Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

“No. I'm a programmer. My name is Dolores,” says Adeline.

“I thought it was just Customer Service and Accounting in here from one to two. Aren't your people supposed to be eleven to twelve?”

A woman who knows the rules. Adeline likes that. “They made an exception today, because of my problem.”

“Pleased to meet you, Dolores.” She sucks down a few swirls of rotini. “Which problem is yours?”

“My boyfriend.”

“Oh, boyfriend problem.”

“Yeah, that one.” Adeline swallows a spoonful of chowder, and then starts to speak. “We've been living together more than three years. He's a great guy, a little old-fashioned, a writer; well, not really a writer. He's a novelist. I actually love him a lot. He's sensitive and he's loyal. I don't know. Sometimes we take separate vacations, but we're usually together. Sex is good. It lasts forever.” Adeline suddenly feels in her belly she is going to tell too much too fast, but she can't stop herself. “He knows things. Like the history of the forklift, and how it changed warehousing. Sometimes he tells me that. That's good. Isn't that good? He was a forklift operator for years, before he changed his name from Ralph to Roger and became a novelist. We always get along great, until this weekend, and we didn't even argue.” Sybil is expressionless. The recessed lighting glints off her braces as she slowly eats. “But I'll tell you, he was doing something to me; I mean, down there, like he does. Usually I like it, but this is going on too long, and I pull on his ponytail to see if I can get him to stop, and something very weird happens.” Adeline waits for Sybil to ask what, but her silence continues. “I pull on his ponytail and his head comes off.”

The pause is heavy, a moment like a balloon that can't shed its ballast. Nothing rises. Nothing from Sybil. Sweet Roger, Adeline thinks. She wants to say, “O woe is me. Oy yoy yoy yoy yoy!” Sybil remains expressionless, and Adeline feels the silence packed with monotony. Tears heat her eyes. A fleck of pasta is caught on Sybil's braces.

Sybil asks, “What is his Social Security number, please?”

“I don't know, Sybil. Right now I feel like I'm out here, you know, on the edge of nature, with all the smaller shadows. Shadow of the inch. Spoonshadow. The wild minkshadow. Wee shadows. Of a comma. Shadow of the tampon. But I just held his head up and it was still talking. That's impossible. Wrong! But he was talking. Oy yoy yoy yoy yoy!”

“What is his middle initial? His daytime phone number or a number where he can be reached, like a cell phone or fax number?”

“And then his body was walking around with a big, you know? Everything going into the deeps. Down the well. Shadow of the chestnut. Shadow of moth. Pillshadow.” Adeline was earnest, but also enjoyed the words she was starting to talk. She could be the queen of shadows. Or King Shadeline. “It was a big erection. You know, shadow of a tiptoe. Dropshadow. Shadow breathshadow.”

“Has he done business with D-M before?”

“I need to find something out. What does the red mean? What happens in the blue?” Adeline brushes a tear from her cheek. “And then when I was working, I started seeing it and hearing him.”

“Is this a private or a corporate account? Is there an 800 number? To what address will we send the statement?”

Adeline sees now that the employee is looking into her face as if it was a monitor, and she is waiting for the responses to come up. There is no satisfaction here for Adeline.

Back at her office Adeline succumbs to an invitation to dinner from Eduardo Nifty, CEO of their Perpetual Pet Food division. He has fielded her refusals regularly twice a week for a year-and-a-half and automatically turns to walk away because he can't fathom that he hasn't been rejected this time; so, she has to shout a repeat of her affirmative. She's in no hurry to get home. Quite the opposite. Eduardo is a career executive, with little in his life except his job. They spend a long, boozy evening at the kind of upscale surf-and-turf she never goes to with Roger. Roger is strictly Asian or Middle Eastern vegetable chow. Eduardo's monotonous conversation is not satisfying, but it does relax Adeline.

They leave the restaurant after ten and find separate cabs home. Adeline has yet to prepare a pep talk for the morning meeting with her middle managers. A small piece of work, but it will keep her going till after midnight. Not till the cab pulls away does she realize how tired she is, and her problem with Roger suddenly looms. She takes some comfort that she's a well-known problem solver. She looks up. No lights on in her brownstone, but every room that has a TV — bedroom, living room, even the small black-and-white in the kitchen — someone switched them on and the walls glimmer. How can that be? In the little window of the computer room, modem, fax, CD-ROM library, a screen flickers, in use. In that very room sweet Roger processes his words. Who is using this now? Has Roger's erection unzipped Roger's head? Is a bowling ball playing with her laptop? She fears what she will have to face on the inside, but can't let that stop her.

On other nights she has stepped across the homeless man lying under cardboard cartons across her stoop. No big obstacle. The box covering his uppers has Do Not Open Until the Millenium marked on it. She is suddenly enfolded in fear, terror of what is now. She feels vacant, without inner resources. Her life is merely a flicker. Windows glow onto the street.

Adeline backs off to lean against a car and breathes the night air. Tasty. She recognizes something. It's acrid, a hint of sweetness in it, this waft of burning flesh, human burning. She knows that smell from her trip to Bali with Mouse Bernstein. They were there for the cremation season, and for the family they stayed with this was a joyous aroma because they had finally saved enough money to cremate a grandfather and a child, both of whose bodies they had kept in shallow graves ’til they could afford the priest. And she had smelled it again when she first moved back to the city, and the vacant building near her apartment burned almost to the ground. Her cat, out for the night, rubs against her legs and makes a doleful noise. Has Buster been fed? She gazes at the window for a long time. Her fear finally goes away, like a broom on a truck, but she still can't go in. She just can't. She doesn't even want to know what has been going on in there. If ever the aliens in their UFOs are going to come and whisk her away, now's the time. Suddenly, rather like a mudball some kid splats against a window, she is hit by the recognition that she has forgotten how many letters there are in the alphabet. She thinks it's an even number — twenty-two, or twenty-six, or twenty-four. It's in the twenties. Maybe twenty-eight. Or maybe she's wrong, and it's an odd number after all — twenty-five or twenty-seven. Maybe that's wrong and it reaches the thirties. She's quite sure it's not in the teens. That's too few.

She'll recite the whole thing, she decides, and count them each by one; so, she leans her head back against the car and starts from the beginning. “A B C D… ” She gets pretty far, all the way to K , before she has doubts. She sniffs the air. Still something familiar. She isn't so sure about the J . Maybe she put it in too early. It comes after O , before T. O J T P; then she can't remember if N comes first, or M . At least she knows they come together in the sequence, she's pretty sure. M N L U R? N M W…? M O N U R Y …? N U M I N O …? Numino? Minemony? No. Not two Ns. She pushes ahead with it, and knows it's coming to the end when she hits L U W Y Z V X. She's satisfied. X at the end satisfies Adeline.