A beast without a name, p.4
A Beast Without a Name, page 4
Yes. It all adds up. Where it always must. At the bottom.
Thankfully, if he’d said anything else, it was lost in the compactor’s clanging hydraulic grind.
I turned from the memory, and found myself face to face with Albert, the arcade’s senior game technician, and one of the few hourly employees older than I was. “You busy?” he asked.
“Not anymore.”
“Good. Need an extra set of hands on the claw machine.”
I followed him across the sprawling arcade to the back wall where the machine was located. With his fire-engine red tech uniform shirt and chest-length white beard, he looked a bit like Santa Claus’s surly younger brother. Given the amount of toys he was responsible for dispensing, and the gruff way he went about it, that wasn’t that far off.
“That guy giving you a hard time?”
“Who? Nando?”
Albert grunted in the affirmative.
“Not that hard.”
“Horse hockey. And don’t let that guy get to you. Ever since he started here, we been losing redemption staff left, right and center. And it’s not just the missing merch that’s making that happen. Don’t want to see you as the next bit of collateral damage is all.”
“Thanks.”
“No thanks needed. It’s not for you. Not a pep talk. It’s survival. We need people in there. Smart people. Good people. You’re clearly smart—”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t play dumb,” Albert added sharply. “Too many dumb people wanting to play smart. Don’t go trying to flip the script.”
I half nodded.
“And you’re good with the kids. Good with the parents too. Not a lot of folks can pull that off. Not in in a place where—”
“Souls go to die,” I finished for him, not sure if those were going to be his next words or not.
“Yeah, yeah. Ha, ha. You know they call it redemption for a reason.” Behind his bifocals Albert’s eyes glistered. “I don’t know what crazy gale blew you into this place, pal.” He cast a quick glance to Nando, just now strolling back onto the midway. “Just don’t let that windbag blow you back out. Hear me?”
Again, I half nodded.
Malik, another tech, and a computer science major at the local university, was waiting with the tool cart at the claw machine. The card reader’s bezel flashed red, supposedly letting people know the machine was out of order, and rarely doing so effectively.
“’Sup,” Malik said as I got closer, and offered a dap.
“Hey,” I said as I accepted it.
Albert went straight for the cart. “Just grip the front panel on both sides,” he said as he fitted a socket bit into his cordless drill. “Grip it good. That thing’s heavy and the last thing I want is to spend the rest of the day cleaning up broken plate glass…and all your blood.”
He wasn’t exaggerating about it being heavy. It was a chore even holding the ungainly thing up as Albert fiddled around by the prize chute.
“Just as I thought,” Albert said, holding up a bent steel flap. “Keep telling them we’ve got to move this thing where we can keep a better eye on it.”
“What happened?” Malik asked.
“What always happens. Some jackalope. Some drunk jackalope, like as not, got frustrated that he couldn’t beat a child’s game to get a child’s toy, decided the rules don’t apply to him and did what any grown up who is used to getting his way does, he cheats. Shoves his hand in through the out door and fouls up the mechanism along the way.” Albert pinged the flap with a flick of his middle finger. “Just ruining the fun for everybody after.”
“Try straightening that out when you get back to the tech office,” he said to Malik as he dropped the flap onto the cart. It landed with a ringing clang. “Otherwise we gotta order a replacement. Machine’s out of commission for a while, either way,” he added. “Let’s get the face back on and hang a sign up.”
We repeated the process, just in reverse. Albert had just finished fastening the last bolt when he said. “Least it was just the flap this time.”
“This time?” I asked, knowing there was more to the story, and knowing that Albert was a born raconteur who lived for stories. “How so?”
“Few years ago, opening shift, we came in to find someone’d pulled the same stunt. Guy who worked here cleaning up after hours. Difference was…he’d got stuck.”
“Stuck?” Malik said. “How long?”
“All night. We found him there in the morning. Woke him up, actually.” Albert took off his glasses and rubbed them with the hem of his shirt. “Boy did we laugh, me and the other tech working that day. He’s not here anymore, the other tech. We figured we could get him out before the managers noticed, but were going to have a bit of funning along the way. Kept joking about how we were probably going to have to cut his hand off. Probably. You know, hardy har har, talk.”
“And…”
“And. We got him out all right. And we didn’t have to cut his hand off.” Albert paused. Then his voice went far away and quiet. “No…the doctors did that. At the hospital.”
Malik’s own hand went straight to his mouth. “You’re playing.”
“Wish I was. That’s just the cold truth of it. Watch band got caught on the flap, they said.” Albert pointed to the bent flap still sitting on the cart. “And it acted like a…a…noose, something like that.”
“Tourniquet,” I said softly.
“That’s it. Cut off the blood flow. Killed the hand straight dead, like what happened to that rock climber in that movie a while back. And that was that, no saving it. Jeeze Louise, think about it. Guy tries to steal a stuffed toy from the claw machine, ends up with a claw of his own for the rest of his life to remind him of that one dumb move.”
Malik shook his head. “Man, that is some Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone shit right there.”
“Watch. The. Language.”
Malik’s eyes scraped the carpet. This was obviously a discussion the two had had a few times already. “But why, man? Why do it?”
“People do a lot of dumb things,” Albert said.
“Maybe he had a kid,” I said. “Maybe it was for them.”
Albert turned. “Could be. Nobody got to ask him, seeing how they fired him and all.”
“Reminded me of a story, is all,” he continued. “You know how they catch monkeys in Africa?”
“What? Like for the zoo and sh—uhh—stuff?”
“For whatever. The bushmen, they cut a hole in a coconut and tie a rope to it. Then they stick a piece of fruit inside and wait for the monkey to come get it. The monkey reaches inside and grabs the fruit. But then he can’t get his hand out. The fist is too big for the hole. The bushman yanks the rope and…boom, monkey meat.”
“Right…right,” Malik snapped his fingers. “I heard that. ’Cept it was a baboon instead of a monkey. And it was salt instead of some fruit. And they put the salt in a hole in the ground instead of—”
“Missing the point here.” Albert shook his head. “Point is, all the monkey had to do was let go. Just let go, and he’d have been free. But no, he just had to hold on.”
“He held on,” I said. “Because it was all he had. That’s what you do when you don’t have anything else.”
Albert shook his head again. “You’re missing the point too. Point is: don’t be a monkey.”
“Monkey,” I echoed, looking through the glass front of the claw machine at the pile of lifeless stuffed animals heaped inside. Looking beyond it and into a life that hadn’t been mine for a very long time. “That’s what we used to call my daughter.”
Albert cocked his head in my direction. “Thought you said you didn’t have kids.”
I felt a twinge in my chest. I didn’t remember telling him that. He must have overheard me talking with Nando. Not that it mattered. I just turned to him and said, “I don’t.”
Then I went back to redemption, and back to work.
“When can I see her?” my wife, Claire, asked from the other side of the Formica table.
It was a mistake coming here. A mistake I made, and would likely continue to make, every single Saturday from two to four p.m., during visiting hours.
“When can I see Rachel?”
She looked comfortable. Her pajamas looked reasonably clean. I wondered how long before the nurse would roll past with her little paper cups, pharmacy keys dangling from her wrist coil. “Soon,” I said. “You’ll get to see her soon.”
And it wasn’t a lie, exactly. And I think Claire knew that. I could see it in her smile. The same smile that always broadcasted who was controlling the transmission. It was a sign off, that smile. It was static.
Claire would see Rachel soon—slippery as that word could be. They’d be in the same place, wherever that was, soon, after a fashion. My wife was certainly determined to get there. That was plain enough. It didn’t take a diagnosis from any of the doctors milling about to make it real. They’d be together soon. And no amount of counseling sessions, prescription pills, IV drips, or forced feedings were ever going to stop what Claire had started all those years ago when she let go of the emergency brake. When she did what put her here. What put Rachel where she was.
She nodded to the manila envelope sitting on the table. It was off to the side, but still somewhat between us. “What’s that?” she asked, like she did every visit, every time she saw it, and never remembering. Her memory had been selective even before the accident, as the courts finally ruled it. But four minutes belted into a minivan, with two lungs full of icy river water—four minutes of being legally dead—made it so it was impossible to tell what was selective, and what was simply gone.
“Just paperwork,” I told her, pulling the envelope towards me and slipping it into my shoulder bag.
“For your job?”
I offered a slight smile, but didn’t answer.
“When can I see Rachel?”
“Soon,” I told her, then looked at the wall clock encased in its metal mesh cocoon, a barricade to any soul looking for release at the corner of broken glass and vein. One hour and twenty-seven minutes to go.
Back in the car, I dropped the envelope in the empty passenger bucket. As always, it remained unopened. The divorce papers inside, unread and unsigned.
It’s a myth that most marriages don’t survive the death of a child. I’ve read that the actual percentage hovers somewhere around fifteen percent, well below the national average of people splitting up for reasons like infidelity or boredom. But I wonder, of those marriages that do survive, how many are like ours. And who, exactly, would look at that and call it survival.
I made a quick circuit of the prize-redemption area, broom and dustpan in hand, sweeping up errant candy wrappers, packing peanuts, and other detritus. Joey stood behind the counter, showing the ropes to another new trainee, one who would last six weeks if we were lucky.
I looked out to one of the massive monitors hanging over the bar. On it, a music video played. Another post-teen, post-Disney pop star dancing the same robotic moves to the same synthetic beat they all did. Not that I could hear much of it. The music on the midway is punishingly loud, but for some reason it’s almost inaudible here.
Despite the fully open arch that demarcated redemption from the rest of the arcade, it just fades to acoustic mud the instant you step over the threshold. I wonder what architectural wizard was able to pull of that sonic sleight of hand. I’d thank him if I could. I used to love music, but now the songs I know are all weighed down with too much memory. And the new ones just make me wonder what Rachel would have thought of them in a future that never happened.
As I pause to tidy up a bin of plush sloths, a little girl sidles up to me. She fishes one out, holds it at her tiny arm’s length a moment for inspection, then hugs it to her chest. Hugs it like it’s alive. Like it could somehow hug her back. They all do this, the kids. They do it all day. All of them. Gender never matters. Only age matters. And although there’s no set cut-off date, at some point that connection, that craving is going to cease.
Another switch goes off. Another light goes out.
I read about a psychological study when I was in college. Some sick bastard had separated some infant rhesus monkeys from their mothers. Then he gave them the choice of a wire-frame with a bottle in its chest and a nipple to drink from—or one covered with fur that had eyes and a face, and nothing else. Without fail they went for the latter. They’d rather starve than live without love, or, at the very least, a simulacrum of such.
Once, after closing up, when there were no eyes to see me, I tried hugging one of the stuffed animals myself. I felt nothing. Not even foolishness. I suppose it only works if you are a child or a monkey.
I was just about done sweeping when I noticed an unopened box of rainbow Slinkys sitting upended beside the card reader. I picked it up and set it back under the display box where it belonged.
Or, at least, I tried to. A woman grabbed it from me just as I was sliding it home. “That’s my daughter’s.” Her voice was pinched and mean, her face the same.
“The whole box?” I asked. There were two dozen of them inside. Even discounted as they were it would mean a lot of tickets.
She looked at me dumbfounded.
“Well, she can’t want all of them, right?”
“What?”
I realized then that her daughter must have seen the ticket “price” sticker stuck to the side of the box and taken to mean that it meant the lot and not each individual slinky. And this woman simply hadn’t noticed. I explained the situation.
“No, I don’t want the whole box,” she said after the reality of it sunk in. Embarrassment marbled her tone, adding a swirl of shame. But not the kind that speaks, I’m sorry—the kind that snarls, How dare you make me look like that.
“Well, here then…” I started, pulling one from the box.
“I don’t want that. I don’t want the box and I don’t want that either. I don’t want any of this.” She gripped her daughter by the hand and her son by his upper arm, both tight enough to make them wince. “Come on. We’re going.” The children went along with her, silently if not willingly.
I wondered about her words. I don’t want any of this. Did she mean the Slinkys? The rest of the trinkets? All the happiness swirling around her? The joy that wasn’t hers? I only hoped that whatever demon was haunting her would leave her children be. But from the leaden look in their eyes as she dragged them to the door, I knew that hope was gossamer-thin.
Back at the counter I proceeded to pull a half-full trash bag from the can stationed at the side. “Taking this out,” I told Joey.
She looked at the translucent bag and its meagre payload. “You still sick?”
I nodded.
“The cold?”
I shook my head and said, “Yeah.” Then added, “Could use the air.”
“I’ll come with,” she said. “Heading on break anyway.”
I was about to protest when she added, “Trainee needs to get thrown to the wolves sooner or later. Only way anybody learns anything.”
The air was brisk outside and a cold mid-March sun hung high in the sky, offering much light but no heat. I tossed the bag into the dumpster and sat down on the remains of an old brick planter. Joey leaned against the giant cardboard compactor opposite me. I gazed past her at the metal doors, weeping rust, at the back of the mall. The arcade, like most locations of the nationwide chain, was housed in the remains of an old “anchor store.” A Sears, or a G. Fox, or some other chain that had long since gone belly up, leaving a cinderblock carapace for us to inhabit, like a hermit crab.
My eyes landed on a jumble of boxes next to the compactor. “You know, when I was a kid, all I ever really wanted was a big cardboard box.”
“A cardboard box?”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “I think about that sometimes when we’re stocking toys. I’d live for the day when someone in the neighborhood would get a new refrigerator or a washing machine and then leave the box by the curb.”
“That’s sad,” Joey said.
“Sad? How?” I asked, the earnestness, the honesty in her tone knocking me on my heels. “You know, a cardboard box could be anything. You just draw what you want on the outside with markers. It could be a race car, or a rocket ship, or a submarine. Cut hatches and portholes with a Stanley knife. How could something pure like that ever be sad?”
She absentmindedly kicked at a chunk of stray asphalt. “Because it’s empty.”
I tried to think of something to say—some response—and came up just as empty. I turned to head back in.
“Wait,” she called just as my hand hit the handle.
“What is it?”
“It’s Nando,” she said, eyes off in the distance.
“What about Nando?”
“I think he’s the one who’s been stealing,” she said. “Stealing the high-end stuff, the video games and whatnot, and pinning it on other people.”
People working in prize redemption, she meant.
Joey flicked a glance to the cardboard compactor. “That’s how he does it,” she said. “He puts whatever he wants at the bottom of the empty boxes and then makes us take them out here. Then he comes back for whatever it is later. Pins it on one of us. Probably sells the stuff on eBay or gives it away to friends.”
“But why? He makes four times as much as any of us.”
“It’s not always about money…you know that.”
I did. And what’s more, I didn’t just know, I understood.
“Have you told the GM?”
“Don’t have any hard proof. I tried to get it, but I think he knows I know…so he has other people do it, and…well, I think he’s going to pin it on you next.”
“Me? Why me?”
“Because you are a little too good at your job. Because, sooner or later, you were going to figure it out, even if I didn’t tell you. People like you here. He needs to get rid of you before you can put down any roots, while you’re still disposable.” She looked to the dumpster, just to make her point all the more solid. “I can cover for you, if you want.”
