From Xman
"The office, grim and dismal, gave on a small courtyard.
Out of sight the Hudson continued to flow, the young man
presumed, into sodden tributaries. He kept reminding himself this was permanent--the real
thing. So very quickly he
fell into a relation of utter passivity with the others, the
endless countless others. Ashamed, however, of his desire to
lie down and die he made his way quickly to the urinal, this
before his status as a permanent employee entitled to all, or
almost all, company benefits could be publicly, celebratorily
confirmed. He was reassured by the long line of urinals, the
superabundance of stalls beyond. Clearly this was a real, a
full-fledged company. Although he did not have to shit he
entered one of the stalls, without removing his clothes sat
down on the toilet lid, and turned to the wall. A scrawl in a
hue somewhat lighter than Lincoln Center's incarnadine
('Trust not the man who.. . ') read: 'Don't be afraid of your
passivity, schmuck. On the one hand passivity freezes, yes
true enough, reinforces a sense of despair, truer still. In back
of all this failed fermentation, however, is an indefatigable
optimism, curiosity about how opportunity to emerge at last
from the shit will make itself known, and from this curious
optimism even you, schmuckface, are not immune. And you
are of course correct, putz, when time after time you find it
inconceivable that you yourself through your own puny efforts can possibly make a
difference--locate survival--for
whatever you touch is immediately contaminated with your
helplessness, your valuelessness. It is only what comes to
you that matters. Continue, continue then, to be passive, on
or off the john, so that life's intentions toward you can be
made known at last. For the only life worth having is the
kind that makes its intentions known at last and without
your having to yourself enter in its grubby arena of half-light
transactions and soggy compromises.'
"Among his co-workers thinking of himself always as of
course completely dead he made it a point never to say, 'Have
a nice day,' or, 'You look nice today, Tushina,' much less,
'Billie Sue, you seem somewhat under the weather.' He assumed they must bristle terribly at
being bracketed, defined,
however amiably, and trounced thereby in the universal game of warring self-assertions.
Abstaining though from
amiability he (naturally?) begrudged them theirs, underwent
each specimen--'How are you today, Pman?'--for that was
the young man's name--'Nice weather we've having
Qman.'--for that was his alias--as a leeringly purposeful
attempt to torment and humiliate his speechlessness, make
him envious of a vastly contrasting fortune-filled felicity.
"He strove, did Pman, harder and harder to be dead, his
desk had the orderliness of a tomb. There was no way at this
point to see the true work--for he fancied himself a true
worker, whatever that is--to see the labor to begin laboring
in behalf of the true work's not quite imminent possibility of
possibility--as pointed toward anything but posthumousness, more than likely posterity-free.
Some of us are born
posthumously, his friend Freddy O'Nitch had once said, out-
side the Ecce Homo Turkish Baths down in--in-- He had to
live his life here in the labyrinth of cubicles according to this
dire knowledge or absence of same. But the key, he told
himself--wandering form desk to john and back again, forever dreading encounters with his
co-workers, especially
those who liked to chitchat and chatchit while relieving
thernselves--the key is to live this knowledge or bloody absence of same as more than an
incantatory cancellation of
its ultimate realization. He was bloody well going to die true
workless, projectless, and he must not expect indemnification for the undergoing of such a
truth. The key was to let
the dire knowledge or absence of same penetrate his bloody
being awfully. But no matter how he tried to globally appropriate this resignation there was
always some fringe of young
man peeping in in expectation of prodigal recompense for so
much resignation, tastefully deployed. This capitulation to a
posthumousness was in fact an intermittent capitulation,
prisoner, if truth be told, of its own systole and diastole. No
matter how hard he tried after Friday's paycheck despair he
always awoke to Satyrday morning's skewed baptism of
quasi-riotous expectation. But of what? Of what? Always
waiting for bad news, more bad news, he felt his proleptic
despair to be genuine. Yet no matter how intense his anticipation, how lucid his resignation,
by the time the inevitable
did roll around, anticipation and resignation had contracted
and volatilized away, had become the sign, the category, the
archetype of themselves for which--according to the felicific calculus relevant to such forms
without content--reparation was due.
"Though he found it hard to remain a sagittal figure of
posthumousness, only posthumousness had the power to
furnish captions of a teleological surety for what bubbled up
incessantly from his site of putrefaction. Only posthumousness could transform chaos's
homogeneity into the dazzling
heterogeneity that sprouts from one fixed point's intersection of all avenues of awe. There
was no awe for his likes
now. But wait, but wait, he told the labyrinths, and the typewriters and the windows of
which he caught a glimpse only
barely in the course of a day.
"To his co-workers Pman was a miserable being but much
to his regret miserableness was never accepted--in other
words, did not startle to speechlessness--once and for all.
And on a bright sunny day when least expecting it he would
be told, 'You seem kind of sad.' But hadn't this been established long before and for all time.
He, who prided himself
most on a grim gapless consistency, was being informed
there were lapses in his armor. For, 'You seem kind of sad,'
meant: We are noting your impersonation today--at this moment-of one always sad in order
to cast retrospective Burchian opprobrium on those many times in your past when,
unbeknownst to you, your impersonation failed miserably.
Or, 'You seem kind of sad,' could also have meant: You are
always glacially--impeccably--sad but we choose just today
for some special reason to call attention to what is ostensibly tacitly understood to be,
beyond sayability, beyond
conceivability. They seemed to snicker not so much beyond
his back as at an angle--the acute angle whence amusement
is most lancinating.
"Botching an assignment he was always sure he heard
them snickering. Yet when these co-workers were similarly
humiliated and then bounced right back with a smile he was
even more enraged. For bouncing back, contrasted with his
brooding miserableness--proleptic coloration against inevitable dressing-down for inevitable
ineptitude founded on inherent indifference to anything diverging from the
possibility of the true work--must mean their bad fortune
was not bad as his was, invariably, bad. They were clearly in
possession of some parergon making setbacks insignificant
in this sphere. Or they sustained a secret and invisible bond
with their tormentor, who was also the young man's--Pman's--tormentor, the less than
redoubtable Mr. O'Kay--a
bond perhaps fortified by vicissitude. In short, his jealous
rage over this intrinsic ability to adapt to circumstance, to
rebound from mishap without hoarding incriminatory instances, grew from day to day until
transformed ultimately into a murderous obsession with their less than licit secret fund of strength
not bravely constructed from scratch of self in the face of circumstance, but wheedled out of
O'Kay on the sly and guaranteed consequently to keep them smiling
under every conceivable lash of exploitation.
"But he was most enraged when, after observing him
praised for a bland piece of botchwork, they--the ubiquitous
co-workers--still found the smiling strength to say, 'Good
work. Have a nice day. Damned good show.' Did this secret
fund--this hypostatization of his own exorbitant despair but
with the sign rousingly reversed--secure them against all
puny successes of others (mere ripples on the belly of well
being) or were they merely heroically dissimulating, sealing
off their anguished envy from his observation with a phrase
or two. And so never did he bristle so bitterly as when he
heard from the depths of this or that cubicle, 'Good work,
Pman. Have a hell of a holistic day.' For this 'Good work,
Pman,' and 'Have a hell of a holistic day, Pman,' did little
more and little less than consign him sempiternally to the
slagheap of susceptibility to simple-minded praise for simple-minded bedpan-Charlie-type
chores simple-mindedly
well-done, Charlie. 'Good work, Pman' told him point blank
and without sugarcoating that his good luck was a crutch
they were very well able to do without, thank you. They
were after bigger garne but this did not prevent them from
observing the amenities where small fry were concerned.
They were all sublimely superior to the contingencies that
accounted for his institutional euphoria. From their exalted
vantage the boss's secretary's assistant's kind words on his
dexterous shredding of paper clips marked him the way a
mongrel is marked by uncontrollable baying at a half-moon
slab of raw rotting tripe. Their 'Good work, Pman' sketched
the bark he ought to have emitted as at fleeced cerulean
curdling the glass at the end of the optic nerve. He envied
their refusal to be envious, to be anything less than goodness
gracious and if they did not show the symptoms of envy
either they were not envious, thanks to the gargantuan guerdon wheedled as a lifetime
annuity out of fat O'Kay, or simply putting up a good show, better than he could have
Managed, he knew, under similar circumstances.
"Once when as a reward for having attended to his little
tasks with such numbskull alacrity he was allowed to depart
early they again wished him a lovely evening again with no
sign of resentment which good wishes meant only they were
delectating over some bacchanal about to unfold in the
loathed office, now a domain of delight, and to whose unfolding his sickly presence had
been the sole impediment. In
short, he was not to be envied, his early escape was no windfall, he had simply been
jettisoned in preparation for some
bureaucracy regatta to whose jolts and surprises he was not,
under any circumstances, to be privy.
"It was simple, they all loathed him, were conspiring against him. From the depths of his
monstrousness he concocted a unanimity they never dreamed--take it from me--they shared.
Telling him to 'Have a good evening' even before
he was fully dressed to leave depicted, defined and designated him as the prey of
contingency, the plaything of circumstance. By so depicting, defining and designating they
proved themselves to be beyond--outside--depiction, definition, and designation--outside,
then, the most chloroforming categories of medieval thought, outside the contingency
he chewed up so gratefully--gratefufly, that is, according to
the interpretation he imposed on their fluttery lighthearted
farewell. Spewing forth their send-off they became superior
to all contingency--for all contingency was suddenly embodied in his departure--they
became mysterious and inconceivable, Mysterious and inconceivably immune to
contingency they were only too happy--always according to
Pman's interpretation of this or that tiny little phrase of
greeting or farewel-l-to relinquish momentarily their vantage out of nowhere in order to
escort him to the all too
localizable threshold of immersion in that out-of-office babbling and gamboling to his wild
heart's boobied content that
knowing him as they did would have to be his first priority
once he hit the streets. They used--he felt it in his bones as
he stood by the elevator and grew sick with mad protest that
he, Pman, Qman, Rman, progenitor of a true work as true as
any man's, should be so discarded, he, he, Pman--they used
the euphoria with which they saddled him via their felicitating 'Have a good evening,' or
'Don't take any wooden nickels,' to plausibilize--always according to his interpretation,
remember--to plausibly camouflage their eagerness to get
rid of him as quickly as possible. 'Have a good evening'--as if
in response to his euphoria--was in actual fact his order to
go, to make himself scarce, euphoria or no euphoria. But
why, why, what were they planning behind his back in the
depths of the labyrinth. Were they . . . terrorists. He hated
them, hated them all, the nameless faceless pastes. He could
barely restrain himself from running back to formulate what
had suddenly already formulated itself in his bowels, inexhaustible source of shit: Only by
manufacturing his euphoria--once again, how many times, Xman, do I have to
remind you, only according to Pman's interpretation--could
this eviction at breakneck speed seem a plausible, nay; a
gracious, response to circumstances rather than a crude hurried molding of same. He
wanted to shout: YOUR EAGERNESS TO GET RID OF ME IS AS IF IN RESPONSE TO MY
UNCONTROLLABLE EAGERNESS TO BE GONE. You're
impersonators. All life is impersonation. All this--my dear
Xman--through sorcery of the phrase, 'Have a hell of a holistic evening.' All this--the
monstrous idea at the heart of
their monstrosity--through the sublime witchery of a simple, 'Good work old shit.'
"But he did not go back. He formulated nothing before
their very eyes. He went down in the elevator saddled with
this crude cruel luck at being able to leave early. He gritted
his teeth at every floor as the elevator picked up more and
more drones. What could he do with these few hours? Saddling him with this crude cruel
destiny they had expropriated the only destiny from his absence of vantage worth
having--a destiny unuttered and unsketched and foiling all
conjecture and thereby derogating blandly all others. They
had constructed him as the enviable one--the enviable one
they did not however envy--in order to carry out some
deeper darker terroristic purpose in his absence.
"The following day he forced himself to take the initiative.
He said--as a monumental mammoth and yet ultimately
impostural--transvestitial--vengeance on being-'Have a
real nice day,' when one of the foremost drones was about to
leave the labyrinth. He felt as if he had mercilessly incised
her, or his--he, Pman, was not sure of the co-workers sex; all
he knew was that he/she was taking a course in Gender
Management at the New School--privacy, the secret intention with which he/she had hoped
to escape unscathed. Yes,
by his intonation the young man wanted, 'Have a real nice
day,' to mean nothing less than 'Fuck you. I've done it--fixed
you in being. Tit for tat. Tat for tit. Just when you think your
departure is unnoticed and therefore unlocalizable, unsayable, I, Pman, alias Qman, alias
Rman, a.k.a. Pman, impale
it. With your labels ("Have fun in the whorehouse, Pman")
many a time you called me into the frame from outside the
frame in order to call attention to your own unsituatability
unlocalizability, your perch outside being. By saying "Have a
real nice day" for once I'm letting you bastards know your
so-called good fortune is not my bad fortune. My good spirits
are a coded message to the effect that I am, for once and at
last, repository of a global security outfacing--O'Kay or Nokay--all species of adversity.' Yet
watching the co-worker
depart stigmatized by his 'Have a real nice day,' the young
man grew sad for what was he doing but impersonating his
co-workers in order to undergo the delectation he supposed
they had experienced ushering him out so blithely. Yet he
felt none. He was trying through impersonation to discover whether the blitheness
irradiating their features had
been dissimulated envy or despair, or authentic blitheness
stemming from global security. Through impersonation he
was trying to resolve an ambiguity that continued to
torment him.
"He stood there, long after the co-worker had left, trying to
make the nonexistent ambiguity decide in favor of one alternative. It was like straining to
relieve himself without success. Either he, like they had a secret 'out' and enjoyed
flaunting its propinquity by showing himself undaunted by
another's good fortune, or he had no 'out' and was desperately keeping up a brave front in
the face of that good fortune
snatched from his clutches. He had been shortchanged: He
did not experience the euphoria attributed to his co-workers,
nor did he detect signs of envy among them. He/she had
simply thanked him and gone a long way down the shaft.
Only they, his opponents, were able to milk this game for all
it was worth, straitjacketing misery in a protocol of bliss.
When they had said, 'Have a nice day Pman,' and 'Fart one
for us, Pman, old tit,' the 'Have a nice day, Pman,' and 'Have
a nice lay Pman,' were simple placeholders vastly vastly
repelling all that might have revealed a true state of affairs,
with soundtrack ultimately triumphing over image. They
had made his early departure mean (for him, for them, for all
of being) what their words said it had to mean. But he, in
contrast, was left in the lurch by utterance, it fell flat, on his
lips sounded stale. Uttering their utterances, impersonating
them, impersonating them as if his life depended on it and in
this case for no pay wielding their little phrases of farewell,
of come and go, had not procured him, no, not by a long shot,
the delight, triumph, aggressive release he knew had to have
been theirs, having deftly extrapolated to such rapture from
his own despairing sense of having been so thoroughly vanquished. Their utterance, their
borrowed finery, had not
served him as it must have, oh there could be no doubt,
served them. The wardrobe mistress had dressed him in the
lowliest tatters, mere flakes of raiment, or rather the costliest garments became mere flakes
when draped on his cadaverly shoulders.
"Clearly their utterance did not exist eternally. It allowed
for one-time use only, like surgical gloves, and they had ex propriated it before he could get
to it, before he could desire,
know he desired, to get to it. 'Have a nice day,' emerging
from their multiple mouth had been at once an empty pleasantry and a savage and delirious
transcendence of all that
pleasantry suggested of envy held in check. The little phrase
had managed to straitjacket his whole being, convert him
into a termite easily assuaged by crutchlike favors from on
high, while inertia, bondage, nonmovement, had become,
also through the phrase's wielding, a kind of infinite clandestine mobility. Bondage was now
simply the broadest vantage
on the fatuous doings of scullions such as he. Through their
wielding of the little phrase, 'Have a good shit, Pman,' bondage had been transmogrified into
the exorbitant fringe benefit of those lucky enough to be left behind at the last
minute--those lucky or willful enough to have engineered
purely through utterance a being left behind. Wielding their
little phrase bondage had been bludgeoned into a foothold, a
pivot, whence others less adroit--especially one other
could be lured, puppeteered into manifesting an essential
and irrevocable futility, big with blundering locomotion and
its heady susceptibility to garish farewells. So it's no wonder,
he told himself standing there like a dunce in the labyrinth
of cubicles, it's no wonder I tried to wield that tool in order
to procure myself the same fringe benefits. The more they
pelleted me with the little phrase, the little phrase I am
trying now with so little success to make my very own, the
more all that exertionless exertion proclaimed their ability
to elude fixation simply by uttering such a phrase. Over and
over they transformed me into the known by uttering their
little phrases. whereas I, using the same phrases, simply
watch them fly back at me like raw egg from a squash racket.
"Then he encountered their slip-ups when fractures in
monolithic localizability showed through. When A, B, or
C slipped up they would invariably proclaim the slipping up
to have been going on purposefully for the longest time, as
part of a grandiose program of defiance--terrorism, in other
words. And it became clear to him, Pman, that these workers, normally so conscientious,
would stop at nothing to lure
him from the straight and narrow in order to have companions in misery. In his presence A,
usually so conscientious,
would profess a flagrant indifference to lapse, taking his silence for credulity And how our
young man--Pman--envied this impersonation, this cancellation of true feeling and true
self with a proclamation. How he envied this swift and
streamlined overriding of the disjunction between ideal feelings and real feelings through a
displacement of focus onto
his almost farcically deluded failure to join in the sabotage.
And this was when he began--I don't know if I should mention it--to contemplate sabotage
as a way of life, a sabotage that would also annihilate these pseudopractitioners. Of
course from their perspective he was such a stick-in-the-mud. Although A tried to be casual
about his refusal to
subscribe to the newly inaugurated program of lapses Pman's
refusal to contribute personal instances of ineptitude was a
clear-cut irritant. Pman only wondered why Aman, Bman,
and Cman couldn't live heroically, candidly. Why had the
datum of a single lapse--it could happen to anybody--to be
transformed into the focal point of a new policy. But if
Xman's--I mean Pman's--silence enraged it also soothed:
subterfuge had passed muster with one who struck the perfect balance between possession
and deprivation of the facts
of the case. Pman hated A as he was later to hate B, C, D, D1,
and E for making him caretaker of this desperate ploy--to
remove the stench of lapse by contriving to make it partake,
this lapse, of the larger stink of a concerted program of
lapses, lapse now metamorphosed into definitive verdict on
the absurdity of conscientiousness and competence. But all
the time denouncing, these others, Pman knew, were plan-
ning to resume their competence as soon as possible. Perfectionists all, as only petty
functionaries can be, so
overwhelmed by the stench of a single lapse they had devised
ploys to inter that stench. Reinstalled once more within
their shells of competence, they would be the first, Pman
knew, to deride his own future lapses. For now he hated their
forcing him to acquire these observations encapsulating the
disjunction between what they proclaimed and what they
truly felt. He wanted to steer clear of acquiring such observations. He hated such
observations. For a moment he would
have given everything to destroy a world capable of delivering its denizens up to such
observations. They destroyed his sanity.
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