I cut off a black woman in a Saab, was gratified to hear her honk at me.
I swerved in front of a punk in a VW, smiled as he screamed at me out the window.
I started buying lottery tickets each Wednesday and Saturday, the two days on which the game was played. I knew I had no chance of winning — according to an article in the newspaper, I had a better chance of being hit by lightning than winning the lottery — but I began to see the game as the only way of escaping the strait-jacket that was my job. Each Wednesday and Saturday night as I sat in front of the television, watching the numbered white Ping-Pong balls flying about in their glass vacuum case, I not only hoped I would win, I actually thought I would win. I began to concoct elaborate scenarios in my head, plans of what I would do with my newfound wealth. First, I would settle some scores at work. I would hire someone to dump a thousand pounds of cow shit on top of Banks’ desk. I would hire a thug to make Stewart dance naked in the first-floor lobby to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” I would yell obscenities over the corporation’s PA system until someone called Security and had me forcibly removed from the building.
After that, I would get the hell out of California. I did not know where I’d go; I had no real destination in mind, but I knew that I wanted out of here. This place had come to represent everything that was wrong with my life, and I would ditch it and start over somewhere else, somewhere new, somewhere fresh.
At least that was the plan.
But each Thursday and Monday, after watching the lottery drawing and comparing the chosen numbers with those on the ticket in my hand, I inevitably ended up back at work, a dollar poorer and a day more depressed, all my plans shot to hell.
It was on one of these Mondays that I came across a photo someone had accidentally dropped on the floor of the elevator. It was an eight-by-ten, a picture of the testing department that had obviously been taken in the sixties. The men all had inappropriately long sideburns and wide, loud ties, the women short skirts and bell-bottomed pantsuits. There were faces I recognized in the photo, and that was the weird thing. I saw longhaired young women who had become short-haired old women; smiling, easygoing men whose faces had since hardened permanently into uptight frowns. The dichotomy was so striking, the differences so obvious, that it was like seeing a horror movie makeup transformation. Never before had I seen such a depressingly clear example of the ravaging effects of time.
For me, it was like Scrooge seeing the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. I saw my present in that photo, my future in the now-hardened faces of my coworkers.
I returned to my desk, more shaken than I would have liked to admit. On my desk, I found a stack of papers and, on top of that, a yellow Post-It upon which Stewart had scrawled a short note: “Revise Termination Procedures for Personnel. Due tomorrow. 8:00.”
The 8:00 was underlined.
Twice.
Sighing, I sat down, picked up the papers. For the next hour, I read through the highlighted paragraphs in the provided pages and looked over the margin notes that Stewart wanted me to incorporate into the text. I made my own notes, hacked out a rough draft of the corrections, which I paper-clipped to the proper pages, then carried my materials down the hall to the steno pool. I smiled at Lois and Virginia, said hi, but both of them ignored me, and I retreated to the word-processing desk in the corner and sat down at the PC.
I turned on the terminal, inserted my diskette, and was about to start typing the first of the corrections when I stopped. I don’t know what came over me, I don’t know why I did it, but I put my fingers to the keys and typed: “A full-time employee can be terminated in one of the three ways — hanging, electrocution, or lethal injection.”
I reread what I’d written. I almost stopped there. I almost moved the cursor to the beginning of the line and pressed the delete key.
Almost.
My hesitation lasted only a second. I knew I could be fired if I distributed these corrections and someone read them, but in a way I would have welcomed that. At least it would have put an end to my misery here. It would have forced me to find another job someplace else.
But I knew from experience that no one would read what I was writing. The people to whom I gave my updates seldom even inserted them in the appropriate manuals, let alone read them. Hell, even Stewart seemed to have stopped going over my work.
“An employee terminated for poor work performance can no longer be drawn and quartered under the new regulations,” I typed. “The revised guidelines state clearly that such an employee is now to be terminated by hanging from the neck until dead.”
I grinned as I reread the sentence. Behind me, Lois and Virginia were talking as they did their own work, discussing some miniseries they’d seen the night before. Part of me was afraid that they would come up behind me, look over my shoulder and read what I’d written, but then I thought no, they’d probably forgotten I was even there.
“Unapproved, non-illness-related absences of over three days will be grounds for termination by electrocution,” I typed. “Department and division supervisors will flank the electric chair as the death sentence is carried out.”
I waited for repercussions from my Termination Procedure stunt, but none came. A day passed. Two. Three. A week. Obviously, Stewart had not bothered to read the update — although he’d had a bee up his butt about getting it done instantly, that day, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Just to be safe, just to make sure, I asked him about it, caught him by Hope’s desk one morning and asked if he’d gone over the update to make sure it was correct. “Yeah,” he said distractedly, waving me away. “It’s fine.”
He hadn’t read it.
Or… maybe he had.
I felt a familiar churning in the pit of my stomach. Was what I wrote as anonymous as what I said or did? Was my writing ignored, too? I had not thought of that before, but it was possible. It was more than possible.
I thought of my C’s in English on that report card.
On my next set of screen instructions for GeoComm, I wrote: “When all on-screen fields are correct, press [ENTER] and your mama will take it up the ass. She likes it best that way.”
I got no comment on it.
Since no one seemed to notice me, I took it a step further and began coming in wearing jeans and T-shirts, comfortable street clothes, instead of the more formal dress shirt and tie. There were no reprimands, no recriminations. I rode up on the elevator each morning, denim-clad amidst a sea of white shirts and red ties, and no one said a word. I wore ripped Levi’s and dirty sneakers and T-shirts from old rock concerts to my meetings with Stewart and Banks and neither of them noticed.
In mid-October, Stewart went on a week’s vacation, leaving a list of assignments and their deadlines on my desk. It was a relief to have him gone, but his absence meant that what miniscule interaction I had with other people was for that week suspended. I spoke to no one at all while he was gone. No one spoke to me. I was unseen, unnoticed, entirely invisible.
Friday evening I got home and I desperately wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. About anything.
But I had no one to talk to.
Out of desperation, I looked through an old magazine and found a number for one of those porno calls, the ones where women talk to you about sex for a three-dollar-a-minute toll. I dialed the number, just wanting to speak to a person who would speak back.
I got a recording.
Twelve
When I arrived at work the next Monday morning, someone was sitting at Derek’s desk.
I literally stopped in my tracks, I was so surprised. It was a guy about my age, a little older maybe, with a brown beard and thick, longish hair. He was dressed in regulation white shirt/gray pants, but his tie was wide and silk and brightly colored, with a print of toucans standing on pineapples. He grinned when he saw me, and his smile was wide, generous, and unaffected. “Hey, dude,” he said.