Waiting

The western sky is a pool of orange sherbet. The setting sun lingers above the horizon. Rita Fuller hunches in her wheelchair, trembling slightly from neurological rather than environmental conditions. She has dragged herself, one faltering heel at a time, to the circle drive by the main entrance. She stops just shy of the curb. She's drawn moth-like to the light. Through thick lenses, her eyes are directed to the tops of pines at the edge of Evergreen Grove's property. Each verdant cone intermittently sways in the breeze as though entranced. A mosquito hums near her ear, but she does not bat it away. She is not concerned. She is totally withdrawn, testudinal in her seclusion. She is a perceptual repository. She is aware of the perspiration seeping from her pores, but she has no desire to blot at it. Her bladder sends a dull signal, but she will not tend to it. Mrs. Fuller only wants to be left alone to stare into the offing and replay her life's fragile reels on the broken projector of her memory.

                Of katydids and sweltering summer evenings. Of the milkman in all-white, spotted with translucent patches of sweat, bringing gallons of ice cream to their porch. Of her two brothers and two sisters gathering around with spoons in hand and herself, the eldest, with a tub condensating in her lap. The container making a darkened ring on her long skirt, her thighs burning with the intense cold. Spoons clanking against each other, protestations of unfairness. Creamy drops landing on shorts or shins, dispersing into cloth or slipping along downy-haired legs, drying in crusty amoebas or sticky trails. Giggles mingling with grunts and shoves. Rita the mediator. One at a time. Take turns. There's enough for everyone. All the children gorging but her who held the tub with numbing fingers. Rita doesn't mind. She is the helper. Her father silently overseeing the treat’s  apportionment from his rocker behind them, stripped down to his undershirt. His bangs wilted in clumps across his forehead, a hand never quite clean brushing them back. He whose chin stubble tugs at her locks during goodnight kisses. He whose strength seems boundless.

                Mrs. Fuller's fingers tingle now but without applied chill. Her hands look crudely drawn. The digits deviate at the knuckles, each failing to align. Her thumbs stick out, contorted. When they aren't tingling, they're throbbing. She has learned to ignore the pain, to let the nerves fire in vain. Like so many matters of the body, the will is impotent.

                Her manual dexterity scores have diminished since she was moved to the Grove eight years ago. She's tired of the tests and the nurses who administer them. She is weary of the staff's ceaseless commands. It's not as though she doesn't know how. Her fingers simply don't obey sometimes. She tells them to squeeze the same way she always has, but they must be hard of hearing like their commander is.

                Three years ago, Mrs. Fuller ceased replying to letters or expressing thanks for cards. Longhand is too demanding with its swirls and loops. Even dialing the phone is a challenge. Its buttons seemed to have shrunken. Then there's the problem of contact information contained in her outdated address book. She ceased blotting the deceased's numbers in black because it obscured the pages behind. Which is just as well. No one expects her to respond or do much of anything else besides cooperate. She scrawls on claims or waivers as needed. She scribbles on the sporadic release when Deborah can't be reached soon enough. The motions are familiar but the outcome is not. She can't read her marks even though her vision is fair. The script is torturous; the lines are faint and squiggly.

***

                A chickadee hops among the landscaping, pausing to eat bits of unseen food. Mrs. Fuller senses the bird out of the corner of her eye. Even its diminutive shadow is lengthy. She watches it forage, the feathered creature, the winged thing, the flying animal. Millie Granderson owned one, but it was blue and white. A terrible pet, always getting loose and chomping on picture frames. Perching on bookshelves in the den, evading capture and taunting with piercing notes from an elevated throne. He would bite your ear and mess on your shoulder. Equal parts eating and messing. Chirping incessantly, all throughout the day like a busted alarm. In the wild, though, how nice. We are happier apart. We are apart. Apart. Mrs. Fuller flits away before the bird does.

                The sun is nearly finished with Springfield. The waning light puts Mrs. Fuller's countenance in stark relief. Her skin has an etched quality as though she were one of Durer's prints. Around her thin lips is a sunburst of creases. Along these peaks and troughs are hundreds of faint hairs. The topography undergoes seismic shifts every few minutes. During the most powerful tremors, half her face snaps taught instantaneously, a flashed and incomplete smile. Others, more aftershock than quake, involve a brief pursing of the lips or partial wink. Glasses pivot on the fulcrum of her nose. The frames’ left arm is wrapped with medical tape. What originally read FULLER in permanent ink has bled beyond all recognition. Above these, her stiff hair resists tussling. It is caked with spray. The gray waves are ruins, structures once tubular but since collapsed. Her hairline is scaly. Her scalp is the same pallid pink of her gums. On her temple above her right eye is a thick scab she picks at each time she rediscovers it. The scab is black and roughly textured from provocation. Rita had struck a table's edge trying to pick up the fork she dropped before she could stab her boiled carrots. The world melted, and she toppled like a spruce at… at… at… at wintertime.

               

***

                Mrs. Fuller waits, but she waits for no one. She believes she receives no visitors; she complains she entertains no guests. Few are left to come calling. Both of her brothers and Edith died decades ago. Her youngest sister, Faye, moved elsewhere without leaving a forwarding address in the 1970s. Nieces, nephews, and cousins are scattered across the nation with lives of their own. Nurses and neighbors do darken her door daily, though these strangers count not to Rita.

                Deborah drops by every other week to debrief with a supervisor and bring Mom her Milano cookies, but she can't bear to stay for long. The journey to Room 138 is reminiscent of a scene from The Inferno. Fetid air fills the corridor's length. Huddled, moaning lumps of people are strewn about the hallway, moored where they were discarded. The cruel juxtaposition of smiley face stickers and mylar balloons against badly-stained carpet tile and oppressively loud televisions is too much to take. Mrs. Fuller's room is no oasis. The space feels cheap even though it is anything but. The furniture is hospital-grade, of a color chosen for its neutrality and a material chosen for its impermeability. Plastic wraps the bed beneath the sheets. Galvanized handles rated to hold four hundred pounds in the bathroom help hoist Mrs. Fuller's scant ninety-one. Red call buttons protrude on every wall; a pullable cord dangles by the toilet. Despite the sepia pictures and framed needlepoint, the atmosphere is transient. Residents' names are slid in and out of plaques like so many bank tellers.

                Every time Deborah enters, Mrs. Fuller is awake and in her chair. She’s rolled over by the window, gazing into the courtyard and the parking lot on the other side. Their interactions play out predictably. Deborah knocks on the door frame, crosses the threshold, says hello, and embraces her mom at an awkward angle. Her mom inertly accepts. On the rare occasions Mrs. Fuller lights up at Deborah's entrance, it indicates the happiness of being surprised—not of being surprised by her daughter. Their conversations tend to be imbalanced. On bad days, Mrs. Fuller responds with flat monosyllables. When she musters more, she trails off mid-sentence as though her teleprompter blanked. After ten minutes, Deborah leaves the bag of cookies on the laminate dresser and says she must be going now. Deborah writes notes on her mom's wall calendar chronicling past and future visits, but Rita doesn't know who wrote them or what day it is. Every time Rita sees the calendar, she thinks it’s wrong. It can't be 2015.

                Mrs. Fuller waits for a breeze, for a bug, for a cloud. She waits for a cue, a suggestive association. Rita waits for Harold, who has been dead for seventeen years, but who'll be returning any moment from the hardware store with a new knob to replace the one in the den that won't catch. What time did he leave? It couldn't have been more than an hour ago. And yet, it feels much longer. It feels like years. Then again, it feels like no time at all because she can recall his voice with a clarity not possible in archaic recordings. The feed is live. The speech is present as much as a passing car's engine. She can almost smell him. He’s borne in certain aromas. Harold resides in the fresh mulch he would spread around their sugar maples and atop their bed of jonquils—earthy, a soiled tang. Neither pleasant nor unpleasant, but real. He's in the wind, felt but not held. He can't grasp or be grasped, but he is here with her so long as she is here with herself. He consists of materials impervious to aging, not from solidity but friability, from being carried aloft like a word or the rhythm of his footsteps. This is the compromise with death. You can stay but not the same. You can be but as forgettable.

***

                Her body brings her back to the sidewalk. Rita's joints ache. How long has she been rooted to this spot? She finds her wrist bony and skin pebbled. How can that be? That is not her arm and yet it is. She grips and twists like a throttle where the watch ought to be. Mrs. Fuller doesn't currently know that she doesn’t wear watches anymore. Although she has acquired many timepieces over the years, she isn't afforded the luxury. They are all dead and buried in a bank whose steps she could not ascend. Her other valuables are stored there as well. The malachite brooch from her trip to Israel, the pearl necklace from Harold’s tour in Japan, Grandma Esther’s ruby hairpin, her parents’ gilded graduation gift: they all lie in a metal container, unworn and cold. The contents were slid into a wall of identical containers and locked with a key of which she has not a copy for their safe keeping. Because such items will soon be part of her estate. Because Evergreen Grove is a nice place but you never know about the staff. Because who's to say if she misplaced her wedding ring or if it was slid off of her relenting finger by a bad apple? Deborah would not allow that to happen, so Mrs. Fuller sits and rubs her bare wrist with her naked hand.

                The nakedness of her ring finger alarms her next. Her eyebrows raise. A siren sounds for the item lost to her but not to her executrix. Oh Lord. She looks in her lap and finds only a carrot-colored stain on her otherwise yellow slacks. She pulls on the rumpled fabric of her blouse, hoping to make the object tumble. The polyester blend stretches and springs back. She lifts and shakes the hem, yearning to feel the tug of two gold ounces and half carat diamond rolling free of their hiding place. But nothing new tugs at her. Oh Lord. She brushes her chest. She shifts and cranes her neck over one side of the wheelchair. Sparkleless pavement. And the other. Sparkleless pavement. Her old heart races.

                She bends to look down at her feet. Whose shoes are those, nude and velcroed, a perforated crescent over the toes? Who would ever wear such ugly things? And yet, when she thinks of twitching a foot, the shoe twitches. Oh no. A clump of brown fuzz clings to one of the straps. Mrs. Fuller reaches down to pick it loose, but meets with resistance. Her back aches and refuses to bend as far as she needs to pick at the ball. The swell of panic elevates this task into urgency. She tries to lift that shoe towards her outstretched hand but meets with resistance in another location. She can feel it creak, feel the sound's texture from within, the quick succession of snags and releases, the vibration of friction and a little sharp pain. Defeated, Rita leans back. Her head is awash in liquid, but she's not wet. She's submerged, but there's no water. Her hearing is muffled like there's batting in her ears. She closes her eyes. Not to stop seeing, but to stop being here. To stop feeling vertiginous. But her head continues sloshing. Please stop. Oh...

                Her inability to reach her foot, to be thwarted by a task so simple, and the liquefaction of earth flushes her face. Pins of dismay prick her body. She shudders and begins to sob. Sobbing gives way to wailing, and she starts to totter. The cries reverberate off of the east wing, and the chickadee takes flight. The tingle in Mrs. Fuller's abdomen subsides. Warmth blooms and spreads beneath her. All the while, she is aware. It occurs to Rita that everything is miserable. She circles around and around this fixed point of helplessness. Who is she now? How did she get here? The deep creek bed of wrinkles on her cheeks channels the tears to her slack jowls. In quieter moments, they wobble with palsy. Now, they are flushed and heaving. If she was seen, she'd look pathetic. She is not seen or so much as wondered about. This is her private suffering. The remnants of last night's sleep moisten in the corners of her eyes and become doughy. If she could see herself, there would be no recognition. She is a constant alien, a wanderer in what passes as her home.

               

***

                Mrs. Fuller intuits her incompleteness. She's never far from her boundaries. Huge swaths of inquiry are forbidden to her, yet she can approach their borders. She does so frequently. Her mind naturally meanders within the yawning chasms between meals, between naps, between pills. She retraces events, relives times, and abruptly tumbles into ignorance. It's as though she plunges into a hole. She begins along a path, foresees the shimmering end on the frontier, but is subsumed by a void along the way. The abyss is unlike unconsciousness, though. It is not experienced like slumber’s ease. While your recollection fails you, your will does not and neither does your shortest of short-term memory. For in the empty place, you remember you entered it with a purpose. You recognize that it was once full. You long to pack in its truth again. You cannot. Adrift in the abyss of forgetfulness, Rita is deprived of herself. She is a person aware of her location but blind to the landmarks. She is lost and knows it.

                Dark matter would be comprehensible to Mrs. Fuller if she had ever heard of it. She could understand the hypothesis that that which is not is the heaviest stuff. It is like nothing but not. Nothing is borderless. These cavities inside Mrs. Fuller are circumscribed. She can walk around them, survey the abutting landscape. These holes are the places where her darkness dwells. A doctor, the soft-spoken one with the nice office, Dr. B— or Dr. V—, explained that her brain was becoming porous. He spoke of her brain and not her. He circled lesions on the backlit MRI with his pen's tip. Mrs. Fuller did not grasp the terminology, but she gathered the upshot from his tone. She agreed. That's how she felt. She felt like a piece of pumice. She contains many holes. The negative space nearly outweighs the positive.

                These moments of disorientation—hundreds per day—are observable in her broadly attentive visage and eyes fixed on nothing more concrete than the distance. When she looks, Deborah can see the agony magnified behind her mother’s glassy eyes. The pain of loss concentrates Mrs. Fuller's mind to pierce through the haze, the clips of sounds, monosyllables, the incomplete sketch of a face or fact. She retracts all attention from her limbs and torso and retreats to her mind's cracked throne, peering and straining to regain bearings. She holds this defiant posture until bereavement makes her slacken. In these moments, she is alive enough to know that death is eroding her, that there are burgeoning caverns in her core, that she is a shell being siphoned of its substance.

                But then, as shoulders droop and Mrs. Fuller crumbles, the foe becomes friend. The remembrance of forgetfulness dissolves like film exposed to heat. She finds herself advanced beyond crisis by the sometimes maniacal, sometimes merciful progression of time. She rediscovers the fact that arrivals and departures are a matter of perspective, destinations are interchangeable when scrubbed of the past. She resets.

                The lives of octogenarians afford ample opportunities to learn by experience. In her years, Mrs. Fuller has been taught what to fear: the death, not the dying. The dying will happen one way or another. Dying is matter of fact. She has long known this, has seen this seven times. She watched her father abruptly expire. He was mowing the lawn, laboring up the sycamore-lined hill. He wore striped shorts and his old loafers, the tan ones tinged grass-green. How he would sweat! The scene was comical from her window's vantage. She thought he tripped. The reel mower shot out in front of him and he crumpled. The handle hit the ground after he did. Nothing else changed. The clothes still flapped on the line. Dogs kept barking. Her father laid motionless like a cartoon character who'd been bonked on the head. Silly daddy. Rita told her mother about his spill, laughing. Her mother did not laugh. She ran. She died next, some years later. Gigi and Edith, too. A car accident and a stroke. No one knew about the hole in Donald’s heart until his lips were blue for a week. He was nineteen. Cancer took its time with Edwin, worked him over like a boxer, drug it out, savored the victory. The heart monitor keeping time, counting down. That’s the way it goes, fast or slow.

                Mrs. Fuller will go when her maker calls, and she has faith she will live on. But she won’t leave this earth a moment before. Life’s a gift she’s in no hurry to return. That’d be ungrateful. That would be ceding victory to the sickness. She does not know the day of the week or what she ate for lunch, but she knows this: that sickness feeds on fear. She has watched it feed on others when given the chance; she has felt it gnaw within her. She will not allow it to be further sated. Death wants you to think it is the end, to give up or run. But it is not. This conviction is her compass by which she marches on.

***

                Under her slacks, on shins and thighs frosted with xerosis, are splotches of eggplant purple. They are the marks left by Webster's Large Print Edition. Rita had extracted it from Evergreen Grove's modest library shelf in the hopes of filling in one of the countless tip-of-the-tongue blanks that taunt her. She wanted to label her experience and place herself again in the comfort of states named. But a dictionary is a cumbersome tool in the hands of an ignorant laborer. It is the flattened haystack, every page full of wrong needles. After flipping through the Cs and Ss, the word kept floating, aloft in an updraft of frustration. Mrs. Fuller was reminded that objects require no name to make themselves known. The force of gravity and fumbling fingers seeking to replace the infernal thing from whence it came suffices.

                Skin was not broken; blood vessels and spirit were. She cried then as now. When Deborah inquired of the ghastly bruises, of which there have been many, Rita could offer no explanation. When asked if the wounds hurt, she pushed them like fleshy buttons and confirmed. When asked about the workers, if they did that to her, if they've been rough with her in any way, Rita wasn’t sure. When asked Mom, please try to keep track of your injuries, write them down—as soon as they happen—because it's serious and we can move you if need be, Rita screamed her hands are no damned good anymore. She raised the arthritic things in front of her reddened face and pleaded through viscous saliva to be left the Hell alone.

                She slumped and sobbed and when Deborah rose to leave, herself in tears, Rita asked where she was going. Deborah didn't explain. She retreated from the threshold and went to her mother, embraced the quivering husk, and reassured Rita it's going to be okay. Rita agreed and rubbed Deborah's declined back, and said of course it will be, Edith. They'll get through this together. She declared she's so blessed to have a sister who is so close, one with whom burdens are shared.

                Rita's tears transitioned from sad to happy while Deborah's remained sad. Deborah did despair, though, she lamented. She'd rather be her own aunt than a complete stranger to her mother. Because it's not a lie if you fail to set the record straight. Because Rita is more contented by this gracious error than the unforgiving truth of the situation: that Esther died fifty-five years ago, but died again three minutes ago, that Aunt Edith passed on more than twenty, and that Rita is eighty four and the final fruit of the Fuller tree.

***

                Emotions emanate from an unknown origin. Mrs. Fuller finds her cheeks damp. She rubs the moisture around and clears the corners out behind the glasses. She rolls the residue between her fingers methodically. These motions require concentration. She appreciates the sensation, so she continues until it becomes sticky. Mrs. Fuller has a propensity to see without registering. Her eyes are open. There are colors and shapes, but they have no import. She is in her fingertips. The echoes of her frustration recede into the lightly molding vinyl siding and the suburbs beyond. She has returned to where she started. Vacancy is her home.

                The golden sun is a tarnished sliver for a moment and disappears. Ochre dims to rust as the sky strains to recall the daylight. Navy steadily advances overhead, attacking from all fronts. She feels relieved of a certain pressure, but grows uncomfortable. Her seat begins to itch. Something is amiss, but something is always amiss. She only wants to be here, here with her disease and fearless, filling her holes with what life continually offers or has not taken back.

                With trips out west and Arizona’s martian terrain. With the Airstream in tow, barreling down two lane roads for days and Debbie sleeping in the bathtub to stay cool. Brisk early mornings with a tea kettle’s whistle and cookies from the filling station for dunking. Playing old maid on the fold-out table and Harold invariably losing. Connecting the dots between campgrounds. Tripping over every leg and corner in the dark to wake him up, a hefty bag of winnings from Reno thudding on the dresser. The two of them giddy, filling coin sleeves at 2:00 AM. Debbie in her nightie, hair a mess, rubbing her eyes by the bathroom door. Go back to sleep, Debbie dear. We’ll all celebrate in the morning. How do pancakes sound? With Harold embracing her from behind while she stirs noodles on the efficiency stove. Her blushed cheek on his tattooed forearm. With reunions of friends beneath the stars, the soda siphon sizzling. Kids squealing, trying not to be it. Going back a week later to where these two people carved out a little room for a third in this crazy, wounded world. Simple pleasures. Open road. Needlepoint to pass the time and jello molds to hold the dessert for when the gals get together for bridge. Those were the days. They still are the days, in a way.

                The sliding door opens unassisted behind her. It sounds like a whisper to hush, but no one is being noisy.

                "Oh there you are Miss Rita! Time to come back on inside, hun. It's going on eight. You got to take your pills, now, okay."

                Rita pretends not to hear the nurse. She would rather be dragged inside. This is her revolt. Her quiet rebellion. Mrs. Fuller's shoes scrape the sidewalk as she's retracted inside the automatic doors of the vestibule. She will not divert her gaze. The sun is nearly risen.

Speech Impediment: II of III

Walking down the corridor, I get the feeling I could be anywhere—at least anywhere American. This is one of a million such stretches. The wall art is dated and vaguely Southwestern. Turquoise, sage, and terra cotta. It’s hard to imagine the prints ever looking good, even when new. The signatures are anonymous scribbles forged by a printer.

Traffic picks up on the east wing. I suppress my pedestrian road rage equivalent behind two hunchbacked and shuffling guests. Room 185 has been converted into a makeshift dining room. A wall dividing 185 from either 187 or 188 has a passageway cut out of it, opening onto an area where the chef/waitress/janitor is stationed. The kitchen appliances consist of a microwave, toaster, and two industrial-sized coffee urns. A spread of Danish glisten in fatty dullness on a counter. Waxy apples lie in wait. Trashcans already overflow. A TV mounted in the corner is showing a local newscast. The set is outdated and the screen skews colors to blue. Half of the patrons are more decrepit than I am, which is simultaneously relieving and unnerving. People are speaking more loudly than they realize. Over the ambient din, the employee announces “Sausage!” A wave of nausea passes over me at the thought.

A plain packet of instant oatmeal with a grinning Quaker greets me as I riffle through a bin labeled ‘Hot Ceareal.’ Perfect. A steaming pot of clearish water rests on a burner. I swirl some of it into my bowl. A drop splatters and singes the fleshy part of my hand. I wipe it on my pants leg. The pain subsides. I snag a cup of coffee and a napkin/spoon combo pack. The coffee smells like nothing but extreme heat. I walk with caution.

A two-top is open in the corner and I make a gingerly beeline for it. I settle down and unwrap what turns out to be a spork.

The conference goers in the room are easy to spot by their nametags. Nametags make me sad. The handwriting is rarely precise and often calls the wearer’s competence into question. Letters are bunched, slanted, or squiggled. There’s no quicker way to make an adult seem like a child than asking him to write his name on a sticker and apply it to his chest.

The coffee is in fact molten. After many a cooling breath, I discover it may well have been filtered through a comforter. It tastes synthetic, but it’ll due. Desperate times.

“Taken?”

A heavy-set man in his mid-to-late twenties is already pulling out the vacant seat across from me. With the body control of a server, he palms his stacked-high plate. He’s wearing a black T-shirt under a black untucked Oxford.

“It’s all yours.” I rub my reddening hand.

His name is written in indecipherably light pencil. The tag may be blank. He heeded the sausage announcement. He’s ringless. We eat in relative silence for a while except for the chalky noise of his cutting on styrofoam. I am more alert after my second cup of coffee. I notice the brown liquid on his plate isn’t sausage related. It’s syrup. I prod my oatmeal with my spork.

He begins. “So uh, what brings you here?”

“A gig. You?”

He cocks his head and furrows his brow like a dog to a new sound. “Gig? Like stand up?”

“No not quite. I’m giving a speech.”

“Why’d you call it a gig?”

“It’s just what we call them in the business.”

“Oh.” The disappointment is palpable.

“It’s a lot like stand-up, actually.”

He hums through his forkful of meat. He asks, “You talking today?” between chews.

“Yeah at 11. Will you be there?”

“I sorta have to be.” He discovered the actual plastic spoons and uses his on a bowl of Fruity Floats.

“Yeah.” I pause. “But at least you have the day off.”

He frowns momentarily, squishing the lump in his cheek. “Sure. I’m not complaining or anything. I mean I’ll take any chance I can get to get away from the office.”

“You look a little wet behind the ears to be burnt out.”

I’ve caught him with his mouth full, so he angles his head back and speaks around his food. “You ever work a 9 to 5 job? It doesn’t take long. Two, three months tops.”

Watching him does nothing for my appetite. “Decades ago, yes. I was a guidance counselor in another life.”

Conversation trails off. He slurps the sweet dregs of cereal. He consumes the entire contents of his cup in two gulps. Is he in a hurry? He’s drawn to the commotion surrounding the microwave. He leaves to get something more to eat or drink. I take my first tentative bite. The oatmeal tastes like a moist paper towel. I bury the spork in the mound and leave it there.

The ladies one table over discuss the pros and cons of wool clothing, taking turns to make a statement and reply with enthusiastic affirmation. A peel of laughter erupts from a man with a horseshoe of salt-and-pepper hair. The employee appears despondent. The buzzers of coffee pots and microwaves erupt more often than a single person can manage.

The wallpaper features small bouquets of cornflowers repeating on diagonal axes atop a taupe background. A chair rail of dark wood skirts the room and a border of vintage mechanized farm implements trims the top of the walls. Most of this country is country.

He approaches our table with a cup in each hand a slice of toast in his teeth. Maybe it’s the challenge of free food that drives him. He places his toast in the puddle of greasy syrup on his plate and sits. “So do you say the same stuff everywhere you go or what?”

“Not exactly. The professionals have five to seven canned acts. I don’t have any fixed speeches. It varies.” His eyes are on me but are not focused. He blinks. Perhaps he wants more. “My material—what I say—is mostly in a notebook I keep with me. I basically write my thoughts down in script form, complete with stage directions. It calms my nerves to have it memorized." He's wiping his fingers on a napkin. "I mix all the little snippets together based on what the situation calls for from talking with whoever books me and anybody I talk to from the company beforehand.”

He retrieves a packet of Squeeze-able! grape jelly from his hip pocket and squirts it onto his bread. The deep violet jelly coils haphazardly. He eats it in a fashion reminiscent of corn on the cob: side-to-side. “Is that good?” I ask, not really interested in the answer.

“Eh.”

He leans back in his chair and nurses his apple juice. “What do you say? Like in a nutshell?”

“That’ll ruin the surprise. If I tell you now, you’ll just tune out later.”

“Well, what’s the gist then at least?”

“I don’t have a schtick, really. I think of myself as a realist. No gimmicks.”

“But others have gimmicks?”

“Sure. Most of us have marketing or advertising backgrounds. You’ve got your if-I-can-do-it-you-can-do-it guys, your life-is-too-short guys, your all-you-need-is love guys. You know.”

Two boys yell at each other and come to blows over the last cheese Danish. The mom yells louder than them both. The loser gets a final kidney shot in.

I try to alter the course of where we’re headed. “You’ve been here since yesterday, right?”

“Yeah we had to get here by like noon yesterday.”

“What else have you been doing?”

“Games and stuff. Dinner. The vice president gave a little talk, commencement type thing.”

“What do you think of the VP? You can tell a lot about a company from the people up top.”

His eyes wander again. When they return to me, it’s as though the last five minutes never happened. Burnt toast or bagel diffuses through the air. “How’s a guy become a motivational speaker?”

I cannot determine the level of genuine interest behind his queries. I want to believe he’s only curious. “D’you have a minute?”

He consults his cell phone. “I’ve got a couple hundred.”

“Mm.” I pause and drink from my cup to gather my thoughts. “I haven’t told this story in a while.” Memories tumble out of their pen like bouncy balls. The pictures are foggy and dim from disuse. “Uh... I wasn’t very happy where I was at—the school. The kids rarely listened to anybody over the age of 20. At 27, I was out of the question. The pay was pretty terrible too and my wife and I had a newborn. So, I looked around to see what else I was qualified for. Turns out anyone can be a speaker.” The TV’s volume increases to a distractingly loud level. I lean in to compensate. “The pay was better and had real prospects of improving even more. I could travel and I could help more people or so I thought. Adults are supposed to be able to listen, right?” I sip. “My wife—Debbie, her name’s Debbie—was supportive, at least to me, so I contacted an agency. There were a few of them popping up in Kansas City, which was nearby where we were living at the time—it’s centrally located—and the nation as a whole was much more open to psychotherapy and touchy-feely stuff, so yeah, I more or less signed up. They sent me a few canned lessons and told me whenever I was ready I could do my own. It was extremely liberal, the agency—very hands off so long as you didn’t get negative reviews. It’s a lot like sales—all about your numbers. So yeah I was on a plane in a couple weeks.” I recall that first flight, Debbie’s haggard face, Will screaming in her arms. The plane was peaceful, a deserted redeye to Omaha. “It was unfair to Debbie of course, but she never protested.”

“Do you like it?” He stacks one of the empty cups into the other and begins work on the third.

“Parts of it, yes. I’ve been at it for a long time and have as long of a leash as you can get. I can turn down a gig if I want. Our savings are healthy enough. I’ve missed out on a lot back home, of course, but I’ve seen a lot, too. I get to meet all sorts of people—like yourself—and I like that. Keeps me young. I get a fair amount of positive feedback and most nights when I’m unwinding I feel I’ve given three or four people something to chew on, something that might stick with them and help them get by. That’s a unique opportunity as far as jobs go.” I sip again more to break up the monologue than anything. “But I’m on the road a majority of my time and I don’t really know anybody to be frank. It’s a lonely profession. I’m kind of like an itinerant preacher.” I clear my throat. “It is what it is.”

His posture suggests he’s bored. He’s reclining as much as possible. “I don’t know you but you don’t look too happy to me.”

I’m stunned by the abruptness of his observation. Either he is preternaturally observant or I look even worse than I feel this morning. I consider taking offense but think better of it. “I’m not too happy.”

“How can you make people happier if you aren’t yourself?”

“My job’s not to make people happy, it’s to motivate them.”

“I would’ve thought happy people were motivated.”

“Not usually, no. Happiness is static, stationary. You wallow in it. Soak it up. Motivation is active though. It’s forward movement and most everything else is backwards. Most of my crowds are slipping when they take their seats if you know what I mean. My job is to give them a push.”

“Hm.”

“Happy or not, I can do that.”

We both drink ponderously. “Eggs!” rings out and chair legs squeal against the asbestos tile. The place is a lot less full. An unknown saint turned the TV back down. My oatmeal is clammy. I push the bowl away. I have some saltines in my bag.

“What’s it like?”

“What’s what like?”

“Your job. I mean, the life.”

“It depends on the week. We’re scheduled on one week and off the next. In on weeks, you make a swing through a section of the country, landing someplace bright and early Monday, renting a car, driving stop to stop through the hinterland, and you end up Friday morning about 600 or 800 miles away from where you started.” I rub my temples. “Then you’re supposed to go home.”

“You only work like half the year?”

“If you’re doing a terrible job, yes. If you want to pay your mortgage or alimony…” I laugh; he doesn’t. “Well, you’re on the road more than that anyway. All the money is in the extras. Make a good impression, hand out some cards, and you can schedule talks on your off weeks. The agencies let you keep a higher percentage of the fees.”

“I couldn’t do it. I don’t like travelling. You waste so much time waiting in lines or with flight delays or security or whatever.” He pauses, visibly reflecting. “God, you must’ve spent like 10 years in airports.”

“That’s probably true. Travel isn’t so romantic when it’s the rule not the exception.”

“Why are you still doing it?”

There’s a confrontational tone behind his words I used to hear a long time ago. “You’re full of questions, aren’t you?”

“You’re the closest I’ve come to meeting a rock star.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

He grins. It is impossible to read him. “I’m still doing it because I’m comfortable doing it. When you get to be my age, comfort counts for a whole lot.”

“Oh.” He consolidates his trash, stuffing his utensils and napkin into the fourth and final cup of his column.

 “What about you? What brings you here? You look younger than everybody else.”

He crosses his arms and stares at what he’s made. “I am. I started in June.”

“What do you do?”

“My title’s computer support specialist. The IT department’s just me and this other guy. I basically reset people’s passwords and unjam printers all day.”

“Do you like it?”

“What do you think?” He’s tearing off thumb-sized edges of his plate to give it a buzz-saw quality. “It’s not exactly what I got a degree for.”

“Be patient. You’ve got a lot of career to go.”

“I know. That’s what scares me.”

“At least you have a job. That’s not a given anymore you know.”

“Yeah.”

I feel impotent. He does not want to be encouraged. His eyes are on me and I avert mine. The employee is frantically wiping down her area. A Leaning Tower of Pisa fashioned out of refuse will tip at any moment. A little boy asks his dad to add his plate to the top of the pile. The dad obliges.

We return to silence. The novelty has worn off. I am uneasy in at least two ways. My abdomen is audible now that the ambient noise has diminished. I cannot bare this any longer. “Well, I best be going. I need to figure out where I’m supposed to be and all that.” I pull my bowl and cup toward me. “It was good talking with you.”

He seems caught off guard. “Oh all right. See you later then.”

“I’ll be looking for you in the front row,” I say full of mirth. He glances at me but does not otherwise respond.

I stand and walk to the far corner with the less swollen trashcan. I flip my oatmeal onto the top of the trash. I push down and the contents crumple and spring back slowly. I thank the employee as I pass. She nods and says, “Mmhm,” while unplugging the urns. Checking the corner table, I see the young man watching the news. Exiting, I sidestep a grizzly man with biker garb who smells like the area around a gas pump. My elbow grazes his leather vest and I am more frightened than I should be. The grizzly does nothing.

I check my watch as I walk down the hall. Roughly two hours to go.

Solitary: 4

The morning head of steam dissipated into the still office air. Josh slumped into his chair and rolled into position. His back ached in a distant way. He squirmed. He envisioned his spine and a time-lapsed vignette of X-rays tracking its compression over years of sitting. No one ever sat this much. He stared down at his desk, jumping along its speckled laminate surface. A little like cookies-and-cream. Been a long time since I had any ice cream. Faintly audible voices mumbled in either frustration or excitement. Being inside the confines of his workstation was like being on the brink of fainting. The sound-dampening batting behind the cloth of the cubicle walls muffled all sounds beyond his perimeter. 

This isolation reminded Josh of being inside an igloo. From years six to eight, he and his father built crude structures out the snow removed from their driveway. Snow is on the short list of most exciting events in a child’s life. The cancellation of school was no less relieving than last-minute clemency granted to a death-row inmate. After rising from the sweet rest of sleeping in, Josh wanted nothing more than to play in nature’s time-sensitive embellishment. The world became an amusement park and a battlefield when a white blanket descended upon his neighborhood. So much was newly possible: the sledding and the slippery surfaces, the laughing and running and heaving lungs constricted by icy air, the nose red and dripping like a faucet to be absent-mindedly tongued or wiped with a sleeve, the hurried scooping and packing, the close-calls and the cold melting down your shirt, under your gloves’ cuffs, and clinging like ice-cubes around the ankles of socks. At least, those were Josh’s dreams. 

Dad and lad, with age-appropriate shovels, created a mound on the western side of their north-south slab of concrete. After the best the Midwest had to offer in the way of blizzards, the final products would be taller than Josh. They looked lumpy like mashed potatoes, except with undertones more blue than brown. Carefully, young Josh dug a hole in the center of its base. This was his bunker. Once the cavern was sufficient to contain him in a fetal position, he outfitted the fortress. He carved out tiny enclaves to house a secret cache of snowballs in expectation of an attack. This was his arsenal. Once completed, he army-crawled inside and waited for the siege to begin. He felt safe at first. He thought it was like being a part of mom, dark and warm with body heat. Inside, nothing beyond respiration could be heard. He had made it. Mission accomplished. The kids would come and he would be ready. Now he would be protected. Even more, he would be victorious. Who else had an igloo? He waited for his chance. He laid on his stomach and felt the chill seep through his black snow-suit that swished when he walked. It was so quiet. No cars, no air conditioning, no dogs or television made noise. Dad went inside. There was nothing to do. There was nothing to look at. Everything was the color of graphite ahead of him. Looking around his puffy red, blue, and yellow coat, he saw the glow of light by the mouth of the mound. Were they out there now? Why was he in here? Excitement fooled him again. Nothing happened. He had no friends. The neighbors’ children never welcomed him into the fold when he moved onto the block. The snowballs sat in their spots. The silence became antagonistic. He was deaf to the world. He felt consumed. Within fifteen minutes, he grew hopelessly bored and frightened. He started to panic. Josh was lost (in the sense of not knowing where he was going rather than knowing where he was). He retracted from the orifice like an inchworm. Defeated, he went inside and dried off by the floor vent, thawing on the carpet. Mom made hot chocolate with swollen marshmallow icebergs in it that clung to his lips mid-sip. He looked out the front windows with their droplets of condensation at the igloo, a monument to disappointment. After a day in full sun, the forlorn structure would start to sag. Often it would be trampled on by the kids he wanted so badly to play with when they returned from escapades unknown, laughing, with ruddy cheeks and sleds in tow. If left alone, the igloo would stay longer than the rest of the snow. It melted and froze into the consistency of a snow cone. It would be soiled with the little bits of dirt that floated in the wind he learned about in science class. In his ninth winter, he heard of a similar structure collapsing on a child and suffocating him. He imagined the terror of being trapped inside that scary place—unable to see, hear, or move. The danger, coupled with recollections of previous attempts, was enough to prevent him from doing anything with the subsequent mounds Mr. Stevenson confusedly built on his own. Poor dad. 

For all this thought of snow, Josh felt colder. He rubbed the sides of his arms quickly, making his hands tingly. His eyes were open, but he paid no mind to his visual field.

While on the clock, it never looked good (i.e., productive/profitable) to have translucent neon bubbles floating across one’s screen or pipes stochastically elongating and bending atop a black backdrop. Accordingly, Josh disarmed his screen-saver. His monitor’s steadfast display suggested he was never far away from where he should be and never stopped doing as he should be doing for more than ten minutes. It was a simple move to ingratiate himself to the “powers that be” (wherever they were) should they ever pay him a visit. Moreover, it prevented the wandering eyes of passersby from gaining compromising intelligence. The ploy was not without drawbacks, though. First and foremost, the cursor blinked indefatigably. It never stopped. It seemed impatient like a mother tapping her foot. By the end of most days, its throbbing was reminiscent of the tell-tale heart. It made Josh feel guilty. The blinking black line would not let him forget the job he had to do. It was waiting for him, taunting. It could keep this up all day. It was going to outlast him. Presently, Josh saw it pulsate confrontationally. Damned machine. Clocks do the work for you. Cursors, though…they won’t do a thing without your effort. He rubbed his chin, which felt warm and slick in comparison with his cold, dry hand. He wondered how many times in an average day he derided himself for daydreaming. Come on now. Back to work. He swigged his tepid coffee. It did not satisfy. The aftertaste was not unlike burnt toast. At least it’s strong. 

Josh grabbed for the mouse. He ran his circuit around four websites. He checked his personal email (nothing), his profile (nothing), his blog (nothing), and then his preferred news outlet (nothing). He sifted through local scores and half-heartedly read a recap of a recent hockey game. He was not interested in sports, but hometown allegiance was an easy position to act upon when idle. For grins, he perused the “most popular searches” feature of his standby search engine. Apparently an actress announced immanent plans to take a sabbatical from the screen and spend the summer in a recording studio. She enthused, “I just think music is great and I really love movies still, too, of course, they’ve been good to me. But I’ve always wanted to sing ever since I was like a little girl. I think I can now, you know? I want to make something really special, you know, that people will want to go out there and buy and connect with. I’m really excited! I’ve got a bunch of ideas for album covers already.” This is what people are interested in. He withdrew from the mouse, pushed down on his heels, and rolled back a little. A faint sound, either laughter or sobbing, briefly interrupted the silence. Josh looked about himself. Kleenex. Mug. Calendar. Papers. Kinda barren. I really should put something on the partitions. A thumb-tack would go right through that material. A print? Cezanne? Would need to cut off the bottom title. Tacky. Why do they put those titles on there? It detracts aesthetically. Better to not know than to detract from the art. Why are people so concerned with the title or who made it? The art stands alone. Is it just curiosity? People naturally want to know. Misses the point of the artwork, though. It’s not for knowing. Still, credit where credit’s due. The point of art, though—what’s that? 

The musings were arrested by footsteps. His adjustable gooseneck desk lamp quaked in anticipation. Here comes Ralph. Ralph Metcalf, chief supervising engineer and elitist in residence, was neither good nor bad. He was simply large. Everything about him was large—his bovine face, his booming voice, his splayed and bulging wing-tips, his mile-long parabolic ties that never managed to descend beyond the dark concavity his gaping navel created beneath his shrink-wrap-like dress shirts. Given his girth, the ground announced him before he could announce himself. The steel girding of the high-rise flexed with each stride. Upon noticing this phenomenon, Josh had visions of the Cretaceous period. The ever-so-slight jiggling in his fleshy parts could well have been the sensation of concussions produced by some great lumbering reptile. Like a vulnerable-yet-savvy herbivore, the tremors caused him to scamper to safety. A thought of Pavlov’s bell raced across his consciousness, but he let it dart by. Josh drew near his desk, opened the folder again, and began to rattle off more letters. Mr. Metcalf hollered, “Stevenson!” as he passed. His matter-of-fact tone implied the utterance was merely to identify what he saw, rather than to greet or scold it. A force of nature. Although his shoulders drooped and he exhaled after the thuds receded, he did not stop working.