Sorry Please Thank You: Stories Part 1

Sorry please thank you : stories.

Charles Yu.

For Kelvin. Hey man.

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone ... but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.... The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

-Edward Sapir.

We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages.

-Benjamin Lee Whorf.

Sorry.

-Anonymous.

Sorry.

Standard Loneliness Package.

Root ca.n.a.l is one fifty, give or take, depending on who's doing it to you. A migraine is two hundred.

Not that I get the money. The company gets it. What I get is twelve dollars an hour, plus reimburs.e.m.e.nt for painkillers. Not that they work.

I feel pain for money. Other people's pain. Physical, emotional, you name it.

Pain is an illusion, I know, and so is time, I know, I know. I know. The s.h.i.+ft manager never stops reminding us. Doesn't help, actually. Doesn't help when you are on your third broken leg of the day.

I get to work three minutes late and already there are nine tickets in my inbox. I close my eyes, take a deep breath, open the first ticket of the morning: I'm at a funeral.

Feeling grief.

Someone else's grief. Like wearing a stranger's coat, still warm with heat from another body.

I'm feeling a mixture of things.

Grief, mostly, but also I detect some guilt in there. There usually is.

I hear crying.

I am seeing crying faces. Pretty faces. Crying, pretty, white faces. Nice clothes.

Our services aren't cheap. As the s.h.i.+ft manager is always reminding us. Need I remind you? That is his favorite phrase these days. He is always walking up and down the aisle tilting his head into our cubicles and saying it. Need I remind you, he says, of where we are on the spectrum? In terms of low-end high-end? We are solidly toward the highish end. So the faces are usually pretty, the clothes are usually nice. The people are usually nice, too. Although I imagine it's not such a big deal to be nice when you're that rich and that pretty.

There's a place in Hyderabad doing what we're doing, but a little more toward the budget end of things. Precision Living Solutions, it's called. And of course there are hundreds of emotional engineering firms here in Bangalore, springing up everywhere you look. The other day I read in the paper that a new call center opens once every three weeks. Workers follow the work, and the work is here. All of us ready to feel, to suffer. We're in a growth industry.

Okay. The body is going into the ground now. The crying is getting more serious.

Here it comes.

I am feeling that feeling. The one that these people get a lot, near the end of a funeral service. These sad and pretty people. It's a big feeling. Different operators have different ways to describe it. For me, it feels something like a huge boot. Huge, like it fills up the whole sky, the whole galaxy, all of s.p.a.ce. Some kind of infinite foot. And it's stepping on me. The infinite foot is stepping on my chest.

The funeral ends, and the foot is still on me, and it is hard to breathe. People are getting into black town cars. I also appear to have a town car. I get in. The foot, the foot. So heavy. Here we go, yes, this is familiar, the foot, yes, the foot. It doesn't hurt, exactly. It's not what I would call comfortable, but it's not pain, either. More like pressure. Deepak, who used to be in the next cubicle, once told me that this feeling I call the infinite foot-to him it felt more like a knee-is actually the American experience of the Christian G.o.d.

"Are you sure it is the Christian G.o.d?" I asked him. "I always thought G.o.d was Jewish."

"You're an idiot," he said. "It's the same guy. Duh. The Judeo-Christian G.o.d."

"Are you sure?" I said.

He just shook his head at me. We'd had this conversation before. I figured he was probably right, but I didn't want to admit it. Deepak was the smartest guy in our cube-cl.u.s.ter, as he would kindly remind me several times a day.

I endure a few more minutes of the foot, and then, right before the hour is up, right when the grief and guilt are almost too much and I wonder if I am going to have to hit the safety b.u.t.ton, there it is, it's usually there at the end of a funeral, no matter how awful, no matter how hard I am crying, no matter how much guilt my client has saved up for me to feel. You wouldn't expect it-I didn't-but anyone who has done this job for long enough knows what I'm talking about, and even though you know it's coming, even though you are, in fact, waiting for it, when it comes, it is always still a shock.

Relief.

Death of a cousin is five hundred. Death of a sibling is twelve fifty. Parents are two thousand apiece, but depending on the situation people will pay all kinds of money, for all kinds of reasons, for bad reasons, for no reason at all.

The company started off in run-of-the-mill corporate services, basic stuff: ethical qualm transference, plausible deniability. The sort of things that generated good cash flow, cash flow that was fed right back into R&D, year after year, turning the little shop into a bit player, and then a not-so-bit player, and then, eventually, into a leader in a specialized market. In those early days, this place was known as Conscience Incorporated. The company had cornered the early market in guilt.

Then the technology improved. Some genius in Delhi had figured out a transfer protocol to standardize and packetize all different kinds of experiences. Overnight, everything changed. An industry was born. The business of bad feeling. For the right price, almost any part of life could be avoided.

Across the street from work is a lunch place I go to sometimes. Not much, really, a hot and crowded little room, a bunch of stools in front of a greasy counter. I come here mostly for the small television, up on a shelf, above the cash register. They have a satellite feed.

Today they have it switched to American television, and I am watching a commercial for our company's services.

It shows a rich executive-looking type sitting and rubbing his temples, making the universal television face for I Am an Executive in a Highly Stressful Situation. There are wavy lines on either side of his temples to indicate that the Executive is really stressed! Then he places a call to his broker and in the next scene, the Executive is lying on a beach, drinking golden beer from a bottle and looking at the bluest ocean I have ever seen.

Next to me is a woman and her daughter. The girl, maybe four or five, is scooping rice and peas into her mouth a little at a time. She is watching the commercial in silence. When she sees the water, she turns to her mother and asks her, softly, what the blue liquid is. I am thinking about how sad it is that she has never seen water that color in real life until I realize that I am thirty-nine years old and hey, you know what? Neither have I.

And then the commercial ends with one of our slogans.

Don't feel like having a bad day?

Let someone else have it for you.

That someone else they are talking about in the commercial is me. And the other six hundred terminal operators in Building D, Cubicle Block 4. Don't feel like having a bad day? Let me have it for you.

It's okay for me. It's a good job. I didn't do that well in school, after all. It was tougher for Deep. He did three semesters at technical college. He was always saying he deserved better. Better than this, anyway. I would nod and agree with him, but I never told him what I wanted to tell him, which was, hey, Deepak, when you say that you deserve better, even if I agree with you, you are kind of also implying that I don't deserve better, which, maybe I don't, maybe this is about where I belong in the grand scheme of things, in terms of high-end low-end for me as a person, but I wish you wouldn't say it because whenever you do, it makes me feel a sharp bit of sadness and then, for the rest of the day, a kind of low-grade crumminess.

Whenever Deep and I used to go to lunch, he would try to explain to me how it works.

"Okay, so, the clients," he would say, "they call in to their account reps and book the time."

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit.

Okay, so, Deepak said, so this is how it works. The client, he books the time, and then at the appointed hour, a switch in the implant chip kicks on and starts transferring his consciousness over. Perceptions, sensory data, all of it. It goes first to an intermediate server where it gets bundled with other jobs, and then a huge block of the stuff gets zapped over here, downloaded onto our servers, and then dumped into our queue management system, which parcels out the individual jobs to all of us in the cubicle farm.

Okay, so, it's all based on some kind of efficiency algorithm-our historical performance, our current emotional load. Sensors in our head a.s.sembly unit measure our stress levels, sweat composition, to see what we can handle. Okay? he would say, when he was done. Like a professor. He wanted so badly to be an expert at something.

I always appreciated Deepak trying to help me understand. But it's just a job, I would say. I never really understood why Deep thought so much of those programmers, either. In the end, we're all brains for hire. Mental s.p.a.ce for rent, moments as a commodity. They have gotten it down to a science. How much a human being can take in a given twelve-hour s.h.i.+ft. Grief, embarra.s.sment, humiliation, all different, of course, so they calibrate our schedules, mix it up, the timing and the order, and the end result is you leave work every day right about at your exact breaking point. I used to smoke to take the edge off, but I quit twelve years ago, so sometimes when I get home, I'm still shaking for a little bit. I sit on my couch and drink a beer and let it subside. Then I heat up some bread and lentils and read a newspaper or, if it's too hot to stay in, go down to the street and eat my dinner standing there, watching people walking down the block, wondering where they are headed, wondering if anyone is waiting for them to come home.

When I get to work the next morning, there's a woman sitting in the cubicle across from mine. She's young, at least a couple of years younger than me, looks right out of school. She has the new-employee setup kit laid out in front of her and is reading the trainee handbook. I think about saying hi but who am I kidding, I am still me, so instead I just say nothing.

My first ticket of the day is a deathbed. Deathbeds are not so common. They are hard to schedule-we require at least twenty-four hours' advance booking, and usually clients don't know far enough in advance when the ailing loved one is going to go. But this isn't regular deathbed. It's pull-the-plug.

They are pulling the plug on Grandpa this morning.

I open the ticket.

I am holding Grandpa's hand.

I cry.

He squeezes my hand, one last burst of strength. It hurts. Then his hand goes limp.

I cry, and also, I really cry. Meaning, not just as my client, but I start crying, too. Sometimes it happens. I don't know why, exactly. Maybe because he was somebody's grandpa. And he looked like a nice one, a nice man. Maybe something about the way his arm fell against the guardrail on the hospital bed, nothing dramatic or poignant. Just a part of his body going thunk against metal. Maybe because I could sort of tell, when Grandpa was looking at his grandson for the last time, looking into his eyes, looking around in there trying to find him, he didn't find him, he found me instead, and he knew what had happened, and he didn't even look mad. Just hurt.

I am at a funeral.

I am in a dentist's chair.

I am lying next to someone's husband in a motel bed, feeling guilty.

I am quitting my job. This is a popular one. Clients like to avoid the awkwardness of quitting their jobs, so they set an appointment and walk into their bosses' offices and tell them where they can stick this effing job, and right before the boss starts to reply, the switch kicks in and I get yelled at.

I am in a hospital.

My lungs burn.

My heart aches.

I'm on a bridge.

My heart aches on a bridge.

My heart aches on a cruise s.h.i.+p.

My heart aches on an airplane, taking off at night.

Some people think it's not so great that we can do this. Personally, I don't really see the problem. Press one to clear your conscience. Press two for fear of death. Consciousness is like anything else. I'm sure when someone figures out how to sell time itself, they'll have infomercials for that, too.

I am at a funeral.

I am losing someone to cancer.

I am coping with something vague.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a funeral.

I am at a funeral.

Seventeen tickets today in twelve hours. Ten half hours and seven full.

On my way out, I can hear someone wailing and gnas.h.i.+ng his teeth in his cubicle. He is near the edge. Deepak was always like that, too. I always told him, hey man, you have to let go a little. Just a little. Don't let it get to you so much.

I peek my head to see if I can steal a glance at the new woman, but she is in the middle of a ticket. She appears to be suffering. She catches me looking at her. I look at my feet and keep shuffling past.

It used to be that the job wasn't all pain. Rich American man outsources the nasty bits of his life. He's required to book by the hour or the day or some other time unit, but in almost any c.r.a.ppy day, there are always going to be some parts of it that are not so bad. Maybe just boring. Maybe even more okay than not. Like if a guy books his colonoscopy and he hires us for two hours, but for the first eight minutes, he's just sitting there in the waiting room, reading a magazine, enjoying the air-conditioning, admiring someone's legs. Or something. Anyway, it used to be that we would get the whole thing, so part of my job here could be boring or neutral or even sometimes kind of interesting.

But then the technology improved again and the packeting software was refined to filter out those intervals and collect them. Those bits, the extras, the leftover slices of life were lopped off by the algorithm and smushed all together into a kind of reconst.i.tuted life slab, a life-loaf. Lunch meat made out of bits of boredom. They take the slabs and process them and sell them as prepackaged lives.

I've had my eye on one for a while, at a secondhand shop that's on my way home. Not ideal, but it's something to work for.

So now, what's left over is pretty much just pure undiluted badness. The only thing left to look forward to is when, once in a while, in the middle of an awful day, there is something not-so-awful mixed in there. Like the relief in the middle of a funeral, or sometimes when you get someone who is really religious, not just religious, but a person of true faith, then mixed in with the sadness and loss you get something extra, you get to try different flavors, depending on the believer. You get the big foot on your chest, or you get the back of your head on fire, a cold fire, it tickles. You get to know what it is like to know that your dead lover, your dead mother, father, brother, sister, that they are all standing in front of you, tall as the universe, and they have huge, infinite feet, and their heads are all ablaze with this brilliant, frozen fire. You get the feeling of being inside of a room and at the same time, the room being inside of you, and the room is the world, and so are you.

The next day is more of the same. Eleven tickets. The lowlight of the day is when I get to confess to my husband that I have been sleeping with my trainer for the last year. The first year of our marriage. I get to see his face, watch him try to keep it together. Of all the types of tickets, this is the worst. Heartbreak. When I first started at this job, I thought physical pain would be hardest. But it's not. This is the hardest. To be inside here, looking at this man's face, at the lowest moment of his life, watching him try to keep it together. To be inside here, feeling what this woman is feeling, having done this to him. And then the world blinks twice and my field of vision goes blue and I'm a guy sitting in front of a computer screen and the sandwich cart is in front of my cubicle.

So I have lunch.

After lunch, I pa.s.s her in the hall. The new woman. Her name badge says Kirthi. She doesn't look at me this time.

On the way home from work, I decide to swing by the secondhand shop and check out my life.

It's not my life, technically. Not yet. It's the life I want, the life I've been saving for. Not a DreamLife, not top of the line, but a starter model, a good one. Standard possibility. Low volatility. A kindhearted wife with nice hair, 0.35 kids, no actuals, certainties are too expensive, but some potential kids, a solid thirty-five percent chance of having one. Normal life expectancy, average health, median aggregate amount of happiness. I test-drove it once, and it felt good, it felt right. It fit just fine.

I don't know. I'm trying not to feel sorry for myself. I just thought there might be more to it all than this.

Still, I've got it better than some people. I mean, I'm renting my life out one day at a time, but I haven't sold it yet. And I don't plan to, either. I'm buying in, not selling out. I want to live, not exist, want to have a life, even if it is bits and pieces, even if it isn't the greatest product out there, even if it's more like a life-subst.i.tute. I'll take it.

I'm not going to be like my father, who sold his life on a cold, clear afternoon in November. He was thirty. It was the day before my fourth birthday.

We went to the brokerage. It felt like a bank, but friendlier. My father had been carrying me on his shoulders, but he put me down when we got inside. There was dark wood everywhere, and also bright flowers and cla.s.sical music. We were shown to a desk, and a woman in an immaculate pantsuit asked if we would like anything to drink. My father didn't say anything, just looked off at the far wall. I remember my mother asked for a cup of tea for my father.

I don't want to sell my life. I'm not ready to do that yet. So I sell it bit by bit. Sc.r.a.pe by. Sell it by the hour. Pain, grief, terror, worse. Or just mild discomfort. Social anxiety. Boredom.