1 | Arjun
Wedged in a crack in the asphalt, baking in the heat, sat a shiny, fresh penny reflecting sunbeams at the sky. Shoes brushed past it. Tires rolled over it. A soda can soaked it, stagnant like a tiny pond. The silhouette of Lincoln watched the amoebas and the rotifers and the insect larvae, chasing their dreams, making plans for the future, getting busy.
Lincoln tanned in the glare, a crusader in copper. He knew it was over when they put him on a coin, and on a stamp, and when they sculpted blocks of granite in his image. By then they just wanted to look at him. They didn’t want to listen.
They had heard it all before.
Candy Carney was starving. She flicked off her desk lamp, pushed in her steno chair, and checked her lipstick in a pink compact. She slipped past the Xerox room and queued at the elevators. Since her coworkers at EverSafe Solutions had started teasing her about having the same thing for lunch every day, she had taken to eating alone on a bench outside.
Last night had been the usual. Five years out of college, and she was still hanging out with her girlfriends at Curly’s Grill & Bar, singing Gretchen Wilson songs at karaoke. Everywhere she went, she found Bobby lurking, reeking of Axe Body Spray, claiming he just happened to be in the neighborhood.
She toddled into the parking lot. The food trucks accosted her with alluring aromas and bright colors and whimsical designs. Her favorite truck was painted sky blue with yellow trim and plastered with cutouts of smiling Indian movie stars and clapperboards. She peered in the window.
“Hi, Arjun!”
“It is a beautiful day!” the young man said, beads of sweat dotting his forehead. “Would you like a curry eggroll? Perhaps a Delhi tea?”
“Yes, please!”
“Did you take my advice about your Bobby?”
“He’s not ‘my Bobby.’ He’s just a creepy guy who likes me.”
“You are tormenting him,” Arjun said.
“Oh?”
“I would not let you torment me. I would sidestep you. I would be nifty.”
“Hmmm?”
“Like quicksilver.” Arjun pulled the eggroll from the fryer, wrapped it in foil, and passed it through the window. “Okay, now let it breathe. Savor its aroma.”
“Yes, I know.” She smiled.
“And then take it into your system.”
She sauntered to the park bench, which was bolted like a bus stop shelter to a concrete slab. Lately she had been waking up in the middle of the night and raiding her refrigerator for the closest thing she could find to a Bollywood Eggroll. In the glow of her kitchen, she gulped frozen entrées in a fever of fantasy.
She lifted the eggroll to her lips. Her mouth watered.
She was late for her two o’clock.
Arjun wiped the stainless steel counters. As an only child, he had grown up playing in his father’s shoe store in the Lajpat Nagar neighborhood of Delhi. The little shop had carried fake Nikes from China. Arjun would drag his chair to the window and watch the mehendiwalas apply designs to the hands of tourists. He would see the same faces come and go each day, dark-eyed men who murmured with his father and lingered over masala chai.
Don’t just sell them what they want, his father had whispered on a rainy day when the shop fell quiet. Sell them what they need.
Arjun had played cricket in the streets, oblivious to adult business, sowing dreams of glory. He had fantasized about making the Indian national team, winning the Cricket World Cup, and catching on with a professional club as a charismatic wicket-keeper.
In his mind, he had always been leaving for some faraway place where he would shed the shackles of his birth and clothe himself anew in the threads of possibility. He would meet a beautiful girl and settle down in a shining Western city. He would succeed in business. It was intoxicating.
His phone vibrated in his pocket. “Hello?”
“Hi, sorry, I forgot to ask you before, but can you let me know if you see Bobby this afternoon? I don’t feel safe.”
“How do I know if I see a Bobby?”
“I’m scared, Arjun. He follows me. He watches me do things, like loading my laundry at the coin-op. Please tell me if you see anything suspicious.”
“I know nothing about a Bobby.”
“I’m afraid something bad is going to happen. Everywhere I go, he’s there. You’re the only friend I have in the lot and—”
“Okay, I will stop what I am doing and call you if I see a nondescript man in a car doing anything at all.”
“Thanks, Arjun. You’re sweet.”
He surveyed the lot for prospective customers, but aside from the pigeons encamped and sunning on the east flank, all was quiet. He returned to cleaning the counters.
When Arjun was sixteen, his father had run afoul of the local police by declining to meet the request for baksheesh. Fearing for his kneecaps, he closed his accounts at the State Bank of India and rushed his family onto a flight west, settling just outside Tucson, Arizona. Arjun enrolled in the tenth grade, his mother clerked for the public library, and his father managed a Foot Locker at Park Place.
Arjun ran cross-country and made the honor roll. He was hired on sight to wait tables at an Indian eatery in Oro Valley. And when he received his acceptance letter from the University of Virginia in a neat linen envelope with his name in an elegant serif font, his parents wept with pride and put him on a plane to the Old Dominion.
Growing up with a single closet for all his worldly possessions, he had been used to living simply. But after seeing his father’s customers in Delhi leer at leather boots and pointed heels, he had noted the complexity of desire. Meet the needs of others, his father had said, and you make your own happiness.
His phone buzzed.
“Is he there?” Candy said. “Is he lying in wait for me?”
“Lying in what?”
“Please, Arjun. I don’t know what he might do.”
“There is no one here. There is no one who might be a Bobby or not a Bobby.”
“I’m scared.”
“Close your eyes. Imagine you are a great, powerful cat. You have no fear. You have no need to call Arjun.”
“I have to go,” Candy whispered. “Thank you.”
He lifted the basket out of the fryer. He swiped the net through the reservoir, removing chunks of burnt batter, shaking loose remnants of eggrolls past, and emptied it into a plastic bucket. He picked up his paperback about Preston Tucker, a 1940s magnate who had to shut down the world’s largest auto factory after producing only fifty cars.
If you weren’t making moves, Arjun thought, you were a pawn in somebody else’s game.
After graduating from the University, he had become a sous chef at an Asian fusion restaurant called Jiyū. The owner, Seiko Okuhara, blended her native Japanese cuisine with Chinese, Thai, and Vietnamese. She added cayenne and Parmesan to wonton soup. She put cinnamon in panang curry.
Arjun had studied this visionary like a monk at the foot of a master.
He watched a rusty, old Honda Civic creep into the lot. A young man waddled out the door and opened the trunk. He withdrew a long, narrow instrument from a hard case, mounted it on a tripod, and aimed it at the EverSafe Solutions building.
Arjun thought at first the visitor was a surveyor. But then he noticed the man’s pants, sagging below his waist, hugging his abdomen. He tapped the number of his most recent incoming call.
“Hello?” a voice whispered.
“I see a Bobby, maybe your Bobby.”
“Bobby? Here?”
“I thought he had a gun, but it is just a telescope.”
“What? What is he doing?”
“I presume he is taking his measure of you.”
“I told you he was stalking me! Oh my God, he is obsessed with me. He can’t stop thinking about me.”
“No doubt.”
“Can you tell him to leave?”
“No, I cannot.”
“Well, can you call the police? He is stalking me!”
“I don’t know what he is doing.”
“Oh my God, Arjun!”
Arjun hung up. He wandered across the lot, in the young man’s peripheral vision, and lingered in the adjacent parking space.
“Excuse me,” he said. “Are you hungry?”
“What? No.”
“May I ask what you are doing?”
“No.”
“Why are you on this lot?”
“She is cheating on me,” Bobby said.
“Candy would not cheat in open view of an office window.”
“She would!”
“I think she would at least go to a supply closet.”
“Agh!” Bobby wailed.
Arjun walked back to his truck and called Candy. “I talked to your Bobby. He is bereft, miserable, a shell of a Bobby. But you will be fine.”
Candy hung up.
Arjun returned to his paperback, but his concentration was broken by shouts. Across the corporate campus, he spied a woman sprinting across the manicured median, her long hair whipping in the breeze, her purse bouncing off her knees as she hurdled the curb. Her face was contorted in anger, or exuberance, or perhaps a capitulation to carnal need.
“Baby!” Candy wailed.
“Baby!” Bobby screamed.
Candy leaped into Bobby’s arms, nearly knocking him to the pavement. He swung her around like a lasso, straightening her out in midair, and pulled her body close to his. He kissed her eyelids, stroked her hair, and locked his hands at the small of her back, whispering words that seemed to calm her.
Arjun wondered if someone deep in the cosmos was watching, eating popcorn and rooting for the plucky, dysfunctional couple. The film was no Oscar contender, but he knew it was the formulaic fare, the grist, that resonated.
