by Jeff Gomez
Ten thousand dollars. Charles can pull that much together if he empties his savings account, but after that he’d have nothing else. He’s not due for a bonus until next year and a raise—since he was promoted just last fall—would be even farther off.
He writes back.
Tell him I need more time to decide.
Grace responds instantly.
Darling, we may lose him. And we need to get it fixed. For Maddie. Please.
Charles begins to nervously drum his fingers on the table. First Dylan notices, and then Brooks, so he stops. He writes back to Grace.
A week. Tell him to give me a week.
Seconds later, the reply.
OK.
Charles is about to put his iPhone back into his pocket when it buzzes yet again. This time it’s an email from Tom, Trust’s southern district manager and O’Brien’s right-hand man. There’s no subject header, a power move that says I’m too fucking busy to tell you what this email is about. Charles opens the email. The message reads: If you have some time this week, I’d love to talk.
Charles looks across the table and can see Tom staring at his iPhone, sitting to O’Brien’s right. Charles writes back.
Of course. I’d love to. I’ll set up some time with Heather.
Charles watches as Tom reacts to the buzzing of his phone, Charles’s email having been beamed up to space before hurtling back down to earth seconds later. In the semi-darkness Charles can register Tom giving him quick nod.
Charles’s heart begins to race. He thinks of the vice president rumor, and how much he needs that job. Sweat begins to break out on his forehead. He’s in a daze as he hears O’Brien end his presentation by saying, “And so, let’s have another great quarter.”
When the lights come on, everyone claps except Charles.
Craig is Googling Ashley. He finally finds her on LinkedIn. He can’t believe it, but she still lives in the area. She works for some sort of non-profit environmental company just outside of town. He looks over her résumé. Fourth down on the list is where she worked when they dated. He imagines her getting ready for each of the interviews that led to these new jobs. She must have been excited. She must have done research. She must have debated, the night before, about what to wear and then celebrated after the interviews went well and then again when she got the job. He hadn’t been part of any of it.
There’s even a photo of her—a thumbnail to the left of her name—near the top of the page. Craig’s about to click on it when he’s distracted by two guys in his office wearing kilts who begin to juggle huge things that look like bowling pins. He tries to ignore them, but the rhythmic back and forth, back and forth of the clubs begins to put him in a trance.
Craig doesn’t have an office, just a desk—a cheap plank of Ikea particleboard with four steel legs. No filing cabinet, no bookshelves, no walls. No pictures, no personal mementos. Nothing but a monitor and some cables for plugging in the laptop he carries with him from meeting to meeting. The only thing that distinguishes Craig’s desk from the three others shoved up against it, which form one of three quartets of desks placed around the loft-like room, are his gray headphones. All the office employees wear headphones when they sit at their desks. The coders wear them to “stay in the zone,” heads down as they focus only on huge Thunderbolt monitors while they blast trance music. On the desk next to his sit a pair of red headphones. On the desk across from Craig’s sits a half-empty bowl of with dry Frosted Flakes, along with a pair of huge black headphones with white skulls over the ears.
One of the coders, sitting on the opposite side of the room from the jugglers, takes off his headphones and tosses them onto his desk. As the coder walks toward the mini-kitchen located in the middle of the room, Craig can hear the thump thump thump of the bass seep out of the headphones and, for a few seconds, the jugglers are in perfect time with the beat. The coder reaches into the fridge, grabs a beer, and pries off the cap with a bottle opener on a chain that’s attached to his jeans. He tosses the cap into a trashcan stuffed with empty beer bottles and half-filled take-out food containers. The cap bounces off a Slurpee cup and lands on the floor where it joins five others, making a big-dipper shape on the discolored carpet. Seatr reminds Craig of college, except more gets done at college.
Craig turns back to his laptop and clicks on the photo of Ashley. It gets bigger, taking up almost half the screen. He loses his breath for a moment. Craig occasionally has thought about Ashley over the years, but he’s never seen a recent picture of her. All of the photos he has of her, or the two of them together, are inside a suitcase in the storage locker at his condo.
The first thing he notices is her hair; it’s considerably shorter than it was when they lived together. Her hair used to fall past her shoulders and was all one length, but now she has bangs and the sides barely cover her ears. The color is different, too—darker than he remembers. She used to be almost blonde, but now her hair is light brown. Craig can’t remember if she was coloring it back then or if what he’s seeing now comes from a bottle, masking gray. Her eyes also look different—more sunken—or maybe she was tired when the photo was taken. Or maybe it’s just that she’s older.
He stares at the screen, finding it hard to believe he has any connection to the person in the picture, or that they’d ever laughed or cried or slept together. It’s just a picture of a person. It could be anyone. It could be a stranger. He has to force himself to remember Ashley’s voice or the two of them together in any capacity. He even tries to remember her naked, but can’t recall any details beyond the generic curves and body parts every woman would has.
Below Ashley’s picture there’s an envelope icon and the words SEND ASHLEY EMAIL. He clicks on the envelope and a pop-up window appears with fields for a subject header and message. He quickly fills in the boxes—typing quickly so that he doesn’t lose his nerve or give any thought to what he’s about to do after all this time. He hits the blue SEND button. The window disappears and is replaced with a box that says THANK YOU YOUR EMAIL HAS BEEN SENT.
He exhales and then looks up, his breath now shallow and quick. He spots Josh entering the office, back from his lunch with the board. Craig’s dismayed to see Josh walk right up to his desk.
“Hey, can we chat a minute?”
Craig closes his laptop and says, “Sure.”
The desk next to Craig’s has an orange inflatable yoga ball instead of a chair. Josh rolls it over and sits on it.
“I just want to make sure you’re comfortable with all the feedback we gave you earlier.”
“What, in the board meeting? Yeah, sure, I get it.” He sinks into his chair, trying to appear casual. “It’s all good.”
“I know it means basically starting over from what your strategy had been initially.” Josh bounces up and down on the yoga ball as he speaks, his eyes becoming a moving target for Craig to follow. “But I think you’ll see that it’s better this way.”
Craig nods, but doesn’t add anything. Seconds go by. In the corner, the jugglers are still juggling and, even though the coder has returned to his desk and put his headphones back on, Craig can still hear the bass.
“So you grok what I’m saying?”
“Grok?” Half the time Craig’s not sure what Josh is talking about. He speaks literally in code, using bits of computer jargon or nerd slang that everyone at Seatr except Craig seems to know. “Totally, I … yes—grokked. One hundred percent.”
“Good,” Josh says, still bouncing. “Basically, you’re thinking linear. I need you to think horizontal.”
More bouncing. More juggling. More thump thump thump.
“Horizontal, yup. Totally get it.”
“I’m glad.”
Craig’s now bobbing in his chair while trying to follow Josh’s eyes as they rise and fall, rise and fall.
“It’s just I was saying that if we keep pushing to get users before the product’s fully functioning it might—”
“Craig, Craig, Craig.” Josh is wavin
g his hands back and forth. “You’re forgetting. We’re in beta.”
“I know that, Josh, but we’re also live. The site’s up and running. We’re getting traffic and people are trying to buy—”
Josh cuts him off by saying, “Beta, Craig. Bay-tuh.”
He gets up, sending the orange yoga ball rolling across the room where it runs into an X-box Rock Band set up. The collision sends plastic guitars and drums crashing to the floor. Josh doesn’t react. Instead, he crosses the office, heading for the conference room. As he walks, Josh is repeating, “Beta. Beta.” The jugglers don’t pause to let Josh by. Instead, Josh times his walk so that he perfectly knits himself inside the pattern of the dancing pins. One second he’s in front of them, the next second he’s behind.
Josh enters the conference room and slams the door. Seconds later, the word “Beta!” ricochets throughout the office.
Ashley parks her Prius in the driveway, pulling up alongside Andrew’s old red Audi with faded Greenpeace and Obama bumper stickers. Neither of them parks in the garage because it’s filled with junk—cardboard boxes full of clothes they swore they’d donate months ago, nearly empty paint cans she has no idea why they’re keeping, gardening equipment they never use for the garden they never planted. This would embarrass Ashley except almost all of her neighbors do it as well. Pretty much everyone up and down Euclid Street parks their cars in their driveways, every garage being too packed with stuff. There’s even a single guy at the end of the block who keeps two motorcycles in his driveway, so he parks a Dodge Charger on his lawn. There’s a patch of yellowed grass and near-dirt where the car always sits. There is only one house on the street whose owners use their garage for their cars—a young couple who moved in last summer, always seen walking at dusk and holding hands. Ashley hates them.
On the front step, she discovers a large cardboard box. Ashley bends over to pick it up, bracing herself for the weight a box of this size must contain. She’s surprised when the box is almost weightless. It feels empty. She looks at the return address. Local. It’s addressed to Andrew. She enters the house.
“Honey, I’m home.” But she says it in a whisper.
Ashley kicks off her heels, closes and locks the door behind her. On a table in the entryway there’s a huge stack of junk mail, bills, and magazines. She places her bag on the teetering pile.
“Andrew?”
What day is this? Maybe it’s a day he’s teaching. I need to get one of those apps for my phone. Something to keep track of my appointments. And Andrew.
She walks through the house, carrying the box and looking for her husband. She finds him in his office off the kitchen, sitting at a desk, surrounded by books. In the middle of the desk is a laptop, the glowing screen the only light in the room until Ashley flips a switch just inside the entrance. He has bare feet and is wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt inside out. His thinning hair is scattered in all directions.
“You’ll hurt your eyes.”
“Thanks.”
“You eat yet?”
“An hour ago.” Andrew’s still staring at the screen of his laptop. “Leftover pasta from last night. You?” Ashley squints and can see sentences and paragraphs.
“We ordered at the office.” She holds up the box. “What’s this?”
Andrew looks up, registering her presence for the first time. His eyes, difficult to distinguish from behind his thick-framed glasses, glance at the box and stay fixed on it.
“Good, it arrived.”
Ashley looks at the label.
“What’s Pill W?”
“It’s pronounced pillow.”
Ashley protests, “But it’s spelled P-I-L-L-W.”
“It’s a website.”
He turns back to his computer. She drops the box on the floor.
“I love how these websites feel they can just randomly misspell words,” Ashley says. “It’s not like letters are expensive.”
Andrew stops typing and grabs a copy of a Richard Yates novel. As he flips through it, Ashley can see blocks of highlighted text and Andrew’s chicken scrawl in the margins. She says, “So, what’s in the box?”
“A pillow. It’s from a new subscription service, based here in Kitty. They send you a new pillow every month.”
“What for?”
“For variety.” After a few seconds, he adds, “They’re disrupting sleep.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean?”
“Sleep. You don’t want to disrupt sleep, right? Isn’t that the whole point?”
Andrew sighs.
“As an industry,” he says. “I mean, as a business. Everything’s got to be disrupted sooner or later. Netflix did it with video; iTunes did it with music.”
“And now Pillw’s doing it … for sleep.”
“Someone had to.”
“How much does it cost?”
“Fifty dollars a month.”
Ashley pokes at the hardwood floor with her left foot, noticing that the toe of her black stocking has a hole in it.
“Do you send the pillows back?”
“Of course not. Don’t be silly.”
She pulls a chair from the kitchen table and sets it in the doorway to Andrew’s office. She sits down. “How’s the novel coming?”
“Good, good. I Skyped with Tina—”
“Tina?”
“Tina from my writing group. I Skyped with Tina this morning and she thinks I’m on the right track. Now it’s just a matter of finishing it.”
Andrew has always wanted to be a writer. After failing to get anything published in his twenties, he went back to school to get his teaching degree. But in the past couple of years, he’s started again. Essays and articles. Book reviews. His stuff appears on a few websites. He doesn’t get paid, but he doesn’t seem to mind. And now he’s working on a novel. It keeps him happy. It keeps him busy. It keeps him away from her.
“Andrew?” Ashley says.
Still typing. Not looking up. “Yes?”
“Do you ever think about children? For us. About us having children, I mean.”
When Andrew stops typing, there’s nothing but silence. It’s something she never liked about this neighborhood. It’s too quiet.
“Is it time again for that talk?”
She doesn’t respond.
“We agreed, “Andrew says. “We agreed a long time ago. And now it’s too late. You’re forty-three, almost forty-four. The chances are …”
“It’d be a chance.” She begins to tear up, her throat tight.
Andrew just looks away. Normally the talk doesn’t go this far. As of late it’s been less of a discussion and more of a bullet point, a statement of fact. How do you argue with time? With age? You don’t.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“No, I’m sorry.”
She fights the urge to repeat, No, I’m sorry. Instead, she says, “I’m going upstairs to do some work.”
She begins to walk down the hallway, first to pick up her bag and then to head upstairs. Andrew calls out.
“Your doctor called.”
Startled, Ashley stops. She backtracks a bit, walking on tiptoe. She doesn’t know why.
“What?”
“Your doctor,” he says. “I guess you called him yesterday about getting another refill on your prescription for Pixilate or Potreronon or whatever that stuff is called.”
“Protraxanon. Yeah, so?”
“So, he’s going to need you to come in for another appointment before he gives you a refill. You’re going through that stuff too fast. He says, and I quote, ‘You are exceeding the recommended dosage.’”
Ashley runs her tongue against her teeth. They feel scratchy. She wonders if that’s a side effect, or if she just needs to go to the dentist.
“So, are you going to go see him again?”
Her face goes flush. She thinks of Craig’s email from earlier in the day. She’s still not sure if she’s going to respond.
After all this time,
what could he want?
“See who?”
“Your doctor. I thought you saw him just a week ago.”
“Oh,” Ashley says. “Him.”
Andrew laughs.
“Who did you think I meant?”
“No one. And no, I’m not going to see him again.” She looks down the hallway, toward the stairs. “It was bad enough last time. All his stupid questions.”
“Ashley, he needs to ask all those questions. After all, maybe that’s the wrong stuff for you. Maybe you need something else. Or nothing at all.”
“I don’t like doctors.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need some doctor knowing all about … no one needs to know … anything.”
“Not even me?”
“No, Andrew.” She starts walking away. “Not even you.”
Mark is driving through town. He couldn’t sleep. Being in his old room was freaking him out, so now he’s guiding his rental car through a nearly deserted Kitty. It’s not even late, just a bit after eleven, but everything’s closed, even the bars. Only gas stations seem to be open.
The town looks more or less the way he remembers it. Before he came back to Kitty he tried to imagine what it’d be like, how the town might have changed in over the last twenty years. He guessed it would be built up, more crowded than it used to be, a bigger city than he remembered. Stoplights where there used to be just stop signs. Houses where there used to be vacant lots. Chain restaurants as far as the eye could see. But it’s almost the opposite. At dinner his dad told him about some new area in town that’s been recently renovated—a number of old warehouses housing a bunch of new tech companies—but Mark doesn’t see any evidence of that growth here. Mark keeps passing strip malls with empty stores, dilapidated churches, and cheap-looking restaurants with signs out front. LUNCH SPECIAL $4.95 MONDAY―THURSDAY, ALL-DAY SPECIALS $5.95.
While stuck at a red light, Mark notices that the Food Lion—the grocery store he used to go to all the time—is still there. The façade has been redone in red brick and white trim, which makes the whole building look more grand and colonial. Back when Mark used to go here it was a sort of mustard yellow. Further along the parking lot, where there used to be a record store, there’s now an Office Depot. Anchoring the parking lot at each end are fast food restaurants that weren’t there before, a Chick-fil-A at one end and a Waffle House at the other.