The Gnome Stories, page 5
In these conversations I couldn’t ever tell where I stood, what they expected of me. Was I another vector pointing toward my almost fiancée and the future they imagined, and was I expected to keep pointing in her direction indefinitely, hoping for a medical miracle? Did they know, for instance, that she had said no to my engagement overture? We had kept dating, and I doubted she’d been straight with them. It wasn’t one of those moments where it was marriage now or nothing, she explained, she’d hoped I’d understand. It wasn’t that it wasn’t me. And it wasn’t that it was her. She felt safe, she said. She wasn’t sure what that meant, she said, not yet.
It hurt a lot to hear. Was it not big enough, the ask? I asked. She said you don’t understand, and I didn’t, it was true. She said I want you in my life and in my home. She said just give me time. Okay, I said. And we had left it at that. I had no idea how to nudge her needle, and now it was stuck there, in memory, unnudgeable, unneedleable: I couldn’t push it in and couldn’t pluck it out. What secrets did she take with her? Now I would never know exactly what it was she was waiting for and what I was trying so hard to hold on to.
I want to be honest here: in my darkest moments after she’d pressed pause on our future, I’d had the thought that my love was shallow and foul, and everyone saw me for who and what I was, but somehow I couldn’t see it. I didn’t tell anyone this because, as my former therapist had explained some years before, I had a habit of making others’ pain about myself. It was a childhood thing. It didn’t help, he’d said.
It took a year for Terry and Charles to get back to their habit of hosting weekend parties. It was different now without their daughter, who became an unavoidable subtext for all the action that followed. The parties still bumped and sheared and veered off course when it got overlate and people were on their own longer, looking at the stars, which were everywhere up here once you got out of the metro area and the ceiling of fog and smoke, only some of which was the result of the bombings: it was like there wasn’t anything obscuring them from you or you from them, and what if we all were high or drunk, barely connecting, if we ever did at all, and before I knew it one of the two—they traded off—would start something and it would lead to, in one case, a grill being kicked over and starting the ramada on fire.
I was there for this event. I watched it. I was drunk, too, I should say, since I didn’t see how I could get through the party sober. I don’t know what set it off, but it was Charles who started teasing Terry, someone said, she had started it, but he had finished it, kicking it over with the chicken still inside. He was smoking it—it was one of those egg-shaped grills that took forever to cook anything—and I remember turning to watch what seemed like a whole beach of burning coals, like a lava flow I’d seen on TV reaching the sea in some island country, spreading on the concrete slab they’d had inexplicably stained black, and into the garden beyond. It held the heat, the paint-black slab, longer than it should, and now it was covered up with char. I wondered if the plants would light, and I watched anticipating it for a moment, before it was clear nothing was going to happen. And Terry left the coals there on the slab with the half-cooked chicken. Fuck it was all he said. Let it burn itself out. I’m done with this.
I wondered if he’d meant me. I was still invited to the parties, and I was glad for the invitations. Charles had called and left a voicemail saying how much they hoped I would come, but I found Terry’s silence even more opaque than Charles’s ostentatious attempts at connection. She was always the one who made the calls—to everyone, I supposed. I don’t think I’d ever talked to Terry on the phone. It was possible she meant the opposite, that she would have preferred that I let myself out quietly from their lives by the back door, but I didn’t think it likely. After all, they’d put me on their cell phone plan; they’d given me Sharon’s old phone in spite of how she’d had it laser-etched and bedazzled. You might as well use it, Charles had told me. It made it through the accident, and that must mean something. And in her state she can’t, she’d said, and had laughed in that flat way. I could never quite figure out if she’d understood it as a joke or not until she said it, and maybe not even then.
I stood there watching the coals smolder after everyone else had moved back inside, like I’d missed the memo. I told Terry that I’d nurse my beer and keep watch in case something caught on fire. I don’t know if he didn’t hear me or didn’t care, but no one seemed to mind that I didn’t rejoin the group in the living room, so instead I turned to look up at Sharon’s window and then out over the garden. It was an okay garden, the kind you grew in Arizona, meaning small and weird and weak. A couple of rows of tomato plants on drip irrigation. Everyone loves tomatoes. A rosemary bush was taking over a concrete bench they’d had as long as I’d known them. Some kind of freaky mini-squashes now were covered in the grill sludge. With everything else blanketed in ash, I could see a little red-capped garden gnome I’d never noticed before crossing his arms as if in disapproval. The light and sound of laughing from inside reflected off his face.
I also had not counted on the fact that I was now doomed to five years of collecting trash by hand from my four miles of motorway, those miles that once led to our future lives together and now led to a spectacular sort of disappointment. I spent one day each month walking those same four miles chucking cans and paper lids and piss bottles and unidentifiable fruit and receipts and cigarettes and broken toys and scratched-up mix CDs that were typically unplayable (I did check and try to play them; I treated them as I treated all the trash I found those years: as auguries) and diapers filled with shit and blood and worse and things that were simply beyond identification, that defied human category, and pulled them into bags and leaving them like little lunches on the sides of roads to be picked up by the state. One time I thought I found a couple of thumbs but the police told me they were chicken bones.
It is not wrong to say I did watch the road, as the safety orientation instructed, not only for weaving cars but also for her parents’ weaving car. Terry had nearly hit me once, though I don’t know that he knew it was me cleaning up this stretch of road with his daughter’s name emblazoned all along it. I caught a flash of his face at speed as I had to dive back into the median to avoid him. It was all wet then, a rarity for the desert. It had rained, and the water had pooled everywhere. It was supposed to drain but didn’t. I’d cleaned the grates in the median in that section already so was pretty sure nothing truly hazardous was down in there blocking the water. I had to put in a maintenance request to the DOT to check the section for a possible obstruction.
I had chosen the adopt-a-road stratagem because I’d seen my uncle memorialized that way and I know he’d have loved to see the whole family out every couple of months in their orange reflective vests and hats spearing roadside trash like we were prisoners. He’d always known, he’d said, that we were a couple of strokes of bad luck away from a life of crime. He was talking about me then: he still thought he could save me from the way our family went. He was also talking about my brother, who was substantially more successful but possibly even less happy, at least before the car accident that killed my almost fiancée, at which point all the balance sheets of our collective woe shifted to me, and I used it as a reason to stop returning everybody’s calls.
You might not know but you can pay to have your section cleaned instead of doing it yourself. If you stop cleaning up your section, though, you can be hit with hefty fines. They can and will put a lien on your property. They take this task seriously, they say. People crap out of it all the time. It’s a drain on the state, they said.
I explained the situation to the DOT on the phone: She said no, I said. And what’s more, she has since died, I said. And what’s worse, I said, is that her body was now preserved down at the cryonics lab, and the worst of all is that I’m not on the list of acceptable visitors, as I’ve been branded by the family and the lab a disbeliever, no matter how well we get along, and have been informed that my sort of negativity is not conducive to recovery, so I am not allowed beyond the interview rooms upstairs. But the DOT would not relent. They were very sorry for my loss, they said. But a contract is a contract, and what you’re doing is important, especially with the traffic getting rerouted in the city on account of recent events. I could, however, subcontract my miles to a company, they said. They gave me some names that I wrote down but then threw out.
For your sign they don’t let you use a phrase. It has to be the name of a person, organization, or corporation, like those are the only things that are important. So I did what I had to do to get it on the sign. You can’t say I didn’t take this all the way. I started up an LLC. I registered its name as Sharon, Marry Me, and the commas are included in the name. It was a fight to get them preserved. It was a brand, I said, and punctuation matters.
I think sometimes how other Sharons in their cars on their way to or from the lakes might still see that proposal, and their hearts might light up, flicker to life, as if they were getting power from a gas generator, just for a moment, thinking, Oh my god, is this me? Even the married ones might pause seeing it, wondering at the gesture I had made, feeling themselves loved again by proxy, seeing that there were still romantic gestures in the world. But how long would that astonishment last? Would that feeling fade as they passed it again and again en route to their city homes or work? And would they wonder at what had happened to it when it had gone, how they had become inured to wonder?
It took a year, but eventually I got a job at the Core Facility, as it was called. My history degree seemed to lend itself to maintenance, I explained in my interview. Because of what I had read and seen of the delusions of the past, I knew how things went wrong, how we always believe we know the world but don’t, not really. They’d asked about my feelings on cryonics. I had meant to lie. I had this whole thing planned, but in the moment I said I don’t pretend to know. Once I did, and disbelieved, I said, but now I don’t, some things happen in your life without a reason, and so who’s to judge what someone else believes? Some people hope, I said. Some of us want to believe.
I had originally applied in sales but they sized me up in the first moment of the interview in the gleaming, faceless room, and said listen, we can tell, you’re not sales, it’s okay, it takes a special kind of personality to do sales; we have another job for you. All I had to do, I knew, was say that I believed, or could, or wanted to. This company was a pyramid built on belief. It was also an actual pyramid, the offices, tinted glass and steel, an accomplishment of branding, though before it was a cryonics lab it was a bank that failed. I don’t know how they found it, but the first thing you thought when you saw it was pharaohs, and look how long they lasted and how much we know about their afterlives.
Anyhow, they were right about sales not being right for me, and they made me an offer and I took it. It paid well, better than what I had made before, which allowed me to start to take a bite out of all those student loans. And one benefit of working there, they explained, was that I got a break on their services. I was obliged, in fact, to sign up for the minimum plan. It was because they needed to say, they explained, that all of their employees weren’t just employees; they were also clients, all the way down, even way down in maintenance.
Well, I didn’t believe, but what was there to lose, I figured. The minimum plan called for preservation of the head and head alone, and was good for twenty years, at which point you or your estate would have to pay a yearly fee to avoid decrepitude or disposal, which felt only a little like a threat.
It remains unclear who is perpetrating the bombings. At first the police weren’t sure they were even bombings. Since the real estate crash whole swaths of the Phoenix sprawl aren’t populated or surveilled. Companies build and fail and move to the next thing to build. So when the first bombs took down unleased office buildings in empty office parks, they were not exactly missed. People figured it was probably a new development they were putting in, and maybe some paperwork had been missed, but when the ruins stayed ruined for a month after that and a fire started burning in the rubble and the sirens came in to put it out, only then did anyone even check, and then arson got mentioned. An insurance fire, probably. When that got reported on the news, people started writing in to the television stations to claim responsibility.
Then they blew up a Beaver Burrito, one of a hundred and ninety in the city, in the middle of the night, and that got people’s attention. People here like their Beaver Burrito.
The theory then was that this was high-grade vandalism, the work of disaffected teens with resources and smarts, or maybe they had an agenda against Beaver Burrito, which had always courted controversy with its risqué item names and underdressed staff, and some thought maybe they even had it coming. A few kids with big backpacks had been caught on tape riding bikes and graffitiing the walls of a nearby viaduct just before. You could always blame the kids, and they did. Then for a week, nothing happened. Well, something happened, but it was unrelated.
That week Charles had asked me if I wanted to stay with them for a little while. It would be nice, she said, to have another body in the house, particularly with people out there blowing up buildings. I think she could tell that I had been badly speared by love and was obviously adrift and neither she nor I could be sure if I could make it back without bleeding out. Maybe, I thought, she simply didn’t want that on her hands. That was care, I thought. I took it as a sign and said yes and that’s how I moved into the casita in the backyard that overlooked the darkened window of the untouched old bedroom of my sort-of-ex. Every night when the house lights flicked out one by one I stood at my window and watched the darkened square where she once slept. Sometimes I gave in to memories and rubbed one out, I admit, but I always felt worse about it later, not that that had ever stopped me before. Considering a woman’s bedroom window turned on something in me that I couldn’t explain, like someone lowered the needle in a record groove I wasn’t even aware I had.
Mostly it was good living with Sharon’s folks, comfortable and domestic, like marriage might have been. The commute did not improve, but I could combine it with some work on my sponsored miles of road, and anyhow I was definitely saving money.
The new job at the Core Facility really was somewhere else, underneath the light and heat, in the darkened tunnels that couldn’t be any less Arizona. It was better than walking down the rows of servers at the server farm, guarding heat and hums, which is what I had been doing. The new job was security, too, they said, though really it was wait and see, watch and handle animal intrusions, which came with surprising frequency. Try not to get outwitted by the badgers, they had said, as if there were any badgers in the state, or in retrospect perhaps that was a joke. Essentially the job was to adjust the dials that controlled the phalanx of supersonic hums we used to try to drive out the squirrels and the other critters. One hum would seem to drive an animal away or piss it off but have no effect on another. There was no pattern. So you had to adjust the hums constantly, cycling through the programmed stations. I started blasting Rod Stewart on the speaker, which seemed to work more often than you would expect. I got it down so I’d do my little “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy” dance as I cued it up, and the squirrels would start to gather, and if I got lucky we’d all make it through to his cover of “Downtown Train,” which was a sadder song than it seemed at first. If the spectacle of my dancing and the music didn’t work I’d try to hit them with the shovel or whip them with a surplus SCSI cable that had a particularly wicked range.
You can see, perhaps, how the Core Facility offered me new challenges. Such as, I didn’t say, trying to find exactly which tube Sharon’s supercooled body was kept in, since, not being on the approved list, I was not an approved visitor. Luckily, the company did not remember me from my three attempts to visit her. For some reason their systems kept those logs segregated from the employee records. I wondered if I was the first to have not entirely aboveboard motives to join the staff. I gave everyone the side-eye in case.
I wouldn’t have visited anyway once I’d seen how these visits went. The office was short staffed one day, so I had to guide an efficient-looking woman with a limp felt hat into the elevator and down into the tunnels and bring her to the tube that held her son, or what was once her son. I didn’t say that last part. When I logged her in, I could see the story: that he had been here fifteen years, how at first there were six of them, the whole family coming in to see him in his preserved state. How it took less than a year for the group to give up and now it was only his mother who came. How she came once a week. How she still believed. It had been nine years since anyone else was logged in with her. How she held her breath when I pulled out the gurney that held the tube, maybe expecting some kind of change, I wasn’t sure, and instead how it was the same. It’s always the same, she says. I looked at her with what I thought was a sympathetic face, as we were instructed to do, and said nothing. At first that was fine, but the silence grew electric and uncomfortable and kept growing and this was why I was not fit for sales, I realized, and soon I felt I couldn’t breathe in the face of her expectation, and so I finally said something and what I said was “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what? What did you do? What do you know?”
“N-Nothing,” I said back, and that was true. I had done nothing. Could do nothing. All of this was controlled by algorithm. I said I was sorry that there was no change, that what she had expected had not yet come to pass. She sensed an opening and continued to badger me. While we were all trained for face service, as they put it, actually one-on-oneing with a client was unusual for me. Mostly my days consisted of walking from tunnel to tunnel through hums—another job with hums!—and silence, taking readings, singing little songs into the microphones that led to the supercooled chambers where the bodies were preserved.
