JONATHAN ABERNATHY STEPS INTO THE office and death is there. Death is not alone. A redheaded attendant named Kai looks up from her paperwork as Jonathan Abernathy walks through the automatic doors. Neither Abernathy nor the attendant feels death, sees death, hears or touches death, but death is there. Death is watching them both. Though it will take three years, from this moment, for death to act, Jonathan Abernathy will never live a life unmarked again. Death will be tethered to him as a shadow.
His will not be a good death. When he dies, it will be slow.
The poor dumb son of a bitch is, of course, oblivious to this. His oblivion makes him human. He is sweeter for it.
Except for Jonathan Abernathy and Kai, the attendant, the empty office is located in a strip mall just off the highway. The only signage is a weather-beaten brass plaque that reads—
THE 508TH
ARCHIVAL OFFICE
FULL SERVICE & RECORDS
A piece of white printer paper is taped to the bottom of the plaque—
INQUIRE FOR EMPLOYMENT OPPORTUNITIES WITHIN
The interior of Archival Office 508 is no more specific than the exterior. The waiting room is Abernathy’s spiritual cousin: chairs of vinyl, cluttered secretarial space, carpet that’s almost as downtrodden as he. There is a damp aura. It is the type of room a government official leads you into to execute you, financially. In such rooms, there are always contracts to sign. Ballpoint pens. With the tips of his fingers, Abernathy can reach above him and pop any of the Styrofoam ceiling tiles out of place. As if the visual similarities between Archival Office 508 and the purgatories of our modern world (IRS rooms, liminal spaces, notary offices at large) are not glaring enough, the waiting room even has a jingle that loops.
Last night two people visited Jonathan Abernathy in his dreams and told him to come here. In this place he could find forgiveness: of his loans, they said, yes, but also of other things.
Though Jonathan Abernathy is not usually the type of person to listen to dreams, voices, or “signs from God,” today he is desperate. Today he has defaulted on his debt.
The debt of Jonathan Abernathy is large. Myriad. His loans, IOUs, and bills so diverse ecologists would be within their jurisdiction to classify the collection as “an ecosystem.” Despite the diversity, the two main life forms are fairly simple: (1) a series of unpaid credit cards inherited after the death of his parents, and (2) the legal culminations of the decisions he made as a seventeen-year-old kid, also known as private, American nonsubsidized student loans with an APR so lethal it can kill in a week. Jonathan Abernathy has student loan debt in the quarter million. His inherited debt is in the low six figures. Even though it is illegal to inherit debt from your deceased family members, this will not stop debtors from attempting to collect. Combined, Abernathy’s debt is one of the most prosperous ecosystems in the world.
Jonathan Abernathy does not make good money. What is illegal when done to some people is not illegal when done to him. He does not have the money to prove the illegality of other people’s actions in the court of law.
So, yes.
A voice in Abernathy’s dream told him to visit this tiny, miserable office, at the outskirts of the city, and he went.
Crazier things have happened.
In time Jonathan Abernathy will believe himself to be in love. There’s nothing crazier than that.
Kai, the redheaded attendant, sits at the far side of the room, at a reception desk separated from the waiting area by a plexiglass partition. To get her attention, Abernathy walks up to the partition and taps on the scratched screen.
“Hello,” Abernathy says.
He looms above the sitting woman. He avoids eye contact with both her and his reflection. His
shirt is depression-wrinkled. His hair sheening with sweat. He will never have a deathless moment again, yet all Jonathan Abernathy can think of is his appearance: the dampness of himself, the slouch.
“I think I am here about loan forbearance?” The word “forbearance” feels strange in his mouth. “I received …” Jonathan Abernathy hesitates. “I received a call from your office … just yesterday, about a government … ah, forgiveness program? Does that sound right?”
The attendant looks him up and down. Her bottle-red hair and green eyeglasses contrast with her skin and make her look like a beetle. Her name tag reads: KAI, DREAM COLLECTOR 265.
Kai rolls her eyes. Without verbally acknowledging his presence, she points behind him with her ballpoint pen.
Abernathy turns away from the attendant and his reflection in the plexiglass. If the walk here had not ruined it (his outfit), he might have looked nice. In his dream he was told to look nice, otherwise resign himself to suffering.
Jonathan Abernathy does not wish to suffer.
He takes a clipboard from the caddy labeled APPLICATION: DREAM AUDITOR. At the far wall, against a window, he settles into one of the polymer seats.
He’s never liked his looks, despite how charming others perceive his appearance to be. He has to live in his body. Others don’t. Perhaps if Abernathy knew people found him charming, he would like himself more. As it is, he knows nothing about the perceptions of others. He has wavy hair. A roundish face. Nice shoulders. Kind eyes. This morning he tried to look storkish: stately, regal, destined for greater things but currently resigned to standing in wait for his proverbial big catch. Instead, he looks like a pigeon. Dirty. Beaky. Wide. Behind him, on the sill, there it is—a dying plant standing in as a metaphor for his life.
✓ Yes, Jonathan Abernathy is in financial peril.
✓ Yes, he is a former student of the public education system of the State.
✓ Yes, he feels like a failure in all things, but still somehow wakes up each morning feeling hope.
Does he sleep at least eight hours a night? As unbelievable as it is—
✓ Yes, he does.
Returning to the window, he slides the clipboard beneath the barrier. The attendant ignores him. She clacks away at a keyboard, huffing and sighing, before finally, in her own good time, turning to his application.
In silence, Kai’s buggy eyes quickly sweep down his writing. Abernathy bounces on his heels with anticipation. She hits a red buzzer on her right. A chute opens in the floor. She drops his paperwork in.
As if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, Kai does not acknowledge Abernathy, though he is right in front of her, separated by only the thinnest, most scratched layer of plastic imaginable.
Kai pulls an orange from a desk drawer. The chute seals. The carpet is intact again. Still ungreeted, Abernathy stands in front of the barrier now at a loss for words.
On the other side of the plexiglass, Kai presses a long nail into the crown of the orange and begins to pull down the skin.
The room is flooded with the asynchronous smell of citrus.
Abernathy raises a finger. Goes to say, “Excuse me, Kai, the two-hundred-and-sixty-fifth collector of dreams, hello,” but he is too nervous. Instead, he says nothing. He tells himself lies.
✓ Jonathan Abernathy you are kind.
✓ You are competent.
✓ You are well respected and valued by your community.
✓ People, including your family, love you.
Abernathy clears his throat. What did the recruitment voice in his dreams say? He can’t remember. Something about appearance being the end-all-be-all of both this life and the next.
As far as Jonathan Abernathy is concerned, he always says the wrong thing. So Jonathan Abernathy says nothing.
Instead, he turns. Walks away. Gets to the automatic doors. Is proud of himself. Only then he remembers: he is no coward.
Or, at least, he does not wish to appear cowardly.
On this updraft of consciousness, Abernathy turns from the exit and dashes back to the counter. He exhales a rush of words in the dream collector’s direction. His sentence follows an emotional trajectory that goes something like, “What the fuck?”
Kai stops. Mid-peel, she leans forward. Onto her elbows.
“Yell at me again,” she says.
Abernathy had thought her to be, like him, the type to take shit.
He sees his mistake.
Abernathy blushes. Steps back.
“Ah,” he says.
Kai looks at him.
He repeats, this time with words, instead of feelings, his inquiry. “You, uh, threw my application away. Just there.”
He points.
Kai sets the orange down. She says, “Right there?”
“Yeah,” he says, then corrects himself, remembering his manners. “Yes.”
“Uh-huh. And this gives you the excuse to talk to me that way because …?”
Abernathy mumbles an apology.
“What was that?” Kai leans forward. She cups a hand around her ear.
Abernathy starts again. “I haven’t been able to pay back …”
“No, please. You clearly have a good reason. Keep going. Go ahead.”
He falters.
Jonathan Abernathy wants to say that he is desperate for forgiveness. From the government or otherwise. He hasn’t been able to pay back his loans. He’s looking for an end to—or at least a break from—his suffering. He would like to one day have a life. Live with another person. Be successful. Now, as he defaults on his education, a great machine he could never get to work for him, those loans are actively ruining his one shot at life.
He needed—he needs—help.
He says, instead, “I just
really need this job, man.”
Kai stares at him.
“I, like, really need it.”
More staring.
“You know?”
“Look,” Kai says, not without patience. She has a deep southern accent and a stone face. She wears a hoodie and a pair of slacks, which contrast with the richness of her makeup and hair. She points at the place in the floor where the chute in the carpet opened. “That’s the file drawer.”
“Oh,” says Abernathy.
“It takes your application and digitizes it, so that our somnambulatory officerial force can review and assess your capabilities.”
“Ah.” Abernathy does not understand any of this, but he wants to sound smart, and competent, and all the other things employers look for in new hires. He repeats the biggest word, “So-nah-em-bew-la-tory?”
“Somnambulatory.”
“Doesn’t that mean …” —he tries to remember— “something about sleep walking? Like when you’re sleeping but walk around?”
Kai rolls her eyes again. “Yeah,” she says.
Abernathy is starting to think he did not hallucinate the men in his dreams who told him to come here.
Still, this place is not what he expected.
He leans into the partition separating him and Kai. His nose just touches the surface which is, like him, weirdly damp. He looks into her tiny reception office. The chute in the floor has closed. The floor is beige carpet patterned with feeble green infinity signs. “So in the dreams …”
“Yes,” says Kai, patience wearing out. “We come to you in dreams. That was us. Is there anything else, Mr.…?”
“Abernathy,” he says, realizing too late that an office that recruits their workforce through dreams may have an architecturally unconventional infrastructure. Their workflows might not align with the workflows of, say, other, more traditional workplaces.
Not that Abernathy has ever worked in a traditional work space.
“Jonathan Abernathy,” he says. “But only my parents called me Jonathan. Nobody calls me Jonny, or Jon. Everyone just calls me Abernathy.”
“Is there anything else, Mr. Abernathy?”
“Just Abernathy is fine.”
Kai looks at him.
“How does the dreaming stuff … how does it …”
“Work?”
“Yeah. Sorry, yes. That.”
Very slowly, with exaggerated, buggy blinks, Collector Kai the Two-Hundred-and-Sixty-Fifth begins to speak to Abernathy as if she is speaking to a child. Abernathy is a child, though he won’t admit it. Just a really tall child masquerading as an adult. To his credit, he tries hard not to be. Jonathan Abernathy wants to be self-sufficient. He wants to grow up. One day, he wants to have children of his own. In short: he wants to enter the great American employment and leave behind his vast forest of debt. This is his dream.
“Have you heard of the Archive of Dreaming Act, Mr. Abernathy?”
Abernathy stares blankly at her.
“Several years ago,” the attendant sighs, “the founder of the Archive discovered that humanity
shares a consciousness while it sleeps.” She sounds very bored, as if she has said this a million times.
“There are ways,” Kai continues, ignoring Abernathy’s disbelieving stare, “of tending to this … shared consciousness …” She pauses. Abernathy thinks it is because she cannot find the right word, but he is wrong. Kai is actually pausing in disgust. “We partner with the government, who then sell our services to employers whose workforces seem”—she closes her eyes and takes a deep breath—“depleted.”
Abernathy has a hard time following this. “Wait, so, what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that in this job—if you get this job, and I’m not sure you will get it—you’ll be going into the dreams of American workers and cleaning them up.”
“Cleaning?”
“Cleaning. Them. Up.”
“What does that … I mean … how do you even …?”
“We will review your plea,” Kai says, interrupting him. Abernathy realizes he has unconsciously crossed his arms across his chest, as if hugging himself. He unfolds. “If we feel like you’re the right candidate for the program, we will get back to you.”
“But,” says Abernathy, lips dry, “what about—”
“Hey,” says Kai. She taps on the smudged barrier, where Abernathy’s nose once was. “I’m only here filling in. My actual pay grade? Not enough to put up with this shit. OK? So, please, if you’ll just—” She waves at the door. Her nails, a rhinestone set in the center of each, are painted an immaculate emerald.
This must be what the recruiters meant when they spoke in his dream of appearance. Be like Kai. Appear to be confident. Appear to be competent. Appear to be good. Abernathy takes a mental note: develop appearances and, in the process, solve your life.
THE NEXT THREE DAYS ARE a panic.
Abernathy thinks: They won’t like me.
Abernathy thinks: I’m not likable enough.
Abernathy thinks: If I become likable, they’ll hire me?
Only two out of three thoughts are true.
To assuage himself of doubt, Abernathy ruminates over Collector Kai, whose personality seems to be that of a wood chipper, but whose confident appearances have already wholly endeared her to him. Abernathy spends his last remaining $66.60 on a cheap suit to impress her. As attractive people often do, especially attractive people who are oblivious to their looks, Jonathan Abernathy equates looking good to being good.
He desperately desires to be good.
To develop a more robust sense of self, Abernathy wears his suit while in his room. His small apartment is located in the basement beneath his landlord’s house. In its past life, his room was a mother-in-law suite. The mother-in-law died, the ruination of her son’s marriage shortly followed, and to pay for the subsequent divorce, the dead woman’s room was rented out to Abernathy. The homeowner, Kelly, got the house in the divorce and Abernathy with it. At the time of the viewing, Abernathy billed himself as “a new graduate looking for his start in life.”
Technically he never did graduate, but Kelly did not need to know that.
Abernathy moved in five years ago.
His life has not progressed much since.
The room (his apartment is only a room, though it does have a small bathroom attached, as well as an open kitchenette equipped with a microwave, a hotplate, and a sink) is wide enough that should Abernathy lay on the floor with his feet against a wall, he could just touch the other side with his fingers.
This depresses him.
He does not do this self-harm.
Instead, he sits in his sixty-six-dollar suit on the edge of his bed, his knees almost touching the kitchen counters in front of him, and eats ramen out of a Styrofoam plastic cup.
Above him, he can hear his landlord—Kelly—entering and leaving the house. As the sound of her heels fades, Abernathy thinks, not without envy, that she must be going somewhere where someone will tell her what to do. Then, in exchange for this, they will give her money. Jonathan Abernathy would like to be told what to do in exchange for money.
LATER THAT NIGHT, the ramen’s excess sodium causes vivid, surreal dreams. Jonathan Abernathy doesn’t know if it’s a consequence of the dehydration or of submitting his application to the Archival Office three days before, but representatives appear as he is dreaming of a trip to visit his parents in Heaven.
In Heaven, he is wearing his sixty-six-dollar suit. He does not clock that in this dream, he is wearing the outfit he fell asleep in. This should be his first clue that this dream is no ordinary dream at all.
Abernathy sits upon the upper deck of a tour bus. His parents sit in front of him. He can’t remember their faces, in this dream, and they won’t turn back to look at him. Still, he knows they are there, and that gives him a dual sense of comfort and calm.
The tourists are being shown gates of pearl. Very pearly indeed. Lots of sheen. Exactly the type of retirement community one aspires to find for their parents’ eternal lodging. The only regrettable flaw in the design is that the gates swing outward,
not inward. Eager patrons are often injured at the gate’s threshold. The dead are too excited. They’ve been waiting for salvation for too long. They don’t think to step back.
A woman and a man join Abernathy on the tour bus. They wear matching jumpsuits that look like space suits from the seventies. The suits are white, a bit plasticky. Not unlike ski suits, actually. There are a lot of zippers. There are round logos above the left breasts: a brown box embroidered onto a blue background. The two newcomers even wear white, bubble-like helmets with reflective visors. At first Abernathy thinks they are strange tourists, like him, on a jaunty trip to visit their lost. Oblivious, Abernathy is only vaguely aware that he is dreaming. In dreams, anything is possible. But that also means events and people can be possibly anything.
Among the silent crowd, Abernathy and the new tourists watch God explain Their choice of topiary. God claims to have hired an expert landscaping operation, but to Abernathy, Heaven looks suspiciously like his backyard: brambles, fallen fences, trees that refuse to flower, wild mushroom patches that dot the landscape in Rorschach-like patterns. Abernathy lives in the outer city, where things are not exactly green, but not not green, either. Brownish-green and greenish-brown and sidewalk-colored, mostly. God waves Their hand across the stubbly yard of Their creation, drawing the tourists’ eyes to Their glory-work. God is not who Abernathy supposed Them to be. In this dream, They wear zinc sunscreen and a toga. They speak into a flesh-colored mic that is wrapped around Their ear, the kind celebrities wear on stage. They seem like They have a sense of humor. Abernathy likes that. He did not expect humor from God.
The two new tourists take a seat on either side of Abernathy.
“Some dream,” the woman says under her breath.
Abernathy is rapt in his admiration of the gates that border his neighbor’s yard. They really are that pearly. What a wonder that is! What a relief!
In his waking life, Abernathy desperately desires to believe in an afterlife. He does not.
It takes Abernathy a moment to realize the woman sitting on his left has turned away from her partner and is now peering into Abernathy’s face. Somewhere, there is a horn blowing. Abernathy cannot tell if the horn is traffic (does Heaven have traffic?) or Angels (does Heaven have Angels?).
The woman presses a small button at the base of her helmet and the reflective visor becomes transparent. Big eyes stare at him framed by green glasses and wisps of red hair. He recognizes the beetle-like woman as Kai, The Two-Hundred-And-Sixty-Fifth.
“Jonathan Abernathy?” she asks.
“Oh,” Abernathy says. “It’s you.”
“Yep,” says Kai. She smiles with her lips tightly closed. “It’s me.”
“What are you doing here?” Abernathy asks.
“Do your questions ever end?”
“Is this about what I think it’s about?” Abernathy asks. If so, he is excited.
Kai gives the man on Abernathy’s right a “see what I mean” look.
The man chuckles and passes a clipboard over Abernathy to Kai. The man has made his helmet transparent as well and Abernathy is surprised by how devilish his good looks are. He has dark, swooping hair. Chiseled cheekbones. A chin that anyone would envy.
The man realizes Abernathy is looking at him and winks.
Kai flips through the printed sheets, frowning. “Great. Perfect. Before we proceed—we’re going to need you to take a standardized test.”
Abernathy looks to the man to confirm this.
“Don’t look at him,” snaps Kai. “Look at me.”
Abernathy realizes what they are holding is his application.
“Wait,” he says. “Does
that mean we’re doing this now?”
He looks quickly between the two. The man shrugs the shrug of a person who, believing they’ve seen it all, no longer gives a shit.
“Yes,” says Kai. “We’re doing this now.”
“So, I got the job?”
Kai breathes through her nose. “We are considering your application.”
“And I need to take the test before I move on to the next step? Why?”
Kai groans. “The questions never end.”
“We need to make sure you know how to behave,” jokes the man.
“I know how to behave.”
“Look,” says the man. He is smug. Serious-ish. “Don’t tell me, tell her.” He thumbs to Kai, who rolls her eyes. “She’s the one who doubts you.”
“Is that true?” Abernathy asks. He sounds more hurt than he would like to.
Kai holds Abernathy’s eye contact.
As They speak about the process of creating this yard, God walks up and down the aisle.
“I guess I can take a test,” Abernathy says. “What’s the harm in that, right?”
The clipboard Kai shoves into his hands is a run-of-the-mill clipboard. Abernathy flips through stacks of slightly crumpled paper and realizes he is wearing only his underwear—white boxer briefs covered in little printed hearts.
Despite his lack of clothing, his nerves, his erect nipples, his general and pervasive feeling of unwellness that stems either from the increased circulation of sodium in his bloodstream from the ramen or his quickly diminishing sense of self now that he faces A Task, the test is pretty easy. On each piece of paper: a small moving scene. Per the instructions, Abernathy circles everything that could cause (or be caused by) anxiety.
✓ A child crying.
✓ Money burning.
✓ Teeth falling from a mouth.
When he finishes, he watches Kai flip through his answers with a frown. God directs the bus through the pearly gates into the yard of Abernathy’s neighbor, a single mom named Rhoda whose child frequently hovers at the fence line to ask Abernathy for advice. Abernathy loves to be asked for advice.
Kai takes her time reviewing his answers. The plants in Jonathan Abernathy’s dream begin to wither, die. God looks around, confused. As the group trundles through a section of the yard filled with overgrown chanterelles, a mushroom with a particularly labial frill, Kai informs Abernathy that though his approach is not necessarily the most creative or interpretative she’s ever seen—in fact, it’s abysmally cliché and shows a complete ignorance to the complexities and processing power of a mature human psyche—their team is regrettably short on hands, so he (and his astonishingly low emotional intelligence) passes. On a trial basis. For now.
“Congratulations,” Kai says as if reading from a script long memorized. “You now have a government job that pays twenty dollars a night with a per-pay-period
hundred-dollar incremental loan forgiveness component. Health care will not be included. Any government-issued liens placed against you due to outstanding debts are now frozen. Third-party lenders who have taken legal action have been sent a notice that you are now employed by the State Department. Should those third-party lenders be contractors of the TSD, their legal pursuits will be delayed.”
Like earlier, when she spoke of “somnambulatory officerial forces,” Abernathy doesn’t understand a single word that comes out of Kai’s mouth, except for the word “lien,” which he is intimately familiar with. When a lien is placed on a bank account, money is automatically withdrawn by the bank and placed in the lienholder’s account. Aka, the person who gave you the loan in the first place gets to go into your bank. They get to take your pay, even if you only have enough money to eat. This has happened to Abernathy multiple times.
Not wanting to seem ungrateful, he nods along.
He suspects Kai might be on to him. She gives him a stern look. “A piece of personal advice,” she says, “don’t blow it all at once.”
The flowers in the garden shoot cannons of golden pollen at the bus of passing tourists. Midair, the pollen becomes celebratory confetti. Abernathy is ecstatic. His dead parents in front of him do not turn around, but he senses they are pleased. Angels, somewhere in the yard of his neighbor, blow their horns.
“Jesus,” says the handsome man. ...
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