imanant :: look at me go.

Monday, January 16, 2006
"Chapter" Five of "Oh, That Wacky Patrick Midleton!"

“Chapter” Five (I'm still working on this one, so please, leave some feedback. especially if you know anything about being an editor.)

I’d started talking to myself.

“Take a shower. You know you always feel better after a shower. It’ll clear your head.” If that’s not a sign of depression, someone clue me in on what is. Jamie had been dead for three weeks. I wasn’t sleeping anymore, one, maybe two hours a night. I’d even been given a managerial order to “chill out”.

“Patrick, you’ve had a rough time,” is the first thing Chuck told me when I entered his office. He leaned casually against his desk, crossing his arms above his nascent middle aged man belly. He did this to butch up.
“But we really need you here, buddy.” Hearing your boss call you buddy is like kissing your sister. “Here’s what I propose…” He picked up his alabaster Compedia Publications desk globe, his fanciest paperweight, and shook it gently, focusing on it like an eight ball.
“Take some time off. I’ll forward you some vacation time.” He looked back up at me for approval. “Two weeks?” He put the desk globe down next to a gold trimmed picture of his wife and ten year old son Allen he took at our annual company softball game. Editors vs. layout. He stood up from the desk and took two steps toward me. Here comes the kicker.
“Try to take it easy. Don’t think about work. Chill out.”

Each letter, a monologue.

C – h – i – l – l o – u – t.

Every muscle in his face worked in unison to form those letters, that sentence, those two words; I saw it happen. Contraction and release, tensing and relaxing. I’m not sure where the strength came from, but the moment that balding, I’m-40-but-still-hip, son of a bitch told me to chill out, I resisted a carnal impulse to leap from my chair and strangle him with his metal slinky until his eyes bulged from their sockets. Instead, I nodded a couple times, stood up slowly to give the appearance of a man who’s gotta do, what he’s gotta do, gave a polite thank you wave, and gathered some things from my desk. Then I left without making even the faintest of a scene. Every pair of eyes in the room was on me and their respective brains were all wondering the same thing.

“Did he just get fired?”

Since the incident, my work had gone steadily down hill. A day after the crash, I was released from the hospital with some minor sprains and bruises, and with a powerful urge to work. I assisted Jamie’s family in arranging the funeral, filed a report on the accident, spoke with insurance agents, leaving a trail of crossed T’s and dotted I’s in my wake. I alone defeated the second law of thermodynamics. The day after Jamie was in the ground, buried adjacent to the plots reserved for her parents, I went back to work with a passion hotter than the depths of hell.

Sixteen hours a day, six days in a row (the office was closed on Sunday), sleeping on the couch in the lounge, going home only a couple of times to change. I edited, drafted, jazzed up, toned down, and smoothed out thousands of words separated by single spaces and punctuation. I can’t recall one piece I worked on during that first week after her death, or whether they were any good. But work I did. I was a machine. No one told me to relax. No one dared. No one dare even speak to me. Fire spurt from my ears like a race car’s tailpipe. When I’d come around for a pit stop at the water cooler, my co-workers would just stare at the floor, scratching the back of their hands and then excuse themselves. I was a silent warlord. A silent racecar warlord. Earnhardt in a Viking helmet.

When I showed up for work the furst Sunday after Jamie died, to my surprise I found the building closed. I had no clue what day it was, so I waited a little while for someone to come and open it. After an hour or so, I walked home. “I should never have left last night”, I chided myself.

After speed walking to my apartment, it hit me the moment I crossed the threshold. The door closed and I dropped my bag to the floor with a noticeably pronounced thud. The entropy had caught up with me. The loneliness, the boredom. The excruciating anxiety. It was like a team of school children was marching around my intestines singing “The Song That Doesn’t End” and poking me with homemade flags.

“What do I do now?”, I asked the empty room. I looked at my books, pilled arbitrarily around the apartment. I looked at my stereo and the shelves of records which seemed to spring forth from the wall.

“I could listen to some music, “ I thought. I looked out the window at the apartment buildings and stores across the street. I saw people going about their lives like, to the best of their knowledge, everyone who mattered was still alive. I sat on the couch and turned on the T.V. I flipped through the channels, but couldn’t tell the difference between the shows. When I turned off the television, my reflection stared back at me; all gaped and wide eyed. I crawled to the television to get a better look. Even with the light from windows reflecting on the screen, I could still make out the bags under my eyes. I got up and hurried to the bathroom and pressed my face into the mirror over the sink. I was feeling something, something very intensely, but I couldn’t pin point it long enough to give it a name.

Then I vomited. Twice. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and took two steps out of the room, falling face first onto my bed.

I started to cry. I hadn’t cried in years. I didn’t cry when Jamie died. I didn’t cry in the hospital. I didn’t cry when my grandfather died. I didn’t cry when Nails, my Jack Russell Terrier, got hit by the ice cream man. I never cried, but there I was soaking the sheets.

When I thought of how pathetic I must have looked, I cried some more. When I thought how Jamie wouldn’t want me to cry, it came harder. Tensing my face into a prune couldn't halt the flow. Nearly smothering myself with a pillow wouldn’t make it stop. So I cried and cried and cried.

I must have gone into some weeping induced coma because when I came to, it was Monday morning and almost time for work. I didn’t even change my clothes.

That’s about the point my colleagues ended their silent pity party, if only out of necessity. I began screwing up every assignment I had. I overheard two of them questioning whether the shock of the accident had caused me to forgot how to read. At first I really did try to keep up, but I couldn’t focus. Words began to blend and pages began looking like Rorschach tests. A chapter from the Albert and McKinsey’s Microeconomics, 7th Edi., looked like a bunny eating a pumpkin.

After two weeks of missing every their/there/they’re error, I gave up trying. Each assignment received no more than a couple minutes of my abbreviated attention, regardless of length. Sometimes, if I got bored with creating flip books out of my steno pads, I’d randomly insert paragraphs from an Anthropology text on Aboriginal woman into cookbooks.

Boil the asparagus in gently boiling water until cooked, but still al dente. This should take about 8 to 10 minutes, depending on the thickness of the asparagus. Melt the butter in a small pan. Women performed not only the normal domestic chores and child care, but used their skills to weave fish nets, paddle canoes during the hunt, tan hides and harvest wild rice and maple sap. An Ojibwa woman was free to shun the protection of a man, if she so desired, as long as she was prepared to follow the male pursuits which were necessary for survival. Arrange the warm asparagus on four plates, and drizzle over it the melted butter. Sprinkle with a little salt, and some coarsley cracked black pepper.

When that bored me, I’d pretend I was Yossarian from Catch-22 and return unfinished copy to the previous editor with words blacked out randomly. I thought it was a gas. One of these letters was passed up the chain of command. Really, I’m lucky he didn’t fire me then. He was probably nervous I’d start acting crazy.

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