April - The Flood 4 страница

I did find myself wondering, though. Had it all really happened? I knew we had woken up together, and we had been naked, but it all almost didn't seem real. The house, the poetry, the garden and flowers, and then all of us - together. It seemed too overwhelming to be true. I almost didn't want it to be true because if it was, then this was what it all had been leading to. I remembered the fortune cookie, from years ago, that Jasmine had gotten. All the moments in your life lead to one overwhelming conclusion. If this had been what we were working towards, then I didn't want it to be done or over with yet. I wanted it to keep going. We were only halfway there.

"So," I started. Gerard and I were in the living room, unpacking towels and cutlery that had somehow managed to get pushed into here. I was unsure about what I wanted to say, but Gerard had smiled at me coyly from across the room. As if he knew something, as if he wanted to say something, but remained mute. So went for it. "Last night...."

"What about it, Frank?" he said. He gave me another smile, and then went back to work. His small nod, small recognition, was all I needed. We got on with our day.

There was no need to mention what had happened the night before, but it was not omitted because of shame. That wasn't it at all. It was a secret between us, a secret desire that we had shared. It was something we had needed, from the bottom of every single one of us. We were bonded now, completely and utterly. Through art, and love, and sex. We were all in this together, no matter what, we weren't backing out. But it was also something that we probably weren't going to do again, I realized, and that was probably why Gerard had obfuscated the question. When all three of us were together, it became intense like the night before. It became too much. It was everything from everyone and it seemed to explode the candlelight from the night before and fracture out towards the stars, plunging us into a pitch black night. We had our separate rooms for a reason, and we did better one on one. But from that night on, our relationships all changed and I knew it was for the better.

I had been so used to being in the middle. It seemed as if I had always been going from one house to the next and then back again, balancing this never ending triangle. Now it had all collapsed, and, it had bloomed into this wonderful being. There was this infectious love that seemed to overtake the house, though we never mentioned the night again beyond a smile for a few days afterwards, or a small quotation from a poem. As it rained more and more in the upcoming weeks, we never noticed, because we were safe inside of ourselves. Together or apart, it didn't matter anymore because there was a base to go back to.

But we needed to focus more and get things done. "World, world, world," I said to myself as I looked out my bedroom window, alone. It was April, Jasmine was almost four months pregnant, and we had things to do.

Chapter Three

There were clocks everywhere at Mikey's office. The building seemed to be made of nothing but clocks, numbers, and white walls, then padded inside with the blue foam of cubicles. I had never really been to an office building before. When I was younger, my mom had worked as a secretary for a law company, but their office had been swanky and charismatic. They were personal injury attorneys and they had to keep up this image to their customers; most lawyers did. They had to appear high class and like they knew what they were doing, and it was part of their job description to be persuasive. There was nothing persuasive about this place. It was just really bleak. As Mikey first gave me the tour, I started to feel foreclosed and claustrophobic, thinking I had made another mistake, but I began to appreciate the toned-down nature of the place. It was not trying to be persuasive at all. It was almost too honest.

As far as I could tell, my job this far would be data entry. Since my resume had some details on it that discussed shows I had done (with Gerard's most recent art production at the top of the list) and pictures I had sold, some people were gearing to get me into advertising or writing press releases, but they wanted to see how I handled things "on the ground floor." This location was as much literal as it was metaphorical. In spite of the winding staircases of the building and the endless elevators, I could still see the trees as I looked out the windows on my floor. Mikey was the one who took me up those elevators and down the stairs, showing me around the place. He had a higher position (again, we were nearing the top floor when he showed me his office) and normally was not delegated to taking the new ones around, but he had insisted. And he got his way. It was going to be a long time before I would be able to have that kind of authority, but I was told that I was going to work my way up those stairs a lot less literally than I was then. There was a lot of room for growth, Mikey assured me. This was where he had been when he started years ago, soon after he was married. The company was just starting out then, and there were a lot of "right place, right time" circumstances that led to his escalation in the company, but he assured me it could happen again. He had a lot of prestige now, I could tell from the way people made eye contact with him (and similarly, from the people who refused to meet his eyes) and I knew that even if I wasn't really in the "right place, right time" as he had been, I certainly knew the right person. The fact that I had a job now, so quickly and so effortlessly after quitting my last one showed that for sure.

Mikey was some type of accountant and business owner or something. I didn't know, and I couldn't decipher some of the jargon he threw at me. Administrator part time sales and buyer coordinator something or other. Like that. The first floor of the building was for mostly PR and the nitty-gritty of the public side of things. That was where the secretaries were and the people who took calls and divided up office time. That part of the floor was a little persuasive, but not nearly as much as the lawyer's office had been. There was better lighting, a big couch to sit on, and some flowers. There were past promos and flyers, different ad campaigns and past press releases, portraits of past CEOs hanging on the walls, but other than that, there was no art anywhere. Mikey said that he had wanted to hang some of Gerard's work up, but it became difficult once Gerard broke away from standard subjects and started to become more experimental.

"I like his work and I think he got much better as soon as he started to do whatever he wanted, but the problem is that we can't have clients looking at Van Gogh and Gauguin embracing just before they're about to have a meeting," he stated with a smile. "Though it may put some of them in a better mood, I'm sure my boss wouldn't appreciate the decoration."

As far as bosses went, there seemed to be an endless tower of who was in charge of whom. The bottom floor, the secretaries, were the ones that basically took orders from inside (bosses) and outside (clients). A lot of the temps and the gophers had their offices there as well and I distinctly remember thanking Mikey profusely for not getting me a job doing that. There would have been no point, he said. He already knew me and knew my capabilities. Even if he hadn't, my resume displayed a little more capability than that, mostly thanks to the art shows and behind the scenes work. I had already done the press releases before; I just never realized it had been Gerard and his work I had been vying for, instead of this huge corporation. I knew there was an essential difference between the two of them, but on paper, they looked the same: I had done press, I had done advertising, and I was clearly on my way in this world. I had also already established myself as a gopher in the drug store and Mel, if called, would have given a glowing review. So I was able to by-pass the first level of this game. Each floor we went up in the elevator led to another boss and a bunch of people, and then someone more and more powerful. On Mikey's floor, there were several other people who had similar titles to him with all the business jargon in it that I couldn't understand. In theory, he and a group of four other people were the final bosses here. Their offices were second to the top. What the top was used for was business meetings and any other type of private gatherings with the super-high ups. These bosses were so powerful they didn't even have to be there all the time. Their rooms remained empty and still exuded a sense of power and authority. They were CEOs (or another jumble of letters) and they came about once a month or so.

I asked Mikey if he would ever consider being a CEO too or if he was allowed to excel that high. I wondered, vaguely like a bad video game, if he had to fight a dragon before he could do that. He made a similar joke, and it make me feel a lot easier in this new job, knowing that Mikey was used to joking around here. He told me it was imperative to laugh while at work, that it was the downfall of most of his colleagues that they did not laugh. In this type of workforce, it was far too easy to take yourself too seriously, and he was determined to not let that get him. I relished seeing this other side of him, in hearing his work ethic (which I was sure also expanded into his life ethic), and how he did manage to get through days upon days of clocks. He was so quiet around most people, even his other higher ups. But anytime we were in closed quarters together, like elevators, empty rooms, stairwells, he would say something to put my mind at ease. Eventually, he told me that he would never consider climbing higher than he already was. It just wasn't worth it to him.

"No slaying in your future?" I teased him.

"No travelling in my future," he said, seriously now. "I travel enough as it is with this position. I like being home. I like having kids and a life with them."

Mikey spoke about things for a few minutes more as he explained the extra tenuous nature of his job and how he was even considering stepping down from this position and going back a level. There were some heavy instances recently in the finance department that had been bothering him the past few weeks, but he didn't elaborate too much. He knew it would resolve itself, and was probably a math issue more than anything else. They had hired a PhD recently to take of that, and he knew it was only a temporary blip on the system. "Nothing to keep me up at night anymore than Jonah does," he smiled, and alluded to the real reason he was delaying movement within departments. It would mean a considerable pay jump. He was caught in a small bind, but one that he was sure would work itself out after Jonah got a bit older. As soon as he was in school, they wouldn't need as much money (since babies, he joked, seemed to be made of money - but I didn't find that one so funny) and then he could afford to step down a bit and be able to spend more time at home.

As we walked through the dull hallways and the clicking of computer keys and shuffling of paper became overwhelming, I began to wonder how anyone could have survived here. Mikey didn't take himself seriously in this role, but how could someone retain that type of distance and disconnection of self and still do this for eight hours a day? How did he do this for so long? He had literally worked his way through the entire building. He was this virtual video game master and had fought off all the enslaving bosses at each realm. And all for what? These walls full of clocks and blue foam? Sure, he had power and prestige, but even he didn't want to dwell on that. His position emotionally and authoritatively, did not make sense to me. I could understand Gerard's struggle as an artist, his loss of money, home, and food, but I couldn't understand Mikey's drudgery. It felt like a prison or a jail and occasional I would remember that I wasn't just getting a tour, that he had gotten me an actual job here, and my chest would tighten. When Mikey began to talk more about his kids, and less about the building, his work began to make some sense and I started to figure his motivations as similar to my own.

Very few people found this type of work fascinating. Very few people were thrilled to come to work in the morning. But that didn't mean that something other than money and the greedy capitalist machine was making them get up every damn day and come. It was awful, but so were most jobs. This wasn't any better than the drug store; in spite of Mel running the place like a family business, it was a chain drug store I was in. It was still a corporation as much as this was. This job was the same, except that it really was that much better. Because Mikey was starting me past the first few levels, this meant that I got a pay jump. A drastic one. When you earn minimum wage for so long, or you get big chunks of money at a time - but often from hours and hours of undocumented work like with photography or art - seeing the pay jump of even one dollar is a lot. Over hours and hours it adds up. I was getting so much more than a dollar more than minimum wage and I was going to be working forty hours a week. At first it was going to be only twenty as I trained, but then within two or three weeks, this would become my job and my life. I would work during the daytime like every single other human out there, from Monday to Friday, nine to five. I had the option of working eight to four as well, and since Mikey often took that option since it corresponded with his kids school time more, I decided to take that since he was carpooling with me on some days. I was going to have a normal job, and it terrified me.

But I was here. I was here, and though I was so afraid, I was not moving. I refused to run away. I was so used to running away when I felt closed-in like this, and when Mikey showed me my cubicle, I could feel my hands shaking and my heart pumping wildly in my chest. I was really trapped now. But the urge to bite off my leg and run faster than anything was gone. I was scared, and I was staying. I listened to Mikey intently and began to try and categorize my fears and my staying, trying to base my life around a man who was so closely linked to Gerard by blood and by bonding, but so radically different in their livelihoods.

Mikey had told me to get familiar with my office space, equipment, and that he would email me my job tasks from his desk and left me alone. While he was gone and while I waited for that mysterious electronic email, I began to write down all the things that were different and similar about Gerard Wyatt and Mikey Wyatt. I wrote down stuff about art and passion and love and dreams for Gerard, and when I looked at Mikey's section, I realized he had those things, too. It just wasn't this job. This job was what Mikey did with a lot of his time - forty hours a week - but it was not his love. Alexa and his family were, and in order to get them and keep them, he needed to be here. We all needed money, and we all needed to eat.

I looked around me and I looked at the foam walls. I saw the clocks that were everywhere and the time that kept ticking and ticking by. This was my life, and it was being spent behind these walls. If I accepted this, which I knew I was going to do anyway, this would be my life slowly ticking away from me. It scared me, but I could not leave. If I left, I wouldn't have all that Mikey had. I didn't have five kids to support, and I also had two other incomes that I could depend on, but if I left here, I also wouldn't be able to afford to keep my own passion going. Photography, when it came down to it, was expensive if I was not selling my work and there was never a guarantee for that. I wouldn't be able to keep all the passion in my life realistically. I couldn't have a kid and be a photographer on what I had in the bank. Money was a fact of life and we also had a house to keep.

There were too many elements to it all bouncing around in my head. There were too many conflicting emotions and I felt like I was caught in the middle of something extreme. Except that nothing was extreme anymore. Nothing was black or white anymore. I didn't feel like I had to choose between having a kid, being with Jasmine, with Gerard, living by myself or with one of them, doing photography, or having a job. I didn't feel like I had to choose between being an artist or being a worker. I knew that today, when I got home from this, I would go into my darkroom because I would need to. I still had not developed those jazz photos. The issue had already gone out, and Jasmine wasn't mad about my lack of contribution. But I still had them. They were mine. They were still trapped in the camera, and I wanted to let them go. I would do them when I got home and I could frame them and keep them in my house and when my kid grew up I could show them the Dizzies and the Billies on the bathroom stall and they could pick what one they wanted to be and I could tell them about that night when I found out they were real and my life cha--

My computer made a funny noise. I was not used to electronic equipment and I clicked a few times before I realised that the email that Mikey had sent me had finally arrived. I opened it up and it sent me to a training program that was on the computer's hard drive and I began doing those exercises. I almost forgot entirely about my list. When one of the clocks in the building changed and everyone got up for their smoke breaks, I stayed in my seat. It didn't occur to me that I was a part of that crowd, that I had to leave to go outside, because this was also a part of my pay. Part of work was the break, the scheduled breaks; it was that time and I didn't take it. At least, not with everyone else. I stayed at my desk and finished my assignment, and then I looked back at my list. I didn't smoke anymore, so this would be my task.

I had been so used to being one color and solely identifying with that. With knowing who I was through that one color. Now everything was mixing, everything was blurring. Everything in my life was ambiguous and unsure of, but the surreal part about all of this inconsistency was that I actually wasn't lacking anything. I really did have everything - but I was so surprised by how that everything made me feel. It was a combination of extreme elation and perpetual fear. It was overwhelming boredom and fiery creativity. It was desire and repulsion.

Did everyone else feel like this, too? Did everyone who had just left for their break, were they wallowing in the same ambiguity that I was trying to struggle my way through? Could people tell me who they were at all? I tried to remember what my specific job title had been, what Mikey said I would be doing for the next little while, but I couldn't remember it. Did it really matter? I looked down at my shirt, my old and grubby shirt in comparison to everyone else's that worked around me, and I looked for a nametag. But this was a corporate job, now. I didn't have that reminder anymore. I had to make it up myself.

When everyone came back, I started to feel more at ease. People worked, and then soon, the day was over. We all got up and began to leave at the same time. I got out of the building before Mikey did, and I waited by his car. I watched the traffic and the swell of people as everyone left. I watched as everyone motored home because that was where they wanted to be. That was where the people they loved were, or the things they loved to do were. I was just like everyone else, I began to realize. Completely and utterly confused, and at that moment, alone.

"Hey, Frank," Mikey said to me as he came over to his car. "How was your first day at work?"

"Okay," I said meekly. Mikey nodded. He didn't expect me to flail and say it was the best job ever. There was no veneers: he knew it wasn't the best job ever. But it was a secure one. I would be getting health benefits and I hadn't had those in a long time. I had already made more in a day than I did in two shifts at the drug store. This was not the best job ever, I was not a famous photographer, but I was going to be okay. We nodded to one another and I got in the car.

"I think you should come home with me tonight. Have dinner with Alexa and the kids. Sound okay?" he asked me when we were at a red light. I nodded. That sounded like the best idea I had heard all day.

Alexa made this complex and decadent lasagna made with spinach and what seemed like nine different types of cheeses and whole wheat pasta. I was amazed and completely devoured what she had put on my plate. It had been awhile since I had had cheese like this; we had stopped buying some because just the sight of it was making Jasmine nauseous and that was more important that having grilled cheese in the morning. I had never been one of those people who fawned over the food the way some people had, so it was easy to make the switch for me. The only real pleasant memory I associated with eating and cuisine was Gerard, and how when he and I had been together almost ten years ago, we would often sprawl out on his floor and eat loaf after loaf of French bread with hunks of whatever cheese we could find, with big globe grapes on the side. But other than trying to recreate that scenario again, I could pass on the item. Ever since the three of us had moved in and began to share a fridge, I had been tinkering with the idea of going vegan. By default I practically was, just because a lot of the stuff that I would have normally eaten that disqualified me from being vegan - cheese, milk, and eggs - were now making Jasmine nauseous and no longer in our house. She felt bad for it, because she was never one to force us to do exactly what she said, but I knew that she was somewhat relieved that she kept throwing up every single time she saw a fried egg. It meant that she had an actual physical reason to not have those items in the house. We had all agreed that until the kid was born, there would be no milk, cheese, or eggs in the house and that was fine with me. But being vegan went beyond just excluding those items, and I knew that. I had noticed from Jasmine's compulsive label checking that eggs and milk got into absolutely everything. It seemed completely unfair that half the products in a grocery store - more than half, most likely - could not be eaten because of one tiny part of the milk. Casein, cochineal, whey, albumin. It was ridiculous. And it also made it difficult, when Jasmine needed to eat more and started to have craving for strange foods (as much as she denied that these were cravings) - to find her what she needed. I had begun to be an expert label reader anytime she asked me to get her something. I took this as a superb sign of trust - that she would let me get her food and then not double check it before she ate it. Because of my own knowledge of the topic now, I had debated going vegan and it seemed quite plausible.

But then I saw Alexa's lasagna, and I would not have wanted to reject it on sheer principle alone. I liked the fact that Mikey could ask me for dinner and I could say yes right away and go without having to worry. They were vegetarian for the most part, so that made it easier. Jasmine would just say that this difficulty could be solved by everyone going vegan and then we could all bond with potlucks and have massive dinners together, but I knew the inability to reach that goal just from my label checking at the supermarket. Everything depended on animals, whether Jasmine and I were there to eat it or not. This fact, along with a few other things I despised about where we lived, was just another thing that would have to wait. Maybe in ten years, when the kid was getting older, there would be more vegans and that dream could become a reality. It was frustrating, I knew, to not be able to have the whole world in our hands.

We had not really talked about raising the kid vegan, yet, though I suspected that Jasmine would want to do so. I had no idea how that could be done and I didn't have enough knowledge to speak on it yet. I did find myself paying extra-close attention to Mikey and Alexa's kids as they ate. I wondered if they would be disgusted by the spinach in the lasagna, if they would hate the goat cheese that seemed to be there, or if they would devour it just like I did. The truth was that no one outright hated the food in front of them, or loved it with all their hearts. Some kids ate it all in one go - Isaac seemed to inhale food and was definitely going through a growth spurt. The youngest girl, Elizabeth picked at it, but she was going through a picking stage. Apparently her bagel from that morning had little porous dents all the way through it. She would literally pick off pieces of her food before she ate it. Mikey and Alexa encouraged her to use a fork, but she ignored them. And they let her do what she pleased. So long as she didn't hurt anyone, or leave her picked food any strange place, then she was fine.

"Eating with your hands isn't bad," Alexa said. "It's encouraged in some societies. It's not the easiest way of eating, but hey, neither is veganism."

She smiled at me. She enjoyed speaking on the subject a lot and since she did read "everything," she was probably just as knowledgeable as Jasmine. She was telling me that she was practicing her vegan baking earlier that day and had a banana bread for me to take home.

We were done with our dinner now and the conversation was lazily passing between us. Mikey had gotten up to help Jonah with his bottle and then some soft food, and then went over to make sure that Elizabeth was done and that she go and wash her hands. The other kids stuck together and brought their dishes out to the kitchen, some of the older ones helping to rinse and then slide them into the dishwasher. Rachel seemed to take charge of David and made him pay attention long enough to get his stuff away, and then the rest of them all scattered to do whatever they wanted to before bed. Mikey held Jonah when he was done feeding and sat down at the table with Alexa and myself. He rubbed the back of his son, and though he listened to the conversation and occasionally said a few words, I could tell that this was how he relaxed at the end of a long day. He just listened to his wife and held his son. He reminded himself again about why he went to work, instead of dwelling on the realities about work.

That was when I realized that no one had asked me how my day had gone and no one had asked Mikey. We had not talked about our work days at all, other than that brief interlude in the parking lot and that had been a handful of words at most. And it stayed in the parking lot. It stayed contained within that building. Mikey didn't take his work home - and more importantly, Alexa never allowed it to pass through her lips as well. I guessed they figured forty hours a week was enough, and they didn't have to give any company their own time via complaints or recaps.

"Feeding kids can be fun and difficult," Alexa was telling me. We had been talking about veganism and our knowledge of the subject, agreeing with its message, but our lack of ability to go through with it. Alexa had held back for kids, in a way. "I found out about veganism too late. Most of them had already been on solid food and were enjoying what they had. It seemed unfair to suddenly say, hey, you liked that, and now you can't have it anymore. I didn't want to be the authoritarian mom. Not ever. They get attached to food just as much as we do, possibly more. Feeding can be fun - because they love it so much - but also difficult, because they do too."

I considered what she was saying, and while she made sense, there were holes in her logic that I saw and that I knew Jasmine would see too. Alexa could always be vegan and not force it on the kids, but lead by example instead. She didn't have to let their own personal preferences get in the way of her ethics and morals. Even if the kids never did end up following her example, she would still feel better for herself. At least, that was the impression that I was getting from the way she was talking. Jasmine, as much as I knew she wanted that kid to be raised vegan, would do her best to feed them vegan meals, but not hold it against them if they made their own choice later on. That was what was really important to Jasmine - the choice. It was one of the reasons she had tolerated our milk and cheese until she literally physically couldn't handle it anymore. We had chosen to stay this way, knowing the consequences, and she wouldn't waver in hers. It made me respect her a lot more than I already did, especially now, having this conversation with Alexa. I looked at Mikey who held Jonah in his arms still. He rubbed the baby's back, but even in the calmness of that moment, Jonah still burst out into tears.

Mikey began to get up to take him away, and Alexa got up with him. Mikey told her it was fine, and so Alexa began to clear what was left on the table. I supposed our discussion was over and though we had really come to no conclusions, I was satisfied. There was this idea forming in my mind, though I still could not articulate it yet. I helped Alexa scrub the counter as she loaded and then started the cycle of the dishwasher. Then, she turned to me with a smile.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14