Fiction

I hate these jobs. The airport’s half an hour away, and traffic’s heavy. No doubt this woman would rather be alone. I wish I had that luxury too, but I’m in the wrong job. I should be eating dinner with my wife, talking about this flatness that keeps me in bed longer. But I’m here, in the dark, with a stranger who needs to be someplace else. The traffic moves and I nudge forward. A red light stops us again.

She pulled away. There was something almost too clean about him, as if he had scoured all trace of human biology from his body and replaced it with the scent of unguents and cologne. The hot influx of his breath was the same: clean and minty, but with a whiff of death somewhere beneath it.

Physical pain is like a pillar of cloud and fire in the desert.

It leads me and salts the ground of my pilgrimage self.     

Physical pain is tender. It is infection, blood, skein-linked and knotted.

Alex checks my catheter, grins: “Fucken nightmares, hey.” I provide

material evidence of my concurrence.

My friend did not ask the obvious. I would have. Asked the obvious. But perhaps the marriage had long since burnt up all such complicating desires.

The moment I walked in, he said that’s what I was. That was before I even told him the sob-story of how shit went south with the government job. How the exec video-called us to say there was no need for a team of writers, that all our work could be done by some younger prick. Before my brother Leonard got drunk and jumped in front of the 351 and practically sawed himself in half. ‘It’s easy,’ he said to me at the time. ‘You just sit there in the crowd, they put the camera on you, and you do something that people will share online.’

She couldn’t quite believe it, still. It had been two weeks since Debbie’s email. She had printed it out, re-read it many times, asked two close friends for their opinions. Did they consider her a spiteful person? No, they did not. Was she difficult? No, she was not. Perhaps, suggested one friend, Debbie was going through a bad patch in her marriage. It was true that Debbie’s eldest boy, Gabe, had just left home and Debbie was not dealing with it very well.

When it’s clear the marriage is finally over, Maggie goes in numbly to look on her sleeping daughter, now five, and finds herself staring at all the things she has somehow accumulated that she will now have to move – the toys and picture books, the pillows and clothes. It’s exhausting, thinking about the inventories she will have to write, the new house she will have to make into a home. She climbs into her daughter’s bed and dreams she is not here, in this bed, but in fact walking on the surface of the Planet of Lost Things.

I may still die naturally or perhaps by the hand of the state too, I don’t know. Some say that someone of my abilities or lack thereof shouldn’t be sent to death. They say I cannot possibly understand the value of life from my lack of intellect, and from my lack of worldly possessions, and my lack of words, and my lack of history. And yet, there are others that say despite everything I lack I am full of rage and horror.

Whatever the pretexts, let me say that disinhibition kicked in around dusk. The photocopier challenge began, as it probably always does, with people photocopying their faces and hands. Personally I regret the direction it took from there, but as team head of human resources tasked with leveraging the input of all employees in the company’s annual targeted goals, I felt compelled to join in.

I am a solitary figure wandering over the grass. Some people think being solitary is the same as being lonely, but I have often been one and seldom the other. Today I got caught up with a commitment and needed to shift this walk with my friend until late in the afternoon. I am tired and I was hoping he would say ‘another day’. It seems strange he still wants to go.