The Voices in Our Heads (13 page)

I exit the truck and turn up my collar. The door squawks when I slam it shut, and for the millionth time I wish I could operate out of a van. But vans and midsized Penske movers and U-Haul units are designed for homeowners who don’t like using high ramps. I need fifty-two inches from wheel’s bottom to deck, just like a sixteen-wheeler.

So I can access the loading dock.

My title at Red Star is officially a “closer,” a part-time, intermediary evening manager who straightens the product on the aisle end caps, levels the shelves, rotates the stock, and runs the red handbaskets left at the registers over to the area in front of the coupon pamphlet rack. I do regular freezer checks with the Raytech Minitemp hand laser, check expiration dates, put out fires in customer service, and oversee the slow-moving maintenance guy while he throws deli, seafood, and bakery trash into the compactor and crams it down the chute with a snow shovel. At 8:00, Harold comes in to break down the product stacked and shrinkwrapped in the back room storage area across from the three trailer bays, and then he wheels the grocery and non-food items on U-frames out onto the floor and into the appropriate aisles. At midnight, when the store officially closes to the public and he leaves, I am alone as the stand-in nighttime crew chief, since Joey D. is out on disability. Lots of packing-out for one guy, and most would squawk, I suppose, that the sluggish economy has turned a graveyard shift usually requiring five union employees into a one-man circus.

Not I.

Come midnight I can finally go to receiving, yank the chain hand over hand to crank up the ribbed steel garage door, and briefly venture into the midnight darkness. To further my artistic journey.

To bring her inside.

Cold box.

A flat-top freezer on rollers, six feet long, three feet high, sometimes adorned with two sliding glass doors as cover panels, other times left bare and open-port for easy customer access to the sale chicken breasts, or bulk shrimp, or the Roy Rogers sausage breakfast packs that weren’t moving so well in aisle 22. There are three freezer tubs outside on the dock apron that have gone down. They have required a tune-up for a week or so now, and I am always the first line of defense upper management “puts right on it,” checking the fuses and all the connections down by the bottom flat panel where the electric is exposed before they call in Redco with a real work order. I’ve always been good with this little bullshit wire-to-wire stuff; another freebie for the company. There are seventeen of these units positioned throughout the store, and always three or so that seem to go down the minute I fix the ones out on the dock. Busy work. Never ends. The supermarket business is like painting the Golden Gate Bridge, I kid you not.

I bought my own freezer last year from a Pathmark that went out of business in a suburban location seventy miles west of here. Gave a fake name and paid cash. Shouldered the ten percent buyer’s premium the fixtures guy tacked on without even batting an eye. The place was a disaster. They were seven days from closing, all the product on sale fifty to seventy off, and the customers were scavenging the shit out of the place. Since I’d brought transportation, everyone I dealt with seemed quite happy to let me roll it out myself so they could quickly forget me and attend the next headache.

My cold box looks exactly like the Red Star cold boxes out on the dock apron. There are twenty-three surveillance cameras on premises, and most are positioned in the store area so spills and falls can be backed up with some sort of visual evidence to accompany the given incident report. Did the employee contain the spill? Did he or she leave the area unattended without putting down a minimum of three “floor wet” signs? Was the customer wearing protective clothing and responsible footwear? Was there a witness? You know the drill.

There is one camera that covers the loading dock area, positioned outside above the bay door and facing the woods behind the property. The apron extends only twelve feet ten inches straight out from the receiving opening, and then yawns thirty-two feet off to the right, like a big lip hugging the wall. The dock is accessible to trucks at its far right edge. The lens span of the camera is but twenty-one feet to the right. It records what goes in and what goes out of receiving, but cut from view are the trucks themselves, let alone the three or four odd freezer units lined up at the edge waiting for a tune-up.

When I go out, get my truck, back it in, and finally roll my personal freezer unit from the back bed and out across the apron, it will look as if I am bringing in one of Red Star’s. I have covered the freezer’s open top with a black cloth, soaking wet, and fastened it to the edges with a few sheet-metal screws. I am not worried about the strange appearance of the dark cloth, because the recording will be grainy, the dark top looking as if the shadows are playing across an empty belly.

Not empty.

I have jury-rigged the inside to keep cold for three days without electricity; I got the idea from some dude on the Internet who called it a bowl-within-a-bowl technique. Under the cloth there is a piece of canvas tied over like a huge duffel bag, sewn shut at the flaps with fishing line. I have packed sand in between the inner steel walls and the canvas, and the drenched top cloth literally pulls the heat out the container. The bowl-within-a-bowl guy claims that fruit normally rotted in two days would last three weeks in this makeshift fridge.

I only need a night.

I also have a bit of a safeguard, since cracking and peeling could present monumental setbacks. I have her surrounded by thirty Igloo ice-max cold bars, and I have oiled her so we don’t have that sticking phenomenon, like the little guy who tongues the frosty pole at school on a dare in that Christmas movie I somehow see bits and pieces of, yet never grant a full viewing even though I vow to each year.

I move onto the apron, turn right, walk the lip, jump the edge, and make my way to the employee parking area. Moments later, I am thankful that the security camera doesn’t have sound, because the dock plate I left outside makes a sharp clanging when I drop it down between the dock bumpers and the rear side of the truck I just backed in. It’s dark inside my rig, and the sounds are pronounced because they are echoless. I undo the straps in the dark, feel my way to the back of her, and give a push. There is a scraping, sluggish progress, a moment when the wheels catch and then clatter over the plate, a slight decline, we pull right, I adjust, and I walk her back across the dock lip. At the corner, I lean down even with the rim of the box and use my weight so I don’t scuff the wall on the wide turn.

I’m in.

I pull down the bay door and shut the padlock. I bend down and push her past the receiving shack, past the dairy walk-in box with the soy and the non-fat, and the extra cases of two percent, and the frozen box where we keep the Turkey Hill, Breyer’s, Klondike Bars, and Blue Bunny. I have to squeeze a bit between a few stacks of milk crates and a rack roller filled with cardboard for the baler, and I push through the red swinging doors of the meat room. It’s cold and that’s good. It feels like work, like good work, like solid work, the type that grounds you. I put on a smock. I put on my goggles.

It’s time to make a new doll.

Stainless steel work tables and cutting boards five inches thick. Sharpeners and scales and the auto feed mixer/grinder, and the poultry cutter and the patty former and the packaging unit that’s always running out of plastic.

And of course, there’s the industrial meat saw. I love the hulking, off-silver thing. Looks like something that came from a collector’s basement, and I love the
nostalgia
of it, and the way that every time I see it, that song in every grandmother’s favorite musical comes to mind:
“Let’s start at the very beginning. A very fine place to start.”
Yeah . . . that and an image of Dorothy tapping that dainty little red slipper on the point of that first twirl that becomes the yellow brick road.

Industrial meat saw.

To the eye of the amateur it could go in any metal shop and stand in as a stationary band saw. And while I certainly do appreciate the throwback look, the ripping blade scrolled onto it and the songs in my head, I am just as thankful for the floor beneath it, all smooth red brick with a drain twenty feet long down center, rectangular grates, seven-inch cork inlay surrounding it. After the work is done tonight, after I wipe my brow with a sterile cloth and soak the trade materials in my triple sink arrangement (clean, rinse, sanitize), after I fill the gun reservoir with concentrated industrial acid cleanser so strong it dissolves hair build-up in zoo animal cages, and after I blast the machines and blitz that smooth floor brick with the wall-mounted, gooseneck pressure sprayer, finally to squeegee the waste to the floor drains, I will have long removed any traces of DNA that might have been hanging around. Board of Health wouldn’t have it any other way.

Meat saw.

I adjust the upper guard to accept stock up to nine inches. Overkill, I admit. Her throat is barely six inches in diameter, poor skinny thing, but I wouldn’t want her to catch and snag. It is a real pain in the ass to have her by the waist and the hair and get stuck in this preliminary, crude pass. Once it bucked the blade and caught up on her cheek. Yes. Number three, my only miscarriage.

I lean down and peel off the wet cloth. It smells like musk, wet canvas, Boy Scouts, camping. I get the bone shears and cut through the fishing line. Open the package.

Her name is Melissa. Lucky number thirteen. I haul her out and she almost slips through my arms. I adjust and walk her over to the saw, King Lear carrying Cordelia.

After I remove her head, I am going to eat her eyes. It is ritual. I don’t particularly enjoy it, but certain obligations must be fulfilled; windows to the soul preserved. Feels right, like a hard lesson. Like morals. For the removal of these precious orbs I am going to try using the three-and-a-quarter-inch boning blade tonight, even though it will be like surgery under a rock. The serrated spoon doesn’t really cut worth a damn, and it sucks to get the remains of the extra ocular muscles caught between your teeth with no chance to floss right away.

Yeah, there’s a pop and burst, like a cherry tomato. No, it doesn’t taste like chicken. Yes, I am careful when I do this, because it’s really gross if it flies out of your mouth and you have to eat it off the floor.

Now, with the preliminaries done, it is time for creation. It was a clean cut, no danglers, and the headpiece is on the table next to the cutting board. There is a thick pool of blood by the body that I am going to need to attend to, but not now. I arrange my cutting tools biggest to smallest, and in three groups, Breaking and Skinning, Lance and Fillet, and Carving and Slicing. I bring her head before me and move the damp hair off her lovely face. I tie it back in a ponytail for her, this long, loose, curly, redwood perm with gold sunset highlights. The cavities where her eyes were seated stare out in pure, childlike wonder. She has straight teeth. Sharp cheekbones, and featherings of pink blush to accent them. Beautiful.

I reach for my first instruments and hold them over her for a moment, poised, ready, teetering on the brink of it. In my right hand I have the ten-inch breaking knife curved up like the weapon of some oily thief in a third-world desert marketplace, and in my left I hold the five-inch skinning blade, angled slightly, picking up gleam. A conductor ready to start his symphony. The painter standing ready with two brushes instead of just one.

I lean in and set to work.

And the colors are glorious.

I attended the University of the Arts back in the seventies, and studied pointillism: small distinct dots applied in patterns that form images best seen from varied distances. Georges Seurat developed the technique in 1886, a branch-off of Impressionism, and it was quite popular until computer animation made it all rather obsolete. I suppose the most practical example of the thing nowadays is newspaper print, the dinosaur that can’t be killed, but what has been lost in modern artistic relevance has been revived through metaphor.

We are too close up to our world nowadays to really “see” anything. Existence has become so ultimately accessible through virtual search engines that we have become a generation addicted to freeze-frames and short climaxes. We are egotistical self-hunters, obsessed with admiring the heads on the wall, our lives no more than the blur we ignore between texts, and Facebook postings, and shock-clips on YouTube. We have become background to our own theatrical presentations. Lifetime scrapbookers.

Time for some distance. Some breath. Some perspective.

Some awareness throughout the routine between poses.

Some wow down in the trenches.

There are gulls in a V formation, flying toward the promise of morning sun still hiding behind the horizon, the mountain tunnel, and the power station.

If I was pulled over and the trailer was searched right now, the given officer would find a very dead girl named Melissa Baumgardener lying rigidly in my used cold box, her face rearranged in what would seem random cuts, gouges, and ribbons, head clearly removed then sewn crudely back on, a kitchen broomstick shoved so far up her tight little ass he would be able to see the business end of it in the back of her throat if he took the time to force open her jaws.

Actually, it is not a broomstick. It is thicker and about three feet longer: one of those window poles janitors at my local elementary school found in the basement and threw out last month. And the cuts, gouges, and ribbons, the lacerations and the gradations I could only get right by wheeling in a deli meat slicer and making five passes, the second set of eye craters, the backup nose hole and twin mouth-orifice I dug out of her left temple, cheek, and jawbone, all of that would seem the grisly work of a madman.

But I am not interested in the view of the officer, nor the report of some criminal psychologist. I know very well what I am.

I am an educated man who holds menial jobs like the rest of us caught up in this nightmare of an economy, a creator, a messenger aiming his craft at your transitions, the times between movie shorts, the dead minutes that are the real moments of your lives: the trips to the bathroom, the times you make breakfast and fill out the Post-it notes to stick on the fridge, the moments at work when you look at the clock, those stretches in the car when you drive between “meaningful” destinations.