It was after I heard The Bow Tie Man proclaim that he was of a mind to 'give his notice' that I stepped away from my desk and walked over to join the conversation being carried on by some of my coworkers. 'And after you give your notice,' I asked The Bow Tie Man, 'then what? Where will you go? What other place could you find that would be any different?' Then the woman whose voice I had previously recognized as that of a longtime member of the company's staff spoke up, protesting that it was absolutely deranged for the company to imagine that it could ever become a dominant force in the world marketplace. 'Do you really think so?' I replied. 'Haven't you observed that there is a natural tendency, deranged or not, for all such entities as the Blaine Company, for any kind of business or government or even private individual, to extend themselves as far as possible—to force themselves on the world as much as they can, either by becoming a dominant commercial entity or merely by wearing bow ties every day, thereby imposing themselves on the persons and things around them, imposing what they are or what they believe themselves to be without regard or respect for anything else aside from how far they can reach out into the world and put their seal upon it, even stretching out into other worlds, shouting commands at the stars themselves and claiming the universe as their own?'
By that point, I think my coworkers were taken aback, not as much by the words I had spoken as by the fact that I had spoken to them at all, something I had never done apart from the verbal exchanges required by our work as document manipulators. From their expressions I could see that my speaking to them in this way was somehow monstrous and wrong—a freak happening whose occurrence signified something they did not wish to name. Almost immediately afterward the group broke up, and we all returned to our desks.
That afternoon the yellowish haze of the Golden City was especially dense and pushed itself heavily against the windows of the building where the Blaine Company had relocated itself. And on the very same day that upper-level management had announced to us that none of the murdered supervisors would be replaced and that U G Blaine himself was going to take a direct hand in the day-to-day operations of each department and division within the company, it seemed that his supervisory presence was already among us.
The most conspicuous early sign of what I will call the 'Blaine presence' was the distinct yellowish tint which now permeated the company's office space. Less obvious was the sense, which a number of persons had previously experienced during the company-wide meeting, that we were at all times under the eye of something we could not see but which was intimately aware of our every word and action. Before the day was over, everyone in the office seemed to have gained a silent understanding of why we had relocated to the Golden City and why this place, which had once been known as Murder Town, was so well suited to the purposes of commercial entities like the Blaine Company... or was at least perceived to be so by the heads of such corporate bodies.
By the following business day there was no longer any talk around the office about the deranged strategy of the company to become a dominant force in the world marketplace. And no one commented on the absence of the man who wore bow ties each and every day. Perhaps the others actually believed that he had given his notice—a course of action he had suggested he might take—even though none of his personal items had been removed from his desk. Since the supervisor of our department had been murdered like all the others, there was no one whose duty it was to be concerned with the failure of The Bow Tie Man to show up at the office, just as there was no one who proffered any information about the meaning of his absence. After a few days had passed, his desk was occupied by a new employee, a man whom no one had ever seen working elsewhere in the company and who did not seem like the sort of person any company would hire to manipulate documents. His age was difficult to discern because his face was almost entirely obscured by shaggy strands of unwashed hair and an ample growth of untended beard, both of which were streaked with the discoloration which we noticed affected anything that was subject to longtime exposure to the peculiar atmospheric elements of the Golden City. As for the clothes worn by our new coworker, they appeared to be very much in the same style as his predecessor who formerly inhabited that particular desk. However, due to the length of the new employee's beard, it was not possible to verify whether or not he was wearing a bow tie each and every day. And no one in the office desired to look close enough to find out if this was the case. Nevertheless, there was one woman whom I overheard telling another that she was going to check on The Bow Tie Man in order to establish what had become of him. Then she herself failed to show up for work the next day. Afterward no one else pursued the disappearance of either of these two employees, nor that of any of several other employees who on a fairly regular basis now began to drop out of the ranks of the lower staff at the Blaine Company, which by this time was known to the world simply as 'Blaine'.
Needless to say, the degree of tension that now pervaded the offices at Blaine was once again at an extremely high level. Yet this tense environment, which had always served as a hothouse for the most violent thoughts and fantasies among company personnel, no longer had an effect on the atmosphere of our workplace, such that you could not see more than a few feet in front of your face. Instead, the office space continued to be evenly permeated by a yellowish tint. While I have already identified this distinct yellowish coloration of the office atmosphere with what I have called the Blaine presence, others around me—and throughout the company—held the view that the haze which choked the streets of the Golden City had somehow seeped into the building where we spent each day manipulating documents. But it seemed to me that these differing explanations were in fact complementary. In my view there was a terrible equation between the Blaine presence, which now supervised every activity throughout the company, even the smallest manipulations of the most insignificant documents, and the yellowish haze casting itself so densely over the Golden City—a place that seemed so well suited to the purposes of commercial entities like Blaine, which of course were merely extensions of the purposes of human entities like U G Blaine himself, specifically his seemingly preposterous ambition to turn his business into a dominant force in the world marketplace. All of this remained hypothetical for some time . . . until one day a certain turn of events allowed me to confirm my suspicions and at the same time—after so much patient restraint—enabled me to pursue my own purposes with respect to the relocation of the company.
This turning point came in the form of a summons to the office of the new Vice President of Development, Mr Henry Winston, who was located in a remote part of the building in which Blaine was the only tenant. Mr Winston's office, I noted when I first entered, was a sty. Judging by the stained mattress in a corner behind some rusted filing cabinets and the remnants of food and beverage containers scattered about the floor, Mr Winston had transformed the place into his personal hovel. The Vice President of Development himself was seated behind an old and heavily scarred wooden desk, his arms stretched across the desktop and his head lying sideways upon it in noisy slumber. When I closed the door behind me, Mr Winston slowly awakened and looked up at me, his hair and beard no longer groomed in the way they had been for the sub-basement meeting at which he spoke some months before. And what he had to say to me now still sounded as though he were reading from a script, although the quality of his voice was far less robotic than it had been at the company-wide meeting.
Mr Winston rubbed his eyes and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, catching the aftertaste of the sleep I had disturbed. Then, as if he were a busy man, he got right to the point. 'He wants to have a conference with you. There's a . . .' Mr Winston paused a moment, apparently at a loss to recall or properly enunciate his next words. 'A proposal. There's a proposal he has for you . . . a personal proposal.'
Mr Winston then informed me of the time and place for this conference with U G Blaine—after the end of that working day, in a lavatory on one of the uppermost floors of the building. This seemed to be everythin
g that the Vice President of Development was required to communicate to me, and I turned to leave his office. But before I was out the door he blurted out a few words that genuinely seemed to be his own.
'He should never have brought you here,' said Mr Winston, which very well might have been his real name.
'You mean the relocation of the company to this city,' I replied, attempting to clarify the issue.
'That's right. The re-lo-cation,' he said, breaking into a little laugh and revealing an incomplete set of yellow teeth. But he stopped laughing when I looked over my shoulder back at him, focusing my eyes deep into his.
'Mr Blaine isn't entirely responsible,' I said. 'We both know how it is with this city.'
After a brief pause Mr Winston spoke. 'I know you now,' he said as if speaking softly in a dream. 'You were here before . . . when the sky was clear. What did you do?'
I simply smiled at the Vice President of Development and then exited that squalid office, leaving the man inside with his sleep-polluted mouth hanging open in stupefied wonder.
By this juncture in the company's progress, there were no longer many employees remaining who were not of a kind with Henry Winston. One by one all the regular staff stopped appearing for work, and their desks came to be occupied by new persons who always looked like fugitives from the great tribe of derelicts living in the Golden City, a shadow population that moved day and night through that yellowish haze. No doubt they too had made accommodations for themselves in the building, little havens similar to the one I saw in Henry Winston's office. I imagined that such accommodations and a modicum of food may have been offered to them by the company in lieu of a paycheck. This scheme for 'cost-cutting' would alone account for the elevated profits that Blaine had realized in the past quarter. Of course this manner of fiscal growth could not continue much longer, and other measures would need to be taken if the company was truly to become a dominant force in the marketplace of this world or any other. These measures, I assumed, would emerge as the chief topic of the conference U G Blaine had scheduled with me after the close of the working day in a lavatory on one of the uppermost floors of that crumbling building.
When the time came, I began ascending the shaft of stairways—the elevator having ceased to function by that time—in anticipation of my private meeting with the company's president and founder. As I made my way in nearly total darkness up these steps I recalled the day that I came to interview for my position with what was then called the Blaine Company. That interview took place in another building in another city. In the reception area where I waited to be called for my interview there hung a portrait of U G Blaine. It was a flattering-enough likeness of a middle-aged man in a business suit, but the effect of contemplating this portrait was such that I wanted to turn away and purge it from my mind before I started thinking thoughts that I did not want in my head. But I found it impossible to turn away. Fortunately someone came along and called me to my interview before my thoughts reached a pitch of intolerable tension and agitation.
The person who interviewed me asked, among other things, what single personal quality I believed I might possess that would distinguish me for consideration as an employee of the Blaine Company. I hesitated for some time, and even thought it might be best if I gave no reply at all, or a very feeble and conventional response. Instead I spoke some words that I was sure the interviewer wanted to hear and that, in fact, were true. 'My quality,' I said, 'my personal quality is the capacity to drive myself and those around me to the uttermost limits of our potential—to affect persons, and even places, in a way that brings their unsuspected possibilities and purposes out of hiding and into the full light of realization. That is my personal quality.'
As oddly phrased and vehement as this statement might sound to other individuals, it was, I knew, exactly what my interviewer wanted to hear. On the spot I was offered the position for which I had applied at the Blaine Company—that of a manipulator of documents. When I entered the company's old offices to be interviewed my only purpose was to lose myself in the manipulation of documents, to bury as deeply as I could this passionate personal quality of mine, which had always resulted in the most unfortunate and twisted consequences for those involved, whether it was an individual person or a group of persons or a commercial entity like the Blaine Company. Because my personal quality, as stated to my interviewer at the Blaine Company, was more than a figure of speech or an exaggerated claim for the purposes of self-promotion, even if I have been at a lifelong loss to account for the full force of this extraordinary quality. For years my only purpose had been to suppress this quality, to crush it as best I could. However, after contemplating that portrait of U G Blaine—after seeing written upon that face what I might describe as a 'profoundly baseless sense of purpose in the world'– everything changed inside my head, which I could no longer keep from filling up with strange and violent thoughts and fantasies. 'This company will soon need to relocate,' I thought as I walked away from my interview that day. 'In order to satisfy its sense of purpose as a commercial entity, and the baseless sense of purpose of its founder and president, this company will need to relocate to another place.' And I knew precisely the place that was well suited to the company's purposes . . . and to my own. Thus, when I finally located and entered the small lavatory where U G Blaine wished to confer with me, I was incited to the point of derangement by the grim drama which was now coming to a climax.
'Opportunity awaits you in the Golden City,' I shouted, my voice resounding against the tile walls and floor, the metal doors and porcelain fixtures of the antiquated lavatory surrounding me. 'Opportunity awaits you in the Golden City,' I repeated, mocking the slogan that a public relations company had used to transform the image of the city once known as Murder Town. It was this preposterous dream of changing its public image that made the Golden City ideal for the purposes of Blaine (the company), which held the deranged and preposterous idea that it could ever become a dominant force in the world marketplace, even though its only commercial activity was that of manipulating documents for small-time businesses and a few private individuals. Only in this atmosphere of a crumbling city surrounded by vast, decaying neighborhoods, its streets filled with hordes of wandering derelicts and permeated by a yellowish haze that no meteorologist or scientist of any kind had ever successfully accounted for . . . only in this Murder Town could I manage to drive Mr U G Blaine to the uttermost limit of his potential—just as I had driven this city itself, whose streets I inhabited for a time, to the vile and devious limit of its potential, leaving behind an inexplicable yellowish haze, a mere side effect of the things that I had done there, things that I was born to do as a freak of this world (or perhaps another world altogether, so unknown am I to myself), things that my freakish nature learned to do over many years, and things that made me seek my own burial in an occupation where I could forget my freakish self and everything I knew about this world where I did not belong. Only here could Blaine be made to realize his unsuspected possibilities and purposes, especially that baseless sense of purpose which I could not escape seeing in that portrait of a middle-aged man in a business suit.
Of course it was not a man in a business suit who awaited my arrival in that small lavatory—it was the Blaine presence, as I called it, that pervaded the bright little room with its yellow tint. 'Your restructuring of the company has been a great success,' I said to the Blaine presence, which now quivered and curled about the room in trembling, yellow-tinted waves. 'Soon it will be just you and your derelicts in this building. You will be the dominant force in the marketplace of the Golden City, manipulating all the documents in town. But you will never go further than that. This is where you belong. This is where you will stay. And there's nothing either of us can do to change that. You think that I can assist you in extending your power and influence, your marketplace dominance, but I came to tell you that no such thing will ever happen. This place is your uttermost limit.'
The Blaine presence was now becoming
extremely agitated, its yellow tint swirling about the room and batting itself against the walls. 'There's no use in blaming me for what you are,' I screamed. 'You're the creator of a marketplace for violent thoughts and fantasies. I saw that in the portrait of the middle-aged man in a business suit, and I can feel it in the presence you have now made of yourself. That's all there can ever be for you in this world.'
At that point I picked up a wastepaper container that stood by the lavatory sink and was shaped like a bullet with a rounded point. Across the room was a small window with panes of frosted glass. I smashed those glass panes by ramming the rounded top of the wastepaper container into it with all the violent force within me. Through the smashed panes of that window in a lavatory on one of the uppermost floors of the building you could see out over the city, the moon shining down through the yellowish haze. 'There,' I shouted while pointing out the broken window. 'Go out into your world of haze. That's your element now. And you can't survive beyond its limits. The limits of the Golden City.'
The Collected Short Fiction Page 100