Not So Bad

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By Fathi Afifi

We couldn’t help it. It was too boring. We ran away from the business meeting.

Or maybe we ran away from obligation. From our responsibilities. From the drone of the executive manager’s monotone voice, the snarling lines of the vivid charts and graphs, the blinding light of the presentation projection that outlined how the economy was heading down and then further down and then further down still. We grabbed our coats—Joseph and I—and we scuttled out the door like two lean blue crabs; sideways, so that our heads were still facing the speaker while our legs inched to the door, so that they wouldn’t notice. They did.

We walked pretty fast down the street, ignoring the taxis and the buses and the little old ladies selling roasted chestnuts on the street-corners. We walked until the air cleared our heads and the pavement grew firm again beneath our wavering steps. Joseph had snatched his newspaper with him on the way out, and he rattled it fiercely now in his hand, as if he could throttle the bad news just like that, just like so. He couldn’t.

We walked until we came into a lumberyard, and the workers were drifting away for a lunch break, all of them tired-looking and hungry, their eyes sparkling with pleasure as they extracted sandwiches or hard-boiled eggs from their pockets. Joseph and I breezed past them, finally stopping to catch our breath behind one of the wood piles. We sat there and wondered how the world would end, when we would be fired, when we’d lose all the money in the bank, when our wives would divorce us and our kids would grow up and leave us.

“You’re the most pessimistic person in the planet,” Joseph told me, as if he could read my thoughts on the lines of my face. He spread out his newspaper in his lap, smoothed it. “It could always get worse,” he added. “Look. Earthquakes in Japan. Floods in New Zealand. This lady gave birth to a double-headed baby in Switzerland.”

I made to grab the paper. “She did?” I gaped.

Joseph smiled. “No, but wouldn’t it be worse if she did?”

I closed my eyes and envisioned myself throttling all of the optimism out of him, like he throttled that newspaper before. And then I stopped, and listened to him sigh. His sigh rattled the paper. It didn’t change the news. But it changed my envisioning. I opened my eyes, looked at his lean, lined face.

“You’re right,” I said. It would.

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