The Cubicle Next Door

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The Cubicle Next Door Page 13

by Siri L. Mitchell

Joe was giving me a thumbs-up.

  “Yeah. Sure.”

  Being volunteered for assorted and sundry team and committee meetings was not uncommon, so I wasn’t worried. I’d find out all the details when I read Estelle’s minutes. Minutes were one thing she did quickly. Mostly because the colonel required an almost immediate report on the action items. The minutes would be broadcast to the entire department within the hour.

  I returned to my sand dollars.

  An hour later, I was staring at my computer screen.

  “Um, Joe?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Have you read Estelle’s minutes?”

  “Reading them right now.”

  “This part about the Emma Crawford Coffin Race?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think Estelle put my name into the wrong item…right?”

  “Nope. She got it right. You volunteered to be Emma.”

  “Emma?”

  “Emma Crawford. You know, sit in the coffin while the history department team pushes it down Manitou Avenue.”

  “No, no, no, no, no. I never agreed to do that.”

  Here’s how I knew I hadn’t agreed. The Emma Crawford Coffin Race was run in Manitou Springs every October, the Saturday before Halloween. It was in commemoration of Emma Crawford, who had come to Manitou Springs at the turn of the last century in search of a cure for tuberculosis. She met an engineer who was working on the Cog Railway, became engaged to him, but died before the wedding took place. Her fiancé buried her on top of Red Mountain, where she could commune with nature and the various spirits she insisted were waiting for her up there.

  Many years later, after having been buffeted by Colorado weather, the peak disintegrated and let Emma and her coffin go. Nameplate and all. She took a ride down the mountain and was discovered by two local boys.

  I was not going to be Emma Crawford.

  And I was certainly not going to sit in a coffin while it was being raced down Manitou Avenue.

  “Yep. I’m pretty sure you did. At least, that’s what the colonel thinks.”

  Great.

  Just great.

  Because the colonel had this thing about responsibility and accountability. Whatever it was a person agreed to in a meeting was what that person absolutely had to do. You had to come through. Because, in his words, “If I tell you I’m dropping a bomb on Bolivia, I sure as #$!% better not drop it on Beirut.”

  Dang. Double dang. Dang, dang, dang.

  He also had a thing about department togetherness. And if I was going to ride in a coffin race and four department members were going to push me, then at least half the department was going to be arm-twisted into watching us.

  Mandatory department fun.

  “I’m going to kill you.”

  “Could you at least wait until after the Coffin Race?”

  Three weeks later I was wishing I had been responsible and kept accountable and followed through on my threat to kill Joe.

  “Look dead.” Joe was standing in front of me, scrutinizing my face.

  “I’m trying.”

  “You don’t look dead enough.”

  “Listen, do you want to wear this dress? And this hat? Because we could change costumes.”

  It was 10:30 AM on the day of the race. We were at Joe’s house. The four mourner-runners and I. We were being dressed by the mourners’ wives. They had gone all out. Joe and his cohorts would be running in tails and top hats. They were all sporting black armbands and walking sticks.

  I had been being dressed for over an hour. Someone had put way too much work into my costume. There were bloomers and underskirts and petticoats. A camisole and corset. The dress was of gray satin with a low square neck edged by white lace that was attached at the shoulders with white roses. Fake ones. The sleeves looked like deflated puffs and hung down around my elbows. They were also edged in lace. The waist was gathered and then it dropped to the floor and trailed out behind me. A tripping hazard. I was required to wear a helmet during the race, so they had hidden it inside a hat. A decorated version of a top hat, it sprouted bows and feathers and all sorts of other things. It also had a gray veil draped across the front, conveniently located for maximum opacity for the coffin ride down Manitou Avenue.

  The women were coating all my available skin with white clown paint. “Don’t move your mouth,” one of them cautioned “or the paint will crack.”

  They finished painting me. Fastened the helmet onto my head. Then it was time for pictures.

  The other three mourners got up from the couch where they had been watching football. They put their jackets on, stuck their hats on their heads, and pulled the elastic bands down under their chins.

  “Where should we take them?”

  “Let’s take some on the couch. Then we can take more outside with the coffin.”

  “Jackie,” one of the wives grabbed me by the elbow and dragged me over to the couch. “Lie there and pretend you’re dead.”

  There seemed to be a lot of that going around.

  I fell onto the couch, trying hard not to move anything with paint on it. I clasped my hands on top of my chest. Joe shoved a bouquet of black roses into them.

  The four guys knelt beside the couch in various poses of grief.

  Joe looked the most stricken. Of course. He knew his time on earth was limited. By me.

  Outside, Joe lifted me into the foam-padded, red-satin lined coffin. For the first photo, I lay down, reenacting the pose I’d struck inside. Then I sat up, the way I would during the race.

  He grabbed my arm. “Look d—”

  “Don’t…say…it.”

  The guys smiled. I didn’t.

  After the pictures were taken, they wheeled me down Pawnee Avenue.

  “Hey, want to practice, Jackie? We could let go. Race you to the bottom of the hill.”

  That’s Joe. Always the joker. Because flying down the hill on Pawnee Avenue would send me whizzing across Manitou Avenue and dump me right into Fountain Creek.

  They didn’t let me go.

  We arrived safely at Memorial Park and lined up with the other coffin contestants waiting to be checked in. We had our coffin inspected and measured. Received our race schedule. I stood beside the coffin while our team was judged. Then we joined the Parade of Coffins.

  Joe and the other guys each carried a bag filled with slimy rubber eyeballs and globs of gook filled with maggots. From time to time they reached into their bags and threw their ghastly treasures out into the crowd. A chorus of shrieks accompanied our coffin on its way down the street.

  I sat in the coffin and waved, but not too often. I didn’t want to crack my paint.

  Crowds lined the avenue, separated from the coffins by garlands of tape, in some cases looking suspiciously like the black-and-yellow tape used to rope off crime scenes.

  All sorts of people watched us go by. Average families composed of Mom, Dad, and two kids. Groups of punked-out teens. Clusters of aging hippies.

  After the parade we waited in Memorial Park until it was our turn to race.

  The racing was done in pairs. Each coffin was responsible for keeping in its own lane.

  The mourners wheeled me up to the starting line. They each grabbed hold of a regulation handle, attached firmly to the side of the coffin, projecting not more than ten inches from the sides.

  I looked over at the other team. They were dressed as ghouls with gray-green faces and drooping black robes. The woman sitting inside was a skeleton, complete with white hair and black-rimmed eyes.

  Creepy.

  “On your mark!”

  I grabbed onto the edges of the coffin.

  “Get set!”

  The guys bent forward, toward the finish line. Joe was on the left side, at the back.

  “Go!”

  We were off.

  The crowd was cheering, I could tell by their faces, but the only sounds I heard were of shoes slapping the road and heavy breathing.

  “This thing is a bear to pu
sh!” We weren’t even 50 yards into the race and one of the guys on the right was already complaining.

  I glanced over at the other team. They were catching up to us. “Just run!”

  “Did anyone put oil on the wheels?”

  A couple paces went by before anyone answered Joe. Then they all answered at once. “No.”

  “Stop talking. They’re catching us!” Turning in my coffin seat, I could see the other team advancing with every step.

  “Go faster!”

  Joe tore his eyes from the finish line. Glanced up at me. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

  “Faster! They’re passing us!’

  “Be…dead!”

  There were only 100 yards left. “Go, go, go, go, go!” My chants were interspersed with Joe’s “be dead, be dead, be dead.”

  At ten yards we were coffin-to-coffin.

  “Come on! Push it! Let’s go!”

  The guys exhausted the last of their energy and sprinted across the finish line. By the time they crossed, I was curled into a crouch, holding onto the sides of the coffin, screaming and yelling my head off.

  I stood up, reached down, and high-fived everyone.

  Then I realized what I was doing.

  I was supposed to be dead. Boy, I’d really screwed that up.

  But Joe whisked me off and gave me a hug before setting me on my feet.

  The colonel was there, with his wife and about 15 other families from the department. They all congratulated us.

  An hour later, it was our turn to race again in the first of two final heats.

  Again, we won. Again, I wound up at the finish line on my knees, inside the coffin, cheering on the guys.

  The winner of the next heat was faster than us by two seconds.

  Oh, well.

  Runner-up wasn’t bad.

  At the end of the day, we’d almost won, I’d almost lost my voice, and I’d almost decided to let Joe live.

  THE CUBICLE NEXT DOOR BLOG

  Surprise, surprise

  I had the chance to work on a project with John Smith. On a project I would have vetoed out of hand had it been up to me. The results were of no importance to myself or anyone else. It was extracurricular in the way only mandatory office fun can be. But I found myself behaving in completely unexpected ways. Maybe even…enjoying…the experience. I still don’t know what it means.

  Posted on October 28 in The Cubicle Next Door | Permalink

  Comments

  Experiment. Experience is all there is to life.

  Posted by: philosophie | October 28 at 10:03 PM

  Yeah, ’cause once you finally get it all figured out, that’s when you die.

  Posted by: survivor | October 29 at 11:28 AM

  Don’t you just hate those “not required but highly encouraged” events?

  Posted by: justluvmyjob | October 30 at 08:02 AM

  Unexpected behavior reveals a disconnect between who you perceive yourself to be and who you really are. Hypothesis states you will resolve this conflict only by engaging in behaviors to eliminate the contradiction between the two perceptions.

  Posted by: NozAll | October 30 at 12:13 PM

  Otherwise known as Festinger’s Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. Thank you, Mr. Fortune Cookie, for your scintillating analysis.

  Posted by: thatsmrtoyou | October 30 at 12:26 PM

  Seventeen

  The next week I was watching ABC’s news journal with Grandmother. They kept teasing viewers, just before cutting away to commercials, with an upcoming story on blogs. Reading tantalizing bits of blog entries. Talking up how they were cyber diaries just waiting for electronic eyes to read them.

  I was marginally interested.

  Mostly for security’s sake.

  Since I did, in fact, have a blog. And I didn’t want anyone to know who I was.

  So I suffered through an exposé on biomedical research. And another on customer service hotlines. Finally, the blog segment came up. It was the last story.

  Of course.

  The story started by flashing the logos of the most popular blogging sites. Had fade-outs of different blog titles. And then a voice-over started reading from a blog.

  I’m worse than a shark. I can smell your cologne from 100 yards away. And it lingers in my senses, long after you are gone.

  I swallowed my water down the wrong pipe and started to cough. Couldn’t stop. But I could still hear the voice. It kept right on reading.

  John Smith doesn’t know this, but I’ve got his back. He thinks I work just as long as he does, but I don’t. Not really. I just stay until he goes home. In spite of considering himself the expert at everything, he doesn’t know anything about the women here. Has no idea how many of them have paused at the cubicle and then kept on walking when they’ve seen me sitting at my desk.

  They were reading from my blog!

  Grandmother snorted. “This is public television. They shouldn’t be talking about things like that. What kind of person writes this sort of thing?”

  I did.

  I wrote that sort of thing. But I never though anyone would read it.

  The voice went on say people blogged for many different reasons. That my blog, The Cubicle Next Door, was, at first glance, just a blog about modern life, but if read carefully, provided perhaps some shades of office romance. Of the modern girl next door. A diary filled with the angst of unrequited love.

  Angst!

  They actually called me the Ingenue of the Blogosphere.

  I sat through the rest of the segment praying that at the end they would put someone else’s URL up on the screen. Hoping that somewhere out in cyberspace I had a clone.

  As it turns out, I did not.

  On the way to work the next morning, I felt exposed. As if everyone in the world knew I was ABC’s favorite ingenue. If only they could see me now: dark green sweater, lime green Converse. Hair pulled back with two rubber bands that had last been used to hold stalks of celery together. I had ceased to be anyone’s ingenue at the age of three.

  All the way down the interstate I lectured myself about the blog.

  I had only ever started it for therapeutic reasons. To vent. To whine. To rage. And those reasons still held true. Especially after last night. I’d never asked for publicity. Didn’t want it. In fact, it could hardly make a difference.

  In anything.

  The only person I really didn’t want to know about the blog was Joe. And what were the chances he’d even watched TV the night before?

  Football?

  Maybe.

  A news journal?

  Never.

  So I was safe.

  Joe was already in his cubicle when I got there. Sipping coffee and leaning over his laptop.

  “I could order you a cover for your keyboard. That way when you spill coffee on it, you can just wipe it off. No harm. No electrocution.”

  “Hey.” He barely looked over at me.

  “Don’t let me disturb you.”

  “Hmm?”

  I shrugged out of my coat, draped it over a stack of boxes. Logged on to the computer.

  “Hey.”

  “You already said that.”

  “There was this blog on TV last night.”

  I broke out into a cold sweat right above my lip. “Really.”

  “Here. I’ll send you the URL.”

  I opened the e-mail from him and read my very own address on the Internet. “I never read blogs. Waste of time.”

  “Never?”

  “Ever.”

  “Because it seems like this one would interest you.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It just reminds me of you.”

  “What’s it about?”

  “Some girl. I’m reading backward to the beginning.”

  I brought up the blog and went into my archives. Brought up my very first entry, a little over a year ago. Scanned for anything at all that might give me away. Nothing.

  Went to the next one.
r />   “Huh.”

  “What?” What had he found?

  “Nothing.”

  I worked my way through the first month, horrified by the number of things I’d blogged about. Why couldn’t I keep my big mouth zipped? Or my hands hidden inside mittens. Something. Anything.

  “Wow.”

  “What?” I kept bringing up entries. Skimming them for hints, clues, anything that would give me away. Heaping humiliation upon myself.

  “Wow.”

  “What? What!”

  “She must really like this guy.”

  “Who? Which guy?”

  “The one she’s blogging about.”

  “The blog’s about a guy? I thought it was about a cubicle. The Cubicle Next Door.”

  “It’s about the guy in the cubicle next to her.”

  “Oh. But maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s…symbolism.”

  “Symbolism?”

  “Yeah, you know. Like…water equals life and winter equals death.”

  “Then what would this equal? ‘My little car doesn’t stand a chance in a face-off against an SUV. It’s the equivalent of modern day jousting. Or boxing without separating the athletes into weight classes. And that’s what John Smith drives. Too bad. I might have been able to like him.’”

  “Oh. That’s easy. SUVs are symbolic of man’s inhumanity against man.”

  “For example…?”

  “For example…it’s always the little guy who gets crunched up. Her little car versus the guy’s big car. Big box stores versus Mom and Pop stores.”

  “Oh. SUV as metaphor. The car as a literary vehicle. Tied in with jousting to lend a historical perspective to the plight of modern man. The image of the boxer, pummeling his opponent.”

  “Yeah. All that…stuff.”

  “Then you two have a lot in common.”

  “We do? We don’t. I don’t think we do.”

  “You both hate SUVs.”

  “Have I ever said that?”

  “Frequently.”

  “I didn’t mean hate. That’s a rather strong word, don’t you think?”

  “Well, I don’t think there’s any way you could mistake this one: ‘I’m worse than a shark. I can smell your cologne from 100 yards away. And it lingers in my senses, long after you are gone.’”

  I put my hands over my ears. Placed my forehead on the desk. Stop it. Stop!

 

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