Sorry Please Thank You (22 page)

“Wait a minute, did I have cancer before I bought The Brad? I don’t understand. Did you give me cancer?” Rick gives him a look that is both patronizing and beneficent, as if to say,
don’t be silly,
and also
I care about you, you silly old fool, don’t you know how much we all care about you?

“You wanted something to happen, right?” Rick says. “For all of this to be leading up to something? Closure,” Rick says, pointing at the manila envelope. “That is definitely one way to have closure.”

“I didn’t say I wanted closure. Drama. I said I wanted drama.”

“What do you think drama is, Murray?”

“How about something more open-ended?”

“Oh sure, that can be arranged, too,” Rick says. “But even open-ended stories have to end at some point, right? Open endings, after all, are still endings.”

Then Murray realizes that he never said anything about drama. He thought about it
in his head
.

“What, just because it’s in italics you think I can’t hear it?” Rick says. “That was part of your story, too. Your inner monologue. All of it. It’s all part of Murray Choosing The Brad.”

Who are you?
Murray thinks.
Or what are you?

You haven’t figured it out, yet? I’m your narrator, Murray.

You’re a sales guy.

Sales guy for a narrative experiential lifestyle product, narrator. Just titles, really. My job is to sell this story to you. To make it yours. To make you believe. To make you feel something again. Isn’t that what you wanted?

The Brad™ they are in disappears, roof, then ceiling, then the walls one at a time, then the floor, then the furniture, each layer and element dematerializing in sequence, and then Murray and Rick are standing in an empty city, Vancouver shot for Los Angeles, Toronto shot for New York, night shot for day, not eternal yet somehow hourless, a place yet somehow unplaceable, an architecture trying to be everywhere and in doing so becoming nowhere.

“Where is this?” Murray asks.

“It’s a commercial break.”

Murray notices that all of the cars are luxury sedans, white and featureless. With a burst of accompanying indie rock, a silver coupe comes slicing around the corner, tight suspension and race-car handling and tinted windows, and the whole world goes into slow motion, all of the other cars and all of the other drivers, except for the hero car and its driver, who has a smile of perfect self-satisfaction, and Murray realizes this is his chance to make a break for it, to escape Rick and The Brad™, and Murray, no spring chicken really in the winter of his days, nevertheless takes off running down the alley and sees a chain-link fence and he can’t remember the last time he did what he is about to do and, with an old-man sort of frog hop, Murray catches on to the fence and clambers up and gingerly over the top,
and lowers himself down on the other side, where he turns to see that he is in a different city now. Not a city at all, really.

Murray pauses to catch his breath, then resumes running, which slows to a jog, which slows to a brisk walk. It’s quiet now, no sound track here, and Murray sees why: he’s on some kind of backstage lot, now, which he knows because he sees crews of men constructing sets and façades, making a town that looks like just the town Murray grew up in. Even more like the town he remembers: an imagined place more real than the place it is supposed to be. A designed substitute that destroys the memory of the original. Murray sees a sign that says

and below it another sign that says “Re-Authenticization in Process” and below that, in minuscule type, a legal notice that the town is now owned by The American Experience, LLC, whose parent company, American Entertainments, Inc. (AEI), is a subsidiary itself of a company called The USAmusement Corporation, which is owned by a German conglomerate, New World Experiments GmbH, owned by a consortium led by Chinese and Korean investors. All around is new ground being broken, dig sites surrounded by chain-link fences, men working in hard hats, large colorful
banners proclaiming that Your Hometown will be relaunched in the Fall of 2015.

Murray runs from door to door, looking for an exit from this place. It all looked so good in the brochures, but now he isn’t sure where he is, doesn’t know anymore what is real or not real, whether he really does have cancer or if that is just part of this, this whatever-it-is, experiential lifestyle product or whatever Rick, or whoever-he-is, called it. True, Murray had been looking for some kind of adventure, but this is not exactly what he had in mind, this manufactured situation, not a fantasy but a kind of trick of the mind, a trick of the heart. This is the same place, the town as advertised, not just a town with a lowercase “t” but a Town, the Town, the scene having been redone by the Tourism Bureau, quantified in the grand Re-Quaintification Initiative, a restoration of the town’s rich history and tradition, which Murray now understands as just more advertising copy written by AEI. All of the buildings and street signs and lampposts and mailboxes, all of it décor, a set, a three-dimensional illusion, part physical, part digital, designed with the purpose of making Murray, or not Murray, the citizen of the town, the citizen of American Entertainments, Inc., a corporate-owned municipality, or citizen wasn’t the right word—customer—all of it designed to make the customer a tourist in his own hometown. A hometown that he never really grew up in, one that never even existed. Everything that had seemed comforting about it before, the ornate overhangs, the stained wood porches, the restaurant
signs with all of the charming fonts all serving chicken fingers, all of it now seems off.

Murray is in an empty theme park, an hour before it opens, not quite ready to be the place it is supposed to be.

Or perhaps a deserted back lot, an abandoned set for one of those network shows, with all of the mopey people in large houses, being sad at each other.
That’s it,
Murray realizes, although he isn’t quite sure what he is realizing, it is more like the feeling of realizing something, which people in those shows tend to do much more often than in actual life.

Murray tries another door and finally one opens, and now he’s running up what appears to be some kind of corporate office disguised as part of the town. The elevator door is open and lit and appears to be waiting for Murray, which gives Murray the creeps and he thinks it might be best, if this is some kind of story planned out for him, if this is all part of The Brad™, that maybe he should avoid that elevator, if he’s going to have any chance of getting out of here. Plus, Murray can hear music coming out of that elevator, and not just any music, but the same music heard before,
the sound track,
his sound track or the sound track to Autumn®, thundering major-chord tonality, the melody seeming to physically lift something inside Murray, lifting him up and drawing him toward the elevator, and Murray wonders if somehow the song has been engineered to fit him, based on some kind of preference matrix, to suit his emotional and psychological makeup, to
push his invisible buttons, buttons he didn’t even realize he had until he heard this music, and Murray knows that he can’t get in the elevator. He opens the door marked “Exit” and goes through it and sees, a moment too late, that it isn’t an exit, now he is in the stairwell and the door has shut behind him. He tries it. Locked. He shakes it with all of his strength, waning now, he’s tired, but gives it a good shake and kicks the handle a few times for good measure, but knows he has no choice but to go up the stairs, probably up to wherever the elevator was going to take him anyway. He has been fooled, he sees, trying to avoid the elevator, the choice he thought that they wanted him to take, and now he has taken the choice that they wanted him to take anyway.
I’m losing it,
Murray thinks.
They? Who are they?
And just when Murray thinks he might be paranoid, he hears the sound track, faint, coming from up above, the sound falling down the stairwell, getting louder as he climbs each flight. He checks each floor of this empty, fake building, knowing that he will end up on the roof, because that’s where
they
want him to go. The music is getting louder and the feeling is getting stronger, stronger in proportion to the volume of the sound track, the feeling that Murray is realizing something.
What has come over me?
Murray wonders, and it occurs to him that searching frantically for an exit is perhaps exactly what someone in Murray’s situation would be expected to do. That’s what Murray has been doing all his life. Getting up when the alarm goes off. Going to work. Coming straight home from work. A drink or three in the evening, and do it all
over again. Straight ahead, plodding along with the plot. And now he has signed up for more of the same, wanting a little taste of what other people had, lured in by the promise of two bedrooms and two bathrooms with shiny fixtures and baskets of individually wrapped soaps, all of the shiny products just part of the larger one, the largest one, a way of life, life itself as a product. This is what he has always wanted, or so he had thought, but now here he is, in the middle of a story of his own and looking for the exit, and realizing all the exits are blocked and then realizing that an exit is not what he needs. Why should he leave? He, for once, is the center of the story, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, Murray feels that he is in control. This is it: his all-time high point. The apex of his trajectory, his moment of total freedom, the moment that Murray has been waiting for his whole life. To feel completely free and real and himself. An authentic experience.
This is my real self,
Murray thinks, but almost as soon as he thinks it, he wonders, who is deciding that? Himself, or some self separate from the self, and what is an authentic experience if you realize it as such while still having it? Now that Murray has labeled it as authentic, could it still be that?
Who is putting these ideas into my head?
And he wonders if they are even his own ideas or somehow part of The Brad™, part of some kind of dramedic consciousness, an internal voice-over, that the product engineers at American Entertainments, Inc., have come up with a way to make him understand his own life as a kind of story.
Is that it?
Murray wonders, and as he reaches the top of the
stairwell and throws open the roof access door, Murray thinks,
yes, that’s right, you’ve got it,
and he realizes that he didn’t think that last thought,
no you didn’t, Murray,
that was me,
and he sees Rick standing up on top of the ledge of the building, six stories up, and he says,
hey Murray,
and Murray realizes Rick is somehow
narrating directly into Murray’s head
.

“Stop that,” Murray screams.

“Oh fine,” Rick says.

“How did you get up here?” Murray says between gulps of air.

“You thought it would be that easy to get rid of me?”

“Kind of, yeah.”

“Don’t you see? You can’t escape your arc.”

“My life isn’t an arc,” Murray says. “I’ve figured it out.”

“That so? Tell me.”

“I’m not fighting it anymore,” Murray says.

“Go on,” Rick says, with a smile. “I’m listening.” He hands Murray a handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

Murray takes it and dries off, wiping his face and neck. “I made a break for it during the commercial,” Murray says, after catching his breath.

“Yup.”

“I heard the music in the elevator, so I took the stairs.”

“Yes, yes.”

“By resisting your story, I was actually creating it for you.”

Rick looks a little surprised. “Pretty good,” he says. “Really good, actually. Hardly anyone ever figures that out.
But let me ask you a question: what are you going to do now?”

“I’ve still got seven days to change my mind.”

“This is true,” Rick says. “But let me show you something.”

Rick pulls a small ring box out of his pocket and opens it to reveal a small toggle switch.

“What is that?” Murray says.

“The on-off switch.”

“To what?”

“Why don’t you flip it and find out?”

As soon as Murray hits the switch, he is deafened by a horrible grinding sound. From out of nowhere Rick produces two sets of earphones. He hands one to Murray and puts the other pair on himself.

“Ah, that’s better,” says Rick. “Can you hear me?”

Murray nods, unsure of how he feels with Rick once again talking right into his head, but then he sees where the grinding is coming from.

“I’ll give you a moment,” Rick says, as he watches Murray take in what he’s looking at, which is the same town he was just running through, the Town, only now it’s not empty, but filled with workers in orange jumpsuits. From behind false walls and through false doors, men appear in twos and threes, wearing blue jackets that say “CONTINUITY” on the back, armed with pressurized canisters and fine brushes.

“That stuff is called RealLife™,” Rick says. “Aerosolized Themed Ambience.”

Rick and Murray watch as the men descend upon threadbare corners of the room, holes in the scene where the wire frame is showing through, or the substrate, or whatever was underneath, expertly applying coats and touch-ups to blank patches of reality, surgical and precise with their movements, smoothing over, restoring, stitching the illusion back together, and then, just as quickly as they appeared, the Continuity maintenance workers disappear.

“Where are we?” Murray says.

“Backstage,” Rick says.

The next wave of workers appears, in purple jumpsuits, with white lettering on the back that reads “DISCONTINUITY,” and Murray watches as they appear to undo some of the work that was just done by their predecessors in Continuity, selectively erasing certain bits of the landscape, scuffing a corner here, rubbing away a bit of reality there. Rick explains to Murray that these guys are actually from a completely different department than Continuity.

“It’s part of Accounts Receivable,” Rick says.