Free Brief Encounters with the Enemy by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh Page B

and listened to some news about baseball and about the war. I shut it off. Sitting in the silent cocoon of the car, with the sun beginning to go down, familiar fatigue came over me, originating in the soles of my feet and emanating upward until I felt soft and heavy. Even the coffee couldn’t offset the effects. It was warm in the car and I turned on the AC and it blew in my face. I took out my BlackBerry and checked my email. I have a tendency to check my email compulsively, especially when I’m idle. There were four new emails, all from work, all forwarded by people who had cc’d fifty people. It was what you did when you were trying to get out of responsibility, when you wanted to pass the buck to the next guy—you cc’d everyone. “Accounts Payable Protocol” was the subject line of one. I didn’t bother to read any of them.
    In my lap lay my spreadsheets, rows and columns of blocks, some of those blocks filled, some of them empty; by tomorrow morning they’d all be filled in by me. They looked like a road map of sorts, my spreadsheets, an aerial view of the city, little block by little block, and I considered the drive I was about to make to Winchester Parks and whether I should take the expressway or the bridge. I thought about Mr. Bildman,and I thought about Mr. Bildman’s daughter, Zlottie. She liked me, but I wasn’t sure if she liked me as
more than just a friend
. A slight tremble of anxiety passed through me, briefly counterbalancing the fatigue. It had been a while since I’d had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, mainly because I was shy, but also because I worked all the time and I couldn’t find any girls I liked. But Zlottie was smart, she was also sophisticated, and she had the darkest eyes. She had the darkest hair too. In short, she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever met.
    The last time I’d seen her was right before Christmas. I’d gone to the shop with Chip. Chip had the connection and I had the car. He’d brought with him sixteen boxes of underpants that he’d taken off the truck at Kmart. “I don’t give a fuck,” he said. He’d been at Kmart seven years and was about to deploy and had nothing left to lose. He’d lost it all already when he blew out his knee senior year and his basketball scholarship was revoked. He’d shown me the letter the college sent him upon hearing the news, a giant coat of arms telling him they’d be happy to still have him if he could come up with twenty-five thousand dollars a year. He was six-foot-six but walked with a slouch, all shoulders, no neck, as if trying to get back to normal height so he could forget the whole thing. Instead of going to college, he’d signed up for the reserves. When he’d gotten called up, I’d told him, “You’ll be back before you know it.” I’d been one of those fools who thought there wasn’t even going to be a war. Now that’s exactly where he was.
    When we’d walked into Mr. Bildman’s shop that final day, Zlottie had been right in the front, standing on a ladder stacking boxes of crackers. On the shelf behind her was one ofthose Jewish candelabras with half the candles lit. The shop glowed in a soft light, making Zlottie look dramatic on the ladder, like an angel descending. She was wearing the same thing she always wore: a long black skirt that dropped all the way down to her shoes like a curtain on a stage and which hid the good parts from view. Even so, I could make out the curve of her ass. While Chip was in the back sorting out the details with Mr. Bildman, I broke the news that I wouldn’t be coming back. It was Chip’s thing, after all, and I was only the driver, and he was going off to war—and I wasn’t really a thief.
    “That’s that,” I said. I tried to sound detached.
    “Okay,” she said.
    She didn’t seem to be affected by it that much. Apparently I was the only one with feelings. It was dark enough in the store that Zlottie, in her dark outfit, was almost beginning to disappear