She watches him wave the server over.
“We’re ready to leave. Can you bring the machine over, please?”
Claudia pulls her wallet out of her purse.
“No, no,” Leon says, jaw clenching under his skin. “It’s my pleasure.” His eyes are hard.
“Is everything okay, Leon?”
“I just can’t understand how you can do that. Haven’t you read The Fate of the Earth?”
“Sure,” she says, although she hasn’t.
“With all of the trouble that nukes have caused, how can you go into work every day and contribute to that?” His voice is getting louder.
Claudia focuses on putting her wallet back into her purse slowly and deliberately. Puts her keys in a pocket that will be easy to reach into once she gets to the door. Home.
“And not only do you swallow the shit they put in the pamphlets, but you spout it back out like it’s true!”
Well, it is true, Claudia thinks, but she is a little bit afraid now and doesn’t say this.
She glances at Leon. He’s balding on top, but his stringy hair is long, spreading down over his collar like roots. Red splotches are showing up on his neck. His round face almost seems to be quivering. His eyes are dark chunks in his face under his eyebrows, the hairs pointing in all different directions, messed up from when he rubbed his hand across them a second ago. His breath sounds loud and ragged. Claudia is afraid he’ll have a heart attack before they’ve left the restaurant. She decides to follow his example and forget her manners.
She stands up, takes her coat from the back of the chair, and pulls the strap of her purse up over her shoulder.
“Thank you for dinner. Don’t call me,” she says, as if that were still a possibility.
The following week, she has another date, a Thursday evening dinner plan. On Wednesday, Claudia has lunch with her friend June.
“Any interesting prospects?” June asks, a spot of mayonnaise in the corner of her mouth. Claudia wipes the corner of her own mouth, but June doesn’t take the hint.
“A date tomorrow. A new guy,” Claudia says.
Even though it is a perfectly acceptable way for people in their thirties to date these days, Claudia feels a twinge of shame when one of her paired-up friends asks how the internet dating is going. Like if she were only a little thinner or a sliver smarter or a tad funnier, she wouldn’t have to keep tossing out the fishing line into the dark and hoping for the best.
Also, there’s something exhausting about it: all that blooming and shrinking of hope. Usually Claudia is not a person who gets tired. She is always asleep by quarter to ten and wakes at six thirty without hitting snooze. After twenty minutes on the treadmill and a shower deliberately broken up with spurts of cold water, she is alert, and she stays alert all day.
At work, she sends emails and completes inspection reports. She works on assessments at her desk and goes to meetings with project managers about welding procedures and radiation protection. She drinks a coffee on the way in and has an Earl Grey tea around three. She doesn’t yawn much unless someone else starts it first. The days, even when they feel long, are never unreasonably so. Claudia likes the rhythm of her weeks most of the time, her orderly work, her lunches with June.
“Well, he can’t be any worse than the last one,” June says. “He acted like you’re on the Manhattan Project!”
Claudia scoops up a spoonful of tuna from the top of her salad. A caper bursts between her teeth, salty and sharp.
“I really think you should tell the internet people how terrible he was.”
“The internet people? You know that there aren’t miniature humans working away inside the computers, right?”
June rolls her eyes, but she’s laughing.
“I mean the people who run the website. Tell them they should attach a warning to him, or maybe an R-rating, like a horror movie.”
“It’s not like he hit me.”
“No, he didn’t hit you. But anybody that goes from zero to rage that quickly should not be allowed to meet new people, especially nice people.”
Claudia feels a rush of gratefulness for June, who is dipping a french fry into a glob of ketchup and glaring at it like the crispy stick is Leon reincarnated. Claudia is touched by June’s outrage and is glad they met for lunch today. Watching June eat, Claudia tries not to stare at the mayonnaise splotch still by her mouth, stubborn as the last bit of snow that clings to the ground at the end of winter.
Claudia arrives first. The bar is in her neighbourhood and not very busy, just the way she likes it. This time they are having drinks instead of dinner, which makes it easier to complete an early extraction if need be. When Claudia first started meeting men from the site, she never plotted escape plans in advance like this. Experience has stomped on her optimism with its clompy, muddy boots. Claudia sips from her pint glass. The beer is tepid.
She recognizes Dean from his profile picture. He’s cute in the way she likes best, like he’s just climbed down off a mountain after years of living there, seeing no one. The Anti-Claud, June would call him. His scruffy beard and hair look careless, like they’re supposed to look, rather than curated. She smiles and waves him over.
But there is something wrong with him. Maybe he’s high or very tired, but after each question Claudia asks, there is a silence so long it feels like a Quaker wedding she went to once.
The bar is quiet enough. He can hear her, and the questions aren’t difficult.
“You said you liked camping, right? Have you ever been to Algonquin?”
Claudia doesn’t really know anything about camping, but June used to go to Algonquin Park every summer with her family when she was a kid. It seems an easy way to start a conversation. But Claudia could finish an incident report in the time he takes to answer. He looks at his beer as though the answer might be floating in there like a fleck of ash or skin.
The bartender cleans glasses while she watches the television on mute. An old man walks in and heads for a stool near the TV. The bartender smiles and greets him. She calls him Doc. Claudia is still waiting for an answer. She drinks. Finally, he speaks.
“Nope,” he says.
They sit in silence for a while. Claudia swirls what’s left of her beer.
“How was work?” she says, and she is almost finished her beer by the time he answers.
“Oh, it was okay.”
Claudia remembers a sloth she saw on vacation in Costa Rica once, moving languidly down a tree trunk. She watched him make his way down for his weekly bowel movement, grey furry handbag of a body moving like a glacier.
He speaks again.
“I might have gotten fired, actually. I’m not sure. But it’s okay because I think I’m done with being an arborist. My cousin and me might go into the paper business.”
Suddenly Claudia feels deeply, into-the-bones tired, and she just wants to be home and sleeping.
“Okay, thanks for the beer; I’ve gotta go,” she says.
Dean doesn’t look surprised, just nods and stares into his glass. Only a quarter of the beer is gone.
When Claudia gets home, she deletes his emails and falls asleep with the light still on.
The day after her date with Dean, Claudia hits snooze for the first time in years. Normally when her alarm goes, Claudia is already awake, or if not, glad to be awoken. Today she goes on the treadmill for ten minutes and is exhausted. She stands in the shower for a long time and doesn’t turn the knob to cold once. She figures it’s just been a bad sleep, maybe a nightmare she can’t remember. It’s Friday and maybe that has something to do with it. Maybe it’s been a long week. She stands in the water, and for the first time in four years, wishes she didn’t have to go to work.
After her coffee, she is more awake. She gives her assistant, Laura, a list of meetings to book. She works on a spreadsheet in preparation for a meeting with her manager. Normally her fingers fly over the keyboard like she’s one of those people who type the captions for television or a co
urt stenographer on Law & Order. But her fingers feel slow today. Before finishing the spreadsheet, she takes a break to buy coffee from the cafeteria. She wonders how long it would take Dean to finish a cup of coffee. She gulps too big a mouthful, but the coffee isn’t hot enough to hurt.
After work, June comes over for a rehash of the date. Claudia orders a pizza with kale and bacon. She makes them mimosas.
“Is this brunch? Why are we having mimosas?”
“That’s what I have. That’s what you’re getting.” June and Claudia have been friends for seventeen years. Sometimes they are each other’s cold water splash.
Claudia sips her mimosa like Dean to demonstrate.
“He wasn’t seriously that slow.”
Claudia counts five breaths before she answers.
“He was.”
June laughs. “What is wrong with these guys?”
“What isn’t?” Claudia says and feels a yawn growing inside her like a lump.
Sometimes when Claudia is running on the treadmill, she wants to stop as soon as she’s started. But if she just runs a little further in place, just a few more minutes, the feeling goes away. Scrolling through dating profiles on Sunday afternoon, Claudia decides to push through until the tired feeling goes away. She reads the profile of a man who is older than she is, divorced, with eyes that look warm in his picture. Daniel is looking for someone to listen to birds and eat chips with. That does it. She sends him a message, and he writes back quickly. All afternoon, they chat back and forth about books and dating and his work as a teacher. When he asks, she tells him she works in energy and likes her job, and then she redirects him back to talking about his students. He types: Wait, you work in energy? Like healing crystals, that kind of thing?
Claudia laughs but does not write LOL.
Energy, like wind turbines and that kind of thing, she types back.
Thank God. I thought you were going to ask me about my sign next.
Claudia deletes what she has been typing.
They chat online until it is very late and Claudia feels her eyes drooping.
I wish I didn’t have to work in the morning, she writes, and means it. Daniel asks for her phone number. He says he will call her the next night around seven, after they’re both home from work, and he types [goodnight kiss]. She blows a kiss at the screen, feeling hope rumbling around inside her like hunger. It propels her through Monday with some of her old energy. She gets up without hitting snooze and turns the water to cold. She does up her blouse, brushes on mascara, and pulls on her tall boots without dread for the day.
At the office, she puts together a PowerPoint on industry best practices. She meets with one of the project managers to review welding procedures. She drinks her usual one cup of Earl Grey in the afternoon and only yawns a few times. By five, the rumble has become a hum.
Before leaving the plant, she checks her personal email. There’s an email from her sister and a forwarded video from June. And something from Leon. Curious, she clicks to open it. There’s no text and most of the image is grey: a mushroom cloud blooming over a desecrated landscape, pocked by naked trees and collapsed buildings. The only bits of colour are shards of what appears to be a cut-up photo. The bits are coming out of the cloud. Something about the colours is familiar. Claudia leans closer and recognizes a necklace in one shard and part of her own eye in another. Leon has sliced her profile photo up into nuclear rain.
She forwards Leon’s email to June, and as she packs up to leave, she thinks this will be a funny story to tell Daniel when he calls. But settling underneath the layer of her that finds this funny is a sediment of alarm.
By midnight, Claudia is angry at herself for being hopeful when experience has taught her the wisdom of caution. She checks her email before she goes to bed, but there is nothing from Daniel. Nothing from Leon either. Only a one-line note from June: Enough now. If you don’t call the internet people, I will. Claudia shuts the laptop and gets into bed, so tired her eyelids hurt from staying open, but it is hours before she is able to sleep.
Claudia is sitting on a bench near the lake with her tea. Seagulls nag each other in sharp screeches.
“I hate that guy too,” June says on the phone.
“It’s fine,” Claudia sighs. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Actually, it’s not that Claudia doesn’t want to talk about it so much as she doesn’t want to hear about it. She doesn’t want to hear all the possibilities about where Daniel has disappeared to—he’s on a week-long field trip with his class, his dog is near death and he’s been with him in the vet hospital, he deleted the part of the chat with her phone number in it by accident. These options are not plausible and not comforting, even though June means well.
“Well, it’s not fine as far as I’m concerned, but you’ve got bigger problems. Did you contact the website about Leon yet?”
“I will do it, I promise.”
“There’s something wrong with that guy, and it’s your responsibility to make sure he doesn’t have a chance to blow up on somebody else.”
Claudia yawns.
“I need to get back to work. I’ll let them know about Leon. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
She ends the call and takes a sip from her Styrofoam cup. The last of her tea is cold. She pulls off the lid and tosses what’s left of it at the seagulls, but it doesn’t even get close, and some of the cold tea splashes on her leg, and she feels like crying but nothing happens.
Claudia’s assistant is standing in the doorway.
“You’ve got that meeting with Rick and Carlos in five minutes.”
“Oh!”
“You forgot?”
“No,” Claudia says, but it’s obvious that she has.
“Want me to postpone?
“Uh …” Claudia can’t remember who booked this meeting or why.
“I think I’d better.” Laura’s expression is probably smug, but it might be concerned, or both. Claudia doesn’t look at her long enough to figure it out.
“Sure, thanks,” Claudia says and shuts the door behind her so she can read her email in peace.
There is something from Leon. The text of the message has been cut out of magazines like he’s asking for a ransom in the eighties, which would be funny if the message said something different.
People like you are why the world is ending.
What scares Claudia the most is the feeling that Leon somehow knows her. It feels like he can see right inside her to all the grey, murky parts she keeps out of sight, all the icky, evil, squirmy things that she thinks about other people and herself. He is the only one who sees how she really is, and he hates her.
Claudia leaves a message for her boss saying she’s sick. She emails Laura to tell her she won’t be in today, and puts the phone under the pillow she isn’t using. She turns over and goes back to sleep.
She dreams she is drinking a pint of beer, but no matter how many sips she takes the glass doesn’t get any emptier. She is sitting on a park bench in a bar she hasn’t been in before, and the waiter keeps coming over to check on her progress.
“You can’t leave until you finish that,” he says. The waiter has Daniel’s profile picture eyes and Leon’s tight, angry mouth. “I’m trying,” Claudia tries to tell him, but the words are lodged in her mouth until he’s already walked away. She looks around for June—she has a vague feeling that she was supposed to meet June here, at this strange bar she doesn’t remember arriving at. But there’s just the waiter and a few other empty park benches. Is she at the wrong place? She takes three gulps of beer—warm and flat—and holds up her glass to check on her progress, whether she’s any closer to being able to leave. The amber liquid sloshes over the lip of the glass onto her hand and hisses. There is something floating in there. She holds the beer up higher so it’s infused with the light behind it, and it’s full of ripped-up pieces of paper, and she looks over to tell the waiter, but he’s gone and the bar is grey and disintegrating, the stools
shrivelling down to ash, and Claudia is so terrified she wakes up.
CALL ME NOW says the subject heading of an email from Laura. The message is blank. Claudia is exhausted but afraid to go back to sleep, the aftertaste of the dream in her throat. She was checking her email from her laptop to make sure there’s nothing at work she needs to attend to and apparently there is. She pulls the phone from under the pillow and walks into the kitchen. She puts the kettle on and looks at her phone. Five missed calls: three from Laura, one from her boss at the plant, and a number she doesn’t recognize.
“Finally!” Laura says instead of hello.
“What is it?”
“You are so lucky you’re sick today. It’s chaos here!” It sounds like Laura is outside. Claudia can hear seagulls and voices.
“Where are you?”
“We’re all down the street from the plant. Somebody called in a bomb threat!”
Claudia’s stomach clenches. Her mouth is filling with spit.
“What?”
“I know, right? It’s crazy.” Laura sounds excited.
If there is a bomb in the plant, Laura isn’t safe down the street. Claudia isn’t safe in her apartment. Evacuating is like spitting on a forest fire. Laura, like a kid under a desk, is probably getting a kick out of this unprecedented disruption in routine. Claudia sees her, phone to her ear, falling to ash. Seagulls dropping into dust. Claudia’s bed and kettle and computer, all crumbling apart in an instant. Claudia herself, disintegrating.
The Colours of Birds Page 11
