by Shane Jones
Asking her to be Leg Wobble Man is risky, but if this is my ideal gate then we will be Leg Wobble Man together. Love is two people sharing the burden of living and refusing to give up with joyful moments of insanity. The end of love is when each person is consistently asking what the other person is doing, what they are thinking, why did they say what they said or why aren’t they talking enough.
I ask her to be Leg Wobble Man with me.
“Walk to the kitchen first,” she says, scheming behind the book. “Then come back and you’ll know my decision.”
“What’s in the kitchen?”
The news is now advertising fireworks on the plaza. It shows the event from previous years. A man with a boa constrictor around his shoulders is walking through a crowd of people holding star-shaped balloons. Red text slants across the corners of the screen. Children under six months are free and adults can enter a hotdog eating contest. Steve is in the background drinking a beer.
“Go find out,” says Alice.
“You’ll be here when I get back?”
“Maybe.”
“Are you going to be Leg Wobble Man with me or not?”
“Maybe.”
The hallway feels like a tunnel. Everything feels slower. The last time I asked her to be Leg Wobble Man she said she couldn’t believe this was her life and collapsed despondent on the couch where Alice is right now.
You shouldn’t touch a crying person unless you have the magic. Elderly told me that. He said to either be really close or really far away, no in between, no standing a few feet away looking dumb. Because I was outside with Elderly I was far away, but it still felt awful with Alice up there ready to leave me.
I run a few steps, then jump into the kitchen before turning around and walking back to where Alice is, crouched low and shaking her legs.
“I’m so fast,” she says, biting her bottom lip.
“Not bad,” I say impressed and ready to wobble, “but check me out.”
We shake like our knees will hit and bruise but they never will. We laugh like maniacs. There is no pain here. We can’t hurt because we are Leg Wobble Man and we’re in love.
Alice watches me leave for work. She sits waving at me from the top concrete step. I am happy and also not. For every interaction with Alice there’s a secondary thought that this isn’t real, my mind correcting then erasing then correcting again, jumping from PER life to real life.
Near the end of the block I turn around and she’s Leg Wobble Man. I don’t like admitting this, I don’t speak in these terms, but I feel, in the moment, blessed. Not by God or a spell, but by the person who has altered what I see. Dorian Blood has changed my life.
At work I try to take the elevator to floor twenty but the button won’t light-up. A man delivering a pizza is with me. He’s around seventy years old, wearing a sweatshirt with a pattern of the cosmos and a red hat with a trident logo. His hands tremble. I hit the button for floor twenty again.
I know I’m not supposed to go to floor twenty after my gate appeared, but I want to ask Dorian if this is it, Alice in my life again, and I’m not missing something.
What makes my gate so unusual, compared to the testimonials in the video and information in the packet, is there’s no material consumption. There’s no object, there’s no new home or exotic landscape with expanding roses. My physical reality is still strong – on my walk to work today I passed elaborate graffiti on a brick wall that just said HAM. After thumb-pressing floor twenty again I hit the button for fourteen, which is already lit up.
“This for you? Pizza in the morning? Don’t get too many but becoming more common, yeah, pizza for breakfast, the way things are, why not.” The pizza man shakes his head in disbelief.
“Must be for my coworkers,” I say. “They don’t care what time it is.”
“That’s funny,” he says without smiling. “I worked with a guy who always ate lunch at noon exactly. Didn’t matter if he was hungry or not, had to have lunch not a minute sooner or later. Saw that guy in the bathroom all the time. Huh. Come to think of it, if he was always in the bathroom, means I was always in the bathroom.”
I ask how much for the pizza.
Since the cupcake incident and the training I haven’t really been part of the office. I want to perform an act of kindness so I feel less guilty, which never works, but I’m going to try anyways. Buying pizza will impress my coworkers and show that I care about them with money and I’m going to make it a big production. In the rising elevator I feel transcendent.
“But never sold pizza in an elevator before,” says the pizza man counting a wad of bills taken from his money clip. “Once sold a sausage pizza to a priest in a hardware store. I think that’s the weirdest one. Yeah, definitely the weirdest. I didn’t even ask what he was doing there, why he was waiting in the hardware store. He wasn’t buying anything.”
“Except a pizza,” I say.
“Hey, that’s true.”
Saturn is on his sweatshirt where his heart is, surrounded by yellow rings, and further out, suspended stardust. The patches of space around his shoulders are black holes. I ask where he bought such a sweatshirt, one I could never wear, and he says Walmart, fourteen bucks, they have them in a crate near the hunting section.
Victorious, I place the boxes on the snack table next to Emily’s cubicle and begin opening the cardboard tops, displaying pizzas in beautiful ways. From the center of the room I shout, “Pizza party!”
Cheese, pepperoni, mushroom, wafting through the office before 9, this is the fucking life. Steve is on the phone, whispering, and Emily comes over and looks at the pizza like she’s never seen pizza before. Michelle is in Sarah’s cubicle saying she has mini Vodkas stashed in her filing cabinet. The air conditioning kicks on in a whirl. Next to where I’m standing the fax machine grinds out an $89 Cancun vacation, and because no one but Emily is ready to eat I know I’ve done something wrong.
“Thanks for this,” she says, slowly taking a paper plate.
I grab the Cancun ad, pretend to be interested, then place it back on the Xerox. I just stand in the office, doing nothing, feeling guilty, watching the Xerox screen blink from white to green.
“Look,” says Francesca, grabbing me by the upper arm and pulling me from the room. She walks hunched over and shuffles her feet like a dachshund. I had no idea she even walked into the room. Her foot speed is a superpower silent glide over office carpeting.
She brings me into the conference room which is decorated in rainbow streamers, rainbow banners, and a rainbow sign most likely printed by Steve – HAPPY ENGAGEMENT EMILY – with a running border of purple horses. Francesca says the surprise party is now ruined, swiping her hands in a downward and outward fashion symbolizing the flattening of earth.
Walking to the Zone, everyone is eating, alone, in their cubicle. They know I’ve been scolded so it’s okay to eat. I use paper towels (people love them) to clean the Zone, everything covered in lunch-dust because I’m disgusting and haven’t cleaned since the fifteen day training ended last Friday, that two week fog I can’t quite remember.
I want to tell Michelle and Steve and Emily and Sarah that Alice is back, but it’s against the rules. Those who saw life as driving a boat while draped in jewelry or owning unbelievable amounts of square footage, wide lawns of fresh sod, didn’t tell anyone close to them, so I won’t say anything either. Besides, they haven’t gotten over the cupcake incident, and now I’ve ruined Emily’s surprise party. I will never be forgiven. I settle into the Zone and work without a break or speaking a word.
I eat a slice of room temperature pepperoni pizza and predict a stomach ache. My work output is like no other, and when I think about Alice back home my thoughts beam. I become filled with the energy I had when we first met.
My boss says floor twenty is closed for cleaning. I don’t believe him, it just feels like he’s lying, because some people when they lie their voice changes. When my boss lies he gets high-pitched like Mickey Mouse. But I say okay
, pretending to believe him.
Back in the Zone I finish my work and begin counting.
I walk home in a near run to see Alice. It’s so hot that in the distance everything including the air is wavy, and what I see, what it looks like on the sidewalk blocks away are four people holding crowbars, dancing over a body.
As I walk closer, they throw their weapons at passing cars, shattering windshields, the cars driving outward to the sidewalks. Before I get too close, I turn onto the next block. But music is playing from where I just walked, a crashed radio, and I can’t un-see what I think I just saw. Sometimes reality is too difficult for one person to process. I concentrate on Alice, the PER life, and can feel myself kind of oozing into it, it’s hard to explain, but I can sense it, tingling, throughout my body.
Could we have sex? Or will it be like at the end of our marriage, that is, will I hump away and think I’m doing a good job but look down and see no expression at all? Embarrassing to be thinking this but it’s been so long. And what if she got pregnant? Would it be a real baby or an image of a baby? Ghost baby, dream baby. A half-reality fantasy infant unable to live in its structure. I need to relax. But I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to try and see what would happen. I need to sleep. Alice isn’t on the concrete steps anymore. Could a PER baby breastfeed?
Alice never wanted to have a baby, but I think in those early years she considered it. I wanted to but became scared. Another fault in my generation. Having babies isn’t hopeful anymore. It’s too much time away from thinking about ourselves, a life we can’t imagine in our present. Our parent’s generation loved to make a fetus. They couldn’t get enough of the blue cigars and pink balloons, the details we now love to criticize.
“Want to go to Target?”
We’re on the couch sitting side-by-side with our feet up on the glass coffee table eating tofu and broccoli. The TV is off, which is odd to look at when it’s just a dark square. The one front window that can open is open, and I keep hoping to hear Elderly and his bag of cans, but there’s only traffic and the deaf person singing again.
“Not really,” she says looking into her bowl. “Why, you need something?”
“Maybe a bathing suit for the Fourth,” I say into my plate, knowing this isn’t something I would ever say or want. “I thought we could go to Lake George for the fireworks,” I continue, scheming. “Or we’ll be stuck here, watching the plaza fireworks.”
“Eh,” she says. “You had fun last year?”
“In A-ville?”
“No,” says Alice, annoyed. “Lake George.” “Did you?”
Every summer we drove fifty miles north to Lake George. Early in our marriage the vacation was fun because everything around us – American flags flown off the back of a Harley, the DILLIGAF store, beach fireworks at 2 am – didn’t phase us. We stayed in a smelly motel with concrete beds and stayed up late on the patio with everyone else drunk, mostly the shirtless of New Jersey who every year took over the town and by holiday’s end crashed their SUV’s into parked SUV’s. Even though our intimacy was fizzling we attempted to do things married couples were supposed to do.
But if this Alice is referring to the last year we went to Lake George it means we’re on the cusp of our marriage ending, when everything – arriving too early to check-in, agreeing on a restaurant, the DILLIGAF store, the flags, the midnight fireworks after getting into separate beds at 10 pm – was an argument. This isn’t unusual in a marriage. Just the natural progression when the force field has been whittled away.
Before the accident my parents stopped vacationing because the trips were a closing vice of stress. Married for thirty eight years, and each year their fighting increased over wrong turns, nose-whistle breathing, too much silence, hogging the bathroom or going to the bathroom “too many times,” what spot on the beach, where to eat, who should go shopping, what to eat, what to do, when to sleep, an endless and awful list. One time Dad had to turn left into this seafood restaurant but the oncoming traffic was bumper-to-bumper. He was patient. Not thirty seconds later and Mom said she would have driven up the road, turned around, and gone through the side entrance. It’s what he should have done. I felt sorry for him in the ticking of the directional signal. At my young age, it was horrifying that a man who paid the bills, fixed everything in the house, always drove, was a cop who upheld laws, could be so powerless. He still tried to turn but no one would let him in. Mom said to just go home.
Their generation is a different one than ours, where sticking it out, staying together in gloom’s grin was important. Alice said she wouldn’t be like them, life is too short to suffer with another. But I would have stayed. Suffering alone is just a different color.
“Last year?” I ask coyly.
“Fucking awful,” says Alice, and I stop eating. “Remember the guy who crashed his SUV into a parked car and drove away? That other guy tried standing in the middle of the street to stop him and got hit? He like, spun around?”
“I remember,” I say. “The people in the room next to us played Kid Rock. All night.”
“Oh shit,” she says surprised in a high-pitched voice and turns sideways, her bowl now on the couch. “I forgot about them. The wife kept saying, “Shut up, Michael” to the husband on the beach every time he talked.”
“And he kept doing that creepy laugh.”
“Yes! He kept going heh heh heh,” she hisses, raising her shoulders, imitating the Beavis laugh, “every time he was told to shut up. He couldn’t say a sentence without being told to shut up.”
“That was their entire relationship,” I say satisfied with the insight.
“Shut up, Michael,” scolds Alice.
I eat a fork-full and with my mouth full ask if we fought.
She holds up one finger to indicate she’s also chewing. “I mean, we agreed to never go back.”
Scientists recently discovered concentric circles of two-inch tall sand mountains on the ocean floor. Each mountain had a seashell. No one could figure out how they were made or who made them, but the scientists assumed it was hoax, similar to those farmers in Nebraska with their crop circles.
The scientists said the sand was crafted in a mechanical way, like a machine or hands from a diver. They did this big investigation with hidden cameras lowered from boats and a night vision camera caught the artist – a male pufferfish, three inches long, who spent twelve hours fanning the sand into the hill pattern circles, topping them with seashells like jewelry or icing. When the female approved they made babies in the clearing just before the tide washed them and the structure away.
So before bed I run a bath for Alice with surrounding candles. Maybe I won’t lose her, just feels like it, if this really is final year Alice. I’ll talk to Dorian tomorrow. If my gate continues in a way where time doesn’t move forward concerning Alice then maybe I can preserve this life. The thought of another fallout destroys me. Into the bath I throw a chalky soap-ball costing nine dollars and it foams and bubbles, turning the water flamingo-pink. On my way out of the bathroom I turn the lights off because that’s what you do in a scene like this. I’ve seen it before in a movie.
Sometimes I’ll struggle to remember the date of the accident, but once a month I’ll think about this Richard Gere movie where he walks in on his wife, Diane Lane, in the bath. Gere stands at the open bathroom door holding two glasses of wine in one hand and says, “Room for two?” Whoever wrote that line should be shot. The scene has tension because she’s been cheating on him, that very afternoon, with her book-collector boyfriend who drew a heart near her vagina which she can’t scrub off quickly enough as Gere approaches with the wine. You think there’s going to be a colossal argument. But because Richard Gere is romantic, and he’s Richard Gere, he dims the lights, which makes Diane Lane smile because now he won’t be able to see the heart drawing.
“What…is this,” says Alice. “It’s like a spa, but in a Motel 6.”
“I was trying to be romantic.”
“That’s t
he problem,” she says, squirting a line of aqua-hued toothpaste onto her toothbrush. “You’re trying to be romantic. You have to just be romantic.”
“Right.”
“There’s a difference,” she mumbles while brushing. “Pretty big difference.”
I blurt out that I love her.
“Did something change?” She spits into the sink with force and with the way the sink is shaped some of the water hits me. “I love you too,” she says smiling, but looking concerned.
I don’t care what people say, when you hear “I love you” it’s pure power. Years before I met Alice I worked three months at Home Depot and every contractor-husband told me to never get married. But then there was this one guy in carpenter jeans splattered in paint who said, “I bet every one of these guys complains about being married.” I nodded because he had been reading my mind. He said marriage was the best thing to ever happen to him, best thing for men in general, the wives are the ones who suffer.
I get undressed and take the flamingo-pink bath alone.
My phone is ringing from a private number. Some people don’t like answering these calls, but I do. Those who work telemarketing jobs have hearts too. It’s a difficult job because when one person hangs up on you the auto-dialer just goes to the next number, so you never get a break. I know this because when the State needs volunteers during election season they ask my office and we’re pressured to say yes.
Most of the requests never made sense. They would have us drive three hours to L-ville and have no work for us to actually do. The paid volunteers were already there finishing up. Or we’d spend five hours driving the horrendous flat route to B-ville to make phone calls in a campaign office more dorm room than professional political operation. When Steve said we could have made the same phone calls back in A-ville, he was given more phone calls to make. The campaign managers worked around the clock and during election week wore diapers.
In the beginning I always said yes. I volunteered hours of my life to politicians I never met. Once, a guy on the phone who I was inviting to a spaghetti dinner at a firehouse told me to, “Fuck the little face.” He had a thick accent, and the insult didn’t make sense exactly, but it was effective. Another person said to volunteer for something that mattered. That one really stuck because on the next call I had tears in my eyes.
