The Entire Predicament (12 page)

I miss you.

I have made eight mistakes checking myself out. (Not like that. This is not me trying to be sexy. I swear, desire is so embarrassing).
I’m all revved up over it. It’s as if I feel I am demonstrating, by stamping my feet and talking back to the instruction screen, the need for qualified checkout machine operators, but I also know no one watching my animated frustration will be anything except annoyed. Can’t we all just cooperate and get through this? Jesus, no one likes this shit, who do you think you are?

Here are the mistakes I made: I did not get my discount card out of my wallet fast enough. I tried to replace the plastic bag on the rack with a bag from home. I took too long putting the bags back the way they were supposed to be and had to rescan my items. I put too many items in the plastic bag. I pushed star instead of pound. I decided not to buy a piece of cheese I thought I was going to buy. I wanted six eggs and not twelve. But that last one always happens.

I miss the rubber conveyor belt, even though it has so often mangled my parsley. No one wants this, I think, looking around for help. Everyone is immersed in the checkout process. People study the screens and handle their items like science projects, sudden experts. I miss the tellers at the banks, I miss the gas station attendants, and when I collect my receipt from the girl whose job it is to oversee all eight automated checkout stations I say,“Does it bother you that these machines are replacing you?” and she says, “No, I have this job,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean—” and she says,“We’ll just have different jobs,” and I say, “Yeah but I mean—” and she says, “We can get jobs at another store,” and I say,“Yeah but I mean—” and she cuts me off and says, “Yeah they suck, I know, everyone hates them,” but this time she’s whispering.

It’s exactly what I wanted her to say, and I go to my car and raise the hatchback, load the slippery bags, and they promptly
slump and release their contents. I miss stiff brown bags with toothy edges. I miss those boys who used to load my bags. I feel old, and rich, and stupid.

The year I spent in the studio apartment, I let the bulbs burn out one by one until I was living by refrigerator light. In the dark, I’d want something, a pen, a cigarette, a sentence from a book, and I’d open the door. Light came to mean cold, and wanting something meant cold, too.

I could hear the man next door, everything he watched on television, and when he turned his television off I could suddenly hear him breathing and I knew we were sleeping side by side or head to head (I couldn’t decide which was worse), the one faint wall between us. I felt pinned between him and the refrigerator, which turned on and off so loudly—refrigerators are so loud, and hulking, you just never notice unless you’re trying to sleep in a kitchen.

Soon the refrigerator seemed as human as the man next door. I pictured the light still on inside it, pressing and humming, the rumbling life that we know is encased in a body’s skin.

Do you see what I mean?

The Judge asked, “Why are you on disability?” and the plaintiff said her arm had been reattached after fifteen hours of microsurgery.

The Judge asked, “Then why do you want the Harley-Davidson back from your brother, who has been keeping it
as collateral and over this year rebuilt it from salvaged original parts along with ordering some new ones?”

The plaintiff said, “This is all I have left of my husband.”

He’d given her the motorcycle, and they’d been riding double. In the accident, her arm was severed, and he’d been killed.This is what I pieced together. What a gory moment in history. The motorcycle was scattered, and her husband’s body was scattered. She’d wandered around the dark road with her arm dangling by the inside flap of her skin and muscle, stumbling and unable to tell what was him and what was machine. Somebody sorted it out later, while she was in the ambulance and in the hospital. They divvied up the parts into two piles: people parts for burial in one box on the side of the road, and motorcycle parts in another box on the side of the road, for trash, they assumed, until her brother claimed the parts, knowing her.

“Knowing he could
use
me,” she said.

She couldn’t spell. The notes of agreement submitted to the Judge as evidence proved it. When the Judge said, “Give your brother the five hundred dollars, and you, sir, give her the motorcycle,” and then cracked the gavel, the plaintiff said, “Yes!”—a whispered hurrah—and made the kind of gesture you make to celebrate when you score in pinball.

Now comes what I have to confess.

Some things she didn’t say in court that I was hoping she’d say were:

“Brother, how could you have put that bike together when you knew I’d want to do it when my arm worked better? I wanted to line the parts in rows in my driveway. I wanted to lift them and fit them into one another. Not because I never learn and I’ll just get out on the road, reckless again, hair in
the wind. And not because I don’t hate the machine for what it contributed to his death and my own wrecked body. But because I know that machine is my man’s body, and in my memory of wandering the glossy night road under the stars, I wanted to reconstruct the motorcycle because I could not reconstruct my husband. Because for all my recklessness, drug and alcohol abuse, and disregard for the well-being of my children, I have a soul that loves and knows beauty.”

I was by myself, watching the television in a waiting room, waiting for the guy to change my inspection sticker (yes, I still have that fucking car), and as soon as I knew that’s what I hoped, those words, those ideas, I felt embarrassed of the things I imagined wanting from her.

This is the problem with thinking and with wanting anything.

The couch felt funny against my skin. Inside my skin, my insides felt funny. It’s just not a nice way of speaking.

Remember what you said when we were walking down the street and we passed that window with all the treadmills, these guys running and running, trying and trying to get through the window, all these guys in the background, so earnest and voluntarily tangled in these contraptions like medieval torture machines, and remember how I said we should hook them up to a loom and you said no, a generator, and we debated the merits and you totally won, but I think now what I liked about my idea so much was that what a loom makes is warm and colorful, and power, well, power is awful and invisible.

As you walk past cobbler shop, hook (A) strikes suspended boot (B) causing it to kick football (C) through goalposts (D). Football drops into basket (E) and string (F) tilts sprinkling can (G), causing water to soak coattails (H). As coat shrinks, cord (I) opens door (J) of cage, allowing bird (K) to walk out on perch (L) and grab worm (M), which is attached to string (N). This pulls down window shade (O), on which is written,“YOU SAP. MAIL THAT LETTER.” A simple way to avoid all this trouble is to marry a wife who can’t write. (
http://www.rube-goldberg.com/html/mail%20a%20letter.htm
)

At the movies it was about a scary video and you had to watch the video really carefully, looking for anything, and I saw the circular blip in the corner of the film, the one that tells the operator to switch reels, and I thought it meant something, I thought it was like when Bergman burned the film but then in this movie nothing came of it. Then I kept thinking: it
had
to be something because are there even projector operators anymore?

Here are some of the machines in a different movie from this week: CD players with headphones and just all kinds of music-recording equipment, microphones, whole panels with knobs for adjusting levels, a bus, lots of cars in the traffic scenes and cityscapes as well as two or three car-fixing scenes, a factory machine that the guys count to two and push these giant buttons in unison and the machine presses car doors into shape, some guns (Is a gun a machine? You bet it’s a machine.
I just never thought of it before), the whole regular cast of kitchen appliances in the kitchen (There was only one kitchen in this movie and it was in a trailer!) although I don’t think the stove made it into any shots.There weren’t any computers in this movie.

Some machines, I notice, are better than others for bouncing ideas off of, and for containing undesirable emotions.

It goes like this: The house contains people and machines. The landlord owns the house. The landlord gets mad at the tenants when the machines break. The tenants get mad at the machines when he’s an asshole.

I hated him, all the tenants hated him, we all hated the landlord. He kept thinking of dumb upgrades so he could raise rent, thirty dollars and then thirty more for this other thing, and fixed everything with duct tape and got mad at you if anything broke. Haven’t I told you this before? He got mad at me when I got robbed, when that guy came in and stood over my bed, holding my TV. He was an overinvolved landlord, meddling, emotional. He’d come over in his tennis outfit and want everyone’s rent, stick his head in your kitchen. He’d come over and start talking with us as if we didn’t hate him.

I was on the porch smoking with Emma, who I must have mentioned, she was so pretty. Hippie girl downstairs, very pretty girl, lithe, always stoned, but intelligent. We were looking at how he’d put in a big hulking air-conditioning unit along the side of the house. We started talking about how stupid it was, how in those old Southern houses, you just open
the doors and breezes go right through, you just don’t need air-conditioning. I love a real breeze, and it was another way for him to charge more money. We started talking about hating the landlord. Made fun of his accent and his wife, his car, his haircut, the way he walked, his nose, his mother we’d seen him riding with one day, her accent, the little dog she carried and how the dog would leap at the window and bounce against it, snarling. Emma did a snarling minidog imitation and then we sat smoking for a minute and then she just went down off the porch and stood next to the air conditioner and kicked it. I came down and stood next to her and then we just started kicking it in. Emma had clogs on but she could still kick great. We kicked in the part with the fan, very satisfying to kick in, and then we kicked at the grill until it flopped off and there was all that silvery fibrous filter stuff, which felt great to kick, because it crumbled and left the prints of my boots and her clogs. I can’t believe I haven’t told you this before.

The next day I looked down from my window and saw the top of his head. He was standing next to the kicked-in air conditioner, talking to Emma through her kitchen window about those idiots who’d backed their car into his unit. He said “unit. ” Even from my window I could see the marks our shoes left. “You sure it was a car?” Emma asked, but he was sure. “I should put in a curb,” he said.

I moved, but maybe six months later I saw Emma, and we got a bunch of dog shit, and we pushed it through the mail slot at his house.Would he think dogs did that? I asked Emma, who was looking through the slot into his house, “Is this satisfying to you?” She said, “Yes!”

My grandfather liked to fly so low over the villages he bombed that he’d return with blood on his fuselage, or at least that’s what he told his kids.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Poked him with their index fingers, told lies about his mother, smacked him in his funny bones, scratched his eyes out with their fingernails. Person Equals Torturer.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Chained him in the stocks, stuck him in a barrel, let the community take over. They peed on him. People Equals Torture.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. Torture (an OED definition): to ‘twist’ (language, etc.) from the proper or natural meaning or form; to distort, pervert. For example: the Chair, the Pear, the Wheel, the Fork, the Ladder, the Hook, the Rack, the Saw, or the great Bronze Bowl. Jim surveyed the chamber. My God! Any ordinary thing, it seemed, could kill you. A chair. A sweet pear. For the rest of his days, though he walked away, his eyes shifted, his body crooked and leaping with nerves. He feared paper clips, cups and saucers, the toilet plunger, packing-tape rollers, newspaper caddies, golf clubs, typewriter covers, pocket protectors, humble onions, and any piece of furniture, especially pine. Object Equals Torture.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured. His son Charlie kept hamsters in his bedroom, but when they overturned a bowl of rodents on Jim’s stomach and heated the bowl, the rodents burrowed. The pulley that raised his intestines had
been so friendly when it lifted cargo from his ship. The apple rumps of the four horses set to draw and quarter him were rosy, broad, and quivered, ready and afraid. Animal Plus Person Equals Machine.

One time they took Jim off to be tortured.The Branks, the Breast Ripper, the Headcrusher, the Whirligig, the Ducking Stool, the Cat’s Paw, Phalaris’s Bull, the Rack, the Brodequin, but then, more wonderful, the Iron Maiden, which enclosed him like an exoskeleton, his body within a body, pierced and warm within cold metal. Then when they set up to strangle him, Jim expected a pair of stockings, as before, which had worked fine for a garrote when they first worked with objects, but this time they brought out a loop of metal with a screw that tightened it. There was something different about this strangling.The limp stocking had leaped to life and stiffened with action around his neck, but
this
, these specialized machines, he thought, meant someone knew all along he’d be tortured. They’d prepared and readied a machine to place between them, as if the torturer was entirely audience, as if the whole scenario was predetermined, Jim bound there prone, torture his fate. Machine Equals Torture; Torturer Equals Machine.

Outside the chamber, he saw no Iron Maidens, he saw no screw-laden loop devices as he wobbled from his shack to work and back. His eyes rolled, unfocused in his head because he could not place his fear; the machines were in the dungeons but he saw the dungeons everywhere.