Why Are You So Sad? (11 page)

S
chlitzy's Haus was not big on lighting. The food came smothered in shadows. The walls were covered in shingles and the shingles were covered in dirt. I was at the far end of a long beer hall table, sitting with my stack of surveys. My thought at that moment was,
What if I have one to five pints of beer before I get on to the business of alerting the world to the pending epidemic?

I had stopped in on my drive home because I didn't want to see Brenda yet. I didn't even call her. It was Wednesday. She would be watching her hospital program on the television. That was my justification. She didn't need me when she was with the doctors. She ate food out of cartons close to the screen and gave the medical staff advice on their relationships. They listened to her in ways that I couldn't.

Schlitzy's was quiet. It was so lovingly dark and quiet. I felt safer in there. Like some bad weather was passing over outside and maybe the weather corresponded with our species being on the brink of something terminable, or maybe it was just bad weather. Either way, I had found a temporary shelter, and the storm could do whatever it wanted, because I was warm and safe and could smell animal knuckles melting into sauerkraut.

Just a few seats to my left, a refined and lengthy woman, with the grace of a swan, glided into a seat on the other side of the table. It was as if she had fallen out of a foreign film. She was clothed in black, the cheekbones of her young face might have won a blue ribbon at a state fair—unless the judges were corrupt or blind—and she had the most elegantly silver hair, well ahead of its time, asserting a sophistication, shining around all of us, making clearer what was already clear: that she was not of this place. She was a magnet, and I decided she was French, because the women there, though I have no personal experience to support this, are at their most attractive when doing the simplest things, like reading the newspaper in bed or wiping pastry crumbs off their child's tasteful wool coat. I began to read, or more accurately pretend to read, the TheraRestore brochure, because it was everything I could do not to stare at her with my mouth open like a child who cannot breathe through his nose, except then I realized openly reading a mental-health brochure might give the false impression that I was crazy, so I started to read one of the surveys instead.

Todd Langley, an associate in Quantity Assurance, wrote:

I am very happy. I have a family. I have a sweet car. I have a hot wife and a nice gun. I have a daughter who will one day be hot like her mother. I go to a great church. And a lot of people would kill for my job (and my hot wife—ha!). I am very happy. Who wouldn't be?

I read it and then was trying to remember who Todd was. There are those people you don't work with but you work near. I never remember these people's names. I think Todd was the big one who scared me. The one who wore the tight-fitting shirts made out of sports fabric that give a person's chest the smooth plastic contours of a Ken doll. I think he is the one I stood behind once in the cafeteria who served himself an obscene amount of Tater Tots and then ladled Thousand Island dressing over them and then sprinkled some sort of protein powder supplement on top of that.

“I don't think they're making a fortune off of the sausage,” the steel-haired woman said to me. This was not expected. I was at a loss. The one constant of Schlitzy's is that interaction is never a probability. It was a temple for people like myself, who didn't want to talk, who wanted to eat and drink and maybe sit under one of the few lights to read a book, or in my case surveys, without any risk of conversation.

“You probably like that,” she continued, undeterred by my silence.

I looked past her. A woman in one of the red booths near the unplugged jukebox kept checking herself in her compact. She was wearing a hat with a fake blue flower on it. The hat had fallen out of a different era. So had the woman. She was checking herself like she was preparing for company, but she was always in that booth and there was never any company.

I looked back at my French woman. She smiled. She was patient. She knew I would eventually answer.

I said, “The sausage or that they aren't making a fortune on it?”

“Both.”

She was right. I loved the sausage. I actually liked the idea of all the parts I would have no business with in any other context—ears, lips, noses, something called recovered meat, all ground and seasoned with God knows what—encased in something else I don't want to know about, and then boiled in beer. Some people smoke cigarettes, looking death in the face, sucking in tar and 419 other chemical reactions, killing themselves on their terms. I eat sausage.

And she was right about the other part too; I liked that Schlitzy's was only scraping by. It was selfish but true. I liked that there was dust on the tables. I liked that when I had to get up to piss out my two beers, I didn't have to acknowledge another patron. There was never a risk of small talk, and I liked that. Everybody at Schlitzy's knew they were miserable. It was how I imagined heaven. We'll have something to eat and something to read and nobody will bother us. And the beer will come in big glasses.

What had me confused and feeling a little vulnerable was that I was so transparent to this woman. It made me feel simple and obvious. I didn't like that she was in my head. I should warn her: My head is working on some pretty big projects at the moment. And then also, she was trespassing. But she was, as I think I have made quite clear, attractive. Not just attractive in the physical sense, though she was that too, but I found myself drawn to her on some other level, a secret level that only becomes apparent forty years later, when you are in the back of an ambulance and all you have to think about is every single moment of your fading life. If she had been the man with the whiskers like corn silk who drooped and drooled near the front of the restaurant, I'd have given her an evil eye for speaking to me. But he couldn't move that far. He also probably didn't have the lingual coordination, nor the teeth, to make intelligible sounds. And he wasn't pretty. Nor was he French in my imagination. So in her special case, I allowed the talk.

I said, “I suppose it does suit my purposes that Schlitzy's isn't exactly packing them in.”

She said, “You want them to subsist,” but she said it at the very same time that I said, “I want them to subsist.” She was like an echo, if an echo could bounce back in nicer clothing.

She smiled at me as if the coincidence was a good thing. I smiled at her like it freaked me out a little.

A man at the bar was slowly crushing soggy coasters as he stared into space. There was no music in the bar, only the occasional sound of the bartender clinking glasses.

My French woman moved over so that she was directly across from me. “My name is Glenda Fellowes-Allbrecht,” she said. “I find you interesting.” She had a long, almost extraterrestrial neck.

I said, “None of us are interesting.”

“You are to me.”

“Interesting has been washed out of us.”

That made her coo in delight.

“I wonder if I can borrow you,” she said as she put her hands together in a kind of prayer. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. She had nice hands. There were big silver rings on a few of the fingers. Bent and modern.

“I wonder if anyone can be borrowed.” I took a bite of mashed potatoes. They had soaked up the juice of the sausage and were delicious. I could feel my arteries wriggle.

She was eating a salad.

“I didn't know they had salads here,” I said.

“I brought my own.” She showed me the plastic tub she had brought in.

She said, “I'm a conceptual artist.”

“I'm unemployed.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'm not. It's a leave of absence. But I don't think they want me back.” I found some relief in telling her. She seemed interested. I had no idea why she was listening. I didn't think it was necessarily for the right reasons, but it was still nice. “I don't think I want me back either.”

“If you are unemployed, why do you have all this work with you?” She was looking at the stack of surveys.

“It's a project.”

“What kind of project?”

I decided to tell her. She seemed like she could handle it. I said, “I believe we are all being sucked into a barely detectable cavity. A very slippery sort of crater. And once we realize we are down there, it will be too late.”

“Can't we climb out?”

“Our hands and feet don't have that kind of traction, and our hearts and minds will be half asleep.”

“We'll be like one of those gangly millipedes who find themselves drowning in a toilet bowl?” she said.

“Except less panicky. If the millipede can be lethargic and defeated, then yes.” I clarified her analogy as if I was only mildly impressed, but in truth I loved what she had said. With an analogy like that, I could feel her burrowing into my heart. I didn't know if the burrowing was like a kitten cuddling up to its mother or if it was like a chigger depositing its larvae beneath the skin of my ankles. It certainly felt like it could stick. Like most things, the feeling confused me. I wanted to walk away. I also wanted to elope, forgetting for the moment that I was already married. I wanted to propose a suicide pact. We could make love in a station wagon, parked in a garage with the engine running, and let the deathly exhaust slowly wash away all of the suffering; leave it for the living to contend with. I wanted to order another beer.

“So what do these”—she was looking at the surveys—“have to do with the toilet bowl?”

“Field data.”

“Can I take a look?”

“Only if you are willing to fill one out in return.”

I gave her one, and a pen, and then left her to it while I went to take a piss.

Above the urinal someone had drawn a smiling cock and balls with legs walking over nippled mountains. I thought we should have a name for these beasts. They were like those Greek man-horse people. Next to the strolling genitals someone else had written, “Hard drives cleansed, affordable prices! E-mail: porneraser@zipmail .com.” Closer to the top of the urinal there was a sticker that said, “Sex-Moms for Hire: 567-878-9878.” I took out a pen and wrote next to it: “Feeling like all paths lead down? Report your sorrow while you are still aware that you might care.” And then I put my e-mail address next to it.

On the way back to Ms. Fellowes-Allbrecht, I ordered a beer for myself and a manhattan for her. The bartender slid the drinks across to me without speaking.

Glenda was still working on the survey. I sipped on my beer and watched. Her brow concentrated into a series of ripples. A strand of silvery hair kept falling down into her eyes, and she would lead it back behind her ear with the hand that wasn't writing. And then a little later it would fall again and she would correct it all over, but never looking up from the survey. I liked that she was taking it seriously.

She looked up and smiled and slid the survey over to me across the table. “Go ahead. You can read it in front of me,” she said.

NAME: GLENDA FELLOWES-ALLBRECHT

Are you single?

We are all single.

Are you having an affair?

We are all having an affair.

Why are you so sad?

Because sad is beautiful.

When was the last time you felt happy?

I feel happy right now.

Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?

It was temporal. It had to do with an idea. Finding a subject for my project. You. You will be perfect for my conceptual art piece. I came in here because I knew I would find somebody. I wanted that disconsolate posture in your face and shoulders as soon as I spotted it. It couldn't be the woman in the corner who is waiting for somebody who died forty years ago, and it couldn't be that man at the bar who is drinking because he is trying not to gamble, and it couldn't be that bartender, because part of his sad appearance is intentionally ironic. You are the one.

I looked up at her for a moment. She smiled at me and bit into a radish. I gulped.

Are you who you want to be?

I am whoever I want to be whenever I want to be.

Would you prefer to be someone else?

When I do, I will be.

Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?

I never felt like a child. Even when it was ponies instead of horses.

Is today worse than yesterday?

There is no difference. But tomorrow should be pretty good, because you are going to help me with my project.

I looked up again. Another smile. I got scared and looked back down at the survey.

If you were a day of the week, would you be Monday or Wednesday?

I would be October.

What does it feel like to get out of bed in the morning?

It feels like a different category of dream. One where balance becomes a little more important and smells are much stronger.