Thomas Disch - 334

“Pow!”

“Ding-Dong!” And they’d break up.

It was the best time she could remember in how long, though it seemed a pity none of it was real—the rows and stacks and pyramids of cans, the lovely boxes of detergents and breakfast food—a whole aisle almost of each!—the dairy shelf, and all the meat, in all its varieties. The meat was the hardest to believe. Candy, and more candy, and at the end of the candy a mountain of tobacco cigarettes. Bread. Some of the brands were still familiar, but she passed by these and put a loaf of Wonder Bread in the shopping cart. It was half full. Juan pushed the cart on ahead, moving to the half-heard melodies that hung like a mist in the museum’s air. He rounded a corner toward the vegetables but Lottie stayed where she was, pretending to study the wrapper of a second loaf. She closed her eyes, trying to separate this moment from its place in the chain of all moments so that she’d always have it, like a pocketful of pebbles from a country road. She grappled details from their context—the nameless song, the spongy give of the bread (forgetting for the moment that it wasn’t bread), the waxiness of the paper, the chiming of the registers at the check-out counters. There were voices and footsteps too, but there are always voices and footsteps, so she had no use for these. The real magic, which couldn’t be laid hold of, was simply that Juan was happy and interested and willing to spend perhaps the whole day with her.

The trouble was that when you tried this hard to stop the flow it ran through your fingers and you were left squeezing air. She would get soggy and say the wrong thing. Juan would flare up and leave her, like the last time, staring at some insane cloverleaf miles from anywhere. So she put the so-called bread back and made herself available, as Shrimp was always saying she didn’t, to the sunshine of here and now and to Juan, who was by the vegetables, playing with a carrot.

“I’d swear it’s a carrot,” he said.

“But it isn’t, you know. If it were a carrot you could eat it, and it wouldn’t be art.”

(At the entrance, while they were waiting for a cart, a voice had told them what they were going to see and how to appreciate it. There were facts about the different companies who’d cooperated, facts about some of the more unusual products such as laundry starch, and what it would have cost the average person shopping for a week’s groceries in terms of present-day money. Then the voice warned that it was all fake—the cans, the boxes, the bottles, the beautiful steaks, everything, no matter how realistic it might look, all just imitations. Finally, if you were still thinking of lifting something just for a souvenir, it explained the alarm system, which worked chemically.)

“Feel it,” he said.

It felt exactly like a carrot, not that fresh, but edible.

“But it’s plastic or something,” she insisted, loyal to the Met’s tape.

“It’s a carrot, bet you a dollar. It feels like a carrot, it smells like a carrot—.” He took it back, looked at it, bit into it. It crunched. “It is a carrot.”

There was a general sense of letdown among the people who’d been watching, of reality having intruded where it didn’t belong.

A guard came and told them they’d have to leave. They wouldn’t even be allowed to take the items they’d already chosen through one of the check-out counters. Juan got obstreperous and demanded his money back.

“Where’s the manager of this store?” he shouted. Juan, the born entertainer. “I want to talk to the manager.” At last, to get rid of him, they refunded the price of both tickets.

Lottie had been wretched through the whole scene, but even at the bar under the airfield afterward she didn’t bother to contradict his version. Juan was right, the guard was a son of a bitch, the museum deserved to be bombed. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out the carrot. “Is it a carrot,” he wanted to know, “or is it a carrot?”

Dutifully she set down her beer and took a bite. It tasted like plastic.

Shrimp tried to focus on the music—music was the major source of meaning in her life—but she could only think of January. January’s face and her thick hands, the pink palms roughened with calluses. January’s neck, the tense muscles slowly melting beneath the pressure of Shrimp’s fingers. Or, in the opposite direction: January’s heavy thighs pressing against the tank of a bike, bare black flesh, bare black metal, its dizzying sound as it idled, waiting for the light, and then before it had gone quite to green its roar as it went tearing down the freeway on the way to … What would be a suitable destination? Alabama? Spokane? South St. Paul?

Or this: January in a nurse’s uniform—brisk, crinkly, blinding white. Shrimp would be inside the ambulance. The little white cap rubbing against the low ceiling. She would offer her the soft flesh of her inner arm. The dark fingers searching for a vein. A little daub of alcohol, a moment’s chill, the hypodermic, and January smiling—“I know this hurts.” Shrimp wanted to swoon at that point. Swoon.

She took out the plugs and let the music wind on, unheard, inside the little plastic case, for a car had left the street and pulled up to the little red charger. January lumbered out from the station, took the man’s card, and stuck it in the credit slot, which replied “Ding.” She worked like a model in a shop window, never pausing, never lifting her eyes, off in her own universe, through Shrimp knew that she knew that she was here, on this bench, looking at her, longing for her, swooning.

Look at me! she thought at January fiercely. Make me exist!

But the steady flow of cars and trucks and buses and bikes between them dispersed the thought-message as though it were smoke. Perhaps some driver a dozen yards past the station would glance up with momentary panic, or a woman riding the 17 bus home from work would wonder what had reminded her of some boy she had thought she had loved twenty years before.

Three days.

And each day returning from this vigil. Shrimp would pass in front of a drab shop with a painted sign, Myers Uniforms & Badges. In the window a dusty moustached policeman from another town (the sprinkles on his jacket were wrong for New York) brandished, in a diffident way, a wooden billy club. Handcuffs and canisters dangled from his black gunbelt. Touching the policeman, yet seeming not to notice, a fireman decked out in bright yellow rubber striped with black (another out-of-towner) smiled through the streaked glass at, in the opposite window, a tall black girl in a nurse’s white uniform. Shrimp would walk past slowly and on as far as the traffic light then, like a boat when its engine conks out and it can no longer fight against the current, she would drift back to the window, the white uniform.

The third day she went inside. A bell clanked. The sales-clerk asked could he help her.

“I’d like—” she cleared her throat “—a uniform. For a nurse.”

He lifted a slim yellow tape measure off a stack of visored caps. “You’d be… a twelve?”

“It’s not—Actually, it isn’t for me. For a friend. I said that since I’d be passing by here … ”

“What hospital would she be with? Each hospital has its own little requirements, you know.”

Shrimp looked up in his young-old face. A white shirt, the collar too tight. A black tie with a small, crisp knot. He seemed, in the same indefinite way as the mannikins in the windows, to be in uniform.

“Not a hospital. A clinic. A private clinic. She can wear … whatever she likes.”

“Good, good. And what size is she, your friend?”