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Everyone Dreams of America

Fiction

By Cole Haddon
Published: March 19th, 2005 | 8:04pm

1.
The girl had worked at the company for four years when she came to the sad realization that no one there knew her name. Not even the payroll clerk, who persistently misspelled both her first name and last. Her boss — who was a robust, hirsute man who wore only Polo shirts and dark blue sports jackets — would simply call her “Bess” (although this was not her name) or “my girl” in sentences like, “That’s my girl” or “Would you like my girl to get you a cup of coffee or a blueberry scone?”

She made copies, faxed documents, mailed letters, and, most importantly (or so she thought), answered her boss’s phone, often speaking with celebrities for whom the company provided publicity management. Celebrities, the girl knew, would pay the company to recreate their boring lives into something fantastic that millions of people would want to hear about, would want to watch on the television, would want to read about in magazines. The girl kept a secret bank account into which she put every cent she could spare, all for the day when she hoped the company would help her recreate her dull and unremarkable life.

On the day that she realized no one at the company knew her name, the girl was also struck, as if by a mallet against the back of her skull, by the epiphany that no one else seemed aware of her existence either. For example, her boyfriend — a man three years younger than she, who enjoyed listening to show tunes during his long subway ride to and from work every day — had only recently found himself tongue-tied, standing in the girl’s tiny kitchen, unable to catch her attention. “Ah…uh…um…I’m sorry,” he laughed, shaking his head. She turned from the carrots she was cutting into orange coins and gaped at him. He said, “I know this sounds crazy, but I forgot your name for a second there.”

“That’s all right,” she said softly and went back to cutting the carrots, thin pieces, so thin they were almost transparent. “Lots of people forget my name. As long as you remember it now, that’s all that matters.”

“Of course,” he said.

The girl asked, “What is it? What’s my name?”

Her boyfriend chuckled and patted her twice on the bottom. “Don’t be silly,” he said, “of course I know your name.” He then ducked into the living room and put on his new Gypsy CD.

“But what is it?” she said, or maybe whispered.

2.
The girl had not grown up in the city, though she had lived there since moving out of her parent’s home in the country. Every holiday — Easter, the Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas — she returned to the country, to celebrate with her family, but last Thanksgiving, when she arrived, her father — who was as tall as a basketball player and wore a pirate’s patch — said to her, “Oh. I didn’t know you were coming,” in such a way as to suggest to her that he was as disappointed with her presence, as he was with his wife’s dog that had gouged out his eye. In the kitchen, the girl found her mother preparing a spinach and tomato salad and offered to lend a hand. Her mother did not respond one way or the other and it was not until the girl walked up to her and squeezed her shoulder that she replied.

“Oh,” her mother said. “I didn’t see you come in. What are you doing here?”

“It’s Thanksgiving,” the girl said, but her mother — who wore Elvis shades to protect her sensitive eyes — still seemed confused as to why the girl was standing in her house. The girl kissed her and, simpering, said, “Happy Thanksgiving, Mom.”

After dinner, the girl bumped into her brother while carrying the extra table leaf back out to the garage. “How’ve you been?” she asked, smiling. “The boys are getting so big, I can hardly believe it. You should let me take them for a week. Let their aunt show them the big city.”

“I’m not sure if that’s such a good idea,” her brother said. His prematurely graying hair had been dyed so many times, it had begun to fall out; a great patch of skin was visible just above his forehead, covered by thin, brittle hair. He said, “Their mother doesn’t feel as if she knows you well enough, to let our kids come stay with you.”

“But I’m your sister,” the girl said, confused.

“You’re adopted,” he said.

“What difference does that make?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It just does. We don’t know enough about who you really are. As parents, it wouldn’t be smart for us to let our children stay with just anybody.”

3.
The girl had been born in someplace called Slerabvia, a kidney-shaped country in Eastern Europe that no longer exists. In fact, the girl could not have found it on a map, even if it did exist, because she had never thought about such things before her realization that no one anywhere knew who she was. After this realization, the girl called her mother and asked, “If I wanted to try and find my biological parents, would you help me?”

“Who is this?” her mother said into the telephone. “Is this some kind of prank?”

“It’s me, Mom,” the girl sighed.

“Oh,” the mother said, snorting. “What do you want? I’m in the middle of watching my soaps.”

“I’ve just been thinking a lot lately, Mom,” the girl said, “about where I come from. Where I really come from, you know. I know nothing about Slerabvia or the people there, or what my family would’ve been like. I listen to you and Dad talk about your parents, your grandparents, how they both came over from Belgium, and I want to know those things about my own family.”

“But we’re your family,” the mother said. “Your great-grandparents did those things.”

“It’s not the same, Mom,” the girl said. “I don’t even have names. I have nothing. Before you adopted me… It’s like I didn’t exist. I have no history. Nothing. I don’t exist.” The girl had been thinking about such things a lot lately, questioning her life, the way she felt that maybe, just maybe, she could blink out of existence tomorrow and no one — not even the mother she was talking to on the phone — would notice.

“I need a history, Mom,” she said. “Will you help me?”

“Sure, sure, sure,” her mother said. “Tell you what, I’ll call you back tomorrow and we can talk all about this.”

But the girl’s mother did not phone back and, on the third day of waiting, the girl decided to just make the call herself. Her parents’ number had been changed, a recording said. When she phoned her brother, to ask what had happened, he said, “Oh yeah, they changed it because some nutcase kept calling Mom, bugging her during her soaps. She called us all and gave us the new number.”

“She didn’t call me,” the girl said, wincing.

“Maybe you weren’t home,” her brother said.

“But I have an answering machine,” she said. “Can you just give me the number?”

“I don’t know if I should,” he said. “Maybe they didn’t give it to you for a reason.”

4.
About a month after the girl realized no one at the company where she worked knew her name, she decided to walk out, if only to see what would happen. It was two in the afternoon and, with no warning to her boss, she collected her purse and umbrella and left. When she showed up the next day, no one said anything to her about the matter, or about anything else. So, to further test her theory that she was, in fact, invisible, the girl left work again that day, this time at noon. On the third day, she left at ten-thirty, and on the fourth she did not even show up. After a month of this behavior, of spending her days wandering the city’s parks and enjoying French films at the cinema just down the street from her seventh-floor walk-up apartment, the girl was still collecting her weekly checks from the company. No one had noticed her absence.

5.
For three months, the girl spent one hour every weekday afternoon learning the Slerabvian language from how-to tapes. Another hour, sometimes two, would be spent reading the biographies of famous Slerabvian men and women, or just reading a Slerabvian novel. She particularly liked literature that detailed the Slerabvian resistance to the Nazi regime during World War II. She bought posters of famous Slerabvian actors like Josef Welmo and Svetlana Svernevic, posters of the Slerabvian countryside and its many famous castles, and she bought black-and-white posters of Slerabvian school children. Her favorite was of a little girl who looked about seven years old, carrying a stack of books close to her chest. The girl imagined that this school child might have been her, had she not been adopted, had she been allowed to grow up with her real family. She imagined her parents, her brothers and sisters (Slerabvians have extremely large families), and the farm animals they owned.

An entire life was invented within the girl’s mind, a life in which she was loved and missed and where everyone, even the postman who walked twelve miles every day to deliver mail to the most distant townsfolk, knew her name. She could see the beautiful old stone-and-wood buildings that made up her village, she could feel the warm grass of the village green under her bare feet on a summer’s day, and she could hear the gong of the church bell at noon and six every day, resonating from the bell tower that was the tallest building in the town. In this other life, the girl knew she would never blink out of existence. In her real life, this was not the case. The company that still paid her every week had not noticed her missing from her desk, her boyfriend had recently begun calling her names not her own, and her family — the ones who had adopted her — considered her as much a stranger as any random name in the telephone book.

The girl was convinced she was doomed, that being forgotten meant she would eventually forget even herself.

6.
It happened on a Monday morning, quite suddenly. As she had feared, the girl simply vanished.

One moment she was there, the next she was not.

The police investigated the matter, but found no suggestion of foul play. When they questioned those with whom she worked, attention was drawn to the empty desk the girl had once occupied and payroll was informed. The utilities to her apartment were turned off, the telephone number disconnected, and her furniture and belongings were donated to charities. Her boyfriend got a job as a disc jockey at a radio station that played only show tunes and did not miss her. Her family subtracted one chair from the holiday table and went on with their lives.

It could be said that no one had the slightest idea what happened to the girl, but, for that to be said, it would be necessary for there to be someone who cared enough to even think about what her fate might have been.

She was simply and quite conveniently evacuated from everyday existence

7.
When the girl woke, it was to the sound of her name being shouted at her by the postman: “Anja! Anja!”

She moaned softly and made as if to stand, but her legs, like wet noodles, would not support her. “I’m OK,” she said, instead crawling toward the lip of the ditch. “I just got a little dizzy, Svorgie. That’s all.”

The postman took her hand and helped her to her feet. “You were unconscious,” he said. “I get dizzy too, but never unconscious.” He squinted at her through glasses that magnified his eyes into wet, searching orbs.

Anja laughed and patted the sweet man on his ruddy, pockmarked cheek. “You,” she cooed, “are the most adorable and kind and sweet man. Thank you so much.”

The postman blushed and then, together, they walked toward her parents’ house. He delivered mail while she insisted the doctors were wrong about her, that she was perfectly fine. Upon cresting a gentle hill spotted with marmalade-colored pansies, Svorgie pointed at a tiny house in the distance and said, “Your father, he worries about you. Very much. Great worrier he is.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “I love him for it.”

Svorgie took the stump of his left index finger, having lost the rest of it in the war, and tapped the side of his skull. “He says you dream, sweet Anja,” he teased. “Dreams, of distant places. Of America. You talk in your sleep.”

“Everyone dreams of America,” she said, and smiled again.

When Anja and Svorgie reached her parents’ doorstep, Svorgie kissed her on each cheek, hugged her quickly, and hurried off. “Tell your father I said hello,” he said. “But no time I have to visit.” He smiled, already walking away. “Other young girls might be in need of my rescuing.” In the distance, the noon bell could be heard.

Through the front door, Anja found her three brothers, Luka, Luka, and Luka at the dinner table, hunched in concentration over a game of Monopoly. Excited to see her, the middle Luka held up a fan of vari-colored game money and announced, “I am rich, Anja. Anything you want, it’s yours.”

The boys told her their mother was outside on the porch, peeling potatoes. “Always potatoes,” the youngest Luka grumbled. “For once, I would like something different.”

When Anja’s mother saw her, she quickly rose to her feet despite arthritic knees and wrapped her arms around her only girl. “Anja,” she said, “I have missed you. Where have you been?” She pulled free two weeds that were tangled in Anja’s hair. “And why are you so filthy?”

“I fell,” Anja said.

“Fell?” her mother asked. “Did you have another spell?” She slumped back into her chair and pressed her shriveled hand to her breast. “Oh dear, no. I thought these were past.”

“It’s all right, Mama,” Anja said, kneeling beside the woman who always wore her waist-length white hair in braids, scooped up and hidden in a great red scarf. “It’s all right, I promise you.”

“No big deal?” the mother repeated. “No big deal? I will tell you what is big deal. I had dream again last night, of you. You were in trouble again, I promise.”

“No trouble,” Anja said.

“Something’s wrong,” the mother declared, and gave the silver bucket of potatoes at her feet a good kick. “I know it, don’t lie.”

Anja sighed. “Nothing’s wrong,” she insisted. “I keep telling you that, Mama. I’m not going anywhere. No more disappearing acts.”

“The first one was more than I could bear, Anja,” her mother said, sniffling.

The girl smile and hugged her mother. She said, “Mama, you have to stop this. It was just a dream. None of it was real.”

Her mother believed in the old stories and the old traditions. She believed in her dreams, that secrets could be read in them, as with the clouds and the sound of wind chimes. “It was real enough to me,” she said, harrumphing. “That is all that matters. It was real.”

“It wasn’t real,” the girl repeated. “This here — this farm, this town — this is real.” She took her mother’s tremulous hand and smiled, tears glistening at the corners of her eyes. “It’s the only reality I’ve ever wanted.”

Together they watched as Anja’s father, who was riding atop an elephantine tractor, slowly crawled toward them across the great garden that swallowed up the surrounding hills of the farm. A twisting plume of black smoke rose from the exhaust, snaking into the sky. An arm waved excitedly at them, a green handkerchief in its hand.

Cole Haddon is a world-famous raconteur. Unfortunately, the world hasn’t caught onto that yet. Until then, he serves as the fiction editor of Real Detroit Weekly and destination guide editor of e-Marginalia. He is also a contributing writer for Rockrgrl, Venus, Buzzine, and Sonic Slang, while his fiction has appeared in Permafrost, The Copperfield Review, and The Planet Magazine. You can e-mail Cole at colehaddon@yahoo.com.