Why Are You So Sad? (4 page)

D
on Ables was in my cubicle fishing through the basket of surveys. His back was to me. Under a striped corporate-casual shirt, he had the shoulders of a sea mammal. Rounded and hydrodynamic.

He said, still facing the other direction, “I don't agree with what I wrote yesterday.”

“Did you wake up knowing more about yourself?”

“No.”

I was disappointed.

I could see that he had located his survey. He held it up and looked it over and shook his head in disapproval.

“I'll bring this right back,” he said, and left.

The light on my phone was flashing. It was a voice mail from Brenda:
It's me . . . Why aren't you at work yet? Did you stop off and watch a movie or something? . . . How are you able to keep a job? . . . Did you open the envelope? . . . I was wondering how you are feeling . . . and . . . you know . . . how it felt to read the letter . . . Call me if you need to . . . Love you . . . Bye.

I thought about what she said long enough to forget what she said, and then started working on a drawing for a bedside table that doubled as a doghouse. I wasn't doing well. The dog looked like he was losing his vision. His eyes looked glazed and dumb. The nightstand/doghouse was flimsy. It was like a shanty out on the far edges of an overgrown capital; there was no infrastructure for this poor dog, or for all of the farmworkers who had moved to the big city on a false rumor. Just a cheap house that I couldn't draw very well.

I looked up at the photo of the African boy with the gun and said, “Can you imagine having a credit card in your child soldier name and buying a house for your dog made out of particleboard on borrowed money that you would have to pay back at a twenty-two percent annual percentage rate?”

He said,
Hell no
.

Then he just looked like he wanted to shoot me.

Sometimes I can't sit still. Particularly when the little soldier is staring at me. At those times I go get coffee or potato chips, or I wash my hands, or I contemplate taking up smoking, or I walk outside to the parking lot and sit in my car and listen to music, or lately just listen to the parking lot, since my stereo was stolen.

I passed Don's cube on my way to the parking lot. There were photos of Alan Alda pinned to the walls. He looked to be hard at work on the survey. When he became aware that I could see him, he shielded the survey even though there was no chance I could read it from the edge of his cube. I leaned in across the threshold without technically entering and said, “Don, if you want to talk about the survey, I am here for you.”

For a moment I got caught in the gaze of his sister in that terrible photo. It looked like she was trying to wink but didn't know how. Because Don was still silent, I said, “Do you think there are people who are unable to wink?”

He kept on writing. I could see he was crossing out large sections of the survey.

He said, “Are there any more blank copies of this?”

I said, “I don't know. I'd have to ask Jerry.”

He had a large black marker in one hand and a ballpoint pen in the other. Blacking out and writing new answers and blacking out. I didn't know whether to stay or leave. I thought it was sad that we never really had conversations about anything real or true. The only things we talked about were the latest e-mails about sick leave policy and whether we had a favorite freeway.

I said, “Any word on what they are serving for lunch today?”

“Don't know.” He wrote some more; I hovered waiting for something. I thought about inviting him out to my car, but then decided against it.

“Ray, who reads these surveys?”

“I think it is a project that Bob Grasston is heading up.”

“Then why are you collecting them?”

“Doctor's orders,” I said, and shrugged like it was all part of a needlessly bureaucratic protocol that would be a waste of time to try to understand.

“But you aren't going to read them, are you?”

“Me?”

“Yeah. Who reads them?”

“I don't know. I could barely read mine, it was so boring. Maybe this is something they have to do for insurance purposes. Maybe it's a way of covering their tracks or something. You know, physical evidence that they at least once asked how we're doing. I don't really know. They probably picked me because I'm at the end of the aisle.”

Despite an obvious dissatisfaction with my explanation, he handed me his survey.

“I'll add it to the others,” I said, and gave him a salute as if we were both in the military. I hated myself for making the gesture.

His survey was a mess. The original answers were blacked out. I ducked into the men's bathroom and attempted to decipher the answers in one of the stalls. It was quiet and clean in there. Almost unused. Nothing was written on the putty-gray walls that divided the toilets. I had to tilt the paper at just the right angle so that the light would reflect the grooves of the original ballpoint answers, which were now covered in wide swaths of ink. It was difficult to make out all of it, and Don's penmanship wasn't great to begin with.

NAME: DON ABLES

Are you single?

I live with my sister, Geraldine.

Are you having an affair?

I am not married.

This is where his revisions began, the original, crossed-out answers followed by the new ones.

Are you who you want to be?

I always wanted to be a surgeon in the Korean War.

Yes.

Would you prefer to be someone else?

I wish I had a nickname like Eagle Eyes or Sonar.

I am perfectly fine being me.

Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?

I thought I would end up in a prison. I always thought I would wake up and my parents would be dead. And then I would owe the money on the house and car and would be sent to prison because I couldn't pay off their debts with my newspaper-delivery earnings, and I feared that in prison they would
me or I would
until I couldn't
anymore.

I imagined keeping a job and having an apartment, so yes.

Why are you so sad?

I don't hang out with a group of pals. I long for camaraderie. Somebody to play practical jokes on.

I am not sad.

When was the last time you felt happy?

When my
was
and I loved
so much, it felt so good it hurt me in my
, but in the nicest way. But that was such a long time ago.