Alien Accounts (5 page)

‘Ed’s just faking,’ he announced. ‘Let’s get back to work and just ignore him.’

Harold licked his lips and glanced towards the door. ‘Too bad about young Eddie. though. So young – to go like
that
.’

‘Yes, death is a natural thing,’ Karl said, blowing a smoke ring. ‘We must learn to accept it and live with it. There must be nothing frightening or shameful about dying – it is as natural as pee-pee and poop.’

‘Yes, the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, as the saying goes.’

The figure on the floor coughed, one sudden explosive noise, then lay still. Using his dirty grey handkerchief, Henry picked up the phone and dialled an emergency number.

Section XXIII: Real

‘All right, Ed, keep it up, right to the last minute,’ Karl yelled down the hall to the covered basket the ambulance men were removing. ‘Keep on faking! You’re only fooling yourself!’

His voice was shrill with fury. It excited the professional interest of the intern, who had stayed behind to fill out the death certificate.

‘Why don’t you sit down for a moment?’ he invited. ‘I know it’s hard to believe in the death of someone close.’ He pressed Karl into a chair and asked Henry his name.

‘Karl Henkersmahl. He’s a stapler.’

‘1 see. Oh, Mr. Henkersmahl? Karl? Would you mind putting a few staples in this form for me? It’s the death certificate of Mr. Warner.’

Karl moved slowly and reluctantly, but with a great deal of ceremony (
Feierlichkeit
) and precision beautiful to behold. He placed one staple neatly in each corner of the form.

‘Say, he really is dead, isn’t he?’ he murmured then, scratching his head. ‘I thought he was just faking.’

‘It’s too late for that,’ said the intern, with a mysterious smile. Though he wore a white uniform, he was a black man.

Section XXIX: The End of All Clerks

One by one, they were all called. Henry thought of quitting first. He even went so far as to interview with another firm, one specializing in famous information. But that night he dreamed that he was brushing his teeth when the toothbrush began ramming wooden splinters up his gums. It was a warning, perhaps.

In the spring, Bob and Rod left, smiling, asking that no flowers be sent after them, that they be cremated by a reliable firm recommended by a leading consumer magazine, and that their ashes be mingled.

At midsummer, Harold left, crossing himself and making signs to ward off the evil eye.

‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ Karl assured him with a serene smile. ‘It’s as natural as wee-wee and grunt.’

But when Karl’s own name was called he behaved in a strange, unnatural manner. The sound made him jerk erect, spoiling a staple. He carefully replaced it, tidied his desk, and with a private, one-sided smile lifted from the bottom drawer a heavy object encased in leather. This he carried into the lavatory and shut the door. A shot rang out. Before Henry, who was the only one left, could try the door, his own name was called on the intercom.

PART TWO: MASTERSON

Section I: The Figure at the Head of the Stairs

Masterson, or a bulging, obnoxious, enigmatic person like Masterson, stood at the head of the stairs. Henry saw he would have to squeeze past him to gain the fourth floor. The eyes in their lenses were quiet and horrible as glass, watching him ascend. In his hand, Henry carried the sheet of paper with his motto: ‘If you work good, we’ll do good by you.’ It was folded in neat thirds, and he held it up before him, like a shielding
dental chart.

Who was this Masterson if this were indeed he? Was he truly the author of all memos, or a figurehead? Had he killed the real Masterson and assumed his place? The figure above, beetling over Henry, seemed almost like a great cancer that had once totally absorbed a man; now its vague memory of his lineaments served it to spew forth an idea of death upon the rest of the world.

As Henry moved closer, however, the cancer cleared its throat and stepped back to let him pass. As it did so, he saw the light had been wrong. This was the face of a fat, weary, self-pitying man, nothing more.

Section II: The Fourth Floor

Masterson explained to Henry that he was closing the third floor department and moving all clerks into the draughting room on this, the fourth, floor.

The old clerk with skin like parchment appeared once more and led Henry into a large room he’d never known existed, where a dozen draughtsmen hunched low over their boards. As he passed them, he saw that each man was working on an entirely different project.

The first draughtsman was drawing large circles and small circles, and dividing them into quadrants. Mandalas, wheels, gunsights? Henry wanted to ask him what he drew, but he seemed preoccupied.

The second was drawing a long, continuous curve on a roll of paper. He might have explained that this represented infinity, but Henry did not pause to hear.

The third drew a histogram showing apparently the sales or consumption of oxen and earthen jars. It seemed too self-evident to enquire about, but was it?

The fourth copied, from the cover of a book of matches, the picture of a girl, labelled DRAW ME, but he was copying it upside down and reversed. Intrigued, Henry asked him why, but the draughtsman was, alas, stone deaf.

The fifth copied stylized arrowheads, from a pattern book. Henry was too frightened to ask him what his intention was.

The sixth was beginning a schematic diagram called MOODY’S LATEST SERMONS. He asked Henry to get out of his light.

The seventh had outlined a set of regular polygons, and was now beginning to black them in. ‘If you like them,’ he said to Henry, ‘you might pay. Otherwise please move on and give another a chance to see them.’

The eighth drew a bird’s wing, ‘Detail 43B.’ Henry was struck speechless by the beauty of it.

The ninth drew a ‘valve in cross-section’. ‘It means,’ he explained, ‘that “My life has for several years been a theatre of calamity.”’ Henry did not understand.

The tenth made, or had made, a map of possibly the human brain. But he was not at his drawing board, and Henry was able neither to decipher
it alone or await his return.

The eleventh covered his drawing so that Henry could not see it. It was very likely either a blank sheet or a smeary example of the kind of erotic thing he had been dismissed from another job for sketching:

Two breastlike hills are covered with little figures, archers, shooting crossbows at the sky, or rather at certain objects in the sky. These are dozens of large, vicious-looking sickle shapes, apparently descending to attack the archers or breasts. In the background is a walled city, possibly Nurnberg. It is filth like this that makes me, as a father, wish I could administer the death penalty instead of this five-year sentence.

(from notes of District Judge Ruking.)

The twelfth and last draughtsman seemed only to be doing meaningless doodles. This man later left the Masterson Engineering Company and took a job elsewhere lettering placards. He committed suicide in his room by plunging a French knife (bought for the occasion) into his heart. Impaled on the blade near the hilt the police found a large placard serving as a suicide note. It read:

ACCIDENT

Section III: Lips whiter than teeth

Past them, at the front corner of the room, were familiar faces in a group. Eddie Futch was eating chocolate noisily. Bob and Rod were tacking up signs saying ACCURASY and SUPPORT IBM. Willard Bask was discussing slavery with Clark Markey. Harold Kelmscott, cowled in an old grey sweater, had turned his back on the others. Only Ed Warner looked up to greet Henry.

‘About time,’ he said. ‘We thought you’d died down there.’

Henry was reminded of the possibly violent death of Karl, which he had forgotten, though it had happened only a few minutes before. Should he report it? he wondered, and if so, to whom? Mr. Masterson was inaccessible in his office. The placard on the door, hand-lettered by the last draughtsman, read ‘No Personal Conversations. This Means You.’

Karl himself had been against making unnecessary trouble by reporting Ed’s death. If Karl was dead, then, the sensible thing to do would be to say nothing. Henry had a great respect for the wishes of the dead.

He began to convince himself that the ‘shot’ was a truck backfiring in the street, and the ‘gun’ nothing but an electric shaver or electric toothbrush. Karl had always, when alive, enjoyed electrical cleanliness.
And to what end?
thought Henry C. Henry.

He had begun to rejoice in his own teeth, covered as they were with a thick, resinous deposit like the gum on old furniture. As he remarked to Willard, who was interested in anything like old furniture, ‘What if I went around brushing my teeth twice a day all my life, then got them knocked out of my head by some punk in some alley?’

‘Hot damn!’ said Willard. ‘I know just what you mean. Very same thing happened to me once, in ‘Frisco. I sure was peeved, I’ll tell the world. Makes a fella want to go back home and open an antique store. Fill it with good old solid traditional things. Whew! Fella’d give his left nut for a chance like that.’

Willard wanted to get into a discussion of the draughting tables and the draughtsmen, some of whom were, or seemed to be, Negroes.

Ed Warner kept asking everyone if they knew why he was declared officially dead. No one knew or wanted to know, least of all Karl, when he showed up freshly shaved some days later. Though for some reason he and Ed were not speaking, Karl said loudly for Ed’s benefit: ‘If he was declared officially dead, he wouldn’t be here, and that’s that. They don’t make mistakes like that, right, Clark?’

‘That’s right.’ The little non-lawyer had grown a foot taller and vaguely hairy. ‘They have no right to hire a dead man all over again, when there are so many living unemployed.’

Masterson was not being a pine cone about it. He hired men of all races and nationalities as draughtsmen, because they could be virtually enslaved, and he especially liked to hire Negroes and South American immigrants.

‘They all carry big, mean-lookin’ knives,’ Willard insisted.

‘I can’t believe that,’ said Clark. ‘They wouldn’t be allowed to carry knives longer than three inches. It’s illegal. Besides, I’ve never seen one of them with such a knife.’

‘You better pray you never do see one,’ Willard said. ‘They only get them out to use them. I know what I’m talkin’ about, now. I could tell you about one street fight I had in Leningrad. Whewee! Them big bucks come at me with knives like …’

To defend himself, Willard began to carry a switchblade.

Section IV: Disappearances

‘No one is so busy as he who has nothing to do,’ read the sign Bob (or Rod) was tacking to the wall. Rod (or Bob) looked on in smiling anguish, the better to see him with; later he took up a hammer and amended the sign to read ‘he who has
something
to do’. Easter was approaching, and the two pals were selling Valentines – to everyone but Art, the old clerk with his aureole of dust-coloured hair. No one ever tried to sell anything to Art.

The chthonic draughtsmen kept to their stalls and did not mingle with the clerks. It was as if they feared infection, or that fraternizing with their superiors would cost them their jobs. For some reason the draughtsmen did not last long anyhow. They were fired, one at a time, and their tables broken up and burnt, until the day would come when … but that day was far in the future when Art revealed a true side to his face, unlimbering himself of the waste baskets of the past.

MEMO:
My childhood.

I developed acrophobia, or fear of high places, as soon as I walked. When I was nearly two, my father one day decided to cure me of my irrational fear by making me climb up a tall (12 to 14 foot) stepladder to the top, and there sit until I stopped screaming.

– Masterson

Section V: Art Speaks

Art was in charge of firing, which consisted of simply filling out a pink slip and putting it into a pay envelope. Henry envied Art this power, the power of dealing effectively with papers. Alone of all the clerks, Art could see the real consequences of his work. He was an old, trusted employee who had been with the firm since its inception.

In fact, as he confided at lunch one day, he was its inceptor, and Masterson’s father.

‘Does he know you are alive?’ asked Henry, incredulous that this harmless, friendly, frail, thin, likeable old man had created both an empire and its frightening emperor.

‘Yes.’ Art took a small bite of his hamburger and mangled it in the wrinkled depths of his mouth contentedly. With a fine jasper hand he flicked greasy crumbs from his tie. ‘Yes, I built the whole shebang, and I nursed it all through the Great Depression, too. It was hard going, let me tell you, but on the other hand, I had all that cheap labour in
long
supply. Ten cents an hour, in the good old days, would buy you an unemployed architect. And I could hit them if I liked, without some damned nosy Labor Board coming around asking questions.’