Person

by Sam Pink

  I follow my landlord into her office and she shows me a Halloween decoration she recently bought.

  The decoration is a plastic werewolf dressed in felt-clothing.

  It’s like, February, I think.

  “Sale,” she says.

  She bends the plastic werewolf over, trying to get it to do something.

  It’s supposed to do something.

  Just stand still and look at the thing and wait for it to do what it is supposed to do then react the same way your landlord reacts.

  Ok, I will.

  Then leave the office quickly, without running or tripping.

  Ok I will.

  Believe in yourself.

  She continues to try to get the werewolf to activate, lifting up the back panel of cloth/fur and flipping a button a few times.

  Minutes pass.

  During the minutes, I see the words “just walk out” scroll through my headhole in neon letters.

  I see myself walking out of the office, a bird landing on my shoulder, kissing my cheek.

  I see myself free and happy.

  “Come on Mr. Tricky Pants,” my landlord says. “Oh, here we go.”

  The werewolf starts to move, plastic limbs creaking.

  A Halloween song comes from the small speaker between the

  werewolf’s feet.

  The werewolf dances and mouths the Halloween song.

  I immediately say, “This is great.”

  And I smile and look at my landlord for a few seconds.

  When I leave the office, I don’t turn around until I am back in my apartment.

  The apartment seems unrecognizable.

  Looking around, I can’t recognize any of the things on the floor or anything.

  It seems like someone else moved in while I was out.

  Goddamn.

  What if all our keys work for any apartment and we’ve all just been trading constantly.

  “You win,” I say. “You always win.”

  I walk back outside and sit in my roommate’s car again.

  It still smells bad.

  That’s the only comforting thing about the day.

  I try to fall asleep with the back of my head hanging over the headrest.

  It gets darker and colder out.

  This is my backdrop.

  And I hum the Halloween song to myself, laughing about the way the werewolf danced.

  So good the way the werewolf danced.

  I’m with the girl from the first floor apartment again.

  I’ve been calling her over a lot now, because I’ve been getting afraid of the dark for some reason.

  We are going to bed.

  She’s in the sleeping bag on my bedroom floor, sitting up topless with a rubberband between her teeth as she makes her hair into a ponytail.

  I’m standing by the lightswitch.

  I’m naked, one hand on the light, one hand kind of stretching my scrotum out at random.

  Shivering.

  This is amazing.

  For some reason I have become the person whose job it is to turn off the lights.

  I like it though.

  A job.

  Right now I can be confused for a happy person.

  “What are you doing,” she says. “Turn it off.”

  I look at her.

  “Do you feel ok right now,” I say.

  “Yeah why,” she says.

  “Like right now, you feel ok in general.”

  “Why,” she says.

  I watch her finish the ponytail and I decide that I don’t hate her, I think.

  “I can’t remember why I asked that,” I say.

  I hold up my arm and smell my armpit.

  “Come here,” I say. “Smell me. Do I have b.o. Like onion-style.”

  “I smelled you before when you were showing me that really high jumping jack. It’s not onions. It’s—” she pauses, “It smells more like pizza.”

  “Pizza sounds worse than onions,” I say.

  “It could be.”

  I lower my arm.

  “People love pizza though,” I say.

  “They do,” she says. “Turn off the light now please.”

  I turn off the light and stand exactly where I am.

  And I half-pray/half-wish that one night once she falls asleep I can turn the light on and off, a year passing with each flash.

  No I mean I half-pray/half-wish that a year would reverse with each flash.

  Haha shit!

  My roommate is sitting at the broken desk in his room.

  There is a dictionary in his lap and he’s about to fail looking up a word he just claimed to be real.

  I’m in the doorway of his room holding the cat we’re babysitting for one of his ex-girlfriends.

  I hold the cat like a baby and kiss its face, avoiding the random attempts to claw me.

  The cat is angry.

  It’s funny to me.

  My roommate shuts the dictionary and sits back.

  “Fuck,” he says.

  “It’s ok,” I say. I kiss the cat’s face again and say, “I’m sure you really believed ‘bilomite’ was a word. I’m not saying you were lying.”

  “Yeah I thought it was like, a fossil, right,” he says.

  “People get confused,” I say.

  He yawns and puts his hands on his face like he is holding his face together.

  He puts his hands down and he blinks a few times.

  “Should we get some beers tonight,” he says.

  The cat tries to claw my eye and I move away.

  There is absolute hatred in the cat’s eyes.

  I feel afraid of the cat.

  I set the cat down and it runs away.

  Down the hall.

  The word “safe” scrolls through my head in neon letters.

  “Should we,” my roommate says.

  “We could do that,” I say. “Or maybe we could just buy a lot of carrots and eat them and see what that does. I think I heard that carrots can make you feel drunk too, just like beer does. We could try that.”

  “Yes or no,” he says, scratching the back of his neck.

  “Yes,” I say. “Should we go to Lucky’s then. They’re closest. Unless you mean going to a bar. If you mean going to bar then I don’t want to go.”

  He scratches his sideburn and says, “Fuck Lucky’s. I hate that place. Fuck that place. I don’t want to get shot. Plus that guy at the register always calls me a bitch. He always finds a way to call me a bitch somehow. One time he told me he was going to ‘erase me.’ I didn’t do anything to him. Fuck those assholes.” He leans back in his chair and says, “In conclusion, fuck that place and also, fuck those assholes.”

  “The people there don’t mess with me,” I say.

  “That’s because you look insane. They like you.”

  I scratch my shin with the heel of my other foot.

  “Remember that old homeless lady wearing the ‘Babe Magnet’ hat,” I say. “She used to be there a lot. I liked her.”

  “Yeah, she was cool,” he says. “She gave me some of her animal crackers one time.”

  “See. Good people,” I say. “Everywhere there are good people.”

  He ignores me.

  He says, “She told me that if I eat the rhino I will have its strength and then she watched me eat the rhino cracker and she looked scared like it was about to happen.”

  “Did it happen.”

  “I don’t think so but I haven’t decided,” he says.

  I can’t think of anything to say so I walk down the hall and he follows.

  We put on our shoes and coats and argue about whether or not it would work to just pass a huge piece of paper around to the entire world and have people sign it in agreement to become friends.

  Would that work.

  What would that change.

  My roommate refers to it as a “worldwide friendship mandate.”

  It doesn’t seem convincing.

  At the liquor store I s
tand in line holding the beer while my roommate ties his shoes.

  There is a song about love playing from the small speakers behind the register.

  A homeless man gets in line behind us.

  He’s holding a dirty plastic doll.

  He smells worse than me and I smell worse than my roommate.

  I establish a hierarchy.

  My roommate looks at the homeless man then around the store, still tying his shoes.

  “I hate this fucking place,” he says. He switches shoes and says, “Why do they keep the tampons by the duct tape and the gardening gloves.”

  The homeless man behind us says, “In case shit gets real.”

  His eyes are open wide and he is nodding.

  He moves his tongue around his mouth, over two big teeth on top that look like tusks.

  I nod upward once and say, “Nice tusks, man.”

  The homeless man clutches his plastic doll closer to him.

  “Don’t touch me,” he says. “Do not, fucking, touch me.” He laughs hoarsely, then coughs a little. He says, “Pretty soon everyone will have a better chance at falling into the pile. You know, I saw the plane crash in my dreams and it was boo-tiful. It was boot-iful.”

  He kneels down and bows his head while holding up the doll.

  “Boo-tiful,” he says.

  I decide to play the disappearing game, where I try to see how completely I can be gone from any interaction.

  The problem with this game is that with victory comes no recognition.

  So I pay for the beer and the guy at the register holds up a red plastic chip I must have accidentally given him with some coins.

  He says, “We don’t take bingo chips, bitch.”

  He flips the bingo chip to the counter, where it bounces then lands on the floor.

  I grab it off the floor and take our beer off the counter.

  My roommate says, “You never told me you played bingo.”

  “It was a long time ago,” I say. “I’ve changed.”

  The homeless man shakes the doll at us as we leave.

  It looks evil to me in the fluorescent lighting.

  The bell on the door rings when we leave.

  It is really cold out.

  We walk home in the cold.

  And I see Christmas lights still hung in a high-up window on an apartment building.

  There is no talking.

  The word “ouch” scrolls through my headhole in neon letters.

  I feel concerned that knowing how to really forget something is a talent learned too late.

  We get back to our apartment.

  In the hallway outside our apartment, I hold the beer while my roommate gets out his keys.

  “Hey, would you sign the paper,” he says.

  “What.”

  He turns the key and opens our apartment door and he says, “The piece of paper that would make everyone agree to be friends. Would you sign it.”

  “Fuck that,” I say.

  We stand in the hallway.

  The door to our apartment is open to us.

  I adjust the beer in my arms, uncomfortable.

  I say, “I think like, whenever the next time somebody buys something off me, and they want to know how much it costs, I’m going to be like, ‘Fifty clams.’ And then wait a second and say, ‘Actual clams.’”

  My roommate is looking into the apartment.

  “Sounds good,” he says.

  I adjust the beer again.

  “You aren’t listening to me,” I say.

  “Yeah, I know. I just kind of feel shitty.”

  And he is the winner.

  We go inside.

  When we get back to our apartment building we stand in the hallway.

  I adjust the beer in my arms and I say, “I don’t have my keys with me.”

  My roommate gets his keys out.

  He says, “Hey would you sign it.”

  “Sign what.”

  He turns the key and opens the door.

  “The piece of paper that would make everyone agree to be friends,” he says. “Would you sign it.”

  I say, “I’d have to see who else signed it.”

  We stand outside in the hallway, looking into the open apartment.

  My roommate says, “Me too.”

  And we stand there staring.

  We are the maggot philanthropists.

  “Are you going to go in,” I say.

  “I was going to wait to see who else would,” he says.

  “Ha ha,” I say. “I love you.”

  He nods toward the open door and he says, “Love you too.”

  I say, “We are both winners here.”

  We go in.

  My dinner is a handful of mints taken from the entryway of a restaurant on the walk home.

  I have fun.

  It’s nighttime.

  I’m sitting in the empty bathtub in our bathroom, fully clothed.

  I’ve been reading one of my roommate’s old yearbooks from like his freshman year of highschool.

  He keeps it in the bathroom for some reason.

  There are many people in the yearbook.

  I touch the people’s faces with my fingers.

  I read about fun dances and experiences.

  I read about science contest winners and sports things.

  The word “distance” flashes through my headhole on loop, in buzzing neon letters, and I sit there.

  The pictures seem so beautiful to me.

  There is no relief from the feeling of the beauty of the yearbook pictures.

  Goddamn.

  I bite my nails and I write letters to the people in the yearbook, but I only write them in my head.

  It feels good.

  It feels like practice.

  Overall, I am comfortable.

  I’m celebrating my new status as the master-champion of the entire galaxy.

  And I know that when I run from something, there is a bigger part of me that hopes I get caught than there is that hopes I get away.

  My defense is that I taste horrible.

  That’s my defense.

  My roommate knocks at the bathroom door.

  From the other side, he says, “Did I leave a shoe in there. If it’s in there, can I get it.”

  I see no shoe.

  The girl on the first floor hasn’t had a job for a while either.

  She invited me over tonight.

  It’s too cold to sleep in her room so we sleep in the livingroom on the couch pullout bed.

  The pullout bed smells bad to me.

  Maybe she is thinking the same about me.

  Who knows!

  We lie down together and our only light comes via tv, where a friendly old man is trying to sell necklaces.

  At the bottom of the screen there is a phone number and a counter.

  I watch the counter while she adjusts the sheets on the pullout bed and distributes them evenly between us.

  She always does that.

  It’s nice.

  “It’s much warmer out here,” she says. “Why is it so cold in my room.”

  I ignore her, watching the counter rise.

  What’s the counter for.

  The word “intriguing” scrolls across my headhole in neon letters.

  Maybe that’s the amount of friends the old man has.

  Fuck yeah.

  You know what, I’m one of them.

  I am part of that bigger number.

  He just looks so friendly.

  The old man I mean.

  We could do everything together.

  We could go bowling together.

  We could dress alike.

  Me and the friendly old man, we could have dates.

  Try on necklaces.

  Play catch with a football.

  I’d always make sure to just loft the football so I wouldn’t destroy his little old-man arms.

  What a good guy I am.

  What a good guy he is.

  I unders
tand now why the counter is rising.

  Yes.

  Yes this makes sense.

  What doesn’t make sense is how the counter on the screen isn’t exploding.

  Like, I’m surprised it doesn’t just begin to ascend rapidly and then melt.

  “I think he just winked at me,” I say.

  “What.”

  She turns over a little.

  “The old man winked at me,” I say. “And it’s because we’re friends.”

  She looks at the tv and scratches her nose with the knuckle of her forefinger.

  “There’s no way they’re selling that many necklaces,” she says. She turns back to me and she says, “Hey remember that magician we saw the other day on tv. He was so good. It makes me think like, maybe some of his stuff is real.”

  We are quiet.

  We watch the tv.

  This is magic.

  The counter continues to rise and the old man continues to smile, holding necklaces.

  And I realize I have never once actually been happy in my life.

  And also never felt any kind of care that didn’t threaten to give up when challenged.

  “Man, I just remembered when I was in like, kindergarten,” I say. “Me and a bunch of other kids were in the plastic playhouse thing during inside recess. We were reading a book. I was always the guy who read for some reason.”

  “That’s funny,” she says.

  I swallow and cough.

  Then I continue.

  “My best friend in class, he was this black kid named Ernest. And while I was reading, I stopped at one of the pictures and pointed at the black kid in the picture. I said, ‘Hey look there’s a little nigger one in here.’ And like, I didn’t even know what it meant. I just knew I’d heard other people say it. So it didn’t make sense to me, but then when I looked at my friend Ernest, he looked so hurt. Like he already knew what that meant. Like, I didn’t even realize it, but then I did. The look on his face was—he looked like he was mad at himself for being my friend. It felt stupid and terrible. Man. It’s fucking shitty I think. I feel really stupid and bad when I think about myself in situations like that.”

  When I’m done talking I just want to keep talking so there is no quiet.

  But I don’t.

  She gets on her elbow again and looks at the tv.

  I can see part of her nipple down her shirt.

  The word “sex” scrolls through my headhole in big neon letters.

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Maybe they’ve sold that many. They could’ve sold that many. How many people buy necklaces at night though.”