The Visitor by Michael Don
"My parents and brother and aunts and cousins and sometimes even my uncles inquire why I choose to live alone in a college town in the middle of nowhere? We’re coastal people. Cosmopolitan people."
Here’s a little peek behind the scenes: How I often read submissions is in batches here and there, whenever I have some “free time.” I like to read the first page or two or three and see if it grabs me. See if it makes me want to read more. If it does, I mark it maybe. At some point, I’ll print out a bunch of those maybes at work (don’t tell my office manager). These days, so many years post snail mail submissions and SASEs and all of that, most people don’t even include their name on their submissions, but when they do, I delete it. So then, during some future “free time,” I read batches of printed out submissions, away from screens and other distractions. It’s nice. I love reading stories. I love reading them even when most of those maybes turn into nos, but then the real treat of editing and publishing a journal is when you read a submission and fall in love with it and get to share it for others to love, too.
Anyway. What all that means is sometimes, like in the case of today’s story, I read a printed out story and absolutely fall in love with it and excitedly go get my laptop and login to Submittable to send the author an acceptance… and find out the story is by a friend! Mike and I went to grad school many many years ago. I was a fan of both him and his writing then, and am so excited to get to publish this story and make some of you fans of his too.
There is so much to recommend here in this story — every sentence feels like a delight! — but the way it captures the oddness and delight, the sameness but also unique joys, the magic of a small midwest town makes everything about the story feel both surprising and incredibly familiar. Enjoy!
—Aaron Burch
The doorbell rings. Probably the missionaries. They’re not so bad. Just teenagers. Maybe early twenties. Put up at La Quinta out on the strip next to Best Buy and Target and Verizon and Chipotle and David’s Bridal and Pier One and Staples and Lowe’s and Honey Baked Ham and the others. Flown in from Utah? Colorado? Nevada? They’re white as can be, hair short as can be, faces smooth as can be, shirts as tucked in as can be, but they’re not hurting anyone. Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway: there are bigger threats to our society. Actually, I’ve been impressed by the young Mormons’ composure and ability to stay on message in response to my not-so-neighborly questions. I don’t know if it’s legal for them to frolic up my driveway and stand on my doorstep and touch my knocker and then touch my doorbell—I haven’t felt the need to look into it—but even if they are breaking a law, greater injustices have occurred. And who doesn’t break the law here and there?
I take a gulp of coffee, wipe my mouth with my wrist, and make sure my fly is buttoned. Button flies are a nightmare. But I love these pink corduroy shorts with the button fly; I’m telling you, they turn heads. And I guess it’s still funny for men to wear pink because these shorts garner many questions, or not really questions but comments phrased as questions, such as: “What color are your shorts.” I also happen to be the type of person to whom people feel comfortable commenting on my appearance. It’s as if I give off so much confidence that I couldn’t possibly be offended. Little do they know, my interior doesn’t match my exterior. Even my doctor scanned me up and down and said, “Has anyone ever told you you’re an interesting looking human being?” as he finished up my most recent physical, which I passed with flying colors except for the eleven drinks I admitted to consuming a week, which he noted was not reckless but a touch excessive. The doctor’s visit opens up a whole other can of beans that I’m not in the mood to delve into today because I’m super busy in my home office doing very legal things for my boss, whom I’ve never met in the flesh, that do not come with questionable ethics. And I’m trying to figure out why the internet—the one entity I need to do my job—has been down for an entire hour, which is a world record of the personal variety. Or a PR, a personal record, as Gloria likes to say. She’s a marathoner and a CPA. Truly has her shit together. Feels at home here with her aunt and cousin in town. And it’s a much better town than the town a few towns over, the town she grew up in. I happen to be the only Jew with whom she’s ever shared a meal, which only feels significant when I stop to think about it. Gloria loves giving me tax advice and I love buying her fun domain names. We joke that we’re a golden match of the nonpermanent variety, both of us having committed to no religion and no unprotected sex.
The doorbell ringer is not a Mormon kid, not even close. This kid at the door is a man and though he is also white as can be, life has clearly kicked him in the teeth a few times because upon first glance he’s approaching 50, but when you really look at him you realize he’s probably still in his thirties. His belly protrudes, parted, thinning brown hair, forehead creases, a frown even though he’s smiling. Probably wasn’t a bad looking guy ten years ago. He wears a black Comcast polo tucked into khakis and holds an iPad.
“Sup, man?” I say, holding the door open a foot.
“Hello, good morning. Samuel Goodman?” he reads from his iPad.
“Barry,” I correct him. I go by my middle name. “Come on in. My modem’s just down the hall.”
“Sorry for any confusion, sir,” he says, waving off my offer to enter. “I’m just making the rounds, giving gratitude to our loyal customers. It’s customer appreciation week.” He turns to cover up a yawn as if yawning on duty is against company policy.
“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call myself a loyal customer. If you didn’t have such a fricken monopoly here, I’d be more than happy to change providers.”
“We appreciate that feedback, Mr. Goodman. Regardless, we know you have a choice and we do appreciate your business.”
“Matt,” I say, scanning his nametag, which reads: Matthew P. “Would you mind if we go off script for just a second?”
“As a valued customer, I’d be happy to assist you in any way I can.” He turns again to yawn. “Apologies, new dad here.”
“Can I just ask you to be honest with me for one second? And hey, congrats on the baby.”
He thinks for a second then powers off his iPad, tucks it under his arm, and nods. All of a sudden he looks his age, but also looks like his eyes might power off and he might just curl up on my doorstep like Hydrox, the friendliest of our neighborhood cats.
“What exactly is the internet? I say. “I mean, what is it physically? Is it a series of tubes underground? Can sharks bite it and shut it down? Does it occupy a physical space? Can it grow like a tree? I rely on it like I rely on my heart, but I couldn’t even draw an abstract picture of it. At least with the heart, I’ve seen diagrams, have a generic image in my head.”
“I wish I knew,” Matt says, exhaling. “But what I can tell you is that you qualify for Xfinity Trisplosion.”
I shake my head and tell Matt that I’m all set and need to go call Comcast.
“Good luck,” he says. “Here’s the Trisplosion deal in case you change your mind.” He hands me a glossy flier that feels nice to rub by thumb over.
The internet goes in and out for the rest of the day and then I meet Gloria for barbeque and beer and sexual intercourse. Each of these activities on its own is quite enjoyable, but I wake up in the morning sober and empty.
The next day the internet is in and out, in and out, in and out. I chat with Aphrodite, then Kunal, then Padma. All three agents go through the same script. After each chat the internet gets better, but as soon as I get some momentum, the internet goes put put put and I shout fuck fuck fuck, pounding my fist against the wall.
I do a lap around the neighborhood. Except for the squirrels and birds, it’s practically lifeless and even the squirrels and birds are low-energy squirrels and birds. I live about two miles from the university, so it’s a mix of post docs and grad students and dropout grad students and the local NPR folks and librarians and retired librarians and a few other randos. It’s safe to assume these folks are, at a minimum, mildly depressed.
I tilt my head back so that I’m looking at the sky to see if I can keep from looking at my phone. This is a little game I started playing with myself after dropping out of my PhD program. I’m able to do it for a block before I reach for my phone and hold it above me, blocking my view of the sky. My head cocked back, I read a text from Gloria, “Bowling tonight?” I walk and text and wave hello at the occasional car that creeps by—it’s an unwritten rule of the neighborhood that drivers and pedestrians must acknowledge each other with a friendly hand gesture.
My parents and brother and aunts and cousins and sometimes even my uncles inquire why I choose to live alone in a college town in the middle of nowhere? We’re coastal people. Cosmopolitan people. Family-oriented people. Jewish people. A college-educated, thirty-five-year-old without a steady significant other, without a decent bagel within two hours, without a single family member or childhood friend within five-hundred miles, is inexplicable. Is he depressed? Psychotic? Monastic? Isolation is not good for one’s health, says the therapist aunt. Might he blow his lid one day? He must be gay: why doesn’t he just come out?! What about his old college girlfriend? What was her name: Carly? Cara? Kayla? Stephanie? I laugh at what I imagine them to be saying about me. What they seem to forget is that I came here for a PhD, and though the attempted PhD did result in a master’s, it’s not so easy to turn a master’s into what my family would consider a brag-worthy career.
*
The Mormons come by. Thank god for the Mormons. Seriously, they’re just doing their job. Good kids. Different worldviews. No big deal. So they interrupt me from doing the not-so questionable things I’m doing, which if you must know: I work in the world of domain real estate. Allow me to leave it at that. But if you must know more, I work in the world of burgeoning celebrity domain real estate. Athletes, actors, comedians, Youtube stars, you name it. Up and coming with a unique name and no official website, cha-ching, baby, cha-ching! This is what a master’s in psychology gets you. My family thinks I’m working for a startup tech company that will soon hit it big and make everyone proud. I spend most of my work hours cruising the webs, looking for future studs and studistas and studtranstas. It’s as fulfilling as any work could be.
It’s two Mormons per usual, though today one is a young lady in a long beige dress. The young man is in khakis per usual. Per usual they smile wide and stand up straight and ask me if I’d like some literature.
“No thanks,” I say per usual, “but would you mind telling me what you know about Judaism. My family is Jewish and I want to learn more about the religion, but I really don’t want to read anything. I’m going back to Jersey next week for a cousin’s wedding and I want to be able to connect on a higher level. I’m the black sheep.”
The young woman blushes and defers to the young man. The young man defers to the woman. For the first time ever I have silenced the Mormons and it happens to be the one time I’m in the market for a real conversation.
“We wish you the best of luck,” the young man says, and the young woman hands me their pamphlet, which I decide to take because my hands are feeling fidgety and I’d rather hold something than not hold something.
“Wait,” I say and they turn back, smiling. “Is your internet working at your hotel?” They shrug to suggest they don’t know and then skip along to the German physicist post-doc’s house.
Inside I look at the Mormon’s pamphlet and realize these Mormon’s are Jehova’s Witnesses. For a second I let myself feel embarrassed.
*
The wedding wouldn’t feel all that Jewish, it would just feel like a wedding, if it weren’t for Gloria’s questions: Why did he step on that glass? Isn’t she getting dizzy doing all those circles? What does Hava Nagila mean? I can’t answer any of her questions with any amount of confidence, which is a damn shame. All those years of Hebrew School and either they didn’t teach us anything or I was too enraged by the injustice of being locked up after school at another school to learn anything. What I can tell Gloria is that my family is so curious about her because they haven’t met a significant other of mine in fifteen years. “Fifteen years?” She says, cracking her knuckles, insisting I must have made a subtraction error. After the wedding, we share a good naked laugh over this improbable truth in our hotel room. Then I ask her who the last guy was she introduced to her parents. “That wasn’t a thing for us,” she says, turning away from me. I apologize for the mind blip, having had forgotten about the rules of her childhood community, and then change the subject to my brother’s dance moves, but for the rest of the night Gloria is distant and quiet.
At the Sunday brunch, I’m interrogated by the cousins. They want to know how far I have to drive to get to an airport, how many tornadoes I’ve seen, if there is a synagogue in my area. Even though the answers are eight minutes, zero, and yes, they look at me amazed, like they just don’t get how I could survive there, as if I were dropped into a country whose language I didn’t speak. Gloria tells them we have great music and barbeque and breweries in town and invites them out to visit. One of the cousins says, “Definitely, definitely,” and another says she goes through O’Hare all the time on business.
*
At the bowling alley, after picking up a nice spare, Gloria jokes that she would start going to church again if she found the right community. Maybe the Unitarians. “It turns out adulthood can start to drag, directionless,” she says.
I laugh and then stick my fingers in a pink ball that’s much too light for me.
Even though Gloria has taken an oath of atheism, her childhood much more eventful than mine, the joke must get to me because I throw the pink ball in the gutter.
I’m just about to click for the best purchase of my career—a young comedian who I find on Youtube who does the most hilarious/devastating bit on finding out his cat has another family—when the internet is nowhere to be found. This time I can’t contain myself and my fist goes right through the wall. Inside the wall, my hand brushes against something moist and prickly.
I look at the hole and think back to a night out on the town when I called across the restaurant at a waiter who I felt was intentionally ignoring us.
“It’s my facial features,” I told Gloria. “They’re too Semitic for these parts.”
“They’re just super busy,” she said. “Look at that line at the door.” And then upon noticing my clenched jaw, Gloria stated as if it had been scientifically proven: “This is why men don’t live as long as women. They spend so much time being angry.”
“I thought it was war.”
“These things can’t be separated.”
I shook my fist cartoonishly to mockingly support Gloria’s theory, but my jaw was already clenched, my shoulders hunched, and I wasn’t really breathing. The joke was on me.
I laugh at the memory because I was acting like a jerk-idiot and the waiter was probably in his first week and simply overwhelmed.
I try refreshing the internet, but I only get a cryptic error message:
You are receiving this error message because you have loaded a high volume of questionable pages. Find the internet (not the modem/router) in your unit and feed it whole milk. If need be, call the fire department. Contact your internet provider if you feel you have received this error message in error.
I screen shot the error message and call up Comcast. After shouting, “Agent! Person! Agent! Real fucking person!” into the phone for about 90 seconds, I’m connected with Moha. Moha assures me Comcast has nothing to do with this error message, though he admits it’s strange, and that I’m welcome to contact Google since it’s their browser producing the message. He will send out a 5-star-rated technician to fix my internet.
“One last thing,” I say. “Has anyone else reported this message?”
“I can’t say,” Moha says. “I can tell you there’s always weird stuff with hackers these days, but I can’t share specific customer information with you.”
“Figures,” I say, and then I stay on for the survey and give Moha five stars.
I get a text message notifying me that the technician will arrive between 2 and 4pm. It’s only 1pm and there’s nothing to do in the house without internet. I get in my car and drive out to the strip.
Out on the strip, my stomach reminds me that I haven’t eaten anything in hours, so I pull into Five Guys. I sit at a table looking out at La Quinta. I scarf down a burger and still have time to kill. I head over to La Quinta and walk right by the 20-something on her phone at the front desk. I take the stairs up to the fourth floor. The hallway carpet is musty, and the fluorescent lighting is bright, but the place is not as depressing as I imagined it would be.
I go door to door knocking. The hotel must be empty because no one comes to the door on the fourth floor. On the third floor, room 303, the door swings open. I’m half expecting the Mormons, half expecting a mob boss. Assuming it’s the Mormons, I’ll show them the error message on my phone and see what they make of it. Standing there is an overweight, middle-aged guy in khakis and an oversized polo shirt. He looks as if he’s expecting someone and is unsure if that someone is me. He waits for me to talk first.
“Good afternoon,” I say. “I’m just checking in to see how your stay is going and if I can get you anything?”
He studies my solid gray t-shirt and blue jeans, which turns his face even more confused.
“Perhaps a toothbrush? Eye mask? An extra ice bucket?”
“Why would I need two ice buckets?” the guy says.
I pull out my phone and look at the time, 1:53PM. “Who knows? People are funny. Enjoy your stay!” I say.
I run to my car and speed home.
The Comcast technician has a bushy beard, broad shoulders, and tired blue eyes—just the way I like my technicians. He sighs when he enters the house, and says, “Let’s see what there is to see,” to no one in particular.
He goes down to the basement and doesn’t come back for a while.
“Well,” he says, a little out of breath, his eyes softening like he’s about to deliver bad news. “You renting?”
“Yeah, man,” I say. “The owner’s like eighty-five.” I write monthly checks to Cheryl Paddock but have never seen her face. Can’t even find her on the internet. I imagine her to be a youthful elderly person: speed walking with light weights or a Golden Retriever, flying across the country to attend her grandchildren’s graduations, knowing how to insert emojis on her phone.
“It’s wild down there,” he says.
“Squirrels?”
“Really doubt it.”
The technician’s phone pings and he looks at it, leans in closer to the screen and nearly breaks out in tears. But he’s the kind of guy that would never let himself cry in front of another man, maybe another person.
“I don’t mean to get in your business,” I say, “but all good? All ok?"
“Yeah, yeah,” he says, looking up but not at me. “I just got some unexpected news. Life changing shit, man,” he says.
“Shit, man. I hope it’s not too bad.”
“It’s not bad,” he says, “I caught a break. A big fucking break.”
“Right on, man,” I say, careful not to sound too enthusiastic in the same way I’m careful not to use exclamation marks in text messages with male friends. “Someone must be looking out for you,” I add.
He gathers himself and puts his phone in his pocket, but he continues to grip it as if the good news would be retracted if he retracted his hand from the device that served it to him.
“Your connection is all set for now, but you should holler at your landlord about the basement. Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it.” He shrugs to suggest his job is complete and it’s not his job to care about what happens to me or the small mid-century ranch in which I inhabit.
Out my kitchen window, I watch the technician sit in his van for about ten minutes, every so often blowing his nose or wiping his eyes.
I make a few solid domain purchases; it’s easy to bet on people other than oneself. Then the internet goes down. This time I don’t let myself get mad/frustrated/annoyed. I close my laptop, then close my eyes. I think back to the moment when I told my advisor I was dropping out of the program. She didn’t look surprised or disappointed. Most of the nonexceptional students dropped out and the ones who didn’t were only embarrassing themselves. “There’s a lot you can do with a masters,” she said, “And now you can go anywhere.” I can’t remember what I said to her, but I remember feeling a certain freedom that you don’t feel every day—that special kind of freedom topped with uncertainty and possibility and excitement and fear of finally slipping through the cracks.
I start walking. I go through my neighborhood, cross the busiest road in town with all the fast food, go under the train tracks, and enter campus. I’d managed to avoid stepping foot on campus since dropping out of the program. I pass frat houses and basketball courts, high rise dorms, and coffee shops. Then there’s the Catholic church and across the street is the Hillel. As a grad student, I once ducked into the Hillel to use their bathroom. I reasoned they were my people and thus those were my toilets. I enter the Hillel and am greeted by a young woman behind a laptop wearing the school hoodie. I tell her I have a quick question for the rabbi, but she says Rabbi Greenberg is out visiting a sick member of the community and that I’m welcome to make a meeting through their online portal. I ask her if they’ve had any problems with their internet, and she says not that she knows of, and then adds that their internet is good enough that plenty of students come to Hillel with laptops to do homework. “But maybe it’s just the free coffee,” she laughs, then takes a swig from a paper cup.
On the way out, I notice a shelf with flyers for various events. I take one of each and keep walking. One flyer is for an upcoming Purim celebration. As a child, Purim was one of the most anticipated holidays because of the synagogue’s carnival. The games, the prizes, the hamantaschen, apricot and cherry. Every kid went home with a goldfish. The carnival culminated with a theatrical reenactment of the story of Purim put on by the third graders. Our roles were chosen randomly a few weeks before the performance. Names pulled out of a hat. When it was time to cast Haman, the villain who kills all the Jews because Mordechai refuses to bow down to him, Rebecca Katzman’s name was pulled. Rebecca pouted and cried. I wondered if she was upset because she didn’t want to be a villain or a man. Either way, I didn’t think it was fair how the roles were assigned. We should have had a chance to voice our preference. I went up to the teacher and said I would happily trade with Rebecca. I had pulled the part of a nameless townsperson. At least Haman was interesting. But the teacher gave me a disturbed look that said, Why in God’s name would you volunteer to be Haman? What is wrong with you? I fold up the flyer, shove it in my pocket and walk home, scrolling through the Rebecca Katzmans of the internet along the way.
When I get back to my street there is a quiet commotion. A firetruck, two police cars, the Mormons, and many of the neighbors are crowded around my house in near silence. The neighbors have their phones out. The firefighters and police gesture to each other. Before I can decide what to tell the authorities, what not to tell them, a neighbor with whom I’ve only shared a few waves points to me and says, “There he is,” and everyone turns around and looks at me, the renter of the most nondescript house on the block, which is now wrapped in a glistening metallic vine, growing up and reaching for a daytime moon.
STORY:
Michael Don is the author of the story collection Partners and Strangers (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2019). His work has appeared in journals such as Baltimore Review, Pithead Chapel, The Southampton Review, and the Brooklyn Review. He teaches at George Mason University, co-organizes the Fox City Lit reading series, and co edits Kikwetu: A Journal of East African Literature.
*
ART:
Zoë Petersen is an illustrator from the Desert Southwest. She loves to knit and believes there is power in the term "grandma craft." Until Craft Grandmother can be her official title, she'll keep making pictures for stories.
Next Tuesday, we’ll feature a bonus interview with Michael about this story!