The Bend of the World: A Novel (10 page)

When I fell back asleep, I dreamed that I woke up on an operating table in a spaceship. I wasn’t bound to it by any physical restraints, but I couldn’t move. The walls were reflective silver. The room was illuminated with floating globes of light like solar flares in a bad photograph. My head was free to move. I looked down and saw that I’d been drawn open like a frog in a biology class. It didn’t hurt, and although I could see my own guts, I didn’t feel disgust or nausea. An orifice opened in the wall and an immense man dressed like something between a fry cook and a Freemason was carried in on an ornate golden litter by four well-oiled ancient Egyptians. The litter was decorated with bas-relief images of crocodiles and pine trees. He lounged like an odalisque. They set him on the floor, but he seemed to have some difficulty getting up. They bent to help him, but he slapped away their hands prissily. No, no. I’m fine. He had a high-pitched voice, like Truman Capote but without the affectation of matinee sophistication. I just need to get a little momentum. He moved like a seal on dry land, as if he weren’t in the habitat most suitable for his physiology, but he managed to rock himself into a sitting position and then haul himself to his feet. He pulled a pair of rubber gloves—not like a doctor’s, like for dishwashing—from his pocket and snapped them on as he walked toward me. Don’t worry, he said. I’m a doctor. What seems to be the problem? Someone’s cut me open, I said; my voice was calm as if I were telling him I had a little rash. Let’s have a look-see, he said. His hand nestled between my legs. Not there, I said. Now, now, he told me. I always start the exam with a little hand scan.

7

In the morning, I was so hung over that I walked out of my building and for a full minute stood gawking at the empty stretch of curb where I usually parked my car before I remembered that my girlfriend had it. It was cold but oddly humid, and I could already feel the back of my neck dampening my scarf. The sky was the same color as the sidewalk. I sighed and walked down to Liberty Avenue, where I stood on a wet corner beside the West Penn Hospital parking garage for fifteen more interminable minutes until a bus came, then discovered I didn’t have exact change and shoved a five into the meter. Hey, buddy, said the driver. Yeah, yeah, I said.

The only seat left was on the side-facing bench just behind the driver between two big women who were discussing flying saucers. I’m telling you, one of them said, I’m telling you it’s all just that damn mayor trying to win reelection. It’s a whatchacall. It’s all a goddamn distraction. Now, how’s a mayor gonna make a goddamn flying saucer, Sherri? the other one asked, and you got the feeling that these two frequently had some variant of this conversation, with the latter playing the skeptical role and relishing it. Yes, it occurred to me that it was Johnny and my future, or one such possible future, two batty old men in thrift store outfits hauling around shopping bags and loud opinions on the bus. I thought about what my dad had said; what if those two old nuts could call back to us; what if they were less an extrapolation than a warning? A younger black woman across the aisle had joined the conversation and said only white people ever saw UFOs. Shit, she said, I bet if they asked them to describe the aliens, they’d be all like, a African-American man, medium build, in a hoodie. Everyone laughed. I looked at the floor.

My favorite security guard was working the main desk in my building. Hey, Rick. Happy Monday, I said. Is that what day this is? he replied. It feels like a Monday, I said as I walked toward the elevators. I don’t know, Rick said. I only work here. He was as indifferent as the architecture. He had a small lexicon of workplace clichés worn through years of repetition into mantras; he had a set of about six gestures and expressions that he arranged with the infinite complexity of a Baroque composer working and reworking the same few musical figures. You and me both, I said. Yup. He chuckled. We sure got them fooled.

The Global Solutions building, which was no longer called the Global Solutions building, as our occupied square footage had declined over the last several years while a new anchor tenant, the law firm of Metzger Richards, had come into possession of most of the upper floors, was fortunately invisible in Pittsburgh’s skyline. We weren’t quite as tall as our neighbors, and we were a few blocks inland from the nearest river, and we’d have detracted from the city’s pretty accidental outline if we’d been included in it. The building had the proportions of a shoe box turned on end, graceless and utilitarian, with horizontal rows of metal cladding between each floor’s windows that made it appear squished, a spring collapsed under the weight of its own mediocrity. It had been built in the late seventies by a long-since-consumed and -digested bank, bought by a property holding company, briefly overrun by AllShip, the dot-com incarnation of Global Solutions, then partitioned out to the usual gang of lawyers and marketing firms on the make. There was a rumor that the lobby had once held a famous piece of artwork, an abstract mosaic by an artist of local origin whose name no one could ever remember, but if that had been true, the art was long gone, replaced by white walls that looked sleek until you got close enough to see that they were a hasty drywall job, and marble floors that, because they’d been improperly sealed, bore many brown spatter marks from the many spills from the many badly balanced coffees carried by the many hurried workers out of the ground-floor Starbucks.

There were thirty-three floors. Johnny thought that was highly significant, because there were thirty-three degrees of Freemasonry. I worked on twenty-five. If you add the digits, Johnny said, you get seven. Seven is a very important number.

Besides Marcy, my relatively sleepy corner of the office held Leonard, Tim, Kevin, Pandu, and the Other Peter, who obliged our need for clarity by going by Pete, although in his absence everyone reverted to calling him the Other Peter. In its internal literature and external job postings, Global Solutions emphasized its team environment. None of us knew precisely what that was, and it never seemed that we were working on the same project at the same time, but in theory, we were a Global Solutions Solve Team, and we hypothetically reported to an apoplectic thirty-seven-year-old vice president named Ted Roskopf, or, as his email signature put it, R. Theodore Roskopf, MBA, even though he was still a year away from finishing his executive MBA program. There was an unlimited supply of vice presidents at GS; they were functionaries who reported to directors who reported to senior directors who reported to senior vice presidents who reported to division directors who reported to the C-levels; they mass-produced them in the copy room or something, each imbued with glossy charts for brains and endowed with a Napoleonic desire to lay waste to the rest of Global Solutions and remake its codes and social order in their totalizing vision. Ted referred to us quite openly as My People and also referred, whenever he had the chance, to the “gray ceiling,” his own coinage, apparently, meaning the gang of fifty-and-overs who held all the executive offices, and who all conspired to keep Ted from revolutionizing and revitalizing everything, everywhere. If this was a real tech company, he’d say, you wouldn’t have this bullshit. I wouldn’t put up with it. There seemed to be flaws in this analysis, but he was so earnest in his desire to implement impactful change or whatever that it became endearing, and even though he treated us with an attitude of feudal disdain, we felt oddly protective of him, as, I suppose, actual peasants might have once felt about their own backwater milords.

I suspected that Ted had convinced himself that he saw me as his protégé. Among our team, Marcy and Leonard were unfireable as Diversity, she being a dyke and he being black. Pandu was an Indian, which didn’t count as Diversity, yet as an Indian with a heavy accent, he was suspect in Ted’s estimation and unworthy of special attention. However, he was the only one of us who displayed competence or appeared to know for what reason and to what end he arrived at the office every morning. Tim was too old: the geezer of the group at something over fifty, and probably also Diversity, or at least also unfireable given the potential of Age Discrimination; Kevin was just out of school and therefore too young; the Other Peter was a mystery, a blond Californian with a surfer’s drawl and an attitude of athletic disinterest so complete and imperturbable that one of us, probably Marcy, once said that he was either the Buddha or a retard.

8

Dude, the Other Peter said, you look terrible. He was putting his lunch in the refrigerator in the kitchenette, and I’d come in to find coffee.

Just a little cold, I said. I looked around. Where’s the coffee machine?

Oh, man, it’s cool. We got a Keurig. He pointed to a machine that looked like something out of Beverly Crusher’s sick bay.

What the fuck is a Keurig?

K-cups, man. Single-serving.

Oh, I said. Yeah. The pod things. Isn’t that wasteful?

Totally
, he said. It produces, like, a bunch of times more plastic waste. But whatever, I don’t drink coffee.

Yeah, what do you do when you’re hung over?

Usually go for a swim. What about you?

I was trying to figure out the machine. Coffee, I said. Do you know how to do this?

Yup, he said, and he made me a cup of coffee.

What happened to the old machine?

I guess they all got junked. Purchasing replaced all the old machines. Didn’t you read the emails?

Who reads emails from Purchasing?

You should read the emails from Purchasing, the Other Peter told me. Those ladies pretty much run shit.

Yeah, well, this coffee sucks, I said. No offense.

Wouldn’t know, but I’ll take your word for it. You ever drink kombucha?

My girlfriend’s a fan.

It totally improves your intestinal flora.

Yeah. How is it for your liver?

Don’t know, man. It’s probably awesome for your liver, too.

Huh, I said.

By the way, he said, R. Theodore was looking for you.

Why?

Didn’t ask.

I drank more coffee, and went to my desk, and crossed my arms and lay my head on them, and although I had every intention of staying that way for thirty seconds, no more, when thirty seconds came I decided that I could do with one more interval, and when that interval had passed, I’d fallen asleep.

I woke about an hour later; no one had noticed, or, if they had, they’d either been good enough not to disturb me, or they just didn’t care, if that was even a distinction worth making. I felt better, but the bad coffee and the long weekend and perhaps the weakness of my intestinal fauna or what have you caught up to me, and I walked quickly and quietly to stairwell C, which I took down to the twenty-third floor. This was still officially a part of the Global Solutions office suite, but it had been almost entirely abandoned over the preceding five years as the Global Solutions Solutions Desk operations had been outsourced to Bangladesh and the Global Solutions TransSolve document translation program to India and the Global Solutions BrandSolve brand management division simply and unceremoniously euthanized when its last client departed for the sharper-focused shores of a real marketing firm. Some cubicles remained, and the conference rooms remained, along with the janitor’s closets and D-marks and break rooms and a few outdated copiers and something in the quiet hallways that suggested someone had recently been there, although of course no one had.

I’d surreptitiously snagged a newspaper from Leonard’s desk on the way down. I found a story about Councilman O’Bannon’s bigfoot-hunting measure in the B-section, written in that wry tone that tells you, reader, that you’re a little too sophisticated to believe it, but you’ll be amused to read it anyway. The article made a couple of references to
taking
a bigfoot, and I made a note to mention it to Johnny, who’d appreciate the double entendre, but it was the opening graf that really got me: As if the flying-saucer traffic weren’t enough, Councilman Jack O’Bannon (12th District) has introduced legislation that if approved by City Council will make it entirely legal to hunt an animal that most say don’t exist. Now some on Grant Street are suggesting that Pittsburgh’s growing tourism industry could look to these popular tales as a potential source of dollars and new investment.

So UFOs were a thing now. It made me slightly queasy. I hadn’t said anything to anyone except Johnny, but suddenly it felt as if everyone would know.

9

By the way, I never did tell anyone about that bathroom on twenty-three. I don’t know why. Secrecy, in the protection and in the breach, is the currency of an office much more than money itself, the small secrets worth more than the large. Nor did I mention to anyone that week, not even to Marcy, that I’d met a sort-of lawyer who’d confirmed the rumors of an impending sale or takeover or Other Important Event by an amoebic Northern European conglomerate, and when the week passed without my seeing or hearing from Mark, whom I’d unrealistically expected to pop by my desk for lunch on Monday, I began to reconstruct my memory of my weekend around a theme of uncertainty that it had not theretofore possessed, which was reassuring.

But I did ultimately mention to Leonard that I’d seen the UFOs. It was Thursday. Back when the original sightings had been reported, he’d mentioned to me in an offhanded and unembarrassed way that he’d once seen a UFO, but—he shrugged—I was doing a lot of dope back then. I always forgot that Leonard was actually older than Tim, which probably made me a racist. He didn’t look older than Tim. Leonard liked to tell stories about working at Global Solutions in the early eighties, when it was Allegheny Shipping and actually shipped things. Worked in the stockroom, he told me. You don’t even know what a stockroom is.

I know what a stockroom is, I said.

Yeah, academically, he answered.

Anyway, I told Leonard that I’d seen a UFO, and he said, Did you, now? There’s supposed to be some real weird shit going down this year. How do you mean? I said. Oh, you know, the whole Mayan apocalypse thing, he said. I didn’t know you believed in that sort of thing, Leonard. Shit, I don’t, but Elijah’s got my girl into it; she’s always making me watch those documentaries about ancient aliens and whatnot. Elijah, I said. Yeah. He’s got that store in East Lib. My girl’s real into authentic Africana, so that’s where she goes for her clothes.