She still refuses to look me in the eyes when we are kissing.
That’s weird, she says. No one does that.
How am I supposed to know? I have not kissed many people. I have seen in American movies that people close their eyes, but I have also seen that sometimes one person or the other will sneak open an eye and take a peek at the other one. I think it makes sense. Otherwise, how would you know what the other person is feeling? That seems to me the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on her face, what she is feeling, to be able to feel what she feels for you. So we kiss, she with her eyes closed, me looking at her, trying to imagine what she is feeling. I hope she is feeling something.
I am at a funeral.
I am having a hernia.
I am having a hernia at a funeral.
I am in prison.
I’m at the dentist.
I’m at the prison dentist with a hernia.
I am in love.
I am in withdrawal.
I am in love with someone who doesn’t love me back. I wish I had a hernia.
—
She takes me to see her father.
He has the look. I remember it. My own father looked this way.
He is living someone else’s life. He’s nothing more than a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone’s convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.
The thing hanging over us, the thing that’s uncomfortable to talk about is that we could do it. We could get him out.
We stand there in silence for what seems like, for what is, way too long.
Finally, Kirthi can’t take it.
He has only four years left on his mortgage, she tells me.
But, see, the way the market works, sellers like us, we never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocket watch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go get it a week later and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.
Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don’t know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don’t know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn’t so great as it is, but I just don’t know if I could do it.
I am in surgery. For my hernia.
I am bleeding to death.
It doesn’t hurt at all.
—
Things progress. We move in together. We avoid planning for the future. We hint at it. We talk around it.
I am being shot at.
I am being slapped in the face.
I go home.
I rest for a few hours.
I come back and do it again.
—
When I turned thirteen, my mother told me the story. She sat me down in the kitchen and explained.
“The day your father decided to sell his life,” she said, “I wore my best dress, and he wore a suit. He combed his hair. He looked handsome. I remember he was so calm. You wore your only pair of long pants. We walked to the bank. You rode on his back.”
“I remember that,” I said.
“A man with excellent hair came out from some office in the back and sat down behind the desk.”
I remember that, too, I told her.
You get, we got, forty thousand a year, she said.
My dad sold his life for a fixed annuity, indexed to inflation at three percent annually, and a seventy percent pension if he made it full term: forty years, age seventy, and he could stop, he could come back to us.
There were posters everywhere, my mother said, describing that day, the reunion day. The day when you’ve made it, you’ve done it, you’re done.
There was a video screen showing a short film describing the benefits of mortgage, the glorious day of reunion. We would all drink lemonade in the hot summer air.
Just forty years, it said.
In the meantime, your family will be taken care of. You will have peace of mind.
“Time is money,” the video said. “And money is time. Create value out of the most valuable asset you own.”
Don’t miss out on a chance of a lifetime.
When we went home, I remember, my father went to lie down. He slept for twelve hours, twice as long as normal, and in the morning, while I was still asleep, he rose from bed, washed and shaved his face, combed his hair. By the time I came down the stairs, he was just finishing up his breakfast, a piece of toast and a hard-boiled egg. I walked over to him and tried to hug him back, but I didn’t have the strength. My arms were limp. So I just let him hug me, and then he went out the door and that was the last time I saw my father.
—
Things stop progressing with Kirthi.
Things go backward.
And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.
Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy the same space, agree to allow their lives to overlap in some small area, some temporary region of the world, a region they create through love or convenience, or for us, something even more meager, whatever that was, it has collapsed, it has closed. She has collapsed our shared space. She has closed herself to me.
—
A week after Kirthi moves out, her father passes away.
My shift manager will not let me off to go to the funeral. I live through funerals all day, every day. Funerals for strangers, crying for other people, that’s more or less what I do for a living. And the one time I want to go to an actual funeral, the one time it would be for someone I care about, I’ll be here, in this cubicle, staring at a screen.
Kirthi doesn’t even ask if I would like to go anyway.
I should go.
I will be fired if I go.
But I don’t have her anymore. If I leave, I won’t have a job, either. I’ll never get her back if I don’t have a job. I’m never getting her back anyway.
I don’t even know if I want her back.
But maybe this is why I don’t have her, could never, would never have had her. Maybe the problem isn’t that I don’t have a life. Maybe the problem is that I don’t want a life.
I go to work.
I open tickets.
I close tickets.
When I get home my apartment seems empty. It’s always empty, but today, more empty. The emptiness is now empty.
I call her. I don’t know what to say. I breathe into the phone.
I call her again. I leave a message. I know a guy in the billing department, I say. We could get some extra capacity, no one would know, find an open line. I could feel it for you. Your grief. I could bury your father for you.
—
Three days later, when I get to work, there is a note on my desk, giving the time of the funeral service. Just the time and, underneath it, she scrawled, okay.
Okay.
I arrange for the hour. At the time, I open the ticket.
I am expecting a funeral.
I am not at a funeral.
I can’t tell exactly where I am, but I am far away. In a place I don’t recognize. She has moved to a place where I will never find her. Probably where no one will ever find her. A new city. A new life.
She paid for this time herself. She wanted to let me in. For once. Just once. She must have used up everything she had saved. The money was supposed to be for her father but now, no need.
She is walking along a road. The sun devastates, the world is made of dust, but the day is alive, she feels alive, I feel alive for her.
She is looking at a picture we took, the only picture we took together, in a photo booth in the drugstore. Our faces are smashed together and in the picture she is not smiling, as usual, and I am smiling, a genuine smile, or so I have always thought about myself, but now, looking at myself through her eyes, I see that she sees my own smile starting to decompose, like when you say a word over and over again, so many times, over and over, and you begin to feel silly, but you keep saying it, and then after a short while, something happens and the word stops being a word and it resolves into its constituent sounds, and then all of a sudden what used to be a word is not a word at all, it is now the strangest thing you have ever heard.