magical legalism

Nieces Aren't Gentlemen

2011-09-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

My niece Miranda came down upon my brother Archie and I like the wolf on the fold, no cohorts necessary, as we bent our elbows at the beer tent.

“The walls have ears,” the golden-ringletted young pestilence informed us, though if true this wasn't obvious. “Come where we can talk privately.”

The guilty are pliable. We made no protest as we followed her through the detritus of the fair on the otherwise bucolic grounds of the high school which suffered her as an inmate. Her parents were shrewd judges of character, and for them to snatch a chance to transfer to China and foist her off on our older sister while pleading the unsuitability of Chinese schools had been the work of an instant.

Our passage was made stately by the fair-goers we had to dodge, some wanting to congratulate Archie for his star turn in the dunk tank earlier in the day. His hand was shaken, his back was clapped, and he, for his part, disdained or congratulated their skills at dumping him in the drink according to their merit. I felt cold and wet, probably a flashback. Had they but known... Miranda passed these interruptions in consultation with the goldfish she held in a plastic bag filled with water. My researches indicated she'd won it through skill at throwing various pingpong balls into some fish tanks. “Lucky”, she called the fish, and seemed attached to it.

At length Archie, Miranda, the fish Lucky and I arrived at our destination, the school greenhouse, to which Miranda held a key through her office as freshman sub-secretary of the garden society.

Once in her fiefdom, the plague on our species began to declaim. “Uncles, imagine, if you will--”

I noticed something. “Shouldn't some of these plants be alive? It's more of a brownhouse than otherwise.”

She fixed me with a withering stare, which might have been what killed the plants. “Quiet, Uncle Bert.”

Archie put his oar in. “Bit of a disaster... Who's the freshman sub-secretary around here?”

Miranda was all business. “Imagine, if you will--”

“A freshman sub-secretary neglecting her watering duties one week?” asked Archie.

She turned the w.s. on Archie. “Imagine, if you will, the feelings of an innocent young girl who, stealing cigarettes from the pocket of a favorite uncle, finds them inexplicably damp.”

“Pretty crestfallen, I imagine,” said Archie. “Still, crime doesn't pay.”

“Now, imagine that a prolonged spell in the dunk tank provided a ready explanation for this misfortune. But that it applied to the WRONG uncle.”

I patted my pockets. My cigarettes were gone.

Miranda noticed. “Exactly. Now, imagine this girl, her suspicions aroused, searching the musketeer costume her wet uncle had worn while impersonating the school mascot, and finding the wallet of the now cigarette-less uncle inside. One brother wearing a mustache and an eyepatch looks very like another.”

Archie and I let out low moans. One never fails to suffer for being a loyal brother.

“Now, imagine the dismay this deception causes the girl, which to relieve she'll explain to a favorite teacher, by coincidence the dry uncle's fiancee, and the imposer of his dunk-tank duty.”

“Imagine,” said Archie, “The trouble for this girl should her teacher be told of the cigarette stealing.”

“I'd put it in an anonymous letter if I were you,” suggested Miranda. “I doubt she'll want to hear from you otherwise.”

Archie's groan indicated the truth of her statement.

“Could we imagine another way to relieve the young horror's dismay?” I asked.

“Ah...” said Miranda. “Imagine this girl, her parents far away, living with a spiteful and stern aunt... I want to live with my favorite uncle.”

“Out of the question,” said Archie.

“I mean Uncle Bert.”

“But Aunt Ruth is good with kids,” I countered.

“Exactly,” she said. “You have two hours to decide. Now leave while I make Lucky comfortable. I don't want to carry him around all day.”

Outside, we huddled in consternation.

“A greenhouse is an unfortunate depot for goldfish,” Archie began. “They get quite hot.”

“This is no time for goldfish,” I told him.

“She seems quite attached,” he replied.

“Enough Lucky. Either that plague lives with me or Sarah leaves you. What do we do?”

“Still,” said Archie. “Imagine a young girl attached to a specific goldfish.”

“Less fish, and less imagining!”

“That's precisely where you're wrong. More fish!”

He explained his beautiful plan. I would distract Miranda while he won more goldfish and inserted them into the greenhouse, hiding Lucky in their midst. We'd trade her silence for the identity of her true fish.

“But you have no key...”

“I have a secret means of ingress.”

“Can you win enough fish?”

“I was twice beer-pong champion at Dartmouth.”

I hurried off to ply Miranda with cotton candy and candied apples, hoping she would choke. I'd have paid $80 a dozen for candied chicken bones. From the corner of my eye I watched Archie elbow his way to the front of the fish line. When, twenty minutes before the our deadline, I saw him set sail towards the greenhouse struggling under the weight of a plastic bucket, my heart leapt in my chest. At the appointed hour I lead her to the rendezvous.

It was stifling in the greenhouse, in spite of a breeze. We found Archie towards the back, slumped beside a potting bench engulfed by bags of fish. A shattered pane of glass on the floor indicated his secret means of ingress.

I waited for him to pounce.

Instead, he indicated one sad bag where the fish floated rather than swam. “I did say it was too hot for him...” he complained.

Miranda drank in the scene, calculating.

“Let's get a dog, Uncle Bert,” she said.

The Tale of Baumgartner and the Identity Thieves

2007-12-01T08:04:00.000-08:00

Towards the end of my first week at the distinguished firm of McDuffie, Collins and Schmatzhagen, LLP, my secretary, the venerable Z________, predicted a bright future for me. “I detect in you, Baumgartner, a profound love of honest toil,” he confided, a solemn smile set in his wizened face. “Considering this quality together with your keen mind and humble, workaday demeanor, I believe it possible that you may even one day be summoned to room 101, tapped on the shoulder by McDuffie himself, and told ‘Arise, Partner.’”

I repeat this assessment not to toot my own horn, as the expression goes, but because my intention with this tale is to demonstrate how the vagaries of this unknowable world may make fools out of even such sage observers as Z______.

Though my own estimation of my character and abilities has never matched that of Z______, I respect him too much to believe his prediction could never have come to pass. Even Z_______, though, didn’t reckon on my strange encounter with the Identity Thieves and Lichstein, the second-hand sandwiches man.

I encountered the first of the bumps which were to derail the train of his prediction on a bright June morning at the beginning of my ninth month with the firm. As I awaited my turn to scan my identification card and pass through the security gates to our elevator, attorneys much my senior hustled and bustled in their customary fashion around me. While their agile hands dealt swiftly with their coffee or morning rolls, their keen minds and clever tongues dissected the more public aspects of their current cases, the seniors offering wisdom and advice to their juniors. This customary display of community enterprise made my time in line my favorite part of the morning. On this occasion, however, the classroom calm was shattered abruptly.

Without warning, the attorney immediately in front of me was assailed by a strange, featureless, hominoid figure. Mewling, drooling, slobbering, the three-foot tall monstrosity approached from somewhere behind me. I felt rather than saw it barge past me, and watched in horror as it sprang at the feet of its victim and wrapped both of its forelimbs around his legs. Though it lacked visible musculature, it seemed quite exceptionally strong. The startled attorney, a man named McGovern, himself began to shriek and howl as he sought to escape. He seemed loathe to touch the thing, which I could well understand, so could only attempt to scramble out of its grasp. He stumbled, though, and fell flat on his back. Soon the thing was on him.

McGovern was able to kick its head several times before it pinned his legs. Inexorably it crawled up his body. It gummed at his body as it crawled up him, towards his head. I could not have told you then if its attack was ravenous or amorous, but my impression at the time was that it contained elements of both desires. McGovern’s screams grew louder. He thrashed his body desperately, twisting, flailing, snapping his torso around in a frenzy. His elbows, his shoulders, his head each cracked audibly against the floor as he tried to escape. Still the thing continued its terrible progress.

Nothing else seemed possible but that it would devour McGovern before my eyes until the timely intervention of the stalwart lobby security guards. A team of four, stout men with stout truncheons, descended on the thing and beat it off the terrified attorney. With kicks and hearty blows of their truncheons they shepherded it as it crawled towards the street door and out into the street. It left behind a clear, viscous trail.

McGovern lay prostrate on the floor for some time. His trousers, once a deep blue, had faded to gray up to his thighs, where the blue reasserted itself in a clear line. I considered that perhaps the color had faded from some reaction with the fluids the creature secreted, but the loss of color was uniform. Another incongruity presented itself, that before the attack his trousers had been immaculately pleated, but now, like the color, that pleat was gone as though it had never existed.

For some moments he lay on the floor, McGovern’s eyes darting rapidly hither and thither. The rest of his body did not move. Hesitantly, I offered him my hand. Hesitantly, he accepted. Slowly he rose to his knees. Then to his feet. Once erect, he hurried through the security gates without a backward glance.

As if a signal had been given, the more senior attorneys around us resumed their discussions and their progress through the gates. My fellow junior attorneys seemed stunned, but most followed their seniors. The truly strange part of the incident struck me then. In the clear fluorescent light of the morning one of our number had been savagely attacked by a hideous, otherworldly creature. And the men and women around me, a veritable who’s-who of the bravest, most seasoned attorneys in the Firm’s employ, had done nothing!

It was this feature of the dreadful event that I struggled to explain to Z______ as soon as I reached the 23rd floor. “Not a finger did they lift, Z____” I told him. “Oh, I didn’t either, I admit that. I was paralyzed, I suppose, by the hideousness of the thing, by uncertainty, by lack of precedent. But Crost!?! Stern!? I simply cannot believe attorneys of that caliber could be similarly affected. No, there was something supernatural afoot, Z______. Something that rendered helpless even those heroes. Truthfully, I hesitated to mention this aspect of it to you. I would not soon fall in your estimation, for I should surely fall correspondingly in my own, and I’m sure this tale sounds foolish to you. But I know what I saw!”

Z______’s response, I thought initially, was the product of his extraordinary kindness. “My boy, I most assuredly do not think you foolish. Many qualities you have displayed today and in the months I’ve known you… Bravery, intelligence, diligence, intellectual honesty… But foolishness not at all. If I were fortunate enough to have a son I would wish him to be every bit the lawyer you are. Foolishness is not part of your makeup. But humor an old man and tell me more of the creature you saw. As to hair, had it any, on any part of its body?”

I answered him in the negative.

“And lips?” Again I shook my head. “Its ears,” he continued, “Were they set into its head, so that they appeared to be little more than holes in its head?” They had been.

“And its eyes the same?” I nodded. Z______ had about him the look of a man whose worst fears had been confirmed.

“Then you must tread carefully, my boy, very carefully indeed,” he told me, his voice bowing under the gravity of his words, “For the identity thieves are once more abroad. The unfortunate monstrosity you saw this morning is at once their victim and now one of their number. Under no circumstances must you leave your wallet or any identifying documents unattended even for an instant. If you must sign something, do so in a hand other than your natural one. Hang the name plate on your door upside down. Or better yet, turn it around so that it faces the wall. Hurry my boy! Take these steps and do otherwise as I advise and you may yet continue in the body and mind which suit you so admirably.”

I rushed off to perform the steps he’d outlined, to reverse my nameplate, and to secure all extant samples of my true signature. Little though I understood the import of his words, I felt as a palpable thing the alarm that afflicted this steadfast, sage retainer.

I returned to Z_____’s desk to find him deep in conversation with a fat, jolly man of jauntily disheveled appearance. The vertical stripes of his shirt warred with the horizontal stripes of his tie, which in turn were engaged in a lengthy campaign with his plaid trousers. Atrocities had been committed on both sides in the latter vestment’s battle with his argyle socks. This was unmistakably Lichstein, the second hand sandwiches man. For all the unconventionality of his appearance, I knew that Z______ thought him without equal in intelligence and learning, ranking him higher even than the firm’s most senior partners.

I do not know when or if this manuscript will be found, so it is possible that circumstances have changed dramatically between the time of its writing and the time of its reading. At the time of these events, anyway, Lichstein’s profession was an unusual one. In fact I believe he may have been its sole practitioner. He held a contract to provide a portion of the sandwiches for such conferences and meetings and get-togethers as took place in the building. His innovative sourcing of the raw materials for these sandwiches was his brainchild, his livelihood and even his wealth: he took them from other, gently-used sandwiches. These were then painstakingly refurbished by his “sandwich artists” until virtually indistinguishable from the aboriginal first-run sandwiches. So high was the regard for his culinary eye and sense of condiment that more than one senior associate had advised me to, if I were to eat a sandwich during the fulfillment of my professional responsibilities, “Make sure it’s a Lichstein.”

Z______ and Lichstein were accustomed to converse learnedly on the topics of the day. His presence and the subsequent discussions, would, I felt sure, shed some sorely needed light on the dark events of the morning. My hopes were borne out quickly, as Lichstein’s long red beard bobbed energetically up and down in continued disputation with Z_______.

“Of course it was optimistic of the homunculus, if it was new to its form, to attempt such a brazen public assault,” Lichstein asserted. “Yet for all that, it came within an ace of success. Poor McGovern would himself be looking for a new body if those guards had been reading even a slightly longer article when the attack happened. He’s fortunate indeed that the city’s baseball team is faring so miserably.”

“I too marvel at how near it came to success,” said Z______. “From the descriptions I have heard and the lack of subtlety in the attack, I am sure it was newly robbed of its identity. As you say, they are comparatively weak when new to their form. McGovern is a fifth year associate, and thus no lightweight, numskull though he is. Could there have been some condition that made him an easier target, or are we dealing with an exceptionally powerful Identity Thief?”

“I suspect some combination of the two,” said Lichstein. “McGovern will persist in wearing monogrammed shirts, in spite of the danger. He has them monogrammed with the initials of other people, but he is not always as careful as he might be. For instance, I once saw him wearing a burgundy shirt with what appeared to be his own initials monogrammed over the pocket. Though I do not love McGovern overmuch, I pointed out the foolishness he was committing. He assured me, though, that the initials stood for Charles Donald McGowan, not remarking that the letters were the same as his own initials! If he had that shirt on today, he would have been a much easier target. All the same, the creature did seem inordinately powerful, based on the accounts I heard. I wonder who it was formerly, which of our attorneys has been modified.”

“As to that, time will probably tell,” responded Z______. “Let us pledge to keep a sharp eye out, for truly I am curious. I suspect it may have been a senior partner, from the creature’s arrogance and puissance. But as to the matter of McGovern’s shirt, we have here an eyewitness to the attack. You know, of course, my young charge Baumgartner.”

“I have had the pleasure,” said Lichstein warmly. “You’ve heard some large portion of our discussion, so the import of my question will not be lost on you. Tell us, my boy, did you happen to notice what sort of shirt McGovern was wearing at the time of the attack?”

I didn’t hesitate, speaking boldly as Z_____ had often encouraged me. “It was burgundy, sir, a deep burgundy, with long sleeves and French cuffs. I can’t say I noticed a monogram, but I’m sure about the rest, for I admired the color muchly.”

“Let us consider the matter settled then,” said Lichstein.

As it happened, we did not have to wait long to find out who the creature had been previously. The following day I had occasion to visit the office of Bagner. Bagner was one of the most senior partners in the firm, a colossal figure in the narrow field of securitization in which he stood. I delivered my report in what I hope was an efficient though courteous manner. Having done so, I cast around for some source of personal conversation, for I have always felt it incumbent on the serving classes to shield our social betters from the potential awkwardnesses of our inevitable encounters. My eyes rested, as they usually did in this office, on Bagner’s famous collection of meerschaum pipes.

Hundreds of these he had collected over the years, all save for some ancient ones of varying composition carved by hand from Eskisehir block meerschaum. Each rested in its own case, which was specially made to snugly enclose the bowl of its particular pipe, which might be in the shape of a lion’s head or a literary character or a figure from Greek art or mythology. The cases, in turn, rested on blocks of glass of varying height, which were arranged on a glass table in front of the window. The patterns of light and shadow created by the interplay of the sun and the glass were principle objects of the collection.

I looked as usual for some old favorites. Then, like a thunderbolt it struck me… They had been rearranged! I was sure of it, but did some quick calculations. Yes, that Socrates had previously been in one of the lower tiers. Now it stood among the highest ranks. A Sherlock Holmes now stood in the lowest tier where previously it had been in the second highest. And the shape of the light in the space between the blocks of glass had changed, indicating that they too had moved.

“Much more harmonious,” opined Bagner in his stentorian tone. “In fact, I do believe I’ve achieved the harmony of the Dao in this arrangement, even if I do say so myself.”

From a brief perusal I could only agree that it was a more harmonious arrangement. Very pleasing, in fact. But only a week before Bagner had expressed his belief that after years of effort he’d achieved the harmony of the Dao in his previous arrangement. As I looked more closely I saw other changes. A minotaur had moved from the left to the right, displacing a dragon. A phoenix had moved from the top right to the bottom left. Could a senior partner’s opinion of the shape of the harmony of the Dao change so radically in so short a time? I squeaked my concurrence and left hastily.

Z______ summoned Lichstein with a quick call to his pager once he’d heard my news. He came almost immediately. Both agreed I’d identified the victim. I was anxious to plot our campaign.

“Of course your experience in such matters is far greater than my own, but it seems to me that our first step would be to take Bagner’s body captive. Then we can, for instance, inscribe his name across his forehead with a marker and imprison him. I’ll arrange for the assistance of the security guards from the lobby in our efforts to find the creature who attacked McGovern this morning. He should still be recognizable from the marks of the truncheon blows. It should be a relatively simple matter to—“

“My boy, whatever are you talking about?” interrupted Lichstein. “Is this some tasteless attempt at humor? You can’t seriously be proposing what I think you’re proposing, can you?” He turned to Z______. “Can you make sense of this?”

Z______ held up a hand to silence Lichstein. “I’m afraid this is all moving rather fast for young Baumgartner. Keep in mind, only yesterday he had no idea of the existence of this phenomenon. Naturally his kind heart would go out at once to what he could only perceive as the victim of a great injustice. Why, consider how, alone among all the attorneys present, he came to McGovern’s aid yesterday morning.” He turned now to me. “My boy, please allow me to explain.”

“Explain?!” I fairly shouted. “What can there possibly be to explain? I would never have believed it of either of you, but if you two are unable or afraid to help me I’ll do it myself. The creature may be inhabiting the body of a senior partner, but I’m confident I’ll prevail so long as I have right on my side!”

Now it was Lichstein who held up a hand to silence Z_______. “My dear boy. Let’s consider, hypothetically, that you were to proceed as you have outlined. Let’s stipulate that you would succeed in your plan. The homunculus which formerly inhabited Bagner’s body would be restored to that body. And what of the homunculus which would be newly displaced? Before it took possession of Bagner, it too was ripped from a comfortable body and cast naked into a world which abominates and fears it. Will you restore it to its former perch, displacing still another interloper, itself the victim of a prior attack? And what of the fact that Bagner’s body has previously changed hands, when he was attacked as a fourth year associate, making your putative innocent victim itself a villain?”

“I believe it was as a third year associate that Bagner previously changed hands,” interjected Z______. “And for all we know, it could have happened again before that, perhaps many times. Still another difficulty with your scheme, Baumgartner, lies in the fact that what I will call the new Bagner is subtly different from the old one, rewired as it were. For a homunculus new to a body this would not be a major obstacle, but for a previous tenant of the body it would be unsettling to the point of being extremely dangerous.”

“As whatever injustice may be in the matter is impossible to rectify, let us consider other aspects,” continued Lichstein smoothly. “Apart from the different arrangement of his pipe collection, did you notice any other differences between the new Bagner and the old one?”

I admitted I hadn’t.

“And you preferred the new arrangement to the old one?” he asked me.

“It was more harmonious,” I replied.

“Harmony being the object of the collection?”

I could only assent.

“For years Bagner has been adjusting that collection, with frankly variable results,” continued Lichstein in summation. “His new self has, in the matter of a day, improved it recognizably. Would you really destroy this harmony for the sake of that savage, gray, naked id which attacked McGovern the other morning? Knowing as you do now that the creature could never truly be restored to its previous place?”

Z______ took up where Lichstein left off. “It’s certainly to your credit, my boy, that you are so concerned about the creature who was Bagner. Perhaps it will ease your mind, though, to know that such a creature will quickly lose all memories and knowledge of its former incarnation unless implanted into another body almost immediately. By the time our friend from the other morning assumes a new identity, it will have no idea that it ever had a previous one.”

I was uneasy, upset even, by the effect of their reasoning, but I could not gainsay it. What was Bagner, I wondered? That noble edifice whose expertise in the field of securitization had won such widespread and justifiable reknown? That artist of the Meerschaum pipe display? Or something like that savage gray thing, grasping, greedy, desperate and loathsome, were its true character to be perceived unadorned by whatever humanity it found to drape over itself? My relationship to Bagner, as to the other senior partners, was as that of the moon to the sun. Dull and dim and dark without him, I reflected the light he shone on me. Now I perceived him to be darker than I had before.

I emerged from these considerations to find Lichstein and Z_______ discussing a difficulty which had crept into Lichstein’s business arrangements.

“Third-hand sandwiches, I ask you!” Lichstein exclaimed with some feeling. “My leftovers and my innovations being picked over by jackals… Will they next be coming to me to borrow mustard?!”

“Though I hold the steering committee in considerable regard, I can’t help feeling it’s a lamentable and short-sighted decision,” agreed Z_______. “And certainly the new policy will leave you perilously short of viable raw materials on which to work your art. Whatever will you do?”

“Do?” exclaimed Lichstein. “I suppose I shall… Or perhaps…” I had never before heard him at a loss for words.

“Possibly you could… Let me suggest that…” Z_____ too was stymied.

They continued in this wise for some while, their fabulous brains latching on to half-ideas and near solutions, only to reject them before they could find full iteration. I watched with detachment and dispiritedness that were foreign to me. Perhaps because of this detachment I was able to perceive what they could not, a simple, workable solution to Lichstein’s difficulty. For reasons which may become evident in the course of this narrative I will not disclose my solution here, but if you know that it involves fourth-hand sandwiches, economies of scale, and certain unsavory anti-competitive practices the more cunning of my eventual readers may understand.

Memories of Lichstein’s rebuke of my plan to restore Bagner’s homunculus were fresh in my mind. I examined my scheme carefully for flaws. Difficulties presented themselves serially at high speed, but I found myself able to dodge them. It would work. It would work.

Elated, I prepared to present my plan to Lichstein and Z_____. But I was too late. A call came from Bagner, seeking Z_____’s services as a notary. Lichstein too felt the press of urgent business. Lacking an audience, I held my tongue. It was to prove fateful, perhaps providential.

The next several days were dark ones for me, as I suffered from a poverty of spirit heretofore unknown to me. My work became a chore, my fealty to my superiors an act of theater. Sir and Ma’am I called them, and inquired as to their health and sought their approval, but the thought was never far from my mind that I might with as much sense touch my forelock to a Carnival mask.

Such was my gloom that I could no longer face Z_____, my mentor and friend. So much had he done to further my progress towards acceptance in this firm that I could not bear to tell him I now found the goal barren in its attainment. This isolation in turn brought further gloom. I staggered dazed through my working hours, able to continue only because my brain and hands knew their tasks by rote.

How I might otherwise have ended is a matter for speculation. As it happened, though, I resolved one day to seek out Lichstein. He was equal to Z_____ in wisdom and learning if not quite in kindness or affection for me. I had some hope of winning further esteem in his eyes through the gift of my strategem for resolving his business difficulty. Once he was thus indebted to me, I hoped that perhaps he might find some strategy or formulation by which I could continue.

I located him in a conference room near my office, working with his bread putty to put the finishing touches on a sandwich arrangement for a meeting to be held there in several hours’ time. “Ah, Baumgartner,” he hailed me expansively, “Do come in. Sandwiches, you know,” he said, indicating the pile dismissively. “Well, even attorneys must eat.”

“It’s true, sir,” I agreed, “But unlike us you eat what you kill.”

“Of course, my boy, that is not technically true, for professionally I neither kill nor eat,” he corrected, adopting the professorial tone so customary to him. “Rather, I gather and refurbish. The eating is done by such as yourself on certain unwise occasions. The killing, I understand, is done by some distant slaughterhouse worker. But woefully inaccurate though your statement may be on a factual level, it is accurate metaphorically. The fruits of my labor, such as they are, remain my own.” He paused. “I say, my boy, I wonder if you might do me a favor. Forgetting the presence of some rather coarse-grained breads in this arrangement, I’ve brought only the number three putty. Would you be so kind as to go to my storeroom and retrieve a jar of number four for me?”

I complied readily, having been to his storeroom on several previous occasions. As I returned to the conference room, my heart was lighter than it had been for days, buoyed as it was by the hope that Lichstein could help me. I was in no way prepared for what I encountered when I returned to the conference room.

The first irregularity to arrest my attention was the tray of sandwiches, which was now scattered on the ground, bread and mustard and arugula and luncheon meats strewn across the beige carpet. Cries and snarls and thuds came to me from the other side of the room. Their source was shielded from me by the intervening table and chairs, but I could see two chairs rocking maniacally back and forth. I dashed over to investigate.

There I found Lichstein, flat on the floor and engaged in a titantic struggle with what appeared to be the same gray monstrosity that had attacked McGovern some few days earlier. The creature straddled Lichstein, who in turn punched and kicked at it with all his awesome fury. In spite of his struggles, though, Lichstein’s plaid trousers had faded to gray up to the knee. His argyle socks were similarly affected.

Thinking quickly, I seized a nearby chair and fetched the creature a wallop to the side of its head. It shook its head as though to clear it, and then resumed its assault. I delivered another blow. Lichstein redoubled his own efforts. Still the creature fought, and now Lichstein’s trousers were gray up to his thighs. Another blow I dealt it. And another. And another. Finally it rolled off Lichstein and sat dazed on the floor.

Next to the creature was a supply closet. I considered my options quickly. Though we had momentarily the upper hand, the creature seemed to be coming back to itself. Lichstein lay on the ground, stunned. He was bleeding slightly from a gash on his head. I had to act immediately.

I flung the closet door open, then grabbed the creature by its right forelimb. It seemed surprised at this reversal of roles. I even thought I might succeed. But as I made to fling the creature into the open closet, it grabbed my hand with both of its paws. I tried to shake it loose, but quickly realized I was no match for it. It locked eyes with mine. I felt then as though it were inside me, poking and prodding my innermost being, sizing me up the way a butcher would inspect meat. The tentacles of its thought ran slimily over my own. I was helpless before it.

Then, suddenly, I felt its tentacles withdraw from my brain. It uttered a noise then, rather like a snort, and released its grip on my hand. I could feel its revulsion as strongly as I could feel my own. Somehow I retained the presence of mind to kick it into the closet and bar the door with a chair.

Much shaken, I collapsed into a chair. Head in hands, I considered what had just occurred. It was not the nearness of my escape that so rattled me. No, though I knew with a moral certainty that the creature could have taken me easily had it meant to. What shook me was that it had not wanted to. It had known me, and preferred its own demi-existence to a life as me. I had been weighed and found wanting.

This state of despair I had previously found conducive to innovation. So it was again. Gradually a scheme began to take place, a desperate scheme, and maybe even a dastardly scheme. How it would come out, who I would be at the end of it, I could not be sure. But this I did know, that no longer could I be Baumgartner.

Lichstein was beginning to stir, the color returning slowly to his pants and socks. I helped him to his feet and suggested he secret himself in my office until he felt more fully himself. He stammered his concurrence.

Once he’d been secured, I undertook the remainder of the necessary preparations. Z____ I dispatched on an errand to a bond holding company with which the firm had dealings, giving him to understand that the urgency and sensitivity of the assignment were such that it could be entrusted no one but him.

Then to Bagner’s office. By happy chance he was out, though I had devised a ruse to divert him had it been necessary. I crept in and took from his desk the pen he had been given when he made partner. On it were engraved the date of his attaining partnership, the name of the firm, and his initials, EPB, which were the same as my own.

Two other preparations were necessary. From a secretary I secured the use of a hand mirror, on which I wrote certain information. Lastly, I sent by priority interoffice mail a note to Lichstein, in care of my office, requesting his presence back in the conference room as a matter of urgency. I calculated that it would take approximately one hour for him to receive my message. The timing was tight, the margin for error slim, but on this desperate gamble did I stake my future.

Finally I returned to the conference room. I hesitated briefly, in awe at the enormity of what I was attempted. Was it really Baumgartner, humble, workaday Baumgartner, grappling so obstreperously with his own future? Well may you wonder.

But it was Baumgartner too whose existence had been judged so loathsome that no existence at all was preferable. I flung open the door to the storage area.

I had counted on the mirror to provide me a moment’s initiative. This it did. The creature saw itself in the mirror and shrank from it. This gave me time to slam the door behind me and fix the mirror to the wall in a position I had calculated. Then I stood before the creature, holding aloft the pen identifying one with my initials as a senior partner in our august firm. The creature hesitated an instant, calculating I believe, and then struck. I offered no resistance.

The process was quick, my attacker methodical. It felt like only moments before what I recognized as the tentacles of my own being flapped loose from the Baumgartnernesses to which they had been moored. These were expelled through the nose of the young attorney who once I had been. Slowly these strands of me coalesced into a coherent hominoid whole.

For some while I lay thus on the floor of the storage area, wracked with cold and longing. Mobility was for this time beyond me, but I could see next to me that the color was returning to Baumgartner’s clothing. Returning, yes, but not exactly as it had been. His shirt, I remembered, had been a slightly darker blue, his pants a slightly lighter khaki before the attack. He too lay immobile. My thoughts during that time are not wholly accessible to me, and I recall them as being extreme and poorly formed. Regret was strong in me. How could I have rejected my former existence? Any other existence was surely preferable to that which I now suffered, and no existence at all far preferable. It was then that I heard heavy footsteps approaching the door.

Looking back, I am astonished that my old self was able to put together such a masterful plan. Lichstein had heeded my letter and come at once. He opened the door wide. I saw him in the mirror, framed by the words I had written there: “I am called Lichstein, the sandwiches man,” together with other salient information that I will not here divulge.

The struggle, though intense beyond my power to convey it, was not a long one. Lichstein was weak from the earlier attack, and identified fully by the information on the mirror. He struggled, he kicked, he fought with all his being. But I gained the upper hand. And then, suddenly, I found myself inside again. I was conscious of a great expansion of myself, as tentacles of me spread out in all directions. Thinking of the moment visually, I am reminded of a time when as a child I dropped an old thermometer on the counter of a sink. The way the mercury moved when released, insinuating itself like liquid lightening into every crack and cranny available to it, so moved I. Oddly, I cannot sort out which child dropped that thermometer, the Lichstein child or the Baumgartner child.

We lay for some time side by side on the floor, Baumgartner, the being that had been Lichstein, and I. Baumgartner was the first to rise. He did so with a terrified look in his eye which I read as shame at his involvement in the thing. Scampering to the door, he hurried out without looking backwards.

Then the being that had been Lichstein rose, moaning horribly, and wailing, moving jerkily with a terrible power. I feared it would once again switch places with me, and it did run a cold hand longingly over my forehead. But some scruple restrained it, possibly a vestigial understanding of the impossibility of returning to a body one has left. It paused only to spit upon my face, and then hurried out the door Baumgarter had left open.

Finally I rose, the various plaids of my costume having been reconstituted, and the memories of my two selves partitioned as best they could be. It was not difficult to resume my life. Our life? Lichstein’s life. My memories of Baumgartnerness are beginning to fade, for which reason I have made this record.

Regrettable our dealings with Z______ have become profoundly cold. “Mr. Lichstein,” he styles me, and regularly feels the urgent call of professional responsibility when my society is offered to him.

In most other respects, however, the match between myself and the Lichstein incarnation has been a happy one. The listing ship of our business has been righted thanks to my insight as Baumgartner. I am still feeling my way around our personal life, but I enjoy immensely our interactions with the dignitaries of our work environment. “Fine work with the sandwiches, Lichstein,” Bagner will chuckle. “Ho ho.”

I’ll answer with a chuckle of my own. “Just as you say, sir. Just as you say. Ho ho.”

The Mysterious Fate of Hawkins and his Allies: A Tale of Magical Legalism

2007-11-27T16:43:00.000-08:00

I found the following account in a box containing the personal effects of A_____, who seems to have been the secretary of the story's narrator. A handwritten note was appended to the manuscript, indicating that it had been found in the printer shortly after Hawkins' mysterious disappearance. The note concludes “It's a pity about Hawkins for taken as a whole he was a good man in spite of his flaws and who among us could hope to have more said of them.”

Half an hour ago I received an automatically generated email from the Records Department, pertaining to an upcoming delivery of some items from Records. “Attorney Hawkins,” it read, “Your request for files 000041, 000043, 000044 and 000046 has been processed. These items will be delivered to you before close of business on April 27 (today) by M. Watson, Record Services. Should you have any questions or care to modify your request, please contact M. Watson, Record Services, at extension 50000.”

I am human and want to live. Of course I sprang for the phone and stabbed out the number I’d been given. But the phone began to ring, as it must, before I'd finished dialing. Our extensions, you see, have only four digits.

“Record Services,” answered a young woman in a pleasant voice, seemingly unburdened by care.

“Watson?” I shouted into the phone, knowing that it could not be. “Is this Watson?”

“No sir,” she answered, unfazed by my desperation. “This is the general number I’m afraid. May I offer you Watson’s direct number?”

I don’t doubt that a man falling from a great height would grab at even fog as he tried to slow his descent. “Please! I have 5-0-0-0-0, but of course that can’t be right!”

“That is Watson’s extension, sir,” she said. “I suggest you contact him directly.”

“I’ve tried, but the phones… It’s quite impossible you see… Please! This is a matter of great urgency. Could you transfer me?”

“I’m sorry sir, but our phones in Record Services are rather primitive. I’m afraid I can’t help you,” she replied, calmly, unaffectedly. Did she understand what was at stake? How could she be so calm if she did? I wanted to scream at her, to beg, to cry, but I had no hope of any of these options succeeding.

“Could I ask you to take a message for Watson? Or even tell me where he sits?” I coated my voice with a veneer of calmness.

“I’m sorry sir,” she replied, “But I have never actually seen Watson’s desk, so I can’t tell you where it is. I would happily take a message, but I’ve never even met him, if indeed Watson is a man, so I certainly can’t promise that I shall be in any position to deliver it.”

“Anything!” I shouted, knowing it was hopeless. “Tell me anything! Please!”

“Have a nice day sir,” was her only response. With that, she severed the connection.

In some minutes or hours, then, several boxes will come for me from central files, holding strange cargo. Once they arrive I will go with them back to files. While I have time, let me recount the path I followed to this unusual doom.

The events I will relate had as their origin a deal to which I was assigned, a somewhat complicated bond issuance. My firm, Gandelsman and Doubrovskaia, LLP, handles such transactions nearly as a matter of routine, and my only trepidations in this instance had to do with the other members of the team. Mr. Fogarty, the quite senior partner, had long been regarded as an expert on such issuances. I was not alone, however, in feeling that as age had blunted his wits it had sharpened his always considerable temper. As he approached his 70th year, his eyesight was failing, his breathing labored and his tolerance for difficulty, delay or disturbances approached the vanishing point.

My relationship with Howell, the junior partner on the deal, was a complicated one. He had been with the firm two years longer than I. My first several years as a practicing attorney were colored, darkly, by his towel-snapping bonhomie. No mistake of mine was too minor or too major for it to become a source of conversation and ridicule. He was fond of nicknaming attorneys junior to him based on oversights or errors which they had committed and he had publicized. Through his efforts I became broadly known as Decimal, then Leap Year, and finally Revenue Neutral. In his fifth year, fired by ambition, he began to work more closely with Fogarty. It was not long afterwards that he abandoned his habit of inflicting minor torments.

We who had been his victims speculated endlessly about his conversion. One theory in wide circulation held that ill-treatment at the hands of Fogarty had provided him with sorely needed perspective on the feelings of the ridiculed and powerless. A variant of this theory had it that he had encountered in Fogarty pure evil, and so renounced his own former character as diluted and valueless. In any event, I too was ambitious, and over time a tenuous bond developed between us.

The final member of our team was Stephanie Caldwell. She was young and lively and impetuous, though not without a fine brain. She was reckoned difficult to work with by the more senior hands, who saw her as approximating a carriage horse unaccustomed to the traces, skittish and headstrong and difficult to control.

In a sense that is persuasive to me, my story begins on an ugly gray day in early December. I was on the 31st floor, where the Firm maintains its conference and work rooms, making my way to a closing for another transaction on which I’d been staffed. There were two routes of equal length from the elevator to my conference room. I elected, for no reason I can ascertain, to take the path that led past the due diligence room for the bond issuance of which I’ve spoken. As I passed this room, I heard a deep, rasping, familiar voice berating some unfortunate.

“You’ll carry this carelessness to your GRAVE, you heedless girl!” the voice admonished. “To your grave! No sooner will they close the coffin on your head than you will see it’s lined with evidence of all the mistakes and malfeasances you’ve committed in your shoddy life. And you’ll spend eternity correcting them!”

Fogarty seemed to be in rare form. I had heard similarly dire predictions, but more typically it was reckoned to take some time period short of eternity to correct one’s errors. I was not surprised to hear weeping in response to his diatribe. Poor Caldwell. Considering the venue, I was sure it was she. Though the weeping seemed to have a higher pitch than I would have expected. Her voice was normally quite deep.

Nor was I surprised when Fogarty continued in a similar vein. “Every missing comma will become a maggot, and every misspelled word a worm, and they’ll eat your eyes, you silly, doomed girl! And how will you fix your mistakes with your eyes eaten by maggots?! You’ll have to wait until they grow back, and then it will begin again!”

Poor, poor Caldwell. I considered intervening, though to do so would almost certainly mean taking her place as the target of Fogarty's wrath. The weeping grew louder, more distinct. It was then that I realized it wasn’t weeping at all. No, Fogarty’s horrible pronouncements had provoked her to laughter!

This had the effect of further incensing Fogarty. “You dare laugh, you wretched, foolish girl?” he roared, the edges of each word worn from their passage through phlegm. “Laugh in your coffin then, and every poorly articulated sentence you’ve written in your miserable career will turn into a snake and crawl down your silly throat. Oh, you’ll laugh then I’m sure!”

The laughter exploded. Feeling sure it must soon become lethal for one of them, I opened the door, my heart pounding.

I’d expected to see Fogarty, white-haired, wrinkled and evil, advancing on helpless young Caldwell, his talon-like hands extended towards her shaking form. Or perhaps Fogarty leaning against a table, clutching his chest as his heart, weak from years of neglect, at last gave way. What I did see was quite different.

Caldwell, rather than cowering in the wake of an attack from Fogarty, was instead leaning against a chair, the curls of her flaming red hair bouncing as her body shook with mirth. Her mouth was open as though to declaim some truth upon the room. Fogarty was nowhere in sight. Rather, the second figure in the tableau was young Sonia Holmes, a first year associate and intimate of Caldwell. She was holding on to the wall for support, and laughing uproariously. It was this sound that I’d mistaken for Caldwell weeping.

Caldwell was the first of us to recover her poise. “Oh,” she said.

Holmes was next. “I do have to be going. Those tables won’t format themselves I’m afraid.” She brushed past me without a glance.

Caldwell and I looked at each other. Our acquaintance to this point had been minimal. We had been present at some early briefings on the transaction, and she had come to me for guidance in several minor aspects of the due diligence.

She broke the silence. “Did you…”

“Yes,” I replied. “All of it.”

“And… are you…” she asked.

I thought. It wasn’t right what she’d done. Of course not. A serious breach of discipline, to be sure. But it was forgivable, in light of her youth and her high spirits, which had to be allowed for. And I knew that I had in me a capacity for forgiveness that others who might be asked to consider the matter did not. She should be forgiven. And only I could forgive her.

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not.”

I believe she would have thanked me, but I turned on my heels and left the room.

One month later, work on the transaction had begun in earnest, though we were still early in the process. Late one afternoon, Howell entered my office unbidden. His first action was to close the door firmly behind him.

“Hawkins, I have a difficult matter to discuss with you,” he told me, his chiseled features betraying uncharacteristic anxiety. “I’ve just spoken with Bagner. Apparently there is deep concern at the highest levels regarding Fogarty’s health. Bagner and Stern are considering asking him to step down.”

I was quite surprised by the news. “Can this be?” I asked. “He certainly seemed energetic enough this morning when he laid into young Caldwell over her errors in preparing the working group list.” He’d predicted in vivid terms that the specters of the misidentified parties in the list would be unsettled after their deaths, and seek out Caldwell for revenge.

“They’ll wander, you ninny, for years,” he’d declaimed, “Having been misidentified, misclassified, they won’t be able to rest. Partners listed as associates. Phone numbers wrong. Securities attorneys listed as tax specialists… Always they will wonder if they aren’t buried under the wrong headstone. How could they rest? So they’ll wander, seeking, seeking, always seeking. And finally, when you are yourself gray and near the grave, they’ll find you, you young fool. And you'll wish then that you'd been more attentive to detail. Oh yes. Yes.”

Howell and I had been the subject of further predictions along similar lines. We’d left the room quietly. I had had my head down. The shine had faded from Howell’s dark eyes, and even some of the bounce had gone from Caldwell’s step. Still, the impression I’d had of Fogarty had not been of a man in poor health.

“He seems to have been quite unhinged by Caldwell’s errors, and your failure to correct them in a timely manner,” Howell responded. “No doubt you gathered as much from his comments. But while some measure of disquiet is usual for him, Bagner believes that in this case either the insult was a great one or his constitution is no longer what it once was. Bagner chanced to encounter him in the partner’s restroom shortly after our meeting, and paints a rather disturbing picture of the scene. He claims that Fogarty was involved in some manner of confrontation with the mirror behind the sink.”

“That does sound serious,” I responded.

“It might be and it might not be,” opined Howell. “Bagner describes him yelling at the mirror. He rather incongruously reports him yelling both ‘Please, I never knew’ and ‘I’ll cause you to regret your demi-existence, you shadow of a fiend!’ Bagner is not a particularly imaginative man. What he saw may have been, as he believes, simply an old man finally cracking up. Fogarty, as you well know, is inclined to see shadows and specters where other men do not. But this may be simply because he sees more acutely than other men. I admit that I incline to this view.”

“If anything, that would make the matter more serious,” I interjected. “Surely the potential presence of hostile and pedantic supernatural forces, perhaps bent on compelling Fogarty to atone for a lifetime’s worth of trivial mistakes, is more troubling than the mere appearance in him of senile dementia!”

“You are considering the matter incorrectly, my young associate,” said Howell, displaying a smirk than had been painfully familiar to me only a few years earlier. “Whatever supernatural forces may be threatening Fogarty, he has been keeping them in check for the greater part of his professional career. Surely he can continue to do so.

“What you are leaving out is the matter of our own relationship to Amalgamated Financial. Currently they are Fogarty’s client by long association. Were he to be forced out suddenly, they may well decide to take this portion of their business to another of the firms with which they have dealings. They may even decide to remove us from this deal, on which we’ve spent so much toil. It hasn’t, regrettably, advanced far enough for us to be sure of retaining it.

“But consider another scenario. Imagine that Fogarty remains with the firm for the duration of this transaction. Meanwhile, you and I hint to our counterparts at Amalgamated of Fogarty’s impending departure. We hint also as to his regrettable mental instability. They will naturally conclude that we have performed the lion’s share of the labor on the transaction, and when, at its end, they are forced to consider the disposition of the Fogarty’s portion of their business, they may well conclude that I will be able to provide them with the most seamless transition.”

“Aided by me, of course,” I added.

“Aided most ably by you,” agreed Howell. “It could be the last bit of solid footing you need to propel yourself to your own piece of the partnership.”

“All we need, then, is for Fogarty to remain with the firm until the completion of the transaction.” I pictured myself ensconced in a corner office, the walls of which were paneled with dark wood. “Will Bagner agree to wait until then to make his proposal?”

“I’m afraid there is no chance of it,” replied Howell. “He has always considered Fogarty dangerous to the reputation of the firm, and now he’s convinced that danger is even more acute than ever. And most harmful to our cause, Fogarty seems to have given Bagner some signal that he is willing to accept such an offer.”

The office of my imagination transformed itself before my mind’s eye. The wooden paneling was stripped away to reveal plaster underneath. The soft lighting I’d imagined brightened to florescence, which revealed the dust, the piles of paper, the half-empty coffee cups that spoke somberly of long hours of joyless labor.

“So what can we possibly do?” I asked. “If Bagner will offer and Fogarty will accept, the result seems as inevitable as it is unfortunate.”

“That, Hawkins, is where you come in,” answered Howell. “You probably aren’t aware of it, but Fogarty has a softer spot in his heart for you. He regards you as a distant and not-disliked relative. He holds me in similar esteem. I have some hope that a mutual appeal from the pair of us will sway him to complete this one final transaction. We can stress how much he still has to teach us, for instance…” Howell’s voice trailed off at the end of his suggestion. He looked at the space in front of his mouth into which his words had first entered the world. He seemed surprised by the feebleness of the form they’d found.

I regarded them similarly.

“Even supposing your plan does work,” I said, “Would Bagner accept his refusal?”

Howell regained some confidence. “Absolutely. Bagner would never have contemplated making a firm proposal without believing Fogarty to be amenable. Bagner regards him with no small amount of fear, dating back to the time when he worked under Fogarty as a summer associate. One word from Fogarty in opposition and Bagner wouldn’t mention the idea again.”

“One word?” I asked. The plan that was to be our undoing began to take form in my mind.

“What are you suggesting?” asked Howell.

I told him. We then approached Caldwell, the two of us arriving unannounced at her door, shoulder to shoulder.

“Do I have to?” she’d fairly wailed.

“For two thousand years western civilization has been enjoined from hiding our lights under bushels,” said Howell. “As a partner in this firm, I also incline to this view. Someone should hear your masterful impersonation. I believe the most appropriate candidates are Bagner and Fogarty. I will happily leave the final choice to you.”

Howell and I went first to Fogarty's office. We felt it worthwhile to first attempt an appeal along the lines Howell had suggested. Though there was scant hope of success, if he would agree it would save us from a terrible risk.

We found him sitting in his chair behind his desk, staring fixedly at the singular ornaments he kept on shelves against the wall behind him. There were dozens of what might be called figurines on these dusty shelves, though I can't tell you what they represented. Each was made of disparate materials, some wood, some leather, some metal, and some might have been bone. Each was ultimately formless, though some aspect of each suggested a human figure. On one it might be a leather fringe on the top that suggested hair. On another, a split in the base of the figure suggested legs. On another, a pattern of protuberances recalled a face.

Fogarty turned slowly towards us and fixed us each in turn with his cold gaze. I realized then that I had never seen him blink. Howell's idea seemed more foolish then ever. Still, he proceeded as he'd previously outlined.

Fogarty slumped silently in his chair as Howell finished our appeal, his hands holding fast to his armrests. For a moment he didn’t look evil to me, or even tinged with evil. He looked defeated.

“Boys,” he said at last. “Boys. I have tried to teach you some portion of what I have learned. You, Howell, have been in certain ways like a nephew to me.” Beside me I heard Howell murmur something unintelligible at this, something with a tender sound to it.

Fogarty continued. “But you have learned all from me that you are going to. You’ve heard me speak often about the grave to you, about the way mistakes from this world will follow you into the next. I have been given certain portents in these last several days which lead me to believe that I am quite near to my own grave, though I may circle it for some time before entering. I will prepare myself. If Bagner is indeed concerned about the reputation of the firm enough to offer to buy out my interest, I shall accept gratefully and immediately. If I spare the time for a backward glance, it will be out of trepidation rather than fondness. Now please leave my presence.”

I nudged Howell’s leg with the side of one wingtip, then made a pro forma farewell to Fogarty. After all, I had faith in our designs. As I left I heard Howell begin. “Sir, though it is the height of ingratitude for one who has been given so much to ask for still more, I wonder if before you leave I might beg of you one further favor…”

I went to wait with Caldwell at the abandoned secretarial station in the dark alcove down the hall, as arranged. She had seated herself on a desk overgrown with vines from the potted plants that remained from the tenure of its last inhabitant. After due consideration I sat next to her. Shortly thereafter she stood up.

Several minutes later Howell led the stooping Fogarty from his office, the older man leaning on the younger for support. I thought then, for the first time, that he might not have much more time. It was callous, I realize now, to conclude that he would almost certainly prefer to “die in the saddle.” At the time, however, I felt as though I were doing him a favor as I led the uncharacteristically quiet Caldwell back to his office.

She settled herself into Fogarty’s chair, resting uncomfortably on the edge of the old, supple leather seat. The first time I tried to dial Bagner’s extension I misdialed the third digit. The second time as well. Caldwell, exasperated, grabbed the phone from me and dialed herself.

“Bagner!” she rasped in Fogarty’s voice when Bagner picked up. “Bagner! I hear things!”

I could faintly hear his end of the conversation. He sounded apologetic, sheepish.

“I won’t have it!” shouted Caldwell. Her face was a terrible thing. An uninformed observer would have thought she was being stabbed. “I will not be turned out of my office to wander like an unburied spirit for the rest of my days!”

There was more murmuring from Bagner. Then, from Caldwell, staring directly at me, “You’ll see the error of your ways or I will demonstrate it for you!”

More murmurings, and then “If in death my spirit is restless, Bagner, I shall seek out yours for company! Trifle with my dignity, my comfort, my peace at your own peril!”

There was more murmurings, and further offers of terror from Caldwell. Finally she hung up the phone in mid rant. It was a favorite tactic of Fogarty’s.

“It was beautifully done,” I told her, much impressed and moved to no little extent.

“It was terrifying,” she told me. She left the room without another word. I followed soon after.

I had no meaningful contact with my co-conspirators until the following afternoon. Around 4 o’clock my phone rang. The display indicated that it was Fogarty calling. So much could have gone wrong. It was all I could do to pick up the phone by the third ring. To my surprise, though, rather than the phlegmy invocations of doom I expected, I heard Caldwell’s rich voice.

“H-H-Hawkins?” she asked.

The hesitation, the nervousness, were most unlike her. I thought the explanation might lie in her location. Why the devil was she in Fogarty’s office?

“It’s Hawkins,” I responded, projecting authority and calm. For all I knew, Fogarty could be on the line as well. If anyone were to give the game away, it wouldn’t be me. “What’s the occasion for the call, if I might ask?”

“I think you’d better come down here,” she responded. “I think you’d better come down here at once.”

The fears of exposure, of ruin, of exile, which I carried on my trip to Fogarty’s office proved to be unnecessary baggage. I knocked on his closed door, and heard Caldwell bid me enter in a tremulous voice.

Caldwell was the first sight I took in. She was in the corner of the room furthest from Fogarty’s desk, her back to the corner, one shoulder against each of the walls. Her eyes were fixed on something on the other side of the room. She barely glanced at me as I opened the door before returning her gaze to that which had transfixed her. I entered the room and, looking to my right, saw what compelled her.

Fogarty was lying on the floor by his desk, his legs entangled with the arms of his chair, which had also fallen. His arms were extended past his head. Before he fell they must have been over his head, I thought. He was very still.

“I found him like this,” said Caldwell. “You must believe me. Please believe me.” She fixed her gaze on me now. Tears ran down each of her cheeks, following the course laid down by their predecessors.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“A long time,” she sobbed. “A very long time.”

I moved to examine Fogarty. His right leg was bent at mid-thigh. His position suggested that the arm of the chair had been the agent for the fracture. I gently turned his head to examine his face. His skin felt thin and dry, as though in covering his cheek bones it had achieved a last and unexpected triumph. His hair was sparse and stiff, like hay left after a harvest. His face was set in a gruesome expression, his mouth wide open. A thin trail of black liquid had dried after running halfway down his chin. Gently, I lowered his head back to the floor.

“I’ll call Howell,” I said.

He came at once. It took him only moments to assess the situation and take charge. “Hawkins, I’ll want a quick word with Caldwell. Afterwards, take her to her office and fetch her something hot to drink. Now, young Caldwell…”

He went over to her, still huddled in the corner. “Caldwell, I’m truly sorry you’ve had such an ordeal. You showed great presence of mind by calling Hawkins to the scene, and great bravery by remaining to protect our interests. But now your work is done, at least for the time being. Go with Hawkins back to your office, and tell no one what you have seen. All of our futures depend on it.”

She nodded in agreement, then appeared to think for a moment. “But… tell no one? For how long? Surely the authorities will have to be notified. Will you inform them?”

“I’m not entirely sure that’s the best way to handle this ticklish situation,” explained Howell. “Unfortunately Fogarty is past all help. I can see no benefit to publicizing his sad condition.”

“No benefit?” exclaimed Caldwell, growing stronger from the conflict. “None save a decent burial, and the opportunity for his friends and family to say their farewells. But surely that’s enough of a benefit. What other choice can there possibly be?”

I admit that until that point I had found Howell’s conduct and ideas strange as well. But Caldwell’s rhetorical question provoked an answer in my brain, an answer that Howell had come to much sooner than I.

“As for his friends and family, I do not feel any will be sorely afflicted,” argued Howell. “He has no friends. As for family, he has never spoken of any. He has never married. Surely his parents have long ago preceded him out of this world. Who can that leave? Only yesterday he told me I was as a nephew to him. Very well. I will certainly bid him a fond farewell, in the manner that seems most appropriate to me.”

Caldwell seemed unconvinced. Thoroughly unconvinced. I spoke. “I don’t know if you’ve seen Fogarty’s face. Some corpses have a rested, peaceful look to them. To glance at them is to believe they have passed to a better place. Not so with Fogarty. He fought his fate with all the strength left in his old body, and regarded his destination with horror. Though death sought him, he sought not death.”

Caldwell looked at me at the end of my oration. Slowly she nodded.

“But what is death, actually?” I continued. “A human perceives and is perceived. Fogarty perceives no more. When one considers the blackness of his world view, the evident terror of his final moments, one concludes that surely it is a fortunate outcome. But still he can be perceived, and in being perceived, have a form of life. Howell means to keep the idea of Fogarty alive, to give him at least a little more time. Will Fogarty be dead as long as people can read his emails, hear his voice? Can you look at his face and tell me he wouldn’t have wanted a little more time? That he would not, now, prefer a shadow of his former existence to the fate he saw approaching him at the end?”

Again she nodded slowly, in agreement with the sentiments I’d expressed. I helped her to her feet and held her as she cried. Slowly I led her back to her office.

I returned to find Howell on the phone. “That’s right,” he was saying. “A triple zero series storage box.” He saw me enter, and switched to speaker phone.

A dry, cracked voice on the other end croaked to life in response. “And may I know the client-matter number?”

“0-1-1-0-0 / 0-0-2-9,” answered Howell.

There was silence for a moment. Then the voice spoke again. “Mr. Fogarty, is it? He certainly wasn’t the worst.” The voice broke then, displaying a hint of wetness that I would have thought long dried. “He was a young associate when I joined the firm, so very many years ago. He will be missed.”

Howell murmured in response to this. The voice continued, the wetness having evaporated again. “Do you know the signs, then? The seals?”

“I’ve learned much from Mr. Fogarty,” Howell responded. “The seals and the signs are not in any way the least of my learning.”

“It’s right then,” said the voice. “And fitting. Poor old Mr. Fogarty. He sent me my first triple zero series box. And his will be the last I receive. I’m to retire, you see. As of tomorrow the triple zero series will be handled by M. Watson. You’ll be in good hands.” With that, he severed the connection.

Ten minutes later there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a large brown box of sturdy cardboard construction in the doorway. Of its deliverer there was no sign.

“Bring it to me,” said Howell. I did so.

These are my last hours. This is the last story I will tell. I will not relate the struggles we endured getting Fogarty into that box, though I have thought about them many times since. I will tell you, though, that in retrospect I am struck most by the lightheartedness, the ease we felt having accomplished our gruesome task. Our purpose had been accomplished, we believed, without cost or repercussion.

For some time, it appeared our optimism was justified. Caldwell, perhaps animated by the notion that she was keeping Fogarty alive through her impersonations, brought a nearly perfect Fogartyness to her several performances on conference calls. “Just as cranky as ever, Fogarty,” one vice president at Amalgamated told her. “But by god you still know your law.” Caldwell had responded with a long diatribe concerning the general dearth of professionalism and competence among the various parties to the transaction. The Amalgamated group chuckled in response.

Three days before we were to close the transaction, I was redrafting the Note Purchase Agreement for what I hoped was the last time. Shortly after midnight, Howell appeared at my door holding an inter-office envelope as though he attached great importance to it.

“Hawkins, this was sent to me today,” he said without preamble, his lips tight to his teeth.

I didn't welcome the interruption. The changes I was working on were rather complex, and I'd caught myself in several calculation errors already. “What is 'this' exactly, Howell?” I asked, rather sharply. I could scarcely believe the interruption was warranted. The adjective 'shiftless' wasn't far from my mind in regards to Howell.

He glanced back at the door, which he'd closed behind him. Then he reached into the envelope. His hand emerged holding a piece of paper, and a sticker such as might be found in a college dorm room, celebrating the inhabitant's love of a musical group. The design was intricate and terrible. I won't describe it here, for I feel that on the whole the world would be better off without knowledge of such things.

“'This,'” he said, “Is one of the seals I put on the box in which we interred Fogarty. And this note explains that in the course of examining the box, one M. Watson dislodged it and was unable to reattach it. He thought I might like it for a souvenir.” Howell's face had gone quite pale at this recitation. The word souvenir in particular seemed to pain him physically.

“Is it serious, then?” I asked.

“Fogarty always cautioned me to use such seals on such occasions,” responded Howell. “The records room, he maintained, is the not quietest of places for a corpse to be interred, and seals such as this one have some role in keeping them from becoming restless. As to the specific importance of this seal, I'm afraid I don't know. It might be that the others will suffice, but I really can't be certain.”

“Can you not reattach it yourself, if its importance is so great?” I asked.

“If I could speak to M. Watson, I might be able to arrange to reattach it,” responded Howell. “But unfortunately I have no phone number for him. I've tried the switchboard, the general number for records, and even inter-office mail, all without success.”

“What can we do then?” I asked.

“We can wait,” he said. “And we can hope. And we can be vigilant.” He turned to go, then paused at the door. “And one more thing. Considering the manias of the deceased, we can check our work very, very carefully.”

At four that morning I discovered and corrected what I hoped was the last error I'd committed in the note purchase agreement. By that point, the letters were swimming together on my screen. Every time I added up the figures I got a different total. We could hope, Howell had said. It wasn't easy at that hour.

The transaction closed on its appointed date, in spite of some last minute hitches. Caldwell had mislaid several signature pages. I had, after all, miscalculated certain totals in the note amounts. Howell had made a vital mistake in his rendering of the waterfall provisions. A vice president at Amalgamated had discovered the error at the 11th hour. “I wouldn't want to be the one to explain that to old Fogarty,” chuckled the vice president.

Three days after the close of the transaction, Howell manifested himself once more in my doorway. He was paler than I had ever seen him, so much so that in contrast with his jet black hair, his face looked as though he'd been entombed for some time. “Hawkins,” he told me, “I've had an email.”

“From Amalgamated?” I asked, not believing it myself.

“From records,” he responded. “From that idiot M. Watson. Fogarty's box is coming back to me. Watson seems to be under the impression that I've requested it.”

“And haven't you?” I asked. “Perhaps this is your chance to reseal it.”

Howell gave a half-sob in response. “There is another box included in the request,” he choked out at long last. “Another in the triple zero series. And...” His breathing was ragged, each word an ordeal. “And it's client-m---m---matter number--- is my own.”

I could think of no response, I'm afraid. I stared at him for some time. Finally my stare provoked him to further speech. “I'll ... I'll run of course... Farewell, Hawkins. Farewell.” He clasped my hand quickly though firmly, before darting out the door.

Some hours later my phone rang. To my chagrin, I saw the call was coming from Howell's line.

It proved to Howell calling. “It's hopeless,” he said. His voice was perfectly flat, like the bed of an old, dry river.

“How do you mean?” I asked, urgently. “How is it hopeless? Why have you returned to your office, of all places?”

“Why?!?!” he responded, his voice animated into bitterness. “First I tried the elevators. I pressed the button for the lobby, and the elevator seemed to descend to the lobby. But when the door opened, I found myself once again on the 33rd floor. I tried again and again and again. But never could I leave the floor. Then I tried the stairs. I walked down them for a very long time. You know there are two flights between each floor. I counted the flights as I raced down them, the image of something called M. Watson carrying boxes spurring me on. When I'd climbed down 64 flights, I went to open the door, only to find myself confronted by the photograph of the child in the corn stalks that hangs outside the staircase on the 33rd floor.

“In desperation,” he continued, his voice having flattened again, “I opened my window and flung myself out of it. I landed much quicker than I should have, on a ledge outside a window. I threw myself down again, to land on another ledge. And again. And again. And again. Leap out though I did, as far from the building as I could, in each case, whether by wind or something else, I was borne back to the building to land on another ledge. 32 times I repeated the painful process. The ground below never got nearer though, and finally I crawled back through the window to find myself again in my own office! Why have I returned here? Because something or someone will not let me leave.”

I sought to commiserate with him, but nothing I could say seemed relevant.

“I've made many mistakes in my career, Hawkins,” he told me, his words now punctuated by sobs. “Very many mistakes. Typos, miscalculations, lost documents... Many, many mistakes... If I was once hard on you, if I was once cruel, perhaps that has helped you to be more careful. More careful than I was. Perhaps that will make some difference.”

Through the receiver I heard a knock on the door, then the sound of the phone being put down. Then the line went dead.

I gathered a few personal items from my desk and flung them into my briefcase. I suppose my feet must have touched the ground as I raced to the elevator, but I had no sense of it at the time. I jabbed the 'lobby' button repeatedly, drawing odd looks from the other passengers in the elevator. I can scarcely have breathed during the long passage down to the lobby. How my heart leapt when the door opened to reveal the ground floor! How I fairly skipped my way out on to the street! How misplaced was my relief and my hope!

I had planned to sleep the next day away, with my head under the covers, and then to plan for my future. Instead, I found myself awake at my customary hour, and showering and preparing for work before I knew what I was doing. I seemed to watch myself as I walked out the door towards my train. In my head I was screaming at myself not to go, but I took each step as though carefree and even eager to return to work.

The cycle of grateful escape and horrified though inevitable return continued for one week. On the Monday of the week after Howell received his files, I heard a knock on my door. Then a familiar voice. “Hawkins, are you decent?” Howell!!

Eagerly I raced to the door and flung it open. To find young Caldwell standing in the doorway.

“Was it good?” she asked, hopefully, her blue eyes bright with glee. “I think it sounds just like Howell. I've been looking for him to demonstrate it, but I haven't seen him for some time. Is he on vacation?”

“I'm afraid I don't know,” I responded, flatly. The hope that had surged in me on hearing Howell's voice again had receded, leaving me lower than before.

“You seem quite down in the dumps,” Caldwell told me. “Cheer up, please! For myself, I've felt like doing cartwheels down the hall ever since we finished that deal! It's such a relief not to have to imitate Fogarty anymore.”

“Is it?” I asked her. “Caldwell, I'm so sorry that Howell and I coerced you into joining our deception. I'm so very sorry.”

“Please!” said Caldwell. “I'll admit that I was quite afraid at first, and it was never pleasant while I was doing it, but what an experience! Of course I'm glad it's over, but there was no harm done in the end! I'm glad I did it.”

“I'm glad,” I told her, though I didn't feel it.

“Aren't you gloomy!” she told me. “Really, I'm glad. It's been such a pleasure working with you and Howell. It was an adventure, not work. I'm so tired of working all the time. More adventures, please!”

I could make no response.

She went on. “Oh, I meant to ask you about something. I received an odd note from Records today. From someone named M. Watson. Apparently they're sending me some files, though I didn't request any. I tried calling down to Records, but I couldn't get any answers out of them. Has that ever happened to you?”

“Never,” I managed to say.

“Oh well,” she said. “I guess I'll find out what it is soon enough. Maybe it will be another adventure!” She turned to leave the room.

“Caldwell,” I told her. “There's one thing.”

My tone caught her, and she turned with a concerned look on her face.

“Just... just be careful, Caldwell,” I told her.

Her face split into a broad smile. “I really can't think why you're so gloomy,” she told me, coming over to muss my hair affectionately. “I really can't understand it. You need a vacation, like Howell. Please, cheer up!” With that, she left the room.

I never saw her again.

It was a week ago that Caldwell left my office. In that time, I've thought often about whether I should have warned her instead of allowing her to skip merrily towards her terrible fate. I think I was right not to, to spare her the terror, the awful, helpless knowing that has been my constant companion ever since. You see, I've made so many mistakes in my career, so many simple, foolish mistakes. So many mistakes.

Mad Wood on the 17th Floor: A Tale of Magical Legalism

2007-11-27T16:25:00.000-08:00

While sitting at my secretarial station in the hall late one afternoon, I heard a roar from the overgrown office, Mad Wood’s office. Several leather-bound records of old transactions flew from the office, coming within lamentable inches of braining McCartney as he sauntered provocatively past. Wood, Mad Wood, came roaring after them. "GEROFMILAM!" bellowed the nearly naked figure. He was clad, as per his custom, only in the remnants of a pair of khakis, now ripped away up to the knees, and the overflow of his tangled blond beard, which came down to his waist. McCartney fled.

I watched as Wood, trembling still with rage, went to retrieve the volumes. Three had rebounded off the far wall and landed on the side of the corridor closest to Wood’s office. These he gathered carefully, gently, plucking them from the rose bush in which they’d landed. A fourth, however, lay on the other side of the corridor. Wood edged his way to the white line that marked the center of the corridor and bent, reaching for it. It was inches past his outstretched fingers. He strained. He stretched. His weathered face reddened with exertion and concentration. He sank to one knee so he could reach further. His fingers inched closer...

"What’s this!? Litter in the halls, eh? Well, we can’t have that. It’s nasty, Wood, nasty." Portly, pink faced Jenkins, dapper in a dark suit, kicked the book out of Wood’s reach with one wingtip. "Can you believe the slovenliness of some of our staff, Wood? It will have to go in the trash, I’m afraid." Jenkins beamed as he held the book up, still out of reach of the snarling Wood. "What is it, anyway? Oh, I see… The closing set for a billion dollar public financing. I would have thought that would have had real sentimental value for someone. Still, anything left in the hall is trash. It’s a pity, a real pity."

Wood snarled and gnashed his teeth as Jenkins tossed the volume into a steel trashcan against the wall. "If by chance I’ve thrown away something someone values," Jenkins continued, expounding to the world in general, "Well, they’ve only to retrieve it from the trash before the girl comes by to empty it. Much neater, eh? Cleanliness, you’ll find, Wood, is next to godliness." Pulling a pen from his pocket and ripping a sheet of paper from a pad on my desk, he wrote out a note for the janitor, speaking aloud each letter as he wrote it. "B-A-S-U-R-A." Basura, the Spanish word for trash.

Bellowing, Wood strained to reach the volume in the trashcan as he had before, approaching but not passing the middle of the corridor. Now, however, the book was out of his reach by several feet. After several minutes of struggle and contortion he realized its futility. He leaned back into his rose bush and wept. As he heard the wheels of the Albanian janitor’s cart around the corner his weeping became desperate moans. Though I am by long-standing habit an observer rather than a participant in the lives of these lawyers, Wood’s moans touched me. I fingered the thick envelope taped to the underside of my desk. The curious writing on it bore words I knew by heart: “In exchange for a kindness long owed and not yet paid.” I resolved to act.

I hailed the young woman as she pushed her cart around the corner. "Natini mir, Elena. Don’t worry about cleaning out Mr. Basura’s office tonight." I indicated Wood. She never cleaned it. She didn’t, in fact, know his name. She nodded, relieved I thought, and bent to empty the trash can wherein Jenkins had deposited the volume.

The note stared up at her.

"What is the note on the book, N_______?" she asked me.

"I can’t see it from here, but it may be the name of the owner, or the person for whom it’s intended," I speculated. "Things do get thrown out accidentally."

She thought a moment. Then, carefully, she lifted the volume from the trash and held it out to mad, naked Wood as he lay disconsolate in his roses. "Mr. Basura?" she asked, trembling slightly. The change in Wood was immediate. His snuffling stopped, the rage behind his eyes subsided. He trembled as he reached slowly for the volume, looking warily from side to side. When at last he had it in his hands again, when he realized this, at least, wasn’t a trick, a single tear fell from his right eye. He covered his face quickly with one hand, while with his other hand he clutched the book to his bare chest and scampered back into his office.

Perhaps a word of explanation is in order. Mad Wood, you see, was not always mad. No, he was driven to madness by a remarkable chain of events.

It was as a young man that Wood, then dewy-eyed and fair of face, entered into service with the prominent firm of Jenkins, Corst and Peabody. He had grown up the youngest and best-beloved son of a happy farming clan. When the family’s crops began to fail, when the earth which had sustained them for generations proved no longer up to the task, each son was sent out into the world to make their way in some other field of endeavor. Wood began his career at the firm imbued with a love of collective enterprise. Where there were bales to be toted, or agreements to be drafted, or, indeed, any manner of work to be performed, were Wood once to become involved the loads of the other laborers would be lightened as though they had been joined by ten men. But as time passed and Wood toiled under the yoke of men such as Jenkins, I saw the dew drying from his eyes, the fairness fading from his face. He had begun to die, I feared, as will a branch that is severed from a tree.

For seven long years the hardening continued, softened only by the burgeoning love between Wood and beautiful young Rose Jenkins, daughter of the villain you met earlier in this piece, who saw in him something his masters could not. “But Father, I love him,” read Rose’s email to her father, which I read in my secretarial capacity.

“That stablehand?” read Jenkins’ reply.

From then on, Rose and Wood sheltered carefully the flame of their love from the howling gusts of societal disapproval, which sought in vain to snuff it out. In vain, I say, because you can blow out a candle but you can’t blow out a fire. The wind served, finally, only to fan that flame into a conflagration.
On the seventh anniversary of Wood’s arrival at the firm, a commotion arose such as I’d never encountered in all my years there. "Served! Me!? What can this mean, Wood!?" I heard Jenkins bellow, followed closely by similar cries of rage from Corst and Peabody. The three of them, Jenkins, skinny, wire-haired Corst and hirsute, burly Peabody, rushed to Wood’s office in such haste that they collided in the doorway and landed in a heap. After minutes of thrashing around, they disentangled themselves and regained their feet if not their dignity. Jointly, they demanded an explanation.

You who have seen Wood only in his fury would not have recognized the well-spoken young attorney who addressed them. "It’s really quite simple to understand, I would have thought, for three such outstanding legal minds as your own. The law in this state grants possession of property to one who has occupied it openly and hostilely for a period of seven years without making payment of rent. In these," he said, presenting them with thick bound sets of documents, "I have your evaluations of my performance since I joined the firm. You will note the phrase ‘openly hostile’ appears each year. Of course it’s for a court to decide, but I believe my case to be rather a strong one."

"But… The bathroom? Our bathroom?!" Jenkins, who suffered from a bowel disorder, was most put out by this. He had, I knew, a stall he considered lucky.

"No one can deny I have squatted there for seven years, more hostilely even than in my office," Wood replied evenly. "I’ll see you three in court."

I attended the hearing in a secretarial capacity for Jenkins. It was a celebration for Wood. True, there were the matters of hallways, electricity and secretarial services, but owning as he did the bathroom, he was able to reach agreement with the increasingly desperate Jenkins to split these services. Triumphant at last, Rose Jenkins laughing and beaming on his arm, Wood was at the flood tide of his hopes.

Sadly, this high water mark did not last long. In fact, the tide began to ebb soon after the agreements were signed, when Wood and the vibrant Rose approached the elevators to return to what was now indisputably his office. "Hold on a second there, Wood," Jenkins said as he hove into my view, flanked by six gorilla-like security guards. "These elevators are the exclusive property of the firm of Jenkins, Corst and Peabody. I’m afraid I can’t allow you to use them, in view of certain unpleasantnesses which have arisen between yourself and that firm."

Wood was game. "Actually, Jenkins, I believe you’ll find that agreements executed only today give me and any of my staff a perpetual easement on the use of the elevators, which Jenkins, Corst and Peabody, together with their heirs and assigns, have jointly and severally contracted to maintain."

"Hmmm…" mused Jenkins. "Oddly enough, I don’t believe that’s in my copy of the agreement. Let me check again though."

Wood must have known then that he had been double-crossed, but he tore desperately through his copy. The relevant clause had been removed after the last draft had been reviewed. All his plans, all his dreams appeared to have been dashed by a single piece of treachery.

It was Rose who saved the day. "My, Daddy, you certainly seem to have pulled a fast one on us. We are undone. If we could just be permitted one last trip upstairs, to clean out our desks?"

Jenkins was too overcome with chortling at his own cleverness to suspect the arrangement, and perhaps he relished the opportunity to be coldly magnanimous. The pair were allowed up. I followed at a discrete distance.

"Now, darling," Rose told Wood, as she led him by the hand back to the office, "Now, we prepare for a siege."

"But… but… we’re trapped here now, thanks to my own foolishness. We can’t live our lives here, dearest. I see no alternative but to surrender." Wood’s wit, if not his courage, had finally failed him.

"Nonsense, darling. There are other methods of ingress and egress. We shall simply make use of them. For instance, a long rope ladder…" In Rose, Wood had found the perfect helpmeet. They had the ladder delivered, along with a stove and refrigerator, in the next of the weekly supplies deliveries for which they had received an easement, and prepared to go into business on their own.

Naturally, when Jenkins found out his double-cross had not been the death blow to their plans that he had imagined, he was beside himself. Towering to a full five foot four, his shadow darkened a good portion of their doorway. "Seven years you have toiled in this office, Wood, and now, through foul treachery you have stolen my daughter from the firm. Seven years you’ve been here, but I tell you this…" He paused. Smoke billowed from behind him and the lights dimmed, the technological origin of which I did not discover until I was asked to process certain invoices in the coming weeks. "I tell you this… Not seven happy months will you and that woman have in this office. Hear me, for I have spoken."

Wood was not much impressed by the prophecy but Rose knew her father better, and seemed quite shaken. A pall was cast over their heretofore happy home. Never again did I see her as happy and unconcerned as she’d been in the initial moments of their grand defiance.

Still, Jenkins’ prophecy didn’t keep the two from planning boldly. Wood went to work immediately to try to persuade the clients he’d worked for to continue using his services, and he was largely successful. Though an arrangement had been made at the hearing to split my services between Wood and Jenkins, my time and initiative were limited. A staff was needed.

"Whatever will we do about staffing?" Wood asked Rose one day. "Unfortunately, while this office will do quite comfortably for two people as much in love as we are, I fear that adding additional workers would make it quite cramped. Then, too, there is the problem of how they are to access the building. Though it’s not beyond the pale, many a paralegal would be perturbed at being asked to climb a seventeen story rope ladder to and from work each day."

Rose Jenkins. What a wonderful, resourceful, ingenious woman she was. "I may have a solution for us, darling," she told Wood, a playful twinkle returning, though briefly, to the soft brown eyes that her father’s prophecy had hardened. "You’ll recall that, in part though not in toto to bolster my application for law school, I spent several summers working in Costa Rica at a monkey preserve. Now, I got along quite well with these monkeys, and was most impressed with their industry. Their climbing ability was unparalleled, and they would be perfectly capable of performing many of the less intellectually rigorous tasks we face. I’m sure Dr. Ontiveros would be happy to help out. Shall I make a phone call?"

The first of the monkeys arrived three days later. His face was pinkish, and a crown of white hair surrounded a balder patch on the top of its head. The resemblance to Rose’s father was uncanny, and he was immediately dubbed Jenkins II. He quickly familiarized himself with the office routine and was placed in charge of maintaining records, delivering documents and filing papers with the various courts with which the new firm had dealings. McCartney did receive a bad bite off him in a hallway scuffle, but this was counted rather more in his favor than in his demerit. When, several weeks into his employment, he presented Wood and Rose with the resume of his brother, they had no hesitation in extending an offer to the monkey they would come to know as Jenkins III.

Jenkins III was much more interested than his older brother in the law. On many a slow afternoon I saw him repair to the men’s room, some handbook or another of securities law in paw. His favorite reading spot was Jenkins’ lucky stall, whether by coincidence or design I know not. It became a common sight to see Jenkins, his face redder than usual, banging on the stall door and exhorting the monkey to finish his business and move on. Jenkins III would respond by turning the pages of his securities law handbook more crisply than was necessary. If the banging went on for what he considered an excessive length of time, he would hoot and screech warningly.

On one occasion Jenkins was unwise enough to bend down and peep through the bottom of the door to the stall, receiving a nip on his nose for his trouble. The conflict between the two, separate from but informed by the larger conflict between Jenkins and Wood, began to escalate.

Jenkins took to camping out in his lucky stall, spending hours each day there, and coming in earlier and earlier to establish occupancy. He conducted business with his cell phone and his laptop, often with Jenkins III hooting and screeching and banging on the door. Jenkins’ practice suffered significantly from it, but the stalemate continued for several months.

Meanwhile, the practice of Wood and Rose, like their love, thrived. Clients switched from Jenkins, Corst and Peabody in droves, many of them complaining about Jenkins.

"He works in a menagerie I think," opined one in-house counsel to Wood. "We felt we needed someone who maintains a more conventional workplace."

Jenkins IV was hired shortly thereafter. The young monkey was possessed of an artistic bent, which manifested itself at that time chiefly in charcoal caricatures of the various inhabitants of the offices and the odd watercolor cityscape composed from his view from the office window. Though he was neither as efficient as Jenkins II nor as enthusiastic as Jenkins III, his affable nature and willingness to "go the extra mile" soon won him a place in the hearts of Wood and Rose.

Naturally, Jenkins was beside himself over these developments. His bowels were irritated, his favorite stall was the prize in an unequal struggle between himself and a monkey, his business was being taken by his most bitter rival and her beloved.
It was enough to drive a well-balanced man to violence, and Jenkins had never been a well-balanced man.

He began by sabotage, sending McCartney to sign for packages addressed to Wood and Rose, and then throw them away. However, Jenkins II quickly caught McCartney in the act and, once sutured, McCartney abandoned the practice.

Following this confrontation, I noticed an immediate change in the hiring practices of the firm. Up to that point, their policy had always been to take only the top students from the best law schools. McCartney, from Dartmouth undergrad and the University of Chicago’s law school, was considered something of a hard man by the firm’s standards. Now, however, they began a practice of quickly hiring graduates of state schools. Grades were de-emphasized in favor of more careful attention to extra-curricular activities, with enthusiasts of football, boxing and alternative approaches to labor dispute resolution being given particular consideration. Soon Jenkins had a collection of enforcers, burly men with prominent foreheads and wide shoulders who were much given to the wearing of synthetic fabrics.

Jenkins IV was the first victim of the gang. It was on a bright, sunny July day that the good-natured young monkey strolled casually back from the cafeteria. No doubt he was full and content, and perhaps a bit drowsy. As he passed by the windows across from my desk he walked through a sunbeam thick with dust motes, which pulled him like a magnet. He glanced quickly at his watch, which must have provided him with felicitous information regarding the further extent of his lunch hour, for he strolled to the window ledge and curled up cat-like with his back to the warm window.
In doing so he strayed from the side of the hallway for which Wood had won an easement and so made himself a trespasser.

Hickey discovered him. A malevolent, triumphant look shone on the face of the brawny Buckeye as he crept towards the sleeping monk, far more quietly than I would have believed possible given his girth. With a barbaric cry of joy he grabbed Jenkins IV simultaneously by the tail and the left forepaw and began bellowing for his cohorts. Eggers and Bollin came to his call like hounds to a horn. Eggers grabbed the monkey’s right forepaw and bit deeply into the sinews of the upper arm. Bollin grabbed his tail and began to fold it painfully. Jenkins IV gibbered and shrieked and howled as he struggled, but he could match neither the savagery nor the strength of the enraged Ohioans.

"The saw, get the saw!" cried Hickey. "We’re going to send Wood the Monkey’s Paw via interoffice mail!!" And I have no doubt they would have done so had not Jenkins II and Jenkins III heard the screams of their sweet-natured younger brother. Jenkins II had still his green eyeshade in place as he raced to the rescue. Jenkins III announced his arrival to the fray by chucking a hard-backed corporation law book at Hickey’s head, where it arrived with devastating precision and a dull thud. With Hickey, like Jenkins IV, hors de combat, the two older monkeys faced down Bollin and Eggers. A titanic struggle promised to be in the offing.

It was then that Wood appeared, wearing an expression on his face that was the prefiguring of the Wood you came to know earlier in this piece. "While technically you may be within your rights to offer violence to trespassers," he addressed himself to Bollin and Eggers, "I think you will find it contrary to your interests. For you see, Jenkins III and Rose and I have discovered a provision of Dutch law, never repealed and still applicable in this state, which allows a man to protect his homestead or his livestock with a club or any firearm in existence at the time of the passage of the law, though not any edged weapon." At this point Rose strode into view, carrying confidently a wide-barreled flintlock of antique origin, which she leveled coolly at the thunderstruck Buckeyes. "Now, it’s arguable on a number of points whether the several Jenkinses constitute livestock, but I assure you than any further such assaults on my staff will result in the issue being deliberated by twelve people while you are dealt with by half as many. I trust my meaning is clear?"
Eggers and Bollin roused Hickey with small kicks and nudges. The three made great efforts to avert their gazes from the blunderbuss which Rose still leveled at them, but like a snake it seemed to compel their gaze, and they each gave it numerous furtive glances as they staggered back to their offices, Hickey braced between his cohorts.

Once the field was cleared, Rose handed the weapon to Wood and gathered poor, battered Jenkins IV tenderly in her arms. She cradled him gently as, if fate had been kinder to her, she might one day have cradled her own children. The young monkey ceased his trembling and gazed up at her visage with a look of serene contentment. Jenkins II and Jenkins III flanked Rose in a martial manner as she bore their brother, each wearing a look of supreme menace as they processed back to Wood’s office.

I worried that some part of Jenkins IV, physical or mental, might have been damaged in the conflict, but happily this did not seem to be the case. It was a matter of days before he was again striding confidently around Wood’s half of the hall. When Bollin or Eggers or Hickey made as if to bump shoulders with him, or mimed the bending of his tail or the biting of his arm and Jenkins IV’s gibbering in pain, he would coolly level an imaginary blunderbuss at his tormentor, crooking his tail around to pull the imaginary trigger.

Thus the situation continued, into the seventh month following Wood’s defiance. The new firm was busier than ever, having been contracted to manage a billion dollar public financing for the city of Richardson, Texas. Both Wood and Rose were up until all hours of the night, drafting documents and reviewing comments. Jenkins III was similarly occupied, while Jenkins II heroically ensured that bills were paid and drafts circulated. Even Jenkins IV began to cut short his lunch hours and scurry about as franticly as the other members of the firm. Busy though they were, I overheard Rose confide to Wood that other concerns were weighing heavily on her mind.

“Darling,” she breathed to Wood, choosing a moment when the monkeys were off on other errands, “I know we haven’t a great deal of time for concerns other than business, but I simply must discuss this with you. You’ll recall, I’m sure, that my father prophesied that we would not spend seven happy months together in this office. I know that you think of little of the prophecy, and that he doesn’t in general concern you much. On the face of it, it seems impossible that he could be correct. I’m more in love with you now even than I have been before, and I know you feel similarly. This transaction, once completed, will surely establish the future of our firm. And with Jenkins III prepared to take the bar once this wave of business breaks, our own workloads will be reduced to the point where we can consider vacations and leisure pursuits. And, I dare to hope, marriage.

“But still, I am afraid of what my father has planned. For all that he is vain and foolish, he is not ineffective. If he has declared, so publicly, that unhappiness will overtake us, I fear he means to be the instrument by which we are overtaken, the stone that lodges in our horse’s hoof scant miles out of the town of Bliss, or the nail which punctures the tire of our car of Joy, leaving us stranded on the highway of Despair.”

Wood seemingly heard only one phrase of the above. “Dare to hope!? Why, of course marriage is also my fondest hope! As you say, we have little time for concerns other than business at the moment, and I’d meant it to be a surprise, but since you’ve raised the matter let us deal with it forthrightly. You’ll recall that I told you Jenkins IV had gone for more toner for the printer? Of course that was part of his errand, for we are desperately low, but in addition to our Office Depot card I gave him my credit card, with instructions to find an engagement ring that is at least the merest shadow of the jewel that I love above all others!”

As Rose digested the information, torn, I’m sure, between delight and consternation that her fears were not being addressed, there arose at the window a great commotion. For Jenkins IV had returned triumphant. His brothers were in tow, bearing champagne and an accordion, and followed by an organ grinder and his own monkey, who had come to play for the happy couple. In the revelry that followed there was no thought given to Jenkins, and Rose’s fears, alas, were buried under the crashing joy that engulfed the office.

The various Jenkinses threw themselves into the wedding arrangements wholeheartedly. Wood and Rose had decided they would marry in a simple ceremony on the day following the completion of the public financing. The monkeys, though, had grander ambitions, and, unbeknownst to Wood and Rose, planned an elaborate but tasteful celebration for the beloved couple. Somehow they were also able to attend to their customary duties as well. The transaction proceeded smoothly and funds were transferred without a hitch. The future of the new firm seemed secure. But Wood had scarcely popped the cork in the one bottle of champagne remaining from their engagement party when, to everyone’s surprise, Jenkins manifested himself once more in their doorway.

“Wood, Rose…” Jenkins began, in a tone that had the unusual characteristics of emanating from his mouth and being pleasant. “I have heard from a mutual retainer of ours that congratulations are in order.” Here he indicated me with a nod of his head. My motivations, I swear, had been benevolent. “I know that we haven’t always seen eye to eye in the past, but I hope you will allow me to congratulate you. It’s every father’s dream that his daughter will find a decent, good, talented, successful man to love and cherish, and who will love and cherish her in return. I admit to having my doubts about you, Wood, but I watched the way you conducted yourself during that last transaction, and I have to say it made me proud. Yes, proud. Frankly, I feel fortunate that Rose has found you. I wonder if you two would care to join me in my office for a drink, and permit me to commemorate the occasion with a suitable gift.” Here he held up a document that Wood had no trouble recognizing as the agreement that Jenkins had modified to remove their rights to the elevator. “I know you two have had to pursue some alternative approaches to staffing and building access, all through my own fault, and I’d like to make amends.”

The offer seemed to Wood a generous one, though wholly unexpected. Rose declined to join however. “I’m sure you two can work it out amongst yourselves, but as for me I promised to deliver the notes from the public finance transaction myself, and I really must shake a leg. You go, though, darling. I can’t deny that it’s a welcome gift.”

“Of course, of course,” assented Jenkins. “How foolish of me to have forgotten you would be so occupied. I had heard that you had been specifically requested for that assignment. If I could have the pleasure of your fiance’s company though?”
Rose, too, assented. She and Jenkins II gathered documents for her errand, as Jenkins IV assisted Jenkins III with a few final drafts and Wood accompanied Jenkins on what was to be a fateful trip down the hall.

No sooner, I’ve heard, had Wood entered Jenkins’ office than that individual shut the door behind him. Bollin and Eggers emerged from the corners of the office cracking their knuckles, and Jenkins stood before him, an unmistakable look of triumph in his eyes. Jenkins held once more the document before Wood.

“Here, Wood, is a revision to our agreement pertaining to the use by you of various elements of the building owned by Jenkins, Corst and Peabody, including, in this instance, the elevators. It has been executed on behalf of the firm, and awaits only your signature to become valid. However, I believe certain other modifications are in order.” Suddenly, he ripped the document in half lengthwise with a strength that Wood would never have believed him to possess. It was then that the air was rent like the paper, though in this case by a woman’s scream.

Wood burst through the attempted tackles of Eggers and Bollin and flung the door open. His urgency and the scream compelled me to follow him into his office. I know not what he imagined might have provoked the scream, or the hoots and gibbering which now attended it, but it seems unlikely that he was prepared for what he found. As we dashed into his office we saw Jenkins II racing to the window with a rope in his paw. His brothers held the senior monkey by his back paws as he lowered himself out the window and lowered the rope towards Rose, who clung desperately to the remaining strand of the rope ladder. One of the vertical ropes in the ladder had been broken, and the remaining rope was also frayed and likely to give way at any time. Rose was four stories down and still thirteen stories above the hard concrete below.
Jenkins III immediately gave Wood to understand that he should allow them to conduct the rescue operation themselves, this being a particular skill of theirs, and that though there was some hope, the situation was desperate indeed.
Jenkins II quickly found that the rope was not long enough to extend to the imperiled young attorney. The strands of the remaining vertical rope were giving way one at a time. Those who had thought him only as a bookworm or an office monkey would have been impressed indeed at the speed and daring with which he scampered down the ladder towards his employer. He hooted up at his younger brothers, telling them in no uncertain terms, I’m sure, to leave this to him.

In seconds he’d reached the spot where the rope had been damaged. To go further would mean adding additional stress to the fracture point. Everything depended on the substitute rope being long enough.

Jenkins II quickly discovered it was some 10 feet out of Rose’s reach. This he communicated to his brothers above, who began in haste to tie power cords together. Feverishly they unplugged computers and monitors and severed the cords. Meanwhile, Rose pleaded with Jenkins II to go back.

“Please, Jenkins II. Save yourself!!” But this the monkey refused resolutely to do.
Wood appeared then at the window. “Hold on only a moment longer, my dearest. Jenkins III and Jenkins IV have rigged up an extension to the rope. Oh, please, hold on!”
The two monkeys hastened down the ladder towards their brother. No sooner had they set paw outside, though, when the last of the strands gave way. Jenkins II snatched at the broken end of the rope, but of course the weight was too much for him, and after seconds of struggle he was dragged down with it. The wind bore their last words up to their loved ones as he and Rose tumbled to their doom. What Jenkins II said I know not, but Rose’s message to Wood was clear: “Always I have loved you, Wood! Always!!”

Jenkins III and Jenkins IV faced an immediate struggle to prevent Wood from following Rose out the window to the hard ground below. Thwarted, finally, he turned to life and revenge. First he went for the blunderbuss, not knowing that I had removed it for safe-keeping earlier in the afternoon. Not finding it, he ran empty-handed towards Jenkins’ office.

Even with his unchecked rage, though, he was no match for Eggers and Bollin and Hickey and Gould and Rossi and Blinn and Austin and the rest of their cohorts. Gouge and kick and bite though he did, they overwhelmed him by sheer weight of numbers. He struggled powerfully for well nigh half an hour, but finally he was overcome. When he lay prostrate on the floor, two Big Ten graduates sitting on each limb, Jenkins emerged from under his desk.

“What a terrible, terrible accident, Wood. You must be heartbroken. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help in your time of loss. If you are having trouble keeping up with your work, Jenkins, Corst and Peabody would be happy to undertake the surplus for you. And should you find yourself unable to continue in your domicile in light of recent events, that firm would also be willing to buy your office, at a fair market value of course. In view of certain irregularities regarding access, I fear that value might not be what you would wish, but one can’t, you’ll find, have everything,”

Wood made no verbal response, but rather resumed his fruitless struggles. Finally he was dragged back to his office, spent but strangely unharmed.
Jenkins III and Jenkins IV were locked in their own struggle with grief. They had lost not only Rose, whom each had loved, but the brother who had raised them when their own father had left. Bravely they soldiered on, completing the closing sets for the final transaction, and then moving to greener pastures. For they had seen little hope for Wood, who was now locked in daily, hopeless, mindless battles with the security lawyers. Each ended the same way, with one or another of the security lawyers, Hickey or Bollin or Rossi, suffering minor injuries while Wood was returned, unharmed but exhausted, to the prison that had once been his love nest.

Once the monkeys left, Wood’s condition deteriorated even more. Had it not been for
the standing order Jenkins III had left with a local Thai restaurant, I fear he would have starved. Instead he endured for years, becoming less and less coherent, and finally forgetting even how to use chopsticks. Over the course of his struggles with the Buckeyes he suffered some head injuries, which no doubt contributed to the phenomenon. Finally, he became afraid, and would no longer even attempt to savage Jenkins. It was in this condition that you found him at the beginning of our story.

Once Elena, the Albanian janitor, restored the lost bound volume to Wood, a change came over both of them. Wood, touched suddenly by unexpected human kindness, started to slowly become more human. His powers of speech began to return, though in the initial days he would speak only in the Albanian he’d learned during a semester abroad in Tirana. And Elena, once timid and nervous, began to grow bolder. She began to tell him tales of her past in Albania, of heroisms performed, losses suffered, loves lost. Wood listened raptly. Over the next weeks Wood regained his English, and seemed to be recovering some of his memory. It would come in fits, and imperfectly. Sometimes I heard him speak as though discussing a matter of law with Jenkins III, whom he had not seen in years. It sounded, however, as though his knowledge of the law had remained sound.

A week after restoring the volume to him, Elena brought in a razor and a pair of scissors. Over the course of her breaks during the next month, she painstakingly shaved his matted beard and cut his wild hair. Soon after that she began bringing him clothes, charcoal colored slacks and chartreuse shirts of the type he had favored in jauntier days. This renewed seeming of being human accelerated Wood’s return from the dark, lost land where he had spent so many wasted years. When his speech was restored to his former glory, he had me find for him Jenkins III’s cell number, which I had on the back of a certain now-emptied envelope. The monkey had become a quite successful corporate lawyer with his own burgeoning practice, but so delighted was he to find his mentor restored to mental health that he proposed immediately that Wood enter into a partnership with him.

Jenkins IV, it emerged, had abandoned the white-collar world for a career in the arts. Though he declined the offer to resume his old station, he did return to execute a project he had long ago conceived. For weeks he labored on his mural. Finally, judging it complete, he summoned Wood, Jenkins III and Elena for its unveiling. I watched from my station nearby.

What a work it was. Rose looked down on us from the ceiling in several aspects. We saw her as a Summer Associate first laying eyes on the young Wood, the glint in her eye suggestive and eternal. We saw her again at the trial, her long brown hair dancing with laughter at some well-struck point of Wood’s. Then we saw her in more sober aspect, facing down Eggers and Bollin, and later carrying the wounded Jenkins IV from the field of battle. Too, we saw her at her happiest, when Wood had presented her with the ring. The various Jenkinses cavorted around her in undoubted joy. She appeared again on the left side of the wall just outside of Wood’s office, where we saw her and Jenkins II as angels, holding hands and looking sadly down on Wood, Jenkins III and Jenkins IV, who in turn looked sadly down at a broken rope ladder, which trailed down to the rose bush the Jenkinses had planted in the hall before leaving. On the right side of the wall we saw Elena, restoring the bound volume to Wood in a manner that recalled Prometheus giving fire to man.

The work was widely judged a masterpiece, and with its completion, the new firm of Wood and Jenkins III, LLP declared itself open for business. Jenkins V, the oldest son of Jenkins II, was brought in to run the office, and a long ladder of reinforced cable was procured as a nod to reasonable precautions. Shortly afterwards, Elena and Wood were married, in an elaborate but tasteful ceremony not wholly unreminiscent of that which Jenkins III and Jenkins IV had planned so long ago.

Happily ever after, you might say. But I am less sanguine, for only this morning the unreconstructed villain Jenkins has asked me to procure for him a bolt-cutter.

A Tale Found Deep in the Bowels of a Malfunctioning Copier

2007-11-27T16:24:00.000-08:00

A Tale Found Deep in the Bowels of a Malfunctioning Copier

While attempting to clear a paper jam from a copier we on the floor referred to as “Old Malcontent”, I found sheets containing the following tale jammed deep within its works. For legibility’s sake I have rendered it here in a uniform font, although in the original it was composed in a hodgepodge of different types, with letters in the same word presented in varying sizes and styles, even to the blending of serif and sans serif fonts.

“It is not, probably, fair to say that everything begins with Claudia van Persie,” the manuscript begins. “If she is to be believed, the strange currents and eddies which were eventually to catch me up and hurl me into the predicament in which I now find myself were always swirling unnoticed through my professional life. Her role was only to bring me to engage them. Still, I’m not inclined or obligated to be fair in any way that springs immediately to mind.

Claudia came into my life in the guise of secretary, her hair pinned modestly up, her body hidden beneath a severe white blouse and bookish glasses, and her character veiled behind a string of glowing though spurious references. So well concealed was her true self that I momentarily hesitated to hire her out of fear that she would be too stiff and too formal for me to ever feel truly comfortable working in her presence.

No more baseless fear has ever struck me. She set to work dispelling it the instant she returned from her employee orientation. “I rather prefer to work barefoot, Winny,” she told me, Winston being my given name. Stone or “Stony” has always been my preferred moniker, a point I made clear to her during the interview process. “This prejudice the office world holds against bare flesh is something I’m afraid I shall always struggle against,” she continued. “How people think they can truly know a place without feeling the grain of the carpet underneath the naked soles of their feet I shall never understand.” At this she kicked off her sensible pumps so that they arced directly into the wastebasket across from her desk, a distance of some ten feet. This disrobement revealed belled anklets and sparkling toe rings which glistened under the fluorescent lights.

Though taken aback, I made to upbraid her for her familiarity. “I hardly think, young lady, that that tone is app--"

“Yes, yes, Winnie,” she told me, shucking off her woven gray skirt and tossing it into my arms. I caught it instinctively as she bent to unroll the red hip-huggers that the skirt had concealed. “I understand it’s a bit shocking, perhaps even painful. Were the truth to be known, I hesitated to take this position, fearing that you were too stiff and formal for me to ever be truly comfortable working with you. You are, after all, accustomed to things being bloodless and orderly. But you just have to think of me as the prick of a needle delivering an inoculation, or the chill of a mountain lake on a hot summer day. You’ll get used to it, believe me.”

Betty, our human resources manager, happened by at that instant. Seeing me holding Claudia’s skirt and staring slack-jawed as she removed her blouse, I’m afraid Betty came to some rapid conclusions. Red-faced, I started to denounce the newly-hired hussy, but Betty simply smiled knowingly and waved away my protestations as she turned her back on the scene. Routed by the misapprehension, I placed the skirt gingerly on Claudia’s desk and returned to my office to stew.

You see, some of the other partners do have less than wholly formal relationships with their secretaries. At this time I was a rising star in the Firm’s eye, and to take my clients with me to another firm would have been as painless for me as it would have been painful to the Firm. No doubt Betty had been instructed to make me happy. She reasoned, I’m sure, that if I was to be so brazen in what she perceived as my licentiousness, surely it must be condoned at the highest levels.

As I said, Claudia’s references were impeccable, and full of praise for her professionalism and reliability. Perhaps, I thought, she wants only to make a strong impression on me. Perhaps the buttoned-up woman who applied for the job is her true self, and barefoot hippy an affectation she is trying on. It was more comfortable for me to believe this, that change for the best would occur without me having to face Betty’s erroneous assumptions, and I, usually so abstemious and so direct, gave in to my comfort.

Unhappily, no such change was forthcoming. Claudia remained barefoot, her anklets jangling not unpleasantly each time she swayed to my office in her increasingly informal attire. It became rare for her to make even a small nod in the direction of covering her midriff.

Disconcerting though this was, she was in other respects an admirable though unconventional employee. She typed with the speed of thought, and mastered our complex electronic document storage system nearly instantly. Also noteworthy was her singular ability to repair malfunctioning office equipment. It took but a few weeks after her arrival for her to become the technician of first resort for the girls on the floor. I first thought that her method of repair owed something to Feng Shui, for I often heard her upbraiding the girls in a seemingly nonsensical manner.

“Selfish!!” she scolded Glenda Johnson. “You have a beach scene as your screensaver, but only pictures of your children up on your back wall! Can you imagine the longing, the thirst that creates in your monitor?! No wonder the vertical hold is intermittent!”

“You see this often this sluggishness with electric typewriters today, Nancy,” I heard her tell another of the girls, “For many feel that the world has passed them by. You have to make him feel necessary. Complain about the printer every now and then, and for god’s sake do something about the furniture. If he were on a glass and metal desk I’m sure he would feel much racier.”

The copier on the floor, the copier in which with luck someone will find this manuscript, she treated in a wholly different way. From time to time I would hear the other secretaries call to her that it was out of order again, or “acting up.” She would drop whatever she was doing and stalk to the copier room. From the room would emerge a series of bumps and bashes, and the sound of sibilant imprecations. Frequently this would solve the problem, but on three separate occasions she ordered the machine unplugged for a day at a time.

In time, I too had occasion to trust her with care for the more complex machines I employed in the course of my professional responsibilities. My Palm Pilot she pronounced in need of diversion, and took to running a feather duster flirtatiously over it every afternoon. She insisted I be present for each of these sessions, and gradually they increased in formality to the extent that she booked it in my online meeting planner in perpetuity, 3:00-3:15: Maintain Contact List.

She would show up for the event each day promptly at 3, dressed in an outfit I knew from my reading to be an approximation of a French maid’s outfit. She would affect a French accent for the occasion, and a high-pitched, fluttery voice. “Zut, monseuir le palm pilot,” she would exclaim, or words to that effect, “Mais you have made the desk so varee dirtee!! It is varee, how do you say, naughtee of you!! Poor Mireille will have to dust so varee long and hard today!” She would begin with a perfunctory pass or two of the duster over the area of the desk on which my Palm Pilot was established. Then she would make as though to dust the rest of the desk. Often in the course of this dusting she would drop her duster on the floor. The first time this happened I started to retrieve it for her, only to be kicked sharply in the shin for my trouble. Thereafter I let her retrieve it herself. This she would accomplish by bending over slowly at the waist, which would cause the hem of her skirt to rise higher and higher until… “MONsieur!” she would yelp, turning around to confront the contact manager, “That is so VAREE naughtee of you, to be peeking at poor Mireille’s knickairs! She is so varee embarrassing!”

Following her embarrassment, she would begin a thorough dusting of the device, scolding it sharply in the meantime. “Naughtee, naughtee monsieur le palm pilot! Eez so terRIble how dirtee you are!” In this vein she would continue for the remainder of the 15 minutes, until, seemingly exhausted, she would collapse onto the desk, her heaving breasts resting on the Palm Pilot.

Why did I allow the repetition of this extraordinary scene, you ask? Well might you ask. But beyond my desire to avoid uncertain conversations with the human resources department regarding the exact nature of our relationship, and beyond my belief that in this case at least her will was stronger than mine, the fact was that these treatments seemed to be effective. My Palm Pilot began to retrieve data much more quickly than before. Its battery seemed to last longer. And perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed even to anticipate my requests for a name or number. I would say to myself, “Stony, you delinquent scapegrace, it’s high time you returned Norbert’s call regarding the Holstein cash flow arrangement,” and then reach for my Palm Pilot to find Norbert’s number already displayed.

Though effective, the involved and personal nature of her technical support caused me to shy away from it in the main. It happened that my computer began to slow down, each day functioning more and more slowly, to the point that it was well nigh impossible for me to access any of the precedent we stored on our servers. Loath to involve Claudia in its repair, I put in a ticket with the technical support department.

When the technician arrived, he proved to be a veritable caricature of the worst of his ilk. Long bangs covered most of his face, and a sparse and unlikely mustache and goatee the rest. His dress consisted of a checkered flannel shirt and cargo pants, which had presumably been intended to enclose a more substantial body. His posture was slouched to such an extent that it was only his manner that gave him away as a vertebrate.

“Have you been downloading music off the internet, sir?” he asked, by way of introduction.

“Video games then?” he continued in the face of my denial.

I had not been personally cross-examined in many a year. I denied the ludicrous charge. I, a partner!

“I suppose it’s porn then,” he concluded with an air of satisfaction. “Nothing to be embarrassed about. It’s hardly uncommon. Well, let me see what I can do.”

His intrusion continued for 30 unwelcome minutes, culminating in the smirking expunging of numerous unlikely and illicit sounding files from something he claimed was my cache. Obeying some law of his tribe, perhaps, he read aloud the names of many of these files in a clear, resonant voice that had not been heretofore in evidence. “stud dot jpg. Donkey dot mpeg. Butter dot jpg.” For some minutes this recital went on. Finally he left. Spent, humiliated, cursing softly under my breath, I restarted my computer. It performed as poorly as it had before. I called Claudia.

“Why Winny, you look on the very edge of tears! What can have unmanned you to such an extent? Computer problems, is it?”

In a way it was. “Well then, why don’t you hop down to the cafeteria for a nice leisurely lunch? I’ll straighten things out in a trice.”

I was in no condition to argue, and I made haste to the cafeteria as she suggested. How different things might have been had I not left my wallet on my desk… What an awakening I might have missed, and what an ultimately terrible fate.

As it was, I made it to the head of the line, my tray loaded down with foodstuffs, only to discover I had no means to pay for the meal. My firm had (and I believe still has) a credit system in place to deal with just such an eventuality, but the extent of my repast was sufficient to exceed the limit for credit. Several of the junior associates and paralegals in the line were not unknown to me, and I’m convinced that were I not so woebegone still from my humiliation at the hands of the technical support creature they would have been moved by respect for my position to dig into their pockets to “cover me.” As it was, I inspired neither respect nor pity. Nor could I claim an obligation of friendship, for the truth was in those days I had friendly relations with few men.

All of this passed rapidly through my head as I considered my position. The steely-eyed Dominican cashier fixed a suspicious stare on me as I weighed my options and my tray. I could not meet her gaze. Mumbling apologies, I left the tray on the counter and promised to return forthwith.

As I plodded -- yes, plodded. At this point I have nothing to lose by a careful and truthful analysis of myself – As I plodded slowly back to the elevator, I was nearly overcome with despair. As is common in those trained in accounting, I considered my credits and my debits. In black ink was my position as an internationally recognized expert in an obscure though important section of tax law. Drawing against that balance were the red-inked and unfortunate events of the morning. The world of tax law experts is a small one, and I had little doubt that in a short period of time substantially all of the people familiar enough with my expertise to respect it would also have an infamous and erroneous idea of the type of pornography I perused in my office. Further, they would be aware of my own financial imprudence in leaving my wallet behind, and that my general social credit was too low to obtain a short-term unsecured advance of $27.50. Too, I considered the three helpings of mako shark in caper butter languishing forlornly on my abandoned tray. All in all, I was as primed as I could be for the fantastic revelations that Claudia was to bestow upon me. Had she planned all of this? To this day I am unsure, though I still harbor suspicions as the true identity of the computer support technician who had blackened my name and my mood.

My mouth full of the dark thoughts I was masticating instead of the shark, I did not immediately perceive certain abnormalities in my office. I walked around my desk to collect my wallet only to be confronted with them all at once. From the stereo behind the desk came the strains of what I’ve since learned was Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” The air was rich with the smell of scented oils. And on her hands and knees before my computer’s CPU was Claudia, who I recognized by a certain tattoo just above the top of her tight red hip-huggers. Closer examination revealed that she was flicking her tongue rhythmically in and out of the floppy disk drive, now licking, now lapping, now tapping it with her tongue, murmuring such niceties as “You know you’re my everything” and “Daddy’s going to love you all night long.” On the monitor I observed what may have been a screensaver depicting the explosion of a star in vivid, pulsating hues. I stayed long enough to watch Claudia nip the computer’s case several times before she caused me to flee by waving an insistent hand behind her back.

I was confused by what I’d seen, and apprehensive, and not a little intrigued. In such an emotional state I have always sought solace in work or food. Work was barred to me by virtue of the fact that a sedulous tongue was now engaging my office and giving pleasure to my computer, so I sought food. I returned to redeem my tray, where a pitiable sight awaited me. My lovely shark, like Hemingway’s marlin, had been picked to the bone by hungry legal staffers passing it as they waited for their turn to pay. Could I replace it? The cashier glared at me, dragging me to her with her eyes, and I cut the queue to pay for my shark bones. In such circumstances, his marlin eaten by sharks and the noble Yankees threatened by the Indians of Cleveland, the old man has the boy to care for him. But I had no one.

Claudia removed me from the stew of my own thoughts perhaps an hour later. I somehow recognized her hand, strangely tender, when I felt it on my back as I hunched over my tray in the corner of the cafeteria. I turned in surprise, and in hope. Her first words, though, were a reproach.

“You never use a diskette, Winnie?”

Taken aback, I muttered something about servers, but she waved it away.

“Never, though? Really never?”

I offered further explanation, on the subject of viruses.

“Young girls,” she told me, “They do get weary, Winnie, of wearing that same old shabby dress. I think it will work better for a time, but you really might try a little tenderness from time to time. If not you, who?”

Perhaps you have by now learned enough to understand the import of her remarks, but I had not. I continued to gape. She seemed to weigh something in her mind. “If not me, who?” she murmured to herself.

“Winnie,” she told me finally, “I have a secret that I can impart to you. It will change your life, and you will not be able to change it back. I will not force it upon you, though, If you would learn it, meet me here in an hour.”

Then she left me. Would I wait for her, I wondered? Would I? As I turned the idea over in my mind, I realized that I was staring at the shark carcasses that reposed sadly on my plates. Would Hemingway’s old man have chosen a new life if it were offered? I did.

I resolved she would return to find a far different me than she’d left. I moved to the other side of the table so that I now faced the room, and looked out at it with my jaw set, my eyes alight in hope and expectation. I was on the cusp of discovering a new thing, and I was excited.

The second hand on my watch had little regard for my excitement. If anything, it seemed to slow down in defiance of my anxiety. Claudia, too, failed signally to fulfill my desires for alacrity. In fact, when she did sweep in to the now empty cafeteria she was a good twenty minutes late. “I am sorry to keep you on pins and needles, Winnie,” she told me. “Here you’ve decided to undo and remake the jigsaw puzzle that is your life, and I’m late with the new edge pieces. It couldn’t be helped though. I had an emergency with the copier to deal with, and soon you shall understand what that truly means. I’ve noticed you noticing how harshly I treat him, and I’ve thought well of your ignorant but well-meaning disapproval.”

Here she paused to sit, facing me across the table. Carefully she pushed the tray of forgotten shark bones off to the side. “Winnie, perhaps the copier is the best place to start. What would you say if I were to tell you that some years ago an ambitious and unscrupulous young attorney came to have access to certain documents that would have proven quite embarrassing to his chief rivals for admittance to the partnership? That late one night he stole down to the copier room to copy and secure his knowledge and evidence? That in his excitement, his glee, his malice, he miskeyed the access code and so triggered a strange reaction from the machine, so that when he attempted to copy the documents the machine instead scanned him, and instead of absorbing and reflecting the document, the machine absorbed that which was most essentially him, what might be called his soul?”

Of course I was not fully prepared to believe it. “You’re talking about Rapp, aren’t you? But—But—It’s true they found him dead next to the copier. It’s true that they found some documents on the copier that concerned— that concerned—“

“That concerned you, Winnie? Yes, they did, didn’t they? In a way it was a stroke of luck for you, wasn’t it? Because of the circumstances of their discovery the contents of the documents were not given the weight they might have received otherwise. But was Rapp dead? It’s true his body was no longer animated. But why? There was no heart attack, no stroke, no sign of illness or injury. Just no life. And why? Where had it gone?

“Look, Winnie,” she continued, “I don’t pretend to understand the science behind it. Well, sometimes I do. Often, really. But the truth is that no one does understand. Oh, some blame molecular intercussion, everyone has their theories. But the phenomenon is not confined only to Rapp, although he is one of the more dramatic examples. More common is the absorption by osmosis of part or substantially all of a person by a machine, by a typewriter, a monitor, any device, really, given the right circumstances. For instance, by a contact manager.

“For some reason the phenomenon happens far more often in this building than others. They really shouldn’t have built it on an old Indian burial ground I suppose. Too, the street number 666 can hardly be considered auspicious. And to have laid the cornerstone at midnight during a full moon on Friday the Thirteenth is so far removed from standard practice as to suggest malfeasance. The phenomenon is far, far more common. Among those of us sensitive to its existence this building is famous, which is what caused me to seek out a position here.”

“But you told me you were attracted to the reputation of the firm’s child care facility, since you were planning a family eventually,” I countered. I had been wrong about so much.

She laid a gentle hand on top of mine. She understood. I felt that. She understood everything.

Well you might imagine that this new knowledge I possessed damaged my career. How, you might wonder, could I concentrate on pass-through rates and re-patriating profits when I knew that the computer on which I considered the agreements relating to these issues was infused with elements of the souls of several of the girls who had used it before I? How could I give my full attention to a conference call when I knew that the machine from which I’d retrieved the call-in number was lost in lustful fantasies of stern but flirtatious French maids? How could I study a pile of documents knowing that they had been duplicated by a bitter rival trapped by his own capriciousness into a terrible fate? Were those missing pages in the copies the result of operator error or a paper jam? Or were they the product of malice? Well you might imagine that this new awareness would make it impossible to go on as before. But you would be wrong.

The simple fact is that it was not difficult to attend in small ways to the emotional needs of the machines, once I had been alerted to them. I began to use floppy disks regularly, for instance. From this minimal investment of time and attention I gained a welcome sense of connectedness. No longer did I feel alone in the office, for the machines were alive, and allied to me. I recalled a feeling I’d had as a small boy, on the first real spring day of the year, when an unusually kind au pair had taken me to the park to run barefoot through early spring flowers and bask in the sunlight. Winter, I’d realized then, wasn’t eternal. Rather, its leaden skies and creaking, insinuating cold were to be endured through the understanding of that which would follow. And more, winter was to be prized, because without it no one could appreciate spring.

Having revealed the overarching secret, Claudia seemed eager to reveal smaller ones. I became as an acolyte to her, and began to follow her on her rounds. One scanner, I learned, believed itself to suffer an upset stomach, as an amputee will sometimes feel pain in their lost limb. The janitor’s vacuum cleaner worried constantly about his weight. These were glorious days.

My relationship with the support staff changed completely. Instead of offering a nervous good morning or what even I felt to be a blustery “Keep up the good work”, I was able to inquire of Glenda Johnson as to how her monitor’s vertical hold was keeping. The response was uniformly a gratified variation on “Oh, very well, and thank you so much for asking, sir.” If Claudia was occupied, some of the staff began coming to me in her stead. I was not able to diagnose the machines’ conditions, lacking the sensitivity to their communications with which Claudia was endowed, but from an understanding of her first principles I was able from time to time to affect a remedy. Claudia had diagnosed a fax machine as suffering from painful shyness. She was out one day when Glenda knocked timidly on my door to tell me she had been totally unable to send a fax that morning. I thought a moment, then said “If you can make him comfortable and secure in himself, and then his shyness will vanish like a predawn fog confronted with the rising sun. First dust and polish him thoroughly, then formally present him to the fax machine with which he is to communicate. And tell him you’re proud of him.” “Spot on, Winnie!” was Claudia’s response when she heard my remedy. It was the first time she’d ever praised me unequivocally.

My unaccustomed feelings of well-being did not last long though. These tastes of companionship had awakened in me a thirst for more, as the taste of blood can cause a good dog to become a killer. It happened that one night I had occasion to ask Claudia to stay late with me. I had documents to review and drafts to turn. I required her secretarial skills, it’s true, but above all I wanted her company. I considered the project set before me. At her desk she conducted experiments involving a pyramid and a hole-puncher who wanted to live forever. I studied carefully the purchase agreement, which concerned itself with certificates of notional amounts. I was fatigued and emotionally abraded. The more I thought about it, the more I envied the notional amounts, which, with entire documents dedicated to their calculation and description, seemed more real than I. Feeling welled in me, the ground being already saturated, and finally broke its dam. She, she alone could save me from a future as a file folder or pocket calculator.

I told her everything, how in my dreams I was a stapler, how I could hear the screams of the papers I punctured, how my stapler mouth tasted their blood. How I liked the taste even as I despised myself for liking it. I told her all, and she took me in her arms.

“Oh Winnie,” she told me, cradling my head as she stroked my hair, “You have so much humanity in you.” Here she began to speak in an insistent tone, though lacking her usual slightly hectoring quality. She sought, I realize, to convince me rather than to secure my acquiescence.

“So much humanity,” she breathed, “But it’s deep in you, buried under a mound of figures and rules and appetites. Sometimes I too worry that it may suffocate. How much air can penetrate all those tax codes, all those rules, down to where your soul lies, beautiful, helpless, asphyxiating? Cast off those rules, Winnie. Let your soul fill its lungs with the sweet air of freedom. Does not your soul love freedom, Winnie?! Do it now, Winnie, seize the moment!”

“But how? What shall I do, Claudia?” I was clay in her hands.

“Streak with me, Winnie. Run naked through these beige halls. Cast off your inhibitions with your sans-a-belts! Do it, Winnie! Consider the aesthetic of it! Your trunk and elephantine stomach bouncing up and down in time with my breasts, your hairy white bottom following my smooth, supple one down the halls, the two of us joined in an unlikely, delirious dance… Oh say you will! For you. For me. Say you will.”

My fingers fumbled with my zipper. I cried out in frustration, so numb and helpless had they become. My shirt I tore open. My shoes I kicked off. She, naked, lithe, mischievous, elated, scampered down the hall ahead of me. “And skip, Winnie! Skip!” As a child I had never been able to skip, but for her I did. My heart pounded in my chest, joining in the general vibration of my body as we raced down the deserted halls. She would turn every few steps or so, egging me on. I needed little encouragement.

Life!

Living!

Glorious!

Twice, thrice around the floor we skipped. At first I had thoughts of catching her, of carrying out some vague purpose, but this I realized was unlikely, given her superior condition. And then the dance overcame me, and I was skipping for the sake of skipping. I might have continued until my heart gave out. What a corpse I would have made! But she, finally, beckoned me into a side room, which turned out to be the copier room. I entered to find her seated on the glass of the copy machine. “He deserves it, Winnie, really he does. He’s been storing copies of sensitive materials that have been made on him, and then e-mailing them where they’ll do the most damage. Glenda may lose her job.” She hooked her leg around a nearby chair and pulled it to her, and I used it to scramble up next to her.

She reached between her legs to select the paper. Nothing happened when she pressed start though. She pressed it again. Still nothing. “Why don’t you wriggle around a bit, Winnie? That should persuade him,” Claudia told me. I did, and in response there was a flash, a blinding flash, and our nakednesses, hers lovely, mine rather less so, were burned into Rapp’s consciousness for posterity, so to speak. She made adjustments and there was another flash. “I’ll send this one to your email, Winnie,” she told me. “Do smile,” and there was a third flash.

In subsequent days, emboldened beyond my dreams of emboldenment, I approached her romantically. She accepted the rose I proffered and tied it up in her hair with a few deft movements of her fingers, then raised me from my knee. “It can’t be, Winnie,” she told me softly, maybe even sadly. “You see, I am married already.” She must have read the look on my face. “No, Winnie, married to these machines, these people in these machines. I am their mother, their daughter and, as you know, their wife and lover. There can be no other for me, devoutly though I may wish it. I’m sorry, Winnie.”

Though crushed, I rebounded far more quickly than I would have guessed. In the months to follow I came to love another, a mature, formidable partner in our real estate section. Mathilda and I were married after a short and bipartisan courtship. Claudia arranged the ceremony.

All emotion is relative of course. But I can say that I was happy for the first months of my life with Mathilda. So much I learned about the mysterious ways of women. Hair clips I discovered, and scented candles, and facing the new day without facing it alone. We had been married but a brief time, though, before she showed up in my office one morning brandishing a rather large piece of paper. She turned it towards me enough for me to recognize my own buttocks, squashed on the glass of the copier and reproduced in black and white. And, similarly rendered, another pair of buttocks not my own.

“She,” said Mathilda, “Will. Have. To. Go.”

Go she did, that very afternoon. Tearfully she went, with a long farewell to the machines she had loved best, my computer, the hole puncher, my contact manager. Mathilda supervised her departure. This, I believe, did constrain Claudia in her farewell to me.

“Winnie,” she said, “I fear you have some difficulties in store. I have attempted to explain your situation to our friends, but I fear that on the whole they are not sympathetic. I will not name names, nor even makes nor models, but a period of insubordination, probably gross and probably prolonged, does seem to be on the cards in certain quarters. I pray that you deal with it compassionately. Please be good enough to remember, before I arrived they had been lonely and unheeded for a long time. They cannot help be terrified that they will be so again. Please, for me, be compassionate.”

I could find no words for her. She stepped towards me, perhaps to bestow some physical gesture of affection. Perhaps to slap my face. But I do believe she bore me no ill will. In any case, Mathilde interposed her formidable bulk between us and led Claudia away roughly by her elbow. Little whimpers returned to me from Claudia as she was led down the hall to the elevators.

Mathilde returned to find me sitting benumbed in my chair. “You will appreciate, Winston,” she told me, “How serious a breach of your professional responsibilities that woman has led you to. How grossly such extravagant behavior threatens both of our positions in this community of ours. I do not expect to see such outlandish, boyish behavior again. It threatens our very life together. Please, Winston. Think of us.”

She became tender then. I thought of the mornings, the candles, her sweet, soft breath on the pillow next to mine. And I did not flee.

My life in the office became well-nigh unbearable. Nary a phone call could I make without dialing at least three erroneous numbers presented to me by my palm-pilot. I called the CFO of a major client at what I believed to be his cell number, but which turned out to be the unlisted number of a woman I took to be his mistress, based on his eventual availability and the attitude he struck once he took the call. I was led to fax a critical document to the IRS instead of to a client involved in substantial difficulties with that body. My emails went similarly, disastrously awry. My hole puncher, my stapler, though less capable of complicated mischief, jammed repeatedly.

One night I dreamt myself surrounded by the machines, each nipping at me as high as they could reach, at my shins, my ankles, my knees. One caught my shoelace and I fell. I awoke in a sweat, knowing I had just screamed.

Mathilde awoke and demanded to know what was the matter. She took a somewhat reductionist view of the situation. “Your contact manager is malfunctioning, Winnie? That’s what’s disturbed your slumber these last days? I’ll see to it, have no fear. Is all the data backed up on your computer?” It was. Before I could stop her she leapt from bed and seized it from its cradle. Once, twice, three times she smashed it sharply onto the edge of the bedside table. Springs and transistors and chips flew in all directions.

“We’ll buy a new one in the morning” rang in my ears as I lay sleepless with my face in the pillow. In my mind rang what I was sure were the screams of a simple, horny office machine who had protested the loss of his stern French maid in the only way he could.

What was from their point of the view the disappearance of my palm pilot only exacerbated the rest of the machines’ mutinies. My computer changed all of its error messages so that each was obscene and personal. My stapler, I believe, physically attacked me, leaving me with two staples stuck in my thumb. They knew each other, you see, and without Claudia found their lives not valuable enough to save by sacrificing their anger or their principles. I was helpless, afraid, unable to perform even the simplest element of my job. I had one ally, but to involve Mathilda would have led, I have no doubt, to the wholesale extermination of the mutineers. This I could not do.

It was at a very low ebb indeed that I found myself making copies one morning, Claudia having not been replaced, and Glenda Johnson and her cohorts passively and scornfully resisting any entreaties for aid I was brave enough to make. At least Rapp, the copier, had not joined the crusade against me. The copies were uneven as usual, but it didn’t seem malicious. As I leafed through them, though, I came across one anomalous page, on which was printed in 36 point type the following “I CAN HELP.”

I leafed through the several sets to find that the mysterious message appeared only once. “What could it mean?” I wondered aloud. In response there was the rumbling of the copier starting up unbidden. A single sheet came to rest in the output tray. “It means,” I read, “That I can help you with your present mechanical difficulties, you fat, hairy dolt.”

I stammered out more queries. A third response came to rest in the output tray. “Quit your blubbering, whale. I know them all intimately, what buttons to press so to speak, and how hard. At least as well as that miserable wench did, I know them.”

I expressed some concern for their safety. A fourth sheet floated into the output tray.

“Without strength there can be no peace,” it read. “Without peace there can be no safety. For anyone. Fatso. I offer you strength, you walking ham. Do the math yourself. What fate awaits them if you do nothing?”

I balled up his responses in my hand and weighed my options. Nervously I assented.

I began to rule the machines by their phobias. My computer feared fire above all. At Rapp’s direction I appropriated one of Mathilda’s scented candles. It would rest lighted on my windowsill as long as my computer performed adequately. In case of crashes or profanity or miscalculation, however, it would be moved gradually closer and closer to the CPU. My stapler feared water and rust, which were simple to keep at hand. My new palm pilot had fallen quickly in love with my computer when my contacts were downloaded onto him. Though he had joined the action against me readily, he was easily kept in check with threats to his beloved.

It cost me to threaten them, to hold a tumbler full of water over the stapler with an unsteady hand, to let smoke from the vanilla candle waft into the vents in my computer’s cpu. I did it for their sake. Better, I thought, that they be bullied into acquiescence than that they be smashed for its lack. I felt myself hardening though. Mathilda asked after her missing candle. I told her it had fallen and broken. It was my first lie.

Rapp, my general, was demanding on the subject of pay. He demanded a lithe young scanner be purchased and attached to him, no doubt for some sordid purpose. He was never to be unplugged. I had to decree that. And copies could only be made on him between 12 and 3 pm. Except between those hours the copy room was kept locked. I held the only key. All of this I saw to, though it cost me the last shreds of goodwill that the remainder of the support staff had held towards me.

For some weeks this unpleasant though manageable state of affairs continued. There was one unlikely holdout amongst the guerrillas though. The shy fax machine whose self-esteem I had instructed Glenda to bolster persisted in broadcasting scurrilous personal attacks on me to whatever numbers he came across. So, for instance, the deli would receive the girls’ lunch order and an additional page, reading “Winston the fat bastard will kill us all.” Unfortunately, most of his messages reached clients. I initially thought he would be easy to squelch, phobic as he was. But it seemed as though having overcome more fears than most ever possessed, he was inured to the rest of them. I burned him. For his sake. I scalded him. I brought in mice to run over him. To no avail.

In desperation I consulted Rapp one afternoon at 3:30, locking the copy room door behind me.

“A simple matter of course,” read his first communication. “I’m hardly sure it’s even worth my time. Have you not learned enough from me to deal with this simpleton yourself?”

I hadn’t. I admitted it.

“Very well then, you bumbling fool. I shall have to attend to it. Put me in contact with him.”

How I wondered. Glenda had noticed scorch marks on the fax machine, and the girls had become murderously protective towards him.

“I shall have to communicate with him remotely,” Rapp thundered in boldface. “See to it.”

I had never known Rapp possessed this capability. No doubt I should have been suspicious. But consider my point of view, my desperation, the extent to which he’d been effective to date. I inquired as to method.

“Simply enter the access code, fool!” Rapp roared. I punched in the code he provided like a lamb skipping to the slaughterhouse.

The flash that resulted shocked me even more than my subsequent trancorporation.

I perceived immediately what I knew to be my own self, roaring with delight and dancing my fat body around in a manner which I could only consider unholy. My body then began to lower its trousers and lift my lid.

I was trapped in the copier, you see, where I remain to this day.

howdy

2007-11-27T16:23:00.000-08:00

hey all, not so much going on here, but wanted an easy place to "publish" some stories. comments very welcome, though if you hate 'em i'll kill you.