The Gum Thief (15 page)

I get older. I grow old. Somebody starts to tell me about their dreams, and I get so bored I have to escape. I flee to the craft superstore down the street from the hardware superstore, down the parkway from the office superstore. I wander its aisles, looking for the seed of an idea to help me escape from myself-I walk past artificial lilies and unpainted birdhouses and crewel kits that allow me to make images of koi swimming in Tokyo ponds. And then, in the scrapbooking aisle, I see 79¢ sticker packs with little rainbows and unicorns that say
DREAMS CAN COME TRUE!
and it makes me want to cry the way we feed nonsense crap like this to kids, who are going to inherit a century of ugly wars started by people who died long ago, but who were sick and damaged enough to transmit their hatred down through the centuries. Dreams don't come true. Dreams die. Dreams get compromised. Dreams end up dealing meth in a booth at the back of the Olive Garden. Dreams choke to death on bay leaves. Dreams get spleen cancer.

So there you have it-that's been my day until now. The Dell shipment got stuck at customs and won't be arriving until tomorrow, so I'm going to have a vodka snack and pretend to help customers in the office furniture department. Then I'll probably go through the aisles and look at all the plastic crap we sell and wonder about the chemicals in it, and what leftovers were flushed into the water system during manufacturing. I sometimes get the feeling that we're having full-time one-on-one unprotected sex with the twenty-first century, exchanging fluids with the era: antibiotics, swimming pool chlorine, long-chain molecules, gas fumes, new car smell-all of it one great big condom free involuntary love-in.

Roger

A half-hour later: Pete is away this afternoon, so we're all slacking off like crazy. We drew straws to see who works the till, and Kyle lost. I went down the road and bought a bottle of rotgut vodka and am going to work on
Glove Pond
in the loading bay. It's warm as long as you're not in the wind.

R.

Glove Pond:
Kyle

Steve and Gloria were psychic abortions. Steve's hour-long exegesis of his five grotesque, directionless and archaic novels reminded Kyle of his sulpha allergy-of that day at his sister's wedding barbecue when he took a tablet for his infected hangnail and suddenly felt as if he were itching and burning to death from the inside. Jumping in the pool only fed the fire. He remembered screaming for painkillers in the ambulance before he blacked out. He more or less blacked out during Steve's speech, only to wake up and find Gloria sitting beside him, her leftmost talon rubbing his right inner thigh. She informed him that he wasn't as in command of his father figure metaphors as he thought-but that was okay because Gloria had figured out how he could hone his skills on this matter in the future.

Thank the Lord Brittany rescued him and a further encroachment of the talons, and thank the Lord she'd then gone upstairs. All the tea in China wouldn't make him go up and have a look at what that car crash of a souse was up
to.

His stomach gurgled. How come there was no odour of cooking? Nor evidence of catering? Nor even place settings at the dusty dining table? Kyle went to the kitchen
to investigate. No Steve. All he could find was an empty box of Triscuits on the counter and a cookie sheet in the sink. An empty plastic Safeway cheddar cheese wrapper with little gouges in it lay on the floor, as though abandoned by teeny white-trash mice. The stove elements were cold. He looked in the fridge.
How is possible to have nothing in a fridge except a jar of pickle juice?

He wondered what the dinner strategy was, and then he realized that there
was
no dinner strategy. All these people had in the house was Scotch. This realization was shocking to Kyle, and he sat down at the kitchen table to collect his thoughts.

A furnace kicked in with a faint hum. He heard a car pass on the road out front. The fridge burped into low gear, and Kyle had a depressing vision of penguins protecting stillborn eggs. This was possibly the creepiest room he had ever been in.

What about the cupboards-could they be as empty as the fridge?
No. That's simply not possible. There has to be food-some kind of food-somewhere in the kitchen.

He went to the cupboards, and each one was revealed to be empty until behind the fifth door he saw a box Willamette’s Home style Pancake Batter Mix. On its front was the most shockingly inappropriate image of - there were no other words to describe it-a plantation darkie offering a platter of flapjacks to a lace-clad Nicole Kidman of yore, who hid behind both a pink fan and the easy knowledge that she could have her darkie flayed to death at whim. The box had no bar code. Kyle opened its flaps and saw what looked like tiny dancing flakes of oregano.

Oh dear God!

He dropped the box on the counter; and weevils scattered away from it in all directions. Steve walked into the room. "Oh, so you're a chef then-what good luck for us."

Bethany

Kyle told
me
that
he
thinks Staples is a piece of shit and should burn. I'm shocked to find that Trail Mix Boy has an anarchist spark in him. Granted,
he
was baked on mushrooms when
he
said it, and
he
and I and eight others
were
ready to mutiny after a twenty-minute seminar on toner cartridge recycling. When I look back on my childhood and on the pictures I once had in my head about what adult life would
be
like,
they
weren't of Fahad squinting into a
coffee
spoon to
see
if his blackheads
were
visible while a Ricoh sales rep demonstrated by way of a PowerPoint presentation that cartridges take a thousand years to decompose in a landfill.

Okay, then, Bethany, what were your images?

Thank you, interior monologue. I thought that when I was an adult I'd
somehow be
a bit more connected to life and death-that when I went to
bed
at night, after drinking a cup of chilled blood with my husband, Johnny Depp, I would look back on a day filled with confessions and accidents and affairs and large amounts of money travelling in all directions. Instead, I get to watch
the
assistant manager's QuickTime loop of Blair being caught stealing Chiclets on the securi-cam.
The
soundtrack? "We Are Family" by Sister Sledge. At least in a possible future career as a nurse, the daily drudgery might be balanced by the possibility of genuine human drama.

But here at Shtooples, there's no chance of drama, period.

Thank you again, interior monologue. You are correct.

So, then, what's keeping you here?

Inertia. Laziness. Hormones. Habit.

Habit? I thought you said you wanted drama.

Yeah, well, aren't we human beings screwy creatures? At least at Shtooples the worst thing that can happen to you is that you get fired. Nobody dies at Shtooples. Nothing can ever truly fuck up in Aisle 5-South. It's safe. In its way.

Are you finally sick of death?

Please, don't ask me.

But I have to, and I won't stop asking until you answer me.

Okay, yeah, I am sick of it. Happy now?

Happy is a hokey concept at best, Bethany.

Okay, then, are you satisfied?

The truth is always satisfying.

Why is that?

I don't know. It's the way the universe is built.

Wouldn't it be great if we all lived in a world where everybody believed everyone else's lies? The lies would cancel each other out, and you'd be left with a massive ultratruth.

Snorrrrrrre. Are you baked on mushrooms too, Bethany?

No. I'm wondering how much longer I can handle working here at das Shtoop.

Nursing school?

I don't know. Anything. Unemployment? Unwed pregnancy?

You're too classy to take the easy ways out, Bethany.

Okay, interior monologue, if you're so smart, provide me with a suggestion.

What's wrong with school?

No
response:

...
Bethany?
...
School?

I'm thinking.

Well, technically,
I'm
the one who's thinking here.

I don't have any money, and I don't want my mother to

sell her place merely to rescue me from prison.

Now we're getting somewhere.

Gee, thanks.

What would be so wrong with your mother selling her condo? The market's good right now. She could rent a place.

Let's stop right now.

Bethany?

Look, there's Fahad, and he's trying out a new pore cleansing strip by the sink. Gotta go.

PS: Roger, my mother wrote you yet another letter? PPS: I think about
Glove Pond
all the time. I'm trying to figure out who is who. Am I Brittany? Is Kyle Kyle? Are you Steve? Or maybe I'm partially Kyle or ... you're so lucky to have an imagination, Roger. You can sit down and make shit up. I can't even make up my mind.
ppps:
As part of my efforts to help Kyle cope with death, we went to visit his grandmother's grave. We were reading tombstones together; and I said it must be nice to be dead and not have to worry about how you look any more-as a joke. And Kyle said to me, "I saw this show on the Discovery Channel, and it said that beauty isn't only about the traits you possess, it's also about the traits you don't possess." He then said, "You're really beautiful, Bethany, because there are so many bad traits a lot of girls have and you don't have any of them."

I asked him, "Like what?"

"You're not greedy. And you don't plot or scheme, and you don't go all slutty or manipulative if you don't get what you want."

I didn't know what to say, so I didn't say anything, but I've been floating ever since.

DeeDee

To: Roger Thorpe
c/o:
Staples

Roger, Me again. This morning I had a crown replaced
($$$!),
and throughout the experience I read your
Glove Pond.
Bethany gave me a photocopy of your manuscript. I must admit, Roger, it's too highbrow for me-all the talk about literature-out of my league. How do you have the patience to write? Me-I'm not calm enough to read fiction. I think you have to be in the right state of mind, and I haven't been there since I was fourteen. I can read magazines and newspapers and other factual stuff. I'm actually leaving library books about science all over the house. It's an obvious ploy to get Bethany interested in school, but it does work, especially the books I leave near the toilet. They always get thumbed through, and it gives us things to talk about besides reality TV and the past. There's this one book on the stars that's fascinating, and it got me onto Google, looking up all sorts of things. Do you have any idea how big the universe is, Roger? It's terrifying, and the only thing I can think of that might make it not terrifying is the possibility of life all over the place.
I
mean, if life was an accident on this one little planet in the middle of nowhere, then what's the point? I find it hard to believe that human beings are the crowning achievement of life on earth. Something better than us has to come along. Maybe someday there'll be a flower the size of Colorado-or a marine organism that occupies the entire Indian Ocean massive super creatures that use telepathy to speak with other creatures in other galaxies!