There lived in our little village a not-so-elderly couple, Aghmisha and Bazumka, who had only recently met and married. However, after a year and a half of struggling to form their lives in common, difficulties ensued as each had brought so much baggage to the union it took seven porters three days to clear the station platform.
Day and night they had dreams that sorely troubled their souls, and they often wasted their mornings lying abed, exchanging synopses and critiques of their individual nighttime lineups and musing over the meanings and symbols of the AM cartoons, all the while ignoring the imprecations of their (her) cats who, having grown accustomed to timely feeding, initiated the destructive clearing of the nightstands when their appeals went unheeded. The cost of replacing bulbs for those lamps was second only to the mortgage.
Now Aghmisha had retired early and the complexities of stretching his meager savings wore heavily upon him. As he had not taken his algebra teacher’s sound advice—Live fast, die young, and leave a pretty corpse—the prospect of a healthy, long-lived retirement loomed before him like a calendar of days peeling away toward a penury ever more severe as the stack of days dwindled. Worse, he was enamored of the good life, and wished to keep both him and his Bazumka in the style to which they would like to become accustomed or better. The math was as crushing as it was ominous.
Bazumka, an artist by temperament, training, genetics, and personal history, had not yet declared her retirement. But she found herself “between engagements” one might say, with many hours and projects to divert her attention from her husband’s dalliance with the sword of Damocles. Her dreams were less fiduciary and dealt rather with accomplishment and recognition in the world of the arts—paintings, gallery shows, photographic exhibits, publishing novels, and the requisite promotional appearances on talk shows. At the very thought, her eyes glazed over like donuts in the ovens at Presti’s.
Her productivity had faltered in recent years, however, what with having to surmount the daily humdrum of economic obstacles (food, shelter, clothing), and of course, now this Aghmisha, whose quirks threatened to outnumber her own. She longed to return to the company of artists, to her live-work loft in the effete urban East, leased for the time at a loss to some accountant who had no grasp of the wonderful life of immersion in a creative klatch.
It should be made clear from the beginning that neither was penniless, homeless, or devoid of talent. But what was more than painfully obvious was that the world had gotten by very well, thank you, both without their talent and in spite of it, and promised to continue that course relentlessly. No cigar-chomping agents had pounded on their door demanding that either cough up the goods of their chosen fields (Aghmisha, a few texts, and Bazumka, her canvases, portfolios, clutches and caches of crafts, which Aghmisha had dutifully hauled to their new dwelling, crowding to uselessness any space vaunted at first to become her studio), to be offered to the world at large, eager to pay any price and thereby ensure their reputations and futures.
One morning, after listening to her husband’s interminable rant about the night’s phantasmagoric adventure, she sat bolt upright in bed and announced, “You should write them down, Aghmisha,” and smiled as if she were staring at a checkbook with a positive balance.
“Right down what?” Aghmisha queried, still in thrall to his unraveling gloom.
“Your dreams, you schmeckelhead!” she countered. “Instead of wasting the day whining about them, you could be mining the gold in those mirages. Who knows how long these stories will keep coming? Start writing! Perhaps they frighten you, but if I find them amusing, others might think they’re downright laughable. One man’s torment is another’s tickling."
“It doesn’t go like that at all,” Aghmisha corrected. His misgivings deftly tucked into his cheek, he was nonetheless willing to try. After all, if the horrid dreams dried up wouldn’t that be blessing enough? It had all the allure of exorcism and worming, he thought. Either way, getting the monsters out of the mind was one step closer to getting them out the door.
“If you won’t do it, dictate them to me.” Bazumka crowed. “ I’m the keyboardist. Nobody can play Tetris all day. I can edit! So dream away, my little pushnik. Does Chinese food help?"
Graduate School for Dummies
Nobody does well in school if they don’t study diligently, but they do even worse if they never sign up for classes or read the books. Agmisha was at a loss even to know his schedule. The months he’d been attending Midwestern State proved a flurry of embarrassments—not being able to keep up, never knowing where the classes were held, and everybody looking at him wondering exactly when this shtunk is going to get his act together.
Worst were the departmental parties, where the really great-looking girls consistently shunned him, even if he approached with drinks and nosh in hand to share. Why was it that they would always turn to the truly handsome guys who knew, really knew, what the hell they were talking about? And how did everyone know he didn’t belong—wasn’t enrolled—lived off-campus who knows where—some pig farm right down the highway perhaps.
Class itself was only slightly less terrorizing. Professors droned in barely audible, inscrutable technicality as they quickly projected complex graphs, charts, and texts in the darkened, sleepily warm atmosphere of massive lecture halls only then suddenly to turn up the lights to blinding brilliance and quickly pose the first question to him.
Two hundred pairs of feet shuffled beneath the seats and two hundred pairs of eyes turned their gaze on him, expecting him to answer easily since the question was usually a softball, just to start the interchange rolling.
But the garbled cough of words that came out was so obviously a complete guess, so off the mark, as to label its originator a total incompetent and fool besides. He then realized he should have worn clothes that day instead of sitting there naked for everyone to scrutinize his pasty corpulence while they roared at his proven ignorance—especially the really great-looking intelligent girls and the truly handsome intelligent guys who probably ploughed them nightly.
Two hands, he found, were not enough to shield all that required cover. He hoped another slide show would soon darken the hall and allow him to leave with a minimum of indignity. But the lecture continued for twenty minutes more in the scalding brightness, broken by frequent mention of the words ”nude,” “naked,” “em-bare-ass,” and the ensuing japes of his peers. Finally the lecture ended, but the hall quickly refilled with another two hundred for the second session.
Not My Job
Ford was a classic work of Black rebellion, defiance, and survival, and Aghmisha envied his confidence and self-sufficiency. Just as classic a work of smug arrogance was the martinet Humphrey, so insensitive he had not the slightest grasp of how he was universally disliked. Will Rogers, Ford offered, had fortunately died before having the chance to meet Humphrey.
Aghmisha met Humphrey when the new director called his first leadership meeting. As the managers and supervisors filed in for formal introduction, they noted by glances to each other that a huge carnival mallet lay at one end of the director’s desk and a noose dangled from the other. Behind the desk Humphrey sat, his feet in boldly embossed red cowboy boots atop the desk and a Western hat cresting his youthful but balding head at a precious tilt.
“Gentlemen,” he started with false politesse, “all you really need to know about me is that if the right one don’t get you,” (he lifted and dropped the carnival mallet), “then the left one will,” (he jiggled the noose) and smiled as if he had forever put to rest any notion they might think themselves his equal or superior, God forbid. And strangely, he had accomplished his wish, as the story went quickly around that one had to visit elephants at the zoo to see an asshole bigger than Humphrey.
Though Ford, as a Black man exempt from any but the grossest criticism, could easily remove his shoes and socks and pick his toes during later supervisory meetings with the director, Aghmisha had already been told, “That’s One,” and knew Humphrey had dedicated himself to a certain course and would come back from the grave to see him gone. Aghmisha was an intimidator’s fondest dream—a willing victim who knew he deserved the worst, and laid better plans for his failure than any nemesis ever could.
“This is a dream?” Bazumka interrupted.
“No, this is the real thing,” Aghmisha clarified.
“Well, get back to dreaming,” she pleaded. “Our readers are not going to want to read your crazy tales from work. Surely they have their own to drive them nuts.”
UFOs Flown by Alien Commies Drop H-Bombs
Aghmisha didn’t need “Independence Day” to ensure post-Cold War fright. As a child of the forties he spent almost as much time in the fifties hiding under his school desk as he did seated in it.
“This is not dreaming,” scowled the watchful editor.
The gray light of the early night sky would have been enough to allow play to continue. The moon, behind these streaks of vapor, lent them their soft fluorescence. The playground was transformed from the hot stink of summer asphalt to a pleasant, cool, grassy space for the darker hours when kids left the swings and slides and the athletes gathered up their bats, balls, and gloves, kicked their kickstands up and began their wobbly balancing act toward home, “Uncle Miltie,” and a late supper. Gradually the teasing calls of friends stopped, the last bicycle disappeared around the corner, the sidewalks cleared of all but the night shift folk waiting at the bus stop, and everything grew quiet.
Aghmisha loved these hours between the ball field and the playground, the spot closest to his home with the greatest expanse of sky. He was fond of lying in the grass just beyond third base where each summer the leaves on the trees surrounding the park blocked the street lights and where, on clear nights, one could see more stars. He had not yet seen the stars on “country nights,” without the pollution of the city’s nightly brilliance, but he was still amazed by the depth of space, the vastness of the universe, which he knew more from reading astronomy and science fiction than he had ever witnessed with his own eyes.
By comparison this was a poor night for star dreams. Between the clouds and the moonlight, he could barely discern even the brightest points. He decided to stay a while even though it guaranteed a guilt-laden reproach from his parents when he got home. Aghmisha liked the solitude of this momentary link with the best thing city life could offer as an unpeopled wilderness.
The air took on a chill and winds suddenly rustled the trees. He felt a storm coming, but rather than bike home to warmth and light, he lay on his back in the grass to savor this unanticipated bonus of untamed weather.
Just above the roofs of the houses he thought he glimpsed something quickly moving, but it disappeared behind the low clouds—maybe a plane landing at the lakefront airport but still high enough to catch the last beam of sunlight. He sat up. Then, behind him, a sound—no, not a sound—he turned quickly but too late to see the other go by. This time there wouldn’t have been a last sunbeam.
Aghmisha felt his heart beating faster as if he had been running for his life. What’s going on? he wondered. Scared?--scared of what? His parents? No, he had that under control, he reassured himself.
He saw the next one clearly. It was an airplane. He saw it tilt as it changed direction just like the ones at the Labor Day air show. This one had come much closer though far from overhead. Its silver wings razored noiselessly through the clouds and the wind of the coming storm was all he heard
Lights went on in windows where there had been only the blue glow of TVs. Soon screen doors opened on the nearby street and people came out to their porches and called for others to come out quickly. Suddenly something brought everyone’s attention to the blackness of the eastern horizon. And, as noiselessly as before, this time three of them, the leftmost leading, emerged from the dark, flying low. Aghmisha could make out the metal panels of their underbellies, the lights flickering along the edges of their wings as they passed directly overhead emitting some noiseless rumble of impending disaster.
Mothers began screaming, and Aghmisha scrambled for his bike but discovered it was gone. Among the screams he could make out something about “attack.,” and quickly wondered if Stalin, finally dying, had collapsed against the red button, or whether the unknowns of the deep universe were about to make themselves known. Hurtling now toward the fading glow of the western horizon, the three planes shot straight upward as if to go high over the center of the city, the leader going furthest as the others broke off left and right, perhaps to follow the lakeshore.
The brilliance of the flash rendered everything in stop-motion. Aghmisha saw hundreds in the street, their children frozen in the air, caught running to seek friends for a new holiday of play in the middle of the night. The clouds, which had earlier seemed vaporous, appeared now as solid marble in a sky blackened in contrast.
Before he could close his eyes he was hammered by the bone-crushing shockwave. Why he was still conscious he couldn’t explain. His body flew ghostlike across the grass until it impaled on the playground’s melting chain link fence and then against the superheated concrete blocks of a collapsing garage.
I can’t be dead if I’m still thinking and seeing this, he thought. The sky, a purple and orange cloud, boiled and grew over him. Now all was screeching as if twisting from the center of the earth. A second brilliance broke high over the east quickly followed by another from the west. The dust of what remained shook backward for a moment in the second light only to be shaken again by the third.
The cat stepped across his midsection. “Oh, God,” muttered Aghmisha as he made his way to the toilet, “What a horrible dream.” Surely one of the worst, he thought, almost as if it were actually happening.
He returned to the warmth of the sheets. Soon asleep again, Aghmisha saw the boiling sky, and watched in horror as gradually it calmed to a ghastly gray-red—the clouds, embers of some monumental fire where, off in the distance, white-hot lightning flashed and evil thunder bombarded.
Please, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Although jogging came naturally to Aghmisha in his dreams, real life was complicated by degenerative arthritis in his left knee and by street critics who would follow slowly in their rap-booming cars, leaning out the windows to scream over the noise, “You gonna have to do more than jog, you fat-ass Honkey!”
“Dream?” was all she needed to ask.
Getting home from the airport via the train was supposed to be a piece of cake. Aghmisha should simply board it after gathering his luggage and ride it to the suburbs. But when the train stopped at the downtown terminal, for some inexplicable reason he got off only to discover in his bewilderment he was stranded in the city center with the sun near setting. If he could get to the eastern terminal close to the university, he could catch a bus and be safely home before nightfall.
Hey, I remember walking home from the arena as a kid, he thought. People really exaggerate danger in city neighborhoods; I’ll jog. Without a thought to his suit and luggage, Aghmisha bounded off, running as if he were flying up the ramps from the subway to the street. He jogged past small bookstores, narrow hotdog shops, leather luggage displays, people buying magazines at newsstands. Traffic signals changed to green as he approached. No cracked sidewalks, no potholes, curbs timed themselves to his step.
The shadows of the skyscrapers soon gave way to those of old grain elevators, refinery tanks where the streets ran red with puddles of rusty water, over railroad tracks, past strings of chugging refrigerated boxcars reeking of rare fruits, tank cars dripping oils and yellow chemicals that glowed as they drained from leaky spigots. He ran under the huge bridges, past their concrete piers. Why didn’t I do this earlier? he wondered, This is so easy, and I’m breathing fine.
Getting through the ghetto though was not so easy. First, the sun had set much faster than he expected and second, the streets didn’t follow his mental map. He was running but not flying. He was more conscious of effort now and his speed slowed accordingly. No matter which bright street he chose, he found himself soon in shadowed byways where intersections promised even darker alleys. Few houses or apartments were lit from within—a porch light here or there where children shouted as they called to one another and ran in and out of the darkness and quieted or catcalled as he passed.
Lights off to his right offered some safety—a commercial zone, maybe—although to do so led away from what he figured was his crow’s flight home. It must have been a good choice; the running smoothed and his breath labored less. Up ahead was a nightclub where a rainbow of lights chased each other around a name he couldn’t read. As he approached, the jazzy notes played over a booming beat and a trio of men stepped from the front door to block his path at the last moment. They caught him by his arms and spun him around to face them.
They were purple-dark, and the pink ridge of their eyelids contrasted starkly with their blood-lined eyes and the holes of their dilated pupils. “What makes you think our boulevard is your track, Whiteboy?” the shortest of the three finally asked.
Aghmisha struggled to catch his breath. He was getting nervous about this encounter. “ I . . . was running . . . from downtown ,” he gasped. “Seemed like . . . a good idea . . .I got lost.
“Well, I think you came to visit,” countered Short Leader. By now his companions had moved to each side behind Aghmisha. “My friends here and I are gonna’ be so hospitable, your white runner homeys will soon be traipsin’ through the ‘hood ev’ry night like it’s a pah-tay!”
Short Leader dressed rather flashily, thought Aghmisha, and his friends bulged their black STAFF tees with muscular sturdiness. Worse, their hands firmly encircled each of Aghmisha’s biceps; his feet only lightly touched the sidewalk.
“Come on, man, . . I really gotta . . . ,” Aghmisha again tried to explain himself out of his arrest.
“Man?” Short Leader interrupted. “MAA—AAA—AAN?” he howled and swayed in mock astonishment. “Listen, dash-Honkey, leave me the jive! I will be talkin’ in STANDARD English so we can COM—MUN—I—CATE.” He turned and strode into the bar. Aghmisha was whisked upward by a power he could all too easily identify and began praying silently for guidance.
Except for curved neon strings advertising liquors available the bar was very dark and filled with a pungent smoke that seemed to bother only Aghmisha who now coughed as he flew and prayed. Short Leader had already taken a central barstool and indicated to his buddies to deliver his most recent acquaintance to the stool on his left. “What be you drinkin’ these days, Shorts?” Short Leader queried.
“No. You don’t really understand. I . . ,” Aghmisha offered, when Short Leader waved his right forefinger inches in front of Aghmisha’s lips. Jeweled rings adorned all but the thumb. “Water will be fine. I’ve been running,” Aghmisha attempted a discretionary reply.
“Shay,” Short Leader called to the bartender without even looking up. “Provide Paleface with some of the baddest-ass water we have. And don’t be long; he’s runnin’.
“You have a name?” asked Short Leader. Aghmisha was taken aback by the question’s tone of genuine interest. The music again blasted so he leaned to Short Leader’s ear and shouted, “AGHMISHA!” Of course the noise ceased just as he shouted. The music continued but by that time everyone in the bar stared, then returned to their drinks and conversation, thinking he had sneezed.
“Auck-mee-shaw?” Short Leader repeated to verify.
“That’s very good,” Aghmisha registered his surprise.
“Years ago I went to a boys’ high school that used to be up the street with a lot of Slavic Catholics. I was good at names but bad at studies,” he admitted.
“What’s yours?” asked Aghmisha, surprised at himself for getting cozy so quickly.
The “water” came in a martini glass. Aghmisha sipped. It was cold, delicious, and solid. He nodded to Short Leader.
“Shay, ma man needs a twist, “ Short Leader approvingly observed. The bartender plucked a fresh lemon and cut the circle right into the glass.
“Let’s leave my name out of it for now,” he finally answered. “What do you think you should call me?”
Short Leader? Aghmisha reconsidered: “S-L.” he said.
“Stands for somethin’ respectful, like Suave Lion, maybe?” SL intoned.
“God, you’re good at this,” he nodded again to SL, hoping he sounded convincing. The nervousness was saying goodbye as the vodka danced warmly somewhere near the center of Aghmisha’s lightly floating body.
“Used to be Cathedral School just up the street,” Aghmisha began. “I went there too. Graduated’61, then went to college and graduate school,” he continued, too late to realize his insensitivity. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to rub it in. About school I mean.”
“Huh?” SL looked at him intently. “You, Honkey, missed your train. You’re runnin’ through the ghetto in your shorts, can nobody know why, hopin’ to catch a bus maybe before some brother busts your ass wide open ‘cause he got nothing better to do.
“I’m drivin’ outta here in a BMW SUV with the rap so loud I can’t hear sirens, and you feelin’ sorry for me?
“Stay; I want you to meet somebody,” SL announced as he got up from the stool and disappeared among the patrons.
Aghmisha swigged the last cone of the precious fluid from his glass, remarked to himself, ooh, that was good, and slid off the stool toward what he thought was the entrance. Just as quickly a wall of STAFF returned him to the barstool.
“He told you to wait,” the wall thundered.
From between the mix of bare black shoulders and suits an attractive young woman appeared, jostled through the crowd by SL, who held her elbow as he positioned her right up to Aghmisha so he could feel the softness of her legs against his knees. She was indeed beautiful. Aghmisha couldn’t tell if she was white or black. Her skin was smooth, her body toned, lips you could get lost in, he hoped. And a wonderful fragrance, like no other woman he had ever known before.
“SL says your name is Aghmisha and you went to the same high school near here,” she said in a musical and flawless voice he could listen to the rest of his life. “You’re really quite handsome. I’d like to get to know you better sometime soon. I like someone who’s bright and funny, but maybe I’m too young for someone like you. Hope you stop again soon,” she cooed and was gone back into the crowd.
“You like her?” SL inquired knowing what the answer would be.
“She’s stunning, positively stunning,” admitted the slightly drunk and more-than-slightly-smitten Aghmisha.
“Intelligent, too.” SL added, a tinge of sympathetic regret in his voice. “Someone who could add meaning and joy to your pitiful, lackluster, barren life, Jogdog. Too bad you can’t afford her, not even for an hour,” SL was growling now. “That brainy three-holer can do more in one hour than you’ll do the whole rest of your miserable existence! I know. Maybe tonight in your honor we’ll celebrate over the honkey who couldn’t find his way home.
“Get outa here, before I have your punk ass myself. Go home and feel sorry but not for me,” SL finished, then signaled the STAFF.
They must have thrown him out but Aghmisha didn’t remember how. He found himself in the street. No scratches, no scrapes. Head was a little boozy as the martini began its second life somewhere back of his eyeballs. He took one step forward, then another, and another, and soon was running again almost as if flying.
What Did a Vacant Factory Ever Do to You?
Movie producers are drawn to sets one can rent for cheap, but in dreams the Taj Mahal is as costly as the sidewalk so why be a piker? For that matter if dreams are a function of choice, why have nightmares at all when just as easily one could conjure the Playboy mansion overrun with scads of scantily clad, eager, and willing eye-candy.
”Philosophy is preventing literature here,” Bazumka counseled. “You’d rather wait for your ship to come in?”
Like every prisoner before him Aghmisha daily took stock of his surroundings. Headache, always on rising; neckache, whether on the stones of the floor or the rack of his rusted bed—bones, oh hell, he thought, the whole body contorted by the nightly struggle to find just one tolerable, if not comfortable, position. Motion worsened the pain before it subsided to mere exhaustion.
Starting the day with a beaten body did not bode well. At least the nightly screamers would now sleep a while. Aghmisha’s cell was too far from the walls or the yard ever to hear the birds that flew in to visit those who were lucky enough to have windows. Lucky enough to hear the executions, Aghmisha thought ruefully.
He knew from experience that torture took longer and occurred more frequently than executions. After a few weeks, he could tell whether the screams came from real or imagined torment. Still, each scream felt like a saw blade ripping through his eardrum, and executions, when they were over, thank God, were finally over and a man could think.
Of course in prison, nobody got a choice. Aghmisha realized for the four-hundredth time he‘d speculated on the same topic. “Pacing does not stop thinking,” as again he caught himself talking aloud. He closed his eyes and thought to quiet the maddening inner voice.
Opening them he found himself outside the cell. It was so quiet he heard his own breathing as a wind blowing up and down the urine-yellow hallway. Reaching so gently and slowly as not to make his sleeve rustle, he leaned against the cell door to peer through the age-etched inspection fisheye lens.
Inside the cataracted globe he saw himself pacing and mouthing words too quietly to be heard outside the heavy paint-peeling, ding-dented, sticky-surfaced door in the hallway where the wind of his breath still ruled. It never occurred to him to try to release the prisoner. Relieved he was out, Aghmisha walked slowly toward what he thought was the exit only to encounter another secured gate. Beyond its bars he could see the guards chuckling to each other. They took no notice of him. Again he closed his eyes to concentrate on his next step and to quiet the prisoner's curse that always sounded with the realization of captivity.
But, as before, when he opened his eyes, he saw he was standing on the other side of the bars, staring at his own face still locked behind the gate. His eyes appeared not to see him. The immobile body to which the face was still grimly attached was clearly his own. With no more than a touch of sadness, again he turned away to continue the escape.
The wind of his breath was rushing now. Aghmisha was puzzled that the guards did not hear it, nor did they look up from their conversation to see him slipping past. He had no idea how close he had been to freedom all his term. His cell was within two locked gates of fresh air and sunlight.
He passed the guards’ lockers and at the corridor’s next turn he was at the prison entrance. The room was busy with the oncoming shift signing in and clearing the metal sensors. No one noticed him. Still Aghmisha took care to stay in the shadow or, when he moved, to do so as quietly and slowly as possible. The shuffle of security gear and the voices of the guards greeting or kidding one another as they passed the checkpoint had replaced the wind of his breath in his ears.
He waited for the staff to begin flowing out of the prison. That no one noticed him seemed unusual but not troubling. Perhaps, he could just insert himself in the stream leaving and no one would bother to check further. He approached the line as a gap developed between two guards more interested in locating their car keys in their jacket pockets than in seeing Aghmisha still in the prison garb. Suddenly the guard in front of him turned around, looked directly at him, and asked, “How’s your old Caddy holding up?”
The voice behind him sounded, “Fine, . . . no repairs. It’s great not to have something in the shop or to have to beg for rides,” as if he weren’t even there. Relieved, he walked through the detector soundlessly. He turned his head for one last glance backwards. The guards who had just talked through him were now wrestling a prisoner about his size to the ground as other guards joined in to kick him into submission. It wasn’t the first time he had to stand back while guards beat a prisoner.
Outside, Aghmisha observed that the sunlight which had seemed so bright in captivity was a rusty red in freedom. The green expanse of grass he’d always imagined lay outside the walls of the prison proved instead a wasteland of a bombed-out factory floor, mired in oily muck, and littered with unidentified machine parts. Overhead, instead of blue sky fluffed with an occasional cloud, a motley gray loomed above the black shadows of girders and dangling corrugated roofing.
He tried to run but his legs had gone numb and responded slowly to the signals screaming from his brain. He felt glued to the muck. As his leg lifted, he lost balance and struggled not to fall. However he had passed the point of recovery, and his hands stretched forward to brace for the collapse. He hit the water face, knees, and hands as he tumbled. The cinders below the oily surface cut sharply into his flesh and he could feel his warm blood mixing with the dirty water.
Pushing as hard as he could against the diamond-hard gravel he raised his head from the puddle and spit the cold, oily muck away from his lips as it drained down his face. The puddle held him like glue. He rose slowly, his clothes soaked with cold, his muscles straining to move him forward, he began to feel faint.
The escape that had proceeded so easily just minutes earlier was now barely possible. Nausea mixed with the trembling of faintness. A buzzing began in his ears. His muscles finally said “No,” and as he fell backwards, the looming gray overhead became a fly’s eye of expanding facets of yellow and black “X”s. The Xs grew and the buzzing slowed to a series of sharp snaps. As the last X spread across to blacken every corner of his vision, the last sharp snap exploded into the silence and was gone.
Keep On Trackin’
He knew he had ridden the same course before. This time he was aware that a very rickety roller coaster of a streetcar system rattled past the same factories, through the same tunnels, over the same hills, except that it failed to terminate reliably at the same destinations.
He was seated in front. Had he been at an amusement park, he would be happy with his seat and the adventure it promised. This was supposed to be a simple ride (to work? to school?). Except for him, the train was empty. Funny, he thought, no driver either.
The train lurched into its regular clatter and acceleration, and was soon traveling briskly along the track. Shortly the ties became a blur of wood and stone. Agmisha sensed the train was moving much faster than usual, and still it continued to accelerate. The car took the banked curves at the tipping speed, lifting and rattling back. He clung to the handrails to keep from being tossed around the inside the empty car. The floor banged repeatedly as the wheels struck the frame in its headlong wobble.
Suddenly the ground fell out from below the rails as the car sped onto an elevated section above the industrial valley. The creak of wooden supports joined the machine-gunning rat-a-tat of the wheels on the rails. As the bridge curved and headed north toward the skyscraped horizon, the car’s lean pushed the creak to cracking.
The track descended abruptly. He could not see the rails below him. The whirl of the wheels gave way to the whoosh of air as the train careened groundwards. He was weightless and knew the crash would be quick and fatal. As the dusty brown squares of factory roofs far below blossomed quickly to huge fields of pebbles and asphalt stretching to the valley’s edge, he waited for the inevitable, immediate crash.
Instead, the roofs opened, and the car disappeared into the underground night. The wheels resumed their rocking screech. The car slammed his backside like a foundry hammer punching him flat against the seat as the train bottomed out of its descent and flew bullet-like inside the urban rifle barrel, the blackness beyond broken only by light streaking outside the windows. The unrelenting noise became the screams of hellbound souls, raced through his ears, and pounded within his bones.
He thought he could see a dim pinpoint of light in the distance ahead. It grew directly in front of the train to a huge disc of sun-like brightness before veering off to the left at the last moment.
Finally the train slowed. The demon screams receded to ordinary knocks and thumps. The streaks became lamps on pillars and under arches. He sat up in the seat, grateful he had not crashed into the ground, grateful he was not a pond of splattered protoplasm evaporating under the flames of a mangled, burning transit car half buried in the shattered concrete of a factory floor.
“So, except for all the histrionics, this is a train-into-tunnel dream?” asked Bazumka.
“Kind of,” Aghmisha admitted. "But sometimes a train is just a train," he thought it wiser to add.
The Worst Day Off Is Better than the Best Day at Work
Advised to wait, he took a seat on the couch, picked up a recent copy of the National Business Review, and settled on an intriguing title about “Achieving Incredible Efficiency.” More of this year’s bullshit, he thought, as the first paragraph droned in management buzzwords laid end to end
As he waited, various people announced and gained entrée readily. “So good to see you again. I’ll take your coat,” the receptionist pleasantly offered each. He had had to hang his coat himself. But worse than piling up in front of his appointment and ensuring an even longer wait, these people all seemed familiar.
The white-haired lady, wasn’t she the head nurse, the one who erased part of his medical entry about depression on his application? He remembered she said, “Nobody really needs to know this, and I’ll never tell." And the tall guy with the bad acne, wasn’t he the one who investigated his accident? “You’re absolutely sure you checked before you backed up?” And the small guy with the short hair and pointy nose, that was his first supervisor, who had raided the bar where they’d all been drinking but saw only him because he was the last one out the door.
Everybody who came in had something on him. There was the personnel director who explained to him once, “Never put anything in writing.” Further, none of them came out: the manager who interrupted him during his first nervous day supervising the unit to remind him, “Around here we flush the toilet, see, or never use my bathroom again.”
None of them turned around as they entered to see him squirming on the couch—“Incredible Efficiency” long ago tossed aside. He felt an urgent need and told the receptionist he would be going to the men’s room. “Actually, you must go in now, “ she countered. Doing his best to resist the pressure, he rose to enter. “Take your coat with you,” she said with a knowing smile.
Beyond the door was the acting director, a colleague whom he knew years earlier as a casual, laugh-a-minute, hale-fellow-well-met who struck him today as a no-nonsense, this-won’t-take-long, power-suited, power-tied, I’ve-got-a-job-to-do, my-way-or-the-highway Mr. Big.
“So, what do you have to say for yourself?” Power suits waste no time.
He looked around the room. How often do they line up like the Valentine’s Day Massacre? They stared back pitilessly: the one who for years had stated, “Fooled ‘em again,” every time he received his paycheck; the one they caught in Detroit fixing contracts; the one who brought along his harem of femmentees when they transferred him from Washington; yes, even those harridans who dressed like whores and didn’t have the slightest idea about how to run the place.
Without looking up from the papers on his desk the director intoned dispassionately: “You’ve got to pay it all back---every cent---with interest—wages, benefits, awards, retirement---even reimbursements for mileage. You’re useless and expensive. The bill will be in your mailbox by the time you get home.
“The back door leads to the alley,” he continued impersonally. “Now get out so we don’t have to dirty our shoes kicking you out.”
He looked to the crowd for sympathy, empathy, some recognition of justice, injustice—anything! But they were now just talking and laughing as they gathered their papers, glad they had done a good job, eager to get back to whatever they were doing before this nasty business needed resolution.
Toys In the Attic
As a young child Aghmisha shared the attic with his older brother. Their parents had remodeled it from a single small bedroom with a large undeveloped space to two larger bedrooms with several minuscule storage spaces under the bungalow’s sloping roof. Aghmisha had the room facing the street and his brother occupied the one facing the neighbor's driveway.
“You really need these footnotes?” she asked.
“Actually I wanted to include how that bugger made gorilla noises all night after we had seen “King Kong.” He knew I was scared shitless in the dark,” Aghmisha replied
Bazumka looked at him quizzically, “This will all make sense?”
“Maybe,” Aghmisha struggled to explain, “I hope.”
The picnic and swimming had left him exhausted. Aghmisha dragged his bones up the long stairway and turned right for the last two steps past the landing where a window fan rotated slowly in the summer breeze. He hit the switch for “exhaust,” and closed the other windows and doors so the fan would suck some fresh, hopefully cooler, air through his room. He shed the half-dried swim trunks, donned his pajama shorts, and crashed atop the green chenille spread. The fan’s whir was the last sound he heard.
His parents were arguing again. Couldn’t they just stop picking at each other like that? he thought. They’d spoiled the whole picnic and embarrassed the relatives. It wasn’t worth going swimming if he ended up sick to his stomach about his parents’ fights.
Aghmisha got up from the bed and crawled through the little door into the unfinished attic area. Inside it was large enough to stand up. Around the corner was a second hall where he climbed up the wall framing to a trap door into the ceiling where another entirely open attic existed and only he knew about it.
Well, it would have been open had the space from wall to wall and from the front windows to the slant of the rear roof not been filled with something of a mixture of a glistening gullwing Mercedes and a World War II Spitfire in full camouflage. He clicked the panel that sprung the canopy open and slid into the seat, tied the belts around him, and hit the red ignition switch.
The engine (engines?) growled? Purred? Whooshed? It was that combination of sound, movement, and power, after which all boys (men?) hungered (lusted?), and which offered uncompromised control and destructiveness. Aghmisha wrapped the fingers of his right hand around the control stick, carefully avoiding the “Fire” button on top, as his left hand squeezed the throttle and brought the rumble to a deafening thunder that shook the cockpit and bounced the car? (plane?) upward—the roof suddenly gone, no longer an obstacle.
Below him the house grew smaller and he was soon at the level of the church spires and the taller buildings in the distance. He pressed the stick forward ever so slightly and the distinct slap of the seat against his back began the flight over the model street map unrolling below. He leaned the controller to the right, to the left, and the horizon tilted oppositely.
He pulled back on the stick and the cockpit swung upward to the blue. His left hand crushed the throttle. The rumbling and rattling smoothed to one vibrationless, continuous firecracker of sound that faded as the device rose higher, almost to silence in the thinning atmosphere. The pressure against his back dropped off suddenly as the engine sputtered in a few final erratic punches—the pumps shut down, then nothing.
Up here, above it all, far away from the mad scramble, alone and weightless in the silent expanse—was his favorite place.
That’s Entertainment
They’d all been waiting for him and rehearsing meanwhile. The chorus began only to stop a few notes later as the director waved a halt and took a message from one of the stagehands. The flag display was rearranging itself behind the chorus. Sets rotated in the background. Curtains rose and fell while spotlights traveled back and forth across their folds.
“Busby Berkley instructed the dancers to form a circle, facing inward,” Bazumka prompted.
“Get your own dream,” Aghmisha snapped. He was clearly irritated. What will real critics have to tear apart, he mused, if he couldn’t get the story on paper in the first place?
Aghmisha regretted that he had missed all the rehearsals, especially now that the audience was streaming into the seats eager for the performance to begin. He hadn’t the least idea what the songs were, when he would be cued, how many would be dancing with him. Did he have a leading lady? What was this performance all about anyway? Was there a story line or was this just a variety show? He was confident he could always fake it.
The house lights dimmed and the conductor’s wand shone above the pit. The wand fell and the crash of cymbals opened the overture. The spotlight waxed as the curtains parted and the chorus entered, singing and dancing from each wing toward center stage. Aghmisha felt a push at his back and realized his entrance was overdue. He strode forward and grabbed the spotlight from the dancers.
They stopped singing and dancing and knelt to the spotlight and waved an arm to Aghmisha. What had they been singing about? He had no idea how to begin. He took a cautious step forward and the orchestra swelled in response. He tried a note and the chorus backed him up. Assured he could do no wrong, he sang about being “Just Another Flawless Man,” or whatever whimsical thing came to his head.
They loved it. He danced as never before and every girl in the chorus twirled at his touch, every man tapped himself deferentially aside. Aghmisha picked up the steps and, with a flair that rivaled Astaire, augmented and exaggerated the routines all the while keeping up the lyric with the cleverness of a Noel Coward and the silken voice of a Bing Crosby.
Without so much as a thought he turned the audience into one roaring, laughing, applauding crowd. Nothing could stop him. He ran to the edge of the wings and began dancing his way up the proscenium, followed by the women dancers, followed by the men, as they all tapped their way upside down across the top of the arch.
The crowd was standing and singing along, “Just another marvelous man . . . doin’ anything I can.” Soon they too were dancing up the walls, clacking their taps against the plastered ceiling. Dust fell and lights broke free of their chains. Their coattails hanging below their shoulders, their black shifts riding down (up?) their legs as they wiggled rhythmically like so many agitated, tuxedoed bats on the roof of a cave, the ecstatic mob who couldn’t sing loud enough were destroying the theater. Stoles and strands of pearls rained onto the floor where they were stomped to shreds and shards by people enthusiastically dancing in the aisles.
Thoroughly Modern Miller
The swimming pool on the central mall was only one of Miller’s fabulously popular projects. Another was the huge greenhouse extending into the lake, which magically shed heavy snow, warmed the frigid water, and provided downtowners a beachy, tropical respite from the winter streets.
Miller was one of Aghmisha’s friends from high school who, after decades of out-of-state exile working nondescript jobs, returned in triumph to wild acclaim as an architect in the city of his childhood but not just for bold construction. He frequently performed his poetry in chic urban settings, often in heretofore undiscovered sites of grand structures deep under the city, to crowds who only increased in numbers and enthusiasm. The film of his performances had won an academy award.
Posters of Miller standing in his typical open trench coat over blazer and khakis, his fedora cocked back on his head, smiling as he expounded, beckoned from the side of every bus stop shelter, almost every billboard, and not a few entire sides of buildings--to whom one couldn’t imagine, as it was impossible to find anyone who had not heard him, much less heard of him.
Miller usually met the crowd on the street at a location announced that same day on his website and led them through walls that popped open like vertical clamshells to wholly new spaces. In his presence every space became extraordinary--beams stretched further, arches soared higher, shadows deepened, marble sparkled, stained glass glowed with heavenly brilliance, brass panels and rails had been polished to where they couldn’t absorb fingerprints.
After traversing several such rooms, each grander than the last, sometimes dropping through littered elevator shafts, sometimes crawling under rusted corrugated doors jammed within inches of closing, but always through some kind of muck that disappeared as quickly as it had soiled them, Miller stood, waved his black-clad lemmings into a circle. He waited for them to take a seat, or crouch in whatever nook or cranny availed until everyone had a clear view and a comfortable position, which, between their high motivation and their tribal geniality, took no time at all.
The show began with searchlights gradually brightening as they played haphazardly around the room, swirling and bouncing on the floors and walls. Then voices, Gregorian and eternal, sang overhead. The crowd and the light play calmed in response. Within seconds the chant faded and the audience waited eagerly.
Miller opened with a favorite poem. When he finished, they didn’t applaud. They never did—never needed to. Everyone was certain that everyone else had felt the same—they’d all been knocked on their ass, taken to heaven, or dropped into hell. Nor did they need to reassure the author who, Zen-like, knew without checking every arrow had struck every center.
So it went for the rest of the evening—with the familiar and the new. Miller always presented fresh work. For very lucky devotees the whole performance was new, and they anticipated recounting their experience to hungry ears at the water cooler the next day. Rock stars and athletes envied Miller’s popularity.
At the show’s end, which came way too soon many said, the crowd wound through the fissure of a long, high, dark narrow hallway ending with a door to the midnight lights of the street where they’d begun. Nobody questioned the magnificence or the variety of Miller’s talent—rather they simply relied he would always have it and would always share it graciously.
“So? Do we ever get to hear this poetry and judge for ourselves how marvelous it is?” asked Bazumka.
“I don’t remember any,” Aghmisha conceded. “Besides, the dream was actually more visual than auditory--very realistic unrolling of scene after scene, gray tunnels, stone towers, steel bridges, gilded, paneled palace rooms--the whole shebang.”
“Shebang? Shebang?” she wondered. “Sounds like something from American Idol.”
“Could be,” he lied. Actually, he too deeply envied the fawning of Miller’s retinue. He often said in therapy there was nothing wrong with him that a stadium full of 86,000 cheering fans couldn’t fix—for a while at least.
The Hugs of Bugs
Finding homeless in the subways was like finding jam in a jar. Whether they’d been hit by a train, murdered, or just froze to death some cold night, they had to be removed quickly because the smell got so bad so fast. Humanitarian concern was really last on the list. Periodic checks of the tunnels revealed what daily passenger observations never spotted—who watched the tracks?—boring.
The two bodies should have been easy to find. The woman had come by a traffic cop’s fluorescent orange raincoat which she clutched tightly over the layers of her regular rags. Patches of the bright material reflected the flashlight beam under the filthy carcass of the man spread like a tarp draped badly over a pile of bloodied salt.
His job was simply to report the bodies and stay with them until the authorities arrived. Waiting half an hour in a cold tunnel with two corpses was not his idea of a great assignment nor did it pay well. People had these kinds of jobs out of desperation and personal preference of the “pick-your-poison” variety. One had to be at the bottom of the bucket to experience such dreadful liberty.
Ten minutes into the wait he would have sworn they made a noise. A gasp? A breath? A belch—burp--fart? The heap expelled something gaseous every couple of minutes and it made him very nervous. Torn between the need for information and the fear of what the information might be, Aghmisha called again to hurry the authorities and to advise his supervisor that he would have to disturb the scene and find if either were alive. Go ahead, they told him, the police were busy and the EMS had an accident on the way.
Up close he neither saw nor heard any hint of breath. He dug his fingers through the rags to the throat of the man on top, hoping not to find a pulse. The pressure of his fingers on what he hoped was a blood vessel in the neck was enough to push through the skin and his fingers sank into pudding-like flesh. Terrified, he jumped back, dropped the flashlight, which of course broke, leaving him in the dark as he stumbled, fell, striking his head against the hard cold steel rail.
His head rang as if it were the clapper of a cathedral bell. I am gonna die in this mess, he thought. Trains should be routed around the scene because of his report, so that was not a worry. He tried moving. All arms and legs could move but when they did his jostled head cried “No! Oh God! Don’t do this to me!”
He could see the fluorescent orange of the woman’s coat glistening about three feet away. He was certain he couldn’t have fallen so close to the heap. At the next glance it was even closer, so close he heard the breath of the glowing mass. Where the hell were the police? Gritting his teeth against the pain of his loosened brain, he felt around for his phone only to sink his hand into a puddle of the orange jelly as it flowed toward him.
“Way too much CSI, F/X, and that sort of crap,” Bazumka suggested. “Reduce your intake of cable.”
“Way too much monosodium glutamate, ” countered Aghmisha, reminding her about the Chinese food.
Beltway Soirée
Chandeliers glistened. Butlers hustled their nosh platters with silent, mannerly insistence. Champagne glasses clinked above the chatter in the room stuffed to standing only with congresspersons, their varied aides, dignitaries of foreign states, ribbon-bedecked dress-uniformed military, the ladies gowned in swirls of silk, satin, velvet aglitter in sequins, pearls, all competing for the eye with their neckwear of colored jewels, gold, and fiery diamonds. It was an evening only high-powered Washington could populate and only a mansion in Georgetown could house with anything like sufficient elegance.
Aghmisha noticed one conversation gaining prominence among the many. At the center a younger officer was relating his experiences at the front. As he had returned only recently, his listeners were eager for the direct, unfiltered news his comments promised. But the happy clinking found no home in his circle. As his story unraveled, a few of the women turned away, some men grimaced at the descriptions of extraordinary interrogations, friendly fire problems, young recruits choosing to kill themselves rather than face the daily tension of rooting out a virtually invisible enemy.
An older, taller, white-haired gentleman whose attention had similarly been drawn to the young officer’s discussion nodded to the crisply epauletted marines stationed at the door, their ceremonial swords sparkling at their sides, and they quietly advanced. Two more appeared as if from nowhere, joined moments later by another two. Without so much as a sound or a jostle to those nearby the six men surrounded the young man. He attempted to protest to the soldiers and began to appeal to his listeners but, as the soldiers closed around him, he quickly grew oddly silent.
He appeared to faint and they shuffled him limply from the floor, the blue of the marine uniforms mutated to black, their shoes grew to jackboots, and the gold anchors on their lapels reshaped to the silver lightning of SS. Of his previous rapt listeners, a few made hurried excuses and sought to depart. Some regained their composure and acted as if nothing had occurred. The rest turned to other conversations but kept their bewilderment and thoughts wisely to themselves. The white-haired gentleman looked certain he had made the right decision.
Never Feed a Gremlin After Midnight
“Why always you? Rather the egotist—don’t you think?” Bazumka kidded.
“They are my dreams,” Aghmisha defended. “I should pretend I’m chopped liver and have somebody else’s dreams?” Finally it dawns, “You want to be featured,” he tried.
“A small part wouldn’t be so bad,” she answered.
“You really want this agony? Oh, . . . soon enough, darling BeeZee,” Aghmisha promised, “soon enough.”
He had his prostate checked. It was fine the doctor said. Still, this getting up nights, which for so many years had been only a vague recollection of a small line ad in the classified of fossilized issues of Popular Mechanics, was now a governing reality of late middle age. So he used it occasionally to check on the cats, snoring away at the foot of the bed, or to see if his car had been stolen from the street where he had parked it because he hadn’t cleared the garage of clutter transported from their previous life, or last, to see which position his athletic Bazumka, who had slept alone so many years before their meeting, had taken across the center of the bed.
She was twitching, and crying out, strenuously and sharply. He worried that she might really be convulsing and his heart sped madly.
“Ba, wake up! Wake up,” he shook her shoulder.
“Get back!” she was still asleep. She whimpered aloud and her arms stiffened and collapsed.
“You OK, Ba?” he tried again. This time she leaned into him and he could see in the dark predawn that she had been crying.
“It was horrible,” she finally started to rouse and she reached out for the comfort of his holding. “They were all over me like locusts with swords. And they were all jabbing me and shouting the foulest, most hateful things, curses . . . worse.”
“But you’re OK now, Ba,” he reminded her as he pulled the covers around her back and tucked them under her side. “You’re safe now. It was probably just a bad dream. For a while I thought you were really in trouble, a convulsion, you were shaking so badly.”
She got up to go to the bathroom and when she returned she crawled quickly into his arms. “I was dreaming I was with Billy when he was about twelve or so. We had been shopping and he had wanted something I couldn’t get, so he started acting up. First it was just pouting and being obstinate about coming along. But he worsened, quickly. He started punching and kicking. He made an angry face and said he hated me. Then he just totally exploded into rage, cursing me and coming at me with a knife. I grabbed something, a bat or iron bar, I couldn’t tell, and swung at him murderously.
"He screamed. Blood flew everywhere and for a moment I couldn’t see but I felt a knife slash across my leg and my arm. When I could see again I saw he had split into two smaller Billys still as angry. I kept bashing away at them. And every time I hit one, two came back, smaller, until there were hundreds, covered with blood, stabbing me over and over again, hundreds of them screaming that I should die, that I was a wretched, horrible, hate-filled mother who wanted her children to die.”
She was crying full tilt now, sobbing as she told the story. He kissed her face, salty with tears, and held her as close as possible. Bazumka had not cried much in the few years they had known each other. But when she did it was always from her depths. Aghmisha just kept quiet, kissed her eyelids, and held her tightly, until she slept again. By this time sunlight reflected against the wall and bathed them both in its peaceful yellow calm as they slept still wrapped in each other’s arms.
The Dry Spell
As quickly as they had begun, the dreams stopped. Ceased. Faded. Kaput. Gone South. Or possibly Aghmisha was sleeping more soundly and didn’t remember them as easily. “We fly forgotten as a dream fades at the op’ning day.” He tried keeping a pad and pencil at the nightstand, but when he awoke he usually had to visit the bathroom first. That done, the fading had already progressed substantially and the dream which he had tried to summarize with a sentence on rising remained barely a subject or predicate, the modifiers flushed in a downward swirl.
The calm he expected to take charge once the dreams ended had yet to arrive, confirming his suspicion that the unconscious had gone further underground and governed now from even deeper below. Whatever, the agitation of the soul or the reverberations of fleshy nervousness, he was as driven as ever to complete his work? fulfill his purpose? do his duty?, or just plain tell his inner child he’s got to possess some other body as carrying around the both of them, what with two sets of needs, desires, and tics, was clearly more than he could manage.
Bazumka described him as manic. But when he chided her hyperbole, she refused to back down and he began to have doubts. He caught up with some of his projects. He created programs for the listing of every receipt over the preceding year. He destroyed their moldy porch floor and rebuilt the foundation. He built a shelving system for the utility room and moved the sink two feet east.
He took on a part-time job of positively mindless scope, the gathering of vaguely related plastic and metal parts, stuffing them into bags, boxing the bags, palletizing the boxes, all the while being interrupted by quality control staff who made certain that each bag contained one-and-only-one framis and two-and-only-two flutzkis or else “you’ll have to reopen and recheck every bag on that pallet and a one will be recorded in your personnel file.” Three ones in a month and your ass was grass.
The part-time part meant he was working ten hours each weekday and six on Saturday. By the time he got into the rhythm enough to regret committing to it, and having designated every dollar he would make over the next year to the bruising of his credit card balance, the temp agent called and advised him not to report the following day as the company had decided to release some of its temporary hires and he was definitely one of them. Meager as it was, Aghmisha soon missed the money (remember the “receipts” charts?), but was glad as ever not to drive again to the god-forsaken suburban wasteland of industrial parks.
He soon forgot that the best part of the job was leaving it at the factory door. Without the rapid, repetitious tasks consuming his furies and ensuring delicious sleep every night, he resumed his habits of fear and foreboding. Except for the artificial hustle of the seasonal holidays and the comprehensive housecleaning required for various community meetings Bazumka hosted, the interims of tedia quickly filled with all manner of threat, finances leading the charge, of course.
So, as if in response to some emergent wartime telegram, the dreams, nightmares, and Aghmisha’s ability to recall them again took up residence in his consciousness, knowing in a way they were missed and welcomed back. World leaders, biblical prophets, ancient kings, and all the mentally ill since Freud had looked to these experiences for knowledge inaccessible to their ordinary senses. Why shouldn’t our beloved Aghmisha also hope there to find his way through the woods of terror and depression?
American Idle
You’d have thought they were at a rodeo—flannel shirts, bandanas, jeans, and enough ten-gallon hats to shade the western edge of Oklahoma. Strutting and electric-sliding throughout the hall, no one could be seen who simply stood still. All manner of country lyrics echoed over the boot stomps and hats flapped against faded-denim chapped thighs. Yippee-i-yo-ky-yay!
“Just--be--cause I haunt the same old pla—aa—ces…where the mem’ry of her ling--ers in the air,” the voice vaguely his own except in key and melodic, seemed louder, closer than the others, Aghmisha realized he was singing and was rather pleased with the result. As a child, at the urging of the nuns, he had sung to his elementary school classes at the end of the day. For a long time he thought he had done so well. Only as an adult did he consider he had unwittingly played teachers’ pet all those many times. But if he had earned thrashings by his peers, they never delivered.
This competition seemed like a complete waste of a workday and he was not alone in feeling the managers were up to something dire—‘way too festive for a sharp-pencil crowd. A forefinger tapped the tip of the microphone, THACK, …THACK…, “Ladies” EEEoow “and gentle” WowEE the speakers rattled and squawked and boomed.
The Audio-Video guy from Training scurried up on stage and began a moondance of button-switching and connector reseatings accompanied by system squeaks, bursts, and silences, until the problem was finally strangled into submission and the mike was returned to the managers who had meanwhile been restlessly milling about the stage, impatiently eyeing each other, and occasionally looking downward to ogle brazenly the younger women supervisors in their push-up bras and barely-buttoned cowgirl shirts who were dancing nearby.
“Now everybody knows this isn’t about music, or costumes, or fun, or anything like that,” the District guy led off. “Sure, we set this up as a contest and told you we’d see who’s the best. But this is really about ‘Following Directions, because our organization needs people who can really follow directions. You know what it’s like to go back to your offices and try to get something done and you run into some guy or gal who just won’t or can’t follow directions. Sure, we’ve all been there.
“I have to get back to the office now—somebody’s got to mind the shop while you’re all here playing," the bastard smirked, “so I’m turning it over to Rex Mason, Chief of Western Operations, who’ll emcee this on my behalf. Without further ado, Mr. Mason,” he clucked with unctuous glee and passed the mike to the tallest of the three regional guys behind him and disappeared backstage.
Mason was the Western regional honcho, and as everybody knew all the bets were on him for Central District. And though he tried to be just one of the regional guys he could not lay aside the mantle of the anointed one even for a pretense of equality. “Back in the third quarter meetings, we asked you to look around the room and see who was there,” he began, “and we said by same period this year half of you wouldn't be. Well, we're rounding third base on the second quarter and you can see we’ve still got some serious decisions to make.
“After all we can’t base this reorganization—as we like to call it—on your performance. On that score you’re all pretty much alike, especially since we’ve already taken credit for any of the good you did and released the incompetents who couldn’t pass the blame onto others.
“We could have you count off, and then toss a coin to see whether Evens stay or Odds go but that might be too flip--pardon the pun--huh, huh. We know you’ve got families and we know you’ve got obligations. Just the same though, we still need a loyal, but smaller, staff who won't think twice about seeing us make our goals.
“The bar will only get higher. We'll require even more, quicker, harder, and those of you who were good this year won’t be even be deadwood next year. We brainstormed and came up with this ‘directions’ thing based on the show so nobody would suspect anything and, you gotta admit, it is kind of fun—really--compared to the other thing.
“Have a seat and get comfortable. My regional counterparts and I will come to your tables to check on how well you prepared today. In the meantime, there’s Danish and coffee, juice and bagels, at the goodie table, for you to enjoy this morning."
Mason headed right for Aghmisha, and Aghmisha, noticing his direction, thought it best to head for the noshes to get an orange juice, an everything bagel, sliced, toasted, spread with the strawberry cream cheese, and a coffee, no sugar, just a blip of half-and-half (damn, all they had was that stupid creamer crap and the orange juice turned out to be Tang).
Mason had followed him. “No need to hurry, ‘Misha,” Mason clarified. “I’ll wait at your table so you can be first.” Mason poured himself a coffee, tore open two Equals and poured them both at once into his cup as if such dexterity were some enviable hand magic like giving a Star Trek salute.
Aghmisha hated when the honchos used the phony affiliatives: “Hey, Sammy, come here so I can kick you.” They were so clearly uncomfortable with Aghmisha’s deeply ethnic name, they struggled to avoid having to use it. “Hey, Aggie,--Hey, Misshie, come here so I can kick you.” The message was always the same and Aghmisha, however deserving (or sometimes undeserving) of the ass-kicking that always came, still always managed to get in, “My name is Aghmisha. And I’d really prefer you use it when you address me.” Or maybe he only remembered wishing he had drawn the line.
“Listen, ‘Mishhie, if you want to play, you got to join the team,” they’d answer. “you can’t just always stay on the bench pretending you’d be doing any better than the guys who carry the ball.” He hated sports analogies, always sports analogies.
As a child Aghmisha had not played sports and knew very little of them. Before he got his glasses for his extraordinary nearsightedness, he had caught two softballs with his face. And after getting the glasses, since his prowess at baseball was forever put to rest he tried football, only to present to his mother first one, then a week later, a second set of spectacles, fractured at the bridge. Family finances had decided, she said, that he would go to the library for sport and become a bookish lad. But as bad as the sport metaphors were, at least they weren’t comparing them to soldiers or surgeons. Aghmisha fainted easily at the thought of pain, wounds, or blood.
Intermission
And so, dear Reader, we come to a pause in this effort. But to clue you in, Aghmisha and Bazumka will resume their dream-o-pedia in the not-so-distant future, as they have many strange paths yet to walk whether sleeping or waking.
