When I got to the IC Monday morning, there was something that seemed a bit out of drawing, off-kilter, something imperceptible that nonetheless made me want to fix it, like in school when the teacher would leave that one little scratch of chalk on the blackboard after she erased it; if you’re like me, your whole day was ruined. That little chalk mark would distract us to the edge of madness. The IC was like that on Monday morning, except I couldn’t find the chalk mark to erase. I looked for it, all the way in from the parking lot, up the concrete steps and through the huge glass doors, through the marble-floored lobby past the PR office where I used to work, up the elevator to seven, all the way to my desk by the back corner near the window, I looked for it, but was unable to locate the problem.
Everything seemed to be in order to the untrained eye: The people I saw every day were moving about in their everyday fashion; there was a stack of contracts on my desk awaiting my careful vetting; there was nothing different about the decor. Everything was as I had left it Friday, except that it wasn’t. It was as if something as implacable and yet imperceptible as a bump in the orbit of the Earth had nudged everything slightly aslant, and it was going to stay that way.
I tried to work through it, but all day my timing was just a bit off. Where before I had carefully observed my coworkers’ movements, and scheduled mine, to avoid even the most light-hearted banter, I was now running into them every time I left my desk: at the coffee machine, in the restroom, at the copier. There was one man in particular—call him Smith—who kept asking me, each time we met, how I was doing, as if I had somehow changed in the thirty minutes since I’d run into him last. Smith was an unsightly fellow, short and squat, a heavy sweater with a thinning blond comb-over, tiny black eyes that made him look sort of prurient behind his thick, black-plastic-framed glasses, a puffy dewlap above his collar. Fine, Smith, and you? I’d reply, and each time he answered the same.
And it wasn’t just Smith. The manager—a gray-haired, slump-shouldered man of sixty or so—seemed to be lurking around quite a bit that day. Remember, now, I’d never met this man, didn’t even know his name. I’d watch him walk to his car in the afternoons—I always tried to stay huddled in my cubicle until I was sure he’d left for the day. He parked in the first row, drove the more prestigious company car, the blue Lincoln, and his hunch-rolled stroll to his automobile was usually all I saw of him. Today he was wandering around seven like some kind of golem, never stopping to speak or even so much as look at anyone, his face an attitude of profound confusion. I tried to avoid his gaze, stayed crouched over the papers on my desk in what I hoped passed for intense concentration, and when he started to get too close, I’d skulk away to the bathroom, walking a little bent-kneed to stay below cubicle level. My evasive maneuvers were effective if belittling, and I made it through the end of the day, still employed, but no closer to finding that overlooked chalk mark.
Just as I was about to leave my desk—while watching the manager slumping along to his car, head down, feet like clay—I heard a sound from outside my cubicle. It was Smith, and he was, for some reason, saying, “Psst,” and peeking over the top of the partition.
“How’re you doing, Smith?”
“Fine, and you?”
“Another day.”
“Not quite yet,” Smith said.
“Smith,” I said, suddenly aware that he had to be standing on his tiptoes, “would you like to come into my cubicle?”
“Thanks,” he said, his head and neck—which were one piece—then the rest of him appearing from behind the partition. “Are you ready?”
“Yes,” I said. “All done. So . . . I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“No, no, no,” Smith said, then peered furtively back behind the partition. He turned back toward me, leaned in close, and, barely whispering, said, “Are you ready for Schmelling?”
The only thing I could think to say was, I don’t know, at which point Smith put his hands on my shoulders and whisked me from my chair. We moved together like dance partners toward the window, where we stopped and, lacking much space in the cubicle, stood very close. I could smell Smith next to me; just above his sweat were the odors of cigarette smoke and Brut aftershave. Up close, I could see that he had had a terrible acne problem, and had some sort of wen on his nose as well, up near the inner canthus of his left eye, causing his black frames to rest slightly crooked on what passed for the bridge of his pug nose. He was a thoroughly unattractive man, but I soon saw that something amazing was happening to his face. He was glowing, turning a healthy, sanguine scarlet, his eyes gleaming like tiny black pearls behind his glasses, his lips trembling in what can only be described—or at least I saw it this way, and still believe it true—as the paroxysms of rapture. I wanted to see what was exciting him so, but I was so transfixed by the bliss on his face I was unable to turn my attention. His breathing was coming a little heavier now, starting to fog the window in front of him. He made a quick, jerking motion with his right arm, grabbed his graying shirt sleeve in his palm and wiped away the condensation. It was then that he said, in a gasp and a squeal, “There he is.”
I looked out the window, down into the parking lot, where the man who had crawled to his car the previous Monday was this Monday doing a perfect phys. ed. crabwalk across the parking lot: his arms directly perpendicular to the ground, his knees bent at T-square-grade right angles, kicking forward on cue to propel himself to his car like some sort of Cossack dancer. Whereas the week before he carried his attaché case in his teeth, today it rested on his perfectly flat chest, at no point threatening to upend. When he got to the third row, to his dark green Ford Taurus, he bent his arms a bit, and then, all in one motion, sprung to his feet and caught the attaché between both hands. He pirouetted to face the building, raised the attaché above his head like a championship belt, and offered the slightest of bows. With that he turned again, unlocked his car, got in and drove away.
I stood and continued to stare out the window, having no idea at all what to make of this. Just as I was about to turn and ask Smith . . . what, I don’t know . . . he took an audibly deep breath and expelled that breath with, “God, I admire him.” He stood in reverie just a second more, then turned, patted me on the back and said, “Well, see you tomorrow.” And with that he was gone.
Maybe now would be the time, in a quick hundred words or so, to explain something to you, about me. I am a simple man, basically, in terms of how I view the world. I do not believe the world is a confusing place, so long as one does not unnecessarily complicate one’s view of it. I do not believe in UFOs, Bigfoot, angels, mysticism, magic, channeling, that there was a second shooter on the grassy knoll, or that 9-11 was an inside job. I do not believe that there are any underlying mysteries. I do not believe in looking either above or below the surface of things, because I think there’s more than enough on the surface to keep us occupied for the length of any one life, which, I believe, is all we get. I do not believe in God. I do not believe in heaven. I do not believe in hell. I believe that life is this world alone, is what we make of it, each to his own abilities and needs.
Knowing all of this about myself, I can, I think, be forgiven for a moment of stuporous inactivity, a stunned paralysis of movement and speech, even of thought. I find it hard, however, to let myself off the hook, for by the time I was able to move, Smith, along with the rest of the seventh floor, was gone, and I was left all alone. I knew I should do something, that seemed clear. But what? How does one react to a grown man crab-walking across a parking lot with an attaché on his chest, especially when that man, or his actions, have apparently inspired some sort of cult following among the people with whom one works? I thought at first to move, quickly, to flee, to get out of that building, use my sick time for a few days until I figured out what to do, or figured out a way to never go back. But then I caught sight of Smith, walking, as normally as Smith could, across the parking lot to his car. I saw him get into a gray Saturn, and as soon as he did I sprinted from my desk down the seven flights of stairs and made it to the parking lot just in time to see him drive away. He turned left out of the parking lot and I ran madly to my car to tail him.
When I got onto the access road, I could see Smith’s car heading west on the highway, so I floored it and jumped two lanes of