Proof
When the Self Insists on Being Its Own God, Evil Laughs from the Moral High Ground
A man who sees that all things are contained in the higher spirit cannot treat any being with contempt. For him to whom all spiritual beings are equal to the highest there can be no room for deception or grief. Those who are ignorant and are devoted to the religious rites only, are in a deep gloom, but those who are given up to fruitless meditations are in a still greater darkness.
UPANISHADS, FROM VEDAS.
— Leo Tolstoy, A Letter to a Hindu
Any excuse will serve a tyrant.
—Aesop 620–560 BC
I am not a good person and I have proof.
A good person would not be standing in the grocery store at 11:04 a.m., staring down a cashier after calling her a bitch.
She...
Is...
Furious right now.
Her supervisor is trying to calm her down. You know the type. She can give it, but she sure don’t like taking it. As soon as she thought she had her boot on my neck, she beckoned Ms. Flanders over. Snitching ass.
No. No!
It’s not her fault. It’s me. This is about me. I can do better.
A good person would have gone home. A good person would have ignored provocation or forgiven it.
A good person would not have turned their car around after they’d driven more than half a mile from the store.
A good person would have capitulated to the voice in their head asking, “Are you really going to do this?”
A good person would not have said, “Yes.” And definitely not out loud.
Glee. That’s what I felt making that U-turn, ignoring my friend’s voice echoing around the atrium of the immense throne room where my conscious mind whiles away this abundance of time I have either earned or lucked into, while my body does the same on whatever beach I’ve wound up on most days.
“You wrong for this, brother. Why don’t you go on home and leave that girl alone?”
I am not worried. There are two empty football fields of marble tile between the throne and the anteroom. He’s not going to cross all that distance to make me comply.
Proof.
I am not a good person.
That’s not the only thing I thought, pulling that U-turn, wind rushing gently through the open windows. I also think, Ahh. I should buy grapes for Mrs. Diamond. She’d like that. Plus I forgot the onions and the green peppers.
Everything feels so familiar. I pull into the same parking space. The glass door still opens outwards to the right. The sign says “Pull” but it still feels unhelpful since the door opens so awkwardly. There’s no bell on the back. Because of how the eidolon clock below the sign bounces against the glass, its impotent hands still pointing to the last time the store was opened, you halfway expect one.
There is one person ahead of me when I get to the express checkout line, a woman fumbling with her cards, and keys, and purse compartments again. So familiar. The cashier is dripping the same invective into the ears of the two baggers at her station. She would be a better manager than Ms. Flanders so they really should listen to her, she says. Even the other company she applied to? Why should she work there when that place was so inefficient? If she ran that place she’d never have everybody turn up so early. That’s just wasting everybody’s time.
Familiar.
The school system is working too well. She’s no more than twenty years old and she’s already capable of running multi-billion-dollar businesses despite a conspicuous lack of qualifications, experience, or demonstrated capability. I fired nineteen young men and women just like her last year. Familiar.
I get the same disinterested response when I say, “Good morning, ma’am.” I am irrelevant to this pastor haranguing her flock.
Smug bitch. She hates it that I’ve called her a bitch. My “language is inappropriate.” She’s lecturing Ms. Flanders. Ms. Flanders looks weary. She’s dealt with this before. The ego on this cashier, this probably happens with some regularity. But not the way it’s going to happen today, Ms. Flanders. I am not a good person. I don’t lie.
I commiserate with Ms. Flanders when she is allowed to give me her attention. I cock my head and affect tiredness. I am weary too. We are both weary together. Why can’t everybody just behave?
“Sir?” Ms. Flanders says.
“Ma’am. I just want to pay for these.” I use the MasterCard in my still outstretched right hand to gesture to the three lonely items on the conveyor belt.
“Sir. You don’t have call her a bitch.”
She’s right.
“Ma’am,” I say gently. “I just want to pay. But if she wants to play stupid games, she fucking with the right one today.” And then I shut my mouth.
I don’t explain reality to Ms. Flanders. I don’t point out that I have my card extended to her in the same way I had my card extended to the cashier while she repeatedly asked me “Cash or card?” getting more and more strident and impatient each time. Ms. Flanders has done this before. She’ll figure it out, and unless I miss my guess the cashier is going to tell it all, and tell on herself. She can’t help it. She never shuts her mouth.
As if on cue, that smug, rat face, untamed by her braces, starts screeching again. She’s almost at the part where I asked her if she is retarded.
To her credit she has only told Ms. Flanders one lie.
Ms. Flanders looks even more weary. She is leaning away from Rat Face, from the ferret tunneling into her ears. Her eyes pop when she hears the word “retarded.” Her body jerks upwards in concert with her eyebrows and her eyes, as if someone has jabbed a pin into her nethers.
This is excruciating. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to hold this.
Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh. Don’t laugh.
What is wrong with you?!
Don’t laugh!
The rat-faced cashier’s eyebrows did a similar thing.
They flew to the top of her face when I leaned in, holding her eyes. I didn’t raise my voice. I enunciated clearly to ensure she would hear me above the bustle of all the other transactions and asked, “Are you retarded?”
Her mouth formed a little o. Her eyebrows popped, looking for all the world like ships way out in the ocean moments from tipping gallantly across the horizon.
She is confused. Her face blanks. I don’t need to be psychic to know what she’s thinking. I know this thought. I’ve had this thought before. Perhaps you too?
This is not happening.
The slack set of her face, the little o, and the eyebrow ships.
There’s no way.
Her brain reboots and she comes angrily to life.
“What? What did you just say to me?”
“Are. You. Retarded?” I say it slower the second time.
She looked left. And then right. My brain spontaneously does a trick where it transports me and the person I am arguing with back ten years in time but superimposes it over what I’m seeing now. I can see a version of her. Dressed smartly in her school uniform, baby hairs laid down neatly, press curled towards her forehead. She is on the tip, tip, tippiest, tip of her toes, right hand thrust high.
Acknowledge me Ms. Flanders! This is urgent. I need your undivided attention.
She’s making sure the teacher sees. The other kids go, “Oooooo. You’re in trouble,” and then the overlay disappears. She’s done this before. This is practiced. I don’t know what she thinks the consequences are going to be, but she is banking on my comeuppance.
You can probably tell I’m only half listening to her laundry list of authoritarian tendencies masquerading as legitimate complaints. I’m thinking about my omelet. I am surprised to find that I enjoy the preparation an omelet requires. I am always careful to buy both red and yellow bell peppers now. Against my better judgment, I have invested in a decent set of knives. Quality tools make any task sublime.
A ritual makes demands. There is a gravity to the practice, to solemnly presenting your best offering. To committing the sin of pride by humbling oneself. To surrendering to a metric you have not created, but which you are obliged to measure yourself against. One must be objective. One must, after careful consideration, and no little preparation, acknowledge without fear the possibility of failure, and still give a good account. There is a wrong way to dice onions. There is a clumsy way to chop. A way that leaves burning tears leaking from your eye holes, or metal slicing into your skin. So it is too with life—you will hurt yourself if you are not respectful.
I tune in. Rat Face has just said something about “respect” too.
“And people like you want people to respect you?” She curls the end of the sentence upwards. Turning a statement into a question.
“Respect? Bitch, you a cashier. Don’t nobody want respect from you. We want you to do your job. You a cashier, bitch. Cash! Cash the goods.”
I can’t tell if this happens to her every day, or if she’s never been spoken to this way. Every time I say the word “bitch” her eyes twitch but every time I say the word “cashier” her face crinkles as if I’ve hit her.
“Stop calling me bitch,” she says.
“Bitch you a cashier. What part you don’t understand? You don’t get to give nobody orders. You a cashier.”
“Stop calling me bitch!”
“What are you going to do about it?”
This is why I can’t decide. I don’t expect this from a more practiced troublemaker. She is stunned. Perplexed. Silent. The little ships have returned from their sojourn over the horizon but have strayed so close together I am given cause to worry about shipwrecks. She can’t move. She looks like what a child imagines happens if you step on a rusty nail and get lockjaw—a mannequin that has taken up breathing. I take aim. The entire place has gone silent. Customers and staff have tuned in to the drama. Cashiers are peering around customers. I see a funhouse image, reflections cascading off into the distance. Meerkat heads, repeating, cocked sideways, straining to see over the tops of candy arrangements and magazines.
The place is hushed.
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One beat.
Two beats.
Three beats.
Some of the cashiers and the baggers in the other checkout rows are wearing the satisfied smiles of people enjoying karma being served.
They don’t like Rat Face. Interesting.
Ms. Flanders herself is holding back laughter.
Four beats.
Five beats.
I am not a good person.
“Bitch, if you didn’t want to be a cashier, you should have paid attention in school. Then you wouldn’t be here. Get another job, bitch. This not for you.”
I twist it in and break the handle off.
I am going to go with nobody has ever spoken to her like this. She clearly wants out of this situation. No one is helping her. Absolutely nobody. Not even the two baggers she was regaling with tales of how she would do a better job than Ms. Flanders if she had Ms. Flanders’ job, and how the people at the call center she applied to don’t know how to run a business.
And then I sprinkle in the truth.
“All you going to do is cause these people more and more trouble. Bitch!”
That jerks her out of her stupor.
“You have a nice day, sir,” she says. And then to Ms. Flanders, “I’m not going to cash him.” She folds her hands and turns her back. She spins right back around when she notices we have everybody’s attention. People are even leaning out of aisles to gawk, hopping on one leg to keep balance.
“I will have a nice day. But you not going to.”
Ms. Flanders has been trying to gently guide her back to the cash register but Rat Face is resisting. She shakes Ms. Flanders off and pulls away from her completely. But this puts her face to face with her audience again. She reacts as if scalded. A whirling demon set aspun by holy water. The machine beeps when Ms. Flanders taps my card. Everything comes to a little less than $10.
“Thank you, ma’am.”
“You’re welcome, sir.”
As I walk towards the exit, I lob another one over my shoulder. Rat Face takes the bait again.
“Lookit. Now everybody laughing at you.”
“They not laughing at me. Is you they laughing at.”
I tilt my head back all the way, a wolf preparing to serenade the moon.
“Biiiiitttcchhhh!” I howl.
Laughter breaks out.
Ten miles later, I am knocking on Mrs. Diamond’s door. There is no answer. I begin to wonder if her daughter has taken her to the doctor. I hear a muffled groan, and then rustling, and then grunting approaches the other side of her door.
“Mrs. Diamond, how come it sounds like you’re having trouble getting up?” Two years on, she is almost fully recovered from the stroke. You can barely tell which side of her face is drooping. She’s all smiles. I hand her the grapes. The smile gets wider. I get to see all her teeth.
More fun cannot be had. Not for $10.
