Inappropriate Behavior. Murray Farish

turned right to look for it, and there was Smith, grinning wildly. I turned my head left, and there was Smith again, still grinning. I looked away, closed my eyes, and set my feet to run the gauntlet of my writhing coworkers, but just as I did, I felt Smith lean in near my ear. “Are you ready for Schmelling?”

      I opened my eyes, and I saw him.

      It was Schmelling, and this time he was walking—if you can call it that—under the weight of an enormous ledger that he carried on his back. The book was as large as a queen-size mattress, made of brown skin the color of cedar, its brass rings as wide as Hula-Hoops, the pages thick and coarse as canvas inside. I don’t know how he was able to carry the thing by himself. I knew he was strong—you try the crabwalk sometime, it’s tough—but I would have thought ten men would have strained under the weight of the astonishing book, and it hurt me to see him bearing it alone. Forget for a moment that I should have been thinking, What the hell is the deal with this huge ledger? And why is he lugging it through this madhouse to begin with? For all I can tell you is that at that particular moment, my only thought was to help him with his burden.

      So I did. I met him halfway across the room, and he, blue eyes popping, face purple with stress, his sandy blond hair matted with sweat, looked up at me from beneath the ledger. All noise in the building, save the sounds of our heavy breaths, stopped immediately when our eyes met.

      I said, “I’d like to help you with that, Mr. Schmelling.”

      He grunted something that was probably not a word, and at first looked at me with demurral. But I wouldn’t move, and slowly he assented, and slowly he began to jog the ledger higher on his back so I could get my shoulders underneath. I finally did and discovered I was correct about the weight of the book. Together we started to move, and the singing woman sang, Aaaiiieeeeeeee! and the clapping and stomping started again, and we carried the ledger together. I was immediately tired from the strain, but I never even thought of putting it down, of not carrying my share of the load. After a while, the tiredness disappeared, and it was as if we had somehow shuffled off the limits of our selves, the limits that fatigue and fear and pain place on us in this life, and so we carried on, I never asking where we would stop, and he never telling.

      Finally—I have no idea what time it was, it was late, it was dark outside the windows—we came to an area of the floor that was cleared of cubicle partitions, and there we set down the book.

      Smith and a couple others scurried out to open the front cover, then they turned several pages at a time, looking for one that was blank. Two of the women rolled caster-bottomed office chairs beneath Schmelling and me, and we collapsed into them. I was too tired at that point to even look at the book, and so instead I simply slumped forward with my head in my hands. I really cannot tell you what I was thinking, other than I remember the incredible fatigue and the incredible sweetness of having that ledger lifted; I felt so light, so empty. It seems to me now that at that moment, all of my thoughts had been cleared away, that my mind was indeed a clean slate, tabula rasa, like a newborn child’s, ready to be filled again with new thoughts, new ideas, new attitudes and visions, as if, from then on, everything would be new. I wasn’t even sure I knew my name.