Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

My mom had cooked a special dinner. “Chicken with stuffing, extra stuffing,” she said. That was my favorite, but I didn’t have an appetite. I hadn’t had an appetite in four days.

My dad said a prayer, “Dear Lord …” He said some things about the past and the future, generic things that could be interpreted in a number of different ways. “Amen,” he said.

“Amen,” we said.

“Dig in,” he said.

I ate to be nice. I picked, really. Moving the chicken and stuffing around on my plate, hoping somehow to diminish the portion so my mom’s feelings wouldn’t be hurt. I could hardly swallow. I drank plenty of water, though. Four glasses of water.

“You sure are thirsty,” my sister said.

“Is the chicken too salty?” my mom wanted to know.

“It’s just right,” I said.

“It’s more than just right ,” my dad said. He was always correcting me.

My sister wanted to catch up on everything, including her special activities in school, especially for the war. Like writing letters to soldiers.

“Are you going to send me a postcard?” I said.

“You know I will,” she said. I thought I might weep. But for her it was exciting. She told me about a soldier she’d been corresponding with. I half-listened. She ended by saying, “You’re going on an adventure, Zeke!”

This was Thursday.

Friday the news was worse. We had stopped fleeing because there was nowhere left to flee. It was official: we were surrounded. All we could do was hope for the best and wait for reinforcements. Friday was also the day I had my office party.

I was late getting there because I didn’t want to go. If it were up to me, I would have canceled. To cancel, however, would have been to exhibit my fear. Or despair. I hung out in the bathroom, not doing anything, just standing in front of the mirror, letting the water run over my hands and staring at myself, wondering what I was going to look like with my head shaved and a flak jacket on, wondering what I was going to look like dehydrated. I already looked gaunt and hungover. I didn’t have far to go.

After a while, Wally opened the door. “I’ve been looking for you,” he said. He was standing in the doorway with a sad face, like he knew the end was coming.

“Can’t talk now, Wally!” I said, as if bursting with enthusiasm. “I have a party to get to!”

There were one hundred people waiting for me in the conference room, standing shoulder to shoulder. It was so quiet it could have been a vigil. All that was missing were the candles. To their credit, they had spared no expense: there was cake, there was soda, there were signs on the walls that the girls had spent the morning making, and which, through either oversight or intention, all said the same thing: GOOD LUCK, ZEKE! ZEKE, GOOD LUCK! WE WISH YOU LUCK!

Luck was the thing I needed now.

As I took my place among the refreshments and decorations, the silence of the room deepened in that uncomfortable way, like when an audience doesn’t know if the play has ended. I was trying to look happy for the fun party, but I could feel my eyebrows raised unnaturally. I was sorry to have put the crowd through this. The crowd was sorry too. Two hundred sorry eyes staring at me.

Then the managing director began to clap, and the rest of the room took that as their cue to get going with false enthusiasm. They tried to applaud with the same gusto that they had applauded for Wally, but it sounded scattered and hopeless. No one was calling my name.

Somehow I summoned the energy to raise my hands above my head as if victorious, and basking in the acclaim of tepid applause, I yelled, “Let’s eat cake!” That got everyone stomping and shouting, no doubt out of relief that I was able to show some zest for life. The managing director handed me a slice of red-white-and-blue cake, the biggest slice, of course. I ate it off a red-white-and-blue plate. And when I was done, I ate another. This was my party. The men came to shake my hand, and the girls came to kiss me on the cheek. “See you in twelve months,” they said optimistically. Brittany put one of those American-flag pins in my lapel. She leaned in close and touched me. “Good luck,” she whispered.

At one o’clock everyone got back to work, and I went to my cubicle to pack up. I had imagined it would take me all day to get everything organized and sorted and thrown out. I’d been in that cubicle two years, after all. It took about fifteen minutes. There were some odds and ends, including a couple of photographs of me and my coworkers on bowling night, when one of the guys had taken the initiative to schedule some work outings, since “work shouldn’t be all about work.” Almost everything else in my desk belonged to the company. I thought about stealing something, a keepsake, but that’s not the kind of person I am. I sat down in my swivel chair one last time, aware suddenly of how soft it was and how well it swiveled. I was going to miss my chair. I was going to miss my desk and headset. My headset smelled vaguely of sweat from having been on top of my head for ten thousand hours. I put it to my face and inhaled. On Monday morning, bright and early, someone new would come, someone who didn’t know me, someone who didn’t know how good he had it. Maybe it would be Wally, after all. Maybe it would be Wally who would sit in my swivel chair, and thumb through the instruction packet, and shake hands with the managing director, and joke with Brittany about his new career. If they mentioned me, it’d be in the past tense. And at ten o’clock on the dot, my phone would ring, and Wally would put on my headset, and he would say for the very first time, “Good morning. My name is Wally. How may I help you today?”

I went out the side door with my bag of things so I wouldn’t have to see anyone else for the last time and make them embarrassed. I took the elevator down to the eighteenth floor. On the eighteenth floor, I transferred to the freight elevator.

The elevator guy said, “I haven’t seen you in a while.” It’d been two years since I’d gotten promoted. There was graffiti about pussies all over the walls

“I’ve been on vacation,” I said.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “Where’d you go?”

He thought I was serious. To him, only a couple of weeks had passed since he’d last seen me. That’s how time moves when you’re in an elevator.

The subbasement was the same as always, boiling hot, even in the dead of winter, and smelling like envelopes. There were sixteen hallways in the subbasement, and if you didn’t know which way you were going, you could get lost and wander for an hour. I knew exactly where I was going. I found Wally in the bulk section, sitting on a crate while he sorted envelopes, big, little, medium. He didn’t look up when I came over. He was busy with his work, busy tossing envelopes left or right. One, two, three, he worked. He had concentration. He had work ethic. He deserved to have a good word put in for him. I’d done this for three years. I used to go home each night and wash my hands with lemon juice to try to get the smell of envelope off them. It had felt like a miracle when I moved upstairs.

For a moment I thought I might pass out, because it was hot in the subbasement, and because I’d eaten a lot of cake, and also because I knew this was it, that my “adventure” was about to begin and there was a good chance I wouldn’t be coming back. I tilted slightly, briefly, and imagined myself falling into the narrow space between the big envelopes and the small envelopes. It wouldn’t be that bad, I thought, to fall into that space. It wouldn’t be that bad to do this kind of work again.

I stood to the side waiting for him to notice me, and when he looked my way, he stood up quickly. I said, “I just wanted to say, see you around sometime, Wally.”