Steve Tem - Onion Songs

Terry grabbed his giant “World’s Greatest Employee!” mug with the company logo emblazoned on the side and got up for coffee. The office was starting to fill up again. Here and there clown heads popped up above cubicle walls, then fell out of sight as if smashed by an enormous invisible mallet. At the coffee station Terry examined his mug, then began drinking directly from the much more spacious carafe. The coffee scalded his mouth and he did a spit-take, spraying hot brown liquid onto Walter from accounting. Walter nodded and spat back half-heartedly, looking sad and bored. Terry poured more scalding coffee down his throat, laughing hysterically. Nervous twitters spread across the office like an orchestra warming up.

Strolling back to his corner cube Terry glanced into a neighboring space as a file drawer eased open and a diminutive clown in a billowy white jumper climbed out, his tiny pointed cap drooping to one side. “Morning, Bob,” Terry said.

“Too soon,” the small clown replied. “Night shift had a party.” He yawned, then burst into tears, pulling out some big red satin bloomers to blow his nose.

Terry turned away. He preferred his clowns with their tears painted on. “Steady, Bob. It’s only Monday.”

“You got that right!” a fat clown said, squeezing past and knocking the cubicle walls out of alignment. He had a target painted across his ample rear. Terry’s feet suddenly itched, but he managed not to act on the impulse. Here and there across the office he heard a quick, explosive guffaw and an anxious dancing of oversized clown shoes on plastic antistatic mats.

Back in his chair Terry was suddenly overwhelmed by a cloud of suffocating perfume. He rolled to the edge of one cubical wall and peered around. At that same moment Laura across the aisle, newly arrived, turned in her chair, her legs spread. He’d seen her only last week leaving late, her lips smeared down the side of her face as if her mouth had been ripped open with a knife. She did not look up, but a spring-loaded clown’s head with razor-sharp teeth popped out from between her legs on a scissoring extension arm and attempted to bite his face. Feeling that face go red beneath his makeup he retreated back to his desk. He’d once heard one of the office clowns say “She melts my face paint,” but hadn’t known what he’d meant, until now.

“Finish your reports yet?” she called mockingly behind him, and he grew frantic trying to remember if there had been a memo concerning some sort of promotion for her. Before he could reply she waved and said, “It’s like the boss always says—there’s always too much until you need just a little.”

Terry could not recall ever having heard their boss say that, and wondered if it might be some bit of boudoir talk inappropriately revealed. To be safe he started to laugh, and could not stop himself until he began to choke on his own absurdity.

From cubicles all over the office his fellow employees’ strained laughter echoed his, followed by the scattered struggle for breath, the cough, the nervous curse.

Some changes had been made since the previous week. A mime now managed the communications group. Whenever someone asked him a question about deadlines , he frowned and stared at an invisible wristwatch.

Terry could see into an office at the end of his aisle of cubes. It had been without an identifying sign ever since he started working here. From what he could tell it had a beautiful view of the distant mountains. Inside, a delicate white-faced clown wearing slippers shouted silently into a phone receiver.

Terry went down to the supply room to make some copies. Inside a very tall clown with a blue mouth was pressing another clown’s face violently against the copier glass. Copy after copy of the clown’s flattened facial features floated down, layering the floor. Terry picked one up. He was impressed that he could clearly see the broken pattern of veins in the eyeballs.

Every couple of hours he went into the bathroom to check his face. He stood in line with the others as they silently patched, reapplied makeup, intensified colors, redrew lines, practiced eyebrow raises, smiles, frowns. Some had a settled expression they simply reinforced. Others felt the need to twiddle, to change, so that their faces were never very predictable, or very neat. These employees made the others nervous, and seldom lasted.

Later he went to Carter’s cube looking for newer data. Carter was leaned back in his chair, staring so fixedly at the ceiling Terry was afraid the older clown was dead. But when he crept closer he heard the soft snores, saw the open eyes painted on the closed eyelids.

Lunch was a quick soup and sandwich at a diner that serviced clientele from the surrounding office buildings. There was plenty of seating but people were always stepping on each other’s shoes. When he came back to the office he could see clown after clown in the exterior windows, identical white-gloved hands pressing against the inside of the glass. On the grassy median between parking areas numerous clowns lay face up, staring at the sky, looking as if they had fallen from a great height.

After lunch he had a meeting on procedures. Twin clowns with giant bow ties stood at one end of the conference table, facing off with water-squirting sunflowers in their lapels. Finally the clown on the right grew tired of the back-and-forth, pulled out a slapstick, and proceeded to beat the other clown with it. No one intervened until chunks of painted skin and bright wig filled the air. Terry remained frozen in his chair, watching, thinking, it’s like peeling clown fruit .

He assembled reports all afternoon. When he couldn’t find the data he copied from the day before. Sometimes he added random graphics in bright primary colors. He had spent years mastering his templates—they were sure-fire, guaranteed-to-please. Sometimes he wanted to cry, they were so beautiful. By the end of the day he had hundreds of pages. They were his big blow off, his major guffaw, his extended joke. He simply could not stop the giggles they caused. He turned to look out the opening to his cubicle space, out the window, out to the sky beyond. He imagined floating there. He could not believe he sat in an office with no door or ceiling. He could not believe he had a boss who paid him for such things.

A dark shape blotted the sky. The cloud of perfume descended and filled him. Panic rose like gorge. “The boss wants to see you. Now,” she said.

Terry could not believe he was trotting eagerly down to see the CEO, his size twenty-twos making a merry slapping sound. He could not believe he was knocking on the man’s door, this company fixture who almost never left the building. He could not believe he was going in grinning, grinning so extensively he might have just had his throat cut ear to ear.

He could not believe he was saying “You wanted me,” and so very pleased by this statement.

The boss’s huge clown face, some four feet across, sat wedged behind the desk, although “sat” seemed to be a misstatement. It was propped up with crutches on either side of the chin so as not to crush the delicate little body beneath. The eyes were tiny and pressed into the face like a pair of bullet holes. The nose was long, slender, beautiful, and completely unsuited to this face. The mouth was wide and slit-like except for two rounded swellings of lip parted at the center, revealing great, blocky white teeth that gleamed like ice blocks. When the mouth opened further a tongue like a great pink pillow heaved in the yawning cavity. When his boss began to speak that mouth was the only thing in the room as far as Terry was concerned.

“How long?” the mouth asked.

“Em—pardon?”

“You have worked for me, how long?”