She told herself that standing in front of the supermarket register wouldn’t be especially tiring. But in fact, she realized right away that time in that consumer prison was mired in a stomach-turning swamp of baked ham, laundry detergent, pecorino cheese and aftershave. Time had stopped. Her colleagues told her that she’d get used to it, but she’s convinced she’ll die before that moment comes. Every day is an unending torture. She’s so wiped out in the evening that her head feels like it’s made of many tiny pieces badly glued together, pieces that themselves are tagged for sale. And the final blow is that to get home now, she has to take the subway first and then a bus. One morning she’d left the house and found that her beautiful twin-cylinder was gone. Well, there was a piece of the lock, which they’d managed to force. The chain, they made off with.
The first days she glanced at the shoppers’ bodies and faces. It’s incredible how much you can determine about a human being from a lightning glance, she would think, back then when she was still enjoying developing theories, translating this thing into mathematical and IT terms. But then she realized that classifying faces and clothing was just one more effort on top of the effort of having to smile. It was better just to keep her head down and restrict her movements to what was necessary to push the products by and take the cash or card. Now she behaves like the others, she spares herself.
After just a couple of weeks, the clientele now rolls by one after the other like silhouettes of refugees, clots of stress made of flesh and odors, but mostly of a great deal of anxiety, of angst. Nearly all are in a foul humor, or a hurry,* and she doesn’t need to look at them to know that, she can feel it in her sternum. At peak hours the queue in front of her register grows longer. Supermarkets aren’t happy places; people leave their happiness outside in hopes they’ll find it later in the things they’ve put in their cart, each with its penitentiary barcode.
* If there’s any church that reveals how badly off human beings are, now that they’ve rid themselves of Me, it’s the supermarket; I can’t disagree with her.
If she knew this was just a temporary situation, she’d be taking it better, poor thing. But the unemployment rate has been worsening, and in her deterministic mind that means she’ll be tied to that shitty register (her words) for eternity. I’ve stopped sending her signals of hope; numbskull that she is, she doesn’t pick up on them. I arranged for her to meet a fortune-teller in the subway who predicted she would resume her research on bacteria-fueled energy. She thought the woman had simply guessed her job by chance. I made sure she saw a horoscope announcing splendid times to come for Sagittarians of the Third Decade. She laughed bitterly, that big mouth of hers spreading even wider. She won’t believe it until she can reach out a hand and touch it, the materialist.
As you can imagine, I could find her another job if I really wanted to, never mind the recession. But this is the path I’ve chosen. Many novices think a god reasons like a traffic cop, but with all due respect for traffic cops, a god’s actions are lofty and very complex. Above all, a god has to keep in mind the welfare of millions and millions of believers, billions of believers, foreseeing their infinite interactions and giving priority to those who deserve it, the faithful of the faithful, as is only right. If it was just a question of looking after one person, a monad untouched by gravity, floating in some sterile no-man’s-land, anyone could do it.
By now her movements are automatic. She slides the products by the barcode reader in one continuous motion, but not too fast: she must look efficient but not exhaust herself before the eight hours are up. She knows the supervisor with the belly that makes him look pregnant is watching her from his elevated booth; he picked her out as snooty right away, reading the puzzled looks of a nearsighted mathematician as contempt. She can’t see him through the reflections on the glass, but he is staring at particular sections of her body with his lewd watery cow’s eyes. I can’t help it if all her bosses lust after her and bother her the way a satyr bothers a wood nymph; I merely report the situation. In theory, there are supposed to be persons of both sexes at the registers, but in fact the ones working there are all female and all have ample backsides and thighs. Those are the tastes of Cerberus the Expectant.