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Please Ignore Vera Dietz

Please Ignore Vera Dietz(5)
Author: A.S. King

KEN DIETZ’S AVOIDING YOUR DESTINY FLOW CHART

A BRIEF WORD FROM THE PAGODA

Technically, flying paper airplanes from here is littering. Littering brings a $300 fine, even if you use it as a metaphor for finding yourself. (And who are you calling a monstrosity? Please. You should have seen this mountain when the quarrymen finished with it in 1905. It was like a pile of shale shit. Seriously—you don’t know the meaning of eyesore.)

THURSDAY—FOUR TO CLOSE

When I get back to the store, it’s nearly ten and Jill, the resident stuck-up-ex-cheerleader-turned-food-service-worker, is in the back, doing prep work. She’s made a big vat of dough and is weighing it, shaping it into balls, and plopping it into trays that will go into the freezer for tomorrow’s pies.

Marie’s in the office finishing the part-time drivers’ cash-out receipts, smoking a long menthol cigarette, and listening to a hard rock radio station. “Free Bird” comes on and she turns it up. James is on the back steps, folding pizza boxes. I see he’s working on large ones, so I haul up a flat-packed stack of small boxes, grab the utility knife, cut away the plastic binding, and get comfortable next to James, with the stack to my left. Sometimes, when the part-time drivers are here and there are no runs to take, we have contests. I can fold a box in four seconds. My fastest time yet was thirteen in one minute. James has me beat by one, with fourteen.

But we don’t rush now.

Jill passes us to go to the bathroom and gives a raised eyebrow, as if to say that we’re sitting too close, and James, for kicks, waits for the toilet-flush sound and slides right into my hip and puts his strong arm around me. When Jill walks out, he gives me a kiss on my cheek and makes a loud heavy-breathing sound and Jill rolls her eyes and throws her hands up. James doesn’t know that his breath in my ear is the nicest thing I’ve ever felt in my life, and when I blush, he’s too busy rocking out to the end of “Free Bird” to notice.

It’s a bland Thursday night and the phones are quiet. There are no sports on TV. We’ll be lucky to make one pizza between now and midnight, when we officially close. We finish folding our fifty boxes apiece and start on closing duties.

“You want cooler or dishes?” James asks, taking a broom handle to the stack of ready boxes to straighten the tower we’ve made.

I hate both. “I can’t face the dishes again tonight.”

So I move to the front of the store and start stocking the cooler with six-packs and occasionally catch a glimpse of myself in the huge plate-glass windows that make up the front wall. I’m there for about ten minutes before the door opens and a thousand Charlies come in.

They’re wearing his favorite Sonic Youth T-shirt with the hole in the front left shoulder. They’re wearing his favorite oil-stained Levi’s 501’s with the frayed bottoms. They don’t say anything. They just glide in, surround me, and then inflate themselves to fill the space completely and breathe my air right out of my lungs. I am suffocating.

I look at the nearest one and see through his translucent skin. I say, “You aren’t Charlie.”

I say, “Charlie is dead.”

He smiles at me. I see four eyes behind his Charlie mask. Eight eyes. I see sixteen eyes. Thirty-two. He is an alien. From outer space. He is a trick-or-treater. He is an embryo. He is a dream.

“Did you say something?” Jill asks, poking her head around the corner from where she’s making a big vat of sauce.

I look over at her, and they are gone.

THE FIRST NIGHT IT HAPPENED

The first night it happened, I followed them into the strip mall parking lot. They were all stuffed into a silver-gray Honda—all thousand of them. This was back in November. Charlie had only been dead two months then.

One minute I was sitting on the side of a country road, taking shots of Smirnoff and counting my tips before I went back to the store to close, the next minute I was in the middle of a science fiction movie, complete with a jet-powered Honda Civic and a thousand translucent zombielike beings who looked like Charlie.

When I followed them to the mall, they stopped outside Zimmerman’s Pet Store and all thousand of them got out, holding hands and two-dimensional, like cutout accordion dolls. They climbed into the front window with the black Labrador puppies and beckoned with flat, paperlike fingers.

They are trying to get me to come to terms with what happened there. They are trying to get me to clear Charlie’s name, but I’m just not ready to do that yet.

HISTORY—AGE ELEVEN

The first time Charlie Kahn tried to make me smoke a cigarette, I was eleven years old. I combated him with health class facts and my father’s numbers.

“Did you know a pack-a-day smoker spends one thousand, five hundred dollars a year on cigarettes? Holy shit, Charlie, that’s like the price of a car!”

He inhaled, and then exhaled through his nose. He never coughed. Smoking was probably good for him. It was the only time he’d actually sit still for five minutes.

“What’s fifteen hundred bucks? People spend that in a month on shit they don’t even need. Like lawn ornaments. Who the f**k needs lawn ornaments?”

We’d just walked past the Ungers’ house on our way to the blue trail. The Ungers were my neighbors on the other side, though their house was at least a hundred yards away from mine on Overlook Road, which put it close to two hundred yards from Charlie’s house. (The order, starting at the hairpin curve, was the pagoda, the Ungers, us, the Kahns, and then the Millers way down the hill, on the other side of the road, and then the lake.) The Ungers had a boat in the driveway that they used twice every summer and two Cadillacs. The Ungers had three faux-Grecian birdbaths and a garish assortment of rose-and-blue-tinted lawn balls. They had lawn jockeys (the black kind) and three cement deer—a doe and two fawns. They had gnomes.

Charlie and I liked to hide the gnomes. Or just move them around. One time, Charlie got two of them and laid them down on top of each other. “Gnome sex!” he said, which embarrassed me completely, but still, I laughed.

“Well, smoking’s bad for you,” I said. “And you know it.”

Charlie put out his cigarette on the road and the two of us headed toward the blue trail—a three-mile-round hiking path on the city’s land between the pagoda and the lake, where people walked their dogs (but didn’t clean up after them) and brought their families on weekends. Just as we got to the trail, a car crept up Overlook Road. It slowed, and then stopped.

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