There was a lot about the Metro Diner that shared this same quality, which was the primary reason I had been an habitué of the place for many years. I also lived in the backstairs apartment above the diner, for which Lillian charged me a modest monthly rent.
Over our Sloppy Burgers I told Frank about the restructuring of the company I had heard about, which elicited from him only a shrug of profound uninterest. Then I told him about the relocation, which interested him only from the practical standpoint of travel-time to and from work.
'Is that it?' Frank asked.
'Not quite,' I said.
'What? Somebody die?'
'No,' I said.
'You're leaving the company. Great.'
'No, I'm not leaving the company, Frank.'
'Then what?' he asked.
'A question,' I said with a deliberate gravity that Frank just as deliberately ignored.
'Okay, shoot.'
'Frank, why is Richard called The Doctor?'
Frank smiled and pushed aside the plate on which only a few ketchup-soaked fries remained. Then he slowly, almost ritualistically lit up a cigarette.
'This is going to cost you lunch, you know that, don't you?'
'Done,' I agreed.
'You really don't know about this? I mean, if you know that Richard's called The Doctor in the first place, you should know the reason why.'
'Well, I don't. I'm not even sure how I know what I know. I think I overheard it somewhere. Maybe it's a false memory, I don't know. But my feeling is that this is not something I should be asking just anybody at the company.'
'You're right about that,' Frank said. 'You ask the wrong person what you just asked me and you might end up on your way out.'
'Yeah, I understand that there've been people who were fired for one reason or another because of Richard. So he's a PhD in office politics—that much I know.'
'Wrong. The title of "doctor" is ironic,' Frank explained. 'Here's the reason. Richard has no fewer than three suicides to his credit—two women, one guy. I can't believe you don't know this.'
'You know me, Frank. I keep my head in the sand. It feels good down there.'
'I know, "Stay stupid, stay alive",' Frank said. 'But that motto doesn't apply when it comes to Richard. I knew the family of the guy who did himself. He actually named Richard in his suicide note, but there was nothing that the family could do—legally, I mean. He was a head case to begin with anyway. One of the women who killed herself didn't leave a note, but it wasn't hard to put cause and effect together. Rumor was she had had an affair with Richard. This was back when he was in... whatever division he was in before he came to live with us.'
'And the other woman?' I asked.
Frank paused to light another cigarette. 'This is the best one. It happened a couple months before you started at the company. This chick slit her wrists right in Richard's office. Died spread out over his desk, blood running everywhere.'
'Like a dead patient on an operating table.'
'Right. It was that one that got him the name The Doctor. Before that little incident the guy was in line to become CEO. He should have been running the company a long time ago. Who knows where he'd be now? Definitely not the manager of our hole-in-the-wall division. Even the other suicides wouldn't have made any difference. If anything they only enhanced his résumé as a real powerhouse exec. But the dead girl in the office—that didn't look too good.'
'I think we'd better head back,' I said, looking at my watch.
On the way out I waved goodbye to Lillian, and she waved back to me.
'Frank, I hope you didn't ask me about Richard because you're having some problem with him,' said Frank as we retraced our route back to the building.
At the time I could neither confirm nor deny that this was the case.
6
There are some people who attest that they do not remember their dreams, who have never known what it's like to awake screaming or half-insane or merely trembling from the aftershock of a nightmare. These are not necessarily simple-minded persons or happy persons or persons of stunted imaginations. But somehow they have retained a lifelong innocence, never knowing the dread some feel upon approaching the bedroom and facing that descent into the darkness of unknown worlds that may range from cartoonish absurdity to quaking horror. They are very lucky people. I wish I were one of them.
Over the weekend I tried to put the office out of my mind like a
Bad Dream
This task was made considerably more difficult by the new nightmares that began visiting me, ones in which a sleep-world version of Richard took center stage. In these dreams I found myself back at the company, a place that resembled the dimestore I used to visit when I was a kid.
In the real dimestore there was a corner that served as a miniature pet shop where living merchandise was on display. Several aquariums held a variety of small fish, and terrariums featured chameleons or tar-colored reptiles of some type that lay motionless against the glass. Parakeets twittered in bell-shaped cages, while guinea pigs and gerbils scampered about in square, smelly cages. I was walking slowly up and down the aisles, in my dimestore nightmares, fearful of drawing attention to myself. The reason I walked so slowly was that the floors were made of soft slats of wood which creaked with every step I took, and I didn't want to be seen by Richard, who was over in the corner with the caged animals.
He was doing something terrible to them, although I couldn't specify what it was.
But his fingers were able to reach between the closely spaced bars of the cages and could penetrate the glass of the fish tanks and the terrariums. I wanted to know what he was doing to these animals, but I was too afraid to look. And there were voices whispering to me about Richard. 'He's fixing them,' the voices said, answering the unspoken question in my fearful mind. 'Why is he called The Doctor?' I asked aloud, addressing no one. 'He's here to fix them,' the voices reiterated, as if somehow meaning both to reassure and to frighten me at the same time.
I wanted to run out of the store, but the front entrance through which I had entered was now only a blank wall. The only way out was through the back door in the corner where Richard was occupied with the animals. He seemed fairly engrossed in whatever horrible things he was doing, and I thought that if I could run fast enough I could make it past him and escape through the back. When I finally reached my destination, fighting my way through the resistant atmosphere of the dream dimestore, I found that the doors were locked. I tried to kick the doors open, but then I saw that their glass was reinforced by criss-crossing veins of metal wire. Before I woke up screaming, Richard turned his head to look my way and then reached out to grab me. But his hands weren't hands. They were
Great White Gloves
But these gloves didn't have the requisite number of fingers on them. I had seen them before... and not just in dreams. Because nothing in dreams is original; it's all plagiarized from waking life. And the gloves in the dream were merely a frightening reflection of something I had come upon earlier that Saturday afternoon.
There was a derelict warehouse that was located just outside the downtown area. For some time I had intended to make an excursion there in order to look around inside and take some photographs before the city had the place sealed up. I was not in any sense an expert photographer, and my equipment was not in the least sophisticated or expensive. I took my pictures in color—not the black-and-white of a serious photographic artist—and brought my film to a local drugstore for processing.
While I certainly desired to retain a record of the sites I had visited around the city over the years, my picture-taking was something of an excuse to justify and explain (both to myself and to anyone else who might wonder) my presence in the city's many regions that had passed from squalor to abandonment, from abandonment to decay, and from decay into the ultimate stages of degeneration that bordered upon complete disappearance from this world. It was not the wabi of battered but still useful objects that I was seeking; it was t
he sabi of things utterly dejected and destitute, alone and forgotten—whatever was submitting to its essential impermanence, its transitory nature, whatever was teetering on the brink of non-existence that was the fate of everything that had ever been and awaited everything that would ever be... every person, every place, every purpose, and every plan that could possibly be conceived. This, in a nutshell, was what brought me to explore, and to photographically document, the exterior shell and the interior spaces of a derelict warehouse that Saturday afternoon.
This place was not unlike many others to which I had made similar excursions. From outside one couldn't say for sure what purpose the structure, which occupied almost half a city block (not including the field of weeds and broken concrete adjacent to the building), had once served. The words painted across its side had been reduced by time and the elements to a few fragmented letters which themselves had all but found their way to the other side of invisibility. But I had already gained enough experience in these matters to be able to distinguish a derelict factory from a derelict warehouse. And once inside, entering through a doorway without a door, I found that I was correct in my judgment.
I should say that it was not my customary practice as an aficionado of modern ruins to invade their interiors. There were several good reasons for this.
One: there were physical risks when one disturbed the sensitive spaces of deteriorating structures—every footstep had the potential of setting off a chain reaction of collapsing walls, stairways, overhead fixtures, and the like.
Two: these places frequently served as home-ground for various persons who had nowhere else to call home, the cast-offs and losers of a world that had no use for them and did everything it could to push them further and further into exile, because the presence of these living ghosts, these ambulatory spirits, was simply too haunting to be tolerated, provoking a dismal reminder of something that must be ignored at all costs... for these specters were not merely human detritus that the rest of us had left behind, but also citizens of a future that awaits all the empires infesting this earth, not to mention the imminent fall of those fragile homelands of flesh which we each inhabit. And even though I already had taken several psychological steps into their desperate world, I felt too much fear of these precocious residents of oblivion to advance any further.
Three: the sad and tranquil pleasures of sabi that lured me to these old piles were best enjoyed at a distance, in suggestive long-shot views of desolate scenes rather than too-clear close-ups of some hopeless drunk or drug addict urinating against a wall.
Yet there are some structures that draw you into them, inviting you inside to wallow in their degraded wonders. From the first time I visited the site of this derelict warehouse, which I had already photographed from the outside, I knew that this was one of those places, if only because its exterior offered so little in the way of outward suggestiveness—a nameless shell whose history and hopes were held back from the outside observer. It all seemed so enticing, but like every other attraction along the world's midway the greatest part of its appeal lay in those moments of anticipation. And after it was all over, the particular attraction which had once promised so much would send you on your way unrewarded, purged of your curiosity and the poorer for being so. This derelict warehouse was, of course, no different.
At least there were no squatters inside that I was called upon to deal with, or none that I saw. And the structure was still fairly safe and solid, with steel stairways that hadn't come loose from their walls, allowing me to make a quick reconnaissance of the place from bottom to top. Aside from the usual array of refuse and junkyard leavings—liquor bottles, worn-out tires, parts of machines, parts of appliances, parts of parts—I did find a filing cabinet in a room on the uppermost floor of the warehouse. Within that cabinet's drawers there were a few pages from a receipt pad that bore the ink-stamped imprint of Murphy's Costumes and Theatrical Supplies, a business that evidently stored some of its eponymous inventory in the warehouse. After further investigation I found some items lying in the dirt and darkness of a shattered wall. These were: (1) a couple of mannikin hands, both lefties, and (2) a very dirty pair of oversized gloves, each with a set of four sausage-shaped fingers—the accurate but strangely impractical accoutrements for the outfitting of both amateurs and professionals called upon to impersonate a beloved and begloved cartoon star. How mysterious, how ridiculous, that my dreaming brain would discard the dismembered mannikin hands, which I found intriguing enough to take back home with me, and decide to feature in my nightmare about Richard those unnaturally large gloves, which I left behind as lesser mementos of that disappointing warehouse excursion.
Walking back to my apartment, I passed through the many shadows cast by great hotels, movie theaters, department stores, and office towers, each of them once filled to capacity with dreams of a future that abandoned them all with an unforeseen haste, leaving behind only untended monuments in a cemetery that no one bothered to visit any more—with the exception of the odd photographer of ruins. Twilight shone through the spaces between these structures and illuminated their soaring peaks with an amber light, the hue of setting suns and fading worlds.
The particular night that followed would have one hour removed from it, as the time zone in which I lived had 'daylight savings' forced upon it, which for me only meant that I would spend the rest of that spring, all of summer, and five weeks of fall trying to recover a lost hour of sleep. This scheme for saving daylight—for creating the illusion that we could manipulate the clockwork movements of our solar system—was once justified to me as being 'good for business'. Before returning to my apartment, I stopped by the Metro Diner to put this matter before—
Lillian
'Good for business?' she repeated with the emphasis of a skeptic. 'That's news to this old gal. You see anyone else besides you sitting at my counter?' (Lillian commonly referred to the diner as a whole with the synecdoche of 'her counter'.) 'You think another hour of sunshine is going to make any difference to me? Maybe it does to other folks, I don't know.'
As Lillian was talking to me she was staring at the two mannikin hands that I had set down on the stool next to me. She reached under the counter and produced one of the brown bags that the diner used to package carry-out orders. 'Would you do me the favor of putting those nasty things where I can't see them,' she said, handing me the bag.
'Sorry, Lil,' I said as I stuffed the plaster hands inside the bag and crumpled it closed. But I wasn't sure if my apology was for thoughtlessly bringing these unclean objects into Lillian's otherwise well-scrubbed place of business or if the sight of these replicant parts of the human body somehow unsettled her. I suspected it was the latter, but I didn't pursue the issue.
'You still taking pictures of those old buildings and junk for your book?' Lillian asked.
'Mm-hm,' I wordlessly replied, turning away to look out the front window of the diner. I found it difficult, almost painful, to perpetuate the lie of 'my book' to Lillian. But what could I say to her? That I'm drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe)... because they take me into a world (the seething builds)... a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch)... the one I'm doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething)... to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work... work... work?
'I don't understand it,' she said. 'There's so many pretty things you could be taking pictures of. Far as that goes, I still don't know why you live upstairs—not saying I ain't glad to have a regular-paying tenant. But even I live in a better neighborhood. And you could live anywhere you want.'
'What can I say, Lil? I am addicted to your cooking. Speaking of which, could I get the meatloaf special before you close for the day?'
'Sure can,' Lillian replied as she lit up a cigarette. 'You hear that, Rudy?'
'Yeah, I heard,' the voice of Rudy called out.
As she poured out two cups of coffee (dec
af for me, as she already knew), I wondered if Lillian's employees feared her in the way that I feared Richard. After all, one business is essentially the same as another, and she was the owner, CEO, and sole stockholder of that longstanding enterprise called the Metro Diner. I judged her to be easily as tough as Richard, and, in her own world, just as savvy. Was I now trading pleasantries with an elderly black woman who beneath the surface was no different from Richard the Bastard, Richard the Evil One? I liked Lillian, but I knew her only from the perspective of the customer, which made me just a little current in that river of cash that she needed to keep flowing into her accounts.
'You going to just stare at that coffee?' Lillian asked.
I smiled at being caught in an unguarded state of preoccupation with my dark thoughts. Then I took a sip of the decaf.
'It's good. Tastes like the real thing,' I said, and this time I was telling the truth.
'Nothing hard about making a good cup of coffee,' Lillian said to this customer as she lit up another cigarette.
And that statement provided something of an answer to my questions about Lillian and her business. Because the coffee at the Metro Diner didn't have to be as good as it was, nor did the excellent food served there have to be so carefully prepared or so reasonably priced. That was not how we did things where I happened to work. The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product—Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price—Everything.
This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be—will be—only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.
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