We Are Here 24/7

by Kit Zauhar (Winner of the 2016 Editors’ Award in Prose)

At the CVS I stand in line behind an old woman trying to pick up a film camera:

“What is it?”

“It was a Nikon, I think—”

“So you dropped off a whole camera?” “That’s right.”

The woman is very old, late eighties maybe. Her spine carries the weight of mistakes made by children and then grandchildren. Her breasts swing like dull pendulums under her loose wool coat. Her whole body looks as though it has been sucked dry. She has a large brown mole on her cheek that reminds me of dried-up tapioca and a blue hat that I immediately assume she knit herself because who else could’ve bothered. Her hair glows white gold in the fluorescent light and suddenly the CVS is humming a single tone. The plastic pills in prescription bottles start rattling.

I remember watching airborne hairs of my grandmother’s float like dust particles in sunlight. I’d sit on her lap and reach upwards towards white light, letting my fingers hover underneath the individual strands, which rippled like translucent tentacles in deep sea water. A game my younger self would play with gravity.

“When did you drop it off?” “Last year, November, I think—”

“Hold up. You dropped off this camera last year?” “That’s right.”

Maybe in the old days, when I was nothing but particles of other people and the air between them, you could just drop off a whole camera and pick it up whenever. They’d wait for you. You’d drop it off and they would say, Don’t worry. We’ll keep it. Sealed away till you’re ready to pick up the memories too painful to collect. We’ll hold the burden ourselves, us CVS employees. We’ll witness the dead sister and the rude grandchild, the husband you divorced and the best meal you’ll ever have eaten, so you don’t have to.

“Well, miss, I don’t know what to tell you. We throw away film after six months.”

“But it was a whole camera . . . can I speak to someone who worked here then?”

“None of us worked here last year.”

Well how did you all get here, you random congregation of red-vested pharmacists and salespeople, who have decided to spend your time selling nicotine patches and discount candy? What will you all be doing if you were not here last year and will not be here the next?

“So, you don’t have it?” “No, ma’am.”

No apology. The old woman didn’t pick it up in time. This CVS has rules. The old woman walks away, patting her knit cap tighter over her head like she’s trying to empty her skull of coins. I can almost hear her whispering, where could it be? maybe I did pick it up? Why can’t I remember? I trail behind her looking for the loose change so she isn’t short-handed at the laundromat, and she turns around, crying, or perhaps it’s the perpetual under-eye wet of the elderly, either way it makes my body quiver, go sore with a sudden exhaustion. I watch the woman’s body deflate like a punctured sandbag. I lick my finger and put it to the knubbly grey carpet to pick up the sediment. I put it to my lips. It tastes like the heated copper of a burnt-out bulb. When I look up, the old woman is walking away, each step the slow timpani beat of a mourner’s song.

The security guard at the front shakes his head when I try to follow: “I don’t know where you’re going with that. You’ve gotta pay, miss.”

I don’t know where I’m going either. I want to run to a river, swim across the river, through that river, into another state, change my name, start a new life, try to forget the old woman with the tapioca skin.

I walk up to the register, where the cashier tries to continue the conversation:

“That woman was really trying to pick up a camera that she dropped off a year ago. Hmph.”

Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up.

She rings up my tampons and gum. I pay and leave to go home though I don’t want to. Outside it’s dark and lonely. I look for the old woman, to do what, I don’t know: apologize for everyone young and red-vested, walk her home, buy her another camera. But she is gone, perhaps having disappeared into a nearby taxi or street lamp.

“Hello?” I call out, teasing at the silence. No response. It’s strange how so many people around me seem to vanish, like particles zapped up into telephone poles.

I wonder what was on that roll of film. Last year, November. Thanksgiving dinner maybe? Her family has come to see her and she had had the neighbors help her prepare a feast. She is wearing a dress she could only fit in as a twenty-something; she’s gotten that thin. She watches her grandchildren snatch piecrust off each other’s plates and thinks, this is happiness. She gets a picture just as the kids cackle, snot running down their noses, whipped cream smeared on their cheeks. She thinks, this is family. She sees her daughter, now elegant and tired and middle-aged, playing with the gold necklace her husband gave her on their tenth anniversary. She takes a picture, knowing the flash will make the necklace glow and sing. She thinks, this is what it is to love. Now that camera is in a trash heap, buried under used condoms and tissues, soy sauce–glazed take-out containers and expired ketchup bottles. Excavators thousands of years from now will find it. One of them will take it gingerly in gloved hands and show it like a newborn bird to his intern and say, They used to take pictures with this. There are little paintings made with light and chemicals stored in a capsule inside. They’ll open it carefully, to find that the film was never wound.

Sunlight destroys memories as quickly as your local CVS.

I walk home quickly. It is a cold and stern night and I don’t want it to catch up to me. I feel like I am being scolded by the gravel bits getting stuck in the soles of my shoes and the homeless man who barks at me for change. The world is out to get me tonight, but I’ll take it. Better me than the old woman.

The doorman is talking dirty on the phone when I get back. He has two apple cores lined up like little soldiers on the front desk and is sucking on the skin of a third. Every day I joke that I need to introduce him to some better fruits. Has he ever had a persimmon, an Asian pear? I could pick one up from Chinatown for him. One time I told him I didn’t like apples very much, they got stuck in my inner retainer. I opened my mouth and tilted my head down so he was a giant explorer in my miniature membranous cave. I let him run his apple-sticky index finger along the metal track stuck with plasticine glue to the back of my bottom teeth. He smiled and said, Cute.

“Baby, you sound real sexy but I’m at work. Uh huh. Yeah, you know I like that.”

I place a peach on his desk. He fondles it and smiles at me. Winks.

I wink back.

“I get off work at three. Yeah, I know you can stay wet for me.” Cute.

I run my tongue along the metal track and walk through the gate. He doesn’t make me swipe in anymore. I’m a regular among regulars. Upstairs I sit heavy on my bed and turn off all my lights. When I was younger I used to be terrified of the dark. An indigo-mute childhood bedroom was death to me. Now it feels safe. I’d rather death sneak up on me than say, Hi how are you doing? and give me the

chance to see all the wrinkles and moles on her face.

I look out the window into the abandoned office building across the street. Sometimes when it’s late I trick myself into thinking that there are dance parties, secret cult meetings, late-night infomercials being filmed in there. The 90’s Macbooks and broken paper shredders are just a ruse, a cover-up. Someone said: how can we make this look like the most ordinary office space ever? But they can’t fool me.

A light turns on and my heart glitches. I watch eagerly for two lovers to meet, a porn film crew to enter and put up the sexy accountant set. Instead, a maid, plump and nondescript with a tight bun and yellow gloves comes in and starts picking up half-full trash bags.

Disappointed that the world will never be as exciting as I want it to be, I close my eyes and tally up the costs of setting up my own porn studio in my bedroom.

When I wake up the dark is still angry with me, so I don’t go out. I stay looking across to the office building again, letting my eyes go static, stretching the windows into small parallel lines of yellow light. Then it slants back to normal as I spot a small figure next to my bamboo plant. This time it’s not the maid. It is a man, dressed in a green suit with a grass pattern all over it. He is looking at me. He smiles like we’ve been reunited in a crowded airport terminal. He waves big so I can find him. It’s been years! Look how much you’ve changed! Still beautiful as ever! I wave back. He keeps waving so I keep waving, I run like I’m on a treadmill so at least it feels like I’m getting closer, like I’m trying to reach him. I jump on my bed and wave at him. I dance to a song we are both hearing and wave to him. He jumps back, beckoning like a man on an island who’s just spotted a helicopter overhead. I turn my arms into propellers but cannot fly over to him. I can’t reach you! But we’re still connecting! I still feel like I’m touching your cheeks, hugging you tight! I call the boy I sometimes I have sex with. I tell him a man in the office building is waving at me! He needs to come over now now now.

By the time he gets here the man is gone. A light particle evaporated into the swinging overhead beams as soon as I look up from my phone. The boy laughs at how crazy I am and kisses me. In between kisses he tells me everything he likes about me in alphabetical order: starting with my abnormal behavior. Now that the man across the street isn’t watching I’m not sure if I want this boy here. But it’s too late. He strips me down, pulling at my tight pants vigorously. Whenever a boy pulls off my pants I feel like I’m getting a diaper changed and I feel an urge to wail, Daddy Daddy. Call it an Oedipal complex,

I call it make-believe. The air smells like the strawberry lubricant he insists on using because he’s always afraid I’m not wet enough (Daddy wants to make sure I’m wet enough). He pulses inside me. I am an ocean and he is a throbbing jellyfish. He turns me around and starts from the back. Our rhythms are out of sync. He is fast rap and I am white noise, a static moan of muted satisfaction. He feels the dull vibration in my bones and wants me to short-circuit, so he spits on me. Mucous trails slowly and deliberately into the baby hairs of my lower back. He rubs them in and tells me how beautiful my body is.

When I was in third grade I was riding the school bus home and a boy had tried to spit on his friend long distance but it had landed on my scalp, a comet exploding, dinosaurs disintegrating; a river formed on the topography of my hair in an instant. It was cold and wet and I was alone, no friend to offer me a used napkin from lunch or even a rolled down sleeve. I wiped my head on the back of the faux-cowhide seat and stared straight ahead while the boys at the back laughed in the uncomfortable space between with me and at me. I went home and shaved the bit of my saliva-covered hair off, putting it in an old sandwich bag. The next day I threw it in the boy’s face, my breath a gust of wind blowing a hairy tsunami, vicious and vengeful.

But I can’t shave my back and have no sandwich bag and pity him too much to spit in his face so I just stare straight ahead, wondering if the man in the grass green suit is back, watching us. I wonder if it looks like I’m being raped. Would he call the authorities? What would he say? Hello! I’m the man in the green suit that is nothing more than a light particle existing in the office building next door. I think a girl who I waved to and danced with is getting raped across the street. Come save her!

Obviously not.

I am on my own. I close my eyes. The darkness projected on the backs of my eyelids must be what death looks like as I wait for him to come. Dying is waiting for other people to come. Then he does, the jellyfish goes limp like the ones I eat at Chinese New Year and it extracts itself. I wonder if it needs to hold its breath when it’s inside me. I kiss him salty and warm and wet. It’s time for him to go.

He throws the condom in the trashcan. How funny would it be if I took them out every time he left and tacked them on the wall? Or hung them out the window like sheets drying. I’d say I was using them to collect rainwater for my bamboo plant and I would laugh and laugh and I’d ask him if he still thought I was beautiful when I was acting so crazy.

He lies back down in bed, cradling my head and playing the gravity game with a curl that has escaped from my ponytail. He tells me he loves me. I still feel the wet in my baby hairs and wonder if it’s anything like that under the woman’s eyes.

I tell him to go, that I don’t love him and that he can’t spit on me and he needs to say sorry now now now.

I push him out the door as he still tries to apologize for doing nothing wrong. It sounds like a child reciting the alphabet slowly and stupidly. I walk into the bathroom to pee, wipe, flush, face myself in the mirror. I touch my cheek, delicately, the swirls in my fingertips like the spine of a feather, where a large whitehead is forming like an inverted bulls-eye in the middle of my skin. It stings tender like a womb about to burst. I wet it with warm water and pop it in one swift squeeze, the sebum exploding like a mini cellular firework. A bubble of blood follows and I smile. I look uglier now, but in a different and satisfactory way. I switch off the light.

I walk back to my room and look out into the office building again. Maybe the boy will be there. If he can’t have me at least he can always see me.

But, there is the green man, a disco ball spinning above him, slow dancing close like a wedding song with the old woman, her blue coat now shining and her hair yellow gold like it’s just come back from the jeweler’s. I want to wave, but they look so perfect and far away from me and my bloody face that I don’t want to disturb them. This night’s for the green man and the old woman. So I sway by myself instead. I can hear the cooing of the melody, soft and simple. I close my eyes and think of the dark like a womb. It is warm and lonely and I am happy. We spend the rest of the night dancing to a song we’re all hearing.