Dyscountopia (6 page)

“Honey, I’m home,” he announced, rushing into the apartment and slamming the door.
 
He stood and waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark.
 

The apartment wasn’t much –gray carpet and white walls, a linoleum kitchen nook in one corner, a small living area unexplored by the eyes of children.
 
It was immaculately clean, practically unfurnished, sterile; as if it had been stored under glass only to be broken in case of emergency.
 

A dim light oozed from the back room, along with the rapid clacking of fingers on a keyboard –
clackety-clack, clackety-clack
.

“Hon?
 
Did you have a good day?”

Clackety-clack
.
 
Clackety-clack
.
 
The ceaseless hum of online browsing.

Albert didn’t bother to turn the lights on.
 
After hours of standing under an endless field of searing fluorescent bulbs, he found the darkness soothing.
 
He took a step forward and stumbled with a tiny yelp, almost toppling over as his foot caught a large, oblong shadow.
 
Steadying himself against the wall, he rubbed his toes and inspected the thing through watery eyes.
 
It was an open box, empty except for a bit of plastic and Styrofoam.
 
He could just make out the five words stamped top of it in cold, black letters:
Home Furnishing – This End Up
.
  

“Honey?
 
Did you order new furniture.”

Clackety-clack
.
 

Albert looked to the center of the room, instinctively knowing what he would find there.
 
The futon
 
– his refuge, that hibernatory den that kept him warm and safe, that shielded him from the outside world like a tauntaun’s cozy innards – was gone, a doppelganger left
 
in its place, a new version of the old but smelling of chemicals and covered with a ghastly blue-flowered upholstery where a faded, soothing gray had been.

Albert’s heart sank.
 
She had no right.
 
It was only a year old.
 
And it was his.

He inspected the tag on the box.

$25.95.
 
It was a bargain and everyone knew it.

Reluctantly, Albert flopped down on the futon, reclining against the crisp, new-car smelling upholstery of the inflatable cushion, and stared into the empty flat screen of the television set.

“TV on.”

Click.
 
The TV turned on.

Click.
 
The TV turned off.

“TV on.”

Click.
 
The TV turned on.

Click.
 
The TV turned off.

“TV on.”

The television exploded into a host of retina-searing colors, bowling him over with flashing logos and fast moving tickers that zoomed across the bottom of the screen quicker than the human eye could read.

--inGammaQuadtodaykillinfortyfivepeopleAfterabloodstirringseventhgamethef ourteenthannualWorldDodgeBallVictorycupgoestoteamDeltaTheCEOofOmega-Martsaidtodaythatprofitsareexpectedtorisefifteenpercentthisquartermakingthisthemostproductivequarterofthe—

A deafening burst of electric guitar music rocked Albert’s eardrums.
 
He flinched involuntarily and, as if to berate him for this act of cowardice, the small, well-groomed figure inside the television began to scream at him.

“IN OTHER NEWS, ALFONSE WANG REIGNED SUPREME LAST NIGHT ON
BOWLING FOR THE WHITE HOUSE
, WITH A RECORD BREAKING VOTE TOTAL OF FIFTY-FIVE MILLION, EDGING OUT ROBERTO FISK, WHOSE TOTAL OF THIRTY SEVEN MILLION VOTES KEEPS HIM FIRMLY IN SECOND PLACE.
 
BLAMING VOTER APATHY, FISK MADE ANOTHER LAME ATTEMPT TO EXPLAIN WHY HE DOESN’T HAVE WHAT IT TAKES, ONCE AGAIN PROVING THAT HE’D MAKE A LOUSY PRESIDENT.
 
LET’S TURN NOW TO OUR PANEL OF EXPERTS, OMEGA-MART’S
VERY
BEST POLITICAL TEAM, TO GIVE YOU A FAIR AND BALANCED VIEW OF THIS YEAR’S -- .”

Click.
 
The TV turned off.

“TV on.”
 

No response.

“TV on.”
 

Nothing.

Albert knitted his eyebrows.
 
“Honey, is there a problem with the TV?”

Clackety-clack.
 
Clackety-clack.
 
Clackety-clack
.

Albert looked wistfully at his lifeless television, staring into his own dim reflection.
 
His hair was thinning.
 
His eyes were dull and tired.
 
 
His whole face sagged like a ruined soufflé, as if someone had grabbed him by the cheeks and tugged downward.
 
The more he gazed into his own eyes, the less familiar they seemed.
 

He
suddenly felt the peculiar disorientation of realizing his own mortality, glimpsing his own existence as a timeline with a certain beginning and a most definite end.
 
He had always lived his life in a sort of even contentment, less intoxicating than happiness, and certainly less satisfying, but infinitely more dependable.
 
But more and more, he had felt that contentment threatened.
 
On days like today, it felt very, very fragile.

Why, oh why, did he have to go and open his big mouth in front of all those people today?
 
He could only imagine what they were saying about him.
 
He must have looked ridiculous.
 
He would surely hear about it from Victor tomorrow.
 
Stupid.

Stupid.

Albert dozed, waking later that night with a tiny whimper.
 
The apartment was dark.
 
He had been dreaming.
 
He stood up and stumbled to his bedroom, holding his hands in front of his face to keep from running into the wall.
 
He felt the door of the bedroom and pushed it open.
 
Someone was in there already, breathing.

Albert took off his pants and his shirt, tossed them onto the floor.
 
He lay down on the invisible bed next to the warm, hibernating beast that occupied the left side, careful not to brush against her.
 
She grunted but made no move.
 
Albert curled into a ball and closed his eyes, retreating into the quiet recesses of his mind.

He dreamed of a world with a sky, and of soft grass tickling his bare feet.
 
And he dreamed of Javier’s teeth -- those horrible, disgusting teeth.

****

She was going to die.
 
There was nothing she could do about it.

She sat up straight in bed, cold and clammy, her pajamas soaked through.
 
She blinked up at the bare white bulb above her.
 
It was a green bulb – an energy saver.
 
It never went out.

She knew that it was late, though there was nothing in the room to indicate the passing of time.
 
The surrounding white walls regarded her coldly, poker-faced.

She stirred slowly in the silent midnight world, reluctant to intrude upon the stillness.
 
Her bare feet hit the cold hard floor and slowly, deliberately, she forced herself to stand, shivering in her own fluids.
 
It wasn’t just perspiration, she realized.
 
She’d peed herself again.

Hugging her own thin frame around the middle, she shuffled from the bedroom into darkness.
 
Ten seconds, then a click, and a light shone down on her once more, illuminating her reflection in the bathroom mirror.
 
She gazed coldly back into red-rimmed eyes.
 
Had she been crying?
 
She’d been in a place with no walls, nothing to tell her where to stop.
 
She’d been falling, for hours it seemed, and she knew that someday she’d hit the ground.

She stared through the dirty glass at the fragile face of an orphan – pinched cheeks, close-cropped hair, sunken brown eyes.
 
She rubbed her eyes, stepped into the shower, and turned the knob on the left, letting streams of ice-cold water flood over her urine soaked jammies.
 
Her skin constricted under the water’s frigid touch.
 
Her blood rushed from her extremities to the core of her body, forcing her heart to pump.
 
She counted to twenty, then turned the water off.
 
She stepped out, soaking, onto the bare floor and shuffled down the hall, her teeth chattering as a trail of water dripped behind her.
 
She gave a wide berth to the coat closet as it came near, as if whatever monsters lay inside might jump out and devour her.
 
At the end of the hall, the apartment was dark and quiet.

Quiet.

It was the quiet that had awakened her.
 
The noise of the television through the wall had gone away.
 
She could no longer hear the comforting bump, bump, bump of indiscernible voices, gunshots, tire squeals from the apartment next door.
 
Like a mother’s heartbeat, she had grown used to feeling it, was only ever conscious of it in the wee hours of the morning, when it went away.
 
It had been absent all night, she realized.
 
And the stillness had kept her awake like a marching band tramping through her skull.

She sank to the floor, wet and alone, tucking her knees under her chin as she pressed her ear to the wall.
 
She stayed like that, searching the silence, until the sunless morning.

****

Albert awoke refreshed.
 
He left his apartment a full fifteen minutes early, ready to give a hundred and twenty percent.
 
He walked in quick, confident strides through the Quadrant, summoning up every ounce of positivity he could muster.
 
It was a bright, shiny new day, and he was going to make the most of it.
 
He couldn’t wait to meet and greet the first customer of the day; couldn’t wait to stir his troops into a price slashing fervor.

But as he grew closer to Produce, Albert’s steps became less rapid, less confident.
 
He began to meander – through Hardware, through Home Office – criss-crossing the aisles as if lost in a hedge maze, unsure of his own destination.
 
The soft, peppy sounds of the week’s top 40 sprinkled down from the ceiling above, bathing him in random lyrics of passionate love and regret, pasted together in no particular order so as to create the vague impression of coherent thoughts and phrases, filling Albert’s insides with a half-formed sense of tragedy.

Could an associate please come to Aisle 57?
 
An associate to Aisle 57.
 
Thank you.
  

The squelch of the intercom split the music in two, almost imperceptibly, as if the summons was a part of the music itself, all a part of the music of Omega-Mart; the daily hum.
 
Square wheeled push-carts added to the chorus, thumping and squealing down the crowded corridors in great buzzing swarms, swerving and weaving and stopping and starting to avoid colliding with one another; steered by wide-eyed mothers and fathers whose children clung to their pant-legs, pointing and wanting, yammering covetously at pretty dolls and plastic trucks and lolli-pops in bright colored packaging.

Boop.
 
Boop. Boopedy-boop-boop-boop.