Briarpatch by Tim Pratt Read Free Page B

lifetime of slips and falls having broken his confidence. He would swing first one leg over the rail, then the other, keeping his grip on the rail with his hands. He would turn to face the bay. A deep breath, because a moment like that, a no-turning-back moment, deserved a breath of contemplation. Then he’d release the rail, step forward, and fall, straight as a plumb bob, and dash himself to death on the water below.
    Orville wondered if any of the tourists on the bridge would notice him climbing over the rail, if anyone would try to stop him, pull him back from the brink, convince him life was worth living. If so, it would be a first. There were days when Orville looked back almost nostalgically on his junior high days, when he’d been picked on mercilessly, because at least then he’d been part of a social order—he’d had a place. As an adult, he didn’t even warrant much in the way of ridicule.
    Orville climbed over the railing, careful, careful, because the way you did things
mattered
, and he wanted a proper death, exactly the death he’d chosen.
    It was windy on the bridge, fogless, and there were a few boats sailing out on the bay. What would it be like, he wondered, to have the sort of life where you owned a sailboat, with so few cares that you could take advantage of a clear morning to go out on the water? Orville would never have that sort of life, even if he didn’t kill himself. Orville was a telemarketer—or had been until yesterday, when he walked out of the job—working from a warehouse in Oakland in an echoing space with dozens of other dead-end men and women, selling newspapers, magazine subscriptions, dietary supplements, or whatever else the script indicated. Orville received plenty of hang-ups, of course, and profanity, and he mumbled through his scripts by rote, feeling his soul atrophy a little more with each day. It barely bothered him, anymore—at work, Orville was a talking zombie.
    But yesterday, his last conversation had been different. The computer dialled, someone picked up, Orville asked “Is this Mr. Ismael Plenty?” Upon hearing the affirmative, Orville launched into his spiel. The man at the other end didn’t interrupt, or say anything, until Orville was done, but then he began to speak. There was something strange in his voice: a kind of infinite pity. “Is this your life?” he said. “You make these calls?” He then described his own life: Arctic expeditions, overland caravans, desert nights, tense meals with mortal enemies, fortunes found and squandered, lovers, wine, wonder. Orville listened, rapt, the man’s voice a low enchantment. And the man said, “My friend Harczos used to say that a small life is worse than no life at all, because a small life commits the singular sin of squandering potential. I have lived, and now, I am ready to die. But you have not lived, and by the sound of your voice, by the rustle of your breath in the receiver, by a dozen tiny tells, I’m sure you never
will
live. And so, I feel compelled to ask: Why do you bother? Why don’t you just kill yourself?”
    Orville’s mouth was dry. “I don’t know.”
    “Come meet me for lunch,” the man said, and named a restaurant within walking distance of the warehouse. “We’ll talk it over, and figure out your next step.”
    Orville didn’t intend to go, of course. Only crazy people asked to meet with their telemarketers. Orville didn’t eat at restaurants anyway, because he had no sense of taste or smell—hadn’t since he was a baby, ageusia and anosmia as the result of early head trauma—and so, for him, eating was just taking on fuel, not a pleasure.
    But when his supervisor yelled at him a few minutes later—Orville had let a call go through without reading his script or speaking at all—Orville tore off his headset and rushed out of the room, out of the job, out into the street. The sunlight was dazzling and merciless. Orville went to the restaurant, just a little sandwich place