Lance Olsen - Girl Imagined by Chance

You came to feel on a daily basis that you were always almost but never quite anywhere.

The future had arrived a decade ago, is the thing.

Their ages, too, it almost goes without saying.

The problem was how your bosses were twenty-something kids with attitudes.

Attitudes and purple lipstick.

You being middle-aged.

You being, in their eyes, officially a member of a different species.

The problem was how it was clear, watching them at their computers, they wanted to be alone and couldn’t live without other people.

This was what the future had turned out to look like.

The problem was how they began wearing overblown Seiko Message Watches so they could consult their schedules, Dow Jones averages, and e-mail just a little more frequently.

But you know what’s totally dope? one of them asked you once.

Auztin, your most immediate twenty-something boss.

You know what’s totally dope?

Twenty-something being a word that sounded hip maybe ten years ago but now sounds oddly dated, a future that became the past trying to be the present.

By the Snapple machine during your lunch break.

You peeling an orange.

Auztin snacking from a bag of Doritos.

Looking twelve in techno-sneakers that appeared almost impossible to put on, there were so many ties and clips and blinking things associated with them, jeans so loose he could have been smuggling small dogs inside them.

He wore an over-sized t-shirt that said: DON’T WORRY. BE STUPID.

What’s totally dope, Auztin repeated, is they can suggest what to order at restaurants.

Your watch can order for you, you said, deadpan, adopting the role of straightman.

It pays attention to your eating habits for thirty days after you fire it up and develops a profile based on its findings.

Why?

You go to a restaurant, okay, and look at the menu, okay, and can’t decide what to eat? So you start feeling nervous-anxious. You know: the waiter’s going to return like any second, and when he asks you what you want you’ll look like this big dork, and everyone else at the table will begin to fidget, and the waiter will give you that look waiters give on occasion that can melt steel. So what do you do?

You ask your watch, you said.

Right on. See, you push this little button here, okay… and out comes your top choices with the statistical probabilities of what will satisfy you most.

Your watch decides for you.

Auztin scrinched up his face.

Minuscule orange-yellow particles of cornchips clinging to the front of his t-shirt.

Raising his bag at you as though to ward off the living dead, he said:

It tells you what your decision would be, okay, if you simply took enough time to make it, which you don’t have, being in this restaurant with this group of totally antsy friends and a waiter who feels he’s being under-appreciated as an actor…

Back in your cubicle, you dialed Andi’s mobile phone.

Native American, Dutch, or English.

It is always possible as well that Teaneck is simply, say, the bastardization of a medieval English word that refers to the T in some road’s neck.

Without a local guidebook, it is impossible to know for sure.

Assuming, of course, the local guidebook itself is telling the truth, and not, for instance, simply the product of the author’s imagination, the author possibly being one of those people who believes no one will ever check his facts.

You caught Andi on the way to photograph an unimportant city council meeting.

For the next half hour you emphasized how you were almost forty. If you were going to make a significant change in your life, today was the day. Ten years more, and it would feel too late.

Ten years, and you would probably feel past the horizon of possibility.

You were both fairly young, you pointed out, at least by certain standards.

You were both fairly young and Andi had been talking about quitting the paper and going freelance ever since college and you could document Virginia Dentatia just as easily from a house on ten or twenty acres of wooded land somewhere out west as from an airtight office in northern New Jersey.

You possessed no animals.

To weigh you down.

No animals and no children.

You decided some time ago not to have children or animals.

Your old friends were free to visit whenever they liked and you were still young enough to make plenty of new ones.

You of course were also free to visit them, your old friends, but less and less, these things tending to unfurl over time and distance.

Though for fairly obvious reasons you never articulated this decision about children to Andi’s grandmother.

Nor would there be a problem with packing up and going, supposedly, packing up and starting afresh.

It even made a certain degree of sense.

It even seemed to make a certain degree of sense.

A long electromechanical silence effervesced on the other end of the line when you paused to take a breath.

Auztin’s upper lip, it struck you, protruded like the beak of a small bird.

You opened your mouth to push on, staring up at the fluorescent lights burring above your cubicle in your airtight office in northern New Jersey.

The black-and-red Barbara Kruger poster on your wall saying ENDANGERED SPECIES and showing a perhaps not completely unpredictable very frightened very fractured man’s face.

Man’s face or woman’s face, it not being as easy to distinguish between the two genders as one might initially assume.

Staring, and not knowing precisely what you were going to say next, but eager to find out, only then realizing Andi was speaking to you instead.

Had been speaking to you for nearly a minute, as close as you could figure it.

What? you said.

I said, she said, when do we leave?

What? you said, just to make sure.

I said, she said, you’re right. You’re absolutely right.

Overexposed sunshine or looking into the aperture of a slide projector.

That startling.

That white.

That is what you think about as you stand in the guest bedroom, painting.

What will become your guest bedroom.

How you sprawled on your bellies on the Persian rug in your living room in northern New Jersey, pint of peanut-butter-cup ice cream between you, thumbing through a U.S. atlas and Encyclopedia Britannica.

The way you did two years ago, the evening you asked Andi where she would like to go on a celebratory vacation because she was about to turn thirty five.

You thought she would name a nice hotel in Manhattan.

Nepal, she said.

Your mouth moving as if someone inside you were trying to speak.

Because, she explained, it sounded like the end of the world and the end of the world was where she wanted to be when she turned thirty five.

So you looked it up.

You looked it up and then you went.

You boarded a plane at J.F.K. and flew to L.A. You boarded another plane in L.A. and flew to Narita. You boarded another plane at Narita and flew to Bangkok. You boarded another plane in Bangkok and flew to Kathmandu.

The smoky terraced hills.

White mountain peaks like broken glass against the blue sky.

Your first afternoon there, a Nepalese man in front of you fainted in an alley. A young man. A man younger than you, in any case. He collapsed politely among tuk-tuks and rickshaws and pedestrians and hit his head on the packed-dirt street. Several store owners approached him. They nudged him with the toes of their sandals. One went back into his shop and returned with a bowl of unclean water and threw it on him and then stood back to see what would happen.

Then everyone simply shrugged and returned to work.

Vendors shouting at you to buy their rugs even as the young unconscious man remained unconscious at your feet.