He assembled reports all afternoon. When he couldn’t find the data he copied from the day before. Sometimes he added random graphics in bright primary colors. He had spent years mastering his templates—they were sure-fire, guaranteed-to-please. Sometimes he wanted to cry, they were so beautiful. By the end of the day he had hundreds of pages. They were his big blow off, his major guffaw, his extended joke. He simply could not stop the giggles they caused. He turned to look out the opening to his cubicle space, out the window, out to the sky beyond. He imagined floating there. He could not believe he sat in an office with no door or ceiling. He could not believe he had a boss who paid him for such things.
A dark shape blotted the sky. The cloud of perfume descended and filled him. Panic rose like gorge. “The boss wants to see you. Now,” she said.
Terry could not believe he was trotting eagerly down to see the CEO, his size twenty-twos making a merry slapping sound. He could not believe he was knocking on the man’s door, this company fixture who almost never left the building. He could not believe he was going in grinning, grinning so extensively he might have just had his throat cut ear to ear.
He could not believe he was saying “You wanted me,” and so very pleased by this statement.
The boss’s huge clown face, some four feet across, sat wedged behind the desk, although “sat” seemed to be a misstatement. It was propped up with crutches on either side of the chin so as not to crush the delicate little body beneath. The eyes were tiny and pressed into the face like a pair of bullet holes. The nose was long, slender, beautiful, and completely unsuited to this face. The mouth was wide and slit-like except for two rounded swellings of lip parted at the center, revealing great, blocky white teeth that gleamed like ice blocks. When the mouth opened further a tongue like a great pink pillow heaved in the yawning cavity. When his boss began to speak that mouth was the only thing in the room as far as Terry was concerned.
“How long?” the mouth asked.
“Em—pardon?”
“You have worked for me, how long?”
Terry felt dumb. He’d never thought of himself as working for this creature. In truth he worked for his family, to keep them fed, clothes on their backs, roofs over their heads, to keep them comfortable, and hopeful.
He thought all these things, but what he said was “Almost six years.”
The lips pursed, and their undersides adhered to the too-large teeth so securely it appeared they would tear when the head started to speak again. “You have completed so many reports, haven’t you? Thousands. You have contributed. So many hours.”
Terry didn’t know what to say. Was this an accomplishment? Was this a compliment? All he could do was grin, but he had no choice, did he? His clown face grinned for him. And the great clown head of his boss grinned back.
The commute home was always the worst. If you wanted a leisurely drive of sightseeing, you didn’t go out on the highway at rush hour. Clowns rolled out of every passing street in their bright funny cars, all of them heading, it seemed, in the same direction, but not everyone lived in the same direction, did they? He could never make sense of it. Clowns cursed and clowns collided, raising their fists and shouting “Bozo!” out their windows, all of them already home in their minds, with only this inconvenience of concrete, metal, and asphalt, this maddening delirium of transit, in their way.
“I believe I got a raise today,” he said with a slight hoarseness, raising his fork as if it signified his turn to speak. “They must be very pleased with my work. Delicious roast beef, by the way.”
His family said nothing, quietly staring. Little Jane appeared to have been crying. His wife leaned over to him, whispering harshly, “Terry, you should have changed for dinner, don’t you think?”
He turned his head to her, not sure exactly what she was trying to say. He looked over at Dwight, who looked back at him out of an angry and defiant mask of red and blue, the edges attached to his skin with safety pins. Then he turned to Jane, whose tears started up all over again. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” he asked. “You’re not scared of clowns, are you?”
He could feel the lower half of his face stretching. He could feel the skin around his mouth cracking. “It’s the smile, isn’t it?” he asked, and thought he might start crying himself. “It’s the smile that will kill you every time.”
STRANGENESS
Strangeness, n. In particle physics a quantum characteristic used to describe certain short-lived particles and their transformations when interacting with other particles.
Short-lived particles. Trish looked up from the dictionary at Martin. A half hour ago she’d had to tell him that his best friend from college had dropped dead from a heart attack the previous week. The man’s much younger wife had phoned with the news. She hadn’t provided many details—she’d said she had so many of these calls to make—she just thought Martin would like to know. “Like” seemed cruel in such a circumstance but what word should she use? Want? No, there had been no history. Absolutely none. The woman had skirted around the precise circumstance and Trish, guiltily, had just naturally assumed sex had been involved. A transformation having taken place when two short-lived particles interacted. The result being this alien state, this strangeness, the lights dimmed, no one left at home.
Martin appeared to be taking the news with equanimity. “He was never in the best of health,” he said softly, but would not look away from the television. It was one of those reality shows; Trish wasn’t sure which one. People yelled at each other quite a bit on those shows—more than she herself had ever experienced, although she knew this was probably normal behavior in some parts of the world. Then someone was voted out of the house, off the island, into the plastic box suspended from a crane, or whatever.
She waited to see if he had more to say, if he needed her comfort in any way. This man had been Martin’s best friend for many years. But Martin had barely reacted—it might as well have been some stranger on the news who died.
Strangeness had been coming into her life for years—now at last it had fully arrived, courtesy of Martin, her husband of twenty-six years. Did men undergo a change of life? Angie once said “The difference between men and women is that men go through a menopause every five years.” Angie was on her third marriage, this time to Harry, a small man who hid part-way behind her at all social occasions.
It was that sense of strangeness that had driven Trish to open a dictionary for the first time in probably ten years. Not even for Scrabble—if she had to look it up it probably wasn’t a word she’d feel comfortable using. The dictionary had been hard to find, pushed to the back of a bottom shelf in a corner of this basement rec room shared by Martin’s big old TV and assorted storage. Not much “rec” had occurred in this house for years, not since Molly had grown up and moved away to a series of eastern towns, none of whose names she could recall.
The top edge of the dictionary had been covered by a thick bed of dust, and curlicues of someone’s long hair—whose she could not imagine. She and Molly had always worn theirs short. Maybe it’s angel hair, she thought, chuckling, scrubbing off the book before daring to open it. But angel hair was a pasta—who would eat this? Of course there were poor people and people a world away whose lives she could not begin to imagine, but that was making her sad, so she derailed that train of thought.
She peeled the pages back carefully, looking for bugs. If she found any she knew she would just throw the dictionary across the room and then that would be the end of this little project.