Mom, he drives and I leave him driving to call you Hello, calling you not on your workphone because it’s too early for work but on the homephone because Fridays you don’t work but are up early out of habit and I listen to you talk, to your stories about your old friends I don’t like — who have children my age whose successes I don’t like — about your new friends whose names I don’t recognize, to what you’re cooking as if smell travels through newer model phones, I listen to recipes and your dairyfree, glutenfree modifications, about the trip you’re planning to the Santa Fe Aunts, the intermediate pottery class you’re taking and the inflammatory bowel disease support group you volunteer with and he drives. He is as lost as a 1:1 map — whereas I’m still only partly awake, despite this being a call I initiated, a call I now want to end, I have to be at work in an hour (and I’m fresh out of gunpowder — the tea).
This is like the Ford, Mom, as it involves other names. It involves what I’ve told you and what I haven’t and just like mothers lie to children not only about where air goes to and mail and phonecalls come from but also about difficult subjects like death and God and can God die? most children lie to parents too, though my lies have been mostly moronic — mine have been lies of omission (and so you can understand why I’ve forgotten to tell you about them until now). I’ve told you I work at a pharmaceutical company, a few times I might even have said a pharmaceutical multinational—as if the sum of the countries malignly conspiring factor into my salary — but what I haven’t told you is that I work as a proofreader. That’s it, as a copyeditor, the lowliest of editors, a reader not even a writer, I’m not allowed to write, I’ve never met the writers. Their copy just shows up in my 9 AM email from close of business in Delhi or Lahore, and I’m supposed to go through it — the label materials, the innards instructions for use — and mark mistakes. It doesn’t take a native to spot misspelled symptoms and dropped articles the and an, but it does take a native to sweat being outsourced every quarter (will Lahore proof Delhi? or Delhi proof Lahore?).
When I began my story I was proofing a drug called Nomenex, Mom — it’s supposed to make you “happier” (my word), maybe it does, probably doesn’t, but efficacy isn’t what irks me as Ronald Ray drives. What irks me is how people in the office still talk about it. If an officeperson is in a bad mood, Mom — say they’ve misfed their pets or their siblings have been imprisoned, leading them crying to handicapped toiletstalls and service stairwells to be used only in case of cardiac exercise or emergency, for private phonecalls to haute veterinarians and obscure lawyer uncles — they don’t say, She might need Nomenex, or, You might want to ask your doctor about Nomenex, they say instead, She needs to get Nomenexed, they say, Nomenex her, or, Nomenex the bitch, and people will even say that about themselves, Nomenex me, I’m a week behind, I assfucked my diet, can’t sleep, and Heather hates me. Heather or weather or whatever depresses, Nomenex my ex while you’re at it. My coworkers all have names like Heather, Mom. How can you be a person with a name like that? how could you expect to be an original individual? Names aggregate, exaggerate, caricature everything too explicit. Two Ricks in Accounting. We all know Ricks, even Rick knows what to expect from a Rick. Marketing Steve. It’s fairly obvious how to market a Steve. Tucson, indisputably itself (handles distribution), Trenton sweet Trenton, the transparent worst (“our” lab), Ronald Ray drives and Patty patters.
Mom, I dress in whatever’s clean. Pants, shirt to which the tie’s always tied and buttoned into collar, jacket singlebreasted, all of it solidcolored except the tie hoisting miniature flaglike stripes, red fimbriated white, the pants dark to where I can’t tell blue or black, the shirt white disclosing dull stars of dribbled deli coffee, jacket matching pants whether exactly or inexactly depending on blue or black, socks definitely black, shoes definitely black (these last were bought together and the salesman gave his word) — what definitively coordinates this colorwise already possibly coordinated wardrobe is that all its brands are utterly defunct. Dad having brought them over the years to my apartment, Dad having bought them years ago, decades and waistline inches ago, these clothes — now covering the nudity of my apartment that’s only a closeted bedroom with bathroom reeking of clogged piping adjoining — mean zero to me, their designers mean zero to me, their normally significant tags giving no contemporary indication as to whether the signified article was once expensively fashionable or just cheap and extraordinarily lame. My other shirts have pips and flecks but no logos, Mom. My other pants are jeans — manufactured in sweatshops sequestered in purdah halfway across the innominate earth — and they certainly have their endorsements, but I purposefully purchase them hidden, to be hermeticized by my belt or within the inseam of the jean, facing the migraine strain of my erection — bet you’re glad to have that thought, Mom, as Patty jerks and shudders.
I take the train moving faster than any car traffic moves, without stoplight, without stopsign, but still Ronald Ray is routed reckless and the body humps around. Mom, they remain lost, as do I. Working at a multinational means that I work in only one nation and cannot travel, I commute. There is a spire often passed. There is an office in the spire oft passed. Not only does this pharmaceutical multinational have a name but its subsidiaries also have names and some of these subsidiaries sell pharmaceutical products with names and other of these subsidiaries license for sale generic versions of pharmaceutical products and even these generics have names (generic names) — and the spire has a name too, and the name of the spire is the same as the multinational’s name but before the spire was named for the multinational it was named for a company that was acquired by the multinational and the company’s name was added to the multinational’s name and so the spire’s name, Mom, was accordingly changed, respired (names I cannot mention, names I wouldn’t even breathe).
9 AM, booting my workcomputer, my morningcomputer, to remind me of where I’d stopped the night before (I’d never stopped): I didn’t know where to bring Patty’s body, Ronald Ray didn’t know what to say about the body, we didn’t know what our responsibility to it was, Mom, with even our tenses undecided. He ranged about their nativity. It was unbelievable that someone could call this fictional strip familiar, but it was also believable. Impossible and yet possible that someone could call this commerce home (I was thinking about home when I wrote that). All around him was Vacancy with the vowels themselves vacant, Vcncy: the local errata of burned connections, burnt bulbs, Free Cable TV! as if in advocacy — what was cable locked up for this time? (That’s a line I’d been saving.) Didn’t we already pass this pass, Mom? make that exit or eat a meal? Did we take our meds or no? and if so, shouldn’t they have been taken with a meal? Light blinking lights. Mom, does a light blink on or off? or does just saying It blinks cover both? This was what I thought about for a week. Blinkblinking go the correx, the corrigenda. 9:30 email, 10:00 new product slogan session (even us galley drones are polled), 11:00 email, hunger, boredom (which is another kind of hunger), still Ronald Ray was driven and Patty not ceasing to be deceased.