The Miracle Letters of T. Rimberg (3 page)

Journal Entry
August 20, 2004

Reasons to do it:

1) Your life, how you live it, harms your children.

a) How you work.

b) Who you choose to love (no more Chelsea—hate her).

c) How you spend your time (watching television while suffering jackass emotions) (pathetic).

d) How you, when you lived with them, considered children and wife to be jail infrastructure.

e) Your stupid potential.

2) How you don't live your life.

a) No respect.

b) No passion.

c) No happiness, ever.

d) Doing nothing to help yourself.

e) No more good ideas—your relationship with Chelsea was an idea, which is further proof of your despicable character.

Possible:

Hang

Jump off cliff

Drive off cliff

Drive into tree

Buy gun (shoot self)

Buy pills

Rob bank and wait for cops, while acting crazy, with gun

Slit wrists—take a nice bath

Take bath with Mary's hair dryer

Disappear?

Where to do it? Travel? Maybe Washington, D.C., to make a political statement. About what? Nashville, TN, because once read that country music fosters suicidal notions (appropriate themes of marital shittiness, hardcore drinking, alienation from work). Nashville, TN: perfect place for underachiever to do dirty death dance. No—twang gives you headache.

Antwerp, Belgium, where Dad wrote on napkins?

Or check into a motel and take a bath with a hair dryer, not Mary's. Any motel. Tonight. Very soon.

Day Two:
Transcript 1

I'm ready. Go ahead.

Have you read everything? All the notebooks and everything in them?

Yes, I began carrying that backpack everywhere I went. It's been everyplace.

I wouldn't have called them visions. They were dreams, you know? I really wouldn't have called them visions then.

Maybe I'd call them visions, now. Yes, I would. I haven't had a dream in nine months.

I know exactly . . . the first was August 19 (my birthday and the day I wrote to Dad). The dreams didn't really get . . . huge until August 23. That day is a big day.

For one thing, it was the date of the last gassings at Auschwitz. 1944, sixtieth anniversary.

Yes. Gloomy. It was a gloomy time.

I don't know . . . maybe because I listened to the song “Vincent” by Don McLean about thirty times on my birthday. (Sung.)
Starry Starry Night
. . . You know it? Dad played it on an eight-track. He was fifty years old in 1979, but he had an eight-track. Old European Jewish Dad driving empty midwestern back roads listening to his eight-track.

I think that song affected my imagination.

Look in the journal. Not so clear at first.

Here. Nightmare one. I'll read it to you.
You are pressed into the doorway of a brick apartment building. There are searchlights in the clouds, searchlights dragging across buildings. It's like a Hollywood 1943 police search and they're looking for you. You can hear gunfire in the distance and explosions. You hunch down, so cold, bury your neck in your collar and there are boots marching on the street. You can't see the army or police, but you can hear the boots and hear gunfire. You haven't had dreams you remember in years.

Yes. And then a little bit more every night.

August 23 was the first night I knew they were World War II dreams. It seemed reasonable, you know, given my father's reemergence into my . . . and his World War II history. That's the first time the little girl showed up, too.

Take action? You mean about the dreams? I didn't then. I thought they were just dreams. Take action how? I thought the dreams were symptomatic. War and annihilation dreams. They made sense.

I did figure out how to take action. Not for a while, though.

I didn't like my job.

Journal Entry,
August 23, 2004

Good T. Again drinking in the morning. Great work. You can't go to work. No more work.

Money Monkey.

Trained monkey.

One-trick pony. Don't know how to do anything except what you do at work, and you're not even sure what you do at work, but when you do it someone pays you.

Oh no, no skills. Can't build a house. Can't fix a car. Can barely cook. Barely clean. Lucky you can dress yourself (barely).

Dee-skilled.

Sit in front of computers under bright fluorescent lights that make you squint, walk around squinting. Squinty monkey wears pants and shirt and shoes.

Monkey. Jackass.

Day Two:
Transcript 2

The money helped. I accepted it . . . because of what I was going to do with it.

I quit work on August 23. Same day big dreams came.

The job was—it was a symptom of . . . a manifestation of my lack of imagination, my total lack of courage.

Some stupid suburban office park. It was safe. Even when I wasn't suicidal I thought about driving off bridges on the way to work.

Marxist? I don't think so. I used the word . . . because it sounded funny to me. I thought I was funny. Used to.

I'm not a revolutionary.

Letter 4
August 23, 2004

Hello David,

I'm a Marxist! What do you think about that, you yuppie bullshitter? A naked Marxist!

Yes. What better way to celebrate the life and works of Karl Marx than to get totally naked in a staff meeting?

After calling you yesterday afternoon and you not listening to my complaints about work in modern times, man I was on fire, and I was feeling pretty free (I'm going to die!) and I was psyched to demonstrate how a dead man walking, with nothing to lose (not even a relationship with his brother who won't listen to him on the phone), could throw off the shackles big-time. My shackles were cotton Dockers and a light blue oxford.

After talking with you yesterday, I knew today was the day to part gloriously from the world of work.

So yesterday, in the evening, I got prepared for my glorious parting. I peered into my closet and chose the right outfit as I imagined my dumbstruck co-workers', mouths open, terrified eyes. I even went out and bought a new pair of shoes from Marshall Field's, the perfect pair of shoes (from the perfect salesgirl—whom I had sex with in a back room! On boxes of shoes!! Life is so good when you give up on it, David. You should kill yourself). Tasseled loafers.

And then today . . . Le Grande Act! (The Grand Act.) Check it out.

Our staff meeting this morning concerned a new service program introduced by corporate called “Service Starts with Me,” or SSM. (Yes, the initials are suggestive of sadomasochism . . . no, apparently nobody thought of that.) When Dee Anne, my boring boss with a fucked-up 1987 hairdo, hit the SSM point on the agenda and began to speak in sincere terms about the need for every associate to adopt an SSM attitude and described how SSM will be the paradigm by which Carter Benefit Services will move from being a commodities-focused organization to being a customer service–focused organization, I slowly began to disrobe, starting with my tasseled loafers (ah yes! The first choice in naked meeting men's footwear—those bad boys slid right off). While she read the new standard script for answering phone calls—
Good morning. This is T. Rimberg of Carter Benefits. How may I help you, etc.
—I unbuckled my pants and pulled them slowly to my ankles, first one knee up then the other, along with my boxer shorts (yes, I went totally nude, after some deliberation—Karl Marx would have demanded that kind of commitment). The motion caught the attention of Jill Sonnenberg, who looked down and whispered, “Oh my god.” Knowing it was do or don't, I jumped from my chair, kicking it back so it rolled hard against the wall. I stood up straight, unbuttoned the top button on my oxford and peeled it up and off, the tie still dangling at the neckline.

And nobody said a word. It was amazing, but just as I suspected, nobody pays any attention in goddamn staff meetings. Nobody other than Jill Sonnenberg and Dee Anne, who had been talking, even looked at me. Talk about worker alienation!

And there I stood, in a meeting of fourteen, hung in amber silence, arms outstretched, head cocked to the side like Jesus Christ himself, beatific semismile on my lips. And Alienated Michael Hendricks continued to doodle Rastafarians pulling long glass bong hits. And Alienated Terri Miller continued to zone out on the reflection on the tabletop and blink and nod as if she were listening. (Had she looked closely she would have seen my naked reflection framed by the great light window.) And Alienated Damian Stotz pretended to take notes. Alienated everyone else stared down at their agendas as if in deep thought over SSM until Dee Anne said, “What in the hell are you doing, T.?” her voice rising into the ether. And I didn't know how to respond and then everybody looked up, gasped, turned white or red, mouths open, quiet.

For ten more seconds I stood, frozen . . . a bit confused as to the next step a nude Marxist revolutionary should take. Then Hendricks started applauding, which startled me to action. I pulled on my pants, pulled my shirt back over my head, slipped my tasseleds back on, flipped a double bird, and ran the hell out of there.

Dee Anne screamed behind me: “I'm calling the police! You stop where you are!” But I kept running and went down the steps, through the lobby, and out into the brutal suburban light of the parking lot.

And I drove home to my empty house, sealed from the heat, not even kitty to greet me (did you know I left him with the kids when Mary asked me to go?), which might have been depressing, had my triumph not been so complete! And I holed up in my living room, expecting the cops to come take me. And I gripped a butter knife, which I was planning to charge them with, to see if they'd shoot me (a Marxist Martyr!).

But they didn't show up. Complete victory!

I am all air! This is the heady buzz the Communards must have felt in the early days of that great Paris Commune. What a glorious revolution. My days of laboring for the MAN are done!Karl Marx must be smiling, somewhere. Workers everywhere must be smiling.

Thank you, David. Have a GREAT day!

Day Two:
Transcript 3

I was jittery in the chair in front of the television in the middle of the night. I remember . . . the night I wrote that work letter to David. The night I left my job. Jittery. I'd gone to sleep, but then couldn't sleep because . . . I dreamt a whole story and woke up and then fell asleep again and the dream picked up right where . . . Finally, I woke up choking.

Yeah, there's a description of the dreams in the journal.

At least the door is open—so dark, those marching feet are soldiers. Spotlights strafing the sidewalk near you. You stand in terror, icy sweat, shaking. You bumble at the door, smash into the door, find the knob, turn it, and it opens, and you fall forward into a lobby, dark, no light except for gas light from the street and the strafing spots. Who is that little girl? She's in shadows. Eyes lit. You roll from your side onto your face and press yourself to the floor, the floor vibrating with sound from outside. It is black and white stone, the floor. Don't look at that girl. Don't look. You press yourself to the floor in the dark without breathing, cold stone. They're coming after you.

That's not it. I wasn't afraid the cops were coming for me because of getting naked at work. I didn't do that. I wanted to be a hero, maybe . . . but I made it up. Thought about it, but I didn't.

The letter was a lie. I didn't even go into my office that morning.

I drove to work sort of buzzed. I sat in the parking lot, sweating. Then I drove home.

No, I did not have sex with a salesgirl.

No, I didn't send the letter to my boss.

I didn't go back to work ever.

Letter 5
August 23, 2004

Dear Dee Anne,

You can't fire me. I'm not going to show up, which means I quit. I'm gone. Good riddance.

Hope your meatloaf Sundays continue to be as satisfying as you always professed (though I doubt they were satisfying). Quick point of advice: stop telling everybody every morning what you had for dinner the night before. Oh shit GOD did I hate Mondays—having to nod and smile and laugh at the appropriate laugh pauses in your stories about your daughters eating meatloaf, while all I wanted to do was put a stapler to my temple and slap it hard enough to end the misery. You are so boring. You lack any quality I would call interesting (except your hairstyle—
très
Glam Rock). Okay, you are great at your job (whatever that means). And I suppose you're a decent person. You're probably a good enough mother even, given your serious limitations, what you understand of the human condition (nothing). But, you're replicating yourself with these daughters. Three more little Dee Annes will eventually populate the cubicles of some financial services company in the Twin Cities. They will bring their husbands to your house each Sunday night and eat meatloaf. And they will head to the office every Monday with no story to tell, but they will tell it anyway, because they are soulless and totally boring. And there will be more suicides in the world. More and more. Jesus, Dee Anne. Listening to you killed me, Dee Anne . . . You're a good person, I guess . . . but is this what a decent life has to offer? Meatloaf dinners and fluorescent lighting? Is this really it?

What a fucking nightmare. Your poor kids. Your poor, poor kids.

Of course this is a suicide letter, Dee Anne. Of course it is. You kill me.

Take care!

T. Rimberg

Letter 6
August 23, 2004

Charlie, my son,

What do you love best as an eleven-year-old? How can you do it forever? How can you make it the focus of your life? Do you think you'll major in theater in college? I'm sorry I didn't take you to auditions at the Children's Theater. I ran out of time. I ran out of gas. Don't ever focus on making a living. Make the life you want. Maybe you'll be a painter. (I'm looking at your fifth-grade self-portrait now—beautiful.) Be artistic. Don't worry about money. Don't have fear. Or if you do fear, make sure you disregard it and do what you need to do. Please, Charlie, go do what you love no matter what.

Save the money you're going to get from me. Let that money protect you, so you don't worry. Go make a real life.

I love you. I love you so much. I miss you. I am so sorry. I am so sorry.

Your Dad