Sorry Please Thank You (5 page)

I tell her about the life I have my eye on.

“Show it to me,” she says.

We walk down to the store where I’d seen it, but it’s no longer in the window.

Inside the shop I motion to the clerk, ask about the life I’d been hoping for.

“Someone bought it,” he says. “Day before yesterday.”

Kirthi looks down at her shoes, feeling my disappointment for me.

I’ll find another one just like it, I tell her. A standard happiness package. Decent possibility. The chance of a kid. It wouldn’t be enough for us, not quite, but we could share it, take turns living the life. One works while the other one lives, maybe I work weekdays and she gives me a break on weekends.

She looks at me for a few long seconds, seems to be thinking about it, living the whole life out in her head, then without saying anything, she touches my cheek. It’s a start.

When Deep was happy, before it got bad and then worse and then even worse, he was always talking about how he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. He talked like that, he really did. He loved telling stories.

About a week before he cracked up, we were in the coffee room and he told me a story about a guy at Managed Life Solutions, a mental-anguish shop across town, who made arrangements with a prominent banker who wanted to kill his wife. The banker was going to do it, he’d made up his mind, but he didn’t want the guilt. Plus, he thought it might help with his alibi if he didn’t have any memory.

Bullshit, I said. That would never work.

No, really, Deep says. He tells me all about it, how they arranged it all while talking in public, at work in fact, but they talked in code, etc.

Could never happen, I say. There are twenty reasons why that wouldn’t work.

Why not, he said.

It’s just too much, I said.

Too much what? There is no upper bound on cruelty, he said.

The next Monday, I came to work, and they were pulling Deep out the door, two paramedics, each one with an arm hooked under Deep, dragging him out, two security guards trailing behind. As they dragged him past me, I tried to make eye contact, but as he turned toward me I got a good look and I saw it: there was no one left. Deepak wasn’t inside there anymore. He had gone somewhere else. He just kept saying, okay, so. Okay, so. Like a mantra. Like he was trying to convince himself. Okay. So.

And then the next day, there it was, in the newspaper. The whole story about the banker. Exactly how Deepak told it to me. There were rumors that he was the one the banker hired. He had been inside the body of a monster and the guilt had leaked through. Some things get through. People are not perfectly sealed. The technology of feeling transfer may progress, but something will always get through.

Or maybe not a monster. Maybe that’s the point. Not a monster. Just an ordinary man, what a man is capable of.

Deep knew what was out there. There is no upper bound on sadness. There is no lower bound on decency. Deep saw it, he understood it, what was out there, and he let it seep in, and once it gets in, it gets all the way in, and it never comes out.

I open tickets. I do the work. I save up money.

Weeks go by. Kirthi opens up. Just a little.

She still refuses to look me in the eyes when we are kissing.

That’s weird, she says. No one does that.

How am I supposed to know? I have not kissed many people. I have seen in American movies that people close their eyes, but I have also seen that sometimes one person or the other will sneak open an eye and take a peek at the other one. I think it makes sense. Otherwise, how would you know what the other person is feeling? That seems to me the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on her face, what she is feeling, to be able to feel what she feels for you. So we kiss, she with her eyes closed, me looking at her, trying to imagine what she is feeling. I hope she is feeling something.

I am at a funeral.

I am having a hernia.

I am having a hernia at a funeral.

I am in prison.

I’m at the dentist.

I’m at the prison dentist with a hernia.

I am in love.

I am in withdrawal.

I am in love with someone who doesn’t love me back. I wish I had a hernia.

She takes me to see her father.

He has the look. I remember it. My own father looked this way.

He is living someone else’s life. He’s nothing more than a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone’s convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.

The thing hanging over us, the thing that’s uncomfortable to talk about is that we could do it. We could get him out.

We stand there in silence for what seems like, for what is, way too long.

Finally, Kirthi can’t take it.

He has only four years left on his mortgage, she tells me.

But, see, the way the market works, sellers like us, we never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocket watch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go get it a week later and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.

Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don’t know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don’t know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn’t so great as it is, but I just don’t know if I could do it.

I am in surgery. For my hernia.

I am bleeding to death.

It doesn’t hurt at all.

Things progress. We move in together. We avoid planning for the future. We hint at it. We talk around it.

I am being shot at.

I am being slapped in the face.

I go home.

I rest for a few hours.

I come back and do it again.

When I turned thirteen, my mother told me the story. She sat me down in the kitchen and explained.

“The day your father decided to sell his life,” she said, “I wore my best dress, and he wore a suit. He combed his hair. He looked handsome. I remember he was so calm. You wore your only pair of long pants. We walked to the bank. You rode on his back.”

“I remember that,” I said.

“A man with excellent hair came out from some office in the back and sat down behind the desk.”

I remember that, too, I told her.

You get, we got, forty thousand a year, she said.

My dad sold his life for a fixed annuity, indexed to inflation at three percent annually, and a seventy percent pension if he made it full term: forty years, age seventy, and he could stop, he could come back to us.

There were posters everywhere, my mother said,
describing that day, the reunion day. The day when you’ve made it, you’ve done it, you’re done.

There was a video screen showing a short film describing the benefits of mortgage, the glorious day of reunion. We would all drink lemonade in the hot summer air.

Just forty years, it said.

In the meantime, your family will be taken care of. You will have peace of mind.

“Time is money,” the video said. “And money is time. Create value out of the most valuable asset you own.”

Don’t miss out on a chance of a lifetime.

When we went home, I remember, my father went to lie down. He slept for twelve hours, twice as long as normal, and in the morning, while I was still asleep, he rose from bed, washed and shaved his face, combed his hair. By the time I came down the stairs, he was just finishing up his breakfast, a piece of toast and a hard-boiled egg. I walked over to him and tried to hug him back, but I didn’t have the strength. My arms were limp. So I just let him hug me, and then he went out the door and that was the last time I saw my father.

Things stop progressing with Kirthi.

Things go backward.

And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.

Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away.
Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has collapsed our shared space. She has closed herself to me.