How Best to Avoid Dying (8 page)

CHALLENGING, REPULSIVE, AND AWESOME

Did you find everything you needed?

Good.

Diet Coke, Twix, Camel Lights. I'm surprised you smoke. Your teeth are so pretty.

More gum. Already? You bought some this morning.

I remember. You came in this morning. Last night, twice. Four times yesterday and three times the day before, once at three
AM
. That's a lot of Stop&Shop.

I understand. It seems like I'm always here, right? Like I never leave? Well, it's true. I am always here. I never leave. I'm the only employee of the 24 hour Stop&Shop.

Really. First I was hired by a tall man originally from Nigeria. I don't know who hired him. Someone who lives somewhere else.

I was made night manager in December. I called my father to tell him. He was in a nursing home and didn't understand any more. It didn't mean much, night manager, just that I worked nights, ten to six. At six in the morning the tall man from Nigeria came in for his shift. One day he didn't. I waited, but nothing. And the customers kept walking in—morning rush for coffee and energy bars. So I served.

The afternoon woman came in at two and I went home to sleep. But I couldn't sleep. I fed my cat and sat on my couch and waited for eight
PM
and the Stop&Shop. It was growing then, the idea. So simple. Great ideas are simple, like Slim Jims. I worked that night and by morning I was hoping, maybe praying, the Nigerian wouldn't show. But he did. So I fired him. I fired him with a strong voice claiming authority from someone who lives somewhere else. And the Nigerian left and didn't come back.

For four months my life was two shifts and an empty third. My father died in his sleep.

One day the afternoon woman came in crying. I told her she could go, I'd cover her shift. My first consecutive twenty-four hours in the Stop&Shop. Sometimes you see the change your life can be. You see it right before you. When the afternoon woman came in again the next day I handed her five hundred dollars and told her to find a good man.

Then it was just me. That was half a year ago.

I lost the apartment, I'm sure. I'm sure they raised voices and taped warnings to my door.

I think about my cat—I liked the cat. But the cat never liked me. It only came for food and water. That's all gone.

Stop paying rent. No home.

Stop feeding the cat. No cat.

These are the bonds we build a life on.

But you see, I am doing something here. You smile, but listen.

This used to be a job. My hours had a price tag and it was small. I was as bad as the cat that stayed for food. Now I burn my paychecks in a metal trashcan. All my needs are met. Slim Jims and powdered-sugar donuts and sugar-free Rockstar Energy Drink. I eat in the quiet hours. When I'm alone and the ice machine hums.

Sleep? No, not really. I don't lie down, that would be inappropriate.

I used to take quick naps behind the counter. But that was silly. Shameful.

With discipline, the mind can do amazing things. Don't smile. Really. Let me explain.

My father owned a book,
The Oxford Dictionary of Saints
. He loved the saints. Do you know St. Simeon the Stylite? He was a
pillar hermit. He lived on the top of a forty-foot-high column in the middle of a city for thirty-seven years straight. Had a platform up there, about the size of this countertop.

They called him holy. Bishops and emperors visited him. They'd yell up questions to him—bishops and emperors! And at Lent, just to make it harder, he would spend weeks without sitting or lying down. Just standing up there, praying. This is real. Documented history. The book said he “provided a spectacle at once challenging, repulsive, and awesome.”

And I know how he did it.

Like sleep. I've split my head in two and allow one half of my brain to sleep while the other half works. I'm getting so good at it that some of the regulars think I'm two twin brothers running the store. One brother is logical, no nonsense, good with numbers. The other brother is dazed, but friendlier and kind of artsy. He gives back the wrong change but in beautiful designs, little silver constellations of nickels and dimes in your palm.

I'm touching your hand. That's probably inappropriate.

I should tell you, I am peeing right now. It's okay. I am wearing an adult diaper, aisle two. Still, it takes a certain amount of effort. I try not to leave the store unattended. I do not go outside. Ever. That's why my skin looks bad. But what's skin compared to all this?

Why? It's not clear?

Well, if my left brain were on duty, I would simply point to the O
PEN
24
HOURS
sign and inform you that I am the sole employee. My right brain might answer with some poetic quip, like, “May my reason be free of reason. Fa la la.” But the both brain truth of it is: “Challenging, repulsive, and awesome.” How could you want more than that? And know, you must know, Simeon didn't live on a column because he was a saint. He became a saint up there, somewhere along the way.

My cat had been my father's before he went to the nursing home. He always had a cat. One would die and he'd replace it with a new one. We can't go out, he'd say, the cat needs to be fed. Can't play music too loud—the cat. Can't travel. Must work. Must feed the cat. He thought his life meant something because he fed a cat.

Hush.

Cats feed themselves.

You—you are unnecessary to your own life.

I—I'm doing something. I'm doing something here. Something challenging, repulsive, and awesome.

You laugh, but I could smell the mediocrity of your life as soon as you passed through the automatic doors. It's stinking up my store. You work some job you don't like, holding your breath for eight hours a day. You spend your free time on eating, TV, and sleep, or looking for someone to eat with, watch TV with, and sleep with. But I don't sleep. I'm awake. Your soul is as soft and pasty as my skin. But my soul is as sharp and cool as the silver caps on your rotting teeth.

Sorry. Sorry.

Not appropriate.

But you will keep coming back. You will keep checking, seeing if I'm still here. You'll try odd hours, and you will always find me. You will ask me math questions and my favorite colors trying to discern which half is at the helm. Some days you won't talk. Every now and then you'll buy something, a Slim Jim, perhaps, or a sugar-free Rockstar Energy Drink. You will linger. A little longer each visit. You'll eye the adult diapers. Your skin will change like mine. You will forget to go home. Forget
how
to go home. Finally, you will come to me and ask for an application for employment, maybe a stocking job in the back. And I will give you one. Because we're always open. Always.

Here is your change. Here is your purchase. Thank you for shopping with us. Come again.

LICORICE: A STORY FOR JOHN ERLER
¹

Zane Bellows: a natural pop star sensation. He was six feet tall with hair that spiked up like flames from a grease fire. He could reach his lanky arm up through the branches of musical composition and pluck the ripest, sweetest little tune, the kind of melody that you'd hear and think, “Why wasn't that written before?” He'd add some reasonably inspired lyrics and find himself with another hit, songs like “Fruit Fly in Your Eye” and “I'm Stoned and Voting.”

But in the fall of 1986, Zane Bellows outdid himself. He and his band the Sea Elephants began recording
Licorice
, the
most ambitious album of rock history.
²
In a time of pop and plastic, the band set out to create starlight and ambrosia.

It began with pain.

Zane Bellows broke his toe on Lane Rope's mislaid bass as the band's tour bus barreled through Austin, Texas. The pain burst from the toe up the leg like oil from an old-fashioned oil drill.

The emergency room's younger nurses squealed when they saw Zane draped between Polk and Shelly Wallenhump, lead guitar. The older nurses had Zane replace his leather jacket and pants with a short gown that felt and looked like paper towels.

One nurse gave him a generous dose of Vicodin and left him in a quiet room to recoup. The neat little narcotic started in his head and slowly floated downward, like those thick fogs he'd left in San Francisco, hiding the pain as it went, down his neck, sinking into his stomach, descending along his leg and welling up in the toe. It didn't stop the pain as much as covered it and made it less important.

Zane was always an explorer, always restless to see what was around the corner. He was alone for fewer than ten minutes before leaving his bed and heading into the clean smelling halls, his bare feet slapping against the cool floor, his happy ass smiling sideways at anyone caring to look.

While walking, Zane glimpsed into the rooms of other patients. He saw cancer, dying hearts, and broken bones. He tried to magnify the pain of his toe so he could relate to the pain of these others. Vicodin was working against him. He couldn't quite empathize, but he wanted to.

Through one of those windows, Zane Bellows saw a woman. She was tall, almost Zane's height. She had slouching shoulders and a thin waist. A bright blue top loosely curtained her chest and a lime colored skirt rested on her hips.

Her hair was straight and brown, the shade of oak-bark, and she had ghost white skin that was covered with a light white fuzz. Her eyes were gray-blue and sad. She stood at the foot of a hospital bed, studying a young man lying there. He was still, his eyes closed, tubes in his arms.

Zane felt protected from the sorrow in that room only by the door—like looking into a radiation chamber, knowing that if you open the door even a crack all that radiation would zip out and scar your eyes, throat, and skin.

He might have moved on, considering the danger of a leak, but Zane remained a moment too long, and the girl, sensing his stare, turned and smiled. From straight on her eyes had an even deeper sadness, which made the smile all the more startling.
³

Zane forgot about his toe. He forgot about the Sea Elephants. He forgot about music. He remembered the first time he tasted chocolate. Zane Bellows opened the door.

She introduced herself as Stella.
⁴

“I'm Zane Bellows,” he said. No reaction. She hadn't heard of him and Zane, much to his own surprise, was glad. They spoke quietly. Simple questions, simple answers. Just sounds exchanged more than words.

After a long while, Zane asked who the young man in the bed was.

“David, my fiancé.”

“Oh.”

Oh, that
oh
. Such an
oh
. Like the
oh
collectively sighed by the population of Pompeii as the volcano's innards streaked the sky. The
oh
Captain Smith murmured as he counted the lifeboats on the sinking
Titanic
. The
oh
gasped by the pilot of the Enola Gay as he glanced in his B29's rearview mirror and saw the bright white and reds devouring Hiroshima.

“What's wrong with him?” he asked.

“Coma. It's been seven months now.” Stella brushed some of the dark curls from David's forehead and, for the first time, Zane noticed the small diamond ring she wore on her left hand.

Zane Bellows was released from the hospital that same day. But for the next week, he returned to the same room each and every day. He told the other members of the band that the rest of the tour would have to be canceled since he had been ordered to the hospital daily for physical therapy.

“For the toe?” Polk asked him.

“For the toe,” Zane replied.

But each day he spent talking with Stella. She would sit on one side of the bed, Zane on the other, and sparks flew over David's prostrate figure like cars on a high-speed overpass. With eager ears she listened as Zane babbled about art, life, the smell of chlorine, or anything else that popped from his buzzing mind. After seven months of conversation with a comatose man, Stella was happy to listen. Her eyebrows, also white, would rise at the subtleties of Zane's humor. Even her breathing matched the rhythm of his speech.

Zane adored her breathing. He was fascinated with the movement of her generous chest and the shudder of her thin lips, but most of all it was the smell. A rich smell like the soil of a rose garden. The breath, wafting from the other side of the bed, soaked right through Zane's person and assured him that he was in love as much as the smell of roast beef would assure him he was hungry.

Then on Zane's fourth visit, Stella stood up and excused herself to the little girls' room and the smell remained. At first he thought, “Ah, her breath lingers.” But then it lingered longer than expected. And it never diluted. Minutes passed and Zane slowly realized that Stella could not possibly be the source of the sent that had seduced him so. His eyes fell to the only other breathing being in the room: David. David, as pale and still as the statue who shared his name. His hair as curly and his features as noble. David. Hadn't Zane always been pleasantly aware of his silent presence? Hadn't Zane aimed at least part of his storytelling in his direction? Wasn't it true that Zane never once asked, never once desired, to see Stella outside of this room, away from David?
⁵