Sorry Please Thank You (3 page)

Some people think it’s not so great that we can do this. Personally, I don’t really see the problem. Press one to clear your conscience. Press two for fear of death. Consciousness is like anything else. I’m sure when someone figures out how to sell time itself, they’ll have infomercials for that, too.

I am at a funeral.

I am losing someone to cancer.

I am coping with something vague.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a funeral.

Seventeen tickets today in twelve hours. Ten half hours and seven full.

On my way out, I can hear someone wailing and gnashing his teeth in his cubicle. He is near the edge. Deepak was always like that, too. I always told him, hey man, you have to let go a little. Just a little. Don’t let it get to you so much.

I peek my head to see if I can steal a glance at the new woman, but she is in the middle of a ticket. She appears to be suffering. She catches me looking at her. I look at my feet and keep shuffling past.

It used to be that the job wasn’t all pain. Rich American man outsources the nasty bits of his life. He’s required
to book by the hour or the day or some other time unit, but in almost any crappy day, there are always going to be some parts of it that are not so bad. Maybe just boring. Maybe even more okay than not. Like if a guy books his colonoscopy and he hires us for two hours, but for the first eight minutes, he’s just sitting there in the waiting room, reading a magazine, enjoying the air-conditioning, admiring someone’s legs. Or something. Anyway, it used to be that we would get the whole thing, so part of my job here could be boring or neutral or even sometimes kind of interesting.

But then the technology improved again and the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them. Those bits, the extras, the leftover slices of life were lopped off by the algorithm and smushed all together into a kind of reconstituted life slab, a life-loaf. Lunch meat made out of bits of boredom. They take the slabs and process them and sell them as prepackaged lives.

I’ve had my eye on one for a while, at a secondhand shop that’s on my way home. Not ideal, but it’s something to work for.

So now, what’s left over is pretty much just pure undiluted badness. The only thing left to look forward to is when, once in a while, in the middle of an awful day, there is something not-so-awful mixed in there. Like the relief in the middle of a funeral, or sometimes when you get someone who is really religious, not just religious, but a person of true faith, then mixed in with the sadness and loss you get something extra, you get to try different flavors, depending
on the believer. You get the big foot on your chest, or you get the back of your head on fire, a cold fire, it tickles. You get to know what it is like to know that your dead lover, your dead mother, father, brother, sister, that they are all standing in front of you, tall as the universe, and they have huge, infinite feet, and their heads are all ablaze with this brilliant, frozen fire. You get the feeling of being inside of a room and at the same time, the room being inside of you, and the room is the world, and so are you.

The next day is more of the same. Eleven tickets. The lowlight of the day is when I get to confess to my husband that I have been sleeping with my trainer for the last year. The first year of our marriage. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst. Heartbreak. When I first started at this job, I thought physical pain would be hardest. But it’s not. This is the hardest. To be inside here, looking at this man’s face, at the lowest moment of his life, watching him try to keep it together. To be inside here, feeling what this woman is feeling, having done this to him. And then the world blinks twice and my field of vision goes blue and I’m a guy sitting in front of a computer screen and the sandwich cart is in front of my cubicle.

So I have lunch.

After lunch, I pass her in the hall. The new woman. Her name badge says Kirthi. She doesn’t look at me this time.

On the way home from work, I decide to swing by the secondhand shop and check out my life.

It’s not my life, technically. Not yet. It’s the life I want, the life I’ve been saving for. Not a DreamLife®, not top of the line, but a starter model, a good one. Standard possibility. Low volatility. A kindhearted wife with nice hair, 0.35 kids, no actuals, certainties are too expensive, but some potential kids, a solid thirty-five percent chance of having one. Normal life expectancy, average health, median aggregate amount of happiness. I test-drove it once, and it felt good, it felt right. It fit just fine.

I don’t know. I’m trying not to feel sorry for myself. I just thought there might be more to it all than this.

Still, I’ve got it better than some people. I mean, I’m renting my life out one day at a time, but I haven’t sold it yet. And I don’t plan to, either. I’m buying in, not selling out. I want to live, not exist, want to have a life, even if it is bits and pieces, even if it isn’t the greatest product out there, even if it’s more like a life-substitute. I’ll take it.

I’m not going to be like my father, who sold his life on a cold, clear afternoon in November. He was thirty. It was the day before my fourth birthday.

We went to the brokerage. It felt like a bank, but friendlier. My father had been carrying me on his shoulders, but
he put me down when we got inside. There was dark wood everywhere, and also bright flowers and classical music. We were shown to a desk, and a woman in an immaculate pantsuit asked if we would like anything to drink. My father didn’t say anything, just looked off at the far wall. I remember my mother asked for a cup of tea for my father.

I don’t want to sell my life. I’m not ready to do that yet. So I sell it bit by bit. Scrape by. Sell it by the hour. Pain, grief, terror, worse. Or just mild discomfort. Social anxiety. Boredom.

I ask around about Kirthi. People are talking. The guys are talking. Especially the married guys. They do the most talking.

I pass her in the hall again, and again she doesn’t look at me. No surprise there. Women never look at me. I am not handsome or tall. But I am nice.

I think it is actually that which causes the not-looking at me. The niceness, I mean, not the lack of handsomeness or tallness. They can see the niceness and it is the kind of niceness that, in a man, you instinctively ignore. What is nice? What good is a nice man? No good to women. No good to other men.

She doesn’t look at me, but I feel, or maybe I wish or I imagine, that something in the way she does not look at me is not quite the same. She is not-looking at me in a way that feels like she is consciously not-looking at me. And from
the way she is not-looking at me, I can tell she knows I am trying to not-look at her. We are both not-looking at each other. And yet, there is something in the way she is not-looking at me. For the first time in a long while, I have hope.

I am at a funeral. Again.

I’m flipped to green.

You can be flipped to green, or flipped to red.

You can be there, or can just feel the feeling.

This is the one improvement they have made that actually benefits us workers. There’s a toggle switch on the headset. Flip it to green and you get a rendering of the client’s visual field. You see what he sees. Flip it to red and you still feel all of the feelings, but you see what you see.

You can do whatever you want, so long as you don’t leave your cubicle. Some people just stare at the cube-divider wall. Some play computer solitaire. Some even chat with neighbors, although that is strongly discouraged.

I was hesitant at first, but more and more these days I am usually flipped to red. Except for funerals. Funerals, I like to be there, just out of some kind of respect thing.

This morning’s first ticket: sixtyish rich guy, heart attack in the home office, millions in the bank, five kids from three marriages, all hate him.

Client is one of those kids, trust-fund baby, paid extra for amnesia. No feeling, no pre-feeling, no hangover, no residue, no chance of actually having any part of it, long
enough to ensure that he will be halfway in the bag before any of the day’s events start nibbling at the corners of his awareness.