by Shane Jones
I don’t say anything more, numbers crowding my screen, gold watch blinking. They all agree that Sarah is an exception. In my silence they hatch an idea that one commercial flight or even a very large boat could “fit them all.” Emily attempts to start a new conversation by confessing she hates everything pumpkin. But seconds later they’re deciding where Muslims should live.
I’m having a problem blocking them out. I’m having a problem locking into the Zone and not speaking a word.
“Alice is back,” I say in my professional voice, walking into the center of the room, plucking blue M&M’s from the snack table.
“The band?” asks Emily.
“My ex-wife.”
On Steve’s computer – a man with a purple hockey jersey pulled over his head absorbing a flurry of uppercuts.
“We’ve decided to get back together,” I add.
“Whoa,” says Steve clicking on another video, this one a zoomed-in slow motion shot of a fist landing squarely into a face, the nose puddling into itself.
“Good for you,” announces Sarah walking into the room.
Telling them about Alice is the only way to change the subject, and I’m sick because it doesn’t feel real, or because I have to keep eating M&M’s if I want to keep talking like this.
“Well, would you look at that,” says Emily from her cubicle.
Emily just a voice expecting a response without looking at a set of eyes. Emily, who loves purple and tall horses. Emily, who is marrying Otto on a day in Vermont that will be absolutely freezing because they booked the ceremony for early October which everyone thinks is autumnal but it never is, it is too late, come on Emily. Come the fuck on. Emily, who anticipates Friday and tells you about it. Emily, who sits a foot from her monitor telling us that Sears is closing two hundred stores, can you believe it.
I say hello to Francesca who after the cupcake incident and pizza party disaster wants nothing to do with me. I am dead to her. She disrespects you by avoiding eye contact and answering everything with a curt single word. But earlier this morning I decided to buy into the coffee club, even brought some into the office. I smile, holding two Folgers Dark Roast containers like weights above my shoulders. According to the labels, I’ve paid twelve dollars for four hundred and eighty four cups of coffee.
“Welcome to the club,” says Francesca, sitting down at her desk.
She looks at the monitor over her glasses, types a little. She’s wearing a red blouse with a dark stain, square shaped, between her breasts. I pour myself coffee.
“Little stain,” I say, brushing my own shirt.
“Where?”
“The center section,” I say, pointing at her chest. “Water, maybe.”
She looks down and then slowly raises her head, pursing her lips. “It’s the design of the shirt,” she says, typing again, faster and louder this time. “It’s Liz Claiborne.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
I need some answers about my reality so I decide to take the elevator to floor twenty.
On the way, the elevator stops on floor sixteen. A square shaped woman in a leopard print blouse walks on. She doesn’t notice me, so when I move past her to get off on floor twenty she screams.
PER / SUITE 2037 / BLOOD
Using the phone outside the locked door, I tell Fang Lu I’m here to talk to Dorian and he hangs up. The feeling I have is that I did something wrong. I call again, letting it ring and ring before the State operator picks up, who I hang up on.
I call again. This time, as the phone rings, Fang Lu is coming toward the door in a speed walk, appearing more nervous than I am. It looks like he has a phone in each pocket, or maybe just weird muscular thighs. How does anyone have enough time to lift weights? He apologies. They are extremely busy.
“Is Dorian around?”
“No. What’s up?”
“I have a question about my gate.”
Behind him, Billy Krol is sitting in his cubicle on a modern leather chair, cardboard boxes scattered around him, most turned on their sides and empty. The office has never looked complete. Billy Krol swivels back-and-forth in his chair, one hand resting on the keyboard as he stares at the monitor. Some ceiling lights have recently burned out, allowing narrow cones of darkness to appear on the carpet. I’m surprised Fang Lu doesn’t let me in, he just stands with the door open behind his back.
“He’ll be back tomorrow, but keep going with everything you’re doing,” he says. “Your work output is high and happiness levels are solid.”
“I am,” I say, grinning.
“Then why are you here? Didn’t you watch the video?”
His tone is condescending, and I’m not sure if it’s because he doesn’t want to be bothered, they really are that busy, or he just wants me to leave because something greater is wrong.
“I wanted to know how real this is,” I say in a half professional voice. “I know she’s not the actual Alice, but it feels like it, and I just wanted to talk about it some more, like, how long will it last? It can’t last forever. When is he back?”
Fang Lu exhales in one long breath, and it makes me slightly relaxed as well, like two people making each other yawn. I get the feeling this is a move he does often, he knows what he’s doing. He closes his eyes, does a few more long breaths, and says with no sense of irony that he’s centering himself.
“If you’re happy, why does it matter?” he says, exasperated.
“But for how long?”
Billy Krol is listening now, turned in his chair and facing the door with his khaki legs spread wide.
“As long as PER is functioning in the office, then, it’s up to you to continue with the repetition schedule and mindset. We don’t do follow-up screenings because they’re intrusive. Data entry and screens will never change. After we leave, a maintenance plan will become available.”
I don’t know what to think. It’s not hot in here, but I’m sweating.
Billy Krol shouts, “It’s all good!”
“But the testimonials, like, what are they doing now? You don’t care if they’re still inside their gate?” I ask, stammering.
Fang Lu does his breathing exercises again. I’m breathing with him. On the last set he says “Flower” before the inhale and after the exhale “Fire.” Then he opens his eyes and rolls his shoulders back. “Our goal is to open the gate, increase productivity, make the client happy, that’s it. Then to the next city, the next town, the next group of workers. No negative feedback has ever been gathered so you don’t have anything to worry about.”
“I’m just worried it won’t be –”
“I’ll tune up your watch,” interrupts Fang Lu. He opens the door behind him a little more, gesturing with his hand to come in.
Dorian’s door is closed so it’s just me, Fang Lu, and Billy Krol beneath the artificial lights in the center cubicles with too much empty office space surrounding us. On his laptop, Billy Krol shows me my work output during the fifteen day training and it’s unbelievable. A chart shows how my efficiency compares to other workers (one is Steve, as the poorest example) who weren’t suitable for PER. There’s a drop-off since the opening of my gate on June 23, but not much. I’m a productive worker saving the taxpayers money while living a cheerful life.
Fang Lu plugs in my watch to his laptop and shows me more charts with increased serotonin levels as thin blue lines rising and a long string of light-gray numbers associated with chemical compounds I’ve never heard of. The waterfall logo turns off and on in the bottom right corner. They both agree by way of non-stop head nodding and tech-speak that the program is functioning normally. Alice as Alice is strong and vibrant.
It’s hard to argue with numbers and charts if you don’t know anything about them, so I agree. Fang Lu kindly suggests I go back to work. He begins his breathing exercises again. Billy Krol rolls his eyes.
Returning home, she’s sitting on the lawn next to the concrete steps. I worked late, deep in a data entry trance for six hours hoping to str
engthen her life. I need to keep the gate open for as long as possible. I can’t be alone again.
Drops of rain begin to fall as I walk, and one fat drop smacks the glass face of the watch and it blinks with the waterfall logo. This is my life and I need to embrace it. Become it. I wave to Alice as I approach.
But maybe my reality is too strong. This Billy Krol thought and he made some adjustments by typing away on his laptop with a sticky cord attached to my temple, but my gut reaction is that it didn’t do a thing. My gut reaction is Fang Lu and Billy Krol don’t do much, if anything, this ride is all Dorian, the one who knows where the program and the ride ends.
The rain marks the sidewalk in dark oblong dots. This summer has been nothing but storms with inter-exchanging pockets of humidity and cold breezes. Can’t complain, I’ll take it. The evening sun cuts across Alice. It brightens her head and shadows her body.
“I’m home,” I say, running up the hill. “I’m here,” I say, groveling at her feet, slipping on the grass.
I put my arm around her and she leans away.
“Easy,” she says.
“It’s sunny, but raining,” I say, holding my palm out. “Weird.”
She tilts her head. “What?”
“Wait,” I say. “What are you doing out here? How did you know I’d be home now, if I worked late?”
“I’m not allowed to sit outside?”
“But why are you out here?”
She shakes a little. It is kind of cold outside, a sharp change in temperature between heat and storm, but not really. She doesn’t say anything else and neither do I. The atmosphere doesn’t feel so electric anymore. I can’t feel the rain.
“I’m here,” Alice whispers. “And I love you.”
New clouds are covering the present clouds. I look forward at the rain but now I can’t see anything. Another déjà vu moment. We’re at the castle, on the beach where the lake is, and it’s either the memory of actual Alice or the recent trip with PER Alice, I can’t tell, but my head is facing the sand and she’s kissing the back of my head with her lips pressed into my hair. “I’m here.” “Where are you?” “All this is fakery.” “Please stay.” “I can’t do this anymore.” Everything flips. My head hits the grass. The world goes dark.
I’m inside my apartment, looking down at Alice in the bathtub with her clothes on and legs hugged to her chest. The window is open and rain is splattering the tiles. I ask if she’d like to get out, extending my hand, and she says there’s room for two so I step in fully clothed and we hold each other in the water.
“Is everything okay?” I ask.
She answers, “Of course, why wouldn’t it be?”
I’m making grilled cheese sandwiches as it continues to rain. I don’t say a word about what just happened. Everything feels good in the present, and I don’t want to knock the gate off-kilter with words. And I like the windows open during a storm. Let the sky to spray the floors.
In the apartment I lived in before this one with Alice, the landlord deducted two hundred dollars from my deposit for water damage. He sent the reduced security deposit with a bill highlighting Windows left open during numerous rain showers, troubling. I wasn’t surprised because he was paranoid and materialistic. He wore his car keys around his neck on thick twine. When he unloaded bags of fertilizer from the trunk of his car one summer he locked his car, only ten feet away, each time after he placed a bag on his shoulder. But I don’t think he was that strange. Everyone knows that landlords are the devil’s semen.
“I’m starving,” says Alice.
As she makes tea next to the stove I flip her sandwich. It sizzles when some cheese drips onto the pan. With the spatula I wrist-flick the cheese out and into the garbage. I have moves when it comes to pan frying. I don’t use a spatula to turn over the sandwiches, I use the fucking plate.
“Nice,” compliments Alice.
“Thanks.”
As the cheese melts, the rain stops. What just happened between being outside with Alice and the bathtub with Alice? Maybe another glitch in my gate. Don’t question it, just be happy with your happiness. Just move forward. But I keep looking at her expecting some problem, like her arms twitching into static as she pours tea. In some way, everything is normal. I shake the pan a little.
“Almost ready,” I say.
“About time.”
My phone lights up where the sun doesn’t touch the counter and it’s Alice calling. I stare. Alice is calling and Alice is next to me. I turn and smile and then go back to my phone, which like always is on silent.
“Who’s that,” Alice asks, and I don’t know why I say it, but I say it, I say, “Alice.”
“Very funny,” says Alice.
The screen rings bright 518-944-4139 with Alice in New York, a picture taken shortly after we got married. We were up early and walking the city when everyone else was asleep. She’s standing against the closed rolling metal doors to a bodega storefront, a painted mural on it with a baby tugging on a river in a jungle. I took about a hundred pictures until Alice said, walking to me every few shots to check my work, it was the right one. I haven’t seen this picture since the divorce, the paperwork question, but here it is. Mercifully, it stops. Then she calls again and the picture comes back brighter than ever.
“Can we eat?” asks Alice standing over Alice calling. “I’m so hungry I could eat a baby.”
“What?”
“What? I’m hungry.”
“You said a baby.”
“Yeah,” she shrugs. “I thought, what would be the absolute hungriest a person could get.”
“It’s ready,” I manage to say.
“A horse isn’t hungry. Now a baby, that’s hungry. Could you imagine?”
She takes a cup from the cabinet above the counter where my phone is still illuminated with her name, number, and picture, but doesn’t notice it, just takes the cup and fills it with water and goes out to the living room and clicks on the TV, which sounds like more news, another fire, more destruction, residents are leaving, too much sadness for one person to absorb.
Finally, the call goes to missed and I delete it. I have no idea why Alice would be calling me because she doesn’t need anything from me. It must have been a mistake, but twice, two mistake calls seems impossible. Maybe another glitch between PER and my reality, the film momentarily blown back by my memories of Alice.
From the living room: “Someone vandalized The Falafel House.”
“What’s that?”
“The Falafel house!”
I’m a total mess. My ideal life is complicated.
She knows I’m hiding something so we get into an argument. Another downfall in our marriage was that I kept secrets. I never told her about Sarah. I never told her about napping in my car during my lunch breaks. I had days at work where I didn’t do any work, but if Alice asked me to take out the garbage or wash the dishes after work I said I was too tired from work. I never told her about masturbating in socks.
“Is something going on?”
“Nothing,” I say, “just tired.”
I remember once at the A-ville museum we were looking at World War I posters. They had this exhibit for one week only, and those who were bored or liked war went to admire the intricate line-drawings. One poster was about female spies and the headline read: “Silence Is Safety.” A snake-shaped woman in a trench coat blew cigarette smoke into the words. Alice pointed and turned to me and said, “That’s you.”
“Because you’re tired?” Alice pries. “Or because you want to avoid me? I think you want to avoid me. You shut down when you have to talk about anything real.”
I’m not thinking clearly so I say, “None of this is real.”
During arguments I like to stare at the floor. I sit on the edge of the bed waiting for Alice to respond and concentrate on a line, a thin trench dug into the hardwood when I attempted to move the dresser by myself. At work, Courtney told me when her boyfriend dumped her for a cashier at Target she rearranged h
er apartment as drastically as possible, as a way to erase Chad. She suggested I do the same. It wasn’t a bad idea. But I only managed moving the dresser which created this dig in the wood.
Alice is gone.
“Hello?”
There’s this sound, a thumping against wood, in the apartment with me. Maybe it’s Alice leaving because of what I said. The gate slamming shut. It doesn’t make sense, I feel like I’m re-creating scenes from a movie I’ve seen years ago, but I sweep my arm under the bed and I search the closet, pushing my hanging shirts against the wall. I peek out the bedroom window and across the strip of grass dividing the houses. One of my neighbor’s shirtless kids is at his window pointing a gun at me. I look toward the backyard but I don’t see Alice.
I enter the hallway and call her name.
In the nine o’clock hour the apartment is dark and dreary after another storm, but there’s still light left in the sky, a last line of day clinging to the underside of clouds. The thumping gets louder. It accelerates as I walk into the kitchen.
There’s one weak light on above the stove, it’s part of the ventilation system, and Alice is sitting on the counter next to it, banging the back of her head against the cabinet.
“Don’t do that,” I plead.
“Then tell me what you’re hiding.”
“I’m not hiding anything,” I say. “Everything is fine.”
She hits her head faster and harder. It’s so dark in the kitchen, even with that weak little light on. There’s a terrifying tempo to the way she’s striking her head on the cabinet and it’s painful to watch.
“Come on,” I offer, reaching out to grab her, but I don’t actually move forward. I have good intentions, just no good action. Add it to my list of holes in my bag. I thought I was doing better. “Alice, please.”
