“Oh well, Infoforms,” Steve said.
“Yep. Go to it, soldier.”
“Back to the bottle.”
“Morituri te salutant.”
“E Pluribus Unum.”
“Pasta fa-zool!” Paul proclaimed.
Steve saluted shyly and clumped back upstairs.
A piece of masking tape stuck to itself. Paul swore under his breath and balled it up, flicked it across his table. After all this talking tonight he was still geared up, adrenalin still bubbling, and it was hard to really focus on the work.
Donna came walking briskly out of the cafeteria. “Hey,” she said.
Paul turned in his chair.
Abigail saw Donna was unusually hurried and said, “What?”
“You should come hear the weird shit downstairs—somebody’s fighting or something.”
“Who?” Maureen joined in.
“I dunno. I heard it in the toilet.”
“Somebody’s fighting in the toilet!” Paul leapt off his chair. “Call in the plumber and the National Guard!” He started toward the cafeteria, and Abby pranced excitedly on his heels. Maureen bolted up from her chair, grinning in mischievous delight.
Paul turned to them before Jean could get up, too. “I can handle this…you all stay here.”
“Oh, come on,” Abby moaned.
“What if Dave comes up and we’re all gone in the bathroom? Oh, we just had to take a leak, Dave.”
“Party pooper.” Maureen pouted.
“Jeesh,” Abigail said, turning back to her table looking irked.
Paul and Donna continued into the cafeteria.
“I oughta run downstairs,” Abby said to Maureen.
“Go ahead.”
“Naw…it’s probably just the guys fooling around.”
Paul had been in here before, to shut the light out at midnight for Dave, the night foreman. Donna pointed at the open stall where she’d sat.
“I heard it in there.” They listened. Nothing. “Ha,” she said.
“Was it bad?”
“Yeah, like a fight.” They listened. Just a radio down there playing a mindless heavy metal rock song laced with the obligatory sexual innuen-does, Satanic references, and teen rebel posings—probably concocted by twelve balding bespectacled businessmen at a long polished table.
“Oh well,” sighed Donna in dismissal.
Paul flushed the toilet and walked out of the bathroom into the cafeteria. Donna followed him. Paul tossed up his hands as three heads swivelled expectantly. “It’s all over now.”
“Maybe I was hallucinating,” Donna said, reseating herself. A secret joke.The five of them worked for several minutes in silence. The radio played King of Pain by the Police, one of Paul’s favorite songs.
Jean stood up. “I’m going to have a cigarette, okay Bloss?”
“I suppose,” Paul droned unenthusiastically. It seemed impossible to keep all four of his workers working at once.
Jean took her pocketbook into the little partitioned office and lit up a cigarette. She didn’t sit. Over the partition she said to Paul, “Can I make coffee in this thing?”
“I don’t like to use their materials.”
“They won’t notice.”
“We should bring our own stuff in—why don’t we?” Abby suggested.
“One time I’ll bring in the coffee and sugar, the next week Paul can…”
“I suppose,” Paul said.
“Well I’m gonna make a pot,” said Jean. “Who wants a coffee?”
All did but Donna. Jean took the glass pot off to the ladies’ room to fill with water. She had tamped out her cigarette first so as not to violate the no-smoking rule in the shipping and finishing area.
Behind its closed canvas curtain the elevator was heard jolting into movement, ascending to the third floor. Probably Steve, Paul thought, but why did he need the elevator? Paul realized that Steve must have cleared a big rack for him as well, to put the big front housing parts on. He’d sent racks down for Paul before. Good kid, Steve.
Jean filled the pot at a sink. She heard nothing through the floor but the radio playing something indistinguishable.
The elevator came to a stop upstairs. The canvas curtain still stirred vaguely.
Near the elevator was a yellow metal cabinet with the bright red word FLAMMABLE! blazing on it. The paint and lacquer thinner first shift used to touch up little painting defects before wrapping and shipping the parts were stored in there. On the closed door was the scrap of tape where the last Tar-Fiend had hung. For some reason Paul glanced over there now. How would Salvador Dali feel if someone walked into a museum and tore one of his paintings to shreds because it offended them? This place could crush his spirit only so much. He’d keep hanging up Tar-Fiend until Ted or Gary themselves came in to him face-to-face and told him to stop, and then he’d ask them why. Why, really, did they deem it so very necessary to obliterate his art?
He had done a drawing for a friend of his, Terry, and Terry’s mother had taken it off her bedroom wall and torn it up. Terry was afraid to tell Paul for months, but Paul was bitterly pleased when he heard. The drawing had been sadomasochistically violent and erotic. It gave him a satisfaction—it praised him even as it insulted him—that his art had incited such a powerful reaction in someone.
This reminded Paul of the many times teachers in school had urged him to draw pretty things, nice things—cows and trees. This had been the case with his cousin Ray as well. In the second grade Ray had brought a Creature from the Black Lagoon model to school to show the kids and the teacher had confiscated it and hidden it in a closet. He smuggled it out at the end of the day, fearing the teacher would keep it. Ray had worn a ring to school he got out of a gum machine—a monster with red jewel eyes.
The same teacher asked him why he had to bring in such awful things.
This same second grade teacher took Ray to the head of the class so he could show the alligator he had drawn, copied from a book. At first Ray had thought she was proudly showing off his artwork, until he realized she was punishing him, telling the class, “Look at the awful things Ray draws.” Ray had felt more of a hot, insulted rage, the rage of a misunder-stood artist, than the sadness of a seven-year-old boy. It was an alligator.
Even in fifth or sixth grade, Paul remembered, a teacher had taken Ray aside and asked him why he drew monsters for the kids. Why didn’t he draw horses and farms?
Paul thought that today, when children played with E.T. dolls, StarWars beings and even a repulsive replica of H.R. Giger’s monster from the film Alien (he owned this doll—a work of art), the ignorant worry on the part of teachers he and Ray had experienced would be rare. He and Ray were rebellious in their own quiet, hot way and Paul didn’t doubt that the teachers who had discouraged them had only fueled their fires.
Nowadays Ray did paint pretty pictures—portraits of women, pastel drawings of the children of people he worked with. And Paul drew misty, delicate meadowlands with crooked ancient stones, robed Druids on the moors with looming lovely skies overhead. But he only drew such things now because he wanted to.
Paul and Ray dreamed of composing their best art into a volume and trying to publish it. Paul had an abundance of work but Ray was slower, lazy with art. They had to make up some photocopies, compose a letter they could send agents and editors. They burned to be recognized and appreciated.
What was taking Jean so long in the bathroom?
Here she came. “Hola,” she said loudly, whisking through and on into the office. Paul almost flinched at her “hola”—her voice could get grating when she projected. He noticed that Jean had the manner and mood of someone’s rich, eccentric aunt in a young girl’s body. She liked to talk about herself and he’d noticed she’d go on incessantly if you let her. She said she came from a well-to-do family and had been to Italy as a child and had done a little modeling at shows, so what she was doing here he didn’t know, any more than he knew why his destiny had led him here.
He supposed life was still tooth and claw, and Nature didn’t make special allowances for paintbrush and pencil.
Jean made four coffees slowly and carefully, obviously stalling from her work and obviously not caring. Paul tried not to get irritated, although he felt rather exploited. Behind him, Maureen suddenly jerked up the volume extra loud on a Van Halen song and Paul ground his teeth a little, his nostrils flaring.
The elevator jolted to life upstairs, began to descend.
Jean came slowly out of the office with two coffees, spilling a little down their sides. She placed one in front of Paul. “I don’t know if that’s enough sugar; you can put more in if you want.”
“Thanks.” Paul didn’t touch it just yet to find out.
Jean gave Abby a cup and went back for her own and Maureen’s.
The freight elevator running parallel to the staircase that led upstairs, the staircase under which the shipping office was located, continued downward on its diagonal track, finally bumping to rest at the bottom.
The drawn canvas curtain breezed like a drape with someone hiding behind it.
Paul sliced the excess tape off a portion of the front housing he was masking. He glanced at his coffee: still steamed too hot. Jean placed Maureen’s coffee in front of her and finally sat down at her work again.
So far she had only done a fourth as many parts as Maureen, at the most.
Paul sighed, got up from his chair and took the few steps to the drawn curtain, now motionless. He unhooked its edge and drew it back.
The elevator’s platform was totally empty.
“What the fuck,” he said to himself. Why would Steve bring the empty elevator up and then send it back down empty? Probably one of the people from the sanding room playing a trick. Cute.
Paul rehooked the curtain and went back to test his coffee.
Maureen was flipping stations on her radio with abandon, listening to a few lines from Boy George, flipping, singing out in a loud twangy country western voice along with Bob Seger, flipping to John Cougar and belting out with him. Paul winced as if someone were firing a gun repeatedly behind his head. She’d make a good country western singer, he thought, if she’d lower her voice a few decibels.
“Old MacDonald had a…” she yelled. Waited.
“Snake,” Paul said.
“Ee-iii-ee-ii-oooh!” Maureen laughed at herself proudly, though flushed with a little embarrassment.
“Lovely,” Paul droned. “Have you filmed a video for MTV yet?”
“Next week.”
“Maybe tonight we’ll even get some work done,” said Paul.
“I’m working,” Abby proclaimed.
“Of course you are, dear!”
“I’ve even got more than you!”
“Everybody’s got to be good at something.”
Abby didn’t reply to that. Just glowered at her part a little.
The phone rang (blooped was more accurate). Paul belched with terrifying volume and resonance, causing Jean to scrunch her face and Maureen to cluck her tongue, got off his chair and moved around the partition into the office.
“I’ll give you ten bucks if you pick up the phone and do that before you say anything!” Abby called after him, apparently cheering up.
Paul picked up the receiver but didn’t belch. “Hello—Rim Corp, shipping department.” There was a hiss of dead air, like a faint blizzardy static. “Hel-lo, Paul speaking. Mask-God at your service.” That soft sifting noise. “Yo, anybody home?: Your turn to speak now.” He glanced at the row of extension buttons, thinking he’d depressed the wrong one—he hadn’t. As he looked at the buttons the hiss was replaced with a click and then a busy signal. Distinctly a busy signal, but strangely muted, muffled and distant. Paul burped thunderously into the mouthpiece, hung up and came back around to his table.
“What’s wrong?” asked Abby.
“Nobody there—maybe somebody took it downstairs.”
“It was an obscene call,” Donna said.
“I’ve had them before,” Maureen sneered. “Sometimes they don’t talk but you can hear ‘em listening. I yell ‘fuck you! ’ at the top of my lungs and slam the phone down.”
“I’d like to shoot a gun next to the receiver,” said Paul.
“Blanks you could do it.”
“My cousin Ray,” Paul said. “When he was still living with my parents my mother got some obscene phone calls so he did the stupidest thing you could do—he grabbed the phone and told the kid he was gonna blow his head off with his shotgun. So the kid called back and said he was gonna cut Ray’s throat and drink his blood. For about two weeks my mother got tons of calls and by now Ray wouldn’t answer the phone—they mostly just let it ring once or twice anyway. Ray was laid off from his old job then and he was staying inside drawing and painting mostly, so…I don’t know if you’ve ever had this happen, but sometimes if you get laid off or something you get nervous and paranoid because you’re not around people all the time and it’s weird. Anyway, he’d purposely stay up all night long and sleep through the afternoon with his headphones on because that was when these fuckin’ punks usually called. It really upset him because it was like having an enemy without a face and you can’t fight back. So anyway, in the middle of this my brother woke him up out of his nap one day and said some guys were here to see him.
Now, he thought every beer bottle in the yard and funny lookin’ car parked in front of the house was these kids, right? So he looks out his bedroom door and sees this guy with a bushy beard comin’ into the house and he’s never seen the guy before. He was keeping a loaded .22 rifle by his bed and he picked it up and walked right up to this guy with it.”
“Wow,” whispered Maureen, always the attentive listener.
“Just then Ray sees his friend Jay come into the house after the bearded guy, and Jay’s holding his little daughter in his arms. The bearded guy, a Vietnam vet who had emotional problems after the war, this guy is standing there frozen with his face turned white.”
“Oh no.”
“He was just a friend of Jay’s he was bringing over to meet Ray. Ray was so embarrassed and upset he apologized and he told me he was almost crying. That’s what happens when you let these ignorant little assholes ter-rorize ya,. I think they deserve to get their heads shotgunned apart.”
“Abby likes obscene phone calls,” Maureen said.
“Yeah!” Abby bulged her eyes with decided lasciviousness.
The intercom came on. You could hear the raspy static and the radio music from downstairs…but nobody spoke. Usually it would be Dave calling a molder back from a protracted visit to the cafeteria. No one spoke.
“Listen,” Maureen squealed, “it’s another obscene call!”
Everybody cracked up. Paul jumped off his seat and pretended to look scared, cried out to the ceiling, “I-I-I know somebody’s there, I can hear you breathing!”
”Yeah,” Maureen said, “speak up or I’ll blow your head off with a shotgun!”
Paul sat back down. He heard Billy Idol singing Eyes Without a Face on the Worcester rock station they listened to down there. Paul liked the tune—he had diverse interests. Elvis Costello and Stonehenge, handguns and Nature worship.
“Ow—shit!”
“You alright?” Abby looked up.
It was Maureen, Paul saw—holding her hand up, smiling embarrassedly. A red bead glittered on a finger pad. “My fucking exacto knife,” she said.“Paulie Paramedic to the rescue.” Would no work get done tonight?
“Go wash it off and I’ll get a Band-Aid.” Maureen got up from her table and Paul headed into the office-alcove.
“You sure are clumsy,” Abby said after her. Maureen had been similarly wounded several times in the brief time she had been here.
“No shit,” she admitted.
Paul chose a bandage. He had bandaged her other little slices. She knocked coffees and Cokes over with her elbows, too. He wondered if she did it on purpose, subconsciously of course, to look cutely bumblin
g and get attention. He lit up a cigarette while he waited for her.
The intercom still rasped. The music was indistinct—it had taken him a minute or two to distinguish the previous song—and this song was just cluttered noise. This happened a lot with the intercom: someone would turn it on to call for Dave or something and forget to turn it off, or they’d think they had turned it off but hadn’t because they didn’t understand the system, and the damn thing would stay open for five, ten minutes, broadcasting the whining of drills, hissing and humming machinery, the molders’ activity. Only tonight the molders and the post-ops guys were gone. The “deflashers” were still down there filing sharp edges smooth—maybe somebody was playing a joke. Twice in the past Paul had gotten irritated enough to go downstairs himself and have Dave shut the thing off.
“They don’t hear that downstairs?” Jean asked Abby.
“No, just here and upstairs. Well, maybe you can hear it downstairs but it’s too noisy to hear it.”
“Come on, Maureen,” sighed Paul impatiently. What, had she slipped cutely on the tiles and bumblingly bashed her brains in on the corner of a sink?Jean completed a part and said, “Sucka-lucka.”
Paul looked over the partition at her and did his “Mr. Spock,” raising a speculative eyebrow at her as if she were some curious new life form.
“Blah, blah-blah-blah, blah-blah,” she chanted to herself in boredom, chalking up the part on her production sheet.
“You keeping yourself entertained over there, Blue Jeans?”
Jean looked up at him. “What?”
“You keeping yourself happy over there?”
“Yeah—are you keeping yourself happy behind there?”
“How could you tell? Masturbation is my forte.”
Abby sputtered into laughter. Donna looked up with a big grin.
Jean cracked, “I wouldn’t doubt it,” drily and went on to her next part. Even from here Paul could see the previous one was rather sloppily masked. He came around out of the office, approached her.
“These are the shittiest masking attempts I have ever seen. This work is inferior to acceptable Rim Corp standards.”
Jean withdrew from him a trifle and replied, “And your mouthwash just ain’t
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