“Thomas?”
I look up, startled out of the scenes playing in my mind.
“Are you all right?”
“Sure,” I say, rubbing my forehead. “I guess I zoned out there for a minute. You were talking about how going to work every day isn't that different from going to school. Right?”
“Right.”
“Well, I know what you mean. Sometimes I want to stand up, right in the middle of whatever project I'm working on, and just walk out of my cube. Without saying a word. Down the hallway, out the door, drive away. To wherever. I don't care. Get the heck out of this life.”
“Right on,” Dick says. “Right on, man. I think about that very same thing all the time.”
“You do?”
“Shit, yeah. But you? I thought you were happy in all this. I never thought you were the kind of guy who might rage against the machine.”
Dick believes these things because he doesn't know anything about me. No one at work does, because I don't talk about my personal life here. I don't generally like people to know who I really am. But for some reason I am willing to make an exception for Dick.
“Then you probably wouldn't believe I sold a screenplay once.”
“You what?” he asks. “When?”
“In 1998. Well, it didn't actually sell. A production company optioned it. Paid ten percent for the rights for a year, and then renewed it for another year.”
“A production company in Hollywood?”
I name a few films produced by the company in question, and Dick's face lights up. As I said, I rarely tell people about my screenwriting, but when I do, this part always impresses them. These famous films that have nothing to do with me.
“No shit,” he says. “What was the screenplay about?”
“A big government conspiracy.”
“Trilateral Commission? Illuminati?”
“Sort of. In my film a group like that is trying to get one of their members elected president, but they don't realize the guy is a Satanist who wants to start a world war to bring about the end times. My protagonist went to school with this conspiracy guy and tries to stop him from getting elected. He thinks he's safe when the FBI assigns two agents to him, but then he figures out they work for the bad guy. Eventually it turns into a race-against-time thriller as they chase him across the country.”
“That was pretty good timing,” Dick says. “In 1998, I mean. End of the millennium and all that.”
“That's what I thought. And the film was almost greenlit a couple of times, but something always seemed to get in the way. My agent and I had this running joke about how the film would never be made because it was too close to reality.”
Dick chuckles. “There's no question the government is out to get you, but the problem is more economic than Satanic.”
“What do you mean?”
Dick doesn't answer right away. I look out the window, where the lawn crew is still cutting grass. One of the men looks into the cafeteria and I make eye contact with him. He's an older fellow with a beard. He's staring right at me. He doesn't look anything like the other members of the crew, who are brown and leathery and probably get more sun in one day than I do in a week.
My heart beats hard and hot and fast.
It's the man from the bathroom.
But then I blink and look at him more closely and realize it isn't the same guy at all. He's just as tan as the other members of his lawn crew, and a lot younger than I first thought. He's also not looking at me, but rather down at his gasoline-powered weed trimmer, guiding it along the ground in long, slow-motion strokes.
I look around the cafeteria and notice the polyester women are gone. So is the blue-collar fellow who was watching TV.
The guy outside glides along the window, trimming grass. Still not the man from the bathroom.
Dick hasn't said anything for a while now. When I look back at him I see immediately something is wrong. He's still facing me, but his eyesâ¦it's as if he's looking at something behind me, something far away.
“Ha,” I say. “Very funny.”
He doesn't answer. It's almost like his eyes aren't talking to his brain, like they're just floating in their sockets.
“Hey,” I say. “You all right?”
On the television, some FOX anchor is ranting about the Internet and how virtual relationships are no substitute for the real thing. The heavy smell of bacon and sausage hangs in the air. Someone in the kitchen is listening to Shania Twain.
Dick just sits there, and the metaphorical hairs stand up on my metaphorical neck.
Time crawls to a stop.
This is what I'm talking about. Everything is all wrong with me. I'd like to believe it started with the blue orb, with a migraine, but I know that isn't true. I've been coming apart at the seams for some time now. The scary thing is I can barely remember anything before the church that morning, except for the Halloween party and the fight I had with Gloria. And the things I do remember don't make any sense.
“You want to know how it works?” Dick finally says.
A little life has returned to his eyes, but not much. I feel like I'm living that moment in a suspense film where something shocking is about to happen, except I'm fairly sure it's not happening at all.
“How what works?”
“The world,” he answers. Complete monotone.
“Sure,” I say, “tell me how the world works.”
“The truth is in numbers.”
“Numbers?”
“Lots and lots of numbers.”
“Butâ”
“Did you know the value of pi has been computed to more than one trillion decimal places but no simple pattern has ever been found?”
“No, butâ”
“Pi appears in nature, it's all around us, but no one really knows why.”
I don't even bother to respond this time, because even though Dick is talking, he's definitely not hearing.
“It's almost impossible to see the pattern when you are part of the pattern, Thomas. Remember that.”
I look up at the television. Another talking head is yapping about a House appropriations battle between Democrats and Republicans, and at the bottom of the screen a stock ticker scrolls by.
Lots and lots of numbers.
Dick touches his forehead with his hand, rubbing it the way a person with a headache would.
“I better get back to my desk,” he says in a shaky voice. His eyes still don't look exactly right. “I have to put together a proposal for my boss before noon, and I haven't even started.”
We stand up, ready to leave. I get the feeling if I asked Dick about the numbers, he wouldn't know what I was talking about. Is that because he went into a trance or because it didn't happen at all?
“I tell you what,” he says. “I'm going to send you a link to this game you should download. If you want to see the world from a different point of view, especially religion, this is the way to do it. It's called
Ant Farm 2.0”
“Ant Farm?”
“Yeah. I know it doesn't sound like much, but check it out.”
“Okay.”
“Wow,” Dick says, shaking his head. “A disillusioned screenwriter. And just when I thought there were no surprises left in the world.”
No surprises? At this point everything feels like a surprise to me.
“Let me know what you think about the game,” he says. “I think you'll like it.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
I pick my way through the labyrinth of hallways and cubicles back to my desk. I feel like a rat looking for a piece of cheese. Eventually I find my way into my cube, inside its four gray walls, six feet by eight feet. I've got a desktop, a file cabinet, a gray desk. I have a black chair.
Normally, I would be staring at another eight hours of mindless pointing and clicking, another futile day, like living in that supermax prison.
But this is not a normal day.
It's becoming more obvious by the minute my normal days are over.
SEVEN
I
was hoping the familiarity of my cubicle and the tedious morning routine would settle me down a bit, provide something solid I could hold on to today. But even though I'm staring at my computer monitor, I'm not really seeing it. My eyes aren't focused and everything seems quiet, like I'm the only one here.
Monday mornings aren't what I would call productivity's sweet spot, but right now I don't even know where to begin. To be honest I was already becoming disillusioned with this job before I began to hallucinate. Now there doesn't seem to be any real point. For instance, on the monitor right now is an Excel spreadsheet, a list of terms commonly typed into the search box on my company's web site. Part of my job is to review these terms and figure out which of them are underutilized in our online marketing. The idea is to gather information about your Internet search habits and use it to sell you stuff. It's one facet of what we call Search Engine Marketing. I run reports to see what words you type into our search box, and then I instruct our site to point you to the products I want you to see. The most profitable products, for instance. Or maybe we have a batch of discontinued items we'd like to get rid of, so I nudge you in that direction.
But it's hard to care about the Internet shopping habits of thousands of people I'll never meet when I'm not confident about my own existence. So I just sit here, watching my inbox, waiting for Dick to send that link to that
Ant Farm
simulation. When it doesn't arrive right away I minimize the spreadsheet and log into Facebook instead.
There was a time when I thought social media sites were playgrounds for bored teenagers, but eventually I figured out they worked just as well for bored adults. Actually what happened is a filmmaker friend talked me into joining MySpace. He said it would be good for networking. I rolled my eyes the whole time I was setting up my profile, but to my surprise I was immediately hooked. Eventually I migrated to Facebook, and in my time online I've met several other screenwriters and even a couple of indie directors, people I would probably have never known otherwise. I've never seen any of these people in person, of courseâthey mostly live in L.A. (like Sophia) or New York, but I'm online so much these days that I talk to my Facebook friends a lot more often than my local friends. We trade witty comments, read each other's blogs, we have conversations about pop culture and entertainment and the screenwriting process. This interaction is usually the highlight of my day because it helps me feel connected to the world in a way I could never feel in this office.
Sometimes I wonder what the point is of physically spending time here, when the work I do occurs almost exclusively in the online medium. Nobody enjoys sitting in a gray box. I can't be the only person who feels like I spend half my life in jail. Imagine how much money the company would save if it sent everyone home to work. We could schedule teleconferences in place of actual onsite meetings. With the economy the way it is, you would think all ideas to reduce our cost structure would be on the table, but so far, despite occasional rumors of impending layoffs, no one around here has even mentioned it. Especially a guy like my boss, William. He thinks the only way to properly manage you is if he can walk by your cubicle and see you sitting in it.
“Thomas!”
I look up, startled, and find William standing in the doorway of my cubicle. What a coincidence. I look down at my monitor and see a Facebook message from Sophia still on the screen, which I think William must also have seen, but I pretend otherwise and make the window disappear. Then I look at the spreadsheet of search terms, as if that's what I've been working on the whole time.
“Thomas?” he asks me. “Are you okay?”
“I'm sorry. I zoned out for a minute. I was thinking about new ad campaigns and went off track there. You know how us creative types are.”
“You were looking at Facebook, Thomas.”
“Right. Facebook ads. I was thinking it might be interesting to devote a portion of our search budget to Facebook and see what sort of click-through rates we get.”
William is everything you would expect a corporate drone manager guy to be. Balding. Oversized gut. He thinks “business casual” means wearing a dress shirt with no tie, tucking it into a pair of pleated tan Dockers that are a size too small. He says things like “thought leader” and “low-hanging fruit” and “bleeding edge.” Sometimes I play buzzword bingo in team meetings to entertain myself, and with William there is never any want for material.
But despite his keen grasp of MBA-speak, William sees no value in social media marketing. William's mind is stuck in an old business model, so he expects the rest of the team's to be stuck as well.
“Didn't we go over this once already?” he asks.
“Yes, we did. But even if you don't want me to build a Facebook fan page, we could still leverage the site's gigantic audience to place ads. It's the same concept as Google except you can be even more targeted with your marketing.
“I already told you this once, Thomas. I won't say it again. I'm not paying you to play on Facebook. Don't let me see you on there again. Got it?”
“Yes, I get it.”
William looks at me as if I don't get it at all.
“So,” he says, “I came to see you because I wanted to interface with you about the Google report. I know we talked about having it ready Friday, but I have a meeting with Kurt on Wednesday, and I'd like to include some talking points from your report in my PowerPoint deck. Do you have anything I can use?”
I haven't even begun the Google report yet. And Kurt Truman, you might remember, is our jackass vice-president of marketing.
You should also know the Google report will probably consume ten single-spaced pages and require many hours of research just to compile the statistics and necessary background information. I will have to build charts and graphs. I feel like that moment in a dream where it's the last day of my senior year, and I've forgotten to study for the final in the most important class in my major. How in the hell did I forget I was supposed to have that ready this week?