My Work Is Not Yet Done

by Thomas Ligotti

  ‘Sorry, Lil,’ I said as I stuffed the plaster hands inside the bag and crumpled it closed. But I wasn’t sure if my apology was for thoughtlessly bringing these unclean objects into Lillian’s otherwise well-scrubbed place of business or if the sight of these replicant parts of the human body somehow unsettled her. I suspected it was the latter, but I didn’t pursue the issue.

  ‘You still taking pictures of those old buildings and junk for your book?’ Lillian asked.

  ‘Mm-hm,’ I wordlessly replied, turning away to look out the front window of the diner. I found it difficult, almost painful, to perpetuate the lie of ‘my book’ to Lillian. But what could I say to her? That I’m drawn to those old buildings and junk because (voice beginning to seethe) . . . because they take me into a world (the seething builds) . . . a world that is the exact opposite of the one (voice seething to a pitch) . . . the one I’m doomed by my own weakness and fear to live in (uncontrollable, meta-maniacal seething) . . . to live in during my weeks, my months, my years and years of work . . . work . . . work?

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ she said. ‘There’s so many pretty things you could be taking pictures of. Far as that goes, I still don’t know why you live upstairs – not saying I ain’t glad to have a regular-paying tenant. But even I live in a better neighborhood. And you could live anywhere you want.’

  ‘What can I say, Lil? I am addicted to your cooking. Speaking of which, could I get the meatloaf special before you close for the day?’

  ‘Sure can,’ Lillian replied as she lit up a cigarette. ‘You hear that, Rudy?’

  ‘Yeah, I heard,’ the voice of Rudy called out.

  As she poured out two cups of coffee (decaf for me, as she already knew), I wondered if Lillian’s employees feared her in the way that I feared Richard. After all, one business is essentially the same as another, and she was the owner, CEO, and sole stockholder of that longstanding enterprise called the Metro Diner. I judged her to be easily as tough as Richard, and, in her own world, just as savvy. Was I now trading pleasantries with an elderly black woman who beneath the surface was no different from Richard the Bastard, Richard the Evil One? I liked Lillian, but I knew her only from the perspective of the customer, which made me just a little current in that river of cash that she needed to keep flowing into her accounts.

  ‘You going to just stare at that coffee?’ Lillian asked.

  I smiled at being caught in an unguarded state of preoccupation with my dark thoughts. Then I took a sip of the decaf.

  ‘It’s good. Tastes like the real thing,’ I said, and this time I was telling the truth.

  ‘Nothing hard about making a good cup of coffee,’ Lillian said to this customer as she lit up another cigarette.

  And that statement provided something of an answer to my questions about Lillian and her business. Because the coffee at the Metro Diner didn’t have to be as good as it was, nor did the excellent food served there have to be so carefully prepared or so reasonably priced. That was not how we did things where I happened to work. The company that employed me strived only to serve up the cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling, creating that which all our efforts were tacitly supposed to achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product they would command the ultimate price – Everything.

  This market strategy would then go on until one day, among the world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and office buildings, there stood only a single, shining, windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside would be – will be – only a dense network of computers calculating profits. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining, windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god. Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory proving wholly ineffectual against the smooth and impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a scratch can be inflicted.

  I spent most of my days in a world devoted to turning this fable into a reality, I knew that. I also knew that the Metro Diner did not exist in that world, that somehow it was located in another place altogether, a zone where the daylight really had been saved, even if it was fast running out. That was why I liked Lillian; that was why I lived in the apartment above her diner. And that, alas, was why I began dreaming about The Doctor who reached with his puffy, four-fingered gloves into the cages and tanks of animals, of living merchandise, in a dimestore pet shop.

  Monday morning I awoke before dawn, shaking from the effects of another of these dreams.

  ‘He has special gloves for fixing them,’ I mumbled with dream-horror. ‘He can go inside with his gloves.’

  Even then he was already inside me, just as he had been inside so many others before . . . fixing them, fixing and fixing, fixing until – in one way or another – they broke.

  7

  All right, then!

  But I didn’t have the opportunity to hear Richard speak these words that Monday. When I entered the room where I and The Seven gathered according to a weekly schedule, where we sat in the dried-up leather of enormous chairs at a scarred-up banquet table, our little voices droning amid great dim spaces decorated in a Victorian Gothic style, I saw that the meeting was already in progress.

  ‘Look who decided to join us,’ Richard bellowed as I closed the heavy and intricately carved door of the room behind me. ‘Glad you could make it, Mr Domino.’

  I glanced at my watch, which I had had the habit of obsessively monitoring for as long as I could remember. I had not arrived late to the meeting. ‘I didn’t know the time of the meeting had been pushed back,’ I said as I took my seat, everyone else staring at me in silence.

  ‘Is it “pushed back” or “moved forward”?’ Richard asked rhetorically . . . and disingenuously. ‘I can never keep those straight.’

  ‘It’s pushed back, I’m pretty sure,’ said Sherry, giving the answer to a question that she didn’t realize needed none.

  ‘Well, in plain English, the time of the meeting was changed,’ said Richard, shifting back to his usual voice of bland authority. ‘You should read your messages, Domino.’

  ‘I did. There was no message about –’

  ‘Actually, Richard,’ interrupted Kerrie, ‘I didn’t want to risk someone not showing up on time because they didn’t read their messages promptly, so I went around and personally told everyone . . . including Frank.’

  It made sense that Kerrie the Framer of Innocent Persons for Stealing Her Lousy Stamps would have the job of insuring that I arrived late to the meeting. There was no point in contradicting her. She could lie far better than I could tell the truth. But that wasn’t what worried me at the moment. The greater issue was that The Seven had held a secret meeting before the real meeting. And I would never know what was on that other meeting’s agenda.

  ‘Well, never mind that now,’ said Richard as though he were giving me a reprieve. ‘We’ve wasted enough time on this already. Let’s just move on to the usual reports and rigmarole. I’ll bring Frank up to speed on the rest of it later.’

  It was another full hour before the meeting ended. By that time everyone had drained to the dregs their two-liter-sized bottles of water, their waxy containers of fruit juice, and their volcano-shaped cups of coffee, tea, or who knows what. (I could still feel the single cup of decaf I’d consumed with breakfast at the Metro Diner sloshing around inside me.) Even Richard had upended his tall thermos of coffee, shaking it over his mug to get at those refractory few drops at the bottom. That was something I had never seen before, which led me to wonder how long the rest of them had been in conference before I arrived. Of course no mention was made of my new product idea, my special plan. That whole matter had entered a realm of gamesmanship that now concerned only Richard and me, and had nothing at all to do with the company . . . or with my ori
ginal intentions to reaffirm my unity with The Seven Swine.

  After the meeting concluded, the other six supervisors gathered up their ringed scheduling books along with their cups, bottles, and waxy boxes, and filed out of the room in total silence, leaving me and Richard sitting some distance away from each other at that long banquet table. Richard was still shuffling some papers around and scribbling in his own scheduling book, or rather books, plural, while I waited anxiously for him to ‘bring me up to speed’. He reigned supreme when it came to the art of the torturous stall, creating the sense of a waiting period that might just trail off into eternity. Then, suddenly, he arranged his papers in a neat stack, slammed both of his notebooks closed, and looked down the table at Domino, who was rolling his pencil back and forth in an attempt to appear calm and casual, even bored. But I botched it, because as soon as Richard was ready to talk I brought that pencil-rolling to an instant halt and jerked my neck around to face the man at the head of the table.

  ‘This is how it is, Frank,’ he began. ‘There’s going to be a few changes, sort of a shifting around. Barry’s going to be leaving our little group in order to head up a committee to come up with a proposal for the new restructuring of the company, which we all knew was coming. It’s Barry’s wish that you also serve on this committee – quite a compliment, I would say, considering the source. Now this is only a temporary arrangement, but it’s going to be a full-time job. You, Barry, and several others to be named later will need to fully draft your proposal by midsummer. This timetable comes straight from the crowd upstairs. They want to see the new restructuring in place by year’s end.’

  ‘Can I ask the purpose of the new restructuring?’

  ‘You know. It’s the same theme as the last restructuring. I mean, sweet Jesus, how many variations can there be on cheaper, faster, and . . . that other thing?’ Richard was as skilled as ever in privately sharing his very genuine cynicism in order to create the false sense that he was really on your side. ‘But if I were you, I wouldn’t bring up questions like that in front of the others on the committee. Just follow Barry’s lead. He knows what’s what with these things.’

  ‘And what happens in the meantime, while Barry and I are serving full-time on this committee?’

  ‘Mary’s going to take over the day-to-day supervision of Barry’s department, in addition to her own. And Kerrie will do the same thing with respect to your people. She knows quite a bit about that new software being tested in your department. It’s only a temporary arrangement. I don’t foresee any bumps along the way. Do you?’

  ‘None at all,’ I agreed, not bothering to bring up Kerrie’s militaristic style of management, her burgeoning psychosis, and her all-round demonic nature.

  For the next few months I served – under Barry – on the restructuring committee, trying to make sense of his concepts for a company-wide reorganization and wearily accepting the successive editions of what he called The Master Chart, which even in its earliest stages resembled a more densely wrought and diabolical version of Dante’s map of Hell. Barry handed out these revised charts to the rest of us almost on a daily basis. Each one contained some infinitesimal modification or addition to the one before it, until the pages outlining his brainchild of restructuralization were almost black with boxes filled with tiny letters that had arrows pointing upward, downward, and sideways to other boxes filled with tiny letters. I never read any of the words – at least I assumed they were words – formed by those tiny letters, which grew tinier and tinier as the boxes became increasingly more numerous and the arrows (the arrows!) ultimately pointed in every direction. Finally the deadline arrived for the committee to turn over its proposal to the greater powers whose offices occupied the twentieth (twenty-first?) floor of the pre-Depression-era building in which the company was located . . . until the time would come for it to relocate to a suburban locale far from the taxes of the city’s downtown area. Now I could return to my old job as a department supervisor – right?

  Wrong: Because under Kerrie’s management two of my old staff had transferred to another division, two had left the company, and two had been fired.

  Wrong: Because Kerrie had her staff, ‘Kerrie’s Special Forces’ she called them, doing all the work once done by both my staff and hers.

  (Barry didn’t return as the supervisor of his old department either, but that was the way things were supposed to work out. He would start working on Phase Two of the company-wide restructuring, while his staff was integrated with Kerrie’s Special Forces. Two understaffed departments were now doing the work of three that had been fully staffed. If I had only paid closer attention to Barry’s charts I might have noticed that this merging of ‘work cells’ was part of the company’s restructuring.)

  And wrong again: Because I had been given a new role in the company’s puppet show, and Richard was pulling the strings with the four, surgically dexterous, fingers of his great gloved hands.

  8

  BY THE END of the summer I was sitting in one of Barry’s tiny square boxes in a corner of the company far removed from where I had been just a few months before. My coworkers were now temporary help, college co-ops, and persons who possessed the ability to spend every workday with their eyes positioned eighteen inches from a glaring screen, their fingertips in constant motion across their keyboards, a never-diminishing pile of pages stacked on the desk counter beside them.

  On the rare occasions that I ran into one of The Seven – perhaps in a lavatory, perhaps in a hallway – they never failed to greet me with the sweetest smiles and concerned inquiries into ‘how I was doing’.

  ‘Just fine,’ I replied, although my unsmiling face and dead voice gave me away to The Victorious Seven, who were on the side of righteousness, the rule of corporate law, and Richard. Speaking of whom, I should record the fact that every so often I still received messages from him asking about my new-product idea and suggesting that perhaps the time was nigh for the company to make some riskier moves. Was he serious? I didn’t know. Did he want to use the complete documentation of my idea, my special plan, to undermine my status in the company even further than he already had? Or was there some other reason altogether that he kept up communications with me on this subject? I didn’t know, I didn’t know. But I did know one thing: no good could come of giving Richard what he wanted from me. He would never, ever see the full documentation of my idea, because it was now in a very safe place. And withholding what Richard wanted did give me some minuscule satisfaction that mitigated, however slightly, what I had endured at the hands of The Seven.

  So why did I stand for such treatment? Why didn’t I leave the company? Why didn’t I do any of a dozen things that I had contemplated doing for many years?

  At the time there was only one answer to these questions. The Doctor had gone inside me, and with his gloved hands he had fixed me and fixed me good. Did I mention that I suffered from Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder?

  Even for a person of average emotional stability the lust for revenge can be quite a time-consuming affair. For me it was all-consuming. It shoved aside every other thought that got in its way, every fantasy and feeling that might have led me back to my former self, every memory of who or what I had ever been. My nights and weekends were now taken over by a set of constantly recycled scenarios in which Domino had his day. And that day was soaked in bathtubs of blood, a day of judgment overseen by a never-setting sun that burned madly red against a black sky.

  But I had always been weak, and, as I think I might also have mentioned, I had always been afraid. So Domino would tough it out, Domino would hang in there, Domino would lay low until . . . until . . . until what I had no idea. Until . . .

  One night I was preparing to leave work, putting away my ID badge, shutting down that staring square of the , etc. And, obsessive-compulsive that I am, I had gotten into the habit of placing a page from a legal pad on top of my pile of unentered data, a page on which I had written ‘WORK NOT DONE’, just in the unlikely event, just
on the remotest chance, that someone from the cleaning staff, or who-knows-who, might see this pile of data as the wastepaper which, in fact, it could justly be mistaken for. No one else among my coworkers, it goes without saying, ever took such precautions. I, on the other hand, could not maintain that puny part of serenity that I still enjoyed without doing so.

  But when I arrived at my desk the next morning, my WORK NOT DONE note, along with the whole pile of unentered data it covered, was gone, nowhere to be found, disappeared. I reported the missing materials to my supervisor, who, strangely enough, did not seem in the least concerned with its whereabouts.

  ‘What really concerns me, Frank,’ said this boy who a year before had not even heard of the company in which he now held the post of supervisor, ‘that is, my primary concern, is your overall performance, both in this department and in the company as a whole. You’re the least productive employee in the department, for one thing. And I’ve been looking at your file from Human Resources. It’s kind of ugly, if you want to know the truth. Forget that you’ve never really been a team player, at least according to the evaluations you’ve gotten from your former manager. There’s also stuff here about theft from other employees, mismanaging your department when you were a supervisor, not carrying your weight when you served on the restructuring committee, sexual harassment, an overall lacksa – lackadais – a bad attitude. It’s your whole profile that’s the problem. I’ve tried to cut you some slack around here because I know you’ve been with the company for a long time. But you’re just dead weight these days. This so-called disappearance of your work – I don’t know what to make of that. Someone’s going to have to go to a lot of trouble to regenerate that data. I’m thinking that maybe that’s what you wanted.’