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  He bled his left hand across her hip and she instantly raised her same hand to staunch his movement. She was sleeping and he knew it. She said it.

  “Space.”

  She talked in her sleep and they used to argue about it, back when they still cared enough to argue. Back then, he would wake her up and demand instant context and analysis right there in the moment of utterance, but she could never recall saying anything at all, let alone understand why she said it. It wasn’t fair but he had stopped believing in fair a long time ago, before the children, before the relationship, before he even knew about relationships. Fair, as far as he was concerned, was a fiction. And this thing with her was so far from a fiction, so so very very real, that fair left the planet a long long time ago.

  In moments like this he used to try and keep his hand as still as he could, pretending he hadn’t put it there at all in case that she actually woke up, caught with his digits spread across her hip in the way she knew he loved to do. But she never did wake. All she ever did was talk.

  And she never woke on her own. He always had to wake her, which was another argument entirely, and not one either of them would consider a favorite. That was the argument where he became convinced what she said in her sleep was directly connected to how she felt about him, no matter how much she protested or implored him to understand. It was both of the arguments about The Respect and The Privacy, vivisected by a bit of The How Dare You; she never used that word in previous arguments, and most certainly never from the cocoon of her sleeping state, but now she was using it.

  “Space.” She was sleeping and he knew it.

  He pulled his hand away and rolled over, onto his other side, their backs in instant parallel. Her hand, which had been frozen mid-air in front of him since her first utterance of the word, slowly thawed before falling on top of her own side. He watched the shadows pile up by the hours as he lay perfectly still, himself not yet asleep even as his entire body had long gone into that beyond-numb place when a limb loses circulation. How he got up the next morning he spent the rest of his life trying to understand, his feet crashing to the floor, his shins knifing through the boards, his knees burning the carpet as he trudged his way forward, down, and ultimately out into the daylight. Beyond.

  When You’re Dead You Can Do Whatever You Want

  You’ll be tempted to settle old scores and new scores and medium-aged scores. Choose only a few, say 5 or 7, but no more than 9—you want a good, odd number and you want to keep it under 10. NO MORE THAN 10!—and settle these scores efficiently. Don’t drag them out. Don’t feel the seduction of haunt. You can be trapped there forever. Like you were when you were alive. Remember? You have a world now literally beyond time, it’s true, but you simply don’t have time for this kind of foolishness. Make your death matter, for Christ’s sake, even if—and especially in the case that—you don’t believe in Jesus.

  SOME PEOPLE DREAM OF SUCCESS… while others wake up and WORK HARD at it.

  Unsolicited Advice

  If you aren’t already a drinker, don’t start.

  If you are already a drinker, don’t stop.

  Lota

  It’s a hot, heavy sick in your stomach, like you’ve just been force-fed a bowling ball greased in cayenne pepper. Your first instinct is to grab on to something rooted in temporal space, anchored down with shanker bolts and the lead quality of your thoughts. This primordial grab replaced by the fever rushing up your face like boiling water in a drinking straw, the heat crowned by a fierce headache.

  Welcome to It.

  For months on end you saw this moment coming: you, with your desk arranged neatly, your pictures of Whomever tacked in a checkerboard pattern immediately above; you, with your monitor freshly squee-geed, you with your own personal monitor squee-gee, bought with your own personal monitor squee-gee money; your jacket hung neatly over your desk, the jacket embroidered with the company logo, the jacket They gave you when Times Were Still Good®.

  This moment is here now, It is, dropped in the middle of you.

  She’s standing in front of you with an empty copier paper box, emblazoned on the sides with the thick green letters that spell out “Boise.” You’ve worked here long enough to remember when these same boxes said “Boise-Cascade.” A few years ago the same boxes started showing up without their Cascades. You thought nothing of it. No one did. Back then, you and your chair spent way too much time smelling like Scotch-Gard.

  Now She’s handing you Boise-sans-Cascade. She doesn’t have to say anything; you’ve seen how this Cascade drill works. Just yesterday it was three Cascades; the day before that it was four; the day before that was Sunday, but one lowly Cascade got a phone call on Friday, telling him that his Boise was waiting for him. Last week She had to order an extra pallet of copier paper, just to make sure there would be enough boxes for this.

  She’s still handing you Boise-sans-Cascade. You know you have five minutes to collect whatever shrapnel of your life fits into Boise before They will be here, the They whose embroidered jackets have an extra word—SECURITY—sewn into them, right above the heart. They will escort you away from here. They will ensure you don’t take anything or anyone out with you. Later They will wheelbarrow your work-station—freshly squee-geed monitor and all—down to IT, where an unpaid intern named Scott or Kevin or Brian will scour all the porn and MP3 files you downloaded.

  Rephrase.

  Scott/Kevin/Brian will encrypt and burn personal copies of them first. Before you’re even to your car in the parking garage, a select few of your favorite anal scenes will be locked in a password-protected Dropbox folder, the one She has IT keep for her, the one She shares with the Consumer VP of They on Friday nights, when all the Cascades have left and the building has been locked down.

  She pays particular attention to which items you grab first. She has been trained to do this, fitted with a security pager that They will answer in less than 30 seconds, chuffing down the hall in their Rockports, pistols strapped and tasers snapped to their hips. They drill on this all the time, you’ll find out. Later, you’ll balk at how much money and time you imagine has had to go into this. But for now you’re intent on pulling down your pictures of Whomever and stacking them neatly into the box. You pause briefly to consider calling Whomever to come pick you up, as if They weren’t who They were, as if They were actually your elementary school principal and teacher, and They had just told you your grandmother had just died, and your dad was on his way to come get you. She looks at you and you decide. Bad idea.

  On the way down the hall you notice that no one is noticing you on the way down the hall. Your life is a palindrome. There is no witness to the memory branding itself onto your mind right now. It is yours. Yours alone.

  When you come to the elevator, you notice it’s empty. She and They and Boise-sans-Cascade stuffed with images of Whomever fill the thin rectangle. You also notice the absence of Muzak. At least, you think it’s missing. Maybe it was never there in the first place. Maybe the elevator never had its accompanying elevator-Muzak. You dig through the jukebox of tunes stuffed in your head, but can only find a trumped-up version of Edie Brickell’s “What I Am.” Upon staggering back to your apartment later tonight after six Jim Beam and 7s, you’ll have a moment of revelation that you were right about the Muzak-less elevator, and that Edie Brickell’s EP Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars was the last CD you bought before They hired you. If this were a story being filmed, you would cry at the realization of this. But it’s not, so you won’t. Instead of crying, you’ll feel and do what everyone else does in the same situation: absolutely nothing.

  The elevator shudders to a stop, spills you onto the freshly-waxed floor. She lightly pushes you in the middle of your back, cowishly prodding you to keep moving forward. In training for this moment, She read case study after case study of Desperation-Risks, those Cascades who like so many labmice turn mindlessly back towards the elevator and beg for a lesser-paying job. 93% of the time, the simple touch on the back
can break a D-R’s train of thought just long enough to get them out the door; 4% of the time a D-R breaks out in hysterical sobbing; 2% of the time a D-R passes out right as the door swings open. It’s that one percentile She has to legitimately worry about, and it’s the reason They are here. This is also the same reason She keeps the second button on her pager pre-programmed to 911.

  You, of course, are in that bottom percentile, flopping through the door and squinting at the sky, as if you have somewhere important to go right now. And, of course, you don’t.

  Welcome to It.

  Kirby in Dreamland

  Jack was 12 years old when he caught his own reflection in his grandmother’s medicine cabinet. Because he was at a 90 degree angle to said cabinet, the thin side of the door and its accompanying hinges could only hold his facial expressions and the occasional drip of his blonde hair as he bobbed up and down, in and out of the cabinet’s line of sight.

  At first he kept his head down, eyes tracing the Fleur-de-lis patterns sculpted into the bathroom rug below him. This rug was one thing of many that distinguished his grandmother’s bathroom from the two in his parents’ house across town, both of which were sealed in the same sick burnt orange linoleum featured in Cindy Sherman’s “Untitled #96”—the famous photograph of the suburban girl with flushed cheeks who is laying flat on her back while stroking a handwritten note in her right hand, her left hand folded neatly into a fist against her head as she stares up and out of the camera’s frame at something incomprehensible and invisible; that famous photograph from Sherman’s series of stills from a series of films never filmed, like Brian Eno’s soundtracks from still more unfilmed films, symphonized in notes that must have been composed on other planets in other galaxies or entirely other realities—and it would be several decades later before Jack would think how strange it seemed to him that someone in his extended family would ever consider installing wall-to-wall carpet in a bathroom. Coincidentally, this would be just about the same time Jack would discover Sherman’s work while Yahoo!ing the internet circa 1996 for images of Cindy Crawford, but that’s a different story altogether that is almost certainly less true than this one.

  Jack had seen his reflection plenty of times before. The first time was when he was barely a week old, sleeping on his back in a hand-me-down wicker bassinet that had been refreshed with a new coat of pearlwhite spraypaint in honor of his arrival. Jack’s older brother Will snapped their mother’s makeup mirror open-closed-open a few millimeters above his nose. And while it’s true Jack’s virginal eyes at the time could, at best, only relay scattered blobs of light to the little cerebral cortex in his still sponge-soft skull—thus rendering his first live encounter with his own visage as a spectacular non-event of the highest order—as it was something he simply could not see despite the fact it was right before his eyes, it’s still none the less true that his reflection was quite indeed there to be seen, irregardless of his young eyes’ complete inability to bring that image into focus. And it’s even more true that even if his eyes were somehow (undoubtedly by a truly freakish physiological accident…) capable of transcoding said blobs into said reflection, it is almost certainly impossible to imagine that week-old Jack’s week-old brain would be able to comprehend that week-old Jack was looking directly back into himself.

  It’s been theorized by more philosophical pediatricians than the ones Jack and Will had that during infancy, the human brain intentionally dulls its sensory faculties to help the new being acclimate to its post-utero existence. Sounds, smells, touches, tastes and sights are experienced as if filtered through cheesecloth. The underlying assumption is that without such filtering, the barrage of sensory stimuli outside the womb would cripple the infant’s ability to discern perceived threats from real ones. This is why the best method of putting a fussy baby to sleep is to wrap a receiving blanket so tightly around its body that the arms and legs are literally pinned against the torso. If the child is particularly irritated, blocking out all light and eliminating oscillating noise is usually necessary; in the most extreme cases, providing a loud, monotone audio source can help pacify the infant.

  No.

  Pacify is the wrong word.

  The correct word is Immobilize.

  The method assumes that an infant whose arms and legs are not secured will kick and punch at the grey blobs and noises from distant planets. The method further assumes that sleep is the infant’s desired state of consciousness, where it assumedly dreams of smirking cartoon farm animals in gender-neutral greens despite the fact that it can neither see nor comprehend such things.

  In other words, if not immobilized, secured and/or tranquilized by its own brain, the child will fight back.

  When Jack was six months old, his mother asked the latest philosopher-pediatrician in charge of him why the infant would cry for four or five hours on end.

  “There is no reason for this,” she said, eyes sunk deep into their sockets. “He’s always full and changed when it starts. There is simply no reason.”

  “There usually isn’t,” the philosopher-pediatrician responded. “Don’t take his crying personal. It’s not about you.”

  The philosopher-pediatrician smiled and patted Jack’s mother on the shoulder as she sat slumped on the courtesy bench in the exam room. The smile did not budge. She could only look down at the floor and grimace.

  Later that day, when Jack’s grandmother came over to pay her regular visit, Jack’s mother stole the philosopher-pediatrician’s word.

  “They call it ‘colic’. It’s a pretty common condition I guess.” Jack’s mother stole the philosopher-pediatrician’s smile, too.

  The grandmother scowled and stood. She walked towards Jack’s mother.

  “That…”

  Jack’s grandmother leaned forward.

  “…is bullshit.”

  The scowl did not budge; Jack’s mother could only look down at the floor and grimace.

  At the next check-up several weeks later, Jack’s mother paraphrased what the grandmother had said. The philosopher-pediatrician provided lots of smiles and shoulder pats, as well as a cheerful suggestion for Jack’s mother to turn on her vacuum cleaner and leave it in the room while Jack slept, so as to provide a constant monotone that would drown out all other auditory stimuli. Jack’s mother was skeptical but did her best to keep her grimacing in check.

  “What about a clock radio?” she asked. “I could tune it to a dead spot and let the static play. All night if that’s what it takes. The vacuum seems so…extreme.”

  The philosopher-pediatrician smiled.

  “Let me ask you something.” The philosopher-pediatrician patted Jack’s mother on the shoulder before sitting next to her on the newly-reupholstered courtesy bench. Thick, diamond-tucked leather. “Have you ever listened to your clock radio at night?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “No, I mean really listened? And I mean all night?”

  James’ mother shifted her weight on the bench, using her left palm to lean slightly away from the philosopher-pediatrician. Before she could pull her hand back into her lap and neatly interlace her ten fingers again, the meat of her palm untethered from the black leather. A loud ripping sound erupted in the little exam room.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” she replied.

  The philosopher-pediatrician continued smiling.

  “Ever notice how you can pick up stations that are sometimes hundreds of miles away, especially in the wee hours of the morning? Say, 1 or 2 o’clock?”

  Jack’s mother simply stared back into the smile. Blank.

  “See, radio waves travel farther and in greater intensity at night because the air is cooler and there tends to be less interference. If you tune the dial to a patch of static in the afternoon, by midnight it’s entirely likely that your radio will pick up a programmed frequency at that same point on the dial that it couldn’t decode before.”

  Blank.

  The philosopher-pediatrician returned Jack’s mother�
��s stare. The smile silently spilled onto the floor.

  “You’ve really never noticed that?”

  Blank.

  And so later that evening, after wrapping Jack into his makeshift straitjacket and laying him down to sleep and praying The Lord his soul to keep, his mother kicked on her Kirby upright and clicked the door shut. She shuffled down the stairs, leaving her faithful machine to drown every note that dared make a sound, draining the trace of every kiss from his dreams.

  Tonight on 48 Hours

  I invite you to sit down in front of your television set…and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland…When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better…But when television is bad, nothing is worse…You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western badmen, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence and cartoons. And endlessly, commercials—many screaming, cajoling and offending. And, most of all, boredom.

  —Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow, 1961 address to broadcast industry

  Brandon hates his name because no one in the Professional Football Hall of Fame is named Brandon.

  No one of consequence anyway.

  Brandon realizes he’s living before the internet in an apartment that will be wired for cable modem service in approximately thirteen years.

  The phone jacks in Brandon’s apartment are yellow; there are two of them; both are disconnected because Gena still hasn’t paid the phone bill since she moved out.