The Time Traveler's Wife Page 3
“Is something the matter John?”
It was his Manager, sitting on a wooden stool beside him, massaging John’s nipple between his thick burly fingers and lifting the near empty silver bucket to his face.
“Is everything right at home? Is there anything you need to talk about? You know I did a course in Occupational Health so if you need to, you know, just talk, we can take a minute away from the milking and you can, you know, make up the time at the end of the day. But this” he said, swirling the few drops at the bottom of the silver bucket. “This is unacceptable.”
“Fire me,” John said. “Please.”
“Well,” said The Manager pensive, “Let’s not go down that path just yet. We do have an action plan, though.”
John imagined himself revolting, thrusting his clenched fist into his Manager’s smiling face but his it was no use. His head was made of jelly and though it wobbled about, it didn’t, as he had hoped, fall off of his shoulders.
“Can I change department then? I think I’d like a change. I need a change.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” The Manager said, struggling to get up from the tiny stool before walking down the hallway with the empty silver bucket in his hands.
“You ever wish you’d done things differently? Or what would happen, if you had? If you could go back, what would you change?”
“Hold on buddy. Trying to concentrate. Nearly done here. And…” Stefan said, drawing his last word with the last drops of milk from his swollen nipple into his now full and nearly overflowing silver bucket.
John peered out from his cubicle. Down along the rows of small office spaces, he could see his fellow colleagues all unclamping their nipples and ejecting their video cassettes from the VCRs that sat adjacent to their monitors. They seemed to enjoy their work. Most looked relieved like they had just finished a marathon. Some joked lightly as they stacked their cassettes, making light of the poor weather and last night’s upset. Most were cynical, quite adamant that The Team never had a chance in the first place. No-one at all seemed surprised or even upset by the result.
John hated football. Not for the sport itself, but for the social obligation. Listening, though, to the murmurs about him, he quickly realized that how they felt about the upset was how he had felt about himself. It was how he had felt about his life, about his job, about his thinning hair and his flabby body. It was how he had felt about the size of his penis and about the tufts of grey hair that had just recently sprouted in his nose. It was how he had felt about the things he had wanted to do his whole life but had never got around to. It was how he had felt about his garden and his scabby cat and it was how he had felt about his wife.
It was how he had felt, until now.
And then, as quickly as his colleagues had packed their cassettes into hard cover casings, each unwrapped one more, loading them into the VCRs before reattaching the cold steel clamps to their nipples and starting another task; the filling of another silver pail.
Most had seventeen cassettes piled on top of one another. It was an average, what was expected by working at an average capacity. John looked around at his work station. His table was empty except for a Diet Coke and a picture of his wife, from when she was younger before he knew her. She didn’t know that he kept that photo and he’d probably never tell her. And though it seemed innocuous, keeping this exact picture, it felt like something that she wouldn’t understand.
He sat there staring at the picture of the woman he never knew and he imagined what she was like before the first time that he saw her, before the first time she turned to him and her sight was littered with his attention, before her thoughts were corrupted and polluted with his image, before they finished each other’s sentences, when it was that she had a complete and independent thought of her own.
He sat there staring at the picture and beside him; he had not one packed cassette.
“Come with me John,” The Manager said. He sounded serious. He even remembered his name.
“Am I being fired?”
Though he wanted it, all he could think of were the seven remaining installments for the outdoor setting they had bought last September but had never used. Then he thought about his wife and how upset she would be and then, how upset that would make him. And he hated himself, for making himself feel that way.
“You’re being promoted,” The Manager said.
John’s eyes widened. He’d been expecting a raise, everyone had; something small and trivial that would take the edge of the rising interest rates on his back dated loans.
“Congratulations,” The Manager said, pointing to a cubicle at the end of the row. “You’ve been promoted to Team Coordinator. You must be pleased. You deserve it.”
John stepped into the cubicle. He looked around. It was cramped just like his old cubicle. And the chair where he would sit, its air compressed handle had its rounded plastic end broken, just like his last chair. And there was monitor just like his old monitor and a VCR too. And on the ground were a small beige stool and an empty silver pail, waiting to be filled, just like his old cubicle.
He tucked his head around the side and peered into the next cubicle and he saw Stefan, filling another pail, thinking about Monster Trucks and smiling as he shook his extended thumb maddeningly as if he were trying to shake off a serious burn.
“I don’t get it,” John said. “I thought I was promoted? Nothing changed. I’m in the same cubicle.”
He wanted to shout the word fuck. He wanted to say that it was exactly the fucking same. He wanted to emphasize that, to shout the word fucking. He wanted to offend The Manager, for him to feel like he felt now. He wanted to, but he didn’t.
“Congratulations,” The Manager said, clapping loudly and inciting the whole office into a massive lauding roar.
“Bravo,” they all shouted. “Bravo. We wish we were you.”
John stared idly at his cubicle and then at the picture of his wife.
“Would you like me to massage your nipples?” The Manager asked.
“No thanks,” John said politely. “I can do it myself.”
Through the Wormhole of Sudden Applause
“You know what I love?” Stefan asked, loosening his tie and sniffing the air as if the blurring luminescence were gently swaying pine.
“Going home” John replied.
“Going home. That’s right. Going home. How did you know I was going to say that?”
“That’s all you ever say at the end of every day.”
“Still,” Stefan said, now pulling his oversized white shirt from beneath his straining belt line. “It feels good to be going home.”
In the elevator, Stefan, along with the men from the other floors, talked about what show he was going to watch tonight after the news and the football and then a debate broke out about what our role was in the Middle East and one of the men in particular, he seemed to have just the right thing to say about every issue. Not everyone was impressed, but that didn’t mean they didn’t concede their opinion and like an infant lulling itself to sleep, gasp resignedly, accepting that they had no voice, none that could be heard anyway.
As they hammered on about political affair, naming cruel dictators and Neo-Fascist Fundamentalist Regimes, John couldn’t help but stare at a spider in the upright corner of the elevator. He or she was no different to the monsters being ber
ated by young men with cheap suits and sore nipples. For like the dictator, the spider kept a kind of unnerving state of balance and order. Though there was potential for the spider to swing low and to bite at the neck of some unsuspecting Western liberal, the truth was, it was more interested in collecting tiny blood sucking insects for its lunch and its pleasure. And like the dictator, if the spider was ever removed from power, if some fearful liberating sponge were to wipe away its sticky veil of authority, there would be no order anymore and all of those bloodsucking insects, they would be free to bite, suck and wreak havoc in this humid cramped space.
John feared the spider, but he was thankful that it was there.
The elevator stopped on the seventh floor and a pretty girl got on. She had long straight black hair that was tied in a pony tail which was pulled so tight that not a single hair was out of place. She wore bright red glasses and purple lipstick and she had a tattoo of a naked woman, straddling a mechanical phallus. The tattoo started on her neck, just below her ear and it ran all the way down her left arm. The last of it, the pointed tail of some winged reptile, curled onto the palm of her hand.
The workers all retreated into an awkward silence, some tucking their heaving stomachs closer to their expanding waist lines, feigning general disinterest but watching, with a sharp peripheral eye on the strange pretty girl who was both demure and dangerous,