“Lunch was huge yesterday. Twenty-two hundred bucks. Biggest of the five stores, but you brought in eight hundred for the rest of the day.”
He shrugged his shoulders and hung his head. He’s a little guy, thirty-five, my age. Single. Ex-Navy man. He’ll never be day manager though. Too wimpy. Afraid of everyone.
I tried to get him fired.
“Look at this, Mr. White.” I held up a chart with a night receipts graph that looked like a pyramid starting at the bottom when I took over the nightshift, peaking the week before I changed to days, and dropping off since Howard Fisk took over. “We’re losing money.”
He said, “You’re not losing a thing.” I shut up about Howard Fisk. Mr. White will figure it out eventually.
Above the door into the back room, just out of the customers’ sight, a sign says NO PERSONAL MUSIC PLAYERS IN THE PREP AREA. That’s my rule, but I know Howard lets the night crew use them anyway.
Howard Fisk is a doormat. He makes me queasy. He looks at me when I’m not paying attention, but I’ve never caught him at it.
I pushed him into a corner. He tried to stand up straight, but I kept bouncing my hands off his chest. I’ve got this problem with physical confrontations. I mean, I like them. So I go to a group counseling session once a week. It’s part of my separation agreement.
“Howard,” I said, “if you don’t enforce this rule, then what will the employees think?”
“I don’t know.” He tried to sidle away from me. I pushed him again. I must outweigh him by a hundred pounds.
“They’ll think I’m a fool, Howard. We don’t want that, do we?”
“No,” he said.
I wanted to hit him, I mean really belt him, over and over, but I backed off. “Good,” I said.
VJ’s waiting for me to answer.
“Oh, you know, the usual stuff: make a million dollars, get laid a lot, kill Howard Fisk,” I say.
“What does Howard Fisk want?” he says.
“Who cares?”
“What does he dream about?”
I don’t know how to answer that. He finishes his coffee.
VJ says, “I’ve got to go now. It’s almost four o’clock.” If he’s not at the shelter by nightfall, they won’t let him in. I fill a thermos with coffee for him. He fills his pockets with sugar and ketchup packets.
Howard comes in and orders dinner. I see him talking to Rideth at the register. Rather than saying anything to him, I inventory the walk-in freezer. Wisps of steam waterfall off the sides of the fifty pound boxes of fries. I’m hot, and the cool air feels good. In the semidark I start a daydream, which is what I wasn’t able to tell VJ about. My vision doubles, like a migraine, and then I hallucinate.
I’m sitting in the dining room and I can see my hands cradling a burger. I’m bringing it up to my mouth. My fingers are skinny, bony and small, like a child’s. I know that I’m really in the freezer, but I’m also eating a burger. The red checkered print on the Formica table top picks up the red in the molded plastic bench seats. In my hallucination the dining room is empty. I’m thinking about Burger Land’s latest television commercial. The camera pans the walls of a cluttered apartment kitchen where a middle-aged man works on a blueprint of a house, his house, on a tiny table. His pregnant wife tiptoes in behind him carrying a Burger Land takeout tray with two Styrofoam Big Burger boxes and two drinks on it. The camera cuts to the blueprint where the man is penciling in a word, “nursery,” on one of the rooms. The wife looks over his shoulder and sighs. She puts down the tray and they embrace. The focus softens and “Let our dream be your dream” scrolls on the screen.
In my hallucination I think, “People who can’t dream deserve this.” I look up from my burger and my tiny hands and into the rainstorm that is pelting the darkened parking lot. My face is reflected in the glass. It’s Howard Fisk’s face.
I’ve been dreaming Howard Fisk’s dreams.
I shake my head and fall backward against the wall of the freezer. My shirt sticks for a second, pulling out of my pants, as I slide down to sit on the woodslat floor. I toss my clipboard away from me. I shiver, then roll onto my hands and knees and retch loudly once. Nothing comes up. My cheek presses against the frosted wood. In my earphone someone says, “Two Big Cheeses, two large fries and an apple pie to go.” My elbow is pushed up against a cardboard box stiff enough that when I move away it crackles. My breath fogs the air each time I exhale. I imagine my body stiffening, so much meat.
I’m really cold. The employee door creaks open and I hear Tillie ask in the prep area, “Have you seen Carter?”
I push myself up, tuck my shirt in, check my fly. This stuff that’s inside my head, I’ve got to deal with it. It means something.
I’ll go into the dining room and have some onion rings with Howard. Tillie can find me there. Maybe the three of us can talk. I’m not very likable—I know that now—but that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person.
NOTES FROM THE FIELD
So much human language is untranslatable. After I’d scanned and tagged my latest subject, she talked non-stop.
She started by saying, “I don’t do this often. It’s my rule to get to know someone before we… you know… sleep together.” And she continued as she pulled up nylons, wiggled into a short-skirted black dress and adjusted her hair. My equipment recorded it, of course, for later analysis and synthesis with the rest of the field data. She told me about her sisters and how they were married, “Except Susan, who has been living with this realtor in Seattle for two years, so she’s practically engaged,” and then went on about her job while she reapplied makeup. When she went into the bathroom, I checked the tag’s status; the monitor showed it had already attached itself to the Fallopian tube, where it would stay, transmitting data for about six months until it broke down into undetectable biological components.
Upbeat, bright, until she was ready to go, she asked me what about half of them do. “Will I see you again?” Her face seemed poised, carefully blank.
I shrugged. A useful gesture, communicating messages in a wide range.
She took a deep breath, a shuddery one, and looked away, which often means the subject is on an emotional edge. I hadn’t seen it coming. I hardly ever do. Reading human facial expressions is my hobby, not part of my mission, but I don’t feel I’m very good at it. She looked around my apartment, at the art prints in frames, at the expensive stereo equipment, at the new furniture, which reinforced my masquerade as a young business executive, and said, “Don’t mind me. It’s all blather.”
I’ve discovered humans in the bars are often lonely, a little desperate. The sex is an amelioration.
Blather: In this context, probably meaning language that covers or replaces the message the sender would prefer to communicate. Although all human languages possess words used in this way, there is no Lasarént equivalent.
The last Lasarént abduction of a human for examination and tagging occurred in 1967 near San Antonio, Texas. The three other extrasolar races quit the practice before 1964. They attracted too much attention. Memory adjustments weren’t perfect. That’s the nature of technology, imperfection. So the plan to study humanity entered its second phase, infiltration. Still, abduction stories appeared in the tabloids. For a while there was considerable bickering among the four races about who was cheating, but it became evident that human behavior is often delusional.
My first field experience coincided with our last abduction. The human lived in Tremaine, an hour’s drive from San Antonio along a twisting, graveled road. We stalled his truck, anaesthetized him and moved him to an exploratory vehicle. Some tests require a lively nervous system, however, so he was brought near consciousness. He looked at us from the table, eyes half closed. “Jesus, Mary, son of a bitch. It’s the goddamned Rapture.”