SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I had this dream —

I don’t want to talk about it.

Okay, I do want to talk about it, but I just don’t know if it’s wise.

Let me try from a different angle. I am a mathematician. I study math. That doesn’t mean that I am a student taking math classes. No. I am a scientist, and I study how mathematics behaves under scrutiny. I study math as if it were a natural physical process to be put under a microscope, as if it were a creature in a cage to be fed specific doses of specific poisons so we could measure the damage to specific tissues and organs at specific times along the poison’s progress.

We’ve trusted math for a long time, assuming two plus two equals four everywhere, all the time, under any circumstances, for the simple reason that it kinda seems to do so and it seems impossible to measure. We measure math with math. It’s like shining a light on a flashlight beam.

Math as we know and use it is based on a set number of unprovable assumptions. Everyone who studies math like I do, all of my fellow members of this fairly large academic cult, know all about this. It makes all of us nervous. Math is difficult. We all like to take shortcuts. We make tools out of all these assumptions and hand these tools to other scientists and knowledgeable people who then tell us all what we know about the world around us. They set us up to be able to build the structures we live in, or drive on, or fly in, and make predictions that allow us to dodge natural disasters if we feel like it, and if we screw up, our structures turn out to be houses of cards and people die. It’s as simple as that.

Every single one of those assumptions could turn out to be the weak link. So we test them everywhere, all the time.

Take your flashlight. Shine it on an imperfect wall. Measure the light that bounces back from the bright circle. You have no idea how much of what you are looking at, in terms of microscopic changes in brightness and darkness, is the light itself and how much is the wall. But here’s the thing. Move the light around the wall. Measure what bounces back. Move it again. Measure. Move it. Measure. Do this a million times. Add all the numbers together. Divide by the number of times you took measurements. If your wall’s surface was random in terms of its microscopic bumpiness, then what you end up with at the end of all of that is a measurement of the light itself. Now you know all about the bright spots and the dark spot from deformations and imperfections in the flashlight’s lens, in the reflector behind the bulb, in the bulb itself.

Or so we assume.

The only way we can check it is by averaging together everything we know about all of our flashlights. Then we find out what we know about light itself. And if we average together everything we know about the phenomenon of light, then all we end up looking at is the math we use to look at the world around us. If we do this everywhere, all the time, then we can make sure that math is consistent enough to bear our weight for everything else. We can know whether we should trust it, and under what circumstances it tries to wriggle in our grasp. When it might try to turn and bite us.

I know, right? It’s unlikely. In an infinite universe, though, the unlikely, if it is possible at all, turns out to be inevitable. That’s just math.

But now math is ubiquitous. Everywhere on earth, and many places in space at various distances, there are instruments taking measurements and computers doing math. Everywhere, all the time. I collect all the data I can, add to it the time and place the measurements were made, the time and place the computations were performed, and average together all of the terms that measure how much of the data is signal and how much is noise. I look at the math that we use to look at our data. I look at the math that we use to look at our math. I measure our assumptions.

This one time I had a dream of a huge glass ball struck by a small hammer. It made a sound like a beautiful bell. The tiny hammer struck again and again and again, and the ringing tones began to overlap to turn into a steady, ugly buzz. The hammer slowed down and sped up so that the buzz changed pitches to settle on a pitch that blended perfectly, beautifully, with the beautiful ringing tone of the glass ball.

Then the glass ball shattered. Then the world shattered. And everybody died.

[*]

This one time I was on the phone with my mother, back in Ssese. She manages a small hotel there, and it is one of the perks of my job all day on the phones that we get to call anywhere we like and talk for half an hour on our lunch breaks. My shift is eleven AM to eight PM, to coincide mostly with work hours on the Pacific coast. Our offices are in a very expensive area of the city to be nearer the necessary infrastructure to carry our telephone traffic, but the offices are small and have no windows. They are decorated like dormitory rooms, mostly posters and toys brought in by my fellow workers.

I like my coworkers and get along well with them. Most of us met at university and took classes together. We do this job mostly because it is not too far from school and to practice our English and Spanish language skills. To be honest, it really does not matter to me how I earn money while taking my economics and pre-law curriculum. I like talking to people, even angry people, which is how I know I will enjoy being a lawyer, even if I am just a consulting lawyer for a business.

My family in Uganda is wealthy from the hotel business at the resort in Ssese. I send my mother pictures of people here in the city and she sends me clothes that will make me look beautiful and fit in with the people in the pictures. If the clothes are too nice I will sometimes trade them with friends for clothes that are more durable or sporty or warm. My mother has little grasp of the need for warm clothing. I keep telling her to pretend I live in a village in the mountains, and she tells me she sees no sign of mountains in the pictures I send. We joke that it is colder on the upper floors of tall buildings, and some times it even snows on the 50th floor.

She has a camera in her phone like mine and she sends me pictures of home for me to print and hang on the walls at my house and at work. So, when I am talking to her, she is interrupted by my cousin who I played with as a little girl. I ask her to take a picture of my cousin so I can see what he looks like now. She says he is handsome, and I joke that if I can make one of my friends fall in love with him, he can marry her and move here and visit me.

Her voice became quieter as she moved the phone away from her head and worked to activate the camera. I heard her laughing and him laughing and the sound the phone makes when it pretends to be a real camera. Then we talked some more and said goodbye and she said she would send the picture when she rang off.

I received the picture about ten minutes later. My mother had taken a picture of his face and shoulders. Her left hand was in the picture also, with her fingers around his throat like she was choking him. He had an enormous smile, showing all of his big white teeth. In the background was a boat dock and Lake Victoria, and it was all bright and beautiful.

Then I knew my mother had sent me a picture taken earlier in the day. When it is three-thirty PM in New York, it is eleven-thirty PM in Ssese. This picture was taken during the daytime.

I looked at the filename for the picture. It had the date of tomorrow in the filename, and the time next to it said eleven-thirty AM.

I am very good at math. I study economics and accounting and I am one of just a few of my classmates that actually understand the mathematics rather than just how to use the software. I never make mistakes about what timezone I am calling. This picture of my cousin was taken from the future twelve hours from now.

I called my mother back, even though I was not supposed to call her a second time in one day, and it took a while for her to answer. I asked her about what time her phone said it was and she said nearly midnight and told me what day it was too. I asked her about the picture of my cousin, and she told me she would remember to take one of him when he showed up in the morning.

I thanked her and rang off, not knowing how to explain the situation to her in either English or Bantu. Twelve hours later I received another copy of the same picture of my laughing cousin with my mother’s hand around his throat.

[*]

This one time I was sitting on the train getting my work done, and by that I mean I was sleeping. The job I get paid for, which is not work at all, consists of sitting in a little room for eight hours a day with a stack of books and magazines — no music or movies or television or anything else that makes noise — and an endless stream of coffee or whatever it takes to stay awake for the entire time listening to a particular channel on a particular radio that plays a particular brand of static, and, when a particular light comes on, I have to write down with a particular pen on a particular pad of paper whatever I hear and then take a pill which, I am told, will only make me sleep and screw with my short-term memory enough to make it unlikely I’ll remember any of what I wrote down.

I am not allowed a phone or a computer or any method of writing even to work crosswords or stuff. I am strip-searched twice every day, once on the way in and once on the way out, and they even check my nails to make sure I keep them short and look me over to make sure I haven’t scratched anything into my skin.

At first it was demeaning, but what demeaning means drifts a bit with familiarity. Demeaning is when I can tell that the people looking me over aren’t paying attention to every detail and treating it like it’s important. Demeaning is when I take my clothes off and their minds are elsewhere and I can tell I that was when I could have gotten away with something. But I’m not allowed to talk to anyone or even to complain or answer questions, but every day I am allowed the opportunity to take the special pen and mark a special square on the special pad of paper that says, “I QUIT”.

Eight hours a day of that, one AM to 9 AM five days per week, and the one thing I’m not allowed to do in there is sleep.

My commute is backwards, but due to the shift I work, I head back into town with the B&T crowd commuting in. A car drops me off at a shopping center. I catch a shuttle there to the train back to town, and take another train to the end of the line, where I get off and walk to an apartment where I can’t goddamn sleep because the neighborhood is noisy and bright and I live right next to a primary school, where the kids come out in shifts like inmates at a prison into the recess area/exercise yard right under my goddamn window.

The trains aren’t very quiet either, but for some reason I find it easier to doze on the train headed home than in my apartment, even with earplugs and a sleep mask. I’ve perfected this wobbly “I’m about to throw up” look that gets me a seat in even the most crowded cars most of the time, and I’ve never been hassled in the twelve years I’ve been doing this, but even with all the practice and the rocking and the warmth of nearby bodies, sleeping is work either on the train or in my apartment, and if I don’t do enough of it before I have to go back to the place where I get paid to basically do nothing all day, then I’ll sleep there and get fired.

So this one time on the uptown train, I’m trying to work and I wake up because something isn’t right. I think maybe we’ve stopped too long or something’s broken down and we’re about to be asked to get off and wait for the next train or something and, whatever, that kind of thing happens every now and then and the commuting-to-work crew, most of whom are actually on one of the downtown trains by the time we hit Central Park North, so guaranteed I’ve got a seat by now… Where was I? The commuting-to-work crew doesn’t take it so well when we have to stop.

But anyway, the train hasn’t stopped, but it’s the quietest it’s ever been on a moving train, or maybe that’s just how it seems, but the tunnel outside the windows are the brightest I’ve ever seen them, like maybe they’ve got workers in the tunnels, or cops, or what have you. I’ve never seen it before, though. If there are workers or cops in the tunnels they shut down the trains. Like you’d imagine. So I turn and I look out the window and it looks like we’re in a huge underground switching station, with maybe twenty sets of parallel tracks and cars of sorts I don’t even recognize dotted about the landscape, not normal MTA cars from any line I ride.

It’s not quite daylight-bright out there, maybe somewhere between indoor/office and snowy-day overcast. It’s a huge yard, maybe a few football-fields long. I look out the window across from mine to make sure it’s the same out there. It is.

And everyone else on the train is either asleep or just looking at their feet or laps or reading or stuff. I’m the only one looking out any of the windows.

And then the train operator’s voice comes on, and in a voice backed by static but still very understandable, he says, “I said close your eyes.”

I scrunched back in my corner and bowed my head, looking at my hands and trying to calm down, trying to figure out where the hell we could be, where we could have been. The next stop was Central Park North, which I was sure we had gone through already, and the rest of the ride was normal.

I was too shaken to sleep, but I managed a few hours after I got back to my apartment. By the end of the day, when I was headed back to the job, I had convinced myself that I had dreamed the whole episode, a kind of waking dream from a screwed-up sleep schedule. I thought very strongly about checking the “I QUIT” box, but I never did.

That night I went to work normally, but I woke up in my bed while it was still dark, like maybe six AM. I was extremely confused. But on the night stand next to my clock was a single sheet, torn off the special pad from you-know-where, and it said, in huge block letters, “GOOD JOB. THANK YOU. COME BACK NEXT SHIFT.”

It was my fourth one of those, the fourth in twelve years. I put it with the others. My only souvenirs from the job.

[*]

This one time me and the boys were sitting around the boardroom table pretending to be important at one another, gauging the uniform subtle shininess of cloth and width of lapels and weaponized neckwear and cufflinks and all the usual bullshit to cover for the fact that we’ve all seen each other naked at any of a number of those parties, each of those parties being an expression of the risk of doing business with partners overseas who have successfully been sold on the idea that they can launder all the money they like by buying consulting through us and letting us write checks back to their favorite projects and lobbying firms and influence outlets and scholarship funds for their children and the usual whatnot. Those parties being the places where we are generally photographed covertly in the presence of enough hookers and blow to make sure we know we face jail time if any of us ever decides to get too greedy or schedule sneaky interviews with certain individuals at the Department of Justice — and in truth it’s all bullshit, because the fact is almost none of the money is dirty by US standards, the stuff that is is dropped into the accounts of people we don’t particularly like, at least half of us work for the Department of Justice anyway at at least one or two removes, and, at the very bottom, Aaron’s uncle owns a country-club minimum security prison in New England with better facilities than any of us are willing to buy in Manhattan because it would attract too much attention. That’s the only place on earth in which any of us would ever have to, at the risk of sounding like someone from a bad cop show, do time.

None of us are particularly good at what we do except look good in suits and have firm, trustworthy handshakes and look just enough dumber than the other guy that they think they can bend you over a barrel. One or two of us go for a subtle stain on the tie or a carefully cultivated pudge as a kind of a “Persian flaw” to avoid that too-good-to-be-true impression. Kind of like deliberate typos in a menu to make a customer feel superior and less likely to notice prices somewhat higher than they deserve to be. Typically the ones of us that do the “Persian flaw” thing really shouldn’t bother, not actually being such hot shit as we think.

The real purpose we serve is to waste our time and our health with bullshit stuff like this so that none of us turns into any form of the inspired monsters that any of us could become with proper encouragement.

And so, this one time, we’re sitting posed around the table, playing the game, when Smiley stands up suddenly, leans forward on the table propped up with both sets of knuckles, and opens his mouth. He blinks ten or twenty times in rapid succession and looks like he can’t get a good breath. His eyes look all wild, like someone just slid a knife into his kidney and he’s waiting to feel it. His arms tremble and shake and his pushing-fifty jowls wobble a bit. He lets out this fairly quiet yet unmistakable stinky fart and a belch loud enough to make the chandelier shake and rain dust.

For another lengthy moment, he just stood there, propped up and wobbling like any second he was going to collapse on the table, and then his eyes went back to normal. He stood up straight, forehead wrinkled with confusion. And then he said, “… and that’s what I think of the lot of you.”

Then he sat down.

I’m no doctor, but that looked a hell of a lot like some kind of seizure. And maybe that was, but I’ve never heard of anyone who could cover enough for it afterward to make it look like a joke, no matter how out of character it is. You can guess about now that Smiley’s name is ironic, because to the best of my knowledge he’s never cracked a joke in his life, especially as crude as the exhibition we just witnessed.

Some of us cracked up laughing. A couple of us sat smirking to cover our shock. But ten minutes later we were back to normal, talking about ongoing projects and potential snags and who was hosting the next poker game.

I don’t know what Smiley had been eating, though, because the boardroom never smelled the same again. And to tell the truth I don’t know whether I’d recommend fumigation or an exorcism.

[*]

This one time I was at work and it was creepy and pitch black, maybe three hours before sunrise, and it sounds stupid to say it was one time because it was pretty much every frickin’ day of my adult life.

See, sometimes truckers like to drag their rigs down the road when it’s daylight outside, and I can get behind that because it’s a dangerous damn job. Tired drivers, other tired drivers, roving gangs of elk hangin’ out in the damn ditches waiting to run out on you and jack your load like they was frickin’ Robin Hood and his band of merry men…. Dangerous job. I do my job right — and it’s not a complicated job, no matter how often I see one of my guys or girls screw it up — and the worst danger for me is I get home so early I might accidentally get a glimpse of daytime frickin’ television.

As tragic as that might get, it’s not as tragic as one of our diesel jockeys smushin’ some rogue moose or a station wagon full of middle school soccer team or a load of McWhatsits tiping over and poisoning the bears, so, this one time, one of damn near ten thousand times, I’m wrapped up in my snowsuit in the seat of a balky damn forklift that also thinks it’s too cold to be working this morning, and I’m cruising with all due speed through warehouse A carrying pallet B looking to slot it into any likely looking space in zone C of trailer D when the backend of the world tips up and the lift falls over and I spill out.

That’s a big ball of suck. I roll around on the concrete pad in my snowsuit, gloves, boots, and helmet for a bit and, well, all that’s gonna happen to me is I get dizzy. I kinda thunked hard onto a shoulder that never fit in its socket right since high school football, but it behaves today. I look around for the lift, looking for the worst, but it’s still upright and running. Hell, the peas are still on the dinner fork, so to speak. The forklift lights are eyes, staring at me sideways, and the whole things looks at me like it’s asking me why the hell am I down here rolling around on the floor when there’s work to do.

It’s an excellent frickin’ question.

If the load on the fork had been that heavy, it would have tipped the lift when I tried to pick it up. Counter to the opinions of some of my brothers and sisters on the warehouse floor, pallets don’t change weight in transit. If it had slid forward, though, on a bent fork….

I got my ass up and looked things over. The pallet was still snug against the back of the tines, up against the lifting assembly. The forklift was still facing the way I had been driving. I looked the pallet over, and sure enough it had a tilt-record on it — not because it was sensitive to damage from tilt, but for spot-checks. One I had put on myself, because I do it to one in 250 to make sure our boys and girls keep track of which way is up.

There’s some odds. I set a little trap to keep things straight and I only catch myself. Except I look at the record and it’s white. It never tipped the fifteen degrees it takes to make it spill the tiny tube of red dye into whatever little cotton wad is in there. I didn’t end up having to report myself to myself after all.

Then why the hell was I rolling around on the frickin’ ground? How did I spill out of the lift? Should I actually start strapping myself in the way I teach the new girls to do it?

I’m no idiot. I’m old enough to worry about stroke and tumors that screw with your inner ear or whatever bullcrap it is that retires good workers before their time. And as soon as I got the damn trailer loaded and the pallets secured and lifted the goddamn sun into the sky, I went back into the office and I made an appointment. I hate doctors, but I hate maybe dyin’ worse, and for what we pay for premiums to get our copays down to ten bucks, the rep himself would slap me silly if I didn’t get checked out for even a mosquito bite.

But I swear to the Protestant Christian God of your choice but best make it a Lutheran one, that lift tipped up sideways, fell over, and spilled me out like I was a sack of potatoes. Except by the time I stopped rolling and looked around, it retroactively hadn’t.

Man, I love me some CAT scans.

[*]

This one time I was shopping for shoes to replace the ones that had the blowout. I was a stone’s throw from the water at Waikiki Beach in one of the thousands of identical ABC stores there, trying to come to terms with the fact that in South Carolina ABC stores are where the gummint allows you to buy your liquor. I was just looking for flip-flops or thongs or zoris or whatever the hell it was that they called them here, or maybe reef shoes or, I don’t know, anything to not walk barefoot on that griddle of a sidewalk and that I could dump the damn sand out of from time to time.

I was sweating and I stank. Every exposed inch of me (I hoped, anyway — I’d sure as hell know by nightfall) was covered in a mix of DEET and SPF 1,000,000 sunscreen, and I could taste it and feel it stinging in my eyes when sweat ran down my face.

Screw the shoes. What I needed was a giant sombrero the size of a golf umbrella with a built-in fan, a constantly running shower, and if it had a bug-zapper for the mosquitoes that would be a big damn bonus.

I could get away with it, too. I had come to terms with the fact that there wasn’t a big emphasis on personal style and couture here. Clothes were loose and airy and colored bright enough to make the sun blink. Shoes were whatever kept your feet off the white-hot pavement and sand and aptly named aa lava and allowed you to kick out any sand or rocks every third or fourth step before it ground your toes off. It was just self-defense.

I tied my dreads up to keep them off my neck and back. One more time feeling one of those slimy things slithering down my neck and back and I’d just freak the hell out, rip them all off, and leave them in the nearest trash can. That said MAHALO on it.

It was too bright to see even with sunglasses on, even. I was in the worst physical hell I have ever been in in my life that wasn’t traction in a hospital bed, and everywhere I looked everyone was smiling like they were on some mixture of smack and Thorazine, and, every time I caught a glimpse of my reflection, so was I. It was Twilight Zone creepy.

Nineteen hours ago personal time — I had skipped east a few time zones — I had signed the divorce papers. Eighteen hours ago I turned in my Blackberry and quit my job with no notice. Half an hour later I dropped off my keys with my sister and she dropped me off at what passes for an airport in podunk Greenville.

I was tired of living in hell so I bought a ticket to heaven. And there I was, in just another kind of hell, trying on plastic shoes held on with what appeared to be a chainsaw blade you slip between your toes and wondering where they keep the English-to-Heroin/Thorazine phrasebooks.

And I was smiling like a demon that had just eaten another twisted soul.

Was I having a psychotic break? Had I just been so unhappy for so damn long I didn’t even know what happy felt like? I was mystified. It was like I had suddenly turned into someone else the second I finished signing my name at 8:15 AM Eastern. That was the moment I decided I had to do all this stuff, and the next time I took stock I was homeless and halfway around the world.

And the happiest I had been in years.

[*]

This one time I was sitting in this cafeteria place and I had no idea where I was or how long I had been there. It reminded me of one of those chain restaurants where all the retirees hang out in the middle of the day, with at least one geezer present tapping some livid green cube of gelatin with the back of a spoon the same way I’m sure he did it when he was two years old. The sort of place that I once joked was maybe a row of slot machines away from a Biloxi casino.

I looked down at my lap and saw the skirt of a baby blue cotton dress with a print of tiny flowers on it. Peeking out around my support-socked calves was a thin line of eyelet lace. My right wrist had a tennis bracelet with a Medicalert tag that I ignored for now, and my left wrist, when I checked, had marks from where I habitually wore a watch but didn’t have it today. On the floor by my ankle was a cheap canvas bag. On my feet were patent-ish Mary Janes with elastic on the buckle strap so I could slip them on and off.

Outside I could feel the position of the afternoon spring sun like the presence of an angel over my shoulder, but I was nowhere near a window. I couldn’t see a door from where I sat either.

I had a glass of iced tea in front of me and a small dessert plate with dark crumbs and a smudge of chocolate frosting. I had no memory of the taste of either in my mouth.

I kept thinking I should be panicking. I couldn’t think of my name. I didn’t recognize this restaurant at all. I just remembered that maybe an hour earlier I had been a young Korean man, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and helping his younger sister with calculus homework, trying to explain why, if the world had been a more fair place, L’Hopital’s Rule would be named after Bernouilli.

Looking at the backs of my hands, I couldn’t even tell what my race was. But instead of feeling disturbed, I just felt this amazing sense of peace, like something I had wanted all my life had finally just clicked into place, and everything was perfect. The sun outside shone through me somehow and heated me to my core. I felt a warmth I always imagined would be what the presence of God would feel like.

And then my name was Mary Jane again, like the shoes, and I was waiting for some cow of a woman who was my grumpy cousin Clara, and I was a retired file clerk from the courthouse at the county seat, and I was miserable miserable miserable. Except now, after that bizarre fractured moment where I could have been anyone anywhere and possibly nearly was, I saw plainly how I didn’t have to be miserable anymore.

I could be anybody.

[*]

This one time I threw a ratty old green tennis ball for my dog Alf to catch and another dog just flew in out of nowhere and swallowed the damned thing whole.

Maybe.

I mean I know I threw the ball. Alf was about thirty yards down range focused hard on me and doing his little dance. I fired the thing straight at him, like maybe a fifty mile an hour pitch with no lob, and then this huge black terror of a dog came flying straight sideways and snatched it right out of the air. He turned his head to face me as he spun and I saw nothing but slavering teeth in a clenched grin and, when I think about it right, a Rottweiller’s head, orange eyebrows and all, and a solid black body like a young Angus bull with a rusty underbelly.

I thought at first that maybe he’d missed, but if he had I would have nailed Alf with the ball. Or at least it would have still been rolling or bouncing and Alf would have been after it. But he was just sitting there in shock, his expression probably pretty close to mine, as this Rottweiller thing goes sailing between us and off into the trees bordering the park.

Mostly I was like, whatever. Big damn deal. Rotties don’t scare me, because mostly they’re big dumb cuddly monsters just like any other dog that knows it’s big enough it never has to fight. I’m down one very used slobber-covered tennis ball that Alf will miss for all of five minutes before we score one that isn’t so slobber-covered over by the courts. Bonus: I get at least one more throw on a ball that isn’t spit-soaked.

And that’s exactly how it goes. I call Alf over and try to convince him I didn’t fake-throw the ball, he contains his disappointment, and then we jog over to the tennis courts to find a fresh fluffy green victim for him to slime. We play for maybe another fifteen or twenty minutes and then I drag him off to the car and strap him into the harness I keep rigged to the backseat seatbelts.

It wasn’t until we were about halfway home before I remembered the whole thing a bit differently, where the Rottweiller wasn’t a dog but some kind of bat-thing about the size of a mountain lion. That was when I remembered that I never saw the dog or whatever ever touch the ground — not coming in to make the snatch, not running away having eaten the ball. It swooped down, made the grab, and then swooped up and flapped off over the trees.

And also I remembered a little differently what it was that I threw, and I’ll never in a million years tell you what it was. I won’t even tell myself again if I can figure out how to unthink it. Your only hint is that it was about the right size for a tennis ball. And slimy.

My heart started pounding like it wanted out of my ribcage. My vision went red briefly before it went dark around the edges and I started to black out. But I was driving, and managed to force a deep breath and straighten myself out a bit.

As I started to calm down the original version of the story came back into my head. It was just a tennis ball. Just a stray Rottie. Just an hour in the park, playing with Alf.

I snuck a look back over my shoulder to see Alf sitting down on the seat and strapped in, looking just as much like that Muppet from that TV show in the 80s as he ever had, cat-eating grin and everything.

And then I forgot all about it. Like completely forgot, by the time I got home, both the Rottie and the bat-thing. I still had a slime-covered tennis ball from picking up the spare at the courts, after all, and Alf never acted any different. I fixed us dinner. The ex came over and brought the kids and we watched some dumb movie.

But two weeks later, next time I took Alf to that park and threw that damn slimy tennis ball, the feel of it changed in my hand to that other thing, just for a split second, and it all came flooding back. I didn’t handle it well.

And that’s the story of my first heart attack.

[*]

This one time I knocked a letter opener off a desk and it dropped right through the top of a leather loafer and nailed itself into the top of my foot. I was visiting a friend of my girlfriend at her office in Midtown. I wasn’t up to anything I shouldn’t have been. I just had the day off and was kicking around waiting for her to get her lunch break, seeing as she worked maybe six blocks away from my apartment and I just felt I needed to get out of the place.

I knew it might look funny to some people and that maybe my girlfriend would worry that I was up to no good — which was stupid, because I know Lolly and Di chatted all the time and Lolly had been sure to mention to her that I was coming by and we were just going to grab a slice somewhere.

But there’s the letter opener sticking out of the top of my foot. It’s not hurting yet, but I can feel it between the bones and tendons and shit and I’m wondering when I’ll start freaking out, and for some reason I’m worried that my girlfriend will think I was more likely up to something I shouldn’t have been doing because of the injury, and I start trying to think of whether there’s a better story, some kind of lie about how it happened, because the way it happened was just so random and stupid that she wouldn’t believe it and would start thinking I was lying about other things.

Lolly was down the hall doing whatever complex negotiations would let her out of the building and get her coworkers or supervisor to acknowledge that she was leaving the building and whatnot and let them know when she was coming back, and I could hear her talking and wrapping up whatever smalltalk was in the way, so in a kind of unthinking panic I reached down and pulled the letter opener out of my foot. No blood came out through the cut in my shoe when I pulled it out and I was looking the letter opener over to see if I needed to wipe it off or whatever and that’s when Lolly came back in, standing in the doorway while I turned the thing around and looked it over.

She hadn’t known me for very long, maybe a month or so during which we’d met maybe ten times, but she just laughed and said, “Should I be worried, you standing in my office and brandishing my letter opener?”

I don’t know what expression was on my face, but I just put the thing back down on her desk before I was sure it was clean and was trying to think about what to say when she said, “C’mon, I have exactly an hour from right fuckin’ now. Move it!” and dragged me out of her office by my arm.

We were out of the building and halfway down the block before I felt the first twinge of pain, and I never made her stop or told her anything. I just kept looking at the slice in the top of my shoe and expecting to see blood welling up out of it, but it never did.

In the end I made it through lunch without feeling too much pain or seeing any blood at all, and when I finally limped home and got my shoe and sock off, I never did see any blood. There was a visible cut in the top of my foot, maybe half an inch wide and looking pretty deep, and it finally bled a little when I squeezed it. I washed it off, put some antibacterial ointment on it and a Band-Aid, put my cut but otherwise spotless sock back on my foot, and proceeded to have a beer and watch some TV that had been backing up on the DVR and forget all about it, mostly, and in a week it had pretty much healed up.

But every time I go to a store that sells office supplies I buy another letter opener. I must own fifteen or twenty now, all different kinds but as close to the kind Lolly had on her desk as I can find, and when I have the place to myself, I spend a few minutes dropping each one from waist height, point down, and watch them bounce repeatedly off the top of my shoes, never even making a damn mark or a scuff or anything.

I still don’t get how it happened.

[*]

This one time I was sitting in a little cafe/restaurant thing that was about as wide and long as the main hallway in the house where I grew up — and it really wasn’t a big house. The tables alternated which of the two long walls they were up against, making the waiter sashay in a zig-zag to get through them when he was in a hurry. I remember wondering if they had a clause in their zoning or whatever that allowed them to specify femmes (male or female) that had the right sashay-rhythm and were stick-thin enough to fit between the tables.

I remember I had a cup of cream of cucumber soup and a toasted bacon and avocado sandwich, but I don’t remember a thing about why. Not a damned thing.

I don’t remember why I was there at all, but I remember rushing to keep from being late. I don’t remember who I was supposed to be meeting, and once I was sitting down, I never gave it a second thought. I don’t remember why I ate anything, because I had just finished off some Thai leftovers before cleaning up and putting on my makeup. I don’t remember why I brought the largest purse I own that barely matches my overcoat. And I don’t remember at all why I thought it would be a good idea to bring that huge pig-sticker my uncle gave me before I took off for the big city.

Though now that I think about it, the big bag is the only one that the knife fits into with any amount of subtlety.

I do remember not giving a second thought about which dry white wine would go best with the soup and sandwich. And I remember thinking it all tasted lovely, and that I would miss the place when it dried up and blew away, like all the good restaurants did that had the poor foresight to rent that little coin-slot between the storefront evangelical church and the stairway up to the mysterious windowless nightclub that had never been open during the times I had been in this area of town.

I do remember lingering over a plate with a small pyramid of thumbnail-sized chocolate-covered raspberry tortes, wondering if I had been there long enough yet.

It occurs to me now — just now — that whole point of the exercise might have been to be away from someplace rather than to be specifically there, but I don’t remember who or what I would have been avoiding either.

But I do know that this is the thing I think about whenever I want to yell at people for not thinking about why they do the things they do. I mean, seriously. I’m bright. Whipsmart. And if I can have an Alzheimeresque episode like this and not find it at all strange until more than two weeks after it happens, then who the hell knows why any of us do the things we do?

[*]