“I saw a dead body today.”
You’re trying to fit two fingers into the plastic mouth of a bottle.
At the bottom, crusted with orange sugar, the last of the Vitamin-C gummy chews. You need those two gummies like Catholics need forgiveness. It’s dark all the time and work lets out later and later now that fall’s turned to winter.
The interjection comes from a newly arrived Étienne, all wrapped up like some proud Queen in his vintage Burberry.
“A guy. Froze to death. I need to smoke. Don’t tell.”
Gone as soon as he arrived, leather bag dropped carelessly into his office chair – some coffee-stained Herman Miller throne. Étienne sits across from you. He’s separated in flesh by a plexiglass partition – this partition full of sticky notes on both sides. “Kevlar.” “3pm.” “Change News Channel.” Impenetrable mythic communication, lost of any meaning, the second whatever task it previously referred to completes itself. Today is gift-bearing day. Your coffee is flavored with maple syrup instead of the customary Splenda. You don’t know why you did this. You don’t really know why you do anything anymore – desire is more a dull, untraceable hum than some revelatory angel’s choir.
This is the last Thursday of the month. This is gift-bearing day. You and Étienne will stay three hours past the usual workday to take inventory of the various textbooks infecting your shipping warehouse. Halfway through the appraisal you’ll glance to him as though by accident and say something along the lines of, “I gotta get a soda; what do you want?” He’ll want what he always wants, which is a Dr. Pepper. “For the caffeine,” he’ll say, if you’re lucky and it’s one of those nights you two throw a few stones of conversation back and forth.
Étienne is not your type. He’s coifed and aloof and too mighty because of those things. Usually, you’d think such a marriage of juxtaposed powers (yourself being ultimately feeble and pathetic) would be impossible – and that the attempt at combination would only highlight your own impotence. But all the time now it’s Work. It’s Textbooks. Who else do you see? Oh, sure, romantic thought might be applied every once and a great while to a stranger on the bus or to the supermarket clerk ringing up your Almond Breeze, but these are wasted wantings. They possess in their DNA the impossibility of completion. At least with Étienne, who is straight and slightly phobic, there is the structural (if not emotional) possibility of conclusion.
You stare through the plexiglass at his leather bag – purposefully chosen and constructed as the rest of him. There’s a fridge in your garage that used to belong to your parents. In this fridge, shelf-to-shelf, you stock Dr. Peppers. Strawberry. Zero Sugar. Vanilla. Diet. At night, after you’ve come home from work (11pm, Midnight, 1am) you stop by the fridge, open its grinning mouth, and take a Dr. Pepper out. Your lips will pucker and you’ll say, “For you, man.” Offer the Dr. Pepper for an invisible figure to take. This is how you’ve become proficient at gift giving. A Corporate Wise Man.
Étienne does not return from his smoke. His bag stays, lifelessly, on the chair. You arrange a shipment to Canada. You offer a discount code to a Vendor whose shipment arrived late. (Fault of Terrence, above you.) 5pm arrives. Étienne remains remarkable only in his absence. Outside the window it begins to snow – fat fistfuls of flakes touching down and draping the world, cleaning it. You can’t see this; the fluorescence of the office light makes the outside seem one black, swallowing void. 5:15pm. Wordlessly, you rise, button your puffer coat, and travel down to the Warehouse. Étienne’s bag, still heavy in its chair. 6:30 arrives. You’re halfway through the way, slow-going alone. You glance around. Nobody. Concrete and cold. Piles and piles of identical textbooks surround you. You might think it eerie if you had the ability to squeeze feeling from the scene, but you can only really think of the Gift.
You take the elevator to the third floor, the floor with the vending machines, approach the buzzing altar of Pop. You need to buy the Dr. Pepper. This is known. It is not a question to you. You wonder why the ritual needs its continued repetition without the possibility of ending. Is it to practice? Or has the giving always actually been some twisted exercise in your own autonomy. You wonder, fleetingly, if the Dr. Pepper is not so much about needing something from the impenetrable Étienne, but the ability to contain (however briefly) power over him. The ability to be his desire, full of caramel color and phosphoric acid.
You reach in your pocket for two crisp dollar bills.
You forgot your wallet downstairs.
The blank face of the Soda Machine stares at you.
It keeps snowing outside.
And suddenly you’re up to your elbow in cold metal and the machine is whirring and trembling around your arm – gasping, groaning. You’re feeling chilled, wet soda cans. Ginger Ale. Diet Coke. Orange Lime Twist. Elbow deep in the guts of an Azkoyen Group specialty. You wrap your fingers around a Dr. Pepper (you can see it through the glass) and pull. The machine tips.
They find you the next day, half-dead and pink with embarrassment, murmuring something about a wedding feast. •
