Alice slept with someone else because I wanted her to be happy. People are like bags, and the more problems you have the more holes in your bag. Not like a I want peanut butter but don’t have any in the house kind of problem. More like Every 24 hours I lose another day so I’m closer to death. Most people don’t think about their end. Another hole in their bag. For Alice, the label of marriage was a hole constantly torn larger.
She often asked if she was destined to a life of unfulfillment. I’d say something like, “I’ll work on it” to which she responded, “But what if this is your best?”
Here are some holes in my bag that I wrote into a PowerPoint slide because I was at work but didn’t want to do any work:
• Alice
• Alice
• Fear of public speaking
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
Before working from home I had the best cubicle in the office, located in a back corner where the cubicle walls were so high I was invisible. The light was always dim because I didn’t have a window, but I didn’t care. I had my own space that no one from where they sat could see into.
I called my spot the Zone. It felt far away from everyone else because it was. My coworkers would be discussing things like the weather, local crime, and meatball recipes in their open, middle-of-the-room cubicles and I didn’t feel the need to respond because they didn’t know if I was there. I was somehow in the office and not in the office, a body gone but living behind cubicle walls.
When my boss called my words slurred like I was waking from a dream. From what I recently read in Sarah’s email they haven’t filled the Zone yet, so there’s the chance if I ever go back everything will be like before.
Along with conference calls I’ve been thinking about bodies. If you work an office job then you already know what I’m about to say. But I’m going to say it anyways because I need to concentrate on something besides Alice.
Bodies worsen if you work for the State like I do. Lots of workers dragging a leg, seemingly shoved by a version of their current self who wants nothing to do with squeezing through the security portal again. I’m not sure how they survive the day.
I rode the elevator one morning with a man who pressed an entire side of his face against the gold-colored doors and when they opened he muttered, “Lillian? Are you still with me?” and walked forward groping the air.
Eight hours of sitting is barbaric and in two hundred years everyone will agree. We’re just not far enough in the future to understand what we’re doing now. I forget who it was, but someone famous visited an office in the 60s and said it was like entering a crypt. She said the workplace crushed not only the individual, but the possibility for romantic love. I’m not entirely sure I agree.
Because I had a moment with Sarah and never told Alice. I liked Sarah because she would laugh when everyone else was serious. During a meeting my boss said he didn’t want to be “the memo police” but if he had to, he would, and Sarah placed her hands over her face, pretending to rub her eyes. She’s also the only non-white person in the entire office. Maybe the entire building. I think she keeps to herself because she understands what the place is. When my coworkers are at their worst she disappears.
Sarah and I were discussing how in ads featuring shirtless men the camera focuses on a man’s abs because abs are the definition of sexy. Men don’t care about women’s abs, but everyone knows that. Sarah said something about Brad Pitt, and what I did randomly, trying to be funny I think, was lift my shirt up. I don’t have abs, just a deflated goose-bumped space with black hair. I felt so dumb and began lowering my shirt. But what Sarah did was place her hand, flat, on my stomach.
It was a weird moment with no talking, standing next to Sarah in her padded swivel chair holding my shirt up. Everyone else was eating hot dogs but we were connecting. It lasted somewhere between five seconds and two minutes, I can’t remember, time gets strange when you’re far away from it.
Now I’m waiting for a conference call. And because I’m thinking about time, it’s taking forever. I need to do more. I should drink eight glasses of water because everyone says it’s important. I live alone and sit when I pee. I could stand now but I can’t stop the habit. As a kid, I’d stand in my driveway with my eyes closed aimed at the sun and think so hard about being alive I’d have a panic attack. I can’t do that anymore.
The reason I work from home now is because of the podium incident. Each May my boss gives a speech at the annual State workers picnic, sponsored by the Leaders who don’t attend. The picnic is catered with deli meat, and all the Michelle’s and Steve’s and Emily’s get wasted. There’s a pavilion and a stage with a podium and the sun is always shining, making Doritos look beautiful in neon plastic bowls.
And every April my boss picks one employee from a hundred and fifty to introduce him in what is supposed to be a light roast with some brown-nosing at the end. He chooses by pinching the name from pieces of paper he swirls around inside a jumbo-sized cheese-puff bucket. Of course my name was drawn. Of course I didn’t say I didn’t want to do it. I spent three caffeinated weeks writing my speech. The night before, I couldn’t sleep.
Steve, who wore an orange golf visor across his eyebrows shouted in my face, “Show the boss who’s boss!” as I walked to the podium.
I had on my favorite suit jacket, the one I got married in, the one I never wore to work because it was a tailored summer suit and baggy pants are popular in my office. Besides, my office was a refrigerator. Did you know the number one complaint in an office is that the temperature is too cold? And can you guess what the second most common complaint is?
Everyone waited for me to speak. All those bodies in flipflops and short sleeve button-ups gripping soggy paper plates of meat. My boss stood off to the side touching elbows with Sarah. I remember the air was cool and a few guys way in the back were playing cornhole on boards they had painted in the American flag. There was one cloud in the sky shaped like a moose. It fell apart as I thought about my life.
My face became flushed with rings of rising heat. My head was spinning, and the sky tilted until it became the grass and then the sky again. I tried imagining everyone in their underwear but I couldn’t because they wore cargo shorts.
Then Steve chanted my name. In this world we never say no to Steve. But some just pretended to mouth the chant, like I did in school chorus, standing in the back and moving my lips. I fainted once during Here Comes the Sun. I walked from the auditorium and into the school and just before the nurse’s office, I collapsed. Sprawled out on the floor with the silver line we had to walk single-file on and no one was near. I remember the fuzzy stars suffocating my face like a pillow and the janitor touching my face.
My boss stepped toward the podium and the chanting stopped. My boss should have known. I never really talked before, so why would I now? Why would I do a good job? It didn’t make any sense and everyone knew it.
I couldn’t read the speech because I was holding my wedding vows which had been in the summer suit for all these good, bad, whatever years. The speech was in the opposite side pocket, but I couldn’t stop re-reading the vows.
What I did at the podium was smile and put my professional voice on. I made a joke about my boss drinking so much coffee that during his heart surgery they ran an IV to the nearest Dunkin Donuts. It was idiotic but everyone laughed. I don’t think I had tears in my eyes when I made that joke. I don’t think I was still thinking about Alice. Then the sky was the grass again and this time I couldn’t right myself. My hands held the far corners of the podium but I was weak.
I told the blurry audience how my boss is the hardest working person I had ever met to no applause. No Steve power clapping in a deafening echo because my eyes rolled up in my head and the sound of a departing plane filled the air around me. I laughed at the disjointed moose in the sky and fainted. Losing my balance I took the podium with me; microphone, cord, water pitcher, plastic cups, off the stage we flew and toward the crowd and onto the grass where everything in my life collected in the dark.
Afterward, I sat in my car with the door open, supervised by paramedics, before being driven home by Sarah who owns a Mercedes even though we make the same salary. At a red light, she put her hand on my stomach and said everything would be fine. I pretended to be asleep.
Back home I received a call from my boss who said maybe some time off was a good idea. This is one tactic, out of many, when they want to fire you.
I should find a new way to live but my phone is ringing. Lately the conference calls have been getting shorter and less frequent, but more people are there. Maybe this time we’ll break the record for voices on a shared line. A hundred? A thousand? A million? Could there be a conference call with all of America on it? What would that sound like? Would it be comforting to know everyone was in one place together? Could you pick out your spouse and say that you missed them? Could you ask about dying? Could you ask a stranger what it’s like to live and get an honest answer? Through all the yelling and power grabs to be the loudest person in America could I find Alice and pull her through the voices and tell her that I loved her? Would America be on my side in weepy silence or would America just laugh?
After a conference call, I need to eat. Routine is important when you live alone because then you believe you’re accomplishing something. I’m walking to the grocery store, about five minutes from my apartment, with the sun throbbing above in the blue sky. In the middle of the road a man in a suit is vomiting. On the other side someone is recording him. I never noticed this stuff before.
Because life is swirling circles of hell and Alice was the comforting pools between. Ugh, I’m not talking about her anymore. I need to concentrate on my future. You can’t work on yourself if you’re thinking about the past. Georgia O’Keeffe said that, I think. She narrowed her eyes at the future she wanted and said, “I’m going to make you my reality.”
I want to be a healthy person but I buy junk food. There’s the produce section, sure, but it’s expensive and shrinking. The way the produce section is set-up now it’s something you walk through, not shop in. One of the cashiers here told me that at least once a week someone is caught stealing bags of frozen shrimp that they immediately try and return without a receipt.
I do my shopping quickly.
A man in blood-red suspenders holding a Caesar salad is mouth-breathing down my neck. Sometimes I wonder why anyone exists. One theory is that Armageddon already happened, invisibly, years ago. I don’t necessarily believe that, but hard to disagree if you’re out grocery shopping.
Caesar Salad cuts the line. Forgetting something, looking at his phone, he moves from the line only to return seconds later and cut it again, his shoulder brushing past mine. He’s big so he does whatever he wants. His left hand is in a cast, a tiny red heart smeared at the base of his thumb.
“Paper bag inside of a plastic bag,” he demands, not looking up from his phone.
Everyone is thinking the same thing, but we won’t do a thing, no way, not this group. If anyone was going to say something it would be a woman. Men are brave but only inside cars. We need someone like Alice. “Show a man who he truly is and he will change.” A quote I like but it doesn’t apply because a guy like this, taking time to study his receipt before leaving, so ready to pounce on a mistake, doesn’t posses a sense of shame.
Back home I have a missed message. Too much time worrying about strangers with salads to realize my phone was ringing. Like Alice used to say, I need to be more aware and to be present. It’s good advice in any situation and it’s annoying because I’m unable to do it.
It’s from my boss saying to come to the office first thing Monday morning for a meeting with Dorian Blood. I don’t know anyone named Dorian Blood. Two weeks working from home and I’m going back, if only for a meeting, but it just goes to show, you don’t really control anything. Dorian Blood can’t be a real name and if it is what kind of head goes with it? Something oblong and bony. Someone with long fingernails and hazel eyes. I’ve never heard the name before. I would remember such a name if he worked for the State.
When people ask what I do for a living I say I work an office job and flutter my fingers on an imaginary keyboard. I don’t know why I do this, but I do, grinning and typing on air. My job isn’t interesting but sometimes if I’m talkative I’ll say, “administrative work.”
Because you can’t tell someone you work for the State without them rolling their eyes. It’s a detestable job. We’re overpaid for bureaucratic paper pushing and the benefits are shocking to the point of evil. You put in thirty years and the pension package and best health insurance available in the country (Michelle calls it diamond level) follows you until death.
At 10am, if you drive by the building where I work, the one with thick streams of black gunk on the crystalized cement, you’ll see smokers on the marble steps, or if it’s windy, crouched and huddled between the bushes like gnomes. We have an absurd amount of free time, and time off, tripling what those in the private sector receive.
When we have a three day weekend with Monday off you’re allowed to leave early on Friday, so most employees put in a request for Friday off completely, which is always approved. Wednesday is a breeze because you’re thinking about the coming five days off, you can’t concentrate on work if you even have work to do. On Thursday you can relax, come in a bit late, followed by a long lunch, sneak out early, and hey, another day off.
What’s also common knowledge is that many jobs are created for the friends and family of the Leaders themselves. There’s an office and job description involved, just no work.
And because many workers refuse to pay the fifteen dollars for monthly parking, they park in Center Square where there is a strict two hour limit. So every two hours, if not for a smoke break, they lethargically excuse themselves from their cubicles to move their car. During this break they make personal calls, nap, and buy potato chips.
I call my boss for details. He says he has none besides, “The Leaders picked you.”
I follow up for more information and he does his nervous boss cough and says he’s never had this request before, meaning from his boss, and to come with an open mind. He never talks like this. This is a man with a perfectly coifed “Greed is good” haircut. On his desk is a ceramic jar engraved with TERRORIST ASHES. He believes those on welfare should be drug-tested. I ask if this means working from home is over and he says of course, didn’t his message say welcome back?
“I don’t know what to say,” I say.
What I’ve learned from working at the State: no sense of logic, karma, or linear narrative. You constantly feel like you will be fired even though all signs, like those older employees shuffling around you, point to you obtaining the coveted thirty year mark. That’s the real reason people work a State job: free time in the present is nice; retirement at sixty is the real heaven.
Being home all the time is depressing, so I tell my boss, “I’m ready for anything” in the strongest conference-call voice in the world while driving my hand into a family-sized bag of tortilla chips. Without a future, no Alice, I’m ready for an adventure.
Dorian Blood. When I say the name there’s a magnetic quality to the sound like I’ve met this person before. Dorian. Blood. I can’t stop thinking about him, or her, and what this meeting means for my future. Possibly nothing, but maybe everything.
In an attempt to distract myself I go for a walk. I live neither in the city of A-ville or the suburbs, but somewhere between, the neighborhood of Pine Hills where two-family houses have fifteen feet of grassy separation on city lots, a sad scattering of trees for the corner homes. The streets are lined with parallel-parked cars, but some people have driveways. I live two miles from my office. If I walk two blocks over I can see the head of the building I work in, one shoulder filled with my coworkers, computers, and cubicle walls.
The weather tonight is a summer storm after a day of record-nearing heat. Elderly is holding his stuffed animal with spider-long arms and legs, curly blue hair and googly blue eyes. If this is surprising, it’s not. Elderly is a street person well-known on the sidewalks of Pine Hills. I find him less troublesome than Caesar Salad. Only one has a stuffed animal named Millionaire. Only one seems destructive.
The thing about Elderly is he dislikes small talk, words to just fill spaces. But when it’s important he talks in endless depth, going on and on about politics and current affairs. Just don’t engage Elderly in chit-chat, he won’t hesitate to walk away. Most people love to talk even if they don’t like people, which is why they love to talk. Tonight he’s got a bag of cans half as tall as him slung over his shoulder. Millionaire is positioned so the stuffed animal’s hands appear to be holding the bag, his body hugging Elderly’s chest.
The streetlamps click on for their thirty minutes, the breeze is sharp and exhilarating, and I say like it’s no big deal that I have a meeting with Dorian Blood.
Elderly looks like James Baldwin, and when he hears the name Dorian Blood he raises his eyebrows and leans back on his heels. “The magician?”
“A work meeting. I’m going back to the office,” I say.
“Why?”
It’s a good question. I’m not sure working for nine years in an office has done me any favors except giving my life meaning to strangers. Because when you’re asked, “What do you do?” you have to respond with your job, but if you’re retired you just say, “I’m retired.”
If I retired at forty years old I’d receive six thousand dollars a year beginning in 2037. I need thirty years total to reach the goal everyone in my office talks about daily – the diamond-flickering retirement package, seventy percent of your highest year salary. But the way it works, I need to reach year ten first to receive anything at all. I am less than a year away before I become vested into the best retirement package in the world.
“It’s for a work meeting,” I reiterate to Elderly. “I’m just not sure what, exactly.”
He has Millionaire adjust the cans on his back. “Work meeting,” repeats Elderly.
The outline of a person flashes in the distance under a tree then vanishes around the corner. I have a little Alice thought because it looked like her. I need to move on. Her side of things is a different experience than the one I had, I’m sure, but that’s life. What you think is a highlight is a lowlight for the person you love.
Dad once told me his favorite experience with Mom was this white water rafting trip they took in the Adirondacks in the 70s, I forget the actual year, but it doesn’t matter, they were young and adventurous. When he told this story he lit up, explaining how Mom beamed as they zigzagged down the river in the rapids, how he almost went over, how the buffet at the resort had all-you-can-eat crab legs and no one was pushy, no single wide-shouldered man stood there waiting for the refill. They got caught in a rainstorm while walking back and ran with mud painted up to their knees. What makes this story so memorable is how Mom felt about the trip. She hated it. It was the worst trip of her life. “Going for a walk,” I tell Elderly who stares at me. “I’ll let you know how the meeting goes.” He doesn’t care if I go for a walk. Elderly dislikes style, material goods, and leisurely activities. He definitely doesn’t like work meetings. What I’m trying to say is that he’s amazing.
When I’m walking at night like I am now into the areas of no street lights or glow from houses it feels like I’m being thrown forward into darkness with nothing to grab onto. I’ve read that people who have attempted suicide at the Golden Gate Bridge have experienced a similar feeling. But does anyone not suicidal feel this way? Everyone is so confident, so sure of themselves. I’ll get there one day, maybe, just hard to imagine the future without Alice in it because Alice, as married to me, is always bleeding images from the past.
I like to cut through the park at night because of the stars. As a kid I could locate the most obscure constellations. I dominated the planetarium field trip. Tonight is overcast, the moon behind a wide band of gray clouds so it’s difficult to locate a star or planet. Still, walking through a field alone in the dark with possible life above feels powerful.
Before leaving, I stand at the swing sets trying to find a star between the slight separation between clouds. Teenagers in hoodies are huddled on a nearby bench getting high. At the park exit men squatting under a streetlamp are spraying cleaner on a truck’s tires, saying, “Yeah, Ronny boy, yeah,” as the foam thickens. There’s a sudden clearing in the sky. I trace the belt of Orion.
Another thing about Elderly is he lives in his car. I can see it in the distance as I walk home, a gold-colored 1995 Pontiac Bonneville which worsens each month and is rarely driven. When it won’t start I help him push it from one side of the street to the other side every Tuesday and Thursday because of the parking rules. The Pontiac sits too low to the ground. It has no functioning headlights, the hood is dented so badly that when it rains it holds water, and one flat tire is covered with little crosses of black tape. The front bumper is missing, and so is a chunk of the car itself, a missing corner exposing an inch of blue washer fluid. Standing next to the car now, I can see Elderly is asleep in the driver’s seat, which contains rips of white foam, crown-shaped, around his head.
From my porch I collect seltzer cans in a plastic bag. Tied tightly, I place the bag next to the driver’s side tire. “Goodnight, E,” I say, and he responds through sleep, “Night, V.”