Absence

*Editors note: This story contains adult language.

Mike wakes up on a cold January morning and feels like fiction.

There is a girl lying next to him, head buried beneath pillows and goose bumps dotting the dip of her bare back. Her name is Cyndi Lauper. She introduced herself to him a few months ago, just like this: “Cyndi Lauper, no relation.” He hadn’t laughed. He likes that – the disclaimer to celebrity. He would like to put a disclaimer on his own existence. It has been on his mind, off and on, but he can’t decide exactly how to phrase it.  Michael Laurent, king of the fruit market. Michael Laurent, not a ninja. Or maybe, Michael Laurent, awkward lay.

It could use some work. He huffs and rubs crust out of his eyes, hoping the unseasonal cold hasn’t turned them bloodshot again; his boss already thinks he is a delinquent. His phone lets loose a shrill twang. Cyndi’s hand snakes out, grabs it unerringly in the pool of sheets, and flings it across the room.

“Covers,” grunts the mound of pillows.

“It wasn’t actually going to make any more noise,” he tells her, heaving the duvet up and over. She squirms and nestles deeper into her cocoon. There is a muffled sound that Mike figures after a moment is probably meant to shush him.

No heat – out again, so he needs to talk to the landlord. Getting out of bed is going to be painful. He does it anyway, hissing round oaths at apartments with big windows and crap insulation. Yes, he decides, yes, it is painful, and pads to the bathroom. The icy water from his old faucets is even more bracing. The antique tile floor has malicious designs on his toes. He rubs a towel through his hair and silently tells his reflection that his apartment is not out to get him, whatever the mold-hiding tile indicates to the contrary.

He hears a prolonged, plaintive beep. Apparently Cyndi didn’t actually kill his phone. He hikes on his jeans, pulls on the cleanest long-sleeved shirt he has – finds socks, a boot, his wallet, the other boot, his dad’s wool coat that smells oddly of syrup, the phone. Somewhat warm now, he swings his bike onto his shoulder and steps out to greet the world – really, the water stains in the hall, but Mike decides that relativity can be his word of the day. It is a good word.

The three-mile bike ride thoroughly numbs his face, and the pavilion-like structure of Cane’s Fresh Produce offers no relief from the wind. His boss greets him with a brusque “Shipment’s in. Run-through today” that stops Mike in his tracks for a moment. He rolls his shoulders and heads to the stock room instead of the antique register, weaving between platforms covered in apples, pomegranates, cucumber, satsumas, pecans, peanuts. At least it is not the season for grapes – Mike has discovered there is very little worse than picking out rotten, gooey grapes for eight hours.

Ah. Flats of plastic blackberry cartons, stacked almost to his head. His fingers twitch. He pulls a couple of dingy gallon buckets away from the wall and settles into the rickety metal folding chair, warm in the knowledge that this is what he went to college to avoid. Mike has brought run-throughs to a Zen state: open carton, sift, pick out any clump of sticky white fungus, pick out any moldy blackberry, close carton, stack carton. His mind is blank, empty, Zen. He is Zen. His world is blackberries. He eats the tuna sandwich his boss tosses at his head, E-Z Mart emblazoned on the vacuum-sealed plastic, and keeps sifting. You gotta do what you gotta do, his mother tells him, Nike shoes squeaking on the kitchen floor as she efficiently mashes sealed rolls of Ritz crackers with the handle of a butter knife. Right now, you should fetch the cream of mushroom out of the -

“Hey!”

Mike jerks and looks up. It is his boss’s head sticking through the door, bristly eyebrows crooked into a scowl that lightens only a little with his employee’s attention.

“What?” Mike says, stupid and thick-tongued.

“Your cell phone’s been going off every ten minutes for the past forty. Answer the damn thing before I smash it – it’s prancing on my nerves.”

“Gotcha,” he replies absently, wiping his hands off on a rag and checking his phone. Cyndi.

“Could startle the dead back to life. Put it on silent.”

“Right,” he tells the shutting door. He looks back down at his phone. The words Cyndi Lauper, no relation stare up at him, backlit and stark. He taps it, puts the phone to his shoulder, and lets his hands start moving after she answers.

She does it like this: “Cyndi Lauper, no relation, proclaims you to be a failure.”

“At?”

“Life in general. I like it. Specifically, though, getting me up in the mornings. You should be my mother, Mike,” she tells him mock-reproachfully. “There’s no need for me to be responsible for myself.”

He rolls with it. “But then I wouldn’t get to have sex with you, and I know how much you like it when I’m terrible in bed.”

“You’re right, I do. There’s just something about the dissatisfaction that rocks my world. In that case, I need you to kill my – shut up, Joseph – kill my boss.”

“Did you just tell your boss to shut up?”

“He likes it. Don’t be jealous.”

“Right. Yeah. You called because…?” He picks out an unusually large clump of moldy berries and grimaces as they squish in his fingers.

“You gotta do what you gotta do, right?”

“What?” he asks, thrown.

“You know, pointless things. Proper Southern ladies apparently call their manfriends for no reason. It’s polite or something – God, Joseph, shaddup – but yeah. Pointless things. You gotta do ‘em.”

He leans back in his chair and stares at his hands, stained deep purple. There are smears of fungus dotting his fingertips. “Right,” he says, his meaningless stock phrase all over again, “right, bye,” and lets the phone slip off of his shoulder. He stares at the stack of blackberry cartons. They glint innocently in the artificial light, stark against the matte grey of the painted concrete floor. He tells them, “Michael Laurent, fictional character.” It sounds truthful. He blows out a breath and opens a fresh carton. Empty, blank, Zen. Blackberries are his world.

When he gets off of work, he bikes to the nearest McDonalds, passing Shan’s Po-boys and a barbecue joint. He orders two Big Macs. He smells like rotten fruit, all sickly sweet. There is berry juice splattered on his shirt. His hands are stained and pruney from the constant moisture. He wants processed food. If there is nothing else his job has instilled in him, it is an appreciation for the frozen, prepackaged things of life. The day is getting towards six, so there isn’t too much light left and the temperature is dropping, but he sits on the curb anyway and breathes in the fresh, familiar scent of car exhaust. It curls into his mouth as he eats, mixing horribly with the special sauce.

“This is awesome,” he tells the sparrows. They are swooping around a stunted tree that is stretching out of the 2x2 square of green beside him. One of the birds, so fat it is almost spherical, lands on a branch and looks at him sideways. Its beady eye is filled with doubt. Mike gamely adds, “Truth is relative. Why would I want the sweet smell of wild grass? No country boy here, no sirree.” It ruffles its feathers in one twitchy motion. He stuffs the rest of the Big Mac in his mouth and decides he can eat the other at home.

Cyndi opens the door before he can turn the key in the lock.

“Hello, dear,” she says facetiously. “How was your day?”

He steps inside in a complicated jig to accommodate his bike. He doesn’t take off his coat; the heat is still out, apparently. “Hell. I didn’t call the landlord today, did I.”

“I don’t answer fake questions,” she says and pulls the crumpled McDonalds bag from where it is wedged in his back pocket. “Mmm, squashed Big Mac. My favorite.”

“Go for it,” he murmurs, tossing his keys on the kitchen counter. He should just close his eyes, spin in a circle, and fling his keys to a far, random crevice of his living room/kitchen; it would be in keeping with his usual habit of self-sabotage, apparently. He tries to push down the frustration. Zen. He is Zen.

“I’m good without burger-y deliciousness,” she says, placing the bag on the counter next to him. “I’ll take some awkward cunnilingus, though.”

“Only when I’m drunk,” he replies without missing a beat.

“I could take this way too far and get you blushing, you delicate little flower you, but I’ll settle for the version of Mike that isn’t brooding. Actually, maybe broody Mike would agree to kill my boss for me.”

“No version of Mike will – Jesus, you’re contagious. Cyndi Lauper, I will absolutely never off Joseph. Take him hunting and do it yourself if you’re so set.”

“Eh. You say ‘never’ as though moral relativity weren’t contagious, too. I’ll get you, my pretty.” She flourishes one slim wrist.

“And my little dog too?” he asks wryly. He can feel his mouth curving as he leans against the refrigerator.

“That too,” she agrees. The set of her face strikes him as oddly victorious. He pauses.

“Wait, what’d you just do?”

She hesitates. “What?”

“That. That, right there – with the banter thing, the killing-Joseph spiel. You completely distracted me.”

“…This is a problem?”

“Yes – yes. Fucking yes, this is a problem.”

Her eyebrows bend inward and upward, her mouth stiffening. “Because?”

“Because you don’t get to control my moods like that! Line drawn, right there. You can chill at my place, you can – "

“Control your moods? Really, this is where you’re taking this. Okay. So next time I can just let you wallow in self-pity like a whiny tweenybopper.”

“Yeah!”

There is a pause.

“Okeydoke then. I’ll leave you to that.” She snags her purse off of the counter and steps smoothly to the door, gone in five seconds flat.

Mike stares at the door. It is an excellent door, one with character. He painted it green when he moved in. He likes it. This, not emotional maturity, is why he doesn’t throw his cold Big Mac at it but instead tells it, “Right. That’s the most pointless fight I’ve ever had.”

He wakes up the next morning and still feels like fiction, only this time he wants to punch the hack writer who wrote him in. He blinks at the popcorn ceiling angrily. “If I have to be a fictional character, couldn’t I at least be the leading man, the protagithingy?” he asks it. He is perhaps a little stupid with cold; he has gotten used to Cyndi, and she radiates five times the body heat one would expect from her frame.

He works. Is Zen. Refuses to think, at least where he can hear himself. He eats, goes home. Sleeps. Is cold. Is nothing.

The morning routine again, icy toes and all. A thought strikes him when he is getting dressed – something about how he could easily put on socks before stepping on the floor. The sheer effrontery of the idea makes his fingers fumble the fasten of his jeans. He bikes to work more vigorously than usual, but he does not tromp through the angular aisles of produce. He walks calmly to the storeroom, eying the flaked paint of the smooth concrete floor like his boss might quiz him on the random pattern.

Again: open carton, sift, pick out any clump of fungus, pick out any moldy blackberry, close carton, stack carton. Again, again, again. His mind is blank, empty, Zen. He is Zen. His world is blackberries. He eats the ham sandwich his boss tosses at his head, E-Z Mart emblazoned on the vacuum-sealed plastic, and keeps sifting. You gotta do what you gotta do. No obnoxious phone alert interrupts him. He picks out rotten blackberries. There is probably a metaphor in there somewhere. Pointless things. Empty, blank, Zen –

Useless. He thinks that maybe his life is composed of self-created distances. Maybe he is waiting for some deus ex machina to force him into action. He tries to remember the last time he wasn’t passively floating along, a log on the bayou, and hits a wall at graduation. The job search.

Mike stops his hands. He goes to talk to his boss. He calls his landlord. He calls a friend’s little brother, who works pizza delivery, and spends the next half hour wandering through the aisles and sticking random fruits and nuts in a dinky basket. He writes a note:

I find myself talking to inanimate objects a lot when you aren’t around.
-Michael Laurent, not actually a masochist

The bratty brother demands twenty bucks. The basket is sent on its way to the Short Art Gallery. Mike determinedly returns to picking through the rotten blackberries. Blank, empty, Zen: he only has one flat left by the end of his shift. He stays a bit longer, knowing with an almost physical certainty that he cannot be faced with this fruit for a fourth day running. He buys a hotdog on his ride home, munches it while straddling his bike. He tells the darkening sky, “I am giddy in the very manliest way right now.”

Unlocking his door, he steps inside. Heat blasts him. He closes his eyes and sighs in bliss, already feeling his face thaw. He relishes the feeling of results.

“So apparently you’ve had a busy day.”

Cyndi. He opens his eyes to see her sitting on his kitchen counter, calico dress bunched between skinny thighs.

“That – isn’t a happy voice. I would even call it very neutral.”

“Would you?” she asks in the most neutral manner possible.

“I - did you go to the gallery today?”

“I was late. More late than usual, even.”

“Right. Joseph get mad at you?” He settles his hand against the wall and balances, unlacing his shoes.

“Funny thing, actually. Joseph was dead.” Mike drops his foot.

“ – Wow. What? Are you okay?”

“Yeah. You sent me a basket?”

“I – yeah, I did. Some pomegranates, candied persimmons, trail mix, some other shit. What about it?” There is a sinking feeling in his gut. Cyndi is looking at her nails fixedly.

“Trail mix, huh? Put it together yourself?”

“Yeah, you can scoop – okay, what’s the point?”

“Apparently Joseph is real allergic to peanuts. Deathly so, in fact. And the basket was delivered to the information desk. Where he loiters.”

“…What.”

“Yeah. So – “ She purses her lips. “- So you really did kill my boss.”

“Right,” he says. He can’t feel his face. “Right. Michael Laurent, assassin.”

She bursts out laughing.