Saïd Sayrafiezadeh - New American Stories

“Was someone bothering you guys?” I find myself interjecting. “This is a weirdly rough neighborhood. Even as it’s kind of a nice neighborhood, it’s also sort of a rough one—”

“Every neighborhood is rough today.”

“It’s iPhone day—”

The UPS women have turned and opened their circle to me.

“They’ve ordered two million iPhones—”

“Someone in my neighborhood already got stabbed over a delivery.”

“I hate phones,” I offer. “I really hate them.”

“There’s no Apple in Russia,” the doorman says. “You can sell the phones to a Russian for fourteen hundred dollars. You buy them for six hundred; you sell them for fourteen hundred.”

“Delivery must be terrifying,” I say to the women. “You never know what’s up with the person on the other side of the door. It’s like you knock on your own nightmare.”

“People love their iPhones,” the vested deliverywoman says. “My daughter says it’s like they would marry their iPhones.”

I keep not asking about Boo’s ring. “I’ve never seen a woman working UPS delivery before,” I say. “And now here you are — two of you at once. I feel like I’m seeing a unicorn. Or the Loch Ness monster. Maybe both, I guess.”

There’s a bit of a quiet then.

“They don’t normally travel in twos,” the doorman says. “It’s only because today is considered dangerous.”

“There’s at least a hundred of us,” the unvested woman says, shrugging.

“Not too many, but some.”

“Good luck,” the doorman is saying.

The women are walking away.

Now it’s just me and the doorman. I am back in the familiar world again. I feel compelled to hope that he finds me attractive, and I feel angry at him, as if he were responsible for that feeling, and I find myself unzipping my husband’s raincoat and pushing back the hood, like one of those monkeys whose ovulation is not concealed. I’m looking for, I imagine myself saying to this man, a wedding ring. Oh, he says, You’re all looking for rings.

—

There was no ring there. But you saw a unicorn today, I remind myself. That’s something. It’s all about keeping busy. We can just buy another ring. Why didn’t we think of that earlier? His old ring cost, maybe, three hundred dollars. We could buy a new one, nothing wrong with that, no need to think it means something it doesn’t, though it would mean something nice to have it again, I think, as I find an appealing empty table in the back corner of a Peruvian chicken joint, where I order French fries. Some people save their marriages — not that our marriage needs saving, not that it’s in danger, one can’t be seduced by the semantically empty loss of a ring, I remind myself — by having adventures together. We could pull a heist. Me and Boo. Boo and…well, we’d have some Bonnie-and-Clyde-type name, just between ourselves. We could heist a UPS truck full of iPhones. On a rural delivery route. The guns wouldn’t need to be real, definitely not. We could then move to another country. An expensive and cold one where no one comes looking and where people leave their doors unlocked because wealth is distributed so equitably. This is not my kind of daydream, I think. This is not my sort of idyll at all. It is someone else’s idyll. I may be happy with that. I was never a Walter Mitty, though I always fell in love with and envied that type. But a Walter Mitty can’t be married to a Walter Mitty. There is a maximum allowance of one Walter Mitty per household, that’s just how it goes.

—

“Why was your phone off? Where were you?”

I guess hours have passed. Boo is back home. It is dark out.

“I guess I turned off the phone because I got scared,” I say. “I was getting scary phone calls. I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

There’s opened mail on the table.

Boo says, “Look, I know there’s something important that you haven’t told me.”

My body seems to switch climates. It must be the unbreathing raincoat.

“I know you’re scared,” he is saying. “I know you’re scared of lots of things. I don’t want to catch you out. I’m tired of catching out. I don’t want to be a catcher-outer. I just want to be told. Just tell me the thing that you’ve been hiding from me. This could be a good day for us. You could tell me, and then I will feel like I can begin to trust you more again, because I’ll know you can tell me things even when it is scary and difficult to tell.”

I see that, along with the mail, there is a shoebox full of my papers on the table. “I was just out,” I hear myself saying. Is this something to do with the guy calling for delivery? “I was just lonely in the house, and spooked, and so I went out,” I go on. “I had a salad. I guess various things happen in a day. I guess one can always share more. But I can’t think of anything I would call a secret.”

There is a long pause now. As if, I’m thinking, I’d made an awkward, outsized observation, like calling him the Loch Ness monster, or a unicorn. He is my unicorn, though. I forgot that I used to say that; that’s how I felt falling in love with him, as if I’d found a creature of myth. He was less practical then, more dreamy. He had an old belt with a little pony on it; the pony was almost always upside down.

“Please,” he says. “I’m asking as nicely as I can. Don’t you have something you want to say to me?”

“I went out and looked for the ring,” I say. “I wanted to tell you that. I didn’t find the ring. But I did look for it. We could just buy another one.”

“A severance check arrived for you,” he says. “Actually, I’ve found three of your severance checks.”

“That’s odd,” I am saying.

“None of them are cashed, of course.”

The unicorn suddenly has a lot to say. Why couldn’t I just tell him that I was fired? he is saying. Or he is saying something like that. I really and truly and genuinely don’t know what he is talking about. I am saying that I said I resigned because I did resign. I really do remember using that word, “tender,” in offering my resignation. And there’s been a lot of misdirected mail lately, I say. Even misdirected calls. I have been meaning to mention that to him.

He is saying that lots of people lie, but why do I tell lies that don’t even help me? It’s just fucking weird, he is saying. Also something about the rent, and about health insurance. “And I don’t even really care that much about any of those things,” he says. “I just care that, even when you’re in this room with me, you’re not here. Even when you’re here, you’re gone. You’re just in some la-la. Go back out the door and it’ll be just the same: you’re somewhere else and I’m in this room alone—”

I think this goes on for quite a while. Accusations. Analyses. I feel something like a kind of happiness, shy but arrived. A faint fleeting smile, in front of the firing squad. All my vague and shifting self-loathings are streamlining into brightly delineated wrongs. This particular trial — it feels so angular and specific. So lovable. At least lovable by me. Maybe I’m the dreamer in the relationship after all. Maybe I’m the man.

It was the day before his cousin’s funeral and Del ended up at the Suds washing his black jeans at midnight. They were the only pants he owned that were fit for the occasion. Even Randy, the dead man who didn’t give a fuck anymore, would look better than Del. The one decent shirt in his trash bag had TROY’S BAIT SHOP stenciled across the back of it.

That wasn’t all. Del was with a woman he couldn’t get rid of, no matter what he did or said. Every time he dumped her off at the group home, she beat him back to his room with a fresh load in her automatic pill dispenser and another wad of clean underwear. To make matters worse, she kept bugging the shit out of him with these fish sticks she reeled up from the bottomless pond of a plastic purse. They were cold and greasy, feathered with gray lint. And even though she was probably the best woman Del Murray had ever been with — gobs of bare-knuckle sex, the latest psychotropic drugs, a government check — he was still embarrassed to be seen with her in public. Anyone who’s ever dated a retard will understand what he was up against.