Cube Sleuth

  Nancy sighs on her end of the line. “You could stay at my mom’s ‘till you find a place. She’d love having a boy to cook for.”

  My brother was right: I’ll never again find a beautiful girl as nice and loyal as Nancy. Finding her once was dumb luck and having the chance to win her back after how I treated her is somehow the opposite of karma.

  Our second first date is less than a month away. I need to come up with something amazing. Already knowing what she likes and dislikes is a big advantage, but having been together so long makes originality difficult. Nancy has always been easy to please, but that won’t keep me from pulling out all the stops.

  Chapter 25

  My Talk With the Baby

  My brother Joe watches me try to assemble the baby’s bottle the way he just showed me. I thought a baby’s bottle was just a cylinder with a fake nipple on it, but inside there is actually a complex system of pulleys, levers, tunnels, and ductwork designed to keep air from getting into the baby’s stomach.

  When the bottle won’t close, Joe shows me the assembly process again, this time more slowly.

  I ace the test on my second try.

  I follow him around the house with a notepad while he explains my tasks and their possible pitfalls:

  “Five ounces of distilled water. Four scoops of formula. Close the bottle and shake it up. Don’t shake too hard.”

  Got it.

  “These diapers if he pees or poops, but this diaper before you put him to bed. It’s thicker, so he doesn’t wet through it overnight.”

  Got it.

  “After you put him in, just pull up on the bar until it locks. Don’t put a blanket on him.”

  Got it.

  “This end is always on. The other end is on the ledge behind the couch. Turn it on after you put him down for the night. Just play with the volume until you can hear him breathing. It mostly sounds like static, but you can hear him breathing if you try.”

  Got it.

  My nephew is eight months old. He crawls around, no walking yet. He can sit up if you put him in that position, but falls over from the slightest disturbance in his surroundings. He can’t stand yet, but when you hold his hands and stand him up, he tries to run in place like Barney Rubble.

  He hasn’t said his first word yet, but makes a hundred different sounds with a wide range of inflections and emotional tones.

  He likes to watch Winnie the Pooh cartoons. He finds light fixtures mesmerizing. The swirling beauty of the ceiling fan transfixes him.

  He has blue eyes that look almost gray, and his face looks exactly like pictures of my brother at his age. His soft brown hair moves in crazy patterns on his head like fudge swirl ice cream.

  I sit on the floor beside him and watch him chucking his plastic blocks at the gated fireplace. The living room floor is carpeted everywhere but in front of the fireplace, where it’s granite. The baby loves the sound of the blocks clanking across the granite.

  Despite looking right at him, I feel an almost constant urge to reach out and touch his back or head or leg so I know he’s OK. I continually scan the carpet for choking hazards.

  This baby is the only male I can call beautiful without feeling awkward. Physically, he’s no different from most babies, but he seems perfect to me. His hair and skin and smile and hands and feet are all perfect. He has endless potential. He might become a Nobel Prize-winning politician, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, a poet-laureate, the Pope, the scientist who cures cancer, the first astronaut to walk on a planet in another solar system. In his big shiny eyes I see all the hope that Whitney Houston sings about in the first verse of “Greatest Love of All.”

  His innocence can be my salvation.

  Even though he’s not my son, his birth and existence seems to be a sign from above that I need to grow up. He’s so tiny and fragile, I need to be strong and responsible in order to protect him. His existence demands that I become a man. And I haven’t yet. I’m still a boy, doing whatever makes me happy and pretending I’m a character in a murder mystery.

  I’m not a character. Not a detective. After a few months of investigation, the two most likely suspects in Ron’s murder are Ron, and me. If the baby were old enough to understand my pathetic reality, I would be too ashamed to look him in his big shiny eyes.

  “I’m gonna stop now,” I say to the baby. I make my voice sing-songy and arch my eyebrows so he smiles at me. I love talking to him because even though he can’t understand my words, I know he understands me better than anyone else. Babies don’t understand pretense, so you can’t help but be yourself around them. “No more detective stuff. Ron is dead and I have to accept it. He killed himself. It’s sad, but that’s the way it is.”

  The baby crawls toward the fireplace and retrieves one of his blocks, immediately flinging it at the gate of the fireplace again. I put my hand on his little calf.

  “I’m gonna do better at work. Try to show up on time. Try to get rid of my debts. Maybe do some freelancing.”

  The baby screams the way I would scream if I were frustrated, but his face looks calm and content.

  “I’m gonna be loyal to Nancy. Maybe I need to cut out the naked lady movies altogether.”

  The baby laughs, looks back at me and scrunches his face into a smile.

  “You know what naked lady movies are?”

  He laughs again. I must be saying it funny. I repeat it a few more times until he goes back to throwing blocks.

  “Time to get my shit together, buddy. I mean poop. Time to get my poop together. Not that other word. That’s a bad word. Poop is a good word. A great word, really.”

  He looks at me again, expecting entertainment.

  “Poooooop!”

  He giggles.

  “Pooooooooooooooooop!”

  He laughs harder, a line of drool hanging from his outstretched tongue.

  “Poo-ooo-ooo-ooo-OOO-ooo-OOOOOOOPa!”

  It’s been years since I was onstage making people laugh. Cracking up this twenty-nine-inch audience fills that hole more than I thought was possible. And I wrote the material myself. Sure, it was only one word, but Ron would’ve liked it, would’ve said that it was a really deep Dadaist nonsense anthem that summed up our cultural depravity in one word. Then he would’ve added, “And it’s poop, so how can you go wrong?”

  * * *

  And just like that, I let go of the “mystery” of Ron’s death. As the night goes on, I feel a great sense of relief spreading through my body.

  I give the baby his bottle after putting him in an overnight diaper. Drinking his formula, he holds the bottle with one hand and plays with his ear with the other, staring up at me the whole time. His constant, unselfconscious gaze hypnotizes me, and by the time he drifts off to sleep I feel like I’m about to, too, but the fear of rolling over in my sleep and crushing him keeps me awake.

  After a half-hour of the baby sleeping in my arms, I carefully carry him upstairs and place him in his crib. I lift the front rail of the crib slowly and wince when it clicks into place. The baby doesn’t stir. I tiptoe out of his room like a thief in the night.

  The house feels completely still, almost like walking through a photograph. I turn on the baby monitor and raise the volume until I can make out the baby’s rhythmic breathing through the warbling static. Sitting on the couch watching TV on mute, I listen to the baby’s breathing. After a few minutes, I start to breathe in and out with him. My body feels limp. The room hums like a quarter-fed vibrating motel bed. I float above my body. I think that if this is how it feels to be dead, death might not be so bad.

  Considering that I just resolved to truly start living, death should be the furthest thing from my mind now right now. Time to become the version of me that my parents dreamed of when they looked into my big shiny baby eyes. Time to be a man. To get my poop together.

  Chapter 26

  Life Through Corrective Lenses

  I go home after babysitting and sleep, well, like a baby.

  When I
wake up, I feel like I’m waking up from the bad dream my life has been for so long. Before Ron’s death. Before Nancy left. Before I broke my hand. Before I realized just how much of a rut I was in.

  My sinuses are clear. I don’t have a migraine. Crisp air inflates my nostrils like I’m camping in the woods, even though I’ve been sleeping on a futon ten feet from a mildewy ceiling and buckets of stagnant water.

  I pop out of bed like a slice of bread in a slot toaster. So much to do, so little time. Actually, I have absolutely nothing to do, and all the time in the world.

  I take a forty-minute shower, all soapy and warm and steamy. I eat a big brunch (I never wake up early enough for breakfast) and then go through all of the junk in my apartment that won’t be worth moving to my new place. I throw out four trash bags of crap and some old pieces of furniture.

  I spend hours looking through apartment complexes online. The places that don’t look scary or identical to my current hell cost $200 more a month than the rent I no longer have to pay. I need to buckle down, pack more lunches, play less poker, and maybe do some freelance editing.

  * * *

  On Monday morning I pull into the Paine-Skidder underground lot in my rental car ten minutes early. I sit in my car and finish listening to the song playing on my CD player (“Transformer” by a new group called Gnarls Barkley that Nancy turned me on to) before going into the building.

  As I pass Suzanne’s office, I catch her leaning forward in her chair, surprised to see me coming in early.

  When you consistently lower someone’s expectations, you can impress them very easily with mediocrity.

  I email HR and ask them to forward me an email they sent around about gym discounts, an email I had deleted without opening at the time. Between the higher rent in my near future and the fact that I don’t know if my insurance will cover what Theo did to my car, this is no time for unnecessary expenditures. But since I can’t walk up a flight of stairs without fear of passing out, this seems like a necessity. I need the structure and discipline.

  * * *

  “Could I move in at the end of the month?” I turn slowly, looking at what will soon be my new home.

  “You can move in at the end of the week if you need to. They’ll pro-rate your rent.” The man showing me the apartment is a tenant who gets paid to show people properties in this particular complex.

  My old apartment had wiring from the twenties and pipes from the fifties. This place has wiring from the seventies and appliances to match, including an electric oven set at eye level. I’ll have a dishwasher and free access to a pool. This is my Xanadu, the third apartment I’ve looked at, and there won’t be a fourth.

  My old apartment was a converted studio. My new one is a true one-bedroom, with a short hallway separating the living room from the bedroom. The bathroom and kitchen lie on opposite sides of this hallway. So if Nancy moves in with me here, one of us can go into the bedroom, close the door, and feel some semblance of solitude.

  Between the money I saved on rent and my security deposit from the old apartment, putting up first and last and a security deposit for the new place doesn’t completely wipe out my savings. They’re decimated, sure, but not nonexistent.

  * * *

  Three days later I have my annual review. For the fourth year in a row, I receive the Meets Expectations raise, which will make my new rent easier to handle.

  When Suzanne tells me that I’m just in time to get my Five Years of Service Award, my first thought isn’t of suicide, surprisingly. That was the old Bobby. The new Bobby focuses on the accomplishment of having survived five years at a job I loathe without getting fired.

  “I can’t believe I’ve been here that long. I’m getting old,” I tell her. It’s almost lunchtime, and Suzanne’s office is bathed in warm yellow sunlight.

  Suzanne laughs. “How old are you? I can’t really ask you that, but whatever.”

  “Twenty-seven.”

  “You’re a toddler, Bobby. I’ve been here since… ” She covers her eyes with one hand, “I’ve been here since you were three years old.”

  “No way! How old are you?” I would have guessed that Suzanne is in her early forties.

  “I started working here right after high school. That’s all I’m gonna say. I got my degrees at night.”

  This place is Suzanne’s high school sweetheart, and she’s been married to him for two decades. She has no idea if he’s good in bed because she has no frame of reference. Though this is my first job after college, I at least got to third base with a few internships, enough to know that Paine-Skidder is a piss-poor bedfellow. But that doesn’t matter so much the day they tack six percent onto your salary.

  * * *

  A woman named Marilyn calls me from her office on the second floor and asks me to stop down because she needs a favor. I’ve never met this woman before. I ask her where her office is before I hang up.

  I find her nameplate: Marilyn Gleichgewicht. I try to pronounce her last name in my head and fail miserably.

  “Come in,” she says before I have a chance to knock. “Close the door behind you.”

  I have no idea what Marilyn’s job is or why I would be able to help her with it. Some corporate abstract art, all geometric and using the same palette of colors as beach motel paintings, hangs on each wall in her office. These pieces lack originality and thus anything that could offend anyone’s theology, ethnicity or cultural sensibilities, or make them even the slightest bit interesting.

  Marilyn talks to me like we’re old friends. “Twenty years ago, when Paine-Skidder was still on Race Street, we’d have Christmas skits every year. Elaborate skits with costume changes, musical numbers, detailed sets. People used to leave meetings early to rehearse. This is back when the company allowed alcohol on the premises for occasions other than when the board of directors came.”

  Back when the company was somewhat cool.

  “When we did those skits, we were kids. Your age.” Marilyn Guggenheim winks, assuming I’ll be flattered or amused by at being called a kid. “But now those kids are the vice presidents. Even the prez was in them back then.

  “Anyway, Dee Dee Satou is retiring. I’m in charge of her retirement party. Dee Dee always lamented that we stopped doing the skits. I want to do one for her, about her.

  “I was in Toastmasters with Ron, and he told us you two were doing a sketch show together.”

  Ah, so that’s why Marilyn Glockenspiel came to me. She is the first person who mentions Ron casually, and doesn’t try to whisper his name with reverence. I like that. “Ron wrote all of our skits. I was just an actor. I don’t write. No good at it.”

  “I’m sure you know more about the process than the rest of us. I wrote a couple of them, but, like I said, twenty years back. Did you work on the skits at all with him?”

  “We would workshop them together and I would ad-lib a line here and there. But really, he wrote them by himself. They just came out of his head nearly perfect. I don’t know how he did it.”

  Marilyn Googlemaps folds her hands in front of her on the desk. “I think you’re the man for the job, Bob. I’ll beg if I have to.” Another wink. Why do people keep calling me Bob? “Dee Dee’s a Survivor fanatic, so we could do, maybe, a Survivor parody or something. I have all the background on Dee Dee you could ever need. Endless material. She’s a real character.”

  “I’ll do it on one condition.” Now I wink.

  “Name it.”

  “I want to play Dee Dee in the skit.”

  She laughs conspiratorially. “I think that’d be really funny. We’ll have room in the party budget to buy you a good wig and those glasses she wears.”

  “I’ll need to talk to her so I can really get her impression down. I’ve barely ever talked to her.”

  “I have a tape of her old Toastmaster’s speeches.”

  “Who’s gonna be at this party?”

  “Everyone. Everyone. Dozens of employees, foreign dignitaries, her family and friends.�
��

  My smile broadens. I get to act like a jackass, in drag, in front of my supervisor, her boss, his boss, and so on, and they’re all going to clap when I’m done. A dream come true. A dream I never even knew I had.

  * * *

  Nancy gives me a second chance.

  I move into my great new apartment, and the money from my old place and my raise allow me to afford it.

  I get to spend time at work writing and rehearsing a skit.

  When this many good things happen to me in a short time span, I always draw the same conclusion: I’m about to die.

  I spend the next few days waiting to be hit by a bus. Crushed by a falling piano. Beaten to death by Theo with my own bat.

  Despite surviving most of the week, I don’t let myself get comfortable. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, knowing it will have recently stepped in dog shit and will probably land on my forehead. I feel it in my bones the way people with arthritis know it’s going to rain.

  When I go to the gym for the first time and have my free consultation with a trainer, I think this might be how I die, of a heart attack. Dying from trying to get healthy is just the kind of irony I would expect for my demise.

  The trainer puts me on a treadmill to see just how bad a shape I’m in. I feel like I’m about to die; my lungs tight and stuck to my ribs. The trainer frowns at my lack of stamina.

  He measures my body fat: twenty-two percent. One less percent and I would have a Poor rating, but instead I make the grade for Very Poor.

  I don’t realize this consultation is a sales pitch until I’ve suddenly found myself signed up to meet with a trainer once a week for ten weeks, which should be enough instruction to keep me from pulling every muscle in my body.

  I need to eat a lot more protein, get eight hours of sleep a night, weight train thirty minutes three times a week and do cardio four or five times a week, and I’ll have the body I want by Christmas (or so the sales pitch goes). The new Bobby Pinker.

  My head hurts and I wish I could throw up as I drive home from my first night at the gym. A promising start.