Christopher WunderLee - Moore's Mythopoeia

Mrs. Ralph Cinn-Cola was a product of rebranding; she had been investigated by a junior member of Captain Vincent Belacque’s unit for deviant behavior and had been found guilty at the age of twenty. She was retrieved from her parent’s home on a cool autumn morning and returned three months later, glazed over, languid, pleasant, only hoping for a proper suitor. She never refused anyone, called everything “harmonious”, repeating it over and over and over again, as if it were the only adjective in existence, as if she’d heard it so often she couldn’t conceive of any other way of expressing herself. She was on a strict drug regimen, and never veered. By the time Ralph had met her, she had been two years out of rebranding and was the most pleasing and accepting of women he’d ever met. She was desperate to begin a family, and when Ralph proposed, she agreed only as long as he accepted that stipulation that he would impregnate her within three months of their union and that they could continue to have children for the next six years. He was immeasurably pleased by her desire for children, her love of the conventional future that was so utterly possible, and he knew that she would never give him any trouble.

“How is it?” Ralph asked as Joseph walked up to the car.

“Fine, Ralph,” Joseph replied, feeling the warmth of the car heater emanating out of the cabin, into the frosty air of the morning.

“Our project schedule seems a little lax in your department,” Ralph mentioned after they had driven out of Solo Energy Hydration Estates and onto the highway.

“I can drive tomorrow if you’d like,” Joseph said, shifting his weight in the vinyl seat so that his words were followed by a long, growling fart noise. He sat motionless for a few moments, studying Ralph out of his eyelashes. “I didn’t fart.” Ralph did not reply. Joseph moved in his seat again, trying to replicate the sound, but only the sound of rustling clothes against the seat could be heard. Joseph was fidgeting, rolling his backside up the seat and then, back down, trying to make the sound again. “I have been working on the schedule.”

“Good, do you think you’ve got it back on track?”

“Well, as you know, we’re a maintenance team, the development of new isotopes is your team’s job, but with the instability of many of the bonds we’re dealing with, which seem to be increasing with each year of production, there are bound to be hiccups.”

“Joseph, you need to focus on the final goal. I can’t take that kind of report to the fasces. I need you to get back on track; I can’t have the maintenance crew behind. I probably shouldn’t tell you this, well it’s probably okay, the company’s going to invest large sums of money in a new ad campaign. Sales have been lacking, we need to pump up production in expectation of a successful sales pitch.”

“Don’t worry, Ralph, my team will be back on track by the end of the week, we’ll figure something out,” Joseph assured the driver, turning his backside and sliding across the seat towards the stick shift. Finally, after too long, the noise returned, a loud, peeling gaseous noise. Now he thinks I’ve farted again. It was too long. “These seats are sticky.”

“If you’d stopped moving so much,” Ralph answered, unrolling his window.

“It’s the seats.”

Ralph and Joseph parked in their assigned space and began to walk into the building from within the covered parking garage. They got in line behind several other men arriving and Ralph left Joseph to speak with another man who was recently put in charge of insulin testers. Joseph was left to himself, watching as the other men greeted each other, talked about weekends, sports, hobbies, wives, and women. He watched their animated faces, their hands on another man’s back, the jokes they shared, the information already known, the intimacy of their fraternity. Joseph was amongst them, their chatter surrounded him, but he was transparent, he was no more a part of this group of men than a ghost is part of the family he haunts.

“…and she came out of the bedroom in this long, lacey teddy, with no stockings on and…”

“…he totally blew it? I knew that guy’d only be trouble for the team, he’s too damn proud, he’s not a team player. I said that to Frank when they traded him, I says: ‘we don’t want that guy, what we need is power, not flair’…”

“…so she says to me: ‘I’ve never been with a man like you’ and I go: ‘I bet you haven’t’ and she starts taking off her shirt…”

“…its probably twenty kilos, you know, a real fighter, doesn’t want to be caught, but I got a good hold and we start our war and he was a jumper, you know, zigzagging, then pulling, then into the air, but I just kept holding on, reeling, and releasing, you know…”

“…well it’s coming along, we’re not there yet, but with a few more days like Sunday, I’ll have her up and runnin’. Then we’ll come rip-roaring passed your house and you’ll see her, you’ll see why I’ve been so busy…”

“…I’m thinking, ‘do I know this girl?’ I’ve been married to her for ten years and I’ve never seen her like this. But, I’ll tell you boys, I’m glad she’s finally shown me …”

Joseph boarded the elevator with the other men, squeezed to the back of the compartment and watched them continue their conversation with a Bettelheimian interest. What kind of lives they led, with wives who wore lingerie after dinner, fishing adventures, automobiles they’d rebuilt, bachelorhood (an abridged list of their accomplishments, for sure, but all their synthetic contentment deserves). Joseph listened to their stories, considering his evenings, his weekends, his attempts at being a sportsmen, the hours he spent in front of the display trying to care whether or not the home team scored, the hours in bars and nightclubs, seeking a woman’s attention. He wasn’t intending to have an affair, he just wanted one of the women to notice him, to sit and talk with him, to laugh at the things that he said, to touch his shoulder in innocent playfulness, to ask him, after last call, if he’d like to walk her home. Then, he would be gracious and kind, thank her for the evening, and leave her dreaming about him.

“Moore, you getting off?” one of the men asked when the elevator stopped at the thirty-fourth floor.

“No, no. I have business on the hundredth and sixth,” Joseph replied with an Illichian undertone.

“Oh, big man’s got business with the fasces,” the man taunted. “You getting fired Moore?”

“No, I just have business.”

“Yeah, sure. He’s going up there to take the tour,” the man said to his friends.

“Moore’s going to get caught in one of the executive’s suites, pretending to be a big-shot,” another man continued. “He’ll be behind the desk, with his feet up and the senior’ll show up and Moore’ll be sittin’ there with a dumb look on his face, trying to think of an excuse.”

“Yeah, then he’ll start emptying the trash and moving furniture.”

Joseph smiled meekly back, trying to behave as though he thought their taunts were funny, as though someone else was the butt of their jokes, as though he was not older than all of them, as though he was a senior officer who put up with his employee’s jokes because he was that kind of boss, a real down-to-earth kind of leader, a man who could joke around with the best of them (rather than, shall we say, an April fool who’s over-stayed his welcome). Joseph tried not to mind that most of them were higher up than he was, that they were younger, quicker, smarter (although it can be said, without too much inconsistency, that they were without a degree of intellectual independence, i.e. madness, of which our hero, was unusually endowed, although in saying so we pronounce poor Joseph as so without any evidence that we are sane, an ironic, albeit illustrative, blessing for mediocrity and majority rule). He tried not to think of the jokes as they truly were, exhibitions of his inferiority, signals unspoken of the entire corporations understanding of him as a laughing stock, as the fool who thought he was important, the man who was kept on due to his loyalty and family, the man who would retire in the same position he was in now, a strikingly Malthusian viewpoint stretched to include social position, as well as population control. The rest of crowd (or masses, of which we know so little of), they could look forward (temporal in all of its significance, of course) to future promotions (a.k.a. prophecies, or the practice of selling credibility on credit), transfers, posts as executives, seniors, vice presidents, but not Joseph (as property of the company, gratifying the passion for possession in one and disappointing it in all others). No one had ever said it to him before, not with real words (as opposed, rather indifferently it should be added, to artificial ones, i.e. those audible utterances that have not been assigned particularly meanings). But they expressed it to him every day, they treated him differently, they would never say those things to a man his age if he was where he was supposed to be in his career. He saw how they behaved when a real executive was within their midst, they stopped their loud talking, their voices changed, they were somber, polite, they talked of work and important topics within their departments (which was always a difficult task, considering the prison-like attributes {being a place of punishments and rewards} of the hollowed halls of the cathedral). Joseph’s presence changed nothing, rather they talked down to him, taunted him, teased him, made lewd comments about his wife (a deficiency on Joseph’s part the main caliber of their strikes). They talked about him as if he wasn’t there, they feared nothing about him, they did not worry about what he thought of them, they did not concern themselves with how he could assist them in their careers.