Ten Little Indians (11 page)

“Listen,” she said, “I’m sorry about being such a bitch.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Considering the circumstances, I think we’re probably doing all right.”

“Okay, okay, you’re a good man. We need more good men in the world. How about we start over? How about we introduce ourselves and pretend like we just met?”

How could she say something so banal? What was wrong with her?

“Look at yourself,” he said. “I don’t think it’s possible to start over.”

She was covered with blood and dirt. She was surprised. How had she forgotten that? And why was she worried about this stranger’s feelings? Again she wondered if she was crazy, if she was dreaming this whole day, if this man and his apartment were illusions.

“Hey,” he said, “I’ve got a clean robe in the bathroom and clean towels. Why don’t you take a shower, wash all that stuff away. How does that sound?”

Now he sounded trivial:
Hey, the city is burning, but you’ll feel so much better if you floss your teeth.

“You just want to get me naked,” she said.

“You’re very pretty, and I will admit I thought briefly about sex. But mass murder and suicide bombs sort of shrink the wonder wand, you know?”

She laughed again. She sat on the couch and laughed. She covered her face with a pillow and laughed. She threw the pillow at him and laughed. “You’re so funny,” she said.

“Come on,” he said. “I was not trying to be funny. I was trying to tell you how I feel.”

“Maybe everything you feel is funny,” she said and wiped tears from her eyes.

“Maybe everything is funny to you,” he said. “But you’re crazy pussy, and I was married to crazy pussy before, and I have no real interest in getting near it again.”

“Crazy pussy!” she shouted and laughed. She rolled off the couch onto the floor and laughed. “Nobody has ever called me crazy pussy!”

She lay facedown on the floor and laughed into the carpet. She cried and wailed and kicked and punched. She convulsed. He rolled her onto her side and held her head while she seized. When it was over, she inhaled deeply and fell asleep. He knew about seizures. When she woke, she’d feel like a buffalo had kicked her in the skull. He sat on the couch and stared down at her. God, he thought, I hope she doesn’t die on my carpet. How would I explain that? He picked up the telephone and dialed 911, but all he heard was a busy signal. He tried again and again, ten, eleven, twelve times, but heard only that same awful busy signal each time. After looking up the general numbers for the police and fire departments in the Yellow Pages, he dialed them and heard more busy signals. He called individual precincts and firehouses, but nobody answered. He called hospitals and clinics and churches but couldn’t get past the computerized answering machines. God, he thought, what a fragile world I live in. One building explodes, and the whole system falls apart. He was more afraid than he’d been before, but then he dialed another number he knew by rote.

“Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

How many times had this young man answered the telephone that way? Did he know how the tone of his voice completely changed the meaning of the words?

“Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

If the pizza guy repeated the question enough times, it might become a prayer.

“Domino’s Pizza, how can I help you?”

“I can’t believe you’re open.”

“Well, it’s just me. Everybody else left. I stayed. I didn’t know what else to do.”

“You’re not really going to deliver pizzas, are you?”

“I don’t know. You’re the first person to call since it happened.”

“Isn’t your family worried about you?”

“They know I’m okay. My dad told me to stay here and lock the door. He said I’d be safer here than trying to get home by myself.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I don’t know. I’m scared. Do you think this is the start of World War Three?”

The pizza boy sounded like he was eighteen or nineteen years old. How could he know how many teenagers around the world had already survived bombings, and lived with the daily threat of more bombings, and still found courage enough to dance, sing, curse, and make love in the tall grass beside this or that river?

“Are you a cook or a driver?”

“I’m both.”

“Well, kid, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t you start making pizzas? Make as many as you can and stack them high. A whole bunch of hungry people will be wandering the streets. Put a sign in the window that says, ‘Free Pizza for Rescue Workers!,’ and you’ll be a hero.”

“I don’t think the corporate office will like that.”

“Forget the corporate office.”

Surely this young man was incapable of socialistic rebellion, no matter how smart or self-contained.

“What did you say?” the pizza boy asked.

“The city’s on fire. Make the pizzas. Forget the corporate office.”

The young man thought about it.

“Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “Forget the corporate office.”

“I can’t hear you.”

“Forget the corporate office.”

“What did you say?”

“Forget the corporate office.”

“That sounds good, but your language, it’s not acceptable.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“‘Forget’ is not a powerful verb.”

“I don’t know about that, sir. I feel pretty bad when somebody forgets about me.”

“You’re right. That’s a fairly wise thing to say. But there is a more powerful verb, a more powerful F-word.”

“Oh, sir,” he said, “I can’t say that word. That’s cursing. And I’m a Christian.”

He was a Christian working for an international conglomerate and worried about foul language?

“All right, then, pizza man, you have your mission. Forget the other F-word and forget the corporate office. Make those free pizzas.”

“Yes, sir.”

He hung up the phone, laughed at the ceiling, then looked down at the crazy woman lying on the floor. She stared back at him.

“What did you just do?” she asked.

“I think I started a pepperoni and double-cheese revolution,” he said.

She laughed and winced. “Oh, man,” she said. “My head hurts.”

“You had a seizure,” he said.

“I know. I was sort of having it and watching me have it at the same time.”

For years, she’d been living a binary life as participant and eyewitness. She’d been so bored and unhappy, and so objective about her boredom and unhappiness, that she’d been conducting social experiments on her family. Last July, she’d served dinner five minutes later than usual, an innocuous change in the family ceremony. But the next evening, she’d served dinner ten minutes later than usual, and then fifteen minutes later than usual the night after that, and so on and so on. By the end of the month, she was serving the meat and potatoes as the eleven o’clock
SportsCenter
was beginning. Her husband and sons had never once uttered a comment or complaint about the gradual and profound change in dinnertime. How could they be so compliant and disinterested? How could they be so dependent on her and so unaware of her blatant manipulations? As they’d eaten and cursed at the football and hockey highlights, she’d studied the man and two boys, her personal space aliens, and couldn’t believe all three of them had spent significant time in her womb.

Now she lay on the floor of a stranger’s apartment, ambivalent about her life. Maybe she could lie on that floor forever. Maybe she could ossify or fossilize. Maybe she could change into a bizarre coffee table. As a piece of furniture, she might feel valued and useful. She closed her eyes and wondered if the other furniture would come to accept and love her.

“Wake up!” he shouted at her.

“I’m very tired,” she said.

“I bet you have a concussion or something,” he said. “We should get you to the doctor. But the thing is, I’m going to have to take you there. The phones aren’t working. I can order a pizza, but I can’t order an ambulance.”

“I don’t think I’d be able to walk very far. Not for a while. I need to rest first.”

“Okay, but if you seize again, I’m going to pick you up and carry you there, okay? It’s about a mile up to Harborview. I’ll drag you there if I have to.”

“I don’t think I’m going to seize again.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m pretty sure it’s not going to happen again.”

“You’re the one lying on the floor. I don’t think that says much for your psychic ability.”

“Have you always been funny?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said. His sense of humor had destroyed his marriage. With each joke, he’d punched a hole in his ex-wife’s heart. But he couldn’t help it. His entire family was hilarious and inappropriate. During his wedding, as his soon-to-be wife walked up the aisle toward him, his little brother had loudly told an AIDS joke. How grotesque was that? If his wife had been smarter and less in love, she would have turned around and fled the church. But she’d believed her soon-to-be husband was better than his homophobic and racist and wildly stupid brother, and when her husband proved to be kinder and more progressive but just as wildly stupid, she’d felt cheated.

On the night his wife had signed their divorce papers, she called him up and cursed him. She was drunk and lonely and enraged.

“All right, Mr. Funny!” she had yelled. “Let’s see how long you can go without telling a joke! How long! How long, Mr. Funny?”

“About seven seconds,” he’d said after seven seconds of silence.

She’d cried and cursed him again and hung up the phone. He’d sat alone in the dark and wondered how he could so easily hurt a woman he loved. Why was it more necessary for him to tell a joke than to acknowledge her pain?

And now, two years after his divorce, he stared down at the strange woman lying on his floor and wondered if she’d been delivered to him as punishment for his sins. Maybe God hated jokesters. Or maybe she was a test. Maybe he could prove his worth by helping her, by saving her. Maybe God was giving him a chance to be serious and reverential.

“My ex-wife used to call me Mr. Funny,” he said.

“That’s a cute name,” she said.

“It wasn’t meant as a compliment.”

“All right, Mr. Funny, let me rest here for a little while, and then you can take me to the hospital.”

“It’s a deal. But I’m not going to let you sleep. You’re going to stay awake. So you better start talking.”

“What should I talk about?”

“Tell me about your husband and kids.”

“I hate them.”

“You already told me that. Tell me why you hate them.”

She didn’t talk for a few moments. He nudged her with his foot. “Talk,” he said.

“Where were you on September eleventh?” she asked.

“On September eleventh, when I was seventeen, I lost my virginity to a girl named Atlanta.”

“Always the wise guy. You know what day I’m talking about.”

“On that September eleventh, I was working.”

“What do you do?”

“I design computer games.”

“If you design computer games, why don’t you have a computer in your apartment?”

“What are you, a detective?”

“I’m good with details.”

“It’s a boundary thing. I want my work life and my home life to be separate.”

“How’s that going for you?”

“I’m never here.”

“That must be fun.”

“It was until the eleventh. I was working on the final stages of a terrorist game. A first-person shooter.”

“What’s a first-person shooter?”

“You see through the eyes of the gunman.”

“You get to shoot terrorists? Must have been a big seller.”

“In our game, you play a terrorist who shoots civilians. You can attack a shopping mall, an Ivy League college, or the World Trade Center.”

“Oh, God, that’s disgusting.”

“We spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop and manufacture it. Even before the eleventh, we figured that kind of game would be controversial. We figured it would get tons of press, and every dumb-ass rebel teenager would have to own it. We were looking forward to the censorship and the lawsuits. We were manufacturing units based on how much negative publicity we estimated we’d receive.”

“How could you live with yourself?”

“We redesigned the game after the eleventh. Now you play a cop who hunts terrorists in a shopping mall or a college. We dropped the World Trade Center completely.”

“And that’s supposed to make it all better?”

“We’ve presold ten million copies. I’m going to be very rich.”

“It’s blood money.”

“All money is blood money.”

“Is that what you tell yourself so you can sleep at night?”

“For a few days after the eleventh, I thought about suiciding. I thought about going up to the top of the Space Needle and jumping off. I figured it would be appropriate for me to die that way.”

“There’s a bunch of people who would have helped you jump.”

“Yeah, but it was all about self-pity. I mean, I’m alive, right? Think about how many people died in the World Trade Center. It took Giuliani how many hours to read all the names?”

“There were about twenty-five hundred of them.”

“Yeah, twenty-five hundred innocent people dead, and me, a living, breathing coward.”

“A millionaire coward,” she said.

On September 11, she’d been collating files in the law firm’s library when the first plane hit the first tower. When the second plane hit the second tower, she’d been watching it on the conference room television along with the entire firm, forty-five white-collar professionals who watched with equal parts revulsion and excitement. She remembered how, when the first tower collapsed, she’d closed her eyes and listened to her colleagues’ anguished moans and wondered why they sounded so erotic. We’re so used to sex on TV that everything on TV becomes sexy, she thought. Their law offices were on the sixtieth floor of the Columbia Center. From the conference room windows, all of the lawyers and staff had at one point or another looked south and watched airplanes arrive and depart from Boeing Airfield and Sea-Tac Airport. After the tower collapsed, she’d looked out the window after somebody screamed the fearsome question they’d all been asking themselves—
What if they hit us?
—and she’d almost seen a passenger jet cutting through the sky. Everybody else in the conference room must have seen their own illusory jets, because they’d all panicked as a group and run screaming out of the room, down sixty flights of stairs and onto the streets below. She’d stayed in the conference room. She’d walked to the window and waited for her airplane to come. She’d wondered if she would be able to see the pilot’s face, and perhaps recognize him, before he destroyed her. And she’d wondered, as she waited to die, if some other unhappy woman or man had stood in a World Trade Center window that morning and committed suicide by inertia.