THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: RETIRED

In my retirement, I read books all day. When I’m not reading, I play word-search puzzles. I have stacks of those flimsy, cheap, books, covered in red and blue ovals, scribbled notes and cartoons, with their puzzles done out; and a Tupperware bin of split-tipped felt markers. On Wednesdays, I fill a sponge with water, put it in the bin and let the pen tips soak. The pens are expensive and my…savings…does not go very far beyond the basics.

Okay, so, there’s a downside.

When I can't do that, I take notes (in pencil, they're always changing) or I go back and revise my notes. 

Every week I buy soap. I buy snacks. When I can, I buy a new pen. Old friends take care of the books and the puzzles (but of course, there are never enough despite my letters). All in all, compared to my work, retirement is a dream. It’s everything I imagined it might be. Disconnected and ruminative. Lonely and cozy. Regimented and lost at the same time…

I retired eleven years ago. It was very deliberate. I mean, I knew I was retiring (even if everyone else didn’t) and it had been a long time coming. The place I worked was a bland smear of a grey industrial building, sunk like chip plugged into a board in the hills of Maryland, humming along with a million other deniable companies like it. The people there were like versions of the same person struck off a half-dozen different variations. All slightly overweight. All with thin or balding hair. Almost all with glasses. I suppose I was one of them once. But something had gone off the track. At 47, a decade or so before the switch should fire, mine had gone off — retire, my mind had told me one morning, and then had struck that chord again and again and again. The voice was implacable, and haunted my every thought.

No one noticed, it wasn’t that kind of workplace, really.

Where I worked, all you ever did was sit and look at data. Intercepts. All day, everyday. I was good at my job; an expert, and people deferred to my knowledge. It wasn’t that the job was uninteresting or without merit, it was just that I had moved past the need for it. The job and me, we no longer connected. I felt detached, and ready to go, like a scab ready to drop off and reveal something new.

When I say my retirement was deliberate, I mean it was something I prepared carefully for. I wanted it all to go down perfectly. I needed to know where and when I would make the announcement, who would be there, what I might say. I worked it out all in my mind over the course of a few months.

I worked so hard on it, that every year, on the day I retired, I step through it in my mind. I replay it. But nothing compares to the thrill of the moment when I tendered my resignation to my boss. It’s a diamond of a memory. Something that glitters in the dark. Something beautiful I can’t put down.

It was a Wednesday (in the days before I soaked my pens) when I went to talk to my boss. His office overlooked a lawn that said so many things. It spoke of fertilizer and gasoline and hours of raking. The patterns of the lawnmower divided the green into squares, and the lone tree out there didn’t play any games. It just went up, straight from the earth and spread out to the sky like the upturned hand of a burned corpse.

On the desk (and I remember this all so clearly) were two books folded open with their faces down, in the way that Evelyn from collections told us we were never to do: THE WITCH-CULT IN WESTERN EUROPE and LIVRO DE SÃO CIPRIANO (the Sturgess, not the Wilder translation). A yellow legal pad next to it had blue handwriting on it which looked like it had been written by a precocious fifth grader, but which I knew was the handwriting of my boss. It read:

-id not die in 1658 and is in Cleveland at the-

I had my prepared speech. Something grand, and filled with implications and blame and which expressed my lack of agency and complete and utter disengagement from the job at hand. I had it. I had recited it every morning for more than a month in the shower. It was there, behind my teeth, waiting.

But in the room it just all felt too big and pointless to say, so I shot him in the face instead.