When Matt returned to his desk, it was with a fat basket of air filters, bottled water, and anticancer supplements. I jumped as he leaned over me and plopped it down on my keyboard.
“You need it more than I do,” he said with a wink.
I smiled, because he was right. I could strip paint with the water I got from my taps, my apartment was rotating sixteen rows down tomorrow, and I had a lump in my left breast the size of a bocce ball that I’d been putting off worrying about.
Inwardly I boggled at what I could do with the money I’d save. That was real meals at real restaurants. New inserts, so I wouldn’t be walking on my ankles everywhere. Something, anything, I wouldn’t have to panic about, even if for just once.
But it still made me feel like nothing.
“Thanks Matt,” I lied.
“De nada, señorita. I’m sure you’ll get it next month.”
This was also a lie. Matt Aguilar was the best Facilitator in the business.
☎
Or at least in the San Andreas Sprawl. Thousands of satisfied customers would tell you the same, if they could. He could have gone home right then, but he didn’t; he plugged back into his InComp and continued rolling numbers. A guy like him didn’t quit just because he’d won. For three years, mine had been the lucky cubicle next to his, so I was as close to the magic as anyone ever got.
Watching him at work was like watching Michelangelo finger-paint the Sistine Chapel. Our InComps, even years outmoded, could tell us everything about a prospective from their pulse to the unique chemical pollution in their sweat. Just picking up the phone was considered legal consent for us to dig up their online backyard. By “How’s your day going,” we’d have their browsing history, medical records, credit card statements, every bit of sniveling poetry they’d blurted like pre-ejaculate onto the internet when they were fifteen. Like dollops of cretaceous amber, each drop of sebum contained the DNA of every bad day they’d ever had. Put it together, and you had a roadmap to where in their soul the hurt was worst.
But Matt? He didn’t need that stuff. Matt Aguilar could get into someone’s head like he had its spare key. The button that turned on his tonalizer was covered in dust. Matt’s voice was Xanax cut with anthrax.
Like, there I was, listening to him talk like mercury into the ear of a widowed mom with one kid on meth and another in prison and two more not walking yet. “Christ, that’s tough,” he was saying. “Trust me, I do this all day and I know it doesn’t get much worse than that.” I could hear her coming to pieces on the other end. Meanwhile, Matt was telling her how things looked bleak now, but you know ma’am, it’d all be alright just as soon as Darwin was let out, right? Then he could get a real job and bring in some money. Except when would that be exactly? Oh no, that’s a while, isn’t it? Jeez, you must be so strong to carry all that for so long.
I gave it a week, two at most.
Matt Aguilar always wore silver suits. The color of edge.
☎
I came back from the break room with a clearer head and a fresh cup of bad coffee. The day wasn’t going so bad. I had six promising prospectives and another seventeen more leaning my way. Those weren’t terrible numbers. Not for me, at least.
I had to pass Matt’s Cubicle on the way to mine. Three walls were decorated with places he’d claimed like trophies. His summer holiday to balmy Okhtosk. That cruise he’d taken last February to the Miami Islands. He wouldn’t shut up about how we all simply had to go. Every few months, he’d come back from some amazing beach with next to zero SMOX and everyone would gather ‘round to nibble like carp at the scraps of his experience. The way he told stories you could smell the pineapple wedge on the best cocktail he’d ever had. The mint of refurbished air. Smell, but not taste.
You wanted to go where Matt Aguilar went. You had to get your numbers up.
Back at my desk I rolled a number on my shortlist: Andrew McCarthy, aged forty-three, two years divorced. “Hi there, handsome,” I cooed in my best Marilyn Monroe. “Hi yourself,” he said, nervous as a kid getting his dick touched for the first time. I flirted mechanically, laughing at jokes I didn’t hear, keeping one ear on Matt, trying to learn the secret to his trick.
Matt’s move was a lot easier than mine. “Did you know,” he was saying, “you can make mustard gas using several common household cleaning supplies?” And he didn’t elaborate, didn’t dwell, just kept talking. “Did you know that Angela has a new husband? Did you know that any police officer would be happy to provide Manual Assistance? Did you know your brain experiences a moment of perfect Euphoria at the moment of death? Like an Avon lady unpacking their sample box, laying out all those lovely powders and lipsticks, letting the customer’s eyes do the selling for them.” So simple, and so stupidly effective. Matt Aguilar was pulling rabbits out of hats and making it look like that was just how people got rabbits.
It didn’t work for me. Believe me, I tried. So, when I was getting desperate, I tried my move. I’d set up dates with lonely souls, acting like I’d fallen for their sob stories, and then not show up. Low effort, low reward. Fire and forget. Handy, but successful enough on its own to keep me out of an apartment that was about to be so deep in the Stax I’d only get sunlight if there was a nearby demolition. Definitely not enough to pay for a weekend somewhere the air didn’t put spots on your lungs.
I wrapped up the call with a sticky-sweet see-you-later and moved on to the next prospective. I had a good feeling about that last one, but I wouldn’t know right away if it worked. Until then I could only worry.
Soft footfalls on paisley carpeting. I didn’t look up. “Hang in there, Kitty Kat,” Judith sang. “You’ve still got time to get those numbers up.”
Kitty Kat. I hated that name, but it was on me like a scar. And besides, she was right. I did have time, but not to waste.
The numbers. That’s what it was all about. The number you could divide into so many meals. The number you could translate into travelable miles. Apartment height. The number you could stack between yourself and eleven billion other people.
Numbers were the Pinyin between death and life. Get them up.
☎
Breaktime at Sunny Futures Facilitation Services. Matt was holding court as usual. Twelve to one p.m. was the only hour you were safe if you lived anywhere on the West Coast. Like always, he was going on about his next big trip. “Looks like it’s going to be Trinidad this winter,” he was saying to Brad from payroll. “There’s this boat you can take to go scuba diving through Scarborough. They say it’s pretty. You ever been?” he asked, knowing nobody possibly could have.
The guys hung out on his left, talking guy stuff, and the girls to the right, talking girl stuff. But they all talked about Matt. Everyone had a story. Maritza, who’d been here since forever, swore that when Matt first started nine years ago his first call had lasted only four minutes before the prospective gave it up. Judith, the boss lady herself, loved to brag about the seventeen straight hours her number one employee had spent on the line with a particularly stubborn jumper. By the time it was over he had half the office camping out around him with donuts and coffee just to know how it would end. Impossible? Maybe. But each impossibility only added to the possibility it was all true.
I sat apart, down by the vending machines, working through my usual sandwich. Meat stamp, veggie stamp, grain stamp on either end. Matt had a Mexican bento box. Yellow rice, chorizo, seaweed wrap. I couldn’t revolve around him the way they did. I hated his silver suits, his cocksure smirk, but mostly I hated having to live in the unflattering glare that all legends put off.
I didn’t hate him because he was good at his job.
I hated him because he made me worse.
People trickled out of the break room as the hour crawled by, until it was just me and Matt left. He was pouring coffee, so at least he had an excuse. Me? I didn’t have the will to go back to my cubicle. There wasn’t much surprise left in the future. I knew I was going to fail more than I won. Some days were like reading through a book you’d already read ten times. Some weeks were the same chapter seven times.
“Hey Matt, do you have a sec?”
I didn’t realize I’d spoken until he stopped at the door to say, “Sure, Kitty Kat. What’s eating you?”
I wrestled down a grimace. What right did a little moon like me have to tell him what my name was? “Sorry to bother,” I said. “I—I just want to know your secret. Teach me how to do what you do.”
Matt looked me up and down. Not appraisingly. Seeing me in total for the first time. “There’s nothing to teach," he shrugged. "And there’s no secret. Just something to remember.”
“What’s that?”
He tapped his nose. “Everyone wants to die,” he said. “No exceptions.”
“I don’t understand.”
A wry smirk. “Don’t tell me you never thought about taking the jump and seeing what there is for you on the other side of the asphalt. Everyone wants to die.”
And I had to admit he was right.
☎
Dedication. Expertise. Innovation. The big three words of the Sunny Futures mission statement. We were the US+K’s premier Facilitation company, second to none, with six hundred and eighty full-time employees and a savory government contract to turn twenty thousand people a month into pink jumpslips. Not once had we failed to deliver on that quota.
The only number in my line of work I ever had to get down was the eleven billion people packed together on an increasingly overweighted planet. Eleven billion people, seething together inescapably, pilloried like conjoined twins by seamless flesh. Eleven billion people, thick as the tick in a bum dog’s ear, all stomping on those packed below and being stomped on by those packed above. They sucked up all the clean air and left only industrial poison. Belt apartments sagged under their heft. Continents sunk as their collective heat melted the ozone layer. What was there not to understand? People wanted off the Titanic so badly that they jumped into freezing water and drowned.
They proved Matt right hundreds of times a day. It didn’t matter how good you had it now; with every inch the oceans rose, the masses crowded in a little closer, climbing the walls you could afford to put beneath you until you couldn’t anymore. And then one day you’d find yourself wondering just how green the grass was at the end of a long drop. And when you saw us calling, you’d pick up, because all you needed at that point was a poet to tell you all about it.
☎
Matt was a poet. I was not.
Home was a long, hot train ride and a cramped elevator ride into the scaffolding of the San Andreas Sprawl. Home was a living room, a bathroom, and a bedroom with three beds. When I got back from work, I hung up my suit on the door and waited for my turn at a cold shower. Someone had shat the toilet dead, so I had to use the one in the hall. And either Angie or Reshma had stolen from my cancer meds; I would have to start keeping them at work.
For dinner I had my usual sandwich. Meat stamp, veggie stamp, grain stamp on either end. All washed down with bottled water for dessert. I didn’t eat so well every day. During the night I was woken up by the rumble and squeal of my apartment descending sixteen flights into the Stax, where the ambient SMOX was so bad you had to tape up your window. Angie snoring in the bunk above mine kept me awake until the sun came up.
And what I stared at until my alarm said I had to get up was the old photo hung up on the wall beside my bed, of my parents and I when I’d been little standing in front of the Fantasy World castle. Me, with a pair of plastic rabbit ears falling off my head. I’ll never know how they afforded that trip. I knew what tickets to Orlando Island costed these days, and even then, it must have been such a sacrifice. But things like money and jobs don’t exist when you’re that small. All you know is that you’re in the happiest place on Earth with a mom and dad who love you. And the future you see is one where you’ll come back some day. Right, Mom? Right, Dad?
Twenty years later, all I had was that photo, curling at the edges.
And it was time to get up. Get back to work. My numbers were back to zero.
☎
“You know what? Screw this. You should just go die. Right now.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me. You’re a waste. You work at a gas station. Your reason for living is to help use up the world faster. Every drop of water you drink might as well go down a toilet.”
“You can’t talk to me that way.”
“You better believe I can. I’m doing something important. I’m cutting waste. As for you, you’re nothing. You’re a negative value. You putting a bullet in your head would literally make life better for me. You would bring my numbers up and let me buy a new pair of shoes or something.”
“I’ll tell you what lady: screw you.”
“Sure, as soon as you go–”
“Ahem.”
I swiveled my chair around. Judith was standing behind me, clicking her heel the way she did.
I spent twenty minutes in her office getting chewed out for unbecoming conduct. You can’t scream at the prospectives. Professionalism was the fourth big word in our mission statement. I told her I was trying something new. That prospectives with low self-esteem and a passive nature might be Facilitated with aggression. It didn’t save me from a write-up.
“This is a very important job we do,” Judith warned. “We’re on the front lines of a worldwide crisis. If we don’t step up and do our darndest, it’s the world on the line.”
Yes, yes, we all knew the mission statement. And yet, with dozens of Facilitation companies across the country, we weren’t making much of a dent, now were we? Last time I checked, Mexico was still an archipelago. Topeka was still a vagrant camp visible from space.
But I didn’t say any of that. I just said okay.
The rest of my day went miserably. I wasn’t allowed to be angry, and angry was all I was. I wanted to hurl my InComp through the window. I wanted to chuck it at Matt’s head. I could hear him perfectly from over the wall, charming the ledge out from under some sick senior in Tacoma, snake-charming one more jumpslip through the gears of bureaucracy and into his bank account.
Meanwhile I was doing math in my head, subtracting each prospective I let get away from the number that would show up on my paycheck, adding on days I’d have to go without washing my one suit, tallying up the things I loved that I couldn’t afford to eat. I could taste my future going gray and tofu-flavored.
It was enough to make a girl want to blow her brains out.
Forty-five minutes to quitting time, and my hands wouldn’t move anymore. Wouldn’t call up another number. The futility hit me, a thousand gallons a second, and I almost drowned right there in my chair. No matter what miracle I pulled off in the next hour, I couldn’t afford TV for the span of a pay period. All I was doing here was wasting time and growing hungry.
I stood, glanced over the wall at Matt. The guy was in another world, one where the Earth was waiting on hold to get talked into a car compactor. By the sound of it, he had a grouper on the line—a big fish, I mean. I wondered distantly what this story would be when I heard it later, at the radius of the spotlight it would shine upon him. Would anyone be lucky enough to be caught in it with him? The Magic 8-Ball said unlikely. From a dozen different beaches, a dozen different Matts raised a dozen of the same martinis, as if to toast him for smuggling them away from here to some sunny, better place.
There are people in the world that are simply bigger. Not everyone meets them but we all bob on the waves they make as they swim like krakens through the world. Some rise up. Others sink.
I went to Judith’s office and told her I was leaving early. She looked at me like I’d kicked her door down first and said that this wouldn’t reflect well on me at the end of the month.
And I said, yeah, well, alright. Nobody reflected well when the mirror was Matt Aguilar.
☎
I got home that night to find the apartment quiet. I stopped in the doorway, insanely afraid that if I stepped inside, I would go through the dark like a banner and reveal all the people waiting for me on the other side. I couldn’t remember when I’d last been alone in the place I lived.
Angie was visiting her parents tonight, I remembered. Reshma was pulling a double shift. I checked the time. It looked like I had an hour and twenty minutes before she got back. I had a whole hour and twenty more minutes of just me. I could do anything I wanted. Read a book. Masturbate in peace. Watch what I wanted to watch. Seventy-five percent of a movie maybe. But more than any of that, I didn’t want it to end.
So instead of doing any of those things, I drew a bath. For the first time in months, I had water as hot as I liked—hot enough to tan me like a lobster. I filled it up with Reshma’s bubble soap to help hide its awful color, then took a razor blade from under the sink and slid into the water.
It didn’t matter that it was brown under the bubbles. I could have stayed there forever. Life was as finite as polar ice, and someone was enjoying the one I could have had. This was as good as it would ever get.
I stamped the razor blade to the slope of my breast, trying to glue it there with moisture. I pushed too hard into my meat and the edge snagged on skin. A ribbon of blood unspooled into the water, and I hardly even felt it. You work in my job long enough and you become a kind of sommelier. You’re trying to market a complicated thing to the sort of people who don’t know champagne from sparkling water and to do that you need to be familiar as a lover with every facet of your product. I could expound to someone at length on the unique virtues of slitting one’s wrists, for instance. I knew from my own PDF-saved rhetoric that by dint of endorphin euphoria, it was a flash of pain like a bad slap and then a warm, slow slide down into the softest bed you’ve ever had. Yeah, I could sell myself on the science of it, with focus-grouped terminology.
But I wasn’t a poet.
☎
“Sunny Futures Facilitation Services, Matthew Aguilar speaking. How may I assist you today?”
Of everyone who could have picked up.
“Hi,” I said anyway. “I’m calling because I feel like I want to die.”
People didn’t often call into Sunny Futures for facilitation. It took a kind of strength that most didn’t have. An awareness and acceptance of one’s darkest desire. They’d come to their ledge alone, and only asked for a push.
We called those people gimmes.
“Hey, that’s great to hear,” Matt chuckled dustily. “It sounds like you’re halfway there already.”
I moved my phone from one hand to the other. “I guess.”
“Well, tell me what the issue is. Let’s see if we can’t put things in perspective for you.”
He sounded different. Tired, maybe. His voice was like a pressed shirt gone rank and wrinkled at the end of the day. It was a little after eight o’ clock. He must have been pulling some overtime with the night crew. Classic Matt. The government wanted a so-high pile of scalps, and his blood was blue and white, as well as red. He’d go around with a machete and a sack if the law said sure.
“It’s a lot of stuff,” I said. “I’m not in great health. I’m an adult living with two other adults in a tiny apartment, and I hate them both. I don’t have the money to eat real food.”
“That sounds rough.”
I frowned at that. Matt normally would have had something a little punchier to say, something so sugary-sweet that you couldn’t help but slug it down until it plugged up your arteries.
“But mostly, it’s this guy at work,” I went on. “It’s like he’s so good at his job that it makes me worse. I feel like an accessory to his life.”
“Yeah, I, uh, I know what that’s like.”
Liar, I thought. But now I could hear the loose tie hanging off his neck. The sweat dried into a film across his forehead. The silver suit peeling off in the heat of a day left on too long. He’d be hunched over his desk with his tight work shoes off, lights all out but for the glare of his InComp.
It had been years since his legendary all-nighter. “How old are you now, anyway?”
“It’s like no matter how hard I work, it’s never enough. This guy, he’s like a mirror. I can always see exactly how bad I am at everything. And all I want is to get away—from everyone, not just him. And just for a little while, you know? But I can’t afford it. Living costs so much these days. I don’t even have forty-five minutes before my roommates come home, and I don’t know when I’ll be alone again.”
“I know what that’s like,” he said again.
And this time he made me believe it.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I asked. “If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?”
That seemed to catch him off-balance. “Well, uh. As it so happens, I’ve been saving up for a trip to Trinidad,” he said. “That’s actually why I’ve been working this late.”
“Been?”
“Every night, I mean.”
“Are plane tickets expensive?”
“Yeah, yeah, they are,” he chuckled, bitterly. “And hotel rooms. And food. And drinks. You’ve got to come in early and work late every day for months to make it work. Why do you ask?”
“So, is it worth it?” I asked.
A long, crackling pause. “It is,” he said, as if admitting something. “It’s–”
“Quiet?”
“Yeah.”
“Clean?”
A silence like a nod. “The sky there is blue like you can’t even imagine. The air doesn’t taste like poison in your mouth. You can go out on the sand and scream yourself sick, and no one will tell you to shut up.”
A low sigh. “But you can’t stay there. It’s pennies per second. You’ll have to come back eventually.”
“You’ve still got it better than me,” I said. “I can’t get away in the first place. You get to escape. At least for a few days.”
“A week, usually,” he said, softly.
“Mm. And then it’s back to the daily grind. Back to long nights spent stacking virtual paper. Pushing people off their personal ledges. You work so you can get away, but you wouldn’t need to get away if you didn’t have to work. Living to escape. Isn’t that messed up? That’s not really living at all. Don’t you wish you could just go away forever?”
“Sometimes.”
“Me, too.”
“I remember–” he began, haltingly, abashedly. “I remember when I was little, my parents took me to Fantasy World in Orlando. I don’t know how they managed. And… It’s the happiest memory I’ve got. I remember riding this rollercoaster and feeling closer to the sun than I ever did at the top of my belt apartment. I…think I work so hard so that I can get as close to that day as I can.” I hear an audible swallow on the other end. “But even I can’t afford to go back there. And soon it’ll be underwater anyway. Like everything else. So, I guess… I’d better let that go.”
A pause swelled between us, pushing us apart and joining us together. I understood then that the words I said next would push me down one of two futures. A binary decision then. Like to push or not push. One, or zero.
But never two.
Not in this shrinking world.
“Can I ask you one more thing?”
“Yeah, sure. I’m all ears.”
“Did you know there’s nothing after death?” I asked. Apropos of nothing. “At least that’s what the science says. Your brain goes click, turns off. You cease to exist, faster than you can see coming. But as you die you feel euphoria like you never thought possible. I think in that moment, you could be wherever you wanted most. You could be in a bubble bath that stays warm. Or on a beach that goes on forever.”
The line was silent for a good while. I started thinking he’d walked away from his desk.
“Are you there?”
“Yes,” he said. “I’m still here.”
“Okay, good, I was going to say, I think you’ve sold me, Mister Aguilar. I’ll go take care of myself. I hope you have a fun trip in Trinidad, and you get to go back soon.”
“Thanks, Katherine. And thanks for calling.”
I hung up the phone and put it down on the floor. I splashed my feet around some, but the water had gone cold as a toilet seat. I picked up the razor and asked it a question. I decided I’d do whatever it said.
☎
This is how people get turned into paper.
When someone is found dead, an investigation is performed. If it is found to be a suicide, the government will run their social security number through our database to see if they received a call from Sunny Futures within a certain timeframe. If so, the Bureau of Population Management submits an online form that we call a jumpslip, acknowledging a successful Facilitation. Once we have that, it gets deposited onto the total of whomever made the call. At the end of the month, that total is converted into a dollar amount and deposited into someone’s checking account. Every month, the region manager sends a report of every Facilitation to central storage in Toronto, where in compliance with Paper Trail regulations, it is printed out and filed in the appropriate cabinet, never to be touched again. Whatever should happen to their body, I think that is where their soul comes to rest—pressed flat between a thousand others, awaiting an audit that will never come.
I’ve been at this job for five years now. The system is imperfect. Not everyone we call lives long enough to jump. Sometimes they get shot first—that’s the worst. A bit of grit in the gears of bureaucracy can send jumpslips to the wrong person or spit them out into that un-place where disappeared things end up. Sometimes, for any number of reasons, you just don’t get credit for your hard work. And who knows where those souls go.
☎
Judith was the one to find Matt Aguilar the next morning. Scared her so bad she’d splashed her latte up the wall. According to her, he’d hung himself from the ceiling fan above his desk with his belt as a noose, but it looked like he’d pulled it down on top of himself and cracked his head open. “Blood going everywhere,” she told the cops. “Tongue flopping out of his mouth like a grape-flavored popsicle.” He hadn’t left a suicide note so much as a memo. An unsent, inter-office email left open on his InComp read, “Dear Everyone: I will be out of the office for a while. I’ll bring you back some souvenirs.” Nobody could mention that without a guilty chuckle. Even dead, Matt was the funniest guy anyone knew. And when, after the police had taken the body away, they checked his call log and found that the second-to-last person he’d talked to had been the governor of California, who had OD’d on sleeping pills the night before. That part was third-hand when it got to me, but everyone agreed that, true or not, it was a good ending to a good story.
☎
By the time I got in, the body was gone. The blood was still there though, soaked into the carpeting. Everyone had already gone back to their work, because we had a quota to meet and without Matt, it wasn’t a sure thing anymore. But there was a perimeter of empty cubicles around his. Matt’s death had left a crater, and nobody dared disturb that sacred aftermath.
I went to Judith’s office and sat down across from her. There was a trashcan full of used tissues beside her desk. I guess tripping over a dead coworker must’ve hit her hard. I told her that I was sorry for the other day. I shouldn’t have yelled at that guy like that. It did not reflect our company’s values. I’d been under a lot of stress, but that was no excuse, and I promised I’d leave it at the door, starting now. She nodded and got back to crying.
I headed back to my desk and paused to stare at where Matt used to be. No one was telling Matt-stories today. Wouldn't be for a long time. The quiet around his desk pulled like a vacuum. Some people are just bigger. They leave big holes when they’re gone.
I thought of glaciers melting. Waters rising. Dry land crumbling into the sea. Men and women forever climbing higher, jockeying for grip. Clawing. Biting. Hurling one another into the waves. Fighting for space to exist while it still existed.
This void begged to be filled.
Without another thought, I grabbed my things and moved them over one space. A girl heading to the watercooler gave me a venomous look. I ignored her and got to changing Matt’s desktop background. I felt better about the future than I had for a long time. It was a new day, and my numbers had been set back to zero, but I’d only just clocked in, and I was already up by one.
