Wasteland

Shortlist winner nominee for the Adelaide Literary Award 2019 - Best Short Story.

First published in Adelaide Literary Award Anthology 2019, SHORT STORIES, Volume One and Adelaide Literary Magazine No. 34, March 2020. Print only. Available through Amazon.

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Snippets of Java code flitted between Doug’s ears blocking the babble around Linda’s work table: Georgia’s high-pitched entreaties and propositions, Rama and Shawn’s murmurs, Linda’s interjections. Doug glanced at the time on his phone—almost the half hour, almost time for the meeting to end.

Linda’s alto intruded, “Doug, do you have an opinion on this?”

He didn’t but experience and sensitivity training told him one must be rendered. He nudged the bridge of his glasses. What was the point under discussion? Ah, yes, the calendar service needed a default sound for non-urgent notifications. Four sets of eyes engaged his.

“Something unobtrusive,” he said.

The eyes remained engaged.

“But which gets the user’s attention.”

The eyes refused to let up.

“Like a tick.” Doug tapped a fingernail on the table.

Nods and murmurs. Georgia pushed keys on her laptop. “Let’s pencil that in. Okay, now I’d like to talk about the test schedule.”

Linda put up a hand. “No. Enough for today.” As Rama and Shawn escaped to the hallway, Doug unbent his knees and lifted his thin frame. Georgia gathered her laptop, twenty pages of printout, her notepad, phone, and two pens.

“Doug, I need you a minute,” said Linda. She waited for Georgia’s smile and exit before turning to Doug, her off-white blouse straining against its buttons. “How long you need to code this thing?”

Doug lifted his eyes to Linda’s face. “What level of effort?”

“Minimal.”

“Six weeks. But—it won’t meet Georgia’s exacting standards.”

Linda dropped into her chair and sighed. Doug followed her gaze to the upper right corner of the whiteboard on the far wall. Tomorrow was Friday, layoff day, not every Friday, fifteen weeks since the last, but always a Friday. Doug said, “Is there one coming?”

“That’s what I hear from upstairs.” From Danny D’Amato no doubt. Danny used to work with them in engineering.

“How bad?”

Linda swung toward Doug legs askew. Doug directed his vision to the whiteboard, wiped and ready for Linda’s ancillary duty as grapevine central. On a layoff day, calls and emails filtered into her office and she posted the casualties in black markup. As official as company communication on the matter got. Employees below upper management would drift in and out to monitor the bloodletting.

“A dozen,” Linda said. “More or less.”

“Know who?”

“A few ideas.”

Doug used to think he was immune with twenty-one years and a top-bracket pay grade. But he’d come to realize not only did he lack immunity but had entered the target zone, seniority these days more of a millstone than an asset. He wanted to ask where his head lay in relation to the chopping block, but knew Linda had said as much as she would.

Following a layoff, the company hired back, but at the low end, out of college or out of country, India and China favored. To avoid age discrimination lawsuits, layoffs crossed all demographics; but hiring back didn’t. “I still say the money they save is not worth the dilution of talent.”

Linda snorted. “We need talent? Look at what we’re building.”

Doug had no rejoinder. He thought about the meeting that had just ended. Their product: yet another calendar service with maybe one bell and two whistles not seen before. Not heavy stuff, not like the early years of meticulous research and serious development, their products today appendages of what already cluttered the marketplace.

“Anyhow,” said Linda. She extended a hand toward the whiteboard. “Drop in tomorrow. If you hear anything yourself, you can contribute.”

Oh, oh, thought Doug.

Linda peered and said, “What’s the matter?”

“A scheduling issue. My father-in-law’s in hospice.”

“Sorry to hear that.”

“If he dies tonight, I might have to take tomorrow off.”

“Jesus, Doug, shouldn’t you be there right now?”

“There’s no point. He’s unconscious.”

Linda’s wordless, outstretched lips clued Doug that he’d flunked another sensitivity test. But couldn’t she, a product manager, understand the logic? That the man had passed from sentience, and there was no point visiting an inert body. And Doug had liked his father-in-law. A different style, blue collar, old-time union, worked in the GM plant his entire life, over-indulgent, overweight, but smart with cars. Many a weekend he and Doug had gone under the hood together.

Doug’s thoughts returned to the scheduling issue. “What if somebody’s getting laid off and they’re not here on Friday?”

“You know, if my son ever tells me he wants to be an engineer, I’ll slap him.”

“Very funny, Linda.”

“That’s not a joke. As for your inquiry, they’ll find you wherever you are and serve you.”

#

Doug drove a ten-year-old Audi A4 in mint condition. He did his own maintenance. His father-in-law used to help. He drove the middle lane with cruise control set two miles over the limit and the sound system oscillating the mountain scene from an old rock opera. “I lift my eyes—to the splatter of rain.” Drums and guitars, a riff of keyboard. “I spread my arms—to wind and pain.”

Doug tapped the steering wheel and sang along. “Why doesn’t the re-a-a-a-lity of life,” boom, boom, “fe-e-e-el like the re-a-a-a-lity of life?”

This wasn’t the soundtrack but a studio make-over. Danny D’Amato had seen the rock opera live in New York City and sneered at the studio version, but Doug liked it. Danny and Doug used to talk about such things in the old days when Danny worked downstairs. No more now that he had a perch with the vice-presidents and directors.

Doug dropped his right hand into his lap and gave a rub. He thought of the power of genital gratification, how it led men to lunacies like leering and wanking and worse, defying reason. He thought of the idiocy of wetting his pants over Linda, his colleague, unapproachable in the flesh. Then he thought of standing behind her, wrapping his arms, cupping his hands, pressing his phallus.

“Why doesn’t the re-a-a-a-lity—”

Doug nosed the Audi alongside his wife’s Toyota Highlander. The Highlander pointed out the driveway, and Mim stood by the driver’s door. She said, “I’m going back to hospice. Eric’s in his room.”

Oh, oh, another scheduling conflict. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, Doug jogged after work. As he opened the car door, dropped his feet, and unbundled his body, his mind rummaged past couples counseling sessions for an empathic response that might segue to logical argument.

“Mim,” he said, “I know how important it is for you to be there.” Good start. He shifted weight to his left leg, then his right. “Eric should be okay alone for forty minutes. I mean, he’s twelve.”

Mim lifted her face to the sky. “Go for your run,” she said. “I’ll wait.”

Doug raised his hands. “I mean—”

“Go. But could you get started, like, right now?”

Doug turned toward the house.

“Wait. One other thing.”

Doug turned back toward Mim.

“You have to have a talk with Eric.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because it’s disgusting what he’s doing.”

Doug’s heart thumped.

Mim said, “Haven’t you noticed? Biting and biting those fingernails. They’re terrible.”

Doug hastened through the front door, climbed stairs two at a time, and passed Eric’s closed door. Fingernails. He continued to the master bedroom, undid shoes and socks, dropped his Dockers, dropped his Hanes. He slipped off his button-down casual and checked his profile in the full-length mirror on the inside of the bedroom door. Thin in the chest and shoulders with long legs but heavy thighs. Brown hair fading at the forehead, fading top rear. Horn-rimmed glasses with progressive lenses.

Downstairs, outside, Doug tightened his Adidas and lifted a left hand. “Thirty-five minutes.”

Mim smiled. On this she could count, Doug knew. Thirty-five minutes meant two thousand one hundred seconds, no more, no less.

Doug dreamed of fleetness, of knees lifted, quadriceps parallel to the ground, feet bouncing on their balls, and forearms swinging in perfect synchronicity. But manifestation saw a stodgy, pigeon-toed ramble with forearms that flapped. Still, Doug managed seven-minute miles, better than most modern humans. Today he trotted his short circuit, his five-miler. He checked his watch at Fourth and Maple—a hundred and nineteen seconds, two seconds off. He adjusted his gait and felt better, felt on, felt the rhythm. “Oh, why doesn’t the re-a-a-a-lity of life,” he sang. At Fourth and Oak, Doug made a second time check. Spot on.

#

Next morning, Doug’s eyes opened at zero six thirty-nine. No Mim. He threw his legs from their bed and strode to the master toilet. From the bedroom, an incoming text chimed. Doug finished his pee, washed his hands, and checked the message: dad still the same staying with mom. Doug summoned empathy and applied thumbs to keypad: tell mom am thinking of her.

Downstairs Doug popped a pod of breakfast blend in the Keurig and four Eggo buttermilk waffles in the toaster. Eric, a flounce of brown hanging over oval, black-rimmed glasses, slipped into the kitchen, took a stool at the bar, and said, “Is it true what they say about grandpa’s dying, that it’s before his time?”

“Yes,” said Doug. “Six years and eight months.”

“Why?”

“Smoking and excessive use of alcohol. And corpulence.” The waffles jumped from the toaster. Eric leaned his forehead into his right hand.

Doug said, “It’s okay, Eric. I know, it’s sad.”

Eric dropped his hand and lifted his head. “I was thinking of something else.” His eyes engaged Doug’s through their two sets of lenses. “Is it really impossible to square the circle?”

Doug hesitated. Coming of age, always ticklish. “It is.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because pi’s transcendental.” Doug finished spreading butter on the waffles and pushed a plate toward his son.

Eric said, “I’m really struggling with that concept.”

“Orange juice or cranberry?”

“Orange. Half a glass.”

Doug placed glasses of juice, a small jug of Canadian maple syrup, and his coffee on the counter. He took the stool next to Eric and said, “Okay, you understand pixels in digital imaging, right? Like little squares.”

“Uh huh.”

“But you can draw a circle with them? And it looks like a circle.”

“As long as the resolution is good,” said Eric. “Say twelve eighty by eight hundred.”

“But if you magnify the screen or look at it in an icon editor, you see it’s not perfect. It’s jagged. Now suppose you keep increasing the resolution, can you ever make those jagged lines go away?”

“Okay, I see that. You’ll never get to a perfect circle.” Eric chewed on a piece of waffle and swallowed. “But why is it?”

“Because the pixels are still square no matter how small—”

“Right. I get the idea of the pixels getting smaller and smaller. It’s like what Archimedes did inscribing polygons in circles.”

“Good observation,” said Doug. “So it sounds like you’ve got it.”

“No, no, Dad. Why? Why is it we can’t go all the way to a smooth circle? Why do numbers have to be transcendental? It doesn’t fit in with—” Eric waved his fork. “—with the world.”

“Ah. Semantics.” Doug took a sip of coffee. He’d thought around this issue all his life, but how to squeeze it into a few pubescent words. “Okay, here’s my take. We like to think what’s in our head is real. But it’s only what’s in our head.”

“But it’s real inside our head,” said Eric. “Right?”

Doug raised a finger. “If we see a tree, the tree in our head is not the tree itself.”

“But it’s the tree as we know it.”

“Okay, let’s try something else. Let’s try numbers. We see five sticks. The sticks are real. We see five rocks. The rocks are real. But is the five real?”

“Well,” said Eric, “you can do a lot with five without the sticks and rocks.”

“You can. That’s why it’s insidious. It’s so powerful what we can do in our heads, we think it’s real.”

“But it’s not?”

“It’s not. In my opinion. It just helps get us closer.”

“That’s kind of deep.”

“You’re young,” said Doug. “You’ve got a lifetime to ponder it.”

Doug moved the dishes to the sink and turned to his son. “There’s something I’ve got to talk to you about.”

Eric dropped off his stool. “Yeah, Dad.”

Doug’s eyes brushed Eric’s nails. Gnawed to the quick.

“What is it?”

“Well, this summer, you want to do some hut-to-hut in the White Mountains, just the two of us?”

“You mean, like walking all day and sleeping in bunks?”

“Something like that. Fun.”

“I’ll think about it.”

#

Next day, Doug and Linda stood side by side inspecting her whiteboard. To Doug’s left, at Linda’s work table, sat Georgia. She chewed the left side of her lower lip and ran a hand through her hair. Her name appeared fourth on the list of ten.

Doug shifted his weight from left leg to right, and back. “This is so unfair,” he said.

Georgia dropped her head in her arms. Linda brushed by Doug and put an arm over her shoulders. “Look, sweetie, you need references, anything I can help you with, just let me know. This isn’t the end of the world.”

Georgia lifted her head. She pulled her laptop and notebook and printouts toward her, her pens and phone. Linda kept a hand on her shoulder and the other on an arm, and guided her toward the door. She watched Georgia recede down the hall.

Doug said, “I guess that wasn’t a surprise.”

“No, I was pretty sure about Georgia.” Linda looked at her phone. “It’s going on two.” She stared at the whiteboard. “They should all be in by now. But—you haven’t heard any news?”

“Nothing.”

“They need one more big head to get their money’s worth.”

Doug’s phone buzzed. He stepped into the hallway and looked down. Not the company reaching out to his private phone; it was Mim. Doug swiped and put the phone to his ear.

“Dad passed,” she said.

Doug had rehearsed this moment but didn’t want it to sound rehearsed. He took a small breath and held it for a second before responding.

Linda’s eyebrows rose as Doug stepped back into her office. “My father-in-law.”

“Sorry,” said Linda. “Why don’t you get going? I’ll let the others know.”

“No rush,” said Doug. “Mim will be home for Eric.” He looked at Linda’s outstretched lips. “The wake won’t be till tomorrow.”

“Doug, go home right now. Jesus Christ.” Her desk phone buzzed. She picked up the handset and listened, replaced the handset, and walked to the whiteboard.

“Wow,” said Doug as he watched the eleventh name take form. Danny D’Amato. Who would’ve thought?

#

Doug tightened and knotted the laces of his Adidas and set off. His knees rose and the balls of his feet propelled him with the barest grazing of earth. His arms pumped in synchronous perfection, fists forward, elbows back, forward, back. He refused to glance at his watch for fear of jinxing the flow but sensed he was doing six—no, closer to five—five-minute miles, his strides exceeding two meters.

His course flowed uphill on a track of dirt and rock with solid wall on the right and sheer drop-off on the left, a Colorado jeep road, he realized. He’d been to the Colorado Rockies years before, and the roads to the trailheads could be as rough as the trails. Doug skimmed over rocks and potholes, ripples and washouts. His body experienced no strain; no burning lungs, no tearing calves, no drag on his gait. He was close to flying.

The wall on Doug’s right receded to a slope. Ahead appeared a Buddha-like figure in light blue hospital bottoms, his naked belly flopping over the drawstring. He sat cross-legged amidst a pile of beer cans and cigarette packs. Smoke swirled from a filter-tipped ash in his left hand. His right hand tipped a pint of Southern Comfort. Doug sensed recognition and thought, no way, but when the pint came down, there it was, the cherubic face of his deceased father-in-law.

Doug raised his left palm. “Hi, Dad, how’s it going?”

His father-in-law’s mouth broadened. “Doug, my boy,” he said, “good to see you. How’s it going, you ask?” His arms opened like bat wings and his male mammilla jiggled. “Check it out.”

Doug twisted his head to check it out, taking care to maintain stride. His father-in-law leaned forward, his stomach folds compressed like an accordion. “I love it here. I can do whatever the fuck I want.”

Doug stuttered a step and stifled a gasp. In three years of dating and sixteen years of marriage, in all those years, not once had Doug heard his father-in-law drop the F bomb. Doug took a final glance over his shoulder. Wow. People really change when they’re dead.

The road leveled and a copse of aspen appeared and in it a length of flesh. As Doug drew close, he saw that the flesh belonged to Linda in three-quarter profile, breasts sagging, nipples jutting. She turned full frontal with a Cheshire smile, her right hand behind her head, and her left hand entangled in the auburn below her tummy bulge.

Doug raised his left palm. “Hi, Linda. Nice pudenda.”

“Thanks, Doug. You looking for a little get-off?”

Doug shook his head and laughed. “Not anymore. You see, I’m impervious to lust.” Linda pushed out her lips. “It’s true. Impervious.”

Doug looked away and lengthened his stride. “O-o-o-oh,” he sang, “why doesn’t the re-a-a-a-lity of life,” boom, boom, “fe-e-e-el like the re-a-a-a-lity of life?”

That’s so true, thought Doug. Why didn’t the accessible, like Mim and Eric, appear on these jaunts? Instead of the dead and the unapproachable? Where was this vaunted reality?

The sky blackened and rain slapped the trail. Doug inhaled its moisture but didn’t suffer its stings. As if in a cocoon, he cantered cool and dry.

The rain dwindled and a left-leaning sun pushed bleached rays through lingering clouds. The jeep road had given way to a path of rough rock. Doug wasn’t in Colorado anymore but closer to home, the White Mountains of New Hampshire, above tree line, on the Gulfside Trail. Doug recognized the pile of boulders called Mount Adams and knew in twenty minutes he’d be looking left into the abyss of King Ravine. But when the occasion arrived, his downward gaze met a phenomenon of fascination, no doubt resulting from the storm: a cloud inversion cloaked the ravine in frothy white from rim to rim. Above, azure skies. At Doug’s feet, a roiling ocean of lather.

Doug wondered if he could jog upon the upper surface of low-lying clouds. So far, his fleet step had held him above the pits and protrusions of road and trail, so why not condensed vapor? On the next stride, Doug crossed right leg over left and yawed off the trail. He crossed again and lost half a meter of altitude. He crossed a third time and pressed upon heaven’s halo.

He crossed again.