11. Mechanical Servants LLC #3
I am surprised, however, that the buildings all mirror my old Florida campus. I recognize the dead fountain, the massive library, the forlorn red brick of the commons.
I walk past the dead computer lab. I walk past an ashtray overflowing with cigarettes, one of which is still alive, its little coal sending thin wisps of smoke as the wind picks up. I walk down a slick path also paved in red bricks.
I imagine you must know where I’m going. I imagine you must know that I was talking to you all along. I imagine you know how much I’ve missed you.
Would you believe me, Becky? After all this time, I still have your number memorized.
I pull out my phone, take off my gloves, and dial the number.
I’m hoping I’ll hear the ring somewhere on this campus, that I will be able to find you this way.
The truth is I no longer trust my own memory.
The truth is I’m no longer sure that the Mechanical Servants headquarters and the campus are identical; maybe they’re just similar; maybe I’m tricking myself.
That is why I call you, Becky.
And that is why I’m so surprised to hear you say hello. Your voice has not changed at all. You’re so glad to hear from me. You want to know what’s up.
I say I was sorry I didn’t come.
“To what?” you say. I could hear children in the background.
“The wedding?” In your house, there are children.
A husband, too. A television blares. “It’s so good to hear from you,” you say again.
“I was so worried after you left. I think about you. I’m so proud of you, getting all those degrees. I hope you’re happy.”
You say the last bit with such sweetness, such sincerity, that I don’t have the heart to tell you that you are dead.
That you might be dead. Or that something has gone wrong somewhere, some part of our lives has broken beyond explanation, fractured or splintered.
I want to know if you followed through on your own dreams: all the paintings you made, all the miniature sculptures, impossibly detailed objects no bigger than your own thumb—of being some kind of artist, even if Orlando wasn’t as good to artists as it could be.
You sound happy, and I’m not sure it’s because you’re still who I remembered you being, or it’s because you’re someone else entirely.
Maybe you’re happy because you’re alive.
Maybe that’s enough. Or maybe you’re happy because you’re not alone.
I hear the chaos of life all around you. Over here it’s quiet.
“You are, yes?” you say. “You’re happy?”
“I’m happy,” I say. It’s not entirely a lie. I don’t tell you I miss you.
You have to go, you say. You hope I keep in touch.
You tell me to call again, and before you hang up, you ask if I’m on Facebook, and I don’t even get the chance to tell you that I am, that I check on your page once in a while.
So many people miss you. Not just me. I’m happy to hear you’re happy, even if you’re not quite here, even if I don’t know where I am.
Here are the ruins of a Chick-fil-A. Here, too, is the vending machine.
It’s empty.
I walk into a room that is indistinguishable from my own studio in Albany Park. I recognize my bed, my laptop, the empty beer bottles.
All the windows are open, as is the door, and the cold and the snow sweep through it.
Everywhere, arranged in no discernible order, are items from the Mechanical Servants corporation still trapped in their clamshells: the toy handcuffs, Becky’s childhood home, even my own parents as toy figures.
They’re by a set of reading glasses that might as well be my own.
I can see their faces as I last imagined them shortly before what happened to them on the road to Ibagué, the same awful panic right before the guerrilla roadblock.
Before the gunfire. They’re alive in there, in the clamshell.
They move. I note with some relief that Becky is not here.
The envelope, too, is nowhere to be found. It’s just me.
I sit by the laptop and set to work on the dissertation chapter, the last one I need to turn in, sure for once of what I want to say and how I want to say it, and I try to ignore the clamshell sitting right by the desk, the one that’s easily recognizably me, a miniature self in a miniature winter coat typing something into a laptop that, like mine, works despite no apparent source of power, despite the very real sense that the battery is dying or already dead, and despite my knowing that I do not want to know what will happen to me after I finish the chapter, though I am sure that it will not be good, that this letter I’m writing instead will never reach you, Becky, in whatever happy life you’ve carved out for yourself.
I will never get through. I will finish the chapter, I think, and then winter will come for me and the headquarters of the company will swallow me whole.
The other possibility is somehow worse: I’ll write, I’ll keep writing in this strange room, I’ll never get out.
I should stop. I tell myself to stop.
I don’t.
I write.
I set up an alert.
I hit Send.
I open a new file. I start again.