Each day he walked the same way to work, crossing the same streets at the same intersections, always turning at the same corners.  He found an apartment within a mile of the branch six weeks after he took the job.  He could take a bus, but buses were inconsistent.  By the time he walked to the stop, waited for the next one to come, and suffered the stops and turns and traffic, he could have gotten there by foot anyway.  He read once that the engineers who planned the city’s traffic light system timed them so that if cars traveled the same speed, right around the limit for a given street, on a perfect day with no traffic they could pass through a green light at every intersection.  He was now convinced the same rule applied to pedestrians, and personal experimentation seemed to support that theory.  If he walked each block at a brisk pace, he could always reach the next street just as the light started blinking so he could cross the street at the last possible moment.  Hence, he never darted across the street against the light or eased out into the intersection just out of the path of cars like bike messengers did, not out of respect for traffic laws, but because it would throw off his timing.  So each day he walked at his brisk pace and timed every light and hardly ever had to stop and wait to cross a street.

Each day he unlocked the outer doors to the branch’s vestibule, punched a security code into the keypad on the wall inside, and swiped his ID badge to open the set of inner doors.  They were heavier than the first set of doors, and much harder to pull open.  He often held them open for old ladies or parents trying to navigate a stroller through the doors while he was working his daily shift as Greeter, the employee responsible for roaming the foyer and directing customers to the appropriate teller window or service desk.

Each day he turned on the lights in all the public areas of the branch, unlocked the restrooms, and started brewing a pot of coffee for the customer waiting area.  When he first started working at the bank, his manager, Michelle, had set up a rotating shift of employees who opened the branch and took care of these menial tasks.  The other employees hated it, but seeing a chance to ingratiate himself with the boss, he volunteered to open every day in exchange for an extra day off.  No one seemed to mind.

Each day he logged into one of the computer terminals behind the teller windows, entered his ID number, and clocked in.  The time card system wasn’t tied to his paycheck in any way–he was on salary–but he took personal pride in clocking in early every day.  His sheet consistently read 8:56 a.m., 8:54 a.m., 8:49 a.m., 8:57 a.m.  He forgot to clock in one day (he wasn’t physically late, of course) and he was mortified.  He offered to work extra time to make up for it but Michelle dismissed him with barely concealed annoyance.

The days at the branch progressed with the same rhythm of his daily routine.  Business was brisk right after the bank opened, then ebbed through mid-morning until it picked up again during the lunch hour, as workers in the surrounding office buildings came by to deposit paychecks, make transfers, and ask questions about their accounts.  He had never worked for a bank before ATMs and online banking were widely available, but he was impressed by how many people still insisted on face-to-face, physical exchanges of currency and signed slips of paper.

Each afternoon around 3:00 p.m. Mr. Gurupanchayan, the owner of the sundries shop next door, brought over cash and change from his register to deposit and recycle into the proper denominations for making change the rest of the day.  “Call me Guru,” he said when they first met, but the teller politely declined.  He was fond of Mr. Gurupanchayan and enjoyed chatting about his business, but the employee handbook explicitly stated: Always address customers by their proper names.  Besides, he was rather proud of having learned to pronounce his name in full.

Each day at a few minutes past 5:00 p.m. (he didn’t want to make it look like he was watching the clock), he entered his ID number in the computer again and clocked out.  He had offered to help close the branch too, but that was strictly the manager’s job.  He said goodbye to Michelle as she tallied up the totals from each cash drawer and keyed in the day’s final reports.  After that, he walked home, following the path of his morning commute in reverse order.

Each evening he made dinner for himself in his studio apartment, something simple like pasta or tuna salad or a frozen dinner.  He also made breakfast for dinner sometimes as a treat: scrambled eggs mixed with fried salami and two pieces of toast.  On Thursdays he usually ate at the diner across the street from his apartment building because they had a soup and sandwich special.  He liked their BLT with turkey chili.

After dinner, he watched whatever sitcoms or law dramas were on network TV, sometimes folding laundry on the bed or setting up an ironing board and pressing his blue shirts and black slacks.  When he hung up his shirts, he always glanced at the gold tie hanging on a hook by the closet door.   He bought it for the day he was promoted to branch manager.  Male managers wore black suits too, but he didn’t want to spend the money on that just yet, plus he worried that the one he bought might not fit or go out of style by the time he needed it for work.  The tie was a good enough motivational tool for the time being.

Each night he read a few pages of a mystery novel in bed.  He had heard reading at night was a good way to wind down and get a good night’s sleep.  He didn’t particularly enjoy the novels, but he got free copies from a book swap in the lobby of his building.  Thrillers and romance novels were usually the only ones left.  When he felt sleepy, he double-checked that his alarm clock was set for 6:00 a.m. and closed his eyes so he could wake up the next day and start all over.

The branch was decorated with posters on the walls and signs in standalone metal brackets advertising the bank’s services, like no-fee checking for college students or prime plus one home equity lines of credit.  The signs were populated by a multiethnic cast of professional models hired to associate banking products with stylish and attractive people.  He helped Michelle rotate the signs each month as the bank ran promotions, and after he worked there a few months he started to notice the same models in different ads: the young African American man with scholarly black-rimmed glasses on the student loan promos, the pretty redheaded woman with striking green eyes hugging a freckle-faced toddler for the mortgage products.

One Monday, Michelle asked him to help with a new set of posters.  He used a box cutter to slice through the packing tape around the plastic cap at the end of the heavy cardboard tubes, and slid the new posters onto the carpet in the waiting area.  He unrolled them one by one, placed them face down, and set boxes of envelopes on each corner so they would flatten out enough to fit into the display frames without warping.  He didn’t even look at the pictures, assuming they were the same smiling, satisfied faces.

He picked up the stack of new posters to distribute around the branch.  They had labels but he knew where each one went just by the size: the banner was for the wooden frame behind the teller counter, the two small ones went in the glass cases on each wall of the vestibule, the movie poster fit in the black plastic frame mounted on the front window.

The last two posters were for the standalone metal bracket that they set near the front doors each day.  He dropped one in the slot on the top of the bracket–a regular, the Asian father and son gesturing at a computer screen to promote their online bill pay server.  He spun the bracket around on its post, took the last poster from under his arm, and looked at it for the first time.

It was a new face, one he decided on the spot was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.  She had flawless skin, the color of the iced lattes Michelle made him fetch sometimes in the summer, and dark brown hair that was pulled up in the back but left a few strands to fall down and frame her face.  She wore a white sweater and clutched a scarf at her chin in a way that, although the rest of her body was out of the frame, made her look like she was hugging herself.  She smiled a demure half-smile, her lips lined with a burgundy shade that perfectly complemented her skin and hair color.

He felt flushed.  He felt that flush of adrenaline that pulses from the top of the stomach and warps the inner ear with the sound of a dying cymbal crash.  He stared at the picture for a moment and only moved to drop it into the metal stand when his hands trembled and the poster started to make noise.  He turned the frame so that her picture was facing inside the branch, then stepped back.  The poster advertised a credit card rewards program, but he just stared into her brown eyes, narrowed slightly with that smile.

He didn’t stop staring until Michelle called him over to start counting out change for the morning rush.  He turned away from the poster and walked over to the counter where Michelle was stacking rolls of coins in the tellers’ drawers.  He felt the woman’s eyes on his shoulder as he walked away, and turned to see her smiling at him again.  This time instead of simply staring, he smiled back.

The rest of the day he glanced at her face every chance he could.  When he finished work, he stopped again on the way out to move the metal sign off to the side of the foyer, ostensibly so the cleaning crew could mop the tile floor.  He paused before he let go of the side of the frame and closed his eyes to make sure he could still see her face after he left.  He wanted to know her.  He wanted to know more about her.  He knew in his head that she was just a model hired by an ad agency but he wanted to meet her and talk to her and ask her out for a BLT and turkey chili.  He kept that picture in the front of his mind the whole way home.

He couldn’t remember when he started saying hello to the picture in the morning, maybe by the end of the first week she arrived, maybe not until the next week.  He did so only when he unlocked the branch by himself, and even then so quietly that no one else could have heard him.  He liked the feeling that she was there waiting for him.

He couldn’t remember when he decided her name was Maria, because by the time he did it felt so natural that her name couldn’t have been anything else.  She could have been Indian or African American or Vietnamese or Filipino, ambiguously ethnic like all the non-white models in the ads, but he decided she was Hispanic.  He once had a crush on a Hispanic girl named Marisa in high school, maybe that was why.  But Maria just seemed right.

He started thinking about Maria at home, what it would be like if she were waiting for him there every day instead of at the branch.  He pictured them having dinner together, watching TV, reading together in bed.  He never thought about sex.  In fact, he never pictured her wearing anything other than the white sweater and scarf from the poster, and the most he ever touched her in these daydreams was pressing against her shoulder on the couch or when she patted his chest after straightening his yellow tie for work.

He stole looks at the poster while he worked, smiling back at her like they were sharing an inside joke.  A couple weeks after Maria arrived, Michelle told him he needed to take a day off the following Monday.  He never used his vacation days voluntarily, so she just scheduled them for him.  He spent that Monday at home, finishing laundry and cleaning his apartment.  He cooked spaghetti for dinner and ate alone in front of the TV, thinking about how nice it would have been to share it with someone.

When he opened the branch the next day, the metal stand holding Maria’s picture wasn’t off to the side of the foyer where he usually put it at the end of each day.  He assumed Michelle or one of the other workers had moved it somewhere else, but when he looked around the branch, he noticed the rest of the signs had been changed.  He panicked.  He felt that same pulse from starting from his stomach, but this time it finished with a tingling chill on the back of his neck.

When Michelle arrived, he asked her about the posters.  “Oh, we got a new batch yesterday.  Robbie and I switched them out.”  No, they didn’t save the old ones, they put them out with the recycling.  Why did he want to know?

He pretended that he didn’t know why he asked, just forget about it.  He tried to go about his day like nothing had happened.  He could still picture her face in his mind whenever he wanted, after all.  He kept this in mind during the morning rush, stopping between customers to close his eyes for a second and recall her smile.  But the busier he got, the harder it was to stop and do this without anyone noticing.  He kept looking over to the metal frame that used to hold her picture, now holding a grinning elderly couple wearing Hawaiian shirts and touting IRA plans, and felt his stomach clench each time.

That afternoon, when Mr. Gurupanchayan came in for change, he made a mistake counting the first time and had to start over.  He gathered up the stack of bills again and started counting out again: “Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one.  Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, two.  Twenty, forty, sixty, eighty …” He stopped.  He couldn’t remember if he had already counted out two hundred or three hundred.  He apologized profusely, and started again.  This time he got to the $10 bills, but lost track again.  By then Michelle had noticed and stepped in to finish counting Mr. Gurupanchayan’s change.  He smiled at both of them and said, “No worries, I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Michelle asked him if he was okay, and he stammered an excuse about being tired.  Maybe he worked too hard cleaning his apartment yesterday, he said.  “You know what?” she said.  “Maybe you could use some more time off.  Why don’t you take off the rest of the day.”

He didn’t know what to say other than sure, thank you.  He clocked out on the computer, the first time he had ever worked less than a full day.  He walked home, crossing the same streets and turning at the same corners he did every day.

When he got home, he watched TV the rest of the afternoon, made himself dinner, then watched more TV until it was time for bed.  As he got ready for bed, he saw the yellow tie hanging by the door.  He took it off the hook, rolled it up, and put it in a dresser drawer.  Then he got in bed, read a mystery novel until he felt sleepy, and set his alarm for 6:00 a.m. the next day.

Photo by Dan on Picasa

Six months after I dropped out of medical school I took a job as a substitute biology teacher at the local high school.  The regular teacher was on maternity leave. Normally, the long-term jobs go to substitute teachers who’ve put in their time doing spot work, filling in for teachers who call in sick or wake up and decide it’s a good time to use up some of their personal days, but my friend, Jeff, who taught social studies at the school, called in a favor with the principal.  I needed to do something to make money, and with my science background, this was the best I could do.

My first few weeks of class went smoothly because I blamed everything on the old teacher. “Mrs. Jacobsen told me that you guys need to have your reports in no later than two days after each lab,” I’d say, or “Mrs. Jacobsen wanted to make sure you all wrote out full explanations for every answer on the worksheet this week.” This avoided conflict while the kids felt me out, deciding whether I was going to be a hard-ass or one of those teachers who tries to be their friend.

I liked to think that after a month, I was still in the, “He’s okay, I guess” category. Then I ran out of explicit instructions from Mrs. Jacobsen.  One Friday, I announced a pop quiz, which never happened during Mrs. Jacobsen’s tenure. The class groaned, predictably, but one student, Dominic, took special umbrage. “Are you shitting me?” I heard him say, not to me but not necessarily under his breath either. I let the cursing slide, because I figured I was liable to let one slip before I was finished, but I stared in his direction as I handed the stack of quizzes down his row.

He snatched his paper from the girl in front of him, and snuck an acid look at me before slouching back into his usual position, just high enough in his chair to reach a pen to the paper, knees splayed beneath him.  He started pecking at his iPhone, laughing to himself about whatever vowelless, acronym-littered text one of his buddies had sent him. “Dominic, can you put that away?”

Heads swiveled in his direction. He didn’t look up, wagged an index finger in my direction, and went back to typing. The rest of the class giggled. I decided to make an example of him.

“That’s it.” I stomped back to his desk, snatched the phone, and said, “I’ll give this back to you after class.”

“Dude, give it back,” he said, standing up. One of the girls next to us gasped.

“I asked you to put it away twice, and you’re not even supposed to have cell phones in school during class hours,” I said, squaring up to him.

He bumped into my shoulder as he turned to sit back down. “Whatever, man, you’re not a real teacher.”

The rest of the class watched us, incredulous. “Just read the next chapter until the bell rings,” I said, and stashed the phone in the middle drawer of the teacher’s desk.  I sat down and stared at the desk calendar Mrs. Jacobsen left behind.  Her last day was circled in blue marker, with a rattle drawn next to it.

During my planning period later that day, I sunk into the old battleship of a couch in the teacher’s lounge.  It must have docked there when the school opened in 1985, the one with the wooden armrests and calico tweed cushions that puffed out a cloud of musty, fart-smelling air every time you slouched into their grasp. It was comfortable though, the downward force of two decades of saddle-bagged asses and career resignation having punished its seats into submission. I nursed a mug of tepid coffee, slumped in my students’ favorite pose. Jeff walked in and spotted me. “What’s wrong with you?”

“Nothing. I just hassled a kid about using his phone in class.  I feel like an old man.”

“Well, are you?”

“Shut up.  I just didn’t expect to end up somewhere like this.”

“Somewhere like what?  I work here too, Dickhead, and you asked me for this job, remember?”

I got up and poured out the coffee in the sink, watching it pool in the stack of empty Tupperware containers and chipped dinnerware. Jeff was always on the watch for me feeling sorry for myself.  He knew I knew better, but he always seemed to know when I was breaking down. I wonder if it’s hard to tell the difference between that specific look of frustration and the usual defeated countenance you see in a teacher’s lounge.

That Friday night, I was sitting another couch in my apartment, staring at the TV, deciding whether I wanted to turn on a baseball game or get a porno DVD from my bedroom.  I started to get up and go back to the bedroom when my cell phone rang.  It was Jeff, badgering me to go out drinking with him like he did every week since I quit school. I took him up a few times, but it usually just turned into sitting around at some friend’s of his, drinking cans of cheap beer and taking bong hits.

I tried to put him off, reading the credits on the back of the DVD to myself, as if it were going to make me interested in anything other than the huge pair of fake breasts on the cover. “I had a shitty week,” I said

He persisted, and told me he’d be coming to pick me up in 30 minutes.  I decided I could use a night out anyway. I was still going to get shit on by kids like Dominic the next Monday whether I stayed home and jerked off to Big Boob Patrol 14 or went out. I might as well get drunk.

We drove to a shabby, vinyl-sided jumble of apartments with walkup porches and rotting balconies for a birthday party for this guy Jeff knew from his softball team. The little patches of grass in front of each building were overwhelmed by crabgrass and the remains of dandelions that had been sawed off by a weedeater. There was a crowd of people standing on a second-floor balcony, smoking and holding beer cans. I could hear a Pearl Jam song playing inside.

Jeff and I walked through a door propped open with a cooler. I got a beer and shadowed him as he made the rounds, pounding fists and giving one-armed hugs, telling me how this guy was awesome and that guy ruled. I remembered having met a lot of them at one time or another on our previous nights out. I settled in on the corner of a couch next to Jeff while he played cards across a low, wobbly coffee table, bullshitting with his friends.

I didn’t move much the rest of the night. New beers appeared in front of me every time I finished one, either passed over by Jeff or slid across my shoulder by one of his indiscriminate, goateed buddies.

There was a commotion at the front door.  One of Jeff’s buddies was shouting, greeting a group of girls. They were dressed in tight halter tops and white pants, with big hoop earrings and way too much makeup, the way younger girls dress when they’re trying to look older. A bleach blonde handed a jug of margarita mix over to one of the guys. Come to think of it, they looked really young. And vaguely familiar.

I leaned into Jeff. “Who are those girls?”

“Oh, just some chicks my buddies met at the bars.”

“I swear they look like some of the girls from the high school,” I said.

“No way, dude. They go to community college or something.”

I let it drop and grabbed another unopened beer from the table. It wouldn’t matter whether the girls were too young or not. I’d never be able to put a sentence together to impress them anyway.

I watched them for a while, then got up to pee and realized I was pretty drunk. I wobbled back from the bathroom, and the exertion made me start to feel sick. I slumped over the toilet, pressing my hands against the bowl, and tried not to think about why the porcelain along the rim was so sticky.  I vomited profusely, then must have passed out.

I woke up to a loud noise behind me. Pounding, then indiscriminate shouting. I was sitting wedged between the toilet and the sink cabinet.  The pounding continued, and I took a deep breath to prepare to sit up. The air stalled in my nostrils as it met impacted mucus and vomit. Immediately, everything smelled and tasted like a moldering version of the canned ravioli I had eaten for dinner, tinged with the sting of bile. I sat upright and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. My knees seared with pain against the vinyl tile floor, and my right leg was asleep from the mid-calf down.

The shouting behind me began to resemble language, punctuated by the pounding on the bathroom’s hollow-core wooden door.  I hoisted myself up by pressing both palms against the bowl then pushing off onto the nearby sink counter. I steadied myself over the sink on my elbows until the feeling came back to my leg. I turned on the cold water, and scooped some into my mouth.

I heard someone keying the lock, then one of Jeff’s friends, presumably the tenant of the apartment, burst in. “What the hell are you doing in here man?” I gave him a dark look while he gathered in the rest of the scene. Then he said, “You better fucking clean up that puke.”

I wiped my mouth on my sleeve and obliged, taking the roll of toilet paper sitting on top of the tank and wrapping some around my hand. I squatted down, losing my balance and cracking my shoulder against the cabinet, then righted myself and started wiping the orange and brown flecks off the bowl and surrounding floor.

When I came out of the bathroom, the party seemed even more raucous, the music even louder.  More girls had come over, and this time I definitely recognized some of them from the high school.  They were standing in the kitchen talking to a familiar group of guys, including Dominic, the kid with the phone from my class.

Jeff was sitting on the arm of a couch, leaning over one of the girls, trying to coax her into the game of quarters while she fiddled with her cell phone, ignoring him. When he spotted me coming out of the hallway, he shot up, spilling his beer on her white pants.

“Where have you been? You weren’t in there puking were you?” he said, gesturing back toward the bathroom with his cup.  The girl on the couch shied away from another shower of beer.

“I’m getting out of here,” I said, glancing over at Dominic and the kids from school, hoping they hadn’t seen me yet.

I tromped toward the door, with Jeff protesting behind me. “How you gonna get home? It’s like 20 miles away!”

I had sobered up from all the puking, and the thought of riding home with him now scared me enough to make the walk, which by my reckoning was only about three miles anyway.

I walked out of the apartment complex, past the remnants of other parties in other units, reproductions of the scene I just left. I thought about cutting through some of the residential neighborhoods behind the apartments instead of walking back to the commercial drag to get home. The streets were nearly deserted, and I’d be less likely to pick up a ticket for public intoxication from one of the bored town deputies idling their squad cars in the strip mall parking lots. But I decided to walk back to the main road anyway, thinking I could hit the Taco Bell and sober up a little more.

I stepped onto the sidewalk along the main road, and headed toward the next light, the late-night promise of chalupas and a large Mountain Dew on the next block urging me forward. As I waited to cross at the light, I thought I had an opening. I started to cross, then hesitated when I saw a white Saturn coming in a little more hot than I expected. The driver, a twenty-something Latino kid, gunned it, trying to beat the light. I turned as he passed me, watching him bolt into the intersection.

Just then I saw a black Nissan hurtling down the main road from my right, straight toward the turning Saturn. I glimpsed the Latino kid’s black hair through the Saturn’s rear window. Then I watched the Nissan barrel into the Saturn’s passenger side door, shattering the window and shoving it off to the side of the street like he was driving a snowplow. It seemed like it took 10 minutes to happen; I watched the whole thing but knew exactly how it would end.

The Saturn spun around and skidded to a stop right by the sidewalk about 20 yards away from me. The Latino kid got out, cursing, holding his left shoulder as his arm hung limply at his side. The Nissan had stopped nearby. The hood was crumpled and his airbags had deployed. The driver, who I recognized as Dominic, got out, ignoring the kid and his Saturn, and limped toward the front of the car to inspect the damage.

I stood there and stared. By that time, a teenage girl had gotten out of the passenger side of the Nissan, blood on her white pants from what looked like a broken nose. It was the girl Jeff had been hitting on at the party.  Another car had stopped and a matronly-looking woman was leading her over to the curb. Dominic, spotted me and shouted, “Don’t just fucking stand there, call for help.”

I looked back at the Latino kid trying to open his ruined passenger door. I looked at the woman emptying a plastic packet of Kleenexes to hold up to the girl’s nose. I looked back at Dominic, still glaring at me. Then I turned and kept walking toward the Taco Bell. I was hungry.