The Grimscribe's Puppets

by Joseph S. Pulver, Sr.

  Though he doesn’t know who’ll be attending, having seen none of the management group this morning but himself and Boaz, Max processes the usual sixteen report copies.

  Twenty-three minutes left. Still alone in the cube grid, apart from a few milling strangers. Heart pounding, Max picks up the phone, dials Cassandra.

  “Everything’s changing here,” he whispers.

  She exhales audibly. “Yes?”

  “Construction, staff reorg. All my guys gone.” Max pauses. What has he called about?

  “Max, I’m working!”

  “The guys in the stairwell yesterday...” He trails off, aware she hates questions. She does this intentionally, overreacts so he’ll never question her about anything. “Last week, I saw those same two guys outside, loading something big, covered, into a truck. Maybe another of your scul.... Your furniture?”

  “I told you, patrons. They’re taking several pieces.”

  He regrets calling, but he’s already interrupted her. “I’m not going to tiptoe around this!” Max catches himself, his voice escalating in sudden urgency. “The truck had a DRG logo. Our competition, Dyno Resource Group. Boaz hates them. Hates. So if you’re using steel I bought you to make sculpture—”

  “Furniture!”

  He grits his teeth. “—Furniture, with Boaz steel, and selling it to Dyno which is Boaz’s bitterest enemy, he wouldn’t just be mad. I wouldn’t just get yelled at, or merely fired.”

  “Oh?” Her amusement conveyed with perfect clarity. “What would he do?”

  Visions of the apartment ablaze, a wild clashing inferno. Bodies gutted by the cronies Boaz hints at, but nobody ever sees. The two blackened dead lying there, blood sizzling in ashes.

  She giggles.

  Max slams down the phone.

  ~*~

  On his way to the meeting, Max passes Boaz’s office at the very moment another taller man emerges. Preoccupied, Max doesn’t register at first that the man’s wearing short sleeves, forbidden at Boaz. Something familiar grabs his attention before Max is fully aware what it is. His neighbor. Those terrible burns. By the time Max looks back, the man’s gone around the end of the cubicle row. Curiosity urges Max to follow, but there’s no time. He races to the conference room. Empty. He sits, waiting quietly, alone.

  “Not here!” Boaz stage-whispers from the doorway.

  Max grabs the report packets and follows, past empty cubicles, inactive document centers, a vacant break room. Near the edge of the construction scaffold, Boaz stops and opens a janitorial closet. What’s this? Max hesitates, then enters the narrow supply closet. Boaz joins him and shuts the door. High shelves force Max into uncomfortable proximity with his boss. Boaz straddles an empty mop bucket. Max leans back against stacked toilet paper rolls, struggling to avoid encroaching on the man’s personal space. Boaz loses balance and almost falls. Max steadies him by the jacket lapels and Boaz ends up standing on Max’s foot.

  “This is the meeting,” Max observes. This should be funny. So why this hollow ache in his stomach?

  “Secrecy’s increasingly important. Stakes escalating.” Boaz’s lips narrow. “Gigantic things underway.”

  “I see we’re scaling up for something but I—”

  “I’m trying to bring you onboard, Max. Make you part of this.” Boaz leans in. “Just seeing if you’re up to it.”

  Again Max wants to laugh, an urge quelled by the queasy hint of malign insanity. Every muscle tense, rigid with fear, as if in response to some looming threat. “With a major project underway, shouldn’t we have all hands? The brightest members of my team—”

  “Yes, yes, but I have to weigh risks.” Boaz grips Max’s shoulders. “Our people, they’re good boys, most of them, but with the normal tendencies.” His lip curls as if in suppressed revulsion. “To resist radically new ideas.”

  Max nods. What to say? “Acknowledging these concerns, sir, how can we ramp up, let alone service existing customers, without our human assets?” Maybe he’s overextending? He almost changes the subject. “Newton’s one our smartest guys, and loyal. And Palomar?”

  Boaz seizes the doorknob without turning it. “They’re involved. Most of them, busy in the melt shop. Don’t worry, we’ll leverage everyone’s capabilities. This new thing, it transcends business. Like Manhattan Project, or Apollo. Changes everything!” Boaz wipes beads of oily sweat from his hairless scalp, then rubs slippery palms together. Finally he opens the door.

  Returning to his desk, Max tries to calm down. He wants to manage this, take stock of facts. What might all this mean? He keeps feeling this new way of things is something he’ll never understand. That he’s being left out. Still oblivious, walking blindly toward... What?

  He wants to call Cassandra. Probably she’s working. The thought makes him angry. Why should he play along with her pretense about furniture? These weird constructs of hers have nothing at all in common with the little tables and chairs she used to make. Next time this ridiculous notion of furniture comes up, he’ll force the issue. What exactly are you talking about? Tables, chairs? This makes him so angry. Everything disintegrating, both home and work.

  The walls of the cubicle constrict. Max tries to focus on routine tasks, duties which always seemed intrinsically valuable. Yesterday’s priorities feel absurd, distant, faced with an office of empty desks, vacant but for a few loitering impostors. Vast overnight construction, undertaken without oversight by the management team. It’s too much. He’s too far outside the loop to see any way back in. One terrible thought keeps looping, like a broken record: Maybe I’m left out.

  Max sits at his desk, mind racing, unaware and unconcerned that he appears to be doing absolutely nothing. At that moment someone walks past his cubicle opening. The short-sleeved man. No mistaking the burns this time. It’s Max’s neighbor! He passes, giving no hint of having seen Max, enters Boaz’s office, and shuts the door.

  Max tries to stand, knees weak, and almost falls. It’s too much to comprehend. This mystery belonging unquestionably to home, the faceless always-aware neighbor, somehow colliding with this place. The whole world’s flipped. Boaz unrecognizable. Cassandra acting like his enemy. The new neighbor shows up here, today of all days?

  Heart thudding, steadying himself against the desk, Max cranes to watch through Boaz’s window.

  The man turns, sees Max. Expressionless, he flicks the blinds shut.

  ~*~

  On his way up the stairs, Max tries to fortify his resolve. When did Cassandra’s lies begin? He can’t remember when things changed. Lately when their eyes meet, both of them know something’s broken.Before opening the door, he pauses, the way he always paused on his way out. He needs to confront her. Max takes measure of his emotions. Too angry. Too frustrated, ready to blow. Too raw, made vulnerable by his wanting. The love he still feels, though distorted and fragmented, exerts such force when he tries to deal with her. Cassandra. When he says the name, he still sees the face of the years-ago girl.

  Max opens the door. The apartment’s quiet, no stereo blasting, no plasma sizzle. No smoke. Cassandra must be gone. He relaxes, slightly relieved, then hears shuffling papers. In the living room, she’s hurriedly piling design drawings. On top, she places a heavy art book.

  He pretends not to notice. “No fires today.” Smiles feebly. Before she turns away, he sees her eyes. Dark circles, skin pale and transparent. “Wait, Cass. We have to talk, then I’ll leave you to it.”

  Cassandra faces him, slump-shouldered. “Too much to do. We can eat something, if you want. Maybe around nine.” More than tired; she’s hollowed out. Just reaching for the torch, an obvious effort.

  Max crosses the room. “No, we need to talk first.” He jerks the plasma unit’s plug from the outlet.

  Instantly feral, she presses up in his face. “Do you realize how easily I could leave you?”

  First he backs up, then stops himself, exhales. “I’ve supported your art. What you’re doing affects my career.”

  She lunge
s for the plug. He sidesteps to block. She turns left, reverses right, and frustration boils over. Inchoate rage finds release in a wordless scream. She throws her glove across the room, storms out, slams the door.

  Pulsing throb in Max’s temple. Breathing hard. First time she’s threatened to leave. He takes a look around, thinking it’s the first time he’s even been alone in their apartment. Such quiet. Dust motes hover in still air. He’s a stranger in his own place. An intruder. The urge to run, to flee home, pulls hard.

  Her pile of drawings are weighed down under La Poupée, a book of Hans Bellmer’s surreal puppet photography. Eroticized constructs of mismatched doll parts. Inanimate sexual invitation meets body horror. Concealed under a few of Cassandra’s drawings, pencil sketches of the sort of furniture she used to make, are numerous professional engineering plans not in her hand. These resemble the weird, gangling structures she’s lately been assembling. The names and part numbers mean nothing to Max. One of the plans appears to dictate the assemblage of thousands of moderately-sized components into an enormous whole. An overview depicts a multi-leveled structure tapering from a broad base, each ladder-like rung narrower, something like the Eiffel Tower but vastly larger, judging by tiny human forms provided for scale. Could she really be building something, using steel Max purchased from Boaz, helping somebody assemble pieces into this sky ladder, whatever it is? What if it involves Dyno Resource Group?

  At the top of one code-like text document, the name: DIAMOND DUST PROJECT.

  A nightmare, like waking up buried under suffocating weight. Too hard to breathe. One dark revelation after another. Level after level of secrecy. At home, at work. Sickness manifesting in her eyes. Cassandra always mentioned a plan. A way out of this apartment. A better future. She never mentioned becoming a cog in some secret machine.

  The front door clicks, squeaks open. Max flips back the papers, replaces the Bellmer puppet book, and stands away. Cassandra enters from the hallway. She looks at him. Says nothing.

  His chance to speak. How often has he resolved to force some issue? Each decision to bring matters to a head trails off somehow, ends in nothing. An intolerable status quo extends, on and on, his concerns swept aside whether or not he uttered them. Max wants to scream, somehow break through her impenetrability. He’s part of the problem, he knows. Inertia, passivity, when it comes to her, at least. Unwillingness to cut free, even from something he’s no longer sure he desires.

  DIAMOND DUST. Whatever it means, the name makes him think of “Diamond Dogs” by David Bowie. Max finds the CD, puts it on without a glance at Cassandra. Too long she’s dominated the stereo with her soundtrack for collapsing buildings.

  He sings the opening line, raises his fist on “genocide!”

  Cassandra crosses the room to check her pile of papers.

  Max sits on the charred futon, reading lyrics in the CD booklet.

  She approaches, sits beside him and sidles up close. She keeps her palms flat on her thighs. Despite this, her version of physical affection, he senses her formulating plans from which he’s excluded. A creaking ladder into a sky opaque with the blackness of soot and metal dust. Cassandra wandering, part of some industrial doomsday. Himself alone in this place, ashen black, cold and still.

  So close. A thousand tiny scars on her face and shoulders, each a pocket of metal that burned into her and cooled beneath the skin. Such tiny disfigurements, so many in number. Enlarged, in too great proximity, even the beautiful can seem ugly. All Max’s friends, especially the men, everyone commented on Cassandra’s beauty. Impossible to ignore. They all say he’s lucky to have someone like her.

  She drapes an arm across Max’s shoulders and he shudders at her emptiness.

  ~*~

  The next morning, a new executive office has appeared out of nowhere beside Boaz’s own, the company now two-brained in control of the cubicle-dwelling segments of its corpus. Max sees within the new office his neighbor conversing with three policemen, probably about the bodies they find every night along Lorraine Street. So many dead. No explanation.

  Boaz stays shut away, alone in his office, even after the police are gone.

  So much changed. What’s the point of giving up dreams for salary if it doesn’t come with some promise of security? If it can all be taken away, in times of upheaval like these? All Boaz’s promises, hints really, probably useless with a second boss balancing the scale.

  Max keeps trying to stamp out his fear before the embers ignite. Despite lacking adequate information, he remains determined to keep up the appearance of forward motion. Someone will let him know what’s going on, or he’ll figure it out himself. He’ll get back on top.

  The corner cubicle, Newton’s until last week, is again occupied. Max has already forgotten the new guy’s name. Legs asprawl on his desk, pant legs riding up to expose white skin over black socks, the man endlessly mutters into his phone, so monotone Max doubts anyone’s on the other end. Within the droning monologue, the words: “...DIAMOND DUST...”

  Electrified, Max leaps up, stumbles into the next cube. He spins the man’s legs off the desk and grabs him with violent urgency. Max leans in, nose to nose. “What do you know about it?” He mouths the words: DIAMOND DUST.

  The neutral-faced man thumbs the disconnect button. “I thought you were inside.” The man’s lips are pale, grayish. He looks around. “This is Planning unit, right?”

  Max nods. “Boaz spoke to me yesterday.”

  The man looks skeptical.

  “The janitor’s closet,” Max whispers.

  Recognition. The man’s face relaxes.

  Max takes a seat. “The thing is, Dyno. I thought they were the ones getting the bid on Diamond Dust?”

  The guy inclines his head toward the new office. “This new man, Fabrizio, he says Diamond Dust is so big, for the first time it’s not Boaz... I mean us, versus Dyno. We’re in it together, every engineering firm in town, every structural fab, every melt shop. And it’s not just Portland any more.”

  Max still isn’t sure what it is. He wants more, something to flesh out the projection he imagines from Cassandra’s plans, briefly glimpsed.

  Boaz emerges from his office and starts toward Fabrizio’s. He sees Max and stops. “What you said about Newton, I’ve been thinking. See if you can find him on the melt floor. He’s too valuable to be slinging coal, or who knows what.” Boaz mimes shoveling, a motion which unavoidably becomes a golf swing. He gives it up.

  There’s sense in what Boaz suggests. It’s what Max wants. Why does it feel like being sent to Human Resources for a layoff?

  Passage to the melt shop is blocked by the black-draped scaffold. Max finds a seam, slips through, and navigates a web of crossbars and platforms. Once beyond the layer of fireproof carbon blanketing the inner scaffold wall, a wave of fierce heat waters his eyes. Vision adjusts to a darkness mitigated only by a distant red glow. The factory he estimated doubled in size is closer to ten times larger than before, the expansion covering not just the old parking lot, but north and east as well, where days ago stood empty fields and a crumbling brickworks. A space so vast, walls recede in haze like the desert horizon. Machines hum and churn, the heartbeat of mechanistic life newly birthed. The melt pool a demonic ocean covering acres, serviced by a fleet of giant cauldrons.

  So unfamiliar, all this. What insight can Max offer? The perspective of decades, worthless now.

  Dead-eyed laborers plod in step to discordant clanging. Rows of sullen hunchbacks, faces featureless, powder black. How will he find Newton, let alone recognize him? Drifting, drawn toward the central vat is if by gravity. A seething orange lake, millions of liquid tons, a city-sized repository of of thermal energy. Ordinary melt pools are terrifying enough. This is like standing near the surface of a tiny, remorseless sun. One slip, and all that energy unmakes you. Fall in, leave nothing behind but a puff of ash and a tiny pocket of impurity soon churned away, dispersed. So easy to disappear. To be devoured by all this.

  Max has v
isited steel mills around the world. Twenty years. He’s seen nothing like this.

  Too hot, stifling. Wants to move closer. Drawn toward an area of blinding intensity. Luminescent currents swirl just below floor level. What is it? Within hypnotic patterns of yellow-hot eddies, he perceives familiar shapes. Human forms. His mind reels. Yes, a pair of bodies. They swim and frolic together in molten steel. Impossible, of course it is. Max leans, grips the railing, squinting against the heat. Not just the two of them, intertwining in a fluid sort of dance. Beyond, others in the background. So many. All moving, unharmed.

  One of the pair resolves to greater solidity, a set of proportions familiar as a face. Max gasps. His heart rattles painfully in his chest. It’s Cassandra, enfolded, writhing with another. Max wants to turn away. Even in such shock, he can’t deny what he’s seeing. Everything’s changed. It’s all unknown, not just Boaz, the factory, Cassandra. All solid ground vanished. A world of deadly fluidity.

  Her face rises from the glowing steel lake and turns to confront him. Any doubt, erased. The second shape, still touching her, Max recognizes as well. Fabrizio, it must be. Cassandra and the neighbor. The new boss. Too much. Max can’t bear watching. None of this makes sense. He backs away.

  The Cassandra shape disentangles from Fabrizio. Her movements change, from fluttering easily like a swimmer in a pool, to the slower motions of struggling against resistance. She climbs, as if stepping out of thick mud. Finally she steps free, the flow seemingly fully solid and able to support her, as if responding to her desire that it do so. Air cools her to reddish orange, standing there atop the steel, then climbing stair-like ridges at the vat’s edge. As she reaches the concrete floor, she’s becoming flesh again.

  Fabrizio remains behind, watching nose-deep from the pool, which remains fluid for him.

  Cassandra approaches Max, her body some evolving intermediate between steel and naked skin.

  “You aren’t...” Max begins. “I thought we were...”

  Cassandra lifts her arms, demonstrating for Max her new form, unblemished white, free of the many tiny scars. She turns and glides off toward darker realms beyond the pools, motioning for Max to follow. Eyes adjust, until he discerns the edge of a vacant space, a deep cavernous pit.