The Talker. Mary Sojourner
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little room with its cool metallic air, the blue-green light of the computer screen, the corners of the room murky and silent, he would pretend he was in a submarine. He would imagine that luminous creatures drifted through the gloom outside and that the red and green and blue lights were signals of their presence. He would hope that they were friendly and not at all hungry. He would tell himself that Safe and Serene Security Systems was a doorway you might see on a re-run of The Twilight Zone, something you might stumble through in a dream.
Spring evenings, he would take his dinner break outside on the marbleized steps. The desert twilight would go pearly. He would stare off into the vastness of the Rio Rialto Office Park, aware that the birds had stopped their sunset noises. No planes would fly overhead and the whine of I-10 would fade clean away. An impossible silence would fall over the city’s edge.
Davy would open his cold yogurt soup or sesame spinach wrap or Canton chili noodles. He was taking a course in vegetarian gourmet cuisine, as his ex-wife’s shrink had suggested. “Something new,” the shrink and Lisa had said. “A way to take care of yourself. A way to move on.”
He would take a bite of his dinner and look out past the black wrought iron fence, across an acre of parking lot. Slowly the mass of the abandoned building to the south would begin to shimmer. For less than a minute, the sleek black stone would reflect the twilight. He could imagine he was looking into a great, curved and empty mussel shell. The deep silence would seem not only possible, but necessary, and the building’s transformation reasonable and essential.
It was just that sort of thinking that had lost him his real job as a computer salesman. It was just that sort of thinking that had sent Lisa out the door. And it was just that sort of thinking, she loved to point out, that was causing her to tell her lawyer and the shrink that she didn’t want Davy seeing her kid more than twice a month.
“Mystery building,” she said. “Mystery brain’s more like it. Meaning, Davy, that your brain is a mystery to me and I could care less to solve it. Jacob needs grounding now.”
Davy cared very much to solve the mystery of the building. It was the Inc. That was all that was left of the glittering stone letters on the long side that faced the Interstate. He wondered what they’d taken away. They’d left no clue. They’d removed the letters with the same attention to detail they’d brought to the parking lot, the grounds, the stone and glass of the building and how the desert light fell on it and lured the eye.
One skinny dead tree rose in front of the big smoked-glass doors. They’d set a floodlamp at the base of the tree, planted some lush ground-cover and set sprinklers there. At dusk, breezes stirred the dust and the little tree became a ghost in the cloudy light.
Sometimes Davy walked along the Inc. fence, past the little tree and giant doors, then back to the trimmed Bermuda grass of Safe and Serene. There the fence stretched away to the west. Sighting down the black iron stakes, he watched I-10 shimmer. At sunset, the drivers on the Interstate might think they were looking at a wall of fire. If he could hold onto this job, he might be driving into work some December evening, look over and surprise himself. He might feel the sweet spooky lurch of “Where am I? What’s happening? This might be awful, but it could be new!” It was something to work for.
Lisa hadn’t liked his weird goals. She was about Safety. He was about Surprise. The two of them were Maturity vs. Fun, Planning vs. Spontaneity, What Works vs. Weird. He had seen the words in capital letters when they fought, like chapters in one of the how-to books Lisa tried to get him to read. Of course, it hadn’t been that way at first. Of course, they’d promised each other that wouldn’t happen. Of course, it had. And that was a mystery he couldn’t have cared more to solve. Even if he had a clue.
Nobody seemed to know what mystery or what business-as-usual the Inc. had held, if it had ever held anything or anybody. There was a service entrance to the east, big enough for five eighteen-wheelers to dock. There was a garage for at least another dozen trucks. The parking lot was bigger than all of Villa Encanta, the trailer park Davy lived in. It was always then, right when he was considering the comparative size of the Inc. parking lot and Villa Encanta, that he would feel his gut knot. He would realize he was hanging on the iron fence so tight the metal edges bit into his hand. He knew unfairness and bitter consequence and how the universe was clenched around him, sharp and fixed in concrete as the iron stakes.
He’d been awarded the travel trailer, half the CDs and old tapes, all the National Geographic collection and two plates, bowls, cups, forks, spoons and knives. All that really mattered was that he’d been granted Jacob, every other weekend for forty-eight hours. They would see how things went before Lisa and her lawyer decided about Easter and Xmas and other national holidays. It would depend on whether or not Davy was finally ready to face reality. They would see how the job went. Maybe a few classes at a community college to show he was thinking about the future. The gourmet vegetarian course didn’t count.
Lisa had driven over the morning after they signed the papers. They’d made love for the first time in a year. She’d gone fierce and soft the way he loved, waited till he finished, jumped up and disappeared into the john. She came out glum and naked. While he watched her from the bed, she opened a beer and chugged it down.
“Don’t eat me with your eyes that way,” she said. “You make me feel weird.”
She pulled on her clothes. When she went out the screen door and as usual, didn’t bother to latch it, Davy had figured that was all she wrote. But just as he started to throw back the damp sheet, he’d seen the door open and her hands setting their senile cat, Ray Cooper, on the carpet. By the time Ray C. got his bearings, Lisa’s pick-up was crunching out over the gravel drive.
Davy discussed all this with Sophieann, Security Engineer 1, in those peaceful hours between eight and midnight. “Jacob awarded to me part time?” he said. “Like I was getting some kind of half-ass prize?” They talked about everything, what men want, what women want, marriage and why bother, Sophieann’s arrangement with her boyfriend, Larry the Fake Chicano, and her pure terror at the thought of Larry’s possible departure.
“We don’t have anything solid,” she said, “not even a magazine subscription—or a cat.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Davy said. “Lisa and I started out with all of it, a kid in the oven, one of those Hollywood production weddings, Ray C., who wasn’t senile at the time, and a joint National Geographic subscription. It made no difference.”
“Why’s the cat named Ray C.?” Sophie said. “Not to change the subject.”
“Ray Cooper,” Davy said, “is the best drummer in the British Isles. Lisa and I used to care about stuff like that.”
Sophieann sighed. “Seems like Larry and I don’t agree on much. But he’s got some definitely interesting ideas about things.”
Davy waited. He’d had his fill of Larry’s interesting ideas. There’d been the run-of-the-mill ones like a Jewish left-wing conspiracy being responsible for Larry not being able to find a job. There’d been the entrepreneurial ones like Davy investing in Larry’s chasing UFO sightings in Nevada. Larry would need a truck, a big one, and video equipment and lots of gas money.
Sophieann stared into the computer screen. Her face was eerie and beautiful in the flickering light, her dark hair picking up little festive Christmassy glints. Davy thought of a tropical fish in one of those black light tanks. He liked that he could see her beauty and know that they were strictly on the friendship track. They’d discussed that right off and said how their hearts were tied up at the moment and probably would be for a long time.
“Larry says it’s Mafia in that empty building,” she said.
“No way,” Davy said. “Not in Phoenix.”
“Excuse me,” Sophieann said, “1976? That reporter that got blown up with a car bomb? Larry says The Boys are everywhere. Bullhead City, Lake Havasu, we’re just a hop, skip and a jump. Larry knows.”
“Whaaat,” Davy said. “What does he know. He plays a little poker, he loses a few bucks over in Laughlin. That makes him Senor Juice?”