“You return,” Z says.
Excel nods. “I return.”
“But you leave forever.”
“That was the plan.”
“Something wrong happens?”
Excel understands that Z’s English—always clipped, always in bites—renders everything he says in the present tense. But the way he says it—something wrong happens—makes life sound like an endless loop of mistakes, never what it’s meant to be. Z arrived from Serbia a few years before, at the age of seventy, brought here by his son. The plan was to collect Social Security, an extra income to help other family back home. He knew almost no English, and had trouble pronouncing Excel’s name, so settled for X instead. In return, Excel calls him Z, short for Zivko.
Excel taps the dictionary. “What’s a new word?”
Without missing a beat, Z closes his eyes and waves a finger in the air, drops it on a random word in the middle of the page. “This one,” Z says.
Excel leans over, tries reading the word upside down, but it’s so unfamiliar he has to turn the dictionary toward him. “‘Planet stricken,’” he says, the word as foreign to him as it must be to Z. “‘Adjective. Affected by the supposedly harmful influence of the planets.’” He turns the book back toward Z, suggests picking another word, one he can actually use in real life.
Z shakes his head. “Any word. I can use.” He rereads the definition, concentrates. “Today I wake, maybe sick”—he checks the word again—“but not sick. Only planet stricken.” He looks up from the page, the face of someone who doesn’t know if he’s right or wrong.
“Perfect,” Excel says.
“When you leave. I have few words. Now, many.” He closes the book. “X. Why are you back?”
“Things didn’t quite work out as planned.”
Z sighs, nods slowly. “Yes, I know.”
“I need a job. Is Gunter here?”
Z leans forward, all the lines on his old face pulling together with worry. He says something in what Excel guesses is Serbian, then pats Excel’s wrist. “Okay,” he says, “my grandson, over there.” He points to the game room. Excel slides out of the booth, stands up straight, takes a breath. “Wish me luck,” he says, and Z looks at him blankly like there’s no such thing, then moves on to learn another word.
GUNTER STANDS ON THE TOP RUNG OF A METAL LADDER, SCRAPING a web of pink chewing gum from the ceiling with a butter knife. How this keeps happening, nobody knows, but Excel once caught a kid standing atop the mini-carousel, stretching out his chewed-up bubblegum like it was pizza dough, then coiling it around a low-hanging light fixture. The kid’s parents merely watched, as if witnessing an artistic genius in the making.
Gunter reaches, scrapes off the last strand of gum, lets it fall to the floor. “Bastard fucks,” he says, and when he looks down to descend the ladder Excel accidentally makes direct eye contact. Before he bought The Pie, Gunter was a bouncer for a string of San Francisco strip clubs, and he looks more like a brawler than ever before; his neck is thicker, his chest bulges, and his T-shirt sleeves are so short they show new tattoos, a ring of blazing skulls around each bicep.
Excel takes a breath, steps forward, says hello.
Gunter looks down, squints at him, and tilts his head. “Well, son of a shit”—he gives a half laugh—“look who’s back.”
It’s a warmer response than Excel expects. “The place looks nice.”
“Then you got anuses for eyes.” Gunter folds his arms, feet still firm on the top rung, unafraid to fall. “That gum down there? Been on the ceiling for three months. And nobody here does shit about it, so I’m the one that’s gotta climb the goddamn ladder and clean it up. Is that how a CEO should start a business day?”
Excel shakes his head.
“We agree. So this makes me wonder: Are you here to scrape shit off the ceiling?” Excel takes that as his cue and nods, is about to ask for his job back, but before he can speak, Gunter wants to know where Excel gets the nerve to show his “jackass asshole face” after all the “bullshit toxic slander” he said the day he quit. Excel tries to answer but Gunter says, “No dickweed, I ain’t done yet,” and he lets out more profanity and names, some of which might almost be funny (“shit-wipe” is a new one), except for the fact that Z sits just one room away, trying to learn the language. Excel imagines walking out and taking Z with him, to a place where he can read his dictionary in peace.
“I’m sorry,” Excel says.
Gunter folds his arms, biceps flexing. “For?”
“All of it. For everything I said.”
“And?”
“And”—Excel gives himself a moment, a last chance to walk away, but knows he can’t—“I’d like my job back.”
“No.”
“You’re understaffed. You’ve got no cashiers. Maybe I can help.”
Gunter puts a finger—his middle—on his chin, makes an exaggerated thinking face, says no again.
“You have a right to be angry with me,” Excel says. “I was out of line.”
“‘Out of line.’ Hm. Tell me specifically what was out of line.”
“Everything. All of it.”
“You want a job? Then climb up here”—he gives the top of the ladder a quick pound of the fist—“and you tell me to my face what you said.”
The ladder is two-sided, sturdy enough, Excel hopes, to bear both their weight; if not, at least they’ll come crashing down together. He climbs up slowly, and when he’s one step away from being face-to-face with Gunter, he looks at the toes of his sneakers and imagines that the ground twelve feet beneath them isn’t the red industrial rug of The Pie but actual earth instead—rocks and pebbles, burnt-orange dirt, the terrain of Hello City. He pauses for a moment, then ascends the final rung and looks at Gunter, tells him again what he’d told him nine months before—that he’d found a way out of Colma, a real opportunity, so no longer needed this dead-end, dumbass job, that three miserable years working for a prick like Gunter were finally—hallelujah! (it was the first time Excel had ever said the word)—over and done with. “What else?” Gunter says, and Excel looks down again, the ground seemingly farther than before. “And then I called you”—Excel takes a breath—“a man without a future.” That was the line meant not merely to sting but to outright hurt, like the kick you give to someone already down: Gunter was forever lamenting his life, all the opportunities the universe denied him. “Here I am,” he had once said, “surrounded by booms. Internet boom. Dot-com boom. Even this bullshit slow food boom. But what about me? Where’s the Gunter boom, huh? What is it with people like us?” He’d said this at the start of a staff meeting, and by the time he finished, everything he said was a weepy blather. “I have no future,” he said, his last coherent words. The entire staff was silent, unsure whether to comfort a boss they feared or get back to work and laugh behind his back later. Excel just stared at him and thought, Don’t let that be me.
“And I guess that’s it,” Excel says. “That’s what I remember. And I’m a shitty person for saying all those things. But I need my job back. So I’m sorry. Really.”