Chapter 7: The Smokers
Dick Ferguson was in his mid-30s but he still dressed like a guy who stayed in the house all day. For his job he was required to wear a collared shirt, and this meant rotating three drab solid-print polos that looked older than a Father of Israel. These garments were never tucked in but hung loosely over his Buddha belly, creating a conical shadow between his shirt tail and his lower abdomen that he wore like a flabby black belt. His hair was curly, ratty, spastically long, and it didn’t take much imagination to see it was exactly what Harpo Marx would’ve had if only he’d lived into the ’60s and had a hippy freak-out.
With him was Betty Cairn. She was about the same age as Dick, but she had a daughter in high school that she’d raised alone ever since she got knocked up on an Army base. She was partial to pastel cotton blouses that uncomfortably showcased her Queen Victoria physique. Her hair came off the top of her head in stiff platinum spikes like the leaves of a fern, and she went heavy on the black eyeshadow and foundation, which hid her splotchy skin.
“You’ll never guess what Orna did,” said Betty.
“Oh lord,” said Dick.
Betty took a drag on her cigarette. “This was just a few minutes ago, when you were in that meeting. I got the phone and it was for her. So I press Hold and hang up and call over to her. They really need to get separate phones for each station. ‘Tha-ank yo-ou,’ you know, how she says everything like she’s talking to a toddler.”
Dick’s chuckle came like a series of breathy hiccups. He scratched the underside of his full bedspring beard and nodded.
“She comes over to my side and picks up the receiver. Then she pulls it away from her ear and looks at it like she don’t know why she can’t hear anything. ‘Hello-oh? Hello-oh!'”
Betty’s shoulders shook with the effort of containing her laughter. She turned her head away and waved her cigarette in front of her face, and, with one false start, composed herself and continued the story. “She starts pushing every button on the phone. Bam. Bam. Bam!”
Betty let out a whoop of country laughter, gaining the attention of the other smokers on the courtyard balcony. Her laugh died in a phlegmy ktch-kss-kss sound.
“Orna,” Dick laughed.
“I know,” Betty said wiping her her eyes. “So then she hangs up the receiver real soft and walks back over to her desk. The phone rings again and it’s for her. This time I just hold the receiver out while she comes over and I’m trying not to die of laughing. ‘Oh girl I’m so sorry. They just changed the phones on us and blah-ha-heh-heh-hey!’ You know how she sounds.”
“Oh yeeah,” Dick said exaggerating his Appalachian accent. “An’ Ah’m jest gawna talk t’yoo girl fuh full half a’ hour.”
“I know. Standing right over my shoulder the whole time. They really need to go ahead and get a phone in every station. Some of us have things to do.”
They grinned some more, pantomiming the actions of the story, and lapsed into silence. The other smokers had returned to their own conversations, conducted in confidential voices. Betty and Dick looked around some, gave each other a half-smile, and shrugged.
“You through?” Betty asked.
Dick stubbed out his butt. “Ah reckon. Guess Ah’ll git back too it. ‘Sides, we might haveta git the phone fuh’er.”
Betty whooped and then immediately felt self-conscious. She walked the rest of the way to their office in silence. Dick gave a sheepish amiable nod to everyone they passed but did not make eye contact and no words were spoken. At the double doors at the end of the hall Dick swiped his ID badge to let them into the copy room.
With a surplus of contractors and a lack of office space Metrotech, like many inner city schools and all punitive housing institutions, had taken to putting desks into supply rooms. Along with Orna, Dick and Betty sat at tables running along the perimeter of the room. The middle of the floor was massed with a Tetris stack of photocopiers and printers that whirred and collated and jammed with aggravating aplomb all day long, and every few minutes a coworker buzzed into the room to pick up his print job or make copies of meeting minutes. Each let the door slam, every time, and left again without speaking to the workers inside, who in turn tensely ignored the interruptions. It was a class system, but the irony was that many contractors were represented by agencies that had negotiated significantly higher wages than what the regular employees received. Metrotech notoriously low-balled their own staff.
Orna was standing over Betty’s computer talking on the phone. Dick shot Betty a look and went to his seat. Orna stayed on another minute after Betty sat down.
The ding that precedes an announcement sounded. “May I have your attention please?” said the intercom. “May I have your attention. We are experiencing issues with the plumbing in the building. All water service is stopped. This includes drinking fountains and restroom facilities. We will make another announcement when service is restored. Thank you for your cooperation.”
In the copy room everyone sighed. “Can you believe it?” Orna asked. “Again?”
“Guess I’ll be driving over to the diner to use theirs,” Betty said.
“I’m gonna make myself go now before it gets too nasty in there,” Orna laughed.
“God, how crass,” Betty said as soon as the door closed, forcing a chuckle to indicate she was kidding when she was not. Dick stretched back in his chair and nodded.
“What are you working on?” she asked.
“Jist tracin’ this shit,” Dick said. “All’s they got is hard copies so I gotta scan it in an touch-it-up.”
“Well that’s a good use of your time.”
“Yep.”
The phone rang. “Copy room, Betty speaking.”
“Get Orna.”
Betty held the receiver out in irritation. “She’s not here right now,” she said leaving out the May I Take a Message? part.
“Where she at?”
“I don’t know.”
“I put a little C4 in her purse when she was takin’ a shit this morning.”
“What?”
“The bitch got a bomb in her purse! Where she at?”
Betty nearly dropped the phone. “The bathroom I think.”
“You see there. I knew you was lyin’ bout where she at. Figures the bitch be back in the bathroom. Now you go get your boss an you tell’im Orna done brought a bomb to work.”
“Okay.”
“You got me I said?”
“Yes, God, yes!”
“A’ight then,” and he hung up.
“What the hell?” Dick asked.
Betty set the receiver down on the table away from the phone. “I, I think someone just called in a bomb threat.”
“A bomb threat?”
“This man said Orna has a little C4 in her purse. A little C4, that’s what he said. He was really nasty.”
“C4 explosives? Come on. They wouldn’t fit in no purse Ah don’t reckon. Too big and heavy.”
Betty stared at Orna’s chair. “Really?” she whispered.
“Well, Ah’m pretty sure. It was in Die Hard.”
Betty went to hang up the phone properly and noticed her hand hovering above it, shaking in mid-air. She leapt to her feet. “We have to evacuate. There’s a bomb. There’s a bomb in this office right now oh my God!”
She burst from the office like a sprinter who beat the drug test. Dick stared at the purse sitting coiled on Orna’s chair, then strode quickly after her.
Chapter 8: A Misguided Attempt at Sanctity
The news vans zipped cross the empty spaces of the Metrotech parking lot trying to reach the traffic lights ahead of the fire trucks, which were also on their way out. The throng of employees given the okay shuffled back into the building and queued up before the elevators. The change from the humidity outside to the stale a/c had many sneezing. In all they’d been kept out over an hour, and it was two more until quitting time.
Snoz made a fast-walking sweep of the lot studying the rows of cars until he spotted the one he was looking for, his boss’s, and this only made him more anxious. He jogged back to the entrance and slid among those waiting for the elevators, looking for her past butts and guts. The last group boarded leaving Snoz to stare with concern at the empty foyer. He approached the lone remaining officer writing something in his squad car. Coming closer Snoz wondered what he was doing. It was difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. The face of the building leaned over him with careless intimidation, and the mild excitement of the moment was pulled out of him. Work always made him blanked out and sad, and these feelings carried through most evenings until just before bed, when a burst of energy brought an elation that was soon replaced by the resigned railing duty of the day to come. Without being conscious of it he had perfected self-hypnosis, the necessity of shutting down all emotions in order to contain the black anger and depression. He knew he was thought a snob for not engaging in workplace small talk, but he wasn’t any part of an actor and could derive no pleasure from commisseration through platitudes, and furthermore he fiercely guarded his out of work, which is to say real, life from his coworkers in a misguided attempt to sanctify it. He held nothing against any of them, he knew that very few given the choice would spend 45 or 50 hours a week there either. He again considered chatting up the cop. Snoz was no outdoorsman, but he did not possess the agoraphobia of a Woody Allen either, and the parking lot on a cloudy day carried an attraction, but his slope-shouldered sense of responsibility won out and pushed him inside.
Inside. He took the stairs to prolong the walk to his desk, the stairs that led to the other building, and from there he took the skywalk back, and wound his way past the company library, and cut through the cafeteria where he met the eyes of another in a bicultural connect, and lingered at the mezzanine’s floor-to-ceiling tinted windows facing the lot he just left, and wondered why he couldn’t turn back for his car, and the cop was gone, and the idea came to pull the fire alarm like the dorm kids who finish their finals early, but he didn’t know where the alarms were, and wouldn’t have done it anyhow.
Everything was the color of 40-year-old drywall, white smoot and bare. A middle manager who considered herself the creative type had been pushing to liven the place up by duo-toning the walls in a nice gravel gray or palm bark tan, but like all employee ideas that cost money it was unlikely to come to pass. Snoz didn’t notice the sterile décor, he had acclimated. It was his life and he did not understand how it happened nor why but he’d read enough sociobiology to know it was primarily an accident of genetics which is to say factors outside his control and while the society had through a process of emotion, small reason, and time been designed to provide contented livelihoods for ninety-something percent of the Western world, he was in the sliver left out. Even so like all of humanity he clung to his life and expected the best of times to continue in perpetuity, and became morose when they did not, coming in such cases as being kept waiting in line at the post office or knocking on a busy friend’s door only to have it go unanswered. Which is to say he expected each day of his life to match the highs of his best memories, and he resented that it did not.
He wondered whether he’d have the guts to go to work high. Drugs were not bad, not as a blanket condemnation, and some were in fact quite good at opening oneself to the world. He was just following the lead of other people, like how when you are in a meeting and you lift your coffee mug, you can be sure someone else will reach and do the same, completely unconsciouly. As far as Snoz could see this applied to all higher functions and ideas of man: it would be difficult to advance the cultural intelligence of humanity without the instinctual impulse of mimickry. Like the hippies. They did not last because theirs was the first mass hedonism in the media age. The idea spread across the world, leaving the narrow-minded and the phobic to lash back in cornered distress. The accident of genetics again. It was only because he’d been born in this particular age that the reality he swam in was wet with the anti-hippy backlash and did not revere the artist. Lacking support the feelings of worthlessness overcame him even as his rational brain understood the situation.
Higher brain functions and art, these things he understood. The sway of tradition and the comfort of phobia, not so much.