The Home Office

     I wake up and I don’t know where I am.  I realize there’s someone next to me and a twinge of panic drops in my stomach.  I blink my eyes and rub them and look around.  I look at my wife, next to me in the bed.  Her red hair is matted against her face, her mouth agape, her eyes still closed.  I sigh in slight relief and pull the covers off myself.  I breathe in deeply and exhale slowly and then do it again.  I rub my left temple with the fore and middle fingers of my left hand.  I rub my right temple with the fore and middle fingers of my right hand.  I rub both temples.  I get out of bed.

     In the bathroom, I turn the shower on, to let the water heat up.  I take off my silk pajama bottoms and the matching collared top.  I sit on the toilet.  I push my penis down between my legs and piss.  I try to shit, but nothing happens.  Steam begins to fog the glass shower doors and I get off the toilet.  I reach my right arm into the shower, making sure it’s not too hot.  I get in the shower.  I let the water rinse over my body, until I’m wet all over.  I take the bar of soap from its built-in enclave in the shower wall.  I rub the soap between my two hands, to build up a lather.

     Holding the bar in my left hand, I rub the lather from my right hand along my left forearm, then my left bicep and tricep, then my left shoulder.  I scrub the lather vigorously into the hair of my armpit, scratching the skin underneath with the fingernails of my right hand.  I rub the lather on my chest and stomach.  I cup my testicles and rub them with the warm soapy water in my right hand.  I take the shaft of my limp wet penis and gently squeeze it.  I cup my hand over my penis and my testicles and rub them clean.  It feels good and I take hold of the shaft of my penis again.  I stroke it several times and it doesn’t get any harder and I give up.  I rub the bar of soap between my hands again.  Taking the soap in my right hand this time, I use the lather in my left to wash my right forearm and bicep and tricep.  I scrub my right armpit as vigorously as the left.

     With my right hand, I rub the bar of soap in circles on my right ass cheek.  I switch the bar to my left hand behind my back and rub circles with it on my left ass cheek.  I run the bar through the crack of my ass and rub the residue into a lather with my right hand.  I lather both my legs and feet.  Then I let the falling water of the shower rinse me clean.

     I turn in small circles under the water, feeling its warmth on every part of my body.  I feel its temperature start to fall.  I stand directly under the nozzle and let what little hot water remains pummel the nape of my neck.  I count backwards from ten.  ”Zero.”  I turn the water off and grab a crimson-red terry-cloth towel from the shower door.

     I scrub my hair dry, and then drape the towel over my back and pull it towards my ass, to dry my back.  I dry my chest and my arms.  I remember what my arms used to look like, how firm my chest used to feel.  I dry my penis and my testicles, and run the towel between my legs to dry the fleshy expanse between my genitals and my asshole.  I dry my ass and the back of my thighs and my thighs and my calves and my shins and my feet.  I hang the towel back on the shower door and I flush the toilet.

     I brush my teeth with the whitening toothpaste in the medicine cabinet.  I comb my still-damp hair, parting it down the right side.  My hair is still black, still full.  I walk naked from the bathroom.  The sunlight peeks around the heavy brown bedroom curtains, embossed with hundreds of tiny golden fleures-de-lis.  My wife lies in the same position, hair matted the same, mouth still agape, eyes still closed.  I dress myself in a navy blue suit with a white collared shirt with buttoned stays.  I choose a solid red tie.  I slide my feet into a pair of black patent leather shoes.  I thread a matching belt through the loops of my suit pants.  I take my wallet and my car keys from the nightstand on my side of the bed.  I look again at my wife and leave the bedroom.  I pick up my briefcase in the foyer as I walk out the front door.

     In the car, I listen to local talk radio, a show called, “Mikey in the Morning.”  Mikey is telling a caller that he’s naive about immigration.  Now Mikey is talking about me.  Mikey is saying that  I am naive like the caller.  He’s saying that I don’t know what I’m doing, that I should be fired.  He says that I’m a fat cat.  I turn the station to classic rock and The Beatles are singing, “a crowd of people stood and stared.”  I stop at the chain coffee store in the strip mall a block away from the home office.  I order a small coffee.  I look in my wallet and realize I don’t have the two dollars I need to pay for the coffee.  I hand the girl behind the counter my credit card.  She asks to see my ID and I show it to her.  She laughs.

     “What’s so funny?” I ask her.

     “Nothing,” she replies, still laughing, “it’s just that you have the same name as our congressman.”

      ”What a coincidence,” I say.

     She looks at me again and the smile disappears.

     “Wait,” she says, “Are you him?”

     “Guilty.” I raise my right hand like I’m swearing an oath.

     “Wow,” she says, “What are you doing here?”

     “Work.”  I take my coffee and leave.  In front of the home office I pull the gold Toyota into a parking spot with my name painted on the asphalt between its confines.  I get out of the car and walk into the office.  I get in the elevator and press a button marked “4″.  The elevator goes up and the doors open.  The intern at the reception desk sees me and stands up.

     “Hello, Congressman!” he smiles, “I’ll let Ms. Garcia know you’re here.”

     “Thank you.”  I walk into my office and close the door.  On the walls are pictures of myself.  There’s one of myself and the president and one of myself and the last president and one of myself and the Lion of the Senate and one of myself and the chief of the Chumash Indians and one of myself and the foreign minister of Azerbaijan.  On my beechwood desk is a picture of myself and my wife, swimming in the Grotta Azzura.  Her hair is a brighter red in the photograph than it is now, my teeth a brighter white.  There is a knock at the door.  It is my chief of staff.

     “Come in.” I say, and she enters carrying a manilla folder.

     “Hello, sir,” she says, “Welcome home.”

     “Thank you, Ms. Garcia.”

     “Shall we get right to business?”

     “We might as well.”

     “Ok,” she says, opening the folder on my desk.  She produces an agenda and spins it around on the desk, so it’s top-up to my perspective, and slides it across the desk.  Below it in the folder is an identical copy, which she picks up.   “For lunch, you’ve got Armistise, from Veteran’s Affairs.  He wants to talk about the new VA hospital, specifically the leasing agreements and future development clauses.”

     “Do we have to do it at the rib place again?”

     “I could try and change it, but he’s pretty particular.” 

     “No, the rib place is fine.”  I set my elbows on my desk and rub my temples with my fore and middle fingers.

     “Jet-lagged?”

     “Yeah.  Laurie, I’m sorry, can you give me five minutes.”

     “Sure,” she says scooping the manilla folder off the desk, “just buzz me when you’re ready.”

      She walks out and shuts the door behind her.  I lay my arms across the desk and my head on top of them.  I close my eyes.

The Restroom Is for Customers Only

     On the radio, Cat Stevens sings “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.”  I hear a clang and look up.  I know it’s her as I do.   With one of the double doors closed, the entrance to the shop is too narrow for her conveyance.  I’m supposed to keep the left door closed when it’s cold.  She and her motorized wheelchair would fit if not for the raft of over-full plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it.  She takes hold of the closed door in her right hand, reaches across her lap to the joystick that controls the wheels with her left hand, and, holding onto the door with her right hand, backs the chair up.  The door cracks opens and she uses her left hand and the joystick to maneuver the chair and its attending sacs of miscellany into the opening.  She flings the door fully open, switches her now free right hand to the joystick and scoots across the threshold.  The door rebounds at the extreme of its hinges’ range and swings shut as rapidly as it was flung open, thudding to a stop against her chair’s trash-bag rear fender, dragging shut as she enters the shop.

     Inside, she parks her rig, stands up and examines the display case.

“Oh, they all look so fluffy, like colored whip cream,” she says to me.

“Yeah, I like the way they look too.” I say.

“Can I try a couple?”

“Sure.”

“How’s that pineapple?  When I lived in Hawaii, they  always had pineapple ice cream.”

“Oh.  I bet it was good, Hawaii, and pineapples and everything…”

She stares intently at the case.

“Do you have a coconut one?”

“Yeah, right here, in the back.”  I put my finger against the freezer case’s sliding plastic doors, pointing at the frozen white waves on the surface of a pan of coconut sorbeto.

“You could make like a-uh pina colada.”

“Yep.”

“Do you like those?  I mean the drinks.”

“Not really, too sweet for me.”

“Me too.  I never really liked alcohol.  Beer I guess, but I never liked alcohol.”

She stares into the case.  I stare into the case.

“Which one do you want to try?” I ask.

“Just give me the four-seventy-five cup, with the pineapple and the tropical.”

“A medium with pineapple and tropical?”  I take a pink cup, made from biodegradable corn plastic, from the top of a two-foot tall stack of inverted pink cups that sits between a one-foot tall stack of smaller green cups and a three-foot tall stack of larger blue cups.  With my left hand, I grab the top pink cup and flip it top-side up.  With my right hand, I open the plastic sliding doors of the smaller of the shop’s two freezer cases, the one that holds the sorbeto, the one she stares into so intently.  I look at the metal pan, with a small plastic lean-to placard in front of it that reads “Pineapple” on both sides,  a quarter full of pineapple sorbet.  I look at the tropical, nearly full.

     With my right hand, I pull the red handled spade from the pineapple sorbeto, like sword from stone.  I scoop the pineapple first because it is older, and I know it will be harder, less malleable, than the fresh, airy tropical.  If I reverse the order, the serving will not find its form: a cupcake-like half-dome, an inch over the pink corn-plastic rim, forming a sticky equator between hemispheres of pastel orange and yellow.  Without the constraint of the week-old pineapple in place, the tropical will not hold its shape.  It will flow over the edges of the cup and stick to my hands.  I’ll have to give her the cup and the sugary soup will stick to her hands too.

      She’ll touch her money with her sticky hands, and it will become sticky, and I’ll have to touch the sticky money.  She’ll touch the chair she sits in, because she does not sit in her wheelchair while she is in the shop, and the chair will become sticky, and I’ll have to clean the chair.  She’ll put her hands on the bathroom door before she leaves, and I’ll have to clean the bathroom door, after she’s used the bathroom.

     I slice through the frozen mixture of pineapple, water, sugar, syrup, dextrose and air with the edge of the equally frozen spade.  A jaundiced iceberg breaks away from a pineapple glacier.  The atoms of the iceberg are cold and slow and so adhere to the cold slow atoms of the spade’s metal concave.  I scrape the chunk of pineapple sorbeto into the pink cup against its plastic rim.  It slips into the dish and lies on the bottom.  I pick it up with the spade the way one picks up a sleeping drunk, and lean it against the wall of the cup, mashing it in a bit with the back of the metal scoop, so it knows to stay up.  I replace the spade, convex down, handle resting on the clean back edge of pineapple’s metal pan.  I reach for the spade resting on the clean back edge of the metal pan with a small plastic lean-to placard in front of it that reads “Tropical” on both sides.  When she sees I’ve got the flavors right she begins pulling crumpled bills from the folds of her clothing, and half-heartedly straightening the bills.

     I pull the spade from the tropical with a slurping suck.  The softer stuff is the fresher stuff, the right stuff, possessing the texture it’s meant to have.  It  scoops less like an iceberg than beach mud, bits of blended seed and pulp for the grit of sand grains.  With the pineapple retaining wall in place, the tropical mudslide fills into the neat mound I mean for it.  I use the nose of the metal scoop to scrape the pink-plastic edge of the tropical hemisphere.

“Could you put one of those cones on there sweety?” she asks.

“Sure.”

     I press an inverted sugar cone into the surface of the mounded cupful of sorbeto.  I’m supposed to put it on the counter by the register.  She’s supposed to walk over and give me five dollars.  I’m supposed to put it on the counter by the register because it’s bigger, so the cup is less likely to be knocked over onto the floor, which would make a mess I would have to clean up.  Also, my tip cup is by the register.  I don’t get tipped as often if people don’t see the tip cup while I’m taking their money and giving them their change.  I take the cup of sorbeto to the bit of counter that she’s leaning on, in between the two freezer cases, and set it down.  She gives me five crumpled singles.  I take them to the register.  I press a button on the register with the number “2″ on it in bold black lettering.  Then I press a key marked “PLU”.  Then “6″, then “1″, then “PLU” again.  Then a button marked “CA”.  The drawer of the cash register springs opens with a thud.  I put the five crumpled bills on top of a crisper stack of the same denomination.

     She ambles to a table in the middle of the dining room, cup in hand.

“Do you drink alcohol?” she asks me.

“Sometimes,” I answer, “Not hardly at all lately.”   I take a spray bottle of kitchen cleaner and a rag from under the counter, beneath the register, and start cleaning the espresso machine.

“My daddy owned a bar, in New Jersey, that’s where I’m from.  So I grew up seeing people drinking and everything.  But I think sometimes the beer actually makes people go crazier than the other stuff even.”

“People drink so much of it.” I say, staring in to the already shiny chrome of the espresso machine, searching for water spots, for any dried flecks of steamed milk.

“There was one guy, he came in all the time.  I would come home from school, and he’d be there in my dad’s bar, and I’d have to go move his car from the middle of the street.”

     I turn my head to look at her and she shakes her head and laughs.  ”He got drunk and left it there?” I ask.

She stares into her cup, “I was seven I think…  when you’ve served drinks most of your life, which is what I did, you see the way that people are when they drink alcohol, you know?

“Yeah.”

     I put the spray bottle and the rag back under the counter.  I sit at the table, under the pass-through window to the production room, where the gelato and sorbeto are made, where I have my computer set-up.  I sit and start typing:  

     “On the radio, Cat Stevens sings “I’m being followed by a moon shadow.”  I hear a clang and look up.  I know it’s her as I do.   With one of the double doors closed, the entrance to the shop is too narrow for her conveyance.  I’m supposed to keep the left door closed when it’s cold.  My boss says it’s to keep some heat in, but still let people know we’re open. She and her motorized wheelchair would fit if not for the raft of over-full plastic trash bags lashed behind and around it.  She takes hold of the closed door in her right hand, reaches across her lap to the joystick that controls the wheels with her left hand, and, holding onto the door, backs the chair up.  The door opens and she uses her left hand and the joystick to maneuver the chair and its attending sacs of miscellany into the opening.  She flings the door fully open, switches the joystick to her now free right hand and scoots across the threshold.  The door rebounds at the extreme of its hinges’ range and swings shut as rapidly as it was flung open, thudding to a stop against her chair’s trash-bag rear fender, dragging shut as she enters the shop.”

     I hear her clear her throat and look up.  She’s standing by the small freezer case again.

“You want another one?” I ask.

“Mango and wildberries.” she says.  ”Here’s the money.”  She lays more crumpled bills on top of the freezer case.  ”And can you scoop it, but leave it in the case for me while I use the restroom?”

I close my computer and stand up.  I wipe my hands on my apron.  ”Sure.”