The Shaft

by David J. Schow

  You are the star of your own life, his mother had informed him, what seemed like centuries ago. But what if your life was a play nobody cared to watch?

  So what? C'mon, kiddo - dazzle me.

  On the shelf at eye-level was a wind-up pterodactyl skeleton, one of Bash's little 'Welcome to Hell' gifts. At his desk, Jonathan had been paring his cuticles with an X-Acto knife. By now he had drawn blood twice. He let the knife roll down to the retention border at the bottom of the layout table, which was a solid four-by-three surface of opaque plastic illuminated from beneath. Two long strips of compugraphics galley proof were taped to the table, blue with Jonathan's handwritten tweaks and corrections. He twisted the windup knob on the prehistoric proto-birdie and set it to climbing the slope of the table. Its rubber wheels slipped on the smooth white plastic. One skeletal wing flapped slowly; its opposite was lame, the tab that operated it stuck in a rib strut. Jonathan removed the wing and trimmed the tab with the X-Acto, but the prognosis was not optimistic. He thought of pterodactyl remains, of ghost dinosaurs recently reborn from a glacier and fighting to negotiate the icy incline. No go.

  Bash had a faultless taste for toys and owned all the best ones. He was still the caretaker of a lot of the fallout from his childhood - a Robot Commando with most of its projectiles, a James Bond Attache Case (missing the exploding codebook), a set of Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots and a whole first string lineup of vending machine Rat Finks. To Jonathan, Bash's most intriguing trifle was a snow globe, the kind filled with water that simulated a blizzard when you shook it. The scene within was a miniature cemetery: Tiny gray headstones jutted from a hillock in painted plastic with part of a rotten picket fence at the rear. When you looked straight down from above, you saw the little graves were open, all occupied by little corpses, their skulls showing jeweled eyes, their cerements clutched about their bones like the clothes of dead pirates. Snug in their tiny graves, they formed a microcosmic necropolis. When the snow settled, the graves were evenly filled again, their tenants concealed.

  Bash still had his Magic 8-Ball. Flip it and a mystic answer would bob to the surface of the circular window on the bottom. It is Not Certain. Outlook Good. When Jonathan had owned one, and asked it about meaningful things in his life, he had usually gotten the dreaded Ask Again Later. But Bash, predictably, had grown bored with this bargain hocus pocus. Too tepid, too conventional. In the layout room of Rapid O'Graphics he had designed and glued together his own tetrahedron of answers. With the resources of the shop and his own fine touch it was simple for him to dismantle the Magic 8-Ball, substitute his innovation, refill the glass globe with water, and deftly reassemble the sphere. After Bash's meddling, it was constructed better than it had been off the shelf. And here came Jonathan to Chicago, picking up Bash's Magic 8-Ball off the shelf, utterly sans clue, fearing Ask Again Later after all these years.

  Bash had taken a bathroom break. Jonathan asked it, sotto voce, whether things would ever get straightened out between him and Amanda. The reply bobbed forth.

  Fuck You, Asshole.

  Bash cruised past to monitor the handicapped pterodactyl's climb. It was hopeless, backsliding.

  'Yo, bro, how it be?' Big hands clamped Jonathan's shoulders. It was a proprietory sort of gesture he had come to quietly appreciate. Almost like being adopted.

  He waved the X-Acto toward the copy sheets. 'This is done; I'm just dicking around. It'll be ready to fly out of here in five minutes. Ten at the outside.'

  'No sweat. Most everybody's taken off; it's close enough to El Quitto Time. Wanna hear some office gossip?'

  Jonathan's eyes stayed with the windup robot, hopeful. Then the copy. Never Bash. He steeled himself. The wrong answer was going to bob up. 'Shoot.'

  'Capra says to Charcoal; 'Y'know Charcoal, I've been nursemaiding cripples for so long it physically pains me to see competent work done so fast.' He holds up an ad dummy. 'I am in pain,' he says.

  'Charcoal looks at him and says: 'We'll do our best to keep you from hurting, oh bossman.' Then Capra, like, petrifies. And says: 'You'd better do your dumdest to make sure I get regular pain as good as this dummy, Chare, Or guess who's gonna get your pay rises next quarter, hm?' And they both laugh. But Charcoal doesn't look all that amused, and Capra doesn't look like he's joking. And guess whose work they were talking about. Go on, guess.'

  'Your ownself, naturally.' Jonathan swiveled on the drafting stool and met Bash's eyes. 'The Big Bwana of layout.'

  'Nope. Guess again.' Bash was beaming. He really was like a great big daddy bear.

  Jonathan lost a bit of color. He could not spare it. 'Seriously?'

  'Serious as a heart attack, my man. The boss is impressed. That ad was for Krueger's magazine. Krueger was impressed. He phoned Capra. Can you add or do I have to spell it out for you?'

  'He said, gleefully mixing his metaphors.' Most of Jonathan's ripostes were funny only to him. 'Jesus - you're not kidding. He was that…?' An ember of pride stoked up in his breast. Of course he had been trying to dazzle them, but consciously, quietly, he thought unobtrusively. Recall modesty. Try not to gloat. 'What about Charcoal? Isn't he going to be pissed? Am I going to be the recipient of sullen glares from afar?'

  'Nah. No skin off his dick. His sinecure at Rapid O'Graphics is a given, mas o menos. He worked his way up the ranks, too. Every so often, new blood's a fireball, and all the happy dancers suddenly remember that they're supposed to be on their toes. It's good for business. Last time it happened was when yours truly signed on. Nobody got shitcanned because of my illustrious presence. I told you you'd dig it here.'

  ***

  Rapid O'Graphics was headquartered in a five-bedroomed house on Saffron Way, two blocks distant from Oakwood's northeast corner, bordered by Russet Run to the north and Elmwood Park to the east. Capra had gutted the backyard garage to make a carport for his employees. Heavy snowfall had collapsed the structure two weeks back, burying Capra's Baby Beemer and forcing all and sundry to park on Saffron Way, battling the implacable wet white stuff and the lunatic, unreliable plowing schedules. Jonathan's first task as the new hired hand was shoveling out parked berths on the street. Bash had shrugged. That was life's great pageant in all its tawdry tackiness.

  Capra owned and resided in the house next door. It had been sheer bad luck that his BMW was not in his own treelined drive on the day of the cave-in. The Rapid O'Graphics house did not thrust a business nose outward to deface this residential avenue; it joyed in blending in. The downstairs kitchen was a disaster area of each employee's favored work beverage. There was a restaurant coffeemaker with three hot pots - normal, decaf, and hot water for one of twenty teas. There was a fridge full of soft drinks and a case or two of Freixneif for the frequent after-hours toasts and the odd birthday. There was a freezer the size of casket stocked with Weight Watchers entries and pizzas and a host of microwavable munchies. Nobody at Rapid O'Graphics 'took lunch.' The plastic eateries within striking distance all served Denny's style vomit on a plate, and who the hell wanted to tough it out back in the White Nightmare?

  Upstairs, three bedrooms were crowded with slanted drafting benches, files, and unboxed supplies on steel component racks. Downstairs was a darkroom with a revolving blackout door, plus, a roomful of typesetting and photo reduction gear. Capra was clearing floor space for a monstrous Xerox machine on which he'd just closed a thief s deal. The living room was sofa-grouped into a comfy general-purpose staff meeting area, relaxation zone and slouch-a-rama. An offset press had been set up in a utility room formerly used for gardening storage until Capra weatherproofed it and moved in space heaters.

  Littering all available wall space was paper. The first reaction Jonathan had felt was of mad bunting, of shredded party crepe with the detritus of a ticker tape parade hurled in for extra chaos. Stapled, taped or otherwise stuck to the walls was enough paper to supply pulp for a run of the Chicago phone book, white and yellow pages. Cutouts, cartoons, dummies, galleys, strips and snippets. Film and photos. Maps. Graffiti.
Posters and ad art. Memos and menus impaled on thumbtacks, pushpins, cocktail swizzles, even tournament darts. The closer you got to Capra's office, the more frames you saw: Awards, commendations, appreciations. You could conceivably sit and read the mosaic of any given wall for hours.

  Jonathan liked the atmosphere. Capra's place of business was an outpost of common sense in a world of corporate waste; funky, homey, vaguely subversive. Capra had been a product of the Sixties with his eye turned - no boast - toward the Nineties.

  Jonathan's corner was next to a laughably unneeded air conditioner blocking a second story window. Once he had nested, and arranged his tools to suit his reach and temperament, he quickly felt as though Capra's was a place he might belong. The stool was locked to accommodate his height. The work surface was slanted to his taste. Bash had presented him with a coffee mug, a Gary Larson job in color featuring cigarette-puffing dinosaurs. Its home was on a slim doodad shelf Jonathan had erected beside the air conditioner. This was where the lame pterodactyl perched. Jonathan had gagged the cooler's vents with gaffer's tape to block the wisps of frozen outside air that shimmied through. When he checked in on the third day of actual time-clocked work, he found that someone had stationed a blue plastic brontosaurus on top of the cooler, with a Post-It note word balloon: SAY HEY DINO BOY.

  The culprit had been Jessica, who made her living in the darkroom downstairs. She possessed an incredible thundercloud of frizzy black hair, flawless chocolate skin and a symmetry of facial features that suggested to Jonathan that there was Oriental blood lurking in her mix. She always wore heels to work and quickly cultivated the ritual of hugging Jonathan hello, or socking him on the bicep en passant. According to Bash, Jessica's divorce papers had come through spot on her fortieth birthday, and she had not stopped smiling since. She had the most generous mouth Jonathan had ever seen. It was intended to smile.

  After that, Jonathan attracted dinosaur mementos as though magnetized. The walls of his corner were decorated in no time. The nickname Dino Boy stuck - unfortunately. More than once, Jonathan jested that he'd sleep behind his desk at Rapid O'Graphics if he could get away with it.

  There was a biting reason for this.

  His first night in Chicago, Jonathan had been assigned to Bash's living room couch. At seven the following morning, he listened in a semi-doze as first Camela, then Bash bought consciousness in the shower. Then came the whirr of his and hers blowdryers. Camela emerged after a half-hour regimen of cosmetics, grinned large, and ordered Jonathan to call her Cammy - everybody did. There was no way he could climb into his pants out of her sight. She hovered while he choked down two hard-fried eggs edged with char. Camela explained how crazy she was about General Foods International Coffees. Jonathan convinced Bash to steam him an espresso for breakfast. He did not wish to insult Cammy's cooking, and so avoided telling her that when he woke up, the idea of eating food was only slightly less repulsive to him than soaking his head in the shower. Jonathan was not a morning shower person. He usually did it before retiring. The sheets lasted longer that way. If you had a bedmate, it was pulse-quickening to slide in next to them all smooth and clean and radiating heat from a late night shower. Frequently this could evolve into a capital reason for making the bedding sweaty and tangled.

  No problem so far. Just adjustments. Real coffee Jonathan could get at work. If you knew the elixir of life was waiting at the far end of a commute, it was easier to slap yourself awake. Showers at night, alter Camela retired, were acceptable. He was careful not to make any noise. He was amused to discover that his old buddy Bash was a confirmed eater of breakfast cereal. It was two bowls of Frosted Flakes or it wasn't a new day.

  They rode to work together.

  Camela was Rapid O'Graphics' interface with the outside world and ringmaster to the switchboard circus. She deflected intruders, greeted visitors, kept up a pleasant phone face, oversaw anything that lived in a file folder and tried to keep workaday bullshit out of Capra's flight path. She ran errands and distributed paychecks. She was the butt of cautious little jokes by the upstairs crew, who were privileged not to have to share a floor with her. Jonathan sensed the brand of group hostility that never truly grows, goes anywhere, or catalyzes action. Camela was easily the most officious of Capra's employees.

  She, Bash and Jonathan rode home together.

  He was good with reassuring banter and kept on his company manners. Past Day Three there were no more complimentary breakfast eggs to worry about; she was just so busy and he would understand, right?

  Six days in, Camela began going to bed earlier. Sometimes she would clearly summon Bash to attend her. Jonathan thought of a slice of spoiled Suthrin whitebread, snapping her fingers for a slave. The second time it happened, Bash lumbered out of the bedroom and gave Jonathan an exaggerated shrug that said he did not really fathom what was going on, either. Then he switched on the ceiling fan, ostensibly to circulate the building's costly heat more efficiently„ Jonathan realized the fan was supposed to mask the noise coming from the bedroom. The building was newer; the walls were garbage. Camela woofed like the Little Engine That Could when she was being fucked. She was one of those romantics who had seen too many soap operas and not enough porn, concluding that a definitive moan should accompany each manly thrust… as though to earmark it for later filing.

  Jonathan's gut untightened only after Camela had gone to bed. He and Bash burned oil, working their way through Bash's CD collection and many sixpacks of Quietly Beer. By the third week it was clear that a competition for Bash's attention and leisure time was afoot, and that Jonathan was winning.

  'She wants to have your babies,' Jonathan said. Quietly Beer had a nice, nutty afterbite. It was light enough to permit consumption of several bottles without a breath-stealing bloat. An overproduced synth tune called "The Killing Love' was rolling out of Bash's Quattro monitors.

  Bash shook his head. 'The one thought that turns my morbid attention toward Mr Vasectomy. I know that if I brought that back up, she'd talk about adopting kids. She's got the next thirty years all blueprinted.'

  'With or without your consultation?'

  Bash made a face. 'What do you think?'

  Long swig, held and swallowed. Jonathan cleared his throat. 'I think Camela's cruise control was engaged a long time ago, and nobody ever bothered to disillusion her while she was laying plans, and now all of those plans have stacked up, accumulated weight, and are about to tip over and squash one or both of you.'

  'Mm.' Bash's hyper-talky persona had stepped out. He groped around in the clear plastic bag at his side and brought up a fortune cookie, which he cracked and devoured. He glanced at the slip of paper without reaction and tossed it into a clamshell ashtray on the coffee table. Filling the ashtray, amid dead butts with Camela's bubblegum-flavored lipstick staining the filters, were enough fortunes for a crowded busload of people. Some were half-burned. Bash bought the cookies by the bagful from a restaurant supplier. He could plow through fifty or more while watching a movie on videotape, always checking the fortunes before he threw them away, as though on a quest for some ultimate revelation, or a single prediciton more perfectly suited to his life.

  Bash's reaction to the expression on Jonathan's face had said: You are the only person who finds this compulsive consumption of fortune cookies weird; I bet lots of people like 'em. So there, kimosabe.

  'Camela strikes me as the sort of woman who was meticulously programmed to snare herself a husband,' said Jonathan. 'As though the only way anyone would want to spend time with her was by being lured, tricked. Mommy says learn to apply makeup well enough so that your prey does not see the pit covered with jungle leaves.'

  Jonathan was being cruel and he knew it. He had seen, from Camela's wardrobe, that she had hit the stage in her twenties where strategic concealment was more important than diet. The dressy stuff she wore to work was layered to hide the runaway widening of her thighs. Scarves with brooches would come next, to cover up the chin collection. The straight cut of her
suit coats diverted the eye from the sprawl transpiring in the butt zone. Jonathan kept this observation to himself along with a few meaner ones. Bash was pretty large himself, no skeleton. But surely he saw that Camela was not the sort of woman to deny herself anything, from double desserts to a prefab family.

  Perfectly fine, if that was what Bash wanted. His discomfort and reticence suggested otherwise.

  'She was bugging me about when you were going to leave,' Bash said. 'Find a place of your own.' He killed his Quietly and rose to fetch two more, taking along a fortune cookie to fuel his kitchen run. Jonathan did not get to see the fortune. When Bash came back he was rubbing his forehead as though he was nursing an alcohol headache.

  'I wish there was a slot in this damned building,' Jonathan said. They'd had this talk once before. 'That would be the best of both worlds: I wouldn't be in her way, we could still mesh for work, and everybody gets a little more privacy.'

  'Last vacancy was a studio, two months ago. But you might be too weird for the management. In their eyes Cammy and I are an upwardly mobile couple. But if I was by myself I don't know that I could get in here, either.'

  Jonathan and Bash had investigated several of the local rental agencies. Most held some very strange conformities in high priority. One desk jockey had emphasized that approvals for listed units were based strictly on availability… and that Jonathan's haircut, of course, had no bearing on any decision that might or might not be made. Jonathan had been struck slackjawed. Bash, livid, had loomed closer, throwing the rental agent into a large shadow, and had gently opined that perhaps the agent's receding hairline and bad vision were a consequence of fucking too many barnyard animals as a youth.

  Scratch one more agency.

  Week Three bled into Week Four. Presumably Camela had hit her period in one of these four weeks. Jonathan noticed no difference. Was she this hostile all the time?