I work in an office now.
The coveralls are folded neatly in the closet along with my cranial and the well-worn leather gloves that were my constant companions for so long. More than anything else these days I sit behind the monitor in the office and look outside, a rough translation for looking back on where things once were and where I once was. This sensation is something like rubbing your hand across wax paper in that you are aware that the material is there. You understand that something is pulling against the flesh of your fingers yet you cannot quite slow down enough to stop permanently. Crumpling the substance into a closed fist simply serves to illustrate the nature of pain and what happens when you interrupt the order of the former condition.
There is no more real stress as there was before. The person that I am relieving told me that he actually lost sleep over the fact that people’s travel arrangements could go wrong and they could wind up in some place like French Guyana. Perhaps Uruguay or Cleveland for that matter, I don’t fucking know really. At the time I was so struck by the comment that I did not know whether to let it slide or seize the massive Tone Commander 3100 telephone from the desk and smash it into his skull. Continue to pound until the plastic gave way, until eyes separated from their sockets and all I am left to do is stand hyperventilating over an unidentifiable reddening mass. Stand over the body laughing like some drunken chimpanzee about what it is to lose sleep over whether or not you have done your job right today. Stand there and wait to be carted away to the nearest mental health facility and ride out the last days of my life in disgraced seclusion.
Taking the paperwork from one place to another I sift, shuffle, sort and fax. E-mail, coordinate, collate, interface, plan, strategize and minimize expenditures. Like any other corporate flack in America I sit at a desk and try not to look out the window because there is nothing more than distraction as far as the eye can see. There was a time when I was trusted to do far more than this. Looking around now I examine my surroundings and find myself disgusted by the cute cartoons on the office wall, the printouts from web sites repeating the same banality. The words are trundled from one end of the sentence to another but the intent is the same. They are intended to amuse. They make me want to slather the place in a thousand gallons of lard and set it ablaze with a goddamn flamethrower.
I work in an office now.
Watching the news on television does nothing anymore. At a time this was something amusing, it was a novelty to hear about things on the other side of the world. All I can imagine now is what it would be like to hoist the television off of its smarmy Ikea mooring that anchors the device in the nexus of my apartment. Revel in the sensation of feeling the weight come on as muscles tense against this new load. Shuffle forward under the burden and onto the balcony, fuck the screen door, just go on and plow right though that flimsy ass bitch.
Sit smiling smugly in the fetid humidity as those children from downstairs wonder why it is that the man from the fourth floor apartment has his tee-vee on the railing.
Push.
Glossy gray glass screen tumbling catching sunlight wince trace plastic look at the cord flutter I never knew it would do that what is that noise airflow over the cabinet maybe.
Subtle whiff of hot electronics caught by the wind and blown up the side of the building on a thermal.
Single.
Glorious.
Moment.
Look out kiddies. Here comes the motherfucking son of a bitch now.
Impact.
You abuse us. You degrade us. You mock us. You taunt us. You play games with us like we’re a bunch of anatomically correct GI Joe dolls. You jam us in the ass with M80’s and light the fuse while smiling like this is some sort of right. You had September 11 coming. Your fucking bad decisions. You left us to bleed out in Somalia. You left us to burn at Khobar Towers. You left us to be blown apart and drown on the Cole. You spit on us in airports when we came home. You declare us inhumane killers simply out for the next violent fix. You could have cared less who we were and finally when your profit margins are threatened then you come begging? September 11 was a debt long due, long due those that ignored the warnings, pushed it all off on someone else and insisted that ‘it could never happen here.’ That day was a debt owed many, many foolish people.
Reap the whirlwind cocksuckers.
Wait.
I feel sorry for the kids I could potentially crush with the television set. I feel sorry for the people who aren’t coming out of those buildings and the Pentagon. For them I am forced to kneel and beg for forgiveness because no one deserves to get whacked like that.
No one deserves to burn, no one needs to be crushed to death under thousands of tons of steel. No one needs to survive the collapse only to spend days waiting for rescue, twitching every time some piece of stone settles only to ebb away because of CO2 poisoning or dehydration. No one deserves that at all. That doesn’t change the fact that it happened, and we are indeed the ones that made it happen.
I work in an office now.
I don’t feel sorry for the ignorant fools who started this all, who pushed their way in until there was nothing left for them to inhabit. Those who profited from the murder before the murders we now know and hear about almost every day. I don’t feel sorry for the media pushing the industry line of accountability and honesty when all it really amounts to is nothing more than a mouthpiece for the very people that they are accusing.
Maybe if you had let us do our jobs we could have stopped this a long time ago. Maybe there wouldn’t be a developing police state in our midst. Maybe more than three thousand people would be alive today if we had been smarter or faster about what we were doing then. Bitterness has so many forms and one of them is recrimination.
Who is the most guilty then? The sailor, soldier, zaibatsu or Taliban? Ronald McDonald? Humanity as a species? There must be someone to blame or else the neat package unfolds and we are all just covered in the same blood. There must be an evil here somewhere. There must be an enemy. We simply have to spray the blood of our sisters and brothers, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters onto the wall long enough and we will find the enemy.
I work in an office now.
Plowed into the side of a mountain after the rotor head flew apart in midair, the lungs could no longer breathe without machines.
The brother nearly killed in a crash off of Hawaii due to faulty maintenance and the heart stopped.
With the connector found, the brain began to slow.
Chief decapitated, the eyes became blind.
Pinned to the flight deck by an Iranian patrol boat search light with a machine gun for company, the family said goodbye.
When I watched people throw themselves out of burning office buildings the soul died.
Glossy gray glass screen tumbling catching sunlight wince trace plastic look at the cord flutter I never knew it would do that what is that noise airflow over the cabinet maybe.
Silence this time.
Sitting awestruck by horror.
Wishing for fiction.
Praying for redemption.
Impact.
This is what I think of now with idle hands and a window for company. I work in an office now.