Read Sorry Please Thank You Online
Authors: Charles Yu
Sorry Please Thank You
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by Charles Yu
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were originally published in the following: “Sorry Please Thank You” on
Esquire.com
;
“Open” in
Explosion-Proof;
“Designer Emotion 67” in
The Oxford American;
“Yeoman” in
Playboy;
“First Person Shooter” on
Wired.com/Geek Dad
;
“Standard Loneliness Package” in
Lightspeed Magazine
and reprinted in
The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy, 2011 Edition,
edited by Richard Horton (Gaithersburg, MD: Prime Books, 2011); and “The Book of Categories” in
The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities,
edited by Jeff and Ann Vandermeer (New York: Harper Voyager, 2011).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Yu, Charles, [date]
Sorry please thank you : stories / Charles Yu.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-90718-9
I. Title.
PS3625.U15S67 2012 813′.6—dc23 2011049487
Cover design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1
For Kelvin. Hey man.
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone … but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.… The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.
—Edward Sapir
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.
—Benjamin Lee Whorf
Sorry.
—Anonymous
Sorry
Standard Loneliness Package
Root canal is one fifty, give or take, depending on who’s doing it to you. A migraine is two hundred.
Not that I get the money. The company gets it. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus reimbursement for painkillers. Not that they work.
I feel pain for money. Other people’s pain. Physical, emotional, you name it.
Pain is an illusion, I know, and so is time, I know, I know. I know. The shift manager never stops reminding us. Doesn’t help, actually. Doesn’t help when you are on your third broken leg of the day.
I get to work three minutes late and already there are nine tickets in my inbox. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the first ticket of the morning:
I’m at a funeral.
Feeling grief.
Someone else’s grief. Like wearing a stranger’s coat, still warm with heat from another body.
I’m feeling a mixture of things.
Grief, mostly, but also I detect some guilt in there. There usually is.
I hear crying.
I am seeing crying faces. Pretty faces. Crying, pretty, white faces. Nice clothes.
Our services aren’t cheap. As the shift manager is always reminding us.
Need I remind you?
That is his favorite phrase these days. He is always walking up and down the aisle tilting his head into our cubicles and saying it.
Need I remind you,
he says,
of where we are on the spectrum?
In terms of low-end high-end? We are solidly toward the highish end. So the faces are usually pretty, the clothes are usually nice. The people are usually nice, too. Although I imagine it’s not such a big deal to be nice when you’re that rich and that pretty.
There’s a place in Hyderabad doing what we’re doing, but a little more toward the budget end of things. Precision Living Solutions, it’s called. And of course there are hundreds of emotional engineering firms here in Bangalore, springing up everywhere you look. The other day I read in the paper that a new call center opens once every three weeks. Workers follow the work, and the work is here. All of us ready to feel, to suffer. We’re in a growth industry.
Okay. The body is going into the ground now. The crying is getting more serious.
Here it comes.
I am feeling that feeling. The one that these people get a lot, near the end of a funeral service. These sad and pretty
people. It’s a big feeling. Different operators have different ways to describe it. For me, it feels something like a huge boot. Huge, like it fills up the whole sky, the whole galaxy, all of space. Some kind of infinite foot. And it’s stepping on me. The infinite foot is stepping on my chest.
The funeral ends, and the foot is still on me, and it is hard to breathe. People are getting into black town cars. I also appear to have a town car. I get in. The foot, the foot. So heavy. Here we go, yes, this is familiar, the foot, yes, the foot. It doesn’t hurt, exactly. It’s not what I would call comfortable, but it’s not pain, either. More like pressure. Deepak, who used to be in the next cubicle, once told me that this feeling I call the infinite foot—to him it felt more like a knee—is actually the American experience of the Christian God.
