Marie-Helene Bertino - Safe as Houses

If you met me, you’d wonder why I do not look like aliens you’ve seen on TV. Why aren’t you green? You’d say, Why isn’t your head overlarge? To answer that I offer this: Landry Business Solutions had a Halloween costume party and Tammy came dressed for a regular day at work. She said, I am a serial killer. We look just like everyone else .

When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field. You can sit in a chair and get ready for it. As it moves through you, you can reach out your hands and feel all the edges. When it passes and you can drink coffee again, you even miss it because it has been loyal to you like a boyfriend.

If you need it to be about a boy, I’ll give you a boy. In a gas station at the end of the day, the fat owner or the skinny teenager he pays counts the drawer, fills the cigarette machine, and flips the closed sign. My ex was the closed sign. On that gas station or any store that closes. He used to make fun of me for answering questions with metaphors. He’d say, How was your day? And I’d say, If my day were a bug, I would crush it . He wanted me to say, My day was fine . He’s dead now, and by dead I mean dating a stripper. Strippers are girls who can say, My day was fine . Also, they’re very good with money. My exes do well after me. I’m like a lucky penny.

Cars, I fax, are not attached to anything. They are free to collide with other bodies whenever they want and wreck each other. This would not happen with my bumper car system. Cars would be attached to poles linked to an overarching mechanism, as they are in bumper cars. The worst that can happen in a bumper car is you make a strange face when you smash someone. A strange face that makes the other person think you are uglier than they thought and that maybe there are other ugly things they don’t know about you. But they forget in the next second when they are smashed by someone else. It doesn’t hurt, though, as much as real cars. It doesn’t hurt as much.

Here’s the thing about human beings: sometimes you smash their cars, sometimes they smash yours.

One time I got my nails done and the girl held my hands so softly I wondered if she knew me. She commented on the loveliness of my cuticles and she didn’t have to. She went out of her way, and human beings don’t like to go out of their ways. I said, I hope nothing bad ever happens to you .

Five days ago, the bathroom key went missing. Landry Business Solutions has a PA and I made an announcement over it. Why we have a PA is beyond me, since only twelve people work here and they sit in one room. I could have easily walked into that room and made a medium-volumed inquiry, but I don’t like to leave my desk. My announcement over the PA was this: WILL WHOEVER HAS THE BATHROOM KEY PLEASE RETURN IT! Three hours later Delilah slammed the key on my desk. The door had gotten stuck and she had been trapped in the bathroom for hours. No one heard her yelling. She missed a meeting and still no one thought to look for her. She heard my announcement in the bathroom where she sat, hating me. Someone from another office finally heard her and climbed through a heating duct to free her. Delilah, disoriented, left early. It’s a bad day when you realize how unimportant you are.

Human beings who are squeaky wheels, I fax, get everything they want. Quiet humans who don’t complain get nothing. Squeaky wheels will complain when they have an obstructed view of a movie screen until they get a better seat. In the better seat, they will find something else to complain about. The floor is sticky. The cup holder isn’t big enough for my deluxe soda. I have to believe quiet humans who don’t complain see half the screen but are happier. But maybe they’re not. Maybe they spend their lives sad because they can’t participate in conversations about movies. Harrison Ford was in that movie? They say, I had no idea .

It would be easier if it were a boy. Then I could say to Tammy or Grace at work, I feel lonely because of a boy . And they could say, Men are like trains; there’s one every five minutes . But if I say, I am an alien taking notes on human beings to fax to my superiors , they would have no arsenal of information from which to draw. They would not know what to say at all.

Two days ago they passed around a newspaper article at Landry Business Solutions and I realized I do everything wrong. I tie my shoes wrong and they are the wrong shoes. I breathe wrong. I walk wrong. The article was about a place far away whose inhabitants are so poor they have to eat dirt. There was a picture of a dirt-eating girl standing with a bicycle. The right thing to say was what everyone was saying, What a shame. Where’s my checkbook? But what I said was, How did she get her arms to look like that? Is it from the constant bike riding?

It’s not a boy or a job or a family or a house. It’s the world. There are so many people in it.

This is the part with the Christmas lights and the miracle.

Yesterday I stopped to collect a heads-up penny and was late for the train to work. I walked fast to catch it. People who walk fast look weird, and every time I’m walking fast I think how weird I must look. I still missed the train. The doors laughed at me. But trains are like men; there’s one every five minutes. So I got the next one. I wasn’t that late and no one noticed anyway. But the candy jar was empty and I couldn’t get to the store until noon and I smiled at Delilah and she did not smile back. The day was a slippery rock I couldn’t climb. Walking home I heard a couple arguing, and even though he was insisting I knew it was the end.

Then I saw two people in wheelchairs.

You’re not allowed to feel bad about anything when you are around people in wheelchairs, which is why I don’t like people in wheelchairs. You can say, Sometimes at night I wake up and my throat is filled with loneliness and I am choking . And they will say, I am in a wheelchair . And they will win. They are the human pain equivalent of a royal flush. Then I remembered that morning I had collected a heads-up penny and nothing lucky had happened to me. I felt swindled. Behind in the count. It was one of those days.

I got home and there were still the Christmas lights to hang. And it was time. It was not time to check how much sugar I had. It was not time to say the word rose over and over until I forgot what it meant. It was no time other than the time it was to hang the lights. So I got a ladder and a staple gun and climbed to the roof of the house I could not be trusted to build. And I hadn’t asked anyone the proper way to hang lights so I crawled around stapling haphazardly to the shingles, not a line but words. Two words to let my superiors know I was finished taking notes and to come and get me in their glorious spaceships. When I was done I climbed down and checked my work. In lights I had stapled, HELP ME.

I figured it was best to err on the side of honesty. I didn’t learn that on Earth, dear god, but I learned it.

I ate a forkful of cold noodles and went to bed. At 3 A.M. a commotion on my front lawn woke me. It sounded like an army of washing machines in their final cycles had congregated outside my window. My bed hummed. I looked out. Beams of ambitious light jackknifed through the yard. Aggressive angel light. Light that somersaulted and looked like sound. Red lights and white lights.

They were cars. More cars than I could count. The first ones pulled onto my lawn so the others would have room to park behind them. They held human beings who disembarked holding baskets with cloth over them. I recognized my mother, the manicurist, my ex, and the stripper he dates, Delilah. People filled my street and the street next to it and the cars were still coming. I could see headlights for miles. They were still coming.