Michael Seidlinger: The Strangest

My eyes are tired.

Veronica’s name and number.

The call goes to voicemail.

Phone and knocking. Phone and knocking doesn’t stop. It requires a lot of effort to walk to the door and open it.

I expect Ben but I am not surprised to see Veronica.

She looks happy, don’t know if it’s genuine, but my eyes focus on something else. I look beyond her, but I don’t see Ben. I feel momentarily relieved until Veronica pushes something toward me, holding it up to my face as I pull back.

She shouts something.

What she said doesn’t register until I read what’s written on the thing she hands to me. It says, “Happy Birthday!”

Then she says it again.

“Happy birthday!”

Hand tightens around the doorknob, “Thanks?”

“Don’t tell me. No. no way. Really?!”

Makes a face. I take a step back. I look at the thing she gave me.

I keep looking at it.

“You forgot your birthday! Only you.”

Veronica laughs, and she laughs too loud. It echoes through the hall and I keep looking beyond her to see if Ben is there.

“It’s cake, Zachary,” she giggles.

I almost drop the cake.

“I have work today,” I warn her.

Sometimes work helps avert situations, unpleasant and uncomfortable situations like this.

“It’s Friday,” Veronica tells me, “you’re so strange …”

She pushes past me, walking into my apartment.

“I love that about you. I love every dysfunctional tidbit ’bout you.”

I quickly close the door.

I look around the apartment.

I go to my laptop. Check the date and time.

Friday. 11:41AM.

There are 2 people in this room.

One of them can’t recall what it was like this week, and whether or not Zachary the employee stuck to his routine.

I begin typing.

Confusion can be a good thing, I think. Sometimes the confusion speeds up time and time can really weigh you down. You feel confused when you aren’t able to configure yourself for the situation. You feel confused when you end up talking in the second person. Like me, right now. Confused. But today is Friday and it isn’t Tuesday like I thought it would be. The week breezed by and I don’t remember any of it. This is a good kind of confusion.

I think.

What do you think? Oh, she’s watching me …

When I look up, she is, as expected. She has her head resting in her hands, elbows propped up on the table that I’ve had for as long as I’ve had it. I didn’t have any other sort of table; that table is the only table I’ve ever had.

Meurks gets a lot of comments. People misinterpreted “she’s watching me” for something sinister. I think about that. I stare at her. Stare at her staring at me. I ask, “What are you doing here?”

She shakes her head, “Zachary, you need to stop acting so strange.”

She stands up, walks into my room, and picks out clothes for me to wear. She shouts from the bedroom, “Enough of this same drab shirt, tie, pants combo. I want you to look the part. It’s an important day!”

I wasn’t born literally on this day. I was born on the same date, apparently, many years ago. Based on my age. I have wrinkles on my forehead. I went to school. I had to take a lot of tests. I think my heart sank at one point and my feelings felt a whole lot denser, improbable. I wasn’t born today. I was born more than a decade ago.

“You need more clothes!” She walks out of the room holding some shirt, no tie, some pair of jeans. “This will have to do.”

And then, “ Don’t know how anyone can live this way.”

The last one gets a lot of likes. A few new followers too.

“I have the whole day planned.” It sounds like the opposite of planning, because I wasn’t told beforehand where we would go.

If this is my day off, it should feel like Sunday, which doesn’t really have a feeling. But it should feel like Sunday and it doesn’t.

I have to eat a piece of cake.

“Come on, it’s a dinky-small slice.”

I look at the cake. It’s very dark.

“Don’t make me spoonfeed you like a baby.”

She sighs when I take the smallest bite I can possibly take.

“Things we do for the people we love.”

This is, I think, how she always talks. It sounds like she’s quoting from something, some movie or some book, or maybe a song, but I never know where she gets it. She probably saw it online.

Everything is online.

I delete it before anyone can react.

Veronica takes the cake away, asks me if it’s good but doesn’t give me time to consider what “good” would entail; she hands me the clothes and says, “Come on, come on — whole day planned!”

I walk toward the bathroom but she asks me why.

She winks.

I understand.

I strip naked and put on the fresh set of clothes.

With her watching.

Veronica never leaves my side. Her eyes never avert my gaze. When I look she is already looking, and I am positive that she has accepted me for who I am. She seems to think I’m more than what I see and do, and in a public setting like this park, I can only imagine that it has to do with possibilities. Possibilities: There are 18 people in this park. 3 dogs. 1 cat.

Too many people.

Not enough people.

Two extraneous considerations about the number of people in this park.

The park is more for pets and their owners, but Veronica wanted to go here. I don’t know why we are here.

The bench isn’t very comfortable.

“What a beautiful day,” she announces.

It is a good day. How many good days are there in a given week? What constitutes as “good?” The weather, the mood, the plan, the follow-through, the people that fit into your day, the fact that the day will end? These are considerations that come to mind while sitting in the middle of all this humanity. And the humanity seems to be self-aware, aware of every single component, every single person.

I don’t have time to see if it gets enough likes. I don’t get to correspond with my friends and followers.

Veronica talks to me.

She talks to me the way she always talks to me:

No pause, no beginning and no real end. Ongoing.

And in between what I don’t hear, I am able to decipher what her and I share. There are similarities I think. I can see why she and I keep crossing paths. Veronica is on one end and I am on the other; she acts strange to me and yet she thinks I am strange.

The rules of attraction and what are the rules?

We enjoy telling people the wrong things, giving them the wrong directions, when they interfere, walking up to our bench, up to us, and asking for some street, some number, some store, some restaurant.

There are a lot of possibilities.

A lot of them are looking for the right subway train.

She gives them the wrong directions.

And either I had the exact same thought or I merely heard what she said and it registered moments later. But we think the same thoughts.

Veronica looks at her phone at the same time I look at mine.

She texts me, “We’re going to miss the previews.”

I text back, “Yeah you’re right. I guess we should go, shouldn’t we?”

Her reply, “LOL.”

Mine, “What?”

I look at her.

She looks up from her phone and says, “Oh, nothing — sometimes it’s just like I’m talking to two different people.”

I think about this but nothing comes to mind.

The sun washes out the park, making it difficult to see the 23, 25, now 28 people and their pets, counting 6 dogs. 2 cats. A number of pigeons.

“Ready?”

Her voice rises at the end, making it a question.