Said Sayrafiezadeh - Brief Encounters with the Enemy

The next morning the sun was out but there were eight inches on the ground. School was canceled and children from the neighborhood had assembled in the street to have a snowball fight. I sat in my kitchen and watched them play: they were fearless and they were ruthless, and they hit each other in the face. Half were the Americans and half were the enemy. “Kill, kill, kill,” they screamed. The snow made everything in the neighborhood look white and clean and newly restored, like in the photographs from fifty years ago when times were good. Before I got in the shower, I opened the window and gathered snow off the windowsill and made a snowball about the size of a cantaloupe. It took me a little longer than the average person, but I got it done. “Here comes the atom bomb,” I yelled, and the boys and girls looked up at me with terror and delight as I hurled it down on their heads.

They said, “Do it again, Max! Do it again!”

“But you’re all dead,” I said.

“Do it again!”

I had to get to work.

Since we were an important city, a vital city, the mayor had sent trucks round-the-clock to clear the roads, and I had no trouble making it to the supermarket on time. Nearly everybody else was late. There were five cashiers when there should have been nine, and there were three baggers, and there was no one in dairy, and the flag displays were all empty. The managers ran back and forth like fools, trying to figure out what to do next.

In the locker room, Pink from coffee was slowly changing into his uniform. It was nine o’clock and he was already high. How he’d made it to work on time, I had no idea.

“Check out my watch,” he said. He displayed his wrist. He always had a new watch, always larger the last one. This one had a gold face with diamonds around the edge. You could tell the time from a block away.

“That sure is a nice fake watch,” I said.

“I can get you one,” he said. He looked at me significantly.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t need to tell time.”

He thought this was funny. He laughed hard but with no sound. Two late baggers sauntered in as if they were on their way to a day at the beach, and I wanted to tell them that I’d take their job any day. How hard is it, really, to place objects into a bag?

When I took off my shirt, everyone looked away.

“Check out my watch,” Pink said to the baggers.

Mr. Moskowitz had the door to his office wide open, and as I was coming out of the locker room, he called out to me like a general ordering his soldier to the front line. “Max!” he said. He sounded angry, he sounded exhausted. Everything that came out of his mouth sounded angry or exhausted. The day he hired me, he sighed, leaned far back in his swivel chair like he was about to fall asleep, and said, “I guess I’ll take a chance on you.” I wanted to tell him, “Don’t do me any favors, pal.” I wanted to tell him that I knew he was getting a tax break for hiring me. Instead I said, “Thank you, sir. You won’t be sorry, sir.” Because the truth was, I needed all the favors I could get. “You don’t need to call me sir ,” he said.

This morning he was halfway through a Hostess cupcake, presumably his breakfast. His belly was pressed against the desk, which was littered with spreadsheets of facts and figures — the lifeblood of the supermarket. He worked six to six, he worked six days a week, he’d been here twenty years. He’d be here another twenty years, then he’d retire and move to the suburbs. On the wall behind him was his framed diploma from college, and next to it was a recruiting poster that showed a group of smiling models dressed like stock clerks and cashiers, standing with their arms around each other’s shoulders, above a caption that read, WE OFFER FREE DENTAL EXAMS.

He was staring at me hard from behind his desk. Angry and exhausted. Suspicious too. Also disappointed. He didn’t take his eyes off me. His stare chilled me. I understood suddenly why I was being summoned. Namely the girl from the day before. Ziggy had ratted me out after all — just like the poor little girl with the math test. What could I say? I had breached the company’s trust, maybe even committed a felony. And here I was, a company man at heart. It was too late to make amends now. The supermarket had taken a chance on me and I had repaid it with dishonesty. “If you give one hundred percent,” my schoolteachers had told me years ago, “you get one hundred percent right back.” It was a phrase I had heard often, and it returned to me with the full force of its haunting implication: you get what you deserve .

“You wanted something, Mr. M.?” I said. I tried my best for playful informality.

He was having none of it. “I was about to page you,” he said. He leaned away from his desk as if about to stand. Instead he sat deeper. He was perspiring in his wash-and-wear suit despite the weather. The exchange was not going to take long. He’d have me packed and ready to go by the time he finished eating his cupcake. I once watched him tell a cashier of fifteen years, “You must gather your things, leave, and never come back.” That had been that.

His gaze bore into me.

“The faggots from the city blocked my car in,” he said. “Do me a favor.”

No, I don’t have a problem shoveling. I hold the shovel in my good hand and the crook of my bad arm. Ten minutes in, I hadn’t been able to make much progress. The car looked like it had been wrapped in marshmallow, but the snow was packed hard like concrete. I chipped away at it, making small piles. Then I moved the small piles into big piles. Chink, chink, chink , went my shovel. The air was cold but clear, and every so often I would catch a faint whiff of the smoke coming off the factories. It smelled like bug spray. After ten minutes, I broke through to Mr. Moskowitz’s back bumper, where there was a red-white-and-blue bumper sticker that said HOLD STEADY.

The man who collected the shopping carts rolled by with a train of fifteen. “That’s not in your job description,” he said. He was a union man from way back.

“It’s in my job description now,” I said.

He rolled on.

Cars were beginning to fill up the parking lot, a long line of cars coming to load up with boxes and bottles, cans and bags, coming to eat and digest and excrete. Over by the loading dock, I could see a woman waving to me. I’m always happy to help customers load their groceries, and I’m also always happy to accept a gratuity, even though supermarket policy prohibits accepting gratuities. And when they see my arm, they are inclined to be extra generous. Toward the far end of the parking lot I walked, with my shovel resting on my shoulder like a miner, and as I got closer I saw that this particular woman didn’t have a shopping cart, in fact, didn’t have any groceries. What she had was long brown hair, and a coat with fur missing from the collar, and a face that was covered with acne.

“Do you remember me?” she said as if our interaction had happened a year ago. She smiled. She was chewing gum and it had turned her lips a shade of purple.

I didn’t know what to say. So I said, “I don’t think so,” because under the circumstances I thought it in my best interest to feign ignorance. For all I knew, Mr. Moskowitz was about to come around the corner at any moment. Followed by Ziggy. Followed by the district manager who stops in once every six months.

She seemed surprised by my response. She had no response for my response. She stood on the opposite side of a foot-high railing where the jitney drivers have to wait, as if she feared that merely stepping onto supermarket property would be grounds for her arrest — which it might very well have been. I got the sense that she had rehearsed something to say but I had confounded her by veering from the script. Now she was onstage, at a loss for what to say or do next. In lieu of dialogue, she blew a purple bubble.