The client is one of those kids, trust fund baby, paid extra for amnesia after the event. 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 enough 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 say, under my breath. She smiles. Rajiv is on night shift now, but back in the day, we had beers once in a while.
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.
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 a 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 make a joke, one of those we have to stop meeting like this things. I probably saw it on TV and it just came out. Stupid. She doesn’t laugh, but she doesn’t frown, either.
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 fifty-five pounds. She doesn’t laugh. 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. And she doesn’t say it in a nice way. Or like a threat. Just real even, like she is stating a fact.
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 body experience. Even when I am in someone else’s body, I am still out of my body. I am double out of my body.
I weep.
I wail.
I gnash my teeth.
Underneath it all, I am smiling. I am giggling.
I am at a funeral. My client’s heart aches, and inside of it is my heart, not aching, the opposite of aching—doing that, whatever it is.
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 heartbroken, 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 on the notepad.
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 failsafe kicks on, just in time. The system overrides. I close the ticket.
It’s her father.
That’s what Sunil tells me, one day over a beer.
Kirthi hasn’t been to work for the past two days.
Sunil is in Tech Support. He has seen all of the glitches. He knows what can go wrong in the mechanics of feeling transfers. He has seen some ugliness. He is fond of saying that there is no upper bound on weirdness.
Her father is still mortgaged, Sunil explains. Locked in. A p-zombie, he says. Sold his life.
“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. Just like my father, I get to have my cake and eat it, too. Except that it’s a great big crap cake.
Still, as the weeks go on, I am starting to think Sunil is 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 and says, how awful it is to look at him in that state.
We draw closer for a moment.
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 had my eye on.
It’s gone, she says.
I’ll find another one just like it, I tell her. 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 the weekdays and she gives me a break on weekends.
She looks at me. For a few long seconds, she seems to be thinking about it, living the whole life out in her head.
She doesn’t say anything. She touches the side of my head.
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. Stuff like that. He talked like that, he really did. He loved telling stories. About a week before he cracked up, he told me a story while we were in the coffee room about a guy at Managed Life Solutions, a physical suffering shop across town, who somehow 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, he says. He tells me all about it, how they met, 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 under Deep’s arms, and two security guards trailing behind. I wanted to say something, anything, to make them stop. I knew I would never see him again. But I froze. As they dragged him past me, I tried to make eye contact, but I looked in there, and no one was left. He had gone somewhere else. He was saying, okay, so. 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 was living with murderous guilt. Other people gossiped that he had done death of a child.
I don’t think it was either. I don’t think it was any one thing that did it. Deep just knew. He 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 was in, it got all the way in, and it will never come 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 that? I have not kissed many people, but I don’t want her to know it. 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 to be the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on their face, what they are feeling, to be able to feel what they feel 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 bypass.
I am in drug rehabilitation.
I am in withdrawal.
She takes me to see her father.
He has the look. I remember this look. This is how my father looked.
He is living someone else’s life. He is 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.
We stand there in silence.
We go back to work.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a root canal.
The thing it is uncomfortable to talk about is: we could do it. We could get him out.
Finally, she can’t take it.
He has only four years left on his mortgage, Kirthi tells me.
The thing is, the way the market works, sellers like us never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocketwatch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go to get it after payday and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.
Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don’t know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don’t know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn’t so great as it is, but I just don’t know if I could do it.
I am in surgery.
I am bleeding to death.
It doesn’t hurt at all.
Things progress. We move in together. We avoid planning for the future. We hint at it. We talk around it.
I am being shot at.
I am being slapped in the face.
I go home.
I rest.
I come back and do it again.
When I turned thirteen, my mother told me the story. She sat me down in the kitchen and explained.
“The day your father sold his life,” she said, “I wore my best dress, and he wore a suit. He combed his hair. He looked handsome and calm. You wore your only pair of long pants. We walked to the bank. You rode on his back.”
“I remember that,” I said.
“A man with excellent hair came out from some office in the back and sat down behind the desk.”
I remember that, too, I told her.
You get—we got—forty thousand a year, she said.
My dad sold his life for a fixed annuity, indexed to inflation at three percent annually, and a seventy percent pension if he made it full term: forty years, age seventy, and he could stop, he could come back to us, to his life.
There were posters everywhere, my mother said, describing that day, the reunion day. The day when you’ve made it, you’ve done it, you’re done.
There was a video screen showing a short film describing the benefits of mortgage, the glorious day of reunion. We would all drink lemonade in the hot summer air.
Just forty years, it said.
In the meantime, your family will be taken care of. You will have peace of mind.
“Time is money,” the video said. “And money is time. Create value out of the most valuable asset you own.”
“Don’t miss out on a chance of a lifetime.”
When we went home, I remember, my father went to lie down. He slept for twelve hours, twice as long as normal, and in the morning, while I was still asleep, he went and sold his life.
Things stop progressing with Kirthi.
Things go backward.
And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.
Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has closed herself to me.
A week after Kirthi moves out, her father passes away.
My shift manager will not let me off to go to the funeral.
Kirthi doesn’t even ask if I would like to go anyway.
I should go.
I will be fired if I go.
But I don’t have her anymore. If I leave, I won’t have a job, either. I’ll never get her back if I don’t have a job.
I’m never getting her back anyway.
I don’t even know if I want her back.
But maybe this is why I don’t have her, could never, would never have had her. Maybe the problem isn’t that I don’t have a life. Maybe the problem is that I don’t want a life.
I go to work.
I open tickets.
I close tickets.
When I get home my apartment seems empty. It’s always empty, but today, more empty. The emptiness is now empty.
I call her. I don’t know what to say. I breathe into the phone.
I call her again. I leave a message. I know a guy in the billing department, I say. We could get some extra capacity, no one would know, find an open line. I could feel it for you. Your grief. I could bury your father for you.
I would say that I am tired of this substitute life, except that this is the only life I will ever have. It is a substitute for itself. A substitute for nothing. A substitute for something that never existed in the first place.
Three days later, when I get to work, there is a note on my desk, giving the time of the funeral service. Just the time and, underneath it, she scrawled, okay.
Okay.
I arrange for the hour. At the time, I open the ticket.
I a
m expecting a funeral.
I am not at a funeral.
I can’t tell exactly where I am, but I am far away. In a place I don’t recognize. She has moved to a place where I will never find her. Probably where no one will ever find her. A new city. A new life.
She paid for this time herself. She wanted to let me in. For once. Just once. She must have used up everything she had saved. The money was supposed to be for her father but now, no need.
She is walking along a road. The sun is hot, the air is dusty, but the day is alive; she feels alive, I feel alive for her.
She is looking at a picture we took—the only picture we took together, in a photo booth in the drugstore. Our faces are smashed together and in the picture she is not smiling, as usual, and I am smiling, a genuine smile, or so I have always thought about myself, but now, looking at myself through her eyes, I see that she sees that my own smile starts to decompose, like when you say a word over and over again, so many times, over and over, and you begin to feel silly, but you keep saying it, and then after a short while, something happens and the word stops being a word and it resolves into its constituent sounds, and then all of a sudden what used to be a word is not a word at all, it is now the strangest thing you have ever heard.
I am inside of her head.
I am a nice person, she is thinking. I deserve more, she wants to believe. She wants to believe it, but I can feel that she doesn’t. If only she could see herself through my eyes. If only she could see herself through my eyes looking through her eyes. I deserve to be loved, she thinks, but she doesn’t believe it. If only I could believe it for her. I want to believe in her, believe inside of her. Believe hard enough inside of her that it somehow seeps through.
She turns up the road and the hill gets steeper. The air gets hotter. I feel her sadness with every step, and then, right near the top of the hill, just the faintest hint of it: a smile. She is remembering us. The few happy moments we had.
I am standing on a hill. I am not at a funeral. I am thinking of someone I once loved. I don’t know if I am her thinking of me, or if I am me thinking of her, or if maybe, right at this moment, there is no difference.
THE LADY WHO PLUCKED RED FLOWERS BENEATH THE QUEEN’S WINDOW
RACHEL SWIRSKY
The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy, 2011 Edition Page 20
