Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

“You don’t understand!” the girl gasped.

The day’s delivery hadn’t come in yet, and the back room was empty, like a stadium before a game. In the vacant space, the girl’s cries were amplified and her size diminished. Ziggy was unmoved. He was all business, oblivious to her beseeching. He was in the process of pulling things out of her fur coat like a magician: cookies and lipstick, chips and cheese, it was endless. He didn’t care about the strawberries or soup in her stomach. They were the least of it. When he was satisfied that he had bested her sleight of hand with his own sleight of hand, he snapped open his briefcase with authority, showing how wrong the police force had been for passing him over three times.

On the wall behind the girl’s head was an array of photographs, almost like a memorial, of the people who had been apprehended over the years, with name and age, staring out at the camera with their bounty held in front of them, their shame lasting into eternity. Once caught, they could never return to the supermarket, but I had become so familiar with their faces that it was as if they shopped there every day. Children with candy, moms with milk, men with meat. To this collection of hundreds of unhappy faces, sullen, grim, imploring, occasionally smirking faces, would soon be added the girl’s face. As I put away the mop and bucket, her voice echoed behind me.

“You, you, you, don’t, don’t, don’t, understand …”

And then Ziggy responded with his own plaintive call for help: “My forms!”

His face was red and anguished, embarrassed and humiliated, as if he had been the one caught cheating on the spelling test. He held up his empty briefcase, showing how right the police were for passing him over. “Goddammit, Ziggy!” he scolded himself in the third person, and he kicked his way through the swinging doors with his combat boots, Lieutenant Ziggy en route to procure the necessary paperwork. The doors banged back and forth six times before coming to rest.

Soon the day’s delivery would arrive, three hundred pallets of groceries — double the amount since the factories reopened — to be unloaded from the eighteen-wheeler by the night turn manager, Tom or Tim, depending. Among my many tasks, it was my responsibility to make sure the loading dock was clear and accessible, so that nothing would be in Tim or Tom’s way when he got to work, so that nothing would slow him down, since the drivers made forty dollars an hour — and I made eight — and the manager had to get them back on the road as soon as possible. Every once in a while I would ask Tom or Tim if he might consider putting in a good word for me with Mr. Moskowitz about the possibility of becoming a stock clerk. How hard is it, really, to put cans on a shelf? But they’d hem and haw and make up some excuse about how the time wasn’t right, Max, about how they’d see about it later, sometime later, about how I should remind them about it later. I’d heard it all before. In the meantime, they’d say, “Time is money, Max. Let’s keep the loading dock clear.”

I pushed the green button and the gate churned upward, letting daylight into the back room and the smell of the factory smoke coming from along the river. It smelled like melting plastic. There was also a breeze, coming unimpeded through the parking lot, reminding everyone that winter was going to be early this year, that winter was going to be bad. Sitting on the dock were some saggy bags of garbage, filled and leaking, alongside a cart piled with cans and bottles, dropped off by concerned customers, and which needed to be sorted and recycled. I placed the bags of garbage in the cart and wheeled it inside, and then I threw everything down the garbage chute, every single can and bottle and bag of trash, because I have too much to do and I don’t have time to sort and recycle.

When I turned around, I saw that the girl was staring at me. She was quiet and had stopped rocking back and forth. She seemed resigned to her fate. Her hand, held aloft on the steam pipe by the handcuff, made her appear to be in the process of trying to hail a taxi. I tried not to look at her because it’s embarrassing to be free when someone else is captive, but in the dim daylight of the back room, her face was very pretty, her acne less acute, and her chocolate hair had regained its luster. I moved awkwardly, self-consciously, trying to keep my good side facing her way, although it was most likely too late for that. She had discovered what everyone eventually discovers, that my left arm is considerably smaller than my right, about half the length. I make sure to always wear a three-quarter sleeve to save everyone the predicament of having to see my arm twisted like a corkscrew and topped by a withered and nearly useless hand, three fingers only, no thumb, more fish fin than human limb, and which I can use to do things like unscrew the cap on a bottle, but that’s about it. “We all have our burdens to bear,” my minister had told me years ago when I was about twelve years old, taking me aside one Sunday after service and quoting at length some scripture that he said applied directly to my situation, and which I felt emboldened by at the time but can no longer recall.

Looking out at me from the great tableau of faces on the wall above the girl’s head was one in particular, that of a young boy, redheaded and freckled. In the photograph, he is holding a bag of pretzels in front of his chest as if it’s a prize he’s won, and he is smiling at the camera because he isn’t quite sure what’s happening and because he was taught to smile whenever he has his picture taken. He was apprehended years ago and would be a man by now, maybe older than I am, but he has been preserved forever in that photograph at age ten. No matter what he goes on to accomplish in his life, he will never outlive this crime.

I happen to know that hidden behind the photograph is a spare key, and it was that key I used to unlock the girl’s wrist from the steam pipe. She yielded with a whimper. Her wrist was pliant and thin. I led her to the loading dock and I clicked the red button so that the gate began to churn down. Then I let her go, releasing her the way trainers release birds back into the wild. She ducked beneath the closing gate without hesitation and without thanks. The last things I saw were her feet.

I spent the rest of my shift avoiding Ziggy. It wasn’t that hard. I’d catch sight of him in the aisles and head the other way. It slowed me down but I got most of my work done. I finally ran into him in the break room, where he was eating a bag of chips like a pig, leaving crumbs all over the floor — perhaps as an act of revenge. He looked at me glumly, sitting there in his fatigues, but all he said was “It’s snowing.”

It had never snowed in September. It hardly ever snowed in October. When I exited the supermarket, the flakes were fluttering in the parking lot lights as if suspended on invisible wires. It was nine o’clock at night, but customers were still coming. They pushed past me as if they were trying to get into a rock concert with shopping carts. Two hours later they’d be pushing their carts the other way, filled with five hundred dollars’ worth of groceries. Next week they’d do it again. My main concern was that they would be tracking snow across my floor.

A couple of the stock clerks were getting off at the same time and they stopped to watch the flakes with me. So did the guy who scoops ice cream in the ice cream parlor. So did the travel agent. So did some of the cashiers. Night turn was just coming in and they stood along with everyone else. It was like we were watching fireworks in July.

Howie from deli stopped too. He smelled like bologna and deodorant. “If it’s snowing in September,” he said, “what’s it going to be like in January?” He ruined the moment. We all got in our cars and drove home.