“What did you want to be when you were young?”
“I wanted to be a Manager,” Stefan said. “Of anything really. Just a Manager. What about you?”
On Stefan’s screen, there was the image that he had in his mind. It was the image of himself, standing in yellow Wellington’s and a yellow rain coat with a floppy yellow hat. His pants sat high on his waist and his belt, which was nothing more than the cord of an old toaster, was tied into one thick knot and its loose end hanged down past his knees. He didn’t look happy but then again, most Managers never really were. He carried a clump of lettuce in one hand which he was feeding to a worker in their cubicle and in his other hand he carried a silver bucket full to the brim of thick creamy Creative Milk.
“I didn’t want to be anything,” John said. “And that’s the thing. I didn’t know what anything was, so I never imagined what I would ever want to be. And I wanna feel that way again. I don’t wanna know what the weather is gonna be like for the next ten fucking days. I don’t wanna plan my fucking vacation. I don’t wanna live in the future, not anymore. I don’t want to go through life content, feeling nothing, feeling so god damn secure. No love, no fear. I don’t want repetition. I don’t want consistency. I want surprise. I want change. I want discord. I want to feel what it’s like to drive on the wrong side of the street, to write with my wrong hand and to feel as if nothing is certain as if there is no future as if now is vital, as if the present is all that matters.”
“Is something the matter John?”
It was his Manager, sitting on a wooden stool beside him, massaging John’s nipple between his thick burly fingers and lifting the near empty silver bucket to his face.
“Is everything right at home? Is there anything you need to talk about? You know I did a course in Occupational Health so if you need to, you know, just talk, we can take a minute away from the milking and you can, you know, make up the time at the end of the day. But this” he said, swirling the few drops at the bottom of the silver bucket. “This is unacceptable.”
“Fire me,” John said. “Please.”
“Well,” said The Manager pensive, “Let’s not go down that path just yet. We do have an action plan, though.”
John imagined himself revolting, thrusting his clenched fist into his Manager’s smiling face but his it was no use. His head was made of jelly and though it wobbled about, it didn’t, as he had hoped, fall off of his shoulders.
“Can I change department then? I think I’d like a change. I need a change.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” The Manager said, struggling to get up from the tiny stool before walking down the hallway with the empty silver bucket in his hands.
“You ever wish you’d done things differently? Or what would happen, if you had? If you could go back, what would you change?”
“Hold on buddy. Trying to concentrate. Nearly done here. And…” Stefan said, drawing his last word with the last drops of milk from his swollen nipple into his now full and nearly overflowing silver bucket.
John peered out from his cubicle. Down along the rows of small office spaces, he could see his fellow colleagues all unclamping their nipples and ejecting their video cassettes from the VCRs that sat adjacent to their monitors. They seemed to enjoy their work. Most looked relieved like they had just finished a marathon. Some joked lightly as they stacked their cassettes, making light of the poor weather and last night’s upset. Most were cynical, quite adamant that The Team never had a chance in the first place. No-one at all seemed surprised or even upset by the result.
John hated football. Not for the sport itself, but for the social obligation. Listening, though, to the murmurs about him, he quickly realized that how they felt about the upset was how he had felt about himself. It was how he had felt about his life, about his job, about his thinning hair and his flabby body. It was how he had felt about the size of his penis and about the tufts of grey hair that had just recently sprouted in his nose. It was how he had felt about the things he had wanted to do his whole life but had never got around to. It was how he had felt about his garden and his scabby cat and it was how he had felt about his wife.
It was how he had felt, until now.
And then, as quickly as his colleagues had packed their cassettes into hard cover casings, each unwrapped one more, loading them into the VCRs before reattaching the cold steel clamps to their nipples and starting another task; the filling of another silver pail.
Most had seventeen cassettes piled on top of one another. It was an average, what was expected by working at an average capacity. John looked around at his work station. His table was empty except for a Diet Coke and a picture of his wife, from when she was younger before he knew her. She didn’t know that he kept that photo and he’d probably never tell her. And though it seemed innocuous, keeping this exact picture, it felt like something that she wouldn’t understand.
He sat there staring at the picture of the woman he never knew and he imagined what she was like before the first time that he saw her, before the first time she turned to him and her sight was littered with his attention, before her thoughts were corrupted and polluted with his image, before they finished each other’s sentences, when it was that she had a complete and independent thought of her own.
He sat there staring at the picture and beside him; he had not one packed cassette.
“Come with me John,” The Manager said. He sounded serious. He even remembered his name.
“Am I being fired?”
Though he wanted it, all he could think of were the seven remaining installments for the outdoor setting they had bought last September but had never used. Then he thought about his wife and how upset she would be and then, how upset that would make him. And he hated himself, for making himself feel that way.
“You’re being promoted,” The Manager said.
John’s eyes widened. He’d been expecting a raise, everyone had; something small and trivial that would take the edge of the rising interest rates on his back dated loans.
“Congratulations,” The Manager said, pointing to a cubicle at the end of the row. “You’ve been promoted to Team Coordinator. You must be pleased. You deserve it.”
John stepped into the cubicle. He looked around. It was cramped just like his old cubicle. And the chair where he would sit, its air compressed handle had its rounded plastic end broken, just like his last chair. And there was monitor just like his old monitor and a VCR too. And on the ground were a small beige stool and an empty silver pail, waiting to be filled, just like his old cubicle.
He tucked his head around the side and peered into the next cubicle and he saw Stefan, filling another pail, thinking about Monster Trucks and smiling as he shook his extended thumb maddeningly as if he were trying to shake off a serious burn.
“I don’t get it,” John said. “I thought I was promoted? Nothing changed. I’m in the same cubicle.”
He wanted to shout the word fuck. He wanted to say that it was exactly the fucking same. He wanted to emphasize that, to shout the word fucking. He wanted to offend The Manager, for him to feel like he felt now. He wanted to, but he didn’t.
“Congratulations,” The Manager said, clapping loudly and inciting the whole office into a massive lauding roar.
“Bravo,” they all shouted. “Bravo. We wish we were you.”
John stared idly at his cubicle and then at the picture of his wife.
“Would you like me to massage your nipples?” The Manager asked.
“No thanks,” John said politely. “I can do it myself.”
Through the Wormhole of Sudden Applause
“You know what I love?” Stefan asked, loosening his tie and sniffing the air as if the blurring luminescence were gently swaying pine.
“Going home” John replied.
“Going home. That’s right. Going home. How did you know I was going to say that?”
“That’s all you ever say at the end of every day.”
“Still,” St
efan said, now pulling his oversized white shirt from beneath his straining belt line. “It feels good to be going home.”
In the elevator, Stefan, along with the men from the other floors, talked about what show he was going to watch tonight after the news and the football and then a debate broke out about what our role was in the Middle East and one of the men in particular, he seemed to have just the right thing to say about every issue. Not everyone was impressed, but that didn’t mean they didn’t concede their opinion and like an infant lulling itself to sleep, gasp resignedly, accepting that they had no voice, none that could be heard anyway.
As they hammered on about political affair, naming cruel dictators and Neo-Fascist Fundamentalist Regimes, John couldn’t help but stare at a spider in the upright corner of the elevator. He or she was no different to the monsters being berated by young men with cheap suits and sore nipples. For like the dictator, the spider kept a kind of unnerving state of balance and order. Though there was potential for the spider to swing low and to bite at the neck of some unsuspecting Western liberal, the truth was, it was more interested in collecting tiny blood sucking insects for its lunch and its pleasure. And like the dictator, if the spider was ever removed from power, if some fearful liberating sponge were to wipe away its sticky veil of authority, there would be no order anymore and all of those bloodsucking insects, they would be free to bite, suck and wreak havoc in this humid cramped space.
John feared the spider, but he was thankful that it was there.
The elevator stopped on the seventh floor and a pretty girl got on. She had long straight black hair that was tied in a pony tail which was pulled so tight that not a single hair was out of place. She wore bright red glasses and purple lipstick and she had a tattoo of a naked woman, straddling a mechanical phallus. The tattoo started on her neck, just below her ear and it ran all the way down her left arm. The last of it, the pointed tail of some winged reptile, curled onto the palm of her hand.
The workers all retreated into an awkward silence, some tucking their heaving stomachs closer to their expanding waist lines, feigning general disinterest but watching, with a sharp peripheral eye on the strange pretty girl who was both demure and dangerous, efficacious and meek, to see if she was wetted to their staunch masculine physique.
She stood beside John humming a song that he hadn’t heard in such a long time. He couldn’t remember which the song was; only that he had loved it once, just as this girl probably did now. The girl smiled at John, but he didn’t notice. He was travelling through his thoughts, trying to find the name of that song.
On the way to the car, Stefan was talking about his children’s performances at school and how being a father was so clichéd but that the thing about clichés was, they were true, that’s why they were clichés. Not because they were uneducated guesses at thoughts and feelings and at social condition, but because they were ubiquitous and common and absolutely sure and right, and that’s what made clichés, clichés.
Stefan was happy about this.
John on the other hand…
Stefan continued talking about his life and then about which girls in the office he would love to fuck and the carnal and depraved acts they would no doubt beg of him to inflict upon them. And he swung his words and swagger like a nymph would, their veiny and stiffened erection, thrusting his hips back and forth and flicking his tongue between the extended V of his fingers. John wondered if Stefan had even seen his penis in the last ten years. So much fat and matted pubic hair hanged over that he was sure Stefan must piss in the shower, so as not to make a mess.
“It’s all about the V,” Stefan said.
“Why didn’t your parents call you Steven?” John asked. “Was it like a Pseudo-European thing?”
As he responded, John saw that girl again, and as Stefan spoke, walking towards John’s car, John verged off in the direction of the girl, baited, not by a sexing desire, but by a hint of the past, a time that he had wished away when he was living it and now – now that time was like a pail of bricks that he carried on his shoulders, the past was somewhere where he longed to return.
“Hey John” Stefan shouted, standing by John’s car and shrugging his shoulders excessively as if he didn’t understand the situation. “I don’t understand,” he said, confirming.
John ignored his friend and his colleague, someone he had, like a meaningless popular expression, learned to understand and even appreciate over the years but as of late, someone that he despised and someone who he daydreamed about in an explicit and violent manner.
“You’re going the wrong way” Stefan shouted. “The car is here.”
What the fuck was she humming? He knew what it was. It was right there on the tip of his tongue. But what was it? What the fuck was it? And how far back had she taken him?
“I’ll see you tonight then.”
He ignored Stefan and followed the girl through the car park and onto the sidewalk and then down along the avenue until they reached the bus stop. There he stood just behind her and he listened to her humming, closing his eyes and letting his mind wander, trying not to determine what the song was but instead, to let his subconscious decide for him, just as it had every other moment of his life, decided upon innocuous little things like what cold tasted like on the tip of his tongue, the edges of his teeth and on the roof of his mouth. And on whether he should piss straight into the bowl with arrogant disregard for how his guests feel or whether he should gyrate in quiet and careful circles and run the risk of missing the bowl entirely and pissing on the floor. And so, listening to the girl hum, he let his subconscious decide for him just as he had let it decide upon following her in the first place.
The bus came and he got on, following the girl but with a person or two between them, so she wouldn’t become suspicious and stop her humming. When he paid the fare to the driver he turned in the direction of the seats but the girl was gone. He tried looking left and right, but he couldn’t see her anywhere. It was as if she never got on.
Then who was he following?
“Hurry up mister” spoke a person behind, pushing against his back and urging him down the aisle.
The thought of getting off only came when it was too late, when he was already wedging himself in the aisle, pushing his way down the back of the bus. The doors closed and the bus driver honked his horn and then after a shaky start, the bus made it way on to the freeway.
John scanned the bus looking for the girl, but all he could see was the same sight. Seat after seat and row after row, he saw scores of people huddled together and sat cramped and uncomfortable next to each other, all with the same book tied of their faces, all with the covers facing out with their fingers moving over every word as they all read in thorough enjoyment, the blurb on the backs of their books. John moved down the aisle bewildered by what he saw. And it wasn’t until he got near the middle of the bus that he saw an empty seat that nobody had bothered to fill and so he sat down.
There was a young man sitting by the window reading a book with no cover. John sat beside him and at first tried to keep his attention from floating back to the man’s book, but he couldn’t resist.
“What are you reading?” he asked.
“A book,” The Man said.
“That’s obvious. What’s it called?”
The Man turned to the coverless plank front page. He shook his shoulders and went back to reading.
“Has no title?” he said.
“Every book has a title.”
“Well” The Man said, showing the blank coverless front pages to John, “It appears that this book doesn’t.”
“But what is it?”
“Well, it’s a book,” The Man said, hardly turning his attention from the words.
“I know that,” John said, staring at the front and back pages which were blank. “But what’s it called? Who wrote it? What’s it about?”
His intrigue was bordering on scathing obsession. There was no cover at all. No title and no author and no
blurb. And the cover, it hadn’t been dog eared or needlessly torn, for there was not a lick of paper out of place. There was not a nick or a cut or a tiny thread out of place from the finely woven spine. It was just a book without a cover as if someone had been crazy enough to want it this way.
“I don’t know what it’s called,” The Man said. “And I’m fairly sure I’m blank as to who authored it.”
“Maybe I’ve read it before,” Stefan said, now desperate to know the title. “What’s it about?”
“I’m not quite sure,” The Man said smiling. “I suppose I’ll find out at the end.”
As the bus rode along, John tried to think of the last book he had read or the last film he had watched without having first read a blurb or a review. He couldn’t think of one. He couldn’t even think of a room he had been in at any point in his life that hadn’t already been designated for some purpose.
The Man’s eyes lit as he strolled over every word in a way that John had never seen another person read, different to the scores of people beside him who all courted the same novel, turning page after page in unison with one desperate person who just got on at the last stop asking, “For god’s sake, does anyone know if he catches the whale?”
“What do you do?” John asked, watching how The Man mouthed the words “Oh, my!” and “Well, I never.” Not as if he were doggedly following the dialogue, but as if each paragraph were a stone that hinged him further to genuine intrigue and surprise.
“I am a philosopher,” The Man said.
“Where did you study?” John asked, intrigued, like a man with a swollen cyst having so luckily stumbled upon a wandering physician.
“I didn’t.”
John looked frazzled.
“But how can you be a philosopher if you didn’t study?”
“Does a drunk have to attend a meeting to know that he has a problem?”
“Alright then. What’s the meaning of life?”
[2014] The Time Traveler's Wife Page 2