Late For Work

Late For Work, an Allegory

Morning came to Axle’s window. The glass was obscured with filth and Morning just stood there looking in, unable to see anything inside. All around the city hummed, hissed and beeped. Outside Axle’s apartment the World walked about with heavy feet, it brushed its teeth, it combed its hair. The World sat down to the kitchen table and poured its coffee and got ready to begin the day. Axel watched the World from his bed, the sheets so unwashed they were like crepe. Axel had to get in gear or be late for work.

Axel looked hard at the windows of his bedroom. He saw the light fingering the window glass like brilliant butterflies. He blinked them away. Focusing beyond the glass through the dirt and dust, he vaguely saw the city reach out a steak knife, trying to carve up the minutes of the day for everyone, serving it to them like a smothering, over bearing Mother. Axel was still in bed. He raised himself from the sheets, stood up and strolled naked across the floor like a drunken surveyor, marking out the distance with shaky strides. It was a short few steps from the bed to the bathroom. Above him, as he sat on the toilet, a single bulb whined. A moment later last night’s dinner spun down the pipes and out to sea. This was a good beginning.

He wiped, stood up from the toilet, and looked weakly into the glass of the mirror. His face was gang-beaten by Time, what used to look like the familiar child in the family photo book now appeared swollen and abused like a roughed up Potato Head. The dark jaw erupted in stubble as if his lower face had been swarmed by tiny black ants. It was painful to look at himself. The pain felt like a toothache that settled like a cat with long claws on the top of his brain, trapped in the dome of the skull’s brain pan, purring and kneading the red tissue with long, pin sharp nails.

He stabbed at his teeth with a stiff toothbrush. Outside a dog urinated on the tires of his car. His garbage can sat in the driveway erupting with TV dinners. The sun crawled weakly up the dome of the sky, shadows spreading like spilled ink on the park grass and sidewalks. Axel was going to be late for work.

He stopped brushing his teeth and looked down into the bowl of the bathroom sink, and saw a tooth. He thought at first that it might be popcorn. He fingered it curiously. It was a tooth. On the sink porcelain the tooth was surrounded by a swirl of gray hair. It was just a skiff of hair, but it was enough to make him pause. He was balder in the mirror today. The angry bathroom light bulb reflected a hard white shine on the dome of his head. He stood at the sink like a speaker at a lectern.

Something fell to the floor with a small thud.

It tumbled behind the toilet. The cold from the bathroom tile crawled up the muscles in his legs from the bottom of his feet. He noticed in the mirror that an ear was missing. He wiggled his toes and something snapped softy, and rolled away.  It was getting late. He had to focus. No time to be chasing things on the floor. The sun straddled his apartment and made the tarred roofing waffle with heat. Cats left the rooftop for cooler napping places and birds huddled under leaves and awnings to shield their dusty feathers from the hot fingers of the sun. Damn! He had to find that ear. He crawled around until he found the toe that had come away instead and rolled behind the toilet. It crumbled in his hand. He was definitely late now. No time for this crap.

All over the World the work-day was in full swing. In an office far away a water bottle in a lobby somewhere made an oily gulping sound as someone poured themselves a drink. The city water was too full of bugs to want to drink it. In his apartment though, Axel dealt handily with the bugs. Everything always smelled of Raid. Now his knee was numb. The bones ratcheted around in the socket when he turned to face the toilet again. How was he ever going to get to work like this?

He glared at the mirror of the medicine chest. He scratched his right breast crowned by a hard, berry colored nipple, and something popped softly, spun downward and made a plunking sound in the toilet. He pivoted on one foot to look, and felt the ankle powder under the skin and collapse like a mound of stiff sand. He needed to go to the kitchen. His foot dragged along on the tile floor of the bathroom dissolving into it as he reached for the knob of the door to steady himself. His boss was going to be pissed.

On the TV news in Axle’s apartment the broadcaster wondered out loud if Iraq would ever become a sovereign nation. Then a smiling man burst down a mountain road in an SUV while his vehicle changed shape and color all the way down, like a chameleon on crack. TV would help Axel concentrate on getting to work. He shuffled to the kitchen, but on the linoleum halfway there the joint in his hip made a soft popping sound and his leg shot to the left as he grabbed at it like a man fumbling for a dropped crutch. He let it go. Dammit he was late. He filled the coffee maker with grounds hopping around in the kitchen on one leg. Then he went to the sink to get water.

He felt the temperature of the flow from the tap with his finger for no reason, and looked out across the driveway to the street beyond. People walked back and forth like cardboard targets. He thought briefly that perhaps he was looking at a personal shooting gallery; back and forth the cardboard caricatures of human beings ratcheted, and if he could hit one or two what would he win? Then again what would he hit them with, a dirty look? He glanced down and saw the water had dissolved his forefinger and carved a groove in the two fingers below it. He was holding the water receptacle around the bottom of the plastic handle with his pinky. He carefully placed it in the coffee maker, flipped it on with what was left of his finger and waited for the coffee to perk.

He sat down feeling the vinyl seat of his dining room chair on his bare ass. He absently kneaded his genitals waiting for the coffee. There had been a time that doing this would have evolved into several hours of enthusiastic impromptu happy masturbation. This time he sighed as his scrotum came away in his hand. He held it up for a few minutes feeling its weight. He thought of things that he had held before that weighed the same as his scrotum. He bounced it all in his hand a little, the penis slipping through his missing upper fingers and dropping to the floor to explode in a small cloud of dust. The coffee bubbled and croaked in the pot. He set his balls on the table carefully, whining a little as they rolled off onto the floor and under his TV chair.

He would be fired today for not showing up for work. What excuse could he give? Should he call in sick? Outside, in offices all over the World people moved back and forth between cubicles focused on the task for the day. On their desks were pictures of their families. Eighty percent of their time was spent in that cubicle. He saw them dissolving in each little space like snails hit with salt, hissing and bubbling, their work place noisily becoming a damp, empty shell. He sighed and tried to handle the sugar with missing fingers. Instead he spilled it on the surface of the dining room table and floor. No sugar today.

The coffee had finally perked. He stood on one leg to pour it, and winced a little as the skin of his ass remained on the chair dissolving into a dust doughnut. He hopped to the counter, poured the coffee with his good hand and tried to sip it. He felt the steam dissolve his upper lip. Air blew across his exposed teeth and gums. Determined, he tried again, the coffee burning his inner mouth. He mumbled his anger at the staring sink erupting with unwashed dishes. He had to call in to the boss. He was sure he would be fired this time.

The work day wore on. The sun moved behind the tall office buildings. Clouds puffed and blew about windy skyscraper tops while birds drifted in the air around them. Inside, people mapped out the minutes of their lives from job to job. Here and there a personal touch or two bled into the fabric of the workday. It was like a stain on someone’s underwear. It was accidental humanity.

He stood on one leg in the middle of his apartment. The TV complained about high gas prices. Osama bin Ladin bitched again about how America misunderstood him. The World dragged itself into the afternoon like a struggling dung beetle pushing its own waste uphill. He tried to pick up the phone but his remaining fingers snapped off his palm from the pressure. They flopped onto the top of the phone table, one falling on the floor behind it. He would explain his lateness to his boss, as soon as he figured out how to dial the phone.

Then again, where was he going today really? He hopped to his recliner and sat down heavily. He pushed back to raise the foot rest and felt his arms pop from the elbows and roll into his lap. He cried. The fingers left on the phone table dissolved like sand. The leg on the floor disintegrated and blew around in a breeze from the kitchen window. Outside someone yelled obscenities at a cabdriver. People were closing their briefcases and shutting down their office computers all over the World. It was quitting time. The sun ducked shyly behind the trees of the city park. Homeless people stirred.

He sat in his chair feeling his chest dissolve into the slick vinyl fabric. He sobbed. His pelvis softened in the seat and collapsed into the wooden frame and metal springs of the chair. In the gathering darkness a little while later his eyes stared sadly out of the ball of dust that had become his head, and then imploded and blew away with his skull.

It was “after work hour.” The streets were haunted now with people trying to have a “kick-ass Friday night.” They migrated to the bars like angry moths. In the dark booths at the strip clubs men talked too loudly and women painted themselves too thickly with the colors of war between the sexes. Urine misted off walls in alleys. Dumpsters echoed the stomach churning growl of dry heaves. At restaurants secretaries argued the drama of that week snitching on each other as if it mattered to anyone but them.

A man somewhere tried to touch his Girl Friday’s shoulder explaining that he couldn’t divorce his wife of 15 years just yet. Be patient baby. She shrunk from his fingers. Days ago she threw herself at him with a kind of abandon she hadn’t felt since high school. All that didn’t matter now. She had become a thing, like the stapler or the letter opener. She didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know what to say. She stared at the gathering night sky and the bright, burning stars blossoming on an inky blue atmospheric dome. Her eyes ached with a pain that gripped her lungs and made it hard to take a breath.  It was lousy to be a thing.

The workplace was like a Petri dish, the relationships evolving like bacteria. It felt like slavery, and yet everyone had their own radio, CD players, wide-screen TV’s and SUV’s. They had all become affluent slaves. But they still kept burning themselves on that bug light, the one that entices them to be scorched by their pain even though they should know better than to keep going there. The streets settled into the deepest part of the night bordering on the onset of morning. Time passed like the inner spindly intricacies of a spider building a web.

Somewhere someone was murdered and disposed of in a cold river. Somewhere else someone had fevered sex on cool, clean bed sheets. A baby cried in a crib. A dog whimpered in its dreams. Buses and trains moved to and fro across the great, pulsing network of life that feeds and nurtures every city. And yet what had to be the fate of human beings that tried to live in accordance with the rules of steel, concrete, Xerox and fax machines? What did exposure to all this finally make them become?

The TV announcer on Axle’s Television said there was no relief in sight for the gas price disaster bringing this nation to its knees. Next door the music of an all night party thumped and shouted against the adjoining walls to Axle’s apartment. A woman whooped wildly somewhere, a live rock band played in a garage several blocks away, until police showed up. The World staggered on its own great feet into another relentless cycle of day and night around Axle’s dry little apartment in the middle of Everything, Everywhere.  

The wind blew softly through the screen of the kitchen window. In the early morning darkness the TV cast the living room in a blue glow. Cats moved along the wood fence outside, their shadows creeping across the wide face of the waning moon.  They blocked the light that powdered the reclining chair in a hoary whiteness, their dark twins padding across the stuffed fabric in smoky duplication.

In the frame of that light a beating heart dissolved into the springs, wood and cushions of the powder blue recliner.  In a few hours the clock radio would go on and the day would begin.

But Axel, he would be late for work.