Woke Up Lonely (6 page)

The bar was packed. Half the place was given over to a birthday party, the other half consigned to the Helix, whose logo was postered all over the walls and spiraled from the ceiling in rainbow pipe cleaners.

Anne-Janet looked around. Speed dating had already begun, which gave her full view of the roulette being played among these single men and women with nothing happier to do. Was it too late to leave? This night was going to be a bust, she knew it. She searched for the coat-check ticket in her purse, the plan to about-face, go home, and do nothing.

Eh, enough; stay focused. She’d heard the testimonials, same as everyone else. Helix Heads. Members who’d directed their goals, resources, and beliefs to practice empathy, no matter how hard. Members who were happier for it. They were together, she was not, so just shut up, Anne-Janet, and date.

Besides, she wouldn’t go home. She’d go back to the hospital and watch the State of the Union with her mother, which was worse.
Our generation has been blessed.
The speech bawled from speakers in the next room and careened off the windows and wood floor of cappuccino tint.

She signed in and collected her date cards. At orientation for the Department of the Interior, she’d been told that new hires who wanted to thrive did well to go to Nixon’s, and so she was not surprised to see Ned Hammerstein in a corner with a woman fifty times prettier than she—the woman sporting a red baize spencer and suede skirt with edelweiss buttons. Throwback Bavarian, repressed but hot.

Anne-Janet hadn’t actually met Ned at work, but she’d been eyeing him from day one. She chose a table across the room from his. And started her night. On your marks, get set, talk.

“Hi,” she said, and looked at her date. His stats were: Gandhi glasses; facial hair goateed but unkempt; skin pallid, eyes pallid.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi back.”

A minute spent. There were prompts on the list; she chose one. “My worst high school moment? This girl Dawn on my gymnastics team tried to switch the talc in my bucket with boric acid because my Yurchenko double-twist vault was better than hers, except a rat got in the bucket and died, and Dawn went to juvie, but the rest of the team blamed me. So, yeah, that was it for friendships meant to last forever.”

“You know,” he said, “you have an asymmetric mouth. I find that very attractive. I think we as humans like symmetry but that we also like to see a pattern, and then to see some slight variation. Music is a great example of that. Establish a pattern and then throw in variations. I guess what I’m saying is, your face is like a song. Like ‘Take Five.’”

Speaking of which:
ding.

Ned stared at his drink. There were cherries in his highball glass; he stabbed one with a cocktail pick. Tried to stab for emphasis. Get it? I hate that my life has brought me to this.

His date scanned a list of questions. “You got any hobbies?”

“I do,” he said. And he looked her over. Her smile was big, and he could see that her front teeth were canted in the direction of her throat and that her lips were tight against her gums, all things moving one way, which boded well if you were a guy with a libido, which Ned was and was not. Not for weeks, but here trying.

“I study the weather. Weather as warfare. Technically, there isn’t much use for the skill because of the UN’s 1977 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. But the fact is, no one cares. I mean, really: if you can roll in a float of clouds just when the enemy needs a sight line, you’re saving lives.”

“Are you a lifesaver?”

“No.”

“Is this your first time doing this?”

“Yes,” he said, but quietly, as though the word, quartered among pride, defeat, disgust, and hope, were not able to assert itself.

“How about we talk about you,” he said.

“No problem,” and she told him she’d just finished six months of psychiatric analysis. That her husband’s helicopter went down in Afghanistan during a training exercise. That the army, finding in six months’ psychiatric surveillance more than enough penance for having murdered her husband, stopped paying for it. “So here I am,” she said. “Trying to make new friends.”

“Jesus,” he said. And he nodded, with the helper literature in mind. It said the only way to assault estrangement and isolation was to pursue ego diminishment. How? By living the life of your contemporaries. So he nodded and frowned and let himself be visibly moved because this woman’s story was awful.

Two down, seven more to go.
Ding.

Anne-Janet had worked her way to Ned’s table at last. She asked if he was having a nice time. Her eyelids fluttered as she spoke, and he couldn’t tell whether she meant to keep them open or closed, which impulse she meant to heel.

She didn’t wait for an answer. Asked, instead, about his life.

“Adopted,” he said. “Just found out, actually. Not even six weeks ago.”

“That come as good or bad news?”

“Both.” And he thought, You are what you are until you are not. Not the genetic progeny of Larissa and Max T. Hammerstein. Not an only child. Yes, a child with a twin, who, for being a girl, was not palatable to Larissa and Max T., who remanded her to foster care on the day she was born, thirty-three years ago.

“Sounds bad,” she said. “But great Prereq.” And she rubbed her eye with the fat of her palm, which jutted from a sweater sleeve that was too long. “You know, like whatever in your life sucks enough to count as prerequisite for wanting to join the Helix.”

Ned smiled. Thinking, This woman’s all right. She hates her wrists.

“Me, I don’t normally do this kind of thing,” she said. “Mostly I set up other people, even if I like the guy, because I figure the other person could make him happier than me. So it’s like doing service.”

“Wow. Sounds like you have good Prereq, too.”

“I know. You got a rash?”

He’d been farming for a spot, several spots, on his back. Anxiety Itch. So many women, so much to tell. Sweat began to front along his hairline and rill down his face.

“No,” he said. “I mean, yes. I get nervous around people.”

“You read the helper lit?”

He shrugged.

“Me too,” she said, and she tugged at her hat—a beanie, really—which saved her at least one confession: I’ve got a crew cut, and whatever the reason, it’s not good.

She reached in her bag for the brochure. It was glossy, picture heavy. Smiling people who didn’t look brainwashed so much as happy, and, of course, a snap of Helix honcho, Thurlow Dan.

They looked over the material, which seemed to fortify the whys of their finding themselves here. What else was there to say? From the lounge came news of the birthday.
Happy birthday, Olgo Panjabi, happy birthday to you.
The voices sang at length, they sang with joy. The hodgepodging of ethnicities in this man’s name was all very beautiful—very consolidating—and people wanted to think about that, especially now.

“That was nice,” she said.

“You’re nice.”

“We should hang out at work,” she said, though he just stared at her blankly.

Ding,
and the MC’s voice: “We are taking a break. Mingle.”

There was birthday cake in the lounge. There was Bruce Bollinger, whose lips were kissed with ganache. There was Olgo Panjabi, source of it all. Olgo, who was now sixty and in whose face was a foreboding about his new year of life, tempered by this impromptu swell of affection for him. There was, also, Anne-Janet and Ned. Interior claimed fifty-eight thousand employees; here were four. They had just met.

From the TV:
“Each age is a dream that is dying or one that is coming to birth.”
The president quoting FDR, who himself quoted an Irish poet.

From the TV:
We have seen the threads of purpose that unite us.
Two terms with this guy. That nasal voice. Those platitudes.

The bartender snorted. He was fluent in drinks that made you sick. Tonight was $5 Trips to Hell, a multi-schnapped, Red Bull, Jägermeister shot he mixed for six at the counter, saying, “The Helix probably pulled in ten thousand people tonight, events all over the country, and this jerk-off is saying we’ve seen the threads that hold us together? Unless he’s Helix, too, he hasn’t seen a thread in years.”

There was laughter. And secret looks. Half the bar was Helix already. Out to recruit, then back to the Bond. The Helix had bought personal data from ten Internet dating sites, which meant it had the emails and psychological vitae of more than fifty million people who had already contributed to the effort of finding each other, and, as such, were reasonably disposed to attend these events. Rest of Your Life Socials. And when the RYLS didn’t produce—when, in fact, they depressed everyone—a Helix Head would swoop in to suggest an alternate means of camaraderie. Weekly meetings. Daily meetings. A lovely house not five miles from here.

Ding.

“So this is my theory,” Ned said. “There is no more famous prototype for twins asunder than Luke and Leia. You know, from
Star Wars.
”

“Uh-huh.”

“And a twin rent from its other will always feel the loss.”

“Sounds reasonable. Only wasn’t there something hanky-panky about Luke and Leia?”

“No,” he said, appalled. “Luke is an ascetic.”

“Do you have a job?” she said, though her voice was so slouched in boredom, she sounded like a teller at the DMV.

“I guess. But it’s weird. I was reading a lot about weather-modification offices in China, silver iodide and cloud seeding. You know, how to make rain and stuff. It’s big in Texas.”

“And?”

“I got a call.”

“Saying what?”

But Ned did not want to say. It was too personal, even for this. He was obsessed with the Vonnegut brothers—one a scientist who discovered the prowess of silver iodide, the other a novelist whose ice-nine plunged the world into the next Frost—and it was Ned’s idea to be like a hybrid of the two. So when he got a call, the decision was easy. Did Ned want to do something for the Department of the Interior that had something to do with changing the weather, which itself had everything to do with snubbing his powerlessness in the world? Why yes, yes he did. Ned had been with Interior for three weeks. But no one had asked him about the weather or anything else.

“It’s boring,” he said. “Tell me about you.”

“I’m anorexic—what more’s there to say?”

“Do you want help?”

“Oh, hell no.”

They laughed until the bell.

Anne-Janet pressed her napkin into a tear blooming at the corner of her eye. You were not supposed to sit with the same person twice, but there are glitches, there is fate.

She looked at Ned and said, “My mom broke her hip yesterday morning. I got home at about six and found her on the floor. Know what that means?”

“God, that’s awful. Is that why you’re crying?”

“Seven hours on the floor. Just lying there. She’s asleep now. I hate hospitals.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Being here isn’t so bad, though. You think you’re gonna join up?” she said. “The Helix?”

He shrugged. “I’m kind of a member already. But just for stuff like this. I’ve got this twin sister now and have never felt lonelier in my life. So I’m not in it for the politics or whatever. I think that part’s bullshit, anyway.”

“Which part?”

“The armed-and-dangerous part. You hear rumors, but I don’t believe them.”

“Oh, that,” she said. “Probably right, only I have a couple friends who joined a Bond and now no one knows what’s up with them because they won’t talk to anyone but each other.”

“A Bond?”

“Like a commune. People living together in some house or building. They’re all over the country. But I gotta say, I actually think it sounds nice.”

“I bet the Branch Davidians thought their gig was nice, too.”

“No, but they were bonkers. And anyway, how do you know? Maybe they knew they were in a cult and just liked it that way.” She cast her arm like it was the line and she was fishing.

Ned tilted his head, gave her a look. “Wait a minute,” he said. “Do I know you from someplace else?”

Her face said it all. “I work four doors down from you, Ned. I see you every day.”

“Oh, jeez. How embarrassing.”

“That’s okay. I’m not all that stand-out.”

Ding.

Ned thumbed through his date cards. Five dates, one match.
AnneJanet 358.
He returned to the lounge for a last drink and a closing look at her because he was determined to remember her face. He found her with Bruce. Bruce and Olgo.

Ned said, “Happy birthday, Olgo Panjabi.”

Bruce said, “So what is that, anyway? Italian-Indian?”

Olgo wanted another drink. He was feeling vibrant. Sixty years old. Sixty today! Sixty at a time when sixty was the new forty, or so his wife liked to say after orgasm, which she still had, with decent frequency and élan, so that even as he thought about it now, he felt a gathering of love for her ramp up his chest and blossom across his face.

“Okay, one more,” said Bruce, as he assessed the détente in his gut—would it keep until home? He had a bad stomach.

When asked, Bruce said he once did consulting. And Olgo? “Arbitration. I used to envoy proposals between people who hate each other. I wrest accord from the teeth of hostility.”

“Wow.”

“My wife put that on a business card for me once. Just for fun.
Olgo Panjabi: Wresting accord from the teeth of hostility since 1945.
Year I was born.”

Bruce said, “I used to work in TV.
Trial by Liar
—my baby.”

Anne-Janet laughed. “And now we all work for Interior, and none of us knows why.”

A man tapped Ned on the shoulder. He was the organizer of the night. He was saying: Nine minutes, nine women. When you do eight, or
four,
you leave a woman in the lurch. There is a woman in the lurch, and she is demanding satisfaction.

Good grief. Ned was directed to a private room, which was empty barring a single woman at a table and, weirdly, a security detail in the nooks. These guys were so conspicuous. So maybe this woman was a higher-up. Maybe she had powers. Not that powers were such an asset if they meant having to take your security team on a speed date. This woman had a stoop—he could tell even though she was sitting. And though there was supposed to be an age limit here, the woman’s neck said fifty. Drapes of neck. Cascade of neck.