Apathy and Other Small Victories (7 page)

But really it’s condescending and patronizing not to make fun of someone because they’re old or stupid or crippled or morbidly obese. Banged up people don’t want your pity. They just want to be treated like everyone else. Mockery, when done without prejudice or discretion, can be a form of respect. It’s the closest we’ll ever come to true equality.

But even I had to draw the line somewhere. Some line at least. And laughing at Marlene’s deaf rendition of “Jessie’s Girl” was it. A great shadow of conscience fell upon me. And it was cold, and felt like shame. I couldn’t speak. Thank christ for sign language.

You sing this at karaoke?

Sometimes. Why?

I prayed that the crowd, if not as kind as me, was at least discreet.

How did you meet your boyfriend?

I sang “Hey Mickey” and when I was done he bought me a drink.

Jesus.

Is he deaf too?

No. He can hear everything.

Jesus.

He must be a real jackass.

Shut up! He’s nice, and much better looking than my husband.

Who would win in a fight, this guy or your husband?

My husband, easy. He’s crazy. He used to be in the army.

They let deaf guys in the army? Fucking A.

Does your husband know about your boyfriend?

No way! He’d kill me if he did. But he always asks me, “Where are you going? Who are you going out with? Where were you all night?” I think he follows me sometimes. It’s so annoying.

That makes you mad?

Yeah.

You’re mad because he’s jealous?

Yeah, it’s so annoying.

Maybe he’s jealous because you’re cheating on him, dumb ass.

No, he’d be jealous even if I wasn’t, so why not cheat on him?
she signed.

There are chickens, there are eggs, there are deaf girls singing karaoke. Nothing makes sense anymore.

Then it was my first day of work. At Gwen’s company, Panopticon Insurance. I was a temp. A woman from human resources took me around to all the cubicles for introductions.

“This is Shane! He’s your new temp! He comes highly recommended!”

“So nice to meet you!”

“Great to have you on the team!”

“Welcome aboard!”

“They’re really throwing you right in, huh? Headfirst, har har!”

Yeah, har har. I tried to fake a smile but all I could do was wince and grit my teeth and groan a hello that sounded like Ed McMahon after a massive stroke. It was horrifying. Khaki pants and polo shirts and exclamation points at the end of every sentence. Each introduction was like a kick in the groin. When someone made a bad joke it was like they’d taken a running start. I had to drop to one knee after this pale turtle-looking man with a huge Adam’s apple and a headset touched his finger to his earpiece and said, “Houston, we have a new temp.”

I would never be able to have children.

My job was to sort, collate and alphabetize all the insurance forms that came in every day, and then send them to the records department for filing. But sorting, collating and alphabetizing are three different words for the same thing really, so by doing nothing I was already two-thirds of the way done. I was efficient.

On my first day I tried to alphabetize for about ten minutes, but being twenty-eight years old and not severely retarded I really couldn’t justify it to myself so I stopped. Then I pretended to alphabetize, but that was too hard. It’s the same as actually working except you get nothing done, which is more satisfying philosophically but still its own kind of work. The fucking fascists didn’t give me Internet access, so mostly I just threw the insurance forms in the garbage and slept in the bathroom. Always in the handicapped stall.

It was clean, spacious, and down at the end of the row against the wall so you couldn’t have guys shitting against you on two fronts. Like my grandmother said, “In the bedroom and the bathroom, never get outflanked.” I was six years old. God she was a pig. But it was good as far as stalls go, with those bars on the walls that make you feel like you’re a quadriplegic learning to walk again, or a ballerina. And it was always empty because most regular people feel too bad to use it, like they’d be screwing some crippled guy who’d have to shit his pants because he’s too handicapped to sit in a regular stall. But all the handicapped people are at home, being handicapped. They’re not working at insurance companies. When was the last time you saw a guy in a wheelchair using the copy machine? Use your fucking head.

So there I was every day, pants down, legs splayed out, arms limp at my sides, head back against the wall, my mouth hanging open, unconscious. I wanted to get a picture of myself like that, put it on a poster saying “Hey Corporate America, Fuck You!” It would be to disillusioned office douche bags what that John Belushi
Animal House
poster was for dipshit college students. I would finally be famous for sleeping on a toilet bowl with my pants pulled down, just like I’d always dreamed.

The only thing you can do as a temp is hide somewhere until it’s time to go home, and the bathroom is the best place. If anybody ever asked me where I’d been all day I could answer truthfully, and if they had the audacity to ask why I’d spent my entire day in the handicapped stall I’d say, “Explosive diarrhea. I saw blood.” Five words and that motherfucker would never even look at me again.

But nobody ever asked, because nobody really cares. As long as you’re not sitting at your desk assembling an assault rifle or jerking off to the Internet—pants down, literally masturbating—people assume you’re somewhere doing something for somebody. Nobody knows what anyone else does all day in an office. Most people don’t know what they do themselves.

It was a good place to hide, but I did not like sleeping in a bathroom all day. It was a fucking men’s room for christ’s sake. Bad things happen in those bowls. The stench and the groans and the splashing sounds made me sad. And that kind of thing stays with you, all day. My lunches were always ruined. Lunch, as a meal for me, has never really been the same. And I began to develop a kind of bathroom narcolepsy so that whenever I sat on a toilet I’d start nodding off, even if I wasn’t tired. I was Pavlov’s mongoloid third cousin from that other experiment. His name was Iggy. He died forgotten and alone. And that kind of thing is fine if you’re at home or in a fancy restaurant, but if you pass out in a bus station bathroom you wake up engaged to some dude in a straw hat named Maynard, and that’s no good. Whatever happened, I wasn’t blowing anybody.

Despite what the manufacturers say, you don’t really get a solid sleep sitting on a toilet. My neck was always crooked and the flush handle bruised my spine, and I could only sleep for half an hour at a time before the tingling in my strangled legs got so bad that it knifed me awake. I had frequent nightmares, usually about vampires or dinosaurs who were chasing me, and I couldn’t run away because of my bad legs. Sometimes I’d wake up shouting. God knows what anyone outside the stall thought was going on. My nerves were shot. And whenever I’d go to stand up my still-asleep legs would give out from under me and I’d have to use the ballerina bars or else I’d fall down.

Then it was like the Special Olympics trying to get back to my cubicle, Terry Foxing it down the hallway and falling into my chair, where I’d rub the backs of my legs and try to get the blood flowing again. And when it did I’d go back in and take another nap. I was afraid I might be developing varicose veins or juvenile diabetes. Something. Cutting off circulation to both legs for eight hours every day can’t be good for anybody. Still, it was less humiliating than sitting at a desk and alphabetizing insurance forms. Somehow, it was.

 * * *

I was standing in the hallway, halfway between my cubicle and my handicapped stall, not sure which was which really, leaning up against the wall like a drunk in the daytime hoping no one would notice me because I could fall down at any moment.

It was early on, before I knew the physiology of sleeping on a toilet bowl and its effects, and what I needed to do to counteract them: how long to hold on to the quadriplegic bars before trying to walk on my own, how to mazimize my momentum without tripping over my dead legs, how to use my lack of balance to my advantage, which I never really figured out. It was all a matter of timing and rhythm, like tap dancing. In those first few days I knew how to shuffle ball step, but I was wearing the wrong shoes.

So I leaned there, my palm flat on the wall, pretending to feel the texture of the smooth paint with my fingertips because I couldn’t think of anything else I’d conceivably be doing in that pose. My head was still ragged from fitful, tormenting toilet sleep. I had dreamt of vampires who were riding dinosaurs. I was still not convinced it wasn’t real. And then I saw something round the corner up ahead. A dark shape lurching towards me, flailing and stomping and swinging a machete. And it was closing fast.

It was like every nightmare I’d ever had as a child, the monster chasing me down and me paralyzed, powerless to run or yell for my mommy. And I would have yelled for my mommy then, in the hallway of that insurance company, if my throat hadn’t been completely closed off and dammed shut. The sound in my head was like the Nazi at the end of
Raiders of the Lost Ark
who screams like a woman before he melts, and I’m sure I had the same look on my face.

I was petrified. As it came closer in its frantic lurch I saw that it was a man. An obviously insane man with a massive puff of black hair, like Art Garfunkel gone mad and brunette. He was wearing an army flak jacket and camouflage pants and huge black boots that slapped the carpeted floor like they were cobbled out of cinder blocks. His legs were wide apart like he was permanently bowlegged and he had to swing each one to get it moving. In his hand was a pair of long pruning shears.

Amazingly he didn’t plunge them into my chest. Not even by accident. He spastic-stepped past me, flailing his arms like he was at the end of a power-walking marathon, not even slicing open my head as he went, a palsied cowboy sidling into the sunset.

“Mommy,” I whispered, and collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Later I found out his name was Carl. He came in sometimes to water the plants people had in boxes on their cubicle walls, and he’d cut off the dead leaves when it came to that. Rumor had it he’d been in the war and taken some shrapnel in the hip and the head, that’s why he was all banged up.

This was our first conversation:

“Hi,” he said, standing behind me in my cubicle and scaring the crap out of me.

“Hey.” I was staring at his machete pruning shears. “How’s it going?”

There was a gut-wrenching silence for about thirty seconds. We stared at each other. Or his one eye stared at me while the other one wandered around in its socket, drifting over my head and swinging side to side like a pendulum. God, war is hell. I wanted to throw myself onto his shears and end it finally, on my own terms at least.

“My name is Carl,” he said eight years later, “with two
a
’s.”

“Oh, like c-a-a-r-l?” Maybe he was Norwegian.

“No, k-a-r-a-l. Like Karal. I water the plants and cut them.”

“Oh, okay. Nice… .” We looked at each other. “I don’t, have any plants.”

“Okay, bye.”

Karal was a terrible gardener. He’d forget to water the plants one week then hack the shit out of them the next. Nobody ever said anything to him though. They left him alone. He’d earned the right to be a terrible gardener by defending his country, and freedom. God bless Karal, and America too.

That next Tuesday when I went to Bryce’s wife’s door I didn’t die, and I didn’t die the Tuesday after that either. There was a succession of Tuesdays where I wasn’t murdered. It eventually got to the point where my first thought after waking up Tuesday mornings wasn’t, “Soon, I will be dead.” And that was nice.

It was always mostly the same. She’d open the door in her bathrobe, stare through me long enough to make me uncomfortable no matter how much cold detachment I’d practiced in my bathroom mirror beforehand, then she’d go into the other room and leave me to follow. Sometimes her blue bathrobe looked brighter, like she’d just washed it with a new kind of detergent, and I thought this might be a sign that these would be special nights. But they weren’t. I’d stopped saying my last words after that first Tuesday, and I hadn’t been able to think of any others, so I said nothing at all.

“You should go,” was all she ever said.

Still, after a few Tuesdays, just from sheer repetition, the sex had marginally improved. We were still dead fish being swung by an off duty clown, but we weren’t just any kind of fish. And even if we weren’t two majestic salmon, glistening in the sun as we leaped up a waterfall into the mouth of a huge fucking grizzly bear, we were at least tuna. Someone, somewhere would be glad to catch and eat us. And on rare Tuesdays we were canned tuna, fitting together, stackable, on sale two for one if you had a coupon. For a few moments at least. And the off duty clown yawned as he put us on a high shelf in his kitchen and fixed himself a drink.

I didn’t mind so much lying around afterwards, watching the ceiling fan, waiting for her to tell me to leave. Of course I wanted to know what the fucked up situation between her and Bryce was, and why I’d become a part of it, and if I should start fearing death again, but I wasn’t about to ask. I was in no hurry to find out really. This was good enough for me. I’d already stiffed Bryce $300 on the rent instead of two, figuring he wouldn’t want to haggle over the price we’d agreed upon for me to fuck his wife. And he didn’t. If I was still alive at the end of the month I wouldn’t pay at all. Until then I’d keep coming back every Tuesday just to see what would happen. All I knew was that soon I’d be told to go home, which was reassuring.

Then one Tuesday, after some fleeting canned tuna sex, she said, “So tell me about yourself.” Matter of fact, like we just happened to be sitting next to each other at a dinner party. Like we were meeting for the first time. And maybe we were.