New blog post — What Should I Read? (Non-Fiction)
San Tropez continues.
Chapter 9: Orna in Trouble in Light
Snoz peered in the office, found it occupied, and knocked.
“Yes?”
“Hey, I was looking for you outside. Did you make it out?”
“No,” said Lucy Chloroform. “They shut down the elevators. I called First Aid but there was no answer. I can’t make it down on my own, not without going airborn.”
“Cute.”
“A fireman finally came by our floor. He said it was nothing and I could go back to my desk, so I did.”
“I don’t know why they assign someone to help you if they’re just going to skip right out like that,” Snoz said.
“Maybe they’re out sick. It’s normal though. I can never get a handicapped spot at the mall during Christmas either.”
“Is that right? Tch.”
“But it was fine. It was quiet. I got a lot of work done and I didn’t have to stand around and sweat out there.”
“Like I did,” Snoz said. “No kidding.” He wasn’t really listening at this point, he just wanted to stave off the return to his desk as long as possible.
“I talked to Hy. She said what happened.”
“Yeah?”
“It was a bomb threat.”
“Huh.”
“They know who did it.”
“Really.”
“I probably shouldn’t say.”
Snoz wondered why she brought it up then. “They trace the call or something?”
“No, but Hy’s got someone in her office. Right now.”
Now Snoz wanted to know, and he grew annoyed.
Lucy whispered, “It’s Orna.”
“Man.”
“And all this on the day the plumbing goes out again,” Lucy said.
“Seriously,” Snoz said.
Lucy awaited further comment and finding none took to arranging the things on her desk. “Well I knocked out a chunk of Heart.” To thwart rampant corporate espionage, the paranoid higher-ups at Metrotech sent a memo that all projects in development were to be given code names based on the parts of the body, “To reflect how we are one corporate body.” Last month he’d done Lungs 1 and 2. Snoz couldn’t wait for the day when he be assigned Pubis. “So that frees me up to start the next one,” she continued. “I was thinking of giving you the rest of Heart.”
“Even the fat chick?”
“What?”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay, you know the schedule.”
“Yeah, all right.”
Snoz swiped his badge and entered the copy room and took his seat. The diversion past, his thoughts returned to Emily. There was so much, the beach was only one memory of thousands, each the strand of a net. A fish caught has the mercy of impossibility, but Snoz, his conscious demanded he act when all he wanted was for the universe to change circumstance for him. He was flopping in a net of intimate knowledge, trapped by the significance he created.
Enrapt Snoz had not noticed the conversation in the copy room stopped when he entered. He sat before his monitor and saw there was still hours to go. He put on his headphones. Music helped the days go faster and kept him tranquil. It also kept him from having to talk to anyone.
The door unlocked itself and Orna walked to her desk. The air in the windowless room seemed to sharpen as if by a wetting stone. Betty blanched, her eyes rolling, though she did not speak.
Snoz was not a friend of Orna’s, or of anyone’s really, but she slumped in such shame that his shell of indifference cracked. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. I hope so,” Orna said.
“What happened?”
“I can’t afford to be sent back to the bench.”
Snoz considered this. “The bench?”
“Our contract agency,” she said waving her hand at Betty and Dick, as they were all in it together, “makes you come to the main office if they can’t place you somewheres. You sit there and fill out applications, but that don’t keep you busy long. Then you mostly just sit. And you get paid less.”
“At least they keep us working steady,” Betty interjected.
“And you make more here?” Snoz asked.
“I’d say,” Orna said.
“But you never really get laid off,” Betty insisted. “That’s the point.”
“I can’t get by on minimum wage,” Orna said.
“It’s not minimum wage.”
“It might as well be. I got a child at home and it’s not enough.”
“Whatever,” Betty said.
“You got a child at home too. I know it ain’t enough for you neither.”
“You leave my daughter out of it. You put us all in danger with that bomb threat!”
“He didn’t mean nothing by it,” Orna said.
“Didn’t mean? I took the call! We could have been killed!”
“There weren’t no bomb.”
“I answered the phone. We didn’t know ‘there weren’t no bomb,'” Betty said mocking her. “The police didn’t know there weren’t no bomb. The firemen didn’t know there weren’t no bomb.”
Orna nodded. “I didn’t expect he’d do something like this.”
“Who?” Snoz asked.
“My ex-husband. Al’s daddy. He’s crazy. Last week he tried to take Al from school. Thank God and Jesus Christ I told the teachers about him. When I heard I almost died. I told him he could get his visitation when he starts paying all that back child support. And now he’s trying to get me fired. Well he won’t.”
“I don’t know what to say,” Snoz said. “That’s terrible.”
“They’ll be arresting him,” Orna said, “if they ain’t got him already. But Al is my son. He’s mine.”
The room went quiet. The fans in the printers and copiers seemed to still. Snoz pulled up the chess program he had snuck onto his sytem. Anything to keep his mind busy. Anything to keep his mind off it.
“Well I don’t know how I’m going to get this turned in,” Betty said, “now that I’m so far behind.”
Chapter 10: The Questions and the Cans
When they announced that water had been been restored Snoz walked with discomfort to where the restrooms were far down the hall. There was a line, one for men and one for women. The first out of the men’s room was Mac, who greeted Snoz the way he always did.
“Way-hey-hey, college boy!” announced Mac, acting as if he were spraying Snoz with a tommy gun. Mac leaned in close. “Reminds me of a hundred-degree jungle latrine in there,” he cackled.
“I’ll have to chance it,” Snoz said. “I can’t wait.”
Mac was in his 50s, thin but for a paunch at his belt, with square-frame eyeglasses and a thick mustache that hung over his upper lip. He had the habit of cussing at work, and though he would remember to lower his voice, it was often the wrong word that he’d whisper.
“I was ready to go dig my own (god) Damn latrine if they kept the water off much longer.”
“I suspect some of us would’ve helped you. I hear they caught the bomber before you could get to him.”
“You said it. Rally the elite against the faceless enemy. Yep, we could get (some) Shit started, boy!”
“We’d need some reconnaissance,” Snoz said. “Sniff ’em out. Maybe a flyover campaign. Some strafing.”
Mac’s eyes widened. “Sniff out the (sons of) Bitches. Chuck the food drops out the chopper!”
“What?”
“The food drops. Big honkin’ boxes on pallets.”
“You got me,” Snoz confessed.
“Okay, get this. We’d load ’em up, the Red Cross boxes right, and we’d have to fly ’em out into the bush. So we’d get us and them loaded on the puddle jumpers. Flying over these villages right. We’d open the boxes and get a arm full of canned goods out. Pass directly over a hut and whoops! The can drops and goes right through the roof of the hut! Noise sounded like foomf, you could hear it over the chopper. Funniest (god) Damn thing you ever saw!”
“You’re serious.”
“You bet. That shit was just made of straw or some shit. Right through it, I ain’t shitting you.”
“Mm,” Snoz said, conscious of the others in line.
“Don’t know why I thought of that. Must be the new medication.”
Snoz could only nod. The other coworkers gaped.
“I know what you mean.” Lucy joined the queue and made a save. “Well,” she said with a sly nod to Snoz, “sort of. But different pills will do that, dredge up things you’d forgotten or thought you’d forgotten. It happened to me. I started having the craziest dreams of things I hadn’t thought of since who knows how long.”
“That’s what it was!” Mac boomed. “Dr. Pepper!”
Snoz couldn’t find the words.
“But every time the doctors prescribe me something new,” Lucy continued, “I ask them if all the side effects are listed and they say yes. And every time something goes on that they don’t tell me about. It makes me nauseous, or it makes me paranoid, or…”
“Or worse, bad dreams,” Mac said. “Guts on the ground.”
Everyone felt uncomfortable again.
“Crazy dreams are right,” Snoz spoke over. “I had one that was like I was stuck in an old fairytale. Briar Rose, you know that one? My dream had a queen with a talking statue and the royal fairy court visiting humankind for the first time in forever. Everything was in these weird pastel colors, like painted in a storybook, and I remember everyone spoke in that Medieval style like ‘Brave Sir Knight, wilt thou accept this quest?’ And it was one of those where it seemed to last all night, like the dream keeps going and going and you’re convinced it’s reality.”
It was Snoz’s turn for the restroom.
“Snoz,” Lucy said. “Meet me in my office. In a few minutes.”
Snoz was seated in her office when Lucy wheeled in, navigating the sharp turns to the other side of the desk, where she locked the wheelchair and lifted herself into her plush desk chair.
“I’ve been getting into more New Age reading,” Lucy said. “A little astrology, numerology, things like that. Not that I believe all of it. I just find it interesting.” Her eyes crinkled and she slouched forward whenever she forced a laugh. “So I, one of the things I’ve been reading is about dreams. And if you don’t mind I’d like to hear more about your dream, the one we were just talking about.”
“My dream,” Snoz laughed, and seeing her misunderstand continued, “no, I don’t mean to laugh, I just thought you were going to give me bad news or something. You got all serious back there. No, yeah, that’s fine. What did you want to know?”
“Well, more detail I guess. You said there were knights so there must have been a princess.”
“There was a queen. Maybe another girl, I don’t know. Most of my dreams are about my girlfriend.”
“How sweet,” Lucy said. “All of a sudden I feel like Sigmund Freud, like I’m the psychiatrist, ‘Tell me, in your dream, zis princess, she is looking like what?'”
“Don’t remember. Like any little rich kid I guess.”
“What do you remember?”
“It was something out of Spenser. A queen, a royal court, a fairy prince. Actually the queen stood out. Not like Elizabeth, more like a gypsy. Scarves, rings, long beaded dress, hair hidden. Intense expression, like a CEO or something. She was black.”
“It’s really true,” Lucy said. “Lady Rene was right.”
“Who is Lady Rene?” asked Snoz.
“A fortune teller I went to on Jackson Square,” Lucy said.
Snoz laughed.
“In your dream,” Lucy said, “the tower was part of a castle, wasn’t it? A white castle with flags and banners flapping so far up in the sky that you wouldn’t have noticed them if they weren’t so brightly colored. And there was an enormous sculpted garden outside it, with a waterfall emptying into a beautiful fountain. And there wasn’t just one queen, there was a room full of royalty.”
Snoz stopped laughing.
“Wasn’t there?”
“What’s going on?”
“We had the exact same dream. All three of us.”
“What?”
“You, me, and Lady Rene.” And Lucy told Snoz about her visit with the mystic who sits among the drug addicts and phonies in the Quarter.
Snoz rose from his seat and paced a step. “That is unbelievable.”
“But it’s true. I know, when I was down there it was getting dark and this woman was saying all this fantastic stuff and I’m going ‘There’s no place like home’ but look what happened! You are the third dreamer. She said you were out there and that I would find you without having to look.”
“Is someone filming this?”
“That’s what I thought too. But no one is. And now we must go see Lady Rene together.”
“What?”
“It’s the last thing she told me, ‘When you find the third dreamer, bring him here.’ We have to go down there together.”
Snoz sat back down. “I don’t want to go see some fortune teller, Lucy.”
“It won’t take long. You live down there.”
“I’m not into that stuff. I don’t even walk on Jackson Square.”
“Don’t you want to find out what’s going on?”
“It does seem, if it’s true. But… when I was a freshman in college, away at a new school and just starting life on my own, I had an aunt who became obsessed with tarot cards, always trying to do readings for everyone. I stayed with her and my uncle over the holidays and she kept bugging me to let her do mine. I refused. Because… what if it’s true? I didn’t want to get locked into some destiny right when I had the whole world in front of me. And I knew, the way my mind works, that I would always remember what those cards said. You become what you believe you are. So if I was to be carrying that around in my mind, who’s to say it wouldn’t come to pass that way? Or what if she had pulled out the Death card?”
“That card doesn’t have to mean you’re going to physically drop dead.”
“Still, how shocking would that have been to an 18 year old?”
Lucy rocked back and forth in her desk chair. “I have to bring you.”
“Yeah, well, you’ll just have to…”
“Wait. This is important.”
“And what’s she claiming to be in my dream anyway? And you for that matter?”
“Hold on, Snoz. This is important. I didn’t ever intend to visit a fortune teller. Something just told me to go down there that night. I had the dream but that wasn’t it, I just thought it was a weird dream. Something was calling me. A problem, well, a personal problem I’m having. And I get there and out of all the people set up down there I’m drawn to her. Why is that? And then she tells me about the dream we shared, and she foretells this very meeting you and I are having right now. Why is that? Now I’m not speaking as your manager, but take it that way if you want. This is important, and you must come down there with me. If you don’t, she won’t help me with my problem, and if she doesn’t, believe me I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
Snoz fidgeted. He thought about it.
“And she told me she has something special to tell you,” Lucy said. “She promised it’s something you’ll want to hear. She didn’t say what. But you’ll have to come down there to find out. You can walk there.”
“But look…” He sighed. “So to go off and do this, and let this be part of my life in some way, at this time, is just…”
“Snoz,” Lucy said gravely. “I need your help. Come with me down there, and let’s find out what’s really going on, and what she has to say that’s just for you, and then we’ll go home. Meet me down there. Tonight.”