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From Xman

Michael Brodsky

"The office, grim and dismal, gave on a small courtyard. Out of sight the Hudson continued to flow, the young man presumed, into sodden tributaries. He kept reminding himself this was permanent--the real thing. So very quickly he fell into a relation of utter passivity with the others, the endless countless others. Ashamed, however, of his desire to lie down and die he made his way quickly to the urinal, this before his status as a permanent employee entitled to all, or almost all, company benefits could be publicly, celebratorily confirmed. He was reassured by the long line of urinals, the superabundance of stalls beyond. Clearly this was a real, a full-fledged company. Although he did not have to shit he entered one of the stalls, without removing his clothes sat down on the toilet lid, and turned to the wall. A scrawl in a hue somewhat lighter than Lincoln Center's incarnadine ('Trust not the man who.. . ') read: 'Don't be afraid of your passivity, schmuck. On the one hand passivity freezes, yes true enough, reinforces a sense of despair, truer still. In back of all this failed fermentation, however, is an indefatigable optimism, curiosity about how opportunity to emerge at last from the shit will make itself known, and from this curious optimism even you, schmuckface, are not immune. And you are of course correct, putz, when time after time you find it inconceivable that you yourself through your own puny efforts can possibly make a difference--locate survival--for whatever you touch is immediately contaminated with your helplessness, your valuelessness. It is only what comes to you that matters. Continue, continue then, to be passive, on or off the john, so that life's intentions toward you can be made known at last. For the only life worth having is the kind that makes its intentions known at last and without your having to yourself enter in its grubby arena of half-light transactions and soggy compromises.'
     "Among his co-workers thinking of himself always as of course completely dead he made it a point never to say, 'Have a nice day,' or, 'You look nice today, Tushina,' much less, 'Billie Sue, you seem somewhat under the weather.' He assumed they must bristle terribly at being bracketed, defined, however amiably, and trounced thereby in the universal game of warring self-assertions. Abstaining though from amiability he (naturally?) begrudged them theirs, underwent each specimen--'How are you today, Pman?'--for that was the young man's name--'Nice weather we've having Qman.'--for that was his alias--as a leeringly purposeful attempt to torment and humiliate his speechlessness, make him envious of a vastly contrasting fortune-filled felicity.
     "He strove, did Pman, harder and harder to be dead, his desk had the orderliness of a tomb. There was no way at this point to see the true work--for he fancied himself a true worker, whatever that is--to see the labor to begin laboring in behalf of the true work's not quite imminent possibility of possibility--as pointed toward anything but posthumousness, more than likely posterity-free. Some of us are born posthumously, his friend Freddy O'Nitch had once said, out- side the Ecce Homo Turkish Baths down in--in-- He had to live his life here in the labyrinth of cubicles according to this dire knowledge or absence of same. But the key, he told himself--wandering form desk to john and back again, forever dreading encounters with his co-workers, especially those who liked to chitchat and chatchit while relieving thernselves--the key is to live this knowledge or bloody absence of same as more than an incantatory cancellation of its ultimate realization. He was bloody well going to die true workless, projectless, and he must not expect indemnification for the undergoing of such a truth. The key was to let the dire knowledge or absence of same penetrate his bloody being awfully. But no matter how he tried to globally appropriate this resignation there was always some fringe of young man peeping in in expectation of prodigal recompense for so much resignation, tastefully deployed. This capitulation to a posthumousness was in fact an intermittent capitulation, prisoner, if truth be told, of its own systole and diastole. No matter how hard he tried after Friday's paycheck despair he always awoke to Satyrday morning's skewed baptism of quasi-riotous expectation. But of what? Of what? Always waiting for bad news, more bad news, he felt his proleptic despair to be genuine. Yet no matter how intense his anticipation, how lucid his resignation, by the time the inevitable did roll around, anticipation and resignation had contracted and volatilized away, had become the sign, the category, the archetype of themselves for which--according to the felicific calculus relevant to such forms without content--reparation was due.
     "Though he found it hard to remain a sagittal figure of posthumousness, only posthumousness had the power to furnish captions of a teleological surety for what bubbled up incessantly from his site of putrefaction. Only posthumousness could transform chaos's homogeneity into the dazzling heterogeneity that sprouts from one fixed point's intersection of all avenues of awe. There was no awe for his likes now. But wait, but wait, he told the labyrinths, and the typewriters and the windows of which he caught a glimpse only barely in the course of a day.
     "To his co-workers Pman was a miserable being but much to his regret miserableness was never accepted--in other words, did not startle to speechlessness--once and for all. And on a bright sunny day when least expecting it he would be told, 'You seem kind of sad.' But hadn't this been established long before and for all time. He, who prided himself most on a grim gapless consistency, was being informed there were lapses in his armor. For, 'You seem kind of sad,' meant: We are noting your impersonation today--at this moment-of one always sad in order to cast retrospective Burchian opprobrium on those many times in your past when, unbeknownst to you, your impersonation failed miserably. Or, 'You seem kind of sad,' could also have meant: You are always glacially--impeccably--sad but we choose just today for some special reason to call attention to what is ostensibly tacitly understood to be, beyond sayability, beyond conceivability. They seemed to snicker not so much beyond his back as at an angle--the acute angle whence amusement is most lancinating.
     "Botching an assignment he was always sure he heard them snickering. Yet when these co-workers were similarly humiliated and then bounced right back with a smile he was even more enraged. For bouncing back, contrasted with his brooding miserableness--proleptic coloration against inevitable dressing-down for inevitable ineptitude founded on inherent indifference to anything diverging from the possibility of the true work--must mean their bad fortune was not bad as his was, invariably, bad. They were clearly in possession of some parergon making setbacks insignificant in this sphere. Or they sustained a secret and invisible bond with their tormentor, who was also the young man's--Pman's--tormentor, the less than redoubtable Mr. O'Kay--a bond perhaps fortified by vicissitude. In short, his jealous rage over this intrinsic ability to adapt to circumstance, to rebound from mishap without hoarding incriminatory instances, grew from day to day until transformed ultimately into a murderous obsession with their less than licit secret fund of strength not bravely constructed from scratch of self in the face of circumstance, but wheedled out of O'Kay on the sly and guaranteed consequently to keep them smiling under every conceivable lash of exploitation.
     "But he was most enraged when, after observing him praised for a bland piece of botchwork, they--the ubiquitous co-workers--still found the smiling strength to say, 'Good work. Have a nice day. Damned good show.' Did this secret fund--this hypostatization of his own exorbitant despair but with the sign rousingly reversed--secure them against all puny successes of others (mere ripples on the belly of well being) or were they merely heroically dissimulating, sealing off their anguished envy from his observation with a phrase or two. And so never did he bristle so bitterly as when he heard from the depths of this or that cubicle, 'Good work, Pman. Have a hell of a holistic day.' For this 'Good work, Pman,' and 'Have a hell of a holistic day, Pman,' did little more and little less than consign him sempiternally to the slagheap of susceptibility to simple-minded praise for simple-minded bedpan-Charlie-type chores simple-mindedly well-done, Charlie. 'Good work, Pman' told him point blank and without sugarcoating that his good luck was a crutch they were very well able to do without, thank you. They were after bigger garne but this did not prevent them from observing the amenities where small fry were concerned. They were all sublimely superior to the contingencies that accounted for his institutional euphoria. From their exalted vantage the boss's secretary's assistant's kind words on his dexterous shredding of paper clips marked him the way a mongrel is marked by uncontrollable baying at a half-moon slab of raw rotting tripe. Their 'Good work, Pman' sketched the bark he ought to have emitted as at fleeced cerulean curdling the glass at the end of the optic nerve. He envied their refusal to be envious, to be anything less than goodness gracious and if they did not show the symptoms of envy either they were not envious, thanks to the gargantuan guerdon wheedled as a lifetime annuity out of fat O'Kay, or simply putting up a good show, better than he could have Managed, he knew, under similar circumstances.
     "Once when as a reward for having attended to his little tasks with such numbskull alacrity he was allowed to depart early they again wished him a lovely evening again with no sign of resentment which good wishes meant only they were delectating over some bacchanal about to unfold in the loathed office, now a domain of delight, and to whose unfolding his sickly presence had been the sole impediment. In short, he was not to be envied, his early escape was no windfall, he had simply been jettisoned in preparation for some bureaucracy regatta to whose jolts and surprises he was not, under any circumstances, to be privy.
     "It was simple, they all loathed him, were conspiring against him. From the depths of his monstrousness he concocted a unanimity they never dreamed--take it from me--they shared. Telling him to 'Have a good evening' even before he was fully dressed to leave depicted, defined and designated him as the prey of contingency, the plaything of circumstance. By so depicting, defining and designating they proved themselves to be beyond--outside--depiction, definition, and designation--outside, then, the most chloroforming categories of medieval thought, outside the contingency he chewed up so gratefully--gratefufly, that is, according to the interpretation he imposed on their fluttery lighthearted farewell. Spewing forth their send-off they became superior to all contingency--for all contingency was suddenly embodied in his departure--they became mysterious and inconceivable, Mysterious and inconceivably immune to contingency they were only too happy--always according to Pman's interpretation of this or that tiny little phrase of greeting or farewel-l-to relinquish momentarily their vantage out of nowhere in order to escort him to the all too localizable threshold of immersion in that out-of-office babbling and gamboling to his wild heart's boobied content that knowing him as they did would have to be his first priority once he hit the streets. They used--he felt it in his bones as he stood by the elevator and grew sick with mad protest that he, Pman, Qman, Rman, progenitor of a true work as true as any man's, should be so discarded, he, he, Pman--they used the euphoria with which they saddled him via their felicitating 'Have a good evening,' or 'Don't take any wooden nickels,' to plausibilize--always according to his interpretation, remember--to plausibly camouflage their eagerness to get rid of him as quickly as possible. 'Have a good evening'--as if in response to his euphoria--was in actual fact his order to go, to make himself scarce, euphoria or no euphoria. But why, why, what were they planning behind his back in the depths of the labyrinth. Were they . . . terrorists. He hated them, hated them all, the nameless faceless pastes. He could barely restrain himself from running back to formulate what had suddenly already formulated itself in his bowels, inexhaustible source of shit: Only by manufacturing his euphoria--once again, how many times, Xman, do I have to remind you, only according to Pman's interpretation--could this eviction at breakneck speed seem a plausible, nay; a gracious, response to circumstances rather than a crude hurried molding of same. He wanted to shout: YOUR EAGERNESS TO GET RID OF ME IS AS IF IN RESPONSE TO MY UNCONTROLLABLE EAGERNESS TO BE GONE. You're impersonators. All life is impersonation. All this--my dear Xman--through sorcery of the phrase, 'Have a hell of a holistic evening.' All this--the monstrous idea at the heart of their monstrosity--through the sublime witchery of a simple, 'Good work old shit.'
     "But he did not go back. He formulated nothing before their very eyes. He went down in the elevator saddled with this crude cruel luck at being able to leave early. He gritted his teeth at every floor as the elevator picked up more and more drones. What could he do with these few hours? Saddling him with this crude cruel destiny they had expropriated the only destiny from his absence of vantage worth having--a destiny unuttered and unsketched and foiling all conjecture and thereby derogating blandly all others. They had constructed him as the enviable one--the enviable one they did not however envy--in order to carry out some deeper darker terroristic purpose in his absence.
     "The following day he forced himself to take the initiative. He said--as a monumental mammoth and yet ultimately impostural--transvestitial--vengeance on being-'Have a real nice day,' when one of the foremost drones was about to leave the labyrinth. He felt as if he had mercilessly incised her, or his--he, Pman, was not sure of the co-workers sex; all he knew was that he/she was taking a course in Gender Management at the New School--privacy, the secret intention with which he/she had hoped to escape unscathed. Yes, by his intonation the young man wanted, 'Have a real nice day,' to mean nothing less than 'Fuck you. I've done it--fixed you in being. Tit for tat. Tat for tit. Just when you think your departure is unnoticed and therefore unlocalizable, unsayable, I, Pman, alias Qman, alias Rman, a.k.a. Pman, impale it. With your labels ("Have fun in the whorehouse, Pman") many a time you called me into the frame from outside the frame in order to call attention to your own unsituatability unlocalizability, your perch outside being. By saying "Have a real nice day" for once I'm letting you bastards know your so-called good fortune is not my bad fortune. My good spirits are a coded message to the effect that I am, for once and at last, repository of a global security outfacing--O'Kay or Nokay--all species of adversity.' Yet watching the co-worker depart stigmatized by his 'Have a real nice day,' the young man grew sad for what was he doing but impersonating his co-workers in order to undergo the delectation he supposed they had experienced ushering him out so blithely. Yet he felt none. He was trying through impersonation to discover whether the blitheness irradiating their features had been dissimulated envy or despair, or authentic blitheness stemming from global security. Through impersonation he was trying to resolve an ambiguity that continued to torment him.
     "He stood there, long after the co-worker had left, trying to make the nonexistent ambiguity decide in favor of one alternative. It was like straining to relieve himself without success. Either he, like they had a secret 'out' and enjoyed flaunting its propinquity by showing himself undaunted by another's good fortune, or he had no 'out' and was desperately keeping up a brave front in the face of that good fortune snatched from his clutches. He had been shortchanged: He did not experience the euphoria attributed to his co-workers, nor did he detect signs of envy among them. He/she had simply thanked him and gone a long way down the shaft. Only they, his opponents, were able to milk this game for all it was worth, straitjacketing misery in a protocol of bliss. When they had said, 'Have a nice day Pman,' and 'Fart one for us, Pman, old tit,' the 'Have a nice day, Pman,' and 'Have a nice lay Pman,' were simple placeholders vastly vastly repelling all that might have revealed a true state of affairs, with soundtrack ultimately triumphing over image. They had made his early departure mean (for him, for them, for all of being) what their words said it had to mean. But he, in contrast, was left in the lurch by utterance, it fell flat, on his lips sounded stale. Uttering their utterances, impersonating them, impersonating them as if his life depended on it and in this case for no pay wielding their little phrases of farewell, of come and go, had not procured him, no, not by a long shot, the delight, triumph, aggressive release he knew had to have been theirs, having deftly extrapolated to such rapture from his own despairing sense of having been so thoroughly vanquished. Their utterance, their borrowed finery, had not served him as it must have, oh there could be no doubt, served them. The wardrobe mistress had dressed him in the lowliest tatters, mere flakes of raiment, or rather the costliest garments became mere flakes when draped on his cadaverly shoulders.
     "Clearly their utterance did not exist eternally. It allowed for one-time use only, like surgical gloves, and they had ex propriated it before he could get to it, before he could desire, know he desired, to get to it. 'Have a nice day,' emerging from their multiple mouth had been at once an empty pleasantry and a savage and delirious transcendence of all that pleasantry suggested of envy held in check. The little phrase had managed to straitjacket his whole being, convert him into a termite easily assuaged by crutchlike favors from on high, while inertia, bondage, nonmovement, had become, also through the phrase's wielding, a kind of infinite clandestine mobility. Bondage was now simply the broadest vantage on the fatuous doings of scullions such as he. Through their wielding of the little phrase, 'Have a good shit, Pman,' bondage had been transmogrified into the exorbitant fringe benefit of those lucky enough to be left behind at the last minute--those lucky or willful enough to have engineered purely through utterance a being left behind. Wielding their little phrase bondage had been bludgeoned into a foothold, a pivot, whence others less adroit--especially one other could be lured, puppeteered into manifesting an essential and irrevocable futility, big with blundering locomotion and its heady susceptibility to garish farewells. So it's no wonder, he told himself standing there like a dunce in the labyrinth of cubicles, it's no wonder I tried to wield that tool in order to procure myself the same fringe benefits. The more they pelleted me with the little phrase, the little phrase I am trying now with so little success to make my very own, the more all that exertionless exertion proclaimed their ability to elude fixation simply by uttering such a phrase. Over and over they transformed me into the known by uttering their little phrases. whereas I, using the same phrases, simply watch them fly back at me like raw egg from a squash racket.
     "Then he encountered their slip-ups when fractures in monolithic localizability showed through. When A, B, or C slipped up they would invariably proclaim the slipping up to have been going on purposefully for the longest time, as part of a grandiose program of defiance--terrorism, in other words. And it became clear to him, Pman, that these workers, normally so conscientious, would stop at nothing to lure him from the straight and narrow in order to have companions in misery. In his presence A, usually so conscientious, would profess a flagrant indifference to lapse, taking his silence for credulity And how our young man--Pman--envied this impersonation, this cancellation of true feeling and true self with a proclamation. How he envied this swift and streamlined overriding of the disjunction between ideal feelings and real feelings through a displacement of focus onto his almost farcically deluded failure to join in the sabotage. And this was when he began--I don't know if I should mention it--to contemplate sabotage as a way of life, a sabotage that would also annihilate these pseudopractitioners. Of course from their perspective he was such a stick-in-the-mud. Although A tried to be casual about his refusal to subscribe to the newly inaugurated program of lapses Pman's refusal to contribute personal instances of ineptitude was a clear-cut irritant. Pman only wondered why Aman, Bman, and Cman couldn't live heroically, candidly. Why had the datum of a single lapse--it could happen to anybody--to be transformed into the focal point of a new policy. But if Xman's--I mean Pman's--silence enraged it also soothed: subterfuge had passed muster with one who struck the perfect balance between possession and deprivation of the facts of the case. Pman hated A as he was later to hate B, C, D, D1, and E for making him caretaker of this desperate ploy--to remove the stench of lapse by contriving to make it partake, this lapse, of the larger stink of a concerted program of lapses, lapse now metamorphosed into definitive verdict on the absurdity of conscientiousness and competence. But all the time denouncing, these others, Pman knew, were plan- ning to resume their competence as soon as possible. Perfectionists all, as only petty functionaries can be, so overwhelmed by the stench of a single lapse they had devised ploys to inter that stench. Reinstalled once more within their shells of competence, they would be the first, Pman knew, to deride his own future lapses. For now he hated their forcing him to acquire these observations encapsulating the disjunction between what they proclaimed and what they truly felt. He wanted to steer clear of acquiring such observations. He hated such observations. For a moment he would have given everything to destroy a world capable of delivering its denizens up to such observations. They destroyed his sanity.

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