I was scissoring away at Mona’s photocopies when I felt a presence hovering over me. I closed the scissors.
“Afternoon, Billy,” Grace said brightly.
“Hi,” I said, laying one hand awkwardly over a photocopied page.
“I’m just passing around this card. For Susan in the typing room. She’s having another baby.”
“Oh!” I said, taking the pink card and envelope from her outstretched hand. I placed it on top of the scissors.
“We’re all just hoping
this
one will be healthy,” she said, lowering her voice. “Poor Susan.”
“Yeah,” I commiserated, clueless.
“So,” Grace said, glancing down at the scattered contents of my desk. Despite her age—she’d told me once she’d been editing Samuelson’s school dictionaries for twenty-one years—her face was a little like a porcelain doll’s: white and delicate, composed, and with a perfect little red mouth. “How’re you liking it? Now that you’ve been here a couple of months? You seem a lot more at home here lately.”
“Yeah. It’s great,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s a really interesting place.”
“It
does
take some adjusting, though. The office. The quiet. The solitary work. Some days it gets to us, even us diehards.”
“Yeah.”
“You know, if you ever want to chat, you know where my desk is. I love having visitors. My corner’s so
quiet
.”
“Yeah,” I said again, stupidly.
Grace hesitated for a moment, then said she’d better let me get back to work. I strained for a hint of sarcasm when she said “work,” but I don’t think I heard one. Naturally, Grace probably wondered what I was doing slicing up photocopies. Could I come up with a reasonable explanation if asked?
Decorating my cubicle
, I decided, and returned to my snipping, looking around every few minutes as I worked. I approached the photocopier with my final product, trying to look confident and casual. I stuck the photocopy and scraps in my backpack and got back to work.
How did I get here? Even the stories I’ve asked you to tell, Red, were only another way for me to ask that question. Now I suppose the question might mean something else? If here means this office, this very physical place, well, my story’s not so different from that of others who work here. I was a good student. I like books. Languages aren’t difficult for me. I graduated with the highest honors, but had no serious grad school plans. My
advantaged
background and education led me here somehow, and I was dropped rather unwittingly into this most bizarre job.
1
She warmed that water with her hatred. She sighed plagues into that water. I didn’t care. In this chill and inhuman place I was obedient and invisible to everything. I needed that tea to remember I was alive, warm-blooded. I always carried the tea slowly up the stairs and to my desk. I drank it with careful relish. No spilling on the citations. No slurping, no satisfied Aaaah! Such noises would echo through the cubicles and start
an uncomfortable collective shifting of the editors and
editrices
in their seats. So I always sipped quietly.
5
Lexicographers rarely make messes. I had no idea where to find a cloth, dustpan, and broom. Or if any even existed in the building. The secretary went to fetch a custodian, but returned with only a push broom and a plastic bag. Feeling like a
schlub
, I cleaned everything up while everybody watched. I picked up the big pieces first. The jagged spike attached to the base of the glass. Then a large rounded triangle shard. Tried not to make too many unsettling clinking noises with them. Then I swept up the small shards, and slid everything into the bag.
8
Only you, Red. Only you acknowledged the mishap. You mentioned it offhand when you came to give me yet another
paperbound
book from your home collection:
Beyond the 38th Parallel
. I didn’t confess it then but will confess it now. I hadn’t even read the last book you gave me. You told me it wasn’t exactly an academic piece of work. Just some pretty good firsthand accounts. Diaries. Letters. I thanked you for it and you winked. Just don’t spill anything on it, you said, and then sauntered off to the secretary’s desk for your midmorning flirtation.
9
Scout drove me to work the next morning. We talked about the usual things. After he parked the car, he asked me what
happened to my wrist. Vegetables, I said. It was a short and
unscripted
version of a story I had half-prepared earlier, for this very purpose. Something to do with chopping vegetables, I had thought, would have a touch of realism. I got out of Scout’s car to ease the transition from that conversational topic to another. The work day went without incident. No policeman came.
21
I switched off the stove and picked up the phone. By the time Scout answered, I’d lost it. I was crying. He wanted to know what was the matter, nearly yelling the question after I couldn’t answer his first couple of tries. I couldn’t form sentences, or even meaningful one-word answers. He hung up. A few minutes later, he was there, at my door. His cheeks were red from rushing there in the cold. His hair, usually so carefully styled with a round brush and
blow-dryer
, was tousled in all directions. He had never looked so cute. He had never looked so powerless. I wanted to hug him, for strength, and then push him back out the door. I was glad to have him there, but suddenly acutely aware that he couldn’t save me from anything. He followed me into the kitchen and watched me pour tea water from the pot to the sink. He wanted to know if I was all right. I said no. No, I said again. I’m crazy. You wouldn’t believe how crazy I’ve become.
23
He offered me one of my own kitchen chairs. Even upon seeing his reserved and intellectual girlfriend in such serious need of a
headshrinker
, he didn’t lose his composure or his gentlemanly way. What is it? he wanted to know. His calm was impressive, and it made the misplaced absurdity of the story all the more
clear. That story and this calm couldn’t exist together in the same room.
24
We passed the next week or two in the usual way. Weekend hikes, book talk, disgust at the verb use of
impact
and the like. And he was still the smarter of the two of us, in all ways but one. There was just one thing now, it seemed, that I knew about the world that he didn’t. It wasn’t a specific piece of information, or some esoteric knowledge. It wasn’t even a story. It was only when the thing exploded later, into a fire-eating
callithumping
fat lady freak tent cinema-circus, that I began to understand the thing as a story. When they figured out who Derek Brownlow was, and what it meant.
28
When the papers went crazy, I knew everything might very well explode. Still, I resigned myself to the stern presence of my fellow word
mavens
. There was at least an odd comfort in submitting to the long silence of the day. Reliable and insistent, it served as a kind of protector. I was reading a book about drug slang, underlining the word “stash,” and you came to my desk. When you saw what I was reading, you said, Now you’re talking. You said that junk slang was your favorite, and wanted to know if there was a chapter on junk. Then you asked if I’d finished that other book yet. No, I whispered. I was unraveling fast. Was it a trick question? What exactly had been in that article that I hadn’t had time to read? Was there something suspect near the corpse? Were you smiling, Red, because of something you knew?
32
A wounded, resentful version of my face—but blue-white and open-eyed and dead—started glancing back at me in mirrors and watching me when I was failing to sleep. In time, the image began to resemble a dead-prom-queen costume, sometimes dripping black blood from a heavily lipsticked mouth, or wearing a ripped ruffled dress. Eventually, it became more cinematic, bearing little resemblance to me, easier to shut off, like a bad movie on TV. Almost comical on occasion. Almost. Dead prom queen on intimate terms. Dead prom queen
demythologized
. Not frightening so much as unsettling, constant, and familiar. An unwanted pet you feed out of obligation. Weeks later, the dead prom queen lingered only out of habit.
36
Next to the fear, though, came a twisted sense of power. I was the star of this little show, and the less I said—the longer I stayed quiet—the more they loved me. In fragile, soundless, faceless form, I was a real
hot ticket
. And if it was silence they loved, I could string them along for as long as I wanted. They would spoil me forever, crown me with a glass tiara that could erase from my head the impulse to calculate the value of one life for another, or one life for several, or the tenuous value of life in general.
37
In the meantime, we ate an awful lot of pies. Three a week at one point. We always sipped tea with it, and he always seemed to find topics for engaging, if somewhat one-sided, conversation. He told me about his grandfather’s dementia.
The poor old man was now confusing the details of his own life with those he had read in some biographies of Charles Lindbergh. He told me about his old Latin teacher who chainsmoked and who, one day, soon after retiring, put on a flowered sundress
plus
a wig, then hanged himself in his study. Maybe he was trying to convince me that he had a stomach for strange stories? Was it the pie or the silence that eased these stories out of him?
41
But still I didn’t speak. How could it ever work with such a story between us? But even once was too many times to speak it.
Larger-than-life
, that story. Larger than anything. Perhaps neither of us would be capable of climbing from the depths of that story? Weeks passed still, and I didn’t tell it. I began to know I never would. Were the pies, then, a sort of peace offering—an attempt to implant a pleasant memory of myself, to sweeten his mind in favor of me in the inevitable event of my betrayal?
43
Whatever I’ll carry, this is what I leave—the explanation, the story I would tell. You told me once that your own stories have no moral, no
subtext
. There is no obligatory response of awe, admiration, gratitude, or pity. That your presence at a certain place and moment was coincidental, and that you’re no better or worse than anyone for it. Does telling the story, then, make it not so much yours? Not so much your private and singular possession, but a shared object of all who hear it? Something others can hear—or even tell—as suits their particular ear?
You’ve said you wish to share history, not possess it. But can it really ever be that way, Red? When the blood is on our hands alone?
49
Mona seemed grateful for my work. She shuffled happily through the pages after the waitress had taken our orders—my clam chowder and Mona’s chocolate and caramel sundae.
“Whatever else we have here,” she said, “I think this narrator has depressive illness. Did you notice all the suicidal material?”
“Mmm,” I said reluctantly. “I can see how you might read some of the cits that way. But overall, I don’t think that’s the main point—suicide threats. Do you?”
Mona tapped
demythologize
and ordered, “Look at this one. When you consider the cuts on her wrist along with this? C’mon. Adolescent death worship. I can spot it a mile away.”
“A woman of many talents,” I marveled. “What makes you say ‘adolescent,’ anyway? We don’t know how old she is. And she’s at least old enough to be working at Samuelson.”
“She’s probably our age,” Mona said firmly. “Look at the first cit. It seems like she hasn’t been there for long.”
“You still consider yourself an adolescent?” I asked.
She shrugged. “Not
me
, no. But twenty-three’s not out of the woods, for some people. I have a couple of old friends back home who still live with their parents and get falling-down drunk on weekends.”
“You’re twenty-three?”
“Yeah. And you’re twenty-two, right? A spring chicken.”
“I just turned twenty-four,” I said.
She raised an eyebrow at me. “Really?”
“Yup,” I said. “Don’t look surprised. Don’t I seem to you like someone who usually takes the slow road?”
“I’m not sure if there’s a diplomatic answer to that question.”
“Don’t worry about it. I didn’t say there was anything wrong with the slow road.”
Mona looked at me carefully.
“Okay,” she said blankly. Then she looked back at the cits.
“I have to admit,” I said. “That prom queen cit is actually one of my favorites.”
“Ew,” replied Mona. “Why?”
“I think it gives us a special insight into her emotional state.”
“How’s that?”
“The dead prom queen is
her
, of course. It’s her, but dead. She calls it the dead prom queen to make light of it, I think. But she sees it as something close to her, death. It’s not death
worship
, I don’t think. It’s just become a part of her everyday life, thinking about death.”
Mona gave me a bored look.
“And you don’t see that as a sign of depressive illness?” she asked.
“No.”
“Hmm.” She looked doubtful. “Then how do you explain the cut on her wrist, in the ‘unscripted’ cit?”
“I don’t know. But suicidal tendencies isn’t the only possibility.”
“I disagree. It sounds like she made some feeble suicide attempt. Or maybe she just cut herself. Deliberately, to get attention. I seriously knew girls in high school who did shit like that.”