(This was originally published as a four part serialization.)
A sudden blur, a momentary riot, bumping, clanging on the hood of my car. Then, just as quickly, the blur vanished out of view and back into the snow flurry that partially obscured my vision.
Prior to this delirious eruption, I had been carefully traveling down a winter-whipped neighborhood street. The blur had seemed to be propelled in front of me by a force existing outside of itself (the object I hit had not seemed to appear in the street of its own accord). Its arrival was reminiscent of the way a strong breeze will sometimes expel a knitted winter cap from its wearer’s head. I began ruminating about all the deviant influences that might have pushed the blur and created this collision.
I worried the blur might be a human, and more specifically a human child. It proved to be precisely that when at last I stopped and investigated what I’d hit. It was a broken little creature, frozen in prone position on someone’s lawn.
“I’m telling you, it looked like whoever that is was thrown in front of me, like a mannequin or a doll, with no time for me to stop or even slow down,” is what I told the cops who responded to the scene.
I hadn’t attempted to drive away. I remained there. I was prepared to take my punishment. I thought that should count for something.
I said to the cops, “Whatever my punishment is, just give it to me now and let’s be done with this and all the anticipation.”
The cops explained that wasn’t how the legal system worked but they added that perhaps it could be in my case, depending on how I was willing to be punished.
I didn’t like the sound of that and I was beginning to not entirely trust these officers of the law, but something about our interaction had, apparently, signaled my assent. They gestured knowingly at me. In the front seat of my car, there was all the raiment of a Santa Claus suit, and a note pinned to the Santa coat said, “Put all of me on and you are free to go.”
I dressed myself in the Santa garb, though I was beginning to feel crummy about getting out of such a heinous crime so easily. It didn’t seem right. Some more severe punishment was in order. I’d have wanted a more severe punishment for anyone who had committed a crime of this significance who wasn’t me, provided I’d actually committed a crime of this significance, which of course I wasn’t certain of.
Instead, I got back in my car, dressed as Santa. I proceeded to my destination, which was to meet with a woman I’d finally worked up the courage to connect with in person, after several years of correspondence over the internet. I’d wanted to look nice and now, dressed as Santa, I was no longer sure that I did. It also wasn’t clear how long I’d be indentured to wear a Santa suit or whether there was any blood on the hood of my car. That last issue being something I imagined would make me seem a bit iffy as people go.
We were meeting for coffees at Coffees-a-Million. They only served black coffee at Coffees-a-Million, and they slapped you with a sponge-covered, wooden slapping hand that the barista held by a gray handle if you tried to use cream you smuggled into their cafe. You had to sign a release stating you were ok with them slapping you, which may or may not lead to spilling coffee on your clothing. Slapping led almost always to coffee spilling. It was a game certain people played, seeing if they could sneak creamers past the watchful barista. There was no reward other than creamy coffee if you managed to do so, which I guess some might call its own reward.
Elizabeth was the name of the woman I was meeting. She had already spilt coffee on her white blouse by the time I got there. I gave her a stilted and self-conscious nod as salutation and instantly regretted it, though she responded with a wave.
She looked in every other way how I had expected. She had an average build, was attractive and youthful if a little bit cartoon cat-like in her facial features: narrow eyes, ovoid chin, button nose, for example. These features contrasted nicely, I felt, with my own, which was more cartoon shaggy dog in appearance, with big dozy, sleepy eyes and bangs that sometimes obscured my vision. My cheeks weren’t jowls yet, but they showed signs that as I aged that’s what I could expect. My head was oblong in shape. I had a slim torso, at least. It was the one feature I took some pride in.
Of course, I was wearing my Santa suit, which looked all the more ridiculous hanging from my thin frame. The fake white beard itched terribly, and I thought a few more days of the itching might be more than I could stand.
Elizabeth made the opening attempt at conversation by referencing the family I’d told her about in our previous typed conversations online. She said something general about how she hoped my mother was doing well after her recent surgery. She mentioned my aunt, too, who was helping my mother through her convalescence, and planned to do so primarily by reading to her her favorite Danielle Steel novels aloud to her, which my mother felt was not actually helping. It happened my mother didn’t care for anything by Danielle Steel and my aunt was being passive aggressive about some other slight she believed my mother had committed at an earlier time.
She asked about my uncle who had started a business using his computer, HeadinHat.com, where your head shape was calibrated and matched to the perfect hat for you. Perfect hats were statistically beanies, according to my uncle, a fact which delighted Elizabeth and she never didn’t fail to mention.
She knew well enough not to ask about my father.
I ordered a coffee and when it was delivered I opened a non-dairy creamer and was promptly slapped. I decided I deserved nothing less than this sort of self-inflicted punishment to accompany the punishment I’d already received.
“Why’d you do that?” Elizabeth asked. She’d been dabbing her own shirt with a wet napkin. It didn’t appear to be doing any good.
Before I could reply we both observed the stain on my Santa suit miraculously clean itself, and so abruptly relieve me of the scalding pain and embarrassment of my spill.
“I was trying to feel something very specific.” I said, attempting to appear cool and blase but surely unable to conceal my amazement about the Santa suit’s self-cleaning. “And why did you get slapped?” I asked, wanting to showcase my interest in her while remaining blase. I had read somewhere that people respond well to you if you don’t seem overeager.
“Same as you, same as nearly everyone who gets slapped. Impertinence with non-dairy creamer,” she said, pulling a screw-top vial from her purse so I could steal a quick glance before they slapped her again.
“I remember my first slapping,” I recalled wistfully.
“It was not my first. I’ve been slapped by the giant hand before, many times. It’s nice to finally see you in person,” she said, stirring what was left of the coffee in her cup with the non-dairy creamer she’d managed to pour. She sipped and added, “Coffee tastes better with creamer you’ve earned.”
I scratched at my beard. She seemed to finally decide it was time to ask about why I was dressed as I was, or do something that acknowledged I was behaving at least a little bit strangely by wearing it.
“Where’d you get the magical Santa suit and why? I guess that’s sort of what I was trying to get at in my vague way with my initial question, more than referencing the coffee slap. Why’d you choose to wear that here, now?” She was trying to needle me. This had been a contentious first meeting, possibly because I was late, possibly because my physical appearance—regardless of the Santa suit—didn’t match the image of me she’d had in her head (I’d offered in our correspondence to send her photos, but she sent me a typed soliloquy about how pictures could convey nothing of my true aspect. Like the cadaver of a once living and breathing human body, they were simply telegrams from the past, a deadened and dried and entirely material past, and she’d rather not have such an image of me in her head, at least not before meeting me as the breathing, still-living and frail human I must surely be).
“Do you really want to know?” I said, venom suffusing each word. I knew the Santa suit must have been playing some role in our misunderstandings, our palpable dislike for one another. It could be no other way than that the punishment I’d thought was intended only to make me look the fool had a far more insidious, primal even, purpose. I couldn’t soon escape it and the many unexpected concomitant effects its wearing brought to bear. I couldn’t even enjoy a good spilling of coffee on myself, which had been a masochistic sensory experience I’d once enjoyed quite well.
“Yes, but do you need me to say why? Shouldn’t that be obvious, considering everything, considering all we’ve already been through together and what this date was supposed to mean for us, romantically?” She was right. We’d been through so much, digitally speaking, engaged in faceless periodized conversations with one another, because neither of us possessed a web camera (and even if both of us had owned one, such a medium likewise fit squarely against Elizabeth’s belief in seeing only genuine physical personage or nothing at all). And the last image of me she’d wanted was one in which I wore the hallmarks of a mythical creature, no matter its jolliness. Its jolliness be damned, in fact.
“If you’ll allow me to explain, I’m not wearing this outfit by choice. It happens that it’s the only punishment I could receive for certain recent lawbreaking. It was this or get arrested and probably go to jail for much longer than I would want, than either of us could want. Not when we were so close. I never imagined the pain it might cause you.”
“What was your crime?”
“Excuse me?”
“Why were you sentenced to wear this outfit?”
“Well, it's a story that surprises and bewilders me still, hours after it happened. I was driving and a boy got into the path of my car without my seeing—I swear to you this: he seemed to have been tossed, like a doll, spiraling in front of my car in a great circular motion. I imagine this might be some sort of horrible trick played on me. I was unable to stop in time. I collided with the boy, the boy didn’t survive. And so the police gave me one choice, and you see that I’m wearing it.”
“I’ll need to process that for a minute,” She spilled more coffee on herself, the sting of which appeared to help her think lucidly. She tilted her head down and winced for a minute, maybe more, before looking up again and saying, “For a terrible act there must be a terrible punishment. This fits that requirement.”
“I’m glad you see it that way,” I said. Elizabeth nodded somberly. She remained in that state, though we both intermittently sipped spilled our coffee, and the waving artificial hand of the barista was always reaching for some new transgressor. Elizabeth stood and so did I, and she embraced me, seeming to breathe in my artificial beard for some reason.
She said, “We’ll be alright. It will be ok.” She didn’t sound sincere, or there appeared to be something that kept her from quite believing what she’d said. I tried to kiss her but she whispered that it wasn’t appropriate, and wouldn’t be until she did what she had to do. We agreed to meet for a pizza dinner later at the Pizza-Face Diner where all pizzas are made with dough to resemble the faces of horror stricken humans, faces held beneath a veil of cheese. It was a lot of fun to dine there. You could also get a calzone shaped like a human skull and they’d cut holes from the bread of the eye sockets so that sauce and cheese and other ingredients could spill out of them.
As I ambled along the streets of the city, briefly bringing expressions of joy to the eyes of the children I passed, I learned the true meaning of torture. How perverse, the shiny little eyes thinking me a mythical being who, when appropriately needled by good behavior and a legible itemizing of demands, could make so many magical dreams of the season come true. But I had to live with the fact that this wasn’t quite the case. No, not remotely. I was every bit the charlatan. And these poor children knew nothing about it.
I walked all the way to the frozen lake where I sat on a snow covered bench (not the best idea but I was not in the best state of mind) and waited to meet with Elizabeth again. I thought of her at this time, of what I hoped and dreamed might happen between us. Then I worried about something I had no control over: why couldn’t she commit to our having a future together, even if it were only to be a future of a couple weeks or months, maybe. It wasn’t just the fear of having to recover from rejection. It was the sense that something intrinsic to me was repelling anyone who happened into my orbit.
* * *
At dinner, I learned why she had been reticent earlier to affirm we’d be ok. She didn’t need to speak a word. The reason was readily apparent when I saw her dressed in her own Santa suit.
“I didn’t know if it would happen. That’s why I couldn’t promise, but I suppose I don’t need to explain what I did. The point is, everything worked out. I’m like you now. I’ve been properly punished for my own version of the same crime,” and she looked at me with eyes of coal through her blanched white beard.
"But are you actually guilty? Do you know?" I flicked the parmesan shaker on our table without aim. Why'd I do that? I thought this after I flicked it.
“Yes, very much the same as what you say happened to you. I was given the same choice you were, by the police. Officer Robertson was the police officer’s name. He told me he’d recently had to come to terms with reality in certain respects and was again ready to do his duty in upholding the law. That is, as he understood that duty to be and that law to be, which he said both were changing all the time. Apparently it’s quite a rush to keep up with everything. He does so out of moral obligation and because he gets paid to at least try,” She said, and there was such an even quality to every word she spoke, like lines fed to her from a script. Of course if we were to be together we’d both need to suffer the same punishment for essentially the same crime. It did make sense, when you stretched it around in your mind for a while.
We didn’t have much time to reflect on that because our pizza had arrived, looking fresh and hot from the oven. We paused to contemplate our own mortality before digging in, as was typical at Pizza-Face Diner. A lot of people cried while they ate, or prayed, or revealed to the owner, Jeremiah, the terrible acts they’d committed in their lifetime. He was very good at nodding solemnly, and not unlike a priest in confessional, managing to absolve them somehow.
“I would ask if you had anything you needed to confess, about the taste of the pizza or otherwise, but I can already see that you do. Hit separate children at separate times in your respective vehicles and were both given a single choice for punishment? How is the pizza, though?” Jeremiah had said, stopping by our table in his typical bouncy fashion.
It was then that he recognized me through my beard, “Jason, Jason is that you? Pardon me, but I did not realize. Though you do make a fine St. Nick. It’s been awhile since your last eating, son. How are you?” Then, as though noticing for the first time I was not alone, as usual, he added, “And who is this you’re with?” Jeremiah was a gregarious ball-of-dough of a man, with a large scalp and a weak jaw that was usually hidden beneath a beard, a real beard, black but dimming in brilliance with each passing year. Almost as though he were anticipating my changed appearance, he’d recently shaved it off entirely. I introduced Elizabeth to him. He nodded, and gave me a wink.
We told Jeremiah the pizza was good. We told him the dough he used was particularly warm and generously dense this evening. “I’ve never told anyone this before,” he said, “But I was brought to selling pizzas with faces in them, emerging from them. I had the idea to start a restaurant many years ago now and what I’m telling you is, even after I’d purchased it, the lease to this storefront, I did not know what to do. I did not know what food I should make and sell. I spent many nights in my office in the back considering options. I’d previously worked as a mason, so I imagined a food that was in essence a brick in shape and texture, if not consistency, but also tasty. I tried many different versions of the food brick, only to find they were delicious to me and me alone. The faces of my wife and other voluntary tasters are fastened in my mind’s eye, dripping with complete aversion to whichever unsavory brick I had made for them and bid them to eat.
“Then one especially late night, after many cups of coffee, I retreated to the lavatory for relief. I needed to start selling something soon or risk foreclosure, my loans were drying up, my savings were drying up, everyone I knew—most assuredly my wife, though she’d never have admitted it—was beginning to lose faith in me. And that is when, touched by something I cannot believe to be anything less than divinity, I realized that a tile in the bathroom was not what it seemed. It was not simply a tile, it was the perfect visage of a modern day Kilroy, pressing itself from the wall. If you look closely into the strange rosy coloring of the ceramic tile, you will see in its celestial midst the figure of which I speak. And then I thought about pizza for reasons I’m not sure of, and I imagined what it would be like not to be forever trapped in a wall—like the face, a face which continues to push further and further in my mind’s eye and perhaps in literal fact from the bathroom tile every day—but trapped in a pizza, and then eaten. You could say in that respect all of the pizzas we serve are the metaphorical embodiment of this fear I’d realized so many years ago and decided to make my living from.”
Jeremiah was probably not lying to us, though I had been in the bathroom of the Pizza-Face Diner many times and come away with no such impression of a protruding face in the tile wall above the urinals. It is possible I wasn’t looking hard enough, or the right way. But in all likelihood, it was much more a vision he didn’t share with anyone else.
Enviable.
If I’d had a vision it was not unique to me, as clearly so too had Elizabeth. The boy each of us saw flung in front of our respective vehicles could have been the very same boy, too, for all we knew. It could have been a plot against us both, as well as anyone else who’d found themselves in similar circumstances.
It being a night of revelations, a forlorn Jeremiah launched into another little speech, “And here is my boy in this picture I wanted to share with you both, the boy who was going to inherit all of this, all of my restaurant, when I finally decided to retire. Anthony, the boy’s name was Anthony. He’s dead now, hit with my very own car, like he was just tossed in front of it. I murdered my own boy. The police said it was an accident, though, and they took my boy away quickly, leaving me with my guilt and nothing more. The people at the morgue told me we’d need a closed casket for the funeral service, the undertaker agreed. I never got to say goodbye to my boy, and I never got to give him this that I’d made for him.” Jeremiah raised and spread his arms, gesturing at the whole of the restaurant.
Considering that Jeremiah had experienced a phenomenon eerily similar to the one that Elizabeth and I had experienced, and looking at the figure of the boy in the photograph he shared with us, I knew this couldn’t be a coincidence. I was certain I was staring at a photograph of the boy who had collided with my automobile.
“Could I borrow this photo in order to reproduce and disseminate it widely?” I inquired with an odd sort of eagerness that I realized could be off-putting. I knew it was unlikely that Jeremiah would submit to my request, no matter how artfully I entreated him to do so. He was unlikely to be willing to part with what might be the only photograph he had of his deceased child.
“Sure, why not? I’d like it back at some point, but here, take it,” he said, handing over the photograph and not asking a single question regarding why I wanted it.
My thought was I would post copies of the boy’s photograph around town, hoping to draw attention to him, possibly smoking the child out and, in its turn, teaching everyone a thing or two about the way our judicial system really worked.
I announced my intentions after Jeremiah had left, while both Elizabeth and I were digging into the cheesy face at the center of our pizza slices. “It’s a good thing the dough is so fresh. This would be a lot harder to eat if it weren’t,” Elizabeth said as she tore through her slice with a knife and a fork. She continued, “Sometimes when I’m eating something exotic or just plain weird I like to imagine, just for a second, that whatever it looks like on the plate is how it looked in life, even if it never lived. For instance, I like to imagine right now that this pizza face was attached to a pizza body and that this being once met me in a ballroom where I wore a comfortably fitted dress, red like a rose, and it wore clothing that was, in the case of the pizza-bodied being, wet with hot oils from its cheesy pores. I like to think that we waltzed there to a song by Chopin, “The Waltz of the Pizza-Face Diner” perhaps, until I was warm with oils, too, or whatever the case may be, my dress weighed down with the liquid discharge of the meal. You see how I’m thinking particularly of pizza oils in this case, for obvious reasons?”
“That sounds unpleasant, but I had an idea I would like to discuss with you,” I attempted to say, though Elizabeth was not finished explaining her own thought and ignored me, because really I had been interrupting.
“I look at my food differently, and I realize this, in its way, must be the sensation those who abstain from eating meat or animal byproduct experience. I lose my appetite readily after that. It’s really hard to take in nutrients when you can imagine dancing with your meal,” she said and seemed to be lost in a daydream about the waltz.
“Yes, but I had an idea. You might have been wondering why I insisted on taking this photograph from Jeremiah,” I tapped a finger on the photograph of his boy, laid flat on the table.
Which photo?” she said. “And who is it of, again?”
“The boy, Jeremiah’s boy, ‘Anthony’ he said was his name. The very boy I hit with my car. Did you hit this boy with your car or did you hit another boy?” I pushed the picture to her side of the table with my index finger.
“I want to say ‘yes’, but the image I have in my mind is of a boy much younger than this one, whose features were hidden by the hood of a parka and who seemed to be tossed in front of my car with what felt like some purpose, probably a nefarious purpose. But I'd really like to talk about us. What do we mean to each other, particularly now that we share the same struggle?"
I saw that she saw things as I did, yet there was a disconnect regarding their import. "Yes, the boy was tossed and this was that boy. I am sure it is the same one I hit, and you must have heard Jeremiah explain to us how his boy, Anthony, had been killed by his automobile, while he was behind the wheel. Surely you'd agree that's what must have precipitated everything else, all this business with boys being tossed in front of cars."
She frowned. "I was not really listening to Jeremiah. Weightier things like our possible coupling and what that might mean to me in the long term, along with the upcoming mayoral election, were running through my mind while he spoke. I was also thinking about the bubbling cheese of pizzas, how the burnt splotches that blemish them sometimes look to me like a horrible rash or some other, more pernicious disease of the skin. I feel a sense of fleeting horror at this thought. It gets me down a new road of thinking, a road of the vestigial, you see? I think about how visceral fear of sickness is inherited by us from our progenitors, the long line of them. Evolution in that way can be clearly seen. We learn from our relatives’ mistakes. An internal form of communication. In that way, people really do live forever—through their fears, at the very least.”
“You really weren’t listening? After we eat, shall we have posters made of this boy and place them around the city, inviting everyone who has shared our fate to discuss the situation at my apartment, or if there’s not enough room, we could rent out a small auditorium and discuss the situation there?” I took a sip of water and then cleared my throat.
There was silence for a good three-to-five seconds before Elizabeth replied. Glancing outside, she said, “It’s snowing really hard out there. How do you feel about snow?” Before I could think to answer she turned her head looked down at the table and said, “I’m willing to give your plan a shot. I’m truly willing to try. I hope you are, too,” she said, staring out into the blizzard that must have swept into the city sometime after we arrived at the Pizza-Face Diner. I hadn’t noticed the snowfall until then, but I got the impression she’d probably been aware of it the whole time.
I envied her awareness of the snow.
* * *
We left the Pizza-Face Diner to go to a place called Just Brochures that no longer sold just brochures. We designed a bulletin at the computers in the Brochure Builder Station, “where brochures aren’t made; they’re born.”
“This date is turning into something I could never have predicted,” Elizabeth said to me, eyes tumid with some sort of meaning. I decided she was talking about our quest to learn the truth of the boy who was tossed in front of our respective cars, and if he really were tossed in front of cars, then by whom? And why? I typed many of these ideas to our bulletin. I centered the scanned image of the boy in the very middle of the bulletin, enhanced to such an extent that no one could doubt if they’d ever crossed paths with this Anthony while driving in their cars, especially if they’d also hit him.
At the checkout register, the cashier accepted our payment and was sure to pepper her speech with the words “brochure” and “just.” For example, when we first stepped toward her she said, “Thanks for just shopping at Just Brochures. I hope you just found all your brochure and brochure-related needs and they were met to your satisfaction?”
“We did,” I said, impolitely but eager for us to be on our way. I remembered my manners, grinned weakly, and added, “Thanks.”
“Are you brosure?” the cashier said sternly, interrogatively. “I can’t interest you in anything more brochure-related? You don’t have many brochures in your order, here. I count no more than seventeen brochure-related items to your order.”
“There aren’t any brochure-related items in our order, only bulletins and a few placards. Do you know what a brochure is?” Elizabeth said, squinting at the cashier.
“Yes, I do. We sell them. Thank you,” the cashier said, her expression giving us the impression she must have come in contact with some form of stimulant in the last half hour or so. “That’s a cool-looking kid in that photo on your brochure.”
Elizabeth lunged at the cashier, her hands tugging at the woman’s collar, pulling the woman toward her. “It’s not a brochure,” she said through gritted teeth.
Through puckered lips and throat constricted by Elizabeth’s grip, the cashier was able to squeak, “We’re not supposed to call the stuff we sell here anything but brochures. It’s corporate policy. You’re the fifth person to do this to me today. If you don’t let me go, my supervisor’s going to come over here and if you tell him what I said I’ll probably be fired.”
Elizabeth released the woman, but she wasn’t entirely satisfied with her explanation. To be fair to Elizabeth there was something dishonest about the place and everyone in it. I got to thinking the cashier was no doubt a pawn in it all, but she may have known more than she was letting on, may have had more of a role in the operation and was just trying to save her own skin. People relied on other people to be sympathetic. It was one of humankind’s most important survival mechanisms.
I sensed that Elizabeth was about to verbally castigate the cashier and so I moved toward the exit, hoping she’d follow.
“Have a wonderful brochure day with the many brochures you’ve paid for, and have a brochurrific day,” the cashier hollered after us. Elizabeth, to her credit, did not acknowledge the gesture.
It was still snowing outside. There must have been at least six accumulated inches now. Plows were double-timing it down the main roads, bits of salt landing in their wake.
When snow reaches a certain height it begins to feel as though it will soon absorb you, take you and make you a part of its frozen essence. This, I think, is why people hurry even more through snow storms than other kinds of inclement weather. I have no proof of this other than what amounts to a “very strong feeling.”
Elizabeth thought it was at least mildly foolish to be placing placards and bulletins around the city in the midst of heavy winter. Why not start a website featuring the image of the boy? Why not, indeed. I hadn’t thought of that. The internet, a way to share information with the masses in the blink of an eye, a way to surf the web, to travel the information highway, to meet the rest of the world at the touch of your fingertips. I didn’t own a computer, and it’s fair to say all I really know about the internet could be said in cliches dating back to the mid-nineties. As unlikely as it sounds, the truth was, I asked my uncle, a software engineer, to search chat rooms for people he thought I might be romantically interested in. He used Craig’s List instead and became pen pals with Elizabeth for me, whose correspondence he would print and physically deliver to me and I would hand-write responses that he would then electronically transcribe. He finally said he would no longer assist me with this, as some extraordinarily outmoded middleman, and that’s when I decided it was time to meet Elizabeth in person.
Perhaps I would see about this computing option, by way of my uncle. I disregarded it at that time with the thought I would politely bring it up again, giving due credit to Elizabeth, later when It would feel less embarrassing that I hadn’t considered the option in the first place.
And there we were, in person, outside, with our expensive placards and bulletins (no, Just Brochures is not affordable by any stretch—although the quality of their materials is average to below average). Neither form of notice was likely to last long in these brutal weather conditions. Elizabeth and I taped or nailed our notices to the lampposts and electric poles that people were likely to come across.
A man walking in the dark, out of the light of the lampposts, for instance, seemed to be approaching us. I imagined he was going to ask us for a light, or the time, or directions, something bland and traditional. He might also have wished us physical harm, or at least wished to make our valuables his own. In any case, he did approach us. He did ask a question. He wanted to know who we were voting for in the upcoming mayoral elections. We both said we were undecided, though Elizabeth voiced skepticism regarding the policies of the incumbent.
“He’s a good mayor, the incumbent,” the man said. “Let me tell you, I should know. I’m the mayor, the mayor is me. He’s a good fella. Frank ‘The Ram’ Mertington, Mayor Mertington. That’s me. Vote Mertington. Vote for The Ram! I’m a good mayor and a helluva guy and a lot like a ram in some ways. I’m completely comfortable talking to you right now, totally at ease. This is normal and natural for me.”
“Why are you out in the snowstorm like this?” Elizabeth asked.
“That’s what you do when there’s an election coming up, you get out and you press flesh from beneath layers of fabric and other material.”
“I wouldn’t think there’d be too many people, gloves or no gloves, to shake hands with out here, though,” I said.
“Well I found you two, and that’s something. I’m the mayor. I want to know about your problems. I want to best represent you at city hall. There’s no other good reason to be mayor but the ones I mentioned. So do me a favor, tell me your problems?”
I pointed up at the bulletin we’d just attached to a lamppost. “See that? That’s our problem.”
Mayor Mertington looked up at the bulletin, appraising the picture of Anthony and what it all meant.
“You son of a bitch,” the mayor muttered to himself. He turned toward me and screamed, “You know, no one—no one—can make you feel inferior without your consent! You know that! You know that! Don’t you know that?”
He began ramming me with his head, apparently this was among those things that made him like a ram in some ways. I slipped in a snowdrift and tumbled backward into a parked car. He started kicking me while I was on the ground and didn’t stop until Elizabeth beat him back with a placard. She’d gotten him good in the face with the placard, so much so he was suddenly laughing up blood, apparently pleased with the way he’d been bested, though still somehow remaining angry.
“I should have known you two, with your beards, you’d want to know why? Why you have been punished with a Santa suit? I’ll tell you exactly why. I know exactly why. And then I don’t want you whining about how life’s unfair. We know it’s unfair and we don’t need you whining. Some people get to be mayors and some people are forced to take their punishment in one form or another, say a Santa suit the whole year round or more.”
He wasn’t making sense, or he was making some sense, but he wasn’t touching on what I was concerned with, so I interrupted him. “That’s not what I want to know. I don’t care about the suit. I care about the boy. Was the boy purposely thrown in front of me? Was the boy the same boy that was thrown in front of her? In front of everyone? Tell me.”
“Ah, I know that answer, too—but I won’t tell. I don’t have to. I’ve got something you want. Vote for me and I’ll be sure to let you know the whole story, if there is one. Which there may not be. Just vote for a ram in the next election, and I don’t mean write in ‘ram’ on the ballot, obviously. I mean, vote for me.”
The mayor’s handlers sped up to us in a snow plow on the street, which made it seem like they’d never been far away and even gave the impression that the mayor and his handlers planned our encounter as a means of securing votes. Impossible, certainly, but not feeling totally impossible in that moment. As I recall the events of that evening, I’m still left wondering if the mayor could have had more of a hand in what transpired than is generally considered within the realm of what human beings, even powerful human beings, are able to do.
Mayor “The Ram” Mertington looked like a raccoon, with those dark concentric circles around his eyes. I didn’t trust raccoons and I didn’t trust Mertington. To be fair, his administration had been known for its wild and flamboyant corruption. Elizabeth and I decided to learn more about him considering he was exploiting our curiosity shamelessly, cynically, for votes. I certainly had not forgotten the horrendous beating he’d meted. My torso was still sore from his kicks and his ramming me in the ribs, like a ram.
* * *
We were back at Coffees-a-Million and Elizabeth was showing me how to use the internet. She was a bit confused by my lack of knowledge of the subject, but she seemed to find ways of reconciling the incongruity in her own mind.
The Coffees-a-Million graveyard shift seemed less vigorous than their daytime counterparts, though occasionally a giant hand would slap from nowhere, almost gently, almost soothingly, as though caressing, and then be gone like that. I don’t know if they were languid from lack of sleep or merely impartial about the work of the place, and as a result, more mechanical in the performance of their duties.
“It’s really interesting the kinds of things you can learn with just your fingertips and a computer screen and an internet connection of some varying level of speed. This is all available to the public here, huh?” I said, knowing I was taking a risk by admitting a great deal of ignorance regarding all things America Online. She certainly looked put off by my questions, scrutinizing them internally and raising all kinds of questions of her own, which she was keeping to herself, for now.
“The internet is so much faster than it was when modems had dial up internet connections and life was so simple and challenging.” I figured if I kept talking I might be able to lessen her suspicions, but it seemed all my words really did was heighten them further.
“I like the internet. I’ve met so many interesting people. You were one of those interesting people. You said so many interesting things. You sounded like a man of convictions, and depth, and all sorts of things I haven’t seen at all this evening, despite your monomaniacal concern with whether the boy you hit with your car was put there on purpose or it was a random and single specific instance of violence, that you perpetrated due to your own actions and no one else’s interference.”
“Yes, well, when I have gone on the internet—to talk to you basically exclusively—I’ve found the words I didn’t know I was able to speak, or something. Obviously what I’m saying to you right now would be much more eloquent if I were typing it to you on the internet.”
“Why don’t you? Write what you’re meaning to say. I want to know for a certainty that those words you wrote with such feeling were actually your words. If I can see that then maybe I’ll have an easier time understanding why you’re so concerned about this conspiracy that obsesses you.”
“You want me to prove that I was the one who wrote to you? You’re questioning that on our first date?” I was pushing it, but I felt justified. My whole life, really. The decisions I made were always justifiable.
“It should be easy. You should have no trouble doing it and this is not some ridiculous request. How do I even know you’re who you claim to be? I’ve already committed so much to you, over one date, I’d say this is the least you could do to demonstrate that same commitment.
I was so mad I started to type her something, something that would knock her socks off (I even used that phrase, about how her socks would be).
I suppose I wished I’d written more often. It would have been easier to express the thoughts that seemed so easy to articulate in my own mind.
I stared at the words on the monitor, noticing how many times I’d written I was sure she’d have her socks knocked off. Fifteen times, I repeated the phrase. I’d mostly repeated that phrase, actually. I think I said something about how trustworthy I was, too, figuring my uncle would have emphasized that about me. I had a hard time thinking of what other good qualities about me he might have cited, although coming from him, they’d have all been works of fiction. My uncle was not my biggest fan, and actually it’s hard to believe he was willing to do all he had done for me without some ulterior motive. This might have been it, the opportunity to see me fail profoundly in this relationship as my fraudulent behavior was exposed. I could have been anyone to Elizabeth, and I hadn’t a single clue who she believed me to be.
I moved over to let her see what I’d written, quietly brooding over my cup of coffee while she read. She stood moments after she’d finished and in what felt like one singular, swift motion grabbed the Coffees-A-Million arm from an employee gently nudging a patron who’d been putting packets of Silk into her coffee, and proceeded to strike my coffee from my hand and into a portrait on the wall nearest the restrooms, startling a man exiting the lavatory and spraying him with its ceramic shards.
“Now look what you did,” I said with a cliched kind of obvious indignity.
“The only thing that was at all reminiscent of the notes you’d written me was your repeated use of the phrase ‘knock your socks off’. Otherwise none of the erudition, charm, wit, any of it, was present. You’re an imposter.”
“You can’t know that, you can’t know how long it normally takes me to crafts my various missives,” I just kept on lying. It seemed like the thing to do.
“I can’t believe I let myself get taken in with all this. I can’t believe I’m wearing a Santa suit because of this. Who really wrote your emails?” Her Santa beard swung wildly as she shouted at me.
“I wrote them, but my uncle transcribed them to the internet. And he may have editorialized a little bit, in his various transcriptions. But I guarantee if your socks were knocked off, it was because of me. I was that inner substance.”
She wrenched the handle from the listless employee and hit me in the face with the Coffees-A-Million hand. Then she stormed out the door, although not before wrenching her laptop from the table, its electrical cord pulled from the outlet and whipping me in the face for one final embarrassment.
I decided I wouldn’t follow Elizabeth out into the cold, cold night. I had a lot of meditating about the mayor to do. I hated that our relationship had fallen on hard times, but I had this hope our problems could be mended, all our issues, before too much time passed. I knew she’d be impressed if I got to the bottom of the business with the boy, even though she was never quite as invested in solving the mystery as I was. She definitely seemed to think it was unhealthy, my pursuit of this end. Perhaps it was. Perhaps solving all my problems was somehow bad for me, solving her problems, too. I needed to vote for the mayor, unfortunately. It was the easiest way for me to get what I wanted.
And so ended what had been a very long day.
***
The next day was Election Day, and I made the decision to vote Mertington, despite his many flaws.
I decided voting for him meant more than just finding out about the conspiracy against me and whether there was significance to the boy's seeming appearance and reappearance in so many places. Was the boy a boy made of clay and by being tossed in front of cars was he meant to entrap people in Santa suits for some grand but awful purpose?
The voting booth was cold to the touch. I'd inserted my card and selected the mayor as my choice. The card popped out of the voting machine and I handed it to an awaiting attendant. An attendant who'd told me I'd "done it," should be "very proud," and gave me a slip of paper certifying my participation. It looked like the city had spent a lot of money on these certifications. They had gilded edges and appeared to be fancily handwritten with a calligraphy pen.
The attendant told me to go to the "Applause Room" which sounded strange and concerned me.
The Applause Room was exactly what it sounded like, a room—or smallish gymnasium—where people applauded virtually anything with only the slightest provocation. Mertington was there, basking in their applause. He feigned ramming me but actually collided fairly hard in my tender rib cage and I buckled from the pain.
"You did it! Yes you!" The mayor shouted, though he didn't seem to recognize me.
"I voted for you, all right? So will you finally tell me what I wanted to know?" I liked the applause but I wasn't about to let it distract me.
"Come again? Oh right! You were the guy putting those signs up on the street. I recognize you now," the mayor said, and I knew he had been only pretending not to know who I was, what I was really there for. I mean, I was happy to be told I’d done a great job, actually.
And though I recognized the mayor as the dirtbag he was, I really couldn't deny the pleasure I felt because of his responding to my presence so favorably. It was like the one time my father said I'd done right by him, the time he had asked me to lie when the police came to our door and asked if I knew where my father was. I'd been instructed to say I hadn't seen him in months. I did. The cops kept warning me about how dangerous a man he was, that he was sure to kill again, there was no reason to think he would “spare me just ‘cause I was his kid.” I still didn't give him up. And that night while I lay bleeding profusely on the kitchen floor, my dad having thanked me but saying "no witnesses," I couldn't get over how good it had felt to have won his praise, finally. I was saved by a neighbor, but I beamed with pride at the feeling of being my father's son. He died in a gunfight with the authorities a few weeks later, but not before killing again, which I do regret that part.
"The truth is, my man, that you hit a boy, that boy died and you're now facing your punishment, but at least you got to exercise your right to vote!" Before I could utter a meaningful syllable, the mayor's handlers moved me to a seat among the rest of the massive audience, who clapped and audibly cheered for me the whole way there, absorbing me quickly.
I felt great, like I'd done something really good for the second time in my life.
And I clapped for the next person that walked in, who was, I should not have been surprised, my dear Elizabeth. I would have recognized her Santa suit anywhere. She was angry at first but slowly warmed to the mayor. She'd wanted answers like me and he gave them to her, even if they weren't exactly what she'd probably wanted to hear. She left him smiling like I had, his handlers leading her to a seat near mine. She refused eye contact with me, but I could tell she was happy by the way she clapped for the next person who entered the Applause Room.
