Daniel Orozco - Orientation - And Other Stories

I run every day now. I dropped forty-five pounds, and I don’t drink anymore. My heart rate at rest is just under fifty beats per minute. I fall asleep every night like that, and I never need more than six hours. When I look in the mirror now, I see somebody who doesn’t disgust me. I see somebody who knows the difference between what he does for a paycheck and what really matters in this life. At work Mack is always telling me to slow down. “You get paid by the hour,” he says, “not by the order.” I don’t argue. So I slack off at work because my foreman tells me to. But I know who I am.

And I know this, too: that I owe nothing to Dave, that I owe nothing to anybody. You get where you are by yourself. There’s no regret in that. That’s just the way it is.

Rilke says: Rejoice in your growth, in which you naturally can take no one with you.

* * *

There was one person I liked. Her name was Dot, and she always referred to herself as “this old broad.” She never said “I” or “me.” She worked in Receiving, and I hated going in there. Receiving is full of middle-aged women, all married or widowed or divorced, and whenever I walked in, they’d stop talking and look at me with these little smiles on their faces, like I’d caught them at something. I liked Dot because when I started running, she was the first to notice the change in me, and not just losing the weight. Everybody noticed that at first. The guys said things like “You look lovely today.” And even the women in Receiving made a few cracks. Dot said they didn’t know anything. The body was a temple, she said, and we could all benefit from sprucing up our temples. She said I seemed calmer, settled somehow, like I’d made a decision I was comfortable with. She wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. I liked that she told it to me. She wasn’t making fun of me. When she retired last summer, they had a little party for her, and she said if I ever wanted to pop a few beers with a tough old broad, to come on by. I would have. A few months later she had a stroke and had to move in with her son Phil, who works on the loading dock. Nobody has seen her since, and Phil never talks about her. If you ask him how Dot’s doing, he just glares at you. So we stopped asking. If she died, I’m sure he’d tell us.

Phil’s been stealing from the stock for the past year now. He hasn’t been very secretive about it, and I don’t know why he bothers, because it’s never anything big — a few rolls of film or a box of ballpoint pens. Nobody says anything, and even Mack, who’s kind of a stickler, pretty much ignores it. I guess we’re all thinking the same thing: If they fired Phil, what would happen to Dot?

* * *

I suppose I was friends with Ruben once. When he first started working here and found out I ran, he told me that running was for pussies and that you had to lift weights. It was his way of inviting me to his gym. We went there one night after work, a twenty-four-hour place with a juice bar and music piped in through speakers and mirrors everywhere. Ruben introduced me around. He called me a buddy from work who was a pussy runner, and everybody laughed. I didn’t get mad. I recognized this as a kind of respect. Ruben joined a group of guys around a weight machine. I never liked lifting weights. Half the time you’re standing around with your hands on your hips, waiting for somebody else to finish. And then there’s the mirrors, mirrors everywhere so you could watch yourself, so that everywhere you turned, there you were. One room even had mirrors on the ceiling. I got out of there and worked on a treadmill until Ruben was done. After we got cleaned up, we went out to the parking lot and joined his buddies. They were all drinking beers out of a cooler in somebody’s car trunk. They were talking about the women in the gym, about who was hot and all that. And I guess in all the talk I let a few things slip. It wasn’t the beer. I only had one bottle. So it wasn’t the beer. It’s just that when you’re talking and everybody’s having a good time, when people are talking to you and everything feels okay, you just let your guard down. I should have known what to expect from people. I should have known better.

Later that week, Eugene sat down next to me at lunch and handed me a doughnut and asked if I wanted a moment alone with it. I didn’t get it. Then Ruben slid the whole box over, a big pink box filled with doughnuts and little packs of condoms. They called it the virgin assortment, and they said I had to fuck every doughnut before attempting real pussy. Then Dave put his cigarette down and stood up. They’d cut one of his lungs out, and he was still smoking. He stood up and pumped at the table with his hips, and said the best woman he ever had anyway was a butterscotch custard bar. Mack finally told them to knock it off, and they did, and he changed the subject. But nobody was listening to him. They were all sitting there, grinning down into their thermoses and ashtrays. They were having a great time.

That was it for me. I eat by myself now, out on the loading dock. Mack didn’t like that at first. He said it creates discord. “You have to eat chow with your shipmates,” he told me. But since I still take breaks with them, he lets me eat lunch alone. I’ve got a spot at the far end of the dock where they recharge the forklifts and pallet movers at night. I can catch the last of the noontime sun before it swings to the other side of the building. I like it out here in the fresh air, in the sunlight, away from the smoke and the smell from the crap they heat up in the microwave.

* * *

I’ve lived in this house my whole life. My folks died here. They both got cancer, my mother first and then my father, and I took care of them both and now they’re gone. So the house is mine. I have a brother who wants nothing to do with it. He’s a lawyer for the EPA up in Alaska. We were never close. Lately he’s been calling me once a month or so, out of the blue, to say hello. He doesn’t have to. I tell him that, but he still calls. He says he wants to come down for a visit sometime, to bring his family. He says he wants his kids to meet their uncle. I tell him: “Fine, come down whenever.”

I’ve taken good care of this house. Whatever it’s needed, I’ve done. I sanded and planed and lacquered the floors a few years ago, and I did a pretty good job. I keep the lawn and the bushes trimmed and neat, and the neighbors appreciate that. They tell me so. These are things I care about. I don’t own a TV; I don’t watch that crap. I listen to the radio and I read the newspapers every day, so I know what’s going on in the world. And I don’t need anybody telling me how a life is supposed to be. I’m alone, but I’m not lonely; there’s loneliness and then there’s solitude, which is a positive thing. It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult. Rilke said that. I’ve read him. I read books. I know who I am.

* * *

The new girl’s name was April. She was hired to replace Dot, and on her first day Mack brought her out to meet us. The guys were very polite. They told her about the rooftop bowling alley and tried to sell her tickets to the underground swimming pool. It was the same routine they did on my first day, and when Ruben was hired. But when she and Mack left, they started in on how fat she was. Phil said you’d have to roll her in flour first to fuck her, just to find the wet spot.

She started coming out onto the stock floor regularly, to chat and to hang out during breaks. This was a new thing for us. The women in Receiving rarely came out onto the floor, and then only to ask where Mack was and then go looking for him. None of them ever came out otherwise. There was no policy against it. It just didn’t happen. The guys muttered to each other when they saw April heading our way. “Here comes our mascot,” they said. “Here comes the pooch.” They were nice to her when she came around. They told their jokes and their stories, and she laughed and told a few of her own, and they laughed. But when she was gone, they leered and made fun of her. They were always talking about screwing her, but not in a good way. And they wouldn’t let up on the fat jokes. I didn’t get it, because she wasn’t that fat, no fatter than any of them. I thought at first that if she dropped a few pounds, maybe they would’ve let up on her. Maybe things would’ve been different. But they just find something else about you to make fun of. It’s what they do. They’re good at it.