When Paula walks past my counter, her smile is so mechanical, has so little to do with her eyes, that I smile almost to the point of laughing, have to clamp my hands over my mouth. Then, standing like that, I see what Paula’s doing: walking in advance of the visitor for us, telling us with her presence to be on our best behavior, that the moment is here. That he’s coming. That we should be casual, like her. Natural. Ourselves.
For a long moment I have to close my eyes to compose myself.
When I look back to the store, the only place I can even remember anymore—did I ever have a mom, even, or did Paula just raise me in the stockroom?—I see the visitor for the first time. Like we’ve been told, he’s not wearing a suit. Nothing that obvious. Like we’ve been warned about, though, he does have an otherworldly carriage, his head turning from Casuals to Intimates as if they’re wholly new, each rack and rounder a complete and total surprise, a wonderful new artifact to catalogue.
From last Saturday’s sales meeting, and from the handwritten notes Paula’s been leafing into our reshelves, we know to smile and grin no matter what this visitor does. Because he’s from the rarified atmosphere of Corporate, yes—we can’t forget that—but, too, because there may be some new protocols in place this visit: perhaps he’s been told that it’s not enough to observe us in our routine. Maybe this time, he wants to see how we react under stress, in sales situations we haven’t been specifically trained for.
The way Paula put it in the breakroom while I was eating my pimento cheese sandwich was that, if I’m asked to give the visitor, say, a chimpanzee, my response should be along the lines of ‘With or without sign language training, sir?’
What this means is that, as the visitor approaches, my mouth is so full of answers and smiles and possibility that I’m afraid to do anything, really, am more than thankful when, for reasons only he knows, he stops with his hand on the shoulder of a clearanced pullover, a look on his face of total and absolute detachment. As if he’s communing with Corporate, possibly, or channeling the board of directors somehow, through the lines and ridges in the palm of his hand.
But it’s deeper, too. The way his lip trembles.
What—what’s he thinking, remembering, reliving?
Have we marked that pullover down too much?
After checking to make sure I haven’t put the same one on at some point in the day—it’s happened, and more than once—I arrange the hangers under my register and stack all my receipts by length, and don’t say anything.
Whoever acts the most ‘retail normal’—Paula’s term, grafted over, we presume, from ‘business casual’—whoever pulls it off the best for the visit is supposed to get a twenty-five dollar gift certificate to the store.
Not that there’s anything here I want anymore—have I really been here that long already?—but still, hidden under that brass ring is a spike: if whoever does the best job is rewarded, then what of that person who messes the whole visit up?
Paula is capable of anything, we suspect.
So what I do is smile, just not too wide, like I’m guilty. And keep my hands always touching something, so they won’t visibly tremble. And, because of all that, maybe, because I’m projecting such a vision of control, of ‘retail normal’—or because I’m an obvious weak, shrieking link—the visitor sidles up to my counter, looking up at me with just his eyes, as if already suspicious here. His fingertips hover over the glass just above my five rows of sunglasses, arranged first by brand and then by price.
He’s just a customer.
“Something you remember from the island, maybe?” I hear myself say.
Above me, my security camera focuses down on the back of my neck. I can feel it like a spinal tap.
The island?
“How can you know about that?” the visitor whispers back, a hiss almost, looking at me sidelong now, as if about to walk away, pretend not to have heard.
I open my mouth to speak, to lie with all pleasantness, to explain how of course I know about that weekend when even his wife doesn’t, but then—then I don’t know where that comes from either: that he’s married; that the island is a secret, a treasure he’s buried so deep it’s making him sick.
Maybe it’s the way he hovered his fingertips over my glass. Yes. That has to be what it was. I’ve seen so many thousands of people place their fingers there that I can read their lives now from the way they splay their hands.
Because otherwise.
Otherwise I don’t know how I could know.
And I don’t anyway, or only ever did in order to say that one thing. Like he needed me to say it.
Only, now, there’s nothing left. I can feel my mouth moving, and my face around it.
The visitor angles his head over, his eyes boring right into me now.
“Candace?” he says as much with his face as with his mouth.
Though it’s not a thing I do or have ever done, as far as I can remember now anyway—which, granted, isn’t that far at all—I touch my hair, look at it.
It’s still brown, still me. But not, too.
I laugh, don’t cry, thrust a pair of suddenly-red sunglasses across the counter at him.
When he puts them on, as if that, really, is the only thing to do with them, as if I’ve left him no choice in the matter, I see that the red-tinted lenses are bubbled, that this is the demo-pair we use to sell the leather, heat-resistant cases.
Before me now, blind to all this, maybe literally blind with those glasses on, the visitor has his head tilted back, is studying all parts of the ceiling at once.
“How much?” he says.
“Eighteen months or two quail eggs,” I say, like it’s a thing I say every day. Like that pair’s even for sale.
“Not the—not the whole quail?” he says back, his fingers to the glass in some configuration so dense and elegant I almost lose my breath: what I can see is sand, matching up with other sand, and children’s feet, a freckled girl even he’s forgotten by now, except insofar as Candace is, to him, her, grown-up.
What the freckled girl and the visitor found in the sand that day was . . . I don’t know. Something to do with a bird, maybe? That he thought of the whole ride home, and then never again?
Am I really going to cry now?
“You’d have to talk to financing about that,” I tell him, nodding across the store to Customer Service, trying to tell him with my eyes that that’s where he really wants to go here.
He looks with me, nods. Doesn’t see the tears running hot down the back of my throat. What I’m wishing with every fiber of my being is that I was Candace, whoever Candace is, my hair sun-bleached and impossible, perfect, my cheeks dusted with freckles I secretly don’t regret. That I was anybody but me.
What the visitor does after looking across the store to fix Financing in his plans is touch the rack of cheap sunglasses, their arms oily from being tried on so much. He touches it and it starts spinning, only, instead of just going around, it goes up and down and around. Like a carousel.
He smiles about this, spins it again, finally starts nodding, looking over the top of his glasses at the store.
“ . . . this—this is all a dream, isn’t it?” he says, “like last week, right?”
“I—I don’t . . . it’s supposed to do that,” I tell him, my eyebrows showing my worry, I know. “Paula—Paula says if they’d put as much money into their product as they do their marketing . . . ”
It’s supposed to be an apology, I think.
The visitor leans forward then, away from the carousel.
“Do they like it, though?” he says, nodding sideways and keeping his lips thin, as if the sunglasses might be listening.
I swallow, try to smile with my eyes, and know suddenly that Paula was wrong, that this can’t be our visitor.
And then I smile. Just a small one.
“I think they do, yes,” I manage to get out, my cheeks hot with another sun.
The visitor bites his top lip, turns back to the sunglasses,
and nods, keeps nodding, as if my lie, if it even is a lie—maybe they do like it— goes right to the very heart of the thing all right, and then he does the thing I’ve been waiting for, praying for: smiles with just one side of his face, a wry smile, telling me that, yes, this has all just been a test. That he understands—nobody could be expected to perform under these conditions, could they?
I blink an earnest thank you to him and then he’s walking away, first to Men’s Shoes, where he tries on the left foot of every loafer we have, then, as if he’s suddenly remembered something about his car in the parking lot, he wanders out, pushing through the glass doors instead of waiting for the automatic one to open.
Exactly ten seconds after he’s gone, I breathe out, let my hand start shaking, and look across the store on accident, to Lingerie. Paula’s there, sitting on one of the formica blocks reserved for mannequins. The particular one she’s by is wearing a red teddy with a tasteful half-robe cinched around it.
Paula doesn’t see me, is just staring down through her tunnel of hair, at the carpet.
But I’m not a bad employee.
I mean, in Men’s Shoes, the new guy with the short hair, he’s crying out loud, has been reduced to real and actual tears in the wake of this visitor.
As self-imposed penance, I skip break, work through dinner, and, after clocking out, the stockboys already moving in in their dark blue jumpsuits to reconfigure the store for the next visit, I purposefully walk by Lingerie, say it as I’m passing Paula—I’m sorry—and see what I couldn’t from across the store: it’s not Paula at all, but another mannequin. One dressed in Paula’s clothes.
I don’t break stride, though—you can’t, at times like this—just nod to myself, roll the top of my purse over and leave through the warehouse, my heels clacking on the smooth concrete like I think they usually do. The only difference is that this time I see that the boxes, our supplies, our merchandise, the stuff from Corporate, it’s all the same, box after box, shelf after shelf, receding in each direction for what looks like miles, so that I have to look away, control my breathing. Pretend I haven’t seen anything here.
The way I smile is the way you smile when you’re about to call yourself some private name that nobody else knows, but then I blink more than I mean to, have to reach out to a shelf for support, and, just in case this isn’t a dream, the rest of the way out of the warehouse—years, miles, a lifetime—I drag my finger through the dust on the cardboard, leaving an up and down line that, the world willing, I should be able to follow back to the floor tomorrow, and all the other tomorrows I can already feel stacking up ahead of me.
THE CASE AGAINST HUMANITY
While the aliens had Gretchen and were using her to infiltrate other camps and kill everybody in their sleep, her roots grew back in, dark. Because mirrors weren’t part of our day anymore, or our lives, she had no idea. It was hilarious.
When she walked around in that shuffling, post-inhabitation daze, Molly or Nicholas would fall in behind her, holding yellow grass at the tips of their brown hair, and it was all we could do not to fall over in laughter.
Finally, one night when the half-bombs (we didn’t know what the aliens called them) were arcing across the sky, pulsing red and pale green, trying to sniff us out, Lancelot—he won’t tell us his real name, claims it died with the earth—he reached across and held his hand over her stiff blonde ends, as if shielding them from aerial detection.
Without looking across to him, she put her hand over his, her fingertips cupping her right shoulder, and the look on her face, we could tell: she was thankful. To be, for the moment anyway, not so alone in this apocalypse.
Lancelot was nearly crying from the not-laughter, and probably would have exploded into hysterics, giving us all away, if a bomb hadn’t drifted down into our midst.
Half the camp was neutralized, turned to that gooey kind of ash, and the rest of us found each other days later, miles away, our faces haggard, eyes dull.
By now Gretchen had an honest-to-goodness brown stripe down the middle of her head, where her not-blonde hair naturally fell into a part.
In our tents we whispered that it was like she’d got run over by a gravity-defying unicyclist who had just pedaled through a mud puddle. We said that she’d just ducked a bullet from the chocolate bandit. We said it was like she was cracking open, like she was going to climb her head with her fingers to that natural color and pull her brittle hair and surely-dry scalp apart, wiggle up a new person, one with darker hair.
That last one was kind of right.
Three days into our plodding trek to the mountains, where the bombs were supposed to get confused, miscounting the trees as people, Gretchen turned on her way to the central fire and caught Tang—definitely not his real name—aping her walk, eight inches of an old innertube laid across the center of his head like a rubbery Mohawk.
She stared him down exactly like she was waiting for her eyes to focus, for her mind to process, and then she nodded, continued on her way, biding her time until that night.
Instead of unfolding a scavenged coat hanger and burrowing it into our ears while we slept, or hovering over us mouth-to-mouth, breathing our breaths up before we could have them, what she did was walk out into the open right when the yellow grass was pulsing red and pale green, red and pale green. Life and death, life and death.
She waved twice to the bomb, then three times, and it shifted in the sky towards us.
We were almost to the mountains, too.
They were bald on top, studded with trees in a ring all around, like an old man’s last lingering wreath of hair.
We’d been calling it Comb-Over Peak.
It was a good name.
I don’t know what the aliens will call it.
HELL ON THE HOMEFRONT TOO
War changes a man. So does getting shot seventeen times by Germans. What Sandy had been hoping the War would change her husband Letch into was a dead man. Just so his outsides could match his insides. Or so his insides could be out. But seventeen German bullets wasn’t enough. Letch came back to Decatur, Georgia a hero. As far as the town—America—was concerned, he was a miracle of science, too tough to die. Sandy knew different. He’d come back for her. And, now that he was who he was, the deputies weren’t going to come out to the house anymore to stop him, she knew. Getting shot seventeen times was going to be his license to keep on doing to her what he’d already been doing for two years before Germany.
The day his bus rolled into town, Decatur PD caught her in Tallahassee, driving a truck she’d stolen from her uncle that morning. She was in her nightgown.
“You don’t understand what he’s like,” she told Sheriff Karlson.
He laughed and delivered her back to Letch. Standing on the porch in his pants and undershirt, Letch saluted the sheriff then balled that same hand up, slung it into Sandy’s face.
She crashed back into the clapboard wall.
Another Friday night in Georgia.
Two weeks later she didn’t even recognize herself. Mostly Letch just hit her in the face, because it was hard to cook with broken arms, hard to clean with cracked ribs. They knew this from before the War.
“Make any friends while I was gone?” Letch asked from the kitchen table.
Sandy was standing at the sink, her bloodied nose dripping into the dishwater. This because she’d opened his beer instead of letting him do it himself.
“Just waiting for you,” she said back.
Letch smiled, laughed through his nose.
The bullet holes had left puckers all along his left side, and gouged out some of his jaw line, made a furrow he was always touching now. What Sandy thought was that he wanted them to match, now—wanted to make her face like his. What she asked him while he was passed out in the living room wasn’t Why didn’t you die? but How can you still be alive?
She was talking to herself, of course.
The one time he caught her watching him sleep his finger jerked up to the scar on his cheek, a
nd then he sat up, and Sandy knew that running wasn’t any good, but she couldn’t help it. She was in her nightgown again. He caught her by the mailbox and pushed her hard enough into it that her collarbone snapped. The metal also peeled some of the skin from her face. It flapped under her eye. She tried to hold it in place but Letch set his lips, knocked her hand down, then stepped back to hit her right there on the cheek.
Sandy didn’t wake until morning. A dog was running its tongue all the way into her sinus cavity, it felt like. She rolled over onto her good side, threw up, and staggered inside. In the mirror, after rubbing it with alcohol, she could see the eggshell white of her cheekbone. She held her skin in place over it and knew better than to cry, because the salt from her tears would burn.
Letch didn’t come back from the bars for three days after that, and when he did it was just because his hand was making him sick. He made Sandy work on it with a pair of pliers. What she finally pulled out, she was pretty sure, was a splinter of bone from her cheek. It was too late, though. The hand was already infected, red streaks of blood poisoning climbing Letch’s arm.
She rolled his sleeve down to his wrist, told him he’d be fine.
The next time he came home was a week later.
His hand smelled like rot, and his arm was going black.
“Does it hurt?” Sandy asked him.
“Looking at you, y’mean?” he said back.
This time she spit on the bandage before cleaning his hand.
Four days later, her collarbone starting to mend, Letch crashed his truck into the porch. The whole house shook.
Sandy pulled him from behind the wheel, opened his shirt. The rot—gangrene?—was all the way across his chest now, but, like in Germany, he still wouldn’t die. She touched the skin and it was spongy, like meat that’d been in the sun too long. She left him there for the flies, and they came, blanketed him, but still his chest rose and fell. On the third day, no food, no beer, he coughed, turned his head to the side, and retched maggots onto the shoulder of his shirt.
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