After much deliberation, the two of them come to the conclusion that I am a nine. They smile because they, too, are nines. Though she is a nine with four tendencies. They look at each other like this is a point of contention in their marriage that has calcified into a private joke. I feel in on the joke, too.
At work the following week, my coworker and I have our first fight over something minor. I interrupt him in a meeting or he interrupts me. He takes credit for my idea or I take credit for his. I undermine his authority or he tramples over mine. The fact that I can’t remember tells you just how minor it was. Either way, we are both royally pissed. We had ordered Chinese takeout for lunch but we don’t eat it together even though it was my idea to split an order of scallion pancakes and now the pancakes are in his office and I can smell them from here.
“Your behavior,” he types from his office next to mine, “makes me think maybe you’re not a nine at all.”
In our private hippie language, this is the single most cutting thing he could say.
“Then what would you suggest I am?” I type back, loud enough for him to hear me clacking.
“A six.”
At his house, we had speculated about the people we knew in common. Our boss was a three. His boss was a four. My coworker’s wife was raised by two sevens. It’s a miracle she’s not in a mental hospital. As far as I know, we don’t know any sixes. I have not begun to defend myself when another text bubble appears:
“Hitler was a six.”
I mutter an expletive at my screen. Stupid system. Stupid new friends. Who needs them? I take my food out of the bag, grabbing the fortune cookie first. My whole life, I have eaten the fortune cookie first. This is because they’re not real dessert and Hitler probably ate his fortune cookies first. I tear open the plastic wrapping just as my coworker knocks on my door frame. Startled, I drop the cookie into a mug of cold coffee, which splatters onto my shirt. We frown together at the drowning cookie. He has come to give me my half of the pancakes, a peace offering.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You’re welcome,” he says, and returns to his desk.
By the time I rescue the cookie, the fortune is blurred and so are the lucky numbers below it. All that’s legible, in red ink on the left-hand side, are the words:
You
someday
Lucky
I pin it to the wall until it’s dry. Then I stick it in some underutilized crevice of my wallet, where it will remain until I quit my job, leave town to find myself, and lose the wallet in a foreign city. Why, it could be there still.
Such a nine thing to imagine.
If You Take the Canoe Out
The strongest impulse I’ve ever had to ride a baggage carousel was at the airport in Santa Rosa, California. What we’re dealing with is a flat loop, very unassuming, that curls through some rubber curtains. Candy Land to LaGuardia’s Chutes and Ladders. At New York airports, you’d have to not care about germs or physics or dignity to ride a baggage carousel. They’re made of overlapping metal scales meant to withstand bodily fluids and bombs. Ride one and you might go to airport jail. Probably not. But the idea of jail is never great. Also you might get a tuba dropped on your head. But the Santa Rosa baggage carousel looks like a kiddie ride. Like you could just pop on and glide through the plastic curtains. Maybe a TSA guy gives you a high five and a doughnut hole on the other side. Maybe the whole doughnut. It’s California. Anything’s possible.
An hour’s drive north of San Francisco, the Santa Rosa airport serves the people of California wine country. The building itself is just a sliver of brick that separates the pavement where the cars park from the pavement where the planes park. Inside there’s a soda machine, a lost-and-found, and a wall featuring the airport seal: Snoopy the dog, dressed as Amelia Earhart, navigating his doghouse through the clouds. At this advanced point in our aeronautical history, I am not comforted by Amelia Earhart as a mascot, never mind a cartoon of a dog dressed up like Amelia Earhart. And yet I keep coming back. I go to Northern California for the same reason Charles Schulz, Snoopy’s creator, went—for the same reason Hunter S. Thompson, M.F.K. Fisher, Jack London, and Mark Twain went—to write. Or, in my case, to try.
There is a fantasy known as “the writing life.” Inasmuch as it’s any kind of life at all. Or any kind of fantasy at all. The average person will spend more time over the course of his or her lifetime wondering why marshmallow is spelled like that than they will wondering how writers write. But at some point, you may have asked yourself: Who gets up early? Who writes standing up? Who unplugs the television and throws it in the closet? I never see musicians get asked about their habits. Answer: Bad ones? Same with actors. Not too many hard-hitting questions about line memorization. This is because those artists go public with their craft in a way that gives their audience an inkling of their rehearsal process, of how the sausage gets made. Writers like to keep our sausage
