Joshua Cohen - Four New Messages

When I began my story I was proofing a drug called Nomenex, Mom — it’s supposed to make you “happier” (my word), maybe it does, probably doesn’t, but efficacy isn’t what irks me as Ronald Ray drives. What irks me is how people in the office still talk about it. If an officeperson is in a bad mood, Mom — say they’ve misfed their pets or their siblings have been imprisoned, leading them crying to handicapped toiletstalls and service stairwells to be used only in case of cardiac exercise or emergency, for private phonecalls to haute veterinarians and obscure lawyer uncles — they don’t say, She might need Nomenex, or, You might want to ask your doctor about Nomenex, they say instead, She needs to get Nomenexed, they say, Nomenex her, or, Nomenex the bitch, and people will even say that about themselves, Nomenex me, I’m a week behind, I assfucked my diet, can’t sleep, and Heather hates me. Heather or weather or whatever depresses, Nomenex my ex while you’re at it. My coworkers all have names like Heather, Mom. How can you be a person with a name like that? how could you expect to be an original individual? Names aggregate, exaggerate, caricature everything too explicit. Two Ricks in Accounting. We all know Ricks, even Rick knows what to expect from a Rick. Marketing Steve. It’s fairly obvious how to market a Steve. Tucson, indisputably itself (handles distribution), Trenton sweet Trenton, the transparent worst (“our” lab), Ronald Ray drives and Patty patters.

Mom, I dress in whatever’s clean. Pants, shirt to which the tie’s always tied and buttoned into collar, jacket singlebreasted, all of it solidcolored except the tie hoisting miniature flaglike stripes, red fimbriated white, the pants dark to where I can’t tell blue or black, the shirt white disclosing dull stars of dribbled deli coffee, jacket matching pants whether exactly or inexactly depending on blue or black, socks definitely black, shoes definitely black (these last were bought together and the salesman gave his word) — what definitively coordinates this colorwise already possibly coordinated wardrobe is that all its brands are utterly defunct. Dad having brought them over the years to my apartment, Dad having bought them years ago, decades and waistline inches ago, these clothes — now covering the nudity of my apartment that’s only a closeted bedroom with bathroom reeking of clogged piping adjoining — mean zero to me, their designers mean zero to me, their normally significant tags giving no contemporary indication as to whether the signified article was once expensively fashionable or just cheap and extraordinarily lame. My other shirts have pips and flecks but no logos, Mom. My other pants are jeans — manufactured in sweatshops sequestered in purdah halfway across the innominate earth — and they certainly have their endorsements, but I purposefully purchase them hidden, to be hermeticized by my belt or within the inseam of the jean, facing the migraine strain of my erection — bet you’re glad to have that thought, Mom, as Patty jerks and shudders.

I take the train moving faster than any car traffic moves, without stoplight, without stopsign, but still Ronald Ray is routed reckless and the body humps around. Mom, they remain lost, as do I. Working at a multinational means that I work in only one nation and cannot travel, I commute. There is a spire often passed. There is an office in the spire oft passed. Not only does this pharmaceutical multinational have a name but its subsidiaries also have names and some of these subsidiaries sell pharmaceutical products with names and other of these subsidiaries license for sale generic versions of pharmaceutical products and even these generics have names (generic names) — and the spire has a name too, and the name of the spire is the same as the multinational’s name but before the spire was named for the multinational it was named for a company that was acquired by the multinational and the company’s name was added to the multinational’s name and so the spire’s name, Mom, was accordingly changed, respired (names I cannot mention, names I wouldn’t even breathe).

9 AM, booting my workcomputer, my morningcomputer, to remind me of where I’d stopped the night before (I’d never stopped): I didn’t know where to bring Patty’s body, Ronald Ray didn’t know what to say about the body, we didn’t know what our responsibility to it was, Mom, with even our tenses undecided. He ranged about their nativity. It was unbelievable that someone could call this fictional strip familiar, but it was also believable. Impossible and yet possible that someone could call this commerce home (I was thinking about home when I wrote that). All around him was Vacancy with the vowels themselves vacant, Vcncy: the local errata of burned connections, burnt bulbs, Free Cable TV! as if in advocacy — what was cable locked up for this time? (That’s a line I’d been saving.) Didn’t we already pass this pass, Mom? make that exit or eat a meal? Did we take our meds or no? and if so, shouldn’t they have been taken with a meal? Light blinking lights. Mom, does a light blink on or off? or does just saying It blinks cover both? This was what I thought about for a week. Blinkblinking go the correx, the corrigenda. 9:30 email, 10:00 new product slogan session (even us galley drones are polled), 11:00 email, hunger, boredom (which is another kind of hunger), still Ronald Ray was driven and Patty not ceasing to be deceased.

Wednesday without breakfast, I realized he might be hungry too. Thursday with my 11:30 canceled (a standards review, the proctor had the flu), I’d had enough of being desked. I thought, find a place to eat. I thought, find a place to eat, you’ll find a place to gorge your story. Not a job to shirk, Mom. Existence was at stake, survival. My own. That of, in motoric italics, my story. Murder, a hunger itself, gives such a hunger also. Both being matters of appetite, of denying yourself until you break. Of holding steady the wheel until the engineblock just cracks. Of going further— farther, Mom, or further? or are they interchangeable like signs, changing only their destinations over statelines? I refreshed my memory of the distinction before heading out to lunch. This was the last day of the first week I was blocked. I went farther than I regularly went, Mom, not to belabor this any further. I went blocks. I passed restaurantfood, passed barfood, he passed arcades serving arcadefood, passed billiardhalls and bowlingalleys offering billiard and bowling fare. But foodfood, Mom. You could’ve cooked for him, I could have if I cooked.

Food, the bottomless metaphor. Food like, or as, an insatiable simile. A pocket of inmeats carved from a cart. That was my objective. Courtesy of a sanguine sincere Halali who liked to practice Spanish. The money from every pocket sold went to feed and clothe his wife and son deserted in Halalabad. He’d asked me, What are the foremost headphones to obtain for my heir? what is the most stable skateboard one may acquire? My answer had been to avoid him for a month. Regrets, Mom. I missed his rotisserie physique, the carbonating banter. Standing talking terrorist economies on the corner of 10th Avenue & Inanity — my cart wasn’t there, my Spanish Halali wasn’t there. I bummed a cig (secretary), a light (deliverer), stubbed. That invaginated pita pocket topped with pickled veg — I’d enjoyed it there before, I would always have enjoyed it there before. Back in the lobby without a meal but within the hour, I surveyed what foodstuffs my fellow spireists preferred. Security pumped dumbbell wraps and protein shakes. 12’s receptionist left the elevator at 12 receptive to water and a salad. None of that would do, Mom. Back in my cubicle — Ronald Ray at his windshield, my screen — it took another hour to understand how badly I’d been poisoned.