Why Are You So Sad? (12 page)

Do you realize you have on average another 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?

That's only if you count forward. But for what it is worth, I think you find me attractive, and I don't mind that you do. I am flattered, even. You have a funny bald spot on the back of your head, and I think it evokes a certain kind of worn-down innocence; it makes you sympathetic, which I think is attractive, as well as perfect for my project.

I put my hand on my head to feel the bald spot, but then realized what I was doing, and that she would realize which question I was reading, which even though we both knew I had read it, I did not want to acknowledge, because I did not know how to acknowledge it. I was scared, and excited. I was aware that my pulse was picking up.

Do you think people will remember you after you die?

I think I'll die after people remember me.

For how long after you die?

[1/(year of death – year of birth)] x {[number of friends + press clippings + photos + (size of gravestone x popularity of cemeteries) + honorary bench at nonprofit theater] / national attention span}.

Do you believe in God?

I think God is a placeholder for the anxiety created by unsatisfying answers to unanswerable questions.

I was feeling something. No one else had taken my survey so seriously. She wasn't promoting a falsely professional and compliant persona, nor was she trying to scold a spouse for trying to carve out a little truth in his life. There was no condescension. There was care and imagination in her responses. A boldness. A triumphant and evolved immunity, perhaps. If I didn't love her, I surely loved her answers. I looked up to see if she was in fact as beautiful as her answers, and she was no longer sitting there. I panicked. I felt a dryness in my throat. I felt a loss. A separation. A desperate willingness to believe in ghosts, if that was what she had been, and the possibility of building a future around a ghost. I lost my appetite. I cut a piece of sausage and put it in my mouth. I pressed down on it slowly with my teeth, so that every bit of the juice would get its moment on my tongue. I tasted nothing. Finally, I turned around and spotted her with her purse on the bar talking to the bartender. She saw me looking at her and she gave a small, reassuring wave. She was as beautiful as her answers.

Do you believe in life after death?

I believe in egg at exact same moment as chicken.

Do you hear voices?

I think you have a very nice voice. My project will entail you reading with that voice. We will perform our piece in a shopping mall. I want to dress you in an orange jumpsuit and chain your hands together behind your back. A woman (me) dressed as a low-ranking military lackey will hold a megaphone up to your mouth, and you will be forced to read letters from children to Santa Claus through the megaphone. There is a small chance we could get arrested.

Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?

I like the way martinis are shaped.

Do you think we need more sports?

No, but I do like the outfits.

Have you ever fallen in love?

I keep love along my side, instead of falling into it.

Now, what do you say about participating in my art project, especially since you are unemployed?

I looked up and she was there again.

“I paid the bill for us. Would you like to walk me to my car?”

I nodded. I couldn't really speak. I put all of the surveys in the folder and followed her out of the restaurant. There was a fluid confidence in her stride. The shining hoops that were hanging from her ears swayed in front of me, and something in me swayed too.

Under the towering security lights of the parking lot, I asked her how she could afford to be a conceptual artist.

“My daddy is rich,” she said. “I also apply for grants.” She went on to confess that her father had started the Anxiety Channel, the lucrative twenty-four-hour cable network that only broadcasts info-specials on fires, disease, and insect invasions. Apparently it appeals to all advertisers.

“People are vulnerable when they are afraid,” she said. “They will buy anything, especially insurance.”

I found this appalling.

She handed me her card and said, “Will you meet me at the Merchant's Gate Commercial Center tomorrow morning at nine thirty a.m.?” She said it while leaning against a vintage automobile.

I said, “Can I pass out my surveys at the mall?”

She looked troubled. Torn. Like she was doing calculations in her head.

She said, “Would you like to kiss me?”

I said, “That is not fair.”

From here I will paraphrase:

She said, “I like your body language.”

I said, “I like your nail polish.”

She said, “I like your spending patterns.”

I said, “I like your lending policies.”

She said, “I like your glove compartments.”

I said, “I like your hood ornaments.”

She pulled on my pockets, forcing me to lean into her. I was close enough to smell that she had never sweat. Never in all of her life.

I let her let me kiss her.

It was a spangled, microscopic world. Entire villages were dancing and roasting pigs on spits. Families gathered around old clanky pianos and sang songs that brought tears to the elders. All the children playing games in all the streets scored goals in a flickering continuum of identical moments. Galaxies gladly collided. There were no tongues. Just four shy, curious lips. It lasted about six seconds.

She said, “I hope I will see you tomorrow,” and got in her car.

 

I
t must have rained while we were in Schlitzy's. The pavement was darker and the cars were quieter. All the tires went
shhhh
. I had only a vague sense of the road ahead. The streets, the dangling traffic lights, the competing motion of vehicles, the pedestrians I might run over—all were part of a diaphanous curtain hanging in front of my memory. My concentration was on the kiss. The objects in front of my car were merely outlines on tracing paper. The real action was a loop in my head. We kiss we kiss we kiss. Lips touch. Hands clasp. Lips touch. I feel it in my elbows and knees. I am weak and blind and falling into her. I am alive and wanted.

A man at the side of the road was holding cardboard that said, “Too Many Wars. No House. Honest Sandwich Wanted.” I slowed and opened the window just enough to push through a dollar, and then kept going.

I replayed the kiss again. It was a mysterious footprint left fresh in mud. I circled and circled it, trying to calculate the size and shape of the animal that had left it in its wake.

I wondered if Ms. Fellowes-Allbrecht would introduce me to her father. Maybe his network could produce an info-special about the sadness. They could hire me, and I would give emotional weather forecasts: “Gusts of ambivalence threaten an otherwise temperate weekend . . . The long days of summer may cause a false and painfully fleeting simulation of euphoria . . . Self-esteem looks to be overshadowed by an unfulfilled searching for forsaken objects.”

I took the War of 1812 Bridge back across the bay. The bridge was striking at night, all of its promise glowing, the layers of grime and graffiti kept secret. The water below it was inky. The lights of the bridge were reflected and rippling in the blackness.

Just past the bridge, I merged with the northbound traffic. The river of red taillights curled down to the right and back around to a matching highway below. We followed each other like a string of ants. I thought again of her lips. The two of us leaning against that collectible car. The unpredictability of a stranger's mouth. The heat. The warm desire. The blind trust. The inherent risk. I tried to remember a time when kissing Brenda felt like that, and my mind was an empty expanse. Our kisses had become a form of punctuation.

I almost missed my exit trying to recall the shape of Brenda's lips. She no longer had a mouth. Her eyes were melting away. But then, reflecting again on the illicit kiss outside of Schlitzy's, I felt that fading too. Only a sketch. A secondhand account from someone who knew someone at the scene of the crime. I was losing Glenda's face, the way her eyes looked devilish right before contact, the taste of her mouth. I squinted my mind's eye. I strained. It was all falling away.

A small leaf was trapped under one of my windshield wipers. I turned on the wipers, but it didn't free the leaf. The wipers dragged the leaf back and forth, in arcs that said good-bye, and then good-bye again. It was leaving a party and could never get through the endless round of farewells. I turned the wipers off. The leaf, still pinned to the windshield, said,
You don't want to dress up in an orange suit. You hate Christmas. You hate malls. She isn't safe.

Stop listening to leaves, I thought.

I was in the final leg of my return commute, along the Birth of America Expressway that defines the western edge of my neighborhood. The Oil'N'Gas Fleximart advertising its perpetual sale on car deodorant. The abandoned warehouse with the broken windows. The decommissioned train depot that could never hold on to a business—not flowers, not donuts, not travel massages. I drove past True Horizons High School. The football bleachers held shiny puddles. A solitary car was in the school's parking lot, its doors open, teenage music thumping. I drove past an Exercise Emporium and a Rebate Galaxy, and then turned into the thicket of suburban housing that makes up our neighborhood. Patterns of houses repeated themselves and eddied into cul-de-sacs. A tricycle sat abandoned at the base of a driveway. A basketball hoop stood netless. A fire hydrant was painted to look like a silver robot. The bushes in front of our house were scruffy orphans. The house looked unplugged and asleep.

The front door was unlocked. All the lights were off except for the imitation stained-glass fixture that hangs above our kitchen table. A note was waiting for me:
You missed another good episode. Dr. Tillory has cancer again. Also, you still haven't read the letter I gave you the other morning. I'm disappointed.

I sat at the table in the near dark and held my head. It was a bowling ball. Heavy. Holes you wanted to stick your fingers in, opening up a lust to hurl.

I looked around at my home, the familiar items coated in darkness: cupboards, spoons, telephones, bills, coupons affixed to the refrigerator, a cat toy on the floor. I felt entombed. My head, my marriage, my house—all felt unmoored. A clumsy tower of wooden blocks engineered by children. I put the surveys on the table, laid them out in front of me, and belched up sausage and beer. I knew then.

Einstein's theory of relativity says that measuring all the smiles and frowns in a falling elevator will not reveal the speed of the fall. The surveys were useless. We were all plummeting at the exact same rate. I was out of a job and my project was impotent. I found that to be true in a brief moment of clarity that rang through a swelling headache. There was no world to save. There was no me to save it. For half a moment I thought I could go to the mall with Glenda and warn the shoppers through the megaphone. But I knew that all the shoppers and all their hot wives would put on headphones and listen to their own music to protect themselves from the ricochet of meaning. They would look at us like we were Hare Krishnas. Not asking “What is that important message they speak?” but “Why is there bird shit on their foreheads?”

I went upstairs to stare quietly at my sleeping wife. She looked peaceful. She didn't snore, but I could hear her breathing softly. She looked like a baby animal. She looked ready to drool. The television was still on, carving a glow into the darkness and offering her new products for her dreams. I turned it off and left her.

I took six of every type of pill we had in the medicine cabinet and sat on the toilet with the lid down. I had the pills in my hand: round, flat, oval, white, yellow, blue. Dividing lines drawn down the center for responsible dosage. Before each pill I said aloud, “Are you going to stop yourself from taking this pill?” Every time I answered the question by swallowing a pill.

I wrote a two-line poem on a cube of toilet paper. My pocket was still full of pens I'd stolen from the office. The ink bled and expanded into the absorbent tissue, but it was still legible. Two lines were all I could write. There was no note that could explain. The truth, the real truth, is only reduced by explanations. What I wrote down made sense to me, but only because nothing in the world made sense to me. I went back to the bedroom and put the poem under Brenda's pillow. She awoke long enough to say “There's Chinese in the fridge,” and then she fell back asleep.

Downstairs I poured myself a glass of Old Grandma to sip on while I waited it out. I was about to sit down in the chair that had belonged to Brenda's dead uncle when I remembered the letter. I was cautious walking from the living room to the kitchen for the letter, and then back to the living room again. I didn't want to shake up the pills in my stomach or get too dizzy. I was careful about my steps.

We had inherited the massive corduroy chair from Brenda's Uncle Henry. Neither of us wanted it, because it was ugly, but Brenda's mother seemed offended, so we took it, and then we soon realized that the ugliness was outweighed by the lazy brilliance of the thing. It was one of the few places I could relax. I sat in it with the letter. I sniffed the envelope. It smelled like nothing. Old paper. My name on the front of it was fading. Black ink that now looked brown.

I started to feel the dull deceleration of the Lortab plus Vicodin plus pentobarbital plus Xanax plus Librium plus Benadryl plus melatonin plus vitamin E. The letter seemed familiar. I thought about calling the number, but then I thought about Switzerland. When I graduated from college my mother surprised me and gave me money to travel around Europe. I saw churches and wrote postcards and stared at people on trains. Poor planning had me stopping over for a night in a city next to a river where they made pills for human pains. It was a wide river, but because it was Swiss, it was not wild. Or maybe it was well-behaved because it was fed a cocktail of pharmaceutical waste. I was feeling well-behaved myself, lying back in Uncle Henry's chair. I was seeing a river of pills. The chair was a rowboat, and I was dipping the oars into capsules and tablets, and hearing the echoes of men and women in lab coats hammering out powders.

I thought again about calling the number. I couldn't imagine locating the energy to get up and find the telephone. I was a little thirsty. My head ticked slower. It was looking for a finish line. I wondered if Brenda would remarry. It wasn't nice what I was doing. I wasn't helping things. I looked to the side of the chair, down at the floor. I could see through the rug, through the floorboards, deep into the core of the earth. A small, hairless man with moon-colored skin was operating furnaces that powered our collective reality. He was shoveling coal into ovens, sweating and smiling. He looked up and waved at me.

I said,
Does this matter? Does one person matter? Is it rude to make your wife disengage your dead body from the recliner and take it to the morgue?

And he said,
Morgues offer pickup services, and it doesn't matter all that much when you go.
He said,
You probably overreacted, but there is nothing about your mind or soul that is indispensable. And besides, I don't know you that well, but my guess is you would find the future pretty disappointing.

My mouth was chalky. I kept telling myself to go get a glass of water. And then I would wait to see if I got up to get the water, and would find that I was still in the chair. My self wasn't listening to myself. My self was too busy watching my self's eyelids failing to resist their growing weight. With every ounce of energy I could gather, I reached for the remote control on the table next to the chair, and I clicked on the TV. I thought this might help me confirm that I was still experiencing the living world. What I found was that everybody on every channel was selling knives.

I closed my eyes. I said,
You are only going to close your eyes for a second, but you won't keep them closed, because maybe you don't want to slip away.

I saw silver static. I saw diagonal lines descending a staircase. I opened my eyes and I could see back through the living room and on through the kitchen and around the corner into the front hallway. A man was by the front door. He was wearing a sweatshirt with my name on it, but in foreign letters. He was trying to turn the doorknob as quietly as possible so that nobody could hear him slink off.