Head of Security

Once my friend (who I won’t name) became tired of his job at the factory and decided to aim for a higher station in life, there was simply no stopping him.

The degree of his determination might have seemed out of character as judged by one whose relationship to my friend was based primarily upon assumption, but not to me.

True, like so many of us, he preferred best those times when he was not compelled to work.

In fact, I never saw him more satisfied or more at ease than when he was not at work or wasn’t required to go in to work the next morning.  

Yet as a man who enjoyed leisure he could hardly have been called unique.

His preference for leisure did not lie in the fact that he felt he had better things to attend to on his own time or in the dull dispensation of the labor to which he was typically applied when working.  

For emotional reasons, which I won’t get into, a job was important to him and for this reason he could never have been unemployed.  

And anyway, he couldn’t have afforded it.  

The fact was that he liked having a job—liked the convenience of it and the ease it provided in conversations when people asked him what he did—it was the work itself that was the trouble.  

He simply did not take to the whole species of the thing.

Sadly, and as the case so often is, his very survival depended on his putting in at least the amount that would, in those days, have been judged to constitute full employment.  

This is why he eventually decided that his best option would be to obtain a job that paid a great deal but required little actual labor.

It was a lofty aspiration but my friend was ambitious despite the claims of his detractors. He would not be dissuaded from his chosen path once he had resolved to obtain a high-paying job that required little labor and he was assiduous and methodical in realizing this goal.  

And why not? His life, or at least his ideal life, depended on it.

He began immediately by taking stock of his resources, which he divided into two categories.

In the category of "capital" he counted sound mind & body and put down grit & determination and a checking account under “ephemera,” pointing out that money, was, at base, as illusory as disposition and that we must not give either item more influence than it ought to otherwise command by mistaking it for something we could count on, however vital it might prove to be in the pursuit of this or any future goal. He then explained that his classification of himself as "capital" was meant to serve as a sobering reminder that that whole endeavor must always be circumscribed by the limits of his own existence, a finite term under wasting conditions whose good maintenance and, with the grace of God, future flourishing, was the true heart and covenant for stepping out into the whole thing at all.

I could see that he had thought about it a lot and was touched by the grace and humility of the words he had been able to deploy in the service of what otherwise may have proven the typically banal exercise of "wishful thinking." Though I had always had faith in my friend—more faith than others had ever been willing to grant—I admit to harboring certain reservations in my thoughts about him; a low-pitched skepticism sounding, now and then within the deep hull of our friendship, slightly dissonant undertones. Not so this time. His words rang clear as tempered silver. I agreed to accompany him to buy resume paper.

We kicked stones all down the length of the old commerce street. There were plenty to be found along with other loose debris of every kind—from shattered bricks and clods of asphalt to jagged shards of concrete and shingles fallen from the roofs of the stately, crumbling homes, and we kicked these as well as we joked about old times, not caring where they flew. With my own work consuming so much of my free time, it was good to be out in the fresh air with my friend, though I stumbled, at one point, into a pothole the size of a sedan and might have lost a tooth or two if he hadn’t caught my hand. If you could somehow harness general decrepitude, I quipped, slapping him on the back, your name and fortune would be assured.

At the depot, complications ensued. We could find no paper with even one blank side. It would not be so bad or so uncommon to have a resume printed on the back of an old spreadsheet or internal memo but no clean surface presented practical concerns.   

I decided to ask the clerk if he could help us. A greying man who looked beset by a host of personal demons, he shook his head.

“Do you have any more paper?” I asked. “Anything that hasn’t been used?”

His eyeballs began to twitch and he slowly brought his pointer fingers to his temples as if to focus a psychic beam. He stood motionless except to work his mouth and I watched him from a respectable distance.

“Here” he said and slowly sunk behind his counter. After a moment he reappeared, holding a roll of toilet paper. “Pure as the driven snow.”

I was glad when a moment later, my friend called to me from across the store. He was crouched by a bin, examining a sheet of paper he had found.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Something very interesting,” he replied and held it out to me.

It was a black and white photocopy of a heraldic crest; a buckler gleaming dully, wreathed in thistle, with the blurred body of a dragon rampant, tongue aflame, antagonized by a tiny knight astride a fat and placid looking pony, his lance flying a gay pennant in the painted breeze. Two undulating ribbons, held aloft by sparrows above and beneath boasted Latin platitudes in Germanic script.  

“Nice,” I observed.

My friend shook his head.

“Turn it over.”

A resume was printed on the other side.  

“Donald Ripon,” I read. The name meant nothing to me. “Do you know him?”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “Look at his experience.”

I scanned the page again. Donald had certainly found ways to stay busy. The many entries showed a man who had risen at a quick but still respectable rate from his humble beginning as a duty officer in a mid-sized city who had to hose down the latrines, to the higher echelons of several private security firms, which, if his own reportage could be fully trusted, regularly secured “plum” contracts with domestic and foreign governments—sometimes simultaneously.

“Impressive,” I said. “But what does it have to do with us?”

My friend smiled. “I have an idea,” he said.

He brought the paper to the counter where the clerk still stood. The toilet paper was gone. Now, he was winding up a toy car, placing it on the counter, letting it go, capturing it with his hand and winding it again. At first, he did not seem to notice we were there.

“Excuse me,” my friend said, indicating the resume. “I’d like to buy this. How much does it cost?”

The clerk wound the car one last time, placed it on the counter and watched as it puttered over the edge. My friend was about to ask again when the clerk took the sheet irritably and strode to the back of his little room to a thin work table strewn with garbage and miscellaneous devices. He swept a few things aside and found a rusted produce scale. He placed the paper on the tray and stared off, stroking his chin, not looking once at the reading, of which I’m sure none had registered anyway.

“How about a trade?” he asked slowly.

“Ok,” my friend agreed. “What for?”

I bent and picked up the wind-up car from the floor. The plastic fuselage was warm, the little windshield smudged with fingerprints.

“That toy car,” the clerk said. There was a plaintive note in his voice. “Would you consider a trade for that?”

“Certainly,” said my friend, with no hesitation. “It’s a deal.”

“Good,” said the clerk, sounding relieved. “Let me wrap this up for you. We don’t need any paperwork.”

“Good,” said my friend. “I’d prefer it that way.”

On the way home, my friend explained his big ideas to me about the piece of paper.

“The way I see it,” he said, “I just start sending it out as if it’s me.”

I wasn’t sure I understood.

“You’re just going to start applying for jobs, as if you were this Donald Ripon person?”

“Bingo,” he replied.  “Not the worst idea someone’s ever had, you’ve got to admit.”

At the time, I didn’t agree. But I also didn’t want to hurt his feelings. He seemed so convinced.

“No, not a bad one. Not by any means,” I hedged, but I couldn’t entirely conceal my skepticism. “It’s just… Even if it does lead to something more—an interview say—won’t they find out that you’re not the man you claim to be when you meet them in person?”

My friend smiled, as if he had expected to encounter this argument. He inclined his head slightly, as though to indicate the esteem in which he held any opinion of mine despite the fact he must proceed, on this occasion, to disagree.

He inhaled deeply and, walking on, hands clasped behind his back, peered at me over his spectacles.

“And how, do you propose, they should manage to ascertain that singular fact?”

I almost laughed but caught myself at the last and prepared instead to gently dismantle the absurd palisade within which he apparently felt so safely ensconced. Indeed, it was such a ridiculous position for him to take up that as I launched into what I supposed was a perfunctory and wholly unnecessary recitation of common sense, I found myself at something of a loss—the weak words rolling out in hollow shells of sound where tides of molten rhetoric should have flowed in rushes.

“Well… All they’d need to do is look at your identification.”

My friend’s eyes twinkled.

“And how many times is it that you have been asked for your identification at a job interview?”

I started to reply but realized he had a point.  

“Well, I’ve never been asked,” I admitted. “But I haven’t had very many jobs, or interviews for that matter.”   

“Yet you have a job, have you not?”

It was true. I had found a position, despite the difficulties generally associated with obtaining one. And yet despite these difficulties, of which the interview certainly numbered and ranked highly therein, I could not recall ever having been asked to present any form of identification whatsoever, even for the purposes of verifying payments made to me by my employer.

“It’s different with a job like mine,” I persisted. “The kind of job you’re talking about—something that only this Donald Ripon would be qualified for—that’s not like the kind of job we’re used to thinking of.”

“What, you mean they pay in loam?”

We both laughed then—the tension draining like a lanced boil.

“What I mean is, these high-paying, low work jobs—they don’t just give them away. You really have to know something to land one.”

“Something,” my friend smiled, “or someone.”

I stopped.

“Are you saying that you have some sort of connection with Donald Ripon?”

My friend walked on and, after a moment’s hesitation, I followed him.

“It’s not my connection that matters, though as far as that goes, no, I do not. What matters are the connections that Donald has.”

“I don’t see how any connections can matter when you’re clearly not Donald Ripon.”

“Oh, what makes you so certain? Other than the fact that we’ve known each other practically all our lives.”

I was getting impatient.

“I don’t mean to disillusion you but you don’t look like somebody who has been working in law enforcement for the past twenty years. You don’t look much older than twenty, period. You’re not hardened enough.”

“Aren’t I?” My friend stopped this time. I turned back to look at him.  

His fists were clenched and his arms straight at his sides though I could see his muscles quivering under his sleeves. His mouth was set, not in a smile or a frown, but a smirk—defiant, uncoupled from the levering brow, which sat straight and hard instead above the flared nostrils and eyes like shards of polished china behind the smudged lenses gleaming in the last light before dusk.

In that instant, he looked like some else. But that instant passed.

I didn’t want to part ways on these terms, so I pretended to look intimidated. He smiled slowly.

We had come to the place where what you would call the paved part of the road ended, continuing on as dirt in one direction and silt in the other. My friend lived down the dirt road. My route was through the other.

I promised him that we would see each other soon—the next day how about? For dinner.

"To celebrate my new appointment," he insisted.

It seemed a premature thing to declare but I had said my piece already and didn't want to stir things up again. I wanted to believe that he was right but could not help and feel my doubts had merit.  

"Yes," I said, without much enthusiasm. "To celebrate."

As the silt growled beneath my feet I brooded on the problems inherent to friendship.

Should a friend disabuse another of his fanciful notions merely on principle? The principle being that it would be more merciful, ultimately, to be disabused by a friend then by the chance forces of fate? And if so, which time is the right one to strip the veil away? A full and flowering life is often rooted in notions that had their starts in suspect soil. Which to kill and which to water is what I wanted to know, when the seeds all looked like shriveled testicles, taken from a little wooden man.

I decided to let this one live a little longer. It seemed cruel to kill an innocent idea so young. It would sew discord between my friend and I. And he was all I had, apart from my job.

It was to this blessing that I returned home every night—thanks to this blessing that I had a home to return to.  Not much of a home but enough for my small needs—a roof, four walls and a door that shut; one window, a table and a chair to sit in; electricity, the internet and my computer; my lamp and my work.

My work was on the computer. It came through the internet onto the machine. I did not want to turn it off in case I lost my job, so I left it on throughout the night. It was alright, though the screen made it hard to sleep.  There was always pale light and thoughts of work. When work came there was a sound, very slight. My friend said he couldn’t hear it, so I must have learned to pick it up because I was never wrong. The sound was like a tiny gasp—a little sound of taking in—different than the normal hum, which was a purring sound of outward breath.

I looked at the screen before making my dinner. Nothing had come when I had been away. I sat in my chair and ate my meal—three blonde apples with blackheads on the mealy skin. Not in their prime but a lot of material—a lot of good work for the belly and the mouth. I sliced them into wedges and bit out the meat, sucking the skins until they stuck to my gums. One wedge on the lower jaw, one on the top. I tried to keep them there and chew another piece and to catch my reflection in the screen but it was too bright and too dirty and I could only make out shapes. I knew I must have looked funny and wished my friend were there to see.

Then I heard the work come in.

I put my dinner on the floor and swallowed the apple skins as quick as I could. I woke the mouse by shaking it gently and looked at the internet through my screen.

I worked description for a company called “CUNDS.”  I did not know what it was they sold or what the name was meant to signify. My job for them was a cryptic one. Every day, they sent me pictures—sometimes hundreds, sometimes few.  I was supposed to look at the pictures, then write about them. That was it. Every few days, my account was credited with a sum that reflected the work I had done. Time was a figure in how I was paid, but so was accuracy and risk as well. There was a complex formula that factored the three, by relative weight, to determine my due. I didn’t know what this formula was but could tell how it worked in general. Time mattered most in the easy assignments though accuracy was expected, too. More difficult ones were afforded more time and allowed more errors but the bonus was bigger the better I did. High-risk jobs were the most troublesome kind—when time and accuracy went out the window and finishing became what mattered most. Enticing because of the pay-out they commanded, a proud describer could fast be mired in the quags of connotation presented by the high-risk picture. All assignments were voluntary and I was free to come and go as I chose, but CUNDS threw plums to those who who could be relied upon.

The pay was not much but enough to live by. Enough for apples and to stay plugged in.

The pictures that appeared that evening were a typical band of low-risk quickies—nothing to excite the pulse. A beach bucket and shovel, an old rotary telephone, a wet-looking leather leash and a chocolate stamped with the letter “K.” My descriptions were curt, efficient and fast—knocked out in rapid succession for maximum take but not without an eye toward craft. I liked to work through these batches in bursts—proceeding from one to the next until they stopped—but I never knew how many were coming, even when I heard them land.  

The program that I used to receive the pictures illuminated nothing in advance and made me work through them one at a time with no way to skip ahead or revisit what I had done without forfeiting my claim to the image I was on and risking future assignments from CUNDS. I had found this out the hard way once, receiving nothing for a month after I inadvertently skipped a high-risk picture to return to later. I would have starved if not for my friend. I had made two resolutions since—never skip a picture and always honor my friend.

I heard the sound again as I finished up a nice sentence about a pretty looking horse with a braided mane and a red silk ribbon. I waited with the window open, wondering what would pop up next. Once I was on, my screen became locked. I could not use any other software or go to any other sites. It didn’t bother me though. My machine was of the basic type and the internet ran on a skeleton crew. At work, that was all; play could wait till I was done. The night was dark, my screen ran hot and work was hard to come by. I didn’t mind the pictures, either.

The next day, I sat with my friend in his home in the trees. A nicer house than mine, the bounty of obscure inheritance—some uncle, killed across the sea in an incident involving a fall from a cliff onto water far enough below to be like brick when he finally hit. So specific a story it was maybe a lie but the house was real and the living there was sweet, though my friend desired more.

We sat in his basement out of the sun and took large sips of old beer from glasses slick with running frost. My friend sat forward in a chair stuffed roughly with straw and crumpled paper while I perched politely on a cheap but sturdy stool of extruded faux wood plastic construction. My friend sat so far forward he nearly slid off his seat and even when he adjusted himself to better approach the simple charge of having a chat it seemed he could not help but keep only his tailbone on the tip of the long tongue of the chair seat. It seemed apparent from my friend’s odd posture that he was anxious to tell me the news of the day.

I opened my mouth, about to play along and ask about the source of his excitement, but he spoke before my first word could emerge.  

"I've had some news," he told me through his teeth, lips curling up in a primate smile too strong to suppress by mere force of will.

"Oh?"

"About the job."

"Job? What job is that?"

His face assumed the grandeur of an ancient  bust—the brow line like purfling.

"The job as 'Head of Security' for the CUNDS corporation."

I laughed and my friend joined me.

“You’ve submitted your application, then?”

“Donald has,” and he laughed again—so giddily it squeaked, as if the pleasure were too great for passage through the mouth. I winced and felt my ear canals contract.

“I hope he hears back soon. But I never knew CUNDS to value punctuality.”

My friend stopped laughing and looked stunned for a moment—his middle teeth peeking through his marginally parted lips—a wisp of thin hair still wagged above his forehead in the decaying waves of his earlier convulsion.

“I had forgotten that you work for them…”

He looked hurt on my behalf.

“It’s alright,” I said. “It means our friendship is comprised of more than shop talk.”

“If I had known,” he said, “I would have mentioned the connection.”

“It’s not too late,” I volunteered.

He laughed again.

“Oh, but it is,” he said.

“I’m sorry” I looked down. “They must have realized it was a ruse.”

“On the contrary.”

I looked up.

His squinted eyes shone with an inner light impossible to conjure from bitterness or joking—his mouth flung wide like a child who was singing.

“You don’t mean to say—“

“Yes,” he beamed. “I have the job.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled dumbly.

My friend rose and strode to the window, clasping his hands behind his back. He looked out upon his ill-kept yard, littered with scrap metal and splintered lumber.  

“Things are going to change around here, I can tell you that much,” he said.  “I start tomorrow. And it’ll begin right away.”

I nodded and brought the beer to my mouth.

“Now that Donald is running things, I’ll have the time and income I’ve always wanted to pursue some long overdue personal projects.”

“And there was no inquiry, about your identity? No interview or follow up of any kind?”

“None whatsoever. It seems that Donald’s reputation precedes him.”

I took a sip and a new thought occurred to me.

“But if the company knows Donald, surely the whole situation is untenable. As soon as they see you, the dance is done.”

My friend turned.

“What makes you think they ever need see me?”

I didn’t know how to answer. I assumed some face-to-face liaison would be expected in any job, especially at such an elevated station, but I had been wrong before and held my peace. I remembered, too the lonely anonymity of my own position. Perhaps this was a policy at CUNDS.

“Well done,” I said and raised my cup in salute.

My friend turned. His eyes looked slightly larger, the pupils like rafts in the center of two storm torn lakes. It was either his position in relationship to the lights overhead—the gentle beams filtering through the outside haze and the window—or the fact that his head, or whole body, or his eyes themselves were quivering slightly, or that they were simply dry and he would begin blinking rapidly any moment to moisten them, but it seemed his eyes were oscillating. I even thought I heard a slight whirring sound. And it couldn’t have been that his eyes were dry because they looked as moist as if water were flowing over them constantly, except there were no tears. He was not smiling, but neither did he seem upset. He seemed both entranced to the point of stupefaction and intensely engaged. He seemed to be looking right at me or—if you’ll pardon me—through me. I began to feel uncomfortable.

I was about to get up and make my excuses when he took a sudden hard step forward and extended his hand, in which he held his own glass, brimming with the pale, glittering liquid. I flinched when he stepped down hard, shoes slapping the concrete floor, and thought of fleeing when my friend’s voice boomed out.

“A toast!” he screamed.

I raised my own cup, trembling.

“To the job?” I peeped.

My friend threw back his head and laughed—a swashbuckling thing.

“To our mothers!” He yelled. “Who brought us on—and to the dogs who’ve kept us here!”

I didn’t know what he meant by that but the spirit was what counted, I supposed. We clinked our cups and drank them off and I made my excuses and got out the door.

I had hoped a visit to my friend’s would clear my head but if anything it had made things worse. I had encountered a problem the night before. A problem with one of the pictures I was sent and I wasn’t sure where to turn for help.

I had been humming along, the work fairly flying by in a way I had rarely experienced before. It was almost as if CUNDS, my computer and my mind had conspired to put aside any differences and delight each other for the common good and our mutual enhancement. And why not? Surely, what was good for me was good for the company. They were edified and I paid to deliver it—what could be more congenial?

The tiny breaths came steady and rhythmic, like the sleeping pulse of a little animal, and the work felt good—like more than earning money, I was helping it to breathe. The pictures flashed by as did my fingers on the keys—a gleaming sword; a sailing sloop; a man in a tub at the bottom of some stairs. The next series of images kept the stairs as a motif—ascending them, sometimes by mere steps, sometimes by great leaps. It was all clearly the same flight—the same dark, varnished wood, the same intricate, hand-carved banister, the same pale, bluish light, leeching from the cobwebbed corners. Occasionally, the picture would depict a landing, where the space would open up a little and shafts of light could be seen, carbonated with specks of fluttering dust, and another picture might hang on the wall—a portrait of a person too indistinct and dimly lit to identify except as such. I didn’t worry that I couldn’t see them and I did not try to make things up. My mission was accuracy and embellishment was not my art.  

I began to imagine a correlation between not only the speed of my work and the pace of the pictures’ arrival but also the care with which they seemed to be composed. As I had settled into my work and the clip picked up, the general quality of the images decreased. At first it was only small details—an odd choice of framing or apparent lack of focus—but as time went on, these issues became more prevalent and more widespread. The pictures became oddly blurred and haphazard in their makeup as if they were taken accidentally by someone running up the stairs—steps elongated with ghostly trails of vaporous after-burn, bleeding one into the other as though taken from the window of a train traveling rapidly alongside the diagonal upward course. Sometimes they became so poor it was impossible to tell if the stairs were being ascended or descended or if even that they were stairs at all, made indistinguishable by bad light and lack of care. Scale I was often unable to determine and even when I thought I made out some clue—such as a background blur that resembled a face that might have been a portrait from another of the seemingly endless landings—I couldn’t be certain if this was the case or if my expectations were simply playing tricks on me. I was surprised and not a little relieved when I finally received another clear picture that was obviously taken with some care.

In fact, I almost laughed when I saw it.

It was a very funny picture.

Like the others, it was of the same set of dimly lit dark stairs in the pale blue light of what was perhaps early morning. The picture showed a broad landing, thick with dust, which the beautiful carved banister curled around, bulging out into the empty black space in the right of the frame. On the wall—on the left side—above the landing hung a portrait of an elegant woman in an old-fashioned gown. Stairs could be seen leading down beneath the landing and up beyond it. On the stairs above the landing—at the very top of the frame where the last step that was fully visible sat before the next rose and was cut off by the frame—there stood two canine legs with a tail dangling down between them. At the bottom of the frame, a nub poked up—barely visible—which, on close examination, appeared to be the very tip of a human nose.  

I took my time describing the thing and even explained why I found it humorous. You’d have to see it to get the full effect but the way the legs stood—so stiff and at attention—it was almost as if they belonged to a little soldier. The nose meanwhile, with no expression to go with it, was all business as well.

When I submitted my work, I found it was the last that had come through my queue. I sat back in my chair and thought about the good job I’d done and how, at times, it had even been fun. I looked at my bed and wondered if I should try to sleep. I wasn’t tired but I felt I owed it to myself to lie down and rest as I suspected I had worked through the night and a fresh new day had risen outside  during the time when I was occupied.  

I had been down only a moment when I heard the work come in again. I snapped up immediately, shaking the sudden urge to sleep that had set in when I laid on the bed, to see what my new assignment would be this time. I looked with bleary eyes at the screen and rubbed them when I saw what I did.  

I tried looking at the screen again but there it was, just the same as it had been before. It was the picture of the stairs again with the dog’s legs and the poking nose and the landing with the portrait of the lady. I searched in vain for some detail that differed but nothing offered itself up to me. I wondered then why it was in front of me.  

An error was my first assumption and, annoyed, I tried to recall everything I’d just written. I might have changed a word or two here and there in this second effort but only for the better.  My frustration and exhaustion soon melted into pleasure as I refined the good work I’d already done. I submitted it again with every confidence, and when I finished I collapsed with relish onto the naked mattress where I laid my head.

For a moment, peace was mine.

Then the sound was in my ear again.

I got up slowly and approached my work station.

The screen had gone to bed, as I had tried to do, and I shook the mouse gently to wake it from its slumber.

There, gazing back at me, was the same image once again.

I sat down slowly and took my time in peering at it. I decided to mentally divide the picture into quadrants and search them one by one for things I might have missed and resolved to spend ten minutes in isolation with each one.

While I did not see anything that was new to me in so far as the details of the picture went, I realized that in choosing to divide the picture into four distinct zones—each with a prominent focal feature—I had stumbled upon a new way to consider it as a whole. There was the nose in the lower left quadrant, the landing in the lower right, the portrait in the upper left and the dog legs in the upper right. In addition to a detailed description of each quadrant and a short essay concerning the ways in which they worked in tandem to achieve the feeling of a cohesive whole, I felt emboldened to include a addendum of additional speculative readings of the work which had come to mind in light of my new approach. Among these several alternate modes, I felt most inclined toward what might be considered a literal “reading,” where the four quadrants each constituted a separate glyph, representing a word, phrase or concept which, taken together and gone through laterally—left to right and  top to bottom—would comprise a coded message to the canny observer or target audience. I hesitated to offer anything beyond this and did not indicate that I myself thought I understood the message or that it was even meant for me to understand.

Completely exhausted but satisfied with what I felt was easily my most highly refined and detailed description yet, I prepared to submit my work and lie down—for the rest of the day if I had to—when I had a thought.

Suppose I signed my name to it?  

It hadn’t occurred to me to do it before. But then again, I had never felt so personally invested in my work before either. It seemed like a good idea. Perhaps it would indicate the pride I took in my description to CUNDS.

I felt a little thrill as I typed a dash, followed by my name at the bottom of the box for writing.

Mine, I thought. 

My own work.

I clicked submit and sat expecting something, though I don’t know what.

My screen was silent and the world of my little house was dark but for the bar of weak light under the blind where the sun seeped in, illuminating nothing but the blank wall behind.

My sliced apples had gone dry and brown and though I was not tired now, I went to my bed and lay there with my eyes closed.

I must have fallen asleep because when I opened them the light was brighter.

I went to the hole in the corner of the room where the water bubbled up and dipped my cup in. It tasted old and there was dust in my cup when I was done, shimmering on the bottom in a dark, wet ball. I dug the dust out with my finger and dipped the cup in the hole again.  It came out cleaner this time but still tasted old.

I sat down at my table and revived my computer to see if any work had come in as I rested.  

Nothing.  

I got up and stretched my limbs one by one as best I could.

I opened the door and looked outside. The day was bright and the birds came and went, singing out of sight in the bushes and trees.

I went and checked my computer again.  

Nothing.  

No cause for alarm, I thought and decided to go see my friend.  

That was when I found out about his new job.

I don’t know why, but the whole thing concerned me. It was the combination of my friend’s new job and the fact that it had been a few hours since I had received work.

Things were changing. I was feeling the shift. 

But what did it mean?

It did not help that when I returned from my friend’, there was, once again, no work to be had.  

I sat on my stoop with my cup of water and an apple beside me in case I grew hungry, but with nothing to exhaust me the prospect seemed remote.

I looked at the apple and the apple looked back, impassive.

I picked the apple up and looked around my silt-road street.  

There were few other houses in my neighborhood but many lots where houses had once stood. These were overgrown with tall grass and weeds and the tough black flowers that grew up through the concrete, roots like long thin fingers slowly parting it like curtains.

I looked at a house across the street and down a ways. Nobody lived there that I knew about and sheets hung in the windows where there usually was glass.

I took aim and threw my apple at one of the windows and missed. The fruit broke on the side of the house instead, leaving a wet mark and a piece of whitish, mealy flesh and the echo of a satisfying sound in my ears—a hollow thud and a light splat all in one.

At the same time, I thought I heard the sound of work and went inside to check.
 

I was surprised to find a man inside, sitting at my table.

When he noticed me, he got up at once and bowed. He was tall and thin and dressed in the manner of somebody important, wearing cufflinks and a tie.

“Hello!” he said. “My name is Rowan—the company sent me to visit you.”

“How did you get in?” I asked.

He explained that he had used the back door.

“But I haven’t got a back door,” I said.

Rowan laughed and explained that the company had sent him along to install one.

“So that I could then use it to enter your home,” he explained, and led me to be back of the house where a door-sized hole stood, tall and ragged. There was no door per se but a doorway nonetheless.

“Oh,” I said. It was very odd but I thanked him all the same.

“Which brings us to the present moment,” he said, rubbing his hands.

“Yes,” I agreed. “May I ask what the purpose of your visit is?”

“Just to say hello, and to introduce myself.”

We smiled at each other, trying to put one another at ease.

“Is there anything wrong?” I asked.

He looked puzzled.

“With what?”

“With anything—I’ve never received a visitor from the company before. Have I done something to upset the management?”

He seemed aghast.

“No, no of course not. At least, I certainly hope not. Though, you would know better than me as far as that’s concerned. No, this is purely a social visit—on behalf of the company.”

“I see. And this is the company that I work for that you’re talking about?”

He laughed.

“It’s our employer. We both should know the answer to that!”

I laughed, too, not quite at ease.

When we had fallen silent he sighed and scratched his nose. Then looked up with concern in his blue eyes.

“Unless there’s another employer at play, here?”

He seemed nervous, so I chose my words carefully.

“Not that I’m aware of at this time,” I said.

He seemed relieved and let his breath out in a mighty puff.

“I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear that. Really.”

His sincerity was disarming. I felt as though I knew where we stood.

I didn’t know if it was my place to say anything but, since I had come to feel at ease with this new visitor despite the odd manner in which he had entered my life—to say nothing of the even stranger way he had entered my home—I started to tell him my concerns about my work. To my delight and astonishment he was both sympathetic and reassuring in his response.

“At the end of the day I try to look at it like this; would you mind?” he asked, holding up one of my apples.

I encouraged him to use it as if it were his own.

He thanked me and proceeded.

“The company is a lot like this piece of fruit—at least, that’s how I like to think of it. It has its skin—the tough, exterior layer that protects it from the elements that would harm it—not without its sweetness and not invulnerable to assault either, sadly. Then, inside is the meat.”

In a feat of rather alarming strength, he cracked the apple in half then with a twisting motion of his two bare hands. I was astonished, though he proceeded with his lecture as if nothing remarkable had happened.

“This is the best part. The part you just want to bury your face in and smell the sweet aroma. It’s the part of the company that almost everybody likes the best, but its only one part and that’s easy to forget.”

What he said seemed true enough though a little vague, and I nodded in agreement just to keep things easy.

“The parts that people tend to forget are, in fact, some of the most important ones.”

He tapped the apple on the side of his hand and then closed his palm up into a fist.

“What do you think I’ve got here?” he asked me.

“Is it the seeds?” I guessed.

He pointed at me and looked impressed.

“That’s right. The seeds. We forget about these little fellows because we don’t usually eat them. That is, unless we do so accidentally, in which case we usually try to spit them out, yes?”

I agreed that this was true.

“So, you can’t eat the seeds? So what? The fruit still needs them. It needs them to grow new ones. And it’s the same thing with the company.”

“Alright,” I said.

He raised a finger. “Now, there’s one final thing,” he said.  “One last thing that we haven’t gotten to yet.”

I didn’t know what part he meant because it seemed like he had covered it all, so I continued to listen with some interest.

He turned around dramatically and I could see he was working something in his hands the way his elbows jerked out occasionally from behind his turned back.  

He pivoted on a polished shoe and snapped his fingers with one hand, holding the other outstretched to me.  

At first I thought he was holding something in his fist again and I was supposed to guess but as I drew closer and focused in on his hand I could see that he was pinching something between his thumb and forefinger, something small that he wanted me to see.

“Do you know what it is?” he asked.

As I peered, it dawned on me.

“The stem.”

“The stem.” He affirmed. “The piece from which the whole thing depends. Whether you’re talking about this apple, or a company like ours, you’ve got to have that little piece. That integral piece that holds the whole thing up and connects it back to its roots.”

He started to bend at the waist and I thought he was about to take a bow so I made to clap, but he was only bending to pick up the apple, which he had dropped earlier after talking about its flesh.

He chuckled jovially.

“Glad you enjoyed the performance.”

Then he grew serious.

“Do you think you learned anything?”

I told him that it was very illuminating. I couldn’t have said what it was I had learned, if anything, but it had made a certain impact on me, in a way.

I invited Rowan to stay but he regretted to inform me that he had to be going.

“We’ll meet again,” he said, as he tipped an imaginary hat at me from my new back doorway. “And don’t worry so much about your job. You’re a valuable asset to the company. Remember the apple. Remember the stem. The seeds.The meat. And the skin.”

And with that, he was gone.

It wasn’t long before I saw him again though. In fact it was the next day when I went to visit my friend at his home. I did not find my friend but instead found Rowan, sitting like my friend did, his legs wide apart in the chair on his front porch.

Rowan referred to my friend as Donald and told me that Donald had expected me and had told him to entertain me on his behalf.  

“Donald is a very busy man,” said Rowan. “I’m sure you can appreciate that.”

“I can,” I said, though I was puzzled.

“He is so busy,” Rowan went on, “that we have hardly seen him at all at the company. He is either coming from something or going somewhere else.”

“Do you know where he is now?”

“His schedule is kept in the strictest confidence and his location, as you might guess, is a matter of highest security.”

“Well,” I said,  “that makes sense. He is the head.”

“That he is,” agreed Rowan.

“Though,” I went on, “what is a body with the head cut off?”

At this Rowan slapped his knees. Then he looked up as though startled.

“It’s a good joke—but you have a point.”

We passed the rest of a pleasant afternoon together in silence and cooked dinner from things we found in Donald’s pantry.

I wanted to return home to check for work but Rowan didn’t seem to be concerned. “The company,” he began, trailing off. "The most important thing is the company you keep,” he said finally, with a weary smile.

I didn’t know if I agreed but liked the confidence with which he made the assertion and passed the night in Donald’s house and didn’t return home the next day or the next.  

At Donald’s with Rowan I found a freer life than the one I had known on my own or, dare I say, even in the company of that friend of mine who we now called Donald.

I worked actively, no longer burdened with the weight of waiting for the company to chose a time for me to sell my time to them. Instead, I sold my time to my whims, which, Rowan seemed to imply, were the company’s as well. 

Rowan would occasionally receive word from Donald and would leave for a day or two at a time, returning with supplies and food and one day—arms and munitions.

“What are these for?” I asked, picking up a rifle.

“Donald is returning,” he said.

I was startled.

“Don’t worry,” said Rowan, putting a hand on my shoulder. “He is still a long way off. We have time to prepare.  But we need to be ready. Once he arrives, he will expect certain things.”

I nodded and cocked the rifle, staring down the gleaming barrel.  

“So, this is where the cartridge goes.”

Rowan nodded.

I snapped the barrel back and shivered at the metallic click. A satisfying sound but cold. Like teeth closing on a plate of ice.

I broke the barrel again and slung the rifle over my shoulder.

A month passed.  

Autumn had arrived.  

We drank coffee in the morning and built fortifications all day. In the night, we paced the parapets and practiced sighting with our guns.

One day in winter, when the snows had come and the days were leaner—with the only food to be had what we could shoot and forage—walking the parapet, Rowan spied an object in the distance growing closer.  

He called me up and I peered through the scope we had installed.

I could see across the snow covered fields—which we’d cleared of trees with saws and axes to build the walls and palisades—a dark shape moving slowly in our direction.

We smoked pipes all day and took turns watching it cross the field, getting larger. By night, it hit the gates and sputtered to a halt.  

In the white light of the arc that Rowan lit, we descended the stairs and slipped out through a secret door we had installed.

Heavily armed, we approached what seemed to be an ancient car and crouching, drew close enough to see inside.

In the driver’s side sat Donald Ripon, hands gripping the wheel—frozen solid, head to toe.

X

This piece was accepted by The Synchronia Project in 2013, though never ultimately published due to the project being shelved. It's another dream fiction, though the dream that inspired it would be more accurately called a nightmare—one that left me particularly shaken. To me, the result is a pretty odd combination of formal sloppiness and vivid detail and might be better classified as an "experiment". I wouldn't consider it a particularly successful fiction on the whole but it's been hard for me to forget or wish to bury—maybe because it still bears the traces of a nightmare that refuses to be ignored.