George Saunders: CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella

“My affliction is out of my hands,” it says. “But please know that whatever harsh words I may direct at you, I truly treasure your patronage.”

He fusses over us by bringing extra ice water and sprinting into the back room whenever he feels an attack looming. I purposely starve myself. We talk about her life philosophy. We talk about her hairstyle and her treasured childhood memories and her paranormally gifted aunt. I fail to get a word in edgewise, and that’s fine. I like listening. I like learning about her. I like putting myself in her shoes and seeing things her way.

I walk her home. Kids in doorways whistle at my width. I handle it with grace by shaking my rear. Freeda laughs. A kiss seems viable. It all feels too good to be true.

Then on her porch she shakes my hand and says great, she can now pay her phone bill, courtesy of Tim. She shows me their written agreement. It says: “In consideration of your consenting to be seen in public with Jeffrey, I, Tim, will pay you, Freeda, the sum of fifty dollars.”

She goes inside. I take a week of vacation and play Oil Can Man nonstop. I achieve Level Nine. I master the Hydrocarbon Dervish and the Cave of Dangerous Lubrication. I cream Mr. Grit and consistently prohibit him from inflicting wear and tear on my Pistons. There’s something sick about the amount of pleasure I take in pretending Freeda’s Mr. Grit as I annihilate him with Bonus Cleansing Additives. At the end of night three I step outside for some air. Up in the sky are wild clouds that make me think of Tahiti and courageous sailors on big sinking wooden ships. Meanwhile here’s me, a grown man with a joystick-burn on his thumb.

So I throw the game cartridge in the trash and go back to work. I take the ribbing. I take the abuse. Someone’s snipped my head out of the office photo and mounted it on a bride’s body. Tim says what the heck, the thought of the visual incongruity of our pairing was worth the fifty bucks.

“Do you hate me?” Freeda asks.

“No,” I say. “I truly enjoyed our evening together.”

“God, I didn’t,” she says. “Everyone kept staring at us. It made me feel bad about myself that they thought I was actually with you. Do you know what I mean?”

I can’t think of anything to say, so I nod. Then I retreat moist-eyed to my cubicle for some invoicing fun. I’m not a bad guy. If only I could stop hoping. If only I could say to my heart: Give up. Be alone forever. There’s always opera. There’s angel-food cake and neighborhood children caroling, and the look of autumn leaves on a wet roof. But no. My heart’s some kind of idiotic fishing bobber.

My invoices go very well. The sun sinks, the moon rises, round and pale as my stupid face.

I minimize my office time by volunteering for the Carlisle entrapment. The Carlisles are rich. A poor guy has a raccoon problem, he sprinkles poison in his trash and calls it a day. Not the Carlisles. They dominate bread routes throughout the city. Carlisle supposedly strong-armed his way to the top of the bread heap, but in person he’s nice enough. I let him observe me laying out the rotting fruit. I show him how the cage door coming down couldn’t hurt a flea. Then he goes inside and I wait patiently in my car.

Just after midnight I trip the wire. I fetch the Carlisles and encourage them to squat down and relate to the captured raccoon. Then I recite our canned speech congratulating them for their advanced thinking. I describe the wilderness where the release will take place, the streams and fertile valleys, the romp in the raccoon’s stride when it catches its first whiff of pristine air.

Mr. Carlisle says thanks for letting them sleep at night sans guilt. I tell him that’s my job. Just then the raccoon’s huge mate bolts out of the woods and tears into my calf. I struggle to my car and kick the mate repeatedly against my wheelwell until it dies with my leg in its mouth. The Carlisles stand aghast in the carport. I stand aghast in the driveway, sick at heart. I’ve trapped my share of raccoons and helped Claude with more burials than I care to remember, but I’ve never actually killed anything before.

I throw both coons in the trunk and drive myself to the emergency room, where I’m given the first of a series of extremely painful shots. I doze off on a bench post-treatment and dream of a den of pathetic baby raccoons in V-neck sweaters yelping for food.

When I wake up I call in. Tim asks if I’m crazy, kicking a raccoon to death in front of clients. Couldn’t I have gently lifted it off, he asks, or offered it some rotting fruit? Am I proud of my ability to fuck up one-car funerals? Do I or do I not recall Damian Flaverty?

Who could forget Damian Flaverty? He’d been dipping into the till to finance his necktie boutique. Tim black-jacked him into a crumpled heap on the floor and said: Do you think I spent nine years in the slammer only to get out and be fleeced by your ilk? Then he broke Damian’s arm with an additional whack. I almost dropped my mug.

I tell Tim I’m truly sorry I didn’t handle the situation more effectively. He says the raccoon must’ve had a sad last couple of minutes once it realized it had given up its life for the privilege of gnawing on a shank of pure fat. That hurts. Why I continue to expect decent treatment from someone who’s installed a torture chamber in the corporate basement is beyond me. Down there he’s got a Hide-A-Bed and a whip collection and an executioner’s mask with a built-in Walkman. Sometimes when I’m invoicing late he’ll bring in one of his willing victims. Usually they’re both wasto. I get as much of me under my desk as I can. Talk about the fall of man. Talk about some father somewhere being crestfallen if he knew what his daughter was up to. Once I peeked out as they left and saw a blonde with a black eye going wherever Tim pointed and picking up his coat whenever he purposely dropped it.

“You could at least take me for coffee,” she said.

“I’d like to spill some on your bare flesh,” Tim said.

“Mmm,” she said. “Sounds good.”

How do people get like this, I thought. Can they change back? Can they learn again to love and be gentle? How can they look at themselves in the mirror or hang Christmas ornaments without overflowing with self-loathing?

Then I thought: I may be obese but at least I’m not cruel to the point of being satanic.

Next day Tim was inducted into Rotary and we all went to the luncheon. He spoke on turning one’s life around. He spoke on the bitter lessons of incarceration. He sang the praises of America and joked with balding sweetheart ophthalmologists, and after lunch hung his Rotary plaque in the torture chamber stairwell and ordered me to Windex it daily or face extremely grim consequences.

Tuesday a car pulls up as Claude and I approach the burial pit with the Carlisle raccoons. We drag the cage into a shrub and squat panting. Claude whispers that I smell. He whispers that if he weighed four hundred he’d take into account the people around him and go on a diet. The sky’s the purple of holy card Crucifixion scenes, the rending of the firmament and all that. A pale girl in a sari gets out of the car and walks to the lip of the pit. She paces off the circumference and scribbles in a notebook. She takes photos. She slides down on her rear and comes back up with some coon bones in a Baggie.

After she leaves we rush back to the office. Tim’s livid and starts baby-oiling his trademark blackjack. He says no more coons in the pit until further notice. He says we’re hereby in crisis mode and will keep the coons on blue ice in our cubicles and if need be wear nose clips. He says the next time she shows up he may have to teach her a lesson about jeopardizing our meal ticket. He says animal rights are all well and good but there’s a substantive difference between a cute bunny or cat and a disgusting raccoon that thrives on carrion and trash and creates significant sanitation problems with its inquisitiveness.