Bell is calling while I’m at the grocery store buying prepackaged spaghetti and meatballs for Francesca. I figure it’s a way to apologize for everything I’ve done or not done in the office lately. This morning I left Alice sleeping in bed, still not one cut or sign of what happened last night. I’m not sure how many hours she should sleep, but she needs the rest, the recharge.
I haven’t called Alice back. At first I had no desire to do so, but now I’m thinking about it. Last night was a nightmare. Alice is not sustainable. But maybe? No, I don’t think so. I’m happy in my life now. Maybe the gate will correct itself. It’s still early. But I need the real. No. I’m happy in my life now. Yes. I’m happy in my life now. I’m happy in my life now. Things are just a little… fucked up. Things are just a little… hole-heavy.
“St. Peters,” states Bell. It sounds like he’s driving with the windows down. I bet he’s in short sleeves again. Running red lights because he has sirens. You would think with everything happening in A-ville he would have more crucial things to do, but I’m not surprised, I once saw a cop riding a bike down a hill past a burning bodega.
I turn around an endcap with 2 for $4 bags of Doritos. An employee is stuffing the shelves with unbelievable speed, slicing boxes open with a box cutter, throwing the bags onto the shelves slightly faster than the people pulling them off. It’s a great deal. But what the employee is doing alone is amazing in its proficiency. He’s a machine, it’s art, but no one records him.
“Peters,” repeats Bell, slightly louder, the phone cutting out. “The old man there. Spent…found at the park. He asked for you. There? Hello?”
“Yeah,” I say, but my head is crammed with Alice, the thought of her as impermanent, something withdrawing, someone I have no control over, someone or some thing with the option of leaving.
I get in line as Bell continues to talk, but I can’t hear him with all the wind blowing into his phone. It takes a second for me to realize he’s telling me where Elderly is.
The man with the blood-red suspenders, Caesar Salad, is here again, holding, what else, a Caesar salad. What you have to realize is your circle is very tight, a radius of five miles or so, and the same people are inside this radius performing the same tasks as you. In my radius is Alice, coworkers, guitar playing neighbor, pizza eating squirrel, deaf person singing, Shawl Lady, Bell, Dorian, Fang Lu, Billy Krol, Elderly, Rudy above RIP, and Caesar Salad. Who am I missing? Someone or so many? Those in my radius including myself are on repeat, and when we’re gone new people will replace us, doing similar things.
During my painting “career” my favorite film was The Exterminating Angel because one scene is dinner guests entering a castle twice. You think it’s a mistake, a glitch in the film, but it’s just the guests re-entering their reality again. This is what life feels like to me, hoping to crack through and into something else, another chance, another dimension, but you’re just doing the same moves.
“Thank you,” I say to Bell.
“For?”
“Telling me where he is.”
“Not much of a favor,” says Bell, and the sirens come on, which means either an emergency or he wants to zoom through a stop sign.
I decide to do something strictly against the guidelines, that is, call in sick to work and go to the hospital. I lock in on Elderly. I shake everything else from my head.
My routine will be compromised. I won’t complete the suggested daily data entry, my face into a computer so important in the maintenance, the headset, the water, the watch flashing with light and logo, but I need to see Elderly because it feels like one of those defining moments, and if I don’t show up I won’t be able to live with myself. My imagination of what could have happened to him will only be worse. Besides, I can get back on track with PER, Dorian isn’t even around. Also, the Alice problems are glaring, and if the real Alice is trying to reach me maybe full reality is possible again.
I leave the line at the grocery store, place the prepackaged spaghetti and meatballs into where the rotisserie chickens stay warm, and the guy stocking the Doritos gives me a big thumbs-up.
I walk across the street to the bus stop. I wait in the summer-heat under a metal awning in front of a smashed CVS sign. Taking the bus is faster than walking to my car, I think, or just running. It’s so hot outside it hurts. The bus is approaching in the near distance, sagging to the sidewalk with each stop. Quickly, I email Francesca while standing inside someone’s vape cloud.
A shower curtain is pulled across and around where the bus driver sits. Light-blue with slits of white rain, the curtain is hung above with plastic laundry clips and twisted metal wires in a half circle. On the floor, big army boots and a ring of garbage. I pay my fare and find a seat.
I love public transportation, but can’t remember the last time I rode the bus. Like a library, it should be free. Another one of Elderly’s ideas, so good. Taking the bus feels right to go and see him. He’ll appreciate it when I tell him.
A huge man wearing a suit with the dress shirt cuffs covering his hands sits in a wheelchair behind the driver, the wheels locked by tiny chains to the floor. The man takes up so much space it’s hard not to stare. He appears naturally a part of the wheelchair. His face is perfectly shaven and shellacked in sweat, tortoiseshell glasses resting low on his nose, mouth parted in a stunned expression. I’m sitting slightly behind him, but on the opposite side, facing him.
“The Body,” says the person next to me. She leans over when she speaks, and means to whisper, but she doesn’t, she’s loud.
“Hey, I know you,” I say, unable to believe how truly small my radius is. Out the window the sky darkens to a violent purple. The first raindrops smear across the glass.
“I’m going to talk,” she says rolling her shoulders back, “but don’t you dare say you know me.”
“We work in the same building. We ride the elevator together.”
“I’ve ridden this line every day for three weeks and The Body is always on it,” she continues, adjusting her shawl. Her green flats are dirty now. On her lap is an open purse showing three prescription vials. “I’ll tell you one thing, if I was in as bad a shape as him, I wouldn’t go to work. But I guess it’s inspiring? I’ve taken hundreds of elevators. Big deal.”
“Who are you?”
She shrugs. “Wait a second,” she says, now excited, “he’s going to do it.”
I shift over, but the seats are designed to cradle an ass like mine, so there’s only so far I can move, I’m kind of stuck in the mold.
“Wait for it.”
If you don’t have earphones or a book to read on the bus you look like a fucking creep in these sideways facing seats. You have to stare out the window or pick at the skin around your thumbs or read old texts on your phone. How do you get a job as a bus designer? With Shawl Lady, I look out the window, but we’re really looking at The Body, waiting for something, whatever she means, to happen.
“I know,” she continues, “you don’t believe me that he’s going to do it. But just a few more minutes and he’ll do it. I’d bet you a hundred dollars if I had it.”
I look out the window.
His spine becomes rigid like he’s being electrocuted, head wrenched left, toes diving into the floor. One thick neck vein pulsates as he tries to control his body, the instrument of his torture. Whatever he does it doesn’t work, the wheelchair bounces like we’re racing over potholes, chains rattle, and something inside him squeals.
The driver says, “You got this, Earl.”
Shawl Lady’s elbow nudges my ribs. “Told you he was going to do it.”
“Remember what we talked about yesterday,” says the driver. “That this too shall pass.”
I hate life.
I love life.
I just want Alice back.
The rain comes hard, and The Body stops, his head hung, he appears to be sleeping, his muscles zapped of energy, the cuffs of his shirt touching the floor.
“Works for the State,” says Shawl Lady. “Never misses a day.”
“Pretty depressing.”
“No,” she says pressing her purse into her chest. “He’s completely out of his mind. He’s both on the ride and off the ride. Oh, you didn’t hear that from me. Sitting at a computer all day doesn’t necessarily feel like it? Not too shabby. Here’s my stop. And listen, you’re little secret is safe with me. I’m not telling him because I’m rooting for you guys.” She stands by gripping the metal pole, pulling herself to her feet in a smooth motion. “Also, you didn’t speak with me today, yes?”
The bus travels across town, away from downtown fires and through the suburbs where the streets are named after renaissance painters. On one side of the hospital, the police training academy, and on the other side, a law school with a bad reputation. Each brick building has sprawling front lawns fenced-in by black iron gates. The sun illuminates everything into the unreal, which, given my life, feels right.
Everyone – the sick, the visiting the sick, nurses and janitors, an entire community – exits the bus at the hospital. I rarely watch the Leaders when they’re on State TV, but one time I remember a Leader’s mouth saying there were two types of people: those who are sick and those who will be sick. They wanted to pass legislation making it illegal to have six hospital beds in a room designed to hold only two, but didn’t have the votes.
I’m riding the elevator with four men in lab coats holding trays of blood. One is a surgeon, and wears one of those thin caps shoestring-tied in the back, but this one isn’t hospital-green, it’s the colors of the flag. I step off on floor ten and start looking at the room numbers, searching for 1008.
The hospital – the lighting, nurses station, the cream colored walls and flower paintings – is identical to an office, if you swapped out the beds for cubicles, made slight adjustments to the layout. But it has the same feel. I hate this realization, and being here reminds me of Mom and Dad. I didn’t need to visit them, that’s true. I didn’t need to see Dad connected to that red machine pumping air into his lungs. I didn’t need to see Mom attached to a wall of wires.
Elderly is sleeping under fuzzy blue sheets. They’ve cut his hair and shaved off his beard, a few red nicks from the razor on his jawline. His hospital gown is tied neatly around his neck and there’s yellow lotion on his skin, little dunes of it under his eyes. He looks waxed. If it wasn’t for the hospital setting you could dress him in a suit and give him an office job. I imagine, when he arrived, someone said to clean him up, look at this bum, or maybe a new hospital program to have the sick look their best possible and this is the result, which isn’t Elderly, but someone else. I feel sick. On his wrist a purple bracelet says FALL RISK and a yellow one DO NOT RESUSITATE. Under the sheets, one ratty blue arm sticking above and against its head, is his stuffed animal named Millionaire. Standing over Elderly, I carefully pull Millionaire up so their heads are touching as they sleep. I’m still capable of sentimental things.
I plop down in a leather chair. I should call Alice. I work myself up into a phony confidence I once channeled during conference calls. What is Alice doing right now? Does she even exist when I’m not there? Maybe she only appears when I open the front door. Maybe my body near her is the trigger to her appearance.
On television is an ad for a salad spinner. Then a local news story with a masked protestor throwing a garbage bin through a Bank of America window. Everyone thinks in twenty years we’ll be living in a dystopia, all storefronts blasted out, banker’s heads on spikes, but in twenty years I just think that no one will care. The protesters will give up when they learn how powerful and indifferent the State is. Good people become corrupt with titles. I’m being negative again, but I’ve seen cruel things done by friendly politicians. So much wasted money, and they love to breed.
I’m not calling any Alice.
The nurse sneezes as she slips the needle in. After she leaves with the vials of blood, Elderly opens his eyes. He leans forward and looks toward the door. “She gone? I like to pretend I’m asleep when they do it.”
“E,” I say, and put my hand on his leg.
He leans back. “You know what I could really go for?”
“What?”
“Big burrito.”
In a hospital you order breakfast by pushing numbers on a phone. As he pokes each number with a way too long press, he says he had a heart attack in connection with poor blood circulation. “Well,” he says, casually, “Omar thinks my feet are kaput. I don’t know what they’re going to do about them, but they seem fine to me, they still work like feet, just don’t look like feet.”
Sitting up, tugging the blankets at his thighs, his bandaged feet are stump shaped, and it’s enough for me to understand I have no power, nothing I have or could say will help this situation, could have helped Mom or Dad, I was just there, like I’m just here.
When I was a kid you had to put your time in during family events even if you didn’t want to be there. Birthday parties lasted eight hours. A hospital visit was a day trip. It was more about obligation than love. I don’t know which one I’m acting on now. I don’t know when, in my existence, I’ve known why I’m doing what I’m doing. Some people can run off a list of personality traits describing themselves, and at a young age know what they want to do for a career. They know what they want in a house and car. I’ve never known. Once on a home show I heard a guy tell a real estate agent, “If it’s not Craftsman style you can forget about it.”
“I was running in the park,” continues Elderly.
“From?”
“What do you mean from?”
“For exercise? Someone was chasing you? Was it someone from PER?”
He folds his hands on his chest. “The body is a temple, V,” he says condescendingly, “and you have to condition it.”
“Just thought –”
“I have a gym membership.”
“You do?”
“I don’t.”
A fat calico cat slinks past the room. Elderly says it’s Graves. That if she naps in your bed after midnight you don’t wake up in the morning. She comes in to either comfort you as you ascend to heaven, or take your soul to hell, according to Elderly.
I could believe him. Everything makes sense if you let it. Someone once looked at the stars and saw an eagle, twin boys, a crab, a woman falling.
“A cop told me you own four houses,” I say hesitantly, “and that you’re married.”
Clean shaven, his hair styled like a little boys school picture, he doesn’t look anything like Elderly. “If you don’t have someone to love houses are traps,” he says.
“But you are married?”
“Martha drives a Lexus,” says Elderly. “A Lexus SUV.”
“Is she here?”
“Fuck, I’m tired. What is this junk?” He yanks weakly on a tube inserted into his forearm. Around the needle a piece of clear tape unsticks. “What’s going to happen to me? Never mind, don’t tell me.”
“I could ask. Want me to ask?”
“No, it’s better not knowing. If you see them tell them I don’t want to know.”
He doses off again, his mouth open and drooling.
I leave the room. Graves is walking the perimeter of the hall so I follow. In one room the lights are off and tied to an empty bed is a silver helium balloon with the number 95. Graves walks in, leaps onto the bed, and curls herself into a comfortable ball on the pillow. I keep walking. In another room I see a child in a reclining chair holding a Dinosaur coloring book. But most of the rooms are empty, beds curtained off, a biohazard bin in a corner, beeping machines, a crucifix cross on each wall. Even with the curtains open the rooms feel cold and terrifying.
At the nurses station I ask to speak with the doctor treating Elderly. All the nurses chew gum and have ponytails and tired eyes brightened with make-up. If I had a daughter I would tell her: You will meet very few people in this world who love what they’re doing. So the trick is to be one of the few that has something inside them that needs protecting, but don’t let anyone else know it, just keep doing it, protecting it, letting it grow and giving you meaning.
A tall doctor, not too dissimilar to the veterinarian who treated Rudy comes walking down the hall, shakes my hand, and introduces himself.
“As his son,” says Omar. He guides me into a lounge area, off to the side of the nurse’s station, with enough space for one family. A TV sits in the corner on a Formica table. The news is on. More protests. More buildings curtained in fire. It doesn’t feel real, and I wonder if it’s PER, the fantasy covering what I’m experiencing and not working the way it should be. My reality could be poking holes through my film, but there’s no way to know without talking to Dorian.
“No, his neighbor,” I say, declining to take a seat. “He asked for me through Sergeant Bell.”
“Who?”
“Sergeant Bell,” I repeat. “The police.”
Omar sighs and flips through a chart. “Has no family and lives in his car, hmm,” he comments. “Maybe a month left, difficult to tell with circulation. Think you could convince him to live in one of the homes until hospice? His wife doesn’t seem open to any possibilities.” He closes the chart. Then he steps too close to me and peers into my eyes. “Sir, have you been drinking?”
“I don’t drink.”
“Your pupils,” he says, turning his head. “Highly unusual color and dilation. Would you mind?”
“I would.”
Two nurses who have been talking about skin grafts are now looking at us.
“Five minutes. Just take a seat over there and I’ll check your blood pressure,” he says, grabbing my wrist and guiding me toward a room.
“Please don’t touch me,” I say nervously. “I’m late for work and it’s extremely important I get there. I need to get to work because I have work to do, at work. Don’t you understand?”
I’m starting to sweat and trying to use my professional voice, but it doesn’t sound like me. Inside my own mouth my words echo. “I have to do my work today,” I continue. “I have to go to work because I have to, I have to do my work. I have days that add up to my retirement, and if I miss those days I won’t have any retirement.” Those visiting loved ones are walking from their rooms and into the hallway to watch. “It’s important, you know. I have to go to work. I have to be at my computer right now. Don’t you understand?”
“Of course,” says Omar, releasing his grip. He does the slightest of head shakes to a security guard approaching from down the hall.
“Thank you,” I say.
Omar keeps his distance following me to Elderly’s room. On the way I nearly trip over Graves, I have to do an awkward legsapart jump, and from one of the rooms, someone, only legs packed in ice visible on a bed, claps.
I walk into Elderly’s room, tell him he’s going to be released, and say that I’ve found Rudy.
“Lying is important,” he says, his head compressed backward into three soft pillows. “You have to have liars to make any of this work.” He waves his hand around the room to signify the “any of this” and sighs. “Thanks for the cans, V.”
His food arrives via a bald man in all white hospital scrubs with an American flag pin over his heart. The tray is placed on a swivel stand then positioned over Elderly’s lap. Taco salad. The bald man unfolds a napkin and begins tucking it into Elderly’s collar. It seems humiliating, so I’m surprised when Elderly smiles, exposing his neck.
Elderly asks about the training, and I tell him it’s Alice, all I see is Alice. I say the real Alice is trying to reach me, and I’m not sure what to do. Alice, I confess, isn’t exactly Alice. I’m not directly asking Elderly for advice, but it comes across that way.
“That’s funny,” he snorts, and blinks slowly. “There’s no way out.”
“The Tehran workers,” I say, placing my hands on the edge of the bed where his legs are. “Were they happy?”
“For a little while,” he wheezes, “but like everything else, it wore off.”
“I thought there was a connection between them and what’s happening with PER.”
“Why? Because you wanted it to?”
“I just thought.”
“V, I don’t feel so hot. V, I know where all this is going. My age, where I am, I know.”
With a napkin I wipe his chin that is covered in salsa and lettuce strands. He seems to have no feeling in his face. I tip the plastic cup of water at his lips. I adjust his pillows and the angle of the mechanical bed and I sit and put my time in.
I adjust his blankets when he says he’s cold even though it’s warm in the room.
I itch his leg where he has an itch that he can’t reach.
The last story he tells me is how he once saw an old friend’s name in the obituary. He walked five miles in a snowstorm to the wake. When he arrived he realized it wasn’t his friend, just someone with the same name.
Francesca asks why I’m here when I called out. As I pour coffee I flatly respond that my stomach is better. If you want to dominate an office power-shout, “Good morning!” when you walk in, and if you want to skip a day, say you have the shits.
Basically my email was that I needed a large amount of time to sit on the toilet. Disgusting, I know, I don’t like it either, but it works because no one wants to talk about what the body is capable of. So much shitting.
“Just be sure you correct your time sheet.,” says Francesca. “I heard the last one had mistakes.”
“Thank you,” I tell Francesca. “Thank you very much.”
“No, thank you very much.”
I’m in the Zone, head woozy with the day. I texted Alice I need to work late again. Settling into six hours of data entry will strengthen the support beams of my gate. What’s unusual is that she doesn’t respond. People looking at their phones look depressed and I’m sure I’m no exception waiting for her response, especially sitting in a cubicle. The little gray cloud with the flashing three dots appears, which means she’s alive and typing.
I texted the wrong Alice. It’s an easy mistake, given PER Alice was never saved in my phone, only the previous texts that I deleted. The real Alice answers with a long stream of question marks and, “Just wanted to say I’m coming to A-ville. Why won’t you answer?”
On more than one occasion I’ve fantasized about throwing my phone from an office window and here’s another.
My first reaction is to text back, “Wrong Alice.” My second reaction is what if they met, PER Alice reaching out to touch Alice. I stare at the picture of her in New York in front of the bodega mural. I slip my phone in my pocket, decide to go to floor twenty and get Dorian’s opinion. Maybe this has happened before. Once again, I run away from the real.
Dorian has his feet up on his desk with a picture of Ronald Reagan on his thighs. A salad more bleu cheese than greens wilts in a plastic container next to his laptop, a screensaver of a fighter-jet ascending with silver and gold exhaust. The carpet is filthy with lunch crumbs and coffee stains, and the windows, which I thought were locked on every floor, are wedged open with tiny wooden blocks, a warm breeze blowing through and flicking the corners of papers. He doesn’t say to sit, but I sit in the same spot as before, during the interview.
“The best social program is a job,” mumbles Dorian with his thumb on Reagan’s hair. “As a person with a job, do you believe that?”
I don’t want to answer because I want to ask about Alice. “I don’t know, but my gate –”
“Right,” he interrupts. “Everyone who participates wants things. Why are you so different?”
“I’m not sure,” I shrug.
“Well, you’re not the first. We had a woman before who saw birds. I’m serious. Her entire house just covered, inside-and-out with birds, even splashing around in her sink.” Dorian smiles sadly. “Tremendous worker though. But it’s okay for you to continue. I don’t see any real serious problem. That’s why you’re here?”
“There’s something else.”
“I have to tell you something. We don’t plan on staying much longer. We’ve been very successful. The best social program is a job. Be honest. Do you believe that?”
“I don’t understand,” I say. “It’s over?”
He says they’ve hit their quota for participants, the office is full (I didn’t see a soul on the entire floor), not much for them to do now but sit and monitor. He shrugs in a manner to convey boredom. He has the drained expression of someone who has achieved something, relished it, and is now waiting for what’s next. C-ville is their next stop which he doesn’t seem to care for. He says Fang Lu and Billy Krol have already begun the screenings. He says pizza in C-ville is lasagna, but I don’t laugh or try to correct him.
Each time I try and speak he interrupts me.
“Pizza,” he repeats, “like lasagna.”
He’s in a good mood looking out the window while discussing his marital problems. But when I finally cut him off to tell him about the real Alice contacting me, there’s genuine concern. His expression, along with his head, snaps back-to-center, facing me.
“Wait,” he says. “What?”
“The actual Alice,” I repeat. “The real one.”
“Here? Now?”
“Maybe not right now.”
“Are you seeing her? Are you planning to?”
“I’m not sure. Can I?”
“Why didn’t you mention this before?”
“Because of the rules. I didn’t want to mess up my gate.”
I mention the phone call. How Alice must have seen the incoming call, she was standing over it in the kitchen and I said it was Alice calling. I tell him how I texted the wrong Alice. How I broke one of the rules and she tried to destroy herself in the kitchen. I describe the glitches.
He looks a little sick, physically shocked by what I’m saying, but he’s interested, transfixed on everything I’m confessing, wanting more, questioning why none of this was caught by Fang Lu or Billy Krol or Kate Helms, a name I don’t recognize and then realize, my heart racing, could be Shawl Lady.
He wants to know why wasn’t any of this brought to his attention earlier, but too late for that, too late to worry, now he wants to know everything about Alice.
If I updated my bag of holes list it would look like:
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
• Alice
“The wobbling of the gate,” Dorian says sorrowfully.
I try and smile but just exhale nervous air. “Sounds bad.”
“I’m thinking,” he mumbles. “My guess is you’ll have to choose, but hold on a second.” He opens a drawer.
I do my nervous cough. “Choose?”
“Decide which one you want. Together they could have consequences. Glitches we can fix, it’s still early, but this, hold on a sec…honestly…I’m not sure what…” He’s shuffling through papers on his desk now. “But I can’t see, I can’t see a positive outcome. Could lose both in the overlap. Wait here.”
Dorian returns holding a white binder with the waterfall logo on the cover. Inside is the article I found on the internet, and what appears to be other papers he has written. As he flips through, the articles separated by some sort of color coded tab organization, there’s the anime sumo wrestler Crying Sub-God with the white tear. “Hey,” I say, reaching over and pointing on the paper and stopping him. “I’ve seen that.”
He puts a finger on the sumo wrestler. “This guy?”
I tell him I received an email with the same picture after our first meeting.
“Oh, that’s nothing. Krol sends it on day one of training,” he says, and continues to flip through the pages while settling into his chair. “To see if you’ll click on it. Participants who watch porn never access their gate.”
At the end of the binder there’s an article that freezes Dorian. I look away, pretending to think about something else, suddenly feeling awkward. It’s odd to look out the door and see nothing but vacant office space, cubicle walls with no person inhabiting them. Either Fang Lu or Billy Krol had hung a Fourth of July banner. It’s still push-pinned, one corner only on the far wall, but now drooping into the water fountain.
Dorian puts his feet back on the desk and places the binder on his lap, not to relax, but to shield the text from me, I think. He hums and touches his lips as one eyebrow rises.
“Absolutely,” he says, tossing the binder back onto the desk, “too risky for both realms.”
“Both realms?”
“That’s right.”
“What am I supposed to do?”
I think about Alice at home, how she’s Alice at the end of the marriage, where the tension was so great that every sentence had the weight of a weapon. If Alice at the castle was the peak there’s only a decline coming. The glitches I could have lived with.
“I think the situation,” he says, now leaning forward, the storm clouds dimming the room, “is new and fascinating territory, but my concern is Alice viewing the real Alice while inside your gate, what her reaction would be in such a situation. And just the mental strain it would put on you, depending on the reaction, I mean, it’s already affecting you.” He smiles, proudly. “If Alice is shown herself…The interweaving of film and reality is where the wobbling of the gate, your entire atmosphere…Never had this come up before.” With both hands he smooths his hair backward. “My recommendation is to collapse the gate before it’s too much for anyone involved. Especially yourself.”
“Okay, sure, I’ll do anything.”
“It’s such an interesting case.”
“Lucky me.”
“Like something sent from outer space.”
I sign a release form with the PER logo watermarked in the center. He reaches below and to the far right side of his desk and opens the same drawer and out comes the white box again. I can’t imagine wearing a second gold watch, what would that look like, but I go along with it. With my arm extended across the desk he uses a twisted paperclip device with little teeth to unlock the watch from my skin. There’s a burning sensation so I turn my palm up and see a dot of raised blood on my wrist. Dorian hands me a cotton ball and clear tape. If I was drugged then it all makes sense. I have a sudden flood of anxiety because I don’t want to lose any version of Alice, I want all Alice. Another wave of anxiety. It’s already too much for me to handle.
“It was a drug?” I ask, blotting the blood.
“Not entirely. Technology and nature combinations have yet to be sufficiently explored, but we rely on what we know to get you into the gate. Are you familiar with visual completion theory? It was mentioned in the packet. That helps as well, once the desire is located, then the repetition training is what really activates it all,” he says, handing me another roll of clear tape because I can’t get this one to work.
The sky is dark and dreary, and I cover my small wound. If stars had eyes what would lightning look like to them? In the distance, three columns of black smoke. Did we set a record for thunderstorms yet? I want more records in my life. Fires are being extinguished by the rain and I’m going to lose Alice again.
“A-ville,” says Dorian, relaxed now and nodding at the window, “I’ve never seen such a place.”
“It will be fine,” I mutter, thinking about Alice. I’ve been saying It will be fine my entire life and it has gotten me nowhere.
“The collapse shouldn’t be more than a few days,” he says. “Because your training was so successful, shutting it down should be easy.”
I ask how he can be so calm now. He says there’s no other choice. He’s looking at the Ronald Reagan picture again. “We’ve had to collapse one or two gates before, clients who just couldn’t handle what they saw, like the bird lady. It became overwhelming. Birds stuffed in the plumbing. Birds in the water heater. Birds flattened under the mattress. Birds chewed-up in the garbage disposal. Who could live with all those birds? Plus, she couldn’t concentrate on her work, a major deficiency that you didn’t experience in the slightest.” He sounds like a cop, a politician, a lawyer, a Leader, no emotion, no compassion whatsoever.
“But this is a person,” I say.
He hands me a printed out PowerPoint slide with an lime-green background and white text illustrating how the gate will end.
The subtraction of the watch, the pills, the repetition work, all the methods, are important, but you also have to break the rules many times over for the gate to properly close. A side list is precautions to take, how to react properly to the vanishing film, which in my case is Alice leaving me again, Alice as a soon-to-be memory, soon-to-be fading into the first.
“I think we’re all set,” he says.
“Did I do a good job?” I ask, surprising myself at the question. It just forces its way out of me, the child-to-parent feeling of being in the presence of Dorian Blood, who seems surprised by the question as well, his face kind of scrunches up as he sits back. One time Dad said I could ask him any question in the world, I was seven maybe, so I asked what a blow-job was. I thought Dad was going to fly backwards through the walls of our house when he heard that question and I think Dorian might too. More lightning outside and more columns of smoke and fires smoldering throughout A-ville, making it anew.
“You did,” he answers.
I settle into the Zone and don’t do a thing because I’m not sent any work. The PER System with the waterfall logo is no longer accessible. So I reactivate Facebook, and like a hummingbird jump from site-to-site. It’s so easy. I become distracted by people who don’t care about me. It’s enjoyable.
I need to concentrate on the real Alice. What would her ideal gate be? A $20 minimum wage, universal healthcare, a four-day workweek, no prisons, high-end grocery stores built in the poorest of neighborhoods. An ideal gate that doesn’t involve herself. Is peace an option, even in fantasy, if you live here? I’m being negative again. But the thickness and strength of such a film seems impossible.
My work day is a typical work day before PER, before the podium incident. Steve, from his cubicle and directed at no one in particular says he dislikes walnuts. Yes! Michelle slurs – sounds like she drank during lunch – that you either have a country or you don’t. Zing! Emily is into the Muslim ban, and how really it wouldn’t cost much to charter a thousand flights to send “all of them” back home. Ba-boom! I lower my head until my forehead is resting on the edge of my desk. There’s a lot of crumbs on the floor, and what appears to be a half slice of pizza. I guess ants can’t make it up this far, but one time we had a pigeon stuck in the wall and listened to it for weeks. Every morning Steve would slam his fist against the wall to see if it would chirp or be silent. They cheered when it went silent.
The tape comes off my wrist, and soon after the cotton ball falls, my wrist drips blood.
I wake up to Michelle saying, “At the funeral, she laid down in the casket to take a selfie.” In the reflection of my monitor I’m a self-portrait disappearing.
I’m in the bathroom and my phone is ringing from the living room. I took a shower because I walked home in the rain and my hair smelled liked smoke, according to Alice, who didn’t move from the couch when I came in. I rub a glob of clear-green lotion into my palms and cover my face. All things considered, I don’t look so bad.
On my walk home I considered the following: if Alice is divorcer Alice, and if PER can’t handle a person as the focal point of an ideal gate, and the real Alice is coming back for whatever reason, then what choice do I have? I don’t need to preserve my gate, I need to preserve my future. I need to move toward my retirement while working on my reality: the real Alice.
“What’s that?” I yell from the bathroom.
Alice is talking to someone in the living room. Maybe my eyes do look odd, Omar was right, a washed-out brown, the shape too is a bit squashed or, just, off. On the fogged glass I write GATE then smear it with my fingers. Alice shouts my name, and when I don’t respond immediately she shouts it again.
I walk out, rubbing lotion onto my arms, trying to act as normal as possible, and she’s in the middle of the living room holding my phone out to me. I haven’t decided when to begin dismantling the gate. She looks so real. She looks so alive.
“It’s Alice,” says Alice.
A tidal wave of anxiety washes over me. PER Alice can communicate with the real Alice.
“Hey you, it’s Alice,” repeats Alice.
“What?”
“Your wife,” she says, tapping the phone against my hand. “You haven’t been returning her calls?”
“I don’t know what any of this is,” I say, taking the phone like I don’t really want it. “Must be a wrong number,” I say glancing at the screen (it’s really Alice) “or a crank call, or, I don’t know. I’ve been getting a lot of telemarketers lately. Have you been getting a lot of telemarketers lately?”
“Stop being weird,” says Alice, “and talk to Alice.”
“I’m not being weird.”
“Then talk to Alice,” replies Alice.
I turn my back and whisper hello into the phone while walking toward the kitchen.
“Vincent,” says Alice, “why won’t you talk to me?”
One thought I had is that Alice previously called because one of her parents had died. Maybe she didn’t have anyone to talk to who had experienced losing a parent. When we were married, her mother had a dozen ailments and continued to live through the diagnosis. They could have ganged up. But this isn’t true. Alice is involved in the rebranding effort at RISSE around the corner and wants to get coffee. She wants me again. Saturday morning. She ignores the fact that herself answered the phone. Hiding in the bedroom, I say that sounds great, coffee, sure, I like coffee, great, perfect. She says, “I’m looking forward to it.”
“That was Alice,” I tell Alice walking into the living room. She’s on the couch, eating gummy worms. My first attempt at dismantling the gate feels wrong. “I’m going to see her again.”
She shrugs. “So?”
“I’m meeting Alice.”
“You already said that you fucking idiot.”
“You’re not Alice,” I tell Alice.
She gets up and walks toward the bathroom and her movements are lethargic. For a second, her left leg looks like a star-filled sky, and the skin on the back of her neck is a flaky moon-gray. I sit on the edge of the couch thinking this is it, the end, the collapse.
I run through the six rules in my head while itching my wrist.
Water is running in the bathroom and it runs for a long time, too long for her to still be washing her hands or her face or brushing her teeth. Outside, the sun is below the clouds now so it can do whatever it wants, but it’s raining in the light. Everything I see in my life is unbelievable. Maybe Alice is gone. But she comes out with a towel pressed to her damp face, and into the living room, smiling like Alice, and it’s impossible to believe she isn’t real and will ever leave.