by Charles Yu
The next day is more of the same. Eleven tickets. The lowlight of the day is when I get to confess to my husband that I have been sleeping with my trainer for the last year. The first year of our marriage. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst. Heartbreak. When I first started at this job, I thought physical pain would be hardest. But it’s not. This is the hardest. To be inside here, looking at this man’s face, at the lowest moment of his life, watching him try to keep it together. To be inside here, feeling what this woman is feeling, having done this to him. And then the world blinks twice and my field of vision goes blue and I’m a guy sitting in front of a computer screen and the sandwich cart is in front of my cubicle.
So I have lunch.
After lunch, I pass her in the hall. The new woman. Her name badge says Kirthi. She doesn’t look at me this time.
On the way home from work, I decide to swing by the secondhand shop and check out my life.
It’s not my life, technically. Not yet. It’s the life I want, the life I’ve been saving for. Not a DreamLife®, not top of the line, but a starter model, a good one. Standard possibility. Low volatility. A kindhearted wife with nice hair, 0.35 kids, no actuals, certainties are too expensive, but some potential kids, a solid thirty-five percent chance of having one. Normal life expectancy, average health, median aggregate amount of happiness. I test-drove it once, and it felt good, it felt right. It fit just fine.
I don’t know. I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself. I just thought there might be more to it all than this.
Still, I’ve got it better than some people. I mean, I’m renting my life out one day at a time, but I haven’t sold it yet. And I don’t plan to, either. I’m buying in, not selling out. I want to live, not exist, want to have a life, even if it is bits and pieces, even if it isn’t the greatest product out there, even if it’s more like a life-substitute. I’ll take it.
I’m not going to be like my father, who sold his life on a cold, clear afternoon in November. He was thirty. It was the day before my fourth birthday.
We went to the brokerage. It felt like a bank, but friendlier. My father had been carrying me on his shoulders, but he put me down when we got inside. There was dark wood everywhere, and also bright flowers and classical music. We were shown to a desk, and a woman in an immaculate pantsuit asked if we would like anything to drink. My father didn’t say anything, just looked off at the far wall. I remember my mother asked for a cup of tea for my father.
I don’t want to sell my life. I’m not ready to do that yet. So I sell it bit by bit. Scrape by. Sell it by the hour. Pain, grief, terror, worse. Or just mild discomfort. Social anxiety. Boredom.
I ask around about Kirthi. People are talking. The guys are talking. Especially the married guys. They do the most talking.
I pass her in the hall again, and again she doesn’t look at me. No surprise there. Women never look at me. I am not handsome or tall. But I am nice.
I think it is actually that which causes the not-looking at me. The niceness, I mean, not the lack of handsomeness or tallness. They can see the niceness and it is the kind of niceness that, in a man, you instinctively ignore. What is nice? What good is a nice man? No good to women. No good to other men.
She doesn’t look at me, but I feel, or maybe I wish or I imagine, that something in the way she does not look at me is not quite the same. She is not-looking at me in a way that feels like she is consciously not-looking at me. And from the way she is not-looking at me, I can tell she knows I am trying to not-look at her. We are both not-looking at each other. And yet, there is something in the way she is not-looking at me. For the first time in a long while, I have hope.
I am at a funeral. Again.
I’m flipped to green.
You can be flipped to green, or flipped to red.
You can be there, or can just feel the feeling.
This is the one improvement they have made that actually benefits us workers. There’s a toggle switch on the headset. Flip it to green and you get a rendering of the client’s visual field. You see what he sees. Flip it to red and you still feel all of the feelings, but you see what you see.
You can do whatever you want, so long as you don’t leave your cubicle. Some people just stare at the cube-divider wall. Some play computer solitaire. Some even chat with neighbors, although that is strongly discouraged.
I was hesitant at first, but more and more these days I am usually flipped to red. Except for funerals. Funerals, I like to be there, just out of some kind of respect thing.
This morning’s first ticket: sixtyish rich guy, heart attack in the home office, millions in the bank, five kids from three marriages, all hate him.
Client is one of those kids, trust-fund baby, paid extra for amnesia. No feeling, no pre-feeling, no hangover, no residue, no chance of actually having any part of it, long enough to ensure that he will be halfway in the bag before any of the day’s events start nibbling at the corners of his awareness.
I see the fresh, open plot. A little rain falls on the funeral procession as they get out of the cars, but there’s a break in the clouds so that it’s raining and the sun is shining at the same time.
As usual, everyone is well dressed. A lot of the rich look mildly betrayed in the face of death, as if they are a little bit surprised that good style and a lot of money weren’t quite enough to protect them from the unpleasantness of it all. I’m standing next to what I am guessing is widow number two, late thirties, probably, with beautiful sand-colored hair. We make eye contact and she is staring at me and I am trying not to stare at her and then we both realize the same thing at the same time. Raj, I almost say, catching myself before I do, but something in my eyes must give it away anyway, because she smiles, or he smiles. I’m not quite sure which one smiles, Raj, or the person he is hiding inside of.
Rajiv usually works night shift now, so I haven’t seen him in a while. He must have picked up a day shift. We used to have a beer or two after work. A friend, I would call him. I want to call him that. One of the few I’ve had in this line of work.
The pastor talks about a full life lived, and the limits of earthly rewards, and everyone nods affirmatively, and then there is music as the body goes into the ground, I’ve heard it at a lot of funerals. Mozart, I think, but I am not sure. Sometimes I think that’s really what my job is. Nodding and crying and listening to Mozart. And I think, there are worse things. There are.
Death of an aunt is seven hundred. Death of an uncle is six.
Bad day in the markets is a thousand. Kid’s recital is one twenty-five an hour. Church is one fifty.
The only category that we will not quote a price on is death of a child. Death of a child is separately negotiated. Hardly anyone can afford it. And not all operators can handle it. We have to be specially trained to be eligible for those tickets. People go on sick leave, disability. Most people just physically cannot do it. There hasn’t been one booked the whole time I’ve been here, so most of us aren’t even sure what is true and what isn’t. The rumor is that if you do one, you are allowed to take the rest of the month off. Deep was always tempted. It’s not worth it, I would tell him. Okay, so, maybe not for you, Deep said. Okay, so, mind your own business, he would say.
The first time I talk to Kirthi is by the water fountain. I tell her we are neighbors, cubicle-wise. She says she knows. I feel a bit stupid.
The second time we talk, we are also by the water fountain, and I try to say something charming, we have to stop meeting like this or something terrible like that. I probably saw it on TV and it just came out. Stupid. She doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t frown, either. She just kind of looks at me, as if trying to figure out how I could have thought that was a good idea.
The third time we talk, I kiss her. By the microwave in the snack room. I don’t know what got into me. I am not an aggressive person. I am not physically strong. I weigh one hundred and forty-five pounds. She doesn’t la
ugh. She actually makes a face like disgust. But she doesn’t push me away, either. Not right away. She accepts the kiss, doesn’t kiss back, but after a couple of seconds, breaks it off and leans back and turns her head and says, under her breath, You shouldn’t have done that.
Still, I am happy. I’ve got three more tickets in the bucket before lunch, and then probably eight or nine before I go home, but the whole rest of the day, I am having an out-of-my-body experience. Even when I am in someone else’s body, I am still out of my body.
I weep.
I wail.
I gnash my teeth.
Underneath it all, I am smiling.
I am at a funeral. My client’s heart aches, and inside of it is my heart, not aching, the opposite, doing that, whatever it is. My heart is doing the opposite of aching.
Kirthi and I start dating. That’s what I call it. She calls it letting me walk her to the bus stop. She lets me buy her lunch. She tells me I should stop. She still never smiles at me.
I’m a heartbreak specialist, she says.
When I see her in the hallway, I walk up behind her and slip my arm around her waist.
She has not let me in yet. She won’t let me in.
Why won’t you let me in? I ask her.
You don’t want in, she says. You want around. You want near. You don’t want in.
There are two hundred forty-seven ways to have your heart broken, she says, and I have felt them all.
I am in a hospice.
I have been here before. A regular client.
I am holding a pen.
I have just written something on a notepad in front of me.
My husband is gone.
He died years ago.
Today is the tenth anniversary of his death.
I have Alzheimer’s, I think.
A memory of my husband surfaces, like a white-hot August afternoon, resurfacing in the cool water of November.
I tear off the sheet of paper.
I read it to myself.
It is a suicide note.
I raise a glass to my mouth, swallow a pill. Catch a glance of my note to the world.
The fail-safe kicks on, the system overrides. I close the ticket. I’m out just in time, but as I leave this dying mind, I feel the consciousness losing its structure. Not closing down. Opening. As it dies, I feel it opening up, like a box whose walls fall away, or a maybe a flowering plant, turning toward the sun.
Kirthi hasn’t been to work for the past two days.
It’s her father.
That’s what Sunil tells me, one day over a beer.
Kirthi’s father is still mortgaged, Sunil explains. Locked in. Sold his life. “Just like yours,” Sunil says. “Right?”
I nod.
Sunil is in tech support, so he’s seen all of the glitches. He knows what can go wrong in the mechanics of feeling transfers. Sunil has seen some strange things.
“There’s no upper bound on weird,” he says.
“This is going to end badly, man,” he says. “You have to trust me on this. Kirthi is damaged. And she knows it.”
Sunil means well, but what he doesn’t know is that I am fine with damaged. I want damage. I’ve looked down the road I’m on and I see what’s coming. A lot of nothing. No great loves lost. And yet, I feel like I lost something. Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all? How about this: I lost without the love. I’ve lost things I’ve never even had. A whole life.
But as the weeks go on, I begin to think Sunil might be right.
“Kirthi won’t let me in,” I tell him. “She tells me to get away from her, to run.”
“She is doing you a favor, man. Take her advice.”
I ask her about her father.
She doesn’t talk to me for a week.
And then, on Friday night, after we walk for an hour in silence, before going into her apartment, she turns to me. “It’s awful,” she says. “To see him.”
“Like that,” I say. She nods.
I wrap my hand around hers, but she slides away, escapes.
Why won’t you just love me, I ask her.
She says it’s not possible to make someone feel something.
Even yourself, she says.
Even if you want to feel it.
I tell her about the life I have my eye on.
“Show it to me,” she says.
We walk down to the store where I’d seen it, but it’s no longer in the window.
Inside the shop I motion to the clerk, ask about the life I’d been hoping for.
“Someone bought it,” he says. “Day before yesterday.”
Kirthi looks down at her shoes, feeling my disappointment for me.
I’ll find another one just like it, I tell her. A standard happiness package. Decent possibility. The chance of a kid. It wouldn’t be enough for us, not quite, but we could share it, take turns living the life. One works while the other one lives, maybe I work weekdays and she gives me a break on weekends.
She looks at me for a few long seconds, seems to be thinking about it, living the whole life out in her head, then without saying anything, she touches my cheek. It’s a start.
When Deep was happy, before it got bad and then worse and then even worse, he was always talking about how he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. He talked like that, he really did. He loved telling stories.
About a week before he cracked up, we were in the coffee room and he told me a story about a guy at Managed Life Solutions, a mental-anguish shop across town, who made arrangements with a prominent banker who wanted to kill his wife. The banker was going to do it, he’d made up his mind, but he didn’t want the guilt. Plus, he thought it might help with his alibi if he didn’t have any memory.
Bullshit, I said. That would never work.
No, really, Deep says. He tells me all about it, how they arranged it all while talking in public, at work in fact, but they talked in code, etc.
Could never happen, I say. There are twenty reasons why that wouldn’t work.
Why not, he said.
It’s just too much, I said.
Too much what? There is no upper bound on cruelty, he said.
The next Monday, I came to work, and they were pulling Deep out the door, two paramedics, each one with an arm hooked under Deep, dragging him out, two security guards trailing behind. As they dragged him past me, I tried to make eye contact, but as he turned toward me I got a good look and I saw it: there was no one left. Deepak wasn’t inside there anymore. He had gone somewhere else. He just kept saying, okay, so. Okay, so. Like a mantra. Like he was trying to convince himself. Okay. So.
And then the next day, there it was, in the newspaper. The whole story about the banker. Exactly how Deepak told it to me. There were rumors that he was the one the banker hired. He had been inside the body of a monster and the guilt had leaked through. Some things get through. People are not perfectly sealed. The technology of feeling transfer may progress, but something will always get through.
Or maybe not a monster. Maybe that’s the point. Not a monster. Just an ordinary man, what a man is capable of.
Deep knew what was out there. There is no upper bound on sadness. There is no lower bound on decency. Deep saw it, he understood it, what was out there, and he let it seep in, and once it gets in, it gets all the way in, and it never comes out.
I open tickets. I do the work. I save up money.
Weeks go by. Kirthi opens up. Just a little.
She still refuses to look me in the eyes when we are kissing.
That’s weird, she says. No one does that.
How am I supposed to know? I have not kissed many people. I have seen in American movies that people close their eyes, but I have also seen that sometimes one person or the other will sneak open an eye and take a peek at the other one. I think it makes sense. Otherwise, how would you know what the other person is feeling? That seems to me the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on her fac
e, what she is feeling, to be able to feel what she feels for you. So we kiss, she with her eyes closed, me looking at her, trying to imagine what she is feeling. I hope she is feeling something.
I am at a funeral.
I am having a hernia.
I am having a hernia at a funeral.
I am in prison.
I’m at the dentist.
I’m at the prison dentist with a hernia.
I am in love.
I am in withdrawal.
I am in love with someone who doesn’t love me back. I wish I had a hernia.
She takes me to see her father.
He has the look. I remember it. My own father looked this way.
He is living someone else’s life. He’s nothing more than a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone’s convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.
The thing hanging over us, the thing that’s uncomfortable to talk about is that we could do it. We could get him out.
We stand there in silence for what seems like, for what is, way too long.
Finally, Kirthi can’t take it.
He has only four years left on his mortgage, she tells me.
But, see, the way the market works, sellers like us, we never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocket watch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go get it a week later and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.
