It’s gone, she says.
I’ll find another one just like it, I tell her. Standard happiness package. Decent possibility. The chance of a kid. It wouldn’t be enough for us, not quite, but we could share it, take turns living the life. One works while the other one lives, maybe I work the weekdays and she gives me a break on weekends.
She looks at me. For a few long seconds, she seems to be thinking about it, living the whole life out in her head.
She doesn’t say anything. She touches the side of my head.
It’s a start.
When Deep was happy, before it got bad and then worse and then even worse, he was always talking about how he knew a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy. Stuff like that. He talked like that, he really did. He loved telling stories. About a week before he cracked up, he told me a story while we were in the coffee room about a guy at Managed Life Solutions, a physical suffering shop across town, who somehow made arrangements with a prominent banker who wanted to kill his wife. The banker was going to do it, he’d made up his mind, but he didn’t want the guilt. Plus, he thought it might help with his alibi if he didn’t have any memory.
Bullshit, I said. That would never work.
No, really, he says. He tells me all about it, how they met, how they arranged it all while talking in public, at work in fact, but they talked in code, etc.
Could never happen, I say. There are twenty reasons why that wouldn’t work.
Why not, he said.
It’s just too much, I said.
Too much what? There is no upper bound on cruelty, he said.
The next Monday, I came to work, and they were pulling Deep out the door, two paramedics, each one with an arm under Deep’s arms, and two security guards trailing behind. I wanted to say something, anything, to make them stop. I knew I would never see him again. But I froze. As they dragged him past me, I tried to make eye contact, but I looked in there, and no one was left. He had gone somewhere else. He was saying, okay, so. Okay, so.
And then the next day, there it was, in the newspaper. The whole story about the banker. Exactly how Deepak told it to me. There were rumors that he was the one the banker hired; he was living with murderous guilt. Other people gossiped that he had done death of a child.
I don’t think it was either. I don’t think it was any one thing that did it. Deep just knew. He knew what was out there. There is no upper bound on sadness. There is no lower bound on decency. Deep saw it, he understood it, what was out there, and he let it seep in, and once it was in, it got all the way in, and it will never come out.
I open tickets. I do the work. I save up money.
Weeks go by. Kirthi opens up. (Just a little.)
She still refuses to look me in the eyes when we are kissing.
That’s weird, she says. No one does that.
How am I supposed to know that? I have not kissed many people, but I don’t want her to know it. I have seen in American movies that people close their eyes, but I have also seen that sometimes one person or the other will sneak open an eye and take a peek at the other one. I think it makes sense. Otherwise, how would you know what the other person is feeling? That seems to me to be the only way to be sure, the only way to understand, through the look on their face, what they are feeling, to be able to feel what they feel for you. So we kiss, she with her eyes closed, me looking at her, trying to imagine what she is feeling. I hope she is feeling something.
I am at a funeral.
I am having a bypass.
I am in drug rehabilitation.
I am in withdrawal.
She takes me to see her father.
He has the look. I remember this look. This is how my father looked.
He is living someone else’s life. He is a projection screen, a vessel, a unit of capacity for pain, like an external hard drive, a peripheral device for someone’s convenience, a place to store frustration and guilt and unhappiness.
We stand there in silence.
We go back to work.
I am at a funeral.
I am at a root canal.
The thing it is uncomfortable to talk about is: we could do it. We could get him out.
Finally, she can’t take it.
He has only four years left on his mortgage, Kirthi tells me.
The thing is, the way the market works, sellers like us never get full value on our time. It’s like a pawnshop. You hock your pocketwatch to put dinner on the table, you might get fifty bucks. Go to get it after payday and you’ll have to pay four times that to get it back.
Same principle here. I love Kirthi, I do. But I don’t know if I could give sixteen years of my life to get her father out. I could do it if I knew she loved me, but I don’t know it yet. I want to be a better man than this, I want to be more selfless. My life isn’t so great as it is, but I just don’t know if I could do it.
I am in surgery.
I am bleeding to death.
It doesn’t hurt at all.
Things progress. We move in together. We avoid planning for the future. We hint at it. We talk around it.
I am being shot at.
I am being slapped in the face.
I go home.
I rest.
I come back and do it again.
When I turned thirteen, my mother told me the story. She sat me down in the kitchen and explained.
“The day your father sold his life,” she said, “I wore my best dress, and he wore a suit. He combed his hair. He looked handsome and calm. You wore your only pair of long pants. We walked to the bank. You rode on his back.”
“I remember that,” I said.
“A man with excellent hair came out from some office in the back and sat down behind the desk.”
I remember that, too, I told her.
You get—we got—forty thousand a year, she said.
My dad sold his life for a fixed annuity, indexed to inflation at three percent annually, and a seventy percent pension if he made it full term: forty years, age seventy, and he could stop, he could come back to us, to his life.
There were posters everywhere, my mother said, describing that day, the reunion day. The day when you’ve made it, you’ve done it, you’re done.
There was a video screen showing a short film describing the benefits of mortgage, the glorious day of reunion. We would all drink lemonade in the hot summer air.
Just forty years, it said.
In the meantime, your family will be taken care of. You will have peace of mind.
“Time is money,” the video said. “And money is time. Create value out of the most valuable asset you own.”
“Don’t miss out on a chance of a lifetime.”
When we went home, I remember, my father went to lie down. He slept for twelve hours, twice as long as normal, and in the morning, while I was still asleep, he went and sold his life.
Things stop progressing with Kirthi.
Things go backward.
And then, one day, whatever it is we had, it’s gone. It won’t come back. We both know it.
Whatever it is she let me have, she has taken it away. Whatever it is when two people agree to briefly occupy
