Leaving the Sea: Stories

The Moors

At work today, Thomas the Dead, as he had privately named himself, made a grave miscalculation by using baby talk with a colleague. He had not previously stooped, even with his own child, to baby talk. Why give the boy another reason to look at him in that cold, queer way of his? Nor had Thomas indulged in the sweet-toned animal coos that his colleagues babbled at one another when they banked and crashed around the lab on their foolish errands. Thomas preferred last words, the sort of speech to be discharged on one’s deathbed. He guessed that some unpleasant number of decades ago, as a teenager, when he wore a thin beard and sported a tie with his short-sleeved dress shirts, he must have sounded old and tired and bitterly impatient, a youth who had already drawn firm conclusions on the key issues of the day, back when certainty was a young man’s best chance at securing a mate and avoiding a life of hellish solitude, not that this had worked so neatly for him. Thomas was one for whom speech, the bursting, songlike kind that showed the world what an imbecile you were, was an annoyance that also happened to sour his body like a toxin.

Thomas and the colleague had been refilling their coffees at the same time because he had failed to calibrate his advance on the self-service beverage cart. Thomas’s mistake, like most of the behavior he leaked into the world, had been avoidable: to join another human being in a situation that virtually demanded unscripted, spontaneous conversation, and thus to risk total moral and emotional dissolution. Death by conversation, and all that. Entirely avoidable. After all, he had seen the colleague approaching, a hand-painted mug dangling from her finger. Thus the peril of a bald, unpoliced encounter with her could not have been more glaringly clear, and the blame was squarely in his corner. Possibly it was the way the colleague glided shamelessly past Thomas’s desk. What is it called, he wondered, when you provoke feelings of inferiority and general shittiness in others simply by the way you walk? When your mode of personal locomotion, in its devil-may-care mastery, serves as a scold to everyone fat and moist and ingloriously failed, sitting in their chairs, tired, swollen, and angry?

The warnings didn’t matter. The colleague flew past his desk, flaunting how alive she was. He could smell her superiority and sheer you’ll-never-have-me-ness, the bottled freshness that had shrouded her in a twister of perfume. Can one copulate against such a column of wind, he wondered? Are there handholds? And Thomas, triggered by scent and irritated lust, swallowing a powerful urge to dry heave, sprang after her as if she was a vehicle he suddenly needed to board, despite knowing (or not knowing vividly enough) that he’d only have to wait behind her at the coffee cart and worry the air with his oversized body.

Anyway, Thomas couldn’t fathom how a person who hoped to live through the day could subscribe to such a Lego-strewn fantasy of worker relations the word colleague implied: as if a group of people whose heads were darkened by the very same hovering ass—something he decidedly never learned in night school was the term for how the human voice sounded when the mouth was smothered by an oily slab of buttock—would ever link arms, sing songs, and be massively productive together, just because they peed against the same wall or starched themselves into a stupor on the salted Breadkins from the vending machine every day. Colleague was a dressed-up word for the coworkers who would feast on his chest if they ever found him unconscious in the bathroom, yet she was his colleague, or coworker, or peer, or, well, enemy, and Thomas couldn’t help thinking of England. Really he pictured an old, sodden map of England, which, even as it molted in his undisciplined imagination, he knew could not be prodded for even the most glancing accuracy (who policed, he wondered, just how badly people imagined things to themselves?). It wasn’t so very far away, this England, with its bearded men who fought to the death over Plato, who politely disrobed and entered the sexual transaction without a break in their conversational patter, as if it would be the highest rudeness to gasp or cede rhetorical ground at the moment of penetration, even with a half-ready British piece of genitalia that reeked of potatoes.

The colleague walked gaily down the hallway, while Thomas, drafting in her tunnel of merriment, took up the somber rear. The two of them in procession—like a dashing mom with her slob kid in tow, thought Thomas (a kid who was noticeably older than his mother)—past the outlying desks and mail bins and various lab doors that were fitted with, instead of doorknobs, the long chrome lever arms that one normally saw on walk-in freezers. Thomas may as well have called after her: Mommy, wait, and he felt a sudden urge to gurgle, fall to the floor, and rub himself for comfort. Chalk that up to another entirely appropriate response he would never indulge. If only he had a dead body, or was it money, for all of these, uh, unpursued urges.

They were not exactly friends, Thomas and the colleague, but the two of them coffined up in the same stinking diesel elevator enough times—trespassing each other’s borders with wartime regularity and altogether too little overt treachery—that didn’t it, he thought, merit some kind of default marriage in the end? Was there a better working definition of marriage than a weapon-free battle between exhausted adults, with an agreement to gaze above each other’s heads, icing each other out with indifference? Cold War would be the way Ramsey, in equipment, would dismiss it to Thomas, Ramsey who delivered transmissions on married and fathered life whenever Thomas had to sign out gear—a beaker, a tray, and an allergen-percolating tool the office referred to as the Bird’s Face—and who frequently reported the sickeningly early hour he was wrenched awake to monitor his paper-eating, tantrum-spurting kid, a youngster who by eight thirty in the morning was at least four hours deep into his terrible day, according to Ramsey, battle-scarred and as strung out as a torture victim, which, come to think of it, was a pretty adequate description of Ramsey himself. In fact, whenever Thomas tried to picture Ramsey’s boy, he pictured another Ramsey, and saw two red-faced Ramseys chasing each other around an oatmeal-splattered room. Big Ramsey and Little Ramsey, trying to kill each other. A classic story of father and son.

Thomas guessed that at times, maybe in the elevator, the colleague could smell how little he had slept, while in retaliation he could see the sauce stain on her back, or the rumpled tidings of underwear advancing over her waistline. That was a fair piece of intimacy, in the end. Shouldn’t they, by now, have already trucked past the romantic swells and decadent fits of sharing indulged by the other middle-aged marrieds, toward a brisker season of restraint and theatrical indifference regarding each other’s mild but steady pain? If they knew each other at all, that is.

For Thomas there was only one outlet for a journey down this hallway—the coffee cart—since he lacked clearance to any of these rooms or freezers or whatever they were. On bright-lettered signs the doors might have cautioned: Carcass inside. Turn back! But turning back would draw too much notice, and he doubted he could rear up and reverse course without some kind of verbal narrative support of his decision—I’m turning back now because I’m scared!—and the thought of such a strange and conspicuous outburst, even one more finely stated, made him feel vaguely sick. What kind of idiot does things, then says why?

So off he trotted after her, drugged with regret and adrenaline and the sort of fear that felt like a boring old friend. He had no mug of his own. He’d have to work that out later. And there was an issue with his, uh, pants. Ahem. But for now he was up and at large and he did his best to gather his face and body into an expression of deep purpose, even if there was none he could rightly claim.

The colleague was a long woman, medically attractive, perhaps intensely attractive. But when Thomas, as was his habit, called up in his mind the nude and indeed the coital prospect with her, simply to work out the mental visualization side of things, in place of vaginal goods Thomas could only conjure a charcoal sketch of the area, just a shabby pencil drawing of something he was supposed to want to bury his face in and weep with relief into. This bothered Thomas because although he could not draw, he could imagine all sorts of drawings, an encyclopedic catalog of, uh, especially rich imagery, which turned out to be an entirely useless ability.

It wasn’t the specific armature of nudity that he longed for, anyway (the canals and curves and rough red patches bursting with boiling hair), but something dutiful in him—as if his erotic strategy was being assessed through surveillance by specialists—bowed to an elementary form of sexual speculation, and he customarily launched this material on his inner slide show for their sake. Perhaps these specialists would see that Thomas could hew to the national erotic standard. But, if anything, he was fair-minded about his crotch pictures, courteously rendering them from the hips of nearly everyone he passed. The result was a kind of gallery, the mug shots, he called them, and it calmed him to realize that his central-most imaginative act, the vision work he was called to most consistently and which occupied him more than any other creative task, was to flesh out in his mind the sexual organs of everyone he saw and to catalog this data for later use. Mostly the genitage that colored his gallery was rendered from some distillation of a person’s face, that is, if the face had been squeezed like a sponge or crushed underfoot. The aesthetics here—what Thomas thought of as his functioning design paradigm, because he had read in one of June’s All About People! folios that we create our private images out of a deep sense of order, logic, beauty, and inevitability, whether we like it or not—involved the notion that a dog (or spouse or child or anything we care for and, in particular, feed) comes to look like its provider. Or something from the stronger, more powerful face is sprayed over the weaker face, rendering it nearly identical. There was a funny-sounding scientific rule to be invoked here, whatever it was called. An old biological trick, which makes us think, Thomas guessed, that we are really caring for and feeding ourselves. One’s crotch stuff should in some way invoke the face, tell a story about it, Thomas felt, or, rather, one’s face should, in its lines and swollen crags, map the sexual terroir. Someone more poetically afflicted could charge up better metaphors about that one. Or maybe it meant that his imagination was severely limited, deriving its ideas from the face. He guessed that artists would laugh at how obviously sourced his material was. Or maybe they’d just be bored. In any case, Thomas was confident that if he saw someone’s face, he could tell exactly what their genitals looked like. Exactly.

Once they arrived for their coffees, Thomas would have to try to drum up some chitchat with the colleague that would not, when it was analyzed for content and style and delivery, by just whoever gave a shit, get him committed to a home, or tossed in a closet that someone somewhere must keep warm for the miserable and lonely and disturbed. Which is what these people did, wasn’t it? They spoke in cold chunks of wordage and no one ever wept or seized or died. The nearly sexual urge Thomas had to destroy himself through difficult encounters, encounters like these with women who surpassed him in every measurable way, would provide the sweet subject matter for days of mistake analysis, the richest pastime. Now I know what I’m doing this weekend, he thought. It was as though he’d been programmed to do exactly the wrong thing, and not for the first time he pictured a keypad on his back that anyone could access, a sweaty keypad that he couldn’t very well clean without one of those curved brushes. This would be another part of his body that itched and hurt and broke and sometimes bled. Add it to the list. Fat Men with Itchy Backs would be the support group he would join. Let’s go program Thomas, the kids might say, and he would lift his shirt so they could have their fun, tucking forward until his belly bulged over his legs. Whose idea was it, this body of his? Do we need yet more reasons to feel disgusting? Or if not a keypad, maybe an embossed alphabet over the rib cage—if you can find my ribs, he thought—raised up in scarred topologies like a cattle brand, so pedestrians and God knows who else could effortlessly dispatch him into crisis and shame simply by coding him, even as he spent nights at home trying to fashion a utensil that would allow him to take control of the area, or at least to shield it from typing strangers.

Protection was what Thomas wanted, from people, their words, their bodies, and the storms they kicked up when they came anywhere near him. Couldn’t the office supply a saltwater receptacle for him to hide away and brine in when there was no actual work on his desk? A casket—upright, transparent, so the others could see him suspended in saline—to keep him from harm?

It wouldn’t matter. He’d sniff out the surplus misery anyway and grind his face in it until the itch stopped, but pretty fat chance of that.

It had been a day of no apparent weather, with gray cars hushing by like silent tracers and air so swaddled and wet it seemed filled with foam. Last week a streak of birds had been sent forth to pop and burst against the office window. Thomas figured it to be some pageantry tossed off by the city to stuff the sky with color, but the official word from the listserv was that a new timekeeping system was being tested. He hadn’t bothered to calibrate his watch to it, even as, hourly, birds smeared through the air, struck the office window, and dropped from sight after the impact. A neat poof, a bright cloud of dust, and the bald white clock on the wall clicked off another hour.

No one in the office, so far as he could tell, had even blinked, as if, oh, this kind of slaughter was just a matter of course. And if Thomas never actually saw a pile of birds rotting in the courtyard, such a pile was inferred, wasn’t it, which was quite enough of a worry to nurse until the office lights were browned down at sunset and the employees were released into the streets so they could stagger home, hump their wooden comfort dolls, and moan into their blankets all night. Or whatever Thomas imagined them doing when they weren’t construing allergic thresholds, putting the beaker to a theory, or tearing into sandwiches with a single, angry finger.

That was history now, sucked into some brownish whatever. There was no one else on their feet now except Thomas and the colleague. Thomas looked back into the cluster and saw necks and heads, fat red arms. It was error sampling time, at least in his unit, and it was nervous, spastic work. So much lab work resembled one’s early attempts at masturbation. There were angry little bursts of typing, and the group of employees seemed to wheeze as a single beast with one faulty lung. He was careful to silence himself while he walked after the colleague, to guard his breath and keep his pants legs from shooshing. But just because no one was looking at him didn’t mean his pursuit was going, uh, unnoticed. Thomas kept his head steady but stole his eyes toward the greasy surveillance camera, a lens jammed badly into some mottled Sheetrock, behind which Sully in the security room would be fastidiously ignoring them. Thomas guessed that Sully’s pants would be shucked and he’d be wrapping a slice of soft white bread around his penis while the security monitors revealed in blue light the morons who walked and slept and stood and self-groomed around Crawford Labs.

This was the easy part. A straightaway down the lab’s hallway that would allow him to get himself together. Big goddamn ha, ha to that. He pulled his shirt as he walked, dug his thumbs between his belt and pants, deep into his gummy sides. You can’t very well hang on to yourself! The wise old maxim of someone important who was now rotting in a hole, a phrase lost to needlepoint and coffee mugs. He licked a finger on each hand and worked dry spit over his eyebrows. Such pointless grooming. If only he could shed a limb, or reach inside his face and reshape it so he looked, maybe, a small bit less Thomas-y. Let’s do a little work on that face, how about? As it was, his face looked as though someone had tried to reshape it and failed.

The colleague, in her cloud of superiority, had done her prep in private, no doubt. She was born prepped, Thomas thought, and he pictured her in adult form being birthed in a clean bright room somewhere to a team of scientists, who wiped her off, hosed her down, and fitted her in specialized gear so she could go out and make other people feel bad. She actually, probably, looked forward to such workplace sojourns like this, so she could flaunt her shit here and there and take everyone down a notch.

But was there a lower notch? Thomas wondered. Let’s invent a new notch, underground, and let’s get you nice and cozy there. He’d find out pretty soon, at the beverage cart, where the basic transaction of drink retrieval, the animal quest for hot, black fluid that Thomas rigorously pursued alone so as not to ever, and that would mean never, have to enter a discussion, would be precisely too long to undertake without some kind of conversational exchange.

The problem was that the beverage cart was lodged alone in an arena-sized space referred to by the laboratory staff—by pretty much anyone who worked and drank and ate and felt pain at Crawford Labs—as the Moors. The Moors was so misconceived architecturally that none of the so-called founders of Crawford could do anything except stash the coffee cart in it, stain it with some Germanic decorations that seemed spritzed from a hose—a hose with different ethnic tips—and hope not to die. Somewhere there were architects rubbing their hands together, laughing at the idiots who were daily demoralized in the spaces they designed. Demoralized, crushed, belittled, and then, for fun, desexed in the most complete possible way. Genitals flicked off neatly at the base. Holes smoothed over with one of those Photoshop tools. Bottoms filled in with putty.

The Moors may as well have had a genital-removal station you visited on your way out. Water-fountain height, retractable into the wall. Tilt in your hips and come back clean. And the egghead architects laughing and pointing, maybe even rubbing themselves into states of ecstasy. Their brains probably sat outside of their heads, simmering in jars of cola. It was a pornographic pleasure, no doubt, to watch people killed in buildings, killed slowly, brought near death and held in suspension simply by precalculated dimensions, by room design. Someone had already thought of this, he knew, the killing power of buildings, so, who cares, another great idea he could not claim as his own. Buildings were coffins, of course, but that came later. First they were killing machines. Did it matter to anyone how mixed that metaphor was, and where had he read that, anyway? It was probably one of those chapbooks that had been ribboned together as a wedding present for him and June, someone’s younger brother’s dissertation. Best wishes, here’s my brother’s piece of obscure scholarship. We love you guys! He didn’t remember ticking that off on the registry at the fucking Shoe Hole, or wherever he and Juney had listed the material bill of goods that would transform their ordinary marriage into a superpowered alliance.

No doubt there were cool loaves of data on a server somewhere devoted to the subject of architectural annihilation, and the theory was clearly infallible, Thomas thought, lumbering after the colleague, who was bouncing out of sight at the end of the hallway. Yet anyone who likened a building to a coffin, anyone who went public with what every known human in the world already totally accepted to be true, was officially considered an asshole.

Of course, the Moors must have been built to enable the kind of productivity that architects fantasized about while at work in their hoteliers—whatever those studios were called—where their young assistants, wearing T-shirts and no pants, rendered drawings, bound by contract, by the apprentice’s promise, to relieve impediments to their masters’ creativity. The Moors was probably meant to be a place where people would be thinking and performing at their best, why not, a blueprint premised on the belief that the actual people who would seize this space for their displays of high-performance creativity would not be defeated, tired, unattractive, and sad. Excepting our friend the colleague, of course. Immune to space. Sad-proofed. The Moors was designed for people who couldn’t be bothered to die on time. Architects don’t make buildings for people who are a bloody mess, just soup, really, because then there’d be no buildings, just tureens. Had there been a dissertation on that? Whose fat brother wanted to take that one on? Tenure fucking awaits. Vats would be trucked in from the factories, into which the people would be poured. Architects have somehow gotten away with thinking that people are not already technically dead, dead beyond repair, according to the accepted measurements, while really they are sloshing inside their clothing, walking spills. It is their first mistake, Thomas thought: believing they are not building coffins. Why weren’t architects simply called coffin makers?

This week there had so far been no birds, but birds would have seemed a mercy compared to the unknowable bundle of something breakable that had replaced them. Instead, the civic timekeeping strategy this week seemed to be a sickly wet thud that shook the entire building, bringing down a sudden hush on the analysis suite at Crawford Labs each time, as though a sack of something, something capable of feeling great pain, Thomas was certain, had plunged down outside, landing badly with what sounded like a sharp moan of grief. Each time he looked to the window today he saw nothing and heard nothing, and if his colleagues met his glance when he sought some kind of communion over this, uh, he wasn’t sure what to call it, they dragged their faces toward him with theatrical fatigue, as if he were a janitor coming to remove their trash: guilt, gratitude, and disgust smoking from their heads. He had taken a night course once and in the minor educational residue that remained he knew there was a word for when a group of people collectively ignored someone’s pain. A very fine word. Even the bland, bread-shaped people in his office, remarkably, had the higher functions of cruelty available to them and could serve up chilling displays of indifference. But whatever that term was for such a moral crime, it was fuzzed out now. Not that having the name for it would really help.

Thomas walked into the bright flat space, just steps after the colleague, and put his hand to his mouth. There was always this terrible adjustment. The smell was not of coffee so much as a burnt limb. Who knew what got cooked and killed here every night. Somewhere, no doubt, there was footage. This, then, was the Moors, a death space stained in beige, with a lone coffee cart, like a Tudor spacecraft, stuck into the floor. Windows, no sir. Doors, no sir. Octagonal space, check. Or, actually, maybe some other number of walls, one of them, if this was possible, slightly lower than the others: It wasn’t a four-sided room, that was for sure. He had done his romantic time in trick rooms; it was one of his favorite dates with June long ago, but this one fell short of the kind of optical illusions that gave you mild diarrhea or freaked you out or, for some reason, brought out the horn dog. The distorted low wall in the Moors felt more like a mistake, after the fact, and maybe now the Moors was only a trick room for people like him, with overfed faces and eyes so tired that everything they saw seemed crushed, shrunken, and slightly moist. Every room is a fun house if your face is broken.

He uncovered his mouth and cautiously sampled the air, expecting for a moment to pass out. Ahead of him the colleague slowed, and Thomas nursed the doorway, sipping little breaths with the spazzy orbit of an insect. He was wary of thresholds—some ungodly number of people got their shit handed to them in thresholds—and certainly he had not hovered about at the foot of the Moors like this before, because he had his ways of determining the area was empty before committing himself to the journey (what idiot didn’t?).

Thomas looked at the fine-suited shoulders of the colleague and wanted to write RIP on her back. It was clear that the designers of the Moors hoped its occupants would die spectacular deaths, and Thomas marveled that the colleague had somehow not spent her good cheer already and been roundly undone by the room. Generally, the people who returned from their adventure to the coffee cart, fitted with beverages, looked gray and dry and past all feeling, even if they had entered the area with a sexual glow, with good ambulation and overly publicized happiness. The most rigorous denial, not that he partook, was brought to its knees in this place. Let’s see the colleague not die a thousand little deaths, starting right now. Thomas found that if he had fountain or specimen work he could sit and watch his colleagues coming out of the Moors, and the experience felt similar to watching a chain of prisoners of war, the kind who had been sucked clean of life and now just shuffled in ill-fitting skin, beyond even any kind of animating pain.

The colleague, however, seemed shielded from the preordained defeat of the Moors. She swung her mug, and in her carriage was the simplistic bliss of a feeder before the great table of some famous god. She seemed to be indulging a moment of choice, and deep sighs of pleasure gusted from her chest, which from behind seemed to Thomas as though a soft wall was breathing. A soft wall swollen with something almost unbearably luscious underneath. Was that an okay thought to have? Hello, soft wall, he wanted to say. I love you.

This mug had been waved in his face before, too, and there was perhaps no other piece of pottery in the region used to draw so much rebuke from its witnesses. The colleague whirled it in such loops it seemed she was winding up to hurl it against the wall. And perhaps that would be fitting. Someone’s child had been wrongfully praised for making this mug, and now someone was rigorously putting it to use at work, actually drinking from it, to prove that taste, style, fashion, sense, and even logic itself—the holy quinitude of scrutiny—could be easily dismissed when it came to the astonishing achievements of children.

Thomas took in the baked, lumpy mess of it as it swung back and forth. What kind of monster couldn’t outright love a mug like that, love it without conditions, love it fully, and maybe, who knows, ejaculate on it out of joy? Are you that despicable? he asked himself silently in a booming voice his father might have adopted when he played the barrister in one of his cringing bouts of summer stage (a reminder arose that he should like to issue to everyone: Never watch your father perform in a play), that you must actually assess this mug with your full adult faculties as if you were a critic? Is there a power surge available to you when you cut down a child? Fine to be a gatekeeper of the fabricated objects of the world produced by lady and gentleman artisans, a mediator of value, as such, but this is a mug shaped by a child, for God’s sake, and what exactly is proven by its dismissal other than high and selfish pettiness, a deep insecurity, and a compulsive desire to alienate anyone in your blast radius?

The rhetoric flowed easily as Thomas silently attacked himself on the colleague’s behalf, and it was not entirely unpleasant to take on such an easy target, to hector from such a fixed moral point, even as he gazed at the grotesque mug swinging in front of him, rimed with lip junk and who knows what else. Chuff and bilge from the mouth. Speech powder. He puffed and tilted and half wished the colleague would turn around and notice him already, since there was something gallant flooding up. Thomas the Brave, defender of children, appearing now in the Moors, ladies and gentleman. Wouldn’t she, in some way, have to admire this, his sticking up for her kid? If only she knew my thoughts she would take her pants off. My thoughts should count for something.

She did not turn around. Willing it with his mind only seemed to make him tired. Thomas surveyed the brown wool length of her as she surveyed the coffee cart, and there was something sorrowful in how undefended she was, at least from this angle. People do not prepare for how they’ll be seen from behind, he thought, and it seemed decidedly unfair, if fairness still had any currency, that anyone could gain such a supreme advantage simply by taking up the rear and looking at a bodily territory that had in no way been readied for this sort of discerning view. Hello, my name is Thomas and I have seen you from behind. I have been granted the lion’s share of what there is to be known here. The colleague had no doubt poured vast resources into the project of her appearance—she was a prim and sharp little project of a person—but had spectacularly failed to engineer a posterior perspective.

To some degree, there was something inhuman about her from this angle, the Thomas angle. But when he thought about it, the term inhuman seemed wrong, however enjoyable it was to use. I stood at the Moors with the inhuman colleague. That sounded rather fine. It was evening, and I carried the inhuman colleague up the stairs to my rooms. In truth, this vantage, revealing the colleague’s disheveled back body, showed Thomas a part of the human that he must admit he felt no particular fondness for: the weak, sad, unnoticed part—keep your sadness under a rock, you sweet-boned colleague!—that could not be properly shielded by clothing. The great failing of the fashion industry. Clothiers, where are your geniuses of disguise? Posturally the colleague showed no sign (this wasn’t a poker face she had so much as a poker body) that she knew some kind of serious assessment of her was under way, but indifference was a subterfuge, of course, and what could she gain, Thomas wondered, by revealing her worry? What did one ever gain? People prep themselves, if they prep themselves at all, in the front and, at most, glance over their shoulders at the mirror to see the grotesque calamity of their backsides, which become pulled long, pulled so terribly long, from the contortion. Should not a person of the colleague’s rank and stature have in her employ an assistant, a perspective manager (bring back the architect’s apprentice!), who might engineer many different views of her, so that her power and clout would not be so easily undermined if someone happened to see her out in the open like this, unprotected, completely vulnerable and, well—Thomas paused and looked around the Moors, wishing someone could appreciate the dramatic pause—killable? He spilled an ugly little laugh at the colleague and swiped at the air as if to erase it. I will be your backside witness, he wanted to whisper. I will see the sorrowful view. Send me, Thomas, first into the sad space. Because what good was the colleague’s power if she could not hide how desolate, nomadic, and freshly assaulted she looked from behind?

But there was no hiding in the Moors, and didn’t he know it. The sole bit of shelter was the beverage cart itself, fashioned to look like a house—a Tudor with chalk-plaster walls and splintered beams painted even darker to appear waterlogged, or possibly to suggest a more authentic species of wood, with predrilled wormholes and hand-painted knots and other calibrated imperfections that someone, somewhere had labored over—a chalk outline of a dead person appeared in Thomas’s mind. As fussy as the cart was, Thomas had never seen it tended to, filled or emptied, adjusted. And the design strategy—a Tudor house pumping coffee by the barrel—always did something sour to his mood. Depressed seemed too strong a word—he was saving this word for something really special—and yet something awful did well up in him when he visited the Tudor, even alone, when it was safe, and not being poisoned by a colleague. Because since when was a Tudor house a place to retrieve coffee? Precisely what historical narrative was being trotted out? Would it not be more apt if it was a beheading station, complete with guillotine? Other than the atmosphere of coziness a Tudor supposedly conveyed, which was predicated on one’s being able to hurl up a foreign language with the red-faced inhabitants whose hands were boiled and fat and who probably stank of vinegar, the cart had wheels and offered dehydrating beverages from a stout, flesh-colored spigot punched into its fake wall. If that was one of the mandatory fairy tales barked at the children of his generation—a house is really a sack of hot fluid on wheels, in which a giant, perhaps, swims—then he’d missed it growing up. Shouldn’t the coffee cart have skins, or, what were they called: peelable facades? A seasonal surface was needed, to mottle and fade and turn gray, only to slowly fill with blood, to pulse and throb, to maybe even bleed slightly onto your hands when you touched it. That would be a worthy coffee cart. A life-form in the Moors, with a dark leak of coffee. I would drink death water out of that item, thought Thomas. A thousand percent for sure.

It was late morning and the air in the Moors might as well have been brown. Soon there would be seizures of lunching erupting in the soft spots, bursts of solitary and group eaters from Crawford, their faces glazed with fatigue. Chances were that some colleagues would flood the Moors with their wilderness sounds and smells, blocking Thomas’s path back to his desk. Which meant that Thomas was pinned down, in military terms, between the Moors and his work space. Hadn’t he read that there were always nine ways to escape a trap? Was it nine? Did they all involve death, or was it just most of them? Maybe this had only been in a novel, though. Someone had dreamed this into being—Nine Ways to Escape Anything—and now people like Thomas had to suffer by wishing it was true. What good did that do anyone?

Just then the colleague stepped to the cart with a little squeal of pleasure, and Thomas felt nearly sucked into the space she had vacated. Her special noise—colleague noise number nineteen, probably—was the workaday exhaust of a body in search of drink, the kind of natural acoustic shedding that apparently emanates from people when they pursue their biological needs alone. It is only in company—Look out, shame!—that we become quiet. Not so the colleague, whose chirping whoop could be, if Thomas only had the technique and speed, rejoined with some equally guttural and possibly joyous chest noise.

Thomas had to wonder if this was how it worked in zoos, when a gang of beasts was suddenly shrieking together, dry humping the scratching post, doing flips around the pen. As a boy, standing in front of the oval domes that held such gorgeous creatures, Thomas always felt that the animals had noticed him and were calling him out, in their berserk fashion, and it didn’t seem to be his imagination that the shrieking subsided into hushed tones of relief when he walked away from them. Such power he had. He used to give the matter a lot of thought, because there was time then to worry about how much he sickened those who saw him, and on his most rational days it was clear that his body itself was triggering a frenzy in animals and humans alike, with removal the only solution to hand. I’m walking away so that you might calm down, which was something, come to think of it, he often had to say to his own child in present times. But elsewhere, when he indulged the need to argue for his own survival, he had to concede that there was a chance, however slight, that the animals, in shrieking and howling and tearing at their own skins, were, in their special way, approving of him, welcoming him, possibly even inviting him into their midst. Was this another missed opportunity he was supposed to be worrying about now?

No one was waiting behind him in the Moors, so the protocol now was unclear. If he moved forward to fill the colleague’s space, advancing in the queue, not that there was legitimately a queue, it would leverage direct pressure on the colleague, encouraging haste and reminding her that someone else loomed. He thought of those times in banks when he walked into the lobby and people seemed suspended in place, as though they had forgotten what they were doing. My friends, the puppets, he wanted to say. These people were not clearly in a line, though, nor were they distant enough from the line to seem unaffiliated with it. Menacing business. Artists of affiliation, they should be called. It took talent to make everyone around you start to worry and second-guess their most basic goals. (He saw himself—handsomer, thinner, slightly girlish—at a podium, holding an audience of animals in thrall with his lecture: In my work, I explore the confusion that results when physical-proximity laws are stretched beyond the breaking point. I seek to destabilize normative pedestrian traffic and queuing strategies by engaging unresolved coordinates with my physical form and holding fucking fast until someone wants to kill me. The setting for this work is the bank or the store, our shared spaces, where I will cause people to ask fundamental questions about my coordinates.) These hovering people required to be questioned on the matter; they were asking to be addressed—ask me where I stand!—and Thomas knew that, no matter what, he did not want to be questioned on this or really any other matter. A credo! Fend off inquiry. How much simpler could it be? One’s actions should prevent all approaches. Why weren’t there needlepoint frames for that?

How soon could Thomas move after the colleague moved, and would that not trigger a complaint on her part? I have the right not to be imitated. Behavioral goddamn copyright, right? Yet he was distant enough from the cart, if he didn’t shadow the colleague, and indeed from anything in the Moors, that it might appear to a newcomer—please God forbid there ever be a newcomer—death to the newcomer!—that he was not waiting in line, but loitering in the center of the Moors with some arcane religious purpose in mind. Or not even arcane. This is a man, others might argue, who is about to sacrifice a child on a pyre. Grab him now before he strikes his match.

Unclaimed space might have been making this worse. The Moors had never developed a specific use by the lab, which was funny when you thought of it, since wasn’t every cubicle acre everywhere else at Crawford Labs fought over by every spazmodia he worked with? They were like Sooners, or Okies, or… Thomas paused as a smile flushed into his face, the sort of smile that required a hand to squeeze down… Jews.

He shot a look around the Moors because this was the kind of thought that would seem so, who knows, detectable. You don’t just think something like that and not show the whole known world what you’re made of. These thoughts steam off of your head, they’re inhaled by everyone around you. He knew that they weren’t Jews, and yet, calling up in his mind the sweaty-headed figurines who passed for his co-employees, the people who might meatily regard him if he ever held the floor (in the contest that had come to be known as Speak Well or Be Killed) and served up a passable, even yeoman performance, he wished he had the sort of acquaintances who would swallow this whole: pretending that the Sooners were Jews and that the Jews had a head start on the Homestead Act, tearing through the dust bowl and planting flags, erecting shtetls, bursting with song as the sun went down on the freaking veld. Was it a veld then, or did velds come later, or from elsewhere?

Standing in the Moors, the whole image—people, his people? stampeding over unclaimed land, a thunder of Jews—turned oily in his head, and it was good riddance. Acquaintances were precisely the people who cold-warred you when you ventured something borderline. This wasn’t Jew hating, he protested to no one, this was Jew loving, loving the Jew so heartily that you sent him into the past to accomplish great things and save lives. Go forward, or backward, young Jew! But tell that to the acquaintances. Acquaintances operated a bellows that blew over you a cloud of reeking air. To the Jews he knew, Thomas was not really Jewish, and yet to the non-Jews he sure as hell was as Jewish as it ever could possibly get. He had pegged the needle. What was this zone of belongingness called, other than stage three alienation? In their minds, the non-Jews bearded Thomas and gowned him and maybe also had their disgusting way with him on an old abandoned couch in the desert. How many times had others imagined killing him, he wondered, and was there possibly a critical mass at work, where technical death occurred if your death was dreamed of by enough people? Had this colleague killed Thomas in her mind? Chances were. Or who knew, but couldn’t the possibility of his wished-for death account in some way for the unusually cold, blue, rigid way he felt? You’re killing me, he wanted to say to her. In your mind, I can feel it.

The building shuddered and, for a blinding second, the Moors went dark. Bedtime, thought Thomas. Thank God. A sharp hiss snapped the lights back on and in the strange glare a smell came to him, something far off, like a person being cooked. He blinked into the brightness, rubbed his face, and looked again at the perfectly composed colleague. A bloodbath wouldn’t get her attention, and perhaps this was the top secret these people shared: They were dead as stones and the world could pour over their cold bodies, but to hell if they’d ever notice.

It was time to push on. Something wasn’t so superfine out there, and the Moors didn’t seem like the very best place to be.

Thomas met the newly vacant hole in the Moors—the colleague hole—by invoking the insect strategy of progress. He inched forward, ever so carefully, with small dips in reverse, as if he was apologizing backward while steadily gaining ground, an orbit calculated to look like nothing was being achieved. He entered the colleague’s shadow, and even though it was not a real shadow but a dark spill at her feet, as if something awful had flushed from a bag attached to her waist, it was her shadow nonetheless and Thomas was gaining ground. How to get ahead at work: Pretend you’re moving backward. How to get fat: Swallow your own laughter. This was how his parents used to dance, shying away from each other as if to say: I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

So it was that he inched into her shadow, and suddenly the air was cool and clean and he found himself breathing in fast little gulping thrills. Had anything more intensely dramatic happened ever?

This is real life, folks, Thomas wanted to say. Make no mistake, it is on!

As strategic as Thomas was, the colleague seemed to be choosing that other, uh, unexamined path, and even though she must have smelled and sensed and very nearly goddamn tasted Thomas, she trilled about indifferently and took, if it was possible, even less notice of the ridiculously fine gentleman nearly riding inside her clothing. Do I have to become you, he wanted to ask, for you to notice me? The liberty she took, to effuse in his presence—the simmering pleasure fountain within the colleague that she’d turned up to full—was, what was the word, problematic. Because if indeed a person only succumbs to such biological gurglings alone, she clearly did not yet know he was there, or couldn’t accord him the status of the present. And yet he was living pretty hard not three feet away from her. Was this kind of omission seriously within her power? Was he meant to actually embrace her in order to prove his existence?

Thomas backed away. This sally would be recalled. Her smell, her climate, the so-called sphere of the colleague was too much. Doesn’t one break into pieces in such an atmosphere? There were laws to be invoked, certainly, yet the fuck if he knew what they were. Perhaps that’s what anyone’s personal smell ultimately was: the residue of the people who had shipwrecked against them. Thomas felt he would get sick on the colleague’s past if he stayed too near. This wasn’t worth it, he knew, and he looked at the sad space he’d have to crawl through to get back to his desk, without his rotten coffee, the doorway that had never before delivered such unequivocal disease to his person before. Was this doorway number freaking one, and was there any possible glory behind it?

The fundamental difference between Thomas and the colleague, a difference in their mistake management protocol, heh heh, was that the colleague was smiling through this disaster (he could tell this even from the back of her head), dipping and dodging and spewing happiness like a strange machine designed to broadcast cheerful moods to people who weren’t sure what to feel. A mood Sherpa. What would you like to feel today, little sir?

Whereas Thomas, well, he was showing a medium-high capacity for colossal not-so-greatness. He looked around and saw just walls of nothing, smelled the burned body smell, and had to restrain himself from trying to chew his way out of the air. He had to remind himself as he held his ground behind the colleague—wait quietly for your coffee, little sir!—that there was still—thank God—a barrier between his thoughts and the world, and that people could not look at his disheveled, sea-bloated fatitude, his pilled attire that had been washed into sheer roughage, the extra fat mounded on the backs of his hands—in case I have to eat myself someday—and have any blessed idea of his, uh, special thoughts, as such. There was, as yet, no tool to read into the clot of his head, and if he grimaced or smirked or grinned or just looked as shit-crazed as he absolutely, in some objective sense, was, there was no proof of the inside material, and this was sufficient and soothing negation to the chance that a disclosure was occurring without his knowledge.

Things were calming down. This was good. The mistaken shadow invasion, the day the colleague’s shadow was breached, was now strictly archival, stored for the crowd who would watch this on video someday. Would it be called Mishaps at the Moors? The Day My Ship Caved In? I, Colleague? What a shrill little bit of drama that had been loosed into the labs, but for nothing, and Thomas looked around for someone to blame. This was pretty basic. Things were okay. The colleague would get her coffee. Thomas would wait his turn, like a good little sir. One by one, events in a divine order would bleed into the day. A little seepage of correctitude, that’s all. The noon hour would bring its dose of calm. Thomas would nod at the colleague as she passed him, a weary but confident nod like one of thousands he gifted to people every week. Some mastery would be inferred. A vague suggestion that usually someone would have stood the line for Thomas to get a coffee, but today, why not, let’s see what the regular people do, let’s build empathy. Oh, who knows, maybe Thomas and the colleague would embrace before she departed the Moors. She’d have to find somewhere to put her coffee, though, or else he’d feel that hot mug on his back and their contact would be queered. There’d be too much caution, and what kind of embrace was that? So there were things to work out, details to finalize. But this would be fine.

Perhaps, if he was lucky, if he survived this test, which is certainly what it was, his heart wouldn’t blow out of his chest into the Idea Wall that loomed above the beverage cart. Maybe that was the real meaning of the term redshift, thrown endlessly over his head during proof-of-concept meetings: a noiseless exit of the heart from the dehydrated and fat body of a man who was…Why bother finishing the thought. Poof. He could hear the sound his heart would make being sucked clean from its cage of bone and fat. Wasn’t this the time when properly prepared people had some fatherly advice they could squeeze from their pasts to help them fire hose the crisis, so they could roar with laughter, drink a stein of thick foreign beer, and do something unspeakably gratifying in the backwoods to a small animal? Because every so often it feels good to tear a hot warm thing to pieces. The things our parents taught us, those sage lessons from the older set, or something. Father always said…but nothing came to him. He cast around in his background, in his memories, in the finer sayings his parents had condescended to share with him, but it felt like he was sticking his hand in a tank of rotted fish.

If he nailed his own head to the Idea Wall, precisely what, uh, idea would he be conveying?

Another bag—or whatever the awful thing was—dropped outside, and Thomas realized he wasn’t breathing. A sweet shroud of silence had hazed up moments before the thud, or the crunch, or whatever the name was when something made of flesh hit the asphalt with the acoustical resistance of canvas. In hindsight you always knew you heard something falling, it was sort of what you didn’t hear, thought Thomas. He wanted to joke about this, but all he could come up with was hindsight is…not funny. There was a strangled cry after the thud, and he saw too little of the colleague’s face to tell if she was registering this, the hurt, the crunch, the goddamn sound track of cruelty that somehow was getting piped into the lab and that was meant to let them know it was noon.

Oh, right, he thought. This was one of those times when only fat men named Thomas were privileged to hear death sounds. Some special access was in play, but it didn’t feel exactly, uh, special. Times like these were Punishment Invention times. Thomas saw himself later that night, or as soon as he could square away the details and complete the domestic schedule with June and the child, sitting in a chair at home, pounding one of his hands with a mallet until it finally stopped bleeding and became smeared into the upholstery like gum. The goal was to move beyond the obvious and stereotypical pain of such, uh, appendage hammering, into the prolonged sweetness that came when one’s very nerve endings were doted on until they saw light and air for the first time. That will teach me, he thought. That will show me not to stand up and do anything or go anywhere. Next time you’ll think twice before being alive!

The colleague, no doubt, was not a connoisseur of the self-punishment, sad to think. This type of hygiene was foreign to her, no doubt. How did one even fraternize with people who could not entertain vivid scenarios of self-mutilation? How was the sexual act even possible if one’s partner could not entertain being crushed under a truck, even as a cathartic exercise?

What important piece of her brain was missing that deprived her of such, well, deeply necessary acts of physical editing?

The colleague powered on at the coffee cart, doing God knows what. From behind she appeared like a giant storybook girl at a table of mind-blowing presents. It was amazing how a teaspoon of professional rank authorized people to dance in your face and publish their happiness with such free dispatch. Thomas guessed that this colleague was an associate something or other. If one day you weren’t hourly but salaried, suddenly you radiated joy like one of those children about whom it was politely said had yet to come into their own in terms of, uh, showing signs of an inner life. Stupid but happy was how he always saw it, as if there was a difference, and why not, since part of their brains had been sucked free with a crazy straw and everyone pretended the obvious imbecility was some kind of prototype maverick behavior not yet ratified by the schools. The goddamn careful language they used about kids who drooled in a puddle on the floor. And then to have an adult, the superior colleague, channeling this moronia, a kind of spokesperson for failure to thrive, even inside her smart pantsuit, which could only accomplish so much mitigation of the, the—he wanted to whisper the word out loud, stage-whisper it—so much mitigation of the retarded. The word should be spat, he thought, and spat at her, but that wasn’t going to quite convey what he was thinking, was it, and her formal attire was confusing things anyway. Pantsuit as softener of cretinism. Perhaps that was the solution to the clods of the world. Dress them up in business attire. Had she studied that behavior at a conservatory?

Thinking this through, watching the colleague attend to her beverage like it was her final act of love, Thomas wished he could say to himself that he’d reached his limit, that it was too much and so and so, and how could he ever, and oh my (the kind of language he loved to hobby with in private, in soliloquies of indignation), but he regularly found himself capable of bearing ever greater insults and grievances, as if he possessed a sort of highly stretchable orifice through which the transgressions of others readily flowed. He marveled at his tolerance for precisely this kind of massacre. He wanted to bow to the power of the colleague, a lady who could stay in character under even the most extreme forms of pressure. There was a fish he recalled with such accommodating features, a blobby kind that simply ate the mistakes of the sea, and yet he knew there was some kind of virtue, ecologically, to what this fish did. Or didn’t there have to be something good here?

When a species disfigures itself in order to conceal a conflict from its mate, turning itself inside out and soaking deeply in the toxins of a terrible dilemma, all the while shielding a loved one from a crisis, that’s called…Oh, who fucking knows?

This would be his role, and all blessings to the clarity that afforded. Thomas, meet Thomas, he wanted to say: You two should make love tonight. He did not enjoy, at least not fully or not without some regret, picturing himself getting bottomly impaled, but he worked these pictures up in any case, and they were among the more vivid of what he called his mule cartoons. Thomas as mule to the competent, confident, attractive overachievers, with a few middling stragglers as well, who might be surprised to learn that they had been cast as, well, as rapists, really, in Thomas’s overworked scenario machine, humping him until he wept, breaking him in half, drop-kicking him off a roof. They shucked his pants and stepped up to his area and they repeatedly defiled him. They shot him, they dumped him in the sea, they led him to alleys where they dug holes and sometimes scraped what was left of him into a pit.

There was an oeuvre of material in these mule cartoons, but no clear way to render it down so others could see it. How did one share such imaginings? Thinking himself dead was his special skill, he knew, and maybe the antidote was not to feature his own feelings so heavily, to accord them meaning and weight, since they didn’t officially matter (now there was a bit of parental advice he could juice: “No one has to know what you’re thinking,” a chestnut shared once by his mother after Thomas experimented with an afternoon silence project during what he called his junior year at home), because in abstract terms what was so wrong with chancing into a coworker at the coffee cart—Hi there, Colleague! some finer version of Thomas might say—and, who knows, sharing a pretty intense bit of quickfire, meant to flush the groins with blood, misting a bit of sex into the air? There were worse places to meet, and couldn’t the coffee cart be the best location to lay waste to the awkwardness that interfered whenever Thomas began to smell the possibility of the good, craven congress with unhospitalized women the world had yet to fully pay him?

Never mind the logistics that would make such, hmm, congress unlikely. They were at work, they were fully dressed, they did not specifically know each other, they could not exactly go to his house, because even if Juney wouldn’t notice, well, the nurse certainly would. Now, if the colleague were hidden in a sack, for instance, and he lugged her into the house, the nurse would have to personally check the sack, which she would not, and Thomas might then wait for her to depart before releasing the colleague from the sack and, if necessary, working to revive her.

None of this would be very, ha ha, collegial, though, would it?

The coffee flushed into the colleague’s mug with the violence of an industrial toilet, and then she pivoted to the fixings table. It was a nimble move, adorned with a sweet little grace note that impressed Thomas. She was, in her way, sort of elegant, and the gesture suggested that even late in life they could have sex standing up against the closet door. Was there an overture here? A dip of her shoulder and a slight tilt in the hips, like a kind of curtsy. It was customary, of course, to respond to such flirtation. One flirted back. One did not look cross or bothered, and one certainly didn’t pretend not to notice that a clear message had been sent, because that suggested a radar-deficient head, a head rotted out and insensate. Not me. Not my head. He would be alive to the possibilities here. These were bridge gestures from the colleague. They resonated with aching desire. Or if they did not, they should, which is what mattered from a legal perspective, and he could now safely argue that she initiated the intimacy, sir. Was there a pose he could strike, so he might reflect his desire back to her and perhaps boost the abstract flirtation into actual congress? A conversion tool was needed. Somewhere a book might instruct him how to flip his mood and adapt. How quickly could a person, without having a stroke, shift from a feverish state of vicious resentment to a soft and vulnerable romantic coquetry?

Underfoot was a carpet the color of absolutely nothing, and in any case Thomas too often found that the shoe-gazing posture—staring at your feet and lost in thought—was a glistening invite to be questioned and entreated or otherwise involved in something quite outside the bounds of one’s reasonable and well-earned solitude. Hang that shingle and be fucked, he knew. He would not be caught staring at his feet, and the busy nature of the colleague—the weevil show she had chosen to stage—gave him a perfect spectacle to rubberneck. If he was being watched—if?—then he could aver to the instincts of that short-haired, single-toothed animal he had read about, whose eyes will follow motion and color, which was bursting in front of him and which he’d be a fool to ignore (not because what the woman was doing was even remotely interesting, but because to overlook the frenzy would seem highly suspicious and, to repeat a phrase from the quarterly review of his performance at work, dangerously insular).

It was unfortunate that so much could be learned by watching someone refill her coffee, and he wondered how knowing someone was supposed to help with the basic erotic problem. In mere minutes he had developed knowledge about the colleague that was especially, uh, not without issues. For instance, she was afflicted with a tragic longness nearly everywhere: in the arms, the face, and, most dramatically, the torso, which seemed to require something like a cummerbund—women might have another name for this, no doubt, a catalog-friendly product term that upgraded the sexuality of what was essentially a surgical scarf—to conceal the area that a shirt would normally cover. The concern that seized Thomas was that this kind of garmenting could never be emotionally withstood, in terms of sheer human endurance, falling beyond what he felt he could survive without hurling himself off a roof. It was astonishing how alienating it was—a sash!—because Thomas would have to deal with it if he and the colleague ever became involved in a romantic tishy tash, to untie and fold and place it somewhere, or even, fucking hell, to tie it for her after breakfast under the blank and milky eye of her medically dead father who was wheeled in each morning for cereal as she dashed off to a conference, leaving Thomas behind to clean up her disastrous house which…Thomas put a halt to that one, deeply outside of any likely reality, a form of inner travel he excelled at and which at times could yield useful material worth sharing with the public, and yet he felt a surge of anger at the colleague in any case, as he stood behind her at the beverage cart, drawing up steam in her shadow. Did it actually matter that those things had not, and would not, happen? And by whose expert accounting? There was good mileage in their remote possibility; this fury could not have been wholly invented, and in the end it was her fault that such a thing could even be thought. Her fault entirely. Such was the colleague’s power to disturb him, and weren’t potential mates meant to be soothing in some regard, rather than provoking such terrible worry so quickly?

Not that he would, or ever could, know, and a Theory of the Ideal Mate was too unbearably something something to pursue. At a certain point, any blood-filled mate with the power of speech would do, but the whole thing was a pipe dream anyway. They were getting coffee at the same time and that was it. Years ago, Juney would have said to him, Thomas, the sun hasn’t come up on that idea yet. And tucked far back into her smile would be the panic that was soon to permanently seize her mouth. As for the colleague, the sheer monolith of courtship had yet to be scaled, and Thomas understood with a shudder that what courtship mostly entailed these days (throughout known history, perhaps) was the grueling scrutiny of an endless parade of her friends—all of them spoiled somehow, if not by outright poison poured over their faces so their flesh appeared melted and stank of fruit, then spoiled internally, rotted out, and primed to hate anyone who meant to cuddle and leak with their friend. No doubt the colleague’s friends festered in a world of private jokes, finished one another’s sentences, and turned every courtship into a game of…He tried to think of a game involving rifles and children and the race to build coffins. If these friends excelled at something, it was at deliriously liking one another despite all good sense. Just as the world gazed coldly at the moronia steaming off these people, they would close ranks and love one another more fiercely. They would test Thomas’s sense of humor, his resilience, his irritability quotient—off the freaking charts, Colleague!—and his basic endurance for the most, well, for actually any conversation, because to talk to any of them even beyond the brutality of a shared “hello” would feel like, it would feel…Thomas was too tired to call up the specific form of torture—and the notion of producing a metaphor for himself seemed suddenly ludicrous—but he finally saw himself crushed under an iron slab, able to breathe just enough to panic and worry and panic and then finally to die of fear. He’d not survive such a gauntlet, and he could think of far better ways to feel like utter shit than to waddle up to a bar and drag his face through a range of barely acceptable gestures with a group of her friends, who may as well have worked over his groin with a hammer and saw.

It would not be a good day for such an examination anyway, even if he had time to go home and change after work. That morning, Thomas had risked the pants that showed everything, darted khakis that could siphon a single drop of pee from his weeping, cold appendage and bloom a fist-sized stain on the fabric before he’d even returned to the seat where he could hide his crotch. Perfect wicking material, his pants. The sweetest feature of his cubicle was that it hid what he called his little horrible from the medical scrutiny that was the basic sensory currency at his employ. The true meaning of cubicle: No one can see your crotch. He’d already wadded a parcel of tissue over the offending eye during one of his fourteen trips to the bathroom, but that, too, had ultimately proxied a haze of dampness that was already bordered—to anyone who cared to look—in a ring of what appeared to be salt. A tide line had seized his pants, and it was a puzzling development. Was there salt in urine? Or, more likely, had something in his urine cocktailed with the laundry detergent used to clean his khakis? Thomas himself crotch gazed mostly to avoid eye contact, a type of connection hugely misunderstood and, to his mind, misused. But crotch gazing brought in important evidence, and why wouldn’t the others in the office have their scopes trained on his? What a time to be at large in the office and waiting for a big-and-tall woman to beverage up before he could even get his own drink and vanish.

A salutation with the colleague’s name seemed the best move. But throughout his six years at the lab, Thomas had been told this woman’s name so many times that in its place all he could summon was a dull sound in his head, chuff chuff chuff, like bone being scraped with a knife. He could recall the circumstances each time he had been told her name—where he had been standing, who had told him her name, and how he had summoned his face into a gesture of interest until it ached with fatigue, an effort that occupied him so totally that he failed to do the one thing that mattered during the transaction—commit this woman’s name to memory. What was the name in biology for species that exhibited reverse, or was it perverse, learning? Thomas couldn’t remember. Something something. A four-legged, hot-bellied creature that took the wrong cues and constantly impaled itself, raped by bears, subject to night weeping. Reversely deducing, was some language Thomas remembered about the thing. But the colleague’s name wouldn’t come to him now, just the sound of a body being carved to pieces. He thought he could produce this sound with his mouth if she cheated her face his way, cough it at her, now that she was at the fixings table, and she would have to appreciate how he had renamed her abstractly, a pure word that had never been spoken before. But actually the colleague would have to do no such thing except possibly pretend, as politely as she could, that this hovering man, breathing on her—whose penis, she knew (how could she not?), was abnormally cold, was so preposterously cold in the tip—she would have to pretend that he had not lost control of his body in such close proximity to hers. His sound for this colleague would be beautiful, but it would probably only seem to her as though Thomas had failed to sneeze, or had shat, perhaps, a little. And then he would be marked, and her pity and scorn and indifference—the holy trinity!—would take him back to those great old days with June, before she started getting so tired, when romance consisted of a series of stuttered apologies, parsed out over the course of an agonizing day, breaking her down until a sort of exhausted indifference set in that would allow sex, sometimes, to occur.

The colleague smiled to herself as she performed an inscrutable modification to her drink. Sugar, milk, straws, little sticks. Something that looked like a rubber eraser, waved over the drink? Part of the coffee poured out into the sink when the taste caused her mouth to winch. Renewed administrations, careful sips, exaggerated grimaces and frowns. The colleague responded to her own actions with some kind of overstated mouth semaphore—for whose benefit Thomas didn’t know, since she had yet to even stand and face him, fat Thomas the sadness machine, Mr. Thomas Last Name with the blankety blank, Thomas Fuckinstein with a cold Mr. Horrible.

Thomas cheated himself into her sight line. Oh it was a neat little shuffle, icebreaker number 49. He offered up his eye contact, but the colleague still seemed facially averse. She was perhaps one of those people said to be in dialogue with herself, preoccupied, super-focused, in deep parallel, enjoying her own company (something only unbearable people are encouraged to do, when no one else is capable of being near them), smugly demonstrating that she was a society unto herself and did not need a mottled, fat, overdressed, pee-soaked coworker like Thomas to chorus with because the two of them happened to be getting coffee at the same time. What so stymied Thomas was that the colleague was hoarding the moment, playing his role for him, leaving him to wobble blandly behind her and pretend that he was not eavesdropping on—or even aware of—an encounter he had every right to take part in. The colleague had effectively split in two and Thomas had become the third wheel. The anthropology on this seemed doomed to him. Everyone else in the world may as well die, since I’ve got this encounter covered. Ladies and Gentlemen, now playing the part of Thomas: the Colleague! Apparently long ago a contract had been struck (he pictured her proud, bearded father, young and strong, with one of those oversized European wallets stitched to his T-shirt) that compelled her to participate facially in the smallest endeavors. He saw her accepting this responsibility without agony, signing her name, believing that she had this one licked. Oh my God, the world is so easy! I can so beautifully do that!

Soon Thomas would be getting his own coffee, and he’d probably throw out his back pressing down the lever on the coffee thermos. He could possibly stage his own performance to demonstrate his parallel version of grotesque self-sufficiency. If the colleague wanted to destroy him with her publicly antic solitude, he could huddle with himself and confer over a mock issue, to demonstrate how athletically committed he was to being by himself, since solitude was a sport, at least as the colleague practiced it. He could weigh a scenario, for instance—this suggested a possible physical expression—shrugging, hunching, balancing the scales—and would show anyone looking at him—Sully!—that he was so absorbed by his own issues—Look at Thomas! He’s lost in thought!—that he had unknowingly begun to dramatize the pros and cons of an argument whose details were elusive to outsiders but clearly important.

Except who really did this but a character in a play—oh you sad fakers, or that moron—the Shrugger, was he called?—who showed up now and then in one of Thomas’s son’s cartoons. Burned into the screen. A fucking television ghost. This had led the boy—miracle that he even spoke—for a time to say nothing but “I don’t know” for weeks, even when you said Good Morning to him and Good Night and I Love You and Please Stay Out of the Road. It was always “I Don’t Know” that he responded with, a small lad in food-stained pajamas, and he spoke it quietly and with so much calm certainty that it was hard not to believe him and hard not to think that this small boy had somehow cornered the market on the perfect response.

Careful, William.

I don’t know.

Good morning, cutey.

I don’t know.

Thomas finally decided that if you had to settle on a single phrase and broadcast it in the home until the people around you succumbed and cried uncle, or just cried, not that June could really cry, then this one would do fine. His son didn’t know, and that made two of them.

The colleague probably knew, he thought, looking at her. Of course she did. She knew and she knew and she knew, and then some. She knew with enough knowing to burn, and God help you if you’re not her, because speaking of cornering the market, she’s cornered the market on this. What is that like? he wondered. What is it really like? Can you tell me, Colleague? Can you tell me what you know?

It was a thousand years later, and it seemed that a terrible snow had fallen and already melted in the Moors. Creatures had been born and flourished and died and now turned to dust, the last traces of which you could just see if you squinted at the very fine air that seemed to be slowing down around Thomas, and then the colleague wheeled around with her coffee and walked right at him.

Thomas looked quickly away, to where there might have been trees growing, the branches stretching out and shading him with little splashes of shadow. In the end, what a pretty place this was. He saw a fine path the sun could take as it rose and set, and the people could crawl from their bloody holes right past his feet and drag themselves over to the watering pool, to drink or die there.

The colleague’s face—where had he seen it before?—looked so fresh and young and her skin was radiant, as if no one had ever beat her in the head until she wept herself to sleep. She had made it through, one of the few, and here she was to rescue him! A little thrill started to bloom in his chest. Why wouldn’t everyone want to be poisoned by this sweet air? The dust around Thomas was thickening into a swirl, and he was sure glad it wasn’t him sauntering over with such speed and purpose toward the scary man waiting in line. Can’t go through him, can’t go around him, must go over him: the name of a game his father used to play with him. Oh to be me right now, for a little while longer. Birds clustered up from everywhere, it seemed, and he marveled that the colleague could still make such a brave show of things.

Thomas braced himself as she approached, but the colleague was all easy smiles and there was no avoiding this one.

“Hi, Thomas, what’s up?”

Of course she knew his name. Of course she did. She bent her head into her cup, sipping and looking up at him as if nothing, nothing, nothing.

There was a luscious chemical in this moment; he felt it in his blood like a great seizing itch. A man would die if he felt like this for too long. A man would die. He stood his ground and watched the colleague’s face start to register him as he failed to speak. The face can’t hide what it knows! he wanted to say. For all of your power, your face is showing me what you think!

It was true. She was struggling desperately to appear relaxed as she stood in front of him and he didn’t respond—while I stand here melting—but her eyebrows were worrying their way down and she seemed ever so glad that she could shield her mouth in the mug. That very same mug. No matter what we’ve been through, it is a mug that I truly love.

Her whole face should be bottled, studied, sold. This was a fine mix of feelings: concern tweaked too hard, a game attempt—learned perhaps in an acting class—to show concern, since she must know that she was obliged to show concern here—this man was not speaking, and oh, those trees—but she had never been so consciously pressed to exhibit such a shattering dose of concern, probably, and how did one really even do that without getting a shit-crazed angelic look going? This was a woman who was scared out of her mind looking at him.

Maybe it was the air of the Moors that had found its way inside him, because he was filling up with a great ballooning warmth, and this dear woman was offering her face to him, such a fine and well-fashioned face. What did one really ever do with faces? Something was required now, something really special. It was too awful to think that he would not be allowed to take this face home for his very own, to hold it up and gaze at it whenever he felt sad or tired. How good it would feel to cuddle up against this woman, to feel the warmth of that skin and maybe the soft, sweet wind from her mouth that could puff some of the terrible dust away from him. There are small bits of them, those people who have gone before us, blowing over me. Madame, can you help me? Could she perhaps be invited to assist here, to shield him with the wind that only her mouth could make? Could it truly hurt to ask, and to ask as a creature new to this world, having crawled free of the trees, new and needing everything she alone could provide?

He pushed out his lower lip and opened his eyes wide and sweet for the capture. He would give her his best and most innocent face.

“Tommy wants cah-weeg to hold him.”

There, he’d said it.

Her face went big and long and open. It seemed that she was trying to swallow.

“What?” She lifted her cheeks into a question, and Thomas thought it must feel good to want to know something as badly as that. If only he could speak for her now, to say what she was too afraid to say.

Mommy needs you to answer now, honey. Please tell me what’s wrong.

It was dark and it was cold and the face looking at him so sweetly, glowing at him, had the most splendid mouth. Too many trees, well, this was what happened, wasn’t it: The air turned solid and dark and you couldn’t see or do much of anything. He liked trees, of course, they had their place in the world, but this didn’t seem right. Trees should be a comfort, not a problem. Whose idea was this, really? June would be quite upset, quite upset indeed. He’d need to get to her and be sure she was okay. Had he left her somewhere safe?

He rather knew this woman looking down on him, smiling, and, he thought, with time he could come to love her, and this would be okay. Would she be taking him home, now?

Thomas was on his back now, and the shade of the great trees felt wonderful.

“Ho dmee. Pweese,” he said to the woman. “Pweese ho dmee.”

There was a cup of water on his desk and a damp cloth in Thomas’s hand. The cloth was pressed to his head, and his head felt exquisitely nice. The hand holding the cloth was his very own and it was really a fine hand that you could not complain about. Everything was in order. He was sitting. He was safe. He was holding quite a pleasant damp cloth and he couldn’t recall his forehead ever feeling better than now, with this nubby wet washcloth pressed against it. Smuggle it home. Oh, you must. He had not thought to press a cool cloth to his head all the time, even if it was awkward to hold it there while walking. He had not thought that he could do this, but really he could, why not, what was stopping him? It felt delicious and perfect. Thomas wondered if the others were on to this. What a first-rate discovery, really. It was sad to think this cloth would dry out someday and begin to chafe and disturb his head. But that was dark thinking. No more of that for me, he thought. This is my time, my time to enjoy. These aren’t even small pleasures. They are the largest kind there are.

The building thumped, and a hoarse cry—from deep inside a bag, was it?—sounded. He steadied his cup of water. Oh it could have been anything. Offices make sounds, don’t they, and what did he even know about the immense workings of a building like this? Someone must have run the chart on this and checked it out. Of course they had. Clearly it was not for him to worry about. Oh for more of this bait not taken. Where would they store it now that he couldn’t be fooled?

Thomas would ride the day out. If he heard something he’d say nothing. He’d do only the fair work on his desk. At five he’d shed the Crawford bibbing in the changing room and slip on his coat and hat. A glass of water would be nice. Perhaps some more water to splash on his face and wake him up for his journey. It’d be good to get home. When the doors shooshed open he’d be swept into the street with the rest of them and he’d tuck into the wind, lean hard against it, and start the long walk back. See you, he’d say, to anyone listening.

With luck, his boy will be waiting at the door when he comes home and Thomas will gather him up and take him inside for his dinner and bath. Tonight he’ll sit with the boy over food at the low wooden table he’d once built. There’ll be the usual chores and the materials to be readied for tomorrow’s trip to work. Everything in the house just so, the surfaces sponged clean with soap, and he’ll certainly be sure to remember to lock the door tonight.

It will feel especially good to remove his clothes and pull on his night shorts and sleep shirt. They are soft and always clean and this is an outfit he loves to wear.

Off with the lights downstairs and a story read aloud at the foot of the lad’s bed. A story about a horse who is lost for such an incredibly long time. The horse grows old and forgets it was ever lost and the girl who has lost the horse becomes a distracted adult, too busy to say anything nice to anyone. Until one day she is reminded of her horse and she weeps and thinks of the wonderful times she had as a girl. On the day the horse dies, thousands of miles away from her, the girl, a young woman now, stirs in her sleep and suffers a terrible dream.

After he reads the story, a last check of the house and a shush and a kiss to the boy before shutting out his light. His son’s eyes will shine for a moment in the darkness, and Thomas will, as is his habit, wait there in the silence of the doorway and listen for a softly whispered “Dad.”

And even if June is already in bed and plugged into her machine by the nurse when Thomas comes into the bedroom, well, he will still lower the bed guard, lift the wires, and crawl in next to her, if just for a moment.

When the streetlights sizzle out finally and the cries from his son’s room grow quiet, he will take the moment for himself, he will take it and hold it and try not to squeeze so hard that he kills everything that is beautiful about it. These are the most perfect seconds ever delivered to the world, aren’t they? It is like someone has packaged them in a soft bag that you can unwrap until they flow over you. Quiet, with cold air, and everyone else so wonderfully hushed, when all you can hear is the far-off singing that has always meant everyone around you, every last creature, is doing fine. What a perfect time it is to be alive, a great time to breathe in the sweet air.

He will hold himself perfectly still next to his sleeping wife and listen so hard it hurts, until all sounds but his own breathing are vanished from the air, and then Thomas will sit up and look at his Juney.

“I missed you today,” he will say.

And then Thomas will lean over to kiss his wife good night.