The Gum Thief (18 page)

You have my numbers and email.

J.

Glove Pond

Kyle paid the Chinese food delivery man, and Brittany carried the bags to the dining-room table, which had been dusted by Steve with several sweeps of a small throw rug.

Gloria then opened each grease-blotted delivery bag with wonder, as though it might yield gold, frankincense and myrrh. She made no effort to fetch cutlery or plates; Kyle went into the kitchen to find some. He rifled through the cutlery drawer, where he found chunky pieces of sterling silver dinnerware. The silver was so badly neglected that its surface was like the oilcaked and smeared concrete bay floors at a Mr. Muffler franchise.
Jesus, these people are disasters,
he thought, looking for something, anything, that might be useable as serviettes. No paper towels. No tea towels. No cloth napkins. In the end, he found a three-week-old copy of a local shopping flyer, and around each knife/fork/ spoon he folded a paper sheet. He carried these four set-ups out to the dining-room table.

"What are those?" asked Gloria.

"Set-ups."

"What's a set-up?"

"It's a restaurant term. Instead of placing a separate napkin, fork, knife and spoon, you bundle them up in the back room and then simply put out one 'set-up' for each seat.
It
saves time."

Nobody commented on the fact that they were using newspaper sheets as napkins. Brittany removed her cutlery. "This is expensive stuff," she said. "Sterling."

"Wedding gifts," said Gloria.

"You could pawn each of these suckers for a few grand," said Kyle. "Your cutlery drawer is worth maybe forty grand."

Brittany said, "You could pay for a first-class trip around the world with just your serving spoons."

And here, dear reader, is where time froze for Steve and Gloria-where their perception of the universe stopped, leaving them in a not unpleasant dimensionless limbo. And then, like a small rose seedling emerging from beneath the winter snow to be kissed by the sun's love, both time and reality returned to the couple with a trickle. And then tiny acetylene bursts somewhere in their reptile cortexes were followed by walloping endorphin rushes and a moment of satori bliss.

"Kyle, we need plates," said Brittany.

Kyle went to fetch some while Steve and Gloria remained almost tasered with joy. Only after another minute did they return to full consciousness. They unwrapped their set-ups and began to poke into the contents of the takeout boxes and flats.

"Ooh!" said Gloria. "Moo goo gai pan. I love moo goo gai pan."

"No," said Steve. "You merely enjoy saying 'moo goo gai pan. '"

"And what if I do? Kyle, would you like some moo goo gai pan?" Gloria speared the largest, juiciest piece of chicken bathed in the foil tray amidst a flotsam of defeated mushrooms and vegetables.

"Sure," said Kyle.

Kyle was amazed at how much noise his putative hosts made while eating-their athletic slurping and brisk glottal vacuuming noises reminded him of nothing more than soft porn.

"So," said Brittany. "Where is your son right now?"

Steve and Gloria's forks stopped in mid-pounce. "Why do you ask?" asked Steve. "I'm making conversation," said Brittany. "Our son is a very special boy," said Gloria. "Special indeed," Steve echoed. Kyle assessed the data around him-the house frozen

in time; Steve and Gloria's wrinkled skin; the absence of any evidence of human life under sixty-and pushing the limits of plausibility
to
the extreme, he asked, "Is he in college now, perhaps?"

Too quickly, Gloria said, "Yes.
In
college. Happy as a clam. Studying his brains out. Study, study, study."

"Can't believe how much he studies."

"His little noggin overflowing with knowledge."

"The brain is a marvellous thing."

"Dear," said Gloria to Steve, "there's no soy sauce here."

"There isn't, is there?"

"I'd better go into the kitchen and get some. "

"I'll come with you."

Steve and Gloria got up from the table together and left the room.

Kyle looked at Brittany. "These people are mentally ill."

"It's all relative, Kyle. Maybe they're happy."

"They have no food in their kitchen."

"Few people do. They probably go to the deli once a day, like us."

"No, I mean no food whatsoever. A jar of pickle juice and a box of weevil-infested pancake mix older than the civil rights movement."

"You're exaggerating."

"I'm not."

"They appear well nourished."

"All they ingest is Scotch and gin."

"Keep your voice down. Maybe they can hear us."

"Are you going to eat that last bit of sweet-and-sour pork?"

"Be my guest."

Kyle ate the last piece of pork.

Toast 2: A High Seas Tale

1I
Nov. 1893 Though the Vessel shakes with incessant nauseating rolls
&
pitches, my faith in a Promised Land free of grills and devices that scorch our tender farinaceous flesh shakes not. The ship's Captain, one Cornelius Jif-a hideous, unschooled poltroon of questionable agenda-has almost entirely reduced our daily ration of both cinnamon
&
sugar, this over and above last week's complete withdrawal of butter. Some of the fainter slices on board have swapped logic with salt water and have gone delirious from the cursed sogginess that is the perpetual enemy of we who travel on the Good Ship
Slice,
registered in Liverpool but flying the Canadian Dominion's flag (though only, one might add, when nearing crafts touting flags of nations hostile to America's open-loaf policy-a policy that promises shelter to those slices who, like myself and my family, sit huddled in babushkas
&
mite-choked rags 'neath the fo'c'sle, dreaming of lives free of staleness and the Grill).

Yesterday the Widow Bran surrendered Hope of reaching our destination and became a piteous sight on the aft deck, the angry gulls
&
skuas gobbling her fair carcass, their demonic cackles rousing Captain Jif from the afternoon round of
chemin de fer
he plays with the beweeviled ship's "Guests of Distinction": Lord Rye of Loafestershire, the Marchioness of Yeaste (said
to have gone mad from a patch of mould on a raisin'ed slice) and the bellicose Herr Pumpernickel, heir to the fabled Knead fortune.

The only notion that gives us plain slices in steerage any hope is our Dream of one day inhabiting a land where freshness can live in peace, free of the perpetual mania engendered by the overbearing presence of cheeses, relishes
&
tuna mayonnaise.

But I neglect the most rousing of experiences, one that I must now here relate. We shored in Angra do Herofsmo, alongside the lava-domed Azorean coast, to restock a supply of durum wheat gone to mush from a leak in the prow-a leak caused by the unfortunate instance when Captain Jif-demented from a heady blend of liqueur-filled Yuletide chocolates and gambling wins-steered our vessel into a Turkish military ship,
At
Sheesh-Ke'h Bahb.
'Twas a fearsome puncture that interrupted our almost unceasing prayers to Saint Gwynevere of Cruste,

Manuscript ends here.

Bethany

You're back.

With a bang!

Thank God.

And "Toast 2" was epic. To be honest, I've been going through Roger withdrawal. Things aren't the same around here without someone a bit older than the rest of us to whip us into shape. Since the incident of the stolen gum (the QuickTime securi-cam loop of the event went viral all over YouTube), everyone's paranoid and grim.

I hope you're feeling better. Eight days is a long time to have been away. It's Sunday today, but it feels more like a "generic" day-or rather, it feels like what days must have felt like before we invented the seven days of the week. Imagine waking up in the morning and not knowing what day of the week it is. What a strange sensation that must have been.

Hmmm-what day of the week is it? It's nothing. It's merely a day, a plain old day with no labels or meaning or anything.

Now go back further in time-to before humans named the four seasons. You'd go through life saying, "Gee, it's colder now-the cold weather usually follows a longish spot of good weather-and if memory serves me correctly, after a hundred more sleeps, the weather will be warming up again."

People must have gone absolutely crazy, not knowing for sure how long the cold and warm patches were going to last-so crazy that they had to make a Stonehenge, to be
sure.
Archaeologists are always wondering why cavemen dragged those huge stones halfway across England-well, come on! They were totally freaked out by not knowing what season it was.

It's slow at EI Shtoopo-I think there are three big football games on TV, and that always empties out the place. Kyle's got the day off and is watching them at a friend's apartment. I'm killing time by walking up and down the aisles with a purposeful facial expression so that people don't interrupt me to ask questions. I've been doing this great big infinity loop of aisles 4 and 5 all day. QuickTime
that.

La DeeDee is driving me nuts right now, so I signed on for some extra shifts. I can use the money either for Europe or for nursing school, though I don't know which it's going to be yet.

DeeDee read this factoid that said one person in ten thousand commits suicide. She figured that if she knows maybe a thousand people, there's still only a one in ten chance she'd know a suicide-but instead she knows eight people who've done it, and four of them were pretty close to her. So she's wondering if knowing many suicides is, in itself, an indicator of herself suiciding. Not that she would. She lacks the necessary confidence and self-esteem. She figures she'd somehow botch it and end up embarrassed and in a wheelchair.

You used to know the Deedster back before life crushed her like a bug. Do you remember anything about her that might prod her in a productive direction again? Something? Anything?

At the moment, she spends her days leashed to a photocopier in a notary's office.
It
reminds me of those cartoons where there's a dog attached to a rope pegged in the middle of a yard. There's no hope of escaping, and she's lost the will to bark.

Depressing!

Bethany

Joan

Roger, now I know why your pal, Bethany, looked familiar.
It
was back at one of my Cancer Survival workshops. She was younger and chubbier, but it was her. Her aunt had breast cancer, and even near the end that woman was doing crafty things like appliqueing sequins onto denim pants. People who can achieve stuff even when they know they're goners amaze me, and when I think of Shakespeare keeping a skull on his desk while he wrote to remind him of his mortality? What a freak.