The One-Eyed Man Page 3

  I couldn’t help myself.

  “Shouldn’t those be called ‘Stuffing Shells’?” I asked. “Or ‘Shells for Stuffing’?”

  The woman looked up from her work. “What do you mean?” she said.

  I wiped sweat from my forehead with a shaking hand. “Well, they’re not stuffed yet. They won’t be stuffed until someone takes them home and stuffs them. As of this moment they’re just uncooked pasta sitting in a box. Same as all the other pasta here.”

  The woman stood up; at her full height, the top of her head came only to my sternum. Her dark red hair sagged in a loose, off-center ponytail, and her face was asymmetrical in the way one sometimes sees with fashion models, which is to say she looked like nothing so much as an extremely pretty extraterrestrial. She put her hands on her hips and gazed down at the boxes. “I can see your point,” she said, smiling. “That’s funny.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “For what?”

  “For seeing my point,” I told her.

  The woman took a good look at me for the first time, and her smile faded. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Can I ask what your name is?” I said.

  “Claire.”

  “I’m not entirely okay, Claire, no. But don’t worry. I’m not dangerous or anything.”

  “Alright,” she said, eyeing me a moment longer. “Then what can I help you with?”

  Claire followed me around the corner to the Premium Body Care section.

  “Everything’s organized by type, not manufacturer,” she said, examining the bottle of liquid hand wash formulated with cleansing agents. “So all we have to do is look for the hand cleansers, and … hey presto. Here it is.”

  “That’s the stuff?”

  “That’s the stuff,” she said.

  “What’s the price on that?”

  “Let’s see.” She dropped into a crouch and peered at the price tag affixed to the shelf. “Eighteen ninety-nine.”

  “Eighteen ninety-nine.”

  “Correctamundo.”

  “For eight ounces of hand wash.”

  “Would seem so.”

  “You wash with it.”

  “Yes,” Claire said.

  “And it’s for hands only,” I said.

  “That’s how it’s labeled.”

  “Okay. I’m able to accept that I should never, under any circumstances, wash anything but my hands with this. But I need to know why.”

  Claire stood up again and glanced around as if searching out eavesdroppers. She leaned in, and I caught a whiff of metabolized alcohol, like the smell of a bottle redemption center, on her breath. “They say it has to do with pH and how soap is alkaline and dries your skin and all that, but I think it’s mostly bullshit,” she said. “I mean, in the winter my hands get a lot drier than my face. So you’d think that your hands are the part of your body that need special treatment.”

  “Why are you whispering?” I asked her.

  “Because we’re in Total Foods.”

  “You have to whisper when you’re in Total Foods?”

  Claire looked at me. “Do you always take everything so literally?” she asked.

  “I didn’t used to,” I said. “But I’m not quite myself today. Or maybe I’m more myself than I’ve ever been. It’s hard to tell.”

  “Okay,” Claire said. “Then I’ll spell it out for you. I’m whispering because even to suggest it’s okay to wash your face with soap would not go over well with the Total Foods crowd.”

  “And by ‘not go over well’ you mean …”

  “Best-case? I get a lecture about the Total Foods ethic, and how my words and actions should always reflect that ethic.”

  “And worst-case?”

  “I get shitcanned.”

  “For saying it’s okay to wash your face with soap.”

  “For merely implying it,” Claire said.

  “Huh.”

  “Yup.”

  We were quiet for a moment.

  “So how about the language on this bottle,” I said, pointing at the liquid hand wash. “What exactly does ‘formulated with cleansing agents’ mean?”

  “You want the Total Foods employee handbook answer, or the no-bullshit answer?”

  I considered. “How about both?”

  “Okay. Here’s the former: ‘This gentle hand wash is blended with premium ingredients formulated to provide a soothing hand-cleansing experience.’”

  “And the latter?”

  “It’s soap. You wash your fucking hands with it.”

  I looked at her. “Claire,” I said, “can I tell you how glad I am that I found you today?”

  She smiled at me, a bit guarded, a bit perplexed, still, by my strange questions and facial contusion. For a moment I thought about how this Claire, model-pretty, with her burgundy ponytail and wry manner, might be someone I’d like to know better. But of course I was not young enough to entertain such thoughts for longer than a second or two, and so I broke the smiley silence between us by thanking her, and walked away.

  • • •

  When I got back in the car I saw Sarah’s old cell phone, the one possession of hers I’d neglected to destroy, sitting in the cup holder. It had been in the car for months, which is why it had been spared the fate of her other belongings. I’d meant to take it in for recycling but instead had been driving around with it, forgetting about it, throwing it on the passenger seat to make room for a bottle of water or a Grande Americano. As I pulled out of the Total Foods parking lot I realized that now was my chance to finally be rid of the thing: across the throughway at the mall loomed the sign for our local Big Buy, a school bus–yellow beacon in the gathering dark.

  I walked through the whoosh of automatic doors with the phone in hand. A second set of doors opened onto the main sales floor, where hundreds of electronic devices flashed and blared for an audience of a few dozen shoppers who paid little attention to their overtures. I wandered around looking for a place to drop the phone, figuring this to be a simple enough task. After a full lap of the store, though, after strolling past the video game section, the home theater section, the computer and tablet section, the DVD and Blu-ray section, and finally the weird anachronism of the music CD section, I was forced to admit defeat and headed for the exit.

  But then, in the same entryway I’d passed through only a few minutes before, I now noticed a long, squat recycling bin. Along the top of the bin were six round holes, each fitted with a rubber gasket through which one could drop whatever it was one wanted to recycle. The first hole was labeled for toner cartridges, the second for laptop batteries, and the third for portable GPS units. Inexplicably, the fourth through sixth holes weren’t labeled at all.

  I stood there for a minute, still holding Sarah’s phone, unsure what to do, wondering what those last three holes were for.

  Then, above the bin, I spotted a sign: WE ALSO RECYCLE TELEVISIONS, COMPUTERS, FURNITURE, CELLULAR PHONES, CAMERAS, GAMING CONSOLES, HOME APPLIANCES, AND MORE. PLEASE SEE A SALES ASSOCIATE FOR DETAILS.

  I went back inside through the automatic doors.

  It made a certain kind of sense, I imagined, that the sales associate I needed to talk to about recycling a phone would be assigned to the phone section. There I found a girl in her early twenties, plump and pretty and brown haired, clad in the ubiquitous Big Buy polo shirt and khaki pants.

  She looked pleasant enough. Hope rose.

  “Can I help you?” the girl asked brightly as I approached. She either failed to notice, or was unfazed by, the fresh bruise on my face.

  “I think so,” I said. “I need to recycle this phone.”

  “Sure,” she said. “There’s a bin out in the entryway where you can drop it on your way out.”

  I looked at her for a moment. “Right,” I said. “See, I was just there. That bin has slots for toner cartridges, batteries, and GPS units. And then up top it says that if I have a phone to recycle I should see a sales associate.”

  She cocked
her head to the side, her smile widening. “It’s fine,” she said. “You can put phones in there, too.”

  I half turned toward the exit. “Okay,” I said. “Because that’s not what the sign—”

  “It’s fine,” she reiterated.

  I went back to the entryway and stood there for a couple of minutes. I read the labels and the sign again several times.

  “See the thing is,” I told the girl when I returned with the phone still in hand, “I understand that when you say ‘You can put phones in there too,’ what you mean by you is one, or anyone, is allowed to put phones in the bin. Not you as in I, specifically, can put phones in the bin. Because I can’t. When I go to the bin and it says if I want to recycle a phone I should see a sales associate, I can’t, given explicit instructions to the contrary, bring myself to just put the phone in there.”

  The girl’s smile had disappeared. “Sir,” she said, “you’ve seen a sales associate. I am a sales associate. And I’m telling you it’s perfectly fine to put the phone in the bin.”

  We stared at each other. My hands began trembling again, and I could feel the muscles in my face twitching and bunching as they tried to narrow my eyes and draw my lips back from my teeth. I clasped my free hand over the one holding the phone.

  “What I’m having difficulty with, see,” I told the girl, trying to keep my tone even and personable, “is the labeling system. If it’s okay to put all manner of things in the bin, then why label it at all? To have signage allowing a certain behavior is, by implication, prohibitive of other behaviors. I would not, for example, assume that because I can deposit a GPS device I can also deposit a potbellied pig. So if a sign reads ‘insert toner cartridges here,’ in the absence of another sign that says ‘insert cell phones here,’ one is forced to conclude that cell phones are not allowed. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  The girl’s expression of impatience had devolved into a wariness, the sort of furtive look a woman will cast at a dark figure in a parking garage when she’s four strides from her car. She shook her head.

  I tried again to comport my facial features. “It’s actually very simple,” I said. “This should not be tough to grasp. At all.”

  “Listen, let me find my manager,” the girl said, backing away without taking her eyes off of me.

  “Okay,” I called after her.

  The girl returned several minutes later, accompanied by a large man whose abdomen strained the fabric of his Big Buy polo shirt like water in a waterbed mattress. They stopped before me, a rank of two.

  “Sir, you can feel free to deposit your phone in the recycling bin out front,” the large man said to me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Could you maybe tell me which hole I should deposit it in?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” the man said. “Whichever one you prefer.”

  I looked at them both. “Have you ever read Kafka?” I asked.

  The girl stared at me, her eyes baleful in their frames of mascara, and said nothing.

  “Is there maybe someone else I can talk to?” I asked.

  The man held out his hand. “Just give me the goddamn phone,” he said.

  • • •

  Sarah had died in winter, about seven months previous. This was why when I pulled up to the house all the lights were still off. When I went inside it was cold because I’d turned the heat down earlier and Sarah was not there to turn it back up.

  I’d had occasion, since leaving Tony’s place that afternoon, to wonder why he hadn’t been more upset with me for breaking his window. Why he hadn’t just tossed me out the front door. Here, now, was the answer: because my wife had died only recently, which meant that no one really expected me to act like a normal human being and, further, granted me dispensation when I did behave inexplicably.

  The cat wound around my ankles in the entryway. We’d had him since he was a kitten, and now he was five or six years old. Sarah had given him a name that I couldn’t recall. For a month after she died I tried to remember the cat’s name, asking friends if they had any idea, searching Sarah’s social media legacy for pictures of the cat, all to no avail. Eventually I just started calling him Meowser, for reasons lost to me by this point.

  Meowser followed me into the kitchen, trying his best to trip me up as we went. He traced figure eights through my legs as I turned on the lights and placed the bottle of liquid hand wash formulated with cleansing agents on the table.

  It was very quiet in the house. For company, I turned on the television that rested on a small stand next to the table. I’d put it there after Sarah died. She would never in the vast disk of eternity have allowed a TV in the dining area, or bedroom, or really anywhere other than the living room. She hated having a TV in the house at all. But now I was my own man, and I didn’t need to compromise with anyone. I could screw a flat-screen into the ceiling over the bed, if I liked. I could install one in the wall opposite the toilet. Whatever I fancied.

  On CNN a panel of four people, none of whom was Kenyan, or African, or even black, offered their considered opinions regarding a terrorist assault on a mall in Kenya. Scores of shoppers had been killed. Women had been blown up with hand grenades, and children ripped open by large-caliber bullets. The men responsible had reportedly ushered Muslims out of the mall, then opened fire on the people who remained. They wanted to kill everyone who wasn’t Muslim simply for their non-Muslimness. There were other reasons they wanted to kill people, too, according to a statement they’d released. They were sore, for example, about Kenyan troops occupying parts of Somalia. They also seemed just generally to not be fans of anyone whose view of God or the world or existence differed from theirs. There were a lot of things that upset them, it seemed, which made sense, since most people wouldn’t murder children unless they were really mad about something.

  I changed the channel to a late football game. The cat wound and wound between my legs. I realized in a distant way that I should probably sit down, make myself comfortable in my own home. I couldn’t do it, though. Maybe because the heat had just kicked on and it was still quite cold. Maybe because my head was throbbing. Maybe because as usual I was hungry but had no appetite.

  A therapist I talked to a few times after Sarah died had told me that hunger, along with anger, loneliness, and fatigue, has a much greater effect on our ability to relax and be well than we realize. He gave me an acronym, to remind me to watch out for those four things. HALT: Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. Hunger fucks with your head, this person told me. He seemed uncomfortable with the tented-finger formality of conventional Freudian practice, so he talked how a regular guy talked, and peppered his speech with profanity. Hunger makes it impossible to be still, he told me, in either mind or body. If you’re hungry you’ve got to eat. Fucking priority one. None of the other strategies to manage grief and be productive and act like a normal human will do a goddamn bit of good if you’re starving yourself.

  The therapist told me some other things, too, before I stopped showing up at his office. One of those other things was: If you blame yourself for someone’s death but the cops disagree, then you’re being a self-indulgent jerk, and you need to get over it.

  He was very practical, this therapist. After a few sessions, though, I began to suspect that his regular guyness was a front, a manufactured therapeutic strategy, and that when he went home he put on women’s clothing and slathered himself in peanut butter and danced around his living room while making noises somewhere between laughing and sobbing. I began to suspect, in other words, that he himself was not forthright in the way he expected me to be, in the way he insisted I must be for our work together to bear fruit.

  That was one of the reasons I stopped seeing the therapist. Another was because the love seat in his office was old and lumpy and had one sharp spring that poked me in the rear end no matter how I adjusted my position. That also influenced my decision not to return, if I’m being honest.

  In any event, his advice about eating seemed sound. So with the Flor
ida/South Carolina game blaring in the background, I made my way to the refrigerator and dug out a slightly rusted head of iceberg lettuce and a bottle of ranch dressing. I put the lettuce on the one plate in the house and put the dressing on the lettuce and put the whole thing on the dining table in front of the TV.

  I ate the entire head of lettuce, but barely tasted a thing.

  By the time I finished, the football game had given way to a nightly sports news program, and I realized I had no idea what the final score had been, or even who had won. I rose from the table, rinsed the one plate in the house, and climbed the stairs to the bedroom. Meowser wound and wound. I took off my shoes but didn’t bother with the rest of my clothes, and was under the covers before I remembered I’d left the television on in the kitchen. It was just loud enough for me to hear the steady drone of the news anchors, but not loud enough to make out what they were saying. I lay there for a while, thinking perhaps I should get up and turn it off, as well as tend to minimal personal hygiene, but then Meowser draped himself across my ankles. I stayed flat on my back, long after it became uncomfortable and the urge to roll over struck, because I didn’t want to disturb the cat.

  I listened to the mumble of the television for a long time. The bedside lamp was on, but it sat just out of reach, so I let it burn. For hours I lay there, neither tense nor relaxed, my eyes trained on the ceiling. By and by, though, I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew it was Sunday morning, a Sunday like any other, except that somewhere in our prosperous little city a man was preparing to rob my coffee shop, a man who thought he just wanted money when in fact what he really wanted, but was not yet ready to be honest with himself about, was to frighten and humiliate and kill a pretty dark-haired young woman.

  I got out of bed, neck stiff, clothes spectacularly rumpled, thinking I should give Meowser his breakfast. But then a caffeine yen gripped me, and I put on shoes and went out for my Americano, thinking I’d be back in ten minutes, twenty at most, and that the cat could certainly wait that long for his marinated morsels.

  3

  GUNS DON’T KILL PEOPLE …