Solitary: 6

For example, sometime that morning Josh wrote/cut and pasted the following:

Dear Mr. Albutoni,

You recently contacted one of our customer service representatives in regards to an issue you had with your Speed Stick™ deodorant. You explained to us you experienced intense nausea after ingesting Speed Stick™ deodorant. We were sorry to hear about your sickness. We thoroughly investigated your claim and what, if any, recourse we had. After speaking with a supervisor and consulting relevant texts, we explained to you we were unable to defray any costs secondary to your issue, including, but not limited to, your medical expenses. Unfortunately, the label clearly states “Harmful if ingested.” We believe the harm you experienced was caused by your using Speed Stick™ deodorant in an unauthorized way. Specifically, you ingested the item. We, therefore, recommend you refrain from ingesting your Speed Stick™ deodorant in the future. 

Please continue to use Speed Stick™ deodorant as directed. Attached please find a coupon for Tums™ antacids, which may be able to alleviate nausea caused by other permitted sources. We hope this helps. We hope you get well soon.

We thank you for contacting us. We, like you, believe that products and services ought to be perfect because it’s what you deserve. That’s why we are the People people™. 

Sincerely,
Joshua Stevenson, Clerical Technician
Customers F1rst, LLC
“The People people.”™

Letters like these pulled Josh in different directions. For starters, there was the issue of the way he was supposed to communicate. It was atrocious writing. He disdained bloating the English language with gobbledygook. He did not like appending his name to them. Unfortunately, he had no choice in the matter short of resigning his post. It was a slight consolation that the recipients were strangers and, even though he was identified by name, he retained the anonymity of physical distance. It’s not like we’ll ever meet. For a brief span, he tried being more straightforward and less verbose. His campaign lasted eight business days, at which time Josh discovered all correspondences were CCed to supervisors for review at random. A three-page reprimand from Calloway for his use of contractions, which were clearly forbidden in the Clerical Technician Protocol Manual as ‘unprofessional language’, brought the mission to a close. 

Behind the style was the bothersome substance, the issues he was addressing. It was impossible that all the customers who had been denied refunds or repairs were to blame for malfunctions. Given the iniquities in the power distribution between a corporation and a given consumer, it stood to reason the consumer lost these battles. He was, then, an agent of injustice. He didn’t make the decisions, he only carried them out. Josh was merely doing as he was told and if he ever contested a decision, he would be punished or First would get someone else. He was in an ethical bind. The only choice was whether or not to continue employment, which was not viable given the various legally binding obligations he had, money-wise. Continuing meant pleading the Nuremburg defense, which made him feel slimy. This interior discussion, which he had carried out many times in the past, usually ceased with Josh concluding it was not a Big Deal. At least in the PCD, people were never out more than $10 because of poor design, shoddy craftsmanship, or lousy materials on the manufacturer’s part. Live and learn. 

Wrongful dismissals were the exception to the customer service rule. Most of the time, the customers had erred. It took less than a month to notice the culprit responsible for most of these communiqués. The common thread of the incidents, the origin of the problems, seemed not to be thoughtlessness per se. As any earnest practitioner of meditation can attest, the faculty of thought rarely shuts down completely shy of death, coma, or deep sleep. At a bare minimum, consciousness idled on sensuous fuel. The matter was in quality, not quantity of thoughts. The root was the horrendous, ubiquitous proclivity to accept thoughts as soon as they arose without a moment’s review. A person wonders whether something that smells so sweet will taste so sweet and does not pause to consider what exactly he might soon nibble. Warnings of ‘external use only’ were spelled out on cotton swab boiler plate because of documented hospital admissions secondary to attempted internal usage. The spectrum of human unintelligence, incontinence (mentally speaking), and brutishness—all of which were on display in the CIRs—was nothing short of astounding. 

Most of these accidents/injuries were funny at first blush like a home-video of a whiffle-ball bat to daddy’s groin. The varieties of buffoonery were the sujet-du-jour on the fourteenth floor. The replaying of daily customer blooper reels made up the lion’s share of First’s water-cooler talk. (“A guy told me today his hemorrhoid cream wasn’t working. Turns out he didn’t know the difference between hemorrhoids and bunions.”) One-upsmanship led to a string of recollections, after which people would laugh and be glad they weren’t That Guy. More than once Josh, the resident English major, was exhorted to write a book chronicling these stories. The concept reminded him of a publication he’d already come across. 

As a junior in high school, Josh spent hours snickering at a website devoted to chronicling the true stories of unbelievably dumb and hilarious deaths. Suffocating in a pile of pachyderm manure, kicking loose a clog within the chute of an industrial wood grinder, or the consequences of attaching a commandeered jet-fuel assisted take-off rocket to the roof of an old Chevy Impala were all rehashed in titillating detail. One such death stayed with Josh. A young man took a young woman he was smitten with to a local carnival somewhere in the American boonies. At the carnival, the young woman was amused (presumably beyond “all get out”) by the troupe of jugglers. The following weekend, the young man called out to his girl in her second floor window in the front yard of her parents’ house. Like a fairy tale, the fair maiden opened her window and beheld him, arms at his sides, holding heavy things. In a daze of love, this modern day troubadour fired up a pair of gas-powered Stihl chainsaws to win her affections with a show of manliness and daring. He could not hear her prohibitive pleas over the sound of the two-stroke engines. Suffice it to say, he was ill-prepared. He caught the first airborne device less with his hands than with his clavicle. Josh often pictured this gruesome scene and its aftermath. Who was tasked with cleaning the lawn? Where was that young woman now? How could she go on after seeing that macabre scene? A pie in the face was funny. It didn’t even leave a mark. It could be remedied. But the sources of these injuries (i.e., the mind), if not the injuries themselves, were in some fashion fatal. Now, people read this over and laughed like it was a pratfall. 

The sentiment aroused in Josh after transcribing a few thousand such correspondences changed. He usually left the break room venting sessions laden with guilt. What began as comic ripened into tragic. Someone was always hurt. Truth be told, daddy was in serious need of ice. What difference did it make if, as in cases like these, a wound was self-inflicted? Did that not make it worse and more pitiable? People acted this way—harmed themselves—without compulsion. They were at once victims and aggressors.

Stupidity accounted for roughly 55% of CIRs. Apart from the people who were damaged from their interactions with products was the smaller class of people (approximately 24%) who were offended by them. These crotchety-types wrote in or called up brimming with pseudo-parental disappointment, moral derision, stern threats of legal action, and promises of at least personal, if not community-wide, boycotts. Imagining these people with nothing better to do than to take time out of their days to carp about how a certain toothpaste tasted more like spearmint than peppermint (unfortunately for that customer, the product’s label described itself as ‘wintermint’) made you want to laugh the first time you read it over. It was pathetic. Then Josh thought about how old these people with names like Mortimer and Justine were (dates of birth were one of the eight informational categories CRs investigated) and how desperate for purpose they must be. He imagined them buying can after can of off-brand chicken and noodle soup with their Social Security checks, slurping them alone, hunched atop wicker furniture in canary yellow rooms with dusty millwork and pilling burnt orange cushions, reading every line of the daily paper with a craggy frown, and biding their time with acidic letters until they see their spouses again in the hereafter. Happiness had expired; nostalgia remained. They had lived the dream. Indignation was their life-support. It was sad.

Now, in an age approximating maturity, Josh thought all of this was no laughing matter. There seemed to be a sinister germ here. To chuckle about topics like this was doubtless a stepping-stone on the trail of apathy that dead-ended in socio/psychopathology. Laughter had an anesthetic quality. The ante needed to be upped the more central it became in a person’s life until a person was functionally nihilistic, making light of everything construed as valuable. Josh had more than once observed how particularly demented comic books were given humor-related appellations (e.g. the Comedian, the Joker, the Riddler, etc.). Was there any greater cruelty than the open-throated guffaws of criminals at the pain of their victims? That was nightmarish. Thomas Hobbes, a paragon of pessimism and hero of hedonism, argued what made funny funny, was a semi-conscious awareness of superiority of the laugher over the laughee. Was that what this kidding around was about, at bottom? Revelry in power? A sixth-sense for evolutionary virility? The smug grin, condescension, sarcasm, and irony distinguished the head from the butt of the joke, as it were. When laughing, people tilt their heads back. The nose goes up. 

Josh played back the last thought in his head. It sounded preposterous for all its outrage. Having thought about it, it occurred to Josh he was uptight. Must he look at everything through a moral lens? What a killjoy he was! He was probably indignant about his ungraceful childhood. Maybe I should write a letter to someone, too. An image could be simultaneously funny and sad. What was it Nietzsche said about laughter? Something about its link to suffering. Seriousness was ambivalent. It was enlightenment’s and hypertension’s antecedent. Taken in the abstract, there was nothing wrong with giggling at ourselves. Our ridiculousness is compounded by our refusal to recognize it. A person needs to be able to make fun of himself. Still, he concluded he would reserve ridicule for himself alone.

Solitary: 5

Pushing a heavy object at rest is more strenuous than maintaining one already rolling at a snail’s pace. In matters like this, momentum is decisive. The trick to accomplishing large tasks (or, more properly in Josh’s case, a large grouping of small tasks) is keeping yourself from perceiving its size. Horses can trot in busy locales because of the blinders. Mr. LaRoi advised during the (a)CT orientation, “If there’s no end in sight, don’t look.” The uphill nature of the job reminded Josh of a nugget of baseball wisdom. (As a lonely, aimless youth, he was enthralled with sports.) In the playoffs, when a team was behind three-to-one in a best-of-seven series, everyone interviewed in the locker room, from the manager to the bat-boy, was quick to say more or less the same statement. “We’ve got to take it one game at a time, ya know? We’re not outta this thing yet. Ya can’t win three games at once.” Josh was slightly embarrassed to live through the truth of a pithy adage, as if life was always more complicated and nuanced than to be framed by an a cadre of simple-minded jocks. But it worked. 

Considering the imposing burden of future toil was like taking in the Pacific. The untraversable distance turns your stomach. It puts you in your place, a teensy, diminutive, practically unobservable place. Letting the scale into your field of vision in this situation entailed decelerating (because of the anxiety), which fed into greater anxiety (because the stack kept piling up) and ultimately despair (because the top was out of sight). Being informed exacerbated the problem. It is a counterintuitive and unjust truth that drunks fair better in the automobile accidents they instigate. Their limber, gelatinous bodies are less vulnerable to breaks and snaps than the white-knuckled innocent who solidifies in fear of the impending collision. Knowledge had this ambivalent nature: it was good in the abstract but not always in the concrete. Sometimes ignorance was preferable. When Josh would err and think about how many more responses he needed to complete, he felt ill. How in the world am I going to get that done? So, he learned not to think—or at least he tried not to. 

If you did not track your progress completion came as a surprise. Time vanished. Everything vanished except for the white background with the flow of little black characters. You were never sure it could be done until it was and you never understood how it could happen when it did. It was a quotidian miracle. Lowering your eyes widened your horizon. 

A lazily strewn intraoffice report Josh once spied on Calloway’s desk documented 27% of new hires resigned after 30 days. This meant 27% of people preferred the murky waters of unemployment and bean-based diets to the First’s reservoir of discontent. The ugly truth was there were at least 8.5 hours to wade through to reach the other side of the work-river and drowning was the fate awaiting those who considered how far away they were (at least in the A.M.). Undergoing tedium is like aerobics. It was painful, but it prepares you for a marathon if you soldier on. After nearly a year of spending 1/3 of 5/7 of his days doing basically the same act, Josh boosted his endurance. He went forward and did his best to leave himself behind. 

The keys were light and responsive underneath his fingertips. Nothing could touch him for a while. He did not feel the stiffness in his wrists. He did not notice the peel of laughter nearby or the swishing of passersby behind him. Josh went all out, nose to the grindstone. He typed and clicked frenziedly and tried his best not to get side-tracked. He was “in the zone.” He was a sluice. His eyes tracked back and forth, from one program to another, absorbing the required information and funneling it back out. It was like taking a shower. Words like drops pelted him, each too fast to be noticed. Large blocks of text capturing the most common-place, yet always heart-felt, sentiments and/or rationalizations could be inserted from a stock file Josh kept updated (a bit of initiative possible only in the first month of his employment). He typed and cut, typed and pasted, copied and emailed, mail merged and printed, saved and closed, folded and stuffed. With each, he felt a tiny swell of pleasure. All the while, the inbox diminished and the outbox enlarged. 

Josh was assigned to the Personal Care Department. This ‘team’ of five (three customer service representatives and two clerical technicians) addressed all queries regarding personal hygiene and/or maintenance products including items whose ancillary purposes were personally hygienic and/or maintaining, such as the multi-purpose and versatile cotton ball. If a person developed a rash after using lotion, bled after flossing, or was lacerated underarm by a stick of deodorant (this happened with astounding frequency), Josh and his ‘teammates’ were deployed. Most of these issues were secondary to user-error. The underarm cuts, for instance, were usually caused by failure to remove the protective plastic cup from the unused item’s top. Through his employment, Josh learned that the quality of obviousness did not entail being understood by the general public. Obviousness entailed being readily understandable to people who would notice. 

The process from Josh’s perspective went as followed. A customer, who was usually aggrieved, contacted Customers F1rst.* Customer services representatives (a.k.a., Customer Representatives, CRs, ‘reps’) were the first lines of defense and were the only ones tasked with actual live interactions. They split their time answering phone calls and fielding web-based customer contacts. CRs consulted warranty policies (written in a different division of Customers F1rst) and replied with the applicable loop-hole or catch. (In the unlikely event neither was found, reps were encouraged to supply the customer with a 15 digit Claim Code and transfer him/her to an unassigned extension with an uncheckable voicemail.) Each of these events became the subjects of query summaries (a.k.a., Customer Interaction Reports, CIRs, ‘sirs’), detailing contact information, Product Code(s), Date(s) of Incident(s), and miscellaneous high points revealed in these interactions. CIRs were temporarily stored in public folders on First servers in .docx format to be manipulated by Clerical technicians (a.k.a., CTs, C-techs) into Response Affirmations (a.k.a., RAs, dittos, ‘affs’). Affs were the fruit of Josh’s labor.

* - As the back-page blurbs and reverse side labels clearly stated, First’s hotlines and mailboxes were open to both ‘Comments and Concerns’. Only the comparatively massive (and oddly named) Edible Department ever received any positive feedback (usually praise written in part by elementary school students who were naïve enough to thank people they did not know for things they enjoyed). Most of the people (i.e., customers) who took the time out of their apparently ‘busy’ days were pissed and largely unreasonable. The fact that they in essence sought recompense from another for their own mistake, blaming gravity for a fall as it were, was lost on them. The scenario was similar to a jerk who choked at a restaurant and ranted and raved for a discount, all the while neglecting the blatant truth that it’s not the manager’s fault he didn’t chew your food (and it’s definitely is not the chef’s or the bus boy’s either). They were wantonly belligerent, primed to yell (or use all caps), curse [or use emoticons (which did not have the same effect)], and occasionally depress the red button atop an air-horn they kept nearby in case, into the telephone’s receiver (or embed Trojans in an attachment with an urgent title).

Overheard at a Park

Parking Lot

[Doors slamming]

“Oh! Wow! The sun!”

“Yep.”

“What a great day!”

“Yeah, really great. It’s good to be outside. Feels like it’s been a year since it was warm enough to get out.”

[Audible deep-breathing]

“I heard it’s going to rain on Friday maybe.”

“April showers bring May flowers.”

“Uh huh.”

Basketball Court

[Ball bouncing]

 “You got nothin!”

[Sneaker squeaking]

“Go on!... Get that weak stuff outta here!”

 [Ball bouncing]

 [Metalic clang]

“I told ya son! Nothin!”

“Would you shut up already, man?!”

“What? I was just havin' a little fun. Chill. It’s just a game, dude.”

[Ball bouncing]

“Whatever.”

[Ball bouncing]

“Get ready, fool! Here it comes! You ready for it?”

[Ball bouncing]

[Grunting]

[Swish]

“Hah ha! No your not! 20-12! That’s game, sucker.”

“I said shut the fuck up, man! Get over yourself already.”

Park Bench

“Such language. In public no less. There’s children around for Pete’s sake.”

“Oh come on now, Ruth. They’re just having a little fun.”

“A foul mouth is no fun at all. ‘A fool’s mouth is his undoing.’”

“Here we go…”

“What? You don’t agree?”

Public Restroom

“Guys, guys! Seriously, shut up! They’re going to hear us. They're right outside. Shh.”

[Suppressed laughing]

“Go on, Derrick. Do it already.”

“I will. I will. Just gimme some space, alright? Back up wouldya?”

“He’s not gonna.”

“Nah. Let’s leave em.”

“I am too. Just gimme a second, willya? Give it to me already. Who’s gotta light?”

[Denim rustling]

“Give to me. I’ll do it… So I’ll light it and then we all walk outta here very casual in different directions one after the other. We’ve got probably like 15 seconds. We’ll keep walking till it goes and then we’ll take off.  In different directions. Don't come back here.”

“Then what?”

“I don’t care.”

“Why are we doing this, again?”

“Shut up, Tim. Does it matter? Because we can. Jeez. Calm down.”

Picnic Table

[Birds chirping]

“Who do you think you are?”

“What? You mean like rhetorically?”

“No. Literally. Who do you think you are?”

“Uh…”

“Don’t you know?”

“Uh. Not exactly, no.”

[Silence]

“ I’m Ted.”

“What?... That’s it? You can’t be serious, Ted.”

“Well, who are you smart guy?”

“I read the other day that you are what you do. Makes sense to me.”

“Where’d you read that?”

“An article about Heidegger. Martin Heidegger. There’s a uh new book coming about him or something. Maybe a new translation.”

“I've heard of him. Wasn’t he a Nazi?”

“He supported the Nationalist Party way back when, but that’s beside the point.”

“So he was a Nazi."

"Sort of."

"Whatever. So... Yyou are what you do, huh? Sounds American, not German. Didn’t Batman say that in the Dark Knight? Or was it Batman begins? Wait… it was Rachael. She sorta scolded him with it.  But uh yeah if it’s true… I um guess that makes you raising broad questions.”

 “Um, no. There’s—”

“Sounds Native American. Raises Broad Questions. And I'm Has Trouble Answering Broad Questions.”

[Trees rustling.]

“...Okay. As I was saying… there’s more to it of course than what you’re doing at the moment the question was asked. Is asked.”

“So, what is it? Like everything you’ve done? Ever? That’s who you are?”

“That’s what I think he was saying. Said.”

“Weak.”

“Less weak than being ‘Ted’.”

“Well I’m sorry if I didn’t have it all formulated going into it. You definitely caught me off guard. It’s a tough question. It’s not like I haven’t given it any thought. It seems like the kind of question that’s gonna take more than a sentence or two. To be fair.”

“Yeah.”

[Soda slurping]

“I disagree, though, with the idea of the definition, that you are what you do.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s uh arbitrary. Like names are. The name thing was a joke, by the way. Of course I’m not just Ted and you’re not just raising questions and all the other acts you’ve done… They aren’t irrelevant, just inadequate.”

[Dog barking. Owner scolding.]

“Arbitrary? Aren’t all definitions arbitrary kinda by definition? I mean, they’re all line-drawing? That’s what they do. They distinguish something from its surroundings. Outline it. Set it apart. I don’t think that’s reason to stop defining, though.”

“Yeah but it doesn’t have to be arbitrary. Sometimes it fits. I don't mean fitting, but uh…well, yeah, fitting’s fine I guess. Because some things are simple and definitions can outline simple stuff.”

“So a person’s identity is complex. Does that mean we can’t describe it? Plenty is complex.”

“You didn’t say ‘describe’. You asked me who I was. That’s like all of me, right? That’s going to take more than a description. Height, weight, and hair color is a description. Who I am is like that and a whole bunch of other stuff, like all these roles I have and where I’ve been and where I’d like to go and on and on.”

“Well, I don’t see it’s any more arbitrary than any other definition. That’s how we think. Definitions make stuff intelligible. They’re like the raw materials we build with.”

“It’s all um behaviorist, don’t you think? What he's saying. Actions—what you do—are done out there in the world right? so your identity is in large part public or could be public, visible. Doesn’t that strike you as a little… reductive?”

[Metal scraping. Child’s crying. Mother reassuring.]

“Poor girl.”

“Yeah, she’s gonna have some scabs after that. At least she’s got a helmet.”

“Yeah. Moms like those.”

“Reductive you were saying…”

“Right. That doesn’t take into account the private goings-on. I mean, that’s a big part of it, who you are. What’s not seen or acted on at all, directly, what’s just inside you. Not like secrets or something, I mean like everything that goes unseen and unsaid… It’s not like you’re ‘doing’ any of those things and yet they are you or uh a part of you.”

 “Eh. Maybe. I don’t know. What you do is like what you’re most invested in. You actually making it happen, as in like bringing it into existence. Every action is basically creative. That’s a big deal, creating. So a by-product of all of this creating is you make yourself, too. And I don’t think Heidegger was pushing for something explicit, like formulated into some sort of all-encompassing proposition. But private goings-on… those are actions, too, so they’d be included.”

“They aren’t all actions, what’s internal. Some of them are like um states or modes. Like a mood. A mood isn’t an action. You don’t ‘do’ happy or sad or pissed or whatever. Those have still got to be a part of you though. So you’re—we are—actions and states...at least”

“I think we’re—”

“And bodies, too. We are embodied and we don’t ‘do’ our bodies. At least I don’t. Maybe that's your thing.”

“Har har. Stay on topic.”

“Well I've just given you at least two significant things, truths, that ‘you are what you do’ doesn’t take into account.”

“We’ve got a bunch of uninteresting ‘truths’ or ‘facts’ about us, too. You want those in your definition? You want to include the brand of shoes you wore in fifth grade or the um number of teeth you’ve had pulled? Come on. To include anything that could be predicated of you for your whole life is a uh bit silly, don’t you think?”

“No. Being is rich, Rob. As in to be, to exist. God that word sounds awful when you say it like that, abstractly. Being. But whatever. I’m not ready to take a machete to it for the sake of discussion.”

“Hmph.”

[Birds chirping]

“Well, I think Heidegger was talking about something more fundamental than what you’re getting at. Essence, ya know? The deep stuff. Like the basic ontologically stuff that everything else cakes on top of. I hear what you’re saying, but uh… you’re kinda forfeiting the game.”

“What game is that?”

“The game of making sense of the world and life. The game of flexing your brain. The whole philosophical enterprise.”

[Snickering] “That’s a bit of an overstatement.”

“No, Ted, I don’t think it is. I mean, to admit that personal identity is unknowable, not just unknown, but totally unknowable because the list would be too long or something—which is what  you’ve been saying, right?—where does that sort of thinking end? I can’t imagine it’s limited to this one question.”

“I didn’t say it was unknowable. Just not that easy. It requires more subtlety.”

“Subtlety. Okay. So if I give you, what? a week? You’ll have a contrary formulation, some other proposition to state who we are?”

“Well shit, Rob. I don’t have a timetable for you. I don’t know if I’d ever be up to the task. I’m not sure I’m that smart.”

“Just smart enough to be a critic.”

“Jeez I had no idea I’d burst such a bubble being honest.”

“Yeah…well… You have to admit it’s an important issue, seriously crucial. I sure as hell would like to know and… Forget it.”

[Trees rustling]

[Soda slurping]

Playground

[Metallic creaking]

 “Higher!”

[Cloth fluttering]

“Higher, daddy! Higher!”

[Metallic creaking]

“If I push you any higher, you’re going to flip over the bar, crazy girl.”

[Giggling] “I don’t care! Higher! Higher!”

***

[Pebbles pattering]

“Woah!”

[Thud]

“I think I’m gonna be sick.”

“I want off! Let me off!”

[Children laughing]

[Pebbles pattering]

“Faster! Faster!”

 “Stop it! I want to get off!”

“Aaaaaaaheeeee!”

[Thud]

“Faster!”

[Pebbles pattering]

Paved trail

“Hello? Can you hear me? Cheryl? Yeah I’m sorry I’m not good with this earpiece thing yet. Hello?”

[Wheels grinding]

“Okay. Good. I swear this is like only the second time I’ve used it. I’ve had it for like a year. I always forget about it. But yes, where were we? Oh. Yes. I’ve been okay. Maddie’s been a little cranky today. I thought I’d get out and take her for a walk.”

[Wheels grinding]

“Oh yeah. Really nice out. Gorgeous. Have to enjoy it while it lasts. I think the weatherman said it would rain tomorrow morning.”

[Wheels grinding]

“Um… not much. I uh had some time for myself on Tuesday. Greg was sweet and took a half-day just ‘cause. He took Maddie to the zoo. It was great. I hadn’t been alone in months it seems like.”

[Woman sneezing.]

“Bleh. Excuse me. Spring has sprung I guess. I can see the pollen right now. What’d you say, though?”

[Wheels grinding]

“Oh, nothing big. I went to this bookshop down the street. I browsed a little but I couldn’t get into anything, you know? I just sat down in this big cushy armchair and kinda watched people go by. I zoned out. Do you ever do that, like just kinda… float?”

[Children laughing distantly]

“I just stared out the storefront windows and like lost it. It sorta scared me, my lack of uh interest. I didn’t cry or anything but I was so exhausted. I had a hard time getting up. I wanted to go home but I didn’t at the same time. I don’t know.”

[Child’s babbling]

“Yes. That’s a squirrel, Maddie. Skwir-rul. Skwir-rul.”

[Wheels griding]

“No, no, Cheryl. I’m fine. Nothing major. Things with Greg have been a little uh… lifeless? lately. Maybe it’s just me, though. I don’t know. He seems fine. It’s just like kinda like an office or something at home. Like a workplace atmosphere I think. We kinda go through the motions and exchange pleasantries, ‘Mornin’ Sam.’ ‘Mornin’ Frank.’ water-cooler type stuff, but we like don’t really talk anymore. Not like we used to—which is okay, I mean, it happens. But it’s like everything’s been said, I don’t even know what I could offer at this point really. I mostly hang out with Maddie. I feel like I’m regressing back to toddlerhood. I'm good with my colors and ABCs. But yes, we don’t really talk and now we kinda just have to do now, like there’s nothing left to say so we just run these laps every day. But listen to me. I’m just very tired and overly—”

[Birds chirping]

“What? No. I don’t know. A few weeks. A month, tops.”

***

 “So.”

[Shoe scuffing]

“Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

“Yeah. I’ve got a younger brother. He’s twelve.”

“That’s nice... Do you two get along?”

“Sorta but he’s weird. What about you?”

“Nope. I’m an only child.”

“Lucky.”

“I guess.”

[Trees rustling]

“It’s not all that lucky.”

“How’s that? I’d think it’d be the best. Because like you don’t have to watch anybody whenever your parents want to go out. That’s a total drain. Plus like when I’m around the house I’m like bothered all the freakin’ time. But I can’t go out whenever I want to because of Donny—my brother’s Donny. So that sucks. And my brother’s into this like fantasy video game type thing, not just in to but like absolutely um absorbed, like united with it. He’s like nuts about it. All of his friends run home from school and play it together online, you know, in their own rooms, and like scream at each other into these headset things. Looks totally goofy. Every day he throws a total fit about only getting like three hours to play it every day, which they don’t keep track of at all, BTW. It’s a big hassle because he’s either screaming about the game or screaming about not being able to play the game. Plus he does this super annoying thing where he like doesn’t flush the toilet. Seriously ever. We share a bathroom and the kid never flushes the freakin’ toilet. He’s twelve. He knows it drives me bananas. But he’s in such a rush to get back to the game because there’s apparently no like ‘pause’ or anything and whenever you’re away people can come up to you and beat you or take your points or magic potion or whatever it is they take. He’s a constant headache around the house. We share the bathroom and I don’t even go in there anymore. I use my parents’, which they aren’t too happy about of course because you know, it’s theirs or whatever and ‘I’ve got my own’, which I don’t though really because mine is full of little brother mess.”

“Wow. That stinks.”

“Yeah.”

[Trees rustling]

“I guess when you put it that way its got its drawbacks. But it keeps things interesting, you know. Never a dull moment at least.”

“Um no. I’d rather have a dull moment or two. It’s a real hassle.”

“I’ve had plenty of dull moments. They’re nothing to like about ’em. I bet your brother loves you and I bet you help keep him in line like a big sister does. That’s a good thing to do. I just sit in a dark room on a computer listening to music and wishing something would happen.”

“Aw. Well, hey, something did happen!”

“Huh?”

“You’re at the park with me. Duh.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s something all right.”

“I’m glad we’re at the park.”

“Yeah me too.”

[Distant yelling]

“I’m sorta surprised I asked you.”

“Why’s that?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done that before. I’m shy.”

“That’s sweet.”

 “Thanks for coming.”

“You don’t have to thank me for that.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

[Dog barking]