5. Window Shopping
Window Shopping
A MAN
As if resurfacing from a deep-sea dive, I gasped for breath.
My whole body tingled as my nerves came back to life and blood started pumping through my limbs again.
My eyes adjusted slowly to the darkness. It was night once again. Hadn’t it been day seconds ago?
The cocktail party display appeared to be back in order. I attempted to step down off my pedestal with no luck. My waist, wrists, and ankles pinched as I strained to break free. The muscles in my arms cramped from holding this position against my will.
My will . My will!
So far, I’d only had a lick of freedom, but I wanted a whole, full-tongued taste.
I refused to suffer an entire evening stuck here with no delicious food, no quenching water, and no way out.
“Hello?” I called into the vacuum of silence. “Helllloooo?”
Nobody responded at first.
Then came the jangle of keys and the patter of footsteps.
“I don’t mean to alarm whoever is there, but I’d like to be let down, please.”
The jangling ceased. The footsteps, too. I half convinced myself I’d imagined them both, until a voice broke through the heavy hum of the heating system. “Please don’t be real. Please be my imagination. Please let me go upstairs in peace.”
It was unmistakably Henry’s voice, and if I craned my neck as far as the pole at my back allowed me, I could sort of make out the curtain parting. “I don’t like this,” I said when he stood before me. I wiggled my braced hands, which were growing more uncomfortable in their zip tie shackles.
“I don’t like this !” he shout-whispered, waving a hand at me and nearly knocking over the Christmas tree again in the process.
From the key ring I’d heard moments ago, he flipped open a pocketknife and detached me from my hold. “Have you been pretending to be a mannequin all day?”
“No. At some point, I froze,” I said. One second, I was sitting in a chair in the back room not making a peep, as instructed.
The next, I was fossilized. “It was like sleeping. Sleeping, right? That’s what you call what I did last night.
I lay down and closed my eyes and suddenly there were images on the insides of my eyelids.
I read a how-to article last night that explained humans need seven to eight hours of that a night to function. ”
Henry helped me down off the platform and into the store. “After this, consider me functionless, because I may never sleep again.”
His tired eyes pinged around the store. He flicked the lights on and off. He exited and then reentered the room.
“What are you doing?”
“Trying to figure out how this works,” he said. The lock clicked and then unclicked and then clicked again.
“I think we should continue our conversation from earlier bec—”
My whole body shut down, and my mind turned off. It was as if someone had unplugged me, then plugged me right back in because without warning, I whirred back to life and tumbled forward. Every sense returned as if charged to full blast. “What… was… that?” I asked, breathless.
“This,” Henry said, flicking at the OPEN/CLOSED sign dangling from a hook on the inside of the door. “When the store is open, you’re a mannequin. When it’s closed, you’re a human. Probably.” He reached to try again.
“Please don’t!” I cried. “I… didn’t like that. It felt… bad.”
Henry halted. “Okay, well, I’m unsure what I’m supposed to do here. I can’t keep the store unlocked with the lights on all night unless I want to be robbed and looted. You already did a good job of tearing this place apart last night.”
“I’m sensing an unpleasant tension coming off of you.” I was unable to label the complicated emotion he was expressing through his hunched, disorderly pacing.
“It’s called frustration. I’m frustrated. And also confused and annoyed and a little amazed but mostly fearful that I’m living in some kind of simulation where this is all some big joke,” he said faster than I’d ever imagined a human could speak.
“Is there anything I can do?” I asked, sensing in the silence that ensued that he needed support. As long as I was human, I could provide that, I assumed.
“Disappear,” he said.
The sharpness of the word cut into me, causing a squeeze and gurgle of my stomach. It was not all that dissimilar from the full, queasy sensation I had after trying all those foods from the refrigerator. My hand pressed to my stomach and a frown involuntarily overtook my face.
Henry quickly said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean that. Well, not that exactly. I just… I didn’t plan for you. I don’t know what to do with you.”
I remembered the red card in my back pocket and pulled it out. “Why did you wish for me?”
A myriad of expressions whirled across Henry’s face.
I decoded none of them. Eyebrow twitches and lip trills and puffy cheeks.
The human face was far more complex than the painted visage on a mannequin.
He shook his head and all those complex mini movements stopped, froze into a placid expression that made sense and also no sense at all.
After checking the watch on his wrist, he said suddenly, “I guess you’re coming home with me. ”
A furry beast guarded the doorway of Henry’s upstairs apartment.
“It’s just a cat,” Henry said of the orange-and-white predator whose tail whipped back and forth in the air. “Topher’s harmless. Unless you forget to feed him. Come inside quickly or he’ll bolt. He loves to make me chase him. He thinks it’s a game.”
“A game?” I asked, giving the “cat” a wide berth for fear that if I walked into its path it might mistake me for food. How could such a small beast evoke such a great terror?
“Yeah, a game. Like, something done for fun with rules and usually a winner.”
“Is driving a game?” I asked, just standing there, completely unsure of what to do with myself. The machines on wheels that Henry called “cars” zoomed through air and space while we made the short trek around the store to the side entrance.
“To drivers in New Jersey, oh yeah, driving’s a game,” he said.
He kicked off his shoes, slung his coat over the back of a chair, and dropped his keys in a bowl on a short, rectangular table before padding into the kitchen, which was through two propped-open glass doors.
I followed suit. “Sorry. That was a joke. New Jersey drivers are notorious for driving carelessly even on residential roads. Always going over the speed limit, playing loud music, drag racing in parking lots. Does any of this make sense to you? Wait, what are you doing?”
I’d planted myself near the front window, staring out past the balcony and into the street where more cars rumbled by. “Just looking out at the view.”
“Oh, good. I thought you’d turned back into a mannequin. Come away from there, though, so my neighbors don’t get freaked out. I’m going to make us some dinner.”
I took a seat at Henry’s kitchen table. The tiny fire that burst forth from Henry’s stove after a repeated click sent me flying backward.
“It’s okay, Frankenstein’s monster. This is how I cook,” he said, pouring some oil into a pan over the flame.
He produced a pinkish filet from his refrigerator, which was significantly larger than the one in the back of the store.
“Do you like salmon? No, not you, Topher. I know you like salmon.” Topher rubbed against Henry’s legs and meowed loudly, which also startled me.
There were so many—almost too many—new stimuli in this apartment that I had no idea how to respond to.
“Did you have salmon in the tiny refrigerator at the store? I liked everything in there except the mushy yellow brick,” I said.
“You mean ‘butter.’ Butter goes on things or in things but is not meant to be the thing, if that makes sense. But no, there was no fish in that fridge, and wow, you really were just a mannequin who sprang to life, huh?” He stared at me for a second with a slotted spatula held up in midair.
Topher meowed again, louder this time. “Fine, fine. You first. I try not to feed him before I eat, as a rule, so he doesn’t think he runs the place, but I fear we’re too far gone in our dysfunctional relationship for that. ”
“You’re in a relationship with…” My gaze dropped to the floor, where Topher feasted upon a gross-looking cylinder of gelatinous goop.
“What?” Henry asked, evidently confused as he rinsed out the can the goop came from. “Oh, you think—” He laughed. “No, Topher is my pet, and I’m his forlorn owner. You don’t know what butter is, but you know about relationships?”
“I told you, I read a how-to article on how to be human on the picture box in the back of the store.”
“Computer.”
“Right. Yes. Computer. I knew that.”
“Okay, so what did it say about relationships?” He plopped the two seasoned fish filets onto the sizzling pan. The rhythmic pop of the heated oil underscored our conversation.
“If I remember correctly, it said that step number six of six in being human is to learn how to love and be loved. Those who exchange love have meaningful relationships,” I said.
“Which is why I was both confused and concerned when you said you had a relationship with Topher because if it was a romantic relationship then that meant you were spoken for and if you were spoken for then you couldn’t fall in love with me and if you couldn’t fall in love with me then on New Year’s Eve—I’ll need you to explain what that is to me later—I’ll turn back into a mannequin and I haven’t been human for long but I can already tell that I don’t want that. ”