Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 16

"Murray, I have to tell you something. You made a huge mistake. You should have trusted your gut instinct."

"What?" Murray says, with more than a hint of panic. "What are you talking about?"

"You have cancer, Murray," Rick says with a heavy, insincere sigh. "I'm so sorry."

"I don't understand," Murray says. "How could I have cancer?"

Rick hands Murray a nine-by-twelve manila envelope. Murray's name and Social Security number are printed on a label in the upper right-hand corner. Murray takes it, and it feels stiff and surprisingly weighty, as if there might be a thick sheaf of lab results in there, or Xrays, or some other grim doc.u.ment laying out his future as a set of probabilities or regions of fuzzy dark gray, darkness and grayness that are growing by the day.

"Wait a minute, did I have cancer before I bought The Brad? I don't understand. Did you give me cancer?" Rick gives him a look that is both patronizing and beneficent, as if to say, don't be silly, and also I care about you, you silly old fool, don't you know how much we all care about you?

"You wanted something to happen, right?" Rick says. "For all of this to be leading up to something? Closure," Rick says, pointing at the manila envelope. "That is definitely one way to have closure."

"I didn't say I wanted closure. Drama. I said I wanted drama."

"What do you think drama is, Murray?"

"How about something more open-ended?"

"Oh sure, that can be arranged, too," Rick says. "But even open-ended stories have to end at some point, right? Open endings, after all, are still endings."

Then Murray realizes that he never said anything about drama. He thought about it in his head.

"What, just because it's in italics you think I can't hear it?" Rick says. "That was part of your story, too. Your inner monologue. All of it. It's all part of Murray Choosing The Brad."

Who are you? Murray thinks. Or what are you?

You haven't figured it out, yet? I'm your narrator, Murray.

You're a sales guy.

Sales guy for a narrative experiential lifestyle product, narrator. Just t.i.tles, really. My job is to sell this story to you. To make it yours. To make you believe. To make you feel something again. Isn't that what you wanted?

The Brad they are in disappears, roof, then ceiling, then the walls one at a time, then the floor, then the furniture, each layer and element dematerializing in sequence, and then Murray and Rick are standing in an empty city, Vancouver shot for Los Angeles, Toronto shot for New York, night shot for day, not eternal yet somehow hourless, a place yet somehow unplaceable, an architecture trying to be everywhere and in doing so becoming nowhere.

"Where is this?" Murray asks.

"It's a commercial break."

Murray notices that all of the cars are luxury sedans, white and featureless. With a burst of accompanying indie rock, a silver coupe comes slicing around the corner, tight suspension and race-car handling and tinted windows, and the whole world goes into slow motion, all of the other cars and all of the other drivers, except for the hero car and its driver, who has a smile of perfect self-satisfaction, and Murray realizes this is his chance to make a break for it, to escape Rick and The Brad, and Murray, no spring chicken really in the winter of his days, nevertheless takes off running down the alley and sees a chain-link fence and he can't remember the last time he did what he is about to do and, with an old-man sort of frog hop, Murray catches on to the fence and clambers up and gingerly over the top, and lowers himself down on the other side, where he turns to see that he is in a different city now. Not a city at all, really.

Murray pauses to catch his breath, then resumes running, which slows to a jog, which slows to a brisk walk. It's quiet now, no sound track here, and Murray sees why: he's on some kind of backstage lot, now, which he knows because he sees crews of men constructing sets and facades, making a town that looks like just the town Murray grew up in. Even more like the town he remembers: an imagined place more real than the place it is supposed to be. A designed subst.i.tute that destroys the memory of the original. Murray sees a sign that says Coming Soon.

(from AEI, the people who brought you The Brad):.

YOUR HOMETOWN.

and below it another sign that says "Re-Authenticization in Process" and below that, in minuscule type, a legal notice that the town is now owned by The American Experience, LLC, whose parent company, American Entertainments, Inc. (AEI), is a subsidiary itself of a company called The USAmus.e.m.e.nt Corporation, which is owned by a German conglomerate, New World Experiments GmbH, owned by a consortium led by Chinese and Korean investors. All around is new ground being broken, dig sites surrounded by chain-link fences, men working in hard hats, large colorful banners proclaiming that Your Hometown will be relaunched in the Fall of 2015.

Murray runs from door to door, looking for an exit from this place. It all looked so good in the brochures, but now he isn't sure where he is, doesn't know anymore what is real or not real, whether he really does have cancer or if that is just part of this, this whatever-it-is, experiential lifestyle product or whatever Rick, or whoever-he-is, called it. True, Murray had been looking for some kind of adventure, but this is not exactly what he had in mind, this manufactured situation, not a fantasy but a kind of trick of the mind, a trick of the heart. This is the same place, the town as advertised, not just a town with a lowercase "t" but a Town, the Town, the scene having been redone by the Tourism Bureau, quantified in the grand Re-Quaintification Initiative, a restoration of the town's rich history and tradition, which Murray now understands as just more advertising copy written by AEI. All of the buildings and street signs and lampposts and mailboxes, all of it decor, a set, a three-dimensional illusion, part physical, part digital, designed with the purpose of making Murray, or not Murray, the citizen of the town, the citizen of American Entertainments, Inc., a corporate-owned munic.i.p.ality, or citizen wasn't the right word-customer-all of it designed to make the customer a tourist in his own hometown. A hometown that he never really grew up in, one that never even existed. Everything that had seemed comforting about it before, the ornate overhangs, the stained wood porches, the restaurant signs with all of the charming fonts all serving chicken fingers, all of it now seems off.

Murray is in an empty theme park, an hour before it opens, not quite ready to be the place it is supposed to be.

Or perhaps a deserted back lot, an abandoned set for one of those network shows, with all of the mopey people in large houses, being sad at each other. That's it, Murray realizes, although he isn't quite sure what he is realizing, it is more like the feeling of realizing something, which people in those shows tend to do much more often than in actual life.

Murray tries another door and finally one opens, and now he's running up what appears to be some kind of corporate office disguised as part of the town. The elevator door is open and lit and appears to be waiting for Murray, which gives Murray the creeps and he thinks it might be best, if this is some kind of story planned out for him, if this is all part of The Brad, that maybe he should avoid that elevator, if he's going to have any chance of getting out of here. Plus, Murray can hear music coming out of that elevator, and not just any music, but the same music heard before, the sound track, his sound track or the sound track to Autumn, thundering major-chord tonality, the melody seeming to physically lift something inside Murray, lifting him up and drawing him toward the elevator, and Murray wonders if somehow the song has been engineered to fit him, based on some kind of preference matrix, to suit his emotional and psychological makeup, to push his invisible b.u.t.tons, b.u.t.tons he didn't even realize he had until he heard this music, and Murray knows that he can't get in the elevator. He opens the door marked "Exit" and goes through it and sees, a moment too late, that it isn't an exit, now he is in the stairwell and the door has shut behind him. He tries it. Locked. He shakes it with all of his strength, waning now, he's tired, but gives it a good shake and kicks the handle a few times for good measure, but knows he has no choice but to go up the stairs, probably up to wherever the elevator was going to take him anyway. He has been fooled, he sees, trying to avoid the elevator, the choice he thought that they wanted him to take, and now he has taken the choice that they wanted him to take anyway. I'm losing it, Murray thinks. They? Who are they? And just when Murray thinks he might be paranoid, he hears the sound track, faint, coming from up above, the sound falling down the stairwell, getting louder as he climbs each flight. He checks each floor of this empty, fake building, knowing that he will end up on the roof, because that's where they want him to go. The music is getting louder and the feeling is getting stronger, stronger in proportion to the volume of the sound track, the feeling that Murray is realizing something. What has come over me? Murray wonders, and it occurs to him that searching frantically for an exit is perhaps exactly what someone in Murray's situation would be expected to do. That's what Murray has been doing all his life. Getting up when the alarm goes off. Going to work. Coming straight home from work. A drink or three in the evening, and do it all over again. Straight ahead, plodding along with the plot. And now he has signed up for more of the same, wanting a little taste of what other people had, lured in by the promise of two bedrooms and two bathrooms with s.h.i.+ny fixtures and baskets of individually wrapped soaps, all of the s.h.i.+ny products just part of the larger one, the largest one, a way of life, life itself as a product. This is what he has always wanted, or so he had thought, but now here he is, in the middle of a story of his own and looking for the exit, and realizing all the exits are blocked and then realizing that an exit is not what he needs. Why should he leave? He, for once, is the center of the story, and for the first time in as long as he can remember, Murray feels that he is in control. This is it: his all-time high point. The apex of his trajectory, his moment of total freedom, the moment that Murray has been waiting for his whole life. To feel completely free and real and himself. An authentic experience. This is my real self, Murray thinks, but almost as soon as he thinks it, he wonders, who is deciding that? Himself, or some self separate from the self, and what is an authentic experience if you realize it as such while still having it? Now that Murray has labeled it as authentic, could it still be that? Who is putting these ideas into my head? And he wonders if they are even his own ideas or somehow part of The Brad, part of some kind of dramedic consciousness, an internal voice-over, that the product engineers at American Entertainments, Inc., have come up with a way to make him understand his own life as a kind of story. Is that it? Murray wonders, and as he reaches the top of the stairwell and throws open the roof access door, Murray thinks, yes, that's right, you've got it, and he realizes that he didn't think that last thought, no you didn't, Murray, that was me, and he sees Rick standing up on top of the ledge of the building, six stories up, and he says, hey Murray, and Murray realizes Rick is somehow narrating directly into Murray's head.

"Stop that," Murray screams.

"Oh fine," Rick says.

"How did you get up here?" Murray says between gulps of air.

"You thought it would be that easy to get rid of me?"

"Kind of, yeah."

"Don't you see? You can't escape your arc."

"My life isn't an arc," Murray says. "I've figured it out."

"That so? Tell me."

"I'm not fighting it anymore," Murray says.

"Go on," Rick says, with a smile. "I'm listening." He hands Murray a handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

Murray takes it and dries off, wiping his face and neck. "I made a break for it during the commercial," Murray says, after catching his breath.

"Yup."

"I heard the music in the elevator, so I took the stairs."

"Yes, yes."

"By resisting your story, I was actually creating it for you."

Rick looks a little surprised. "Pretty good," he says. "Really good, actually. Hardly anyone ever figures that out. But let me ask you a question: what are you going to do now?"

"I've still got seven days to change my mind."

"This is true," Rick says. "But let me show you something."

Rick pulls a small ring box out of his pocket and opens it to reveal a small toggle switch.

"What is that?" Murray says.

"The on-off switch."

"To what?"

"Why don't you flip it and find out?"

As soon as Murray hits the switch, he is deafened by a horrible grinding sound. From out of nowhere Rick produces two sets of earphones. He hands one to Murray and puts the other pair on himself.

"Ah, that's better," says Rick. "Can you hear me?"

Murray nods, unsure of how he feels with Rick once again talking right into his head, but then he sees where the grinding is coming from.

"I'll give you a moment," Rick says, as he watches Murray take in what he's looking at, which is the same town he was just running through, the Town, only now it's not empty, but filled with workers in orange jumpsuits. From behind false walls and through false doors, men appear in twos and threes, wearing blue jackets that say "CONTINUITY" on the back, armed with pressurized canisters and fine brushes.

"That stuff is called RealLife," Rick says. "Aerosolized Themed Ambience."

Rick and Murray watch as the men descend upon threadbare corners of the room, holes in the scene where the wire frame is showing through, or the substrate, or whatever was underneath, expertly applying coats and touch-ups to blank patches of reality, surgical and precise with their movements, smoothing over, restoring, st.i.tching the illusion back together, and then, just as quickly as they appeared, the Continuity maintenance workers disappear.

"Where are we?" Murray says.

"Backstage," Rick says.

The next wave of workers appears, in purple jumpsuits, with white lettering on the back that reads "DISCONTINUITY," and Murray watches as they appear to undo some of the work that was just done by their predecessors in Continuity, selectively erasing certain bits of the landscape, scuffing a corner here, rubbing away a bit of reality there. Rick explains to Murray that these guys are actually from a completely different department than Continuity.

"It's part of Accounts Receivable," Rick says.

If a customer doesn't keep current on payments of the Continuity Maintenance Fee for The Brad or The Jake or whatever other product they may have chosen, then corporate calls in the continuity disruption team to initiate the Experience Degradation Ladder.

"Like repo men," Murray says. "For the life I bought."

"Now you're catching on," Rick says. "Look at all that. It's a beautiful thing." Murray tries to see what Rick is talking about, but all he sees is a kind of factory. A manufacturing process for a way of life. Taking anything, experience, a piece of experiential stuff, a particle of particularity, a sound, a day, a song, a bunch of stuff that happens to people, a thing that makes you laugh, a visual, a feeling, whatever. A mess. A blob. A chunk. A messy, blobby, chunky glob of stuff. Unformed, raw noncontent that gets engineered, honed, and refined until some magical point where it has been processed to sufficient smoothness and can be extruded from the machine: content. A chunk of content, h.o.m.ogeneous and perfect for slicing up into Content Units. All of this for the customer-citizens, who demand it, or not even demand it but come to expect it, or not even expect it, as that would require awareness of any alternative to the subst.i.tute, an understanding that this was not always so, that, once upon a time, there was the real thing. They don't demand it or expect it. They a.s.sume it. The product is not a product, it's built into the very notion of who they are. Content Units everywhere, all of it coming from the same source: jingles, news, ads. Ads, ads, ads. Ads running on every possible screen. Screens at the grocery store, in the coffee line, on the food truck, in your car, on top of taxis, on the sides of buses, in the air, on the street signs, in your office, in the lobby, in the elevator, in your pocket, in your home. Content pipelines productive as ever, churning and chugging, pumping out the content day and night, conceptual smokestacks billowing out content-manufacturing waste product emissions, marginal unit cost of content dropping every day, content just piling up, containers full, warehouses full, cargo s.h.i.+ps full, the channels stuffed to bursting with content. So much content that they needed to make new markets just to find a place to put all of it, had to create the Town, and after that, another Town, and beyond that, who knew? What were the limits for American Entertainments, Inc., and its managed-narrative experiential lifestyle products? How big could the Content Factory get?

"You brought me up here to see this?" Murray says.

"No," Rick says, "I brought you up here to see that."

Murray looks down to see his son getting out of his car.

"He's here to see you," Rick says. "He heard you're ... "

"Let me guess," Murray says. "Cancer."

"The doctors say you've got six months. But with modern medicine, who knows? You might live happily ever after. Or at least, happily enough."

"Your doctors? In here? TV doctors?"

"They're the best in the world. They also have very complicated love lives."

"I'm not even sick," Murray says.

"Are you sure about that?"

"Is that, are you, is that some kind of threat?"

"No, no no, noooo. Murray, come on. I'm not a bad guy. I'm not your antagonist. I'm just here to give you choices."

Murray looks down again and sees his son, someone or something that looks exactly like his son. Except that something seems off.

"Wait a minute," Murray says. "Is that even my real son?"

"Depends on how you define real," Rick says. "Are you sure you're still the real Murray?"

Murray doesn't even know what that means, but he is tired of this sales guy messing with his head and it seems to Murray that the absolute right thing to do, or perhaps absolute wrong thing to do, or perhaps the absolute right thing to do because it is the absolute wrong thing to do, or just in terms of what will feel good, would be to punch Rick or "Rick" or whatever right in that smug mouth of his, so Murray plants a foot, puts his weight into it as best he knows how, and pops Rick right in that very real mouth of his, flesh and bone on flesh and teeth and that, Murray is sure, is something solid and visceral and real, and Rick goes down.

"Wow," Rick says, still lying on the ground, hand covering his mouth, blood running onto his gums and fingers.

"Sorry," Murray says, shocked by what he's done. "I guess I watch too much TV."

"No no no," Rick says. "Happens to me all the time. It's a good way to end your story. Something tangible, decisive, action-oriented."

"I was supposed to hit you?" Murray says, coming to see what that means. "I can't escape my arc."

Rick nods, like a proud teacher. "You're not going to live forever. Everyone has their time, of course, but if you stay in here, it'll be dramatic, and meaningful, and all of that good stuff," Rick says, pointing down at Murray's son or "son" or whatever. "And as you can see, you won't be alone. This is what it comes down to, Murray. If you stay in here, you get closure. If you leave, well, I don't know what happens to you out there."

What am I going to do now? Murray thinks, now realizing that he really is having his epiphany: he is free. Completely free. This is his big Change of Life scene. All his life he's been waiting. But even now as it is happening, as he tries to hold on to it, it is slipping from him, a sh.e.l.l, just the diaphanous skin of an epiphany, which, with the softest whisper, slips off and floats into the air, the form of the experience, without the substance, the husk of a moment. It feels false. A false resolution. Closure. This is what Rick is offering: a sound-tracked life. Life as a story. A story as a product. Is this really the best he can hope for? Is this all there is?

Shut up, Murray thinks to himself. Just shut the h.e.l.l up and stop narrating to yourself. Shut up shut up shut up shut up. Shut up.

And then it's quiet. The factory is gone. Rick is gone. The music is gone. Even Murray's own internal monologue is gone. Behind Murray is his backstory, his life. In front of him is who knows what. But how does he just go on now, having seen what he's seen? The guts of it. The gears. The machinery of production of his reality. His existence as a customer. As a paying customer in a managed lifestyle experience. This is what it is, what it has been for some time now. The only difference is that now he knows it. Murray has chosen The Brad but it's not enough, or it's too much, or neither or both. His life is not a dramedy. There is no arc. No episodes, no tuning in next week, no sound track, no ending, happy or sad. He may or may not have cancer. He may or may not have anyone who cares. He has a son in the world, somewhere, who might or might not think of Murray every day. Not much else. Not enough for a story, Murray thinks, here at the edge of his own story, but it will have to do, somehow it's going to have to be enough, and somehow it is. It's enough.

All of the Above.

Sorry Please Thank You.

You're reading this, so it's too late. For me, I mean. I'm gone. That's redundant, isn't it? What the h.e.l.l am I doing-only so much s.p.a.ce on this napkin and I'm using it up on rhetorical questions? What a metaphor for life-a finite s.p.a.ce, impossibly small. No way to fit a whole lifetime in there. But we sure do try. Oh G.o.d, I am annoying. I even annoy myself. I'm out of control with this kind of stuff, I know. This is why you never really loved me. Got one bullet in the chamber, barrel jammed in waistband, metal cold against my skin. One bullet, one napkin. Napkin that my last drink was sitting on. Jameson, rocks. Running out of s.p.a.ce, so I'll start to get to the point: You said I'd get over it.

Should have made you a bet, because, hey, guess what, got a loaded gun in my underwear so it turns out I was right. Not that I can complain. Had some good years. My life, nutsh.e.l.l: 08 yrs. happy, no reason; 919 happy, wrong reasons; 2033 unhappy for all the right reasons; 34 to present moment, unhappy, looking for a reason. Sorry, man. I get that a lot. I'm sorry for your loss, people say to one another. What does that mean? I wish it weren't so. I can imagine a world in which it had not happened. But that's not what sorry means. Sorry means: That happened to you. That happened to you and it may or may not have been inevitable, but it happened and there are some things that happen that we can only look at and say, sorry. Circular. Sorry for your loss means I am sorry that there is loss, or to put it another way, there is loss. The sorry cancels itself out, and it might only mean this: that happened to you, and I can see that it hurt, and I am going to say this word, sorry, that corresponds to something, a vector, a medium of propagation and/or force-carrying particle that allows transmission or communication of sorrow, or the related but not identical state of sorryness, a mysterious action-at-a-distance between humans that allows one human, separated in s.p.a.ce and time from another human, to impart upon the other an influence, an effect. The state of being sorry.