Alien Accounts (8 page)

Great bales of papers piled up, collecting dust. They grew greasy and black from handling, and Henry grew greasy and black from handling them. He washed and brushed his teeth often, but one cannot hold in the heart what is not bred in the bone: he stank.

Bob and Rod organised a clean-up campaign. They collected all the dirty forms in the office and laundered them. Karl was so pleased with their efforts that he even permitted them to sew patches on worn-out forms, though common practice did not permit this. Even so, after the windows came out, they could not keep up with the dirt.

No one but Henry and Ed and Eddie were working full-time on clerical duties. Clark was reading law fulltime now, and Masterson had come to approve this. ‘You never can tell when you’ll need a good mouthpiece,’ he said, and began calling Clark ‘the mouthpiece’. The mouthpiece never spoke to anyone.

Harold was making charts of the company and of Mr. Masterson full time. They overflowed the walls of his office and began to cover the corridor.

There was a chart showing the chain of command and another showing the flow of work. There was a chart showing weight of forms handled per clerk per day; a chart showing all the muscles of Mr.
Masterson’s body (with the Latin labels lettered by Harold in half-uncials); a chart of company work-output vs. world population, and a fishing map of Northern Minnesota, which Mr. Masterson planned to visit some day. There was a graph showing the monthly number of accidents, fatal, and accidents, non-fatal, per clerk.

Karl’s job included researching the data for all of these. He counted paper clips, measured the level of water in the cooler, taped Mr. Masterson’s biceps, weighed forms, and estimated the world population. His estimates, Harold chuckled, were not conservative enough.

But Masterson pointed out how efficient Karl was. Who else would have realized the wasteful duplication in using both pink and blue copies of the same form? Karl had purchased a new single form printed on litmus paper, which was either blue or pink, depending on the weather. Ed seemed to grow a beard, which had the appearance of frightening Masterson. Clark wore rimless glasses..

The janitor service was cut off because the rent had not been paid. Karl had estimated the company could survive one year without it, saving several thousand dollars.

On the stage of a nearby theatre, two girls, one dressed as a man, were singing a song about making little gifts. One of the girls was sincere, but it was never clear which. Bob and Rod explained to the boss his father had sabotaged the janitor service.

‘He sees what a good thing the company is getting to be,’ one of them said. ‘He wants to muscle in on you.’

‘Well, I’m ready for him,’ said Masterson. ‘Let him try something.’ Grinning, he flexed his forearm and watched the sinew lumps move in it as characters move about on a stage. Rod and Bob, or as they preferred being called, Dob and Rob, began doing janitor work around the office. They refused service to anyone who would not contribute to their list of charities: CORE, CARE, KKK, CCC, the Better Business Bureau, AAA and Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. Only Harold did not give.

They cornered him one day. ‘What’s the matter? Don’t you care that millions of Asians are starving while you sit here well-fed and complacent?’ Harold did not deign to reply, or perhaps had not the strength. His skeletal face showed odd emotions, but he did not look up from his chart. Steadying a hunger-quaking hand, he went on with his beautiful, flowing uncials.

Living on the scraps of other clerks’ lunches, and on the crumbs of cream cheese in Clark’s law books, Harold was under a hundred pounds. He gulped water from the cooler, until Karl stopped him, saying that it ruined the line on the water-consumption estimates.

Once Harold fainted, and Mr. Masterson revived him with a little natural soya meal. Harold gulped it down until Karl, alarmed at the way the expensive stuff was disappearing, grabbed the canister away. ‘Easy does it, now,’ he said. ‘Not good to take too much at once.’

Willard made tables to replace all desks, but more tables were
required. The volume of business, as Karl explained it, was steadily increasing. Consulting a table of Willard’s table-making progress, he was not satisfied. ‘Why don’t you make tables out of the doors? It might be faster.’

‘Or make coffins,’ whispered Ed.

Willard converted all the doors into tables. When still more were needed, he unputtied window-panes and began using them for table-tops. The windows were grimy, and nearly everyone appreciated the increase in light.

Clark’s sight was failing. Eddie Futch now read Law to him. Clark’s sedentary life had made him gouty, and he began to walk about with a stick. From time to time, he would take a turn about the room, flicking with his stick at the dead forms that lay everywhere like leaves, like history. He would mutter legal phrases to himself through gritted teeth.

It was spring again, and a chill, dirty wind whipped through the office, whirling drawings and forms in a constant flux. To keep some of them in place, Henry borrowed weights from Mr. Masterson’s office.

The boss was rarely there these days. He worked out at a gym most of the week, and only bounced in occasionally to assure them that the company was recouping its losses at a truly fantastic rate. The litter of dirty forms was now ankle deep.

M
EMO
:
Dreams

I dreamed of finding pieces of hate.

I dreamed an obscure dream: part of it was talking with a psychiatrist who looked something like Hemingway and something like Jung, and showing him my written-down dreams. It seems that I had never remembered the important parts. I forget the rest.

I dreamed of loving the princess of the glass house, Geopatra, full of mirrors and swimming pools.

– Masterson

No one talked, except Eddie Futch, droning periods of Law. Whenever the youngster stumbled, Clark caned him across the back, screaming epithets. Once the non-lawyer grew so excited that he had to take a turn around the room, limping and muttering, ‘… ergo sum … ignoratio elenchi … petitio principii … non compos mentis … mons veneris …’

‘Ed’ nudged Henry, pointed to the ponderous figure and laughed. ‘They’re fattening him up for the kill,’ he said.

‘Who is?’ Henry’s ass felt a chill.

‘Who knows? Maybe no one. Maybe “they” is just a figure of speech … but then maybe, you know, maybe
we’re
just figures of speech, eh?’

M
EMO
:
Park conditions today

Thick pink balloons were drifting over the park from some unknown source. They reminded the boy and the girl of giant
drops of rosy sperm. Flowers seemed to be exploding at their feet as the boy took out his gold-filled ballpoint pen and wrote, in an unpretentious, sturdy, masculine hand, a love poem.

The poem spoke of fire-trucks and other excitements, of televisable passions, of a love nest made of food, wherein they settle:

No car honks madly;

The mayor gives the death penalty for honking tonight;

And cars have nightingales in place of horns.

The girl placed a drop of perfume on the pulse of her throat, and began to curve the soft inner part of her arm about the boy’s writing hand. Inside every pink balloon was a hundred-dollar bill. A passing policeman thrust his nightstick at the polka-dot sky and laughed out of pure joy. The flowers made a noise like distant target practice. The boy leaped and the girl laughed. The policeman’s gun belt shook with laughter, while overhead the opalescences bumped one another silently.

– Masterson

‘You want to know why I was declared officially dead?’ Ed asked. Henry shook his head and pointed to a sign affixed to his table: ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’

‘I was declared officially dead because Karl put four staples in my death certificate.’ The water was cut off. Henry seized Ed by the throat and tried to strangle him, as one might strangle an empty faucet, not to choke it off, but to make it flow again.

‘Art’s cut off the water, now,’ Rob and Dob reported to Art’s son.

‘Oh, trying to starve us out, is he?’ His heavy handsome jaw took a stern set. ‘We’ll just see about that.’

Harold showed him his latest, indeed his last effort, a chart of the basic natural foods and their constituents, arranged in a segmented circle. Heavy with gold-and-red illumination, the chart was called: ‘THE WHEEL OF LIFE’.

‘Very nice indeed, Harold,’ said the boss, reaching for it. A ripple of muscle was visible through his specially-tailored suit. ‘But you seem to be losing weight. Why is that? Dieting to improve the strength of your grip? I tried that, and it worked wonders.’

‘By the way, I hate to ask you for it, Harold, but when are you going to pay me that twenty you owe me? I really need it – got a big week-end in Boston coming up. You know what I mean.’ He winked, and winked again at Clark.

‘Well, now, mouthpiece, say something legal,’ boomed the boss. A voice croaked from the tangled depths of Clark’s beard. Holding his cane to the sky, he said, ‘
Mens sana in
–’ he belched painfully, ‘
– in corpore sano
.’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Masterson, not hearing him. His powerful calves waded through the knee-deep debris effortlessly and carried him to his
office.

M
EMO
:
On Communication

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– Jqw534w9h

From the office came the clink and chunk of weights, and breath hissing through clenched teeth. Suddenly, as he lettered the words ‘The Form Divine’, Harold collapsed. Henry reached him first and held up his head. Harold cast a rueful look on his unfinished work, murmured, ‘I go … I go to the Death Registration Office,’ and died.

‘Now where,’ said Karl, ‘did I put that fatal accidents chart?’

There came a deep reverberation, not Masterson. He came bounding from his office in sweatpants, his chest gleaming with perspiration. ‘What the hell is going on?’ he demanded. ‘Is someone else lifting weights around here? He’s fucking up my timing.’

The crew made its way down the stairs after him, to see the other weightlifter. Eddie led Clark down last, a step at a time. Naturally Ed and Harold remained behind.

The offices all the way down were empty. When they reached the sidewalk, the clerks found a derrick smashing at their building with a steel ball.

Masterson walked over to have a word with the foreman, who held up the destruction for the moment.

‘We’re tearing it down.’

‘Why?’

‘Abandoned.’

‘… some mistake, or …’

‘But nobody works there.’

Masterson said something else as the foreman gave a signal and the derrick engine roared. The tall tower turned awkwardly, like a hand puppet, setting the ball into motion.

The man shook his pink helmet. ‘I don’t know nothing about no father,’ he shouted. ‘All I know is, we got
work
to do.’ He signalled the derrick operator, who swung the moving ball far back, then towards the wall.

Mr. Masterson ran headlong towards it, springing with the grace of a dancer on his ripple soles. For a moment, it looked as if the steel ball would bounce harmlessly off his great chest.