I look up at the office in front of me. My office.
Secretaries, admins and paralegals all look at me from the corners of their eyes, not willing to appear so distractible as to turn and make eye contact. If I want something from one of them, I'll walk right up and interrupt them. They know I am here and their entire gestalt subconscious sphincter tightens despite my own uncharacteristic surprise at having arrived at the office from a subterranean maze some fifty years in the sideways future. I look down at my clothes and hands. That's more like it. A dark gray suit, crisp linen white shirt, red tie with some little grid of repeating designs on it. My cologne is substantial but not overbearing. My shoes, oh they feel so good, my cognac crocodile shoes. My feet are inside velvet cushions.
Nervously, I step from the box, my peripheral vision inspecting the crack between carriage and shaft as I cross that razor thin crevasse. I expect it to be glowing red hot with center of the earth madness. It is dark and empty and has completely swallowed up the movement of my watch. I look at my wrist. I am wearing my gold Movado, casing intact, ticking away as it always does. I shake my wrist near my ear, and someone says, still ticking? as they pass with a folder full of papers.
I say, hold on a minute. Let me see that folder, please. Jenny stops cold in her tracks, turns and hands the folder to me without so much as an equivocating eye movement. I eye her with suspicion as I take the folder and open it. Merrick and Williams manufacturing plant consolidated yearly reports for years 2010-2020. Blah blah blah. I hand it back to her, choking back the calamity in my head that tells me I will find folders composed of that one single endless numeral, calculating itself on into infinity. Thanks Jenny, I say.
Does that look like what you wanted me to send over? she asks.
Oh, yes, that's perfect, I say, having no idea what she is talking about. I am in this world, my world, and none of it feels familiar anymore. I feel like an alien in my own life. There is this slick brick in my lower inside jacket pocket. I pull it out and stare at the glass screen in front of me. It recognizes me and unlocks. Several notifications materialize describing to me what I am apt to be doing today. There is no room for serendipity. Jenny turns with efficacious energy to bear her package onward to wherever I have asked her to bring it.
I search for my office along the outside ring of rooms around the cubicles. Every one I go to is occupied. I just keep walking, peeking surreptitiously into the rooms looking for my name on a desk somewhere. I reach the end of the row, unmolested. There is another elevator. The sign says Executive Suites. That sounds like me. I press the call button and the door opens. I ride the elevator up and get off a floor or two above. The timbre of the space is entirely different. There is no clutter whatsoever. I know this is me. My comfort in emptiness proclaims itself. I feel the pull to the biggest office, the one with all the windows and light. I walk up and enter, find it empty. My name is on the door. I sit in the big leather swivel chair. Feel it electronically mold to my form and massage my legs with infrared heat.
The phone on the desk is a dinosaur with dumb lights and buttons, many of them flashing. I pull my mobile out again and look through the messages. Lisa has texted. She is interested to know what my plans are for dinner tonight, should she grab something? I press the call button. My hand pauses a moment as I stare into space before lifting the phone to my ear with a tic and a grimace as I feel that my sense of reality might be slipping.
It rings seven times and goes to voicemail. She texts again, is everything alright?
I answer, yes, I just wanted to hear your voice.
That's weird.
I've had an interesting day. I wanted to talk about it.
Do you want me to call you when I finish what I'm working on?
No, that's okay.
What about dinner? she texts, and I put down the phone, unsure how to answer such a question. If I have been restored to my fortunate life, it must mean something for the things I have seen, been shown. Chet living out his life in the little village really seemed to have given him some vivacity and life of his own. If the world was going to end, did we not need to be in that grove? All of us.
This life I have built is an empty shell. It is leukemia. I look at my desk again. Empty. I open the drawers, empty. I look around the office. Clean. There is no warmth. I feel a chill. Perhaps it has always been that way, and I just became aware of it. This alienation is the system I have developed around my conscious entity. My skeleton dances inside me. I look for something to throw. There is a laptop computer, shut, its power cord neatly rolled and stored in a drawer, the back of the folded screen is freshly wiped with an anti-static cloth. I pick it up. My face pulls to one side and teeth are visible. The computer held in my hands pulls itself up high and then to the ground in an anticlimactic slap. Nothing even falls out. There are no sparks or explosions. The laptop smacks the ground, and its functionality disintegrates leaving the casing intact. I throw it at the wall, and it disappears into a slot shaped hole in the cream-colored drywall.
A voice from the office next door shouts, what the fuck? It's Timmons. He comes rushing around to my door. What the fuck was that? he says again.
What? I ask.
The fucking laptop that just came through our partition wall is what. What the fuck, man? There's fucking debris all over my office. Have you fucking lost it? He is shaking, angry, but also scared. He is no match for me physically and I assume he must be contemplating the possibility that I have had a psychotic break and am about to pummel him into a mush. He has his cell phone in his hand.
I look past him into the large open central executive lounge area. There are several others who've come out to see what the fuck is going on in my office. There is a variety-show of emotions on their faces. Some of them wrinkle their foreheads, others bare their teeth, some hold their hands up over their faces. Roberts with his jacket slung over his arm and his attaché gripped firmly in his hand strides for the elevator and leaves.
Timmons backs out of my office. I've said nothing, offered no explanation, which could only mean I am stifling another explosion. He goes back to his office. I can hear him calling human resources. The others kind of mill about in a pool of anxiety.
Billy says, we're still on for squash this afternoon?
I look at him like he were a talking dog. He just averts his eyes and slinks away. Nothing he wants to face at the moment. A bomb has gone off. I am that bomb. Whatever has happened to me is beyond their comprehension. I know that. It doesn't stop me from hating them now, for being the ethically vacant bunch that we all are. My shift in personality is the flickering light bulb revealing the lemon juice invisible ink of our secret biographies. Everyone is very uncomfortable.
I open my center drawer. I look into the empty wooden box. Fuck. Give me a folder, I yell. Billy, a junior exec, eager to please, brings me the incidentals on Grover McNiland Corp. I ball up each page of that hundred-page document while he watches silently. Then I pull the Zippo out of my pocket. The scent of lemon oil cleanses the air of the room. Billy's face drops as he realizes he is party to arson.
I walk to the elevator while all these assholes scramble to find the working fire extinguisher. The alarms are going off. With my back to the doors I shout into the executive lounge, mice will eat your shoes! I get inside the box and press the button for the lower level. Walking out amongst the calm bovine faces of the herd below, I see Jenny again. I say, Jenny, I quit. Her face tells me she doesn't know how to react. If it's a joke, should she laugh? If it's not, should she try and stop me?
The elevator I arrived on looks normal again. It brings me to the ground floor where I find my Jeep in my parking spot. I start the engine and drive. Buildings shrink as the trail leads out from the city, east into the rolling fields in the vast valleys between the Rockies and the hills of Malibu. The dirt gets richer. The sun is invisible.
Bakersfield is an eyesore full of mechanical plungers fucking the dirt for oil. These industrial dinosaurs like so many drinking birds level their hollow gaze to the horizon which fails to approach. Sterile lifeless forms routing out the space of their days. I turn North and the poison oil fields give way to the agriculture of robot run farms. Drones everywhere carrying fruits of all shapes and colors. I drive until I see the yellow gems hanging in the branches above me. Then I pull over and get out of the car.
I am hot so I leave my jacket. My pants are itching me. All I have for an alternative are a pair of jogging pants and a t-shirt. I put them on. I text Lisa and Chet and tell them where to find me. Then I put the phone in the glovebox and leave it on so it can be geo-located. My hands are sweating. My vision shaking. My ears feel cold. I trudge into the lemon grove, one last time. No food, no water, though I know how to siphon off the robot irrigation until I find my way through the portal. That doorway that I have never seen worries me. Finding it, and my way back to the village, is the only release for this fettered soul.
In the village the drums are pounding. Dancers whirl around and through each other. One big family of barefoot farmers tending crops in a world gone by. The women with their hair all bleached by citrus juice and sunshine, their skin darkened by the same catalyst, hold up the entire village under the matriarchal authority of Abuela. There is a sense, I worry that I have simply been used, and that use drove me mad. Some out of this world power like I never thought reasonable has come over me. In its corona, I have felt the utter uselessness of everything I have done to preserve what I thought were my values, and the destructiveness of those values to my family is in stark relief to the unity that will form in my absence.
The torches pound up and down to the beat of the coyote skin drums. The resonating lemon wood barrels give a sweet and sour rejoinder to the feet stepping lively around each other. I feel a toe slide under my heel and it escapes being crushed by milliseconds as I clumsily falter backward. Or forward, through time to a place that left me behind, for good reason, though I suspect by accident. No one person could possibly control all these portals and slippages. No great plan could be using me in a tiny little village at the end of the human journey. My power has always been in the clever use of the system I was born into. My madness comes from seeing that system dismantled and tossed aside, either by choice or consequence.
Visions from the cave world below the grove come back to me. Were those sons of bitches following me right now? Is my family coming to join me? I look for signs of inter-world transport. I don't know if it was a shimmer, or a wave, or some magic combination of actions, a pile of coyote entrails arranged like a Basquiat painting. I look for anything that isn't orderly. I look for any sign of declension from the pattern which symbolizes infinite reproduction and robotic algorithm. I look for old men with sandwiches. I run through the whipping lower branches. They tear at my skin. The feeling of transgression is ecstatic. Where are you? I shout aloud into the thicket of suns beneath the smoldering clouds from burning mountains. Take me back! I shout into the dense curated wilderness, hoping that some breach will hear me. Some chasm between worlds open up and admit me to the place where I am penniless and where in the absence of power, I feel peace. Then I see a honeybee.
She looks drunk. She's been breathing smoke all day and her flight dances from flowerless branch to late yellow ball and back. The ground is a wasteland of dirt, not a clover or dandelion in sight. No soft blades of grass for her to tumble down into and cool off. I follow her, my path becoming hers. My legs scattering beneath my careening torso. I become the drunk by proxy of my motion. The movements work in reverse to stimulate my nervous system into reeling. She flies and I follow, off course from the row, the easy path. She goes right between two tall trees which are pressed tightly together, and I drop to my hands and knees and crawl along behind her, craning my neck and twisting my head sideways to keep an eye on her flight. The sound of her wings is a transformer, an electric current sweeping along a microphone. It is a lonely sound. She moves quickly as though she knows I am chasing her.
Looking up to keep my eye on the honeybee, I see into the ash gray vault above me. The great emptiness draws my breath, and my chest hurts a little. Across the firmament, traversing a wasteland in search of rabbits, flies a hawk. Its motion from left to right in my field of view. It must be a sign. I run willy-nilly along behind the honeybee without looking where I am going. She must be going somewhere. Out of this hot smoke air comes another buzzing sound. It swoops in and grapples her in midair. A wasp, twice her size, bloodthirsty and strange, picks her out of her drunken ranging and carries her off, paralyzed in its carnivorous grasp.
I stand stupid there. What the fuck am I doing? Maybe I should just go back and spend some money. I am a frugal man, but perhaps that's what I need to escape this trap. Spend a little freely the money I know will never run out in three lifetimes. While I ponder, another sound creeps in. It is not a river, but it is in a sense a current. It is a much bigger buzzing. I listen carefully and follow my ears. The sound grows louder, angrier, ravenous. I know what it is before I find it.
Pushing aside the branches and ducking under the thickest of them, I lean forward into the smell of a rotting carcass. Dog’s blood fills my nose. Dried into the soil, it crushes under my fingertips and floats as a cloud to cover my face. I see a thousand wasps on the body of a dead coyote. It is dead, but it is squirming with life. Its insides pulse with the breath of maggots. Its fur bristles with the antagonism of a crawling army of mechanical killers. They pinch and lick the rotting flesh and are driven into a state of murderous climax by the cold corpse. Here is the birth of life.
I crawl in further under the tree. Hornets fly in front of my face. They angrily buzz in my ears. I feel them landing on my back through the t-shirt as thudding lumps of crash-landed DaVinci flying machines. Feel them picking their way along the white cotton, their prickly feet searching for the edge of the fabric to crawl beneath, as I crawl along the ground. I feel the first one reach the nape of my neck and wonder how committed they are to this assault. A searing pain as it stabs me.
My hand goes up in reflexive shock and smashes the bug against my skin. This explosion of pheromones undetectable to me is like a clarion call to the mass of insects and they begin to leave the dog, jaws full of pincered off hunks of putrid flesh and they come for me. I close my eyes and fling myself upon the corpse. Covered in a thousand stinging biting crystallized objects of fury, I pull open the bowels of that lowly creature and dig my hands inside. I can feel the wriggling of intestines full of meal worms and larvae of insects. I feel the life of this object appearing dead before me.
With my eyes closed I see the portal open. I hear the drums. I see the dancers again. I taste their whisky and feel the warmth of that sun. I smell the pungent and meaty white flowers blooming everywhere. I hear Katrina, sitting naked on my lap whispering something in Spanish into my ear. The river behind me washes its eternal current of stories along in a fluid embrace of truth which changes, not from day to day, but moment to moment, each one as inseparable from the whole as life from life.
The End