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A Wave, a Wash
You are in a meeting. People are saying things. In the meeting and online.
In Atlanta, in Dallas. Where you are.
Somebody says, “Accessibilty has a rough measure of initial page and one flip scroll.”
Somebody says, “If I am a mobile customer, I have mobile concerns.”
This seems to make sense, you think.
There is something there, you think. You think about saying something, something about this, but you don’t know who you’d say it to.
Everybody is saying something. Crisp words, one after the other. Cool and clean.
Assertive, you are thinking.
Assured, you are thinking. Like a small, tight smile.
Context and usage and great feedback.
You are not saying anything.
There are standards, you are learning.
Necessary content and functionality for a task.
Core tenets for a mobile-first design.
Shared across device type. It needs to serve a purpose, whatever this is, that is, this is what these crisp, assured words are saying. You like this, the hum and the buzz. All of those words bouncing around. This is good, you think. You think you nod. Things need to serve purposes. This means two things, you think in the middle of all of these bouncing words, in the middle of Atlanta and Dallas. In the middle of where you are. One is that there are things. This is good to know. We all seem to be agreeing on this, even though no one is saying that, even though none of these crisp, cool words are saying that.
We agree that there are things.
You smile at this, you think.
Another thing this means is that things need to serve purposes.
A thing does a thing.
We can identify this.
We can establish methods of flow.
Flow, content wording, prioritize critical information, establish a model and keep it. These are precepts, they are tenets. Processes, forms. You are not paying attention. It doesn’t matter. There is too much, a wave, a wash, and it is over, over, and you are gone.
.
As the pattern gets more intricate and subtle, being swept along is no longer enough. Somebody said that once. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe it is. I’m not the kind of person to answer that question, never have been. It’s cold and I don’t have time for this. With my scaly claws, I hike up the collar of my tan trench coat. I’m a crocodile, and it’s freezing.
.
And slowly pan up and silhouette and up and moon and night, and that right there is the opening scene of Crocodile Detective, a book or movie you will never write. You think about Crocodile Detective a lot, but not as much as you used to. You are out of your meeting. Out of those words.
This is where you are.
You are walking through the tunnel between buildings thinking about a crocodile detective. You are underground. Lights are in walls. You are tracing a pattern in the carpet; you are on the right side. It is a concourse. In another book you wrote, this where you would write something like “you know how you’re sometimes thinking about how you’ll never write a book or movie about a crocodile detective? How sometimes that haunts you?” That would be part of it; you would think that was funny. This is where this is; this is where you are. In a tunnel, lights in walls, dripping with significance, thinking about a character from a book you haven’t written, a book you’ll never write. This is interesting, you think. Remember this, you think, as you head into your next meeting.
§
A Small, Halting Noise
In the atrium on H1, there is a 3D printer. It’s shooting lines of glue, Ron says. Ron has a parrot named Sinbad. Ron can ride a unicycle. That’s how it works, Ron tells you, pushing up his glasses. It’s not hard.
Ron is glad to talk. His shirt is purple and tucked into his jeans. His tennis shoes are white. New Balance. There is a guy you call Ron’s Fat Nephew. You usually see him on M3. He looks like Ron, except younger and fatter. You told your team about that once. Everybody laughed. You’re thinking this while Ron doesn’t blink or budge. Ron doesn’t move. He’s waiting to explain this. It’s not that hard. You can see yourself in his glasses. This what you’re doing, in Ron’s glasses and in real life.
You watched The Friends of Eddie Coyle last night. Robert Mitchum, 1973. You think about how you are now a person who can say that. You can ask somebody if they’ve seen The Friends of Eddie Coyle and if they pause, you can go Robert Mitchum, 1973.
As if to clarify, as if to explain.
You never saw that coming. You are also the kind of person who can say, “I’m going to stop you right there,” in a conversation. That is a line from a book you will never write, you think about saying to Ron’s glasses but don’t.
You read the book before you saw the movie. You didn’t know there was a movie until you were looking for movies to watch. Now when you can’t sleep, you watch movies. Before when you couldn’t sleep, you wrote. You are watching movies now. Your friend gave you illegal screeners to watch. He used to be a nurse. His brother died of a heart attack. You didn’t know he had a brother until he told you that he died.
You may watch The French Connection. You are thinking about a scene in Dial M for Murder where the detective pulls out a mustache comb and starts combing his mustache. That’s the last scene of the movie. A guy combing his mustache. You feel like asking Ron’s glasses something about this, but don’t know what to ask.
It’s adding things up, Ron is saying now. Ron is pushing up his glasses again and you lose sight of yourself for a second. You are gone and then you are back. He’s explaining things. He leans forward. You can see yourself again. You wonder if you look horrified. You can’t tell. Ron is explaining 3D printing to you. It’s something about the accumulation of layers, the layering upon layering. A 3D printer shoots lines of glue. It adds up, it does. A thing on a thing on a thing. Rows and rows. An accumulation of layers. You make a small, halting noise. You tell Ron you’ll see him later and you head to your 1 o’clock.
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Ope and Whoop
You are thinking scenes, you are thinking rich inner life. Yesterday the escalator stopped. This was between M and H; this was yesterday. Stopped, and people stumbling, no one hurt, thank goodness.
You heard sounds.
You heard ope and whoop. Not the ope and whoops you usually hear, not the ope and whoops you and everybody else says when you about run into each other.
.
Everybody says ope and whoop; everybody’s always about to run into each other.
.
You have stopped saying ope and whoop. This is something you’ve decided, a conscious decision.
Action, reaction.
Cause, effect.
If this, then that.
There was no reason you said this; you don’t know why you started. You all of a sudden just said ope and whoop when you about ran into somebody. This could be a thing, you thought, a clue to a mystery you’re not sure you believe exists even though it got harder and harder not to.
You said ope, you said whoop. You did and you didn’t.
Accepted, ignored, until one day, and you don’t know what day it was, but you do know it was between K3 and L3, by one of the video labs, right at that corner, the one with the sign about the viruses and disks, that you heard one, two, three people say ope and whoop. Three different people did, right in a row, right as they were about to run into each other.
You thought enough.
Not big, not loud.
No proclamations, no declarations.
A decision. Small and deliberate.
You are thinking that now. You are thinking that now, then, by the sign. You are thinking that in the middle of the ope and whoop.
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One day you saw a redheaded man walking by eating chicken fingers. He was busy, he looked busy. He was walking to something or from something. Hands grabbing chicken fingers. Red hair on head. Later that day, in another building, you saw another redheaded man, a different redheaded man. He was eating chicken fingers, too.
What are the odds, you thought.
What is the math, you thought, because there was a math out there that discussed this, that covered this. You are sure of it. There is always a math, always an algorithm. Connecting and intersecting. Bouncing and colliding. There is a music, there is a math. It is measurable and it is determinable. For all of this. It is a question of whether it’s been discovered yet.
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You are thinking how it feels sometimes like you are remembering something great that you just forgot. It feels like this sometimes, like you are remembering a time where you thought of something great and then immediately forgot it. You are thinking it feels like that, right now, and you pass Janet Earth. You wonder if your locker is in this hallway. It could be. This is your building. You have always been in this building, the whole time you’ve been here. People would say where do you live? You have always lived on M.
.
This is what people at work said when they wanted to know where you sat, which building, which floor. This meant that, or we thought it did. Maybe it didn’t mean that anymore, maybe it always meant something else, when they said where do you live. When you meet people here, you say what do you do. They would tell you and then you would say where do you live. This was the second thing. What you meant was where do you do that. The thing you just described, where does that occur. You are thinking how this is the second thing you say to everyone, to people, while you are thinking about how you have always lived on M. Maybe your locker is here. You have a key on your key ring for your locker. You have had it for 6 years, this key. It has been here the whole time.
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There was a fat woman crying outside of the H cafeteria. You saw her when you walked in. She was by herself. She was sitting on a bench, crying. Her head in her hands, her knees pressed together, crying. People walked by her from all sides. There was sun everywhere. People walked by her, talking. To each other, on their phones. Talking about meetings and plans and whatever it was that people talked about when other people sat and cried which, when you think about it, could be almost anything. There’s no limit, you thought as you walked passed the people talking and the woman crying, to what they could be saying. It could be almost anything.
When you come out of lunch she is still there, still crying, still sitting. People are still walking by, but not as many. Lunch is almost over. You wonder if she is there. There are a lot of ghosts here, you think. You may be one of them. You think about the car accident. You wonder if you are dead, if you have been dead this whole time. You smile when you think this, kind of and not really. You think about the baby that has died and the other baby that has died. You think of the baby from that show Baby in a Cowboy Hat and how that baby will die. You walk away thinking about how all the babies, all of them, will someday die, which is a sad thing to think, you think, so you don’t think about it anymore.
§
Shrimp and Whales
You are intimidated by history. It is too much, you think, to be around all of this history. This majesty, this glory.
Places with significance, you think.
Resonance, you think, grandeur.
It is too much, the weight of it is. The weight of possibility.
It is better to be here, you think. In the middle, surrounded and ensconced. Flatness and horizon.
Rote and memory.
You hide in the anonymity, in the ubiquity. This is everywhere, this is everything, and you are walking, walking. There are places you need to be, spaces that need filling. If you are not there, there is nothing there. There would be nothing without you, without any of you, without all of you, you think, and you know how this sounds. People have to be places for there to be places to be, you think, and you know that’s wrong. You scratch your head or make a face that looks like you’re about to scratch your head. You are in a hallway. This is what people would see if they saw you, that would be your face. This got away from you, you think, the way things do. If you catch just parts of it, you think. Glimpses of it as it goes by. Hurtling and fleeting. You can make out bits, you can make out pieces. All of it could add up.
And maybe, you think.
And somehow, you think.
A thing you think people should know is this. A blue whale can eat up to 9,000 pounds of krill every day. This is a fact. Verifiable. This is a monstrous, wonderful, outrageous fact. This is where you are, where we are. We are where monsters swim the seas. Monsters that eat tons upon tons of tiny shrimp. There are monsters, you think, and we all know there are. You can say a thing like a blue whale can eat up to 9,000 pounds of krill every day and people will accept it. Calmly. Fully. They accept it because it is true. It being true makes people not question it, how wonderful and strange it is. If you say this to people, about the blue whale and the krill, people will nod. They will say wow or whoa. If you almost ran into them, they’d say ope and whoop. You imagine almost running into somebody and then telling them about the blue whale and the krill. They would say ope, whoop, wow, whoa. Those would be the sounds they make if that happened, you bet, and you think about trying that out. An experiment, you think. A trick.
One time you were walking down the hall with Jordan. There were two women in front of you. One tall, one shorter. Indeterminate. One says to the other, “I really need to start eating more shrimp.” She has a pained look on her face. This has been troubling her. She has been thinking about this, her face says, about how she needs to start eating more shrimp. She is pained by it, troubled by her lack of shrimp-eating. The other one, the taller or the shorter one, doesn’t matter, looks at the other one as she’s saying this. She has a pained look on her face, too. She is nodding. Slightly and imperceptibly. A series of small nods as she walks, looking at the other woman’s face. There is empathy, there is understanding. She knows the other woman really needs to start eating more shrimp. This has been troubling her, she is glad the other woman said this. Finally, she thinks, and you can’t tell what any of this means.
Did you see that, you ask Jordan. Did you see that just there.
—Ben Slotky
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Ben Slotky’s first novel, Red Hot Dogs, White Gravy was published by Chiasmus in 2010 and was re-released by Widow & Orphan in 2017. He recently completed his second novel, An Evening of Romantic Lovemaking, a fictional autobiography told in the form of a stand-up comedy routine. His work has appeared in The Santa Monica Review, Golden Handcuffs Review, McSweeney’s, Hobart, J
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