Hermes's Den

            He has the look as he rounds the display, a jar of blueberry jam held captive, its wildness locked in its flavor alone. Whenever the abyss is about to speak to me from across the counter of a register, today register 3, it always has a certain air to it. It’s not entirely unlike a blizzard at night, a hollow shadow that hints at a truer horror you just barely can’t see. Today the abyss is feeling vacuous yet populated; in his eyes live the pale blue chill of ice flows after they melt, polar bears lost somewhere in the frozen deep but felt as an immediate and eminent danger.

            “Hi, how are you?” I deliver the line with enough enunciation to get around my mask and quiet voice. It’s easy to do it now. I just have to wait until they’re in my Sphere of Influence and looking at me. I imagine this is how non-playable characters feel like the rest of the time, constantly waiting for someone else to come along make anything happen in their day so they feel like they still exist as they’ve always been, as if they matter at all. Or something.

            “I’m just gonna buy this—” he relinquishes his hostage “—and I want to see how many points I have on my account.”

            “Okay, no worries, just give me a sec. Can I get your last name and zip code?”

            “Caruso.” All of Westchester rode with him as he spelled it out, the “C”, “R”, and “so” emphasized by pride and an undying love of the Giants. It is only mildly disturbing to me when his zip code is all but around the corner from mine.

            I furrow my brows both in confusion and annoyance. “No one’s coming up, that was Caruso and—?” The next zip code he gives me differs and pulls his house comfortably away from mine but close to Marla’s. I’m grateful she’s gone on break and left Austin at the register with me. I’m not sure how many times I can overhear her telling her entire life story to customers and then to me while being micromanaged before I snap but I sometimes feel I am close to the edge. If not with Marla than with Denise.

            The thing with being micromanaged and spoken down to by random white women at work without prompting is that they do it while thinking they’re so clever at hiding their disdain when they’re the one who initiated the conversation. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind being corrected when I make a mistake—in fact, I often ask questions to make sure I’m doing the right thing—but the same way I hear you spilling your life story five times before my next break is the same way I hear you cutting into my transaction in order to assist when I don’t need help. The same way I hear you say you tried to get that man to sign up for a MasterCard is the same way I hear you  immediately asking me what I’m looking for in one closet and then leaving your section, finding me in the other closet on the opposite side of the store, and suddenly telling me to bring up a bag of popcorn that wasn’t the one I was looking for or asked to get. “19 Forest Street?”

            “Yeah, over in Stamford. It’s not like it’s Cambodia,” he confirms.

            I nod and chuckle, hoping to disguise the fact that this man doesn’t have a MasterCard and therefore can’t even earn points. “So unfortunately, you don’t have any points available at this time, sorry.” People like to think that just because they’ve been shopping with the store for longer than I’ve been alive that means that they have points and discounts out their ass and then get pissy when you tell them you only get points if you have a MasterCard, and that the only discount going on right now is saving fifteen percent on your order if you sign up for a MasterCard, oh, you don’t need another card, no worries, I get it, your total is nine hundred thirty seven dollars and forty four cents, you can go ahead with the card with your ready—it’s going to tell you to take it out and put it back in, you might’ve been a bit too early with it. Sorry.

            “Oh, I coulda sworn I did. You know, I was gonna be here earlier, but I was having some car trouble and when I called, they said they can just check how many points I have in the store.” I nod and hum. They say a lot of things with varying degrees of truth-hood in regard to the stores. An untold number of people call to collect the unicorn of a shark print backpack but let us put out stacks and stacks of flannels and not one will appear on the website. I understand that they’re just doing their job with the information they have—the same way I am when I’m calling customers to pay for their held items. The difference, I suppose, is that when they charge the person without physically holding the item, it’s fine, but when I do it, I’m edging towards a mortal sin. I like to think catalogue and inventory workers sit at home in their thirty three percent off flannel pajamas, take a massive bong rip, and tell these fuckers that some poor person in the stores can fulfill their random ass requests over the phone just for fun. No, we don’t have any doormats that won’t clash with your oriental rug. Yes, you can return one of them if it bothers you that much, I understand that the other is on the porch and therefore isn’t clashing with anything. “But you don’t care about all of that, you’re just trying to do your job.”

            I chuckle and incline my head. He’s right, desperately so, but the Cashier NPC doesn’t talk about that with the Customer Character. The Cashier NPC only asks you if you found everything you were looking for and if you want to save fifteen percent by signing up for a MasterCard. “Don’t worry, I’m just being a wise guy.”

            “Somebody has to be wise.”

            Momentarily the expression on his maskless face is blank, confused, it seems by my temporary glitch. His eyes harden and he wags a finger at me. “I like that,” he says, “I like that.” I slowly exhale the small breath I didn’t realize I was holding. Sometimes I wonder if I’m right for this job. I mean, I don’t really think anyone’s right for this job—people are awful—but I don’t think I’m especially right for this job. I react a bit too genuinely and quickly for some of these people. Once, on reflex I said “I’m so sorry” when I heard someone (Denise) bumped into (hit) a child in the head with a trolley and the parent was so appreciative and caught off guard he told me he had to fish an apology out of the trolley conductor then asked for my name. I gave the kids a couple of stickers both because that kind of sucks and if he was going to send a message to corporate, I wanted to make sure I was on his good side. “Is there any kind of military discount?”

            “Yeah, I just need to see ID.”

            “I don’t have any kind of ID—I’m in Special Forces.”

             Naturally. “Oh, okay, well I can’t really give it to you without ID, sorry.” The force with which he commends my quick praise of his wisdom tells me that he does have experience in the armed forces, but the company would likely be mad if I gave this dude ten percent or whatever off his jam simply because his energy just screams fatigues. I’ve already incorrectly transferred a call and thus accidentally hung up on the wife of the vice president. That earned me the distinction of being in trouble. “Good trouble!”

            “Ey, that’s tough shit. They don’t give any IDs for Special Forces.” He throws up his arms but waves it off as if it’s nothing. “In my job, I deal with the not nice people, they send me into deal with some nasty people.”

            “Oh?”

            “Yeah, I’m in Black Ops—it not a race thing.” His hand is quick as it shoots out and he tries to extend some of his I’m a Safe White Person aura. “It’s that when you’re in Black Ops, and you go over there, it’s like you don’t exist.” His hands rake down the space before his face. I should probably take some larger offence to him thinking I’d hear “Black” and assume he’s invoking the trauma of my people, as if I wasn’t eleven when Call of Duty: Black Ops came out, but growing up in a Casablanca lily white suburb, then going to college at a snow white university, and currently working in a glacier white Bentley town in Connecticut, you learn to shrug off things you maybe shouldn’t; my greater critique lies with his failure to honor the ever invisible John Cena in both action and phrasing despite coming so close to doing so.

            “Oh, yeah, I know.” A light fervor colors his demeanor as he withdraws the aura dispersing hand as if he’s coming out of something that’s living in the edges of this periphery, the reason for his extended hand. Aah, of course. How did I not see an outcome such as this establishing itself?

            “And when we’re out, it’s crazy, you can’t tell anyone anything, not even your wife, and if you die over there, they can’t tell em anything at all, they just know you aren’t coming home. Let me tell you too, you don’t want to exist when you’re over there either.”

            “Yeah? Total’s 8.90, when the arrows light up, you can go ahead with the card.” I don’t acknowledge my gay desire not to have a wife or my childhood trauma’s general skepticism with marriage, even if he has the personality of a golden retriever with pecs that bounce when he runs downstairs and a beard he knows how to use, but I understand. Imagine your loved ones learning you were just somewhere doing something and now you’re gone, and they don’t even get the closure of hearing the story of how you ended. The pain I’m sure still smolders in the dark like embers against a winter’s night.

            He taps then inserts his card before it has a chance to even really sense it. Like, come on people. I understand that the chip’s supposed to be faster but that doesn’t mean instant. “Oh yeah. And the thing is, we’d go in and—have you seen Apocalypse Now?”

            “No, I haven’t seen a lot of movies.” I almost add “but I’ve read Heart of Darkness” but at his look of disappointment, I hold the thought. Adding that I didn’t finish Heart of Darkness because I didn’t want to force myself to read about all that seemed like a maybe a step too far.

            “Well you know what it’s about right?” I nod. “Okay, but you gotta see this movie, man, it’s the exact shit we were doing. It was just like that. So the thing about the jungle—that fucking jungle—you can’t see anything. These people just attacked and then!—” he throws up his hands, the abyss trailing after like an echo trying to break free of its loop. “At some point we just started going in and throwing grenades and shit, shooting exactly where we heard the bullets come from and it’s like they aren’t there at all. You know too, the Viet Cong are just animals—I don’t mean that in any kind of way.” He extends his Safe White Person aura again to mollify any feelings of solidarity with people he murdered fifty years ago on the other side of the planet. My questions have more to do with the time period. Oh, that’s when we’re talking about. I look again into his eyes and the frozen death in them is swept aside, swallowed whole by the abyss and the blackness of his pupils. Barely, made small over the distance, I see the image of myself reflected in his eye like a shard of glass. “You know what they would do?”

            I share my head, the no muffled by my mask. I toss a brief look to the line, devoid of anyone who would come push him along, and submit myself to both my own curiosity and his need to speak.

            “When they’d hear the Americans had gone through and vaccinated all their kids, you know what they’d do? A few days later, they’d go back through and cut off their arms.”

            My immediate impulse is to call bullshit as he mimics the act of slicing through his bicep, the impulse underlined by Austin going “Hey Noah, I need your help with these.” I take a step and look towards him and further along the counter Michelle. Nice, love a manager watching me get a history lesson. In a pandemic, it is comedy for this dude with his mouth open to every sneeze to tell me that after vaccination, these kids had their arms chopped off.

            I look at his eyes again, fleetingly as if I myself will freeze if I stare too long and in my polished reflection, I know he’s telling me his truth as he believes it happened and I am transfixed. If he’s telling the truth, he saw that. If he’s telling the truth, there is a generation of people on the near side of middle age who had part of them stolen away in someone else’s issue. “Little kids. Imagine that. Just chop their arm because we helped them. Can you believe it?”

            “Cool,” my brain defaults, a line better tailored to the woman returning five of the six rain coats she bought in three shades of blue, swaying indecisively between medium and large, admiral, sapphire, and navy. “I don’t mean cool,” I try to backtrack, but allow the mask and his immersion in his own story to swallow the need: between the two, he never heard me, and we are both better for it.

            “Noah, I really need your help with this.” I take another step towards Austin and pause. The man still has me in his gaze and the longer I look, the more I want to ask him to probe and explore, to learn the limits of what he holds onto.

            The spell is broken when he says “But let me tell you, you don’t want to mess with me and my boys, you do not want to mess with me and my boys, cause if you mess with me and my boys—you ever seen The Godfather?” I shake my head no and accept his disapproval of my movie viewing history. “Well if you mess with me and my boys, it’s just like The Godfather—it’s just business.” He spreads his arms out as if he’s on the cross. I suppose some part of himself hopes he is. I suppose a larger part of him believes he’s trapped in hell. Around him and just this side of invisible, the abyss tangles and rolls like swift clouds across the moon. “It’s just business. I’ll let you get back to work though, you have a good one.”

            “You too.” I nod and hope my eyes betray nothing more than benign ambivalence. The abyss is slick. One moment, it’s smiling pleasantly, the next, it is rearing it’s angry head as if I personally want to make them pay the twelve dollar difference to exchange the water bottle for them. It’s not my fault you got this one mad discounted and this is a new color. As he walks away, jam held captive again, the abyss melts with him until he leaves the store and finally, I let myself drop as much as I can in front of the cameras. Air fills my lungs slowly and exits sharply.  “I can take the next person over here—oh, there’s no one there.”