An Unusual Place - Chapter 1

 “Hello, grandson, did you get much bad weather? When will you be leaving that unusual place?  Hope to see you over the holidays. Stay safe and prudent. Surely miss seeing you.  Love ya, gram.”

Chapter 1

I got a letter from the government today. They took away my birthday. The bill read that it was the fifth and final collection fee. I called in and reminded them that I was in a payment plan. If I signed up for a payment plan, they said they would stop charging me collection fees. They said I signed up for the payment plan too late and now I was susceptible to all the fees. They asked if I read statute 59:193.98. I said I did but I didn’t understand any of it. No one does, they said.  I asked them if the person who wrote statute 59:193.98 was a foreigner or mentally challenged or some busted computer program. They said it was a politician who wrote the statute. I sighed and told them I was expecting a few cards in the mail for my birthday and I hoped that this wouldn’t screw that up. They said it likely could interfere with some of the letters arriving. They then asked me to mail a letter myself with a check for $487.39 and three forms of documentation proving my existence to reinstate my birthday. I asked if I could pay online but they said their fraud system would flag my application since I no longer had a birthday and that it could take months to review. I asked if I was speaking to a robot. They said no. A clone? No. Are you sure? Yes. I sighed. I asked If I could go in person to talk to someone and they said no I couldn’t talk to someone but I could come to the office to manually submit my paper application. I sighed and asked for the address of their office and if I’d come down today would I have my birthday back before my birthday. They asked when my birthday was. Next Tuesday, I said. They said that unfortunately that wasn’t likely. I asked if I could change my birthday to next Friday and if so then could I have my birthday back before next Friday if I came in today. They said there was an extra application to change birthdays but before I could do that first I had to reinstate my original birthday. I hung up.

I didn’t receive one damn card for my birthday. It was quite sad. I didn’t expect to be so down about it. It didn’t help that it rained all day. I walked down to the gas station to get some beers after I logged off work. A fat black guy was yelling at the Middle Eastern guys who run the place threating to shoot them, I don’t know what for. The fat guy was outnumbered fived to one, all five of the guys not concerned at all that there was a man threating to kill them. I felt like a loser standing there. Fourth in line waiting to purchase my beers, all of us customers waiting for the fat guy to leave so we could pay and leave. There was an old man in front of me with no shoes on who had mustaches for eyebrows. When I got up to the counter to finally purchase my beer I gave the cashier my driver’s license. He swiped the license on his machine and told me my license wasn’t valid. He said I wasn’t of age. That’s ridiculous, I said. My birthday is right there, I said, pointing to my ID. I come here all the time. The man shrugged. I guess he was some new cousin of the family that ran the place, never had I seen him before. I usually had Amir check me out. I protested it was my birthday but quickly the man told me to leave and the people waiting in line began to grumble at me to get moving.  

I needed my birthday back. It was my birthday, and I couldn’t even get a drink. I went home and watched my favorite show on PBS where a pretty tall lady in shorts and tight shirts goes to national parks and walks around giggling and pointing out trees and animals. Occasionally they point out some history but not much since the Feds all got confused and cut that out years ago. After a watching it for a while the woman didn’t feel real and I wanted a drink again. I went back to the gas station and saw in the window that the same guy was working at the counter. Luckily, the Lakers fan who’s there every night for the doughnuts walked out. I asked him to buy me some beers. I said the government took my birthday away. Man, fuck the feds, he said. They did that to my brother a couple years ago when he couldn’t pay his child support. He asked if I had kids and I said no I just had a cat. He said he didn’t like cats. I asked if he would still go in and buy me some beers. I said I used to have a dog as a kid but then some farmer shot it for playing with his horse. I stood there waiting for him to take my money. He grinned and asked me what do you say when a midget comes out as gay. I knew this one, it was stupid. The brother of an old girlfriend always loved this one. He comes out of the cupboard, I answered. He laughed and slapped his knee. He got me my beers but I had to buy him some too. I’m going to take these silver bullets straight to head, he said, as he walked off with the sixer he bought with my money. When I got back home the Antique Roadshow was on PBS. Some fat old white lady got fifty thousand for an old sword she found up her butt from the Battle of Shiloh. I was happy for her.  

~

When I die, I’m going to Australia. There’s a girl named Mimi who said she’d meet me there. She’s blonde and blue-eyed and looks like an angel. I met her at the Cadillac Café. Together we are going to have six sun-kissed children. I know she can bear a lot of children because she has a forty-five-degree angle between her waist and butt. God has blessed her with such and has made me promise to raise our kids Catholic and send them all to college. That’s an easy bargain, I tell Him. The guy is not as cheap as some people make him out to be. He’s a strange fellow to be sure, a shy one too, but he’s alright. He doesn’t say much and lets me blabber my problems on to him. I like him because he listens and just gives me one word replies like yes and no in the same manner as when you ask a dog a question.

When I was six, I couldn’t read and still believed in Santa Claus. I was dumb and alone and they put me and the other dumb kids in a separate room when it was time to read. It took us an hour to read one of them Dr. Seuss books. Later that Spring the teacher dressed up as the Cat on the doctor’s birthday. She was a fat woman with cankles and varicose veins and I ran away when she tried to hug me in that awful costume. I would have made it had some parent not caught me by the collar in the parking lot. The Cat caught up and dragged me back to class and made me read while the other kids went out for recess and when I was done reading she handed me a bunch of pink slips she called Must-Dos that weren’t necessary at all but rather a bunch of crap about grammar and annoying math puzzles. If Stacy had three buckets of shrimp she brought to school, and gave one bucket to Chris, and two buckets to Chester, how many bugs did Stacy have left to bring to the library? 

I generally drink to keep the bugs away. In the darkness they’re everywhere. I used to sleep in the light but I found I could only get about four hours until the light woke me up. Now I drink and I can get an even five till the morning thunder rolls in. There are three types of people in the world. Those that can count and those that can’t. I heard that from a guy at the gas station. He and I have the same schedule. Most nights I go in there at ten to get a drink and every night he’s in there too, waiting for the doughnuts. The doughnuts are delivered late at night so that they’re fresh in the morning. At least that’s what he tells me. He always asks if I’m in there for the doughnuts. I tell him I’m here for the jokes. He grins and asks me what you call a cow that jumps over a fence. I tell him utter destruction and that my French teacher told me that one. Habla Expansol? He asks. Nein, I say. He’s a Lakers fan too. I only say that because he wears a dirty black Lakers cap. I ask him who his favorite Laker is. He tells me Kobe.

I like Kobe too. I yell his name every time I shoot an empty beer can into the trash. I don’t make a lot of shots but I shoot a lot of them which makes me a shooter. The bugs don’t like it when I yell his name. The Black Mamba. That’s what they called him. They know after a couple made threes I’ll be untouchable. I don’t know why the bugs don’t like the booze. When I turn on the lights they jump around like teenagers but when I’m six cans in they flee like I’m Satan.  Do bugs believe in God? Who cares, they’re bugs.

I don’t know why I’m talking about bugs so much. The last time I talked to my neighbor she was bithcing about the bugs. She’s always bitching about something. She’s a single mom so I find her bithcing lovely. Moms who bitch are moms who care. Don’t read too much into that, moms. You can care and still be a bitch. I’m swearing too much, pardon my French. Now there’s an expression I would like to get to the bottom of. Pardon my French, what cheeky bastard started that one? It must have been the English. England is the realm of cheeky bastards. I went to England once and I couldn’t stop giggling. I was in one of those towns whose name ends with berry or shire and the older American lady in my group asked the people there what they thought of America. A mixed response, but this lady sure loved the English, obsessed with tea and all those period pieces on the streaming apps where the fancy people gossip about who the young people are hooking up with. I like the English well enough. They were funny but they were also pale and their food was bland. I imagine you can say that about a lot of places in Europe.

In high school they made us read books around Europeans. Most of western history is centered around Europeans so go figure that most literature is about pasty white people. I remember reading The Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka. It’s about some Czech who wakes up as a human-sized bug. His family was terrified of him and so locked him in his room. I can’t remember how it ended. I can’t remember how a lot of books from high school ended. In the summer between my freshman and sophomore year they wanted me to read Rebecca, by Daphne Du Maurier. Fifteen years old, hormones raging, body growing, the world ahead of me, and I had to read Rebecca. It’s hard to describe the agony of reading that book at such a time. I read it though, front to back. I hated every page. That’s the problem with schools; it makes you hate learning. I suppose it’s useful though, because otherwise you end up a Lakers fan waiting for doughnuts at Circle K. That seemed to be the lesson at least.

I got a cat to keep me less lonely. I call her Cleo. She has lots of colors and is fat and sassy. She follows me around and cries at me when I get out of the shower and purrs next to my face while I sleep. I got her as a kitten during the recent flood. The animal shelter had flooded and the sister of the husband of a woman I met at the Dusty Frog worked at the shelter and was giving away kittens for free. I was lonely and not having much luck on swiping faces on the apps or inquiring upon ladies at the bars. So I went to pick out a kitten at the lady’s house, the lady I met at the bar. Her name was Sherry. There were a few other people already there waiting on the couch. I met Sherry’s parents who had lost their house during the flood. Sherry’s father was a retired pastor who now made soap. He explained his house had four feet of water and was full of suds when he got out. Sherry’s mother had a small head that wiggled when she spoke. She had a faint and sweet voice and asked me what church I went to. I said I didn’t have a church and asked her if she’d seen any good movies lately. She said she hadn’t been to a theatre in years, not since before the virus hit the states. Sherry’s husband’s sister then arrived with the box of kittens. Cleo came right up to me and nuzzled my chest. It was an easy choice. You have to pick her, Sherry’s mother told me. She’s a sweetie.

Cleo is a sweetie but she’s also a sickly girl. I take her to the vet often. I like vets though. Many are kind and attractive women, but every time I go, they tell me something is off with Cleo. They pull up x-rays of her little cat skeleton and point things out to me. You see this here, her back right leg is all fucked up, you need to get her to lose some weight to take the pressure off her knees. You see this here, these little peas, those are the bladder stones we’ll need to remove. You see this right here, these dark lumps, these are her feces in her intestinal track, she’s got to take a big poop, she probably ate too much. You see this here, this saggy pouch, all that fat, yeah, you need to get her to lose some weight, we tested for diabetes, she doesn’t have it yet, but she’s overweight. They tell me she has fleas in her coat too. I tell them I give her a flea shot once a month. They ask which flea shot I give her. Revolution Plus, I say. Tsk-tsk, they reply. Revolution Plus is like water and no good at all. Not here, they say, where we are, this is parasite palace. They say I need to give her Revolution Max. It’s two hundred bucks for three shots; one shot a month. I sigh and I buy the shots.

I pay too much money for this cat but it’s worth it when I come home in the rain, slogging through the puddles, and up the stairs, and I see her in the window waiting for me. It really is the little things in life. Coming home to a made bed. A breeze rustling through the trees. A fresh squeeze of lemon over catfish. A rainbow in the gutter. Blowing out your birthday candles and making a wish.

~

I went downtown to the capitol grounds to see about getting my birthday reinstated. I showed up early in the morning, afraid I would have to wait in line, but when I got there they said I would have to make an appointment. Not till one in the afternoon could they fit me in with an appointment. The building was tall and grey and tons of people were going in and out, a good chunk of them clones from the look of it. They made too many of them in the war during the labor crisis but then it was over and no one knew what to do with them. Nobody wanted to live or work alongside a clone. The constitution was murky on the details of it all and nothing got settled in the Capitol so the states all got to decide. A lot of them ended up getting jobs in the government since the Algos got banned from government work and to replace the electronic slaves the states started hiring a bunch of clones to do the work. They don’t go out too much since some people are quite mean to them. I went outside to wait but it was pouring rain as usual so I went to the cafeteria instead.

It was the beast meal I had in some time. Cheap and delicious, I couldn’t believe it. Bacon, biscuits & gravy, fried green tomatoes, grits with cheese, fresh eggs with chives, and breakfast burritos of all things. Half the people in line were obese but they sure had good reason. The portly women in hairnets hollered at me as they scooped out extra. Take some more! Here, take some more! You a growin boy, take some more!

As I finished my meal a little man with bottled glasses and thick green tie with a briefcase came up to me asking if I knew where the Cherokee room was.

No clue.

I’m looking for the job fair. Do you know where that is?

Sorry, I don’t.

The little man left and after I finished my meal, I still had time to waste so I went looking for the Cherokee room.

I found the room filled with clones bustling around like chickens between booths. There were multiple departments hiring positions and private companies I had never heard. Jobs! Jobs! Jobs! The clucking seemed to ring in my ears. I found the little green tie man and asked why all the hiring.

The new governor of course! He replied, explaining that the governor was planning to enact some laws soon that would require all non-retired-age households to have a job and that if you didn’t you would be deported out of the state.

Didn’t you hear about that?

I guess I thought that was all a load of crap. Where are they going to send us all?

West Texas I hear.

Why?

Lot of land. Lot of jobs in El Paso too with all the Mexicans gone.

I frowned. Sounds awful.

Yeah, it’s pretty bad, last time I was out there, I saw a bat swimming in a toilet at a pit stop outside Fort Stockton. Hotter than two rats fuckin in a wool sock so I cant say the blame the bat too much. Not even sure it was a bat, could have been a bird, or a beta fish. The worst restroom I ever found. But hey, at least it doesn’t rain much out there. Well, anyways, I don’t want to go there, I got a wife, and she aint leaving, so if you find something good, let me know. I’ll look out for you, you look out for me, eh?

He patted me on the back, chuckled, and scampered off, leaving me in shock at the discovery that the little goblin had a wife and here I was with a job, money, and no lady to speak of. I wandered through the booths and some lady called out to me asking if she could see my resume. I look at the lady confused.

Is that your resume, she pointed at the folder in my hand.

It was my birthday documentation. Oh no, I said, holding up my papers, I lost my birthday.

Are you a clone?

No.

It’s okay if you are. There’s a booth in the Choctaw room that helps with birthday documents for clones for free since many of them weren’t provided with proper documentation during the war when made.

I nodded and faked a smile and walked away. Down at the end of the row there was a great big booth in blue with a bright green banner advertising “Great Jobs for Software Engineers!”

I came up and introduced myself to the man behind the booth. He found my name interesting.

Copper, I like that name, don’t find it much.

Well, it’s a dog name really.

Yes, I suppose it is good for a dog as well.

Now, I wasn’t looking for a new job exactly, but I was getting tired of my current job. It was my current job that sent me to this unusual place. I had a lot of loans from college since my home state didn’t think I was very good at reading or writing. I didn’t get much of that scholarship money. Math was always a strong suit though so I got a computer degree under the impression that a lot of jobs were there for it. I got good grades, but sure wasn’t the top of my class in any stretch. I took the high paying job, and didn’t even care where they sent me, nor did I know when signing up.

Well, they sent me to this place. Hurricane Tracy had done a number on the state, destroying the southern half, and the company I was working for provided geospatial and traffic analysis. I was sold on helping the recovery of the state by analyzing maps and geology with software I would help build. Nice gig it sounded like. They were setting up a new office on the outskirts of town with all the new work needed in the state getting spliced by the wrath of God but six weeks after I showed up God wasn’t done and the flood came and rocked everything, destroying the office among other things. Remote worker I became, with promises by the company that they would rebuild the new office where I was. In the meantime, I was assigned as a grunt on a traffic analysis project for Salt Lake City, thousands of miles away from the swamp I was in, combining real-time traffic data with predictive route analysis for the massive urban development required by all the people fleeing the coasts and borders looking to push in with the Mormons up in Brigham Young’s Rocky Mountain paradise.

Drink and be merry, for tomorrow you may be working on traffic in Utah. Boring work it was. Not what I expected, and my coworkers spread all over the map. A year in and I hadn’t met one person face-to-face. A couple people over in India and a couple people up in New England my main peers. A hodgepodge faceless crew working to help advise vehicles away from traffic trouble spots before they develop and accurately estimate travel time to help prevent the great people of Utah from coming home to cold and lonely dinners. That was my purpose from nine-to-five. A new job, well, that didn’t sound so bad, and as I said, I was getting lonely, at dinner especially.

I explained to the man behind the booth at the job fare my skills and experience. He was interested but was secretive about telling me much about the job. He said if I interviewed then he could tell me mor though. I was skeptical about that. Strange vibe for a company at a job fair not saying much about the job. I scheduled an interview for later that day since my birthday appointment was coming up and left.

At my birthday appointment a man named Arturro helped me. He was old, short, and slow, but a gentleman of the highest order. He wore a white kangol hat and a striped blue shirt and before he stamped my updated birth document he made me swear with my right hand that I was a man and was born by the mother and father I attested to. When we were done, he said he’d remember me always. Sweet man, made my heart melt a bit, unfortunately I had to pay $1200 on top of more than $600 in collection fines, interest, and late payment penalties. I paid for it all up front on my credit card since I didn’t want to risk the failings of the payment plan systems again. And all this for a ridiculous car registration penalty for a lemon of a car I didn’t even have anymore.

Before I moved out here, I bought an old Mercedes-Benz at an estate sale from the daughter of ninety-year-old woman who had died in my neighborhood at the time. You hear about those Chinese balloons up in the sky? She had asked me. My son said he saw one in Missouri. That was the only interaction with the old lady I had when I encountered her by the mailbox once, a real homebody at her age as you can imagine. I went to the estate sale on Sunday when all the best deals were and bought her ole retirement Benz real cheap, but after driving it 1,500 miles across the country and subjecting it to floods and storms within the first months arriving at this unusual place the Benz became a lemon. Constantly broken down with costly repairs, I had to sell it.

The junk didn’t even drive and so I had to nearly pay for it to be towed until some white boys from out in the swamps with face tattoos showed up at my apartment and gave me $500 and took it away in a tow truck. A couple of months later I had letters flooding my mailbox informing me that the Benz was still in my name and that the police had impounded it after finding it abandoned after a car-chase with weapons and illegal insects stashed in the trunk. I guess I messed up some of the legal paperwork during the sale and the swamp boys never did anything to report it on their end. I complained about the case to the authorities but the car was still registered in my name and so I had to pay a heavy fine for the illegal trafficking of some Peruvian ladybugs as well as for a couple fees that I never knew I needed to pay in the first place concerning the car being foreign-made and holding pre-2010 combustible v6 engine. The state had concluded that my vehicle was a detriment to both national prosperity and safety and I had to pay $400 for such a luxury. Moving certainly is a pain. I don’t think they ever found the swamp boys either. I looked at the bill of sale I had and all I could make out was the first name. Robert. The handwriting was so poor and the last name some sort of bastardized French I had no clue who I sold that lemon to. Looks like Sanskrit or Greek, my neighbor told me when I asked for help reading the bill.

In a week I had my birthday back and my license was swiping again at the gas station. No longer I had to ask the Lakers fan to get me my goods, which was a great pleasure. It was good timing that my birthday came back because some woman from the company I scheduled an interview with from the job fare said my name didn’t pass their computer checks for applicants.

We can’t hire you if you don’t exist, sir. If you are dead on March 24, you can’t work on March 25. We do allow clones to work for us, but you didn’t mark yourself as one. Are you a clone? If so, that is fine, but please fill out the correct questions on the internet application informing you are one along with the proper identification as part of the CWEEP Act.

I said to hold on and let me submit my resume to their portal again and with my birthday back it passed with no problems. I was alive again, and I was ready to work.