literary fiction

Because imagining the absolute worst-case scenario is my default setting

STEVE BIERSDORF

Beach and the Gulf of Mexico on this side of the island, waterways on the other, walled off by an impenetrable mangrove thicket infested with things that bite and constrict, uncompromising, vicious, camouflaged things. I see how the island could be taken, overrun then fortified with only the beach side to defend. Not much potential for resistance or insurgency here, where aggression is getting up at sunrise to find the good shells before anyone else does. The local police cruise the beach in jeeps, looking for open containers or enough nudity to offend public decency statutes.

In quick succession take out the local cell tower wherever it is, inland somewhere, easy to find because its exact location can be googled, detonate the concrete stanchions that prop up the causeway so it buckles and keels over into the bay. There aren’t two, the only way on or off the island if you’re driving. An amphibious assault from the ocean in the new moon cycle, storm the condos and resorts, evacuate the residents top floor to lobby, set up MANPADS with SAMs on the roofs of the taller complexes, heat-seekers.

I’m well acquainted with the view from the balcony, the beach and ocean and our building’s identical twin across the way, its pool, green tennis courts and driveway on the grounds in between. Almost straight down to the crown of a several-stories-tall royal palm, with its full head of yellowish fronds and branchless beneath, fronds like dying plants in a pottered vase, its trunk like a cylindrical sculpture hewn by the elements, steady inbound breeze, torrential downpours, rain delivered sideways, glazed by the tropical sun. I estimate the top of this royal palm to be slightly more than halfway to the ground from the tenth story balcony I peer down on it from. I wonder if it could be possible to land atop the crown, but suspect only with a running start. It looks like a step off the rail and I’d be able to hit the mark. What I can’t know is if the crown is substantial enough to impede my fall or if I would tear through it, two hundred pounds hurtling down and the fronds a matador’s cape.  

The invasion force overrunning the twin tower to our north, lining up on opposite balconies and systematically clearing the condos in this building by unleashing automatic weapons fire covering every square inch of visibility into these condo apartments in the southern tower. These condos are glass-walled facing out but there are two obstructed views, on the other side of the kitchen and the full bathroom by the guest bedroom and not the master. Everything else is in the line of fire. Behind the kitchen wall as the torrent of automatic weapons fire swarms every inch, shredding glass, chewing up the plaster walls, splintering wood, devouring furniture and creating flurries of lighter material, foam rubber, feathers, dust, dismembered bits of cloth, pieces of everything scattered under a deafening rain of hellfire. Systematic shock and awe, floor by floor, so by the time the invasion force moves in behind the covering fire, any resistance has been obliterated.

When the unleashing ends my ears ring with it, what’s left of a cabinet door dropping to the floor, a piece of glass table falling and breaking in half. I make a break for it, straight out and over the balcony, bits of glass crunching under every step, jumping the rail, realizing I’ve overestimated how far out the royal palm is, I won’t land dead center in the crown, crashing through the fronds and I grab desperately as I come ripping past, I feel a sharp pain in my upper chest and my arm feels like something’s tried to remove it from its socket with a violent tug. The momentum of my fall disrupted enough to blunt the impact. Landing in a blink. One of my arms is useless. I slither. It feels like something’s been threaded through my pelvis so I can stand properly only with the assistance of fishing line at the behest of a manipulating hand. I spit out teeth. My jaw barely opens so that when I spit blood and broken teeth tumble reluctantly out, blood, saliva and teeth fragments coating my chin. On the left side of my mouth are gums or broken teeth, same side as the useless arm. I blink blood from my eyes, drops on my eyelashes. I make for the nearby dumpster, not walking but partially erect, dragging what doesn’t work and over-relying on what does, lean over and fall in and close the lid over me with a hollow, metallic boom, hoping no one saw.  

At the Ballpark

STEVE BIERSDORF

The ballpark has a retractable roof with a giant glass greenhouse façade, giving it the look of a massive, self-contained biosphere. Our team is in the early stages of a rebuild, so if they lose today we can chalk it up to better days ahead. Every twenty seconds or so they play a short blurb of a song, “Wild Thing,” “Let’s Get It Started,” “Plush.” “Day-O,” daylight come and me want to go home. Turns out (google search) they have a forty-song playlist.  

Between innings a group of young men and women down on the field shimmy laterally to centerfield with a huge inflated sombrero upside down, with writing on it, presumably some local restaurant or restaurant chain. The inflatable sombrero and the sideways-moving legs of those carrying it resemble an immense and deformed crustacean scrambling desperately in search of a return to the sea, stuck and enclosed by the walls around the field and the leering, hollering masses.

Beneath mammoth ads for Southwest Airlines, Bud Light and Larry’s Shoes, above the Target bullseye logo plastered to the outfield wall, someone walks to the edge of the outfield stands with a much smaller inflated object I take for a replica of a pillow-sized taco, throws it in the general direction of the upside-down sombrero, the taco bounding off the brim of the sombrero and falling to the outfield grass, to the collective, unconvincing “awwww” of the stadium crowd. The leftfielder jogs out to his position, observing it all, pounding his glove with his fist with what can only be disdain.

A left-handed batter stands in and swings at a pitch like a blur, redirecting the blur, slower-moving and looping and askew and high into the glowing stadium lights. The ball is a small darkening object, a tiny pin-prick eclipse of the candlepower, rising impossibly high and on its descent angled straight for where we’re sitting. A man in the team regalia stands and the ball falls to him as if hit to him intentionally, or at him. He lifts his hands together to catch it, but it bounces off his hands with a meat-slap and skips to the row directly in front of us. As if the baseball is a priceless trinket dropped from the sky, something that if procured would inexorably alter the life of its new possessor, as one body and then another and another hurtle directly over us, diving headfirst, knocking us from our seats to our knees, spilling beverages. A pile of bodies in the row in front of us, a scrum, a compilation of legs and arms and torsos and grunts and jostling, and a woman walks up to the scrum, reaches in and magically produces the fouled-off baseball, holding it aloft, triumphantly, and the entire section erupts, as she turns and curtsies to the rows higher up.

Phone Scammers

STEVE BIERSDORF

They were working an old IRS scam. Googling phone scams you could find out what people were hip to, so he invented his own messages. The women quickly copied him when they saw his results.  

“You are hereby notified that we need to speak with you or your attorney immediately regarding an ongoing investigation. In the event we do not speak with you in our office today, we will document that you waived your rights to counsel and submit your file to the state.”

“This telephone number is linked to a questionable financial transaction that is now under investigation. It is possible that your name and social security number could be involved. I need you to call me or one of my associates immediately.”

He would make two hundred calls by lunch. Rarely, if ever, talking with anyone on the initial call. The calls were local but came from scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes. He’d eat lunch, take a solid forty-five minutes and peruse shit on the Internet. The women hammered the phones nonstop trying to get someone, skipping lunch or eating at their cubicles between calls. You had to scare people with the messages you left. They had to call you.

Early afternoon the callbacks started in earnest. Sometimes he couldn’t keep up, the women gladly handling his overflow. Mary Stewart took the inbound calls. From the number on caller ID she would know which agent had placed the call, confirm the caller’s name and social security number and transfer the call to him if it was his, or if he wasn’t on another call. He’d reconfirm the social security number with the caller. Knowing their social security numbers was like holding their babies out a window ten stories over a sidewalk.

They purchased call lists from payday lenders, storefront or online. It was the afraid callers with sketchy credit histories who gave up their card numbers. The standard charge was payback of the fictitious loan for $400 and a $35 processing fee. He went for more. Sometimes he’d say the loan was for $1,500 or $2,000 and they’d want to mail him a check, he’d tell them if they gave him a credit card number he would waive the processing fee and come down $300 to settle. Sometimes with the bigger amounts the card number wouldn’t go through, and Mary Stewart or Mr. Anderson would send it through for less, whatever they could get.

The women were using his scripts, but they didn’t have his deep, resonant voice. They had weird accents. Sometimes they would go out into the empty warehouse together, Denise Meyers, Susan Jones, Ann Johnson and Mary Stewart. Susan Jones and Ann Johnson smoked. They would converse in a foreign language. After five minutes of his standing there awkwardly with his hands buried in his pockets, Mary Stewart smiled apologetically and gave abridged translations. When Mary would translate, the other women would stop talking in the strange language, looking at him by turns. The next time he followed them out into the empty warehouse they spoke English.     

They could hear each other. They had earbuds and weren’t right on top of each other, but the offices were tight, formerly the administrative offices of a defunct propane gas concern. The women would threaten the callers if the callers weren’t taking the bait or were confrontational, “get a good lawyer,” “I’m forwarding this information to the three credit reporting agencies.” They took the confrontational calls personally. You couldn’t. If there wasn’t any money in it get off the call quickly, hang up if necessary.  

Denise Meyers was the most egregious. If Denise Meyers called a blocked number, she would continue to call using all twenty-nine scrambled numbers with Ohio area codes and leave her message, or her version of one of his messages. She would call the same cell number from all thirty scrambled lines until she was completely blocked, each time leaving increasingly menacing versions of the original message. If she knew where the owner of the blocked cell phone number worked she would call that person’s work and leave messages with a receptionist that the owner of the blocked cell number was facing a grand jury indictment for embezzlement. She would look up family members and call them, telling the family members their brother, sister, son or daughter was facing fraud charges. He would listen to her being awful in her weird accent and disaffected tone. He’d listen to her and want to fuck her. Fuck her hard.

Taking Inventory

STEVE BIERSDORF

Yesterday when I checked the National Debt Clock was $20,493,703,619,404. It’s like a never-ending telethon run amok. Watch it for five minutes and it’ll go up another million dollars. Can’t sleep, check in on the National Debt Clock, and it’s still going up at two in the morning. Checking it just now and it’s up to $20,493,874,732,187. I wonder, how do we borrow $171 million in little over twenty-four hours? Do we borrow that much every day? We’re not really planning to pay all that back, are we? We can’t be.   

I live in what was once a quarry pit. At some point they ran out of rocks to pulverize, and now there are townhouses and single-family homes where once were mountains of rubble. It’s a valley now with an imported horticulture, low-maintenance roadside flora that can thrive out of a gravelly, nutrient-deficient subbase and thick flowering trees growing from patches of sod. The people behind me live a little higher up on the western ridge. At the back of their yard is a bulwark of white boulders, leftovers from those old quarry days. I live alone, in a two-level two-bedroom townhouse with a two-car garage. Beneath the kitchen sink, I have an array of household cleaners to tackle the most stubborn stains or waxy buildup. 

My neighbors to the right, a retired couple, we’ve never exchanged a word. We haven’t made eye contact. For the husband, waking up each morning without a meaningless job to go to has been an awkward transition. His driveway is always the first one shoveled when it snows. He uses a snow blower for the main stretches and fine-tunes the edges with one of those ergonomic shovels curved in the middle like half a parentheses, so he doesn’t have to bend. In summer he handpicks the weeds in his yard and punches aerating holes in his lawn with a long, thin-handled implement with a three-pronged metallic claw. During summer days when I’m home I sometimes hear the discharge of a pellet gun – pop-pffft – coming from his backyard, followed by the frenzied scattering of birds from the vicinity of his well-stocked birdfeeder.

I have this gnawing feeling I should do I’m not, not sure what that would be. My leg bouncing frenetically or if I’m lying down, my foot moving side to side like I’m waving at someone with it. I should feel better having my time at my discretion. I feel like I’ve fallen into one of those be-careful-what-you-wish-for scenarios. Sometimes I watch the ceiling fan for a disturbing amount of time. Every revolution the slats disappear and reappear. There are six of them, only three visible if the setting is on high. I know how many floor tiles there are in the front bathroom. I wonder how I came to have thirty-three forks.

Any latte is a Goodlatte with good company

STEVE BIERSDORF

I arrive at the downtown hotel for the interview five minutes in advance of the scheduled time. I’m to meet Jim Goodlatte in a café off the lobby. Jim Goodlatte hasn’t described himself or told me he’ll be wearing a red tie or a blue shirt or name tag, so I’m wondering how I’ll identify him. When I enter the café, there’s a huge guy in a suit with an open laptop and smart phone sitting alone and almost no one else there, a few elderly people in armchairs at the front window, staring out at the sidewalk, backs to the rest of the café, lethargic turn of their heads following the traverse of any passerby.

We shake hands and mine is lost in his, though he has an easy grip and lotiony soft hands. He asks if I’d like something and I say sure and he says go ahead, I’ll wait, and gestures toward the counter. I order a latte, pay for it after a moment’s hesitation, the woman behind the counter waiting patiently for me to hand her my debit card. She gives me a plastic number like a miniature sandwich board and says she’ll bring it over when it’s ready. I put the number at the edge of the table and it doesn’t take long. She picks up the number and sets the latte in the same spot. As we’re talking, I’m compulsively pulling on the latte despite how hot it is. The aftertaste is melted cup. I’m getting pretty geeked and the roof of my mouth becomes callused. My responses are more elaborate than they need to be because I’m overstimulated. I’m careful to maintain eye contact, Jim Goodlatte is an eye-contact guy.

Jim Goodlatte pokes at his computer. His fingers are too big for the conventional keyboard. I can tell when he’s backspacing by the peck-peck-peck with his bratwurst of a finger. He mispronounces my last name, pauses, asking me how I pronounce my last name, I pronounce it correctly and he apologizes, smiling introspectively, like fucking up names is a lovable flaw. He’s staring at the screen of his laptop facing away from me and he goes hmm, huh, asks me a few questions about my jobs past and present. It occurs to me this is the first time he’s looked at my résumé. Initially, I find this off-putting, but then I decide he’s just not that into his job. I’m waiting for him to ask me to describe a weakness and stare blankly at me, not listening to my bullshit, wondering why he asks this question when people always respond by blowing smoke up his large ass.

Meh

STEVE BIERSDORF

In the parking lot of a Piggly Wiggly, waiting for a parking space opening up, Sundays a popular day to Shop the Pig. A blue Buick backing out of the parking space he wanted, angling toward him, still coming. He could have honked but didn’t, expecting that the Buick’s driver would have consulted the rear-view mirror and seen him there. He’d have backed up to get out of the way but right behind him, nose to ass, was a pickup truck with authentic steer’s horns as a hood ornament. The Buick kept coming until it clipped him in the front license plate. The Buick lurched forward and crept slowly away, the driver seemingly oblivious, as if the modest impact went unnoticed. He pulled into the hard-won spot and went around front to see the collision had broken the front bracket, the front license plate dangling vertically, Lone Star State reading south to north.  

There were enough things he’d rather not do but had to that made procrastination a brand of optimism. Grocery shopping was one of those things he’d get around to when he was good and ready, not the most excruciating but painful in its own way. If he had children, they would be emaciated urchins waiting at home for him, watching him with placid desperation, developing a scavenger’s shrewd instinct, picking things out of the garbage that had nutritional value, pizza crust, Styrofoam containers with swabs of sour cream, yogurt containers with smears of fruit at the bottom, then turning to what might be left in the fridge, milk beyond its expiration date, flat soda, butter, condiments.  

Something transcendental happened to people when they grocery shopped, almost as soon as they pulled into the parking lot, there being something mesmerizing about stocking up on provisions that he was apparently immune to, or the many product offerings bewildering to the average consumer. People strolled dreamily down the center of lanes between parking spots, returning to their cars with laden shopping carts. They froze in aisles as they contemplated the various selections of any item. They chatted up the cashiers, oblivious to anyone in line behind them, sifting through a stack of coupons for items they were buying that day.  

Any minute spent grocery shopping longer than was necessary was, to him, like putting a bullet in a minute. He would buy items at the deli counter only if no one was in line, almost running with his cart down open aisles. He would keep the number of items purchased to twelve or less so he could check out in the Express Lane or he would cash out electronically as long as a terminal was available.

As a power shopper he had less occasion to eavesdrop but would catch snippets in passing, or as a captive audience when unavoidably obstructed by an indecisive plodder in frozen foods, a discriminating fondler of produce, a new cashier in training, or someone unable to negotiate the electronic checkout without assistance.  

“He’s always in such a hurry to get off the toilet he barely wipes himself or forgets or doesn’t bother and I can’t seem to Shout© out the skid marks. I end up throwing his underwear away.”

“You need to slow him down a little. Have you thought about leaving some magazines in the bathroom, or the newspaper? The sports section? His e-reader? Does he have an e-reader?”

“Um, that’s disgusting.”

“More disgusting than his underwear?”

***

He wasn’t quick to get the front plate bracket repaired and drove around that way without a care about it. Driving along a country road of a Sunday noontime, a serpentine connector road, when a Volvo in front of him slowed and stopped and its yellow flashers came on. They were nowhere near a stop sign or stoplight or anywhere to turn in, out in feral flat country, ranch houses spaced widely apart as if their occupants preferred hardy vegetation that could survive desert-like conditions to humanity. A soft-bodied woman with pale skin and straight brown hair like a helmet emerged from the Volvo, in her Sunday finest, walking purposefully toward him, beaming her fresh God buzz, brimming with the weekly message, to spread kindness and mete out good deeds as opportunities presented themselves. And she was outwardly pleased that this one had, pleased that she could to recognize it and could commit this random act of kindness. Down came his window and he leaned over, head partially out the driver’s side window, looking at her, eyes dancing, waiting to see exactly what was on her mind.

 “Your front license plate is broken,” she drawled merrily. He looked at her with nothing immediately forthcoming, no discernible outward reaction. He could say he already knew. He could ask her if she really thought he’d not noticed. And she could have driven to a hospice and held hands with the terminally ill, or baby-sat for free, or read to children, or sold magazine subscriptions on behalf of the Latter-Day Saints.  

But she wouldn’t want any of that sticky personal interaction. She was a Good Samaritan of the hit-and-run persuasion, a soul mechanic offering an off-the-cuff diagnosis without the messiness that came with looking under the hood, pulling things apart and getting at the root malfunction.

It was a word he loved, genius in its way. He’d only ever texted it and had been steeling for the appropriate context to use it in conversation. If a three-letter word could encapsulate a generation, or a society, or its preoccupations, it had that kind of breadth. He’d rehearsed saying it, sometimes in front of a mirror, with a nasally incantation and a practiced indifferent shrug to accompany what he said in response as he watched her:

“Meh.”          

She was already half-turned away from him, mission accomplished, pointing out the hanging license plate, doing her part to bring order to the world. If she’d looked at him, established eye contact, she’d have seen that his strong left eye, being 20-15 vision, was doing all the heavy lifting so the right one could be lazy, not having to focus if it didn’t feel the need, so that he seemed to have two different points of vision. She turned away, hastening back to her car, sensing a miscalculation.