Some People on This Floor (Part I)

Some people come into your life by accident, or perhaps out of necessity; but you pick them up along the way because they seem nice or useful. Others’ lives collide with yours with a dizzying cosmic force, sweeping you along in the mystery like you’ve just fallen into a swollen river. Emily fell for Bruno because he had a dark complexion and icy, infinite eyes. But lying here on the office floor, darkened by dusty Venetian blinds and staring at the constellations of dust bunnies on the ceiling, trying to read their fortunes, it seemed to her that she’d been swept into a deluge much bigger, more powerful and encompassing than anyone in the Channel Thirteen Duplication Department could have guessed. It certainly made live around office worth living.

“Why don’t we just get out of here and go out West?”…

“I have a meeting with Lisa at two”.

“No, I didn’t mean today”

“I have meetings all week” … “And then next week is new-intern orientation”

It had already been a red-letter day in the glamorous world of Public Television.

The Duplication Room had served as a sufficient backdrop for their fantasies of a western sky, perhaps better than the real thing. Flat on their backs on the cheap carpeting behind the Dub Racks, anything seemed possible, at least to Emily; she had once been an intern too – between that scared neophyte and the mature, professional woman she was on her way to becoming there was an abyss, but all could do was try; experience is all there is. And in the midst of all her tireless efforts in the Big City, his eyes kept flashing before her mind and egging her on towards destruction, just like everybody in this not-for-profit hellhole.

“Boy, am I happy to see you guys” Darlene, the Office Assistant, peered in at us as if the entangled afternoon lovers were the Way and the Light. Darlene was Emily’s neighbour in the vast sea of cubicles on which they all floated, except for the Executive Producer, who had her very own office (a set of three walls and a glass panel). Darlene’s greasy hair was matted and her desperation reminded Emily of an orphaned child who was being sold into slavery. She was the only one who publicly knew of these lunch-hour trysts in the Edit Room; ever since Emily had discovered that Darlene herself having regular liaisons with one maintenance worker named Omar, there had been nothing to hide. “Lisa keeps asking me to fill out something called a purchase order. What the Fuck?”

From what could be gathered, Darlene didn’t do a damn thing accept to have cappuccinos and peanut butter cookies delivered daily to their Department on Executive Broadcasting Director’s tab. For this, the entire office was so immensely grateful that all cheerfully relieved Darlene of all her other demented little tasks; Emily for one was happy to sell her soul for a few crumbles of cookie each day to this sad little 250-lb Mormon nymphomaniac from the South Bronx. Darlene was not human, she was part of the divine mystery of How We Get Through Work Each Day – and every divinity, even a minor one, has her due.

The shaft of harsh white light from the hallway was blinding: “Close the fucking door, Darlene”. Of course everybody on the floor already knew. But if they went all public, were that open about their exploits, Emily rightly feared that it would jeopardize the tenuous thread of civilization within entire Science and History Programming Department, maybe within all the Programming Departments or the whole Channel itself, and anarchy would ensue. Who could tell who would start screwing casually in the hallways, closets, Production Studios, Men’s Rooms? Darlene had already gone too far by seducing fucking Omar – wasn’t the maintenance staff universally off limits? Wasn’t Darlene really treading on the precipice of The Fall of Civilization As We Know It? Of was this just a bourgeois Upstate assumption? The door slammed. High heels growing fainter in the distance.

In their list few minutes of solitude and post-blunt-and-coital darkness before returning to their cubes, Emily’s thoughts lingered on Darlene and the delicate balance she painted between conventional reality and the utter absurd.

“You know”, began Emily, although nobody was listening, “Darlene used to work in psychiatric hospitals before coming here. She told me all about the interesting people she met in there, and all the hot guys that were in there because of women. One guy was blonde and young and looked like Brad Pitt, but he’d had a breakdown when his 45-year-old chiropractor girlfriend dumped him for an even younger Iranian guy.

“Another guy she told me about was really young, like 15, gorgeous, and she told me he seduced her. I don’t really know if I believe that, or who seduced who, but Darlene ended up sneaking into the Quiet Room with him like two or three times a day. Finally, he convinced her to break him outta there, and he went to live with her at her house. She said she was really in love with him.

...the softness of snoring arose next to her; she continued...

“But after a few weeks, all was not bliss…he apparently began doing strange things around the house – funny thing that, a psychiatric patient behaving bizarrely, but it came as a big shock to Darlene. Nobody at the hospital ever suspected she was the one who freed him, but one day she came home and found he’d killed her cat in quite a gruesome way, and had painted pentagrams and strange messages about Satan on her walls. That night, she said they had the best sex of her life, and when she woke up the next morning he was gone – he’d gone back to the hospital and was there in the Rec Room when she arrived at work. And he’d already told everyone about his two weeks of vacation at Darlene’s house. She was fired after that.”

“That’s a pretty fucked up story”, a voice from the dead came from beside her on the floor. “Now, I can understand why television would be the natural place for her to work after that, but my question is why would he go back – why would he want to be locked up again?”

Emily paused, thought. “Darlene didn’t say. I guess he liked it in there after all. Maybe he missed the structure. Maybe Darlene’s cooking was just that bad, and he had no money to order in. Anyway, he was crazy, right? You’d have to be crazy to WANT to be stuck in an institution day after day”.

“Sure, like we are.”