Brief Encounters with the Enemy (7 page)

That night I sat on my couch and watched David Letterman interview a starlet. She wore unusually long earrings, high heels, and a red dress that I kept hoping I’d be able to see up. “What’s your dream vacation?” Letterman asked her. “Oh, I just want to stay home in my pajamas,” the starlet said. And David Letterman looked at the camera in that way he has, and everyone in the audience laughed, and Paul Shaffer played something quick on the keyboard, and the rain was coming down outside my window, and I realized that, shockingly, it was the anorexic waitress being interviewed by David Letterman. David Letterman was looking at the camera, which is to say he was looking at me, and he was saying, “Is it really that complicated for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The
anorexic waitress was holding a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich as evidence of my incompetence. “Why was this returned?” David Letterman was asking. But before I could respond the valedictorian said that some of us here tonight would either go into the military or enter directly into the workforce.

Suddenly I was wide awake on the couch. A police show was playing on the television. Buddy talk. I switched it off. Light was just beginning to break. I got up and paced around the living room and then I sat back down on the couch. The couch was soft; next to it was a chair and a lamp, all generously provided by the landlady. When I first came to look at the apartment, I was disconcerted to observe a refrigerator standing against the living room wall. “You can have that too,” the landlady said, as if having a refrigerator in the living room were a desirable thing. I made a show of considering it. We walked out onto the balcony, which was the apartment’s main selling point. It was a sunny day, and we stood together for a while, looking down five flights to the street. The previous tenant had spray-painted a pair of shoes on the balcony without bothering to put down newspaper as protection. Positioned between myself and the landlady was the permanent silhouette of two feet facing the railing. They had a ghostly quality, as if someone had leaped and left behind his imprint. I wanted to ask the landlady if she might be able to clean away those feet at some point, but I didn’t ask and I took the apartment anyway.

Now I opened the balcony door and stood outside. It was raining lightly. Perhaps today was the day it would stop altogether. No one was out on the street. In the distance was a line
of dense trees that in the dim light seemed closer than they actually were. Beyond the trees were the mountains. The mountains and the trees made the city seem rural, or on the verge of becoming rural, as if civilization were working in reverse and nature were reclaiming the land for itself. The mayor had countered this by referring to the city as “The Emerging International City.” He hoped the moniker would catch on. So far it hadn’t. On local television, there were commercials every fifteen minutes, poorly made, with people on the street pretending to make unprompted remarks about why the city was already an international city or deserved to be one. But it was clear that none of them really knew what they were talking about. Furthermore, the phrase “emerging international city” was so cumbersome and took such great concentration to say that you could detect, after watching these commercials over and over, the way people paused ever so slightly before uttering it. The very fact that everyone managed to pronounce the phrase without stumbling once was evidence that the whole man-on-the-street conceit was fraudulent.

Below my balcony, two black boys were riding by on bicycles. They were drenched from the rain and they were laughing and they were full of bravado. One of the boys happened to glance up at me. “What are you looking at, white man?” he yelled out, speeding away as if I might be able to swoop down and get him. I was humiliated, not by the use of “white” but by the use of “man.” He sees me as a man, I thought. When I was eight years old, I had spent the afternoon playing with a group of my friends and a lone black boy who lived in the next neighborhood over. All afternoon we played, until another one of our friends showed up, making the lone black boy superfluous.
“Time to go home, fella,” my friend had told him. But the boy had refused to go home, and an argument ensued. My father heard the argument and threw open the kitchen window.

“Go home, boy,” he said, assuming that the black boy was the cause of the trouble. “Go home before I come down there and slap the taste out of your mouth.”

When I woke in the morning, it was raining hard. My downstairs neighbor hadn’t taken in his newspaper yet, so I sat in the vestibule and read it.

Business is bad. That was the big news. Business is bad and the rain won’t stop. Business is going to get better, but first it’s going to get worse. The rain is going to get worse too. And then the rain will stop.

When my neighbor came down, he was wearing a gray bathrobe.

“Here’s your paper,” I said, as if I’d been standing in the vestibule with his newspaper in my hands for the purpose of handing it to him.

He looked aggrieved. “Thank you,” he said. Hollow words. He folded the paper and put it under his arm; his armpit was stained. He nodded at me. “Have a great day,” he said.

Later, I did my exercises. I do them every day. If I ever end up joining the military, I will be ready. But I have no intention of joining the military. A couple of years ago, on the basketball court, an older guy had come over after the game and talked to me about life. He was friendly and showed interest, and I thought he might be gay. He smiled at everything I said.
“Is that right, son?” At the end of our conversation, he handed me his business card: Sergeant Robert Alton. “Stop by, son, and talk to me sometime.” I thought about stopping by, but what I really wanted was for him to come back to the basketball court and ask me again to stop by sometime.

I did fifty push-ups, straight and with no effort. Several minutes later I did fifty more. Those took effort. Then I did sit-ups. The room vibrated. When I was done, I examined my body in the mirror. Sharp corners met round corners. When I turned to the side, the sharpness gave way to roundness. The body of a hamster, I thought. And then I thought about the anorexic waitress standing next to me at the time clock. The body of a hamster meets the body of a bird. “Here,” the hamster said. “Like this. You do it like this.” And the bird’s wing touched the hamster’s paw, but it was not clear if this was intentional.

On Saturday night, I decided I would ask again for a raise. Especially considering that one of the other cooks had not shown up for his shift. I was covering for him, a near-impossibility, because that night the orders were unceasing. I loathed the waitresses who brought them to me, even the anorexic one. The manager said that he would come and help out, as if he had any idea what needed to be done, as if anyone could just drop in and do my job. But he didn’t help, and I saw this as even more reason to ask for a raise. “I’m looking to move up to …” “I’m looking to move up from …”

Near midnight, things finally slowed down. My apron was splattered, as if I had been shot with food the way people are
sometimes shot with paint for fun. The dishwasher smoked a cigarette, and I hoped the manager would come in and catch him. Through the window of the kitchen door, I could see the anorexic waitress tallying up her tips for the night. The way she concentrated over the pile of money accentuated her cheekbones. I knew she’d be gone by the time I was done cleaning up my workstation. A last-second order came in, and I got it ready. And then I scrubbed the grill with a long wire brush. I was supposed to scrub it every night, but I never did, and no one noticed. Tonight, though, there would be no evidence that could be used against me. Hard bits of ash that had accumulated over the years fell from the grates like ants. My shoulder ached from the exertion. When I looked through the window, sure enough, the anorexic waitress was gone.

Just a few more odds and ends to finish up, I thought, but when I turned around, my manager was standing there with a plate in his hand. “What’s this?” he asked.

On the plate was a grilled cheese sandwich: the bread was almost black, but the cheese, as my manager showed me, had not melted.

“How do you burn the bread, Ike,” he asked, “but not melt the cheese?” His face was kind.

Outside, I stood under the restaurant awning. The rain was coming down in great sheets. The wind and the dark gave it the quality of a volcanic eruption. People were saying that this was it—the final rainfall—and that as early as tomorrow morning or tomorrow afternoon it was going to be sunny. They’d heard this said.

I started walking. My umbrella was no defense. After two blocks, the black fabric tore away beneath the onslaught, so that I was holding only the sagging frame of an umbrella. Why could no umbrella be invented to withstand a downpour? When I was sixteen years old, I had filled out an application at school for a summer job and then forgotten about it until I was called one June morning to meet with the supervisor of an umbrella factory. It was a small family-owned place on the outskirts of town, where some factories still existed. I had to take three buses to get there. The supervisor was a perspiring man in a tie and a shirt with one button missing from the center. He was looking for an office clerk. He asked what my skills were, but I didn’t know what they were, because I’d never had a job. I told him I was a hard worker, because I assumed that this would be true if I was given the opportunity, and he seemed to accept it at face value. Afterward, he showed me around the plant. It was old and made of wood, and there were probably mice. A group of ex-farmers, or people who looked like they might be ex-farmers, stood around a long table spray-painting assorted logos onto umbrellas. I was curious about their work, and the supervisor took me closer so I could see. The smell of paint was pleasant and reminded me of my kindergarten days. “It smells great,” I said to the supervisor, grinning. He looked askance at me, and within thirty seconds the smell had become so overwhelming, so noxious, that I feared I might vomit. “Let’s get away from these characters,” the supervisor said. He showed me the office where I would be working. It had a file cabinet and a swivel chair and a window that looked out onto the factory floor. I pictured myself sitting at the desk and wearing a tie, and the image
invigorated me. Two days later, the supervisor called to offer me the job, and I told him it was too far away for me, but I thanked him anyway.

Three blocks from my apartment, I could see that I had left the lamp on in the living room. In the dark, it looked like a beacon of sorts. The hair on half of my head was matted from the rain. A car approached from the opposite direction, spraying water on both sides. It steered toward me, and for a moment I thought that it might be some punks looking to drive through a puddle and splash me. Then it slowed and stopped completely, and the window came down and the anorexic waitress leaned her head out. “Get in, silly,” she said.

There was another girl in the car, so I got in the backseat.

“I just live right there,” I said, pointing, but instead of turning the car around, she drove over the bridge, past the railroad tracks, up into the hills.

“This is my friend,” the anorexic waitress said, looking at me in the rearview mirror, but the windshield wipers were clacking and I couldn’t catch the friend’s name.

She was in college, this friend. Or about to go to college. The anorexic waitress was going to the same college in the spring. I couldn’t hear what she planned to study. She spoke as if she were already weary of it. Her thin hands gripped the steering wheel. In her black waitress blouse, her arms looked the diameter of fingers. Could those even be called arms? But she drove with ferocity. Up into the hills we went, those dark hills that looked as if they were encroaching on the city. Shortly we were in the thick of them, and I was surprised to discover that, rather than being the heart of the rural world, they were the heart of the suburbs. Nice houses that looked
identical were set catercorner to one another off the main road. Billboards directed us to more houses about to be built, and to a mall I’d been hearing about for a while. Another billboard showed an illustration of a spinning earth with an arrow pointing to a small dot that presumably was where we were.
THE EMERGING INTERNATIONAL CITY
, it read.

Soon we were dropping the friend off in front of her parents’ large house. The house was dark except for one light that illuminated the driveway. “Good night! Good night!” she called.

I took the front seat and I noticed how wet my pants were. I noticed how close I was to the anorexic waitress. Back toward the city we went. In the gloomy swirl of rain, I could see the giant office building with its antenna that, in the darkness, looked like a cross on a church steeple.

“Do you want to hear a riddle?” she asked out of the blue.

“Okay,” I said.

She smiled broadly. Her teeth looked discolored. “There’s a cabin in the woods with two dead people. They are both strapped to chairs.” She paused to glance my way. “The doors of the cabin are blocked and the windows are sealed. The people did not die from murder, exposure, dehydration, suicide, fire, asphyxiation, disease, or starvation. What did they die from?”

She concentrated as if she were also trying to think of the answer. I thought about the word “starvation.” I had no idea what the answer was, so I guessed AIDS.

No.

I guessed again.

No.

“Should we really be talking about dying while you’re driving in the rain?” I asked. She let out a ghoulish movie laugh and pantomimed turning the wheel hard, as if to swerve into oncoming traffic. This made me tense. The windshield wipers beat out their rhythm. “What killed them?” she said again. We went around a bend, and the office building disappeared momentarily and then reappeared, so that its giant antenna resembled a needle stuck in an arm.

“It’s an airplane, silly,” she said. “They’re seat-belted into the
cabin
of an airplane that’s crashed in the woods.”

I thought about this, piecing it back together from the opposite end. “That’s a good riddle,” I said at last.