happy numbers

The first time I see him is when Trudy points him out. “That guy’s watching you,” she says, arms crossed as she leans against the counter and points with her chin. “He looks like he’s in lu-uv,” she sneers. And sure enough, when I look up from sorting plastic hangers into bins, I see a homeless guy in a dirty, oversized coat lightly fingering the ladies belts and gazing in our direction.

“Isn’t that your last boyfriend?” I dismiss Trudy’s observation and return to my hangers.

She tries to laugh but instead lets out a snort through her nose that sends her searching for a tissue. I try not to laugh at her because I know from experience she’ll take it personally and not talk to me all day.

Later, the homeless guy comes through the checkout line with his fist full of pastel mints from the measly candy counter in the basement – excuse me, lower level. We’re not supposed to say basement in case anyone catches on to its morose undertone. Personally, I don’t think basement is so bad. I mean, it’s not like we’re calling it the morgue or something. Although you could almost get away with that on a technical level, considering how many old ladies work here.

He grabs my hand as I give him his change – seizes it awkwardly between his thumb, nestled in my palm, and his fingers that press insistently on my knuckles. When I glance up at him, he’s grinning from ear to ear in a way that suggests he knows me, which is definitely not the case. Despite this gesture, I’m not alarmed. Behind the tangled beard and hair, I see a boyish face. And his teeth are surprisingly white, for a homeless guy, suggesting to me some mystery behind the façade. I decide that he isn’t nearly as old as he looks at first glance. Likely no older than me, mid-thirties at best. I’m finding that maybe as many as nine times out of ten, things are not as they might first appear. It’s disconcerting, but also a little reassuring, to think that you really can rely on not being able to rely on pretty much anything.

He lets go of my hand and snatches the bag from the counter. Once he’s gone, I find a note tucked in my palm. In hasty handwriting: Didn’t we go to scool together. I wonder if he spelled “school” wrong on purpose.

The next day, I see him lurking in the sunglasses and women’s accessories. Shortly afterwards, I notice Jan, the pregnant undercover security guard, “shopping” in the same area. Well, you can’t blame her – he’s an obvious mark. But something tells me he’s not as desperate as people think.

Trudy and I go for lunch in the food court, where we see him looking forlorn by himself at a table for four.

“We should sit with him,” I say to Trudy, only half joking. But then security shows up and talks to him, and I see him leave.

“Once we had a homeless guy at the Circle who was on house arrest,” Trudy says, mouth full of egg salad. “He gave the mall as his home address,” she snorts.

I’ve heard this one before. Trudy talks like she knows everything there is to know about retail because she’s worked in every mall in the city. And she says it as if it’s something every sane person should envy her for. Trudy’s one of about twenty “assistant managers” in our department store, which means she gets ten cents more an hour than me and the satisfaction of wearing her title on her name tag. I’m relegated to “associate,” which incidentally contains the word ass and might be marginally symbolic of the position. Then again, so does Trudy’s.

Everyone knows you can’t get much lower than “associate” unless you’re a “stocker” – then you’re just nobody. As “assistant manager,” Trudy is entitled to see my personnel file, which contains my resumé – on which I have lied extensively. This is why I can’t tell Trudy about my own considerable and varied experiences in retail. According to my resumé, I’ve spent the past seven years working in Korea as a karaoke singer. I counter scepticism at job interviews by pointing out, with no minor amount of incredulity in my voice (as if to say, I know, crazy, isn’t it?), how much Korean men love redheads. Even overweight ones with nerdy glasses.

“But you don’t have red hair,” they invariably say, eyeing my dark head suspiciously.

To which I ruefully reply, “Oh, but I did,” as I cast my eyes downward in apparent nostalgia. I had to tell the Korea lie because I couldn’t reasonably be expected to record all the jobs I’ve held over those years, pretty much none of which would give me a decent reference, or even remember me in some cases.

So when Trudy acts like she knows everything there is to know about working retail, there’s really not much I can contribute without totally blowing my cover. And I haven’t always worked retail. I spent my first years after dropping out of university as a bean counter in a large plant that sold pre-fab houses. My “condition,” as my mother likes to call it, eventually took care of that job, just like it took care of university, and condemned me to this life of servitude in a series of McJobs.

I go several days without seeing him anywhere in the store or mall. Then one afternoon as I leave through the back doors of the mall, which lead to the bus terminal, I know I’m being followed, and I know it’s him. I stop in my tracks and wait.

Feigning indifference, I look off in the distance and wonder about the clouds forming above the gas station to my left. Rain always makes me sad. It’s part of my “condition,” which I like to call dysthymia to confuse people. It’s a medical word for sadness, far as I can tell, and while I’ve never had an official diagnosis, it’s the closest I’ve been able to come to a self-diagnosis. It’s like I was born depressed.

He comes up behind me and slides the book seamlessly between my arm, stiff at my side, and my body. It happens in a fluid motion executed so cleverly that his step does not falter. I watch him amble away, his overcoat flapping at the backs of his knees. Heart of Darkness. The title makes me shiver and, combined with the rain clouds, threatens to fill me with some irrational remorse. This book was my nemesis in school. It’s like a punch in the gut, seeing it again.

I hurry home as if my constant and quick movements can stop the pall that looms. I can’t even bring myself to look at the book on my way home as I chant Hurry hurry to myself under my breath, trying to make it before the black hole opens.

I drop the book like a cinder block inside the door of my lonely apartment. I can’t look at it now. I try to resist, but soon I find myself crawling between the covers of my bed for relief. I bury my head into the pillow and drop into sleep. I have to spend the next three days in bed, calling in with a migraine – a handy excuse, easier for sure than calling in with depression. Each day, I try to will myself out of bed. Each day, I fail. I sense the book lurking in the hallway near the front door like a sneaky visitor hoping to be invited in fully.

Finally, near the end of the third day, I’m able to shuffle to the door and retrieve the book. Cross-legged on the bed, I examine the copy of Heart of Darkness, well worn, the cover crisp and flaking where it’s been bent, the yellow pages curled at the corners. With interest, I notice a bookmark on page thirteen. A very good sign, I think. Thirteen is a happy number. Thirteen is innocuous and delicious.

Starting on page thirteen, he’s underlined words, here and there in the text, in order to make a sentence. He’s used an unimaginative blue pen; demerit points for that. I go back to the kitchen and grab a piece of paper. I flip the pages and write out the message – it’s not all darkness behind a veil of tear. He missed the s on tears – a legitimate tears with an s does not occur for another forty-nine pages. I say legitimate because what he’s given me is actually tear, as in rip. Maybe he thought forty-nine pages was too far for me to have to look. But he doesn’t know me. I wouldn’t have given up. And forty-nine is such an exquisite number; it would have been exceptional to have to turn those forty-nine unmarked pages looking for the completion of the message. It’s like an omen or something that all these happy numbers are coming up. Forty-nine is absolutely as simple and innocent as it gets, astonishing by its combination of sevens, i.e., seven squared, when seven is the quintessential perfect number. Anything as nice as forty-nine has to be lucid, first-rate stuff. I can’t believe he missed it.

I’ve always liked certain numbers because they have personalities. At first it was like this: a number like five could make me sad, just like that, while another number, say seven, could make me feel, well, not happy exactly, but optimistic anyway. And I didn’t have any kind of reason for this association.

One shrink, when I was a kid, told me he found this hard to believe – that numbers could have such an effect on me. I told him that I found it hard to believe that he could be a certified shrink and not know that people felt this way. He ended up telling my parents I was “sensitive” because I had been “overprotected.” My dad blamed my mom, and my mom blamed my dad before they collectively decided that the shrink was on drugs.

Then my dad brought home a book that belonged to one of the guys he worked with at his creepy agriculture lab. He was excited to show me the page that talked about happy and unhappy numbers, right there in a textbook. I couldn’t stop freaking out. “Man, I knew it!” I screamed, jumping up and down hysterically on the couch, hopping from cushion to cushion. My dad held the book open and ran around the room turning on all the lights so we could see it better. I just kept jumping and screaming like I’d cut my arm off or something. Scared the hell out of my mom, who came running in from the kitchen to see what all the yelling was about. All I could think of was that numbers do go with feelings. Wow, that was a great moment. My dad always worked hard to understand me.

When I finally calmed down, we sat at the dining room table, me close enough to my dad to be able to smell his Old Spice, while my mom hovered over his shoulder. He showed me how it works. You take a number, and you do the square of it or its individual digits, if it’s more than one digit. And then you add the squares of its digits together, and you keep repeating the process until either you get the number one or the number goes into an endless repeating cycle. The numbers that end in one are happy numbers. The numbers that don’t are unhappy numbers. It’s really that easy, a logical mathematical way to come to a conclusion of happiness. That was one of the best days of my life, learning that. I still get a shiver.

I uncurl my legs and stretch them out on the bed. Suddenly, I’m hungry, and my head and shoulders feel less leaden. I go to the kitchen and open the fridge so I can look at the near-empty ketchup bottle next to the empty box of “party cubes.” Some food was designed to try to make you feel better – as if the maker understood there are people like me out in the world, grasping at anything that looks even remotely promising, something as optimistic as “party cubes.” I grab the remains of a flat two-litre of cola, slam the fridge, and snatch up the box of stale crackers from the counter.

I decide to play along with his game. I find a yellow crayon in the junk drawer and, with my crackers and Coke, sit on the bed to carefully underline my message. I underline word by word and, at times, letter by letter, with the yellow crayon that’s difficult to see, although not entirely impossible. It’s his own game; I refuse to go easy on him. Life is a tale told by an idiot signifying nothing is my reply, heavily plagiarized from Shakespeare. I intend for him to know who he’s playing with here. I want him to know I’m no pushover.

Funny he should have chosen Heart of Darkness to play this game with me. I blame it for sending me into a dark hole of depression when I was just a kid – the first of many “episodes.” Back then, adults liked to tell me how smart I was, and for a while I enjoyed trying to prove it. In fourth grade I read all the books from the tenth grade curriculum and wrote a report on each one. My teacher was impressed, not so much with my intelligence and industry, but with my impudence. Someone’s too big for their britches was her uninspired bit of hyperbole. Over the summer I secretly completed the eleventh grade reading list, and in fifth grade I had the twelfth grade list done before Christmas break. Heart of Darkness was on the first-year university English syllabus, and that’s how I first came to it. By then I was in sixth grade. I think it was the density of the book, the images of the “dark other” and that fucking relentless river that pushed me over the edge. Even though I’m quite certain we didn’t go to “scool” together, I feel a connection to my homeless guy, who’s hit on one of my weak spots.

I like the idea of having a stalker. And despite what Trudy might think, he’s not bad looking, once you get past the exterior. I’d never tell Trudy this, but when he looked at me, I saw something. Like he was paying attention, like he was thinking about what I was thinking about. Those eyes were looking at me, not through me or around me.

I take the book to work with me and keep it in my bag by the checkout. They don’t like you doing that, taking your bag to the counter with you. You might steal from the till or something. But honestly, let the video surveillance catch me doing something wrong. I dare it. The video surveillance that they pretend is not trying to catch you stealing or picking your nose or whatever, even though everyone knows better. I know when he’s in the store because Jan suddenly appears, skulking about in my peripheral view, stalking my suspected shoplifter. I reach under the counter and take Heart out of my bag, trying hard not to glance at the camera that I know is capturing my every move. If I let myself think about that camera, watching me with the eye of a clinician, it will only discourage me.

I heard somewhere that we are each captured on video as many as twenty times a day. Just the thought of that in the morning can be enough to prevent me from leaving my apartment. I want to ask someone this: Who is watching these videos? Just who has that god-like, god-forsaken, godless, god-awful, god-damned mundane job, I would like to know. But that’s the point, isn’t it? There is no one to ask, except maybe the cold all-pupil eye itself. I’m afraid I’ll never get an answer, but I decide to ask anyway. I turn my face up to the camera and mouth, “Is anybody in there, and if so, tell me what it all means.” I do it clearly so my lips can be read because I have no idea if there is a microphone attached to the surveillance system. I’m pretty sure there isn’t.

I set the book on the counter a foot or so away from my station. When he comes through the checkout to buy his crumbly old-lady candies, I mumble into the neck of my sweater something about all the donkeys being dead and add, “But I don’t know about the less worthwhile creatures.” I mean it as a hint of where to start looking in the book. The less worthwhile creatures are, of course, people, a suggestion I think is well suited to my cynical nature. He snatches the book and rushes away, but not before I see a grin spread across his face. I feel strangely satisfied.

Two days later Trudy is waiting for me when I arrive for my shift. She “invites” me to go into the mall for a “chat.” We sit in the deserted food court, and she sets a file on the table between us. It’s my personnel file. She asks me if I know what she wants to talk to me about. I open my eyes wide, press my lips together in a silly semi-grin and hold my hands up in front of me, wordlessly conveying a not-a-clue response. She flicks the corner of my file impatiently with her fingernail and looks over my left shoulder, trying to impress on me that she has a lot of better places to be right now.

“The security camera?” she says suggestively, as if to jog my memory. I concentrate on keeping my features as blank as possible. Blank Man. Was that a superhero, or did I make that up? Trudy taps her nail impatiently against the green Formica tabletop. Then she decides the niceties are over and it’s time to get down to business. “It’s against store policy to talk to the security cameras,” she says as though scolding a truant child.

“Policy?” I choke. “There’s a policy about that?”

“There is.” Trudy narrows her eyes. Her tone challenges me to ridicule something as serious as “store policy.” Her expression is lethal, so I bite my top lip to keep from asking if she has, by any chance, received an answer for me from the god-opticon. This lip-biting technique, I know from experience, serves to make me look sincere. Maybe she’ll take it as repentance. We go back to the store in silence, but within the hour she’s decided to forgive me and offers me a piece of gum. We’re not allowed to chew gum on the floor, but I refrain from pointing out the irony of this to her.

The next several weeks include the passing of the book underneath the watchful eye of the camera, our benevolent big brother. What started as a bit of a lark, a distraction, becomes a ritual that I look forward to more and more, even though I can’t help but be aware of Trudy in the background, ever watching, ever critical. I avoid going for lunch with her, making excuses about appointments and errands so I can, instead, sit on a bench in the sun by the river and manufacture elaborate messages for him instead.

From his messages it’s clear he sees me as gloomy and sad and that he finds this to be endearing. I feed his mildly romantic image of me by building cryptic, nihilistic messages about the meaninglessness of life. Bored to death but I don’t seem to be able to depart, I write, stealing snippets from Godot, and then rush back to work to wait for him to come through my checkout line and retrieve the book.

When he returns the book to me the next day, he replies by messaging, Everything doomed is more beautiful because of such a fate.

Our exchanges occur exclusively within the book, and it becomes increasingly difficult to find a new colour of pen or highlighter, or a new method, to demarcate the intended words or letters. The book fills with different coloured lines, squiggles and circled words. It’s a challenge to decipher the messages, but always rewarding. I hope he sees that I like this game. I start a list for myself so I can keep each message and its corresponding colour or method straight, for future reference, should the need arise.

When we pass the book back and forth, he never speaks out loud to me. After a while I realize he’s astonishingly shy; it’s a quality I find alluring. I start to anticipate each day at work with a new excitement. When I send the book back with the question What’s your name? he circles the Russian and puts a neatly drawn hammer and sickle beside it like a logo. Unfortunately, the Russian in the book is crazy. Interesting, but insane. We are all born mad. Some remain so, he’s added to his message.

“Ahh,” I whisper to myself, a smile spreading on my lips. Since I sent him my stolen message from Godot, he’s figured out where it came from and gotten hold of a copy. For some reason his message makes me feel hopeful.

In another message, he lets me know he hasn’t slept for the past ten nights. Whether literally or metaphorically true I don’t know, but I find it an interesting juxtaposition to my own condition, during the peak of which I can do nothing but sleep.

Of course he already knows my name because of my nametag, but I want to respond similarly – to be able to identify with one of the characters. But there’s no one in the book I can relate to. Certainly not Marlow. Or the indigenous people, whom Conrad portrays as little more than incidental backdrop – inhuman and devilish. I wonder if he sees me as his Kurtz? Two ships rubbing in the night. I shudder and hope not. Kurtz, the quintessential colonial imperialist white bastard. Instead, I circle a dark and pensive forest, an impenetrable darkness where the sun never shines – and I draw a tiny black heart beside those last words. He gets that this is meant to represent who I am because when he replies he does nothing more than draw a single teardrop beside that black heart. Tears for my sadness. I curse and adore him for his sentimentality. For the first time in a long time, I feel understood.

“You don’t actually like him, do you?” Trudy says one day, sneaking up on me as I watch my Russian lead Jan on a wild goose chase through the men’s wallets and novelties – items that are frequently shoplifted. I observe an elderly gentleman with a violent tuft of dyed red hair above each ear delicately slip a “Genuine Leather” billfold from its box and into his hip pocket as Jan single-mindedly pursues my bearded Russian into men’s hosiery. I ignore the scorn in Trudy’s voice. “Haven’t you heard about this guy?” she asks me. “He did the same thing to some poor girl in Aggie’s last summer. She was a dull little thing with sad eyes. Always had her nose stuck in a book.”

I wait politely for Trudy to take her foot out of her mouth before turning to observe her slightly flushed cheeks.

I raise my eyebrows at her and hope this will be enough to deter her. I know what she says about him isn’t true, anyway. She probably has him mixed up with someone else, probably thinks all homeless people look the same. And even if it is true, so what? This is different. This isn’t like that at all.

Regardless, Trudy persists. “Finally she had to get transferred to another mall just to get away from him.”

“But this is a good mall,” I say lamely.

Trudy ignores me. “Apparently he didn’t know how to take a bus to go and find her, ha ha. I guess you’re his next target. Can you imagine him on the bus? My mom used to say, ‘There’s always one weirdo on the bus.’ Isn’t that the truth? Well, one thing’s good about having him here: We don’t have to feel guilty about throwing recyclable bottles in the trash – there’s always someone to pick them out, ha,” she snorts. She and I both know she’s stereotyping. After a moment she sighs philosophically. “Ah well, I guess every mall’s got one.”

I don’t tell Trudy that pretty much every mall’s got one of her kind too.

I exit through the back door and wait. The clouds are building again over the gas station, and I can see we’re in for another good rain. He’s no more than one minute behind me, a good sign – a happy number. When he puts the book in my hand, he lingers, and we both stand steady in that awkward embrace, each of our hands clutching different ends of the book. He leans toward me and I don’t move away. He leans in slightly more, and when it seems apparent that we will, he says, in a voice that’s soft and kind, “I’ve never kissed a girl with glasses before,” as though this is the most important point to be made at this moment. He has the tiniest bit of a lisp.

“I’ve never kissed a boy with a beard before,” I reply, although neither of us qualifies as the child that “boy” and “girl” suggest. I notice light freckles on his cheeks, under his eyes. He plunges toward me headlong, mashing unpredictably soft lips against mine. Rationally, I think he should smell of pastel mints, since that’s all he’s ever bought, but he doesn’t. Just as I twig to the taste of salt and the smell of stale tobacco, the hopeful tip of his tongue and the long-forgotten electric shiver up my spine, the back door bursts open with a clack like a shot, and Trudy lunges through with an unlit smoke between the fingers of one hand, flinging a laugh over her shoulder. She’s followed by the girl from the Orange Julius. Both of their expressions freeze for a split second, and I see Trudy’s tiny wheels turning as she grasps what’s transpired between me and the Russian. Before Trudy can twist her mouth into her tell-tale sneer, I pivot on the ball of my right foot and run like I’m in the hundred-metre dash through the nearby bus terminal and down the street. I’ve left the book behind.

For the next three mornings, I manage to drag myself out of my black pit and call in sick. For two more I let the phone ring itself silly before it finally stops. For two days after that, I stay in my bed eating potato chips and watching the Shopping Channel. When I do rise on the seventh day, determined to leave my apartment, I shower lethargically and consider my options. I think about running away like that, how silly it must have looked. I think I’ll probably just add the past seven months to my time in Korea and go out to look for another McJob.

I dress and put my glasses on. It’s then that I see the mark. One lens bears the residue of a greasy nose print, testament to what’s evolved over the past weeks with my Russian, culminating in that one awkward kiss.

I remove the glasses and hold them up in the window where the sun shines in so I can get a better look.

The book, I think, rubbing my glasses clean with my shirt. The book. Whoever has the book holds the key to the next interaction. It’s occurred to me before, during this game, that at any time I might pass the book back to him, with my carefully coded message, and never see him again. He could take the book and not reply – and wouldn’t that be the height of loss, in this game? If it is a game, which all along is how I’ve thought of it, then doesn’t a game need a winner and a loser? And now, with what I’ve done, running away like that, I’m not sure if I’ve made him the winner or the loser. I’ve left the book behind with his last message unseen by me, as if I didn’t want it. I’ve left him with his own unsent message.

I go back to the mall, sit in the food court for more than two hours, waiting to see if he’ll show. I stay on the lookout for Trudy, hoping to avoid her. Later, I sit outside the entrance to the store. The store is at the end of the mall – it’s what’s known as an anchor – holding the mall down, one big department store at either end. I stay as long as I can without risking Trudy coming by for her break. Finally, I spend a small amount of time in the parking lot outside the back door before I go home on the bus.

The next day I rise early. This time, I put on my work clothes and clip my nametag to my vest. I sit in the food court, waiting. I wait throughout the morning. I wait so long I start to wonder if I’ve been the object of my own elaborate delusion. Perhaps I made him up, my Russian with his book – imagined the whole crazy thing.

The lunch rush starts to arrive. Trudy and one of the clerks from the CD store show up and sit near the taco vendor. I’m frozen, waiting to see what will happen next. I know hot sauce gives Trudy heartburn, but I see her eating it anyway. She doesn’t notice me at first. Only as she’s squeezing her little white cup of sour cream in half to lick the remaining line from its collapsed rim do her eyes search the food court and meet mine. She stops with her tongue out, white cream on its tip, and eyes me suspiciously. She puts the cup down and says something to her lunch mate, who immediately turns to look in my direction.

I look away and grab my bag, hear Trudy’s laugh. I walk quickly across the food court to the narrow hallway that leads to the back door, my quickest escape. I imagine Trudy in hot pursuit, and I begin to run. Clack goes the handle, and I burst into the sunlight, still running. I imagine the Russian at my side, him and me, sprinting through the bus terminal. I see the number seven just pulling away, and I wave my arms to flag it down. All I can think is that at least seven is a happy number. I run up the steps, and from the top one I turn and shout at my pursuer through the still open door, “Love is a dark devil!” One of the Russian’s early coded messages to me.

But instead of Trudy at the back door of the mall, I see the Russian, in his long coat, holding the book abreast in one hand like a gift, his other arm raised in an open palmed salute.