Worthy Of This Great City

by Mike Miller

  But I knew this was merely sporadic; aunt and niece would be fine again soon. Meanwhile it was impossible for me to say anything or leave. Thom had one foot up on his other leg and was absently brushing at his shoe, meanwhile looking at Ruth in this very sharp manner, like he was trying to solve a difficult equation. I’m sure he was aware of my discomfort.

  “And now all this nonsense to make me crazy.” They were turning against each other, Pat and Kate. Sick suspicion taking firm root because he was pushing her to move to a senior living community and she didn’t want to be told what to eat and have to listen to old ladies talking about their health or see vacant, drooling old men all day although there she was on the phone to Ruth at every new crisis, Pat back in rehab: “I deserve some time to myself, don’t I?” Then he insisted she go sort out her own family documents and photos and what business was it of his if she kept her private things, her precious context? Why couldn’t he leave her in peace instead of always trying to control everybody? It wasn’t his decision except they both knew it was. They’d had a physical fight! Kate threw rolls of toilet paper at him! Now she was dangerously depressed, or so Pat reported with kindly self-importance on Ruth’s voicemail. It was hilarious and tragic but what was Ruth supposed to do?

  Thom said, “She isn’t going to change at this point, is she?” Looking at me as he put the question, and finally Ruth acknowledged me too.

  She rose, and we all automatically got into our coats and got ourselves out onto Chestnut Street, relishing the cold air. “It makes me furious, the way she never has to acknowledge how she’s treated me. How they’ve all treated me. Like an illegitimate, deformed fetus.”

  A final great epiphany as unburdened to me: “I understood by the time I was nineteen, I think, and then everything changed for me. It wasn’t that I practiced meditation, it was much more casual, but I had to fight through to the answers.” In her bedroom with the twin bed and sheer white curtains and windows giving onto the back drive.

  There on consecutive nights sweating over urgent, slippery concepts until ultimately grasping a satisfying solution whole from the living air. “I knew I’d had this experience, that’s all. It was sort of pink, tinged with pink. Everything crystallized; and it was so childishly obvious it was almost silly.” Ruth folded into a chair by a student desk in a rowhouse in South Philly, neighbors’ cars and voices in the drive outside and her radio playing.

  We were walking along South Street when she confided this, a vicious wind throwing stinging sleet pellets at us, Ruth wrapped inside this huge olive-drab down coat. This was our third and final real interview; she’d been catching me up on work and Stanley, meanwhile dawdling along despite the cold, feigning interest in the tattoo parlors and the boutiques stocked with cheap exotic crap and hipster apparel. We had no excuse for being there except we were bored with her office.

  “I realized that because our thoughts are identical with our physical brains, we’re completely integrated with the material world. Biologically we desire to be exactly what we are and what we will be. Only we need to be ignorant of that truth to make it work.”

  Of course she knew it was outrageous; a sideways glance admitted as much, and then she was walking a little ahead of me. An apotheosis of sorts: getting that out, adding it to our narrative. I admired the logic: obviously you can’t fully experience terror and agony and despair if you know you yourself created the situation. No railing against God then, no pity for the slaughtered millions. And what of the eternal soul? “It’s determinism, but we remain entirely in control because like everything else it’s always one hundred percent on both sides.” This while looking off to some romantic distance above the blank Philadelphia skyline, eyes shining with certainty and a little trepidation.

  “Sometimes I look away from people on the street, but not because they’re ugly or disabled or anything, but because I’m embarrassed for them. It’s about absolute respect for every person’s ultimate decision to be themselves.”

  With a noticeable halt and correction, and I bet you a month's salary she meant to say “black” or possibly “homeless” instead of “ugly” or “disabled.” Knowing who she came from and how deep that shit runs.

  “Anyway the important thing about total physical responsibility is that it really doesn’t change anything. Not when you actually think it through.”

  Early in the new year Stanley asked her to compose a formal call policy, asked her to discuss the recall contest yet again, asked that she make notes with Leslie regarding the newsbreaks each morning immediately after the show and email them to him for consideration during their next meeting. All this although her numbers remained strong while the rest of the day trended marginally downwards, including the intimate syndicated show running evenings. He mildly objected to her liner readings, as if trite advertising copy could be materially empowered by sheer volume, as if her listeners would abandon their trust just because her pitch lacked resonance. “We talked before about enthusiasm. I asked you to make it bigger.” Not said critically, but more as an observation. Also untrue, at least so far as her excellent memory served.

  “Bigger than that? Okay, I’ll try.” Intimating her contained, incredulous laughter. And in response, Ruth widely flaunted this ability to excel while putting in as little actual effort as possible. “Believe me, I know this job is a sinecure! I know how lucky I am!” she gloated to the receptionist, a nice motherly type who smiled back without comment.

  So Ruth filled her superfluous office hours checking out horoscopes, comparing forecasts about eclipses and conjunctions between outer planets and other celestial events, double-checking all communications if Mercury was retrograde, pinning fresh hope to each new moon while respecting the dictates of stern Saturn and welcoming the beneficence of smiling Jupiter. “You see they all agree on the main points, so even taking my enormous gullibility into account there’s obviously an underlying validity.”

  And frequently on those sites that identical cruel reiteration: we all choose our own lives before we’re born. Ruth found that sentimental, childish notion hilarious but indicative, too. “You see how that basic truth keeps resurfacing.”

  Then one morning her ubiquitous yellow legal pad was missing from its place beside her keyboard, and that initiated a frantic search that eventually led in unacknowledged certainty to Stanley’s office. And remarkably he was already in at that early hour, his door wide, her pad clearly visible on his otherwise empty desk. She entered on a brief knock and indicated her property. “Did you need to see something in particular?”

  “I walked over to see you and found this left out on your desk. I think we’ve been clear about company policy on leaving documents exposed like this.”

  Okay, maybe that really was the new protocol for the office at large, but it was never anyone’s practice. “It’s just my own notes.” That was stupid of her; he pulled out the office memos she’d stuck between the pages and spread them out on his desk, one by one.

  Naturally she left the same pad out again, if only over her lunch break. That time Bob came in from his own nearby cubicle. “He came by twice. First was before you left; he caught me staring and stopped by my desk, said he wanted to sneak a chocolate.” There was a crystal bowl of those miniature Hershey bars on another desk in Ruth’s shared office. “Then again while you were out, same reason.” The Case of the Coveted Candy.

  That time she found Stanley in Jenny’s office, the two of them seated behind the coffee table contemplating the damning evidence. Catching sight of her in the doorway, Jenny said, “Ruth, come take this.” She held out the pad, not rising. Then as Ruth lingered, waiting for their next move. “No, we’ll talk about it later.”

  “It’s the blatancy of it. The open evil. I truly don’t understand how people explain that kind of behavior to themselves.”

  Ultimately she was called to a formal conference in Stanley’s office, Jenny and Valerie Zhang in chairs pulled up to his desk, signifying a second and final written warning,
the three of them reading out unlikely expectations and deadlines. “I asked you to create a caller report and bring it to me this morning, which you failed to do.” Stanley read that from his own notes.

  “Actually we already have that report; I email it to you each week. But I sent you an additional copy this morning since you requested it.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I asked you to bring it to me yourself.” Shifting his thin frame, looking at Valerie. “We also have the issue of the amount of time off you’ve taken this past year.”

  “No, I still have loads of PTO left.”

  He handed her his list of corrective measures and a pen for her signature. “That doesn’t matter.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The stupid young woman was actually arguing with Ruth, her paying customer, as if her tawdry predictions were God’s own truth instead of the usual practiced crap. And this attitude from a garish, immature immigrant in a closet of a storefront business virtually open to the frigid Atlantic City boardwalk. As if the crescent moons decorating the chalk-pink walls, the luminescent white hand outlined on the purple signboard represented some actual body of arcane wisdom and she were a learned disciple who commanded powerful prophetic forces. Basically as if her customer was a complete idiot.

  Ruth huddled in a tiny gilt chair beside an equally miniscule table, bending in against the miserable chill and critically scrutinizing the cards as they were revealed in turn, familiar Rider-Waite designs rapidly turned into significance by slender dark-skinned fingers. Flashing out from beneath ornate gold-toned rings weighted with semiprecious stones in pink and lavender and milky opal. The entire array of gems, cards, and the woman’s half-hearted costume, peacock and ruby gauze under an unbuttoned navy wool coat, faded into an old-fashioned exotic postcard in the gloom of the overcast day and the scant lighting. The reader’s dark hair was pushed back from a narrow face; she had shrewd brown eyes thickly circled in brown pencil and spoke with an assured East Asian cadence.

  “You must listen. You know you can be a very difficult woman sometimes.” Neutralizing this with a slight grin.

  It hadn’t started out as overtly adversarial, just as more of the same, with an amateur signboard beckoning from without and the occupant offering a restrained welcome, courteous but with that delicious hint of exclusivity, as if she wasn’t the kind to perform for just anybody. The real prices were naturally much higher than those advertised outside, at least if you wanted anything substantial, and then came the introductory rigmarole, the choice of deck and secret wish, the shuffle and cut. And all this time, that sharp professional assessment.

  Ruth tolerated the initial nonsense, impatient but not seriously irritated by the tired ceremony. “I see you are a good person. You are going to have a long life with no big sickness. I see that you’ve had to overcome a great deal in your life. There was a lot of sadness in your early life.” All the usual, and those clever eyes constantly searching Ruth’s carefully blank expression, her deliberately unrevealing clothing and accessories, the restrained jewelry and nice but hardly exclusive handbag.

  So fine, they were done with the preliminary moves. Ruth straightened and fingered the plain silver chain at her neckline. She was wearing a fairly inexpensive black cashmere sweater and plain blue jeans under that dingy down coat, and felt confident of presenting an overall uninteresting appearance, what with her fair hair dangling in damp strings, her cheeks splotched with red from the cold and rain, and her distinctly moist nose.

  “Your heart is not happy. There’s an imbalance. Your chakras are out of balance.” One long finger pointed out the Queen of Swords simpering on her throne against a pale blue sky, except the card was reversed, the weapon pointing down from the cottony clouds to penetrate the heavens. Not a very good position for that particular card. “This has to do with how you open yourself up to love. You have a restlessness and a deep dissatisfaction. This is because your heart is alone, maybe?” This inquiry with what her customer viewed as an offensively impertinent sideways glance, any spiritual compassion already moderating into a sales device. Ruth sighed inwardly.

  “My heart is fine. I’m actually only interested in my career right now; that’s why I came in. My job is definitely not fine.”

  This was received with increased sternness, and an imitation of great wisdom blatant enough to be amusing if it weren’t for the sheer duplicity, the heartless avarice. “No, no, your career is fine. You are always safe and you will always make enough, in this you are very fortunate, you will never have to worry about this part of your life.” The smarmy condescension exacerbating Ruth’s frustration.

  “Trust me, I have to worry. And I don’t know why I can’t get an answer to one simple question, the thing uppermost in my mind but apparently I’m not supposed to be worried about it, it doesn’t exist. The whole universe insists I can’t see what’s happening in my own life.”

  “Because this darkness in your aura is making you unhappy and you don’t see so clearly. All your problems are to do with your intimate relations, with your family, with the people who are next to you.”

  Ruth was shaking her head, not merely impervious to such suggestions but now perfectly furious. “I have no family. My family is all dead.” Not even troubling to conceal her wedding band.

  This tantrum, too, was ignored. “But I see you were meant to marry and have children, more than one. I see an older woman, maybe one with bad health? No? I see this, for some reason. Maybe not here in the body anymore, but family doesn’t go away just like that, poof! They stay with us in spirit.” She underlined this with a neat flap of one hypnotic, dominating hand. “This imbalance, this is a fact and you will stay dissatisfied unless you heal this. I don’t understand.” Looking up comically. “Why don’t you want help? Don’t you want to be happy?” And she shrugged her narrow shoulders.

  “Well, I don’t have children. Why do you people keep saying that, like I got careless and missed out on my own destiny? That’s stupid. And the fact is I believe dissatisfaction to be the highest state of being. You could say it’s my religion. Life is dissatisfaction. God is dissatisfaction. Life is an aberration by definition, so trying to live in peace and balance means running away from life.”

  Still the girl remained utterly unfazed, no piece of Ruth’s rant remotely denting her professional confidence. “So then why are you here?” Clear mockery now, although she must have realized she was forfeiting any tip. “Look at these.” And she gestured at a narrow credenza in the corner behind her where a bronze goddess figurine, surrounded by an array of dull crystals, simpered from atop a light blue doily. “These are special crystals for healing. You need a special prayer and a crystal to lift this darkness from around you.”

  “No thanks.” Ruth, having heard this spiel before, put down two twenties and a ten and walked out into what was by then merely a drizzle, momentarily grateful for the drops against her cheeks.

  It had to be Atlantic City despite the seasonal closings, not Harrah’s or Parx or anywhere else nearer home because the ritual, the buildup, was a necessary part of the process. Part of how you invoked the truth. The boards were slippery beneath her boots, but despite the cold, sloppy weather they hadn’t been totally abandoned by the usual winter crowd, overweight and ill dressed and fairly desperate, or else merely elderly and of modest means and expectations. People who came down almost every day in their natty warm-up suits or sporty blazers, women with multiple tote bags, men in baseball caps. Gulls were everywhere, one instant mere black or gray silhouettes vanishing into the low clouds and the next unexpectedly close, emitting raucous screams from open yellow beaks, hovering competitively for a potential meal or squabbling meanly over scraps down on the rain-pocked sand while the waves came boiling in, sliding over the sand like hissing glass. Nevertheless some stalwarts, bored or romantic, bent under the wind down at the shoreline or sat hunched into sweatshirts and blankets atop the litter of seaweed and the sharp shards of clam and mussel shells. Further out fat g
ray humps heaved into the low heavens as if in continual discomfort, and close above them, separated by one band of unlikely light, a wooly blanket of cloud moved north urgently, practically fleeing.

  Ruth covered ground with her characteristic easy strides, observing herself in her mind’s eye, tall and slim and defiant, sometimes glimpsing herself in storefronts where she seemed amorphous and puzzled, a mildly inappropriate figure examining closed-up souvenir shops and T-shirt emporiums and eateries and arcades and costume jewelers. On past Fralinger’s, its windows piled with boxes of salt-water taffy and ribboned bags of macaroons, past the bright-painted Western-themed façade of Bally’s Wild West. Past the descent to a through street leading back to the outlets and the new Convention Center before it lost itself in the slums that comprised the genuine Atlantic City beyond this shallow, unconvincing stage set by the sea.

  She’d been swinging her arms while walking and her fingers were numb from the cold. She flexed them, then pulled down her glove to check her watch, its face misty beneath the crystal. Just past noon. And then, maybe pretending the hour carried some significance, she abruptly reversed direction, resuming her spuriously purposeful march but now heading northward, back past the familiar landmarks, past the discouraged scattering of rattling jitneys and pleading rickshaw pullers and the couples clinging to each other for shelter. Past Resorts and the garish turrets and arches and general gilded excess of the Taj Mahal, past the old Steel Pier, a legend reduced to whirling carnival attractions and dispirited displays of stuffed animal prizes, deserted then anyway. Continuing north past the modest city museum and a tiny art gallery.

  The clouds were breaking apart, allowing vagrant patches of sunlight to warm her back. The beaches this far up, posted for lack of lifeguards, were mounded with uneven dunes and resembled deserted construction sites. She passed a row of small private homes, a few fastidiously kept up and jauntily painted in Caribbean blues and greens and yellows but others in between them unabashedly deteriorating. That stretch gave way to newer condominiums, unimaginative edifices of terraced concrete, until eventually the sad casino city fell behind and the boardwalk gradually rose higher above the water, transforming itself into a bridge over a bottle-green ocean.