The Gnome Stories, page 7
The Small Hand wasn’t wrong about late capitalism, but they underestimated the size and spread and resilience of the Phoenix sprawl, the sheer number of Beaver Burritos and our appetite for what they served. A Jack in the Box had to close because of the smoke. A body shop replaced a destroyed sign. Another Beaver Burrito—this one on Sunnyside, next to an elementary school—was blown up, and the space spawned another, and another: there were two, side by side, where there used to be one. Both did a brisk business, cars backed up into the street waiting to garble their orders into the drive-thru.
Some road was always closed, and cars moved off the interstate to the surface streets that also seemed to go on forever. Fires still burned in one of the sites, and then fires burned on several visible mountain slopes. They could not be put out; they could only sort of be contained. The statistics on the fires mentioned only the percentage containment and the sheer weight of resources—men and chemicals and machines—deployed to halt their spread. Still, the mountain fires were much more visible than the bombing fire, which, while it burned, was one hundred percent contained, there was no threat from it, and when we got our first monsoon storm it would be extinguished.
I followed the Small Hand’s progress not only out of curiosity but also because it was something to track. I made maps. I put pins in them. I connected one to the next incidence with string. I kept waiting for a pattern to emerge. I had experience with patterns and explosions. When I was younger—this was back in Michigan—my friends and I were obsessed with bombs. We’d blow stuff up out in the forest before it snowed: refrigerators and abandoned cars, mailboxes, mail, snowmobiles, televisions we’d found out back of the Goodwill. We’d make bombs from recipes handed down to us by older boys, our betters, those we’d have to seek to supplant if we wanted ever to make a mark on this place. Then it would snow and all of it—the bombs, the fires, the boys, the burn marks on our hands—would be erased.
It was only a matter of time before I started listening to Sharon’s reassurances. You probably figured this out already. I guess it was inevitable—it seemed that way in retrospect—but it didn’t feel like it at the time. It took an act of will for me to go that far. I’d been spending more time listening to and coding the reassurances, and they’d allowed me to start editing them and queuing them up too. With that responsibility came more access. With more access came more risk. What if they ran a background check now that I was deeper in the system? I caught Denise looking at me more attentively now that I had proved my worth. It was like she hadn’t ever seen me before. I noticed her more too.
I still hadn’t told Terry and Charles that I was working at the facility. I knew how they’d feel about it, creeped out probably, or else they’d pump me for information I didn’t have, and it was easy enough to let them believe that I continued to work at the server lab. The work seemed about the same, and what was the difference, really? It was all maintenance and machines and passages and occasionally trying to kick a rat in the face but not succeeding. Since I almost never got to see the visitors, I had no fear of running into them there, and besides, Charles only came once a month for a while and then a year passed without her coming for a visitation. Terry came every two weeks without pause, and he spent more time in the tunnel, speaking into the handset, according to the logs. Most of what he said had been deleted by the time I got to it, but there were a couple of cached selections, one of him singing songs from the 1970s. They played those songs at home a lot: “Drift Away,” “Desperado,” the sort of songs you still heard sometimes on radio stations where they played old, sad songs to people too old and sad to understand that they were old and sad. Maybe they had always been that way, I thought, these listeners waiting for their chance to age into the role, to cocoon themselves in memory. Phoenix had a lot of these stations. They’d come in only intermittently as you came down through the mountains into the rings of freeways and new developments, speeding up to pass one car only to have the one you merged behind slow down pointlessly.
On account of the bombings I’d had to find new ways of getting to the facility, so I discovered new stations whose signals surged and took over the ones that I’d listened to before. I could be halfway through some trip-hop jam as I’d cross some invisible boundary from one domain into another, and suddenly I’d be filled with “You’re So Vain,” and before I realized it the song started to come true: I began to believe the singer was singing it about me. It started to almost feel like an augury, how one truth would intrude into another. In this way I learned a lot about the 1970s.
So when I heard the song it was obvious whose work it was: that voice was unmistakable, and of course I knew the songs, or some of them anyway. The editing was sloppy, so the loop was joined midsentence, with Terry saying something about how her room was the same, how not a thing was moved, how he wasn’t sure if that mattered, how he didn’t think she could hear him, and your mother, she’s sorry she can’t be here to speak to you, but she’s so sad now all the time, and can’t deal with the facility and how strange it was that you weren’t aging, not really, and he was, how time collapses in moments like this, and then he broke into song.
I’d never heard his singing voice before. It was beautiful, I thought, if amateur. He was only halfway through the song when the loop cut out, or maybe he did, gave up and stopped and put the handset down. There was no click or sound of switching off. The recording kept on going on with silence. I flagged the loop in the system as Needs Attention, though I knew that just meant it would be deleted. Still, it seemed right: this recording needed attention, as did Terry, I didn’t say. How alone was he now with his daughter gone?
I couldn’t look at the screen for a while after that. I kept seeing this ring of light, like a lens flare or a little rainbow bull’s-eye. It wasn’t one of those things you see when you close your eyes. My eyes were open, I was sure of it, and the light was there. It did not track with my gaze. Maybe there was something broken in the screen. I wasn’t sure. I felt stupid pressing my finger on it to see if it would smear, but I did, and it did not.
Then I felt a little tremor, like thunder, but subtler. I checked all the readings I could see. The lights were steady. Nothing appeared to have changed.
I got back to the control room and Denise asked me if I felt it too. I did, I said. She didn’t know what it was. Was it something structural? No, she said, it wasn’t ours. We had sensors dialed into everything. There was a little blip, but it wasn’t us, so it was something verifiable, but not something that needed our attention. I figured out its source shortly after, when I arrived at the Beaver Burrito to get lunch for Denise and me, and found it cordoned off and smoking with bits of paper napkins floating in the air. The police had sealed off the scene. I stood outside it for a while, staring at the television cameras. Each was trained on someone with a microphone illuminated by a light, telling a story. I wasn’t shocked except that this was where I had meant to go, and now the place was gone. When the lights clicked off and the cameras got stowed away and the newspeople returned to their satellite-dished vans, only then did I get back in the car. Almost an hour had passed while I was watching. I had a dozen texts on my bedazzled phone from Denise, who was wondering where I was and if I was okay. I hadn’t felt it buzzing in my pocket, evidently. I asked the voice recognition app in the phone where I could find the closest Beaver Burrito, and it kept directing me to the rubble in front of me. I told the voice thing that this was no longer a Beaver Burrito, and to find me the next-closest one instead, not the one on Sixteenth and Seventh but another, but it seemed to be confused. You’re standing right in front of it, the application said. She (of course she had a female voice) asked: Do you need help going in? No, I said. I see where it used to be. She asked: You’re searching for a Beaver Burrito? Yes, I am. I want another one, I said. She said: if you’re having trouble, I can help you with your order.
Frustrated, I chucked the phone in the back of my car and went out to find another Beaver Burrito. It wasn’t hard.
I had ordered up two Tejanos from the next-closest Beaver and had pressed myself into a booth to await their delivery, which could be a while because they were understaffed and Everything Got Cooked from Scratch as the slogan went, though that seemed to me patently false. Everything Got Cooked from Scratch Sometime Ago and Stood Ready for Assembly was more like it. They gave me a free drink, though no ice, you had to pay for ice, and told me to park it for a minute. I could see a guy sobbing in the next booth over and so of course I turned and surreptitiously watched. He was holding two action figures, one in each hand, and arranging them in poses: here one was breaking up with another one; here was one returning a box to the other with a tiny figure inside. He’d spend a couple of minutes adjusting their arms and hands and step back and look and cock his head and adjust again. He’d gasp when he got it right. He had something he was getting close to, I could tell, but I didn’t get to see what it was because they called my name and so I rose to pick up my order, and then there was no subtle way for me to stay to watch without the burritos getting cold. Denise was expecting hers. I had been gone more than an hour now. The phone was surely filled with texts. I could have got up and gone right back to the Core Facility, I bet, if I hadn’t then overheard a woman in another booth telling the story about their dad who had, while hiking the Appalachian Trail, found and fed a gnome.
Later I came back to blow the Beaver Burrito up, and afterward, as if in penance, I bagged all four miles of trash on Sharon’s proposal road. They say you don’t forget your first for a reason. It did feel different from the trash cans and rusted-out school buses we’d bombed back home. This wasn’t abandoned: it was closed. I did check to make sure no one was there. I have lines I won’t cross.
And it didn’t go like in the movies I replayed in my head. I’d broken in with a centerpunch on the glass of the front doors, and kicked the glass outside the door so it looked like it had broken from within, then I fired up the gas on the whole row of stoves and let it run for as long as I could stand it, I wanted to make sure I smelled it and let it build, and I opened up the door and threw a road flare inside and snuck across the street and waited. All I heard for a while was a little whump and then a flump and I could feel the air get hot. But the windows didn’t all explode out in a giant Death Star ball of flame. I was watching from a safe distance under the viaduct. I had a cold burrito in my hand, the one I had told Denise I’d eaten when I brought hers back, but I hadn’t. I had kept it. I knew I’d be hungry later. It was like a switch got flipped and I’d leveled up, and these were times that you want to eat so you could get bigger. I couldn’t stop eating. I’d even stop by another Beaver Burrito on the way home to buy another big one to sate me.
All the gas had done was start a fire, and it didn’t spread fast enough. As I held up my phone to take a shot I saw the light and then there was what you could describe as something exploding. One window cracked, and I could hear the sound of breaking glass. I heard a voice shrieking what sounded like Woo ha Woo ha and cackling, though I couldn’t see where it came from. I stayed there where I was, concealed. I didn’t move for a half an hour to ensure I wasn’t seen. I heard no sirens or flashing lights. She who cackled: What or who was she and where? Would she wait me out or flee? Had she already gone? I checked my watch. How long could I afford to stay before police arrived? An hour? A day? A year?
Eventually I concluded whoever it was had cried out independently, that these were unrelated cries, or maybe it had even been me. They couldn’t have seen me in my spot. No one could. I’d picked it well. I’d checked. So I got up and walked toward the car like I was meant to be here. Perhaps I was, I said, aloud. I was a member of a team, I said. It felt like I was chipping in, like I was part of the effort now. I drove away to get more food as I’ve discussed and then to clean my stretch of road.
By this point it was pretty far into the night. I had cleaned up down to the last mile. As I labored in the median picking up chunks—of what, melon? well, chunks of something—with the grabber and the spearer I contemplated silence. Though I didn’t have a lot to say most days, still I listened to what everyone else said all around me. Here no one talked to me. Nothing was explained. There were no coded messages to force myself to ignore. It was quiet here in a way the city never was, not even the abandoned parts. I could see roughly fifteen miles down the slope as the little blips of light crept slowly uphill, blinking in and out around the curves. Every few minutes a car would fly by with its brights on and I’d have to avert my eyes. If drivers saw me I don’t know what they thought. I thought: What was my story anyway?
I tied and tagged the bag. The animal skull I’d found didn’t count as trash, I had decided, and so I would take it home. I could take it all home if I chose, throw it in the trunk and find a use for it later. I filled eighteen bags by the time I was finished. It was a lot of trash. Why was another question: Why did drivers cast off so much stuff? Couldn’t they wait twenty minutes for an exit? Why was it so hard to take what you consumed home? And why, when you heard a story did you feel the need to tell it all over again to someone else? Couldn’t you just let the stupid thing lie there at the party?
By the time I got back to the house I had about an hour to wash off in the outdoor shower whatever smells had stuck to me and turn the car around to get to work on time. Denise wasn’t going to be there today, and I was assigned to the control room in her stead. I let myself into the main house to put an extra Tejano in the fridge for whoever’d want it later. Everything was quiet. I could hear the hum of the fan Terry ran every night to help him sleep. I typed the passcode into the security system to shut the whole thing off so I could come and go. The LEDs clicked from green to blue. Because of the fan sound I could creep around and often would while they both slept. I rinsed off the skull in the sink downstairs because who knew what was stuck to it, and as I creaked up to Sharon’s old room I had the thought that both of her parents were curled up in their beds like gnomes. Where Sharon was she was sure not curled: all the bodies in the facility were stood up vertically. I’d finally seen my first a week ago. A boy, Denise showed me, seventeen, motorcycle accident, no helmet, skull trauma. As such you couldn’t see his face in his tube. The tubes had bands they’d install where appropriate for modesty, of course, and to keep visitors from seeing how bad it was. So instead of seeing the wreck of his head, the foot-long band displayed a digital image of his face. They’re sourced from photographs, she explained, breathing a little fast. I’m not supposed to show you this stuff, she said, but you’ve been here long enough. That’s why the image appears to move slightly as you change the viewing angle. Weird, I said. More than that, she said: it’s superweird the first one that you see. I asked her: Could I see the actual head? How bad was this guy gone? Unfortunately, she said, that was restricted to the medical team. Even she couldn’t access it except in the description in the file: the brain was only half there, she said. But what was there might be rebuilt, the theory went; documented cases showed that the brain could reroute almost any aspect of its functionality. I asked: I mean, couldn’t we just remove the band if we really wanted to? You could, she said, but you’d compromise the preservation. Oh, I said, that’s cool. I’m just curious. I know, she said, and winked.
I wasn’t sure what this was becoming between us, Denise and me, but it was starting to mean something different from what it did before. She’d asked me if I was single a while back and yes, I said, well, there had been someone in the picture, but she was gone. Or maybe I was, I thought. She asked: Like out of the story or out of the frame? I said all the way out. What doesn’t fit in the frame doesn’t fit in the picture. What we’d had was ruined, I’d said, and it was no one’s fault, and I was over it. Which I wasn’t, obviously, not entirely, working here, but nobody wants to hear that. So I courted Denise’s attention. I brought her lunch and little gifts, like origami horses I’d pose and leave on her station.
Partly they installed the clients upright because it was aspirational, she said, to give you the sense that at any moment they could stride right out of their supercooled tube and drape their arms around you once again. And that’s why I knew Sharon or what she used to be was upright in the B wing, dreaming no dreams. I wasn’t sure why I cracked open her parents’ door: I’d done it before, but it felt a little new now, and I watched them for a moment, sleeping, curled away from each other, as I said. I could have gone in and stood over them but I didn’t. I did think about it. I closed the door and backed down the hall. I went to Sharon’s room instead and put the cleaned-up skull underneath her pillow. I didn’t know what kind it was (maybe an opossum?) but it was cool and smooth, not white like you’d think: more a spotted gray, like it’d been out there for a while, getting chewed on by the world. I don’t know, in retrospect, why it was I did this either. I felt charged up, like anything I touched I could electrify. I went back downstairs, took that shower I mentioned, masturbated thinking of things I don’t want to reveal, clicked on the local television news to see if there was coverage of the latest bombing, which there wasn’t, and meant to stay awake but fell asleep.
I got to work late as a result, which took some explaining. The facility counted this against me, I was told. No problem, I said. I was a new man. I wouldn’t be late ever again. I was on control all by myself for the first time. They sent the temp controller home and I slid—I slide, rather, always in my memory this is enacted in the present tense—into his seat, still warm from his perspiration and body heat. He looked a little like a cartoon animal, I thought, as he walked away.
