Before walking to work I check on Elderly, who is asleep with Millionaire draped over his chest. The car’s interior is mostly trash, a weedwacker wet with grass clippings rests across the back seat. When Elderly is feeling good he likes to trim the edges around the park and nearby abandoned properties. Two homes are on my block. Millionaire, strapped to his waist with a rope-belt, helps him. In the front passenger seat are two Rudy fliers and on top of them a gold cross on a silver chain. On a torn piece of paper he’s written I’m religious now and taped it with what looks like peanut-butter to the glovebox.
I own a car and walk to work. My coworkers think my throat will be slashed for walking two miles, through what they consider a violent neighborhood splattered in graffiti, but it’s just poor people.
Back on floor fourteen, everyone says in chilling unison, “Welcome back, Vincent.” Hung on the outside of my corner cubicle wall is a banner: “Welcome back, Vincent!”
On the snacking table is a box of donuts and I’m allowed first pick. Nothing has changed since the podium incident. The copier is jammed, the plastic plants are gigantic, it smells like Windex, and Francesca has thumbtacked a sign on the wall – Clean Me After You Use Me – with a blurry picture of the breakroom microwave.
“Thank you,” I say, “it’s nice to be back.”
The Zone has a huge computer monitor, comically large for the work I do, that’s new. Then the typical stuff – pinned memos to the cubicle walls, filing cabinets, ceramic pen holder, IBM printer, uncomfortable blue office chair, phone directory that needs updating, too much gray desk space, and a thick area rug weaved in black and brown square design purchased by Alice. What hasn’t changed is that I can still hear my coworkers, and they can’t see me.
Once, before working from home when I was in the Zone, Emily brought her daughter in and afterward Michelle said, “Little bitch doesn’t know what life will do to her.” At the time I thought that was a really tough thing to say about a seven-year-old, but after Alice left me I kind of understood. Even Michelle has her moments.
Today she’s telling us that a pig can have an orgasm for thirty minutes. I ignore the conversation and instead log into my employee account with five hundred emails. None of them matter because here if you don’t do a specific job it just flows to the next person. Because I have to click on them individually it takes ten minutes to do my deleting. Then I’m done with my work. I have nothing to do until my meeting.
Eventually, he came to hate his creation. His name was Robert Propst, which is the perfect name for someone who would design the first cubicle. His 1960s blueprint allowed workers a comfortable space to work in, and for the first time ever, privacy. But once the companies figured out they could shrink the cubicles to save money, and add more workers to increase profits, and shorten the walls so the supervisors could spy, that was the end of the dream. Years after his design was implemented he visited an office like mine and stood in the entranceway, turning his chin over the expanse of cubicle walls, bald heads and hairdos on rounded shoulders, everyone able to hear everyone else breathing. “This is monolithic insanity,” Robert Propst said to the proud supervisor beside him. “I’ve created something that hurts people.”
I’m pacing just outside my boss’s office near the water cooler. Dad said being early shows respect but he was wrong. I arrived forty five minutes early to the dentist once and the receptionist said while photocopying my insurance card (best dental in the country, diamond level) “Did you know being early is just as inconvenient as being late?” Alice said it was true. Being early throws people off their track. They love routine. It’s why everything they do, important or not, is on a schedule and screen.
“Vincent, get in here,” says my boss.
This boss is not the person who hired me. I was hired by the new Leaders at the time because I was a creative type who could write press releases. Then the old Leaders regained power through the elections and rehired the old employees back, like Steve and Michelle, but for some reason I wasn’t let go. I am one of a handful, from hundreds, who weren’t fired. That’s why working in the Zone is so special and odd – I have the most secluded spot and my boss and the higher-ups and Leaders working across the street in the Dome don’t know what to do with me.
The Dorian Blood meeting is on floor twenty, which I didn’t know was in use. My boss says it was empty for years, formerly used by lawyers during the 2012 coup, a complicated story involving multiple back-stabbings, an affair between two opposing Leaders, and a smashed electrical box resulting in an office blackout. I ask for more details and my boss shakes his head. “I don’t know much,” he says. “As usual, I’m just the messenger.”
This only makes the Dorian Blood meeting more eerie because it’s not my boss in control but a Leader I’ve never met. This is how the world works now. Entire rooms of people you’ll never meet are making decisions about your life.
He says Dorian Blood is the head of a new work productivity program, and that he feels guilty because of what happened at the annual picnic. He was asked what employee fits a certain profile and supplied my name. A ten percent raise included in participating in the program will drastically affect the percentage of my retirement, he says while grinning, and I can’t help but smile too.
“Good luck,” he says.
“Thank you.”
“One more thing.”
“Absolutely,” I say in my professional voice.
“Francesca’s birthday.”
If there’s any future consistent with the now, it’s an office birthday, the same as the previous, continuing forever inside an endless streak of office buildings. When a birthday is planned everyone who doesn’t have a birthday contributes. You sign your name next to a responsibility and this sheet travels from desk-to-desk in an unmarked manila folder. Because I’m the last to see the list I’m responsible for the most difficult task, the cupcakes.
“And one more thing,” says my boss turning to his computer.
“Of course.”
“She likes the desserts from a diner. Is that even possible?”
The professional me, continuing: “Anything is.”
On my way to floor twenty I share the elevator with a woman in a black shawl. She’s not Alice level attractive, that’s impossible, but has that quality some posses who work in an office environment where they appear shockingly clean. I’m speaking in a way Alice would disapprove of. I could never look that clean because men need money to look that clean. “Nice shawl,” I say. Shawl Lady turns and faces the wall until the elevator stops at floor eighteen and she side steps out. With no one watching, I shrug.
The elevator opens and I walk onto blue carpet and face a sign:
PER / SUITE 2037 / BLOOD
After using the wall phone outside a locked glass door, I’m greeted by two men with professional voices and professional smiles. They’re college age young with a combination of confidence and calmness I can’t relate to. Their gingham shirts are slim fit, their purple ties knitted, their fingernails attentively cared for, not bitten like mine. One says, “Nice to meet you” while vigorously shaking my hand, and I feel like I did that day at the podium, that at any minute the recessed ceiling lights could become the floor.
The Iceman isn’t succeeding. But I follow the two men, maintaining some distance between, trying to calm myself down, unable to remember my mantra. My future is coming for me? My future is mine? As we enter an office space full of light, I’m thinking about Alice again.
From her point of view the reason our marriage ended wasn’t because I couldn’t fulfill her sexually, but I stopped connecting. She said I wasn’t there with her mentally because I was either commuting to work, at work, coming home from work, or dead-eyed from having sat for eight hours at work. Sundays were spent preparing for work. I soon realized something that horrified me: I slept 9-to-5 and worked 9-to-5.
Besides, she was so busy at RISSE, sometimes working twelve hour shifts, which I admired and made me look like I was accomplishing nothing. How can you compare teaching a Syrian refugee resume etiquette with printing a twenty foot banner: WELCOME TO THE EASTER EGGSTRAVAGANZA?
Whatever she thought or still thinks, I was there, with her. Which I realize now was part of the problem, how, after giving up painting, I was stifling her and the marriage. I became too much of having nothing to do but Alice. That makes sense now. I was jealous of her work and it wasn’t fair. But I was there. I tried.
I brought her dinner at the refugee center once, and in the common area everyone was kneeling on neon-blue rugs. There was a glass compass on the floor and Alice was next to it, praying. I didn’t say anything. It was so powerful with everyone submitting to what they thought God was that I couldn’t move.
“A rattlesnake can live a year without eating.”
I’m in a huge room outside a corner office with the two men now typing on their phones. The corner office door is open but no one is visible, only a voice coming from inside. My stomach growls this disgusting high-pitched bubbling that disappears in a whimper.
“I’ve heard so many good things,” continues the voice.
In office meetings you morph into a language and set of body movements if you’re aware of it or not, it doesn’t matter, but it’s not you in the meeting. Some people are better at this than others. They are built for the changing. I never speak in meetings, let the big dogs roam special, but years ago my boss caught me laughing. I was having “one of those days.” Everyone stopped talking and I said toward the window, “You know none of this matters.” I wasn’t trying to be difficult, it’s just sometimes you forget where you are and you say something real.
“Vincent, come in.” An arm, most likely connected to the voice, is waving at me from the open door.
The office I walk into contains a framed Ronald Reagan illustration leaning against a freshly painted white wall with stacked cardboard boxes around it, an oval shaped wooden desk with an open MacBook, and next to a set of large windows, sitting on the air conditioning unit, a shallow cardboard box with broken glass. It smells like cigarettes and mouthwash. There’s more, but this is what sticks out as I move into the space and take a seat across from Dorian Blood.
I ask if he recently moved in.
“Yes, about twenty minutes ago,” he says, looking into the larger office I just came from. “The reason I mentioned the rattlesnake not eating for a year is a metaphor for energy conservation, routine, and discipline. In case you were wondering.”
His graying hair combed backwards contains gel. His skin is clear and unblemished around narrow pale-green eyes. White cables are tangled in a mess around his laptop. Maybe he really did just arrive, he’s not making it up. Outside, the two employees are unpacking cardboard boxes like the ones in here and filling two center cubicles with printers, telephones, black lamps, cords, manila folders, laptops, and glossy stacks of copy paper. The morning light is half-filtered by the blinds set at various uncaring levels, and I’m sitting in a chair across from a person named Dorian Blood.
He could be thirty five or fifty, it’s hard to tell with the graying hair but tailored suit and youthful skin. And he’s thin, but fit from what I imagine is a habitual lunchtime walk and morning pushups. “Straight off the bat,” he says with his fingers making a peace sign. “What are the two biggest complaints about State workers?”
I’m lightheaded from not eating and sweating. “That the work is dull and the jobs are a waste of taxpayers dollars.”
He looks pleased as he settles back in his chair, a silver Cross pen seesawing between his fingers. “Couldn’t have said it better myself. Perfect, just perfect. I see why Frank picked you. Now, what if I told you I can change that.”
Sometimes I do this thing where I stick my bottom lip out and nod. I did this a lot toward the end of the marriage, when Alice was packing her belongings in those shit-orange Home Depot boxes. She would say, “You’re bottom lipping me again” when I didn’t know how to respond to, “We don’t connect anymore.”
And I bottom lip now with Dorian because I don’t know how to respond to the claim he can make office jobs exciting and worthwhile. My office isn’t necessary. You could erase my department and the world would continue without a glitch. I’m not just saying this. I know it.
Because when there was a major shake-up in the Dome, the coup, I was given the position of Supervisor which I didn’t want. This was two years after I started and what I learned, having access to the office budget, is that we could be liquidated and nothing would change except saving half a million dollars. Another office, the printing warehouse uptown could easily do the work we were doing with the addition of interns (unpaid college seniors who are worked until cynical). But I didn’t say anything, because if I did I would have been firing myself.
“Let me back up,” says Dorian. He loosens his tie, very similar to the blue one I’m wearing, and rolls up his sleeves revealing a gold watch with what appears to be a thin black wire dangling from the back, a charger, I can’t tell what exactly. “So this is the third state we’ve been to this year,” he says. “Sometimes I get carried away during the screening process because of the success we’ve been having. Increased worker productivity, improved quality of life, taxpayer savings. The program is technically and originally called Patrol for Everyday Repetition. PER, for short, is what we call it now. Follow?”
“What?”
“Vincent,” smiles Dorian. “We’re going to change your life.”
I lean back in my chair attempting to give the impression that I’m not completely dumbfounded. I try and access the conference call version of myself but he’s not here. The air is suddenly difficult to breathe. I’ve never been one to adapt well to these situations, but I’ve lived in them for so much of my life. Maybe the coming years won’t be so dull, so hard, though, if Dorian Blood is telling the truth. But that’s impossible.
“I follow,” I lie.
“Are you lying?”
“I’d like to hear more.”
Dorian smiles and his teeth are so white they appear fake. “It requires training,” he continues, “but you shouldn’t have a problem. I’ve gone over your file.” He leans forward. “PER is a way of life, a routine and a process and a discipline in order to live a fulfilling existence while being a productive worker. This, you’re smart, means more money for citizens, more beach vacations, new cars, televisions, family gatherings, you know, things that make people happy. But the main goal is not only increased productivity, but bringing joy to the workplace. It’s something that has never been done before.”
I imagine Elderly’s reaction when I tell him about this, his eyes widening to cartoonish width. I imagine his stunned expression, and, in this vision, I’m nodding at Dorian Blood and becoming increasingly interested.
Dorian casually says, “Give us a chance and you’ll see what we’re about. Everyone successfully engaged has experienced a more pleasant, more positive, daily existence. No one deserves to get hired at a well paying job and a month later be depressed. Isn’t it sad how people stay in these jobs until retirement just because it’s a so-called good job?”
“That’s true,” I say. “It is sad.”
“PER alleviates that.”
I let everything sink in and bottom lip some more. I don’t really have a choice. If I say no, I have to explain why I declined to my boss, which could jeopardize my position in the office, possibly sending me back home to work. No more Zone. No more increased retirement package. I could be sent back home forever, and there’s too much Alice still in there because Alice is impossible to erase. I said I wanted a future, and here it is, presenting itself.
“Okay,” I say, not entirely convinced. “I’ll try it.”
“Fantastic.” He slides a binder from a corner of the desk on his side, and across the desk to me. “Here’s the questionnaire and script for the blood test, to be done after you leave here. The process can be challenging, but Vincent, it’s going to change your perspective on everything.” He rubs his hands together. “Before you go, can I ask you a personal question?”
“Sure,” I say, and my heart races, thinking of Alice, seeing her running down an endless hallway.
“Are you happy?”
On the shiny white binder is an illustration of a waterfall flowing out of a computer, the name PER below in delicate script entwined in black ink mist.
“I’m not sure happiness is part of the deal,” I say, not looking up from the illustration that I’m touching with my finger.
“The deal?”
“You know,” I say turning my palms up on the binder. “In life?”
“The answer a depressed person would give. No more conference calls. How does that sound? Pretty good?”
I tell Dorian that conference calls are soul sucking vortexes and each one kills me a little more.
“We’ve treated two hundred people, possibly more,” he continues, smiling. “The success rate is something I’m very proud of, probably talk too much about, but I’m sorry, it’s just what I do. You’ll still be working 9-to-5, but adjustments to your routine will take place and it won’t necessarily feel like you’re working 9-to-5. This will become clearer after the training. What’s important is that you are willing, which is how the other participants started.”
“And they’re happy?”
“The program showed them their ideal life, so I’d say so.”
I flip through the binder with hundreds of questions typed on heavy paper, each page with the PER waterfall logo. “But what’s in this for you?”
Dorian stands so I stand too, signaling the end of our meeting. He shakes my hand by pulling my arm toward his chest and says, “Vincent, your happiness is my reward.”
At the LabCorp across the street I fill four vials of blood as dark clouds form a thunderstorm. A nurse whose hairline starts in the middle of her head says I have big veins while handing me a sugar cookie. Next to me is a pregnant woman reclined, flanked by two paramedics and a man, the father I presume, in a denim jacket with Bugs Bunny on the back. I take a huge bite from the cookie and it starts to rain.
I walk home excited and lightheaded to complete the paperwork. People are running because it’s raining, and those waiting for the bus are crowded under the little metal station with red trim. I like those who just walk in the rain with no umbrella. There’s something spiritual about it even though I couldn’t tell why. I just think the slower a person walks in a downpour the better they are.
On my way home I pass the refugee center. It recently had a fire. A third of the roof is black char exposing a room once used for cooking classes, where Alice showed me how to make babaghanoush. The front door is boarded up and graffiti under the windows, most likely something evil stated, has been covered with black paint in the shape of a ship’s hull.
Back in my apartment, I sit on my bed and flip through the binder before grabbing my laptop. For all the questions in the binder there’s no explanation on what, exactly, I’m going to be doing. I type “Patrol for Everyday Repetition” “Dorian Blood” and “PER” into various combinations.
It takes a while because the word Blood really throws things off. I’m shown numerous pictures of bleeding gums. Participants must be sworn not to publicly say a thing about PER, but eventually I find a crinkled article turned into a PDF, ten pages long, written by Kate Helms and Dorian Blood. It was published fifteen years ago in a sociology journal called SCATZ FORUM on the benefits of, get this, “extreme daily routine.”
A majority of the text is blacked out. But there’s a chart with ascending numbers on one page, and on another page black rectangles labeled “Reality” and “Ideal Gate,” attached antenna-like to a floating head in a work cubicle. On another page there’s an illustration of a watch with a tail snaked around a wrist and a nearby potted plant with all surrounding text blacked out. The chart and pictures are childlike in their simplicity. On the last page is the waterfall logo. The caption beneath the mist says that, “PER activates the subconscious dream of life.”
I have no idea what any of this means. I have no idea what I’ve gotten myself into. I am filled with panic and excitement and fear. I email the article to myself then slam the laptop shut.
Shit. I forgot to order cupcakes for Francesca’s birthday. Immense drama in the office tomorrow. Fuck. During the divorce I forgot strawberry pie for Emily and for three days no one talked to me. No real loss, just hours of cubicle whispers I knew were about me. But I want to start fresh in these PER office days.
The questionnaire is divided into two sections: Professional and Personal. Some sections have already been computer completed – thirty nine years old, a reliable worker for nine years, no political affiliation, less than a year removed from being vested in the retirement system. A page printed of a PowerPoint slide using a bamboo textured backdrop has a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree:
• You respond to e-mails and dislike a crowded inbox.
• Your home environment could be described as minimal.
• You are rarely distracted by fantasies and ideas.
• Others do not influence your actions.
• A book is preferable to a social event.
• Real world objects are the focus of your dreams.
• Your emotions control you more than you control them.
• You often contemplate the reason for human existence.
There’s more questions like this until the personal questions on height, weight, diet, and routine. The routine questions are detailed down to the exact minute inside a typical hour. For example, from 7 am to 8 am what minutes do I consume (the paper’s wording, not mine) brushing my teeth, showering, opening the refrigerator, checking my phone. There’s also a question, mostly a blank page with small text, with the dimensions of a typical one bedroom apartment as an empty box asking how many steps I take inside this hour where the steps are located, draw them if possible. Also, before bed, what minute if it can be accurately stated do I fall asleep on? I answer to the best of my ability. In my new life, I am honest. In my new life, I throw myself into the world of PER.
I’m in bed re-reading the Blood article. I’ve completed the paperwork, agreeing not to discuss the program with anyone or post anything about it online. Outside it smells like thunder, a breeze coming from my bedroom window that’s open an inch. I feel a real sense of pride having completed the paperwork – exhausting for sure – but so much better than a conference call, which is what I think when my phone rings. Sometimes when I’m forced to look at a screen I want to throw up.
“Hi there. Sorry to bother you so late sir,” says a shaky voice, “but I’ve found your dog.”
I sit up and a bag of Doritos falls off the bed. My apartment has reached far beyond sad-bachelor level depressing, very little in here, such moody colors, dirty clothes everywhere, a permanent male stank. “Where is he?” When I speak, my voice echoes a little.
“I found a flyer,” says the voice.
“Can I ask whose calling?”
In the background a car passes by.
“You can.”
Someone behind the voice is saying to hurry up.
I walk to the front windows facing the street. There are three windows total and two don’t open because the landlord used bargain priced paint. This is something all landlords do, no exceptions. When there’s a sale they buy in bulk and use the same stuff forever. The basement here is littered with self-adhesive Spanish floor tiles, plastic plumbing fixtures, gallons of Fabuloso floor cleaner, and columns of paint cans customers outright rejected after they were mixed. I look out the window. Elderly is on the sidewalk, next to the Pontiac parked in its usual spot, holding a phone. Elderly doesn’t own a phone.
“Who is this?” I ask.
I should have seen this coming. He likes to call the flyers of anything with a reward. With his lifestyle, I don’t blame him. I’ve seen him tear a flyer for a missing cat from a telephone pole and later that same day pluck a flyer off a postal box for a missing turtle. Although I’m not sure how he would actually receive the money without the pet.
“Tom Ruddles,” says Elderly. “Says something about a cash reward? I require that first.”
He’s bent over and inside the open driver’s side window, and a young kid on the sidewalk with his arm extended is asking for his phone back. Behind the kid are three girls in high-waisted jeans, thumbing their phone’s glowing screens. The lawns behind them rise and ooze a strange darkness, the grass moving in the breeze.
Elderly walks around the back of his car and grabs one of the flyers off the passenger seat. The three girls point dramatically at the boy who takes one step forward before peering into the car. “You’re such a good boy, aren’t you a good boy, that’s right, you’re a good boy,” baby-talks Elderly, now walking back around the trunk and holding the flyer up to the boy.
“Tom,” I say, excitedly knocking on the window. “I’ll be right out with the money.”
“Cluck cluck,” goes Elderly, looking up at my apartment. “Busted.”
I put on the one pair of jeans I own, bought by Alice, and leave my apartment, which desperately needs to be vacuumed, there’s dirt everywhere. Did you know a new vacuum cleaner costs the same as a new dog?
Outside my apartment there’s a concrete staircase built into the hill, like all the houses on my block, and when Elderly sees me coming down, then crossing the street while waving at him, he throws the phone at the boy and jumps in his car. I’ve never seen him actually drive the Pontiac besides the occasional lucky burst to get to the other side of the street, so I’m not surprised when the engine doesn’t start, his head craned over the twisting key. I open the passenger door that makes a rusty hinge kind of sound, and I imagine it falling off, crumbling into red sand when I shut the door.
“Sorry, V,” he says dejected and leaning back. “You ever get bored and do something weird? That’s what I do with the flyers.”
“It was a good try,” I tell him.
“You think so?”
“Absolutely.”
I sit on the soft maroon-colored seat and consider severe work routine and ideal gates and a work program obsessed with increasing work productivity but tied to an individual’s happiness, this program I’m intrigued by because I have nothing else to be intrigued by. Maybe my office life really will improve, become something else entirely. I wonder if any of my coworkers will be in the PER program. Maybe Emily?
She wears purple everyday and her cubicle walls are covered with pictures of horses printed from the work printer. That’s how much she loves them. Emily seems so depressed – slumped shoulders, forced smile, calling her husband who doesn’t answer twice a day, too much sitting, too much cafeteria food – but on Friday she’s always insisting we can’t be unhappy on a Friday. But you can be unhappy on any day you want. Even a Saturday. This is a pretty innocuous thing, I know, Emily should be able to say whatever she wants, it’s not hurting anyone, but what makes it so sad, and what I relate to, I think, is knowing via Steve who remodeled her kitchen, that Emily never has weekend plans. Her body in her cubicle on Friday afternoon is her body on her couch come Saturday evening.
“E, I need to buy cupcakes,” I say, taking my car keys from my pocket. “Can I buy you dinner?”
The first time I met him he was installing handmade stop signs. Alice and I had finished moving the last of our belongings from the U-Haul when my brother-in-law dropped a table on the ramp. Hundreds of half inch glass cubes scattered down the street and toward Elderly who, glaring at us, gripped a wooden mallet.
“Sorry about that,” I said, extending my hand. “I’m Vincent. You live in that house?”
“I live in that car,” he said. “1995 Pontiac Bonneville. Best vehicle this country ever produced. And I own it.” He walked over and pressed the mallet against the window.
He wore blue gym shorts, no shirt, and his calves resembled torched pepperoni. From the neck up he was a hippie Santa Claus balding, a mad-man with wisps of white hair and a vacant stare. Still, there was something strangely handsome about him, in his scars – it felt like he had lived through some rich past experiences, had seen some real life shit, which I immediately admired.
“Nothing to apologize for the way these cars, too many cars in this world, drive down this street. Better they get a flat from the glass then kill the family dog,” said Elderly. “That’s what happens, you know. They drive too fast, they kill the family dog. Ends the family. You look surprised. But there’s no coming back from that, especially for a child. Politicians ignore me, that’s why I’m doing my own signs. They kill the family dog? You’re down, you’re done.”
The signs were torn Home Depot lawn bags, white house paint, and wooden stakes of various heights. Each one read SLOW DRIVE NOW FUCK. He had hammered them into the grassy space between curb and sidewalk down the entire block. They would be taken down later, violently, by a police officer with sleeve tattoos as the sun fell but the air didn’t cool – Elderly asleep in his car, myself questioning my new neighborhood from the front windows I couldn’t open.
On the drive to the 76 diner, an establishment with a thin metal statue of George Washington standing in a rowboat, Elderly rolls down his window, and finger counts every other house saying, “Poor people love the flag.”
I’ve always wondered about this, so I ask, “Where do they even buy them?”
“Buy them? They’ve had them in their family for generations. It means something to them.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
Elderly looks at me like I’m crazy. “That they aren’t poor.”
The 76 caters to the wizened on fixed incomes who enjoy huge portions for a low price. They consider this tremendous value because they can stretch their leftovers out over several meals, eating through the stomach cramps by envisioning money not spent. The air conditioning is either never on because the regulars have complained enough to keep it off, or it’s on chilling blast because other regulars have complained enough on the comment cards to keep it on. Tonight it’s on frozen blast. Brown cardigans, herringbone caps, black shawls, and pilling sweaters are everywhere.
In a corner booth, Elderly glances at the menu before clapping it shut and telling the waitress, at our table for the drink order, that he’ll have the clams casino.
“Turkey something,” I add.
“And two Bud heavies.”
Sitting across from Elderly, who is joyful and talkative now that he’s receiving a meal, downing his first beer in two gulps, I have nothing to talk to him about besides PER, which feels wrong because I also realize, watching him shimmy uncomfortably on the booth’s engulfing leather seat, that I know nothing about him as a person, even though I’ve seen him weekly, almost daily, for ten years. I’m not sure why I never took him out to eat before. I’ve given him food on occasion, typically on a holiday along with extra cans, but never out to eat. I’ve always assumed he was in Vietnam and not to bring it up.
“Clams have no head,” he says flippantly. “They’re just a flat heart cleaning the ocean.” He starts on his second beer. “Millions of clams stolen from the ocean only to go down a human throat until shat back.” He touches the hanging ceiling light, a Tiffany style knock-off with gold and avocado colors, and it sways. “Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you have to eat it,” he adds.
“But you just ordered clams,” I smirk. “It’s what you’re about to eat.”
“I ordered clams casino,” he says offended. “There’s a difference.”
“What difference?”
“Casino,” he replies.
“I had my meeting with Dorian Blood,” I say sipping water. “He runs a program called PER, stands for Patrol for Everyday Repetition. Increases office productivity by showing the workers their ideal life. You believe what our taxes are paying for?”
“Yeah, sounds religious,” Elderly says drinking his third beer. The beer is served in short amber glasses, same as the water, and it’s difficult to gauge just how much he’s consuming, but who cares, he lives in a fucking car.
He becomes relaxed, shoulders slumped, voice deepening as he taps the rim of the glass. “These companies are always on the hunt for new ways to save money, especially if it’s taxpayer money, real nice for the Leaders who don’t have to do a thing but write the check. Been this way since the first office. Why do you think they came up with the cubicle? With technology I’m sure the possibilities are pretty endless. And cheap. And terrifying.” He smiles. “What will we be doing to each other in the year 2037?”
“The logo is a computer screen with a waterfall coming out of it.”
“I’ve seen that in Tehran,” he says, stacking the jelly packets into a miniature wall he immediately knocks down with a quick whack of his knife.
“You lived in Tehran?”
Elderly closes his eyes and rests his head on the table. The skin of his skull appears paper thin.
The warm plate of clams casino is slid across the table and bumps him awake. The waitress apologies but she meant to do it.
“In the late 70s I was in Syria for a few months, but Iran was my home while setting up the phone systems.” Elderly says this like it’s no big deal, spooning out clams covered in breadcrumbs, bacon, and chives. I don’t even know his actual name, age, if he’s been married or has kids. “That’s where they had that image you described, well, not exactly, but this very 70s screen with liquid pouring out. But it was the art style at the time, this combination of old world caves and sand and temples mixed with American pop art, very futuristic in Tehran. We messed it up. We messed up the future. Do you know anything about Tehran? Now it’s offices and God. Doesn’t matter your thoughts on the Shah, just the images of Tehran then, the blue and orange box cars, the bell bottoms and long black hair, the street sales with spices and sterling silver. I could go on. There’s never been a place so quickly accelerating into the future as the past so desperately clung on.”
He’s on his last clam and stops again, entering these moments where he realizes, I think, he’s saying too much, it’s not like him. Maybe he just wants me to keep buying drinks, he needs his past to come flowing from him.
So I order a hot fudge sundae and three more amber glasses of beer to the disdain of the waitress who believes, correctly, we are poor tippers.
“Alice worked at the refugee center on Johnston,” I say reluctantly. “She taught the refugees how to apply for a job. She’s doing something similar in Chicago. A bigger position. Maybe has the title of Director. I hate when people have titles.”
“Who?”
“My ex-wife.”
Elderly wipes his face with the back of his hand. “Why would she help people who don’t need it?”
Sitting near us are two old people who have been arguing since we arrived. They remind me of Alice and I when we couldn’t communicate if it wasn’t an argument. When you’re in love all language is interesting. Now there’s a dispute over what to leave for the tip. The woman says, “Just because you’re stupid doesn’t mean it’s my fault” and the man, running his finger down the receipt, placidly throws a hard candy no-look into her blouse.
“Because,” I say turning back to Elderly, “RISSE helps refugees in this country. They go because they want help.”
“That’s what I said,” he responds, holding up one grubby finger toward the annoyed waitress, then pointing literally down and into his empty glass with the same finger. “They don’t need your help, they just want it.”
The waitress slides me the check. Even with my order of three dozen cupcakes, the Freedom Cupcake which is a specialty here, it’s less than a hundred bucks. Elderly went to the bathroom, and now he’s walking back out, slipping his shirt over his head.
“I was employed by AT&T,” he continues, pleasantly surprised I’ve bought him another beer with cash – he slides into the booth, the cushion exhaling air. He takes a sip before pushing the glass towards me. “The phone systems were these headsets the employees wore and beeped when they completed quotas. Thinking back, this kind of office, so American, is what Iran really hated. I mean, not everyone, just the most passionate, which is what matters if you want a revolution. It wasn’t about a decline in morals or women running around showing tits or smoking opium to “Gold Dust Woman,” nah, it was the corporations creeping in, the profits connected to happiness. Didn’t help that the Shah looked like a Hollywood actor playing a CEO. Sounds so simple now but the beep worked as a Pavlov’s dog kind of thing, kind of putting the worker into a daze, I don’t know. I don’t know anything else. Just installed the wiring. Just these workers were proficient and left work happy, even if still in the daze. Anyway, the system was pulled after the revolution. People want freedom but they don’t know what to do with it, look what happened, look what’s happening here. I was gone after Nida was arrested. Hey-o I’m drunk.” His head flops forward, seemingly unhinged before springing back up.
“My first wife,” he slurs, head swaying.
“You’re married?”
“Was.”
“What happened?”
“She was kidnapped by the Shah during a women’s protest.” He stops, and tears form in his wrinkled face as the boxes of cupcakes arrive by the waitress who doesn’t make eye-contact or say a word.
Outside, we pass an idling car with the old couple facing their windshield and screaming. The woman’s chin is frothed with her own spit. The man is shaking his head so fast that he has become smeared. Sometimes other people are hell. Sometimes it’s nice to have someone to argue with.
I drive Elderly back to his home, the 1995 Pontiac Bonneville, lit-up under a streetlamp.
I walk in the dark holding cupcakes for Francesca. Up the concrete steps and into my apartment to vacuum and consider my happiness.