Alien Accounts

by Sladek, John

  The tenth made, or had made, a map of possibly the human brain. But he was not at his drawing board, and Henry was able neither to decipher it alone or await his return.

  The eleventh covered his drawing so that Henry could not see it. It was very likely either a blank sheet or a smeary example of the kind of erotic thing he had been dismissed from another job for sketching:

  Two breastlike hills are covered with little figures, archers, shooting crossbows at the sky, or rather at certain objects in the sky. These are dozens of large, vicious-looking sickle shapes, apparently descending to attack the archers or breasts. In the background is a walled city, possibly Nurnberg. It is filth like this that makes me, as a father, wish I could administer the death penalty instead of this five-year sentence.

  (from notes of District Judge Ruking.)

  The twelfth and last draughtsman seemed only to be doing meaningless doodles. This man later left the Masterson Engineering Company and took a job elsewhere lettering placards. He committed suicide in his room by plunging a French knife (bought for the occasion) into his heart. Impaled on the blade near the hilt the police found a large placard serving as a suicide note. It read:

  ACCIDENT

  Section III: Lips whiter than teeth

  Past them, at the front corner of the room, were familiar faces in a group. Eddie Futch was eating chocolate noisily. Bob and Rod were tacking up signs saying ACCURASY and SUPPORT IBM. Willard Bask was discussing slavery with Clark Markey. Harold Kelmscott, cowled in an old grey sweater, had turned his back on the others. Only Ed Warner looked up to greet Henry.

  ‘About time,’ he said. ‘We thought you’d died down there.’

  Henry was reminded of the possibly violent death of Karl, which he had forgotten, though it had happened only a few minutes before. Should he report it? he wondered, and if so, to whom? Mr. Masterson was inaccessible in his office. The placard on the door, hand-lettered by the last draughtsman, read ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’

  Karl himself had been against making unnecessary trouble by reporting Ed’s death. If Karl was dead, then, the sensible thing to do would be to say nothing. Henry had a great respect for the wishes of the dead.

  He began to convince himself that the ‘shot’ was a truck backfiring in the street, and the ‘gun’ nothing but an electric shaver or electric toothbrush. Karl had always, when alive, enjoyed electrical cleanliness. And to what end? thought Henry C. Henry.

  He had begun to rejoice in his own teeth, covered as they were with a thick, resinous deposit like the gum on old furniture. As he remarked to Willard, who was interested in anything like old furniture, ‘What if I went around brushing my teeth twice a day all my life, then got them knocked out of my head by some punk in some alley?’

  ‘Hot damn!’ said Willard. ‘I know just what you mean. Very same thing happened to me once, in ‘Frisco. I sure was peeved, I’ll tell the world. Makes a fella want to go back home and open an antique store. Fill it with good old solid traditional things. Whew! Fella’d give his left nut for a chance like that.’

  Willard wanted to get into a discussion of the draughting tables and the draughtsmen, some of whom were, or seemed to be, Negroes.

  Ed Warner kept asking everyone if they knew why he was declared officially dead. No one knew or wanted to know, least of all Karl, when he showed up freshly shaved some days later. Though for some reason he and Ed were not speaking, Karl said loudly for Ed’s benefit: ‘If he was declared officially dead, he wouldn’t be here, and that’s that. They don’t make mistakes like that, right, Clark?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The little non-lawyer had grown a foot taller and vaguely hairy. ‘They have no right to hire a dead man all over again, when there are so many living unemployed.’

  Masterson was not being a pine cone about it. He hired men of all races and nationalities as draughtsmen, because they could be virtually enslaved, and he especially liked to hire Negroes and South American immigrants.

  ‘They all carry big, mean-lookin’ knives,’ Willard insisted.

  ‘I can’t believe that,’ said Clark. ‘They wouldn’t be allowed to carry knives longer than three inches. It’s illegal. Besides, I’ve never seen one of them with such a knife.’

  ‘You better pray you never do see one,’ Willard said. ‘They only get them out to use them. I know what I’m talkin’ about, now. I could tell you about one street fight I had in Leningrad. Whewee! Them big bucks come at me with knives like …’

  To defend himself, Willard began to carry a switchblade.

  Section IV: Disappearances

  ‘No one is so busy as he who has nothing to do,’ read the sign Bob (or Rod) was tacking to the wall. Rod (or Bob) looked on in smiling anguish, the better to see him with; later he took up a hammer and amended the sign to read ‘he who has something to do’. Easter was approaching, and the two pals were selling Valentines – to everyone but Art, the old clerk with his aureole of dust-coloured hair. No one ever tried to sell anything to Art.

  The chthonic draughtsmen kept to their stalls and did not mingle with the clerks. It was as if they feared infection, or that fraternizing with their superiors would cost them their jobs. For some reason the draughtsmen did not last long anyhow. They were fired, one at a time, and their tables broken up and burnt, until the day would come when … but that day was far in the future when Art revealed a true side to his face, unlimbering himself of the waste baskets of the past.

  MEMO: My childhood.

  I developed acrophobia, or fear of high places, as soon as I walked. When I was nearly two, my father one day decided to cure me of my irrational fear by making me climb up a tall (12 to 14 foot) stepladder to the top, and there sit until I stopped screaming.

  – Masterson

  Section V: Art Speaks

  Art was in charge of firing, which consisted of simply filling out a pink slip and putting it into a pay envelope. Henry envied Art this power, the power of dealing effectively with papers. Alone of all the clerks, Art could see the real consequences of his work. He was an old, trusted employee who had been with the firm since its inception.

  In fact, as he confided at lunch one day, he was its inceptor, and Masterson’s father.

  ‘Does he know you are alive?’ asked Henry, incredulous that this harmless, friendly, frail, thin, likeable old man had created both an empire and its frightening emperor.

  ‘Yes.’ Art took a small bite of his hamburger and mangled it in the wrinkled depths of his mouth contentedly. With a fine jasper hand he flicked greasy crumbs from his tie. ‘Yes, I built the whole shebang, and I nursed it all through the Great Depression, too. It was hard going, let me tell you, but on the other hand, I had all that cheap labour in long supply. Ten cents an hour, in the good old days, would buy you an unemployed architect. And I could hit them if I liked, without some damned nosy Labor Board coming around asking questions.’

  He shook his wattles wistfully. ‘Yes, sir, ten cents an hour. And they were loyal, mind you. I had men staying on ten, fifteen years. It was the war ruined all that. I have always been against war, and if you talk at me until you are blue in the face, I’ll not change my opinion. War destroys stability. Nowadays, the young men only work for you a year or so, then they run off to get drafted, with not a care for the future of the firm.’

  Section VI: Masterson on Tour

  Shortly after lunch was the time when Mr. Masterson made his afternoon tour. He paced the aisle, holding his fat, hairless hands carefully away from his sides, fingers together and slightly cupped, thumbs braced, as though he were gripping the wheels of a wheelchair. In the watery glass panels on his face, two pale creatures darted back and forth.

  Masterson’s finger suddenly stabbed the table of one draughtsman with a sound like a thrown knife. He screamed. ‘Arrowheads! I said no arrowheads! Take them out! I distinctly said no arrowheads! When I come back here in an hour, I don’t want to see a single arrowhead! No arrowheads! Can’t you understand plain
English?’

  The man did not understand a word he was saying, but he realized erasures were in order, and nodded. He bent lower over his board, and the electric eraser trembled in his hand.

  Masterson passed on to the next man. ‘What’s that number?’ Stab. ‘It looks like a three, for Christ’s sake.’

  ‘It is a three, sir.’

  ‘Well, it don’t look enough like a three, then. Take it out and do it over.’

  Smiling, the man obeyed. Masterson’s doughy features began to glow. ‘Take out all your numbers and do them over. Make them all look like threes.’

  He came at last to a deaf-mute, Hrothgar.

  ‘What do you call this? A centreline? And this? If these are centrelines, let’s make them look like centrelines, huh?’

  Hrothgar looked hurt, but moved to obey.

  ‘And I told you before I wanted more space in there and there. Why don’t you listen when I’m talking to you?’

  ‘Nggyah-ngg!’ protested the victim.

  ‘Don’t you talk back to me that way!’

  Section VII: Questions

  From the office came the sound of a knife being thrown with great force and apparent hate. Perhaps it was as Ed said, that arbitrary power corrupts arbitrarily.

  Masterson screamed at the draughtsmen continually, but never at the clerks. He never asked the clerks what it was they were doing because he didn’t know what they were doing. It did not suit him to ask a question unless he already knew the answer. Nothing infuriated him more than discovering that someone else knew the answer, too.

  ‘How fast does light travel?’ he asked Henry casually one day. Henry did not know.

  ‘I know, naturally. In our measurement system, 186,000 miles per second,’ said Karl.

  ‘Who asked you?’ said Masterson’s right eye.

  Somewhere inside Karl another eye was closed forever by a foot squashing it; it spewed forth a grapey eye-seed.

  The unpleasant marsupiality of Karl’s eyes was worsened when he smiled. Little sharp shrew-teeth glittered at the ends of big dead-pale gums, and one knew his tongue would also be black. He looked like someone Henry had met before, somewhere, and Karl had changed. He was a spoiled bear, a bear gone finicky – yet how had he got those teeth?

  Section VIII: More Questions

  Masterson slapped Harold on the shoulder and asked if he could borrow ten till payday. ‘I’m a little short, heh heh.’ Assuming the boss was joking, Harold began to chuckle.

  ‘No, I’m serious. Had a big weekend with a doll in Boston. I’m flat broke. You know how it is. I could always pay myself my own salary early, but I hate to screw up the book-keeping, see?’ Reluctantly Harold saw. He loaned the ten.

  ‘You’ll never see that again,4' whispered Big Ed, his face a complete blank. Harold pretended to be unaware of the old man’s existence.

  Henry noticed how blank Ed was actually becoming, as if someone were slowly erasing him. He was not just blurry, like Clark (who was growing a great mouth-devouring beard), but less definitely there at all.

  On the following payday when Art passed around the pay envelopes, Harold did not get his ten. He tried to catch the flickering eye of Masterson when he stalked through the room, but the boss pretended to be unaware of Harold’s existence.

  ‘In the good old days,’ Art said to Henry, ‘I never had to take crap from anybody. Good feeling, being your own boss.

  ‘Why, I used to walk down that aisle and I never even looked at what was on their boards. I just stared real hard at the back of each draughtsman’s neck, stared until he thought he was going to get hit. If he flinched, my rule was, I got to hit him twenty times on the arm. Hee hee, they nearly always flinched.’

  The two men sat in the warm diner speaking to one another through pale yellow clouds of steam from the french fryer: mists of the distant present. On the previous day, window cleaners had appeared at the office and wiped away the winter’s grime. An hour after they had left, a dirty rain began.

  ‘I notice everyone smokes around the office,’ Art said. ‘Not in my day. I never let anyone smoke, and I’d walk around the office all day puffing fifty-cent cigars and blowing the smoke at them. Drove ‘em crazy, especially when I’d dump hot ashes on their drawings. Yes, sir, I ran a tight office in those days.

  ‘If anyone ever sneaked off to the can for a smoke, I’d lock him in there for the rest of the day, then fire him. “Enjoy your smoke,” I’d say as I turned the key. “You got all day, bright boy.”

  ‘Whee, one time a new kid ran in there for a smoke at about nine in the morning. I locked him in till six. Hee hee, the rest of them didn’t like that, I can tell you, working all day without a biff.

  ‘Well, came six o’clock and I opened to let him out, and what do you think that young bastard had done? Hanged himself! Yep, he had that old chain right around his neck and he was stone cold, and the toilet running gallons and gallons. You should have seen my water bill that month.’

  His eyes crinkled with amusement. ‘Yes, sir, that’s the only time anyone ever put anything over on old Art. Hee hee.’ He hugged his new coat around him gleefully, while some of his coffee dribbled off the point of his chin.

  Section IX: The Theological Virtues

  Division A: Faith

  It soon became apparent to all that Harold was going to get the shitty end of the stick.

  ‘Did you even ask him for the money?’ asked Ed.

  ‘Well – no. How can I? He’ll think I don’t trust him.’

  ‘Do you trust him?’

  ‘Of course I do. Heck, he’s the boss. Our lives are in his keeping, so to speak. Our names are in his book. He gives us each payday our wages. How can we turn against him? The pen is mightier than the sword.’

  ‘But if you trust him, what have you got to gripe about?’

  Harold, descended of a flawed monk, pondered this point of faith. ‘It isn’t the money, you understand. Heck, I don’t care if I never see that ten again.’

  ‘What is it then?’

  ‘It’s just that I trust him, and now he’s going to betray that trust. He’s going to welsh on me.’

  ‘Maybe he just forgot,’ Karl purred, showing his little nasty teeth.

  ‘Oh sure. He forgets, and I never see my money again. You can be sure he wouldn’t forget it if I owed him ten dollars.’

  Clark made a diplomatic suggestion. ‘Look, just ask him if you can borrow ten from him. If he’s forgotten about the loan, it’ll remind him of it, and if he’s planned on welshing, he’ll be caught out ashamed. Besides, this way he’ll know you need the money right away.’

  Division B: Hope

  Harold accosted Mr. Masterson. ‘Sir, could I borrow ten from you till payday? Heh, heh, I’m a little short, at the moment.’

  The bulging figure turned slowly with the dignity of a wagon train, and faced him. For over a minute, Masterson subjected Harold to an intense stare of scorn and disbelief. Then he sighed and pulled out his billfold. Harold sighed, too.

  ‘I wish you’d learn to live within your means, Kelmscott. I’m not a loan company. Now I’m going to loan you this, but it’s the last time, understand?’ The hinged glasses beetled over him.

  ‘But I do live within my means, sir,’ Harold stammered. ‘It’s not me who has weekends in Boston with a girl.’

  The pale eyes did not register anything. Masterson sighed again, heaving his big, flabby shoulders. ‘I’m not interested in nasty details of your personal life, Kelmscott. If you can’t live on what I pay you, maybe you’d better look elsewhere for a job.’ With a snort of disgust, he peeled a ten from his thick bundle of large bills and slapped it on Harold’s desk. Then he stalked off to his office to throw, presumably, knives.

  Division C: Charity

  Every time an object hit the wall, Willard jumped. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned. ‘I just know he’s got some big, mean-lookin’ knives in there.’

  From time to time, Willard got out his own knife and tested the action.
It was never fast enough to suit him.

  At lunch, Henry asked Art about the pink slips. Did he ever warn anyone they were about to be fired?

  The old man stopped masticating. ‘Sir, watch your tongue. The job of firing is a sacred trust. My son, Mr. Masterson, has entrusted me with the care of and disbursement of those pink slips, and of the persons they represent. Do you think I could let him down? My own son?’

  Drawing himself up, Art for the moment resembled a famous general, and his thin chest seemed even to fill out the folds of his new coat.

  ‘Besides,’ he added with a wheeze. ‘I like to watch a man’s face when he opens his envelope. Boy, he sees those streets, those employment offices, even soup lines, hee hee hee …’ His laughter turned to a fit of dry coughing.

  Section X: A High Office

  That afternoon, Mr. Masterson called Henry into his office. None of the clerks but Art had ever been there before, and Art had forgotten what it was like. Rod and Bob looked envious of Henry, but Karl smirkingly assumed he was being given the axe.

  ‘If you want my opinion,’ he said, ‘I think you’re going to be quietly axed to leave. Ha!’

  Willard drew him aside and said, ‘Play it cool, boy. If he pulls a knife, just you give me a holler.’

  Henry pushed open the door with the placard and entered a plain, drab room. On one wall was a peculiar dart board, and on the floor beneath it a huge pile of darts with plastic fins. Near the opposite wall was a long desk behind which was visible the upper half of Mr. Masterson. In his hands was a dart with green plastic fins. Nothing else in the room was describable.

  The boss half-rose, turned and hurled the dart; it hit a spot near the baseboard with a sound like a thrown knife, hung for an instant, then fell to the heap.

  ‘So it goes,’ sighed Masterson, or maybe, ‘How would you like a raise?’