I hung up. Then I started walking to the street. I’d have to take two buses, I thought. The 9 and the 3. I wasn’t sure if I was going to make my appointment at eleven thirty.
I turned left on the sidewalk and walked to the bus shelter. I leaned against it to wait. No one else was there. I could see joggers and Roller Bladers passing, one block closer to the ocean, but here in the residential layer, layer three, nothing moved. There was a time I would have listened to music or something, but I didn’t. It was weird: there were moments, like then, when I almost missed the voice talking to me. I mean, it had made me do terrible things, mostly to myself. But it had been company, you know?
Now I had no one, and I was living in permanent mist, obscuring everything, making it woolly and still.
I was just thinking that when I saw a gleam of white, and then you were there, sitting in the driver’s seat of your Ford pickup truck.
“Hey,” you said.
I nodded. I didn’t know what else to do. I noticed, close up, that your eyes were a shade of green I had never seen before: river green. But flecked with gold. A slow river, dotted with ocher leaves.
Sorry. But it’s true. You have amazing eyes.
“You need a ride?” You made a face. “Sorry, that sounds creepy. I mean, it’s not a pickup line. It’s just, you looked kind of down. I thought you might need a lift.” You swallowed. “I’m on break. I have till—”
“It’s okay,” I said. “I don’t need a lift.”
A pause.
“Uh, but, thank you,” I added.
“S’cool,” you said.
You didn’t drive away, and admittedly I had just been thinking about how I was lonely, so even through the fog I was living in, some glimmer of desire for human contact obviously shone. At the same time I was kind of surprised that the voice, even though it was mostly gone, didn’t say anything about you. Usually the voice hated if I spoke to someone.
So …
I figured I would speak to you.
When I say it like that it sounds ridiculous, makes it sound like such a radical decision, but it was. But also, I’m telling you this for a reason, because I think you thought I was being standoffish, and I wasn’t, not deliberately.
“What’s with the truck?” I asked in a lame attempt to make human contact.
You smiled. Then you opened the door and got out. You stood by the Ford and did a little bow, kind of showing off but mocking yourself at the same time. When you straightened up, I watched the muscles in your neck move. “You’re looking at the Assistant Plush Manager for Two Piers,” you said.
“What?” I said. I flashed back to meeting Paris at the hospital, how I had said the same thing. It was like a tic with me.
Suddenly you looked self-conscious. You straightened up. “Oh, uh, it’s stupid,” you said. “I just … I’m delivering plush.”
I looked at you blankly; at least I assume I did, because you had an uncomfortable expression on your face.
“Stuffed toys, you know? For the stands. Prizes. I get them from a warehouse in town, and I drive down onto the beach. Throw them up to the guys on the piers. To restock.” You gestured with your thumb toward the open back of the pickup truck.
I looked: there was a plastic bag in there, the size of a person, full of Angry Birds.
“After my break, I’m taking those to Pier Two,” you said, filling the silence nervously.
“They have an assistant manager for that?” I asked.
You shrugged. “Like I said, it’s stupid. Really, I’m just the plush delivery guy, but they gave me that title. You wouldn’t believe how quick the stands run out of prizes. And there are a lot of stands.”
I wasn’t really interested in the stuffed toys, which is sucky of me, I know. I was still amazed that the voice had said nothing about you. I hadn’t even had my risperidone that morning; it made me too tired to do anything, so I’d skipped it, which I knew Dr. Rezwari would bust a gut about if she knew. The voice had stopped with the threats. It didn’t seem to tell me to hurt myself anymore or that it would kill Dad or whatever—I don’t know if that was the drugs—but it would still sometimes insult me, sometimes curse about stuff.
I thought for sure it was going to say something like, “He knows you’re ugly,” or whatever. That would have been its style.
But that’s the thing about you—you’re an insulator. A muffler. You silence the voice.
Then the little mike on your shirt buzzed.
“714, come in,” said a crackly voice, sounding reedy through the small speaker.
You reached up and pressed a button. “714.”
“What’s your 20?”
“On my break for another half hour,” you said. “Then I’ve got a delivery to Pier Two.”
“Okay,” said the voice on the other end of the radio. “I need five medium Tweety Birds and ten large SpongeBobs to Pier One, when you’re done.”
“10-4,” you said, and signed off.
“10-4?” I said. “Seriously?”