Secret Life
Legion
A vision of the building from on high: five glittering floors surrounded by a dull concrete parking lot. To the west lay a forest. To the east, the glint of a shopping mall, substantial as a mirage. To the north, highways and fast-food restaurants. To the south, a perpetual gloom through which could be seen only more shadow.
The building housed hundreds of people. They worked day and night, as relentless and constant as the seasons. The first four stories lay open to all, but no one could visit the fifth floor without a special key. Few had ever seen the roof.
The stairs were used for emergencies only. Some of the elevators clanked and groaned. Some of the elevators, quiet and smooth as ghosts, rose and fell with limitless grace.
Most inhabitants of the building, even the janitors in the basement, it was rumored, preferred the noisy elevators. When the quiet elevators reached the first floor, a scream could sometimes be heard, as of an animal trapped and then crushed beneath their feet. The screams might continue for several minutes. No one knew what kind of animal it was, or how it came to be trapped there.
Here Be Dragons
Over time, the inhabitants of the third floor grew to despise the inhabitants of the second floor. “They cannot see what we see,” the people of the third floor would say to themselves. Sometimes, they would put an ear to the carpet and listen to the people on the second floor as they performed their empty rituals.
“They are no more intelligent than bees or ants,” the people of the third floor would say, and smile. Yet they still visited the second floor, often for no particular reason, and would talk to the blank-eyed people they found there. After all, they too had once lived on the second floor, before the growth of the company.
Over time, language fell away from the people of the second floor, as if words had been something gifted to them by those on the third floor. Over time, the words of those on the second floor came to seem like the hum of busy wasps, or the sound wind makes through corn not yet ready to be harvested. Over time, the people of the third floor grew afraid, for reasons they did not understand.
The Pen
How did it get there, he wondered as he stared at it. The pen held in his manager’s right hand had, only an hour ago, been on his desk. With that pen—extinct, no longer made, refills imported from a foreign land—he had signed important documents, written condolences, drafted memos. The pen had a black obsidian exoskeleton, a fine, sleek body. Strange symbols had been carved into its surface. The point rode across the page as effortlessly as his fingers rubbing his wife’s back.
Might the pen be as responsible for his success as any other factor?
The manager walked across his field of vision again. Behind the manager, conveyed by a film projector, images flashed across a screen: of badgers killing moles, of men in trench coats, of complex diagrams, of open briefcases like wings. The manager continued his singsong chanting of the training mission as the twenty-five trainees, one penless, watched him.
Could he be certain a signed contract was binding without that pen? Could he be certain his good fortune would continue? And did his manager know what he had done by taking the pen? Looking at the smooth smiling face of the manager, he realized he could not be certain of anything. Images of falling bombs painted the manager’s face gray and black. Anger began to glimmer inside the man, like moonlight reflected in a dark pool. He began to sweat, to fidget. His hand was empty; he could feel the phantom presence of the pen as if he had lost a finger.
