Читать книгу Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World - Joseph Keckler - Страница 11

THE ORPHAN BIRD

Last night over the phone, my mother informed me that she has a brain aneurysm and will undergo brain surgery in several months. Today I am at my office job.

I work at Bumble and Maw, a classical music publishing company whose main office is in London. I am positioned in The Rental Library, which is the bottom of the caste system. I refer to the staff in our department as “The Rentally Ill.”

Patti is our boss. She is an opera singer. There is a hole under Patti’s desk. Not just a hole in the flat green carpet but a hole in the floor itself, surrounded by a mound of concrete and debris. There is a pipe in the hole and it intermittently spews steam, which rises up above Patti’s desk, through the dying leaves of a weeping fig. Patti is constantly announcing that she is “putting out fires,” which generally means “dealing with the demands of cranky customers.” This is a phrase drawn from standard office lexicon. But the steam over her desk looks like smoke and illustrates Patti’s fire in a way, metaphorizing it as one that will never be put out.

Today Patti is slightly more centered than usual because she has brought in one of her birds. Last week she brought in Newton, an African gray who knows various barnyard animal noises and occasionally sings the Queen of the Night aria. When Patti went upstairs for a meeting she left him in her office. For two hours he made the sound of a bomb being dropped, often punctuating the whistling descent with a sotto voce “boom!”

Occasionally he moved into “Pop Goes the Weasel.”

Today Patti has brought in Cully, a forty-year-old parrot who was recently made an orphan when her owner, an elderly woman on the Upper East Side, passed away.

Patti sets Cully’s little cage atop a file cabinet and says, “OK, everyone. I’m going for a meeting at the Met Opera Library. I should be back around four o’clock.”

We all nod or grunt slightly. “I should be singing at the goddamned Met,” she mutters as she exits.

For the next two hours I sit next to the phone and do not answer it. I have learned that there is, invariably, a clueless and panicked orchestra librarian on the other end trying to place a last-minute order. Each of the six thousand customers acts as though he or she is the only one.

I listen to the messages they leave me:

BEEP!

“Oh hi! This is Lisa from you-know-where,” comes an apologetic and manic squeak. “I need to rent the Ravel Bolero … again. Hoping to have the parts airmailed so they get here by morning. Also hoping you can waive the two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar rush fee. Our orchestra is really struggling here. I’m sure you understand! Give me a call as SOON as HUMANLY possible! You have the number!”

BEEP!

“Heeellloooo. This. Is. William. Moore. That’s MOORE … Not more, as in “greater quantity.” Not Moor as in “Muslim,” or moor as in “area of wasteland with poor drainage,” but MOORE. That’s Emmmm. Ohh. Ohh. Ar. Eee! As in Marianne Moore. The poet. If you don’t know who that is, well, I should advise that you learn.

“Pressing on!

“I do not want to rent any music. But I am in need of some information that I’m hoping you can provide. It concerns the Ravel Piano Concerto in G and a certain eighth note, which is marked as a sharp, and which I believe should be marked as a flat!

I am hoping to compare notes with you—no pun intended—and see if we can’t get to the bottom of this!”

BEEP!

“Hi Baby, it’s Rhonda Finch. Santa Barbara Symphony. Listen Baby, I got a conductor breathin’ down my neck here. I’m gonna need those advance string parts for Benjamin Britten’s Four Sea Interludes. Pronto. Like yesterday morning. And I swear: if you charge me a rush fee, I’ll break your goddamn neck! I’ll stick a gun in your mouth! I would never do that! I love you, Baby. Call me!”

BEEP!

They are a culture of emergency. In response, I have transformed the phone lines at Bumble and Maw into a theater of deprivation. Before customers are forwarded to voicemail, they are placed on hold for several minutes as minimalist music plays.

If a customer insists that I must call him back by the end of the day, I will call him back the following one. If a customer leaves two desperate messages in a row, her name is moved to the bottom of the callback list. If she leaves a third, a thick and indelible black mark is drawn across her name and number. Some days I cross off so many names with that sharpie I get high off the fumes.

I am so enveloped in the world of the office I cannot imagine myself outside of it. I don’t know who I would be if I were not here between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every weekday. I’m afraid I might have a breakdown if I found myself in my Brooklyn apartment at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. Such a life resides in my mind at the very outskirts of possibility, the dragon at the edge of a flat world. And I cling to the perks of the job, which are, I imagine, the Wite-Out and paper clips I steal. For a year I’ve been telling friends that I’m going to quit. Each time I say it my eyes get a little darker. I’m like Pirate Jenny, the washer woman invoked in the Threepenny Opera. She claims to be pirate royalty and plots vengeance against her customers as she scrubs the floors and waits for her ship to come in, that black freighter with the skull on its masthead. I imagine myself as her, speaking in a rough, showy cockney accent. That’s right! No more five days a week for THIS one. I’m gonna get ME a catering gig! Gonna make time for me work. Me art work. They’ll see. Aw, they’ll all seeee!

One of my eyes is kept on the psychic ocean. I’m waiting to catch the first glimpse of that skull on that masthead, appearing on the misty horizon.

My other eye is kept on Google. I Google myself compulsively, hoping to find that I’ve been up to something, hoping to discover some encomium to me on a blog somewhere. Today, though, I Google brain aneurysm. I find a message board of survivors. They share experiences of the slow recovery process after surgery, and exchange little anecdotes about memory loss. One woman jovially recounts having temporarily forgotten who her husband was. Another responds with a story about how, one evening, she absent-mindedly made multiple trips to the grocery store and awoke the next morning to discover five cartons of milk in her refrigerator.

I begin to think of my grandmother, who sat in a chair for fifteen years without speaking or making eye contact. Her brain began to deteriorate when I was a child. I remember that my mother had a talk with me one day. “Joseph,” she said. “If anything like what has happened to your grandma ever happens to me I have an instruction for you. Are you listening?”