One day a guy by the name of Franklin Midor just lost it. He took a magic marker down to the factory floor and began to draw on the inventory. Most of the contaminated items were retrieved before they could be hand-rolled into their packages and distributed for usage. It was mostly skull and crossbones and a couple of acerbic expletives, but a few calls came in a month or so later saying that a couple of unlucky consumers had found small shards of glass hidden deep in the tip of the unit. This one guy, though it can’t be confirmed it was Franklin’s handiwork, sent in a letter demanding his money back. There was a STUD XL stapled to the top right corner, and the words SHE DOESN’T LOVE YOU ANYMORE were written across the flattened box in bold, excited letters. He got a full refund. Franklin Midor was terminated that very day.
Maybe it was the constant stench of ammonia that’s used to help set the rubber that set him off. Or maybe it was the telephone that, once white, was now the color of earwax. Or maybe it was the way the thing rang, so loudly that it left a kind of poison in the ear. Or maybe it was the office chair that had no arms and only one wheel that could actually roll. Or maybe it was this keyboard, the very keyboard Thom has been tapping at for the last…three years, the one with the upside-down T key. Maybe it was that very key that did it, looking at it for years and wondering how truly pathetic he must be to use a factory-second keyboard, and wondering if it was a disgruntled keyboard factory worker who was to blame for the upside down T key, and, if that were the case, what defective or ill-wrought product had he been staring at for years before he just snapped and let it all come to bear?
Maybe it was that Esther always seemed to forget to send over somebody’s paycheck.
It could have also been the barely perceivable whir of 5,000 glass phalluses continuously being forcibly dunked into a simmering cauldron of latex. It had to be similar to some kind of round-the-clock robotic porno that he could hear through the walls but never see, as none of the office workers were allowed behind those massive manufacturing doors that led to the factory floor.
Whatever the reason, Franklin’s Phallacy, as it became known, seemed to only get brought up on Friday the thirteenths, the anniversary of the incident, when it took on a kind of festive Guy Fawkes Day feeling in the office. No one dressed up, say, like a giant rubber or anything, but occasionally prophylactic balloon animals could be found in the can. Or, like this year, sometimes an unrolled condom hat made its way from cubical to cubical like the common cold.
Earlier that day, after Thom Evans returned from the men’s room where a latex giraffe and eel had been taped to each beige stall, he found that the very condom hat of note had been placed over his keyboard.
When the clock tipped six, after ordering his desk haphazardly, he stood, folded the hat to conceal the nipple, and began to make his way through the crowd, leaking toward the doors.
–Johnson!
Thom turned around and saw his boss, Loretta Cooke, supervisor of the Marketing and Research division at the Lott-Faye rubber company, makers of the Stud-rubber:
Stud, rub ’er with the Stud Rubber.
She called everyone Johnson on Friday the thirteenth in honor of the Phallacy. There was even a rumor that she’d made out with Franklin Midor at a Christmas party during the fuzzy libertinage of the cocaine 80s.
–Yes?
She motioned for Thom to come inside her office.
–Hi Loretta. How’s it going?
Her real name was Dorothy, but she liked going by Loretta. Just feels right, she’d explained through a sandwich of Wonder Bread, ham dangling over the side like a panting tongue. Loretta had the kind of plain-wiped face that never moved. It was like an organ she’d give up on, like a tit that’d been sliced off and reconstructed. It looked real but seemed like it didn’t actually feel anymore. She lowered her head to her folded fingers as if in prayer, then stood stock still for a moment before pushing the door shut.
–I’m afraid, Johnson, Esther has…forgotten your check this time.
–Huh? Oh, right, right.
–She’s had such a hard time of it lately, I’m afraid.
She stood in front of the doorjamb and rocked back and forth, freeing one leg from the weight of her body only to have the other bear it all. She was a slow, simple pendulum.
–I’m afraid, Johnson, you’ll have to visit her tonight to grab your check before she packs up for the weekend.
–Well, okay. I need to get paid, so…
–I’m afraid, Johnson, you’re absolutely correct.
Loretta was so white she was almost blue. You could see each furcating vein, long like twiggy florescent tubes glowing beneath her skin. She placed her weight on one foot, then the other, and stabbed toward her desk.
Thom stepped toward the door and coiled his fingers around the knob.
–Thanks then.
–I’m afraid, Johnson, there’s no one really to thank.
Thom couldn’t seem to close his mouth. It was as though his brain would leak out through the flesh-bone elevator shaft in his head. His heart began to burn up blood like oil.
He opened the door and he left the room.
–Hey there, Johnson!
He turned, but his feet kept pulling him forward, knowing what was coming. Her assumed role of éminence grise had long ago spun out a particular motto, and to be fair, a decent public safety message, for this very day.
–Don’t forget to wrestle a condom on that monster!
She pointed at him with two spindly fingers in a cha-cha fashion and then emptied a laugh from the back of her throat.
Thom faced forward and felt his hand ball around the thick condom hat.
–Sure thing, Loretta. Sure thing.
She was still laughing behind her desk when Thom passed though the final set of doors leading out of the building, the main door, the door that people had to be buzzed through like a clinic, and made his way past the trudging congregation slipping one by one into their respective vehicles.
–G’night, Thom.
–Good night, George, enjoy your movie.
–Good night, T-bone.
–Yeah, Good night, Ed.
–Good night, Martin.
–Mr. Evans, have a pleasant evening.
Thom followed the huge yellow lines painted over the asphalt, each a massive set of pinching brackets, interiorizing more and more, line after line until he found his little car stashed deep in the corner of the lot. He crammed the key into the lock and twisted. He had closed the door to the office too lightly and now slammed his car door as hard as he could to make up for it. In the act of loosening his tie, he decided it best to be rid of it completely. He yanked it off and unbuttoned the first two buttons of his shirt. He fingered the chain around his neck, exposed now to the air, and slid his hand down his chest to his protruding stomach.
As everyone else drove off, Thom sat in his car and pretended to search for the right radio station to ride home with on a Friday evening. He waved to the last coworker in the procession and was suddenly overcome by the vast incompleteness of the plant, conspicuous like a playground without children. Locked behind a protective wire mesh, he studied the steel doors and imagined how beautiful the sight of 5,000 glass phalluses in motion must be, a secret droning cotillion. He could hear them humming away from here, even as he slid out of neutral and began to drive across the commodious campus toward payroll.
Out of the perforated rows of parked cars. Off of the sunburdened asphalt. Out of the lot. Along the crookneck network of shared roads. Around circular islands of dense green bush that purport old money but with cement trim whispering: middle class and second mortgage. As he took the curves, he dialed on the radio.
…thousand year old man has been discovered. Experts say the man has been preserved in ice…
How could she have forgotten? Always remembers to forget. She’s a goddamn…elephant that way. Not that she’s fat. Well, in certain terms, she’s pretty goddamn—
A car horn tore the air, decapitating the silence. Thom shook in a way that suggested his seat was electrically charged. For a few seconds his car straddled both lanes of the road.
Thom lifted his eyes to see a man filling up the entire rearview mirror. Easy does it, big boy. His body itched slightly more with each new sound storming through the thin shell of his car. The squeak of the stop-and-start. Engines bringing up phlegm. Traffic snorting across the highway. The street was a new plant muttering out new product. Each cell in Thom’s brain craved a round of stone-stiff drinks. Line ’em up. Hurry up please, it’s time.
…woman in a coma has reportedly given birth to a healthy baby boy…
He threw on the blinker as a slit broke in the thread of cars. When he met the man’s huge face filling the entire rearview mirror, his eyes ignited. But Thom waited. Switched the dial on the radio around as the opening narrowed. Switched it again and lunged into the streaming loom of consciousness that stretched across the belly of the earth. A few miles along, he passed the outer perimeter of a vast and rolling cemetery and flicked his blinker again, sat, waited, thought better of it, and drove on.
Today, it was getting harder and harder to focus on things, the here and the now. Driving was more. Driving was more like rolling. Or dreaming. Or falling horizontally. There was an expectation of stopping cold. A clenching in the head to muffle the sound of a firecracker. Teeth squeezed. Lungs full.
What’s your name? Is it Mary or Sue?
He quickly twisted off the radio. The car drove itself. How had he made it through this day? It was like holding onto a subway rail and not being swayed by the motion of the train. But now he was losing his grip. Things were blurring, unraveling right before his eyes. Lanes converged. Cars seemed to lift from the road into space. The scenery, the set moved by. He watched from the back row. And now speech was impossible. How could he fit words together and make? Form fucking meaningfuls?
He found the exit and took it.
His grip on the wheel was light. The tips of his fingers were sore from jabbing at the keyboard. Thom had never learned how to type with the harpist’s fluidity you see in those smiling happy handjob office scenes in the movies. Today he had shriveled little arthritic lobster claws. His head felt fifteen pounds heavier than it should be, the head of someone else, some blotchy giant. It was wilting on his neck and with considerable decay. How had he made it through the week? His shoulders crept to his ears. He really could go at any time.
He found an open space in the payroll department parking lot.
High. He could be high. This was like being high, wasn’t it? Being pulled away from the universe against his will, trying to hold on, hold tight to the rail, to the edge of the planet, and the moisture accumulates and the rail becomes slippery and he’s dragging and screaming, screaming and dragging, wailing and pantspissing and poof: Gone.
The engine was hushed. The car door was opened. The walkway was traversed.
One of those not really there moments. Walls jump out. The ground is spongy. Strings hold up the knees. Words are fishing line, pulled from the lungs like a breathing tube. There he is. There is the back of his head. There is his hair on the back of his neck. There he goes.
Eyes malfunctioning now, pulling in not one, but two, sometimes three stationary objects, street lamps and traffic lights, moving freely about, encased in a water skin. Eyes fluttering like wings. It was hard to keep adjusting. Soon, Thom feared, he would have to stoop to slapping at his face repeatedly or throwing water on it in order to return. Maybe catching his tongue in a mousetrap.
He entered the building, passing a woman in a grey blazer. He watched her shrink away in strides, into the world outside, the backside of her body disappearing into a tiny heart. A smile detonated over his face.
*
He tried not to notice Esther’s stomach cresting over her desk as he walked down the hallway. She noticed him through the glass though, and as he peeled open the doors, she began the procedure of rising from her chair. With only a few strides, he stood before her, neck craning and head in a slight confused cock, as though peering down into the unwrinkled skin of an empty swimming pool. Family photos lined the edges of her desk, the frames gradually becoming smaller and smaller as he surveyed from left to right. He tried to follow each picture frame, imagining each one was a progressively smaller family member, like a nesting doll spread out across her desk. He tried focusing on the four pairs of scissors variously arranged in increasingly more libidinous positions, but mostly his eyes stayed locked on her stomach.
–I’m very sorry, Mr. Evans.
Her head shook gravely, and she pushed on her thighs, both legs spreading in the limited facility of her ascension. Her entire body, including her sour-bell ears, urged itself upward.
This was Step 1: The Hand Plant.
The few of times he had been in her office, this was how it had begun.
–No problem. No problem at all.
Step 2: The Dismount.
This, predictably, involved a groan or two. Today, though, there were three.
1) Emmmmmmmmmm.
2) Eeeaaaaaaaaaaaa.
3) Emmmmmmmmm.
With the added straining sounds, he had difficulty not picturing her on the toilet. Her knees looked as though they might buckle under the teetering gumdrop they supported, wrapped in pattern-dazzle polyester. Momentarily, Thom was compelled to help her. It seemed like such a waste, her standing routine—this long-standing routine to collect his modest wages. He knew where the checks were, where it all was located. He could handle it without a single groan.
She very well may end up back in the chair or on the floor like an overturned truck. Would he have to help her; would he be able to help her up? The deeper he thought about this possibility, the more his mind began stretching away from the logistics, the angles and leverage, the footing. He could see her without any clothing, could see those two starving mottled gluttons squealing below her waist. And yet then, just then, he was gone.
The pendulum swung the other way. Now he desperately wanted her to fall. He felt passionate about the fall. The polite mummery of suspension would finally be over. People should point and laugh; she should be a shut-in, or filling the screen of a talk show, or dripped on by a thousand pandemonical men. Beyond the beyond. He could crack a chair over her head or slowly peel away her underthings to see if any washcloths had been lost among the rippling waves in the sea of her stomach. Make a million selling her body as soap.
Thom returned to the rickety tableau before him and quickly extended a hand toward Esther. She clasped firmly and smiled as she rose.
Finally, Step 3: The Ascension.
She made it.
4) Ooohhhhhhhhhhh.
Thom’s hand returned to his side after she released it; her feet tilled the carpet as she headed to and from the safe. Her grey zebraic polyester pants, practically bellbottoms, dripped past her off-white sneakers, and her back humped up, causing each arm to come forward, closer to the ground. She stood in front of him. He smiled fully.
–Forgive me, Mr. Evans. I apologize.
She passed him the check, her wedding band strangling her ring finger.
–Not a problem. No big deal.
He reached forward to take the check then quickly withdrew.
–Have a pleasant weekend, Mr. Evans.
One long white hair swung slowly from her protracted chin.
–Yes, you too, Mrs. Polly.
Thom raised his cheeks lightly to show her a slight smile then spun around, arms outstretched like a tornado. Had someone been behind him they would have collided. The cracking of teeth. A human toast. Maybe he shouldn’t have assisted. To help is to whelp. And, as long as “maybe” is in play, maybe he should not have delayed the enormous man in the car behind him. Maybe he’s a dentist. Or a doctor…or a liposuctionist. Thom passed through the office, closed the door, and dreamed of pulling it off the frame.
*
He was late, but she was sure to be late as well. At least he’d gotten the wine, the wine wasn’t... it wasn’t back there in the refrigerator, back of the mind. Forgotten. Keeping the wheel steady as he drove, he reached under the passenger seat and pulled out a brown paper bag. His stomach growled for the first time all day. He watched a clear bottle of water roll across the floor of his car while holding the lunch he had somehow forgotten to eat that afternoon. There was no wine, and this was certain to be non-trivial.
At the far edge of the street Thom had driven down, the dilated glass doors of a bloated school bus gave birth to child after child. Each carried a lunchbox like a briefcase. Parents watched horrified from the sidelines as Thom’s car skated forward, in and out of his lane and ever closer, about to cream the bus. He looked up, pumped the pedal with his foot, and the brakes wept glittering solder. Children still onboard spun their heads around in unison, but the car froze sharp before contact.
When the road was empty of children, Thom watched the long, patient path of the school bus as it trudged by his static car. He sighed and placed his hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel as a kind of delayed display of safety. Framed inside every bus window was a tiny raised middle finger.
A smile opened along Thom’s face, if only to occupy it.
Suddenly then, there was something squealing, like the end of the world, like it landed on the roof. He turned back from the school bus’ departure, and there next to his car, in the last winking collapses of late autumn sun, stood an enormous woman, her ballooning stomach pressed flat against the glass, a mere inch or two from Thom’s face. She leaned back and tried for the door handle before Thom could get the car in gear, rockhorseing it forward. The woman screamed. She screamed through her mouth and screamed through her entire head.
–There are kids, I’ve got kids!
Maybe it was an echo, or maybe she just kept shouting and it carried. The line repeated in his head all the way through town.
Thom’s hands were pale, trembling slightly, as he cut the engine and began to walk through the pub. He carved his way past chain-smoking flesh and approached a dimmed cigarette machine in the corner. He hadn’t had one in years.
The cigarette machine was empty, well out of service. Still, automatic doors opened and closed in his brain, pleasure, release, undo. A sudden bolt of anticipation flicked like an electric tongue across his stormy mind. His mind moved his feet, and across the street he went to the gas station. As the glass doors lingered through their slow sweeps to close, Thom slowly slid the plastic sleeve off the package of cigarettes. He had always enjoyed the unwrapping.
Light was there. Expanding. Descending stair by stair from the sun. Coating his eyelids and activating all the machinery, the rods and cones spinning around in his eyes, spitting out clouds of blue and red twinkling dots that blur into the Ishihara tests. He opened his eyes slowly, trying to neatly shed the evening’s collection of debris. White light grew to an ever-brightening slow yawn all over his face. His lap took shape, first the outline, then the thicker lines of his body. Legs rose like loaves of bread.
Then came the details. The fine print. He noticed the new topography of his pants, the brown smudges, shit or shoe polish. Craggy eggshells rose off his knees like little mountain ranges and jutted down his legs.
A tightly rolled newspaper stood up erect between his knees like some kind of lightening rod that seemed to have attracted all of the other bits to his clothes. Without thinking, he slid the rubber band downward—naturally—down to the base, and the paper budded in his hands. Just then a slightly muted drone clicked behind the door of the building. Meaninglessness, all meaningless, a private language of machines or insects. Each step closer to the door, realized a language more related to the one he understood, picking up on the tails of words as they slipped through and flapped around his ears. It was as if the entire evolution of all wriggling interior thought, all the exposed wires, all the pneumatic grunt-speak had thawed into the most immediate and glowingly cogent slang within mere moments, within earshot. Sound ripened into words. Words loomed together the fibers of thought. Thoughts became action.
The air was thick, magnetic as he rose to his feet. He quickly felt caught up in it, plucked away from the universe. The door to his building opened, ripping through the day like dry toast through a half-fried egg.
–I’ve never liked asparagus. It tastes like soiled branches. You should know that.
–Howard...
Her eyes squeezed together a glare.
–I do know that.
Glimmering in the early morning sun, her jogging suit appeared newer than Howard’s. Thom looked for the tag as they stood in the doorframe staring back at him, straddled between the inside and outside, door ajar. He tried to stand perfectly still, as though he was well out of service.
He opened the paper. It fell like a curtain before his pants. He fluttered and crunched his eyelids like teeth, trying to chew himself into something small, something smaller than the periods spotting the front page. The couple emerged fully formed from the inside. Their completeness, their cleanness, their great and powerful nessness, spiraled around Thom like a tornado of needles.
–Mornin’.
Thom left off the g to give it that just‐rolled‐out‐of‐bed authenticity, as if the edges of words had been sanded off and forgotten somewhere in dreamland.
–Hello.
–Hi there.
Howard’s companion seemed focused on Thom’s crotch.
–Nice day. Goin’ joggin’?
–No, no, speedwalking.
–Oh…
Thom threw his eyes to the paper and shuffled ahead, trying to slip past the couple before the door shut.
–Excuse me, young man.
His eyes slowly rolled upward.
–Are you the one who has been stealing our paper?
Stealing sounded like gangbanging. Paper sounded like dead grandfather.
–Of course not. We’re like neighbors. We are neighbors! Neighbors don’t do that sort of thing, right?
–We’ll somebody’s been doing that sort of thing. It’s a damn epidemic in this building!
–We’ll, I am not that, it’s not me.
–Of course you’re not. It’s never ever anybody’s fault, right?
The words hung almost visibly on the corner of her lips. Howard’s gaze didn’t move from his sneakers.
–Whose name is on that paper? Give it here.
She grabbed; Thom dug in. He pulled, but she had steel in her arms. As she pulled one way, Thom matched it in the other. Her arms raised, Thom’s followed.
–Young man!
He pulled back.
She pulled. The majority of his strength gone, Thom swished around all vertigo.
–Goddammit, Rose, let go of the fucking paper!
She released the paper and walked off the porch before dissolving in the sea of sunlight bouncing off her jumpsuit. The door opened again, spitting out an unfamiliar man with a shiny, serious face and a smile that seemed too flat to be pleasant. He had goose bumps on his arms and a thick vein above his elbow that disappeared beneath his sleeve. Thom grabbed at the closing door and held it open, as if to lure Howard back inside.
Howard’s tiny lips parted but he didn’t say a word. They continued to stare in an unspoken contest until Thom walked backward through the door, turning down the hall and disappeared into the wall like a mouse slinking into a hole.
Across the street, Rose touched her toes, shrouded in treeshade. Howard was almost halfway up the block.
*
He didn’t want to turn the knob. A closed door had a kind of purity to it. It was a kind of hymen. The metal knob was cold and numbing in his hand. All at once, he never wanted to open that door again. Never clean another dish behind those walls. Never take another shower. Never screw uncomfortably on the sofa.
Something perfectly violent lay behind the door, wickedly indifferent, juiced. There was a fire behind the door, and he could feel the doorknob sizzle. The best thing now would be to flee. Fleeing is not surrendering. Fleeing buys time to reload.
Slippery under his palm, the knob was over-ripe fruit and gave in. Door, wide open, his nostrils filled with an effluvial wallop from the eggs that she’d thrown at him last night. Ornamentally, they hung off the walls in every direction. The albumen, drying and sliding downward, left translucent silver rings around each egg as it had soaked deeper and deeper into the wall overnight.
This…this, must be what a fetus smells.
Quietly, he passed the closed bedroom door and headed for the bath. He tried the lock but it was broken, so he rolled two towels against the door to keep it closed.
One endless supple thread ran into the white basin. Soon, steam stood on the water and stretched upward. Thom ran his hands over the top of the water, half expecting to tug notes from the ceilingsoaring steam. The room warmed into a foggy-white fluctuation as slowly rolling steam caressed him completely.
Button by button his shirt fell to the floor. Laces like pulling dead snakes from a burrow. Sockplop. Sockplop. A hollow pantleg and then another. He lifted his undershirt overhead and saw only white. The closest you get to climbing back inside.
Toewet.
And then allwet.
Thom broke the skin of the water and slid inside with a muted thud, pitching a splash of water across the lip of the tub and onto the floor.
His plump stomach rolled across the surface of the water and bobbed with the current. Floating above and burning, a fleshly sunrise. He tried to ignore it, pretending, but he couldn’t. The blinding thing. Moi ra. He put his eyes past, focused on his feet, working the controls of the faucet. One long thread of water coiling into the tub. Like the fats. The fates. He let it fill until it couldn’t anymore. Water ran over the basin and spread across the floor. He cut the stream and toed the drain lid with his other foot. He pedaled in this way, cutting and releasing, raising and filling, overflowing, letting the blood and dirt and egg slide over and over until he was clean. Through the window he watched as the sky seemed to lower more and more, flaring brighter and brighter. You can see it all, pressed flat by gravity. It’s always so good to be alone.
A waterlanding. A new skin.
And a warm one.