Escaping Heaven

by Cliff Hicks

  “Because of this, and because of the excellent efficiency you and your team have done in documenting your highly successful procedures, we launched an off-shore calling group headquartered in India approximately four months ago. Using the fine techniques your group pioneered, they have achieved sale numbers the likes of which we have never seen, surpassing even your teams’. Because of this, and because of the amount of savings we are able to offer our investors by using the India group’s salary, and by setting up similar calling centers similar to the existing India group in other overseas nations, we have no choice but to close the Omaha call center.”

  He looked up from the paper, and there were tears in his eyes. From his appearance, he expected people to be moaning and wailing, and instead he saw only aghast silence.

  “As thanks for your team’s service to us, we are sending you a case of complimentary mugs, and extending you and your team four weeks of severance pay instead of the company’s standard two. We expect you to notify your team two weeks from today and then have the office closed up the following day. If we can offer you any references…’” He picked up the paper and shook it. “References! Can you fucking believe these people?!”

  That outburst made more than a couple people sit more upright in their chairs. Andrew had never sworn in the entire time he was at the company, at least as far as Jake could remember, and here he was, blasting away at the corporate office, suits just off to the side of him.

  “I’m sorry, guys. I tried. I really tried. But they wouldn’t listen. They can get people like us cheaper, and we made it easier for them.” He lifted a hand up and rubbed his head, looking a little lost for what to say next. “So I don’t know about any of you, but I’m going to pack up my crap, toss it into my car, then walk down the street to the Welsh pub and get myself utterly shit-faced. Okay guys, that’s it.”

  One of the suits moved over to put a hand on Andrew’s shoulder and Andrew shrugged it off angrily. “Get the fuck off me!” Andrew glared at the man, before turning back to his crowd, the life from his eyes totally gone, as dead to the world as the people he’d managed for years.

  He took the letter which he’d so meticulously unfolded and tossed it up into the air, then stormed off stage, down the aisles past newly unemployed people and kicked the doors open. They swung open banged against the walls and bounced back at him, slamming into his shoulders, but he was determined to keep walking out, no matter how much it hurt. And Jake had been hit by those doors once before; they had hurt like hell.

  Jake slowly rose to his feet, one of the first ones to do so, rubbing his eyes, chuckling just a little bit. He tried to keep it in his mind, that single thought that had kept him going for the two and a half years he’d been here – fuck it; it’s just a job.

  The mass of people slowly shuffled out of the room. There was no righteous indignation. No riot. The meek did not inherit the earth; they quietly moved to their cubicles and began to pack things up into the boxes that had been so thoughtfully placed next to each of their desks.

  There wasn’t a whole lot to pack in Jake’s cubicle. He picked up the picture of him and his fiancée and tossed it into the box first. He slowly began to peel down the various comic strips he’d push-pinned to the foam of his cube’s half-wall. After two of three of the strips, he just grabbed them all into one big handful, crushing them and tossing them down onto the floor, next to, not in, the trashcan. He scrunched his face up and opened up his desk drawers, taking out all of his pencils, pocket change and notes. He lifted the coffee mug, considering it in the light, then put it into the box. It would hopefully remind him that just doing what it took to get by wasn’t enough, and that was something. Hard work, indeed.

  It was a sea of faces, a few people crying, most people shaking hands and exchanging phone numbers, but Jake paid no real mind to them. Even Nathaniel, who was patting Jake on the back, was talking in a sort of droning monotone that Jake had just tuned out. It was all so much noise now. Jake felt a little bad that he didn’t care more, but these people were really just coworkers, not particularly friends, and it wasn’t like he’d seen much of them outside of work in the years he’d been here. Jake thought to himself that the only difference between working here and not was that he wouldn’t have money coming in (negative) and that he wouldn’t constantly be calling people to get yelled at (positive). So, it evened out. Still, not having a steady income for at least a few weeks would suck, that much he had to admit to himself. There would always be other jobs, though, he supposed. With a sigh, he hoisted his box up and walked out, leaving the office mostly with a sense of resigned listlessness.

  His car, the rust-colored rust-covered beat-up Chevy Nova, still waited for him in the parking lot and he fished his keys out of his pocket and opened the trunk, putting the box into it. He slammed the trunk shut and then walked around and got in the car, buckling up and turning the key to the sound of a dead battery. Jake closed his eyes and banged his head once against his steering wheel.

  His horn didn’t work either.

  Twenty minutes and one jump later, the Chevy Nova was on its way. Jake hadn’t really felt like going back to his house, so he’d decided to head over to his fiancée’s apartment. She’d suggested they keep separate places until they were married, as her folks were something of religious sticklers, and two unmarried people living together would cause quite a ruckus with their friends at the country club. He’d kill a few hours at her place and when she got home, she could help him get his strength back and feel better about the day.

  As his car pulled into the guest parking space at her apartment complex, he noticed that her car was in her parking spot. He wondered idly if she wasn’t feeling well and had stayed home from work today, but figured she was just home getting some lunch.

  He picked up the box of his stuff from the trunk and walked into the building and up to the apartment on the third floor. It really wasn’t that big a box, nor really did he feel like he’d lost all that much of himself when he’d been laid off, or “cut back” as the company preferred it said. He unlocked her front door with the key she’d given him and let himself quietly into her apartment.

  Her place was one of those places that revealed she’d always been aiming for social climbing. Her family was well off to begin with, but that never seemed to be enough for her, always wanting more. And rich by Omaha standards wasn’t exactly rich by, say, Hollywood standards. The apartment was in a posh neighborhood with posh neighbors who were talking about what arthouse film they’d seen lately, how the value of the Yen was rising and how it was hurting their business, how the country club’s pool had gotten too crowded since they’d lowered admission costs, how the tax breaks weren’t enough for them and too much for the “lazy lower class”… it wasn’t Jake’s world, and he knew it. Hell, he felt uncomfortable just being in the neighborhood most days, but today was a particularly bad day.

  Worse than he’d yet realized, in fact.

  The first thing he was confronted with was a thong on the floor inside the hallway of her apartment. Right next to a pair of jockey briefs. And Jake only wore boxers, so he knew they weren’t his. And Jake could put two and two together. “Oh no,” he muttered to himself quietly.

  “Yes yes yes oh fuck yes! Fuck me!” his fiancée’s voice screamed from her bedroom. He could hear the sounds of her bed shaking as the headboard slammed up against the wall, something she’d told him never to do as it bothered the neighbors, and they wouldn’t want that. Apparently that didn’t apply during the day, though. Or to other people, he guessed. She’d never talked to him like that. (He probably would’ve liked it if she had...)

  Jake inhaled a long breath and turned right, moving directly into the apartment’s kitchen. On the counter he saw her stack of keys and her engagement ring right next to one another. He set the box quietly down on the floor and pulled the mug that read “Thanks For All The Hard Work” out from it. He put the mug down on the countertop then picked up the engagement ring and
put it into his pocket. He unspooled the keys to his house from her keyring and put them in his pocket right next to the ring. He took her key off of his keychain and put it inside of the coffee mug. He pulled out the picture he had of the two of them from his box and deframed it, then tore himself out of the picture, and put the half with her, his arm still half-way visible in the shot, inside of the coffee mug.

  And then he left.

  He knew he should feel a lot angrier, and even felt a slight twinge of fury when he recognized his so-called best friend’s car in one of the guest parking spots out in the apartment building’s lot, but the rage passed as quickly as it arrived. For the most part he didn’t feel anything at all. He wondered if he should attribute it to shock or whether he truly didn’t give a shit right now.

  His best friend, his fiancée… they were part of the whole wasted life he needed to get rid of. He needed to kill the old him and start a new one. It was something he had to do; he could see that now. That isn’t to say it didn’t hurt – it stung like hell. But really, he felt like he should’ve seen this coming a long time ago. His fiancée, his ex-fiancée, had always been trying to change things about him, make him into whatever it was she really wanted, which clearly wasn’t him. Maybe she wanted him to piss off her parents, or his stability, or his dependability, or whatever it was she felt like her life was missing. It certainly hadn’t been the sex; that much was clear. Maybe his best friend was filling her sexual needs and he was filling everything else. He would need to change all of his bank accounts, his credit cards, everything that had her name on it next to his.

  He looked at his car and sighed, terrified that it wouldn’t turn over. Fortunately, his Chevy Nova started up fine this time. Perhaps it was thankful that it would no longer have to hear his fiancée, his ex-fiancée, bitch about how he should replace it. He would have except getting the money together had been a bit of a challenge. The behemoth rumbled out into the street and Jake decided to turn on the radio to try and take his mind off of things. Suddenly, The Beatles began blaring “All You Need Is Love” out of the speakers. The radio, it seemed, had no such loyalties. Jake’s eyes rolled closed again and he drew in a deep breath, reaching over to turn the knob and turn the radio off. It snapped off in his hand. Jake paused, nodded a bit to himself acceptingly (as if this was the only possible thing that could have happened when he turned on the radio), then pulled the car over to the side of the road in front of an elderly rest home, leaving the car running as he got out.

  As a dozen senior citizens watched from their porch stoop, Jake moved back, opened his trunk, pulled out his tire iron, slammed his trunk, moved back to his car and smashed in his radio. He swung that tire iron three or four times to bash in the radio until it stopped making any sound. There was a squelch at the first strike, as if protesting the abuse, before it fell deathly silent as Jake’s last few blows crushed it in. He tossed the tire iron on the seat next to him as he sat back in the driver’s seat and lifted a hand up to wave to the senior citizens, who were staring at him in mild shock. At the sign of the wave, though, their automatic reactions kicked in, and they waved back on pure reflex. He started up his car and continued along his way.

  He maneuvered the car through the streets, pulling into a fast food joint. He needed some kind of lunch, and he didn’t particularly feel like cooking. He moved inside and joined the long queue, the line that would not die, the never-ending line. It looked like there were only a dozen or so people in line, but he could practically feel the hours melting away as he stood there, motionless. After what seemed like an eternity, one person moved. Then another. Jake felt as though that by the time he got to the counter, food itself would be obsolete. Eventually, he got to the counter and a man whose nametag featured only a random assortment of lines and was of an unfathomable background looked at him with a gaze of unrecognition. He spoke to Jake in a language he wasn’t familiar with, but the blur of constants and vowels sounded vaguely like “Hap flu?” Much of the man’s face was covered by a shock of black hair, or by a pair of giant coke-bottle glasses, and the rest was covered by acne, which also had acne on it.

  “Yeah, I’ll have a cheeseburger, plain, a side of fries and a vanilla milkshake.”

  “Hun fleaserber, fives anna kajilla fecksick, fillthir de handyjing hels?”

  Jake blinked a minute, struggling to try and make sense of what the man had said back to him. (At least, Jake thought it was a man, but now that he thought about it, he couldn’t exactly be sure.) Then Jake nodded in confirmation. “Uh, yeah.”

  “Sezdrendyfir.”

  Jake blinked again for a long moment and fished out a ten-dollar bill. Surely that would be enough to pay whatever bizarre figure it was this man (at least he thought it was a man) was asking for. The creature lifted the ten-dollar bill up and glanced at it in the light. He put it down on the counter and ran a marker across the top of it, then handed it back to Jake, shaking his head. Jake peered back curiously, examined his ten as he tried to figure out what the marker had done (nothing, as far as he could tell) then pocketed the ten and pulled a twenty out of his wallet.

  “Try this one,” Jake told him, holding the bill out to the maybe-a-man-but-still-not-sure.

  The thing held the bill up to the light, peered at it for a long moment, then set it down on the counter and ran the marker over it again. He (at least Jake thought it was more likely to be a he) scrutinized the bill as if it might bite. Then, after a good two minutes or so of inspecting every corner of the scrap of paper, the employee (Jake had decided to think of it as an it – much safer that way) pushed a button and the tray opened. It shoved the bill into the tray and then picked up a roll of quarters, rapping the roll against the edge of the counter. It poured the roll into the black plastic tray and then began counting out quarters. It was, it seemed, out of ones. And fives. And tens. Fourteen dollars or so of quarters later, the being of indiscriminate gender handed Jake a scrap of paper with a number on it. (Or perhaps it was a hieroglyphic. The ink had smudged and made a mostly unrecognizable blob that Jake thought might have been 14. Or an owl. Perhaps both.) Jake pondered the paper as he moved over to the side and proceeded to wait.

  A few minutes later, Jake saw his food get put up on the metal ledge behind the counter. Just a few sparse feet away waited his meal. And there it waited. And waited. And waited. Fifteen minutes or so later, an employee came out of the back and picked up Jake’s tray. He carted it over to the counter, and yelled out the wrong number. (Or at least Jake assumed it was the wrong number. They had yelled out 73, which it seemed unlikely matched the thing on his piece of paper.)

  “I think that’s me,” Jake said quietly. “You might just have your number wrong.”

  The new employee, just as inscrutable as the last, picked up Jake’s piece of paper, and compared it to the one in his other hand. His eyes (Jake was sure this one was a he, although his age looked like it might have been as low as twelve, around the same as the man’s likely IQ) moved back and forth between the two several times before he shrugged and handed Jake the tray.

  Jake took the tray over and began walking through the rows of booths. Each and every one of them was dirty beyond use. Some of them had mustard and ketchup all over them. Another was covered almost entirely in napkins. Yet another still was draped in the wreckage of the Great Plastic Spoon/Fork War of The Reasonably Recent Past, and no one had cleaned any of them. He kept walking away from the counter and finally reached a small two-seater table that looked serviceable, although one of the seats was missing a back. He put his tray down atop of the table and moved to sit in one of the seats, the one with a back, which promptly bent and dropped him to the floor.

  Inhaling a long breath, Jake stood back up, dusted himself off and moved over to the other chair, the one without the back, testing it before he sat down in it, this time without collapse. He opened the Styrofoam containers to find that his order was incorrect on every level. Instead of a plain hamburger, he had a chicken sandwich with eve
rything on it, including extra jalapeños. Instead of fries, he had onion rings. Instead of a vanilla shake, he had club soda. But Jake was too tired to go argue with the androgynous clerk who spoke only ancient Babylonian with a lisp and a stutter, so he simply ate his completely incorrect order in sadness.

  His cell phone rang part way through his meal, and he knew that ringtone, that pop song that he’d only tolerated because it was what his fiancée had wanted him to hear when she called. Well, now it was his ex-fiancée’s he figured, and he didn’t feel like taking her call. She had found her key, he supposed. He pushed the button on the side of his phone to silence it and a minute or two later, the voicemail sound went off, but he simply pushed the button to ignore that too. It was entirely possible that she had a valid reason for getting balled by his best friend (okay, ex-best friend) but he somehow doubted it. He was pretty sure he knew how the message would play out. She’d say it was just a one-time thing. She’d say she was weak. She’d say that she never meant to hurt him. She’d say to blame her and not his best friend. She’d say she wanted to work it out. She’d say that she could change. She’s say anything she could to convince him that she wasn’t a traitorous whore who’d been getting her brains screwed out by his best friend whenever they had a spare moment.

  When Jake thought about it, he realized she’d probably been lying to him on every level for a while, and that her message would likely go on for a rather long time, and his voicemail had never been able to handle deleting a message unlistened to. And he didn’t want the hassle of listening to and deleting the message right now. They were done, that was all there was to it, and he was afraid if he listened to the message, he might just give her a chance, and god only knows why. Because it was easier than arguing with her, possibly.

  About halfway through the meal he hadn’t ordered, Jake just didn’t feel like eating anymore, so he got up and walked out, not bothering to bus his tray. After all the things they had screwed up, he didn’t mind letting them clean up his mess. Let them suffer his one minor act of rebellion. He pushed open the door and made his way to his car, climbing back in and forcing the engine back to life. He scowled a little bit as he started backing out into the parking lot.