I was looking forward to tonight. I didn’t have a hot date. I wasn’t expecting any monumental news. I had ordered my favorite pizza, but that wasn’t what I was looking forward to.
My new mattress was being delivered tonight. After years of sleeping on cheap, lumpy mattresses, I was about to join the memory foam club.
Lying on a mattress in the store never gives you a reliable idea of how it will feel night after night at home, but I knew this mattress was going to be amazing. I spent at least half an hour lying on different mattresses in The Dream Zone yesterday, doing my best impression of Goldilocks (minus the golden locks, of course). Too hard, too soft, holy crap, too expensive… until I found the Seata Cloud Eleven®.
I had lain down on that demo bed and did not arise for a full five minutes.
The pillow wasn’t perfect. I already had a nice contour pillow at home, for which my neck was thankful every day. But the mattress felt like it wasn’t even there. I lay on my back. I lay on my side. I even rolled over onto my front and spread my arms out to the sides like some blissful horizontal crucifixion. I thought I would fall asleep right there in the store. I plopped down my freshly-cleared credit card (So long, Christmas bonus!) and arranged delivery.
Tonight was the night.
Ding-dong!
I answered the door… and was surprised how disappointed I was that it was just the pizza guy. I paid him (cash; RIP credit card balance!), set the box on the table, and poured myself a coke (actually generic store-brand cola; this mattress was a serious splurge). I took a couple of bites, but could barely eat. I pulled out my phone and was halfway through a level of Aggravated Avians when
Ding-dong!
I looked up from my game and saw a delivery truck idling on the street outside. It was here! I confirmed the required information with the delivery guy, then held the door so he and his helper could carry my mattress into my house. They thanked me for having a one-story bungalow as they maneuvered the heavy mattress into my bedroom, then thanked me again for having my bed frame ready, and my old mattress ready for them to take away. They were gone in five minutes.
I pulled out my best set of sheets (the ones I bought at Bedroom, Bathroom and Yonder Room, not my usual Box-Mart sheets), and started spreading out the fitted sheet. Wait! Mattress protector first! Got to protect my warranty! I lifted up one heavy corner after another to fit the mattress protector. I was pulling the warranty guardian over the foot of the mattress when I saw
DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG UNDER PENALTY OF LAW
I had probably seen this tag on my previous mattress. I’m sure it must be on my pillows, and maybe on the upholstery of my couch. But this was the first time I really noticed it. My new mattress, my Cloud Eleven®, was giving me an order.
Yes. That’s absolutely silly. I don’t know why that thought entered my mind. But once it lodged there in my forebrain, I couldn’t get rid of it. If I didn’t do something, the tell-tale tag would scream at me from beneath my feet as I entertained whoever visited me in my dreams.
I gripped the tag and pulled. It stretched, but did not give. I gripped it closer to the seam and pulled at a greater angle to shear it off. Still it resisted. It was stretching the material. If I pulled any harder, my cloud would spring a leak. This task required scissors.
I went to the corner of my living room that I used as my office (My desk was there, anyway. I had no need of an actual home office.) and opened the top drawer. Of course my scissors weren’t where they belonged. Kitchen junk drawer. So that’s where my staple remover went! But no scissors. I glanced at the four slices of now-cold pizza on my table. Deal with those later. Scissors. Where are you hiding? What was the last thing I needed to cut? A zip tie on my reading lamp. There they were, on my nightstand.
I picked up my scissors and gave them the snip-snip motion that was absolutely necessary before every use. I knelt by the foot of the bed. I pulled the tag. I lined up the scissors to cut as close as possible to the seam without damaging the stitching. I squeezed the handles. The scissors made a slow, satisfying slicing sound, as sibilant as this sentence. The tag separated, and the mattress material sprang back into position.
The world went silent. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked.
Ding-dong!
I jumped up so fast, my head nearly hit the ceiling. Then I laughed. What were the odds of that timing?
I walked to my front door, scissors in one hand, amputated mattress tag in the other. Then I realized that answering my door with a deadly, double-bladed weapon might give my visitor the wrong impression. I set the scissors on top of a bookshelf, where they would remain until the next shear-search, and opened the door.
I didn’t recognize the man who stood on my porch. He was taller than me, with a short haircut and a square face. He wore a dark suit.
“Are you Ron Roberts?” he asked.
I had the quick thought that this was the point in a movie or TV show where a visitor would shove an envelope at someone and say “You’ve been served.” If someone was suing me, the joke was on them. The most valuable thing in my house was my new mattress.
I took a half-second to consider how sad that was.
“That’s me,” I said.
“I’m Tim Schmidt, Vice President of Customer Satisfaction for Seata International. I understand you just bought a Cloud Eleven®.”
“That’s right,” I said. (Don’t ask me how I heard him say the ®.)
“Have you had a chance to experience the Cloud Eleven® Experience?” Somehow, I could even hear the capital letters.
“Not yet,” I said. “In fact, I just…” I held up the tag.
Tim’s eyes went wide. His mouth opened. It was as if I had held up a severed limb. He didn’t say anything. He stared for several very long seconds.
“Um…” I said. “It’s just a ‘new material’ tag.
Tim’s shoulders slumped. He lowered his head, then slowly shook it side to side.
“I keep telling the Standards department. We really need to print on the tag exactly what law is affected when people do what you just did.”
I stared dumbly at Tim, wondering what the penalty was for removing the infamous DO NOT REMOVE tag.
“Am I… under arrest?” It sounded stupid. But considering Tim’s expression—hell, his overall body language—it looked like it might be a capital offense.
He chuckled weakly. “No,” he said, “nothing that mundane. You were the ten thousandth cloud eleven sale…” (The ® was gone from his voice, as were the capital letters.) “…and the six hundred and sixty-seventh tag separation.”
He turned and walked down my sidewalk toward a shiny black Caddy. He paused halfway and turned. “God help us all,” he said.
I stared as he slumped into his car and silently drove into the darkening dusk.
What had I done?
Seriously, what had I done besides remove a tag that manufacturers and retailers were not allowed to remove?
I looked at the gray lettering on the tag. Funny, I thought it was black on white. It contained the usual disclaimer that this product contained new material only, and, in big block letters, DO NOT REMOVE THIS TAG UNDER PENALTY OF LAW. That was it. These tags usually said something about removal by the consumer only. Or customer. Or something like that.
I walked back to my bedroom and held open the pillow case that enclosed my favorite contour pillow. “Do not remove this tag under penalty of law, new material only, this tag to be removed by the consumer only.” My other pillow. Same message. Living room. Couch. Pull out a cushion. “Do not remove, new material only, removed by consumer only.” So why was this tag—
So why was the lettering on this tag now a faded, barely readable light gray, a contrast level currently favored by web designers who obviously had perfect monitors and perfect vision?
It was getting late. I’d worry about this in the morning. If the feds came to get me (or the men in white coats, more likely), I’d jump off that bridge when I came to it.
I walked back to my bedroom and picked up the fitted sheet again. Time to get this done before… Six-thirty? It was mid-May. The sun should be up for another two hours. Alarm clock must be hooped. Check my phone… What the hell? Six-thirty. It was ten-o’clock-dark out there.
I started walking toward the window. It was getting harder to walk, but I couldn’t quite… What the hell? My feet weren’t staying on the ground like they normally… like…
There was a sound from outside, kind of halfway between a hiss and a roar. A riss? A… I’m going to stick with riss. Two… vehicles pulled up outside. Vehicles was about as close as I can describe them. They were about the same size as dune buggies, but they had no wheels. They not-quite-flew, not-quite-floated to a stop in front of my house.
Four men in black jumpsuits got out of each one. They bounded up the sidewalk. Between each long, loping step, a burst of smoke or mist or something propelled them back to the ground. They looked like astronauts walking on the moon. By this time, I couldn’t walk at all. I was floating above my floor, not quite touching it.
When Tim talked about “exactly which law is affected…”
No.
Hell no!
There was no way on Earth…
I heard my front door burst open. There were shouts of “Clear!”, and then the men in black loped into my room, one after another. Before I could react, they grabbed me and forced me onto my bed.
If I was going to die, I thought, at least I’d die in blissful comfort.
One of the mattress police (who else could they be?) cut the front of my pant legs with a pair of bandage scissors. (He had no trouble finding them, at least.) Then he moved up to cut off my underwear.
What the actual… NO! NO! NOOOOOO!
“And then they brought me here,” I said.
The man sitting behind the big wooden desk took a deep breath. It was a breath of relief, with good reason. The sun was shining, and everyone was planted firmly back on the ground.
“So what the hell happened?”
The president of Seata International sat back and interlocked his fingers.
“The deal we made to get the Cloud Eleven®…” That ® was subtle, but I heard it, along with the capital letters. “A new supplier, one we had never heard of before. I lay on that mattress for the first time… It felt like it wasn’t even there.” Told you so. “He wanted us to sell it for a mid-range price. We had to agree to that in writing. He told me, ‘they’ll sleep like they’ve died and gone to… cloud eleven.’ I remember the pause. That’s where we got the name for the mattress. But I should have paid more attention to that pause.
“We would be allowed a certain number of… errors.” He leaned forward, resting his hands on the desk. His fingers weren’t loosely interlocked; his knuckles were white. “As the numbers increased—don’t ask us how we were notified each time, just accept that it happened—we needed a contingency plan. And you know the rest, because you experienced the plan.”
I stared at the mattress magnate. His story filled in some of the holes, but the story still seemed pretty… no, that did not seem like the right word under the circumstances. I probably wasn’t going to get any more than that.
But there was one more thing…
“So… I have to keep this tag attached to my ass for the rest of my life?”
“Until the boatman takes it from you, yes. It’s your fare across the river.”
I didn’t ask which river. I knew the answer.
Ten years later, I’m still living in the same house, still single. Dating is awkward. You can’t keep the lights out forever. Other functions are just as awkward. At least the stitching is tough, just like the tag. Seata sends their doc out twice a year to check me out. He’s basically my personal doctor now; I don’t know how I’d explain it to a regular doc.
I don’t know when my time will come. I’ve pictured the boat and the river a hundred different ways. But there’s one thing I hope, more than anything else.
I hope the boatman can find his scissors.
Afterword
This is my favorite of my short stories. I was thinking about the infamous “do not remove” tag affixed to many textile goods, and wondered what was the most ridiculous law the tag could be warning you not to break.
Copyright 2020 by Violet Beckingham, all rights reserved
I Am Violet 