Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 2

I'm at the dentist.

I'm at the prison dentist with a hernia.

I am in love.

I am in withdrawal.

I am in love with someone who doesn't love me back. I wish I had a hernia.

She takes me to see her father.

He has the look. I remember it. My own father looked this way.

He is living someone else's life. He's nothing more than a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone's convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.

The thing hanging over us, the thing that's uncomfortable to talk about is that we could do it. We could get him out.

We stand there in silence for what seems like, for what is, way too long.

Finally, Kirthi can't take it.

He has only four years left on his mortgage, she tells me.

But, see, the way the market works, sellers like us, we never get full value on our time. It's like a p.a.w.nshop. You hock your pocket watch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go get it a week later and you'll have to pay four times that to get it back.

Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don't know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don't know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn't so great as it is, but I just don't know if I could do it.

I am in surgery. For my hernia.

I am bleeding to death.

It doesn't hurt at all.

Things progress. We move in together. We avoid planning for the future. We hint at it. We talk around it.

I am being shot at.

I am being slapped in the face.

I go home.

I rest for a few hours.

I come back and do it again.

When I turned thirteen, my mother told me the story. She sat me down in the kitchen and explained.

"The day your father decided to sell his life," she said, "I wore my best dress, and he wore a suit. He combed his hair. He looked handsome. I remember he was so calm. You wore your only pair of long pants. We walked to the bank. You rode on his back."

"I remember that," I said.

"A man with excellent hair came out from some office in the back and sat down behind the desk."

I remember that, too, I told her.

You get, we got, forty thousand a year, she said.

My dad sold his life for a fixed annuity, indexed to inflation at three percent annually, and a seventy percent pension if he made it full term: forty years, age seventy, and he could stop, he could come back to us.

There were posters everywhere, my mother said, describing that day, the reunion day. The day when you've made it, you've done it, you're done.

There was a video screen showing a short film describing the benefits of mortgage, the glorious day of reunion. We would all drink lemonade in the hot summer air.

Just forty years, it said.

In the meantime, your family will be taken care of. You will have peace of mind.

"Time is money," the video said. "And money is time. Create value out of the most valuable a.s.set you own."

Don't miss out on a chance of a lifetime.

When we went home, I remember, my father went to lie down. He slept for twelve hours, twice as long as normal, and in the morning, while I was still asleep, he rose from bed, washed and shaved his face, combed his hair. By the time I came down the stairs, he was just finishing up his breakfast, a piece of toast and a hard-boiled egg. I walked over to him and tried to hug him back, but I didn't have the strength. My arms were limp. So I just let him hug me, and then he went out the door and that was the last time I saw my father.

Things stop progressing with Kirthi.

Things go backward.

And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it's gone. It won't come back. We both know it.

Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same s.p.a.ce, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has collapsed our shared s.p.a.ce. She has closed herself to me.

A week after Kirthi moves out, her father pa.s.ses away.

My shift manager will not let me off to go to the funeral. I live through funerals all day, every day. Funerals for strangers, crying for other people, that's more or less what I do for a living. And the one time I want to go to an actual funeral, the one time it would be for someone I care about, I'll be here, in this cubicle, staring at a screen.

Kirthi doesn't even ask if I would like to go anyway.

I should go.

I will be fired if I go.

But I don't have her anymore. If I leave, I won't have a job, either. I'll never get her back if I don't have a job. I'm never getting her back anyway.

I don't even know if I want her back.

But maybe this is why I don't have her, could never, would never have had her. Maybe the problem isn't that I don't have a life. Maybe the problem is that I don't want a life.

I go to work.

I open tickets.

I close tickets.

When I get home my apartment seems empty. It's always empty, but today, more empty. The emptiness is now empty.

I call her. I don't know what to say. I breathe into the phone.

I call her again. I leave a message. I know a guy in the billing department, I say. We could get some extra capacity, no one would know, find an open line. I could feel it for you. Your grief. I could bury your father for you.

Three days later, when I get to work, there is a note on my desk, giving the time of the funeral service. Just the time and, underneath it, she scrawled, okay.

Okay.

I arrange for the hour. At the time, I open the ticket.

I am expecting a funeral.

I am not at a funeral.

I can't tell exactly where I am, but I am far away. In a place I don't recognize. She has moved to a place where I will never find her. Probably where no one will ever find her. A new city. A new life.

She paid for this time herself. She wanted to let me in. For once. Just once. She must have used up everything she had saved. The money was supposed to be for her father but now, no need.

She is walking along a road. The sun devastates, the world is made of dust, but the day is alive, she feels alive, I feel alive for her.

She is looking at a picture we took, the only picture we took together, in a photo booth in the drugstore. Our faces are smashed together and in the picture she is not smiling, as usual, and I am smiling, a genuine smile, or so I have always thought about myself, but now, looking at myself through her eyes, I see that she sees my own smile starting to decompose, like when you say a word over and over again, so many times, over and over, and you begin to feel silly, but you keep saying it, and then after a short while, something happens and the word stops being a word and it resolves into its const.i.tuent sounds, and then all of a sudden what used to be a word is not a word at all, it is now the strangest thing you have ever heard.

I am inside of her head.

I am a nice person, she is thinking. I deserve more. She wants to believe it. If only she could see herself through my eyes. If only she could see herself through my eyes looking through her eyes. I deserve to be loved, she thinks. She doesn't believe it. If only I could believe it for her. I want to believe in her, believe inside of her. Believe hard enough inside of her that it somehow seeps through. She turns up the road and the hill gets steeper. The air gets hotter. I feel her weight, the gravity on her grieving body with every step, and then, right near the top of the hill, just the faintest hint of it. She is remembering us. The few happy moments we had. Okay, so. I am standing on a hill. I am looking at a color I have never seen before. Ocean. I am not at a funeral. I am thinking of someone I once loved. I don't know if I am her thinking of me, or if I am me thinking of her, her heart, my heart, aching, or its opposite, or if maybe, right at this moment, there is no difference. Okay, so. Okay, so. Okay.

First Person Shooter.

Janine is on line four.

"There's a finger in Housewares."

I don't ask what she means, because I can't think of anything funny to say, because I can never think of anything when I'm talking to Janine, because I'm in love with her.

I tell her I'll check it out and hang up the phone. The whole way over to Home and Bath, I'm just repeating to myself, under my breath, stupid stupid stupid stupid stupid dummy. The only thing that makes me feel better is that none of this really matters since I don't have a chance in h.e.l.l with her anyway.

I hang a left at the towel racks and then a quick right and whoa, Janine was not kidding, that is definitely a finger. On the ground. In the middle of the aisle with all of the slow cookers.

This is the graveyard shift at WorldMart. Biggest store in the human world. I work Sunday through Wednesday, and then Friday if anyone calls in sick, which, of course, is pretty much every Friday. We're open twenty-four hours a day, three hundred sixty-five days a year, because keeping the fluorescent lights on for a decade or two until they burn out is actually cheaper than turning them on and off, and that means for eight hours every night there are two of us in here, minding the store, which is roughly the size of three city blocks.

I walk over to the nearest house phone and call Janine.

"We should tell Burt," I say. Burt is the manager. At the moment, Burt is not in the store. He's in the parking lot, a quarter mile away, listening to Black Sabbath with the windows rolled up in a smoke-filled Pontiac Sunbird. I can smell it from here.

"So tell him," Janine says, and there's something about the way she says it. It's a dare. She's daring me. It's a test. She's testing me. I start to wonder whether, despite all of the stupid things I have said to Janine, I might actually have a chance with her.

I hang up the phone and go back to where the finger is.

I pick it up.

Then I feel something cold and sharp tickling the back of my neck and I almost wet myself. A small yelp escapes from my throat.

I turn around to see Janine. I hate everything about her except for the fact that I love everything about her. I don't think I would actually ever want to kiss her so much as I'd want to possess her. Consume her. Eat her, so that no one else could have her.

"You should have seen your face," she says, laughing at me, but not quite mocking me. Not quite. Is this how she flirts?

I slip the finger into the pocket of my jacket. I don't know why, exactly, but I don't want her to see that I have it.

A bunch of stuff crashes to the floor over in another section.

"Sounds like Toiletries," I say, and we both run toward aisle ninety-seven. We stop in Mascara, crouch down, and listen to what sounds like shuffling. Janine starts crawling toward Lipstick and I try to grab her ankle but just end up with her shoe in my hand. She looks back, catches me watching her from behind, frowns, then motions for me to follow.

We stop at the Maybelline end cap just in time to see someone, or something, shambling toward a beef jerky sample station. Janine shrieks, and then the thing lets out a groan and then Janine and I are both up on our feet and running and we round the corner into Eyeliner and come face-to-face with it, whatever it is. Only, it's not an it. It's a her. A zombie. A woman. A zombie woman. She's older than Janine, closer to my age, maybe early thirties, missing a little bit of her face, but otherwise sort of pretty in a melancholy way.

"She looks nervous," I say to Janine, but Janine's gone, flat-out sprinting, screaming all the way to Power Tools.

Pretty Zombie Lady holds up two different tubes of lipstick, one bloodred and one that's more of an earth tone, and then I understand. She wants my opinion. I step back, look at her skin-which I guess is sort of a grayish baloney color-and point to the earth-toned tube.

"Matches your blouse better," I say.

She's holding the lipstick in her right hand, which has a hole where the ring finger should be.

I pull her digit out of my pocket and offer it to her.

She takes it and jams it into the hole where it used to be, and then sort of nods as if to say thanks.

She starts to creep over toward Accessories.

We shop for a while together like this. She picks out a couple of options, I give her my choice. Sometimes she goes with it, but a couple of times she goes the other way. At one point she stops in front of a mirror and looks at herself and I'm looking at her look at herself, wondering what is she thinking, and we lock eyes, we're making eye contact with each other in our reflections in the mirror. She's clearly thinking about someone. Me? No. This is crazy. But is it? I don't know. I don't know anything. I didn't even think zombies could think. And I'm thinking maybe she's not thinking, maybe she's under the control of someone else. Maybe I am, too.

Pretty Zombie Lady moves slow, and by the time she manages to pull together a decent-looking outfit, it's a quarter past two. Just as I realize that I haven't seen Janine in half an hour, I hear her voice booming over the PA system.

"I'm in Firearms," she says. "Stay low."

I pick up the nearest phone.

"She's not going to hurt us," I say, my own voice carrying out across the cavernous store. I just hope zombie girl understands me.