Hamdy Elgammal
I was alone at the warehouse that Sunday morning when all this, for lack of a better word, started.
After college I careened from one dead-end job to the next, avoided people, drove long trips on my own where I drank boxed wine and listened to the classical music station on the radio. Years passed. Soon enough, too soon, I found myself in the studio apartment I now call home. My hair greyed behind my ears, my toenails turned the color of dead leaves.
These days it seems as if all my memories are stuck in a file cabinet that’s being consumed by a slow, persistent fire. Sometimes I don’t know if the moment I’m in is now or ten years ago.
That Sunday morning I woke up, darted out of bed, brushed my teeth, ate some dry Cheerios straight from the box, washed them down with a glass of milk. I left for the warehouse.
As I exited my building, I saw Mrs. Green, the octogenarian who lives in 2B walking her brown cat near the building entrance. Mrs. Green’s bathrobe was wide open, exposing her t-shirt with a large print of a cat’s face. Her grey curly hair had streaks of deep blue dye where it sprouted from her forehead.
“Good day to you, Mrs. Green,” I said.
“And to you!” Mrs. Green said, beaming a smile at me. She let go of the cat’s leash, walked towards me and linked my arm in hers.
“Rick,” she started. She smelled like cat food and burnt olive oil.
“It’s Paul.”
She paused, blinking twice at me. “Okay Paul,” she said. “Do you know what happened in 4A?”
“4A? You must be talking about another apartment.”
“No, 4A.”
“4A is where I live,” I said.
Her face took on a serious expression and she let go of my arm. “A man,” she continued, her eyes widening, “a man lost something in 4A. Something very important.”
“What did he lose?”
“I just told you. Something very important.”
“Well, I don’t lose stuff. And I haven’t lost anything recently.”
“Sure, Paul,” Mrs. Green said, rolling her eyes at me.
“Where’s this coming from? Who told you this?”
She waved her hand at me, dismissing the question. Her cat sniffed at a parked car’s back tire. I knew Mrs. Green was a little strange but this was over the top.
“Mrs. Green, did you miss your meds again?”
“Very important,” she repeated, nodding. “Something very important.”
I walked away from her and got into my car. As I drove, I talked to calm myself. “Mrs. Green is insane,” I told the empty car. “She’s on a cocktail of antipsychotics. She’s insane. Insane. Remember. Insane.”
I turned on the radio. The host was finishing a sentence, “As in all the whispers of dreams. The third suite.” The music began. I listened to the violins, rising then falling, the cellos muttering ominous things, the horns like an afterthought. I imagined the instruments playing themselves, disembodied from their instrumentalists.
“Could bodies operate in the same way?” I asked the empty backseat through my rearview mirror. I liked mental conundrums to warm up my mind in the morning.
I turned the radio off then continued, “As in, could bodies one day be just like radios, receiving waves at the right frequency? Could one’s frequency be possibly received from any other radio, that is body, if only said radio had the right tuning?”
There was only silence in the car. I realized I was, as always, alone. This manifested as a feeling of both exhaustion and liberation—a constriction of my chest and a charge in my elbows.
I pulled up to the Insure4Sure warehouse, where I worked my adjustments. When I took the key out of the ignition, I caught my reflection in the rearview mirror and saw that I had a milk mustache from breakfast. I wiped it clean and ran my fingers over my coarse stubble. I stood outside my car and looked up and down the street. The wind picked up an empty Pepsi can and it rolled away from me until it was stopped by a pile of wet-looking trash. “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if we’re radios.”
Inside the warehouse, I stood a few feet away from the gold Chevrolet I was there to adjust. The slanting sunlight filtered through the dusty clerestory windows. Dust particles floated in a slice of light right in front of the car. The light seemed to split the car in two: the passenger half that was still car-like and the driver half that was a mangled mess of metal, plastic and glass.
I opened the passenger-side door and put one knee on the seat, leaning my head in. The seats were black leather and there was a hole in the passenger headrest. A McDonald’s coffee cup sat next to the handbrake and a little brown toy dog with a chipped black nose was stuck to the dashboard, its head bobbing in all directions. I took notes in my clipboard; made little check marks, scribbled lists in all the right boxes. I underlined the words: “cup,” “handbrake,” and “dog.”
I picked up the green car freshener, shaped like a miniature pine tree, between my thumb and my index finger, untangling it from a wooden prayer rosary that hung over the rearview mirror. I touched my finger to my nose—wondered how much of this faded pine smell this man had smelled before he died.
In broadside collisions like this one, T-bones, your door is your first line of defense. It occurred to me that I must have seen hundreds of these broadside aftermaths. Yet I hadn’t thought twice about any of them. For good reason, too—they were gruesome affairs.
I stood in the warehouse and thought about what it would be like to be killed by such a collision.
“The door goes first,” I said. “It would be the only thing standing between me and the 50,000-pound freight truck going 70 miles an hour—it’d be crushed like a soda can.”
I put only my index finger to the side of my chest. “My ribs would go next,” I said, resting the rest of my palm against my chest. “One after the other.” I felt myself almost choking up. What a strange thing it was that I was here, contained, in this body! I felt like I was barely holding on to myself, that if I let go for a second I would burst out the top of my own head.
I couldn’t articulate the rest of the consequences. I was already so emotionally distraught. But I imagined it all—my punctured gut, my intestines, my liver, my pancreas swimming in a pool of corrosive juice leaking from my stomach, my gastrointestinal perforation, my collapsed lungs, my drowning, my death.
In car crashes, there is usually no time to feel or to see your life flashing before your eyes. Your last thought would probably be “Pain” or “Hurts.” Except it wouldn’t be words, because who thinks in words? It’d be flashes—orange lights, the whir of a car engine in its dying throes, a million little images of loss, nested one within the other, faster than even the pace of the few cubic inches inside your skull. Color and noise and pain splashing like buckets of paint on a blank canvas.
You look at pictures of enough crash victims—the wet and bloodied hair; the cold, purple fingernails; the shirts, torn in some, carefully sliced by medical scissors in others, always too bright for a corpse; the eyes either rolled up or non-existent—you look at all this long enough and the photographs start to feel as dead as greeting cards.
I stood beside the car and saw my face reflected in a flint of damaged window—my face older and more fractured than I knew what to do with. I thought of how things were when I was younger, of Mary Perkins. We had gone out to a burger joint together on our first date. I had worn a white bomber jacket and put Brylcreem in my hair. She had said it smelled nice.
I remembered her face not in any precise, three-dimensional way but only her still picture from our high school yearbook—the defined cheekbones, the freckled nose, her blank slate of a forehead. I did remember the way her toenails were painted in alternating shades of red. Her warm lips on mine like a slice of fleeting summer, her faint jasmine smell.
How long ago was Mary Perkins? Why, it could have been two minutes ago for all I knew.
It was always now, I realized. Always this second. And this. And this. Forgotten, remembered, forgotten again. What a bind! If I would eventually never remember anything in time past in the way that mattered— as the thing itself, not just my singed memory of it—what sense did it make doing anything as routine as insurance adjustment with time present? Especially given that all time present, all of now, was destined to be burned into time past? There would be no point in continuing this nothing of a job.
Slowly, I unlocked the Chevrolet’s passenger door, sat inside and buckled my seatbelt. Once buckled, I felt like I should say something. Anything.
I said, “Fine day today, don’t you think?” in conversation with the nonexistent driver. I smiled, it felt less awkward now. I looked to my left and then I pulled both hands to my face, shielding my head and neck from an imaginary oncoming truck. I glanced at the name at the very top of my clipboard: Rick.
That was strange. Mrs. Green had said that name earlier today. If she was crazy then, what was this proof of, if anything? My eyes lingered on the all-cap letters of the name, I ran a finger across them, felt only smooth paper underneath. Then I looked at the address—a part of me expected it to be mine, but it wasn’t. 321 Folly, Apt. 6. Not me. I breathed a sigh of relief.
I felt silly. It couldn’t have possibly been my address. This man was dead. I was, of course, alive. “Rick is dead,” I whispered, reassuringly.
After unbuckling my seatbelt, I picked up the styrofoam coffee cup from the holder and shook it against my ear. I heard coffee sloshing inside. Rick’s coffee, I thought. Rick’s toy dog, Rick’s freshener, Rick’s car mats.
I felt claustrophobic. I stepped out of the car, slammed the passenger door shut. It had rained the night before and I could smell the damp dust in the air. I inhaled until my living, uncollapsed lungs were full.
Then I tasted bile rapidly climbing up my throat. I walked to the big trash bin in the corner and threw up Cheerios in wet yellow chunks. When I was done, I wiped my lips with my sleeve. I thought I ought to say something. “I’m not Rick,” I said. “I’m Paul. Paul is here to do his job.”
I snapped pictures of the passenger seat, the driver’s seat, the crushed door, the front wheels, the fenders, the plates. Routine. I put the paperwork on the car’s roof for my manager to find Monday morning. I looked at that wooden rosary around the rearview mirror again. I wondered if whoever knew this man might benefit from getting it a little early. I thought of Mrs. Green’s words, “something very important.” I pictured myself sitting with Rick’s widow or mother or orphaned child, giving them the rosary and then feeling very good about myself afterward.
It would also prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that I was not nor have I ever been Rick. “Paul, Paul, Paul,” I said. “Not Rick.” I leaned into the passenger door again and carefully untangled the rosary from around the rearview mirror.
When I stepped outside, it was cold and the clouds hung like big grey dogs in the sky. I didn’t know if anyone was going to be at Rick’s address but I felt I should try anyways. 321 Folly Street, Apt. 6. I rolled down the windows as I sped down the I-80, watched the white stripes melt into each other on the road.
321 Folly Street was an old apartment building, three floors high. There were two tall jasmine bushes on either side of the front gate. When I touched them, soft dust rubbed onto my thumb.
I took the stairs to the third floor; Rick’s apartment, number 6, was the last one on the left. The door was ajar and there was a red and yellow doormat in front of the apartment labeled, “Home.”
I was here. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. What would I say if somebody asked why I was here? I would babble about time present and time past, about rosaries and radios. I would sound insane. I shut my eyes tight, heard blood rush behind my ears. I pushed the door.
When I stepped in, I smelled the unmistakable aroma of broiling burgers. Somebody was cooking in the house and I was scared I’d be caught trespassing. I turned to leave but felt a soft hand on my shoulder.
“You’re back,” a woman’s voice said. I turned my head and saw Mary Perkins, my first and only girlfriend, the most beautiful girl I had ever known. She looked exactly like that night we went out to the burger joint, nineteen on the nose. Her teeth were as pearly and perfect as I remembered, the smile pursed and a little secretive, her eyes June-sky blue and the toenails painted in alternating shades of bright and dark red. She wore a black cocktail dress with no shoulder straps that stopped just short of her knees.
“Mary?” I whispered.
There was a silence. Then her face broke into a smile. She hugged me, her fingers digging pleasantly into my shoulder blades.
“It’s been so long,” she sighed into my neck.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
She shrugged.
I closed my eyes tight again and stretched my neck to the right then to the left. “Okay,” I said.
I opened my eyes and Mary was still there except one half of her right eyebrow was now bright gold. I noticed, too, that right under her neck was a tattoo of the Chevrolet logo. I touched my index finger to her smooth skin, traced the corners of the tattoo.
“Is this a dream?” I asked. “Am I dreaming right now?”
She looked pitifully at me. “Not quite,” she said. “Walk with me.”
We walked, hand in hand, down the short hallway. There were hundreds of framed pictures of Rick hung on each wall. I saw that Rick had had sleek black hair, a double chin and bright green eyes. He was overweight, dressed in a brown tweed suit and red suspenders in every picture. The pictures seemed to have been taken everywhere—Rick holding a USA flag at a 4th of July rally, Rick standing proudly over a deer with a bullet wound in its head, Rick leaning his elbows against the hood of his gold Chevrolet, Rick flipping the pyramids off.
At the end of the hallway, we turned left into the living room. There was an apple-green couch against one wall, an open window to the right and a small walnut chair in the left corner. On top of the chair sat a blue vase of fresh jasmine.
I turned to Mary. I cupped her face in my hands and ran my fingers between the strands of hair above her ears. I felt such longing! I was so old and alone and she’d remained so young. How? That didn’t matter. It seemed we now finally had a chance to set things right.
I leaned in and kissed her. With her lips against mine, I tasted burnt rubber and pine car freshener. She smiled at me when I pulled my head back. She touched her nose against mine; I could count the four faint freckles above her upper lip.
I let go of her head. I held my fingers to my temples, slowly kneaded the skin. I knew that, in a way, she wasthe car crash but I also knew that she was Mary Perkins, this kind, intelligent girl whom I thought I’d lost forever.
Mary walked over to the couch and sat down. She crossed her legs and looked straight ahead at the wall next to the living room’s door. I went and sat next to her. It was soothing sitting there in Rick’s house, Mary next to me, the afternoon sunlight from the window gently warming my forearm. It was then that I was aware of the rosary in my pocket—the rosary I had come all this way to deliver. The something very important. I took it out of my pocket and held its beads between my fingers.
“This was Rick’s,” I said.
Mary shrugged. “Thanks,” she said. “But it can’t help anyone now.”
I paused. “I’ve missed you,” I said. “I once felt such affection for you that it seemed to wash over me like rain. And yet now…”
“Now what?” she demanded.
I thought about it. “I can’t explain,” I said. “It’s as if I’m touching you through a layer of fog. All these years, they seem as much a dream as this.”
“You’re not making a lot of sense.”
She was right, I wasn’t. “I’m sorry,” I said. I put my head in my hands. I wept. For what? I didn’t know. When I turned my head up towards Mary, she had peeled her face off her head. Underneath the face, which she now held in her lap, was a mesh of arteries, blood, flesh as raw red as the paint on her toenails.
“This is the nose,” she said, pointing to the nose on the face in her lap. Her voice was muffled now that that she had no lips.
“This is my nose,” I said, pointing to my nose, very much intact on my face.
“This is the mouth,” she said and I repeated, pointing to my mouth.
“Here,” she said, aligning her face with mine like a mask. “Wear my face and tell me something I don’t know about this world.”
I considered this for a second. I could see the bloodied mess through the eye sockets, but only barely. Then, strange as it was, I did what she asked.
HAMDY ELGAMMAL is an Egyptian software engineer and writer based in Oakland, CA. His prose has been published in Bourbon Penn, Origins Journal, Jersey Devil Press, Easy Street and Five on the Fifth.
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