But at least Jeff could feel good about this sweet new tee shirt he was wearing. Soft and thin, scoured green cotton, in places brushed almost to transparency, and on the front of it a simple graphic of Richard Pryor’s face, the comedian’s hair like a black globe about his head, his mouth wide open in laughter. Jeff had recently watched some Pryor stand-up for the first time, and it had blown his mind, so when he had come across the tee shirt at a boutique near the Open Eye Café, he had purchased it immediately, and without guilt, using twenty-five dollars from his second Star Video paycheck. Jeff looked down at the shirt now, at the inverted image of Pryor on his chest, and for a moment, he felt a bit more grounded in space-time.
“What this?” Dorofey said in a gruff, thickly accented voice.
Jeff leaned forward over the desk and looked at the page in the notebook where Dorofey now pointed.
“Oh,” Jeff said. “I made a note. I realized, uh, that I was making my happiness too high.”
“Too high?”
“I made a note that you should take away two from every rating before that day.”
“Take away?”
“I mean, you know, subtract?” Jeff explained, gesturing toward the notebook. “Too high. In there. Subtract two.”
Dorofey set down the notebook. “Mr. Meeker, I speak English very well. No need for speaking slowly so I understand.”
Jeff’s face warmed over. “Sorry,” he said.
Dorofey squinted at the younger man. “Did something happen, Mr. Meeker, on September the tenth to prompt you to retroactively reduce your level of happiness?”
“Nothing happened,” he said.
“Then what’s the problem?”
“Well, I’m not sure I should say,” Jeff said.
“Why not?”
“I don’t want to hurt your feelings. Or mess up your experiment.”
“My feelings? Mr. Meeker, if there is problem, you should tell me.”
Jeff settled back in the square wooden chair, a chair reproduced identically, he had noticed, all over campus. “Well,” he began, “I guess I didn’t understand the assignment, sir. I mean, what do you mean by happiness exactly? You never told us. You just gave us this slip of paper that said, ‘Write down how happy you are on a scale of one to ten whenever the beeper beeps.’ I mean, I don’t walk around all day feeling happy happy. I don’t think anyone does. So maybe you meant, I don’t know . . .”
“Contentment?” Dorofey suggested.
“Sure, contentment. That’s what I was thinking. But I wasn’t sure. Then, on Monday, I pinched my finger real bad at work while we were repairing some shelving that had fallen down. I work at Star Video, you know, in West Appleton? And right when I pinched my finger, the beeper beeped. I didn’t know what to write. I mean, I was in pain, so I wasn’t feeling too happy. Maybe contentment, but I don’t know. You didn’t say to write down the reasons we were feeling whatever, but I did anyway, on the next page. I wrote down, ‘Pinched my finger at work.’”
“I see that.”
“I thought maybe—”
“Mr. Meeker, please get to point.”
“Sorry. I just wanted to know what the goal of the experiment was, sir.”
Dorofey removed his gold-rimmed glasses, folded them shut, and with a discontented huff slid them into his shirt pocket. He muttered something in Russian, then said, “The purpose of the experiment is to study relative happiness. How happiness fluctuates throughout the day. You, for example. Your happiness seems quite high in evenings, but not so much during day. Overall range of five points.”
“Is that a lot?” Jeff asked, a little frightened by what the Russian’s answer might be.
“Mr. Meeker, this is not a diagnostic tool. I am not telling you if you are happy or not.”
“Oh.”
“But your fluctuations do seem higher than other subjects I have interviewed.”
Jeff heard himself gasp. “What does that mean?”
“Mean?” Dorofey said. “I don’t know what it means. It means you seem fairly unhappy in the mornings, and fairly happy at night. This is not uncommon. Most people work in morning, go home in evening, and their happiness fluctuates accordingly.”
Jeff felt a chill of fear. Was it possible that he was miserable and didn’t even know it? “But, sir,” he said, “I work in the evenings.”
Dorofey nodded, squinted with momentary thoughtfulness. “So you like your job?”
“Yes, very much.”
“At the video store?”
“Yes,” Jeff said, taken aback by Dorofey’s apparent disbelief. “I like working at the video store.”
“Is not boring?”
“Boring? No, sir! We watch movies and talk—”
Dorofey held up a hand, as if asking for a high-five. His voice lowering, he said, “Mr. Meeker, I don’t care about video store.”
“Oh.”
“What do you do during day that make you so unhappy?”
“I don’t know.”
Dorofey waited, stone-faced.
“I go to school,” Jeff said finally.
“So you don’t enjoy school?”
Jeff shook his head, thought of the string of awful exam and essay grades he had received lately, despite all his studying. Then he said unsurely: “No, I enjoy school.”
Dorofey squinted. “Is a girlfriend?”
“A girlfriend?”
“If not school, usually young men are unhappy about girlfriend.”
Thinking at once of Alaura, Jeff quickly raised and lowered his shoulders to indicate that his problem was most definitely not a girlfriend.
Dorofey leaned back in his chair, crossed meaty fingers over a considerable belly. “Listen, Mr. Meeker. This baseline phase of the experiment in which you participated was designed simply to measure how much self-reported happiness fluctuates throughout a day. That is all.”
“Okay?”
“I’m sure you are familiar with famous lottery-wheelchair study?”
Jeff heard Waring’s voice in his head say, What do you think, buddy?
“Very simple,” Dorofey said. “Happiness research is relatively new, but my colleagues and I agree that human beings are not terribly smart at determining what makes us happy. In lottery-wheelchair study—a classic study referenced many places, including several Hollywood movies, I might add—in this study, researchers compared the happiness of people before and after they had won lottery or received major injury that put them in wheelchair. The result was that lottery winners were not any happier one year after winning lottery, nor were wheelchair folks more unhappy once they got used to their new condition. Happy people remained happy. Unhappy people, unhappy.”
Jeff’s vision blurred as he struggled to follow the Russian’s words.
“It complicated,” Dorofey continued. “Apparently, chronic back pain and long commuting time are better indicators for unhappiness than is blindness. And having one extra hour of sleep every night makes businessmen happier than doubling of their income. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
Jeff shook his head no.
“And if you want to, the phrase ‘hedge your bets’ against unhappiness,”—Dorofey’s eyes fell shut, and a chortling sound began to emerge from his throat that Jeff soon recognized as laughter—“then, then you should seriously . . . consider taking many naps . . . and against children. Naps make people happy. Children, on average, miserable.”
Dorofey’s weird mirth subsided, and he sighed in what seemed to Jeff like an unconvincing display of embarrassment. Finally Dorofey said, “Mr. Meeker, I shouldn’t say this, but you strike me as a nervous and potentially unhappy young man. If you want to be miserable, go ahead, I do not care. But if you want to be happy, maybe make some changes in your life. This is modern world, after all. There are options.”
“Options?” Jeff asked quickly.
“Many. Go out in world and do modern things. Post profile on online dating site. Get cute girlfriend. Use the Facebook or Me
et-Together sites to find people with interests similar to yours. You’re interested in film? Join film club. There are several I believe here at Appleton University. Or buy your own little camera and make your own little movies. I hear it very affordable these days. Then put your little movies on Internet. A documentary. Or a fun romance. Cast a girl and a boy and have them talk about things, have silly things happen. This formula always works. Who knows, you might get one million hits on YouTube, become famous.”
Bewildered, Jeff opened his mouth to ask the Russian another question, but Dorofey again held up a hand and said:
“Time to leave, Mr. Meeker. Bye-bye. I have fifty undergraduates to see, and they all want to know why they’re so damned unhappy.”
Meanwhile, Alaura—though it was a bit embarrassing to admit, even to herself—felt like a new woman. She had been a student at Reality for four days, and while she still believed that many aspects of “the Experience” were absurd, corny, over-the-top, useless (in particular, the constant hand-holding), nonetheless “the Experience” had cracked open something inside her—what she could only refer to, in Reality jargon, as “access to her innate potential.” Karla was right—they just showed you. They pushed you and asked you endless swirling questions until all of your defenses had chipped away, leaving only your soft, frightened inside. Leaving only your future, ready to emerge. They showed you how your decision-making had formed your life—that you, and no one else, had formed your life—for Alaura, it was most definitely how she’d isolated herself with movies and drinking and unhealthy eating and smoking, her lack of ambition, her worry about appearing both tough and sweet to others, and her choosing to fall in love with shitty men . . .
That night, she strolled through West Appleton (when was the last time she’d actually strolled?) focusing on the contractions of her muscles, conscious of an energy stirring in her belly, and observing the goings-on of a Thursday in late September. It was eleven p.m. The LED streetlamps, powered by solar energy collected during the day, cast a bluish light over the nearly empty business district. The first day of autumn had passed only a few days before, and already some of the small retail shops had decorated their windows with fake pumpkins and fake brown, yellow, and orange leaves, though the trees wouldn’t begin changing color for a month or more. A handsome street musician played a slow, sad electric guitar, sitting on his own amp at the corner of College and Weaver Streets, in front of Walk In The Clouds—one of West Appleton’s many yoga studios. Alaura sidestepped a crocodile of cackling young women, a bachelorette party stumbling arm in arm from one bar to another. Of course the bars on College Street were full—the upscale places filled with blazers and sorority hair, preppy interlopers from Appleton, and the not-so-upscale places, Alaura’s places, with their pretentious jukeboxes and craft beer on tap and a greater likelihood, on any given night, for physical violence.
All of it beautiful in its own human, sweetly pathetic way.
Alaura had asked Karla to drop her off downtown, not at her apartment—she and her gorgeous friend, like little girls, had chattered, giggled, actually held hands in Karla’s Lincoln Navigator on the forty-five-minute drive back from the Reality Center. Alaura had never felt so close to Karla, never allowed herself to be so relaxed in Karla’s presence. And this was only because, Alaura now knew, she had been so weak and frightened before Reality, so unaware of how she sabotaged her potential, like a skittish animal conditioned to fear all external stimuli. But now, with four full days of Reality under her belt, Alaura was “standing outside the ordinary” (Reality’s term), a “powerful goddess” (Alaura’s term—such melding of belief systems was not openly discouraged), fearful no more. So she walked the streets of West Appleton, wasting the hour before she absolutely had to be at Star Video, to train Jeff how to close the registers—one of the last tasks keeping her connected to the place—and she couldn’t stop smiling.
Her face ached from so much smiling. But even the ache was transportive to broader thoughts: the ache represented her new life, and looking at herself in the autumnal shop windows, allowing herself to smile her full Reality Smile, she saw that she was beautiful, while, at the same time, she knew that others, seeing this (manic?) expression, might think she was insane.
A giggle erupted from her stomach like an electric shock—Other people! she thought. Though her Reality Center instructors wouldn’t admit it, other people, non-Reality people, were to be pitied. Loved, of course, but also pitied.
Love. She loved herself—she could honestly say that she loved herself. Despite everything, she loved herself! And though this thought, I love myself! was real and frequent and always accompanied, almost literally, by melodic trumpets and riotous applause from the invisible audience of her psyche, still she was the tiniest bit ashamed of loving herself so much. It was a hackneyed sentiment, she knew. So banal. But was this shame the last barrier Reality would help break down? When its philosophies finally came together, and the future finally revealed itself to her, would she finally love herself without embarrassment? Would the power that now rendered her unable to stop smiling soon narrow its focus, phaser-like, onto her life’s true purpose? And she could see with HiDef clarity that she loved West Appleton. That was obvious. West Appleton was her home. She never wanted to leave. She had occasionally entertained the notion of moving away, of finding a new life somewhere else, anywhere else, anywhere far away from Sprinks and West Appleton, anywhere outside of North Carolina. But not now. Now she strolled and strolled, hands linked behind her back like a dictator surveying her town. Her people, West Appletonians, “Applets” (Waring’s term), streamed around her—the pleasant drinkers (she hadn’t sipped a drop of alcohol in four days—but they are having fun, aren’t they?). Why would she ever leave? True, the shops that lined West Appleton’s business district, a quarter-mile from Star Video, sold mostly expensive nonsense. Trinkets of no real value. Vintage clothing stores—but the skirts and shirts and scarves were all so pretty, she thought. Is it wrong to want to be pretty, to value beauty?—her thoughts, a mile a minute. But always returning to the Reality mantra—I love myself, and I can create whatever I dream. I will never abandon this belief. I love myself, and I can create whatever I dream. I will never abandon this belief.
She looked at the ornate analog clock high on the redbrick Community Center building—a clock she knew to chime a digital bell tune every hour—and she saw that it was 11:45. Star Video would be closing in fifteen minutes. She didn’t want to be late.
Jeff kept surveillance on Star Video’s parking lot—Alaura would be arriving any second. Business was slow. Nonexistent. He and Rose had nothing to do, and, like always, Rose had remained silent during their entire shift. But that was fine. Since meeting with the Russian grad student, Jeff hadn’t felt like talking to anyone.
Alaura arrived at 11:55 p.m., five minutes before closing. On time, for once. He hadn’t seen her since The Corporate Visit. And . . . she looked amazing. Jeff was speechless—she wore a black dress, blood-red lipstick, gold sandals snaking up her legs. He was transfixed by the dress’s spaghetti straps and the almost-fully-exposed tattoos on her back and right arm. And her hair—it was up in that amazing pompadour, rising three inches above her head, slicked back and shining dark.
“Hi,” he said shakily.
“Hi there, Jeff.” She presented an open-mouthed smile, teeth gleaming, as she glided around the counter.
“I . . . you . . . we . . .” but Jeff’s stammering was silenced by Rose, who yanked her backpack from under the counter, slung it over her shoulder, and stomped (as much as such a tiny person can stomp) toward the door.
“Is something wrong?” he called out to her.
“Bye, Rose,” Alaura said sweetly.
The door clanged shut behind the little girl.
“That was strange,” Jeff said. “What’s wrong with her?”
But Alaura hadn’t seemed to notice. “Waring’s not here, is he?” she asked with a cheerfulness that did not match he
r question. “I’m avoiding him.”
“Um, that shouldn’t be hard,” Jeff said, confused. “He hasn’t been around much.”
“No?”
“Me and the other part-timers are basically running the store.”
“What?”
“Well, honestly, me more than anyone else. Nothing seems to be getting done. I think there’s a whole shipment of DVDs in the back that haven’t even been processed.”
He watched Alaura’s face tighten, but a moment later she rolled her eyes and said brightly, incongruously, “Oh well, it’s Waring’s store!”
After this baffling response to what he assumed was troubling news, Jeff decided not to report the full extent of Waring’s strange behavior: that for days he had been scribbling in a large red book, talking angrily on the phone, and storming in and out of the store without explanation.
“How’s your leave of absence going?” he asked instead, bypassing the subject of Waring.
“Wonderful, Jeff. Absolutely wonderful.”
Only then did he notice the dark circles under her eyes. “You look tired,” he said.
“I didn’t get much sleep these past few days.”
“You look great, I mean,” Jeff corrected himself. You’re such an idiot, he thought.
“That’s very sweet of you, Jeff.”
The Last Days of Video Page 12
