Apathy and Other Small Victories (9 page)

That’s what I thought on a bad day. And since every day you’re temping at an insurance company is a bad day, that’s what I thought. It’s easy to lose faith when your weekdays are draped in death shrouds and your only respite is to sleep on a toilet. It is very easy to lose faith then.

And whenever I thought I was being too hard on them, I remembered Inspiration Alley. There was proof that nice, well-meaning people would politely and eventually rob the rest of us of any reason to live. Inspiration Alley was a row of cubicles stretching from the boss’s double-cube office to the inner walkway around the elevators, and it was lined with quotations. They were printed on company letterhead in large type and tacked up on the burgundy walls like mirrors in a funhouse. These were my favorites:

Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not
—Robert Kennedy

Do not hurry, do not rest
—Goethe

Once all struggle is grasped, miracles are possible
—Mao Tse-tung

I looked around, waiting for someone to do something. Then I realized that I was someone
—Anonymous

Great things are not done by impulse, but a series of small things brought together
—Vincent Van Gogh

The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world
—John F. Kennedy

When the way comes to an end, then change—having changed, you pass through
—I Ching

If at first an idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it
—Albert Einstein

And the coup d’etat:

If a man is called to be a streetsweeper, he should sweep streets even as Michelangelo painted, or Beethoven composed music, or Shakespeare wrote poetry. He should sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will pause to say, here lived a great streetsweeper who did his job well
—Martin Luther King

That one took two pages of company letterhead, but it was worth it.

I sometimes saw people standing there, moving their lips as they read, nodding, really understanding, clenching their fists at their sides, “Yes. Yes!” Then they went forth to be the best insurance agents the world had ever seen, for the glory of God and Panopticon. And I sat in my cubicle making a miniature gallows out of paper clips, and waited for my legs to work again.

The boss’s name was Andrew, but he didn’t like the term
boss
. He referred to himself as the
team facilitator
. He was blond and slight and soft-voiced, with that managerial style where you speak quietly and
ask
your employees to do things, prefacing every request with, “Could you do me a favor?” or “If you have time…” or “Whenever you have a moment…” and ending with “At your earliest convenience, of course.” It’s the kind of shtick where if you’re a parent who tries it on their kids they grow up to be crack whores and gang-related murder statistics with no respect for anything. But it works on defeated adults because they don’t have the backbone to say “Fuck you Dad” and make the obviously wrong decision.

Andrew was always nice to me. So nice that every time he saw me he’d say, “Hi Shane.” He once, in a span of six minutes, said “Hi Shane” eleven times. I fucking counted. He just kept walking past my cubicle “Hi Shane… Hi Shane… Hi Shane…” Finally, after the tenth time, I was on my way to the bathroom. He was standing talking to somebody and as I passed he turned his head—while the other guy was in mid-sentence—and mouthed
Hi Shane
, then turned back to the conversation. It was very unsettling.

When I returned from the bathroom I went back to work on my gallows. But it is hard to make a full-size noose out of paper clips, and it takes a very long time. As it’s set up, the world encourages you to do things in miniature.

If sex with the landlord’s wife was like an off duty clown swinging two fish together by their tails, then sex with Gwen was that same off duty clown sitting on the splintered wooden floor of his living room with a gun in his mouth, watching a German snuff film and crying.

“You know what I like about you?” she said.

We were on our backs and her sheets were drenched with sweat and fear and gallons of my blood. I thought my collarbone was broken, or at least torn out of its socket. And that was a shame, because it had always been one of my best features: prominent but not overbearing, shapely and subtly regal. It was the clavicle of an African queen. But not after this. Not after Gwen. She’d dug her hands in up to her knuckles and yanked up on it as she slammed herself into my pelvis, using my own body against me. I was a fuck prop in her one woman show. The critics vomited in the aisles and the ushers wept unabashedly. And I sang that Foreigner song in my head:

I wanna know what love is…

I want you to show me…

slow, and with emotion, as she kicked the shit out of me. I thought the irony might dampen the unbearable pain, but it gave me no comfort. I fingered my collarbone and thought of happier times.

“I like how you never bring work home with you. You leave it behind when you walk out every day.”

This was not entirely true. I used to fall asleep in her bathroom all the time.

“I know you’re just a temp, but still,” she caught herself, thinking maybe she’d offended me, as if that was even possible, “and I know you’re busy now and putting in a lot of hours, so we don’t get to spend as much time together, but you’re really good at separating yourself from it.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I need to do that more. I need to step back and remember who I am. I hate thinking about work and stressing myself out when I’m at home and I should be relaxing.” She paused, then said thoughtfully, “I need to remember that Panopticon Insurance is not my entire life.”

It was one of those completely untrue affirmations people feel like they have to make every once in a while, like “This was for my lord and savior Jesus Christ,” whenever somebody catches a football for a four yard gain, or “We did all we could,” whenever a doctor loses a patient who’s old and not famous. It’s just something you say.

Because Panopticon Insurance was her entire life. It was all she ever goddamn talked about. All her friends worked there, or they were former employees who’d left on good terms with management. She went in on weekends even though she didn’t have to. She fell asleep thinking about it and had nightmares where she had to make decisions even though she wasn’t given all the necessary information, and hilarious dreams where she fired the corporate vice president because he wore an ugly tie. She fucking woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me that one. And I’m pretty sure she called me Panopticon during sex. More than once.

It was her entire life, and that’s exactly how she wanted it to be. And that’s fine. She cared about Panopticon Insurance. It was important to her. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Which is untrue, and again just something you say.

“So I like that about you,” she said again, and leaned her head on my shattered collarbone as I writhed and wilted.

“I also like that about myself,” I said. Of all the things in me to admire, she picked my apathy. That’s disheartening.

“Oh, I meant to tell you, marketing is having a contest to come up with a new slogan for the company. The winner gets a fifty-dollar gift certificate and a write-up in the newsletter. You’re so creative, why don’t you enter?”

“I’m shy,” I said.

“
I
would beg to differ,” and she curled her head under my chin, trying to play sexy as the pain coursed through me like I was being fucking electrocuted.

“What’s the old slogan?” I said through clenched, grinding teeth.

“Panopticon Insurance: Watching Out for You, Wherever You Go.”

“Chilling.”

“I kind of like it. But they want to bring it into the twenty-first century, maybe say something about technology or computers, but still keep that old brand nostalgia.”

“The Neo-Nazis are trying to do the same thing.”

“Ha ha, real funny.”

“So’s the Klan.”

“Could you be serious for once?”

“All right, how about Panopticon Insurance: Where Dreams Go to Die.”

“If you don’t want to do it that’s fine,” she said, annoyed, and turned over. I was very happy with myself.

She lay there, facing the wall, breathing loud through her nose to let me know that she was angry. After a few minutes of cleansing, nasal-snorting silence, she turned back towards me. She had worked through her feelings, and we could talk again. Self-help pop psychology techniques are fucking fascinating.

“So how do you like working with Martha? Isn’t she great?” she said.

“Yeah. She rules.”

And so did Fred and Keith and Sue and all the other faceless fuckers I didn’t know who sat in the cubicles nearby. They were all on my
amazing
team and they could all help me get a full-time job if I was nice enough to them, asked if they needed any extra photocopying done or a shoeshine, or a rimjob maybe? The implication was clear. But I didn’t talk to anybody. I knew them only as the ugly guy, or the fat guy who’s gay, or the old woman with the stringy hair. None of them had names and I didn’t want them to. I didn’t want to be involved, even in the shallowest sense of the word. But I didn’t tell Gwen that. I never told her about sleeping in the bathroom either. She would not have understood.

“What about Karal?” I said. “How did he ever get hired in the first place?”

“Who?”

“The banged up guy who waters the plants. Karal.”

“Oh Carl! He’s not really an employee. He works for the maintenance company. He must be in a union or something. But Gina in HR—”

“Who?”

“Gina? In HR? Human
Resources
? You really need to start learning the lingo Shane.” And she laughed.

My god, how I loathed her.

“Anyway, Gina told me that his mother calls every Friday and says, ‘Did my son do a good job this week?’ ”

“His mom? Jesus.”

“I know! But how is Gina supposed to know? He doesn’t even
work
for us!” She thought that part of it was hilarious. “One day she started crying and told Gina how he used to be an Eagle Scout and he was so handsome until this hunting accident in high school where he almost blew his head off. There was mud in the barrel of his gun and—”

“Hunting accident? I thought he was in Nam?”

“I don’t think so. I think he’s always been with the maintenance company. But she was crying and everything. Gina didn’t even know where to transfer her! Isn’t that crazy?”

I agreed that it was, in fact, fucking insane. After she had sighed her way out of laughing she said, “I should introduce you to Gina. The more people you know in HR the better.”

“Human Resources,” I said.

After pedaling all the way home from work in the goddamn pouring rain and almost dying at three different intersections, I realized that I’d left my keys on my desk. They were behind the stapler, wrapped in a paper towel. Goddamnit.

I’d had a rough time on the toilet that morning. I woke up kicking and holding on to the handicapped bars with both hands. I was dangling from a fucking helicopter in my dream, hanging on to the landing gear as we flew out over water. We were really high up and the pilot was jerking us all over the sky, trying to shake me off. He didn’t like me for some reason. I gasped and opened my eyes as an echo clanged off the walls. I had just kicked the metal stall partition, really hard. My foot hurt. And someone was standing outside the door.

Their shoes were pointing in at me. They were probably wondering if they should knock, or say, “Is everything all right in there? Do you need any help?” But they didn’t. After a second’s hesitation they left, without saying a word. There are no good samaritans in a men’s room. Nobody wants to help some guy off the toilet. Maybe if he’s family, but even then, hire a fucking nurse or something.

I got up quick, still shaking off the dream. All I had to do was be out of the stall before anyone else came in. Then if they asked me anything I’d blame it on Karal.
Yeah, that guy who waters the plants ran past me as I walked in. I think he was crying
. But when I stood up I saw my keys sprawled out on the rancid floor in a pool of water at the base of the toilet, like they were sunning themselves in filth. They’d fallen out of my pocket during the helicopter struggle. I didn’t know where all the water had come from. A pipe must have been leaking. Or. Oh god.

I ran them under the lukewarm water in the sink for a few minutes, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. They were tainted now, polluted with dribbled piss and splattered shit and toilet water. The unclean molecules had already attached themselves and become part of their DNA. It’s how atoms work. That’s why everyone hates science. I wrapped them in a paper towel like a dead pigeon and set them on my desk behind the stapler and tried not to think about them for the rest of the day. And I didn’t. Which is why they were still there and I was outside my locked door, half-drowned and cursing the ugliness of the world and its bathroom floors. I hoped the cleaning people wouldn’t throw them out. They’d probably be too busy stealing shit to even bother.

There was no way I was riding all the way back to work in the rain just to get my filthy keys, just to ride back home and almost die all over again. It wasn’t going to happen. I thought about kicking the door in or jimmying the lock with a credit card, but I knew I didn’t have it in me. To do that kind of thing you really have to believe. I settled for trying the door knob again, twice. It didn’t work.