I stared at the bright green neon sign that blinked at me from the shop window. I was filled in those days with the desire to be anything other than what I was: a dull person with a dull job in a dull place, discontented with everything but with no motivation to change anything. So those words, flashing like a warning, gripped me.
I was working as a copy editor for Nissan at the time. After college I had set out to be a high school English teacher, but I was too rigid, too punctilious to work with students. Instead of broadening their creative horizons, I trapped them in cages of grammar, structure, spelling. I had managed to get through an English degree by rearranging the ideas of others, but really I had an unoriginal mind and felt jealous when one of my students displayed creative potential beyond what I myself possessed. After three awkward years, I left and found the copy-editing job. I spent my days poring over car manuals, fixing grammatical errors and stylistic inconsistencies. It was a stupid, boring job which left my eyes myopic, my mind full of constant static, and my body stiff and hunched.
The only advantage to the work was that I could do it from anywhere. I had never enjoyed the outdoors, not even as a child, but still I had always dreamed of living by the ocean. Upon accepting the job, visions of blue water lapping at the soft sand beaches of Florida or California welled up in my head. I had neither surfing nor tanning aspirations, and in fact had no interest in any ocean-related activities at all. I knew that it would be enough for me just to watch other people frolic and laugh and connect in ways I had never learned how. If I could merely witness that joy, I was certain, everything inside me which was gray would suddenly take on new color.
The dream fell apart quickly. My parents balked at the idea of me living so far from our southern Arkansas hometown, and I found that the salary of a remote copy editor was not nearly as extravagant as the rent of a seaside apartment on either coast. And so, through the combined weight of a lifelong fantasy, my parents’ wishes, and deeply ingrained financial prudence, I ended up in Boussais, Mississippi. It was a town on the Gulf with not much more than a Waffle House, a menhaden processing plant, and the dingy psychic shop in whose window I saw those alluring words: YOU ARE WHAT YOU MAKE YOURSELF.
I kept walking, past the shop, down to the Winn-Dixie, through the aisles, the checkout line, back to my apartment, all the time with those words echoing in my head. I didn’t feel that I had made myself to be anything; I didn’t feel that I had made myself, period. I had been made, rather, by the meaningless push and pull of an average life. The random eddies that had dragged me through time until that point had directed me this way and that, bumping and kneading me gently to remove any distinctive edges, until I was completely without shape or form.
I wanted shape; I wanted pokey bits and pockmarks and mysterious concave expanses. But how? How to begin making myself when I had never had any capacity to create anything? If, as the sign proclaimed, I was what I made myself, then I was nothing, and worse, the nothing was formless.
I felt at odds with the place I had chosen to settle. Boussais was not what I had wanted it to be, but even it was at least something. The flat, brown water of the Gulf, so different from the crystal ocean of my imagination, had a stable essence that fueled the town’s purpose. Decrepit purse seiners left the docks before sunrise and returned after weeks on the water, bringing loads of menhaden to the factory, which turned the small fish into fertilizer and ground protein meal. The choking stink of the processing plant permeated the whole town and made me feel faint on days when the onshore winds were strong. It gave everything about Boussais a sharp distinction, as though someone had outlined each dog, building, and tree, every object and being except for me, with a thick marker the color of the smell.
The undeniable substance of the town made me feel my own nothingness acutely, and I searched desperately for a cure. I tried yoga, literature, Twitter. But I didn’t have the dedication to keep up with exercise; I got bored with books after the first chapter; I could never think of anything to post. It occurred to me eventually that while making myself into something would require great effort and, besides that, skills which I did not have, it would be much more manageable to create without substance; in other words, to give form to my nothingness. In this way, I discovered lying.
At first I merely embellished. “Oh, I must send a card to Joan’s family,” I announced upon reading in the newspaper that Nancy Reagan’s astrologer had died. “My mother was good friends with her in college, you know.” My mother had in fact met Joan Quigley at a party once. Perusing the paper further, I saw that the local car wash was being bought by a chain company. “What a shame,” I sighed, though I did not care much. But I was alone in my apartment, and with no audience, the shimmerings of form that came with each lie quickly dissipated.
I started making an effort to go into town more; I sought out conversations with strangers. Eventually I graduated from embellishments to flat-out falsehoods. “I collect hammers,” I said to the hardware store clerk when I bought one; “My sister just had her house painted,” to a man in the park who told me about his kitchen renovation; “I used to play just like that when I was little,” to a mother watching her child dig a hole in the garden. I had no sister, no need for a hammer, no fond memories of playing in the dirt. But slowly I was starting to have shape.
The lies were bland and lifeless, but still they represented a departure from the amorphous stupor I had been in before the green sign. Beyond seeking out opportunities to lie, I changed nothing about my life. I woke up every morning, put on the outfit which out of laziness had become my uniform, went to the office space I rented, and struggled against dangling modifiers and improper formatting until my eyes were strained. I spent weekends hanging around the docks, watching trawlers and snapper boats drift in and out, occasionally finding a fisherman to converse with. He would tell me about the day’s catch, I would tell him some mundane lie, and we would go our separate ways. In the evenings, I walked to the Winn-Dixie, bought exactly enough food for the next day, and went home to cook. My apartment was an ode to linoleum, a soulless smooth illusion which allowed me to pretend that termites were not feasting on the wood that lay beneath the off-white panels. It was undecorated except for one wall in the living room, on which hung an orderly grid of framed car manual covers. I did not like my job, but I took muted pride in it. Before I began lying, it was all I’d had, that job, those frames.
For a while, I was content with my new way of being. My newfound shape was metamorphic, however, blurring and reforming with each new lie that I told. Surely, I consoled myself, one day something would stick. One day I would speak into being a shape I could not dissolve out of, a shape that would provide such a form that the nothingness inside it would turn into something, and I would become what I had made myself in accordance with the green sign which followed me like a prophecy.
I told bigger and more outlandish lies. I began testing my luck by telling conflicting stories to the same people, perhaps hoping that being caught in a lie would somehow produce substance and permanence. But it had no effect. No one ever recognized me, not even the Winn-Dixie cashier whom I told one day that I had no fine motor skills due to a childhood accident, the next day that I was the Origami World Champion, and the day after that I found competition degrading to all forms of art. I felt worse than ever, convinced that I could not achieve form or being beyond a viscous, ephemeral shape which, before I could get comfortable in it, flowed into another shape altogether.
And then it happened. One evening after a particularly arduous day of correcting syntax errors, I came home from work to see that the termites, always so discreet in their gnawing and copulating, had emerged en masse. The floor, the bookcase, the bed, all were covered with a dusting of shed wings and dead little bodies curled up on themselves like babies. I fled, disgusted by the idea of cooking or eating or sleeping in that den of insect parts, and ended up slumped on my hands in the Waffle House. The miserable voice in the back of my head was nagging that I hadn’t bought groceries yet; I would have no food tomorrow; my precise routine and budget would be thrown into chaos and never recover. I didn’t have enough energy to quell the voice, but I didn’t have enough to listen to it either. My eyes were nearly closed when the waitress came by to refill my coffee. “You okay honey?” she asked.
“Just tired. I had a long day at work.”
“Don’t I know it. What’s your job?”
I hesitated. I had never told a lie about my work before. It felt more sacred than any other aspect of my life, real or invented, and was the only subject I felt any qualms about remaking. But I was frustrated, tired, every bit of nothing in me was begging to be something; I had no shape that day and I needed one. “I’m a sugar packer,” I finally said.
“A sugar packer? What’s that?”
“The little packets of sugar they give you for coffee in restaurants and hotels. You’ve got them here.” I waved one at her. “I make them, over at the factory in Moss Point. Arrange each pile of sugar on the bottom paper, lay the top paper over it, and stamp them together.”
“Huh.” She seemed skeptical. “I guess I would have thought that’s the kind of job a robot would do.”
It was a good point. No one had ever questioned one of my falsehoods; I was taken aback, destabilized, but all the buzzing nothings inside me were vibrating and inverting, coagulating into a something and the something made me sure even if on a conscious level I was unsure, I responded, “Oh no, it’s very intuitive work. All granules react differently to being packed. You’ve got to be able to feel the collective energy of a packet and adjust it accordingly. A robot could never sense those things.” I had no idea what I had said, but it satisfied the waitress.
The next morning, I put on my uniform, which was a little dirty but no matter, and went to work. The granules were especially difficult that day; they crackled and stung and fizzed, not wanting to be confined to the thin paper squares, and I couldn’t find enough calm granules to balance out the raucous ones. I went home with burns and cuts all over my hands.
