Why Are You So Sad? (9 page)

“I think it is the things we use against ourselves that are the real killers.” It sounded like nonsense as I said it, but I tried to relax anyway. Let go a little. Enjoy the discomfort of our exchange as best I could. I thought about our thoughts—my thoughts, Jerry's thoughts, everybody's thoughts—swirling around in outer space, an astro-cloud of ideas and emotions, a celestial storm light-years away, and our bodies acting as receivers. We were like radios sitting next to each other, picking up programming that wasn't necessarily related, simulating a conversation, because our bodies were in a close proximity, and sounds were coming out, and at times our meanings intersected, if only slightly.

He walked from his desk over to the love seat, which was closer to the leather chair I was sitting in. A conversation pit, minus the pit, made of sample furniture. We were much closer now. Direct eye contact was difficult to avoid.

“Do you remember Debbie Rayburn?”

“Vaguely.”

“She worked as my assistant. In Lorraine's position. Real sharp dresser. Loved the color cyan.”

“That sort of rings a bell.” In my memory all of his assistants blended together into one big mound of makeup and overburdened hair arrangements.

“Well, she had a mole on her upper lip. The kind that drives a man wild. It wasn't something I could control. Which was liberating in a way—to have no choice but to yield to the urge and pounce.”

“Like an animal?”

“Like a savage,” he said, with the glee of a child deciding on the ideal Halloween costume.

“Do you think savages are aware of their own existence—I mean, in a historical sense?” I was hoping this might take the conversation in a more philosophical direction.

He stared at me like I was eating salad with the wrong fork. A large forehead of disappointment.

“Well, back to Debbie.” As he said it he reached over his shoulder to the bookshelf that was behind his chair and grabbed a stuffed pink and green giraffe. He found it almost without looking. Like the way a championship quarterback knows ahead of time the precise location where his all-star receiver will end his route before hurling the ball downfield. A muscle memory perfected through practice. The giraffe was one of our more popular children's toys. It had been resting on the shelf as a bookend to some business titles—
The Joy of Business
,
Alpha Manager
,
Will to Consume
. He held the stuffed animal against his chest and relaxed deeply. “It took months to crack her. I started out subtle. I talked about my sore shoulders, how they were stiff; I talked about the stress of work, how I simply needed a release of some sort or another.”

He sipped on his whiskey, looking past me, up to the ceiling, slinking lower in the love seat. “Eventually I switched tacks, became more direct, told her how incredibly attractive she was. The things I said became more and more suggestive, descriptive, anatomical.”

Now I took a real sip of my whiskey.

“But she resisted. Avoided me. She was always in a region of my office that I wasn't.” I imagined him—his big head, his strong grip, his large knuckled hands, his project-management eyes—chasing after the poor woman. “Just as I was nearing my body toward hers or putting my hand around her hand, which was around a pencil,” he said, “she would slip out of reach.”

The last comment reminded him of a fishing story. A slippery fish flopping around in a bucket. A chartered cruise in the Arab Emirates. Advice on treating sunburn he learned from a man named Ahmed. He took me along for the entire detour, and then finally got back to his original thread. “And then once she didn't really resist, and slowly it became a regular thing.”

Jerry was almost lying down in the chair. His legs were splayed far out, wide open; most of his back was on the seat; his hands were resting on his thighs; his head was looking upward in a trance state, lost in confession. The giraffe was napping on his chest, rising and falling along with Jerry's breath.

“Was it what I wanted?” he went on rhetorically. “In some ways, maybe. The first time was thrilling. There is no disputing that. Animal, erotic, bordering on illegal. Just tremendous. But it never got back to that, no matter the risk of the locale. We did it in the parking lot. In the conference rooms. We probably did it on your desk. On every desk in the building, while the Guatemalans cleaned the place at night. But it was never as incredible as that first time.”

He kept talking, and I could tell he didn't want to be interrupted. But my radio was still receiving signals too. I was contemplating injuring myself. Trying to think of a painless way to make my arms not work for some temporary period of time. Fantasizing about a paid leave; of afternoons in a library, researching various theories about the collective emotional framework of humanity, which was something I thought I believed in. All of us part of a larger organism. We were all together in this. Except then I looked at Jerry talking on and on—comparing his sex with Debbie to an army that had forgotten why it was fighting, then getting off course and sharing with me a trick for getting lightbulbs to last longer, and what it felt like the first time he killed a deer, and why rainstorms made him think of a pet turtle he had in his youth.

I looked at the clock as he said all of this. It didn't have any numbers on it. Every hour was an illustration of a piece of furniture. It was currently an end table past a lamp.

“And so the answer to that is no,” he said, to a question I hadn't heard.

Because he wasn't looking, or maybe as an act of defiance, I pulled out his survey for something to read while he went on. Maybe I even wanted to get caught, to break his trust, to disband this alliance.

Have you ever fallen in love?

Gayle. She was my nurse. We met when I had plantar warts removed. The way she so delicately applied dry ice to the warts and then scraped away the dead growth broke my heart.

If yes, were you surprised that it, like all other things, faded over time?

Our love will outlive the tides.

I read that while he said, “I was making love to Debbie on a big pile of those imitation bearskin rugs that were such big sellers a few years ago, and I was having the toughest time finishing, if you know what I mean. So I imagined someone else. Pictured somebody else in my mind.” He gave me a moment to contemplate what he was saying. “And do you think you can guess who that was?”

I couldn't.

“I imagined my wife. I imagined that it was my wife who I was making love to, but in Debbie's irresistible pantsuit.”

He looked wistful and faraway. I felt like I was visiting with someone who had dementia. They start to inhabit an older part of their brain that still feels alive, and it doesn't really involve you—they are talking to the ice man, recovering old private memories, horses are still a popular means of transport, paperboys wear those funny caps—and you don't really know when or if they are going to come back to the present, and you can't quite decide whether it is more polite to stay or leave.

He kept talking about his “termination.” Its brilliance. He made it sound like an epic battle with bows and arrows and cannonballs and slaves and lions and Romans. He was holding the giraffe again, close to his heart. I was looking at his survey.

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 don't look in the mirror in the morning. Gayle combs my hair for me. I read the paper while she does this.

“As soon as I could, I rushed home to my wife. I had to have her. It was all I could think about. She was busy playing solitaire on her laptop. I kissed her on her neck. I tried to put my hands through her hair, but it was in a bun and I didn't know how to maneuver around that. She was a little irritated. Said she was in the middle of a good hand. I explained to her my needs. My urges. Reminded her she could save her game by pressing ‘command S.'” He looked proud as he said it. “And so we walked up the stairs to the bedroom. And I even lit candles—you know, the ones we sell that look like fish jumping out of streams—and we made love. And it was terrible. Like eating stale crackers, reading a soggy newspaper. Not one thrill. And then we lay there, and my wife wept. And I missed being in my office. I was overwhelmed by a deep desire to check my e-mail.”

And he told me that little had changed in his marriage, and he accepted that, and he said the next year he was an even more efficient worker than in the previous one, and he doubled the length of his goals, and tripled the rate of achieving his goals, and now they are flying him to Iceland to receive an award soon, and his youngest son is becoming quite a little shortstop on his baseball team, and the other one not a bad trombonist, and LokiLoki sold four million travel sofas last year, and 1.2 billion plastic beer glasses, and that he hasn't missed a day of work in five years, and that he reads at least one success biography a month, and that he just got a physical and the doctor told him he had the heart of a twenty-year-old, and then he finally looped around to his earlier theme and said, “Even now when I get together with Debbie, and we make love, I always imagine it's my wife, and that usually does the trick, and if that doesn't work, I think about checking my e-mail, and that definitely does the trick, and I can't for the life of me make any sense of this routine, so I don't.”

He looked up, looked around, confirmed his surroundings after such an intense departure. He was like one of those séance ladies who jabbers the voices of the dead for their remaining relatives and then reenters her own body, her regular consciousness returning to the room—looking around as if to say,
Did anything shake up while I was out of body?
That is what it was like. Jerry saw me. He knew he had been relating private details. He took note of the survey in my hands. He saw that I had been reading it. And I thought,
There isn't anything in here that is as bad as what he just told me.
But he looked betrayed. So what I did was I let the radio transmissions direct me for a bit. I kind of waved out. In a half-present, or maybe doubly present state, I walked over and took the giraffe out of his hands, and then I returned to my seat, and I held the giraffe, and I began to talk to him—the giraffe—and to Jerry, and let them listen to my transmissions.

I said, “Jerry, we were never meant to be here. We were never meant to be us.” I petted the giraffe on the head as I said it. Other than the colors, it really was a nice little toy. “We're a mistake. We are growing and getting bigger, but we are still a mistake. Everything we strive for, a mistake. We don't work right. We're all very sick. Very, very sick. And we're eating our own shit, lapping it up, as fast as we can, which is naturally making us even sicker. And as I say this I feel very certain that we'll die off soon. Much sooner than later. We're like horses with wings who are too fat to fly. Beautiful horses. Beautiful wings. An incredible combination. A miracle of evolution. But way too fat to fly.” I looked over at him and he seemed a little threatened. Like a kid who doesn't like the rules of the game, or didn't mind the rules while he was winning but is definitely looking to disrupt the rules now that the lead is changing. “If you understand even a whit of what I am saying, can you then see how working here is like building things specifically for landfills? Sure, our initial customers are poor people, not landfills—and by
poor
I don't mean economically disadvantaged so much as simply defenseless against our advances. But these aren't our real customers. Our real customer is a festering hole in the earth, and we are cramming our cheap furniture down its throat like it is a duck and we are trying to make pâté.”

I looked over at Jerry. He stood up. He was walking over to me. I wondered if he was the kind of drunk who likes to fight or the kind who likes to hug. He stared down at me. His face was red. He couldn't figure me out. I was a product that was impossible to assemble.

 

A
s I walked back to my desk the light in the building turned in on itself. It was probably in part the whiskey and in even bigger part the residue of channeling the far-off broadcasts. It doesn't make any sense, but that is how it was. Blues turned to orange. Black became white. Red became green. My coworkers moved in slow motion. Polaroid negatives of busy people. There was no sound. I looked in a cubicle and Ron Turner was pointing to some pornography on his computer and Ted Jenkins was in there and they were laughing like it was a clever joke, holding their quaking ribs and laughing, like there was real wit involved in sticking a thirty-nine-dollar camera up to a contorted labia. They saw me walking by, and they both gave me an aw-shucks look as if to say, “This sought us out, not the other way around.”

I felt sideways. Upturned. I passed a conference room. One of the less formal ones, for sit-down chats, where supervisors practice listening techniques. The couches were plump and unused, overstuffed and injected with neon dyes to make them look more playful. Rita Carlyle was on one, submerged in personal conversation, whispering into the phone. I read her lips: “I hate my job . . . I miss you . . . People are stupid . . . I've already had four energy drinks so far today . . . I hate my new phone . . . Why are postage stamps so expensive?”

Walking on in the silence of our communal rot, I composed a letter in my head:

Dear Mr. President,

There is no reason to believe you will read this. You are probably in the middle of important plastic surgery with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But there is an emergency.
We
are the emergency. I don't know if all the simple humans fucking and shitting and farming and texting all over this spinning earth can look up all at once and say together, in a grand chorus of self-awareness, “We are not well,” but I think it will take something like that. Can I prove it? I suspect I could, with a little help from our nation's top scientists. Will tackling this problem advance your career? I don't know, but you are already president—how much further do you need to advance?

I passed the printer where my survey had first been exposed. The intern from the Bible college was standing there trying to fix a jammed stapler. He smiled at me. I looked the other way.

At my desk I wrote a rough draft of the letter to the president as quickly as I could. While typing, the commonsense side of my head was saying,
This is a waste of time.
But writing the draft, protecting the thoughts before they slipped away, made me feel good. I sent it to a personal e-mail account that I could access away from the office, because I knew I wouldn't be coming back.

I took a deep breath. The colors returned to normal. I could hear again. The sound of a thousand microchips fanning themselves. The slow electric bleed of processors. I collected my favorite pens, stuffing them in my pockets and, when there wasn't enough room, putting even more of them into a cardboard box. I looked around my desk for more. There was a trophy I had won for “Excellence in Output.” I threw it in the trash can. There was a framed photo of Brenda from right after our honeymoon. It had been hidden behind the now discarded trophy and a gift-size jar of pretzels. Brenda was pretty in the photograph. That's probably why it was hidden back there. The forgotten Brenda. An easy smile and sympathetic eyes that could make me talk. It was not long after I took the photo that I landed the promising job of Assistant Pictographer. I remember it made Brenda happy. I had interviewed and we waited every day for a week to hear if they would hire me. Making Brenda happy made me happy. I felt like somebody. I would have health coverage. An occupation. Something easier to explain to people than my noncareer as a fine artist, oil paintings from photographs I had taken at the morgue. I felt safe with the job. A protection from poverty and insanity. I wouldn't become the man who sits in conversation with himself at the public library. I was gaining citizenship to a powerful country with a solid infrastructure and significant defense budget. I remember telling her, after getting the offer on the phone, “They really do make some nifty things. Practical things. Things you can sit on.” She squeezed my arm and we looked through a catalog, picking out a lamp and an end table that we would buy at the employee rate, and then we probably rolled around on top of each other and, when we got tired of that, had food delivered to our apartment and ate it in bathrobes.

I put the picture of Brenda in a shoebox. Then I slowly took the photographs down from my cubicle walls, leaving behind brighter pink rectangles where the fabric hadn't faded or collected dust. An albino man serving hot dogs in an amusement park. A dwarfish girl in a full-body cast holding on to a bouquet of balloons with her one good hand. A woman in a nursing uniform with feline eyeglasses bottle-feeding an infant chimpanzee. And the child soldier. He gave me the same cold stare. I wanted him to know that I would fight too. I would publicly humiliate those who had wronged him and his family. I touched a finger to my lips and then I pressed it to his. He still looked back at me like my life had no value.