Brief Encounters with the Enemy (19 page)

But when I hung up, I was overcome with guilt, choked with guilt, almost to the point of tears. I thought of my grandmother, alone in her apartment, rheumatoid arthritis, suffering for years before she died. I put my elbows on my knees, I hung my head in shame, my tie dangled down. Now it was I who needed to atone.

Next it was a girl on the line. She sounded beautiful. She sounded forgiving. She wanted to know if she could have two tickets for the Shakespeare play. “Yes, you can,” I said, my voice heavy with remorse. If she had said one kind thing, anything, I would have cried in gratitude. She sounded like she was a brunette with glasses and a nice ass. I bet she was smart and read books. I bet she’d gone to a good college and utilized her opportunities. I helped her with everything she needed and I got her great seats at a good price. I wanted to ask if she was going to the show with her boyfriend. “Are you married?” I wanted to ask. I once made a terrible mistake years ago by inquiring if the girl on the other end of the line was married. This was against company policy, but she had sounded so beautiful, and my desire had been so unbearable. I’d managed to establish a rapport with her in a few minutes on the phone, and I’d kept talking to her well after sealing the deal. Just so I could talk. I didn’t care about company policy, I didn’t care about losing commission. She had laughed at everything I
said. “You sound tall,” she had said over the phone. “Are you tall?”

“Not that tall,” I said.

I was picturing her short, but when I met her a few days later, I was shocked to see that she was tiny, and her hair was red, and she had freckles and wore giant earrings. I sat across the table from her at T.G.I. Friday’s, looking down at my plate of salmon and listening to her voice, trying to recall the image I’d had of her on the phone in my cubicle.

The girl who wanted tickets for Shakespeare was happy with what I’d done for her. She left it at that and hung up. The next six callers were happy too. I was happy for their happiness. I was the portal through which they must pass on their way to pleasure. I was the faceless voice on the end of the line that enabled them to have those memorable evenings, those exciting afternoons. If not for me, the little boys and girls of the city would never be able to see the clowns and elephants. They didn’t know what I’d done for them, those little boys and girls, but I knew, and that was good enough for me.

By the tenth caller, I was bitter again. I was callous again. I knew I would be. My mouth was dry, my ears were buzzing. Plus I had to piss.

This is how my days go,
bringg, bringg; bringg, bringg
, every day pretty much the same as the day before: intimacy in intervals of three minutes or less—three minutes or less if you want to make enough commission—holding at bay my desire and antagonism, and also my boredom, and not a little regret. The only thing that made today different, that made it stand out from any of the days before, was that Wally was coming back.

We gathered in the conference room. I was late getting there. I made a point of being late by staying in the bathroom. By the time I walked in, he still hadn’t arrived. This added to my aggravation.

Everyone else was there, one hundred people standing shoulder to shoulder, surrounded by an overblown display of congratulation. If you didn’t know it was January, you would have thought it was the Fourth of July. There was an American-flag cake in the middle of the table, three feet long and three inches thick, there were red-white-and-blue plates and napkins, there were red-white-and-blue cans of Coke, there were little ninety-nine-cent American flags. Hanging on the walls were the red-white-and-blue handmade signs telling Wally what a good job he’d done.

Three of the girls came my way. Amber and Melissa and Tiffany.

“Here you go, hon,” they said.

“Here you go, Zeke.”

“Here’s one for you.”

They stuck an American-flag pin in my lapel. They touched me and leaned close.

“What I really want is a slice of that cake,” I said suggestively.

“That’s for later, hon.”

They had French manicures, they had highlights, they smelled like apricots.

Twelve months ago, almost to the day, we’d clumped together in this same room, one hundred of us, saying goodbye
to Wally. Everyone had cheered. Everyone had stomped their feet and chanted, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” I’d done it too, despite myself. That is an example of how you can get caught up in the spirit of the moment.

About an hour after his going-away party, Wally had come into my cubicle and stood by my desk, close to my desk, playing with my paper clips and waiting for me to get off the phone. When I hung up, he said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Zeke.” He had his mailbag slung over his shoulder, half filled with mail. He looked like a paperboy. I’d known him from the neighborhood when snot had dripped from his nose even in the summertime, when he’d been undersize and chubby and the teachers had thought he might be retarded. Everyone had made fun of him except for me. I’d had compassion for some reason. I’d been the one who had chased down two boys who’d been jabbing him in the belly with sticks. “Aw, we was just playing around.” Those boys were bigger than me, but they cowered. By high school I had built a reputation for being fearless and exceptional. I’d been the one who had stood onstage at graduation and told the other students what life held in store for them. “Give your best, get your best!” I’d said. The parents had loved that. But it was Wally, slow and runny Wally, who, on his own initiative, had gone down to the Career Center one morning before work and signed up for the army, and I was the one who sat at a desk all day long with a headset on.

So when he came into my cubicle to say goodbye, I said, without missing a beat, “I’m real proud of you.” I tried to say it like I meant it, hoping he wouldn’t detect that underneath was condescension, and underneath the condescension was jealousy, and after that lay melancholy.

The next thing I knew, he was sitting down on the floor, Wally was, sitting down between my cubicle wall and desk, wedging himself in as if playing hide-and-seek, hugging his mailbag to his chest with both arms and squeezing his knees up to his chin, all the while whispering something over and over, something that I had to lean down to hear, something about being scared, Zeke, about not wanting to go, Zeke.

“I don’t want to die, Zeke,” he nearly hyperventilated. He looked at me with baby-blue eyes that were filled with tears.

I stood up so fast that the wire from my headset caught around the arm of my swivel chair and yanked the headset off my head like a rubber band. “You’re not going to die!” I said.

“Yes,” he said, “I am.” He said it like he knew it.

After that, I didn’t know what to say. What I really wanted to do was jab him in the belly with a stick. Maybe he
was
going to die. Maybe this was what his whole life had been leading up to and he was going to be one of those unlucky soldiers who caught it, one of those few unlucky soldiers who never made it back out of the five hundred thousand who did. He’d come back in a coffin with the flag draped over the top. I’d go to his funeral. His dad would hug me and say, “Thank you for everything.”

“You have a greater chance of dying in a car crash,” I said. But Wally didn’t want to hear about odds. He shook his head, his lips trembled, snot leaked out. I squatted down like an elementary school teacher would, hand on his knee, firm but consoling tone. “You’re not going to die,” I cooed. I mustered compassion from somewhere, and I must have said it with enough conviction that he appeared to believe me. A few moments later he rolled himself up off the floor, wiped his nose
on his hand, wiped his hand on his pants, tucked his shirt into his pants.

I took him by the shoulders then, squarely, masculinely, and to lighten the mood a little, I said, “Go kick some ass, Wally!”

I had been right: he didn’t die. In fact, he was reborn. Here he was, entering the conference room unscathed, smiling, blushing hard, his head buzzed, his face tanned, waving his hands in the air like he’d just been having the time of his life. One hundred people cheered him all at once, one hundred phone operators clapping and stomping until the room shook.

“Wally, Wally!” they called, “Wally, Wally! U.S.A.!” Even the cleaning girls had stopped by, Maria and Olga, clapping, thanking him for everything he gave. I clapped too. I stomped my feet too. Because this is how you get caught up.

He was a changed man. You could see that right away. He was electric now. He was fluid.

“Where’d you go, Wally?” I thought as I pounded my hands. “What’d you see, huh?”

“I’ve been places, Zeke,” his grin seemed to be saying to me. “I’ve done things.”

He looked like he’d lost weight. That was what he’d done. He looked like he’d put on muscle too. His gut was gone and his jaw was hard and he didn’t resemble a large baby boy anymore. If his nose was running, I couldn’t tell. Apparently neither could the girls who were throwing their arms around his neck and kissing him, one after another, including Brittany, the prettiest of them all, the one I’d gone out with two years ago when the managing director had given me free tickets for a show that had come to town. We’d gone to Applebee’s afterward,
Brittany and I, and I’d told her, “Order whatever you want. It’s on me,” because I wanted her to know that this was a date, that I had designs on her. But for whatever reason, our outing never seemed to rise above coworkers with free tickets gossiping about the workplace, and I ended the night kissing her on the cheek.

Now she was kissing Wally on the cheek, damn close to his mouth, leaving her lipstick on his face, and when she was done, the next girl stepped in, and when all the girls were done, they moved back in a circle to give him some space to breathe, so he could compose himself amid all the attention, and he stood in the center of the conference room, as if under a spotlight, while we waited for him to say something profound about his experience. But of course he didn’t know what to say, profound or otherwise. He looked around at a loss, lipstick all over his face, staring blankly at a roomful of people he had only ever delivered mail to.

It was the managing director who broke the silence by raising a plastic cup of soda, saying how he was happy to have Wally back, how Wally had sacrificed for us, how it was a shame that after everything he’d been through, he had to come home to such cold weather.

But Wally didn’t look like he’d been through much of anything. He didn’t have one scratch on him, as far as I could tell. He looked like he’d given little and gained a lot. As the managing director droned on, I contemplated how, if I ever went over there and came back with a tan and no scratch, I would be ashamed of myself. I would be embarrassed. I would make sure I got a scratch even if it meant I had to inflict it myself. And then I’d stand in this conference room, the way I had
stood onstage at my high school graduation, and give a speech about country and family and friends. Society too. “It’s
you
I want to thank,” I’d say. That would bring the house down.

“You’re going to be losing your tan,” the managing director said in conclusion, and slapped Wally on the back. At that, the room laughed, clapping and shouting, with Wally standing in the middle of it like one of those things in a snow globe, with applause showering down around him.

“What’d you see, Wally?” I asked out loud. No one could hear me. “What’d you do, huh?”

For a moment our eyes met and he smiled at me.

“Why, I killed a man, Zeke. That’s what I’ve done.”

Then the applause stopped, it stopped all at once, because the break was over and it was time to get back to work. The phones were ringing.

The phones kept ringing and Wally’s hair grew back. In February the temperature dropped to zero degrees. For three straight days it stayed at zero. Then it dropped below zero. The roads froze and the pipes burst and the circus was canceled. Whatever commission we had earned had to be returned. That was company policy.

We continued to get closer to catching their man. We even had him surrounded once, briefly, but he was wily and managed to elude us. Not to worry, we were getting closer. Any day now.

Other than that, not much changed.

Then one morning, toward the end of the month, I woke
as I always did to the sound of my alarm going off. It was six-forty-five.
Wrangg, wrangg; wrangg, wrangg
, the alarm went. The alarm could have been the telephone ringing in my cubicle. Lying in bed with my eyes closed and the covers pulled up around my chin, I listened to the winter sounds: the wind and the windows and the salt trucks. I tried to recall what my dreams had been from the night before, but as usual, they were fading—I could remember only symbols. Paperweights. Redwoods.

At 6:50 my snooze went off and I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling for a while, following my upstairs neighbor’s footsteps going back and forth.

At 6:55 I had no choice but to get out of bed and go into the kitchen and go into the bathroom and go back to the bedroom, where I wondered if the neighbors in the apartment beneath mine were staring up at their ceiling.