Secret Life
The manager continued to pace and smile as he talked, sometimes pointing with the pen for emphasis. Behind him, the bombs had stopped falling and a man in a raincoat was walking slowly up the side of a barren hill, above him an observatory. Could the manager have taken the pen by mistake? No. Everyone knew what the pen meant to him. No one could take it from him “accidentally.”
Sweat flecked the man’s forehead. He could not keep still.
The pen had been a birthday gift from his wife five years ago. She had given him the pen by hiding it between her breasts. She had made him hunt for it with his mouth, his tongue. After he had found it, they had made love for hours, urgently. He could not think of the pen without thinking of her soft, hot skin. He could not think of the pen without remembering her nakedness, shining in the dark room.
Overcome, he rose.
The manager stopped pacing.
“Is there a problem?” the manager asked, his eyes cold. Steam seemed to rise off the top of his head, but it was only the screen behind him.
“Is there a problem?” he repeated when the man said nothing, all of the man’s will focused on the pen.
With a shudder, a sigh, the man shook his head and sat down.
The manager gave him a sharp look, then resumed his lecture.
Behind the manager, the walker had reached the observatory, which had turned into a museum, which had become a library, and then was gone, replaced by the V of geese migrating across thin, light-blue air… and the time between the manager’s curt words and the man’s realization that he was capable of killing the manager yawned across that expanse of sky like the slow curve of his own signature.
Sometimes
Sometimes, sitting in the basement, staring at dim green light through a murky portal, the janitor-in-training had a strange longing for another life, a life he received an inkling of in the small hours of the night, in a stray sentence of conversation curling away from him around a corner of the office. A chance meeting on a crowded elevator. A life he knew he would never find, too enraptured by or entangled in the life he had already chosen. Each day he eyed the back of his trainer with suspicion and found less logic in the speeches of the Head Janitor.
Conquest
At dusk one day, the company that had colonized the second and third floors conquered the first and fourth floors as well. For months, they had sent their employees to work on one or four. For months, these new employees had infiltrated the first and fourth floors. The liquidation, when it came, was swift and brutal. Cruel smiles. Locked doors. Blood sprayed across walls, carpet, ceiling. No one on the outside heard the shouts and screams. No one came to help. The janitors in the basement, balanced teetering on their chairs as they watched television screens filled with snow, paid no heed, even to the muffled echoes that descended to them from the air ducts.
For a time, all was still. All was quiet. The outside of the building glimmered with patchwork lights. The sounds of traffic dulled into silence. A wind came up and the nearby forest rustled with the music of leaves. To the east, the shopping mall lost the glister of its neon signs. To the north, the highways slowed to a sometimes car, flaring like the tip of a cigarette. To the south, the sudden stars cut off abruptly, victims of the gloom that hid the south from all but the most piercing gaze.
