The Cubicle Next Door (32 page)

“You
want
to go?” What was the tone I was hearing in my voice? Desperation?

“Join the military, see the world. What’s not to like in Iraq? I could be the hero in my own movie. People shooting at me. Taking a bullet. Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?”

I could imagine it all. Vividly. I’d been doing it for years. Every time I thought of my father.

“Oh—wait.”

“What?’

“Hmm.”

“What!”

“They only want pilots.”

“And?”

“I’m not.”

“What do you mean you’re not?”

“I used to be, but I’m not anymore. Remember those headaches?”

I didn’t know whether to throttle him or whether to hug him.

“Let’s grab lunch.”

“I already have mine. It’s in the refrigerator.”

“Is there enough for me?”

“No.”

“Then we have to go out. Because I didn’t bring any lunch and it would be rude for you to eat in front of me when I don’t have any food.”

“You could just stay on your side of the cubicle and you’d never know.”

“Except that when you heat up the stuff you bring in, it always smells really good and it makes me really hungry.”

“If you’d bring something in to work besides a bag of Doritos, then maybe you wouldn’t be starving all the time.”

“Come on.” He had appeared at the end of the cubicle. Grabbed my hand from the keyboard and started tugging. “Come on, come on. You know you want to.”

And that was just the problem. I did.

I wound Joe’s scarf around my neck. Pulled my coat on and fastened it up.

We decided to go to Arnold Hall. Joe was in the mood for Taco Bell. And Subway had salads.

It was a T day, so we were able to leave ahead of the crowd, before the cadets broke for lunch and left the instructors free for an hour. But Joe still saluted his way across the terrazzo.

“Did you see that punk’s boots? They weren’t even shined. They don’t do any of the good stuff anymore. No more Smoker’s Nights, no more SERE.”

“What’s that?”

“Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape training. SERE.”

“How would they teach you that?”

“Take you out to Jack’s Valley and up into Mueller State Park, make you run around in the woods until you’re caught and then simulate a POW Camp.”

“By torturing you?”

“No. Just basic stuff. Sleep deprivation. Interrogation. Sensory deprivation.”

“And how did you resist?”

“All sorts of ways.”

“Was there a point to all of that?”

“Yeah. It made you understand how you react to pressure. You find out if you’re one of those guys who’ll blab at the first opportunity or whether you start to hallucinate when you’re deprived of sleep or placed in solitary confinement. There were guys who started seeing bugs all over the place.”

“And you were one of the guys who…?”

“I was an instigator. I kept the guards busy with stupid stuff so the escape could be planned.”

“So basically, you were just annoying.”

“Extremely so.”

“And you probably consider that a positive trait.”

“It’s a life skill.”

“You don’t take anything seriously, do you?”

“And you take everything seriously, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Yes, you do, Miss Let-me-just-take-that-straw-and-plunge-it-into-your-heart.”

I shoved my hands into my pockets and just kept walking.

“Okay. Sorry. But don’t you think you take things…some things…just a little too much to heart?”

I stopped walking and turned toward him. “Well, if people like me don’t, then people like you won’t have any gas left to drive your monster SUVs around town!”

Joe held out his arms in a “see what I mean?” gesture.

I opened my mouth to respond, but nothing came out.

“Okay. Cease-fire. Different topic.” He began walking again. “Let’s be nice to each other for a few minutes.”

I felt ashamed of myself. Decided to try. “Are you doing better? With instructing?”

“Yeah. I actually like it.” He laughed. “Who would have thought it, right? I wonder what my pilot buddies would think about that.”

“Who cares what
they
think. The important thing is what you think.”

He sent me a look I couldn’t interpret.

“What?”

“You have no idea how…fearless you are, do you?”

“I’m not fearless.”

“Yes, you are. You don’t care what anyone else thinks. You just go right ahead, doing what you want to do, being yourself.”

I shrugged. Who else could I be?

“Hey. I was thinking about that blog. You know, John Smith seems to have a lot in common with me.”

I had to run a few steps to catch up with him. “He does, doesn’t he?”

He looked straight into my eyes. “Don’t you think that’s kind of strange?”

I looked straight back into his. “Not really. I’ve always suspected Estelle has a crush on you. I just didn’t want to say anything.”

He laughed. Quieted. “Seriously, though, don’t you think it’s strange he drives an SUV and makes her do things she doesn’t want to do and…everything else?”

“He who?”

“John Smith.”

“Not really. Half the population of the country drives an SUV.”

“Around here they do.”

“What are the chances it’s about you? What do you do? Read that blog trying to find all the ways it could be about you? Because it’s not.” Half the time, it was about me. We were two halves of a confused morass of a blog.

We got to Arnold Hall, ordered our food, and took it out into the dining area.

“So how do you think she’d feel if John Smith happened to have an ex?”

“You’re still thinking it’s about you?”

“What if it were? Humor me.”

I shrugged.

“Do you think it would bother her?”

I shrugged again. I was trying to buy time.

“Well, what would
you
think?”

What would I think? In some ways, that was safer than talking about what TCND would think. “I would think that you can’t always have what you want in life. If it were me, it wouldn’t make any difference. I’d feel the way I’d always felt: that some things in life just weren’t meant for me.”

“What do you mean? You wouldn’t marry someone who’s been divorced?”

“I wouldn’t—won’t—marry anyone at all. Ever.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t.”

“Because…?”

“Because I just can’t.”

“So you don’t have a problem with divorce, but you do have a problem with marriage? That’s unusual. But then, why should I be surprised!”

“Look, my parents never got married.”

“It’s not uncommon.”

“They met each other and it was cataclysmic. And afterward, my mother went crazy.”

“I’m sorry…but I still don’t understand what this has to do with you.”

“Don’t you get it? I’m her daughter. I will never do what she did to me. I will not do it.”

“Who’s to say you would?”

“Who’s to say I wouldn’t? I’d rather stay on the safe side of things.”

“Safe side. You seem to want that to be the theme of your life. But I don’t think it can be. I think you have a wild thing hiding inside.”

“Exactly. That’s exactly it. I think so too. And I’m not going to let it out.”

THE CUBICLE NEXT DOOR BLOG

The lie

I told you a lie today.

It’s not the first lie I’ve ever told you, but it’s the first one I’ve done with the intention of deceiving you. (Instead of myself.) I wish, I wish, I wish I could tell you the truth. But saying a thing three times doesn’t always make it true. And if I told you the truth, then you would know me. And I might not be the me you thought I was.

Dream girls are always perfect.

Dream girls are always pretty.

Dream girls don’t pick their noses or wear holey underwear or drool in their sleep.

So dream of me tonight the way I wish I was.

Posted on January 26 in
The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

Comments

During the day we swallow our saliva, but during the night, the swallowing reflex becomes muted and drool collects in your mouth. Try sleeping on your back. Or try breathing through your nose instead of your mouth, unless you have a deviated septum. Drooling only creates problems if it becomes excessive. In that case, it’s called sialorrhea and you may need treatment.

Posted by:
NozAll | January 26 at 09:15 PM

Only in dreaming can you alter your reality.

Posted by:
philosophie | January 26 at 09:22 PM

You can pick your nose and you can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your friend’s nose.

Posted by:
theshrink | January 26 at 10:08 PM

Don’t worry about it. I lie all the time.

Posted by:
justluvmyjob | January 26 at 10:41 PM

Not me. I can’t stand the guilt.

Posted by:
survivor | January 26 at 10:59 PM

Thirty-Two

F
ebruary began with a bang. And an ominous thump.

Grandmother had gotten up in the night and fallen down the stairs.

By the time I reached her, she was lying in the entry hall beneath the bottom step. Her eyes were closed and I couldn’t get her to open them. Couldn’t get her to say anything. Couldn’t get her to respond at all.

I called 9-1-1.

And then I called Joe.

He arrived first and insisted we didn’t move her. He got a blanket from the hall closet and spread it across her.

I knelt down beside her and reached a hand out to grasp hers.

“Don’t.”

I looked up at him.

“Her arm or…something else…could be broken. Don’t touch her. Just in case.”

I sat on the floor beside her.

We heard a siren in the distance. Heard it get loud and louder and then cut off mid-wail as footsteps came thudding up the walk.

Joe opened the door.

They placed an oxygen mask over Grandmother’s mouth and nose. Brought in a backboard. Placed a collar around her neck. Took her out to the ambulance.

I climbed in beside her. One of the paramedics started to shut the door. “But, Joe—”

He poked his head in just before the door shut. “I’ll meet you there.”

The ambulance moved from the curb, siren screaming, carrying us off into the night.

At the hospital they took Grandmother from the ambulance and wheeled her inside. It took me a minute to jump out, and by that time she had disappeared. I went in through the doors marked EMERGENCY and wandered through a maze of halls. Returned to where I’d started and walked in the other direction. Came to a waiting room. Everyone looked away from the nurse at the counter and stared at me with blank eyes. I stood in front of the counter, waiting for the nurse on duty to acknowledge me.

But the phone kept ringing and she kept on answering it. She kept one finger held up in the air, asking me to hang on for just a minute. But “just a minute” soon turned into five.

Finally, she set down the phone.

“Excuse me. I just wanted to know—”

It rang again.

“Can you wait just one minute?” The nurse picked up the phone before I could respond.

No. I really couldn’t. Because by that point, I’d been at the hospital for more than ten minutes. And somewhere back there was Grandmother. So I left the counter and walked through the doors I’d come in, determined to wander the halls until I found someone who could show me where to go.

But that was easier imagined than accomplished.

One long hall led into another and another. And although there were many doors that lined the halls, all of them were closed. And, I soon discovered, locked. I never came across another living soul. Although I had the idea somewhere in the bowels of the building were lots of dead ones.

For all I knew, Grandmother could be among them.

At the intersection of hallways, signs pointed to places like oncology, gynecology, and radiology. All of them places I didn’t want to visit. Eventually, I walked out into a vast lobby. Deserted at that hour, in the morning the coffee cart would probably open and maybe a person would staff the window marked INFORMATION. But at 2:30 it was empty.

I put my face up to the glass window, turned it sideways, pressing my cheek against the glass, longing for a glimpse of a map. Finally I just gave up. I considered returning to the waiting room, but as I thought about my long sinuous journey to the lobby, I realized I didn’t know anymore where I’d come from.

So I took the only course of action I could.

I went out the lobby doors, into the frigid night, and walked around the outside of the hospital until I came, once more, to the door marked EMERGENCY.

My plan was to take the phone from the nurse and strangle her with the cord until she told me where Grandmother was. But fate intervened. An ambulance was still parked out in front. Several paramedics were hanging out by the door. They were
my
paramedics. Grandmother’s.

“Excuse me.”

They stopped talking and looked toward me.

“Do you know where they’ve taken my grandmother?”

“Yeah, sure.” One of them held the door open. “I’ll show you.”

He directed me to a sitting room. And seated there, side by side, were Joe and Oliver.

Joe stood as I approached.

So did Oliver.

“Where were you?” It was a relief to see Joe. I hadn’t realized before that moment that I had been counting on his presence.

“Where were
you?
”

“Trying to find Grandmother.”

“I assumed you were in there.” He tipped his head in the direction of a door. “With her.”

“She’s in there?” I went to the door, tried to peer in the high window. I wasn’t tall enough. I tried to push it open, but Joe stopped me.

He took me by the hand and led me to a chair. “When they’re done, they’ll come out.”

“Did they tell you that? Do you know for sure she’s still in there?”