Sam Pink - The No Hellos Diet

“Shit,” you whisper, smiling.

“O-k?” he says, hitting your arm. He laughs, looking at the ground and shaking his head side to side. He puts another fruitsnack in his mouth. “Finna get some mo fruitsnacks,” he says, tapping your arm to signal the conversation is over.

“Fruitsnacks,” you say, like it’s the same as “Goodbye.”

In the video a different person is talking.

Having missed the first part of his story, you don’t know what happened, but his head looks dented.

You’re eating fruitsnacks and watching a video of a man with a dented head.

You’re sad in a way that makes you want to be of use to others.

Like somehow happiness is selfish.

*

After orientation, you walk home.

Sweating new-sweat through the pasty old-sweat.

Across the street from your apartment there’s a cemetery.

Every time you pass it, you’d like to know everything knowable about everyone buried there.

Everything from shoe size in eighth grade, to most gratifying insult ever openly stated/received, to grade point average junior year of high school, to worst Halloween experience.

You go into your apartment and lie down on the floor in your room.

Clothes, books, garbage, and drawings all over the floor.

A museum you’ve created.

The hard carpet smells comforting.

A cologne you’ve created.

Balled-up bathtowel beneath your head.

A pillow you’ve created.

You lie there smiling.

Considering that it comforts you.

And considering that you’re a perfectly guarded person, unsure of what’s being guarded.

And you have no complaints.

Sirens pass outside as you fall asleep.

The first effort at sleep only lasts for like, thirty or forty minutes.

But then!

You’re able to keep continually falling back asleep consecutive times until deep into the next day, simply through sheer dedication and will.

Thinking about how fantastic it is, as it happens.

How it’s like circling a planet made entirely of ocean, in a series of jumps. Sinking into mud between each jump.

“It feels so good to jump and sink,” you mumble, between each effort at sleep.

Laughing and half-facedown on a crumb-covered sweaty-ass towel.

Effort after amazing effort.

In the future, a history teacher points to a map in the classroom and says, “What’s known as, The Sleep Effort, took place here — in the Midwestern United States” then shows a picture of you to the class.

It’s the end of summer in Uptown, Chicago.

You’re happy that your life is happening the way it’s happening.

Happening in days, where it’s impossible not to just feel like some kind of random floating eyesight without any control.

An off-balanced float into the future of off-balanced floating.

A passenger in something un-piloted.

You find things happening a certain way and accept whatever way it will crash.

Over the last year, you’ve been a grocery bagger, a deli worker, a nanny, a Census Bureau employee, and now a stockroom employee at a major U.S. department store.

At work you have to wear a red shirt and khaki pants.

You scan things with a laser gun then lift them into carts.

Whatever people buy in the store, you retrieve from the stockroom and put on carts for the salesfloor employees to restock.

You’re 27 and make fifty-cents more than Illinois minimum wage.

Every hour equals eight dollars and seventy-five cents.

Sometimes you imagine yourself in some unpainted room with the door locked, and every hour the door opens and a mysterious hand throws in eight dollars and seventy-five cents, and there is laughing, and you quickly gather the money off the ground and return to the corner.

At work the only two things to be done are scan and lift.

It’s fun.

All you have to do to be a success is wear a red shirt, scan things, then lift them.

Another important goal is to avoid other stockroom employees shooting their laser gun in your eye.

Because it hurts to be lasered in the eye.

You’re worried it’s going to wake you up from this coma.

Worried you’re going to love it.

Who knows.

At work, you find yourself doing what’s supposed to be done.

Staring blankly ahead, communicating in the least way possible to co-workers.

They say, “What’s up with your hair, is it like, wet from the shower still.”

“No it’s just greasy,” you say.

They say, “Oh, that’s gross.”

“Who knows,” you say.

Sweeping four stockrooms on each floor, avoiding conversations.

Barely saying enough to the other employees to constitute being an object that’s different than all other objects.

Sometimes you think people are surprised when you talk.

Not because it’s interesting, but because they didn’t realize anyone else was in the room.

Like you appear from nowhere, holding a broom.

(It surprises you too sometimes though, admit it.)

Conversations don’t happen.

The last conversation you remember having at work was just a manager saying, “Oh, I didn’t even know you were here” when she was throwing out garbage, and then you made a sound to acknowledge you heard her.

But that’s not a conversation.

At work, you also have to throw out garbage.

You load broken-down boxes into a compactor then crush them by pressing a button.

Crushing the boxes, you always say, “Die. Die. Die.”

Sometimes audibly, sometimes not.

It feels the same either way.

The box compactor squeals, compacting.

Die. Die. Die.

“Die. Die. Die,” you say, and watch the crushing.

Feels good to watch the boxes die.

Die. Die. Die.

Sometimes when the store closes you empty the box compactor and press the button when there’s nothing in it.

And the crushing mechanism stops a little bit above the empty bottom then comes back up.

Lately, it is enough to consider that maybe when the compactor crushes without anything there to crush, a new universe opens horizontally with the crushed air.

And that maybe all the crushed atoms of air open horizontally into a new material plane of possibility.

And that maybe you’ve been absorbed by one, the same look on your face as always.

It is enough to consider that happening.

This afternoon, you do something called “Zoning.”

Zoning is when there’s no stockroom work for a little while, you go out into the store and line up products in the aisles, so the aisles look organized.

It’s just you and Billy, this old alcoholic guy.

There’s more crust in his eyes than usual, and you avoid him as you organize the candy aisle together.

Billy is in his sixties and prefers people call him Billy.

He’s in a band that only plays music written by another musician “but”—he always says—“Only the more rock and roll type stuff.”

He has a really whiny voice and doesn’t do any work and there are always sores on his lips.

He drinks tallboys on his lunch break and then comes back and says purely descriptive things on the stockroom walkie talkie channel.

Like he’ll say, “Eyyy, Billy here. Just walking up the escalator now, going upstairs — few more feet and I’m almost there” [static sound] “Okee, I’m upstairs now.”

Or, “Eyyy, Billy here, I just found a press-on fingernail in a shopping cart. Probably just gonna throw it out, heh heh.”

You’d rather not be alive than organizing this candy aisle.

Not meaning that in any dramatic way.

More like in a situation where a genie asked, you’d opt for being dead.

It’s that simple — you think.