Chapter Twenty Six

“I’ve done nothing since graduation except be his little wife,” she complained into the phone, “And here I am about to give birth to his child.  He’s at school more and more, and he doesn’t have any time for me now.  I mean, it’s not like I don’t know how hard he worked for his Ph.D., but…”

        “Yeah,” the Remedy said on the other end.  But he wasn’t really following the conversation.  He was thinking about how fucked up everything was, and about how he had put his penis inside of her the week before, and about how there had been another man’s baby in there, and about how he should start respecting himself more, and find another woman.  But even then, at 27, he loved her.  All the other women were just shades of what she was becoming, every day.

        “Well I’ve got to go now,” she said.  “He’ll be home any minute, and I’ve got to fix dinner.”

        “Sure,” he said, feeling slightly disgusted, “I’ll talk to you later.”

        She hung up the phone.                   

                              

        He was standing next to the pay phone in the break room.  It was a functional space, where safety posters and union information adorned neatly maintained bulletin boards.  There were two vending machines in the corner, one for snacks and one for unspeakably bad coffee.  There was a sink at the other side of the room, and rows of fluorescent track lighting above.

In the center of the room there were several tables with several sets of chairs.  Some of these chairs were occupied by his tired coworkers, men he barely knew by name.  Everyone in the room was sweating, despite the fact that it was December, and almost Christmas.

His job description there was simply “Loader,” which meant that he loaded packages into trailers at an increasing rate of exhaustion.  That the work was dangerous was common knowledge, but it paid well and there were all the benefits that came with a union.  The Remedy could have told you how many vacation days he had coming from memory.  He could have almost made it sound like these vacation days were worth dragging himself to work every day.  They were almost worth the agony in his shoulder.  

He was becoming an evasive man.  He had learned this after college.  He answered questions with what people wanted to hear, unless of course he was drunk, too angry to care, or both.  There were many other evasive men in that break room, but they were better at keeping a low profile, and better at hiding their dependencies.  If the Remedy had been a more patient young man, he might have learned about the art behind their camouflage.  But as with college, he was a bit too loud for that place.  He was too easily noticed, and by the time one was noticed it was already too late to change one’s ways.

His boss, a twentyish man who looked twelve, entered the room from the Remedy’s left.  A golden chain was threaded into his boss’s shirt, and the Remedy knew that at the end of this chain there was a cross.  He also knew that his youngish boss never ran red lights, or smoked crack, or visited strip clubs.  His boss was a man who enjoyed walking a very straight path, and also a man who enjoyed renouncing things.  This fact was clear to all who worked there.

        “Hey there,” said his boss, “Can we talk?”

        “Uh… sure,” he answered, fearing the worst.

        “Privately?”

        “Sure.”

        He followed his boss into an adjoining room occupied by cardboard boxes and plastic containers full of files.  His boss was wearing a tie, a dress shirt, and a pair of Dockers.  The Remedy wore whatever filthy clothes he had on.  Clothes suitable for Loaders and their loading.

        “I’ll cut right to it,” said his plausibly immature supervisor.  “We’re going to have to let you go.”

        “What?” he exclaimed, almost managing to sound surprised, “Why?”

       His boss leaned against a pile of boxes, wiping the surface of the top box as he did so.  “Well you see,” he said, “Your work performance has been below average.  Below average for the entire hub, in fact.  You’re late all the time, and some of the others have been complaining about your coming to work with liquor on your breath.”

        He took a few seconds to process all of this.

        “What?” he said after the overlong pause, “Am I being fired for drinking or being late?  I mean, I’ve tried…”

        “I know you’ve tried,” his boss cut him off, “And you know that you have the right to go through the union if you have a grievance.  If you pursue this matter, I have the results of your urinalysis and your past performance reviews.  If I were you, I wouldn’t pursue this matter.”

        The Remedy said nothing for several minutes, staring at the wall and biding time.  It was all for effect.  He already knew that he wasn’t going to protest, wasn’t going to fight.  There was nothing he could do.

        “Fine,” he said after this second, monumental pause.  “I’ll clear out my locker and go.”

        “Fine with me, too,” said his boss unemotionally.  “And… can I give you some advice on your way out?”

        “No,” he said, finally growing angry.

        “Look in your Bible when you get home,” his boss said anyway, “And ask the Lord for guidance.  I’ve seen a lot of guys like you come in and out of this place, and I know what a strong temptation liquor can be for some people.  You just gotta talk it over with the Lord Jesus.  He’s always listening.”

        But by the time his boss had gotten to “temptation” he was already headed out the door.  The rest of this short speech was yelled at his back, across the partially occupied break room.  Fuck that guy, thought the Remedy.  Fuck this place.  I’ll find something better somewhere else.

        This kind of self-talk was something he engaged in every time he was fired or “let go.”  It was something he did automatically, without introspection.  He didn’t want to know why anything was the way it was.  He didn’t want to know the reasons for things.  He was afraid that if he knew, he would find out that it had all been his fault somehow, all his doing, without his being aware of his own complicity.  His parents, his failures in school, his doomed love – they would all collapse upon him like a string of dominoes.

        From the break room, a set of metal steps led down to the floor of the hub.  It was a vast space, comparable in size to an aircraft hangar.  At one side of the building there were large doors for trailers to pull into, and at the other side of the building there were larger doors which allowed delivery trucks to drive into and out of the building.  The trailers were loaded with packages bound for more distant locations, while the trucks serviced addresses within that part of the state.  

Around the perimeter of the building there ran a system of belts upon which packages were placed, and after being placed upon the belts these packages were sorted down into one of the smaller doors, where a Loader such as himself loaded the packages into an attached trailer.  The place hummed with machinery and the shouting of workers.  Trucks drove into and out of the building as he crossed the hub floor to the employee locker room.  Everyone was too busy to notice him leaving.

        After retrieving a few items from his locker, he got into his car and drove to his tiny apartment on the other side of the county.  To get home, he had to drive all the way across Bellevue and Lake Washington, and from I-90 turn back into the city.  As he drove he watched the treed hillsides turn into suburbs, the suburbs turn into a city, the city give way to a lake, and the lake give way to Seattle, where he lived.

His apartment was just off Rainier Avenue, not far from an abandoned bowling alley and a string of Vietnamese restaurants.  His former high school was just up the road from Martin Luther King Way, and many of his former classmates lived in that area.  The Jacksons had both passed away some time ago.  Mrs. Jackson had died of a stroke, and Mr. Jackson had been killed by a drunk driver.

He slammed the car door behind him, and walked quickly to his apartment on the second floor of a gray and white apartment building.  Ten minutes later he was on his couch, still fuming.  He had a bottle of Jim Beam on his living room table.  His hand was wrapped around the neck, and he was scratching off part of the label with his thumb.

        Condescending motherfucker, ran his thoughts, with his ugly ass wife and his ugly ass kids and his tiny shriveled up dick.

        And as his thoughts roiled thusly he began to drink from the bottle, and as he drank his thoughts cooled.  He had never been an angry drunk.  Liquor always resigned him to the injustices of the world.  After enough whiskey he was viewing his life from the other side of a picture window, and even though his life depressed him, he knew that there was little he could do to change it.

        His apartment was a mess.  He was sitting on a leather couch half covered in magazines, and the rest of the room was in a similar state of disarray.  There was a picture of his birth parents kept in a drawer somewhere, and when he got sad he would go and look for it.  When he got sad, however, he could never find it.

He started to ask himself why he was such an obvious alcoholic.  But he pushed that voice away; he silenced it with another gulp of bourbon.  He had given up on all of that the minute he’d entered the real world.  The minute he’d been kicked out of school.  The real world had no use for reasons, or for cause and effect.  There were consequences, but the consequences were experienced collectively, so that the evil doings of one person almost never affected the wrongdoer, but rather some other person, on the other side of the city or the world.  

He felt himself at the mercy of strange powers.  It was all a mysterious present-time delusion, irreducible to historical chronologies, impenetrable to introspection, and quite simply beyond his knowing.  This was a fact that always returned to him in his drinking.  A few sips of whiskey, gin, or vodka and it was all quite clear.

Why not get drunk once in a while? he thought, Why not fuck the professor’s wife?  Why not live in this moment, or in the next moment, or in the moment after that?  Why not try to forget?

        He sometimes wondered why he didn’t settle down with someone, or at least pretend to.  Then he remembered that he was unemployed – again – and that he was a drunk.  Then the phone rang, and he knew that it was her, the professor’s wife, ready to complain about what had happened during dinner, or about the general fact that her husband cared only about his career, or the larger problem of making a name for himself.

        So many women pouring their mistakes into his ears.  They couldn’t have been looking to him to fix anything, not if they had possessed any sense.  He might have been their idea of a casual lay, but he was too messed up most of the time, too out of focus.

        The phone rang again.  He picked it up.

        “Hello?” the Tail’s wife said into the phone, “Are you there?”

        “Yes,” he answered, “But how did you know to call me here?  Now?  How did you know that I got fired today?”