scrawls.

scrawls

still cheaper than therapy*

31.10.03

FEAR

There's something deadly about a daytime building at night. Anything that happens, throughout, is clear and audible; if, on the second floor, a refrigerator turns on, far from the elevator shaft or the stairwell, the dust bunnies up on fourteen waft along to the hum, their loosely connected atoms vibrating with dreams of the burning, deadly coils behind the ancient Sears model that they so love to collect on but are fried every time they try. If the last worker of the night dares to speak, the ducts behind the walls, which function as an auditory canal for the monolith, serve to record permanently the echoes of human communication, there to be found millennia hence by alien archaeologists who wonder what, not on earth but some other rock of dirt and ice, silence was, in an experience of four-dimensional telepathy and gamma radiation. The building smothers its sole occupant in stillness and mechanical efficiency, pressing its evening entropy on the pitiable, soulless worker still praying for overtime to that big time-clock in the sky that makes us all check out early. A myriad security eyes glow, watching him and recording every move, so that if the building is vandalized with paint or violated with unauthorized entrances, its revenge will arrive flashing blue and red lights from tops of authoritarian cars that the building towers over, contemptuously apprehending their scant respectability even as they arrest its interlopers.

The worker does nothing out of the ordinary.

He sits instead at a small metal desk in a windowless office, reading and preparing memos for paper-shredder consumption in the morning. Midnight comes and goes until the witching hour of the morning arrives, when all but the classic rock goes off the air because not only is the building nearly deserted, but there are no people in the street or drinking in alleys or hitting a fellow nightwalker for money, as they are all warmly asleep, as is god its unnamable self, leaving the world to the minions of hell. Any who see this hour in such a building can never hope to see the blue noon sky again, and the realization comes only after, of course, it is too late in more ways than they could ever have thought of before.

It's then that the worker becomes restless in his grey room, and though the structure is only two years old, voices come out of the aesthetically conspired woodwork, passing shadows on the walls, creeping around the corridor, and whispering in the worker's ear things no human can understand, making him watch the family photos on the desk of two children in soccer uniforms and a golden retriever as they laugh, mocking their own existence as lost time.

The worker notices how loud the lights hum, and tries to concentrate, impossibly.

Now the heat disappears, making the worker put on music to keep away the silence, singing in contribution, so that the voices in the walls sympathize, adding to the loud, obnoxious, jarring cacophony, filling the badly upholstered office and the narrow hall and the stairwell with what the aliens will think of as color until the building catches itself and forces upon the worker the realization that it's really only him and Steven Tyler, killing the marvelous disharmony, leaving its poor creator staring, now, at the miniscule dots on his computer screen, trying to remember how the sentence he was just writing was going to tie up its own loose ends without getting overly tangled in endless metaphor, pointless in the extreme at this hour, really, when everything logical and grammatically correct goes to wonderland and through the looking-glass, appearing on the other side as no longer rational or even likely.

The thought was eaten by the building, which is angry at being inhabited in a time rightfully its own. It sent the sentence, along with the remainder of the memo, through the ventilation system to the boiler room in the fourth basement, which is responsible for destroying all the emotion and consciousness the building collects, filling itself with the wails of lost souls combing through an infinite Rolodex in search of an appropriate scapegoat.

The worker is hungry and tired, and caffeine and cigarettes can only do so much.

The smokeless ashtray he uses to hide from the alarm is starting to sizzle conspicuously, so in an attempt to be self-sufficient he rings the exterior universe, calling all the pizza places in the neighborhood and then in the phone book, ringing time after time in the desertion of a powerless cityscape, and it is increasingly clear as he tries one Giovanni's after another that he is now painfully alone in the world, as the building has cut off all access to the now-worried family and golden retriever and delivery boys who look questioningly into the security eyes, jealous of such a cushy job as to be able to order food from miserable red-faced teenagers in the middle of the night, looking out of what they picture as a fully windowed suite over the city, wondering who else would decide, voluntarily, to still be awake.

Lapses in consciousness and strange thoughts intruding on his memos are keeping the worker from productivity, making him dream that Salvador Dali is masturbating on him with disembodied hands, but he nods awake anyway, determined to finish the report by morning, by morning, while the building's shadowy regulars tap and hint into his mind, and he struggles to keep his eyes focused on the screen ahead but can't, perceptively losing the will to keep trying because the building is winning, and the building has always won.

The worker wakes up, one final time.

He slumps, mindless and assimilated, on the cheap desk they bought for his second most recent predecessor only three months before, and the building watches for his breath to become shallow and slow to reanimate him and show him into its most exalted corner where only those most dedicated to their work can go, and his superiors puzzle over the loss of one more worker and hold yet another job fair.

Labels: writing

scrawled @ 18:16