Stacey Levine - Dra-

Not much later, the Manager burst into the closet doorframe again, bright light behind her throwing her body into silhouette. “Time to join the world!” she cried enthusiastically, moving close, rather bent. The Manager then murmured that a job actually had been found, and that Dra— had been assigned to it summarily, so she must pack immediately and meet her new job Administrator at the train station. After this, she would be ready to report to work.

Bottomlessly relieved, confused and overwarm, Dra— fell back into the bed, clutching the blanket, exhaling, nearly smiling, though she noted that the Manager was now quiet, and that her eyes might have been red as she gazed sadly at the bed, emitting a small sound of grief, as if she were watching over someone with a deep illness that was at last giving way to death.

Slowly the Manager leaned her cheek upon the wooden bedpost, and gave a groaning sigh. “They say all people want the same things,” she said with wonder. “Closeness to others, drinkable water — can it be true? Are we all so alike? Is there any way for friends to depend on each other without feeling betrayed and angry enough to jump off a bridge? Why, no, I’m afraid not,” she concluded, grinning weakly, closing her eyes.

“Now you’ll be leaving!” the Manager cried with sudden new force. “But look how we’ve grown accustomed to one another, even to one another’s scent, in such a short time!”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Dra— muttered, turning her face into the pillow, mind aswarm with dozens of disparate shreds of uncomfortably intimate thoughts.

The Manager said, “There’s a little person inside me who gets awfully sad when an employee finally takes a job. Oh! That little person feels helpless and lies on her bed so inert — why, just the way you’re lying there now! — but no one comes to help!”

Again the Manager leaned over the bedclothes. “I just loathe life when people go off to worksites all on their own and leave me,” she said hopelessly. “Leaving is like a terrible seduction, but a different kind of seduction, a falling into the ground, a humiliation that one is powerless to drive away! Oh, sure, I have my job to do, and I do it,” she added flatly. “Still, what am I but a girl?”

“Ah—” said Dra— uneasily, voice muffled by the blanket.

“Tell me, how much do you like me?” the Manager whispered, bending low, sidling along the bed-frame.

“I don’t know.”

The Manager expelled a snorting breath and her tone hardened. “That’s all you can say? Never mind then, you’re going to change like hell when you meet your new Administrator, believe me. And listen—” A wily look passed through her eyes and she bounced the bed enthusiastically with her palms, grinning. “You won’t recognize yourself when it’s all over! You’ll be all different, not like now, and every single day of your life from then on you’ll be making decisions by the mountainful! Won’t that be wonderful?”

“No!”

The Manager turned to regard herself in a small hand-mirror. “Look at me, I’m as tough as a whistle! I’m not losing,” she said softly, wiping her hand down her hip with great pleasure. “I’m doing just fine, and sometimes I forget that.”

She strode to the door, smiling. “I do hope you like your new job; it’s a complex job, I hear, one that’s inextricably bound up with the future, so you’ll probably want to bring a headscarf. You’ll be working at the pump site, dear.”

The Manager crushed her palm upon a wall switch, causing the room to blaze with light, and the scars and holes of its homely wooden walls were revealed.

“And also,” the Manager paused dramatically, blinking, “I know you’re anxious to meet your new Administrator. Well, let me tell you all about her right now: she’s a real dream. You’ll meet her at the train station, do you understand?”

Then the Manager slowly pronounced the Administrator’s full name, including her maiden name; this Dra— took in with excited, fearful eyes, and she sat up, pulse rising, now more than ready to leave the room.

“You’re afraid of others’ feelings, aren’t you?” the Manager said, eyes focusing hard on the bed. “You’re afraid of anger. Why? I can see it in your face — you’d do anything to avoid anger, even stop defecating, wouldn’t you? Oh, dammit,”—her voice rose again—“who will be left to talk to me? There’s no one here, not really. Don’t I want a steady friend to help and hurt me just like everybody else? Tell me, why is it so hard to need another woman, after all?”

Huge, sentimental tears rolled down the Manager’s face, and Dra—, pained on her behalf, waited patiently, for the Manager had grown so candid and warm in these few moments that indeed the thought of leaving her and this entire office — she had been here at least three days — caused her enormous grief. She flopped back into the bed, staring at the slanted ceiling, struck with awe, for even in this moment of silence, the Manager’s voice rang miraculously in her ears, and the Manager’s long face with its bright red lipstick was fixed in her mind.

And the Manager, so attractive in her various skirts and dresses, might indeed have been the ideal boss, but there was no hope of working here with her, Dra— realized: that would be a shameful thing to do, because the only valid, real task was to find her Administrator and begin work at the pump site, never turning away from that. And so, clamping her feelings shut, Dra— whimpered once then turned over in the bed. The Manager opened the door of the closet, and with a hollow sob disappeared deep within the matchstick hallways far at the rear of the department.

After an hour or so of silence and no sign of the Manager returning, Dra— finally rose from the bed, heavy-hearted, body and clothes rather damp, and padded from the closet, searching fruitlessly for the Manager.

But the Manager was gone, she realized, passing rows of abandoned lockers, buckets filled with doorstops, and a small pot of soured soup on the floor; then she came upon a small changing room near the filing cabinets, its walls laden with blurry photographs of ignominious employees dating from decades past. She scanned the images of the worn faces, envious, for these people obviously had worked successfully and without incident for dozens of years on end; yet she turned and banished all such wishful notions from her mind and toweled off, changing into a fresh skirt.

Now in the waiting area, she held before her a lengthy note from the Manager, which she had found nailed to the countertop. The note detailed the time Dra— was to meet her new Administrator at the train station, and also the topics that the two of them should probably discuss, including the problem of maintaining physical integrity in the face of friendship, and various conundrums involving intimacy and telephones. They ought also to discuss grades of paper stock, the note instructed.

But Dra— could not absorb all the note’s information, and stuffed it into her skirt pocket, instead thinking fondly of the winsome, fickle Manager and all the things she had said. She moved toward the front counter of the darkened office, then, still dreaming, leaned her head there heavily until her attention was caught by an enormous old book lying nearby.

The book seemed to be a descriptive index of all jobs everywhere, charting and cross-referencing them in so many dozens of ways that it seemed, she thought, beginning to flip through, ludicrous — as was the book’s gnatlike print which grew smaller and smaller as the chapters progressed, until it disappeared into the grain of the paper itself.

Skipping the long preface, she glanced upon an advisory written by the book’s editor, warning that if some employees were insubstantial and weak, it only meant that they imagined an overpowering entity in their vicinity, and that it was this noisome frame of mind, in which a party was so fearful that they could not assume full responsibility for self, which was the major cause of suffering.