Why Are You So Sad? (6 page)

I was both encouraged by Don's initial openness to the survey and discouraged by his revisions. It corrupted my results. I had naively anticipated a certain level of honesty. I wondered what Don would do if I started calling him Sonar. I wondered if I shouldn't use the toilet since I had already been there. I dropped my pants, and did the things we do—unnecessary to elaborate on, I'm sure. Let's say that I found a peace. I played a game I like to play with my memory, where I insert fantasized memories back into my life, altering its course, but feeling deeply that it's almost real, or certainly would have transpired that way, had I just made a few different moves. I rolled back in time. Instead of a life with Brenda—with whom I still allowed myself a short-lived, sex-filled fling in my revised past, just not one that involved marriage—I asked Hope Crestwell out on a date, which, because I did so in such a charming way, led to much, much more. Hope had been the most talented artist in the life-drawing class I audited at the art academy. She had this way of confidently not caring about anything. Like the teacher would tell her to change something, to make it more proportionally faithful, but she knew she didn't need to listen to the teacher, and she continued to draw the models both as they were and also in ways they were not. So a thin woman in her thirties with small, pear-shaped breasts would in Hope's drawing look larger than a bear, maybe even with fur, but still exactly like herself. And the idiotic teacher would tell her not to do that. The point is that this made Hope irresistible. She knew who she was, or maybe didn't give a shit about who she wasn't. And I pictured us living in France with our very quiet, well-mannered child, who liked to entertain herself in the outdoors collecting butterflies while Hope and I made love in a rustic but charming farmhouse filled with exotic canvases where we were each making really bold, fearless brushstrokes. Then my daydream came to an end when I noticed there was only a cube and a half of toilet paper left on the roll.

 

A
t my desk, more thoughts of Don soared on the shifting air currents in my head. The life he probably lived. Nights in front of the television. Geraldine, a quiet presence. Her eyebrow arched with concern for wartime medicine. I imagined they kept their rooms dark. That they read magazines to the light of the TV. That they wore custom slippers. I entertained these thoughts while I worked on a drawing for a combination CD rack/shoe organizer. In my drawing the rack was beginning to look like an accordion, an instrument I've always admired. I gave it a face. The face had big cheeks, ready to puff out stale air. I put the drawing aside, looked at my phone—no messages—glanced at the photos on the wall—still there. I blew my nose. Cleared my throat. Cracked my knuckles. Played a game of online poker. An e-mail came, asking people to give blood. Another arrived, alerting us to a health insurance deadline that involved a date and a form. A third warned that they were spraying pesticides along the campus pathways over the weekend, which should not constitute a health hazard except for any employees who might be pregnant.

I left my desk to hide out in my car for a while. I sat there wishing I still had a stereo, thinking I ought to buy a new one, then talking to myself, putting my head in my hands, putting my hands behind my head, adjusting the seat backward, and then forward a bit, and then too far forward, and then back a little. A small motor buzzed in the direction of my car. A man in a jumpsuit and hard earmuffs was wrangling leaves with a leaf blower. It was still summer. I don't know why he thought there would be a lot of leaves. His machine was loud. It hung from a strap that went over his shoulder. The exhaust from the blower danced upward in translucent heat. I watched him weaving through the sea of cars, back and forth, like he was a shark circling for chum. Then he came out of the water and started to blow nearer the building. As I tracked his movements I noticed Robin Lipsk sitting at the picnic table next to the wheelchair ramp. She had been watching me. Robin was the one female member of tech support. They were a cartel. They kept their own schedules, and they all agreed to act with a casual concern toward everything. They had all the power.

Robin was an enigma. A convergence of science fiction enthusiasm, confrontational tattoos, and computer fluency. She wore strange beads around her neck. Maybe they were teeth and not beads. It looked like she had paid disabled children to cut her hair. She had dyed it pink and green, probably without realizing those were also the company colors.

She walked up to my car. Stared through the window. I smiled and raised my eyebrows to acknowledge her, hoping she would walk away. She opened the door and got in.

“Let me smoke in your car.”

I didn't respond. I tried to look uncomfortable, which didn't take much effort.

She said, “I'll bump you up on the waiting list for the new machines.”

“Smoke away.”

“It's kind of dirty in here,” she said, pulling a glass pipe out of her army surplus pants, followed by a sizable green bud that was silhouetted in miniature orange hairs. It was the professional athlete of the plant world. It looked like it had been meeting with a trainer who fed it a cocktail of illicit enhancements in preparation for the competition that was about to take place in Robin's head. She groomed the bud like a Zen butcher who could carve a shank with her eyes closed, never hitting the bone. And then the car filled with smoke. She offered me some. I declined. She started looking through my glove compartment.

“Can I help you find something?”

“Don't you have anything to listen to?”

“Just the leaf blower.”

She smoked some more. We watched the leaf blower through the rearview mirror. The man didn't smile. He was smoking a cigarette while he worked. He wasn't even looking at where he was blowing, as far as I could tell.

“He has a rad mustache,” she said.

“It will not blow away,” I said.

She looked at me like I had said something special, something heavy, instead of realizing I was just trying to get through this.

“I like your car.”

“Thanks.”

“My mom has one like this.”

“Is your mom happy?”

“I don't know.”

We sat. She started to complain about the leader of the tech support cartel, Kyle Blanks. He was a real selfish dick. I asked if he was happy. She didn't think he was, or more accurately, she hoped he wasn't. Then she was transfixed by a passing cloud that she thought looked like a bagpipe. She thought bagpipes were freaky but also beautiful.

“It sounds like they are crying, 'cause they can never get rid of that one note. It drones on, like a broken key.”

I started to like her. This was better than e-mail.

She made the flame of her lighter curve toward the bowl as she sucked in more drug. It made a crinkling sound: baby sticks on fire. As the smoke came out she said, “Do you think time has a shape? I mean, duh, of course it does, but what shape do you think it has?”

“Maybe like Kansas? I don't know. I never thought about it.”

“Never? Kansas? You mean like a real flat plane?” I didn't answer, so she went on. “I think it is shaped like a bow tie, but I think most people think it is shaped like a rake.”

“Well, then I think it is shaped like a frown.”

I could feel smoke entering my tear ducts.

“You mean like it is linear but it swells upward in the present and then back down again in the future?”

“Maybe more like the downward motion of an airplane that has run out of fuel.”

She said, “Most people think everything up until now is a line. And some think the future is also a straight line. But some think right after this moment the future fans out in various directions. The tines of the rake are the different paths available to us in the future.” Her eyes were spinning like fruits in a slot machine.

“Do they continue to exist in multiples after they are absorbed by the present?”

“Good question,” she said, giving me a friendly punch in the shoulder to punctuate her appreciation. We were friends now. Maybe. Don would be jealous because he had once tried to talk to Robin about
Lost in Space
and she hadn't been interested. And because now my computer would get fixed faster than his.

We looked out at the clouds again. I pointed to one that I thought looked like a shoe. She saw it as a croissant.

“But if the future fans out, wouldn't the past also fan out?” she said. “That's what I think. Think about it. It's like trees: If you dig in the ground, they don't go down in a straight line; the roots below stretch out like the branches above. Right? We are totally perched on the nose of a cat, and the future and the past are the whiskers.”

“My cat only has three legs.”

“Aw.”

“If you are right about the tines, does that mean that it would be possible for all of us to die off in one tine but live on in another? Is there a tine where we all live underwater and coexist with aquatic tigers?”

She wasn't listening. She was staring at a couple walking back to the building from the far end of the parking lot. The man was adjusting his shirt. The woman was fixing her hair. It was Nora and Charlie. They walked past us, too involved with each other to notice us staring at them through caged smoke. I looked over at Robin. She was gazing at Nora. Her mouth was open the way my mouth is open when I realize I have been staring at Nora and then look around to make sure nobody has seen me. Robin had the same open mouth.

It erased our conversation. Wiped it out. She said she had to go back inside to install a sort of software something. I went back to rework the drawing that wasn't supposed to be of an accordion. We didn't talk. We walked past the leaf shepherd, who was now sitting at the picnic table eating a banana. We entered the building and fanned off in our separate directions.

There appeared to be a few more surveys in the envelope, but not enough. I wanted more. I wanted to leave. I left.

 

I
was in the video store, wading in an overflow of consumer stimuli. Flattened screens were making claims about high definitions. Animated insects were talking like stand-up comedians while falling into sharpened computer foliage. Cardboard cutouts promoted the competing romantic comedies of the decade.

A woman with her dog was on the phone asking what she should bring home, reading the backs of boxes aloud into the phone. “This one's got Pierce Brosnan,” she said, “
and
a love triangle.” Her dog wasn't happy. He probably smelled rat poison or was irritated by the high-pitched noise that was broadcast every time a customer came in or out of the store. I hoped in vain that the dog would shit on the carpet, which was patterned in dancing film reels. I hated the carpet. I hated the woman. And I recognized that was mean-spirited. I wondered if I should put that on the next revision of the emotional self-appraisal.

—
Have you always been mean-spirited?

—
Would you attribute your mean spirit to nature or nurture?

—
Have you ever wanted someone or something to fail for reasons that were not entirely clear to you? Perhaps a restaurant that played techno music while you attempted to digest your food, or a man who wore open-toed shoes into that same restaurant?

Holding a copy of a direct-to-video movie about a traffic accident that brought together strangers who were both recently widowed, I contemplated a few more:

—
Is all communication impossible?

—
Do you wonder if words like
face, blue, happy, exceptional, honest, magical, heart, wish, love,
and
please
may mean something else to other people, but because everybody is consistent in what they think the terms mean, it is very difficult to detect that we are in fact referring to different concepts and feelings?

—
For instance, you meet someone, and you say you like to travel and they say that they like to travel, do you nevertheless feel like the ways in which they like to travel are not the same as the ways in which you like to travel?

—
And more importantly, why does that make you feel so completely alone in the world?

I browsed in a different direction from the woman and her poor mutt. We were like ducks on a pond, watercraft drifting along fifty-some years of Hollywood spew. At the end of the aisle were buckets of popcorn, boxes of candy, and some tabloid magazines. Despite zero interest in its contents, I found myself picking up
Them Weekly
. A new reality person was rumored to be drinking while pregnant. I put the magazine back and thought of a few more questions:

—
To relieve yourself from boredom, do you distract yourself with things that are also boring?

—
Are you more afraid of boredom or death
?

—
If you could represent your most horrifying boredom with a sound, what would it be? A drip? A scream? The cryptic chirp of an outdated modem?

My drift had taken me toward the front of the store. A clerk in a blue shirt with the yellow Movie Blitz logo was behind the counter giving a minimum-wage effort. She was dipping fast food into fast sauces, leafing through a magazine, not paying attention to anything outside of the glossy photos, dipping nuggets into sauces without even looking, but never missing. She did this with great long painted fingernails that seemed like a place I would call home if I were a flesh-eating bacteria. She always dipped first into a semitranslucent amber sauce—three quick dips and then a longer, lingering plunge into a darker and thicker sauce that I presumed was barbecue. I was transfixed, watching her hands carry the food to her mouth; entirely captivated, like a child at the zoo, watching closely to see how an animal could possibly entertain itself in such cramped quarters; wondering if the animal knew it wasn't in its natural habitat. And I was incredibly curious to see how long she could eat this way without missing, or if she would ever break from her pattern with the dips and the sauces. I couldn't decide which side of the event I was rooting for. Was I hoping for the pitcher to throw a perfect game, or was I waiting to see if the race car drivers would crash in flames? Would she dip a nugget into the cash drawer, or smear sauce on the magazine, or miss her mouth altogether and smear it on her face? And what could possibly be in the magazine? Nothing was in the magazine. But she was looking at it like they were having a conversation.

She finally caught wind of me watching her like an animal, so I asked her what she recommended.

“I don't know. What do you like?” she said, and dipped.

“I need to make my wife trust me again.”

“We have some video games where you can shoot people together.”

“I was thinking more of a movie.”

“New movies are over there. Most people like the new releases.” She was looking at the magazine as she said it. I wanted to go into the back room with her and eat some of those terribly sour sugar worms together, to get a younger and poorer perspective on just how bad things were.

“And I just so happen to be looking for a new release on life.”

It is amazing how before you say something, you think it is a sensible thing to say, but even as your lips are turning the thought into sound, you begin to realize what a terrible thing you're about to say. It was a poor joke. Not even a joke—a pun. Younger people hate puns, especially coming from older people.

My cell phone rang. I nodded at the clerk, as if regrettably this damned device was bringing our conversation to a premature end, and moved over to a shelf organized by the theme of violence with cars.

“Did you find something yet?”

“I just got here.”

I could sense Brenda was walking around on the other end of the call. I don't know how. It's part of the dark science behind marriage. I couldn't hear her opening our refrigerator, but I knew that's what she was doing, and that she was pouring herself some filtered water, and when she was done with that, she would stare into the fridge looking for something to eat, like if she waited long enough there might be some activity in there, but then after staring for some time, she would shut the door without taking anything out.

“Why didn't you open the envelope I gave you this morning?”

“What envelope?”

“Raymond!” She sounded exasperated. I told her that Triangles, I mean Gus, distracted me and then I was late for work. Was that true? It seemed like it was essentially true. Then neither of us said anything. Now I couldn't hear but knew she was sitting at the kitchen table looking through the mail.

“After everything I said this morning?”

“You know how Gus gets.” This was as pathetic as the pun I made for the nugget-eater.

I could detect, with my marital sense, that she was taking off her shoes and rubbing her feet, and I had always suspected that when she did this, she would press extra hard on the really tender points and imagine her feet were like voodoo dolls, and that by pinching them in such a focused way, she was inflicting a corresponding pain in my shoulders or my testicles or any part of my anatomy that deserved justice.

“Well, just rent some fucking movie and come home.”

“I will.”

“Make it funny, but not jokey.”

“I'll try.”

“But hurry up. I'm getting tired.”

“Why don't I just come home and we can talk?” I surprised myself.

“I am afraid of what you will say.”

“What will I say?”

“That your life is over, or that you wish you had become a magician, or that you think we should become nudists, or something else that is divorced from reality.”

“I won't say anything.” I made a mental note to add a question about divorce and reality in the next revision of the survey.

—
Are you divorced from reality?

—
What made you get married in the first place?

—
Were you pressured into it
?

I was about to start reading her titles from the new release section, but then I realized I would become the woman with the dog.

“What's taking you so long?”

“Well, at first it was that the clerk had a fascinating eating ritual, and it captivated me. I think you would understand if you saw her.” I whispered this very carefully. “And then it made me think of the zoo.”

“See, that's the kind of thing you will say.”

But it was true. I thought about the day my dad took me to the zoo and how the wolverine had lain next to a leafless tree, as if it was wounded—and perhaps it had been. It was the only visible wolverine—this wasn't a big-budget zoo—and it looked like it had fallen from the sky right onto a small patch of cost-effective ground cover. And I was a kid. I didn't understand why a wolverine would be splayed out and inert. I wanted an explanation. I said, “Dad?” And he said, “I know, I know, this is a disgrace. We paid ten bucks and all the animals play dead.” He said that after seeing the wolverine, but it was even worse when we came to the elephant. The elephant was in a mental rut. He was moving, but his brain had crashed. This was probably my first exposure to insanity, or at least the palpable strain that is right out in front of you. He was big and gray and majestic, as all elephants are, but despair radiated off his giant body. He took a step backward and then he took a step forward. He only looked in front of him, toward the fence that separated him from the giraffes. His trunk hung low. He took another step backward. He took a step forward. He repeated this motion while the zookeeper, helpless, tried to sell him on the hope of walking in a full circle around the faux rock enclave.
Come on, elephant, you can do it!
But the elephant was completely broken. I had no idea how they would fix him. It was terrifying. He was broken like my radio-controlled car, which had gotten too much hair and dirt caught in its wheelbase and as a result could never turn right or go in reverse. The elephant's gears were broken: Forward half a step. Backward half a step. Pause. Look bewildered by own brokenness. Repeat until death. I wanted to cry, but I thought that might make it worse; that my tears might confirm that the elephant couldn't be fixed. My dad took me away and said, “This is worse than taxidermy.”

The epidemic was beginning all the way back then. I had been too young to piece it all together. I was nine and I knew the animals were telling me something, but I couldn't figure out exactly what. I didn't realize then that it wasn't just confined to the zoo.

“Are you still there?”

“Yes, I'm looking at the cover of a movie with Woody Harrelson. He plays a blind man.” I was as bad as the woman with the dog. I looked for her and the dog—well, really just for the dog—wanting to get a look at its face, see if it was carrying a mournful countenance or trembling in fear of a gutted future that hadn't yet registered with our dim senses, but the dog was gone.

“Is it jokey?”

“I can't tell. Hold on. It says ‘heartfelt.'”

“Ew.”

“They have two whole shelves of
Titanic Returns
.”

“How could they make a sequel of that? Didn't everybody die?”

“Maybe it's about reincarnation.”

“Oh, it doesn't matter. Just come home.”

I decided I would get a couple of movies so that she could choose. I rented
The Wind
with Lillian Gish. A silent film from 1928. The box said it was about a woman who moves to west Texas, where she is plagued by a howling wind and marriage proposals. I also rented
Kramer vs. Kramer
. I didn't read the cover on that one, but I remembered liking it some time ago, and I knew that Brenda liked legal thrillers.

The clerk scanned the movies with a bar code gun that was tethered to her computer. She did it without looking at me. She was chewing gum. Had she been chewing gum while eating the nuggets? It seemed possible. I said, since I had no credibility left to lose after the pun, “Do you think that historians lie about the past to make the present look better than it is?”

She said, “That'll be seven dollars and ninety-eight cents.”