While the senior officers who called for this meeting readily admitted that a sub-basement in an old and crumbling office building was perhaps not the ideal place to hold a company-wide meeting, it was nevertheless the only space large enough to accommodate the company’s full staff of employees and was thought preferable to convening at a site elsewhere in the Golden City, since we would then be required to travel through the yellowish haze which lately had become far more consistently dense owing to ‘seasonal factors’, according to the radio and television reports of local meteorologists. Thus we all came to be huddled in the dim and dirty realm of the building’s sub-basement, where we were required to stand for lack of adequate seating and where the senior officers of the company addressed us from a crude platform constructed of thin wooden planks which creaked and moaned throughout this session of speeches and announcements, their words sounding throughout that sub-basement space as hollow and dreamlike echoes.
What we were told, in essence, was that the Blaine Company was positioning itself to become a ‘dominant presence in the world marketplace’, in the rather vague words of an executive vice president. This declaration struck nearly everyone who stood crushed together in that sub-basement as a preposterous ambition, given that the company provided no major products or services to speak of, its principal commercial activity consisting almost wholly of what I would describe as manipulating documents of one sort or another, none of which had any great import or interest beyond a narrow and financially marginal base of customers, including such clients as a regional chain of dry cleaners, several far-flung restaurants that served inexpensive or at most moderately priced fare, some second-rate facilities featuring dog races that were in operation only part of a given year, and a few private individuals whose personal affairs were such that they required – or perhaps only persuaded themselves out of vanity that they required – the type of document manipulation in which the Blaine Company almost exclusively specialized. However, it was soon revealed to us that the company had plans to become active in areas far beyond, and quite different from, its former specialization in manipulating documents. This announcement was delivered by an elderly man who was introduced to us as Henry Winston, the new Vice President of Development. Mr Winston spoke in a somewhat robotic tone as he recited to us the radical transformations the company would need to undergo in order to make, or remake, itself into a dominant force in the world marketplace, although he never disclosed the full nature that these transformations, or ‘restructurings’, as they were called, would take. Nor did Mr Winston specify the new areas of commercial activity in which the company would be engaged in the very near future.
During the course of Mr Winston’s address, none of us could help noticing that he seemed terribly out of place among the other members of senior management who occupied that rickety wooden platform constructed especially for this meeting. His suit appeared to have been tailored for a larger body than the bony frame that now shifted beneath the high-priced materials which hung upon the old man. And his thick white hair was heavily greased and slicked back, yet as he spoke it began to sprout up in places, as if his lengthy, and in some places yellowed locks were not accustomed to the grooming now forced upon them.
As murmurs began to arise among those of us pressed together in that dim and dirty sub-basement, Mr Winston’s mechanical monologue was cut short by one of the other senior officers, who took the spotlight from the old man and proceeded to deliver the final announcement of the meeting. Yet even before this final announcement was made by a severe-looking woman with close-cropped hair, many of those among the crowd huddled into the confines of that sub-basement had already guessed or intuited its message. From the moment we descended into that lowest level of the building by way of the freight elevator, there was a feeling expressed by several employees that an indefinable presence inhabited that place, something that was observing us very closely without ever presenting a lucid image of itself. Several people from the lower staff even claimed to have glimpsed a peculiar figure in the dark reaches of the sub-basement, a shape of some kind that seemed to maneuver about the edges of the congregation, a hazy human outline that drifted as slowly and silently as the yellowish haze in the streets of the Golden City and was seen to be of a similar hue.
So by the time the woman with the close-cropped hair made what might otherwise have been a striking revelation, most of the lower staff were beyond the point of receiving the news as any great surprise. ‘Therefore,’ continued the severe-looking woman, ‘the role of those supervisors who have been so tragically lost to our organization will now be taken over by none other than the founder and president of the Blaine Company – Mr U G Blaine. In an effort to facilitate the restructuring of our activities as a business, Mr Blaine will henceforth be taking a direct hand in every aspect of the company’s day-to-day functions. Unfortunately, Mr Blaine could not be present today, but he extends his assurance that he looks forward to working with each and every one of you in the near future. So, if there are no questions’ – and there were none –‘this meeting is therefore concluded.’ And as we ascended in the freight elevator to return to our desks, nothing at all was said about the plans revealed to us for the company’s future.
Later that day, however, I heard the voices of some of my coworkers in conversation nearby the enclosure that surrounded my desk. ‘It’s perfectly insane what they’re doing,’ whispered a woman whose voice I recognized as that of a longtime employee and a highly productive manipulator of documents. Others in this group more or less agreed with this woman’s evaluation of the company’s grandiose ambition of becoming a dominant force in the world marketplace. Finally someone said, ‘I’m thinking of giving my notice. For some time now I’ve been regretting that I ever followed the company to this filthy city.’ The person who spoke these words was someone known around the office as The Bow Tie Man, a name granted to him due to his penchant for sporting this eponymous item of apparel on a daily basis. He seemed to enjoy the distinction he gained by wearing a wide variety of bow ties rather than ordinary straight ties, or even no tie at all. Although there were possibly millions of men around the world who also wore bow ties as a signature of sartorial distinction, he was the only one in the Blaine Company offices to do so. This practice of his allowed him to express a mode of personal identity, however trivial and illusory, as if such a thing could be achieved merely by adorning oneself with a particular item of apparel or even by displaying particular character traits such as a reserved manner or a high degree of intelligence, all and any of which qualities were shared by millions and millions of persons past and present and would continue to be exhibited by millions and millions of persons in the future, making the effort to perpetrate a distinctive sense of an identity apart from other persons or creatures, or even inanimate objects, no more than a ludicrous charade.
It was after I heard The Bow Tie Man proclaim that he was of a mind to ‘give his notice’ that I stepped away from my desk and walked over to join the conversation being carried on by some of my coworkers. ‘And after you give your notice,’ I asked The Bow Tie Man, ‘then what? Where will you go? What other place could you find that would be any different?’ Then the woman whose voice I had previously recognized as that of a longtime member of the company’s staff spoke up, protesting that it was absolutely deranged for the company to imagine that it could ever become a dominant force in the world marketplace. ‘Do you really think so?’ I replied. ‘Haven’t you observed that there is a natural tendency, deranged or not, for all such entities as the Blaine Company, for any kind of business or government or even private individual, to extend themselves as far as possible – to force themselves on the world as much as they can, either by becoming a dominant commercial entity or merely by wearing bow ties every day, thereby imposing themselves on the persons and things around them, imposing what they are or what they believe themselves to be without regard or respect for anything else aside from how far they can reach out into the
world and put their seal upon it, even stretching out into other worlds, shouting commands at the stars themselves and claiming the universe as their own?’
By that point, I think my coworkers were taken aback, not as much by the words I had spoken as by the fact that I had spoken to them at all, something I had never done apart from the verbal exchanges required by our work as document manipulators. From their expressions I could see that my speaking to them in this way was somehow monstrous and wrong – a freak happening whose occurrence signified something they did not wish to name. Almost immediately afterward the group broke up, and we all returned to our desks.
That afternoon the yellowish haze of the Golden City was especially dense and pushed itself heavily against the windows of the building where the Blaine Company had relocated itself. And on the very same day that upper-level management had announced to us that none of the murdered supervisors would be replaced and that U G Blaine himself was going to take a direct hand in the day-to-day operations of each department and division within the company, it seemed that his supervisory presence was already among us.
The most conspicuous early sign of what I will call the ‘Blaine presence’ was the distinct yellowish tint which now permeated the company’soffice space. Less obvious was the sense, which a number of persons had previously experienced during the company-wide meeting, that we were at all times under the eye of something we could not see but which was intimately aware of our every word and action. Before the day was over, everyone in the office seemed to have gained a silent understanding of why we had relocated to the Golden City and why this place, which had once been known as Murder Town, was so well suited to the purposes of commercial entities like the Blaine Company . . . or was at least perceived to be so by the heads of such corporate bodies.
By the following business day there was no longer any talk around the office about the deranged strategy of the company to become a dominant force in the world marketplace. And no one commented on the absence of the man who wore bow ties each and every day. Perhaps the others actually believed that he had given his notice – a course of action he had suggested he might take – even though none of his personal items had been removed from his desk. Since the supervisor of our department had been murdered like all the others, there was no one whose duty it was to be concerned with the failure of The Bow Tie Man to show up at the office, just as there was no one who proffered any information about the meaning of his absence. After a few days had passed, his desk was occupied by a new employee, a man whom no one had ever seen working elsewhere in the company and who did not seem like the sort of person any company would hire to manipulate documents. His age was difficult to discern because his face was almost entirely obscured by shaggy strands of unwashed hair and an ample growth of untended beard, both of which were streaked with the discoloration which we noticed affected anything that was subject to longtime exposure to the peculiar atmospheric elements of the Golden City. As for the clothes worn by our new coworker, they appeared to be very much in the same style as his predecessor who formerly inhabited that particular desk. However, due to the length of the new employee’s beard, it was not possible to verify whether or not he was wearing a bow tie each and every day. And no one in the office desired to look close enough to find out if this was the case. Nevertheless, there was one woman whom I overheard telling another that she was going to check on The Bow Tie Man in order to establish what had become of him. Then she herself failed to show up for work the next day. Afterward no one else pursued the disappearance of either of these two employees, nor that of any of several other employees who on a fairly regular basis now began to drop out of the ranks of the lower staff at the Blaine Company, which by this time was known to the world simply as ‘Blaine’.
Needless to say, the degree of tension that now pervaded the offices at Blaine was once again at an extremely high level. Yet this tense environment, which had always served as a hothouse for the most violent thoughts and fantasies among company personnel, no longer had an effect on the atmosphere of our workplace, such that you could not see more than a few feet in front of your face. Instead, the office space continued to be evenly permeated by a yellowish tint. While I have already identified this distinct yellowish coloration of the office atmosphere with what I have called the Blaine presence, others around me – and throughout the company – held the view that the haze which choked the streets of the Golden City had somehow seeped into the building where we spent each day manipulating documents. But it seemed to me that these differing explanations were in fact complementary. In my view there was a terrible equation between the Blaine presence, which now supervised every activity throughout the company, even the smallest manipulations of the most insignificant documents, and the yellowish haze casting itself so densely over the Golden City – a place that seemed so well suited to the purposes of commercial entities like Blaine, which of course were merely extensions of the purposes of human entities like U G Blaine himself, specifically his seemingly preposterous ambition to turn his business into a dominant force in the world marketplace. All of this remained hypothetical for some time . . . until one day a certain turn of events allowed me to confirm my suspicions and at the same time – after so much patient restraint – enabled me to pursue my own purposes with respect to the relocation of the company.
This turning point came in the form of a summons to the office of the new Vice President of Development, Mr Henry Winston, who was located in a remote part of the building in which Blaine was the only tenant. Mr Winston’s office, I noted when I first entered, was a sty. Judging by the stained mattress in a corner behind some rusted filing cabinets and the remnants of food and beverage containers scattered about the floor, Mr Winston had transformed the place into his personal hovel. The Vice President of Development himself was seated behind an old and heavily scarred wooden desk, his arms stretched across the desktop and his head lying sideways upon it in noisy slumber. When I closed the door behind me, Mr Winston slowly awakened and looked up at me, his hair and beard no longer groomed in the way they had been for the sub-basement meeting at which he spoke some months before. And what he had to say to me now still sounded as though he were reading from a script, although the quality of his voice was far less robotic than it had been at the company-wide meeting.
Mr Winston rubbed his eyes and ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, catching the aftertaste of the sleep I had disturbed. Then, as if he were a busy man, he got right to the point. ‘He wants to have a conference with you. There’s a . . .’ Mr Winston paused a moment, apparently at a loss to recall or properly enunciate his next words. ‘A proposal. There’s a proposal he has for you . . . a personal proposal.’
Mr Winston then informed me of the time and place for this conference with U G Blaine – after the end of that working day, in a lavatory on one of the uppermost floors of the building. This seemed to be everything that the Vice President of Development was required to communicate to me, and I turned to leave his office. But before I was out the door he blurted out a few words that genuinely seemed to be his own.
‘He should never have brought you here,’ said Mr Winston, which very well might have been his real name.
‘You mean the relocation of the company to this city,’ I replied, attempting to clarify the issue.
‘That’s right. The re-lo-cation,’ he said, breaking into a little laugh and revealing an incomplete set of yellow teeth. But he stopped laughing when I looked over my shoulder back at him, focusing my eyes deep into his.
‘Mr Blaine isn’t entirely responsible,’ I said. ‘We both know how it is with this city.’
After a brief pause Mr Winston spoke. ‘I know you now,’ he said as if speaking softly in a dream. ‘You were here before . . . when the sky was clear. What did you do?’
I simply smiled at the Vice President of Development and then exited that squalid office, leaving the man inside with his sleep-polluted mouth hanging open in stupefied wonder.
By this juncture in the company’s progress, there were no longer many employees remaining who were not of a kind with Henry Winston. One by one all the regular staff stopped appearing for work, and their desks came to be occupied by new persons who always looked like fugitives from the great tribe of derelicts living in the Golden City, a shadow population that moved day and night through that yellowish haze. No doubt they too had made accommodations for themselves in the building, little havens similar to the one I saw in Henry Winston’s office. I imagined that such accommodations and a modicum of food may have been offered to them by the company in lieu of a paycheck. This scheme for ‘cost-cutting’ would alone account for the elevated profits that Blaine had realized in the past quarter. Of course this manner of fiscal growth could not continue much longer, and other measures would need to be taken if the company was truly to become a dominant force in the marketplace of this world or any other. These measures, I assumed, would emerge as the chief topic of the conference U G Blaine had scheduled with me after the close of the working day in a lavatory on one of the uppermost floors of that crumbling building.
When the time came, I began ascending the shaft of stairways – the elevator having ceased to function by that time – in anticipation of my private meeting with the company’s president and founder. As I made my way in nearly total darkness up these steps I recalled the day that I came to interview for my position with what was then called the Blaine Company. That interview took place in another building in another city. In the reception area where I waited to be called for my interview there hung a portrait of U G Blaine. It was a flattering-enough likeness of a middle-aged man in a business suit, but the effect of contemplating this portrait was such that I wanted to turn away and purge it from my mind before I started thinking thoughts that I did not want in my head. But I found it impossible to turn away. Fortunately someone came along and called me to my interview before my thoughts reached a pitch of intolerable tension and agitation.
My Work Is Not Yet Done Page 15
