03.09.07
Alice’s Birthday
This was inspired by a friend’s birthday in 2006. I wrote it for her, though I don’t know if she ever read it. Other people have, and the general opinion of it seems to be “That’s really fucked up.”
Have fun.
“Mommy?”
“Mommy, wake up.”
“Mommy!” The girl climbed up on the bed and started shaking the lump under the covers. “Mommy, you have to wake up!”
The lump said something unintelligible. The little girl kept shaking. Louder, this time, and clear enough to be understood. More or less. “‘m ‘wake.”
Awake now, Alice sat up and blinked at her daughter, her eyes red and sticky. “I’m awake,” she repeated. “Sorry, baby. I didn’t sleep well last night.”
“It’s your birthday, isn’t it?” the girl asked, her eyes wide.
“Yeah,” Alice said. The invitation was on the night stand, next to the alarm clock. She tucked a strand of her daughter’s hair behind her ear. “It’s my birthday.”
“I don’t have to have a birthday yet, do I?”
“No, sweetie, you don’t. Not until you’re twelve. That’s years away.”
“Oh.” The little girl thought about that, her face screwed up in concentration. “How many years?”
“You’re five now?” Alice thought briefly about making the question a lesson, and having her daughter do the arithmetic, but it didn’t seem worth it. Not today. “Seven. Seven years.”
“Are you going to run away?”
The question, and the look that came with it, broke Alice’s heart. She crushed the girl to her in a fierce hug and kissed the top of her head. “No, sweetie. I’m going to go.” There wasn’t enough time, not nearly enough. “You’d better scoot, big girl, or you’ll miss the school bus.”
Alice’s daughter kissed her on the cheek and whispered, “I hope you have a good birthday, mommy.” Then she ran for the door and the stairs beyond it, scooping up a bright pink backpack along the way.
Alice fell back on the bed and stared up at the ceiling, not looking at the card on the night stand next to her. “I hope I do too.”
~
On the train downtown, no one would look at her. They knew, somehow. Maybe it was the way she stared at them, rude and challenging. Whatever it was, they knew, and they acted like she didn’t exist. She was just a random bit of space that couldn’t be walked through.
Alice sighed and rested her forehead on the cool metal of the bar she held on to. She wished that someone, anyone, would look at her. They didn’t have to say anything, just acknowledge that she existed. She wished she didn’t do exactly the same thing whenever she saw someone else on the train who was having a birthday.
~
It took Alice nearly an hour to inch her way through the line to the counter. The young man behind it looked supremely bored, not looking up from his monitor screen when she got to him. “Invitation?” he asked, sounding exactly like he asked the same question several hundred times a day, six days out of every seven. He was pale, and the glow from his monitor made him look like some sort of underwater creature installed in a civil service post.
In a way, it was even worse than the train, Alice thought. Everyone waiting in line here had a birthday today. No one talked to anyone else. If you saw someone you recognized, you pretended you didn’t. When you waited in line at the motor vehicles office for a driver’s permit, at least you had a good reason.
At the census bureau, everyone was there for their birthday, and wished they weren’t.
Wordless, Alice slid the card across the counter. The young man fitted it into a slot in his terminal, waited for a moment for his monitor to refresh. “Look here please,” he told Alice, tapping the iris-pattern scanner on its flexible arm. The politeness didn’t mean anything. Not here. Not today. Not ever. Alice tried not to shiver as the soft rubber fitted itself to her right eye socket, intimate and invasive. The flash of the device left her blinking and temporarily blind.
“Room eight twenty-seven,” said the young man. He looked at Alice, handing her a brightly colored paper hat with an elastic to go under her chin. His eyes looked directly at hers, and she couldn’t see anything in them, not even her own reflection. He smiled, and his eyes never changed a bit. “Happy birthday, miss.”
Alice stared for a moment, took the hat, and left for the elevator banks. The bright cones of the party hats stood out, cancerous in fluorescent light against grayish skin and grayish clothes and nicotine-yellowed institutional paint on the walls.
An elevator arrived and released its cargo. Alice made herself look, made herself see them. One woman had a stain on her blouse, a smear of chocolate, and the look of someone who’d just had a birthday party. It was too much, too raw, and Alice retreated, filing into the elevator and watching the changing lights of the floor indicator, just like everyone else.
Room eight twenty-seven was just like any other birthday party room. The center was well-lit and the edges shadowed, not quite hiding the figures in black that leaned against the walls. There was a round table, twelve chairs, twelve plates, twelve glasses, twelve forks, twelve helium balloons each tied to a chair with a thin ribbon. Alice and the eleven others who shared her birthday found their seats and did not look at each other. Some years, she knew one or two of the people at her table. This year they were all strangers. All, like Alice, were thirty-four today.
After enough birthday parties, everyone was a stranger.
When they’d settled, the figures in black started to move, placing a single piece of cake in front of each person, filling each glass with milk. It was chocolate, three-layered with buttercream frosting and a rose done in white icing. Each slice the same size, each with a single lit candle. The cake was always chocolate. I don’t like chocolate drifted through Alice’s mind and failed to connect to anything.
In unison, the birthday boys and girls blew out their candles and began to eat their cake. It was moist, sweet, and might as well have been wet concrete the way it stuck in Alice’s throat.
You always knew when it happened, when the person who had the bean in his or her slice bit down on it. When Alice was younger, sometimes that they would try to get up from their chair, try to run. No one her age did any more. Most just froze, looking terrified. Some cried. Some prayed. One woman had looked relieved, whispering, “Finally.”
It was over in just a few seconds. Two of the shadowed black figures grabbed the woman who’d bitten into the bean. Another put a black bag over her head and pushed her down to the table. He – or she – or it – drew a pistol and shot her in the head. The double explosion of the unmuffled pistol was very, very loud in the small room and made Alice’s ears hum with a pure piercing tone. She knew that later, her daughter would ask if she had a good birthday, and she had no idea what she’d tell her.
The dead woman’s blood was already soaking into the white tablecloth as the survivors began to sing. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you…”