Will VanDenBerg
I met a man while working at a costume shop. We were both seasonal help, hired ahead of Halloween. At an all-staff meeting in early September, we sat on carpeted stairs and listened to our manager go through the hard and fast rules: Show up for your shift, no stealing, no drinking to excess on the clock. Throughout the meeting, the man tapped the tip of his thumb against the broad pad of his palm, a dull, vacant thud that—seated next to him—only I could hear.
A month before we met, one of his doctors gave him a medication that interacted badly with another medication a psychologist had prescribed. During the two week overlap, the man's speech split. It's hard to explain, he told me in the stockroom one day. In one of my hands were four alien masks squished together, my middle and ring fingers threaded through the eye holes. His arms—too long, hair lush, elbows crooked—were overfilled with hats. I'd go to tell someone, I'd like milk in my coffee, and someone else would say it, he told me. It's like there was another voice doing the actual talking, a 1:1 echo—at least for the first week, after which the voices diverged.
He was in his late twenties, too old to be working a job like this. Until the break, he had a bright future in a single-story office building. He wore eggplant v-neck sweaters and pressed his hems. He called his issues a setback, but didn't have so much as a scattershot plan to restore his old life. This tracks—in my experience, men aren't required to imagine the future. On a long shift in early October, he told me points where the other voice had split:
I went to say, I don't believe we'll be able to accommodate that request under our current scope. But the voice said, I don't believe we'll be able to accumulate that request under our cormorant scope.
I went to say, I acknowledge that absence is cause for dismissal. But the voice said, I'm annulling that abeyance, a cause for dimethyl.
I went to say, I should turn around, go home, go to bed. But the voice said, You will follow this road as far as it goes, past Federal, past Sheridan, past Wadsworth, past Kipling, until you see the foothills rising ahead of you (out, out, out) and at this late hour, you will find only one restaurant open, the neon lights inside glowing like a womb, and from there—
It was around this point he was told to go home. His confessions were harming his productivity—there were more hats left to restock, customers unattended to. The next day, he came back focused, dosage adjusted.
From the south facing window of his apartment, you could see in the rectory of the Catholic church on Colfax. One night, I peered down at a priest rubbing tiger balm into his chest, all without removing his cassock. The man's radiator rattled terribly, so I pressed my head beneath his chin and wrapped the comforter tight around my head, trying to muffle the noise. The man slept motionless, wrists crossed, breathing imperceptibly, neither dead nor dying but bearing some proximity. The rattling stopped at dawn.
Back then, I was seriously considering going to seed. I bit through a night guard. If unattended, I would peel skin from the center of my palm until it bled. Back in high school, a classmate called my tic christlike until I flicked a bit of skin at him.
A week later and late at night, we were in the costume store's chipped parking lot, me drinking, him standing stock straight. We'd just finished a restock shift. The parking lot was wet and reflective, but the rain had recently stopped. We were dry, unscathed. My last 48 hours on the medication are missing, he said. I remember going into a fast food restaurant on East Colfax early in the morning, the whole building filled with pink dawn. I was standing in the dining area, not eating, not waiting on my food, just standing. There were two words stuck in my mouth. I was trying to say "superfluous," but the second voice favored "septifluous," a word that means "flowing from eight streams." Neither voice would give way, blocking the exit. I could not speak either one. I resorted to emitting sounds, trying to expel either word by force. Nothing. The pressure smoldered them, formed them into one object, an amalgam which I'd never spoken before and no longer remember. I extended my tongue as far as it would go. I peeled the smoking word off like gum from a shoe.
He looked down at his feet, then up at me. They found me in a field two days later, suffering from hypothermia, he said. The costume store parking lot was nearly dry by this point. He and I were due for another shift in four hours. His face was a window left open, rain coming in. I couldn't see him moving on from this.
One of his collarbones had a deeper hollow than the other. Decades later, and I have not seen another pair as asymmetrical as that.
At the end of the season, they asked a few employees to stay on and work the quiet, unseasonal months. Neither of us were selected. Me? I started fights back then, stole fake mustaches and pirate jewelry that colored my wrists green. He spent his shifts gobsmacked, which didn't lend itself to sales or service.