Here I am, here to please, to knock on your heart, tug on your sleeve, and sir, do you have a moment to discuss your life goals? The state of the economy? The state that wants secession? The recession of hair, of tides? The ceasefire and the forest fire and the brand-new flavor of fire-roasted pretzels? The exegesis of today’s front-page headlines? The story of how the world will end, slash, how the world began, slash, what kind of world is this, anyway, slash, how ‘bout that certain team that plays that certain sport? How about the environment? The economy? The bathroom? As in, can I use yours? Do you like comedy?
Would you perhaps consider a list of vintage novelties you played with as a child? A listicle of popsicles you ate as a child? The story of your inner child? The story of the baby and the bathwater? The story of the baby otter and the baby giraffe and their unlikely friendship?
“Can you just skip the stories and give me the pamphlet?” one man says. I give him a pamphlet gladly, and he places it on a pile of other pamphlets from other companies, on the handy pamphlet table in his home’s entryway, an aedicula to life’s mysterious accumulation of printed collateral.
“For pamphlets,” he says, pointing to the table. “For scraps.” He points again. “For ephemera.”
I stand on a corner and supply pamphlets, a steady stream of paper, the reflexive pedestrians and their involuntary grabs, clasping the pamphlets and walking forward, their hands turning red with rashes from the pamphlets, and from above, an aerial, blimplike view of pamphlets scattering and spreading through the streets, a sharp confetti cutting the city with wonder.
I return to the cave pamphlet-free.
“I’m impressed,” says the Director, pouring me drink. “Cocktails!”
Her cheeks are a field of freckles, fine lines of smiles, and she pays me with a wad of cash.
“We’d also like to give you the very special opportunity to donate a portion of your payment to the further creation of pamphlets.”
I oblige.
More pamphlets in the morning, but first, the Director reminds me to distribute every single pamphlet. “We can’t risk any stray pamphlets making their way back to this cave.”
Then door to door and down the sidewalk, around the block and across the city, with my poncho full of pamphlets. A thin drizzle dissecting the day. Around the cul-de-sacs and the one-way streets and the small-jointed streets and the bony ligamenture of corner stores connecting a skeleton of avenues. A pamphlet for the man who makes the artisan paninis.
Can I interest you in a pamphlet about your rights? Can I interest you in a pamphlet about my rights? How about restrictions? Directions? Can I offer you a pamphlet with pictures of your body, to tell you about your body, an instruction manual for how your body works, as told to you by someone else?
Please ma’am, have a pamphlet. Take it in your hand and pull it through your door and put it away. Forget about it for a year, then remember and find it in a folder full of takeout menus and old to-do lists. Struggle to read the pamphlet and struggle to touch the pamphlet. “Ouch!” you’ll say. “I can’t deal with this right now!” you’ll say. “It hurts in a way I can’t describe!” Put the pamphlet back into the folder, put the folder away, and label the folder IMPORTANT, then repeat those steps year after year, new haircut, new house, new husband, new haircut, new car, new husband, until the pamphlet softens with creases and pressure from piles of pamphlets, piles of tasks nearly complete, in a box of documents for sorting, a box of documents for shredding. Then finally shred the pamphlet, because you can’t throw the pamphlet away, not ever, because you throw away only things that are useless. And though you’re not certain of the pamphlet’s use, you know the pamphlet is useful. You know it’s important. You’ve felt it working on your life, a silent sacred work, a life guided by possession of the pamphlet. And though you’re not sure why, you know you’ve been changed by the presence of this slip of paper, this slip that somehow hurts, that cuts, that has no use except to remind you of something (what?), of someplace (where?), of your first husband sitting on the porch the day the pamphlet first fell into your hands. No use except to convince you, over and over, that you’ll probably need it, probably use it, probably redeem it, probably redeem yourself, someday.
“Can I have two?” the woman asks.
“No,” I say.
I return to the cave pamphlet-free, my fingers swollen with welts.
“Great work,” says the Director of Pamphlets.
There is certain work that cannot be done well and cannot be done poorly. It can only be done or undone. There is no success metric for a job that simply keeps me busy, so I ignore her empty praise.
She asks, “Are you game for a night shift?”
“Of course,” I say, and I travel up and down the streets, distributing pamphlets with pictures of Carl’s face emblazoned in thick, drippy ink. Fugitive, the pamphlet says.
I return to the cave wearing my empty-pocket poncho, whistling a pamphlet-placing tune. The Director is crying, and her cave swallows the sobs, releases them as growls. In certain kinds of light, the waves in her hair resemble scales.
“Thank god you’re back,” she says, the growls subsiding, her curls unfurling in a waterfall over her shoulders, not a scale to be seen. “My pamphlets! My poor pamphlets,” she says, “alone out there in the world.”
“Is that not where they’re meant to be?”
“There’s been a clerical error,” she says. “We printed the wrong kind. The wrong color! The wrong font! With typos, no less.”
“I see,” I say, and I hang my poncho near the entrance of the cave.
“You need to retrieve all the pamphlets, every last one.”
“Just take them back?”
“Take them back,” she coughs, wiping her nose. “Remember, it’s the same rules. If you don’t retrieve every single pamphlet, bad things will happen. Oh, my poor pamphlets!”
I shrug the poncho over my shoulders and turn around to retrace my steps. Please, can I retrieve this pamphlet? Please can I take it back to my cave? Some stops are luckier than others. One woman has already put her pamphlet in the recycling, and I find it crushed in the bin next to her front door.
A man finds a pamphlet stuck under his welcome mat. “Ow,” he says, tossing it into my hands like something scalding hot.
A woman is using her pamphlet as a placemat. “Ouch,” she says, flicking it at my face like something frozen.
“Here,” a family says, removing a magnet from their fridge with a tough team effort and sliding the pamphlet into my open pocket.
If I distribute a pamphlet, then repossess the same pamphlet, is the entire experience erased? What should I do with the elegance of this revision, a revision that also erases me? I decide to leave some small remainder in the world, some unretrieved pamphlets, unsought. I know that I’ve been warned against this course of action, but I can’t bear the task that makes and unmakes. Because in the end, what does that make of me?
I return to the cave with pockets full of pamphlets, not all, but many. The Director of Pamphlets stands at work against the moldy walls, and she doesn’t see me enter. But I see her clearly. She has a tail and wisps of leathery flesh framing her face. The smile lines are now growl lines, deep valleys unveiled around her mouth, unleashing a wave of flame. Or no, something like flame, something adjacent, not exactly flame, but a glamorous sort of blue heat, flecks of gold, odd and gleaming and flowing from the Director’s mouth and into a pile of newly folded pamphlets.
“Um,” I manage to say.
She turns toward me and reveals her face, wizened like a wet, organic root, something for smoothies, something, honestly, beautiful.
“What?” she roars, handing me the new stack of pamphlets, fresh from printing. “Here. Typo’s fixed. I corrected them while you were out.”
“Right. And did anything else happen … while I was out?”
It takes her a minute to notice her scales, her tail, the length of it curling up and around her face, h
er eyes growing wide at the sight. “I see you didn’t retrieve the full stack,” she says, her voice growing deeper and more reptilian by the minute.
“I retrieved most of them!”
“I told you,” she says, a snarl encroaching on her mouth, revealing a tooth the size of my hand, “that bad things would happen.”
The Director lifts herself onto her haunches and sprouts wings from her back. She flies out of the cave and into the world. I’ve released her, which was not something I was supposed to do.
I pocket the pamphlets and pocket my possessions.
The time I spend now is time spent with pamphlets. I think, if I continue to distribute them, I might just rein my employer back into her cave. I try a street I haven’t tried yet, and I pamphlet the street with pride. I turn down another street, giving in to the laziness of mailboxes, mail slots, setting a pamphlet in the cuticle of a glass-framed door. I ring a couple of bells now and then, but the solitude isn’t horrible. I notice a nodule of boredom hiding in my mind, and I want to pick it. I pick it until it bleeds. Other times, boredom blossoms in my chest like a lush chord, an empty schedule, the luxury of freshly fallen snow. The boredom of the pamphlets canvasses my expectations, papering my peripatetic life into a single, boring document that makes a kind of folded sense.
The next street looks familiar. I stand in the center of the road and feel another version of myself, standing in the same spot. Have I been here before? I carry my pamphlets to the door of a house down the way, a lovely little house, hydrangea bushes framing the entrance, windows luminescent. A woman wearing a glorious gold watch answers my knocking, her bangs clipped from her forehead with a tiny silver pin.
Anna.
Anna’s home, an elegant tree house of warm smells and subtle touches. High polish on the floors. A miniature mirror winking above a kitchen cabinet. A tapestry pinched into a playful tent, hovering over an overstuffed chair in the corner. Bright, crisp notes from the chimes outside her window, calculating the arithmetic of evening winds with their song. Hints of lemon and grease and honey, boiling liquids and roasted root vegetables, covered, then later, uncovered, browned, crisped, burned by accident, scraped and replaced with brand-new turnips and radishes and sprouts, no problem, squat and fat and fresh from the fridge. Heirloom tomatoes on the cutting board and heirloom treasures on the mantle. The entire scene shines like the contents of an animated sparkle on the edge of some glinting, watery eye. She holds me in her cashmere arms and hugs me to her chest, all the way into her nest, uses the hug as a pulley to reel me into her house.
“This house,” says Anna, cashmere arms open wide. “My house. I own this house.”
My entire face is trembling, and there is little I can do to stop it. Oh, Anna, is what I mean to say.
“Do you want a pamphlet?” is all I can manage.
She looks bewildered.
“Yes, of course,” she says politely.
She reaches out, but I don’t let her touch it with her hands, her little cream-tipped nails and her delicate rings and the gold watch that still fits her wrist after all these years.
“Here, for you,” I say, and I put the pamphlet in her pamphlet basket near the door. She has baskets in every shape, stacked in every size, for just about every type of storage consideration. She looks at my filthy, stolen boots, and I understand I’m meant to remove them, place them in a basket. They slide off easily now, finally broken in.
“Can I fetch you a glass of water?” Anna asks. None of the things we used to do make sense anymore, but I guess we both still drink water. We drink some water side by side, our bodies full of fluids, of blood and acid and methods of hydration, caffeination, intoxication. Would I like to sit down, Anna wants to know. “Sure,” I say, and now we’re two women, formerly two girls, sitting down. I realize we’ve never before been under a roof, indoors, inside, together. Always sitting in the middle of the road, in a driveway, on a path, on pavement connected to streets, to highways, to interstates for which to someday travel.
“It’s been a long, long time,” Anna says.
“Has it?”
“Of course it has. But I’d recognize you anywhere.”
“Same.”
“That forehead!” she says, and I don’t know what she means. She pauses for a sip of water, and the silence is excruciating. Then, “Are you here on vacation? Are you visiting someone special?”
“I’m looking for my next placement. What about you?”
“I live here,” she says, gesturing to the room, confused. “Remember?”
“I mean, for your current placement.”
“No. I don’t do placements. I don’t do that anymore.”
“Oh?”
“I hopped from that old delivery truck to another delivery truck and to a bus and to a train across the country, and when I came back, I came back with the steadiness. A real job. A dream job!” She cups her chin in her hands and squeezes her eyes shut, a princess with a granted wish.
“A permanent job?”
“Yeah,” and she sounds disappointed by my lack of excitement. “Like, you know, a regular job.” She lobs the word regular in the manner of an eye roll.
I tuck my feet up onto the couch and under my thighs, but is that too informal? The holes in my socks are showing, and I slowly slide my feet back to the floor.
“What does it feel like?” I ask, trying not to cry. “The steadiness?”
“Oh, you know, it’s hard to describe. Maybe like a rolling pin running over my shins? No, that’s not right. Maybe like a Slinky wrapped around my hand? No, not that either. It’s really different for everyone. Well, not everyone.”
“Not everyone,” I say, and it’s like stretching open a sealed scar.
“I didn’t mean it like that!” she cries. “Don’t worry. When you know, you just know!”
I hope she won’t say the next thing, but she says it anyway.
“Sometimes these things happen when you’re not looking for them.” Anna smiles.
“Where do you work?” I ask, trying to change the subject, barely breathing. “Where is your regular job?”
“At the bank,” Anna says, wrapping herself in a cashmere throw. She is cashmere upon cashmere.
“Which one?”
“They make it so confusing,” she says, “but between you and me, it’s really all the same bank. Just one bank. All those robberies barely make a dent.”
I can still picture Laurette slicing and shoving, locking the safe, blood pooling on the floor.
“Are you by any chance ever assigned to clean the bank?” I ask.
“Oh my god, you’re so funny,” Anna says, and she gulps her water like it’s something stiffer. “I don’t ever have to clean anything, not even my own house.”
“Right.”
“We need to treat ourselves kindly, you know!” Anna declares. “Especially right now, with all the bombings and the fugitives. And I heard something about a wild beast, like a dragon? What even is this life?” She shakes her head, then laughs. A real, happy laugh.
My whole body starts to shake, but am I sad? Am I cold? Am I safe? Am I scared?
“You’re practically quaking!” Anna says, and she wraps me in the other end of her cashmere throw, really just a fringed corner. We sit like this for a moment, both comfortable and not, Anna’s mouth curved into an expression I can’t decipher. When we were younger, every door was a secret door. Every mollusk perhaps contained a pearl. We could anticipate rooms hidden behind other rooms, or meaty carcasses buried under mounds of soil. We wandered every surface with amazed suspicion. Now, Anna scoops up all the mystery for herself, tossing it over her shoulders like an oversized sweater. I surmise this much: Getting older is the difference between solving mysteries and studying to become one.
A round voice bounces down the stairs, inaudible but jolly. Anna has apparently understood the voice, because she yells, “Just a minute, babe!” Her posture changes, shoulders popping, head bobbing.
“
We were about to watch a movie,” she says, and for the first time I notice the two glasses, two plates. The pair of napkins. Two remote controls and two more on a shelf, and another remote in a ceramic dish.
“So many remotes.”
“I know. We always lose track of which does what. I can never change the volume!” She tucks her feet up under her thighs, and I feel I’ve been invited to do the same. She leans into the couch with a long yawn, and I think, Is Anna bored?
“You should stay,” Anna says with a pout, her eyes half closed. But the word stay has two syllables in her mouth—stay-ee—and I recognize that second syllable. It’s the extra square foot, the exit where I’m supposed to see myself out.
“No, no, I really shouldn’t.”
“But wouldn’t you like to join us? Wouldn’t you like to stay-ee? You’ve only just arrived.”
“I’ve seen this one already. On an enormous screen.” I point at the television. The film is paused on a frame from the opening credits, which I recognize from the pirate captain’s movie retrospective. “I’ve seen it big projector–style,” I say.
“Fun! Like an outdoor movie in the park?”
“Yes, like an outdoor movie in the park.”
“Cool. But we can watch something else. We can watch anything. Or nothing. Stay-ee!”
“OK. OK, maybe I will.”
Satisfied, Anna tucks her cashmere sleeves into a cashmere cardigan under the cashmere blanket. Cashmere upon cashmere upon cashmere, a cocoon: She softens herself daily, in preparation for receiving love. Then she stretches out her arms and grabs me by the shoulders, reaching forward in parallel lines. At first I take it as a gesture of affection. But on further consideration, it’s really an ambiguous pose, isn’t it, the shoulder bridge, holding onto someone and also holding someone at bay, and she backs away into the kitchen, like a mammal running scared, to retrieve a board of cheese.
The round voice bouncing down the stairs once again. I think I hear the name Anna, or some variation on that theme.
“I need to go up to the bedroom for a second,” she says, a cube of cheese on her tongue. “You’re fine for a minute? It won’t be long.”
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