The Laws of Average (11 page)

By this time the cars ahead had pulled away and so I had to jerk the car into motion using its first gear. There was no way I intended to move my shifting hand, but it wasn't clear to me if she was into this at all, so I asked her to help me shift into second. She obliged and I wanted to think she attempted a smirk, queuing for the engine to hit that sweet spot with its RPM before I buried the clutch pedal into the floor, allowing her to effortlessly slide the beanstalk into the next gear. I underhanded the top of the steering wheel and spun the tires so the car could make the curve, simultaneously plunging that middle finger of my shifting hand through the firey-wiry hair and arriving at the tip of her clit, soft and unsure like waking from an inadvertent nap on a cold and rainy afternoon. I whined the engine up for her to shift into third, and again she did it seamlessly.

I would love to narrate something fantastically meta-phoric for you here, but the simple, brutal truth is that when the car hit fourth gear she was staring straight ahead without a single emotion on her face. Me telling her to please leave her pants that way only led to me changing my mind as she resigned herself to my request, flatly and without word or motion. Grade schoolers extract their math books with more desire than what surfaced in her at that moment, and I instinctively knew that although she had never had a shred of anything to feel shame for in her 15 years on the planet up to that moment, I had just given her something to change that for her. And I joined her in that feeling.

I parked across the street from the brick house she lived in, the one that always had ample parking in its expansive driveway and attached carport. The engine spun down and she relooped the denim over the fat brass fasteners below her stomach. She smiled the vacant smile she had seen in practice inside the house on the other side of the road. I must have grimaced. But if I didn't, I am now. Whatever that's worth. Choice is such a beautiful thing.

It probably should have ended with an argument like the one that was their favorite and most frequent, the one about which size fork she preferred with her apple pie, which of course differed from which size fork she preferred with her swedish meatballs, which of course differed from which size fork she preferred with her spinach salad, but was exactly the same size fork she preferred with her ice cream, which of course baffled him because he always forgot this part about the ice cream and served it to her with a spoon enough times that their second favorite argument was about which size spoon she preferred with her tomato soup, which of course differed from which size spoon she preferred with her oatmeal, which of course she occasionally ate with a fork to make sure she didn't get a huge mouthful of the mush because he never microwaved it to achieve the right temperature, and that was an entirely different argument altogether, one which most certainly wasn't frequent or ferocious enough to rank in the favorites list, because there was potential for real hurt and pain in that one, and they never argued a single second about anything that lasted.

But it didn't. It ended like this.

After she'd finished her fourth crossword thingy and tenth sudoku whatchamadoo and sixth anagram-a-bob, he figured it was safe to drape his arm along her side as she faced away from him, the mechanical pencil still dangling between her index and middle fingers, the little crumbs of its eraser clinging to the sheets and her skin like a stubborn snow. She was sleeping and he knew it; the television buzzed in front of their bed, quick shadows strobing against the textured walls, constantly flickering into new shapes just at the moments the old ones became identifiable.

He bled his left hand across her hip and she instantly raised her same hand to staunch his movement. She was sleeping and he knew it. She said it.

“Space.”

She talked in her sleep and they used to argue about it, back when they still cared enough to argue. Back then, he would wake her up and demand instant context and analysis right there in the moment of utterance, but she could never recall saying anything at all, let alone understand why she said it. It wasn't fair but he had stopped believing in fair a long time ago, before the children, before the relationship, before he even knew about relationships. Fair, as far as he was concerned, was a fiction. And this thing with her was so far from a fiction, so so very very real, that fair left the planet a long long time ago.

In moments like this he used to try and keep his hand as still as he could, pretending he hadn't put it there at all in case that she actually woke up, caught with his digits spread across her hip in the way she knew he loved to do. But she never did wake. All she ever did was talk.

And she never woke on her own. He always had to wake her, which was another argument entirely, and not one either of them would consider a favorite. That was the argument where he became convinced what she said in her sleep was directly connected to how she felt about him, no matter how much she protested or implored him to understand. It was both of the arguments about The Respect and The Privacy, vivisected by a bit of The How Dare You; she never used that word in previous arguments, and most certainly never from the cocoon of her sleeping state, but now she was using it.

“Space.” She was sleeping and he knew it.

He pulled his hand away and rolled over, onto his other side, their backs in instant parallel. Her hand, which had been frozen mid-air in front of him since her first utterance of the word, slowly thawed before falling on top of her own side. He watched the shadows pile up by the hours as he lay perfectly still, himself not yet asleep even as his entire body had long gone into that beyond-numb place when a limb loses circulation. How he got up the next morning he spent the rest of his life trying to understand, his feet crashing to the floor, his shins knifing through the boards, his knees burning the carpet as he trudged his way forward, down, and ultimately out into the daylight. Beyond.

You'll be tempted to settle old scores and new scores and medium-aged scores. Choose only a few, say 5 or 7, but no more than 9—you want a good, odd number and you want to keep it under 10. NO MORE THAN 10!—and settle these scores efficiently. Don't drag them out. Don't feel the seduction of haunt. You can be trapped there forever. Like you were when you were alive. Remember? You have a world now literally beyond time, it's true, but you simply don't have time for this kind of foolishness. Make your death matter, for Christ's sake, even if—and especially in the case that—you don't believe in Jesus.

If you aren't already a drinker, don't start.

If you are already a drinker, don't stop.

It's a hot, heavy sick in your stomach, like you've just been force-fed a bowling ball greased in cayenne pepper. Your first instinct is to grab on to something rooted in temporal space, anchored down with shanker bolts and the lead quality of your thoughts. This primordial grab replaced by the fever rushing up your face like boiling water in a drinking straw, the heat crowned by a fierce headache.

Welcome to It.

For months on end you saw this moment coming: you, with your desk arranged neatly, your pictures of Whomever tacked in a checkerboard pattern immediately above; you, with your monitor freshly squee-geed, you with your own personal monitor squee-gee, bought with your own personal monitor squee-gee money; your jacket hung neatly over your desk, the jacket embroidered with the company logo, the jacket They gave you when Times Were Still Good®.

This moment is here now, It is, dropped in the middle of you.

She's standing in front of you with an empty copier paper box, emblazoned on the sides with the thick green letters that spell out “Boise.” You've worked here long enough to remember when these same boxes said “Boise-Cascade.” A few years ago the same boxes started showing up without their Cascades. You thought nothing of it. No one did. Back then, you and your chair spent way too much time smelling like Scotch-Gard.

Now She's handing you Boise-sans-Cascade. She doesn't have to say anything; you've seen how this Cascade drill works. Just yesterday it was three Cascades; the day before that it was four; the day before that was Sunday, but one lowly Cascade got a phone call on Friday, telling him that his Boise was waiting for him. Last week She had to order an extra pallet of copier paper, just to make sure there would be enough boxes for this.

She's still handing you Boise-sans-Cascade. You know you have five minutes to collect whatever shrapnel of your life fits into Boise before They will be here, the They whose embroidered jackets have an extra word—SECURITY—sewn into them, right above the heart. They will escort you away from here. They will ensure you don't take anything or anyone out with you. Later They will wheelbarrow your work-station—freshly squee-geed monitor and all—down to IT, where an unpaid intern named Scott or Kevin or Brian will scour all the porn and MP3 files you downloaded.

Rephrase.

Scott/Kevin/Brian will encrypt and burn personal copies of them first. Before you're even to your car in the parking garage, a select few of your favorite anal scenes will be locked in a password-protected Dropbox folder, the one She has IT keep for her, the one She shares with the Consumer VP of They on Friday nights, when all the Cascades have left and the building has been locked down.

She pays particular attention to which items you grab first. She has been trained to do this, fitted with a security pager that They will answer in less than 30 seconds, chuffing down the hall in their Rockports, pistols strapped and tasers snapped to their hips. They drill on this all the time, you'll find out. Later, you'll balk at how much money and time you imagine has had to go into this. But for now you're intent on pulling down your pictures of Whomever and stacking them neatly into the box. You pause briefly to consider calling Whomever to come pick you up, as if They weren't who They were, as if They were actually your elementary school principal and teacher, and They had just told you your grandmother had just died, and your dad was on his way to come get you. She looks at you and you decide. Bad idea.

On the way down the hall you notice that no one is noticing you on the way down the hall. Your life is a palindrome. There is no witness to the memory branding itself onto your mind right now. It is yours. Yours alone.

When you come to the elevator, you notice it's empty. She and They and Boise-sans-Cascade stuffed with images of Whomever fill the thin rectangle. You also notice the absence of Muzak. At least, you think it's missing. Maybe it was never there in the first place. Maybe the elevator never had its accompanying elevator-Muzak. You dig through the jukebox of tunes stuffed in your head, but can only find a trumped-up version of Edie Brickell's “What I Am.” Upon staggering back to your apartment later tonight after six Jim Beam and 7s, you'll have a moment of revelation that you were right about the Muzak-less elevator, and that Edie Brickell's EP
Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars
was the last CD you bought before They hired you. If this were a story being filmed, you would cry at the realization of this. But it's not, so you won't. Instead of crying, you'll feel and do what everyone else does in the same situation: absolutely nothing.

The elevator shudders to a stop, spills you onto the freshly-waxed floor. She lightly pushes you in the middle of your back, cowishly prodding you to keep moving forward. In training for this moment, She read case study after case study of Desperation-Risks, those Cascades who like so many labmice turn mindlessly back towards the elevator and beg for a lesser-paying job. 93% of the time, the simple touch on the back can break a D-R's train of thought just long enough to get them out the door; 4% of the time a D-R breaks out in hysterical sobbing; 2% of the time a D-R passes out right as the door swings open. It's that one percentile She has to legitimately worry about, and it's the reason They are here. This is also the same reason She keeps the second button on her pager pre-programmed to 911.

You, of course, are in that bottom percentile, flopping through the door and squinting at the sky, as if you have somewhere important to go right now. And, of course, you don't.

Welcome to It.

Jack was 12 years old when he caught his own reflection in his grandmother's medicine cabinet. Because he was at a 90 degree angle to said cabinet, the thin side of the door and its accompanying hinges could only hold his facial expressions and the occasional drip of his blonde hair as he bobbed up and down, in and out of the cabinet's line of sight.

At first he kept his head down, eyes tracing the Fleur-de-lis patterns sculpted into the bathroom rug below him. This rug was one thing of many that distinguished his grandmother's bathroom from the two in his parents' house across town, both of which were sealed in the same sick burnt orange linoleum featured in Cindy Sherman's “Untitled #96”—the famous photograph of the suburban girl with flushed cheeks who is laying flat on her back while stroking a handwritten note in her right hand, her left hand folded neatly into a fist against her head as she stares up and out of the camera's frame at something incomprehensible and invisible; that famous photograph from Sherman's series of stills from a series of films never filmed, like Brian Eno's soundtracks from still more unfilmed films, symphonized in notes that must have been composed on other planets in other galaxies or entirely other realities—and it would be several decades later before Jack would think how strange it seemed to him that someone in his extended family would ever consider installing wall-to-wall carpet in a bathroom. Coincidentally, this would be just about the same time Jack would discover Sherman's work while Yahoo!ing the internet circa 1996 for images of Cindy Crawford, but that's a different story altogether that is almost certainly less true than this one.