Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

A few days after I was turned down for a raise, an anorexic waitress started working at the restaurant. She was pretty but had no breasts or ass. I caught her a few times eating the scraps from customers’ plates. She chewed and swallowed slowly, methodically, as if it took all her concentration. The waitresses said that they heard her sometimes in the bathroom coughing violently, and if they entered after her, they noticed traces of blood in the toilet.

The first time I saw her, she was sitting at the employees’ table before the dinner shift, clipping flowers and placing them in vases. She looked up when I passed by, and I saw that her eyes were bright blue, contrasting with her hair, which was jet black. Her arms were thin and her shoulder blades protruded at a sharp angle. When our eyes met, she looked down quickly and then looked back up, and when she looked up, I looked away. A couple of days later, she was standing at the time clock trying to figure out how to punch out after her shift. I was just arriving at the restaurant, and my shoes were wet from the rain. “Here,” I said. “Like this. You do it like this.” I put her time card in and jiggled it, because sometimes it has to be jiggled, and the clock crunched out the time: 4:52 P.M. “What a piece of shit,” she said. “The manager should fix that.” Her voice was deep, considering how fragile she appeared. I saw that she had a red rash on her neck that she was trying to conceal with makeup. The rash seemed to be either creeping up toward her face or down onto her body, as if it might be the thing that had eaten away her breasts and her ass. Her elbow touched my elbow, but I couldn’t tell if it was on purpose. And then my manager came into the break room.

“Busy night ahead of us,” he said, and slapped me on the back.

“The time clock,” the waitress said to him. “It doesn’t work.”

“Oh?” the manager said. He looked embarrassed. “I’ll tell the fix-it guy.”

He was wrong: it was a slow night. Which can be worse, because then one must make oneself busy. Or at least appear busy. A self-imposed punishment for the lack of business, as if the employees were to blame.

I spent my time polishing all the stainless steel in the kitchen, using an old jar of cream that guaranteed immediate results. It lived up to its billing, and I got satisfaction from seeing things gleam. When an order came in, it was burdensome, and I had to drag myself to the grill to put together whatever it was that had been requested. Tonight, I was certain, was not the night to ask again for a raise. I commended myself on my foresight. Occasionally I would look through the little round porthole of the kitchen door and see the anorexic waitress carrying trays of coffee mugs from one end of the restaurant to the other. How was it possible for her to carry a tray of coffee mugs? How was it possible for her to stand on those skinny legs? But she showed no signs of exertion in anything she did, like one of those small birds that take off with great power, beating their wings angrily. I should ask her out, I thought. We could come back here to eat. Take a long time looking at the menu. Inconvenience other people for a change. At the end we could ask to see the manager, and if he were feeling generous, he could waive the bill.

That night I sat on my couch and watched David Letterman interview a starlet. She wore unusually long earrings, high heels, and a red dress that I kept hoping I’d be able to see up. “What’s your dream vacation?” Letterman asked her. “Oh, I just want to stay home in my pajamas,” the starlet said. And David Letterman looked at the camera in that way he has, and everyone in the audience laughed, and Paul Shaffer played something quick on the keyboard, and the rain was coming down outside my window, and I realized that, shockingly, it was the anorexic waitress being interviewed by David Letterman. David Letterman was looking at the camera, which is to say he was looking at me, and he was saying, “Is it really that complicated for you to make a grilled cheese sandwich?” The anorexic waitress was holding a plate with a grilled cheese sandwich as evidence of my incompetence. “Why was this returned?” David Letterman was asking. But before I could respond the valedictorian said that some of us here tonight would either go into the military or enter directly into the workforce.

Suddenly I was wide awake on the couch. A police show was playing on the television. Buddy talk. I switched it off. Light was just beginning to break. I got up and paced around the living room and then I sat back down on the couch. The couch was soft; next to it was a chair and a lamp, all generously provided by the landlady. When I first came to look at the apartment, I was disconcerted to observe a refrigerator standing against the living room wall. “You can have that too,” the landlady said, as if having a refrigerator in the living room were a desirable thing. I made a show of considering it. We walked out onto the balcony, which was the apartment’s main selling point. It was a sunny day, and we stood together for a while, looking down five flights to the street. The previous tenant had spray-painted a pair of shoes on the balcony without bothering to put down newspaper as protection. Positioned between myself and the landlady was the permanent silhouette of two feet facing the railing. They had a ghostly quality, as if someone had leaped and left behind his imprint. I wanted to ask the landlady if she might be able to clean away those feet at some point, but I didn’t ask and I took the apartment anyway.

Now I opened the balcony door and stood outside. It was raining lightly. Perhaps today was the day it would stop altogether. No one was out on the street. In the distance was a line of dense trees that in the dim light seemed closer than they actually were. Beyond the trees were the mountains. The mountains and the trees made the city seem rural, or on the verge of becoming rural, as if civilization were working in reverse and nature were reclaiming the land for itself. The mayor had countered this by referring to the city as “The Emerging International City.” He hoped the moniker would catch on. So far it hadn’t. On local television, there were commercials every fifteen minutes, poorly made, with people on the street pretending to make unprompted remarks about why the city was already an international city or deserved to be one. But it was clear that none of them really knew what they were talking about. Furthermore, the phrase “emerging international city” was so cumbersome and took such great concentration to say that you could detect, after watching these commercials over and over, the way people paused ever so slightly before uttering it. The very fact that everyone managed to pronounce the phrase without stumbling once was evidence that the whole man-on-the-street conceit was fraudulent.

Below my balcony, two black boys were riding by on bicycles. They were drenched from the rain and they were laughing and they were full of bravado. One of the boys happened to glance up at me. “What are you looking at, white man?” he yelled out, speeding away as if I might be able to swoop down and get him. I was humiliated, not by the use of “white” but by the use of “man.” He sees me as a man, I thought. When I was eight years old, I had spent the afternoon playing with a group of my friends and a lone black boy who lived in the next neighborhood over. All afternoon we played, until another one of our friends showed up, making the lone black boy superfluous. “Time to go home, fella,” my friend had told him. But the boy had refused to go home, and an argument ensued. My father heard the argument and threw open the kitchen window.

“Go home, boy,” he said, assuming that the black boy was the cause of the trouble. “Go home before I come down there and slap the taste out of your mouth.”