by Joe Meno
“What?”
“You look pretty.”
The girl rolls her eyes and smiles and says, “Thanks,” and then the light changes green.
“Do you want to go to my place?” the girl asks, and Jack nods, surprised.
“Really?”
“I live off of Wood. Plus my roommate’s not home. I could show you my little brother’s notebooks.”
“Your what?”
“His notebooks. From high school. He used to write his speeches in them. He was on the debate team. My parents made him join. They’re hilarious. His speeches. There’s this one about Star Trek that’s just ridiculous. I make everybody I know look at them.”
“Okay. If you want to.”
Then, as if she’s still deciding, she finally blinks and says, “Okay.”
And they pedal off in the direction of the girl’s apartment, only five or six blocks away.
And as they go, Jack stops at a light at Division and Ashland and the girl pauses beside him, both of them atop their bicycles. And the snow is still coming down and Jack reaches into his gray winter coat and takes out the silver tape recorder, and the girl asks, “What’s that?” but Jack doesn’t answer; he just holds the tape recorder up and hits play and record and the sound of the snow drifting down and floating through the air somehow seems to grow louder, and after ten seconds Jack holds the tape under his chin and says, “Snow, at the corner of Division,” and then he switches the tape player off.
The girl looks at him and smiles and Jack shoves the recorder back into his coat.
“What was that for?”
And Jack doesn’t bother to try to explain.
A few moments after that, they are quietly climbing her rickety stairs, carrying their bicycles beside them. And then her key is in the door.
And then they are sitting on the girl’s couch and she is showing him her brother’s high school composition notebooks, and there is a blue one, and another one that is orange, with a rounded wire edge, and she flips to a specific entry and says, “Here, read this out loud,” and Jack asks, “Really?” and she says, “Yeah. I make everybody do it,” and he nods and sees the girl is probably a lot younger than he thought she was and he starts to read, “The technology in the TV show Star Trek is not real; it’s fake. But many scientists argue that what we see in the movies and on TV could one day be real. Why not? It happened with rockets. And also escalators …” and here Jack stops reading and looks at the girl and she is laughing and saying, “Isn’t that the funniest thing you ever heard?” and he is nodding but he doesn’t think it’s actually all that funny. It seems like something he might have written in high school or maybe even yesterday; but he doesn’t say anything because they are kissing now and after a minute or two, he asks if he can use the bathroom, and it’s then he decides he has to come up with a reason to leave. Because this girl is too young and dismissive. And all he can come up with is to fake a stomachache, and when he comes back out, he says, “I’m not feeling so hot,” and the girl asks, “What’s wrong?” and he says, “I think I’m gonna take off. I don’t want to get you sick,” and she says, “What is? What’s the matter?” and he says he has a bad pancreas and holds his left side, even though he has no idea where his pancreas is, and the girl nods, and it’s nice to see her look concerned, and then he lifts his blue ten-speed from beside the front door and hurries off.
AND THEN.
Only a few moments later, Jack is pausing at a stoplight, recording the sound of the traffic light making its alterations overhead—the noise of the different colors switching from one to the next, a specific, mechanical sound—and when the light turns green, he rides off again. Before he can stop himself, he sees a smallmodel foreign car turning in front of him, and although he knows what’s going to happen, this realization is about one second too late. The red foreign car hits the rear tire of Jack’s bicycle with the corner of its front bumper and Jack flies over his handlebars and lands on his back, and there he lies, groaning, watching his blue ten-speed ride off without him. And then his left eyetooth begins to throb. And he looks up and sees a girl, somewhere in her twenties, her eyes brown, her hair blond, wearing a green coat and red sweater, mouth agape, standing above him asking, “Oh, my, God, Are you okay? Are you okay?” and he sits up, his back and elbow sore, his eyetooth throbbing, and tries to straighten his glasses. He gets himself to his feet and stumbles around a little, the girl reaching out to catch him, but Jack backs away, murmuring, “Don’t. I’m okay. I’m okay.” And on wobbly legs, Jack finds his tape recorder, still clutched in his hand, and it’s okay, it’s not broken, and he holds it up to his mouth and says, “This is the sound of me getting hit by a car,” and records a few seconds of that before limping off, saying “Ouch” each time his left foot comes down.
AND THAT NIGHT THERE IS AN ANGRY MESSAGE FROM HIS LANDLORD.
Taped to his door. Where is The Rent? Is It missing? Is it in The Mail? Did you Forget to Pay? Do Not screw Me, it says. I have BAD Friends. And this is exactly the kind of thing Elise used to take care of and so he finds out how much money he has in his checking account and sees, apparently, he’s going to need a job again.
And so he looks in the want-ads the next day and finds a job listing that says: Night-owl? Having trouble sleeping? Make big cash working at Muzak Situations, Madison Ave. Great Temporary Work. And he faxes them a resume from the local copy shop but doesn’t hear anything back that day. And still he can’t sleep. And the screenplay is not going well and so he realizes he has to do something. And so he calls his stepdad, David, who is a highly regarded psychiatrist. And his stepfather calls him back and asks him what’s been going on.
“Nothing. I’m just. I’ve been having a hard time sleeping. I haven’t slept in a couple of weeks.”
“Are you taking the same dose of Lexapro?”
“I am.”
“Hmmm. Do you want me to prescribe you some Ambien or something?”
“No. I think I’ll try and rough it out.”
“How are other things?”
“Pretty good. Except I hurt my tooth last night. I mean, I really hurt it.”
“What happened?”
“I fell off my bike.”
“You fell off?”
“Someone hit me.”
“You should get someone to look at it. You shouldn’t mess around with your teeth, Jack. When’s the last time you went to the dentist?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple years. Four or five.”
“Why don’t you go see Ray?” Ray being Jack’s second stepfather.
“I don’t know. I haven’t talked to him in a long time.”
“He’s very good. And you wouldn’t have to pay him anything.”
“I really don’t talk to him anymore. I mean, my mom … They’re divorced now.”
“I’m sure he’d take a look at it.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“Okay.”
“How’s your mother doing? I heard she got remarried again.”
“She did.”
“Yikes. Fourth time’s a charm?”
“Yeah. Maybe.”
“Well, call my receptionist and let’s schedule lunch together sometime. I haven’t seen you in a while. We need to catch up.”
“Sounds good,” and Jack hangs up the phone and wonders what he is so afraid of. Why doesn’t he want to talk with his stepfather about what’s going on? And then he holds his hand to the side of his mouth just above his sore tooth and groans out loud.
A DENTAL APPOINTMENT.
Off he goes to his second stepfather’s dental office on Monday and looks at the lobby directory which lists Ray’s practice on the third floor. Jack takes the stairs because the elevator is out of order and he carefully opens the glass door and enters the office. The waiting room is beige. The magazines on the dark wood table all have to do with golf. Jack takes off his gloves and hat and signs his name at the front desk. The receptionist, a radically b
eautiful young woman with long white-blond hair, holds a black phone to her ear and smiles.
“I’m here to see Dr. Ray,” Jack says. “My last name is Blevins.”
“I’ll see if he’s available. Please have a seat.”
Jack takes a seat, directly across from a good-looking girl in a dark turtleneck, who is flipping through a glossy magazine. The girl is maybe twenty-five, twenty-six years old. Jack watches her for a moment. She nods at him and smiles a curt little smile, which is just enough as she has the most darling dimples he has ever seen.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hello,” she says.
“I really hate going to the dentist,” he announces as much to himself as to anyone else.
But the girl nods.
“I really do. I don’t know why. Are you nervous at all?” he asks.
The girl looks up and smiles, surprised. “I’m okay.” She directs her attention back down to the magazine.
“I used to be nervous whenever I had to go to the doctor when I was a kid,” he says. “My parents are doctors, though. Which is weird when you think about it. But they’re shrinks. So that doesn’t really count. Actually, my father and mother, and also my stepfather, are all psychiatrists. Or psychologists. I forget which.”
The girl nods.
Jack retrieves the silver tape recorder from his pocket, pointing it directly at her. “Do you mind if I ask you a couple questions? It’s for this project I’m working on. I try to interview different people when I meet them. It’s just this thing I do. Is that cool?”
“—”
“Or do you mind?” he asks again. But the girl does not respond, only turns her attention back toward the magazine.
“Okay. How about this. Here’s an easy one to start off. Do you think my forehead is too wide? Be honest.”
The girl breathes a little hassled breath through her nose.
“No. Okay, what famous person would you be and why?”
The girl looks at him and frowns and then says, “I’m just here to get my teeth cleaned.”
Jack nods and smiles. His eyebrows are raised as he points timidly. “It’s just … you have really great dimples.”
“Thanks,” she says, but does not look up.
“I usually don’t notice people’s faces, but you …”
The girl nods, afraid to look him in the eyes.
“They’re just nice-looking. Your dimples. That’s weirdsounding. Talking about someone else’s dimples,” he says.
The girl stands, sets down the magazine, and then crosses the small waiting room to the receptionist’s desk. She whispers something to the receptionist, who peeks over the edge of her modernist furniture to stare derisively at Jack.
Jack then finds himself standing, forcing the tape recorder back into his pocket, feeling incredibly embarrassed. His face is now bright red. He gathers up his things, pulling his hat and gloves back on, and leaves in a hurry.
AND TO HIS MOTHER’S APARTMENT.
Before the elevator doors close in front of him, he has already decided that he is done, done with human relations of any kind—that all these feelings are hardly worth it. He is going to talk to his mom, who is a psychiatrist and probably the most reasonable person he knows. He’s going to tell her everything. The elevator doors begin to close before him as Mrs. Canarski from the fourth floor approaches with her famous toy poodle. But Jack does not try and stop the doors from closing. The elderly lady looks at him as if she has just been slapped. The poodle barks a sharp note in protest. The old woman, struggling to hold the animal, spills a bag of groceries, and a single orange rolls inside the elevator. The doors close. It is quiet. It’s the first time there’s no noise and Jack looks down and sees the single orange lying at his feet and then it is like a moment from a dream; it is happening but not yet happening. And he feels like something in him is giving up. Something’s changing.
The apartment is quiet when he enters; he mumbles an awkward hello but hears no answer. What now? He is feeling worse than he has in months and so there is only one thing to do. He locks the top and bottom locks of the front door, and then tiptoes into his mother’s bedroom, the bedroom she shares with her fourth husband, a man named Reg, and he opens the medicine cabinet and begins sorting through his mother’s prescriptions. He takes a Valium and then a Xanax and then another Valium, swallowing them with a glass of cold water, and then he takes a handful of each and puts these in his pocket. And then he walks around the empty apartment, his footsteps filling the air as he makes his way to the corner of the den where the ancient hi-fi stands. The stereo, with its cassette player and turntable, once belonged to his grandfather, his mother’s father: it is brown and beige, the knobs enormous and etched silver. He can still see his grandfather’s fingerprints along the dials if he squints. He flips through several vinyl records—also pieces of his grandfather’s collection—and finds the one he has in mind, Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite. He slips the record from its cardboard envelope and places it on the turntable, leaning in close to hear the tiny zip as the needle meets the plastic surface. He turns the volume up as far as it will go, hearing the piano begin to twinkle its upper ascent. There along the antique table are several magazines strewn about, magazines that his mother’s patients often page through while they are waiting for their appointments; he reaches for the bottom of the stack and finds an out-of-date Cosmopolitan. Carefully, listening to the precarious music build, he turns the pages of the magazine, opening it to a swimsuit pictorial, which features a gorgeous green-eyed model, her décolletage nearly spilling out of her flimsy top. He leaves the open magazine on the coffee table and then begins to pull down his pants.
Moments later he is in his white briefs, thinking of the girl from the dentist’s office, of her dimples, and then of Birdie, in her bed, of how serious and soft her body seemed to be, and then how sad everything is, how wrong it all goes, in the end. And then he’s not aroused anymore. Even masturbating seems to have become a serious problem. And so, in his underwear, he walks out into the hallway to the closet, takes out the vacuum cleaner—its pink body a horizontal cylinder with wheels, its apparatus a single, lengthy hose with nozzle attached—and plugs it in. It is the sound he likes, the whir of the machine’s motor blades, and also the sensation upon his skin, which is both touchless and clean. In its artificiality, in its machineness, it is unruinable, it is perfect, his relationship with this particular device a remnant of his weird experiments as a teenager when he would masturbate for hours on end, imaginatively using various household items. And so he turns the vacuum cleaner on, pressing the nozzle against his chest. But it is still too personal, the feeling of what he is doing, and so, wanting to feel less like a person, wanting to become totally anonymous, he pulls his white T-shirt over his head and leaves it there as a blindfold.
More than a few moments after that, he is lying on the expensive, multihued Persian rug, his face covered, his underwear around his knees, his right hand groping himself, his left hand holding the attachment of the vacuum cleaner near his groin, when his mother and her new husband come in. His mother immediately begins to scream, her voice ricocheting off the muted walls in small staccato bursts. Because of the blindfold, he does not see the expressions on their faces, and for this he will always be happy.
AND SO.
The girl in the cubicle beside his has the curious habit of peeking at him from beneath the jagged arrangement of her dark brown bangs. Because the phones are quiet now. It is twelve-twenty a.m. on a Monday night in February. Only forty minutes are left in this shift. The rest of the gray office of Muzak Situations has gone still. In addition to the girl in the cubicle beside his, there are two other operators on duty this evening, one of them reading a lurid paperback, the other picking at her equinelike teeth. There is the sense that each of them, all four of these phone operators, are silently occupying the territory of the other operators’ dreams. In part, it’s due to the subtle sounds of soft keyboards and digital drum
s playing overhead: it’s instrumental music, the kind a person might hear in a dentist’s office, which is what they are selling. Beyond the looping keyboards, there’s also the air of something temporary about the office, with several cubicles still waiting to be assembled, stacks of merchandise in unpacked brown boxes, the windows blinds themselves not yet hung, as if the office has just been opened or is just about to go out of business. There is the phone and the computer before him, both of which have to be from the year 1988. And then, in the cubicle beside his, the girl keeps staring at him as if he is a bad piece of art not meant to be figured out.
“Have you ever done anything interesting?” she finally asks, blue eyes flashing green.
“Excuse me?”
“Have you ever done anything interesting?”
“Like what?”
“I dunno. Like dropping a water balloon on someone. Or stealing a bus. Or performing an emergency tracheotomy.”
“Nope. I can honestly say I’ve never done any of those things.”
“Too bad. Me either,” she says, looking away now. She is chewing some sort of pink gum. There is a tattoo on her wrist which kind of looks like a beehive. Is that it? A beehive? Or is it just an oblong scar? She blows a large pink bubble, pops it with her finger, and then disappears behind the turf of the gray cubicle wall. He smiles to himself, adjusting his glasses against his face, and then sees her poke her head back over again.
“Those glasses make you look retarded.”
He touches them and smiles sadly. “Oh.”
“But they’re also kind of awesome. I mean in a fucked-up sort of way. I mean they definitely fit your face.”
“Gee, thanks.” He touches the black frames again and looks down at his desk.