Why Are You So Sad? (7 page)

A
warm loaf of bread is on my chest. A thermal whole-grain weight that vibrates. Is this bad or good? I should care for the bread. If I move the bread is spoiled. Falls onto the floor of cabin. Cabin that is black and white, with doors banging from howling wind. Beautiful, pale woman runs back and forth distressed. A terrified doll in a ruffled dress. She doesn't see me. Why can't she see the lovely loaf of bread I protect like a baby?

I was on the sofa, drifting and dreaming. Brenda had left me sleeping there to the accompaniment of a rental decision that lacked a joint enthusiasm. Lillian Gish was flickering like a star, getting blown about in a rustic shack. Gus was on my chest, his quiet motor spinning inside, pinning me down. Asleep. What time was it? Was I still depressed? Was Gus? I think he was not yet infected, bless his three-legged heart. I kicked off my shoes. I eyed a blanket on the arm of the chair next to the couch. With the caution of a tightrope walker, I reached for the blanket, hoping not to disrupt my sleeping loaf. We drifted out again.

I give Lillian the questionnaire. Her face glows white like an exquisite mushroom that blossoms in a dark forest far away from the sun. Her body, because the lord was once merciful, has never seen a gym. I can admire its outline through her historical nightgown. I hand her a piece of paper. It has only one question on it:
Did people have more or less free time prior to the invention of abs?

Gus moved to a space that was both my shoulder and the side of my face. Awoken, I watched the end of the picture. I fell in love with Lillian and wondered if it was possible for people to look like that today. If Brenda and I abandoned our promise to each other and decided to have a child, and that child blossomed into a beautiful star of the silent screen, would she be destroyed by a tanning booth? I watched the finale of the picture. I could tell I would sleep again soon. Reading the interstitial titles to the plink of an old-timey piano was a much more effective relaxant than staring at the ceiling fan next to a wife who sleeps like a determined snowbank.

 

I
took the Henry Ford Memorial Bridge that morning. A container ship from China was working its way up the bay, a floating mosaic of painted boxes in weathered reds and faded blues, all filled with lead dog food and tainted pacifiers. Tufts of smoke trailed behind the ship, rising up above the bridge's suspension cables, tucking themselves into the haze. I watched the road curve downward to the other side of the bay and thought about my head—how it felt like it could fall off and nobody would care. Probably because they barely cared that their own heads were about to fall off. The airport was ahead of me. The grass along the runway looked tired of being green. An airplane up in the sky to my left was small but became huge in seconds, cracking the sky in sound, touching down onto the runway that ran alongside the freeway. It was big enough to eat me.

A truck was overturned and on fire just south of the airport. Traffic slowed. Magenta flares dotted the road. It smelled of burning plastic. People were hungry to see the damage. I too would look. I wanted to know what fate I had escaped.

The driver was talking to a police officer, waving his hands about. His shirt was torn and he looked like he had been shaken upside down by a giant. He didn't know if the conversation with the officer was taking place before or after his death. I felt sorry for him, but not as if he was something that actually existed. He was on the other side of the windshield.

Allied Heat and Invisibles, our corporate neighbor, appeared to be having a sales rally. A banner reading, “Innovations in Solution Creations!” was draped along the entrance to the giant prisms of glass and steel that contained their offices. I passed their buildings and pulled in the drive to our campus. There was no place to park. The out-of-town sales reps from Allied had taken over our lot. I thought I saw a spot next to one of the huge machines that pump the airless breezes into our buildings, but it was taken up by a motorcycle that hadn't been visible at first. I circled and circled.

My only option was the Di$count Xplosions parking lot on the other side of the expressway. They always had spaces. I parked in an empty row next to a pen of shopping carts.

Crossing the first half of the expressway, on foot, back toward our offices, was not a problem. The southbound traffic was light. A dirty heat rose off the pavement. I made my way across to the median, but there I was forced to pause. The northbound traffic was a different beast altogether. It had a homicidal intensity to it. Trucks and cargo vans looked like they would fly off their axles and take out my limbs. It was loud. My hair blew. I sneezed, an involuntary response to light shining off things. A near guarantee to make me sneeze, the glimmer of airborne particles. I searched my pockets for a tissue. Neither pant pocket was stocked. I tried the breast pocket on my shirt, also finding no tissues, but the search did inadvertently set free a small photo I had cut out and placed there for safekeeping. It was a photo of a mutant frog, a grayish-white cyclops born near a bio-enhanced fertilizer plant. I wanted it for my cubicle wall. But it blew free of my hands, fluttering in the shimmering dust. I chased it down, almost getting my hand on it as it danced in the automotive winds, but then I sneezed again, the light bouncing against something aluminum. In only a millisecond I lost the trail of my renegade photo. It was a terrible place to lose something so scrappy and trashlike. I got down low, on my hands and knees, figuring it couldn't have floated far, and searched in the very unique traffic median ecosystem, where half-items regularly expire without memorial. A broken toy. Bits of polystyrene. Rugged plant life. Dirt. Shredded nothings. Eroded somethings. An orange plastic cap, cracked and punctured. Filthy strings. An abandoned fast-food prize—a plastic chicken nugget, perhaps—with eyes and pretend lipstick. Nowhere could I find the photo. Which was sad. The frog was sad, which is why I had saved it; it was sad, but ignorant about its sadness. Another resolute message to all of us. We wanted to pretend we weren't like the frog. You know, we have two eyes, we think, our skin has at least some pigment—so we're still doing okay. But like the frog we were born into strange shapes that we merely accept as sensible. Flaps for feet. Ears that are sealed off. Bifurcated tongues. We feel sorry for the frog, but how do we know we aren't ourselves mutations? Anyway, I was looking forward to seeing how it might fit in with the other friends on my wall. I searched just a little bit longer. Brushing away some litter—a potato chip bag, a crumpled beer can, a losing lottery ticket—I noticed a tiny flower in the weeds. It was also a weed, but it was transcendent. The petals were the color of egg yolks but with metallic red edges. It seemed to have no sense of its surroundings, fertilized by snack wrappers and soft drink coupons, respiring an air that hosted a growing number of inorganic particles, drinking up a sun that was forever in polluted veils. The plant persisted despite the odds, and I was inspired. It was not that flowers were new to me. But this flower at this juncture struck a chord. Plants don't always have it easy. They get stepped on and driven over and their terrain is forever encroached upon by asphalt and concrete, but they persevere, and they make these eloquent, fragile sexual organs that we cut and bundle and give to our sweethearts. In that moment, I was willing to get old for the flowers; not for my job, or my wife, or the promise I made to the therapist I fired, but for these little miracles. I could move to the country and have a garden and tickle my nose with daffodils. Maybe Brenda wouldn't come along. Maybe I would leave her behind. She was like an electric blanket I had bought in Europe and now couldn't plug into North American outlets.

I stood up and waited for a break in the traffic. A teenager without sleeves leaned out of a pickup and yelled, “Get a car!” I was too slow to give him the finger. I said, “Fuck you,” but I couldn't hear it over the traffic. A space opened in the fluid masses, and I made it across to the offices with all my limbs intact.

 

AN E-MAIL from my boss was waiting for me:

Ray,

We need to talk. ASAP.

—Jerry

P.S. Be my buddy and bring me a coffee when you come to my office. Black. Two packets of sugar. Thanks, soldier.

M
y hunch was that Jerry's e-mail had to do with the survey. Maybe it had spoken to him. Unearthed some truths. Jerry was sad. He had to be. Looking at him made me sad. His big head. The brown suits. His misguided sense of self-worth. Sometimes it made me enjoy looking at him, because I felt less sad about myself. But of course that was a trap, no doubt an aspect of the global virus that kept people complacent.
Things can't be so bad, because I am definitely not as bad off as that guy.
It didn't matter who that guy was.

I would go into Jerry's office and he would be crying and I would hold him and say, “We lost a lot of years in this place.” He would wipe his tears on his pink and green tie and nod in agreement, and then I would say, “Now what do you say we go out there into the world and start picking up the litter?” We would give each other a rousing high five and kick over his computer in defiant victory. Then he would say, “On second thought, I better stay here and run the shop while you go on the paid leave of absence I will be giving you, because you deserve it. You go out there and figure this nasty swamp bug out. Make some calls. Do some studies. Alert the scientific community. Meanwhile, I'll make sure things are running here so we can afford to subsidize your important work.”

Brenda called in the middle of my daydream.

“What are you doing?”

“Talking to you.”

“I hate it when you say that. Then I have to say, ‘What else?' and then you finally answer the question. You act like I am wasting your time by asking you what you are doing, but your game wastes more time.”

“I'm sorry, let's try again.”

“What are you doing?”

“Wasting time.”

She hung up.

 • • • 

The break room had once been the floor model of a two- to four-person Winnebago. They appended it to the west side of the building, putting a tent between the two so that you were never technically outside. The Winnebago had been a luxury item they never expected would sell well, but they had anticipated, and correctly so, that people would want to look inside, and would then find themselves purchasing brand-new picnic baskets and collapsible furniture. When they finally discontinued the Winnebagos, a manager in a meeting decided that using one would spice up our workspace while saving on the expense of renovating the old break room. He was promoted the next day.

There was barely a kitchen in the room. There was a microwave, and a toaster oven, and a vending machine where the toilet once had been. There were packets of instant coffees and powdered sweeteners arranged in tidy rows. There was a half-size refrigerator that was dangerous to open, because it was filled with forgotten yogurts. And there was Nora, standing alone by the sink, humming quietly to herself in a minor key.

Her back was to me. She was facing the fake window above the sink. As I moved in past her toward the hot water tap, I noticed that she was removing bread from a sandwich she had purchased in the vending machine. Nora was like a surgeon with that sandwich. Precise and focused. In delicate, uniform strokes, she was now using a paper napkin to dab the mayonnaise off the orange cheese.

“Looks like it's going to be another sunny day,” I said, gesturing to the photo of the Swiss Alps printed on the cardboard window. She didn't laugh. She didn't respond in any sort of way. She simply kept dabbing, staring at the American cheese.

“Jerry's looking for you,” she finally said.

“I'm on my way to see him, after I make him this cup of coffee.”

She looked at her cheese.

“Are you doing all right?” I asked.

She looked up. She looked back down. She must have heard me, but didn't seem to care. I sprinkled instant coffee into a mug of hot water. The flakes turned to blurry dashes, the dashes turned into dark spots that sought each other out, the brown consumed the clear: coffee.

She walked over to the small dining nook and sat down. She had her survey there. She must have been working on it during her snack break. I had to join her. I could not imagine not joining her. It was a bold move for me, considering how all her cheer made me talk dumb, and feel dumb. I sat down and casually took a sip of the coffee. The nook was cramped. My knees pressed against the bottom of the table. There was nothing in the cushion to keep me from feeling the cheap wood of the bench.

“I'm not sad,” she said, holding on to her inner sandwich.

“I didn't say you were.”

“You asked me if I was okay.”

“Just curious.”

“I am fine. I don't know. Maybe this survey”—it seemed like she wanted to say
fucking survey
—“has gotten under my skin.”

I liked what she was saying. Her recognition of her dismay. I smiled. She didn't like that.

“Why am I talking to you? I don't even know you.” She said it, and then looked at me and must have detected some fraction of humanity in my face. “Oh gosh, I'm sorry. Why did I say that? Don't tell anybody I said that. It just slipped out. I like everybody. I really do.”

“We belong to the same credit union.”

“Huh?”

“You said you didn't know me.”

“Right.”

“But what were you saying about your skin?” I looked at her skin, freckled and athletic, slightly sun-damaged. I imagined biting the gold chain off of her neck and spitting it out. I wanted to put a finger to a freckle on her cheek and see if either of us could feel something from the inside of the other. I also wanted to read her survey, which helped me remember what I was going to say. “How has this gotten under your skin?”

She didn't answer.

I said, “I'll tell you about my feelings if you tell me about what's gotten under your skin.”

There is an attitude children have, when they want to tell something important to their parent, but their parent isn't nearby, and you, the only adult around, offer to help, and the child tells you, reluctantly, what is on their mind, but they say it in such a way that makes clear that they see you as a substitute, and that telling you isn't going to satisfy their needs to the degree it might if you were their mommy or daddy. It was in this same way that Nora finally spoke to me. She said, and she seemed genuinely upset by it, “I work in Employee Regard. Obviously you know this.”

“Uh-huh.” My ass was getting sore on the lousy Winnebago bench.

“This self-appraisal thing should have come from Employee Regard. Right?”

I hadn't thought about it.

“Where else would it come from? But I
am
Regard, and I didn't know anything about it. Zilch.”

I took another sip of Jerry's coffee and made a mental note to make the next cup stronger.

“Somebody's trying to steal my thunder,” she went on, “with this fucking survey. It doesn't even make sense. Some of these questions don't make sense, unless they are some kind of mind trap. But it doesn't matter. Somebody came up with it, and it wasn't me.” There was a territorial animal in that curly headed little acrobat. Her teeth looked sharper as she spoke. “Why didn't I think of it? All I ever thought up were karaoke parties in the parking lot and all that obvious holiday-themed bullshit. Foosball Thursdays. Banana split Wednesdays. Putting Jerry in a dunk tank. Over-the-top shit, heavy on razzle-dazzle and streamers, excuses for people to get boozed up a little. But now this fucking survey comes along. Whoever is behind this is going to out-kudos me. I want a promotion to Customer Acclaim. I always have. They get to travel to Dallas every year. I want that.”

“But you are very good at what you do.” Was she? Did I care? I imagined her in her teens, bouncing around on blue tumbling mats. I pictured her spinning in the air, a leotard clinging to her lean body, moist spots under her arms, her toenails painted with flags on them, her head of curls tamed by high-performance hair spray. Spinning like a competitive maniac and then landing perfectly and breaking the judges' hearts.

A tear fell onto the orange cheese. Apparently she really wanted to go to Dallas. I offered her a napkin in case she started to have a full cry. The napkin had a picture of a home on it. The home was smiling. She blew her nose right into the mouth.

I wanted to tell her the perfect reassuring thing, but I wasn't sure what that would be. So I told her about my sadness, figuring we were on the same side of the virus. I said, “Sometimes I close my eyes and I try to look deep inside my body; even though there is no real location for our feelings, I imagine they are housed somewhere in my thorax, and I picture dipping my hand in to get a look at them. But what I pull out are broken objects—pots, urns, plates, unidentifiable fragments. I look at them and I hold them and I have no idea what they were originally used for.”

She took a bite of her breadless sandwich and made a sour face. She threw the rest in the trash. Then she said, “I have to get back to planning the travel barbecue launch party.” Her indifference hurt, but then she handed me her survey, a minor consolation for being so aloof.

“Take this,” she said, “and put it with the rest of the fucking surveys. I don't think I answered it correctly, but at some point I stopped caring.” She paused and thought about what she'd said. “Don't tell anybody. Especially Jerry. I know how word gets around. I said I stopped caring. But I care. I do.” With a smile that looked practiced, she walked away, erect and spring-loaded.

If she was willing to stop caring, then I was willing to stop caring if anybody saw me reading her survey, which is what I did while drinking the rest of Jerry's coffee.

NAME: NORA PEPPERDINE

Are you single?

Yes. Though sometimes I feel married to the company. But not in a bad way.

Are you having an affair?

With this company. Hah. (That was a joke. I love it here.)

Are you who you want to be?

I am doing very well. As you probably know, I started as an intern, parking cars and working the espresso cart. I data-entried and now I events-coordinate. I love working in the Employee Regard department. I could work in this department for the rest of my life, though I do love new challenges and Customer Acclaim seems like a fun crowd too and a great challenge, should something open up there. I mean, the customer comes first, right?

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

I thought I would be endorsing cereals and using my celebrity to help the United Way. But I have a great apartment near the freeway, which makes my commute a real cinch, and there is an on-site health club here at work and at my apartment building.

When was the last time you felt happy?

I am happy. I am, really, and when I am not happy, I just make myself happy. I buy a diet soda and listen to classic rock.

Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?

I would never be dishonest about my happy.

Do you realize you have on average another 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?

That's why I have a really big mirror with vanity bulbs.

Karl Flannigan walked into the break room. He was tall. Too tall for the Winnebago. Hunched over, he gave the vending machine a long stare, jingled his change in his hand deliberatively, and waved over at me without taking his gaze away from the machine.

I read more.

Do you believe in life after death?

Of course. I can't wait to meet Jesus. I hear he talks to you for as long as you want up there. He'll go on walks with you. He's just got a lot of time for communicating, and you can put your head on his shoulder, and he'll whisper you a joke, and it's totally appropriate, and it makes you feel better, even though you already feel great, because you are in heaven and heaven is number one.

Do you believe in life after God?

That is a sad thought. I hope God never dies. Who'll take care of us?

Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?

Only until the wound heals.

Do you think we need more sports?

Hard to say. There are some pretty great sports out there. Maybe a sport to include the larger people, because I feel like they don't appreciate sports, because they don't know how fun they can be, because they are larger, so they think sports are stupid, but they aren't. Is it bad to say that? I don't think anybody here is too large, and even if I did, I think that's great. I was just talking about sports is all. For sports it can be a problem. I love all people. I'm not perfect either.

Have you ever fallen in love?

I love my dad. I loved my coach, but that got us into trouble. I love somebody else right now, and I think he loves me, but he isn't able to give me everything. But he will by this spring vacation, which I planned for us. So the answer is yes.