So Joyce finally hit her limit and asked
herself, Why is that depraved, depressed
little weirdo still in my life? It had been twelve everfucking years now. Twelve!
Longer than most marriages! Longer than most lozenges. Their relationship should
have faded away long ago. Fade away or collapse. Or explode. Or was implode the correct term for the
fucked-up situation they had situated themselves in? Their relationship was
hard to describe. That sound you get from the bottom of a glass when your straw
sucks up the last of the liquid. THAT was the sound of their relationship—a lot
of air and a speck of taste. A not-very-satisfying final gurgle from the bottom
of the glass. A flat, tepid death-knell.
Flogging
the dolphin. All that was left to do was acknowledge that this final (?) ordeal
came out of nowhere. Again. Well, in truth there’d been several small skirmishes
along the way but Joyce and Walt inevitably teamed up again and cleaned up the
caustic, hateful debris they’d hurled at each other like pizza sauce, and
returned to the weird relationship that didn’t make sense to either of them but
was—for some loony reason--important. But Jesus, sometimes he was just
exhausting.
But they needed each other, right? Christ, maybe not. Walt hated to
think it might all come crumbling down due to a ringing phone in the middle of
the night.
Everything
was done by telephone. Walter and Joyce had met on an online writing community
and their relationship never moved beyond that. At least in a geographical, spatial
sense. They were 1,314 miles apart yet obsessively close together. They talked
and laughed and wept and fought and fucked and got as close as two people could
get without actually meeting. They helped each other through trauma and loss:
The death of a pet. That time Walt got cancer. When he lost his job. When Walt
was lost in the hospital, arms sore and punctured like a voodoo doll, hers was the number he wanted to call.
When Joyce went in for one of her endless arteriograms (Joyce had a blood-sucking hole in her brain) Walt tried his
best to make her laugh. Tried to make it seem less frightening. They played
like children sometimes to alleviate, if only for a few dewdrops, the horror of
existence. They were as close as they wanted to be. Neither one was booking flights or planning a
cross-country drive. Their magic moved through the sizzling intimacy of
telephone lines.
The freakish[1]*
magic that held them together was borne out of some mysterious alchemy forged
from transmission signals and electronic membranes. Migraine headaches. Drunken foolery. Frenetic, sugary, disaccharide
molecules flavored the air they breathed, air that transmitted delicate
personal information. Boy did they know each other. They felt like invisible,
forever-babbling entities, and spent hours sharing their lives and analyzing
things. It was easy to share long-distance. They didn’t have to look each other
in the eye but they could never hold hands. A lot of stuff was made up. They
wanted to hire the Banana Splits to play at their wedding. They spent long
hours dissecting the behavior of serial killers. The songs on their (imaginary)
jukebox would part your hair. They agreed that No Reply by the Beatles was about a creepy, possibly homicidal
stalker and not a song about lost love. They quoted lines from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974), Taxi Driver, (1976) and Goodfellas (1990). They both used the
Marx Brothers as directed—to stave off fear and despair. They developed verbal
shorthand which started to morph into a new, private language. Sometimes their
conversations were so short-handed and kinetic it made their hair stand on end,
their compass needles go weird, their bunnies flee, and once, even TIME ITSELF
sat down and slowly froze to death like crazy Jack Torrance in The Shining (1980).
There was power to their friendship. In the early days they’d talk for
eight or ten hours. Batteries would die. They couldn’t get enough of each
other. They would recite poetry or favorite passages from favorite books and
Walt still remembered with fondness their first phone conversation. They talked
about A rebours with such giddy, delighted
surprise. They felt like they had found someone new and revelatory yet
strangely familiar. They were in their 40’s when they “met” but turned into
teenagers in each other’s company.
All over the phone. Give it up for Alexander B.
But things were different now. The word impasse came to mind and Walt tried to
sweep it away. He didn’t want to dwell on his many mistakes, how freaked out he
was to talk to her. All the times he tried to run away or push her away, all
the times he was weak and pathetic in front of her. The times he confided his
darkest impulses...
Joyce was forcing herself to get exercise
(for some arcane medical reason) by walking around Lake Walnut. Her doctor—a
devout, bald man—recommended she take up jogging. She said, “Okay,” but knew
jogging wasn’t in her future. She refused to jog. It was a matter of dignity
and self-worth. All those women straining and sweating and struggling up and
over endless, merciless hills. And don’t even mention power-walking. Every time
a power-walker passed by, Joyce wished for a sniper in the trees, aiming at the
walker through the scope of an assault rifle.
Joyce was the kind of gal that used to sneak a smoke during gym class,
hiding on the distant side of the track. Once, in art class, she and her best
friend Rita managed to share a joint simply by opening a window (which wasn’t
allowed) and releasing the smoke through the screen. It was audacious and scary
(if caught they would have been royally screwed) and they got away with it. Of
course they did. They were fearless.
Joyce smiled at the memory, remembering Rita. It was only half a mile
around the lake (Lake Walnut should have been called Walnut Pond or, better yet, Walnut Puddle). A
gaggle of chatty women ran past her and Joyce remembered the term “runner’s
high,” something to do with endorphins producing euphoria.
Joyce
had been addicted to Percocet for several years. She knew all about euphoria
and was quite sure she couldn’t achieve it by running around a puddle.
She walked around the pond once and then bounced. She fled the scene in
her red Mazda Miata, tires spewing pebbles and sand behind her. That was enough
for today. She wondered if Walt would call. She really read him the riot act.
Would he even remember? Everclear abuse had worn holes in his head. They both
had holes.
Walt was at work. Walt was hungover. Walt
worked at FedEx. The Graveyard Shift. He took packages and moved them around.
He placed them according to lettered codes on the labels. For example: JBC went
to Franklin. PVD went to Providence. You would think WST would go to Westboro
or Worcester but no, it went to Providence too. It was best not to ask too many
questions. Walt worked in what was called The
Sort.
The Sort was housed in a big building
full of machines growling and grinding. There were conveyor belts and chutes
all over the place. Guys drove forklifts, guys handled hazardous stuff, guys
stood way up on scaffolds scanning barcodes.
“Guys” meant women too. There were a lot of women that worked on The Sort.
Walt was standing at his spot in front of a conveyor belt and packages
going past. Walt stood there and read the codes on each box that glided by. He
had three codes that were his responsibility: HYA, BDL and good old JBC. When a
package came by with one of those codes, Walt would shove it off the belt and
it would slide down a chute and then it was the next guy’s problem.
There were people that the managers selected to be “team leaders.” They
could boss you around. Walt’s immediate team leader was a black, mountain of a
man named Jesse. Some of the package handlers hated him, others feared him.
Walt was somewhere in the intimidated middle. Jesse always seemed to be under
tremendous stress. He could kid around and laugh but mostly he just worried and
barked orders. He had to. He was a team leader. One of Walt’s coworkers, a
friendly, verbose guy who drove a white panel van, told him that Jesse’s
personal life was as miserable and stressful as his job and he spent his
off-hours alone, swilling whiskey in the dark. Yeah, but Panel Van Guy’s gossip
couldn’t be trusted. He hated Jesse and once confided to Walt that he wanted to
stab him in the face, the eyeballs. Like a prison hit. Walt just nodded and eased
away.
Walt looked at the clock even though it was pointless. The shift ended
when all the freight had been sorted and shipped. Walt looked at the clock
again anyway. It was two o’clock in the morning and he had never needed a drink
more ruthlessly. He needed to talk to Joyce with such desperation he felt
embarrassed by himself. But he was afraid to call her. He had seriously fucked
things up (again).
See, Joyce lived with people now. Walt couldn’t just get drunk and call
at all hours anymore. People were sleeping. He had become a natural disaster. Unpredictable.
A befuddled invader. Joyce was right to be furious. No one needs a screaming
phone at two in the morning. And Walt was no help. He couldn’t remember a
thing. He looked at the clock again. It was still two o’clock in the morning.
Endless packages, endless time.
Joyce couldn’t work because of her
condition and passed the time doing scrimshaw. She used bone instead of ivory.
She could lose days etching and scribing into the bone. Her current project was
carving the cast of The Mary Tyler Moore Show into a moose hip. Scrimshaw
ate hours. Sometimes her hands hurt from
repetitive motion.
She had left home at 16 and moved in with her pot-dealer boyfriend,
still managing to complete her education. Now, at 50 she was living with her
parents again. She started to tackle Gavin MacLeod, etching his head into the
polished bone.
When Jesse the Team Leader finally yelled,
“Third shift all set!” Walt felt close to collapse. Package handling was hard
work. It was hard on the body, all that activity and heavy lifting. He punched
out and urged his aching form out the door and into the pre-dawn dark. It was
three o’clock in the morning. Birds were screeching in the trees. “I hate those
fucking birds,” said a disgruntled guy behind him.
When Walt got home the telephone was sitting there. He cracked open a
beer and turned on the TV. Looking at the phone. Calling Joyce was impossible,
of course. He wanted to talk to her, tell her about his workday. A new guy had
lost three fingers to a conveyor belt. A hazard guy had to clean up after him
wearing a spacesuit. It was exciting. The guy who lost his fingers remained
eerily calm as he reported the accident to the dispatchers. We figured he was
still in shock. That would explain his calm. Three fingers, Jesus. An
amputation too mangled to repair. Walt drank his beer, casting an occasional
glance at the empty phone.
1,314 miles south, Joyce decided to call it
quits. She put away her scrimshaw tools and then hit the hay. She wondered if
Walt would call. He didn’t. Neither one of them was reachable anymore.
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