July 19th, 2024
I was nearly in tears as I made my way into the restaurant to start my shift. But from anyone else’s perspective, I suppose I wore a neutral expression. Cheery even. I’d become good at changing my face to suit the situation, regardless of what was going on inside.
I’d learned this trick through years of observing other people, and I’d become so good at it—both the observation and the ability to hide my own mood—that very little of what was going on with others slipped by me, and very little of what was going on with me was apparent to anyone else. Except Lincoln, and he was a special case.
“What’s up, Harp?” asked Adam, smiling as he passed me on my way to the kitchen.
“Not a lot. How’s it going? Busy day so far?”
“Nah,” he said. “Pretty slow. I actually wish something would happen. I’m close to dying of boredom as things are now.”
“I could punch you or something, if that would help?”
“Ask me again if things are still this slow in an hour.”
We both laughed and moved on. Our interactions were generally brief, lighthearted. We were friendly but not necessarily friends.
Lately I’d noticed something was going on with Adam. He’d been happier the past few days, for starters. He’d been walking with more energy, like a person with a destination rather than a person just passing through. He’d been complaining less about work.
And, come to think of it, Christine had been acting the same way, and she was often withdrawn and surly, at least with me. But even with me, the past few days she’d been courteous, joking, friendly.
And just like that, some internal mechanism in my brain that even I didn’t fully understand figured it out. They were finally dating. Well whoop-de-doo for them, I thought. And another reason to be miserable for me.
I’d already fucked everything up with my friends, it was fitting that something should come along and kill my relationship with my coworkers, too. It was a shame, because Christine would have been the type of person I would have looked up to, if not for the fact that I resented her implicitly for the way Adam looked at her, the way he pined after her. It made me sick, and not in a metaphoric way; it literally made me sick to my stomach to think of them together. A lot of things made me sick to my stomach.
Two years before, I’d found a way to cope with that feeling, and still no one knew about it besides my brother.
If I was feeling sick to my stomach, I emptied it.
Looking back at the dumb grin on Adam’s face, the pep in his step, the straightness of his back, I went into the washroom, threw my apron back over my shoulder, kneeled over the toilet and stuck my fingers into the back of my mouth. I’d become almost as good at repressing the noise of my retching as I was at masking the emotion on my face. The sight and smell of vomit used to make me feel worse, now it brought a strange relief. A euphoria, even.
It started with body image issues—doesn’t it always?—but it had grown so much more intrusive since then. The stupidest thing about it was how much I recognized both when it began and as it progressed how illogical it was. I was an athlete, I ran track, and I had a body that reflected that. I was never overweight, I was never chubby, but one stupid little joke about my thighs in eighth grade—by a girl who I knew was just fucking with me because she couldn’t stand the fact that I kicked her ass in the 200 meter—and I was making two or three trips a day to the bathroom to clear out my stomach and ease my anxiety.
And because it worked to ease my anxiety in one way, I started using it as a crutch to ease my anxiety in other ways. I would say things spiraled out of control from there, but they really didn’t. The fact is, I was good at keeping things under control. I was good at maintaining.
I’d worked on developing my ability to read people as a defense mechanism, I guess. The point had been to spot when people had a problem with me early on, so I could remedy it. And I’d gotten good at it. So good that I never had any problem making friends, because I could generally spot what people wanted—even when they didn’t know they wanted it—and get to them through that.
But I got so good at it that I never had any problem losing them, either. Because, as it turns out, people don’t really like to be told how they feel. They don’t like the idea that someone else can see what’s going on inside their heads. They’ll even deny feeling what they clearly feel simply because you pointed it out to them. And I always, eventually, pointed it out.
“What’s up, Harper Lee?” asked Jaleel as I passed him on my way out of the bathroom. Had he been standing there long? Had he heard the noises I’d made? But no, he was acting too casually for all that.
“Harper Lee?” I asked, forcing a laugh.
I knew who Harper Lee was, obviously. I just didn’t know what she had to do with me.
“You know? To Kill a Mockingbird? Famous book.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard of it.”
Was Jaleel being patronizing on purpose? Maybe, but … We were in the same grade, we’d both been assigned To Kill a Mockingbird in English class. Maybe he was just referencing that. Maybe he was making fun of me for not paying enough attention in class? Because … what? He thought he was better than me? Or maybe he was just making a dumb joke and I'd missed it because of baseless ideas I held about him.
I’d been thinking of him differently lately. There was a time I thought of him as aloof, distant, pretentious, arrogant. He was brilliant, and he had a right to be a little arrogant, I suppose, but I’d always read his behavior as intentionally cold, like he looked down on others. But suddenly I had a reason to think otherwise.
The day before, I'd walked past Christine and turned my head away when she said hi, and Jaleel had cornered me in the storeroom to tell me to quit acting like a child just because the guy I liked had a thing for Christine. I acted like I didn’t know what he was talking about and he’d said, “Jesus, Harper. You’re not as good at hiding yourself as you think you are.” God, am I that obvious? I'd thought. He was right, of course, but that wasn't even the point. The point was that he noticed, that it mattered to him at all.
I didn't think anyone other than me paid that much attention to other people's behavior.
This revelation had come at an interesting time, because earlier that day I’d lost pretty much my entire friend group in one fell swoop, when I insinuated that my friend Becky would be happier with James, Sophie’s boyfriend, than Sophie was. I may also have pointed out that James was obviously into Becky and had been for years.
I just got so tired of hearing both Sophie and Becky bitch about their lot in life constantly, and I thought I could put an end to it. See, in my mind, I thought I was neatly solving everyone’s problems. But no one asked me to solve them. And what I didn’t know—what I couldn’t have known—was that James and Becky were already sleeping together behind Sophie’s back.
But somehow I was the bad guy …
In the aftermath of the shouting match that had followed, I’d found the nearest bathroom and puked my guts out. I’d felt better. In the short term, at least.
Although we went to the same high school, and we had worked together pretty much since he had moved to Texas, I barely knew Jaleel. As far as I was concerned, he was just that arrogant, aloof dude I worked with and saw in the halls at school who would never deign to talk to someone like me if he didn’t have to.
At school we were as far removed in terms of interests and social groups as two people could be. Whereas I participated in several sports and considered my grades largely an afterthought, Jaleel was a part of every academic club the school offered, and was the president of several. Our paths rarely crossed, and when they did I always had the distinct, and completely unfounded perception that he looked down on me. He was polite and friendly at work, of course. He seemed like the type for whom the perception of being friendly and polite was important. I got that; I also worked hard to maintain my public image. Only maybe with Jaleel it wasn't a lie.
When he confronted me about my attitude toward Christine, something clicked into place in my mind. Part of that was the awareness of and appreciation for his observational skills, but another part was that he actually cared if I was being good and fair and right toward Christine.
I sighed as I emerged from the washroom and straightened my apron and looked back at both Jaleel and Adam, who were standing shoulder to shoulder in the kitchen and looking at Adam’s phone. I noted the differences between them. I hated to admit it, but noting people’s appearances was usually my first step in trying to break them down to their essential parts. It wasn’t a comfortable truth, but there was usually a lot that you could glean from how someone looked, how they presented themselves. At least you could if you knew what to focus on.
Jaleel was tall and rail thin and dark skinned, with short cropped black hair, thick-rimmed though stylish glasses, and a thin, squint-and-you-miss it black line of mustache under his nose. Can’t really grow facial hair, I thought. But tries his hardest. Part of his religion? Not allowed to shave? No, I thought. That’s stupid. I’d seen his dad before and he didn’t have a beard, and if I was reading the situation right—I usually was—his dad was a lot more devout than Jaleel. I filed the mustache away in my mind as something to think about later. But not everything had to mean something, I reminded myself. Sometimes people just wanted to have a mustache because they liked the way it looked. Of course, that still said something about them.
Conversely, Adam wasn’t short, but he stood a good four inches shorter than Jaleel. He had messy dark blonde hair he didn’t put much effort into trying to tame, and a full beard that was kept short. The beard didn’t do much for him, but I understood why he kept it around; I’d seen pictures of him without it, and to say that he had a baby face was putting it lightly. Insecurity, I thought. The primary motivating force behind most people’s decisions about their appearance.
I wasn’t one to talk about that, though.
I couldn’t say much about either of their outfits, as they were both in uniform. But even then, there was something in how they each wore what the business had provided them. Jaleel’s apron hung straight and smooth, his nametag was perfectly square and centered over his left breast. It spoke of—not necessarily pride, but … wanting to create a good impression. Wanting to portray the appearance of pride. Everything about the way Adam wore his uniform—the way it hung off him—conveyed a carelessness. This job was nothing to him, and he didn’t care if people knew that. He didn’t have the energy to care.
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I related to them both.
Why had I been wasting so much time being friends with the likes of Becky and Sophie, I wondered. But that was a silly question. I knew myself as well as I knew anyone else, and I knew that I needed to be part of a group. I wasn’t built to be alone. And Sophie and Becky and their ilk were a doorway to warm and full and complete social spheres. They were a way to never be alone.
While waiting on a table of grouchy redneck guys who spent entirely too long staring at my chest—gross!—I noticed that a lot of people in the restaurant were holding their phones sideways and looking at them. One of the guys at the table pulled his phone out and looked at it that way, too.
“Something going on?” I asked.
“Just got an alert, darlin’. President’s making an emergency address. Nothin’ for you to worry yer pretty little head about, though, I’m sure.”
“Hey, Big Ed,” said a man in the next booth over, turning in his seat to look at the guy I was talking to. “You think he’s gonna talk about all the crazy shit people have been filming?”
“Crazy shit?” I asked, momentarily intrigued enough to pull myself all the way out of my internal musings.
“Aliens,” said Big Ed without hesitation.
“Ain’t aliens, Ed, you fool. Like I been telling you guys, them videos is deep state propaganda,” said the man sitting across from Ed, the one who had been staring at me enough to make me uncomfortable. He pronounced propaganda as ‘proper-gander’. “It’s all deep fakes, AI, that kind of shit.”
“Oh, shut your mouth, Glen,” said Ed. “The videos is real. I seen a guy on Facebook who said he could prove they were genuine.” ‘Gin-you-wine’.
These guys would have had a certain Southern charm, or at least their back and forth might have been amusing, if not for the fact that they were dumb as bricks and not above creeping on a seventeen year old girl.
“I think yer both wrong,” said the man in the other booth. “They’re real, alright. And they ain’t aliens, neither. We’re looking at some sort of mutated freaks, probably messed up from something they put in vaccines. What I know is we gotta do something about them. Soon enough they’ll be as big a problem as the immigrants.”
“Do you need anything else right now?” I asked, suddenly tired of the conversation. I had some vague idea of the videos they were talking about—obvious CGI videos of people flying, or lifting cars above their heads, or setting fire to trees by staring at them. I assumed it was some sort of huge art project. What was shocking to me was how many people were taking them seriously.
Surely that couldn’t be what the president was going to make an address about.
“Just the bills, honey,” said Big Ed. “Two bills,” he clarified.
As I walked back over to the till, I pushed all the nonsense about videos and flying people and presidential addresses and creepy rednecks out of my mind and started thinking about my personal predicament again. Maybe I could recontextualize, I thought. Maybe I could shift to a different sort of group, smaller, but full of people less vapid and more interesting. People like Jaleel.
I might not have been the biggest academic overachiever around, but I had always prided myself on my interpersonal intelligence, and I couldn’t help wanting to get to know anyone complicated, in the same way that I supposed mathematicians couldn’t leave an interesting equation unsolved.
And with this epiphany, I started to break down the walls of all the assumptions I’d ever made about Jaleel. He wasn’t detached, I understood now, that was merely a pretense to cover for something underneath. And maybe seeming unapproachable to people like me helped him avoid unwanted connections. Why? Because connections made you vulnerable. Vulnerable to what? Humiliation. Pain.
And he wasn’t arrogant, exactly. Okay, well maybe he was a little arrogant, but that was an understandable result of being smart—of knowing you’re smart—and not being taken seriously. He felt he had to prove himself the smartest person in the room, or at least be perceived as such. And why wasn’t he taken seriously? Because of the color of his skin. Because of his religion. Because his parents were immigrants. Because the world—and especially Texas—was full of people like Big Ed and the boys.
I thought I’d cracked the code. But of course, people are complex, and some people even more so. There was obviously more to Jaleel than what little I’d gleaned from these few observations and the leaps of logic that had followed. I was confident that the conclusions I’d come to were mostly correct, but there was more to the story and I wanted to learn it. And, if I could, I wanted to help him come out of that shell, because now I was certain there was something inside that deserved to be seen.
Or at least, I told myself I wanted to help him. But if I was being really, truly honest with myself, I just wanted a new group, some new friends, and I wanted them quickly.
———————
I was still working through all that when my manager, Derek, burst through the kitchen doors and straddled up to the payment counter where I was standing and finishing up the transaction with Big Ed’s table—a fifty-eight dollar bill and a two dollar tip, lovely—and stood behind me, working through a series of minute and involuntary body movements that conveyed intense impatience.
When I bid the customer a good day, and opened the till to deposit the cash and the receipt, Derek wasted no time in coming around the the front of the counter and saying, simply, “Have you fuckin’ heard about this?”
“Heard about what?” I asked, confused.
“Are you serious? You haven’t heard about it?”
“Again, Derek. I have no idea what you’re talking about? Did I do something wrong?”
“No. It’s not … Just come back to the kitchen.”
“I’m going to have another customer to cash out in like, two minutes tops,” I said, looking toward a table that was just finishing up their meal.
“Don’t worry about that. Just come.”
I could tell he wasn’t going to wait two minutes to show or tell me whatever it was he had in mind. Although normally I wouldn’t have left that counter with a customer coming up soon for fear of disciplinary action by my manager, since it was that very manager who was asking me to do it, I saw no reason not to. I briefly entertained the idea that this was some sort of test or a trick, but I discarded the idea quickly. Derek was too much of a straight-laced straight shooter. Deception wouldn’t occur to him. Neither would humor.
In the kitchen, Jaleel and Adam were crowding around a phone that was playing a video on a countertop. I joined them, squeezing in next to Adam. I could feel my face flushing with the closeness of him, but it’s unlikely he noticed. He nodded at me briefly and let out what might have been a grunt of acknowledgement, but then he turned his full focus back to the phone. Jaleel seemed not to have noticed me at all.
On the screen, there was a blue walled room with a stage at the front. Upon the stage was a podium flanked by two American flags. And behind the podium, the president of the United States of America was addressing the nation. He looked exhausted. No, I thought. Not exhausted. Something else. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. Distracted, maybe? Maybe.
“Nation, I’m speaking to you today to address events that have been unfolding recently that you deserve to hear about directly from your government … from me. Over the course of the past few days, I’m sure many of you will have heard rumors—perhaps seen videos or heard accounts—of what can only be described as human beings performing superhuman feats. I’ve seen many of the videos myself. And like many of you, I was prepared to write these accounts and these videos off as nothing but a hoax—a large scale and incredibly intricate hoax, but a hoax nonetheless.
“See, I’ve always lived by the philosophy that extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. It’s a philosophy that’s served me well over the last three decades of my political career, and it served me well in my military days, too. Still, I’ll admit to you, nation, that as these videos kept surfacing, and as these accounts kept adding up, a creeping doubt started to infiltrate my thoughts. ‘What if?’ I found myself asking. What if it’s real? What are the implications for the nation, for the American public? For the world?
“Still, I held steadfast in my conviction. My top advisors were telling me that they had no—I repeat no—verifiable evidence that any of this was real, and who am I to doubt them? They have the latest data, they have the widest range of sources. So I continued my work rebuilding the economy. I continued my work, working alongside energy industry leaders and manufacturers and politicians, economists, and global partners to try to bring more jobs to America, to build up a next generation infrastructure, to position America to be an international leader in renewable energy and sustainable living in the remainder of the twenty-first century and beyond. And I put rumors of superhuman powers out of my mind. Well, mostly …”
He paused and a few of the reporters in the room laughed. I giggled a little bit with them, releasing a bit of the tension I hadn’t even known had been building inside me. I noticed that the president didn’t smile in response to this laughter. In fact, he looked vacant. Robotic, even.
“But then something happened. I was presented with evidence that I could not deny. My good friend and longtime political ally, Senator Teddy Barnes from Minneapolis, phoned me up and he said, ‘Dan, there’s something I need to show you. How soon can you be in Minnesota?’ And I said, ‘Well, Teddy, I’m the president of the United States. I can be anywhere in the nation pretty quickly, but generally people come to see the president when they have something he needs to see, not the other way around.’”
Again he paused, and again the reporters laughed, but not as many as last time, and the laughter died down more quickly. They were rapt, and wanted more than anything for the president to just get on with the story. Again the president showed no reaction to the reporters’ laughter. To me, it looked like he didn’t even know they were there. I had started to notice something about his cadence and tone of voice, too. It was off, somehow. Like someone telling a story that had nothing to do with them. Like someone reading words in a language they didn’t even understand. I was starting to feel uneasy.
After a pause that was just a little too long, he continued, “well, as I said, Teddy’s a good friend of mine, and normally I’d expect him to laugh when I made a joke. But this time, he stonewalled me. He told me he was serious, that I’d better get there as soon as I could. So I got on Air Force One and we made a quick trip over to Minnesota, and nation, let me tell you, what Teddy showed me defied everything I’ve believed in and sworn by my whole life. But I couldn’t deny it. I wanted to, I really did, but when you see something with your own eyes, you simply can’t deny it any longer. What he showed me was … Well, it’ll be easier if I just show you. Teddy, come on out here.”
From behind the curtain the president was standing in front of stepped a man in a suit that I might have vaguely recognized as some talking head political figure on T.V. I couldn’t see anything extraordinary or even that interesting about him. He was just an ordinary guy, maybe fifty-five, receding hairline, square glasses, square face, thin and with a slightly defined musculature, but with the undeniable concentration of body fat around his midsection that made you think maybe he used to be in good shape but years of a stressful job had robbed him of the privilege of having enough time to take care of his body the way he used to. In short, he looked like half the middle-aged white guys I saw bringing their families in to grab a pie on a Friday night before going to the movies. Until he looked directly up at the camera and I saw that his eyes were glowing red.
Without warning, he opened his mouth and a red mist erupted past his teeth. As if at some unheard command, the president jumped over the podium, displaying a level of athleticism that shouldn’t have been possible in a man his age. He pulled a knife out of nowhere and stabbed the nearest reporter in the throat. The red mist was starting to envelop the first row of reporters, and as the cameras swiveled toward them to catch what was happening, I saw their faces go blank. Within seconds, several of them were knocking over chairs in their urgency to attack the ones whom the mist hadn’t touched yet.
One of the secret service agents who had been standing inconspicuously just offscreen during the president’s address turned his pistol toward the president, who was now strangling a woman in the third row, and opened fire. Two of the other secret service agents promptly shot the first one. Another one turned his pistol on Senator Barnes and looked prepared to fire, but then the red mist enveloped him and he put his gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. The broadcast cut out just as the president was standing, blood covered, over the body of the first lady, who had rushed in in complete hysterics to try to get her husband to stop attacking people.
“What the fuck?” said Adam and Jaleel in unison. I sat on the floor, shaking badly. Derek was retching into a garbage can in the corner.
All of our phones and the radio playing in the restaurant blared with an emergency tone.
I looked at the message on my phone:
CIVIL DANGER WARNING
FOR YOUR AREA UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.
You are advised to stay indoors and await further instructions.
“What the fuck?” I belatedly echoed my coworkers.