Thomas World

by Richard Cox

  “Thomas?”

  “Are you sure?” is all I can think of to say.

  “Yes,” says William. “Thomas, your performance over the past several months has been far below standard. I have repeatedly asked you to step it up or at the very least complete the projects assigned to you. And during this time you have demonstrated almost zero ability to complete any task on time, or at a minimum level of quality.”

  “I know my attention has waned lately,” I tell him. “But it’s one of those temporary things. I’ve worked here a long time. Sometimes the monotony gets to me, but I’m going to do better, William. I promise. Give me another chance.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that. The economy has hit this company hard, and we’re looking for areas to cut costs. One way to do that is to eliminate dead weight. I’m sorry to be so blunt, but that’s what you’ve become in recent months, Thomas. Dead weight.”

  “That isn’t fair,” I say. “I usually do a pretty good—”

  “Tell me the status of your five primary projects. Generally. Not including the Google report we discussed this morning.”

  “I’m looking through the search terms. I was doing that this morning when you stopped by my desk.”

  “You were doing that before you switched over to Facebook?”

  “Right. I was only on Facebook for a few moments learning how their ads work.”

  “Okay, so on the search terms, where are you? What’s the project status?”

  I open my mouth to answer, and that’s when I remember I have no idea. This morning I told you I was reviewing the terms to figure out which ones were underutilized in our online marketing. But I have no clue what I was actually doing. I was just sitting there waiting for Dick to send me the Ant Farm email.

  Beyond that, I can’t remember any of my other projects. Not their statuses, not their names, not even the concepts behind them. Nothing.

  What on earth is wrong with me?

  “Thomas, sometimes I wonder if you do anything at all in that cube of yours. I checked your Internet usage and you don’t appear to be wasting time on web sites. So what do you do? Just stare at the wall and daydream all day?”

  “William,” Brin Finneley says. “Let’s stick with the facts. Perhaps it’s time to talk about the severance package.”

  “Okay,” says William. “Certainly. Thomas, your severance package is generous. You’ll receive one week of pay for every three years worked. That adds up to a month’s pay.”

  “That’s not generous,” I say. “That’s company policy.”

  “Oh, it’s generous,” William tells me. “Some companies offer far less.”

  “Yes,” says the Brin Reaper. “Quite generous.”

  “And,” William adds, “you’ll have the opportunity to retain health benefits through the Cobra system.”

  “I think that’s the law, right?”

  “Also quite generous,” says the Brin Reaper.

  “I don’t believe this. I’ve worked here for twelve years. Don’t you give out warnings? Like a probationary period or something?”

  “Anyone who has ever built an empire sat where you are now,” William offers.

  “One month?” I say. “I’ll never find a job in one month. Not in this economy.”

  “Maybe you can use the time off to write a new screenplay,” he answers.

  I just sit there, staring at him, dumbfounded. All my thankless whining seems pretty stupid right about now, doesn’t it?

  “Sure,” I say. “That’s what I’ll do.”

  “You’re welcome to go back to your desk and gather your personal effects,” Brin says. “Someone from the mail room will bring you a few boxes. William will remain with you until you have finished, and then he will escort you from the building. Your building access has been terminated, so from this point forward you won’t be allowed back inside.

  “Nothing personal,” he adds. “Just company policy.”

  EIGHT

  You don’t realize how much useless shit you amass over a twelve-year period until you are forced to sort through it while your boss watches from the hallway. Everything seems frivolous. The newspaper clippings of ancient Dilbert comic strips. The foam rubber Cartman doll, his head squeezed into a tiny, plastic Dallas Cowboys helmet. The first-place ribbon for winning your ESPN fantasy football league four years ago, attached to the cubicle wall with a plastic red pushpin.

  I keep very little of these trinkets and throw the bulk of it in the trash. I take particular care to bury deep in the wastebasket my notebooks, which are inscribed with pages and pages of (now useless) notes taken in William’s office. I wonder if he will fish these volumes out of the trash and look through them, if he will find all the caricatures of him I drew? All the haikus I wrote about the pointless conversations we had? The longer he stands there watching me, the more I realize how useless I really was in this job, how no one in this building is going to miss me for even one minute. I’m an idiot. I’m thirty-four years old, for heaven’s sake. What the hell have I been doing with my life?

  In the end I am left with only one box, rectangular in shape, maybe ten inches tall and fourteen inches wide and twenty-four inches long. Twelve years of life at this company reduced to a little more than two cubic feet of personal effects. The box looks like a cardboard casket.

  “Ready?” William asks.

  I nod to him, and together we head toward the main hallway. The box is heavy and I can’t reach for my name badge, which also contains a magnetic strip that grants entrance into and exit from the building. When you forget your badge, you have to drive to the security building and ask for a temporary one if you want to get inside. And it’s not like we manufacture intercontinental ballistic missiles. We make sprinklers. Lawn sprinklers. What’s ironic is the “secure” doors close so slowly you can tailgate someone into the building without them knowing it.

  Then I remember my name badge has been turned off, so I stop worrying about this and wait for William to open the door for me. Instead he stops in front of the exit and looks at me awkwardly. I realize he wants to make a speech.

  “Thomas, I’m sorry about this.”

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been carrying my weight.”

  “I want you to know,” he says, “that I think in the end this will be good for you. I know you hate it here. You don’t have any passion for this work and I can understand why. You have bigger dreams. Hollywood dreams.”

  “Yes, well that’s no excuse for me being so unproductive.”

  “Chase your dreams, Thomas. People will do anything for what they really want in life. Or at least they should.”

  William opens the door with his name badge and I walk out of the building and into the morning sunshine. I’m halfway to my car before I remember that I’ve never mentioned anything to him about my screenwriting. In fact Dick Stanton is the only person here I’ve ever told, and that was just this morning.

  So how the hell did William find out?

  NINE

  Driving home now, I feel dizzy and lost, like I’m drunk. I don’t mean to beat a dead horse here but I’ve lived in that building almost every weekday for my entire adult life, and now it’s over. One minute I’m sitting there like every other morning, and the next I’m carrying a box of trinkets to my car and that’s it. Forever. Never going back.

  But let’s be honest—it wasn’t like every other morning, was it? Since yesterday at the church everything in my life has been going downhill, and now it just got a hell of a lot worse.

  I mean, is this a coincidence? All of that shit yesterday and then today I get fired? What’s next?

  On the freeway, traffic moves a lot better now that it isn’t rush hour. And I still feel sure someone is watching me.

  Think about it. How did that man in the bathroom find me? Why did I choose today of all days to talk to Dick? How likely is it that he would know about the Ant Farm game? Someone clearly has a vested interest in what I’m doing. They are probably watch
ing my every move. And there must be more than one of them, because you can’t effectively monitor someone with just one set of eyes. There could be a whole team of them.

  I pass a yellow Volkswagen Beetle. The driver is a small young woman with black glasses and a funky haircut. She stares back at me.

  Is she one of them?

  I pass a brown Ford sedan driven by a guy wearing a gray suit and matching Stetson hat. Actually, there are two men in the car, and they’re both wearing the same thing. Neither of them are looking in my direction, but that doesn’t mean they haven’t been following me.

  Now I drive past a silver Dodge Durango driven by a short bald guy. A black Jeep Liberty driven by a hot brunette.

  Maybe none of them are watching me.

  Maybe all of them are watching me.

  When did the surveillance begin, I wonder? When I saw the blue orb in the church? Sometime before? Have I always been watched?

  When I think about having been observed my entire life, my ears start to make that roaring sound again. My mouth tastes bitter, like pennies. And of course I hear the phantom woman, counting out numbers…

  Or wait. They aren’t numbers anymore. Now she’s reciting words, like code words, using the same monotone voice as before.

  Charlie, she says in a hesitant British accent, almost as if she is reading a language that isn’t hers. Alpha…delta…alpha…echo…India…bravo…foxtrot…echo…Charlie...

  The crazy thing is I know this is a method for indicating letters of the alphabet, but if you asked me to recite these words from memory, I wouldn’t be able to get past alpha, bravo, Charlie. And yet I’m hearing them in my head, anyway.

  My car chews up the road, and eventually I exit the freeway. A few minutes later I turn onto my street. Then my driveway. Finally I walk into my house, which seems strangely quiet and mysterious, maybe because I’m never here at this time of day…or maybe because an intruder was in here earlier.

  It makes sense. If I’m being watched, whoever it is has probably been to the house when Gloria and I aren’t here. Maybe they came today.

  Maybe they’re still here.

  The main hallway is hardwood, and even in a house this new the wood creaks just enough to give away my position. I peek into the study on the left and the master bedroom on the right, looking for anything that might be out of place. My nose is on high alert, ready to detect the slightest scent. I think Gloria might have made eggs for breakfast after I left for work. I creep into the kitchen, then the living room, then the spare bedroom. Bathrooms are empty. The only places left to look are the closets, and the only one with enough free space to hide in is the big one in our master bedroom.

  So I tiptoe in that direction, and the closer I get the more certain I become someone is in there. On the way past the chest of drawers I grab a 6-iron leaning against it. It’s no weapon, but it’s something, and as I creep closer to the closet, I swear I can almost feel a tiny increase in air temperature, a bit more humidity, the smell of something metallic.

  Part of me thinks I should back away. Walk outside and dial 9-1-1. What the hell is a golf club going to do against a guy with a gun?

  But I just lost my job and I’m not feeling so stable right now, so fuck it. I grip the club tighter and step boldly into the closet. I swear when I do, I can almost hear a dramatic music cue in my head, as if someone (you?) is watching all this unfold on the silver screen.

  And I see him. For real I see him, standing in the shadows against the wall, holding something above his head. A gun? What is that smell? What the fuck?

  I’ve got the 6-iron in both hands, held high above my head, and I bring it down like a sword as hard as I can. I aim exactly where the man is standing. He seems to move in response to me, and in the split second before impact I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

  My golf club buries itself into the wall. A cloud of drywall dust and projectiles puff out of a 6-iron shaped hole I’ve just made. I let go of the grip, and now the club just hangs from its place in the wall. It looks like some kind of strange decoration, like it’s always been there.

  Even without turning on the light I now see there is no one in here. What I do see is my own shadow falling against the far wall. Closer to me, the LED readout of the iron glows green. The iron is supposed to turn itself off when not in use, but it frequently forgets. For a moment I just stand there, examining the damage I’ve done to the wall. My heartbeat pulses in my ears.

  How the hell did I think someone was in here? I mistook a pressing iron as the smell of a gun. As the body heat of another human being. I attacked my own shadow with a golf club.

  I don’t want to think about this anymore, so I turn around and walk out of the closet.

  The golf club stays where it is.

  TEN

  There’s a mirror above my bedroom dresser, and I stop to look at myself in it. My eyes are only about half open. The crease between my brows appears to have deepened since just yesterday. I look tired and somehow older, like three years have passed since I went to bed last night. As I stand there my eyes begin to drift out of focus, the image in front of me blurring, as if there were something to see beyond the mirror, something more real than this.

  Eventually I realize I have to do something. A whole day is stretched in front of me, almost eight hours before Gloria will walk through the door and ask how my day went. I have to figure out how I’m going to tell her I was fired without her freaking out. I have to start looking for another job.

  Or do I?

  I walk into the hallway and reactivate the security alarm and shut all the window blinds in the house. Just because I found an iron instead of an intruder in the closet doesn’t mean they aren’t watching.

  Then I sit in front of the computer and Google the Ant Farm game. The blue orb appears again, and when I click it a new page appears, a form asking for personal information. I type Thomas in the FIRST NAME field and Phillips in the LAST NAME field. I enter my email address (thomasphillips314@gmail.com), pick a password, and then enter my true AGE, SEX, CITY, and STATE. The final field is optional, which is MYSPACE/FACEBOOK/PERSONAL URL. I key in: http://www.facebook.com/tphipi. I have a blog, too, aptly titled “Insanity Is in the Mind of the Beholder,” but I don’t see anywhere to add that. Finally I click SUBMIT, and a window pops up displaying the name of the file, antfarm.exe, along with a message asking if I want to save the file or open it.

  I click “open.”

  The ant farm file is so large that even with my lightning-fast broadband connection the estimated download time is thirty-one minutes. While I wait I think of the work I should be doing right now, compiling search engine statistics and building charts with them. I have this feeling, this guilty feeling, that I’ve made a huge mistake. Because after all, I’m at home on a workday downloading a computer game that is supposed to help me understand what is wrong with the world. Intellectually I realize how misguided my actions are, but somehow knowing that is not enough. Knowing that doesn’t mute the voices in my head, it doesn’t erase the pictures I keep seeing.

  Like a bridge and a man in a Stetson hat. Like the concrete walls of a supermax prison cell. I wonder how I’m ever going to get out of this prison, this black iron prison. Dick said the truth was in numbers. Does he hear the numbers, too? Like three and one and four and one and five…

  It’s hot in this house. I feel itchy. I’m absolutely convinced someone is watching me, and now I’m beginning to wonder if maybe everyone is watching me.

  I mean everyone.

  Including you.

  From the hallway I hear a sound. A creaking baseboard. Fear pours into my arms, strokes my neck, like a bad dream, and I slowly swivel the chair around, certain someone will be standing there. Certain that you will be there.

  But no one is there.

  I stare at the doorway, waiting for the intruder to show his face, until finally the computer chimes. I turn back around and realize the file has finished downloading. A splash screen ap
pears with that same photo of the Mayan temple and the crawling ants. At the bottom of this image is some text that says: Install Ant Farm 2.0.

  This process takes another several minutes, during which I force myself not to get up and search the house for intruders again.

  Finally the game loads. The first thing to appear is an Earth-like planet against a backdrop of space and stars, and in front of that, this message appears:

  Thank you for downloading Ant Farm 2.0, the sim that makes YOU a god. While there are many simulation games on the market today, Ant Farm 2.0 is the only one that puts the power of belief systems at your fingertips!

  By giving you the ability to set hundreds of parameters, Ant Farm 2.0 constructs a system of rules that your self-aware race will try their best to live by.

  Okay, let’s get started.

  Below all this text is a link that says CREATE YOUR WORLD, which I click. The five categories that appear are: BELIEF SYSTEMS, BIOLOGY, ECOLOGY, COSMOLOGY, and CULTURE.

  When I click BELIEF SYSTEMS, I am presented with a page full of parameters, such as:

  Does your belief system possess a set of values the ants should live by?

  Are the values expressed in a clear manner, or are they embedded in stories and scripture that can be interpreted in a variety of ways?

  That question sounds like something a typical atheist would say, just like the next one:

  Do any of the values conflict with each other?

  Or:

  Do the stories in your value manual match reality as described by scientific study?