Читать книгу Inappropriate Behavior - Murray Farish - Страница 10
ОглавлениеMy name is Perkins, and my story begins on a Monday. Just as I was about to leave my desk after another day at the international corporation where I am employed, I happened to glance out the window to see a man crawling across the parking lot. I watched him as he crawled—hands and knees, attaché handle in his teeth—from the front steps of the building all the way to the third row of cars, a good sixty yards or so, just like a baby in a blue business suit. When he got to his dark green Ford Taurus, the midlevel company car, he stood, took his attaché from his mouth, dusted himself off, got in and drove away in what I have to assume was the normal mode—seated, strapped in, ten-and-two—for a man of his age and station.
I had long ago quit wondering, or at least asking, about most of what went on at the IC. I started there three years ago—just after Marcie and I got married, just before my father died—and I had seen more than enough corporate and individual doltishness, weirdness, and outright stupidity to make me seriously question the veracity of the yearly financial reports, which show us as a major player in the IC world. I had witnessed fiscal irresponsibility and massive waste offset by arbitrary niggling and concealed by necromantic accounting. I had narrowly escaped involvement in churlish turf wars. I had seen grown men and women reduced to paranoid hysterics by such matters as their table assignment at the company picnic or having their name left off a memo concerning this month’s coffee fund. I had learned that the single most important task one can master in business is that of assigning blame, and I had seen the best of the best ply their trade with such a profound lack of conscience that it would be debilitating in normal life. I was even there the day last March when Terrence McNeil—who never learned the corollary to the Most Important Task, that one must diligently avoid blame—came by to show some of his former coworkers in Vendor Support the business end of his Winchester side-by-side. But I had never seen a man in a blue suit crawl across a parking lot before.
It wasn’t until after the man had driven away that I noticed the other workers on my floor standing at the window watching the same spectacle. I thought of calling someone over and saying . . . what, I don’t know . . . maybe, what the hell? But then, I had done a pretty good job of remaining unnoticed since my transfer to Contracts six months before, wasn’t even sure any of the others on the floor knew my name. I could envision calling to someone and having them look at me blankly—or worse, with alarm, the McNeil incident still fresh in our minds—then phone security, or worse, ask our manager who I was, and the jig would be up.
You see, I had no idea what I was doing in Contracts, no idea what my job was even supposed to be. I got hired in PR, then two and a half years later, I got a memo saying that my requested transfer to Contracts had come through. Contracts? I went to my supervisor, who was still up to her neck in blaming people for the McNeil business. She said it was a mistake but to go ahead and report to Contracts the next day and she’d get things straightened out. For the past six months I’ve sat at my desk for eight hours a day doing absolutely nothing. When a contract comes to my desk, I pretend to read it, sign it, and pass it on. I read a lot of newspapers and magazines, spend hours on the Internet, thumb-twiddle, navel-ponder.
And I got a raise, a nice one. And almost to the day of my transfer, the economy went south, or the news started talking about it going south, and all of a sudden I needed the money. I talked it over with Marcie, and since the whole country was laying off people left and right, we decided that I’d take the raise and stay there for as long as I could until I screwed up and they fired me, which, since the IC did not admit mistakes, usually meant a handsome severance package in return for the dismissed employee’s enduring silence.
So every morning I’d get to my desk and there’d be a stack of three or four contracts waiting there, and every evening I’d leave those same contracts in the outgoing mail. Easy as that.
So while I was interested in the strange man and his stranger method of perambulation, I felt it was best, given what I thought was a tenuous grasp on my frankly embarrassing income, to simply let the matter pass without comment. Apparently the others on my side of the floor felt the same, because no one said a word about it. They simply turned from the window and left for the day, moving silently out of the hallway and into the elevator.
When I got home to Marcie, I told her about the man and how he crawled across the parking lot. Marcie is a painter. Her work was just beginning to appear in some of the smaller local galleries. I told her she should paint that, get a mental image of what I was talking about, and paint the man crawling across the parking lot. I advanced the themes of abjection, endurance, possibly even protest. She said if she painted it, she wouldn’t show the man at all.
“But, Marcie,” I said. “That’s the whole thing about the painting.”
“Nope,” she said. “The whole thing about the painting is you.”
“Me?”
“Yes,” she said. “You. Standing there watching him.”
She started that very night.
The rest of the week passed without incident. Every day at a little before five, I would peer out the window, looking for the man to crawl across the parking lot, but he never did. I thought I caught a glimpse of him one day, walking normally, and I tried to follow him with my eyes all the way to his car, to see if it was the same man. But there were lots of men in blue suits and lots of dark green Ford Tauruses, so I wasn’t sure.
That Friday night when I got home from the office, Marcie was very glad to see me. She met me at the door and kissed me deeply, her arms around my neck and her tongue dabbing madly in my mouth. Before I could even get a word out, she was taking off her clothes, and then she took off mine, and we made love there on the living room floor. After, both of us still unclothed, she took my hand and led me to the spare bedroom that served as her studio. There on the easel was the sketch of the painting we had talked about. I was standing at the window in coat and tie, with a look on my face that was a mix of revulsion and pity and confusion and, I thought, just the barest hint of shame. I thought of mentioning to Marcie that revulsion and confusion were right on the money, and that pity was good—I should have felt pity somehow, I thought, and it made me feel a little bad that I hadn’t—but I had not been ashamed. Instead we got dressed and went out for drinks and a steak dinner, which is what we always did on Fridays after Marcie had a good week of work. When we got home, we made love again, this time on the floor in the studio, with me on top, a reversal of our earlier interlude. I rubbed my knees raw from bracing against the canvas drop cloths on the floor of the studio. I was a little drunk, but more than a little preoccupied as well. Every time I looked up from Marcie as I moved above her, I saw the sketch of me standing there in the window. It was really good; even I wasn’t sure what I was looking at anymore.
When I got to the IC Monday morning, there was something that seemed a bit out of drawing, off-kilter, something imperceptible that nonetheless made me want to fix it, like in school when the teacher would leave that one little scratch of chalk on the blackboard after she erased it; if you’re like me, your whole day was ruined. That little chalk mark would distract us to the edge of madness. The IC was like that on Monday morning, except I couldn’t find the chalk mark to erase. I looked for it, all the way in from the parking lot, up the concrete steps and through the huge glass doors, through the marble-floored lobby past the PR office where I used to work, up the elevator to seven, all the way to my desk by the back corner near the window, I looked for it, but was unable to locate the problem.
Everything seemed to be in order to the untrained eye: The people I saw every day were moving about in their everyday fashion; there was a stack of contracts on my desk awaiting my careful vetting; there was nothing different about the decor. Everything was as I had left it Friday, except that it wasn’t. It was as if something as implacable and yet imperceptible as a bump in the orbit of the Earth had nudged everything slightly aslant, and it was going to stay that way.
I tried to work through it, but all day my timing was just a bit off. Where before I had carefully observed my coworkers’ movements, and scheduled mine, to avoid even the most light-hearted banter, I was now running into them every time I left my desk: at the coffee machine, in the restroom, at the copier. There was one man in particular—call him Smith—who kept asking me, each time we met, how I was doing, as if I had somehow changed in the thirty minutes since I’d run into him last. Smith was an unsightly fellow, short and squat, a heavy sweater with a thinning blond comb-over, tiny black eyes that made him look sort of prurient behind his thick, black-plastic-framed glasses, a puffy dewlap above his collar. Fine, Smith, and you? I’d reply, and each time he answered the same.
And it wasn’t just Smith. The manager—a gray-haired, slump-shouldered man of sixty or so—seemed to be lurking around quite a bit that day. Remember, now, I’d never met this man, didn’t even know his name. I’d watch him walk to his car in the afternoons—I always tried to stay huddled in my cubicle until I was sure he’d left for the day. He parked in the first row, drove the more prestigious company car, the blue Lincoln, and his hunch-rolled stroll to his automobile was usually all I saw of him. Today he was wandering around seven like some kind of golem, never stopping to speak or even so much as look at anyone, his face an attitude of profound confusion. I tried to avoid his gaze, stayed crouched over the papers on my desk in what I hoped passed for intense concentration, and when he started to get too close, I’d skulk away to the bathroom, walking a little bent-kneed to stay below cubicle level. My evasive maneuvers were effective if belittling, and I made it through the end of the day, still employed, but no closer to finding that overlooked chalk mark.
Just as I was about to leave my desk—while watching the manager slumping along to his car, head down, feet like clay—I heard a sound from outside my cubicle. It was Smith, and he was, for some reason, saying, “Psst,” and peeking over the top of the partition.
“How’re you doing, Smith?”
“Fine, and you?”
“Another day.”
“Not quite yet,” Smith said.
“Smith,” I said, suddenly aware that he had to be standing on his tiptoes, “would you like to come into my cubicle?”
“Thanks,” he said, his head and neck—which were one piece—then the rest of him appearing from behind the partition. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I said. “All done. So . . . I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No, no, no,” Smith said, then peered furtively back behind the partition. He turned back toward me, leaned in close, and, barely whispering, said, “Are you ready for Schmelling?”
The only thing I could think to say was, I don’t know, at which point Smith put his hands on my shoulders and whisked me from my chair. We moved together like dance partners toward the window, where we stopped and, lacking much space in the cubicle, stood very close. I could smell Smith next to me; just above his sweat were the odors of cigarette smoke and Brut aftershave. Up close, I could see that he had had a terrible acne problem, and had some sort of wen on his nose as well, up near the inner canthus of his left eye, causing his black frames to rest slightly crooked on what passed for the bridge of his pug nose. He was a thoroughly unattractive man, but I soon saw that something amazing was happening to his face. He was glowing, turning a healthy, sanguine scarlet, his eyes gleaming like tiny black pearls behind his glasses, his lips trembling in what can only be described—or at least I saw it this way, and still believe it true—as the paroxysms of rapture. I wanted to see what was exciting him so, but I was so transfixed by the bliss on his face I was unable to turn my attention. His breathing was coming a little heavier now, starting to fog the window in front of him. He made a quick, jerking motion with his right arm, grabbed his graying shirt sleeve in his palm and wiped away the condensation. It was then that he said, in a gasp and a squeal, “There he is.”
I looked out the window, down into the parking lot, where the man who had crawled to his car the previous Monday was this Monday doing a perfect phys. ed. crabwalk across the parking lot: his arms directly perpendicular to the ground, his knees bent at T-square-grade right angles, kicking forward on cue to propel himself to his car like some sort of Cossack dancer. Whereas the week before he carried his attaché case in his teeth, today it rested on his perfectly flat chest, at no point threatening to upend. When he got to the third row, to his dark green Ford Taurus, he bent his arms a bit, and then, all in one motion, sprung to his feet and caught the attaché between both hands. He pirouetted to face the building, raised the attaché above his head like a championship belt, and offered the slightest of bows. With that he turned again, unlocked his car, got in and drove away.
I stood and continued to stare out the window, having no idea at all what to make of this. Just as I was about to turn and ask Smith . . . what, I don’t know . . . he took an audibly deep breath and expelled that breath with, “God, I admire him.” He stood in reverie just a second more, then turned, patted me on the back and said, “Well, see you tomorrow.” And with that he was gone.
Maybe now would be the time, in a quick hundred words or so, to explain something to you, about me. I am a simple man, basically, in terms of how I view the world. I do not believe the world is a confusing place, so long as one does not unnecessarily complicate one’s view of it. I do not believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, angels, mysticism, magic, channeling, that there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll, or that 9-11 was an inside job. I do not believe that there are any underlying mysteries. I do not believe in looking either above or below the surface of things, because I think there’s more than enough on the surface to keep us occupied for the length of any one life, which, I believe, is all we get. I do not believe in God. I do not believe in heaven. I do not believe in hell. I believe that life is this world alone, is what we make of it, each to his own abilities and needs.
Knowing all of this about myself, I can, I think, be forgiven for a moment of stuporous inactivity, a stunned paralysis of movement and speech, even of thought. I find it hard, however, to let myself off the hook, for by the time I was able to move, Smith, along with the rest of the seventh floor, was gone, and I was left all alone. I knew I should do something, that seemed clear. But what? How does one react to a grown man crab-walking across a parking lot with an attaché on his chest, especially when that man, or his actions, have apparently inspired some sort of cult following among the people with whom one works? I thought at first to move, quickly, to flee, to get out of that building, use my sick time for a few days until I figured out what to do, or figured out a way to never go back. But then I caught sight of Smith, walking, as normally as Smith could, across the parking lot to his car. I saw him get into a gray Saturn, and as soon as he did I sprinted from my desk down the seven flights of stairs and made it to the parking lot just in time to see him drive away. He turned left out of the parking lot and I ran madly to my car to tail him.
When I got onto the access road, I could see Smith’s car heading west on the highway, so I floored it and jumped two lanes of traffic to follow him. Just as I hit the highway, my cell phone rang. It was Marcie.
“When are you coming home?” she said as I wrenched my neck to hold the phone while keeping both hands on the wheel. I was doing nearly eighty, and Smith was still well down the road. The late September sun hung blandly in my windshield, and I reached up with my left hand to lower the visor, dropping the phone from my neck as I did. I managed to shift my hips and catch it in my lap, but not before swerving into the service lane, then swerving out against an angry, guttural horn blast from a semi to my left.
“I’m just going out for a quick drink with some friends,” I shouted into my lap as Smith began a rightward move across traffic, some quarter mile ahead of me.
“Friends?” Marcie’s voice came from the phone, dubiously.
“Some of the guys from work.”
“I wish you’d come home,” she said. “I have something incredible to show you.”
I saw Smith exit onto Dunleavy. I swerved, said to Marcie, “I won’t be late,” then flipped the phone closed while executing a nifty move between a school bus full of band members and an SUV. I had to hurry, or Smith would get lost in side streets.
When I got to the top of the exit onto Dunleavy, I saw Smith’s car turn into a strip mall six blocks down the road. At least he wasn’t going home yet. As badly as I wanted some answers, I wanted no part of Smith’s home life. There are things in this world you just can’t get out of your head, and Smith’s house, I knew, would be one of them.
His car was parked in front of a Walgreens, so I parked nearby and went inside. I could imagine catching Smith in an aisle where you’d rather not be caught, perhaps foot care or fungicides or protective undergarments. But a fairly good look around the place brought no sign of Smith. I was approached by a retarded boy in a blue smock who asked me if he could help me find anything. When I told him no, he moved on to someone else, a woman who said, “Yes, cough syrup,” at which point the retarded boy called someone to help the woman find cough syrup.
I left Walgreens thinking Smith must be in another of the shops in the strip mall. But when I got to the parking lot, the gray Saturn was gone.
Not knowing what else to do, I went home. On the way, now driving with the last of the sun at my back, I thought about how silly all of this was. That I would go chasing after Smith like some sort of madman, as if Smith had any answers, as if the incident I had witnessed even merited answers. I realized now that Schmelling’s antics in the parking lot were nothing more than that, antics, some sort of frat prank that he and his acolytes never outgrew, a symbolic thumbing of the nose at the IC and the conformity it bred, and if Smith and some of the others were a bit carried away by the whole thing, that was their problem, not mine.
When I got home, Marcie was again very glad to see me. She met me at the door, already unclothed, and the next thing I knew, she was on her knees in front of me. When she finished, as I hung there, leaning against the front door to support my shaky legs, she took me by my limpening member and led me to the studio. There was the sketch, but now a full painting, finished and beautiful, maybe her best work yet. My face and white shirt were colored by the setting sun through the glass of the window, which she had somehow portrayed without showing any glass at all. My tie was an iridescent stripe of blues and greens and reds woven together to produce an effect of color the likes of which I’d never seen. My hand against the windowpane was the picture’s most stunning feature. I seemed from one angle to be waving; from another, I held up my hand as if to say, Stop! From still another, I was a startled man bracing himself against the glass, which, as I’ve said, was both there and not there at once, which led to an even more eerie effect, that of a man trying not to fall as the building behind him leaned. I was completely carried away by the painting, so much so that I hadn’t noticed Marcie’s hand moving on me, working me back to a state of arousal. Before I could speak, Marcie dragged me to the ground and climbed on top of me, inserting me into her as I became fully hard again. This may have been the single—or double, or triple, I lost count—greatest sexual experience of our marriage, and by the time we were done, even the palms of my hands and the soles of my feet were tender from pushing against the canvas drop cloths.
After, lying together on the floor beneath the easel, beneath the painting that could very well be the best American portrait since Whistler’s Mother, I told her about Schmelling, that today, instead of crawling, he crabwalked, told her I’d figured it all out, that he was some poor midlevel schmuck who was never going anywhere and that his way of rebelling was to put on this weird act in the parking lot every so often. I wanted to tell her about following Smith, about the way things seemed out of place at the IC that day, about having to avoid the manager, about the retarded boy at Walgreens, but I never got the chance. As soon as I got it out about Schmelling and the crabwalk, she leaped to her feet as if someone had poked her with a cattle prod. I tried to call for her, but she was already gone from the room. She’d run into our bedroom and locked the door, and standing there in the hallway, naked and cold and covered with the sticky, drying liquids of our love, I could hear her crying.
After trying the door and calling for her a couple of times, I, not knowing what else to do, went to the guest bathroom to take a shower. While I was in there, lathering and rinsing and trying to guess what in the world I’d done wrong, I could hear her stomping about outside in the hall between our bedroom and the studio. I wasn’t that alarmed, really, at least not as alarmed as I realize now I should have been. I mean, I lived with Marcie, she was my wife, and she was temperamental, and much more of a believer, or at least much more receptive, to the things in life that float beneath the surface (which, as I said before, we create for ourselves as need be). Marcie was the artist, the woman of moods and funks and elations, and I was the calm, levelheaded one who kept us grounded in the world and made the work she did possible. It was the perfect arrangement, it seemed to me, each of us using our own skills and bents and frames of mind to make our marriage a true union, to make up one body that was prepared to meet the world on whatever terms it asked of us. I still had no idea what I’d done wrong, but I decided it didn’t matter—I’d get out of the shower, towel off, and then go to her and hold her until she calmed down, and I’d say I’m sorry and I’m sorry and I’m sorry again, for whatever I’d done to upset her. And then the door opened, and she flung back the shower curtain and threw in the painting in six neatly razored, beautifully colored strips.
I jumped quickly to dodge the initial burst of whatever she was throwing at me, but when I saw it was the painting and that it was being ruined by the water, I tried to pick it up somehow. She stood there, tiny and furious, wreathed by steam.
“Just leave it,” Marcie said. “You’re the one who killed it.”
“Marcie, what are you talking about? I thought—”
“No, you didn’t think, you son of a bitch. You didn’t think at all.”
“What are you . . . why did you do this?”
“I could ask you the same thing, couldn’t I?” She was really screaming now, trying to talk through the kind of tears that should be saved for those two or three times in your life when unless you cry like that there’s no way to go on living, the kind of tears that leave you completely at their mercy, when you can’t even control your arms and legs and spine anymore, so you flail around in some kind of rhythm that only your sobbing knows. “You . . . murderer!”
When I stepped out of the shower, she got control of herself enough to run from the bathroom. She returned to the bedroom and locked the door and stayed in there and cried all night long. I lay on the couch and watched a show on Animal Planet about otters and their lives until I fell asleep. When I awoke the next morning, early, she was already in the studio, with that door locked as well. I figured it would be best to leave things be for a while, to go on in to work and give her some peace, and then, when we’d had a chance to clear our heads, talk about it tonight.
So I got dressed and drove to the office. As I started down the access road, I looked about to try to see the thing that had bothered me the day before, the missed chalk mark. But I couldn’t find it again, and as I approached the IC, as I pulled into my parking space, as I went through the huge glass doors and across the marble-floored lobby past PR and into the elevator, it seemed that someone else had found it and erased it unequivocally. Everything was in order, the way it had always been, as though during the night, fearing discovery by my wary eye, whoever or whatever had shifted things had come and shifted them back, sighing with relief over the closeness of the call, determined never to try to sneak anything past me again. The elevator disgorged several women from Marketing onto three, a janitor got off on four, and I was alone and feeling fine up to seven. I looked down at my tie, which was, coincidentally, the same tie I had worn in Marcie’s picture. I was straightening it in the shiny brass reflection of the elevator keypad just as the bell for seven rang. I reached down for my briefcase, and when I looked up, I was staring straight into the blank and pitiless face of the manager.
My heart stopped—I really believe it did—for just a second, and then it began to move about wildly in my chest like some sort of little swamp mammal trapped in an underwater tree trunk. The manager was a bit taller than I, and he looked down at me with baggy, red-rimmed, jaundiced eyes that registered nothing about who I was or what I might be doing there in the elevator, much less attempting to get off on his floor. I was so riveted with fear that until I was shoved aside by them, I didn’t even notice the IC security guards at the manager’s elbows, accompanying him like escorts at a pageant or a dance. They moved by me and brought the manager into the elevator. I turned, still looking into the yellow sclera of the manager’s eyes, our gazes locked, until one of the guards said, “Getting off, Mr. Perkins?”
Hearing my name snapped the spell the old man had on me. I looked back and forth quickly at the two other men to ascertain which of them had said it, which of them knew who I was, although it could hardly matter. If one of them knew me, the other did, too, and everyone else on seven as well, and everyone in the entire IC, and that meant that this otherwise unremarkable Tuesday was to be, no doubt, my last in the employ of this prestigious concern, and that tonight, instead of patching things up with Marcie, I would spend the evening updating my résumé, making phone calls, and trying to figure out how to keep paying our mortgage on nothing more than an unemployment check.
I moved from the elevator, down the hall to the main room of the floor, and toward my desk in the corner near the window. It seemed to take forever to get there, as if this morning I were the one with feet of clay, but the time it took me to get there allowed me to notice a rather strange thing. Everyone on the floor was looking out from behind their cubicle partitions as I passed. At first, I figured this was the natural instinct to watch a dead man walking, but this was not the case—some of my coworkers winked, others smiled and gave a thumbs-up, still others nodded in that sharp, professional manner that young executives must spend hours practicing in their mirrors at home.
Much about this, obviously, struck me as rather strange: (1) that I had seen the manager being led away in the traditional manner of dismissal, a dismissal of which I believed myself and my poor performance in Contracts to be the direct cause; (2) that, because I wanted to avoid scrutiny, I was usually among the first employees at my desk each morning—and had in fact come in even earlier than usual, owing to my night on the couch and my fitful otter dreams—but today everyone else was already there, as if they were waiting for me; (3) that they all seemed to know something I didn’t, something about me; and (4) that just as I was about to enter my cubicle, out popped Smith with a sort of Al Jolson move, a ta-da move, arms out to the side in presentation of himself, weight on one leg, head cocked, vaudeville grin on his face, and he led the entire floor in a raucous rendition of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow,” which rendition would have been rather touching in its raucousness, had I even the slightest idea what I had done to merit it.
After the song, me still outside my cubicle, there was much backslapping and carrying on, many Go get ’em, Tigers and You’re the mans, even a Well done, Perkins from an old-schooler I couldn’t identify in the melee. I thanked them all, because there seemed to be little else to do, and as I thanked them they slowly moved away, all but Smith, who stood there by my side the whole time, as if we were somehow in this—in what?—together.
I looked at him, and he made a motion with his hand, directing me into my cubicle, a motion that said, Well, let’s go, and so I did. There was a box with all the things from my desk sitting on the floor by my chair and a bright orange Post-it note on my computer monitor. Written there in heavy black felt-tip ink were the words: Perkins! See me! Schmelling!
All those exclamation marks! And why was my stuff—four copies of Newsweek, three of Time, a half roll of Life Savers (Wint O Green), an unopened Cross pen and pencil set, a spare tie (always keep one in your desk, Dad had said, one of the last things he’d taught me before his heart exploded)—in that cardboard box on the floor? It could only mean one thing. But then, why were all the others so proud of me, winking and backslapping and congratulating me with song? Could it be that they all hated the IC, that they envied my imminent dismissal? And really, what had I done that was so outrageous? All I had done was not ask any questions; really, it was a matter of respect for the IC and its decisional prowess; I had gone where they told me to go, read what they told me to read, sort of, and signed what they told me to sign, and if I had been doing such a bad job, why had it taken six months for them to notice? I had certainly not done anything like Terrence McNeil, nothing even as bizarre as what I’d watched this Schmelling do not once, but twice, in successive weeks, what he had apparently done enough times before to become a hero to everyone on seven and God only knew what other floors as well. And now he—Schmelling!—wanted to see me—Perkins! Perkins who had never done anything truly wrong in his life, Perkins who just wanted things to go easy, who didn’t make waves, who kept his head down and turned his work in on time, who had a house and a wife at home—sure, she’s a little odd, she’s an artist, try to understand—and if they wanted me to go back to PR, I’d go. It was all a terrible mistake, but it wasn’t my mistake, see, and the thing is, I was only trying to keep whoever had made the mistake from getting in trouble, I wanted to be a good team member, and yes, I should have known better, I know Contracts is far too important, Contracts is no place for a person like me, Perkins! I’ll never let it happen again. I promise.
At that moment, I heard a noise outside the cubicle. At first I thought it was my heart again, but the sound soon grew too loud even for that. It was a clap, then a stomp, then a clap, then a stomp, and soon all the employees on the seventh floor were doing it, clap, stomp, clap, stomp, in unison, and somewhere in the midst of it all, a woman began to sing, the words, if there were words, unintelligible, the tune a whiny, unmelodic descant above the percussion of clap, stomp, clap, stomp. I looked out and saw Smith standing across from me, sweat popping out of his forehead and that forehead red again, much more so than the day before. He was clapping and stomping and clapping and stomping, and his teeth were clinched, his mouth a rictus of pleasure and pain at once, his yellow teeth glowing against the redness of his cheeks and neck, his eyes shut tight behind the thick black frames as if he were so transported that to look on anything in a world as banal as this would be unholy, unnatural.
Afraid to move from my cubicle, I decided—decided is too strong a word, I was beyond deciding anything—to stay where I was and wait for whatever was causing this apocalypse to come to me. But I was beyond being able to do even that, beyond being able to do nothing. As if some unseen, giant, but still gentle hands had hold of me, I felt myself being led—not drawn, but led—out into the hallway between the cubicles. It was an irresistible force, and I didn’t even try to avoid it. I knew that whatever I would see on the other side of my partition would change me forever, irrevocably, from being who I was to being someone I was not prepared to be, and I could only hope that somehow, as I had been led to Contracts and led to the window to watch Schmelling that first day, I would be led to an understanding of my new self, to adapt and grow and somehow live with what I would soon become.
There in the hallway, the workers were lined up, clapping and stomping, clapping and stomping. The woman singing was now in a wailing frenzy of sound, and there was no longer any question about words; it was just sound, animalistic, primal, going from groaning to screaming and haphazardly hitting every octave in between. Some people were falling on the floor and rolling about in some kind of corporate Pentecostalism, still clapping and stomping all along. The room, the floor, had become incredibly hot, from all the strenuous activity of the untested muscles and lungs, yes, but also from some other source, as if hell, if you believe in that sort of thing, had opened a branch office right here on seven. I was beginning to come back to myself in some way, to realize that what was happening here was wrong, and again, that urge to flee that I had felt briefly the day before returned to me.
I thought of the box of stuff on the floor near my desk, turned right to look for it, and there was Smith, grinning wildly. I turned my head left, and there was Smith again, still grinning. I looked away, closed my eyes, and set my feet to run the gauntlet of my writhing coworkers, but just as I did, I felt Smith lean in near my ear. “Are you ready for Schmelling?”
I opened my eyes, and I saw him.
It was Schmelling, and this time he was walking—if you can call it that—under the weight of an enormous ledger that he carried on his back. The book was as large as a queen-size mattress, made of brown skin the color of cedar, its brass rings as wide as Hula-Hoops, the pages thick and coarse as canvas inside. I don’t know how he was able to carry the thing by himself. I knew he was strong—you try the crabwalk sometime, it’s tough—but I would have thought ten men would have strained under the weight of the astonishing book, and it hurt me to see him bearing it alone. Forget for a moment that I should have been thinking, What the hell is the deal with this huge ledger? And why is he lugging it through this madhouse to begin with? For all I can tell you is that at that particular moment, my only thought was to help him with his burden.
So I did. I met him halfway across the room, and he, blue eyes popping, face purple with stress, his sandy blond hair matted with sweat, looked up at me from beneath the ledger. All noise in the building, save the sounds of our heavy breaths, stopped immediately when our eyes met.
I said, “I’d like to help you with that, Mr. Schmelling.”
He grunted something that was probably not a word, and at first looked at me with demurral. But I wouldn’t move, and slowly he assented, and slowly he began to jog the ledger higher on his back so I could get my shoulders underneath. I finally did and discovered I was correct about the weight of the book. Together we started to move, and the singing woman sang, Aaaiiieeeeeeee! and the clapping and stomping started again, and we carried the ledger together. I was immediately tired from the strain, but I never even thought of putting it down, of not carrying my share of the load. After a while, the tiredness disappeared, and it was as if we had somehow shuffled off the limits of our selves, the limits that fatigue and fear and pain place on us in this life, and so we carried on, I never asking where we would stop, and he never telling.
Finally—I have no idea what time it was, it was late, it was dark outside the windows—we came to an area of the floor that was cleared of cubicle partitions, and there we set down the book.
Smith and a couple others scurried out to open the front cover, then they turned several pages at a time, looking for one that was blank. Two of the women rolled caster-bottomed office chairs beneath Schmelling and me, and we collapsed into them. I was too tired at that point to even look at the book, and so instead I simply slumped forward with my head in my hands. I really cannot tell you what I was thinking, other than I remember the incredible fatigue and the incredible sweetness of having that ledger lifted; I felt so light, so empty. It seems to me now that at that moment, all of my thoughts had been cleared away, that my mind was indeed a clean slate, tabula rasa, like a newborn child’s, ready to be filled again with new thoughts, new ideas, new attitudes and visions, as if, from then on, everything would be new. I wasn’t even sure I knew my name.
