by Sandra Poligun Varma
A man who most would try to forget, with some bias--a bum, approximately, a bummer--approached us outside our condo from the parking lot.
We were waiting for a locksmith and sitting on the hood of Henry’s 1991 Mustang, black, Hindi characters neither of us could read as window stickers, “anti-ironic” shell-beads lining in the back.
Henry had turned in his key with our old apartment keys and I’d left mine inside the condo. It was Easter Sunday and no one lives on-site there, the small man from the office wasn’t around.
I won’t speak for him, but there was something melancholic about the scene. About the cleanness of the complex, the huddled retentiveness of it — an outpost of stainless steel and short grass for the successful, somewhere in the middle of a neighborhood where there were still people returning bottles and selling used wares or drugs as the primary source of their earned incomes.
Henry’s been Henry lately too — tense, you know, like he always wants to be somewhere else and with some other people, inside his movies and shows, solving old fashioned murders or fighting evil men with evil faces, and I missed the old apartment.
Not to mention, that far into April and the sun was still acting like it wasn’t Spring, probably grogged in bed somewhere, I figured, probably breathing on the moon from his pillow, but Henry knows when to make me laugh. He pointed with his thumb at the man, the gangling please-forget-me bummer man in the Dodgers t-shirt with oil or tar on it, and bulged his eyes. I laughed quietly. Let’s all be honest about our meanness while we can.
The man had what looked like a woman’s jeans on. He stooped and lurched as he walked, couldn’t have weighed more than a small mattress. We could see him mouthing his greeting before he said anything.
“Hey there, you guys seen a smartphone lying around out here?” he said. His voice was a tired child’s.
We told him we hadn’t. He moved his head in odd angles toward the ground, like he was looking for Easter eggs or mines. I felt bad for almost laughing.
“Oh, well, you never know… You know, I never seen you around here, you new here?” he said.
We told him that we were still moving in.
“Ah, well welcome friends, figured I wouldn’t miss a car like this one here, real beauty,” and we thanked him for his hospitality.
He scratched under one of his knees.
“Well, I live in that white house down 110th about a block that way from here, over there,” he arced his finger over the shrubs to our left. “Feel free to stop by, you know, or if you find my smartphone or you know…”
We told him we would, for sure, for sure.
As he flopped away from us, Henry said “Great” through his teeth. And I knew what he meant. Another living complex like that, he was thinking.
We’d been robbed twice at our last apartment. It was closer to the city though, and Google Reviews had claimed that this new place, these condos for young detail-oriented self-starters, were “notorious for safety, high maintenance,” probably written by the small man. We laughed at that, but for different reasons. Sound familiar? Henry had said and giggled.
“He seemed so… nice, though,” I said, about the phone man. I slapped him across his chest with the back of one of my ring-free hands. “Don’t be so mean, Henry-kun.”
“Oh, like he actually lost his phone around here? Don’t be so gullible,” he said. And he was right. The second time we got robbed, I’d been the one who’d let our robbers in. My sister and her boyfriend, in fact, stole our TV, Henry’s Playstation, my external hard drive, and a bottle of my sleeping pills. She tried calling and apologizing from a rehab somewhere a few months ago and I couldn’t quite bring myself to respond. There are unforgivable things. I think.
But there I was thinking about my sister and I got sad about it all, about how much she’ll regret having stayed with him for as long as she did, about how he’ll probably end up looking like the phone-man, lurching around forgetfully in places he’s not wanted, thinking about intoxicants, hoping to find unlocked doors or empty bottles to return. Well, I try to feel sorry for him.
“You’re right, I said.”
Once the locksmith arrived and we started emptying our stuff into the condo, I made a trip with excess cardboard and plastic wrap and a broken keyboard of mine to the dumpster. That’s where I found it.
That’s where it was. There was the phone, right there, a newish, gold-hued smartphone sticking out from underneath the dumpster, covered in sticky and miscellaneous gray filth, surrounded by beer bottle caps and colored glass shards, and only now am I thinking a metaphor could have been hidden away in there.
I figured it must have been the phone guy’s phone. I pictured him lurching into the dumpster looking for useful or valuable things to take home, adjusting his woman’s jeans, grinning at his luck when he found something like my old keyboard or an old pair of Nikes or whatever else was in front of me at that moment. I picked it up and went to tell Henry.
“How do you know it’s his phone though?” he said.
“Whose phone would it be if it’s not his?”
“How do you know it’s not just junked? People like these probably throw valuable shit away all the time, I mean… look at this place,” he spun with his arms out like that woman in the field from that old musical. I chuckled. Him and his movie references in our own new, clean condo, you can chuckle when something isn’t all that funny.
“Well.”
“I mean it’s nice, you really think he’d be…” he paused. “Well, I guess it is an older model…”
“We should just take it over to him to make sure.”
“I mean… to a guy like him? What if someone else dropped it there?” He leaned against our wall like a Western hero and wrapped his foot around his other foot. He was wearing the Anime shirt I bought him. “He’d take it regardless, guarantee it.”
“Isn’t that a little presumptuous?”
We went back and forth like that for a good minute before we settled — a pleasant surprise cessation (we were both excited to be in a nice building)—to plug the phone in and see if it worked. Maybe there’d be a way to determine whose it was.
It turned on without a fuss. No water damage. Henry pretended to not be interested, just made an eh sound, and started microwaving a pizza. He was trying to re-initiate some nebulous relationship struggle. Get him going on anything, and I mean anything, and he’ll re-initiate the great nebulous relationship struggle. This is human nature, I’m afraid, and will happen with any two people who share a bed and/or bathroom and kitchen.
It asked for a password.
Henry said “eh” again and told me I should drop it, he was going to get his pizza ready and put on the show we’d been watching.
I tried what I assumed would be the most common four digit pins — 1234, 4321, 0122, etc. — none of them worked. Henry told me to just drop it and reminded me of the cliffhanger I’d apparently been frustrated by the previous week. His shows, frankly, bore me to death. But I watch them with him and he’s happy. It makes him happy and you’ll find things to be entertained by, I guess. I wasn’t having it though. I didn’t care if Xiung-Xi acquired the manifolds for the flat simulacras, not really.
“Forget it, Sandy. Put it back out by the dumpster, he’ll come double check for it if it really is his.”
“Of course it’s his,” I said.
“Then what the hell is the point of trying to turn it on then?”
We went back and forth like that for another minute. He got used to dating weak women and I, personally, have an innate inability to capitulate. I do not budge. It’s been a problem for me in the past, I’ll admit it, and I am not always proud of my ability to stand so strong, but Henry and I are a match. Plain and simple. We both knew it when we met a year or so ago. I make things happen.
“You just can’t leave things be, for fuck’s sake. Come sit with me and watch the — I want you to watch the show.”
I went into our new bedroom, everything in piles in the center of the room, and closed the door.
I ran a simple diagnostic script — reneged the outer processor and installed a parent program onto it from my laptop . I got into the phone. I make things happen.
And, yes, you could say I was shocked by what I found.
Part 2 COMING SOON
