Chapter Six, in which shockingly little happens

Arrow closed the appointment book on her desk and looked over the shoulder at the field of cubicles that comprised the first floor of Higher-ups, inc. headquarters. She had decided recently to stop feeling sorry for those poor bastards. She had been sorry for them as recently as last week, but now, with her plans going as they were, she had decided she could no longer afford to feel sympathy for any employee of Higher-Ups.  She had been told to clear all of the appointments for the highest of the Higher-ups in the Propriety, Uprightness, and Morality Project (PUMP).  Fuck all those bitches, she thought, What are they going to do all afternoon anyway? Undercover ops at a swingers club for the bloated and long-toothed? She had just set down the phone from the last of sixteen apologetic calls when Eleanor Barrett emerged from the elevator. Rumor had it that all the men she slept with had their souls destroyed by the orgasm. Arrow believed that on the basis that the other rumor she had heard about Ms. Barrett, that she kept some kind of rabbit-cat hybrid in her bag, was true. Arrow had heard that animal talking about ‘harbls’, whatever the hell that was. Besides, Arrow knew of several forces that could destroy, I mean really forever, destroy the essence of beings. She had one of these forces in the second drawer of her desk at that very moment, next to the box of rubber gloves. She had made it herself in a pan on the stove and kept it in a bottle of correction fluid. She would use it soon, she hoped, to cancel the system the Higher-Ups worked so hard to maintain, the bitches.
Why didn’t she just do it now? Why not just switch her bottle of correction fluid with the one the Highest Up’s desk and wait for him to get some on his fingers when he made a spelling error and get blotted out of existence?
Because:
a.)    That’s a shit plan. It leaves far too much to chance.
b.)     The lowly receptionist Arrow Saracen didn’t have access to the upstairs offices, so she couldn’t even get it into his desk, which doesn’t matter because—
c.)    She didn’t know who the Highest Up was, or if he even kept an office. Besides which, she wanted them all gone, at least from the third floor up.

However, to give the others a sporting chance, Arrow had decided to start with the Highest Up.  She only knew of one person who had supposedly met the Highest up, some kid named Chauncey, who himself had been seen by only a few people and not in a long time.  His last known address was Sartre’s house, and Arrow intended to go there after she shooed all people from the lobby.
For some reason the dead don’t think they have to make appointments, they think that the world will give way to their whims. She couldn’t understand their sense of entitlement: Just because they had been made to eat a lot of sandwiches, work a lot of shit jobs, deal with bad landlords, unsavory religious figures, smug cops, and dissatisfied lovers; ride the bus even when frightening people were on it, drink low quality liquors, watch infomercials, see their families fight, be bad at sports even though they tried really hard, save their money, read books, and love people who refused to think about them—they thought they could just c’mon in here and make demands when they didn’t know shit. They assumed that everyone here was one of them.  Assholes, she thought. She didn’t think about what she was if she wasn’t one of them.
The facts were unsettling to most employees of Higher Ups. They were made up of the parts that living people threw away. Very few knew the specifics of the method by which these parts were retrieved and organized. When the living changed bits of them selves, when they started eating the crusts of their sandwiches, for instance, the crust-less part of them got thrown out, collected by Trash Men, cleaned up and put into a blender with a bunch of other parts, and when the Trash Men thought they had an interesting enough mix, or thought it was time for snack break or whatever, they poured the slurry into an incubator and left it for a few hours, until whatever was going to happen happened, and fully formed people emerged.  Eleanor Barrett was made mostly with the remains of old smoking addictions, copies of D.H. Lawrence novels which had their interesting bits whited out by well meaning mothers and false numbers on putt-putt golf score cards.  Arrow was made out of Country albums hidden under beds, people pretending they gave a shit how their lawns’ looked, things wives meant when they said they weren’t cheating on their husbands, and the feeling girls get when they realize they are getting too old to build snowmen.
“Okay, time to get out. Maybe if you made an appointment you could have registered all your complaints about FAP by now, gone out and found more things to complain about.”  She said. The people waiting stared at her with their hands folded in their laps. Their joints always seemed too loose to her, like they weren’t really hands, but rather bits of meat flopping in hand shaped bags at the ends of sleeves that got washed even though they weren’t ever dirty. Arrow locked the appointment book into her desk and slipped the correction fluid and some rubber gloves into her pocket. The people in the lobby continued to wait. “Now!” She put out the light. “Go already!”

~ by tuffsoffluff on August 10, 2008.