Smile at Zero

It is 10:34 a.m. on a Tuesday. I am now 18 minutes late for work and counting. There is a small but noticeable coffee stain on my favorite blue shirt. A nasty purple bruise has formed on my left hand from where I slammed it in the car door earlier. I have been conscious for exactly four hours and forty-eight minutes. I look up and see a twelve floating in sickly yellow light half a foot above my head. Already the mistakes are piling up. I am dying. 

As I walk into the building the elevator is shutting. Trills of anxiety run up my spine at the sight so I make a mad dash for it. I have been plagued, among other things, with an absence of coordination since birth so I wasn’t surprised when maybe five inches from the doors I stumbled. The first thing I notice is the hollow bang as I  ram my face into the sliding door. Shame dulls the burning pain in my jaw only slightly. I refuse to look up. I know what it says. Internally I feel screams rattle inside me. Eleven. My impact with the elevator did stop the door from closing. Luckily there was no one in the lobby to see that mistake. Unfortunately, as I slipped inside there was a woman already present. She was pressing herself into one of the back corners as much as possible playing that game of trying to show me she was uncomfortable with her body language but not trying to be so open with it to possibly offend me.

It is entirely possible that she did not personally see my failure but it is a foregone conclusion that she surely heard it. I tried to ignore this fact as I moved inside. The next thing that happens is the thing they tell you not to do as a child because it’s deemed rude. We stare at each other’s numbers. Immediately, we both gain looks of absolute dismay but for very different reasons. 

My eyes gaze upon something so disgustingly bold and hubris that I am almost overcome with the need to vomit. I allow my better nature to suppress it because that would just be another mistake. 28,472. That is what I see above her head in grotesquely dazzling blue lights. 28,472 successes. How!? It must be a lie or some trick. It’s downright violence against me. It’s impossible to be that good at existence but I can tell by the way she stands that it's true. She stands like she’s full of life.

I want to cry and she looks like she wants to do the same. She sees someone terminal. Beyond hope and worth only brief condolences. Eleven. That is what she sees above my head. Eleven more failures before my death. Her look of pity is just another reminder of my almost-scheduled demise. I don’t need it. I make a quick turn and press the button for my floor. My mind is still focused on 28,472 so I am not cautious of my finger. It lands on number fourteen. I work at fifteen.

I must be suicidal. That must be it. I’m actively plotting my own death. The panicked shriek from the woman behind me almost sends me over the edge. I don’t know what edge but I’m perilously close to it. For a moment, my lungs refuse to work and the world goes dizzy. The elevator ascends.

When I was six I saw a man fall and die. He didn’t jump off a building or anything he just tripped on the sidewalk and that was it. He was at one and by the time he hit the ground, he was at zero. A misplacement of feet stole that man's soul. Killed him in front of me. He was scared. I was scared and I haven’t stopped being scared since. I remember my parents told me that I shouldn’t worry. All I had to do was live a good life full of accomplishments. Successes would buy me more failures. I tried but failure builds like a tide and beats down any structure of victory. 

When the elevator opened on floor ten, the woman was quick to get out. She took extra precautions not to touch me. It is natural to avoid the sick and dying. Of the two I am surely of the latter. With extreme focus, I pressed the button for floor fifteen and waited. During the wait, a game plan was formed. I would achieve exceptionalism. I would be both a paragon of an employee and also of a human. It was the only way to save myself. To avoid drowning in my ocean of mistakes. A new sense of confidence flooded me. I was high on the delirium that only a person pushed to the absolute extremes can experience. I would be a perfect person.

I hit zero by noon. When I got to my desk I discovered that my boss had left me a list of tasks to do today. Things quickly became catastrophic from there. I hit nine when I put in the wrong password for my computer. Eight when I forwarded the email about acquisitions to Kelly with a y instead of Kelli with an i. I dropped to three when I emailed Russel in accounting about when my next paycheck would be. Turns out I’m the type of idiot who makes five grammar mistakes in a two-paragraph email. After that, I retreated to the break room and stared at someone’s two-week-old birthday cake in the fridge for half an hour. 

At this point, I’m running a cost analysis of my life. An inner dialogue took place between the many fractured pieces of my psyche. An official debate between fear, paranoia, anxiety, and pragmatism.

Anxiety queries, “Should I stay for the rest of the day?” 

Paranoia purposes, “I only have one more task to do but I’m technically not supposed to leave work until five o’clock. I could get fired for leaving but I might be worth the risk.”

Fear responds, “It’s safer at home but I have to get there first without making three mistakes. It’s a ten-minute drive from work to home.”

Pragmatism counters, “Although driving is a very technical activity with a lot of room for error. I could walk or run. I’d make it there in forty minutes.”

At once, the man who tripped when I was six flooded my mind so I dismissed the idea. I am hyperventilating now. Struggling just to breathe. To live. Like most debates, I am left with horrifying dread and no closer to an answer. I walk out of the break room and make it about four steps out before I remember that I forgot to close the fridge door. Two. I keep walking.

I hear outright gasps and hushed whispers as I make my way to my desk. Someone across the room is already calling an ambulance for my corpse. My master is oblivion and I’m its herald. There is an unopened letter waiting for me when I arrive. The sender is anonymous. With a sort of numb instinct, I read it. It’s just a simple single sentence. “Give us a big smile at zero!” Followed with a crude smiley face. It took me so long just to process the message. My eyes were glued to that dumb smile. Clearly, it was a joke. A morbid, horrible joke directed at my rapidly slipping grasp on life. I should have been angry. I should have been swallowed within the deepest chasm of despair. I should have been something but I wasn’t. Maybe the whole situation caused me to snap and spiral into insanity. I interrupted the message as advice.

My eyes lazily moved to a stack of papers resting on the edge of my desk. It was a memo I was supposed to hand to my boss. Without caution, I went to grab it and knocked down a pen. One. There was no shock. There was no sinking feeling within me. I did not react, it did not matter anymore. I secured the papers and went searching for my boss.

I found him talking to the person who had called the ambulance earlier. 556 floated above his head. He had a grim face on but that twisted into something mimicking surprise and a little bit of fear when he noticed my approach. For the first time that day, I smiled. It was a wide smile too, teeth, gums, and everything. I think that scarred my boss even more. He couldn’t understand why I looked so happy. But why shouldn’t I be? Soon there would be no more counter, no more mistakes, and no more fear. With uncharacteristic confidence and steady hands, I handed the papers to my boss. Boldly and loudly I said, “Here, you go Dad.” We all watched as the one turned into a horrific bloody red zero. All the while I never dropped my smile. I thought about this moment a lot and I expected many different things. I expected a blinding pain that would bring me to the ground. I expected immediate darkness. But none of that happened. Nothing happened. And therein lies the final trick of nonexistence. We expect there to be something. How could we not? For all of life, there has been something after, something to anticipate. There is no anticipation in death because there is no after.

The end comes like a television turning off in the middle of a performance. It exists as a ball inches from the goal frozen in the air. It exists as table clothing being pulled from out under a tower of champagne glasses. I will never see its conclusion. In my perspective, forever I exist in the moment of my death. My heart seized in stasis, refusing to pump blood to my brain and other organs. Without fresh oxygen they start to wither and rot but never truly die, just dying. 

The advice I received from my anonymous benefactor was truly worthwhile. In my forever moment of dying, I am free of both the consequences and burdens of my mistakes. Here I get to constantly show my joy because there are no more mistakes to make. I smile eternally at zero.