true, anyway. She probably has him mixed up with someone else, probably thinks all homeless people look the same. And even if it is true, so what? This is different. This isn’t like that at all.

  Regardless, Trudy persists. “Finally she had to get transferred to another mall just to get away from him.”

  “But this is a good mall,” I say lamely.

  Trudy ignores me. “Apparently he didn’t know how to take a bus to go and find her, ha ha. I guess you’re his next target. Can you imagine him on the bus? My mom used to say, ‘There’s always one weirdo on the bus.’ Isn’t that the truth? Well, one thing’s good about having him here: We don’t have to feel guilty about throwing recyclable bottles in the trash – there’s always someone to pick them out, ha,” she snorts. She and I both know she’s stereotyping. After a moment she sighs philosophically. “Ah well, I guess every mall’s got one.”

  I don’t tell Trudy that pretty much every mall’s got one of her kind too.

  I exit through the back door and wait. The clouds are building again over the gas station, and I can see we’re in for another good rain. He’s no more than one minute behind me, a good sign – a happy number. When he puts the book in my hand, he lingers, and we both stand steady in that awkward embrace, each of our hands clutching different ends of the book. He leans toward me and I don’t move away. He leans in slightly more, and when it seems apparent that we will, he says, in a voice that’s soft and kind, “I’ve never kissed a girl with glasses before,” as though this is the most important point to be made at this moment. He has the tiniest bit of a lisp.

  “I’ve never kissed a boy with a beard before,” I reply, although neither of us qualifies as the child that “boy” and “girl” suggest. I notice light freckles on his cheeks, under his eyes. He plunges toward me headlong, mashing unpredictably soft lips against mine. Rationally, I think he should smell of pastel mints, since that’s all he’s ever bought, but he doesn’t. Just as I twig to the taste of salt and the smell of stale tobacco, the hopeful tip of his tongue and the long-forgotten electric shiver up my spine, the back door bursts open with a clack like a shot, and Trudy lunges through with an unlit smoke between the fingers of one hand, flinging a laugh over her shoulder. She’s followed by the girl from the Orange Julius. Both of their expressions freeze for a split second, and I see Trudy’s tiny wheels turning as she grasps what’s transpired between me and the Russian. Before Trudy can twist her mouth into her tell-tale sneer, I pivot on the ball of my right foot and run like I’m in the hundred-metre dash through the nearby bus terminal and down the street. I’ve left the book behind.

  For the next three mornings, I manage to drag myself out of my black pit and call in sick. For two more I let the phone ring itself silly before it finally stops. For two days after that, I stay in my bed eating potato chips and watching the Shopping Channel. When I do rise on the seventh day, determined to leave my apartment, I shower lethargically and consider my options. I think about running away like that, how silly it must have looked. I think I’ll probably just add the past seven months to my time in Korea and go out to look for another McJob.

  I dress and put my glasses on. It’s then that I see the mark. One lens bears the residue of a greasy nose print, testament to what’s evolved over the past weeks with my Russian, culminating in that one awkward kiss.

  I remove the glasses and hold them up in the window where the sun shines in so I can get a better look.

  The book, I think, rubbing my glasses clean with my shirt. The book. Whoever has the book holds the key to the next interaction. It’s occurred to me before, during this game, that at any time I might pass the book back to him, with my carefully coded message, and never see him again. He could take the book and not reply – and wouldn’t that be the height of loss, in this game? If it is a game, which all along is how I’ve thought of it, then doesn’t a game need a winner and a loser? And now, with what I’ve done, running away like that, I’m not sure if I’ve made him the winner or the loser. I’ve left the book behind with his last message unseen by me, as if I didn’t want it. I’ve left him with his own unsent message.

  I go back to the mall, sit in the food court for more than two hours, waiting to see if he’ll show. I stay on the lookout for Trudy, hoping to avoid her. Later, I sit outside the entrance to the store. The store is at the end of the mall – it’s what’s known as an anchor – holding the mall down, one big department store at either end. I stay as long as I can without risking Trudy coming by for her break. Finally, I spend a small amount of time in the parking lot outside the back door before I go home on the bus.

  The next day I rise early. This time, I put on my work clothes and clip my nametag to my vest. I sit in the food court, waiting. I wait throughout the morning. I wait so long I start to wonder if I’ve been the object of my own elaborate delusion. Perhaps I made him up, my Russian with his book – imagined the whole crazy thing.

  The lunch rush starts to arrive. Trudy and one of the clerks from the CD store show up and sit near the taco vendor. I’m frozen, waiting to see what will happen next. I know hot sauce gives Trudy heartburn, but I see her eating it anyway. She doesn’t notice me at first. Only as she’s squeezing her little white cup of sour cream in half to lick the remainin
g line from its collapsed rim do her eyes search the food court and meet mine. She stops with her tongue out, white cream on its tip, and eyes me suspiciously. She puts the cup down and says something to her lunch mate, who immediately turns to look in my direction.

  I look away and grab my bag, hear Trudy’s laugh. I walk quickly across the food court to the narrow hallway that leads to the back door, my quickest escape. I imagine Trudy in hot pursuit, and I begin to run. Clack goes the handle, and I burst into the sunlight, still running. I imagine the Russian at my side, him and me, sprinting through the bus terminal. I see the number seven just pulling away, and I wave my arms to flag it down. All I can think is that at least seven is a happy number. I run up the steps, and from the top one I turn and shout at my pursuer through the still open door, “Love is a dark devil!” One of the Russian’s early coded messages to me.

  But instead of Trudy at the back door of the mall, I see the Russian, in his long coat, holding the book abreast in one hand like a gift, his other arm raised in an open palmed salute.

  the visit

  After being spit-polished and having his cheeks rubbed hard enough to make his eyes water, the boy retreated to the window to avoid his brothers thinking he was crying and calling him a baby for it. His dad had left the house early enough that the boy had not even stirred, else he would’ve begged to be taken along to Toronto for the day. He knew from experience that his daddy would not return until long after the women had cleared the house, leaving only the aroma of succulent meats and cheeses to linger in the still air. In spite of the fact that these were his dad’s own relatives, obvious by the way they all talked alike, with their Irish accents, even his dad couldn’t stand to stay for the visit. Likewise, the boy longed to be anywhere else.

  He knew the Aunties and the old Gran would arrive sometime shortly before the sun shone its brightest beams from between the clouds – arrive just in time to obliterate it all, their hulking, corseted, crisp-rustling figures like battleships, inevitably coming between him and the best part of the day. Then, instead of running off to catch up with his friends and down to the quarry with its crumbling edges, he’d be forced to watch as the women invaded the family house, their legs like fat hams wrapped in scratchy nylon whispering gzwee, gzwee, gzwee as they marched through the gate and up the walk, leaving his mom to haul the boxes of food in by herself. Then the Aunties would assemble themselves in the living room to complain of the humidity and stale air of the house.