Brief Encounters with the Enemy (21 page)

I went out the side door with my bag of things so I wouldn’t have to see anyone else for the last time and make them embarrassed. I took the elevator down to the eighteenth floor. On the eighteenth floor, I transferred to the freight elevator.

The elevator guy said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.” It’d been two years since I’d gotten promoted. There was graffiti about pussies all over the walls

“I’ve been on vacation,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

He thought I was serious. To him, only a couple of weeks had passed since he’d last seen me. That’s how time moves when you’re in an elevator.

The subbasement was the same as always, boiling hot, even in the dead of winter, and smelling like envelopes. There were sixteen hallways in the subbasement, and if you didn’t know which way you were going, you could get lost and wander for an hour. I knew exactly where I was going. I found Wally in the bulk section, sitting on a crate while he sorted envelopes, big, little, medium. He didn’t look up when I came over. He was busy with his work, busy tossing envelopes left or right. One, two, three, he worked. He had concentration. He had work ethic. He deserved to have a good word put in for
him. I’d done this for three years. I used to go home each night and wash my hands with lemon juice to try to get the smell of envelope off them. It had felt like a miracle when I moved upstairs.

For a moment I thought I might pass out, because it was hot in the subbasement, and because I’d eaten a lot of cake, and also because I knew this was it, that my “adventure” was about to begin and there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming back. I tilted slightly, briefly, and imagined myself falling into the narrow space between the big envelopes and the small envelopes. It wouldn’t be that bad, I thought, to fall into that space. It wouldn’t be that bad to do this kind of work again.

I stood to the side waiting for him to notice me, and when he looked my way, he stood up quickly. I said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Wally.”

He put down the envelope he was holding. He put his hands in his pockets. He took them out. His face was flushed from the stuffiness. This was probably what the barracks was going to feel like.

“Did the managing director ever talk to you?” I asked, as if there was a possibility.

Wally shook his head.

“That’s a shame,” I said, but I was relieved. And then I was sorry. “Well, it’s not that bad down here,” I said. I smiled, I chuckled. As if to prove my point, I picked up an envelope, weighed its heft, and tossed it into the medium pile. But before I knew what was happening, I was sputtering, teetering, grasping Wally’s hand, and saying, “I don’t want to die, Wally. I don’t want to die.”

Wally grabbed me to steady me. He put his arm around my waist. He let me lean straight into him. We stood there like that for a while in the hot basement with the sound of the fan whirring in the background, with me heaving against him.

I kept waiting to hear Wally offer some words of comfort, of consolation. I kept waiting for him to talk to me about percentages and odds. Instead, he took me by the shoulders, firmly, tightly, looked me straight in the eye, and I suppose to lighten the mood a little bit, he said, “Go kick some ass, Zeke!”

It was dawn. It was oddly warm for dawn. Twenty-five degrees, maybe.

I was supposed to catch the bus at the depot—that was the instruction. I fully intended to follow all instructions. At the depot, there were fifty guys like me milling around. No one looked at anyone. Half of us stood there smoking cigarettes. There was a sign that said
NO SMOKING
, but we knew the basic laws of the land didn’t apply to us anymore. The rest of us slouched in the blue plastic seats, trying to stay awake. A tall man came and sat down next to me. He had a can of Coke that he kept tipping all the way back, as if trying to get out every drop. Enjoy that last drop, I thought. His Adam’s apple bobbed. He said to me, “Do you know where we’re going?”

“I have no idea,” I said.

“We’re going for training,” someone said, someone who was eavesdropping. Privacy didn’t apply to us anymore either. Soon we’d be showering together.

“No,” the tall man said to the eavesdropper, “we’re going
straight to the forest.” He chuckled like this was something that could be funny.

When the bus pulled in, the headlights came at us like giant yellow eyeballs. It was a Greyhound bus with an LCD display on the front that said
GOD BLESS
A
MERICA
. The bus had been rented free of charge for the war effort so that not everything would have to fall on the taxpayers.

An officer appeared out of nowhere. His hat was on and his shoes were shined. It was clear he wasn’t a man who had trouble with the early hours of the morning. “Line up and get on” was what he said.

We did as we were told. This is day one, I thought.

A fat man sat down next to me with headphones on. He was already out of breath and would most certainly die within days. They weren’t picky anymore. They were taking anyone who wanted to be a soldier. The man bobbed his head to whatever music was on his headphones, and when I looked at him, he pulled one of the headphones off of his ear and said confidentially, “If you’ve got music, you better listen to it now, because they’re going to take it.”

“Is that so?” I said.

“That is so,” he said.

I wasn’t going in for rumors. I wasn’t going in for hysteria. I’d stay above the fray, the paranoia. I wanted cold hard facts. Cold hard facts were going to save me in the end. Facts and luck.

The officer came through the bus, doing a head count. His gun was on his hip. When he walked past me, the gun was at eye level.

Someone in the front shouted, “When am I going to get me one of those guns, Captain?” Everyone laughed.

The bus started, and we pulled out so smoothly. The bus hummed. We made a left and another left. I leaned back in my seat and found comfort in the swaying. Then I drifted off to sleep. But I didn’t dream. And when I woke, we had arrived.

The story began to change for me the summer I was working at the supermarket in Montour Heights—that enormous state-of-the-art supermarket that had been built to great acclaim, with its forty-eight aisles, its ice cream parlor, its travel agency.

It was summer, but it was starting to get unseasonably cool, strangely cool, sixty degrees, fifty degrees sometimes. The days were overcast and the nights were chilly and when I left home in the morning there’d be frost on the leaves. The public pools had shut down and the price of heating oil had gone up and families picnicked in their living rooms in front of the television. It wasn’t unusual to see people on the street dressed in corduroys and sweaters and sometimes gloves and hats. In the evening there’d be smoke coming out of the chimneys. No one cared about the weather, though, because everyone’s
attention was on the war. We’d taken the bay, we’d secured the border, and we’d had almost no casualties. Within a week we’d made it within fifty miles of the capital, and a week later we had closed to twenty-five, and it was agreed upon by all the experts, patriots and naysayers alike, that the enemy no longer stood a chance and now was the time to begin discussing the terms of settlement.

At the supermarket, business was booming. The factories had opened back up along the river like old times, and people had come in from the outskirts to work, and people needed to eat. Before and after our shifts, we would crowd into the break room—the cashiers, the baggers, the stock clerks, the butchers, the bakers, the man who collected the shopping carts—and talk about what was happening and what was going to happen. Fifty of us standing shoulder to shoulder in that windowless room, laughing and joking and breathing a sigh of relief because now that the end was near, it was evident there wouldn’t be a draft. Some of the guys said they were thinking about enlisting anyway, before it was too late, so they could have an adventure. I said I was thinking about enlisting too, which made everyone laugh, because of course I would never be eligible. That summer everyone was happy and everyone was carefree. But then toward the middle of August, things started to bog down due to terrain and logistics, and for a while we advanced no more than a quarter of a mile a day, sometimes not even that, sometimes we lost ground, little by little we lost ground, until before long we were once again fifty miles from the capital. So after that we talked about other things.

In September Ziggy caught a girl shoplifting. I saw her first
when I was coming through the produce aisle with my broom. Her back was to me, and she had long wavy hair that was the color of chocolate, and she had a nice ass, and she was eating strawberries straight out of the bin as if she owned the place. No regard. It was about four o’clock and I was late on my tasks because I’m overworked, but I lingered, hoping I might have an opportunity to chat her up, which is what I imagine whenever I see a pretty girl—imagine but never undertake. I wasted some time sweeping up the stray lettuce leaves, even the ones that had been ground into the floor, which I generally leave for the guy on night turn. My good side was facing her way, so that if she happened to turn around, I would be at my most handsome and appealing, and I would say something in the nature of “What’s your name?” and she would blush and tell me and we would go from there. When she did turn around, however, I saw that her face was covered with acne, like sunburn, painful no doubt, red and splotchy and concentrated around her forehead and cheeks but also her chin and nose. She was staring at me as if about to ask a question, one side of her mouth puffing out like a chipmunk’s because of the strawberry in her mouth. I wanted to look away out of respect. I could detect that underneath the acne she was a very pretty woman, with brown eyes and high cheekbones and puffy lips that were noticeably without blemish. She was wearing a fur coat with an American-flag pin on the collar, and below the pin were her breasts. I knelt down to gather up the pile of lettuce leaves and when I stood up, she was gone.

That could have been the end if I hadn’t run into her again, not over twenty minutes later, as I was wheeling my trash bin past the row of hot soups. This time she was putting a plastic
spoonful of clam chowder into her mouth, tasting it slowly and making a big show of considering its merits before moving on to the next selection. She was trying to appear as if she were having a small sample of each before deciding which one to purchase, but it was clear that she was one of those people who intended to eat an entire meal within the confines of the supermarket. I didn’t appreciate this, because I’m a company man at heart, but she was a poor girl—I could tell that now—and since I have my own struggles, I felt some affinity for her. She was doing her best to conceal the reality of her condition, but I’ve learned well that the unforgiving fluorescent lights of the supermarket eventually reveal all, and seeing her poised above the steaming pots of soup, I noticed that her long chocolate hair was unwashed and unkempt, and her fuzzy coat had tufts missing from the collar and wrists.

Coming down the aisle was Ziggy, pushing his shopping cart filled with two weeks’ worth of groceries. He wasn’t a customer. He was an undercover, and today he was dressed like a soldier in camouflage and combat boots. Yesterday he’d been a construction worker wearing a hard hat and tool belt. Tomorrow he might come dressed as a baseball player or whatever other profession struck his fancy. Halloween was two months away, but for him every day was Halloween. “Why don’t you come one day dressed as an undercover?” I joked with him once.

“Because I’d give myself away,” he had responded solemnly. He was slow like that sometimes.

He winked at me as we passed each other. He knew what the girl was up to, and he knew that I knew. He loved this. He lived for this. I’d known him since middle school, where he
had developed a passion for tattling. He once tattled on a girl for copying off his math test, even though it was no skin off his back. Her parents had to be brought in for a conference. Things like that can mar you for life. Now he earned twice as much as I did, and he didn’t do anything but spend his day strolling up and down the forty-eight aisles, gazing at the assortment of products, studying, pondering, selecting, then handing me his shopping cart at the end of his shift so I could return every single item to the shelves. Most days he was just an endless shopper full of suspicion of other shoppers, hoping for his intuition to be proved right to affirm him and release him from his tyranny of wandering. His original dream was to be a cop, but like a lot of people’s dreams, this one was dashed, mainly because he failed the written exam three times. “They’re all idiots anyway,” he told anyone who would listen, near tears, inverting the judgment. He was thinking about joining the army now. Once the war ended, of course. Or the marines. He was chubby and easily winded, but I supposed he had a shot. “Keep striving for your goal,” I encouraged him. It was what my father always said when he found himself at a loss for what to tell me next.

Ziggy passed me as I passed her. She had moved on to sampling the broccoli soup. I wanted to hang around long enough to see the exciting moment of revelation when the soldier takes his true form and removes his store ID, but the loudspeaker clicked on just above my head, and Mr. Moskowitz, as if he were a fire captain ordering his men into the burning building, screamed with great urgency, “There’s a cleanup in aisle thirty-nine!” So I had to wheel my trash bin around and return the way I had come, through the maze of aisles, past
the cheese court and the chocolate confectioner and the ice cream parlor, to the back room, where I retrieved my mop and bucket from the mop and bucket closet, then hurried all the way to aisle thirty-nine, where someone, through negligence or spite, had knocked over a display of molasses. A half-dozen bottles lay smashed in the middle of the floor, and from them oozed a great puddle that was widening slowly, almost imperceptibly, oozing across the aisle as if it were a lake at the beginning of time that, if left long enough, would engulf the entire supermarket.