Reciprocity

"Reciprocity”

We meet William Busca around five o’clock. He is returning to his car after a quick sojourn up to the Children’s Memorial/scenic vista point overlooking his old home town. His bosses have given him three weeks leave from his new job to contemplate the passage “How precious are your thoughts to me O God! How vast the sum of them! If I should count them, they would outnumber the sand.” That Psalm printed on the back of the odd and surreal pamphlet Busca now holds in his vest pocket hasn’t failed to make him laugh yet. Who but God, that venerable sadist, forces you to believe in the game he makes you play; enclosing your life in time, “before and behind,” endowing you with all those dreams that would stretch to the infinite only, in the end, to show you all those hopes painfully shattered as he pulls your, or your loved one’s, ticket. And he does this as impersonally as if you had simply been waiting in line at a deli. What a quaint existential crisis.

But why is he so sad you ask? Do we really have to go into that? Greif is so droll; it’s always the same story. We’d be bored before we even got started. There are seven billion people in the world and they all have a story and they all expect you to cry for them. I’m bored just talking about it. Satisfy yourself with this: that he had gone to that spot on the hill above his town to look for something—him and his oddly appropriate name. He felt his town owed him some meaning: a memory from the past, maybe, to remind him of who he was and give some direction to his life for the future. After all, he had given it the “best years of his life,” was it too much to ask for something return?

Alas! It was a futile gesture; he found no such sign here. The leaves on the eucalyptus trees hung motionless above him. The tall brown grass was not rustling. He was a lonely, sad, doomed man in an unchanging scene. He dumped the sand from his shoes and looked at the sunset. How poetic. Let’s continue though, shall we? As now Busca is nearing the town. He takes the pamphlet from his pocket. “You don’t look much like her,” he says to the picture on the front. He jams the pamphlet in this glove compartment. He sips some of the coffee he bought yesterday out of a soggy paper cup.

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           A little off of the “Boulevard, the town’s main strip, the law offices of J.J. Sterner are undergoing extensive remodeling. It’s all moving along quite splendidly, contrary to the initial projections of that depthless man. They are, in fact, nearly a week ahead of schedule and under budget. The very idea of being able to reopen his new, bright, shinning offices a week early gave Sterner a pleasure beyond words. He likened it to Shock-and-Awe; it would strike fear into the pocket-books of his peers. It made him like Prince Hal: this would be his reformation glittering over his fault—this would make them all forget about that unfortunate incident with those mashed potatoes.

 This good fortune caused Sterner to wake up with a wry smile on his face. This smile, though mostly hidden beneath his scraggly mustache, never failed to annoy his wife, who believed that nobody smiled like that unless they were having regular sex. As she was sure she was not having sex with him, nor could she imagine anybody having sex with such a tall bald mustache of a bastard, this half hidden wry smile stole the pleasure away from her own affair, thus causing her to lose her own wry smile. This made Sterner smile all the more wryly; nothing pleased him more than an unhappy wife.

For these reasons, Sterner regularly made the trip to his office with gifts of coffee, sandwiches or bagels for the hardworking men. On this day, Sterner had been talking on the phone with his contractor all the way from his house to Starbucks, hanging up only after the contractor had successfully convinced him that work is most effectively done with two hands. After all, he is only a few blocks away, and the good part is coming up.

***************************

On the second story terrace of Sterner’s office building, a young boy is shoving his thin arm through iron bars. Why? Is it for us to understand the beautiful simplicity of a child’s mind? He has found a ball.

The boy’s mother had left him in the break room while she attended to some delicate business matters; a temp had accidently shredded the wrong file. The blunder itself was relatively harmless, but the temp simply couldn’t bring himself to get over it. He slouched like a sullen dog and battered the poor woman with a myriad of rapidly repeated apologies. This excessive groveling gave the boy just enough time to escape the break room, navigate the faded blue cubical walls, and reach freedom under the slowly darkening evening sky. Now he is reaching, extending one arm over the parking lot, blindly thrusting a blue ball out over a large white pick-up truck.

A dog barks in the parking lot. The Child can hear him. He strains to extend his arm farther out, trying to get the ball positioned over the truck’s bed. Finally, the child drops the ball. He quickly pulls his arm back through the bars to see if he was successful. He was not.

Dismayed, the boy watches as the ball drops too short. It bounces on the cab of the truck and flies off into the street. The dog bounds after it. Out of sight, a man calls after the dog. The boy makes a run for the stairwell. He is half way down the stairs before he stops. There is a noise from the street: a terrible thud followed by a screeching of tires. Though the boy has never heard a sound like it before, he knows what it means. Tears begin to form in his eyes as he creeps down the remaining stairs. The horrible realization of what he has done makes his feet heavier. He slips between two parked cars and out into the parking lot to view the scene.

The dog is lying by the car. An unfamiliar man is standing over him. He is covered in coffee and seems unable to say anything but “holy shit.” The man who was introduced earlier to the boy as “Dan” is kneeling over the dog. His face is hidden to the boy, but his back is heaving as if he were crying. The man covered in coffee leans over and says something to Dan, but Dan doesn’t respond. Then the boy hears his name called from behind him. “Chance, you stay right there,” the voice says, “I’ll be right down.” His mother vanishes into the stairwell.

***************************

 “Goddammit, is there one fucking CD in this car that I’m not sick of yet!”

Busca turns right on to the Boulevard. He is leaning across his center counsel, reaching under his passenger seat, searching for a CD case. He finds it, knocks some of the god-sand off of the cover, and brings his eyes back to the road just in time to slam on his breaks and swerve to avoid a silver Mercedes. It’s parked in the middle on the street with its hazard lights on. Furious, he pulls into a nearby parking lot. He passes two men standing over something. He parks his car and prepares to give one of them a piece of his mind but, when he opens his door and takes the whole scene in, his opinion changes.

At the feet of the two men is a yellow Labrador. Almost exactly like the one Busca had as a child. He can see one of the men crying, the other one is too shocked apparently to form coherent sentences. In varying order, he repeats “I’m sorry,” “holy shit,” and “I didn’t see him.” Busca turns and sees a young boy clinging to his mother under a streetlamp. The boy is hiding his face in his mother’s blouse. Busca approaches the two men. The dog’s chest inflates and deflates in quick shallow breaths. He looks as if one of his legs were broken. There is some blood on the street. He does not try to move; he just lies there, on his side. He whimpers a little, and looks at the sobbing man.

“Is there anything I can do?” Busca says. He sticks a hand in his pocket and puzzles over the small collection of sand he finds there. He silently curses it.

“I don’t know,” the sobbing man says. He stops sobbing now and wipes his face with his shirt sleeve. “I don’t have a vet around here. I don’t even know where one is.”

“I just work here, I live a few towns over” says the tall bald man with a mustache. “I didn’t know, I didn’t see him. He just popped out of nowhere. I think he was chasing something. I swear to god I didn’t see him. I didn’t know he was there.”

“I think I know what happened,” the mother says. She and the little boy had come out from below the streetlamp and are standing behind them now. The three men turn to look at her.

“My son Chance wandered out onto the balcony and saw your dog in the back of your truck, and, well you know how they were playing a little bit earlier today… He found a ball lying around the office and he wanted your dog to have it so he dropped it from the second floor. I just work upstairs.”

The dog’s owner kneels down and looks at Chance. “Is that what happened?” he asks. There is no anger in his voice, just defeat. Chance nods.

“I know where a Vet is, I can take you there,” says Busca, reaching up to scratch his head and finding another grain of sand. He curses it again, and wonders how much more sand there can be; he hadn’t been on that beach very long.

“I can’t drive,” the dog’s owner says, “I’m too shaken up. Besides, my cab is full of your shit.” He turns to look at the bald man, who turns away and mumbles another sorry.

“I can take you in my car,” Busca says “there’s room in the back, it’s no problem at all. I’ll get it right now.”

“Thank you, thanks a lot,” the dog’s owner says. He kneels back down and strokes the dog’s ears.

Busca drives up close to the dog. He brushes some sand off of the back seat and thinks a little more about god and irony. As the three men lift the dog into the car, he looks into the dogs eyes. There is such a strong resemblance to his old dog. He’s even just as heavy—probably from eating anything and everything in reach. Is this a sign?

Chance says he doesn’t want to leave the dog. He asks if he can come along to the vet’s. Busca says that’s fine by him, and Chance’s mother says it’d be ok as long as she can follow in Sterner’s car. As they begin to pull out of the parking lot Chance makes them stop. He leaps out of the car and grabs something from the gutter. It is a blue ball.

The Vet’s clinic is only five minutes away. Chance’s mother runs in ahead to let the Vet know they’re bringing in a hurt dog. The Vet comes out and directs the three men through the back door and into a bright white room where they lay the dog on a table. They’re told to wait in the waiting room. The dog’s owner says he does not want to leave, but does so without much more protest.

There are magazines littered throughout the waiting room on coffee tables. To avoid the nauseating effect pastel colors had on him, Busca picks up one of the magazines with a sunny beach scene and pretends to read it. After he flips through the first few pages, he begins to worry that he has committed some faux pas by not engaging any of the others in conversation. He looks around the room but sees that the others are all busying themselves as well. The dog’s owner is pacing around the room, occasionally pausing to look at an impressionistic painting of some boats in a harbor. The bald man has his head in his hands and is staring at his phone like a condemned man—as if he wants to call somebody, but can think of no one. On the table in front of him, folded and re-folded for ease of transport, is a copy of the local paper. Busca tries to read it but the words are disconnected by the folds: “Memorial Service held today for Lauren B… Friends and Family members gathered at San Gregorio State B…”

Across the room from the bald man, Chance’s mother is attempting to sooth her son. He says nothing, and keeps his eyes fixed on the blue ball. Busca’s eyes linger on the boy’s mother. Longer than appropriate for the situation, he thinks to himself, but makes no attempt to correct it. Something is drawing him to her. Can he know her from somewhere?

After a few hours the Vet comes into the waiting room and talks to the dog’s owner who in turn comes to talk to the group. The Vet needs to have the dog overnight and the dog’s owner is going to stay for a while to fill some out paper work. He doesn’t reveal what the Vet had told him, but he doesn’t look very good either. The bald man offers to stay; he wants to pay the bill. Busca tells Chance and his mother that he can give them a ride back to her office.

They spend most of the ride in silence but, as they get closer to the office building, Busca begins to feel an anxiety growing. He may never know who this woman is: if he had known her before; if she held some important meaning for him. Finally, he brings himself to say something. Just before the last stop light he asks “Do I know you from somewhere?”

The mother turns to look at him. There is a spark of remembrance deep within Busca, but still he cannot place her in his memories. “I’m not sure,” she replies, “could be. Are you from around here?”

“Yeah, grew up here.”

“Yeah? Maybe we went to high school together?”

“I graduated class of ‘98”

“Oh, yeah? We must know each other. Michelle Lawrence?”

“Really? Wow yeah, we must have gone to a million parties together. I’m William, William Busca. Jesus, it must have been twelve years since I saw you last! Wow, what a coincidence, I can’t believe it.”

“Yeah, we had Government together, with that weird guy who always had those huge pit stains. You and…” she paused “what was her name? Lana?... Laura? You two were always together, so cute…”

“Oh that was so long ago. I can’t remember. But yeah! Mr. Brophy, sixth period! Wow, I haven’t thought about him in years.”

Busca pulls into the parking lot and Michelle points out a red Jetta. Busca is elated. This whole experience, it was such a coincidence, it has to mean something. Can this be his sign? Is this his town showing him his new direction? The years had been kind to Michelle; there is a worldliness in her eyes where before there hadn’t been much except for a little shallow flirtatious glint. Now her face betrays an intelligence; as if she knows something, something that Busca needs. Hadn’t she flirted with him once or twice? As Michelle is about to get out of his car, Busca blurts out “Hey, would you like to get dinner and catch up? It’s about nine you know, and I’m sure Chance is hungry.”

Michelle ponders this request for a few seconds while she brushes the sand off her pants. She decides it was relatively harmless, and agrees. They pick out a Chinese food restaurant called Silver Spoon that’s right around the corner and open late.

***************************

It takes all of fifteen minutes for them to catch up. Between the things one wants to admit to an old high school acquaintance, and the things one is willing to admit to oneself, twelve years can be summed up pretty quickly. It was very typical of these meetings: inevitably both parties found they had little in common.

Michelle married her high school sweetheart but divorced him shortly after Chance was born. They were on alright terms, she supposed; he came to get Chance on weekends. Things were going well for them now; Michelle was living with someone else—someone she loved— and got a job in insurance that paid pretty decent. Busca changed jobs almost every year. She hadn’t moved anywhere, although she vacationed pretty much every year. Busca had moved around aimlessly since college, didn’t have any real solid plans, and never vacationed. Then they talked about people from high school. About who was married, who was dead; who was doing well, who was doing poorly; who stuck around, who vanished.

After that, the conversation slowed. They got their food and made minor small talk about Jettas, and how they always seemed to smell like crayons. They talked about Chance. He was playing soccer and had recently picked up the guitar. The boy sat and looked sullenly at his Sweet and Sour Pork. He had loved dogs so dearly.

Busca said something about how he liked when restaurants played music from the same place the food is supposed to be from. Michelle said it was an arrangement of the Celine Dion song from Titanic. That was where the conversation effectively ended. “It’s weird how these things happen. It seems so random,” were the final words spoken at the table. They split the bill. Busca got a to-go box—he liked the idea of eating the same meal twice—and they left.

**************************

Outside the restaurant they agree that it was a very odd coincidence—their meeting again—and that life was often strange. As they part to their cars, Busca begins to feel anxiety rising again. He scratches his head and finds a few more pieces of sand. What if he had blown this opportunity to change his life? Michelle could really help him, would it be so inappropriate to ask? What if they were supposed to be together? Reaching his car, he feels he can wait no longer. He turns to see Michelle at her red Jetta and yells from across the parking lot “Hey, Do you believe in fate? Maybe the universe crossed out paths for a reason, you know?  I’m not saying I know what that reason is, but it could be great. Who knows, maybe we’re supposed to be together. Twelve years is a long time to just pop up after. It’s just too strange to not mean anything!” He is blushing furiously now. His palms are sweating, and the box of Mu Shu pork is becoming slippery in his grip. “Well,” he says after a moment, “how do you feel?”

From her the open driver’s side door of her car across the lot, Michelle smiles. She has already put Chance into the car and fastened his seat belt. She shakes her head laughingly and brushes the hair out of her eyes. She throws up her hands. “What’s the matter with you?” she says. She looks at him a moment afterward, then turns, gets in her car, and drives off. William gets in his car, knocks some ineffable sand off the passenger seat, sets his Mu Shu pork down, and leaves too.