Apathy and Other Small Victories

  Damn good dentist though. Damn good. And he let me pay my bills in installments, which hadn’t started yet.

  “I know you’re good for it,” he said.

  If it weren’t for his fainting spells I’m sure he would’ve had more patients. I never saw anybody else in there but me. Not everyone had my kind of time. The constant fits and iced tea breaks made every appointment a daylong affair. Except for the crying it was very European.

  “I mean, Bus Door Head?” he said, tears draining into his mustache. “I’m sorry!” and he ran out of the room with his face in his hands, leaving me to take the fucking dental dam out of my mouth. Marlene came in and we were both laughing at Doug. After some sign language pantomime of the bus door squashing his head, we talked about her husband. His name was Brian and he was deaf too. I assumed that meant they had a lot in common and that they’d always have plenty to talk about.

  So, we’re deaf huh?

  Yeah, how about that.

  Yeah.

  They’d met at a deaf disco, which I thought was an oxymoron but it wasn’t. She told me it was a club where they pump the music up ear-bleeding loud and have sets of strobe lights and fog that smells like raspberries. Everyone turns up their hearing aids and dances to the whispers of music or the waves of bass, or they dance to the lights, or to the music they can’t hear because even with their hearing aids they’re still fucking deaf, so they dance to nothing whatsoever. I imagined it looked like the piano breakdown of a Charlie Brown special. And then when the raspberry fog rolls, everyone grinds on each other and starts making out. A really fucked up Charlie Brown special.

  She’d met him there, in the raspberry fog, and they’d been married for almost two years. It wasn’t going so good. Both of you being deaf isn’t even enough anymore. That’s what the world has become. He was nice but lazy, and often jealous. With good reason, because she was cheating on him. She’d met the other guy a few weeks ago at a karaoke bar.

  What were you doing at a karaoke bar?

  I was singing, stupid.

  Singing? You’re fucking deaf, remember?

  So what! I can still sing! she signed. And then she shouted “YOU KNOW I WISH THAT I HAD JESSIE’S GIRL!—DUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH—JESSIE’S GIRL!—DUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH NUH—WHERE CAN I FIND A WOMAN LIKE THAT!”

  “Jessie’s Girl,” by Rick Springfield. The “duh nuh nuh nuh” was the guitar part. She even sang the guitar part. The whole thing was loud and atonal and slurred together and off the beat, and she was clapping and dancing around as she sang. She was so happy. It was and remains the most tragic thing I have ever heard. The guy who watched the Hindenburg go down had nothing, nothing on Marlene’s version of “Jessie’s Girl.”

  I have always thought of people as punch lines. I laugh at everyone, all the time. I laugh when they fall down, no matter how old they are, even if they break their hip and they’re my grandmother. Jesus my mom was fucking pissed. I laugh when they just miss their bus and then run after it waving their arms in a futile attempt to make the driver stop, and when he doesn’t it means they’ll be late for something very important. I especially laugh when they have nervous breakdowns. Sometimes I think about that footage of Jim Bakker being led away in handcuffs as he whimpers and goes fucking insane and I have to lie down to keep from fainting. The Other Sister and I Am Sam are two of the funniest movies ever made. I can’t even walk into a McDonald’s, not even to steal a saltshaker. All those people stuffing double cheeseburgers into their greedy mouths are just big fat sloppy sight gags to me. I was kicked out of my reading circle in third grade for laughing at a girl who couldn’t sound out her sentences. Years later she told me that I was singularly responsible for the stutter she’d later developed, and for her intense shyness and low self-esteem. The important thing was that I’d made a difference in her life. I have always found the misfortunes of others hilarious, because they’re not me. If there’s such a thing as karma I’m fucking doomed.

  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 w
as 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.