11. Mechanical Servants LLC #2
I was. It was a life at any rate, even if it felt like my body was falling apart.
I wheezed. I wore loose black T-shirts I got for free from smoking Camels, and so I had a perpetual Joe the Camel screenprinted on my back.
I wore the same pair of baggy Levi’s for months.
But I was also inexplicably happy, even if alone.
Maybe a little bit because I was alone. It was years of this life before Becky, and now, I’m shocked to find, that I’ve slid back into the same lonely figure who read too much and drank too much and talked to no one.
Sure, it was a messed-up kind of happiness—a little dismal, a little grubby—and sure, I’d wake up gasping, throat raw from reflux, due to nightmares of faceless men storming into the apartment and forcing me back to Colombia.
I kept hoping I’d find a solution to my present dilemma: that I could not be anything other than an international student while I was here, and so I kept being a student.
And so, I drank.
And so, I was super hungover in that dead pocket of time between work and classes, and by the campus Chick-fil-A there was this vending machine that sold Tylenol.
An odd fog had settled over the damp campus green, the dead fountain, my own body, which felt hot in the cool Florida night.
My head throbbed. I had enough coins in my pocket—a blessing in itself since it was the end of the month.
What I found odd—odd and charming—about the vending machine was how it nearly always seemed to have the worst possible version of things you never thought you needed until you did: combs whose ineffective teeth couldn’t wait to break, nail clippers already dull and listless, Pepto-Bismol the wrong shade of pink.
The campus was kept clean, but no one ever wiped down the machine, so the glass was smudged with grit and pollen.
Everyone pretty much went anywhere else for what they needed—they drove to the Publix or walked over the commons, or at the very least ended up across the way where the campus bookstore sold a small selection of toiletries and medicines, all in better condition.
Everything was closed, however, and my head pulsed, and the cigarette I could not stop smoking made it worse.
The Ibuprofen waited at the top right-hand corner of the second row: E6.
It came in a flat blister pack that advertised, proudly, a drinking cup that Mechanical Servants included for customer convenience.
It was an impossible promise. The packet was too small, too thin.
I put in my two quarters, curious. Looked again: still just a blister pack.
Slender. No cup. No possibility of a cup.
I walked, cigarette in one hand and blister pack in the other, and when I found a drinking fountain I realized that the promise of a cup was kind of pointless, that you really didn’t need a cup to swallow pills, that even if you did, it wasn’t much of a convenience anyway.
But I also realized, once I opened the pack, that Mechanical Servants had not lied: they had included a small envelope and called it a cup.
Here’s where the first of two inexplicable things occurred.
There were instructions printed on the back, and I followed them closely, despite my headache and despite the unnecessary nature of the task.
(I did not need a cup. All I needed was water.
The fountain was right there.) What I ended up with resembled nothing less than an actual substantial cup, a kind of perfect object complete with a delicate handle.
For years after, I’d keep this fragile cup on a counter, the words A gift for you from Mechanical Servants legible around the edge of the lip.
In the early morning fog, I filled that same cup with water from the drinking fountain, put the Ibuprofen into my mouth, and drank.
My headache vanished almost immediately, which never happened.
I decided to skip class. I walked home. I fell into a strange, deep sleep full of troubling dreams, full of faceless actors I’d see again in different dreams in a different city.
I woke up early the next day, distressed to realize I’d missed a work shift, my body tired from everything I’d done to it: the bad food, the cigarettes, the mechanical drinking.
I know that it’s difficult to quit smoking.
I know that for some people it is practically impossible.
Same for drinking. I don’t know how it happened, how I woke up one day and decided that what I really needed to do was to go for a walk, eat an apple, drink more water.
That’s what I did right then.
And then that’s what I did for a whole year: I worked and studied and applied for a master’s at the same university (because I’d get to keep my campus lab job), but I also went for runs and cleaned up my lungs and grew grateful for the clarity afforded by not drinking.
I’d look at the perfect paper cup every morning and go about my business.
That was the second inexplicable thing, the one that puzzles me still: my sudden change.
I met Becky soon after. I was very happy, though still troubled by the same dreams.
The alert arrives as usual, and if I do not check it right away it is because I’ve been looking through the apartment for the remote possibility that I never lost the envelope in the first place.
Maybe it’s been with me all along, and maybe it doesn’t need to be replaced.
And maybe, if I do find it, the envelope will do what it did for me back then: it will fix everything.
I will be someone who I was never meant to be: not alone, not unhappy, not contingent. I will be a person.
The dissertation is late. I do not open my advisor’s emails.
I also do not open the emails from the college, because it’s easy to tell from the subject line that my request for some last-minute college teaching has been denied.
I open the eBay alert set for Mechanical Servants, but in the short space between clicking and opening I remember how I did in fact throw the envelope away.
I was angry at Becky. Angry at her for dying.
Angry at myself for leaving Florida and flying off to Illinois, thinking that it would fix everything.
Was I drinking? I’m sure I was. Or was about to.
Still, I do not remember setting the alert. It must have happened years later, in the fog of some distant grief, in the hope for some kind of return.
This time around there are a number of items newly available, none alarming.
There’s a set of playing cards, a pill case, a sewing kit, a diminutive sailboat inside an equally tiny bottle, the toy figure of a woman with her hands in the air, her mouth an open O.
Everything enclosed in the same milky clamshells.
I look again at the toy woman. I put on my reading glasses.
It’s Becky.
I click on the alert. I had never done so, because all I ever wanted was the envelope.
In the eBay listing I can see her features clearly; she’s wearing what we wore when we first met: a denim jacket, a shirt with a flower print design, pink barrettes. In her toy hand, held tight, I recognize the Mechanical Servants envelope, not yet turned into a cup.
I take a bus with the last of what’s on my Ventra card. I do not take anything else with me, just my bus card. What’s the point of an empty wallet?
It takes four transfers, two hours, to arrive at the headquarters of Mechanical Servants.
The world is just the gray and snow and bitter chill of early January, and I can’t see much at first. The headquarters are behind a chain-link fence, but the fence is obscured with black plastic sheeting, and only then do I realize the terror of my predicament: I do not have enough money to get back, my coat is insufficient, and I have no way of getting in.
A gust of wind, a patch of ice, knocks me to the ground. It also swings open one of the fence sections, enough space for me to squeeze through. Which I do.
The Mechanical Servants headquarters is a series of buildings clustered close together, and they are in fact abandoned, or the company has moved or both, and it’s all evident from the boarded windows, the graffitied bricks, the way the buildings lean into themselves.
I am not surprised by this state of decay.