FOR REMINGTON: “How to Erase My Address from the Map”

  When he shreds the delivery address off the letters, he puts on soft acoustic music and lights a single joss stick that his mother bought him for Christmas. The scent covers the burnt odor coming from the paper shredder, which grows hot with each slip of mail and envelope he feeds into its slotted mouth. Each note was either a coupon from local businesses, spam mail from services that definitely did not exist, the occasional handwritten correspondence from his sister and nephews over eastward, or a fleeting invitation to a coworker’s evening dinner. He refuses to answer anything he receives in the mail.

There is no formal plan for him to move from Salem to anywhere else, or to formally go off the city grid. He is not prepared to produce his own power or raise his own livestock in a rural setting, nor is he exactly ready to leave his position as a mechanical engineer in Portland, which allows for him to sometimes work remotely. While the noise or sights of either location didn’t interest him—the youthful coffee buzz of the Pearl District or the rolling green in the Willamette Valley—he can not think of a single other place in the country he wants to relocate to. Perhaps, like his coworker had said to him once, that he should look into backpacking somewhere out in the hills of Europe.

He shreds another letter that his colleague, Hayden, had written for him on his fortieth birthday. He doesn’t like parties or any sort of social gatherings; he went to one football game in college with distaste, visited bars on Thursday nights with disinterest, and he found gatherings in the office tacky and the food plasticky. The slow melodic guitar from his radio brings him back to focus, and makes him ignore the ringing of his phone.

A few months ago, when he began considering his departure from this house, he set the voicemail to play automatically on his landline, not wanting to be around for when it plays, but wanting to feign having been present to listen to the message. Coworkers approached him with the usual, Did you get my call the other night? And he absently nodded before answering, Yes. A bold-faced lie. The transition from the current song to the next brings him back out of the lull and a voicemail cuts his shredding short. Standing up from the barstool and stretching, he faces the far counter near his spice rack and full sink, where he has the home phone plugged in.

“Nathan,” the voicemail begins, sounding mostly static through the line. “It’s Hayden. I’m sorry to call you, but HR has requested that I try again before there’s any administrative action.”

He rolls his eyes. He has never been on good terms with HR, despite his prolific results with his work.

“Within the next week, we need you to bring back the seventh prototype, as you should have a few days ago. They have some questions pertaining to why you always take this one home. Nathan, the team needs to see the progress on the body.”

He smiles and thinks about how much progress he has made, suppressing the grain of frustration towards his coworkers for not understanding how much he’s done for the seventh prototype. At the office, on an empty metal stand it should have been propped up on, a lone silicone slab sits at the base on two padded prongs, intended to be the skin for its torso. He hates the color of it, as it doesn’t match the tone he wants and knows is correct. Which is why, as devious as this is, he unlocked the chamber they kept the prototype in last Monday and carried it in his car, all the way back to Salem for the hour commute.

“If you have some concerns with our progress, why don’t you email us and organize a conference over the progress of Remington?” the voicemail says after some pause. “I know how much this project means for you to have spearheaded it. We need to work together. Please give us a call or step into the office by this Friday evening.”

The voicemail ends without a pleasurable goodbye.

Nathan stops smiling, becoming sick of the joss stick and the acoustic guitar. He slides over to his radio, slams the power and volume dial with the side of his right fist, and takes to his bedroom upstairs, ignoring the low buzz of the paper shredder behind him.

On a velvety armchair he inherited from his grandmother Sada after her death, one where she seated herself and read stories to him as a child, it sits askew with a blank face, sleepy eyes and a neutral mouth. Wiry sierra springs sprout from the head, serving to look like brown waves, and the once olive and flush skin begins to turn sallow and greyish. Same goes for the torso, where the silicone cover over the chest plate does not match the color of what he had in mind.

With a labored sigh, Nathan approaches it. “Back to Portland tomorrow,” he says.

It barely glances up at him. “I got tired of looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“Something with your name on it,” it says in return, defeat in its voice. “You said I’ve known your name before. Why won’t you just tell me?”

“This is out of love,” Nathan hums, caressing its cold cheek in his palm. “Maybe later, Remington."

It does not recoil from his touch, but instead heavily leans into it, frowning.

“Can I at least sit in the front with you tomorrow,” it says, “and be awake the entire time?”

Nathan nods, not directly looking into its eyes. “Of course.”

“You know, I think I slept for the first time since you’ve taken me home,” it muses, watching as Nathan brushes particles off his silver duvet cover, carefully sitting adjacent to the prototype. The words never reach him, for he focuses all of his attention on the mechanical jitter of Remington’s jaw, and how he would have to fix the creaking from its attempt to pronounce vowels. There is nothing wrong with its voice, boyish and clear and smooth when hushed, but the clicking as accompaniment throws Nathan off.

“You don’t sleep,” he says.

“But it was like I did, without you holding my head.”

Nathan, upon hearing this, reaches over, noting the stretch of his thin sweater against the skin of his shoulder, and cups his right hand beneath Remington’s ear, feeling the cheekbones against his palm. It goes quiet, and for a few hours as he returns downstairs to prepare dinner and continue shredding documents, it’s almost as if Remington takes a nap in the silence.

Acoustic music is reserved for when the shredder comes out, but the car rides from Northeast Salem through Keizer, along the Willamette River, are always backed by radio talk shows. While entertaining company isn’t Nathan’s strong suit, he likes listening to the mindless drawl of water cooler chat, or the frantic whispering going from cubicle to cubicle when something in the office unexpectedly happens. Radio hosts briefly provide him with local news or garish games and contests, and because he’s made the commute in his worn SUV back to the office so many times, he knows which stations to switch to once he goes out of range of the last.

The city seems bleak today. Some of the businesses that Nathan passes are from the advertisements he receives in the mail, with desperate hiring and sudden, rife lease renewal signs. Workers trail out of their stores, the fronts full of broken glass or boarded up doors, flimsy boxes tucked in the crook of their arms, and one watches Nathan make a turn at the intersection where their business once stood. He doesn’t remember so many vendors struggling this much during the last commute to Portland.

For this drive, Remington eyes the dark greys and greens of the passing scenery; it’s typically cloudy, the air sweet and dense, and the undulating conifers on the bluffs stab upwards towards the sky in armies of jade knives. Construction vehicles and workers pack the shoulders of the road, forcing unsuspecting drivers to swing into Nathan’s lane. He stays in the middle lane, allowing people to pass him and urging the other slower cars to creep in behind him. The radio host asks a random female caller a trivia question about the origins of Mount Hood, such as its namesake and founder, before Remington’s clarion voice cuts through.

Nathan jumps, as he usually shuts it off before car rides to work.

“That river,” it begins. “Do you think you’d ever be able to make me waterproof? And I could swim in that river?”

“That’s a tough ask,” he says after deliberation. “You should be talking to an engineer from the future for that one.”

“Well, I exist. This is the future.” There is a flowery undertone in Remington’s voice, almost like a hum, but in words. “And the future holds days where I’m able to swim. As well as the other prototypes. We’ll all swim.”

Nathan bites his lip and frowns, letting his eyes follow the white dashes on the highway. If Remington was allowed to talk more during this car ride, it would ask more and more questions until it found out where the rest of the prototypes were; discarded body parts in the basement storage unit of the office. He isn’t done with any of them yet for good, but they proved useless for the time being. Remington doesn’t need to know that the other ones, which are all supposed to be him regardless, are all sitting as recycled material—and recycled material only. A memory of Hayden, concerned eyes and a slowly shaking head, distracts him from driving and he decreases his speed.

“The water and the trees are pretty. But the cities are all terrible. I wish you’d kept me awake for the ride sooner, so maybe I could see these places before they fell apart.”

“What do you mean?” Nathan asks.

“The buildings—they’re all broken and abandoned. There’s trash in the streets. Are you just ignoring how they look?”

“Maybe you notice it more because you don’t get to see it a lot. Not this part, anyway. You mainly see whatever’s in the valley. I never wake you until after we’re past Gervais.”

“You grew up here, right? Did it always look like this?”

“No.” Nathan doesn’t specify which question he’s answering.

A silence ensues, thick and unpleasant.

“Why do I have to be off when we return to the workplace?” Remington asks, facing Nathan. This makes him uncomfortable, and he looks into the side view mirror and watches the skewed images of cars just beyond his blind spot, or encroaching on it. “Don’t you get lonely?”

“I’m trying to listen to the radio.”

Remington leans forward. “Listen. I’m going to find out everything you’ve been withholding from me. I’ve thought about it for a long time, and I’m not going to be tired of looking through your things forever.”

Nathan doesn’t respond, but instead switches to the left lane and speeds up. The chassis squeaks and groans hitting rumble grooves just shy of a designated construction zone, but the noise doesn’t deter either body in the car. For a minute, the radio show is the only sound filtering through the SUV, with light fans and the din of high wind against the sides of the vehicle to support the noises of the game show.

“How many will be before me? How many are going to be after?”

“You ask so many questions, even though you know I won’t answer,” he sighs. “I’m not telling you my name. You get to know where we are and what you are, and this will satisfy you until everything is done.”

“You’re going to finish my body alone?” Remington challenges. It gestures to the myriad of unfinished plates, hinges, skin-like padding, all sallow or grey and deconstructed, like an unfinished puzzle. “What will everyone say once they see my arms? My legs?”

“I’m doing this out of love,” Nathan blurts, stubbornly gripping the wheel until his knuckles go white. “I told you. This is out of love. It’s going to hurt if you learn why. It’s going to hurt if this ends fast.”

“It already hurts.”

Nathan grimaces, in pain himself.

“Give me a hint. What does your name start with?”

His chest swells and his pulse throbs in his temple. “N.”

“It could be anything,” it says in a low voice. “But that’s good. I felt that it was N, like I knew it in a past life.” Outside, in the rolling green of Willamette that he knew Remington would love, a faraway cloud of charcoal smoke billows, sluggishly worming its way into the sky. He blankly stares at its puffs growing into the ether, and keeps it within his peripheral vision. This is the first commute where he’s seen smoke from a fire. With everything that he witnessed coming out from Salem, he begins reconsidering this drive to Portland, but threats of possible project cancellation keep Nathan in the administration’s grip.

He has to complete it, but he has to do it right.

“Nate,” Remington exclaims.

Nathan jolts in his seat and swerves so hard, he feels its hand grip the wheel as well. They both veer right too, earning honks from the surrounding drivers, and once the chaos settles, they look in the rearview to see everyone rounding his car or staying back farther.

“What was that?” it asks. “Are you okay?”

Tears well in Nathan’s eyes and he releases a series of guttural, choked coughs that escape with his attempts to suppress his cries. “Wrong,” he only says, with gritted teeth.

“That can’t be wrong,” it urges, but with the semblance of guilt forming in its chest, it relents and sits back in the passenger seat, folding its hands wordlessly.

The highway blurs with his tears, and he squints—almost wincing as they trail down his face and drip off his chin. This is a feeling of being utterly and hopelessly pathetic, snivelling in the presence of something he had created. Shame, shock, and stress all coalesce into a weight and slams onto his shoulders, unwieldy and unforgiving.

Remington could very well open the glove compartment and look at the car insurance, if that firm still exists without bankruptcy or staffing shortages or closure. On the slip, it says his full name, expiration dates, and it sits wedged in between other documents he legally could not shred in his home with the world still spinning as it does: Invoices, other insurance files, certificates. With it being turned off, it does not know the car’s interior very well, and perhaps it truly gave up believing that Nathan’s name or address is anywhere but on word of mouth alone. There is no Nathan Ruche in Salem, Oregon; no home in the Northeast corner with its green walls, spice rack, paper shredder. In fact, there is no Salem. There is no Remington. As the world comes to a halt, these two are the first to disappear.

Nathan continues to cry, while Remington looks onward. Instead of avoiding the topic, it thrusts itself right into it. It reaches over to punch the power dial on the radio. “Nate.”

“Before you say anything else,” Nathan interrupts, “know that you cannot call me Nate.”

Remington shrinks in his seat.

He takes a deep breath. “You cannot call me Nate if you don’t love me.”

“What?”

“I’m going to say this one more time: You can’t call me Nate if you don’t love me.”

“So your name is Nate.”

“Wrong. Not to you.”

“But who can call you that?” Remington asks, exasperated. “People who love you? Your mother, father… friends?”

“They’re not here anymore,” Nathan evenly says, but his voice has an edge that borders on quivering, threatening. “No one in Salem or Portland or the entire world calls me Nate.”

“Unless they love you.”

Nathan resumes crying and tries to turn on the radio, but his hand meets Remington’s.

“This is the last question I’ll ask,” it says, watching the tears stream down his skin. “Can I call you Nate?”

“Do you love me?” Nathan demands. It is a harsh, heavy question that it does not immediately answer. Instead, they both take in their lingering hands, fingers brushed up together, and note that all cars are slowing down when the fire gets bigger. It swallows the white and slate clouds above it, blacker than the rest, and it can be pinned somewhere in the vicinity of either Hubbard or Aurora beyond one of the curves of the Willamette River. Traffic tends to slow down once people drive past Lake Oswego, but this nears gridlock, and Nathan finds himself marooned on the highway about half an hour outside of Portland, with Remington’s hand on his.

“Am I supposed to love you?” it answers. “Before the world started to end outside. Before you started stealing me away from the office. Tell me, am I supposed to love you?”

A blend of curiosity and pain colors Remington’s face. When the cars finally come to a stop, Nathan wipes his face with his free hand, leaving the right one on the dial. It is a mixture of emotions he knew so well, down to the exact curvature of the furrowed brows, the stretched lips, the focused eyes. Wearing a blindfold, he would be able to tell which side Remington’s face preferred to slant when it smiled, where the beauty marks were, and the length of Remington’s eyelashes. The prominent angle of the nose from European ancestry. How Remington’s traps look when shrinking in guilt, sheepishness, all consideration and coyness and apprehension.

This one has most of these features, but not all. Hayden would not know about this progress needed for the body; he vaguely knows the hue of the skin, and what reactions to code into Remington’s brain. But where were the memories, the idiosyncrasies, the love?

In nearby cars, the two see craned necks and mouths agape looking at the smoke. A sense of community forms when everyone is stuck in the same situation, a bit helpless and the circumstances a bit absurd in nature. The world literally freezes for Nathan and Remington to look at each other.

“You did love me,” Nathan says with great difficulty. “You loved me.”

“And I called you Nate.”

“You called me Nate.”

Remington thinks for a moment. “What should I call you now?”

The shredding is rendered futile against Remington, but not against the rest of the world. No colleague knows about Nathan’s attempts to delete his name and address off of the map. Little mail receives a response and most go straight into the hungry mouth of the shredder. A sense of fear instills itself within Nathan, now that his wounds are reopened, fresh and alive, festering right inside the run-down SUV where Remington should have been quiet, and where he should have been past Multnomah by now.

“If you knew that my name started with N,” Nathan says, “then why don’t you…?” He shuts his eyes and shakes his head. “Remington. He loved me. And you’re not him, are you? Not enough like him to call me Nate. Not enough like him to know those things.”

It only stares at him in surprise, before smally whispering, “I could love you.”

The black smoke eats more of the sky, and Nathan watches the plumes and ribbons snake upward. “We’ll see once we get back to the office,” he says. “We’ll see."