An Office Somewhere

I dreamt last night of an empty office. I was there with two people who I can't remember, but I was certain that we were using the place as a hideout from something. The room looked like most generic offices – whites, grays, florescent lights, and cubicles padded with fabric to keep things hushed.

So there we are, basically biding time before answering for unknown sins. We had no work to do, nor did we share much in common. Each of us retreated to a cubicle and tried to be quiet. I wanted to use a computer but there was no power other than whatever was fueling the lights above us. The nebulous surges of threat had passed and I began to walk around the place. Along my stroll and feeling bored, I began drumming with my hands – first against my thighs, then against the walls. This was when I noticed something.

I thought I was the only one drumming. I’m a fidgety person and boredom only exacerbates this skittishness. So I found it pretty strange when I heard the same beat I’d been patting out – bah DUM, ba dah dah DUM – coming from somewhere other than my hands. I looked around the room and the other folks were just sitting lazily about, swiveling in chairs or resting their heads on desks. They were not making the sound.

I drummed slower this time. Bah DUM. I waited and heard nothing. I lifted my hands to finish the beat and then I heard it. Bah DUM. I came from over my head, from the ceiling of chalky cork and rectangular glow. I looked back at the others again. They were in the same lazy positions. I tried again. Bah DUM. I waited and started at the ceiling. Maybe ten seconds later, the same bah DUM shook out of a vent, right where the ceiling meets the wall. An echo? Where was this room?

I roused the others to demonstrate this find. They were equally perplexed, but offered no valuable feedback. The sound was somehow being absorbed and spat back out after an unseen journey though whatever space we had come to inhabit.

The point of view shifted to a spot maybe four feet above our heads. I was now being watched by this thing with a sniper’s vantage point. I saw myself standing there, next to the wall, but had dropped any control of the dream’s narrative. The lazy others and I were now being watched by a set of eyes perched atop the walls. Whatever it was, it rested there, fixed on us and the growing clamor of our heartbeats and thickened breaths.

I managed to force out a moan from my dream-restricted lungs. This woke me up. My eyes were still closed but I knew I was lucid and in the world. I lied there in the new morning, eyes shut and tried to slow down my breath. Then, somewhere in the black wakefulness, a moan came from the empty side of my bed. I froze.

It could have just been a delivery truck honking along Broadway.

Growth

I attended a concert at Avery Fisher Hall the other afternoon. It was a rare matinee performance for the Philharmonic so the audience was thick with seniors. My friend had warned me about this, but only five minutes into the concert an old woman across the isle began coughing. After a few minutes, she reached into her zippered bag to retrieve a hanky. Then, she spat into it, all the while thumbing through her program as if she was in her parlor on the Upper East Side. I gave her a look or two, but didn't push it. Soon enough, the woman got the idea and left for the bathroom to hack up in solitude. Cheers to her.

The orchestra went on. The first piece was by Bach. It's that fugue TV producers always use when evoking a lone madman plotting evil in his study: DAH-DAH-DAH (pause) DAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAH-DAH. Don't pretend you don't know it. It's the DAH song. Duh.

However, the music could not stop the senior death gasps. The man behind me emitted what I first thought was a growling stomach. After the 15th growl, I had to look back and ask if he could use a fucking cookie. But my fury was allayed when I realized that the man was just asleep. The "growls" must have been gutteral dream sighs. I let him rest in peace and began to re-evaluate my prejudice against old people. Just because humans over 60 add their own percussion section to an orchestra does not make them bad people. It means that health and wakefulness must deteriorate to such a degree that the true enjoyment of a concert must come from the stubborn refusal to leave it. "I got through the damned show, now gimme my hanky." I admire the will to remain an active member of society, despite neither enjoying nor being fully lucid during its cultural moments.

Modern American People

Hassan looked through the window out onto the street. His phone had just been charged and it was a full hour before he’d have to put his dinner vest back on, eat a small meal and brush his teeth in the restaurant’s bathroom.

“The are coming Tuesday, I think,” he said into his phone. “Yes, all the way in a day.” His mouth moved while his eyes scanned the passersby along 6th Avenue.

“No. they stop in Dubai for one hour. Okay. Okay. Bye. Bye.” Hassan shut his phone and remained there, seated backwards on a chair from Table 11, crossing his forearms onto the seat back. I was a good distance from him, trying to fall asleep on one of the Hondo Bar’s leather banquettes. It was between the lunch and dinner shift and this was my customary time to lie down, shake out thoughts of my fledgling career and dream for a few minutes. The only indication that I got any napping done was the quarter-sized drool stain on my work shirt.

“Hassan!” I shouted across the twenty or so empty tables and chairs. “You’re family’s never coming home. You’ve been abandoned.”

“Hah?” He mumbled after craning his neck towards me.

“Just keep sending those checks,” I continued in a near yell. My volume was helping me wake up. “That’s all they want from you.”

“Be quiet, man.”

“Send them money. They can build a hospital there in Bangladesh and save that whole pitiful country from flushing itself into the fucking sea.” He didn’t say anything. He just kind of chuckled and went back to looking out at the street.

“What time is it?” I asked nobody in particular.

“Almost four o’clock.” Four o’clock was when the kitchen put out the staff meal. If it was chicken, it was undercooked. If it was pasta, it was accompanied with the most soggy vegetables imaginable. Such disparate crops as eggplant, orange bell peppers, broccoli rabe would be tossed into a vat of oily rigatoni and topped with some parmesan. Without fail, all the vegetables would quickly unite and form a new composite that I liked to call “buttervegeblob.” Regardless, I ate anything they put out with the relish of a starved homeless boy from one of those Christmas specials.

I rose from my booth cave and walked into the kitchen. I liked to do this when I was bored. There was Hugo, one of Hondo Bar’s cooks, putting the finishing touches on the staff meal. Hugo was a thick guy from Ecuador, I think. He looked like a History Channel recreation of a neanderthal, all hairy and stoic with teeth like studs. I called him El Caveman.

“Donde the food, el caveman?”

“Suave, man. Relax. Coming, coming.” Hugo said while he topped a stew of some sort with chives.

“Stop pretending you’re mucho busy, okay? Tengo hambre, man. Time to eat! You are mucho lazy, puto!” The kitchen guys loved calling each other puto. I loved calling them puto too. I think puto is a male whore. Funny that American guys don’t really have a word for that. It doesn’t even sound like an insult to me, but it’s the main currency of abuse among kitchen guys all over town. The way I was feeling that day, I would have love to be a puto for a little while.

I kept harassing him. “What is this shit? Pork? Because you know that’s no good for the Bengalis. Two reasons: One, because they are Moslem. And two, because they don’t eat shit.” I put my nose over the pot of stew. It smelled nice and spicy.

Hugo threw a slo-mo elbow towards my face. I followed his lead by tossing my body back into the espresso machine, shouting, “Oh My God! Mi nariz! My nose!” I clenched my face from this mock-injury and stumbled, cripplingly, towards a massive trash can and began miming the most violent vomit noises. I went on like this for twenty seconds while Hugo watched and giggled.

“This is not funny, puto. I am dying.” El Caveman kept laughing like a boy, picked up the pot of stew and left the kitchen. Left alone, I felt a momentary pang of embarrassment. I had just staged an elaborate fight sequence and all it got was a chuckle from a cook who spoke marginal English. I hated this place.