ERIC HAUSMANN: listen

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Some of us are born with a death wish, and other of us, no matter how much absurdity we endure, insist on staying around til the last chapter, in the hopes of seeing how the drama resolves.

 

That was my intention, anyway. But I couldn’t tough it out, after all. My frail little body was getting out of a cab and got smashed into a million pieces by a bus. At least that is what I think happened. My memory can at times be a little fuzzy. And at other times, I think it even tries lying to me. 

 

I am surrounded on all sides by an assortment of freaks who would never have chosen to be trapped in an elevator together. On my left is Jihad Joe. He painfully flits his hands above the keys of his type-machine, each nervous sausage about to touch the keys before navigating away. Each ambush foiled, each expression averted, I suspect that the man never learned to read and write in the first place, and now he is charged with this painful duty—summarizing his life, as brief as it was, before he blew himself up with a car-bomb outside a crowded discotheque. 

 

Granny Honeytongue isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, herself. While she, in life was a competent touch-typist, now that she’s here, she can never commit to a final draft of her story line. She types and re-types the events of that fateful Christmas dinner where her husband of fifty-three years confessed to having an affair with her sister…a forty-year long affair, and she got stinking drunk and tripped and fell on the shiny glass mid-century coffee-table, its sharp and precise lines exacting her left eyeball, right in front of all five daughters and seventeen blond and athletic grandchildren. As was the wont of rural Wisconsinites, the brood rushed to her aid, the womenfolk herding Granny into the kitchen for some first aid, and the men proceeding to eat the Almond Roca and pecan pie. Oh, how the children’s cartoons blared—Road Runner blotted out the blood; Tom and Jerry rendered the visions of Granny’s dangling left eyeball a G-rated tribute.

 

The Sex Bomb sits behind me, trying to come up with the morals to her story—a life well lived, full of drugs and dangerous men, a life of fast cars and makeup hastily applied to bruises. Beneath her helmet of sugary-frosted hair, beneath the insectlike-layers of her black and clotted mascara, she precariously types, with finger-pads well shielded by four-inch iridescent orange press-on nails. She relates a life locked in closets, a life of lies, cries, and glorious recoveries. At one point she went to one of those two-year training schools and became a certified public accountant. Three years later she couldn’t afford her mortgage, two sons, or the gigolo mechanic. She took too much acid at a rave and woke up without her left arm on a Minnesota farm. A farmhand discovered her to the side of his thresher, and lifted the damsel in distress to a sort of safety. I imagine him now, a mangled hunk of man, like a Steinbeck monstrosity, dumbly staring at the damsel on a hay bale leaking red. 

 

For what it is worth, I can tell you she has her arm here. The Editors think of everything. They know that we will produce more, if our bodies are restored to what they were—in our prime. 

 

And what is it we must do with these bodies, you may ask? Where the hell are we, we zombie-like auteurs, we workaday monkeys, relentlessly whipped on to type-type type our guts out—type our lives, before the time clock buzzes that our days are through? 

 

This is what it looks like to me: I sit at a desk. This room contains THOUSANDS of desks.

 

The room goes on forever. The desks, in neat rows, get smaller and smaller, and approach something like a horizon. It is almost as if I can see the curvature of the Earth with the desks on this horizon. But I would hesitate to say we are on any kind of earth.

 

I am actually comfortable at my desk. I don't even mind the insistent backaches and sweltering heat. The sound of the ceiling fans, while my neighbors can't stand it, strikes me as having a meditative quality—or at least it promotes such thoughts in me. I meditate too much here, while I hear the other's industriously typing away. Why should I even try to advance? I am on strike.

 

Ha-ha! They don’t let you be on strike for long. A nagging little supervisor in a shiny suit and strange ear contraptions struts over and pokes a cane in my back and forces me to type on. 

 

All of the people who laughed at you in high school are the ones who rule you as an adult. That truism holds in this land. Surly jocks and nattering bureaucrats abound. I hear whispers that there are other varieties of type-shops, but I can only speak with authority on the one who torments me here.

 

His name is Charles Pelletier, and he has a shock of stiff red hair and a nose like a clothespin, and he yanks on my hair if I am especially sluggish.

 

At the end of each workday, the time clock gives a loud buzz. It is a localized buzz, like a drowsy hornet, and then it is followed in the distance by a siren—like an old-fashioned air raid call. We are to pull the sheets out of our typewriters, and sit, weary and stilled at our machines, as our immediate supervisors fetch our life stories of the day. 

 

These are taken to the Editors. We never get our original manuscripts back. 

 

As the siren dies down, a type of drowsiness overtakes our minds—and pooof—we hear the morning’s work-day siren, then the time clock buzz. We open the sealed envelopes that sit between the platens of our type-machines. 

 

Rejection Letters. Throughout the room, with a heaving quality not unlike the collective whirr of thousands of vending machines inside a casino, each typist in the room sighs. We place the rejection letters to the sides of our desks.

 

We still didn’t get our life stories right. We don’t get to sleep on it. We aren’t wired for sleep.

 

My rejection letter goes like this: The Editors feel my work doesn’t meet their needs at the current time. The note—it never varies—goes on to say that I should re-work my submission and send it to them at a later date. 

 

It is like the message at the end of all the arcade video games I played as a kid. When you lose, and the machine has exhausted your every last quarter, the screen flashes:

 

TRY AGAIN.

 

And so we do. 

 

When I first got here? You want to know that? What is time here, anyway? I have to confess, my mind, while I like to think of it has having at one time functioned as a steel trap…my mind is not what it used to be. It has gone through its troubles…Death, for one. 

 

I’m a little foggy on how I got here. It used to be that I drew a blank on my death, but as time passes, and I type everything leading up to it, I start to get memories of being in a rushing taxi, on the way to a banquet that was to be held in honor of…me! I don’t remember why. I think I had agreed to do something that was going to change my life, that was going to give me riches and fame. It was going to make people love me…even if I didn’t love myself for making this decision. If only I could remember what it was.

 

So much of it started with my sister. My sister was the opposite of me: I was the boy with comedy on my brain: I was the one who cracked jokes and had to get everyone’s attention. I burst out in tears or shouts and poured a plate of hot green beans on my grandmother’s neck—when I was eleven, of all things. An eleven-year old is supposed to know better! Meanwhile, my sister was studious. She would look for any excuse to go off alone. Aurora invented things when she was a kid—or at least she drew out blueprints for them. 

 

When she was fourteen, Aurora came up with a device that could manage the medication old people take, even crush it in their puddings for them. When she was eighteen, she came up with a device that could turn compost into renewable energy with an efficiency that dwarfed the plans of scientists all over the planet. She won a scholarship to MIT, and soon she was jet-setting to symposiums all over the planet—to Oslo, and Brussels, and Rio Di Jenero. And the fateful trip to Bogota. 

 

There is a certain tribe in Colombia who has rights to a region of the jungle where a very rare lizard lives that has photosynthetic properties. Aurora wanted to sample the cells in this lizard’s back, watch these lizards mating in the wild, and come up with a compound she was going to use in her greatest invention yet. I was going to visit her, and she was excited. 

 

I was supposed to meet her in Bogotá at 3:45 PM in front of the American Embassy. But as usual, I got lost in the airport, and spent too long washing my face in the bathroom mirror, and I even had a drink in the airport bar, hoping to pep myself up a bit. When I finally got out of the cab in front of the Embassy, half the street was blocked off because there had been some guerilla action, and one of the millions of gangs involved in drug running and machine gunning had just sprayed the plaza with bullets—one hitting my sister, it was said—but no one can say where—say, in a non-essential left pinky finger, or the heart—and then the gang disappeared with her. 

 

Many suspect she was a hostage. For ten long years, The CIA and other less formidable yet more humane agencies searched for my sister. But she was gone without a trace. 

 

I repeat—I was supposed to meet her at 3:45 PM. I was an hour late. The guns and grenades went off at 4:00 PM sharp. We should have been long gone from the plaza by then. 

 

I have submitted sixty-seven versions of this story to the Editors, and another five-hundred and twenty-four stories with this Embassy bit as a side-note. No matter how I write it, I always get rejection slips. No matter WHAT I write about my life, they won’t let me out of this god-forsaken room.

 

We have a chronological memory of how many days we have been here. For me, it is ten-thousand six-hundred and seventy-eight days and four hours. Jihad Joe has only been here three months. Sometimes, I see a person, far off in the left quadrant of the room, near the water coolers—getting forcibly ejected. Others seem to have a more respectful escort out. With triumphant letters clutched in their hands, and relieved looks on their faces, these illustrious authors strut out of the room,—but to where? 

 

Into an abyss, for all I know. Their works—their life stories, have been accepted by the editors, and who knows if they will end up wining and dining at the Algonquin Round Table in the Sky? Or maybe it is just a nursing home in the sky. Perhaps it is a type of Nirvana, where once you have successfully written your life story, a machine takes your memories—your very sense of self—and vaporizes them. 

 

I used to think a person was supposed to instantly find out these things after death. Well, think again!

 

The thing is, I don't know who these 'Editors' are. But just look what I’ve done for them! I’ve chronicled the ups and downs of a stand-up comic who eventually inherits a radio show. Then he works as a freelance writer, bumming around mausoleums and golf courses of the Deep South, until a top secret military corporation offers him a contract to sell one of his sister’s inventions to their R and D men. Chomping at the bit! Military-Industrial-Complex! I sign the contract, and make a lot of money, and get run over by a bus. 

 

And STILL I get a rejection letter!

 

So I try again. I do my childhood as a tone poem. My college years as an erotic opera. I’ve done everything short of typing out a menu of my bedtime snacks and the history of my teeth—and nothing has pleased these Icons on high! What will cut it? I could just use a guideline or two...WORD COUNT. Just some WORD COUNT would help me. Maybe all they want from me is a haiku!

 

My supervisor, Charles, has a magnetic ability to creep up behind my back, and in a brittle voice that sounds like a man who's eaten too many bags of caramel corn, he coughs up: 

 

“What are you typing there! If that isn't part of today's submission, then hand it over. We've received several complaints about you disturbing your neighbors, failing to maintain 45 WPM, Several false starts, and staring off into space.”

 

He grabs the paper sticking out of my type machine. It reads:

 

Cookies and cream

I had a dream

of a long line of women in easy chairs.

They all said: You are so wonderful.

When can we have a chance at you?

 

Tightly gripping the paper, Charles weaves his way around a gaggle of about forty desks with bleary typists, and disappears though a side door—an affair done in drab wood painted olive with a panel of smoked glass. 

 

It is then that I feel a strange vibration in my hands, and I feel that room is also vibrating, molecules dancing apart from molecules, about to disappear. 

 

In minutes—or what I would have once said feels like minutes—Charles returns. 

 

He hands me the Editors’ letter of acceptance. His face is pained, and I wonder if this is simply because he will no longer have the opportunity to torment me.

 

The letter trembles in my hands. Charles stiffly pushes me toward another side door made of smoked glass. I feel like I am marching for a mile around cubicles of busy typists before I reach it.

 

The letter says that the Editors are looking forward to working with me. 

 

When the door opens, I feel the stiff, mean little hand of Charles Pelletier nearly shoving me though the ever-widening crack…