From: al677@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Jerry Cosyn)
Newsgroups: alt.prose
Subject: A Day In A Life
Date: 29 Sep 1992 13:46:50 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
NNTP-Posting-Host: slc4.ins.cwru.edu


                            A DAY IN A LIFE
 
 
     Marvin Brandex squirmed unhappily under the covers and made soft
moaning noises in his throat.  A minute passed before an arm snaked
out and a stubby finger punched wearily at the snooze button,
silencing the squeal of the alarm.  Nine more minutes, thought Marvin.
I'll get up the next time it goes off.  He relinquished the tenuous
connection to the waking world and gave himself up to the blissful
wave of sleep that crashed back over him in an instant, having held it
back only through tremendous effort.  The dreams returned immediately,
as if there had been no interruption, like a VCR that had been
momentarily paused, and the tiny fragment of his mind that was put in
charge of waiting for the return of the alarm smiled in happy
gratitude.  He always had his best dreams in between punches of the
snooze button.
 
     Of course, he gave in to temptation a few more times when the
alarm went off, so that when he finally forced himself to peer at the
time on the clock, he sprang up, scattering covers and jumping for the
door with a wordless cry.  He was supposed to be at work in twenty
minutes.  It was a fifteen minute walk.
 
     His sleep-fogged mind quickly performed a great many
calculations, searching for a way to fit a shower, shave, and the rest
of his morning routine into five minutes, and in every case came up
with the answer he had known before his feet hit the floor: don't be
ridiculous.  Before he reached the bathroom he had decided to forego
the shower in favor of some cold water on his face, give the shave a
quick once-over with the electric razor, wet his hair and slick it
down, and throw on the first clothes that came to hand.  He left home
only three minutes behind schedule, and made up most of that time by
walking very quickly.  He was just settling into his chair with a
styrofoam coffee cup when the boss arrived.
 
     Marvin's job was not difficult, and consequently did not pay
particularly well, but it was gruelingly tedious.  For eight hours
each day, in two four-hour shifts split by a half-hour lunch break,
Marvin Brandex read numbers off of smudged pieces of paper and typed
them into a computer terminal.  What the numbers were for, and why
they had to be entered into the computer, Marvin had only slight
knowledge, and none of it made any difference in his life.  If he
typed the numbers, he was paid; he needed money to survive.  It would
never have occurred to him to wonder why the numbers couldn't be read
from the paper by a machine, or why the machine that had originally
typed the numbers onto the paper couldn't simply feed them directly
into the computer, and if it had, he would not have asked anyone.  His
job was to copy the numbers from one place to another, and he
performed it with the unquestioning regularity of the rest of the
office machinery.
 
     He made obligatory small-talk with the blurred faces that crossed
his path at odd intervals during the day, agreeing that it had been a
wet spring, that the summer wasn't as hot as last year, that the
coffee was lousy, and that the girl from the mail room who pushed a
cart through the office twice a day was some hot number, and wouldn't
it be something to take her temperature with your own built-in
thermometer?
 
     Marvin had never spoken to the girl from the mail room.  He
didn't know what her name was, nor anything about her except that he
liked the way she looked as she walked through the office, leaning
forward to push the mail cart, her hips clicking rhythmically between
two extremes under her tight skirt, her calves firm and tanned, her
long brown hair a teasing veil that alternately obscured and revealed
a pretty, sculptured face.  Marvin sometimes wondered whether she had
a boyfriend, and what she did in the evenings when everyone left the
office and there was no more mail to push.  Did she go home alone and
cook spaghetti for herself and watch television and read, or did she
have lots of friends to go out with, to bars and movies and
restaurants and nightclubs?
 
     Marvin often wondered about other people's lives, and what they
did and felt and thought.  He wondered what it would be like to talk
to girls the way he saw Jim Swann do every day as people were leaving
the office to resume their private lives.
 
     Jim Swann was a tall, handsome, dark-haired man who could talk to
anyone, anytime.  He worked in the computer room, performing arcane
tasks Marvin could only wonder about, and he carried himself with an
air of importance that could only be envied.  Marvin had often seen
Jim Swann standing in the hall talking to the girl from the mail room,
laughing at private jokes, gesturing boldly to emphasize some point.
Marvin had never been able to do that.  Girls were alien creatures
that intrigued him but made him nervous.  He could exchange
pleasantries and polite greetings as long as he didn't have to look
them in the eyes, but a sustained conversation was out of the
question.  Marvin knew, somehow, that men like Jim Swann had found or
been given a secret about life and women, a secret that was carefully
and jealously guarded and forever beyond his reach.
 
     There were many such secrets, Marvin knew.  Secrets for success
in different endeavors.  Secrets that governed the mysterious
interactions of people in a world that made little sense to those who,
like Marvin Brandex, had not been told the rules, nor the goals, nor
the reasons.  It bothered him sometimes, being left out of things, but
twenty-three years of practice had taught him to keep such thoughts
buried, and they only surfaced on rare occasion now, to give him brief
and unexplainable moments of despair.
 
     Most of the time Marvin simply went through the motions of a life
without purpose or destination and gave no thought to questions of
why.  It was only sometimes, when he was working on automatic pilot,
punching the numbers from the papers without seeing them, that his
mind snuck up on him and clamored like his alarm clock, demanding that
he wake up from the sleep of his life and begin whatever actions he
was really supposed to be doing.  When that happened, Marvin would
feel a moment or two of rising panic, the way he did when he had
overslept and knew he would be late for work, but he was never sure
what it was in his life that he was so afraid of being late for.  Then
he would hammer the feeling back down, out of sight, and convince
himself it was nothing to worry about, that everyone had such feelings
from time to time, and that if he just ignored it and stuck to his
daily routine everything would be all right.
 
     When lunch time came, Marvin filed into the small cafeteria with
the rest of the crowd.  A few people left the office to run brief
errands or to get a break from the standard vending machine fare, but
it was difficult to fit very much into the thirty-minute break, so
most stayed in the building.  Small groups gathered at the round
tables with their brown bags from home and sandwiches wrapped in
plastic.  Some played cards, occasionally erupting into raucous
laughter or shouting disagreement about the way a hand had been
played; others talked about yesterday's baseball game or repeated
jokes heard the night before on television talk shows.
 
     Marvin picked a table at random and sat with whoever happened to
be there, speaking when spoken to and smiling when someone said
something funny.  He ate without tasting, watching and listening and
wondering what the others were thinking, and which ones had the
secrets and which didn't.  It was difficult to tell just from their
conversations, but sometimes people would look at each other in a
certain way that Marvin knew meant they shared a secret.  When and how
to use that look was one of the things Marvin had never been let in
on, and he spent a lot of time watching secret looks pass between
people and feeling that he could learn that language if only someone
would teach him.  When the lunch break was over he gathered the
wrappings and remains of his repast, brushed crumbs from the table,
pushed in his chair and headed for his work station.
 
     As the afternoon progressed, Marvin worked methodically, not
letting his thoughts wander very far, not thinking about the end of
the shift and what he would do with his evening.  As always, the
office was filled with the blended voices of people and machines.
Marvin sometimes felt that it was the machines that had the more
important things to say, chattering and humming among themselves in a
language free of the trivial and ambiguous noise that people
surrounded themselves with throughout the day.  It was as if even the
machines shared a secret language that was just beyond Marvin's
understanding.
 
     With only about an hour left in the shift, a sudden sound pierced
the normal background noise, a very human sound, loud and out of
place, a call, a cry, almost a wail.  People stopped what they were
doing and the office was suddenly quieter as dozens of keyboards were
silenced and heads came up, listening with questioning looks.  The
call came again, and shortly there were other voices, coming from out
in the hall, shouts of confusion and fear.  Managers went trotting
toward the disturbance and some came back with ashen faces and
haunted uncertainty in their eyes.
 
     In moments the news was spread throughout the office: Art
Dennisen had been found dead in the men's room, lying in his own
blood.  Art was an operator in the computer room, and it appeared that
he had killed himself by slicing his wrists and finally his throat
with a razor-bladed knife used to open cartons of computer forms.
Work came to a standstill as people clustered together, talking in
hushed and brittle voices.  Then word got around that before he had
died Art had taken time to write a message on the bathroom mirror in
his own blood.  There were whispered discussions but no one could
figure out what the message meant.  Two short syllables was hardly a
suicide note, and there was no indication of who Art had meant the
message for.
 
     Shortly an ambulance arrived, followed by the police, and
managers began to circulate through the office, asking that everyone
remain calm and quiet, confirming that a tragedy had occurred, and
giving assurances that the proper authorities were handling
everything.  No more work would be done that day, and everyone was
asked to leave in an orderly fashion, staying clear of the bathrooms
and their immediate vicinity.
 
     Some of the women were crying.  Marvin felt sick.  Though he
didn't really know Art Dennisen, when he heard about the message on
the mirror he felt he knew what it meant.  He could almost feel the
razor slicing his own flesh as the words slashed through his thoughts,
and he felt a terror growing within him as he imagined himself in Art
Dennisen's place, watching his blood run from his wrists into the
sink, reaching a bloody finger to the mirror and saying his final
words to the rest of humanity: "So there".  That was the last thing
Art had wanted to communicate to anyone, after he had already made his
final decision and spilled his own blood.  "So there," without even
the emphasis of an exclamation mark for punctuation.  And having
written that curt remark, Art Dennisen had grown impatient watching
the blood pumping from his wrists and had put the razor to his throat
and hurried the matter along.  And Marvin Brandex felt with every
nerve that he knew exactly what Art had meant, and to whom he had
addressed the words.
 
     As he thought about those two simple words, Marvin Brandex felt a
fear welling up from within him, a return to the thoughts he would
never allow, the panic he always suppressed.  He trembled with effort
as he struggled for control.  The alarm clock inside him was shrill
and demanding, threatening to drown out the quiet of his life,
imploring him to wake up and begin -- he knew not what.  And as he sat
at his station, his head swimming with the rush of feelings long
ignored, some core of control deep within him suddenly pushed the
tendrils of a startling new thought into his frantic mind and then the
feeling of panic was suddenly gone, leaving barely an echo in his
hammering pulse.  Marvin Brandex suddenly had a secret of his own.  He
made his way to the door and began walking.
 
     Along the way he stopped for milk, bread, and a TV dinner,
carefully counted his change, and walked calmly home.  He did not
think about the day, nor Art Dennisen.  He did not think about his
strange and sudden realization or the peculiar serenity that had
abruptly engulfed him.
 
     That night Marvin didn't feel much like reading, or watching TV.
He ate his dinner quietly, brushed his teeth, set his alarm, and went
to bed early.  Somehow he knew that he would oversleep the next day
and be late for work, but it didn't seem to matter.  He slept well,
and did not dream.

                             THE END

(c) 1992 by Jerome L. Cosyn
Newsgroups: alt.startrek.creative