Are You There and Other Stories

by Jack Skillingstead

  “That’s all right. I’m having a bad day, too,” she said. “Do you want to tell me what’s wrong with yours? I’m a good listener, people say I am.”

  “You’re a Virgo, I bet.”

  “Yes, that’s right. And you can’t resist my nurturing powers.”

  “I guess I can’t.”

  She couldn’t see his face clearly and it bothered her. She could smell him better than she could see him. Worn out leather, a trace of old sweat and cologne.

  “How far are you traveling?” Freya asked.

  “To the end of the road.”

  “And where is that? I think this bus turns around when it reaches Phoenix.”

  “I haven’t decided yet. I haven’t decided, and it’s kind of scary. Man, I’m tired. You know, I used to really like people, but not so much anymore. Present company excepted.” He flashed a perfunctory smile. “When I saw you I thought you looked nice. You also looked like you were leaving something, rather than going to something. You looked sad, I guess.”

  “Well—”

  “Don’t pay attention to me. I’m a little nuts.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  He laughed shortly out of his indistinct face. Freya reached up and turned on the reading light. That was better. Neil’s eyes were red from crying and perhaps lack of sleep. He stared at her in an unblinking, probing way that made her feel like squirming. His skin was too white.

  “Do you know what I am?” he asked.

  “No, what are you?”

  “I’m a freak,” Neil said.

  She tried to smile but couldn’t pull it off.

  “I tell myself stories,” he said. “Like I was saying before. I make up stuff about people I don’t know. Stories.”

  “That’s not so freakish.”

  “Do you want to hear one?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Don’t be afraid. It’s okay.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  Neil leaned closer and whispered: “Take a look at our friend, the wrestler.”

  Freya looked past Neil. The beefy bald man with the earring was balancing a laptop computer on his knees, scrolling the cursor around with a delicate movement of his stubby middle finger, like a child absorbed in finger paint.

  “He’s not a wrestler,” Neil said. “He owns a small company that makes swimming pool filtering equipment. He’s moderately successful at it and he’s thinking of opening a small manufacturing plant and distribution center in Phoenix. He’s going there to meet with local investors. The reason he’s taking the bus is he’s scared to fly. It’s practically a phobia with him. He hasn’t been on an airplane since 9/11. He won’t even take a train, because he’s too cheap. He doesn’t like to drive long distance, so he might as well bus it, right? Everybody’s neurotic, that’s my theory.”

  “I don’t understand,” Freya said, thinking Neil and the man across the aisle might have talked while she dozed. “Is any of that true?”

  “It is now. I make stuff up about people, and then the people become the stuff I make up.”

  “I see.”

  Neil laughed. “God, I’m tired,” he said.

  “Why don’t you sleep? I’ll keep my eye on the swimming pool guy for you.”

  “It worries me to sleep.”

  “When I think about sleep,” Freya said, “I worry about how vulnerable I am, my body lying there breathing by itself in a dark room. I guess that goes along with your ‘everybody’s neurotic’ thing. What worries you about going to sleep?”

  “I’m afraid that I tell stories in my sleep; and I’m kind of fixated on that guy. I have a story for him but I haven’t told it yet. I don’t want to tell it. But what if I do while I’m asleep?”

  “I think it’s safe for you to sleep.” She patted his arm. “I’ll watch out for things.”

  “All right.” Neil reclined his seat and closed his eyes. “Freya?”

  “Yes?”

  “Don’t worry about Mr. Pickwick.”

  *

  Freya opened and closed her book a couple of times. She couldn’t concentrate. Finally she gave up and put the book into her shoulder bag. Out the window a prairie slid past in moonlight. Beside her, Neil slept with his mouth open. The genie, or swimming pool salesman, or whatever he was, closed his computer and folded his hands over his thick waist.

  After a while, Neil began to make small, anxious sounds in his sleep. Freya almost nudged him but didn’t. She got up to use the bathroom, careful to step over Neil’s feet. Making her way to the rear of the Greyhound, touching seatbacks on both sides of the aisle, she played the game. Faces in repose, white cords trailing from snuggly placed ear buds; faces in conversation, in concentration, floating in reading light, swaying with the road, the dips and curves, the driver’s minor adjustments. iPod girl is a college kid going home to visit her parents for the weekend; this guy’s a plumber, owns a cocker spaniel named Munchkin; this hippie-looking guy is a burglar who ritualistically smokes a joint after every job. No: he smokes one while he’s doing a job, lights up in the victim’s living room and leaves the roach on the kitchen table, like a calling card, almost hoping his DNA will get him convicted someday.

  And so on.

  The shapes occupying seats without reading lights were faceless ciphers. They could be anything.

  In the tiny closet at the back of the bus Freya sat on the toilet and cried. She cried because she had surrendered her secret heart to Roger, a man she hardly knew, left her life in Phoenix (not that much to leave, admittedly, but was she that desperate, for God’s sake?), and wound up alone anyway. And lucky to be that way. It wasn’t a matter of knowing Roger, or anybody else; it was a matter of someone, anyone, knowing her. Wanting to know her. To understand her intimately, to be interested in her life. But Roger had only been good at acting like he was interested. It had taken everything she had to go to him, to sever herself from life in Phoenix. She hadn’t expected him to bring out the handcuffs, hadn’t expected him to want to hurt her; usually she got hurt as a consequence of her trusting vulnerability. Somehow she always found the “wrong” man, in her relentless search for a new daddy, one who wanted her, who wouldn’t leave. Mythical man.

  She wiped and flushed, stood up. In the mirror, her face drew down toward middle age.

  Is this all I am?

  *

  She slept, fitfully, her head resting against the window, the cool flat glass, vibrating, bouncing with the road, bucketing along above sleep’s deeper threshold.

  The sun woke her. She squinted, worked her mouth. The bus was pulling into the parking lot of a diner. The sign at the turn-off looked like a big metal cactus the color of a pickle: KACTUS KATE’S! COME IN AND GET COOL!

  “Forty-five minutes for breakfast,” the driver said over the P.A.

  Neil smiled at her. He looked better after his rest. He looked like somebody she could like. Except, she reminded herself, she was done picking up strays.

  “Welcome to Arizona,” Neil said. He sounded resigned.

  They filed off the bus. With the engine stopped it was suddenly very hot. Neil removed his leather coat and carried it by the collar. Freya blotted her forehead with the back of her hand. The swimming pool guy shuffled down the aisle between them, his short-sleeved cotton shirt stuck to his back in dark patches. Freya couldn’t take her eyes off the tight roll of fat on the back of the man’s neck.

  *

  She sat on a stool and the counterman took her order for scrambled eggs, toast, and orange juice. The swimming pool guy hunched over a USA Today a few stools down, but he stared at it the way Freya had stared at her book, as if it were written in Chinese. She wondered what words he was hearing, what voices.

  Neil sat at a corner table by himself. The lost man-boy. He had a cup of coffee in front of him but no food. Freya sipped her orange juice and glanced over occasionally. Every time she did, Neil happened to be glancing at her, even as he tore open packets of sugar and emptied them into his cu
p.

  When her eggs arrived, Freya picked up her juice and plate and carried them to Neil’s table.

  “May I?”

  “Sure.” He waved a packet at the empty chair, scattering white sugar crystals. Freya brushed the seat off and sat down.

  “Are you feeling better today?” she asked.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Good. I was thinking about something. I was thinking about how you said don’t worry about Mr. Pickwick.”

  Neil smiled slightly.

  “You don’t know it, but it was kind of coincidental. I had a cat named Mr. Pickwick. I know you were talking about the Dickens, from before. But it’s still a coincidence. It’s almost synchronicity, but not quite, I think. Am I making sense?”

  “You are. But not in the way you think you are.”

  “And what way would that be?”

  “I wasn’t talking about Dickens, when I said the Pickwick thing. I meant don’t worry about your cat.”

  “Oh, really.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I—”

  “There he goes.”

  Freya turned, almost expecting to see the yellow tabby padding across the diner. But it was the beefy bald guy of a thousand identities, or three anyway. He walked past, looking grim, and went into the Men’s Room.

  “You’re quite taken with the swimming pool salesman,” she said.

  “Filters,” Neil said. “Anyway, he doesn’t do that anymore.”

  “No?”

  “No. I had a bad dream, I think. I can’t remember it, but I know what I was thinking before I went to sleep. And I know I dreamed about something scary that I desired. There’s that residue in my mind, no specifics.”

  Freya studied his face, looking for a clue that he was kidding, or setting her up for a punch line. No such clues were evident.

  “So you dreamed he wasn’t a filter salesman and now he isn’t?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What is he now?”

  “A poor slob whose wife left him last week and took his sweet daughter with her. He also lost his job, after showing up drunk for his morning shift and punching out his supervisor. This surprised both of them. Until then he hadn’t seemed like the violent type, despite the guns.”

  “What guns?”

  “Well, he’s always been a little paranoid and scared. More so than anybody ever guessed. He keeps a gun in the glove box of his Ford and a couple more in the house, plus a .38 in the ankle holster, like he’s a secret agent or something, except he isn’t. Not by a long shot. Shot’s kind of a pun. I used to tell nice stories about people, right? Now it’s mostly depressing stuff. Those eggs look good.”

  “You should order some,” Freya said.

  “There isn’t time.”

  She thought he meant there wasn’t time before the bus left. But then, looking at him, at his haunted eyes, she knew he meant something else. Something terrible, maybe.

  “So you think you know about Mr. Pickwick.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then tell me what it is about his eyes.”

  “Eye. Not eyes. Did you ever think of dressing him like a pirate for Halloween?”

  Freya put her fork down. “That was a good guess.”

  “It wasn’t a guess. I told you: I make up stories about strangers, and then the strangers become the story I made up. I don’t want to do it, but I can’t help myself anymore. The stories happen. It’s like a reaction. Instinctive Inventive Reaction, I call it.”

  “Eye Eye Are. Er?”

  He laughed, and the haunted look fell away, briefly.

  “I like you,” he said, “which is too bad. I’m kind of out of the people-liking business.”

  “Me, too. Or I thought I was.”

  “Because of Roger dodger?”

  She stared at him.

  “Yeah,” he said, “I know all about him.”

  She sipped her orange juice, put the glass down. “I probably said his name in my sleep.”

  Neil shook his head. “Nope.”

  “Don’t tell me you made up a story about me.”

  “I could prove it, but in a couple of minutes it won’t matter.”

  She moved her glass around the table, sliding it on a film of moisture. After a moment she raised her eyes.

  “Go ahead and prove it.”

  “You’re a junior high school teacher from Phoenix,” Neil said.

  “I told you that.”

  “Right,” Neil said. “But you didn’t tell me about Roger.”

  Freya waited, suspended between expectations. Her heart was beating faster.

  “You didn’t tell me you met him in a chat room, and that you started a relationship with him that progressed to phone calls and then to visits. You didn’t tell me that he seemed to know all your secret places, that he convinced you that he was in love with you, and that you quit your job and moved to Seattle. You didn’t tell me that he turned out to be a manipulating, needy asshole who liked to hurt people, especially you. And you didn’t tell me that after a while it was you and Mr. Pickwick verses asshole Roger. The cat was a stray, and you took it in. Because even though you were living with the guy you felt dreadfully lonely. Worse than you had felt back home in Phoenix, and that was pretty bad. You didn’t tell me that asshole Roger threw a full bottle of Bud at the cat and hit it in the ass, and that Mr. Pickwick ran for his life out of that apartment, which is when you decided you had to do the same. You didn’t tell me that when the cab was waiting to take you to the bus station a couple of days later, after all the yelling and tears and threats, that you still couldn’t find Mr. Pickwick, though you’d seen him slinking around the alley. And asshole Roger made you get in the cab without your cat, and you did it because you were scared. Another stray that got away and went feral. You didn’t tell me any of that, did you?”

  “No,” Freya said, her voice very small.

  “See?” he said.

  “It’s a trick.” She felt naked, publicly exposed. “You hypnotized me or something, back on the bus, and I told you all that.”

  “Yeah. It’s a trick. I’m The Amazing Neil.”

  “You don’t know me,” Freya said.

  “You’re right. I don’t know who you really are. But you know what’s funny? You don’t know who you really are, either. Not anymore.”

  “That isn’t funny, Neil.”

  He looked down. “No, it isn’t. I’m sorry.”

  His eyes shifted to the Men’s Room.

  “Why do you keep looking over there?”

  “No reason.”

  Freya looked at the Men’s Room door.

  “Now you’ve got me doing it,” she said.

  “Anyway,” Neil said, “you don’t have to worry about your cat.”

  “Maybe I never even had a cat. Maybe you just planted that idea in my head.” Her heart ached a little when she said it. Mr. Pickwick, as opposed to Roger, had been a comfort to her. It wasn’t even the cat she missed; it was the comfort. Another stray gone feral.

  “Is that what you think?” Neil said. “That I ‘planted’ Mr. Pickwick in your mind?”

  “No.”

  “Because that isn’t what I do,” he said. “I don’t plant things.”

  “What do you do, then?”

  “I see somebody, and his or her face suggests a little story. So I listen to the story, add to it, embellish it. This only takes a few seconds. And the little story isn’t the whole story. It just gets things rolling.”

  “You make people be something they’re not.”

  “No. I give them lives they could have had but didn’t. Or maybe they had them in parallel dimensions, or a previous incarnation. Who knows? I don’t make anybody do anything. I wish I could. I’ve tried it.” His mouth turned down in a sour scowl.

  “What happened?” Freya asked.

  He shrugged. “There was a girl.”

  He picked up his mug with both hands and slurped coffee. She thought he was pausing to gather his thoughts,
but a minute went by, and he only stared, holding the mug up to his chin, elbows on the table, his eyes focused inward.

  “What about the girl?” she said.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me. Please.”

  “You already think I’m nutty,” he said.

  She did her one-shoulder shrug, but it was the other shoulder.

  “Her name was Lynn,” he said. “She was totally random, nobody I knew or was likely to know. I was walking into a bank in Spokane, and she was walking out. One of those revolving doors. Her face. Oh, man, was she cute—but very sad-looking. And a story begins spinning itself out, something about a divorce, an empty bank account, embarrassment, a brave face, and a fast exit. At which point I tried to take control of the story. I put myself into it, which I think screwed it up. I’m the outsider, right? I don’t ever have a story to be in, not with anybody else. Anyway, I followed her down the block and found her crying in front of a Starbucks. And it was like she was so glad that I stopped and asked if she was all right. I have a kind face, non-threatening? I’ve heard that before. How far does a so-called kind face get you? It doesn’t matter. I’m totally used to being alone, I’m accustomed to the idea. With Lynn I reminded her of her high school crush, the one she always wished had asked her out but never did.”

  “That was mean,” Freya said. “Making her believe that.”

  His eyes widened innocently. “I didn’t intend it to be mean. I just wanted to meet her. I wanted her to like me.”

  “Maybe she would have liked you anyway, without you changing all her memories around.”

  “I doubt it. People tend to look right though me, Freya. Especially women. Anyway, I bought her a coffee, and we talked. She really was a sweet girl.”

  “What about the bank account, why was it empty?”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “But you said—”

  “That was before. Once I intentionally added myself, the back story changed, too. She told me she was crying because she was thinking about her best friend, who had told her she had breast cancer. Nothing to do with the bank.”

  Freya thought for a minute.

  “What if the empty account story was never real?”

  “It would have been, if I’d left it alone.”