Why Are You So Sad? (3 page)

 

I
drew up an official-looking sign with “Surveys” written on it and an arrow that pointed to a wire basket I had stolen from the supply cabinet. In the basket I placed a large manila envelope upon which I had written “Confidential.” I put Don's survey in there. I wanted to read it desperately, but I didn't want to get caught reading it. Somebody passing by or dropping in with a question could catch me in the act. People needed to believe this was coming from the top.

The phone rang. “Are you still working on something ‘important'?”

“Hi, Brenda.”

“You didn't tell anybody about the robot, did you?”

“What?”

“The robot that doesn't bleed, or whatever that gibberish was earlier.”

“Are you starting to feel that way too?”

“I often feel like a machine. It's called getting shit done.”

I wrote this down on a pad of paper. She might be a lost cause.

“But listen, Ray, you didn't tell people at work that, did you? That you are a boy robot? Don't start talking like that at work. You can say that nonsense to me, because we have a legally binding agreement that I won't leave you in sickness or health. But they'll dump your ass faster than microwave popcorn if you start talking like that.”

“I haven't had a meaningful conversation with anybody here in over ten years.”

“Good. We recently fired somebody for saying he believed the earth has a consciousness.”

“What?”

“Exactly. Right in the middle of a team-building breakfast. He was packing his things before lunch.”

“I have to get back to work.”

“That's the spirit.” She hung up.

More surveys trickled in while I worked on a drawing for our new whisper mop. I was trying to give the mop a face. The face was to look up and wink at Mr. CustomMirth
®
, who was mopping up a spill. I was pleased with the face on the mop. It was playful and compliant. The spill, however, looked too much like something regurgitated, a hearty stew come back from the digested. I crumpled up the drawing and stared blankly at my computer.

I needed a break. I peeked out into the aisle, and when I was sure nobody could see me I grabbed a completed survey from the envelope and snuck off to the company gym.

The gym was all mirrors. A kaleidoscope of white metal fitness machines. I grabbed a communal magazine stacked next to a chain of stationary bicycles. I was the only exerciser. I could see at least twelve of my selves: pale limbs, flushed cheeks, flimsy bodies.

Concealed in last September's issue of
Man Health
, I took a look at Van Wilson's self-appraisal. Van was a nepotism case. His mother was best friends with Jerry Samberson's mother. Van wrote:

I think we should have more sports. I think if a guy is really good at some sports, like riflery, then he should get credit at work and at home, because it shows he can focus and really make something happen.

It made me dizzy to run and read at the same time. I slowed the treadmill to a brisk walk, climbing a hill ranked level three. I noticed in the reflections that my hair in the back was melting away into a circle of unprotected scalp. These mirrors defied my active hair-loss denial.

I read more:

I am totally a Monday, because Sunday, when it isn't football season, I work on things and play virtual golf and kind of get in touch with stuff, and I'll call an old buddy and drive my car around and sometimes walk around the mall, just kind of getting to know my thoughts and checking out sales and magazines, and then I go to a movie or maybe catch a buffet somewhere. So I am more or less Sunday—that is my day. I am Sunday. But since that isn't a choice, I figure Monday is closer to Sunday than Wednesday, unless you say that the week starts with Monday and you can't get to Sunday until you have gone through Wednesday, but I don't think that's what you mean by this question. I see the week as more of a wheel, and that is why I am closer to Monday than Wednesday. I am a Monday.

Van was probably in denial. That was okay. I should have expected this. A likely symptom of the epidemic.

The men's locker room was empty. It smelled like bleach and dirty socks. Sports-themed music was coming out of tiny round holes in the carpeted ceiling. I decided to take a sauna. It is the one place in all of the buildings that isn't air-conditioned.

I sat on the top bench, wearing my towel like a skirt. I ladled water on the rocks. They hissed. I sat and wished that I could travel back in time and get a representative sample of depressed people through the ages. My research could benefit from some graphs. I wanted to chart the course of humanity's collective spirit over time. The Middle Ages might have been a low. That could be good news. This might be cyclical, like sunspots or El Niño.

I was starting to perspire.

Bob Grasston came in, looking even more like a steamed dumpling wearing nothing but a white towel.

“Bob.”

“Raymond.”

A light moss of hair grew on his shoulders. He was holding a folder of papers.

“What are you working on?”

“I'm charting quarterly sales growth and weighing it against personnel costs.”

“Sounds pointy,” I said. It was all I could offer.

He was one level below me. He had a cell phone clipped to his towel. I thought I saw the edge of one of the surveys peeking out from under the sheets of business data in the folder.

I was still holding Van's survey, brazenly, now unprotected by the magazine I had left back with the bicycles. I rolled Van up into the shape of a telescope and wiped sweat from my brow. I was at the threshold of what I can endure in the sauna, but I was curious to see if Bob was going to fill out his survey.

I stared at his shoulders in awkward silence. We sweat. I became impatient.

“Is that the emotional well-being survey you have there?” I asked, and only then did it occur to me that Bob shouldn't have had one of the surveys. He was in a different organizational pod. He worked in a different building.

“It is.”

I could feel a trickle down my back. Perspiration bloomed out of my pores. My face felt like it looked like a tomato.

“I see you have a survey too.” He gestured toward Van's survey.

“I figure it must be important.”

Bob's flesh was heating up. The hair follicles on his arms were red and irritated. His forearms looked like plucked drumsticks. My mind drifted briefly to cannibalism. I imagined us surviving a plane crash together, or being the only two to remain after a global pandemic. Could I build a fire without matches? Could I clean out his entrails? Would I know how? Would hot sauce be available?

“Could I take a look at your survey?” he asked.

This was a dilemma. I wanted to see his survey. I could have suggested we swap, but I wasn't holding my own.

“It's kind of personal,” I said.

He nodded in agreement and poured some more water on the rocks. I could taste salt on my lips.

“Does anybody know where this is coming from?” he asked.

“I assumed it was coming from the top.”

“I see.”

“It seems like a great idea, though.”

“It does?” Bob said.

My arms were a puddled street after a storm.

“Well, I can see how unhappiness might sneak up on people, or collectively on a staff, or a company, or a country, or on a species. And we are busy. We are occupied with our work. We have an obligation to the home office in Iceland. We have an obligation to Georg Loki—may he rest in peace—who started making furniture for everyday lives fifty years ago, trying to fill his time during the endless nights of winter.” I was beginning to sound like the video that Human Resources played during the orientation training for new employees. I thought sounding like the video would appeal to Bob's corporate patriotism. “Because we are working and living our everyday lives, maybe we don't realize that we're all a little under the weather, on an emotional level. At least, that is what I'm guessing they are after with this.”

“Interesting.” He nodded and wrote something down, shielding it from my view, then nodded again.

I felt my heart beating back where my earlobes attach to my head. He was waiting for me to say more.

“Well, I think this turkey is just about cooked,” I said. It was his meaty arms that had me thinking of poultry. I hoped he wasn't aware of the association. “I better get a move on,” I said. “I have to draw up the instructions for the new party sofa.”

I left Bob to roast.

The stack of surveys on my desk had not grown substantially. I tried looking on the bright side: People were giving this thought, taking stock, considering their true feelings. It might take a while. I needed to be patient. It was a good survey.

 

I
t is my very clear understanding that dreams, like apartment buildings, are composed of many floors and rooms. I was in the third-floor alcove of an Edwardian manor, curled up in a nest of Turkish pillows, thumb in my mouth, getting my belly rubbed by a talking panda bear, when news from the first-floor radio cracked the patina. Political scandals, flash floods, and celebrity drug busts rose up like smoke, bleeding into paradise and drowning out the gentle affirmations of my soft-pawed friend.

Golden warmth dissolved into earthly bedroom. I opened my eyes and spied a black dress sock hanging out of our overstuffed laundry hamper.

Waking up was like reversing a burial; I was a Cartesian brain alive in a coffin, aware of my own thoughts and the requirements of the living, but with no will to rise and proceed with my life. If it weren't for my bladder, I might never have gotten up. I had to pee, therefore I was.

Downstairs, Brenda was at the kitchen table, humming something that wasn't on the radio, eating cereal, reading the paper, making lists. Her hair and face were already in place. She was a morning person. It didn't matter that she drank the night before. You could run her over with a tractor and the next morning she would be up with the birds, laying out breakfast options, paying bills, alphabetizing the spices.

Milk and cereal had been left out on the kitchen counter. Everything was fortified. I joined her at the table, looking into my bowl of cereal, preparing to eat it. All the cereal rings looked like clones of each other. They were all the same. I longed for something uglier and less Space Age. A spotting banana or the uneven terrain of breakfast sausage.

I heard a newscaster talk about congressional hearings on the homeless. There was a proposal to use them for medical research. Another proposal to farm their organs. “Let's give these people a purpose,” a Southern politician was heard saying on the Senate floor.

Brenda held a spoonful of cereal by her mouth, waiting until she had finished digesting an important point in one of the editorials before finally rewarding herself with the oat rings. She moved on to another section of the paper, scooped up more cereal, and chuckled at a cartoon.

“Do you think it is strange that we now gladly eat things that are so uniform?” I asked my wife. “Don't you think we take too much comfort in the unnatural?”

“There is a funny piece about body bags in the Living section,” she said. Her jaw was making those noises while she chewed: another postmatrimonial discovery. She swallowed and said, “I filled out this little joke of yours,” passing the survey across the table like it was some dirty thing she had found on the street.

“Oh,” I said. I must have left a copy out on the table. A mistake. She was likely to dismiss my concerns. To discourage my project. To threaten me with practicalities.

“Oh?” She said it like a stern teacher.

“Maybe I got carried away.”

She started saying other things, a lot of things, but I couldn't hear her. Or at least a central part of me resisted hearing her. She might want to categorize this behavior as not listening, but that sounds more willful than the way I experienced it. For me it felt like I was being held captive by an instinctively dissociative response to her words. Certain words, like
remember
and
before
and
again
, or phrases, like “we've been through this” or “you need to let go,” were triggering sensations that distracted me from the very same words that were initiating the response, and this reaction, this disconnection, had a distant familiarity to it, like hazy memories of feelings falling down to me out of time from a well-traveled place. I know this doesn't appear to make much sense. The best way I can describe experiencing this echo from somewhere else in time is if you imagined a roller coaster that did a full 360-degree loop, and either it was moving so fast or gravity was so weak that you could somehow drop something from the top part of the loop, when you were upside down, and it would defy the rules of time and fall into your lap at the point in the past when your car was only just beginning to start the loop. Or maybe it wasn't the past. Maybe you took the loop so fast that you were actually on your second time around when you caught the thing you had just dropped. You lost count. You were turned around. Down was up. Before was after. Past was future. See, it's confusing, which is probably why I don't bother describing it to people anymore. But just in case, here's another way I have attempted to explain it: As a child you say something to your grandfather and it doesn't make sense to either of you, but you're a child and therefore less rooted in language, which frees you up to say things that are poetic, if also gibberish. And your grandfather kind of laughs at it, because it is meaningful in its amusing, nonsensical way, and the laughter makes you feel good, because it is a form of recognition. And then seventy years later, your grandson says the same thing to you, at least to the best that your tired memory can verify, and it still doesn't make sense, but it does effectively make you wonder which event came first. So, anyway, this happens to me sometimes. Certain words may result in a kind of sizzle in my head, or maybe it's a resizzle. I have come to think of it as a bird with rare markings that keeps showing up at notable moments in my life—funerals, warm nonverbal connections with strangers on a bus, blind dates gone wrong, traffic accidents. The bird is a silent witness to that cousin of the epiphany where you feel a deep awareness of a moment that surrounds you, but minus any improved understanding or clarity regarding why or how we are to be in our lives. Maybe it is pointless to try to explain. It isn't really necessary to the retelling. The gist is: Her mouth was moving. Words were coming out. I felt a familiarity with the experience of falling upward and away from the content of what she was saying, and this transitioned into a fuzzed-out ringing in my eardrums. Alternate words then began to come out of her mouth. These words I
could
hear clearly, though they didn't correspond with the movement of her lips; she was suddenly an actor in a foreign film with the dialogue hastily dubbed in. The new words were saying, “She's trying to tell you things you don't need to hear. People will do this. They will talk you out of what you are trying to do, because they are invested in this illness. But you are onto something. Why else would you be feeling this way? It is the nature of the illness to think you are crazy for suspecting it even exists. That's how it takes over. Fight it. Nod at your wife like you are listening to what she is saying, but in your head know that you will stick with this. You've taken your survey. You saw the answers. This isn't make-believe.” It felt good to hear somebody say that, even if nobody was really saying that. It felt good until I looked at her eyes. They were concerned, like I was an injured animal, and even though I suspected she was trying to talk me out of something, I couldn't deny that her eyes were particularly beautiful at this moment. I have overlooked brown. It doesn't have the flash of blue or green, but the browns in her eyes were subtly layered, like the earth, or a delicate sweater knitted by hand—something to support you under your feet and keep you warm at night. Her eyes were trying to reach me, as she pushed an envelope across the table in my direction. And then finally her speech—the speech that was aligned with the movement of her mouth—returned. She said, “I've been holding on to this envelope for you for a while now, and I think the time has come for you to open it.” I'm pretty sure that's what she said. That's how I have it ordered in my memory. She passed me an envelope, expressed some concern, and got up with her dishes. That's the pattern. She washes her dishes and leaves for work.

On the way out she swooped in for a kiss to my forehead. As she put on her coat, she looked back at me from the hallway. She paused to say one more thing but instead made a face that was the equivalent of another kiss.

I said, “Have a good day at work,” but I could barely hear my voice as I said it.

As she left I stared at her, I stared at her ass in her skirt, and I recalled staring at her ass in college, where we had first met. We were both in the same class: “The History of Science.” It fulfilled a requirement. We enjoyed the class. We both appreciated science from a distance. We both liked electricity and birth control. She was the fourth person I had ever slept with, and it was the first time it didn't make me feel like either a baboon or an astronaut. Sleeping with her put me on Earth, and that was a feeling I wanted to marry.

The envelope she had given me had my name on it. It was written in my own handwriting. There was no postage. No return address. I put the envelope in a stack of mail I continue to build on. I have an aversion to bills and other things addressed to me. I avoid opening them until the tower of mail gets so high it begins to spill over. Then I reluctantly face up to it.

I was much more interested in Brenda's survey than the envelope with my name on it. So that's where I shifted my attention:

NAME: BRENDA CHAMPS

Are you single?

Not yet.

Are you having an affair?

Not yet.

Why are you so sad?

Did I say I was sad? I don't think that I did.

When was the last time you felt happy?

When I balanced our checkbook.

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

It was a you are wasting my fucking time with this survey kind of happy.

Are you who you want to be?

Last I checked.

Would you prefer to be someone else?

I am good at being me. You know that.

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

I thought I might have a house with a swimming pool and a pink Cadillac. I didn't realize my breasts would have a weight to them. I didn't think they would hurt my back. I was a child. I imagined child stuff. This is a dumb question.

Is today worse than yesterday?

All days are the same.

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

Both.

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

Like popping a joint back into place.

Do you realize you have on average another 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?

I think I look great. You better too. Stop staring in the mirror and do some push-ups.

Do you think people will remember you after you die?

They better.

For how long after you die?

How would I know?

Do you believe in God?

Kind of. Not really. Sort of.

Do you believe in life after death?

I don't like to think about that.

Do you believe in life after God?

I still believe in God, more or less. Is that what you are getting at? What is this about? This is madness.

Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?

Look, I took those ones to quit smoking. And I took those others for my ankle injury, and I keep around the extras for the occasional hell-born menstrual cramp. And those others I don't take but keep around in case I need to relax. Like after I see you are spending your time writing insane mental-health surveys, which winds me up, so then I want to take a pill to wind down. There is nothing wrong with that.

Do you think we need more sports?

Raymond,

What is this all about? Did you write up this fake questionnaire because you thought I didn't hear your paranoid nonsense the other night? Memo: The world is still spinning. Everybody is fine. People are unhappy sometimes. You'll be fine.

Love,

Brenda

P.S. Don't take this to work. I don't want to have to support you when you get fired.

Was she happy? I would say she was not in touch with her unhappiness. Or maybe she possessed a gene that helped her resist the decline. She was of a blurred Eastern European background. There is probably a village somewhere over there where the women all behave like her. They all whistle the same tune while the men and animals fall over dead.

I looked at the clock on the microwave. I was late for work. I find it difficult to move at that hour. Like there are ankle weights on my soul. But I had to move or I would be late, and I was always late.

So I did get up. In a mild act of defiance, I put Brenda's survey in the shredder—the data was corrupted anyway—and spread the confettilike end product in with the kitty litter. It might be more useful there, is what I was thinking. We have a cat. Gus. He's missing a leg. I had wanted to call him Triangles, but Brenda thought that was stupid. It was stupid. That was the point. That cat is stupid.