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ANNALS OF EMPLOYMENT 
Carossa I get a job, I work at this job. I work in an office, it's a law office.
A little firm, I mean at the time I got it I was psyched. I was psyched
because, at the time I got it, I could have put my accumulated wealth in
one pocket. In nickles. The bank account read 200, then 100, and then it
is dripping away in the background like some untied IV tube, and me the
patient gasping for bodily fluids, as I make my daily rounds and even try
to feed myself now and then. Visions of dying in the gutter. So I am pathetically
grateful to Carrosa, the man who hires me. The interview, I go in there
suited up, I had my spiel working, I am so perfectly abject, so eager as
a beaver to please, and I thought I was playing this guy. Playing him like
a master. I thought I was bright. Which, really, this is a delusion that
might have been brought on by hunger. He even warned me. As I talked to
him, he told me a funny anecdote. He said the reason they were looking for
a part time office assistant was that the last one they had left for lunch
and never came back. And he was genuinely puzzled. We never treated her
badly, he said. She just never came back. This story has since been the haunting motif of this job. The woman who
never came back, who never even came back to get her paycheck. An absolute
sayonara. A disappearance from the world of part time office assistants.
How could one give up the golden spoon like that? The filing? The answering
of the phone? The continuous, absolute obedience? But it happens, and so I am working there now. Carrosa and Ronn. Let's call them - of course they aren't named Carrosa and Ronn, of course I am protecting my ass, on the one in a million shot that they will actually read this web magazine. Carrosa was the slick one, older, very attractive. He has that elegant look, the honed face, all the right angles, and the clothes that emphasize a lean, athletic build. Athletic as in skier, not athletic as in some vulgar team sport. And he has, above it all, that slight retardation of the wealthy. It is how you know the quality, this sense that these people are all somehow still close to their diaper days. Still needing to be nursed. And us, the legions of attendants out there, waiting on them, cocooning them. Here's something he'll have me do. I am sitting at Sandra's desk. I'll get to Sandra, Sandra is the real secretary of the place, but because she has two boys in school she takes off at 2:30. I don't really have a desk. Which is another of those signs of impermanence which are eerily reminiscent of that office assistant who disappeared. Anyway, I am sitting there and he calls up. Calls me up on the phone intercom, although his office is next to this one and the door is open and we can hear each other perfectly. Still, I am just as glad, I don't want him yelling at me from his office. Rather like one of those bureaucrats in The Castle, who make enigmatic demands and have their assistants rushing around, trying to placate them. So he says, get me the fax we sent Moth. Moth, a small time polluter we are representing. I should parenthetically include here that Carrosa and Ronn don't do a lot of trial work, what they do is lobby, and represent licenced facilities and agents before their various boards of licencing - nurses, dentists, utility companies. Whatever. The gristly part of the law. I rummage in the file cabinets, which are along the wall facing Sandra's desk. I find the Moth file. I find the fax (I am of course abbreviating in order to spare us all the real-time searches and seizures that make up these forays into our outflow - a lot of times an order for a fax or letter will involve fifteen minutes of frantic pawing, on Rattus' part, through papers in all six rooms of the office, and we don't want to go there. Believe me.) I've found the Moth fax, I walk into the office with it. Bearing two pages. Carrosa is facing his computer. He's typing. The way he types is, he places his fingers very delicately on the keyboard, minding his manners, and he sticks his elbows up high and away from the keyboard, and then he spastically jerks down on the keys, watching the screen. It comes together as a painful exercise, you know that he is conscious that here the forefinger is pressing an "a" and here the thumb is pressing the space bar. It is like an upper body yoga stance except without the contemplative element, that thing where in yoga the initial body pain connects to a slowed down tempo and then it gets sort of groovy. None of that. Now, this is the good part to me. He's called me in, I have the papers, he's at the computer. Check, check, check. That voice of his, over the telephone, directing me to get the papers, it appears that it was an accidental interruption of his total, client-chargeable trance. He pays no attention to me, standing there with the papers. It is as if his voice had uttered the words: Moth, fax, in a dream. The order came from track two, what Freud calls the Vorbewusstsein, and we are here completely and absolutely in Bewusstsein, buddy. The conveying, by causistry, of escapes from the regulatory net. But now, look, look. He wheels his chair slightly out. First sign that he has actually become aware of me in the office. His arm goes up. His fingers, clawlike, make a grasping motion. I stick my sheets of paper in the claw. Sometimes I don't judge it right, and the papers fall on the floor. The feel of the papers in the claw pings some area of the brain, and the arm comes down with the papers. His face now draws away from the computer screen. He looks at the paper. What this means is that his face goes through this invariable passage. His mouth draws radically downward. His eyelids flutter. He tilts his chin out, and his face back. There is a splitsecond of blindness. He is gazing at this thing that ended up in his hand, with no idea. I can feel the incomprehension, it is a heavy moment in the room. Who knows what I have thrust into his hand! If only Rattus were a cartoon character, this would be the moment Carossa's eyes would widen, taking in the fizzling stick of dynamite. But no. His eyes uncloud, and he thrusts his sharp nose at the paper. And now, finally, he absorbs that he is looking at language. More, at writing. More, at the fax. It converges in his memory, dreamlike, the order, the fax, who I am, who he is. Snap, the world comes together. This happens every day, and in almost that order of postures. It reminds me of feeding some uncommon animal, like, say, the Komono Dragon. Something supremely awkward, something that lunges for lunch. I wait to see if it is the right document. I hover. Then by his silence I know I can go. It is like we have just finished performing a trick. The other partner in the firm is Mr. Ronn. But before I get to him, let's
go back to Sandra. Because I want to be fair to Mr. Ronn. No, that's not
true, I want to shoot him dead with a pistol. But I should be as objective
as possible, and I still don't know how to do it. And also, this is all
going to crystallize around a very trivial event. That's the point here.
Maybe detouring through Sandra
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