ranklin
was working in the meat department at a grocery store. His job
was to clean up the department after the rest of the
staff had gone home, so he worked alone. He had to take apart
the slicing machines, lay the gears and blades on the tables,
and spray them with a nozzle that was connected to a long hose
that was full of sanitizing soap. When he came in for his shift
at eight o'clock, everyone else was clocking out and the tables
were covered in blood. There were drains in the tiled floor and
the floor was slanted so that he could spray the whole room and
let the water drain out through the floor. Franklin didn't exactly
like the job, but he had to pay the rent somehow and he liked
working alone. He liked the simplicity of his task and the feeling
of having it finished. But sometimes in the solitude it was as
if he heard a small but powerful whisper blowing through the
supermarket, a message meant for his ears alone, telling him
to drop the hose during the middle of his shift and leave, forever,
without ever looking back. He tried not to pay attention to that
voice, because he wasn't sure where to go once he walked out,
or how to pay his rent in the meantime. But it made him restless.
There was a huge open window that looked out of the meat room
into the rest of the supermarket. Since there wasn't any glass
in it to separate him from the customers, sometimes someone peeked
through at him and asked him a question about where to find a
certain kind of meat. He hated when they did that, especially
if he happened to be holding the hose in his hand at the moment,
because then he'd have an urge to spray the customer with the
hose. He'd picture them disappearing, turning into mist upon
the impact of the water. Franklin liked solitude and hated to
be bothered. But he liked to keep an eye out for attractive girls
who might walk by the open window. One time he'd been watching
one through the opening with the hose in his hand, and his hand
had twitched, making the hose emit a fine spray, a short burst
of moisture that probably hadn't quite reached the girl, but
it had made his heart pound and he'd hidden behind one of the
tables until he was sure she must have passed.
One day a manager from another department, whom Franklin had
never seen before, came into the room while Franklin was spraying
the tables, gears and blades with the sanitizing spray. He was
glad the manager hadn't arrived a few minutes earlier, because
then he'd been busy trying to destroy the stereo speaker in the
ceiling with the hose. He hated the music they played in the
supermarket, so he had turned the water up all the way and sprayed
into the ceiling speaker, clenching his teeth in rage, but to
no avail. Then he had tried spraying it with the soap, hoping
that the soap would somehow damage the speaker, but nothing happened.
The speaker was still dripping with water when the manager walked
in. "My heart is burning for you, I'm so lonely" the
speaker said in dripping, over-emphatic falsetto. "My name
is Jim Abrams" the manager said, and some water dripped
from the ceiling and hit him in the nose, which made him blink.
He had red hair and a short, well-trimmed goatee. His eyes looked
somehow pale and lifeless, like fish-scales lying on a cutting
board. Franklin had noticed that most of the managers had that
look to their eyes, as if too much responsibility had sucked
something out of them, and he'd vowed never to be in charge of
anything.
Jim Abrams looked up at the dripping speaker and then back
at Franklin, squinting in puzzlement. "It must be leaking" Franklin
said, smiling wanly, but Jim Abrams looked strangely afraid,
as if he suspected that Franklin had been trying to destroy the
supermarket's music and didn't know how to deal with someone
who cared that much about what music was playing. But he shrugged. "Just
try to be more careful with the hose, okay? Are you finished
spraying the sanitizer?" Franklin replied that he was. "Okay.
Well, he have a truck that just arrived out back, and we need
someone extra to help us unload it. I'd like you to come out
back and help us." "Sure" Franklin replied, "I'm
supposed to let the stuff stay on the equipment for at least
fifteen minutes before rinsing it off anyway." Jim Abrams
nodded. "Great," he said, and motioned for Franklin
to follow him. They walked out through a hallway and past a bunch
of lockers, then out a door in the back. "This might take
more than fifteen minutes, though" he said over his shoulder.
Franklin nodded. He didn't care. He had tomorrow off, anyway.
So what if he got out late.
As soon as the air in the parking lot behind the supermarket
hit Franklin's face he had a hysterical impulse to run, to laugh
his head off while Jim Abrams looked on and called after him
in total bewilderment. The image took ahold of him so strongly
that he almost did it. But he didn't want to lose his job. He
was saving up to escape somehow, though he didn't know where
to yet.
Franklin liked the way the mostly-empty parking lot looked in
the early moonlight, and the way the eighteen-wheeler truck's
insides looked in the yellow light from the back of the building,
the dusty loading dock. There were two other men already wheeling
boxes out of the truck on two-wheeled dollies. It didn't look
like it would be that difficult. Jim Abrams told him that all
he needed to do was grab a dolly and unload, that everything
just needed to be taken off the truck as quickly as possible
because it had been a late delivery. There were still a lot of
boxes and crates in the truck, and Franklin got to work. Jim
Abrams walked alongside him for a moment. "By the time you
do this and then finish rinsing the meat department, you might
be the last one left except for a few janitors. Just leave through
one of the back doors, it'll lock behind you. Okay?" Franklin
nodded and walked into the truck, pushing the dolly in front
of him on its two rubber wheels, and he felt a little drunk at
the thought of being the last one in the supermarket. Maybe if
he took an extra-long time rinsing the tables, he could manage
to be the last one around. He'd always wanted to be alone, to
run up and down the aisles like a little kid, to sing loudly
over the intercom and turn summersaults. But they had cameras.
Too bad. There never seemed to be a quick enough escape from
anything.
He had sixteen hundred dollars in the bank, though. Maybe he
should stop saving and just leave. If he left without paying
the five hundred dollars that was due for rent tomorrow he'd
be able to use all of it. His car wasn't in the best shape, but
maybe he could...but then, he had a girlfriend, too. Whenever
he thought about taking off he got so excited that he almost
forgot about her.
The other two men both nodded hello to him as they passed on
their way back into the truck. He had put as many boxes on the
dolly as he could without toppling them. Through the opening
where the ramp lay, in a space between the truck and the dock,
the sky was mostly clear, but the few clouds that were in it
were drifting. It could make you drunk to look at it, and Franklin
looked down so that he'd be able to get done quicker. He'd often
find himself looking longingly at open doorways and windows,
and had been fired for it before. Too much daydreaming, they
always said. And recently his girlfriend had started crying because
one day she'd been kissing his belly and cooing, making her sexiest
noises, and he'd just been looking off to the side, out the window,
not even touching her or responding, and when she looked up at
his face she suddenly realized that he wasn't there with her
and she'd started crying. He'd patted her on the head lamely,
slid out from underneath her as if he were removing a blanket,
and walked outside and sat on the front step, staring out over
the neighborhood. Did he love her? She'd asked. He'd told her
that he did but that he just didn't feel like doing anything
that night. They'd hugged and he'd told her he needed to be alone.
He seemed to need that more and more often lately, she'd said.
She was right, but he didn't know what to do about it.
Franklin was rushing like a madman now, because he didn't want
the other two guys to talk to him and so he wanted to look very
serious and busy. But hopefully he would find himself alone in
the supermarket tonight. He'd always wanted that, ever since
he'd been very little. He was twenty now but he didn't feel any
different. Sometimes he'd get excited at the thought of possible
disasters, or earthquakes and volcanoes, of plagues, of wars—because,
somehow, he knew that he'd be safe, that whatever storm came
would leave him unharmed. He didn't like the sight of human suffering,
and he'd never so much as hit anyone. But he knew that the horror
of disaster would never be as great, for him, as the sense of
a great cleansing taking place, of the world opening up a little
bit, as if time had been derailed. He'd daydream of empty towns,
where he'd walk through and maybe bump into someone else who'd
learned something from solitude. And they'd have time to talk
to each other because what had been the world had ended, at least
long enough for them to gather their thoughts.
He wondered if the two men passing him with their stacks of
boxes thought about things like that. But he didn't want to ask.
He'd
done that once and it had gotten him fired, because the co-worker
he'd asked had thought he'd been threatening him in some way.
He hadn't been—Franklin had never threatened anyone, not on
purpose. All he'd done is looked into the man's eyes and asked
him why they did what he did. They were digging a series of holes
together on someone's lawn for a landscaping company so that
the owner of the house could put up a decorative fence. Franklin
had pointed out that the owner of the house didn't really need
the fence for anything and that they were putting it up just
for the money, that they couldn't care less whether the guy who
owned the house got his fence or not. So it's meaningless for
us, Franklin had said, shaking with nervousness as he said it,
knowing that you weren't supposed to talk this way to people
in this world, much less on the job. The man had looked nervous
at first, then shrugged and said, "it's what we have to
do." Franklin had never believed him.
No, people didn't react to Franklin the way they did to most
other people, he'd learned that. He often felt like a visitor
from another planet—but no, that wasn't it. It was more that
he felt like he was on the right planet and everyone else was
on the wrong one, but thinking that way made him feel like a
jerk. Something about him made them nervous. He didn't mind—it
made people leave him alone most of the time, though sometimes
someone asked him why he was so quiet, why he never talked to
anyone or went to parties after work. He'd just smile and shrug.
The boxes were getting heavier and heavier now. Maybe he was
tired, or maybe they'd put the heavy stuff on first when they'd
loaded the truck. The other men were panting now. The thin strip
of sky between the truck and loading dock seemed more insistent
now. The light streaming in from the loading dock seemed to have
aged, like it was light in an old religious painting.
It was like a dream, one of those dreams in which you realize
you're dreaming—lucid dream, they call it. When you realized
that you were dreaming, that the things around you weren't real,
and that you could do whatever you wanted—take your clothes
off, run around singing, or grab someone and fuck them. But,
like a dream, if you woke up here you couldn't count on anyone
around you to notice that they too were in a dream, and so the
dream might be able to strike back and hurt you, even send you
hurtling out of the sky if it wanted, though the fall might be
less frightening if you knew all that was going to happen was
that you were going to wake up. Franklin was sweating now, almost
grinding his teeth with the urge for action. He wanted to act
normal for at least the next couple of hours, so that he could
get out of here without anyone catching him dreaming. Dreaming
inside the dream, he thought to himself, and the thought made
his head spin. He hoped that he'd still have this energy when
his shift ended. Usually when he got home the urge to escape
was not as intense, because there was more freedom when you weren't
at work. That's why he hadn't left yet.
Soon they could see the back of the truck's trailer, its dusty
white wall, its faint smudges of history. And the last boxes
were picked up and the other two men finally spoke a few words. "I'm
the driver. My name's Rob. Thanks for helping us. You're a pretty
strong kid, you went fast." The driver grinned and very
deep wrinkles showed around his eyes even though he was only
in his thirties. Maybe he'd been driving trucks since the beginning
of time. It felt good to be thanked, and Franklin smiled and
nodded in response. On the way back to the meat department he
started to feel relaxed. The compliment from the driver had stolen
his will to escape—he felt a warm glow, a man's pride in having
worked like a man. He had to get his will to escape back, or
it would just come back the next time he worked and he'd hate
himself for not having escaped when his energy was high enough.
He'd have to do something crazy tonight and burn his bridges
so that he'd have nothing to come back to, but he'd never done
anything reckless before and wasn't sure how to go about it.
But as he rinsed the tables, the hot water occasionally causing
a faint rainbow to appear in the fluorescent light, he thought
of the robotic nature of this world, especially this part of
it—the way the people lined up obediently with their carts
every day, the way the cashiers obediently checked them out,
as if
it would never end, as if the world would never change. He'd
always had a cautious personality, and usually didn't like to
make himself conspicuous, but he was getting frantic with the
urge to live more heartily, and he was afraid that something
bad was going to happen, that something in him would die if he
didn't make a break for it, and that if he didn't decide to do
it soon enough that he'd wake up one day and be dead inside,
just like the eyes of the managers. When that happened his desires
wouldn't mean anything anymore.
Franklin's heart was pounding as he went to his locker. Pounding
the way it would have if he'd ever challenged the schoolyard
bully to a fight, or talked to the girls who he really wanted
instead of waiting for someone easier to fall into his lap, the
way Chelsea, his current girlfriend, had. He stood for a second
in front of his locker after he'd closed his name-tag and his
apron inside, wanting it to be like throwing dirt onto a coffin's
lid. He remembered something that he'd seen many times; he walked
over to a nearby tables where there were some cardboard boxes.
They were filled with some candy, silly hats, other things for
company parties. Then he found what he was looking for. A long
blonde wig. He pulled it on over his short black hair. He almost
giggled out loud even though there wasn't a mirror. There seemed
to be a slight breeze in the hallway. He turned around and felt
that he could almost see them—all the faces of people who
he'd never talked to, never made contact with, walking like ghosts
past him in the dim hallway, nodding goodbye. He opened a nearby
locker that had some old aprons in it and put one on. He walked
shakily to a supply closet that he knew of and took out a price-labelling
gun and another hand-held device that scanned bar-codes and let
you know how much things cost.
They had cameras, but now if they happened to check them they'd
see a disguise walking around. Franklin thought that's all they'd
ever seen anyway. He walked out through the meat department and
went toward the front of the store. The tall windows looked out
on the front parking lot where only a few cars were left. The
store lights stayed on all night, he already knew that. He saw
a janitor with a machine that looked kind of like a vacuum cleaner
but was circular at the bottom, spinning with black brushes.
A floor-polisher. The man pushing it looked up tiredly and nodded
at Franklin. Franklin felt an incredible love for the man. Maybe
this was what happened when you finally decided to act on your
hidden desires—you felt love, felt everything more powerfully.
If that were the case, Franklin looked forward to the feelings
that might be coming next—this would make the next step
easier. Franklin got a shopping cart from the front of the store.
He
put the pricing gun and the other gizmo in the small compartment
of the cart nearest his hands, where you could seat a child if
you had one. He wheeled it around and started to shop.
Franklin found a button on the pricing gun that shot out stickers
that said PAID FOR. He had never stolen anything in his life,
and maybe he never would again. But he walked up and down the
aisles picking up a good quantity of everything he might need—toilet
paper, toothpaste, that sort of thing, and lots of canned foods,
and stamped them all PAID FOR. Coming around the corner of an
aisle, he saw the janitor standing there with the floor polisher,
staring at him dazedly. He smiled and waved. "Inventory!
It's a bitch!" he bellowed, and the janitor with the sleepy
eyes blinked and nodded. He didn't seem to care. Maybe he wasn't
staring at Franklin after all. He looked half-asleep. He was
bald and had massive wrinkles around his eyes, and the hair left
in a ring around the back of his head was dark. He hadn't gone
gray yet. Franklin almost wanted to invite him to come along.
When Franklin had loaded the cart as much as he could, he headed
down a last aisle stamping everything with stickers. All those
boring conversations with his parents. The silent dinners. The
lack of violence on the surface that was just stagnation. PAID
FOR. The girls he hadn't talked to when he'd wanted to. The books
he'd read to feel smarter when he'd really wanted to read other
books. The stupid television shows, the parties he'd only lingered
at in hopes that someone would notice him without him having
to do anything. The friends who he'd only played videogames with
and never really talked to. A silly life, really. Not enough
pain or pleasure to set it apart from any other life. But it
felt good, sometimes, to spray the blood off the tables. It gave
a feeling of momentary clarity. PAID FOR. PAID FOR. PAID FOR.
PAID FOR. PAID FOR. Franklin laughed, not the way that he'd laughed
at the bosses' lames jokes or at his girlfriend's attempts to
amuse him, but a full-throated laugh, and the closer he got to
the rear doors the less hatred he felt for it all, because it
was over now and it could never touch him again.
It didn't take that long to load the car—he hadn't gotten anything
perishable or breakable, so all he had to do was toss the stuff,
mostly cans and toilet paper, into the trunk and the back seat.
That's when he realized that the back door was locked just like
Jim Abrams said it would. He frantically checked his pockets
for the car keys, then realized that he'd already used them to
open the car, and laughed. They were hanging from the ignition,
he'd already put them there. Jim Abrams never would have done
anything like this, he felt sure. He had separated himself forever
from the Jim Abrams of the world. He took off the wig, put it
in the glove compartment and drove away. The streets were quiet—it
was a town, not a city, and it was getting late. Not much of
a night-life. But Franklin remembered that there were bars in
town, bars he'd never visited. He'd never understood the attraction
to noisy socializing and didn't like the taste of alcohol, but
he was attracted to almost everything right now, ready for experience.
When he got to his apartment he went inside as quickly as possible,
holding the note-pad he'd swiped from the stationary section
at the store. He looked around, his heart thumping, at the apartment.
It was clean enough. And there was the shower where he and Chelsea
had washed each other after they'd first had sex, clinging to
each other in something like terror, as if they'd been drowning.
Franklin remembered the blood going down the drain. He had liked
the way it looked, the finality of it. Her blood from that night
was part of the earth now, somewhere. It made him think, for
some reason: none of this is mine. This place doesn't belong
to me. Even the care in the driveway isn't mine and I'll have
to get rid of it, he thought frantically. He wanted to live like
a boy again, to pick up daydreaming where he'd always been forced
to leave off, to see if it would turn into the dream of a man,
and then, just maybe, into reality. Maybe this was how to do
it—to turn your life into something resembling your daydreams.
Maybe then you'd begin to know how to live.
He wrote a note for his landlord on the stationary and taped
it to the front door of the stove, which was the first thing
someone looking through the window in the front door of the apartment
would see. In his excitement he couldn't remember the landlords'
name and almost wrote 'Dear Jim Abrams' on the top of the note.
But he crossed it out and changed it to
Dear Landlord:
I had to leave. Sorry. I'm not taking my stuff. You can sell
it if you want to to help make up for the rent. I've got some
music and movies and books and some other stuff that you might
be able to get some cash for. The apartment's fine. I just needed
to leave.
Franklin
Then he wrote one for his girlfriend, which read:
Chelsea
You're a nice girl but I don't love you, at least not in
any personal way. I've always pretended to be in love with
you, because
I don't want to hurt your feelings, but I think I'm hurting you
worse by not saying anything. I care about you. But I've never
loved anyone in a personal way. I don't think I've lived a real
life. I'm leaving. I don't know exactly what I'm going to do,
because I've never done anything before. That doesn't seem possible,
but I think it's the only true thing I've ever said—that I haven't
done anything yet, until tonight. I hope you get a life that
makes you happy, but I'll probably never see you again. Thank
you for being the first—you know. Maybe we'll see each
other again someday, but we won't be the same people and I wouldn't
want us to be.
Franklin
The notes looked bland, ineffectual. They didn't express
what he really felt. But it was that easy; it felt good to
let go
of his belongings and his girlfriend. Somehow he knew there
wouldn't be any price to pay, yet. Something might make
him suffer some
day, but not this. He gathered his clothes in an armful,
pausing on the doorstep to look at the sky because there didn't
seem
to be anywhere else to look.
[END]
© 2006 Luke Buckham - Contributor's
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