“We are residential. We are commercial, we are safes, we are automotive.”
“Automotive,” Wands said. “That’s Ibrahim’s specialty. He’s the best car man in town.”
“We handle Triple A.”
“What are you going to start him at?”
“We have exclusive account.”
The guy at the bar called again.
“I need someone to organize the keyboard,” Ibrahim said. “To help with dispatch. To count this drawer—once in the morning and once at end of the day.”
There were no sick days, no medical.
“I need someone I can trust,” he said.
“You need to get over there, Ibrahim,” she said. She said his name with no trouble.
“I left five minutes ago.”
“I could smell it through the phone. Maybe he shouldn’t drive.”
Maybe, I said, she was right.
Ibrahim shrugged, winked. “So long as he’s not too drunk to pay.”
“He’ll probably start you at seven,” Wanda told me.
“Minimum wage.” Ibrahim got up. “If,” he said, “I take you on.”
“Please,” she said. “Nobody can live on that.”
“Here we learn to pay ourselves,” he said. Commission. Once he started moving, it was hard to remember him sitting. “He has no experience. Anywhere else you train on your own time, buy your own tools . . .” I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. He looked around behind the counter, picked up a cell phone and told me how many free minutes he got. I assumed this was a good thing and nodded.
“Wanda.” He wasn’t done looking for things yet. “Where my keys are, Wanda?”
“Use that thing of yours,” she said. “That thing that does everything.” A small showy smile. Ibrahim pressed something on what looked like his wristwatch. A chirping sound. He made his way to it and picked up his keys.
“Ibrahim’s a gadget freak,” Wanda said. “You should see the van.”
I nodded. He stood there with the cell phone and the thing on his wrist and wore a pager. There were two computers behind the counter. More little boxes with buttons and screens. I was not a gadget freak.
He stood there. “Tell me, he said. “Why I should hire you?”
I could not get interested in trying to convey my worth. I said that he would find out he could trust me. That minimum wage would do till he decided I was worth more.
He smiled. “If you don’t want money, then what do you want?”
“A start.”
“I think about it. Maybe Wanda call you in the morning.”
“I told you he doesn’t have a phone.”
“Then you stop by.” We shook hands and he headed out the back. “Wadiya! Give this man something cold to drink.”
Up front there was a mini-fridge like the one I had. I said water was good.
“I know I can get you six,” Wanda said. “He likes you.” She advised me to forget everything I’d ever heard about A-rabs. Really a very generous man. No benefits but they were a family, he’d give you an advance and sometimes even say forget about it. She’d needed a root canal, pointed to her jaw. “Hurt so bad I couldn’t even talk. What a relief, right? Shut up.” A sideways motion of her hand wiped the slate clean for all time. “Never even took it out of my check.” She gave me a preemptive look. “And I’m not sleeping with him.”
That was how you knew she was. Someone needed to say something then and all I could think of were the scratches on Ibrahim’s neck and arms, but she wasn’t finished. He was just so . . . She groped, looked in the air.
The phone made its sound. A customer came in. They definitely needed someone but I was glad to get out of there. Wanda tore off the sheet of long yellow paper and told me to fill in what was missing, bring it back the next day. She told me what she needed. I thought I might hang on to it until someone insisted, or get creative and take my chances. And Ibrahim might decide against me anyway. There was still the beat-up van. There was still fast food, people gone crazy with choice like they could make up for the options life denied them.
SOMEBODY must have made a mistake. I didn’t say anything. I was supposed to go once a week.
It was a ten-minute bus ride but the summer school kids in the back made it a lot longer. I pulled the cord above my head about six blocks before my stop and if it made a sound you couldn’t hear it. When I stepped off the bus I was already there anyway. The Clinic had gotten bigger and was still expanding—The City Within The City, a sign read, as if there were nothing ominous about it. There was no center, no front door, and I finally stumbled across an emergency entrance and went in that way.
Maybe it wasn’t a mistake.
I’d never been there before but I certainly knew about it. Everybody did—the Clinic was famous around the world for its treatments and research, for cutting-edge advances made in the realms of the heart and brain. Celebrities were regular customers. Actors, athletes, heads-of-state who crossed oceans to undergo treatment—even the deposed dictator of a small nation. That one had raised a stink.
An impatient old man in an information booth told me I wanted the Lab, like there was only one. He pointed a shaky finger and I asked one other employee before I found it. A waiting room. A woman working a desk on the other side of a window. She took my name and gave me a seat.
If it wasn’t a mistake, maybe they didn’t think it mattered. I picked up a Reader’s Digest and took the vocabulary test. I wasn’t sure about ferule and ziggurat, so I was excellent but not superior. I wasn’t sure if I would see her. As far as I knew, I hadn’t been formally restrained, not even by her family, but I wasn’t sure. At the time certain things were beside the point.
A small, pleasant old lady opened a door next to the window and invited me in. She took me into a small white room with cupboards and a counter, put on blue rubber gloves and had me empty my pockets. I wrote my name on a label, washed my hands. She told me not to flush. The water was blue. The lid on the toilet tank was locked and above it a set of instructions told you how to ensure a “clean catch.” There was no sink.
When I could wash my hands again I asked her about patients who were in a particular condition. She gave me directions. Another new building.
I let myself get lost. Skyways, escalators, tunnels, as in an airport or a shopping mall. After a while it was impossible not to glide. Attendants pushed machines on wheels that made no sound, men and women in billowing lab coats or surgical scrubs, paper shoes, a red-faced administrator in a black suit saying, “I don’t let myself have bad days.” Everyone else looked out of place—you hardly saw any patients. Families huddled in waiting rooms, asleep on benches or in their chairs like stranded travelers. Announcements, a sexy voice incapable of bad news, preceded by a soft bell. The building
