Super Flat Times (11 page)

But it was perfect, horrifyingly so. I understood, for the first time perhaps, how erroneous the statement “I felt empty” was — what I felt was
full:
I brimmed impossibly with wild, sputtering dread. Karen sat, folded like a paper crane, in the corner. The office was actually called Loss Prevention.

“Don’t panic,” the woman said. “We haven’t even begun a formal search.”

“After that, we can start panicking?” Karen asked. The woman did not respond, only wrapped the sketch in burlap and ushered us out into a waiting room.

Two, Part Two

We watched ourselves on the security monitors while men in light blue uniform tops patrolled the dense arteries of the showroom floors, looking for signs. I paced restlessly, purposefully, aware of my body’s participation in a larger, more historically significant pacing, convinced that, given the chance, I could lure the child back into our lives, using my body as a probe, a divining rod. As the day failed, predictably, to do anything but insinuate itself into night, though, my will gave way to a sort of frenzied inertia, which crested as guards ushered the last shoppers from the floor with gentle static prods, and bottomed out at about 2:00
A.M.
as a dim, flickering fear.

The first thing I dreaded was that my daughter would not return, but in barely perceptible stages I realized that what I was more afraid of was that the child
would
return. I did not want to have to endure the moment of painful, awkward reconciliation when the girl, rescued from the precipice of some sprawling ventilation unit or the cargo hold of a chalk blue van driven by some swarthy, toothless parolee, would run toward us, bruised, bandaged arms outstretched, wholly unaware of how easily and confidently we’d lost her. It would be, for everyone else who witnessed — the families at home, watching the moment replayed in slow motion on a screen behind the slick, rotund visage of a harried anchorwoman — a shameful riot of light and motion that could not be erased. I imagined how the scene would play itself out as seen from the observation camera, through the choppy blue monitors mounted on the opposite wall of the waiting room. Who were we, loping in the periphery of the camera’s gaze? We were not parents. We were patrons, members, enthusiasts.

Two, Part Three

At some point during the night I took a magazine to the rest room. It was a women’s magazine, the kind with multiple-choice personality tests that determined one’s outlook on life by how many points one accrued by responding a certain way. One of the tests had been filled out. I recognized Karen’s hooked, cramped penwork in the arithmetic — the way she crossed her sevens, especially, as if someone could mistake a seven for — what? The results of the test were meant to indicate what type of woman the subject was. The last thing I wanted to know was what the test had to say about how little my wife trusted her own perceptions, so I closed the magazine and fitted it, folded in half, in the orifice of the conical tissue dispenser.

The lead article in the magazine: “Crutches Used as Weapon.”

At 4:30 they let us out. “Most children are located within seventy-two hours,” they told us. Again, we were told not to panic. We trudged numbly through the cavernous green parking garage, motivated only by the desire to anchor ourselves to the house, barricade ourselves from the ugly new life we’d inadvertently created.

In the car Karen said one thing. “Her hand. The way it —” Her lower lip listed and shook, threatening to give way. “I’m already forgetting.”

“You don’t forget. It’s —,” I said. I gripped her thigh reassuringly. “It’s not a thing you forget.”

Three

They dig me out of the snow.

“Jesus,” Hot Brian says. “This snow sucks.”

“It’s terrible,” says Penalty. “It’s like a white rubber quilt.”

“I can’t see,” I tell them. I’ve told them before that I couldn’t see, which is why they don’t respond in any way, but this time I really can’t see. Not even tiny pinpricks of light or patches of color.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” they say. If we don’t get real snow to happen soon, we will all lose our jobs.

“We should never have told those guys we could make snow,” Penalty says as they lift me onto the bed of what I can only imagine to be a helicoptruck.

“Yeah, that was really stupid. What were we thinking?” Hot Brian says. I can feel them strapping my body down with nylon cords.

“Next time, chaps,” I say into an undefined cube of air directly above my head. One of them, I can’t tell which, pats me gently on the head. They are mouthing words to each other, I can tell. Their lips smack noisily, working out the specifics of some plan involving, I am sure, my dismissal from the project. The vehicle lurches. We are in the air, churning upward toward the cloud.

Four

Immediately, and without forethought, I started telling lies about where I’d been on the day we lost our daughter. I was surprised at how easily I could modify my life and how readily my parents, my brother, my coworkers accepted the new person I had become. The more people I lied to, in fact, the further away from that Sunday afternoon and everything I did (and, perhaps more important, what I did
not
do) I became, so that, presumably, one day the whole four years I’d spent as a father might be successfully and completely excised, like raw footage.

This has not happened yet.

Karen stayed in the house, slaughtering whole hours huddled in one position. I’d call her up from the summit every few minutes on my speech bead, to hear what she saw through the bedroom window. “There’s a man in a yellow shirt,” she’d say, softly, into the pale blue lozenge, as if I were in the room with her. “Oh, he’s just now turned the corner.”

Four, Part Two

“Bedtime” became a misnomer — it was no longer a point one got to in a day but something grueling one
put in
for, a lengthy trail along which we lumbered, one hand still holding the last light of the previous day while the other reached out for light that had not yet struck.

Five

When I am not out on the summit with the machine, I work on the basement floor of a converted warehouse in the revitalized district, sketching out different kinds of snowflakes. The people who are paying us want the snow to be as real as possible, which means that each snowflake should be different from all the rest, but so far I have not even come close. I keep drawing the same snowflake. My waste bin is filled with sketches of identical snowflakes.

Because of our proximity to the sea, with its erratic tide, the basement often floods, so our desks are balanced carefully on tall stilts. We sway pleasantly as we work, threading our sketches into a wide data cauldron in the center of the room. On the days of flooding, the water laps gently against the cauldron, so that when we close our eyes during naptime, some of us have dreams in which we lie in sand at the edge of a warm, triumphant body of water, resting our heads on a dense patch of ferns.

Ruth sits at the desk directly ahead of me. She is trying to make the snow fall more gingerly. I keep motion sickness at bay by concentrating on the symmetry of her back, how her shoulder blades really do resemble the graceful wings of a butterfly. I never look for too long, though, because when I look for too long she turns and smiles courteously, her stretchy, made-up face bundled in a burgundy kerchief. She smiles the condescending smile of a woman who is aware that someone’s eyes have been drawing themselves across her entire body, and this is always the worst thing to have to see.

Six

By springtime, when the solid clouds came and hung their bold, craterous heads over our sector, snapping plastic satellite dishes from the rooftops down our street and breathing hot, sooty panels of wind into every open corridor, Karen and I had already started to make a habit out of steering clear of the house. The rooms cast an alarmingly bright light at all hours, giving us double vision and trembling fits. The hallway leading to the girl’s bedroom was especially bright — light seemed to spring from the walls and floor in fiery waves. It was exhausting, even, to sit completely still for long periods. Put another, less fidgety way, the house would not allow us to grieve. We stayed away for as long a period of time as we could manage, loitering in multiplex theater lobbies, sneaking from film to film like children — anything to put off the inevitable return to the place where we lived.

One night, sitting in the third row for a film we had already been to earlier in the day, Karen said, “You know, the thing I’m most ashamed of is that what I really miss about her are the things that everyone misses. The sound of her feet clapping on the linoleum in the morning — I long for that. I die inside every time I think of it. And I die again just knowing that someone else in an office building somewhere deep in the city could predict that I would feel that way, years ago, probably before I was born, and make a commercial about it. I feel like someone has already anticipated my life. I want to feel something new. I want my own feelings.”

In the sour green light of the trailer advisory, her face appeared translucent, beautiful. I realized the sort of jurisdiction she had over her own emotions, and I felt myself start to sink away from her because of it. My own feelings were as crudely hewn as cave paintings, a child’s tentative stab at the human form — what they called a cephalopod. No matter how hard I tried to fudge the numbers, everything came down to a constant preoccupation with the status of my dick.

Seven

It was Karen’s idea to start the garden. I felt it dishonest somehow, as if as a result of our failure to guide a small person through even the most rudimentary social acts — walking, for instance — we should be forbidden the responsibility of ushering on any life at all. But Karen was of the mind-set that we should start small and work our way up — that our real mistake was in starting with such an enormous thing when we had never really taken note of the smaller ones.

The plants that grew were not the ones on the packages. We could not recognize any of the wild, colorful flowers that shot up from the harsh dirt we’d tilled with a single stolen, rusted hoe. The flowers were long and wispy — they gave off great clouds of orange pollen, which attracted strange yellow insects we’d never seen before, long-legged creatures with dark, knowing eyes. They gathered on the padded surface of the flowers and drank, making a faint whirring sound.

It was a beautiful garden, but not the one we’d wanted. Not the one we’d envisioned in the store, thumbing through stacks of shiny seed envelopes. Knowing this, we tended the area obsessively and to exhaustion. Then the clouds passed, covering the flowers with dense ash. They looked like gaunt black snowmen. Then they died.

Eight

“I suppose you’ve been waiting for this.” It is the Minister, calling me from his office at the other end of the complex. He wants me to visit him. When I visit him, he will tell me to pack my things into boxes and leave.

“I suppose that is what I have been waiting for,” I say, barely paying attention, just skimming the real content of this discussion. I already know I am off the snow project. I have stopped drawing snowflakes altogether and have been submitting drawings of my own hand instead. I wrote “hand sandwich” on one I submitted to the data cauldron. The next day it appeared on my desk with the word
heh
written in red pen in the margin. I thought that perhaps they’d gotten the joke.

“Where are you going?” Ruth asks as I descend the ladder from my desk.

“This is it,” I say, trying to sound as small and hurt as possible, even though what I feel is a sort of dull satisfaction.

“No more snowflakes?”

“Never were snowflakes, if you really think about it.”

“I’m never going to see you again.”

“Nope.”

She turns back to her work. Then she turns around again. “Wait,” she says. “I’ll walk with you.”

We don’t go to the office. Instead, I lead her into the network chamber. She holds onto my arm, just above the elbow, with both trembling, fussy hands.

“I don’t remember being in here before,” she says. “Whenever I think of you for long enough,” I say, “we tend to end up in here.”

“Oh,” she says.

It is dark in the chamber, and humid. Periodic gusts of wind burst through the corridor where we stand, rustling her long, wiry hair as if it were a fancy straw hat.

I tell her I do not want to do the thing that we are about to do.

“Isn’t it a little too late for that?” she asks, hoisting a leg up onto the steel railing. Her heel gets caught in the grating, so that the whole shoe comes off her foot and tumbles over the edge into the blackness. “Damn,” she says, and then, taking the other one off, “might as well lose them both. No use for a single shoe.” We listen to them ricochet off the sides of the deep cavity.

She pulls herself close to me, pressing my face into her neck. She smells like a false human — the way another sort of creature would assume a human smells. Her presence is as brutal and unyielding up close as I’ve imagined, but there is also something else I haven’t anticipated, a tender spot, a bruise she lets me finger and press with my whole body. She is not the kind of person I imagined would allow this sort of discourse. As she clings to me I can feel some of myself going away — as if my body were suddenly nothing more than a decanter and I could pour myself out entirely, spoil someone else’s life with my own dank, ruinous indecision.

Afterward, she returns to her desk, barefoot. I start down toward the office of the Minister. My hands are trembling, so much so that I can barely open the door.

Nine

We were at the theater again. The film we were watching was turgid — it shimmied before us like a block of dead flesh, the ruminative characters inside little more than blurred slivers of darkness. A couple sat behind us. The woman said, “I’ve been getting really good at closing my eyes through the whole movie.” Karen did something with her face that might, in another time, have passed for a smile.

They’d often take trips together, Karen and the girl, and in celebration of their return I’d hide a small toy or some candy somewhere in the house. The child would carefully investigate each room, carefully lifting, nudging, drawing back the fabric of the furniture until she found the tiny wrapped package. Later, though, sometimes days later, I’d find her sitting on the floor right near the place where I had hidden the surprise, waiting for something else to show up. I thought it odd then, but there in the theater, studio logo looming on the screen, I realized that the girl was only training herself for a lifetime of disappointment, the way we huddle close to the people we know best, waiting for something of what we first felt for them to make a new appearance.