Visions and Revisions

He says he’ll ruin me. That’s his word: ruin. This guy, this customer with a face consisting mostly of beard matter, he stands by the door on his way out, angling a large pizza box against his hip. He’s yelling that he’s going to tell all his friends not to eat here. Then he actually jabs a pudgy finger skyward and howls, “I’ll ruin you!” And stomps off and slams the door. In the uprush of silence, everyone in the dining room, including a little girl coloring on a placemat, turns to see what I’ll do.

Why’s he going to ruin me? Because I charged him too much for his complicated pizza: a half Veggie Supreme with extra cheese, one-quarter green pesto, and one-quarter bianca with black olives, broccoli, and artichokes. When I told him the price, things escalated before I knew they could. The total, I was about to explain, included materials and labor. The application of the sauce, toppings, and cheese (quarantined into their fractional domains) required exceptional precision. Before I could come up with a normal way of saying that, though, he started in. He ran a business himself, he said, and this was no way to treat customers, and so on.

How will scaring away customers, Scooby-Doo style, ruin me? It won’t. But he thinks I’m the owner. The Deke of Deke’s Pizza. Granted, I’m a paunchy, slouched twenty-six-year-old bald man working among high school students. But I’m not Deke. In fact, there is no Deke. Deke was invented years ago by the real owner because he wanted, in his words, something manlier than Todd’s Pizza.

In that post-slam silence, I don’t give the dining room a second act. I just withdraw. I scuff out back to brood over the stainless steel sink filled with gray water and chopped veggie floaters.

It’d be a good image for a story. Dejected and haunted, our protagonist slouches over the cold, dingy sinkwater and imagines an ocean someplace far from his unremarkable life. The Sargasso Sea maybe. He reaches into the depths, pulls the stopper, and swishes his fist to start a vortex. Everything spirals down. Super symbolic!

I can’t remember the last thing I wrote, though. Whatever it was, it was a while ago—probably at college before I dropped out to pursue a career in pizza. And it wasn’t just the pizza; I had a lot on my plate. There was the freelance vodka consumption and recreational insomnia. And of course there was driving Maggie away via sustained emotional distance. That, just by itself, took a lot of energy.

Now, having been threatened with ruination, I do what fictional me would do. I spin the Sargasso Sea into a sucking maelstrom and imagine how things could’ve been different. I run the scenarios:

1. The Zinger
   I stand up to the beard. I’m unflappable. I coolly dispense some stone-cold snark in which I scoff at the very notion of ruining an already ruined thing. Like I go, “Look, you got me. I overcharged you. But how about a refund? No hard feelings?”
        The moment his guard drops, I deliver the zinger: “Oh, I just remembered: Fuck you, fuck face! That was a complicated pizza! You think we’re just giving away complicated pizzas?” And I drop a version of “good day sir I believe I said good day.”
        That’d learn him. Learn him good.
2. Frenzied Ambush
   Why not fisticuffs? Simply beat the living shit out of him. Even now, it’s not too late to storm out to the parking lot, roundhouse-kick the complicated pizza off his hip, and repeatedly punch his ginormous beard and fleshy cheeks as he screams and sobs and bleeds and slumps into a pulpy mound of stillness.
        Drawback: Such an act would make me the beast, and the pulpy mass on the ground would, by extension, be me. This renders the scenario unseemly and unviable. Possibly illegal. I’d need to call Maggie for bail. If there’s bail. And would she bail?

    

3. Resignation
   There’s always dramatic, message-sending quitting. Rip the soiled apron from my waist, cast it into the Sargasso Sea, walk.
        And do what, exactly? And what “message”? To whom?

    

4. Literary Retribution
   Play the long game. Swallow my need for immediate payback, let it steep in my imagination for two to three decades, and then write revenge fiction that scathingly places blame on that bloated, loud, absurd, petty creature consisting mainly of beard and ego.
        Limiting factor: Implementation requires ignoring the possibility that he’s a human being with his own pain, disappointment, longing, and so on. He’d need to be reduced to a free-floating beard. Which isn’t my thing, clearly.

    

5. Epiphany
   Swallow my need for payback altogether and exact revenge through living well. Meaningfully reflect on my life choices. Beard is not my problem! My problem is that I’m driven and derided by vanity, probably. Or I’m just stuck, is all. Maybe a concrete detail could symbolize an emotional truth? The walk-in freezer maybe. Inside, there’s a glow-in-the-dark escape knob and, under it, a sign with a super significant double meaning: “You are not locked in.”
        Inspiring! In this scenario, I clean up my act. Wean myself off the vodka and cigarettes. Do sit-ups. Think about going back to school. In fact, make a specific, realistic plan do to so! Maybe give Maggie a call. Humble myself, of course. Admit fault. Then vow to be emotionally available. Do better. Do what’s good for me so I can do good unto others.
        Considerations: It was just the emotional distance thing, right? That’s it? Like she hasn’t stopped, you know, feeling those other feelings?
    
6. The Pale Cast of Thought
   Put the ugliness behind me, focus on Maggie. Write a non-vengeful, plaintive story that ends in unavoidable heartbreak. Just start writing. Tonight, while it’s still fresh. In the story, they’d fall in love, this man and this woman who bear no resemblance to me or Maggie. They stay in love even as things fall apart. They’re aware of the new distance but are powerless to change it. Every night, the silence sits between them on the couch. Every night, they wait, each assuming the other’s invited him, each hoping he’ll go away.
        In flashbacks, we see them holding hands on the bleachers at a high school football game. We see them on a cool beach on a starry summer night, talking past curfew. We see them at the movies and, much later, making tacos in their apartment. Near the end, before they admit it’s the end, they go to an amusement park like they used to, but this doesn’t work either. Dark energy inexorably expands the space between them. And every night, the silence takes his usual spot on the couch. The man and the woman say nothing at all.

The rest of my Deke’s Pizza shift drains away, and I head home. I have a screwdriver and cigarette for supper and fall asleep on the couch. But a little after midnight, I snap awake with the first line of a short story in my head: “He says he’ll ruin me.” 

I get my laptop. I write it all in one go. Like Kafka. I use a literary title that alludes to a line from Eliot. Around dawn, I have it. I have something, I mean. Whatever it is, though, it’s an embarrassment—thin, rambling, self-indulgent, lacking any kind of discernible point. Granted, it’s Raymond Carvery, but it’s more like Raymond Carver recovering from a head wound. Like “What We Talk About When We Talk About Whatever We Were Just Talking About.”

Still, I cut myself some slack. It is, after all, a draft. The first one in a long time. And it does have one redeeming scene. In the coda, there’s a quiet moment in which the protagonist almost understands something. Not an epiphany in the Joycean sense, but something new. The man, the one who isn’t me, he’s sitting in the living room as a shaft of sunlight slants in through the front window. The woman, the one who isn’t Maggie, has moved out.

We see flecks of dust swimming through the sunbeam, and the man remembers something from college about sunlight. The photons, born in the heart of the sun, have spent perhaps tens of thousands of years pushing their way through the sun’s churning plasma to finally reach the photosphere and then streak across ninety-three million miles in only eight minutes to his living room. After all that time and all that distance, the photons meet with particles of dust swirling in unpredictable patterns in this column of unspeakably ancient light.

Then, in the story, the phone rings.

Because the story’s set at a time before answering machines and caller ID, the man doesn’t know who’s calling. It could be her. He just doesn’t know. He could find out, of course, if he picked up. But he waits. He lets it ring. As long as the ringing continues, the caller can be considered both her and not her. If he doesn’t answer, that is. If he just holds on, it’s both. The man and the woman can be, without contradiction, both together and not together.

So he closes his eyes, listens to it ring, and does not think of moving.

*“Visions and Revisions” was inspired by the following Reedsy.com prompt: “Start your story with someone vowing to take revenge.”