Eclipse

Nothing exemplifies the modern and efficient industrial society more than the institution of the workplace lunchroom; they occupy space, by the hundreds of thousands, not centrally to their establishments and not peripherally such as in separate architectural units, but rather emplaced as a nexus wherein the social and the business symbiate. These liminal habitations are the natural destinations for the birthday, the anniversary, the retirement; aesthetically they aren't much to write about, being as they are almost perfectly functional in their arrangements of Formica tables surrounded by metal and wood chairs, with mimeographed or photocopied bulletins tacked to their boards. It is in one such space that I begin my tale.

One day, never mind which, a middle-aged man with a slight stoop and a distracted air went into his workplace lunchroom and scanned the vista in a searching way. Seemingly not seeing what he was looking to see, he accommodated himself with a chair at a table near the window which afforded a view of the cracked and miserable parking lot. He clenched his hands to and fro and muttered the odd untranslatable signifier from a lexicon inscrutable though familiar to anyone who (provided with the key of a clear referent) has found him- or herself in the selfsame condition. He even muttered a groan before standing up and hurrying to the sink, only to return to the table and chair almost immediately. Finally his eyes lit up as another man, a slightly older man, came into the lunch room and spied the former fellow, and thereupon went to the table and sat down with a smile on his face to greet the careworn and excited visage opposite.

The elder spoke first, to begin the process of revelation that he seemed expected to pay attention to. He said: "So, Bob," then looked out at the parking lot. "We're not going to get many more nice days like this this year."

Bob (for so our central character is called) said: "What? Yes, it's nice out." Bob looked around the lunchroom, and noted that they were a safe distance from the nearby table of scientists employed by the data centre.

The elder--whose name was Mark--said: "So we're here, you and me, and I am frankly quite worried. What's up? What's happened? Does it have to do with Anne?"

Bob appeared to choke on something. "In a way. Yes. Quite. Indirectly."

"Well? What is it? Get it out, for God's sake!"

His fellow was quiet for a moment, then: "There's a woman who works here, and I can't stop thinking about her. I wake up thinking of her, or I wake up feeling guilty because I haven't yet thought of her. At night she keeps me awake.... I can't get my bloody balance back!"

Mark leaned back. "It's not a physical thing, is it?" thinking about his friendship with Bob's wife Anne.

"No, nothing's happened. Nothing really, nothing physical. It's just that I'm, like, in love with her and I think I'm going to do something crazy, destructive, and I don't want that to happen, but I'm right on the edge. When I'm at home I stay away from the Internet because I'm afraid I'll send her some squeegee note in the wee hours of a Saturday night."

Mark almost laughed. "Ah, man, I can remember that feeling. Being in love; that madness; the juices flow." Mark thought this the proper discourse, but:

Bob slapped his hands palm-down on the Formica, three times in rapid succession, bang-bang-bang. (It was a habit of his.) "Can't you have some sympathy with me? Is it just a joke to you? I'm demented, Mark. I can't function. Nothing I eat tastes like food. What am I going to do?"

"If you got it that bad, then: You're avoiding whoever this woman is?"

"Yes, which could be making it worse. I'm carrying around this internal image of her, and it's like it talks to me."

Mark raised a drama-school eyebrow. "Like a terrible and grave spectre?"

"No, not like that, I'm speaking metaphorically."

They were quiet for a bit. Then, Mark, evenly: "Should we cut her down to size in your eyes, this mystery woman? Find out what she really thinks about something, which would be no doubt stupid?"

"No."

"Should I talk to her, explain things?"

"No! It's too embarrassing. It's shameful. I'm old enough to be her father."

"Yikes. That's perv territory. You didn't mention that." Mark spread his hands as if to throttle something. Angrily: "What is wrong with you?"

Bob moved his chair back a little and scanned the room for interference. "It just happened. Fate, or destiny, or the constellations."

Rotely: "And now it's time to say goodbye to fate and destiny and all those phony constellations and get back to being married and dull."

"That's what I want to do. Mostly. Oh, what am I saying? Completely!"

"This is ridiculous. Just ridiculous." Mark mulled the problem seriously. "You're obsessed. It's like you're in some Chinese handcuffs.... I don't know if this will work in your case, but ... years ago ... serious years ago ... I wanted something that I couldn't have. So I drew pictures of it, lots of pictures of it, how I imagined it, in all its glory. There was no way I could have it, so I made my own version. And believe it or not, that satisfied me. I think you should do something like that."

"You want me to take up fine arts?"

Mark nodded aggressively to convince himself. "Yes. Yes! Or something like that. Maybe you could write it all down, and then you can in a sense exorcise this little harlot home-wrecker out of your life. You'll be seeing things objectively again in no time."

Bob stared off for a moment. "What about writing songs?"

Mark shook his head. "Too dangerous. You might end up serenading her at the staff picnic near the keg."

"Yeah, I guess you're right. I think the writing would be good." Bob was thinking it seriously through here. "Painting would be dangerous like music, not so dangerous but still I'd have to explain it to Anne. If I wrote it out then I could hide the file. Call it 'Memo 6' or something like that. It's all coming together. It'd be just words, I guess. What harm could there be in words? Wow, I feel better already! She'd be just words on a page.... Thanks, I got to say, really, Mark, thank you for this. I feel like I have control over the situation again."

"Good! And take this advice for real life: Avoid her if you can."

"What?"

"She no longer exists. She's in your head, and only in your head."

After a brief internal struggle Bob said: "Right. Only in my head."

They basked in their true friendship for a while, then things got back to normal. They re-committed to meeting for snooker on Friday, and went back to work.

Some nine hours later, some three-and-a-half miles away, in a kitchen on the fourteenth floor of a one-bedroom apartment in a thirty-storey building, said kitchen being accoutred with only the most modern appliances (LG® refrigerator and toaster, Samsung® range, Sharp® microwave, Bunn® coffee-maker), tidy and painted and neat, a woman was busy at work with a mortar and pestle. Adjoining the kitchen was this woman's living room, whose décor matched the fastness of the kitchen, that is to say, all was tasteful and well-ordered and dustless, with a deep comfortable pleather sofa and big-screen television, some plants domestic, exotic, or arcane, an orderly cedar desk (from Ikea®) with a closed solid-state laptop upon it, plus pillows, abstract prints, blinds on silent runners and a view of the lake; and around the corner, past the entranceway, was her bedroom, in which the bed was made every morning and tucked tightly, in which the closet door was always closed upon its WD-40®'d hinges, and in which the dresser-top was always ordered and geometrical with nothing diagonally placed; and through whose window nothing could be ever heard except for the odd siren in the middle of the night; all being all-in-all the perfect apartment for the modern sophisticated cosmopolite wise woman.

The mortar and pestle, of exquisite marble mined from Michelangelo's source, she was using there in the kitchen she had purchased at an Italian design store. The air smelled of the hair (her own) she had burned within it, and she was carefully grinding the ashes into a fine aerable dust. She was humming as she ground, a little ancient thing her familiar had taught her many moon cycles ago. "There," she said, satisfied with her grind. She poured the burned dust into a glass beaker made by Kimax® and proceeded to add three millilitres of the secretions of her secret garden to it, and topped it off with fifty millilitres of water that had been distilled through her very expensive imported Vevor® stainless steel water distiller. She the took a pipette and stirred up the mixture two hundred and fifty times. She carefully poured the contents into an atomizer, humming away merrily, and capped the tip.

She felt something in the air lightly brush her. What was it? Someone somewhere was thinking very hard about her, somewhere within five miles or so. She smiled, and responded quickly. She could feel it coming in the air all right, she smiled again; the resistance she could feel was lessening daily.

In the morning she took the atomizer to work and kept it in her desk. Before she left for the day, she took it out of her desk, to allow it to reach room temperature. (She hid it behind her cheap Samsung® screen.)

Bob was already knocking the billiard balls around when Mark got to the Brunswicks on Brunswick billiard hall, a place where they had met some scores of times since the latter part of the previous century. The hall had twelve snooker tables plus eight eight-ball tables in the back. Bob and Mark had started with regular eight-ball but had quickly moved onto the more challenging game to find their more proper level of difficulty, and they could go through three racks in two hours if the wind was going the right way. The purple carpet passed under Mike's feet as he came up to the table to observe Bob making a total killing of things. Balls were going in every which way, off one bank or, twice, two. Bob suddenly noticed Mike's presence and called: "Hey! Buddy! Rack em up!" Bob reached in all the pockets one after another and glided all the red balls close to the mark and the coloureds to their appropriate sites while Mike slowly pulled down the triangle.

Mike across the table said: "So, Bob, been busy?" meaning: "Been drinking?"

Bob thought for a second and said: "Nope! Nothing so far. Want one now? I feel like one or three. I'll pay." He came back in a moment with two bottles of beer.

Mike looked at him very seriously and asked: "Are you bi-polar or something? What's changed since I saw you Tuesday?"

In response, sing-song: "All has been solved, all has been solved, all has been solved, all has been solved."

Bob cleaned up in the first and second racks, in little more than an hour. The third took a bit more doing; at one point he was losing! However, as you can guess, he righted his galleon in the end and clobbered his poor friend who was frankly amazed at the skill and luck of his friend.

Repairing to a local tavern afterwards--the Sheek, a fine palace of oak and bronze, sometimes too noisy but not so that particular peculiar Friday evening--Mark, after getting a couple pints and clinking, said to the effervescent Bob, looking perfectly perfect: "So what's the explanation? Are you 'on' something?"

Bob leaned back like Henry VIII. "I took your advice, and it totally killed it. I am now free again, free at last, my God, my God, so free at last."

"I'm not sure you should be that free."

Bob banged his pint glass down, and Mark jumped. "I have control again! She's no longer a bother. I'm back in my proper prison of domesticity: a Club Fed, with rolling grassy putt ranges and massages every other day."

Mark, surprised to the utmost that a piece of his advice had been worthwhile, asked: "So you're saying that you ideated her, sublimated her, reified her, into a bit of writing?"

"Exactly what I did!" Bob put his experience into, more or less, words. "First thing I wrote was a poem. I pulled the girl apart piece by piece. I wrote about how I loved her hair and how it smelled once, that's to say the one time I smelled her hair, I wrote about. 'As amber scented,' I wrote. Her mouth and kissing it, the softness. Her breasts like pomegranates, and since I couldn't say anything about down there, about how her ass was an inverted heart. I liked the whole thing, it was a kind of a sonnet, and I felt better. But I tossed that out and started again, this time it was about how she was a witch who'd enchanted me, like she was in a kitchen cooking up a spell with her burnt hair and pussy juices and water, but I stopped there because it was all in my head and she wasn't to blame and I was being, quite frankly, misogynistic. At that point I changed tack again, and I got gentle and romantic, with this thing about, you know, a fantasy about she and me. She became the daughter of a religious zealot and a schizophrenic, and I was some ordinary guy from the suburbs and I loved her and--I'm going fast, I know--I had to save her from all of that, and she was almost lost. It's now an epic journey with her in some place in the distance and me, or the fictional me, I'm going in to save her. It's pretty intense stuff, and all those years playing Dungeons and Dragons weren't lost on me, boy. And guess what happened yesterday."

"Yesterday, what?"

"No, I want you to guess."

"I really have no idea."

"Come on, guess."

"I don't know."

"I'm not going to tell you. Guess."

"She got struck by lightning."

"Yesterday was a pleasant day, weather-wise."

"I held up my end. I guessed. So, what happened?"

Bob spread out his hands palm up as if receiving a blessing. "There was no-one at her desk."

"What do you mean?"

"Her desk is cleaned out. She's not there anymore."

"What happened to her?"

"I don't know; and I don't care."

Mark nodded, and wondered what to say for a moment. "So you're free of her. And you don't miss her." Mark nodded to himself because he knew the ways of the world. "I think you're going to miss her."

"Nope! Nope! She's out of my life."

They ordered a couple more pints but before they wetly hit the table Bob went stiff. Mark looked around, suspecting there'd been some interference in the atmosphere. At a nearby table a young filly was studying the menu. She had every right to be there, so why was she so remarkable? She looked like a mouse more than anything else. Ninety pounds wet. Attractive, yes, for those who'd been smitten by Sandy Dennis a way back. She was entirely absorbed in the menu, and Bob hadn't looked in her direction. The air pressure seemed to drop, and Bob slowly said, like a man who had stepped onto a bouncing betty:

"I'm not going to turn to look. I know it's her, there behind me. I can smell her entire body, I can smell all her hair. Pussy. Do you think she's here on purpose? Do you think this whole thing was planned?"

"I don't know," said Mark weakly. "You think it's her?"

"It's her. Unmistakable. I think I'm losing it here."

The woman sipped on her glass of white wine. She seemed entirely oblivious to them. It looked like just some woman out having dinner alone. She reached down for something, and came up with a paperback book. She opened it harshly, folding it in half disgracefully, and drank some more wine.

Bob said: "I've got to get out of here. There's more I'm going to have to write. I've made some mistake in it; I have to ex out the last couple paragraphs; I'm on the wrong track. Do you remember where I left off? I can't. There's got to be a back door to this place. Can you settle up? I'll pay you back."

"You're going to leave, just like that?"

"She's burning me. She's burning my back. I'll ignite soon if I don't get away."

"I think you're making all this up. I think you're in your cups."

"No. That's it. I'll see you later." Bob slowly, unobtrusively, got to his feet and walked past Mark, who turned to watch him going deeper into the bar without looking back, and then he was gone. Mark kept a-drinking, Friday night after all, and he looked at the woman who continued to peacefully read her paperback. She didn't even come close as a mile to looking back at him.

He finished his pint, considered and dismissed the idea of drinking Bob's near-full pint, and paid up. He was on his way out when he turned around to walk up to the woman. "Hey," he said.

She didn't look up. "Buzz off, creep."

Mark, sensing some, oh I don't know--malice--left quickly. Out on the street, in the night, he found himself worrying about Bob. Perhaps he needed some talking down from his great height. So naturally he got on the subway and went over to Bob and Anne's place.

Bob and Anne lived in a row-house unit on a nice street with everyone having a dog or kid or both. They had neither, but still they got along with everyone. Mark knocked on the door and Anne came. Anne was a quite good-looking woman with long black hair and a cute little turned-up nose. She opened the door and said: "What happened?"

"It's hard to explain. Is Bob here?"

"He came in, grabbed his laptop and left. He said there was something he wanted to show to you."

"Oh, golly, we must have passed each other. If he comes back, can you get him to phone me?"

"Yes, certainly. Take care!"

Mark walked down the street. Perhaps Bob was looking for him. It was really his only lead, so he went back to the bar for a peek. There was no sign of Bob--and the "creep" bitch wasn't there either. Mark, thinking that perhaps Bob (diminished probability) had gone to his own (Mark's) house, travelled across streets and avenues only to arrive at his own apartment whereat he found no signs, nor hides nor hairs, that Bob had been there. Since he found himself at his own home, Mark decided to call it a night.

Three days later, a woman arrived at her place of work. She carried a box of knick-knacks sufficient to populate her new office in a personal style cribbed from O. She dispersed her store-bought factory-made mementoes tastefully, and then got down to work. She woke her computer and checked some mails and feeds, and among the 'CONGRADULATIONS!' and 'WELCOME TO THE TEAM!'s, she noticed a request--WANTED--for fresh and new idea for a Blue Sky session Thursday afternoon. She chose to ACCEPT the invitation and began to wonder in what direction the organization should go; or rather she began to wonder how to express what she envisioned in some properly Latinate, clerical, commonplace, language. They had to be edgy. Sharks die when they stop moving. Something devilish. Let's do some thinking outside the box. Something satanic.

Meanwhile, Mark was also at work, (in the same building at the same company remember,) but he was not working at that moment. Rather, he was at Bob's cubicle, alone, for Bob was not there, which was rather unusual for Bob. He asked the guy in the next cubicle. Hadn't seen him. In fact, no-one had seen him that day, in the entire building and company. Mark went back to his desk and phoned Bob's house, at which there was no answer. He called an hour later, and there was still no answer. He tried to remember if they'd told him they were going to go away for a holiday, but the memory simply wasn't there.

He called again that night, after work, and still there was no answer. Now Mark couldn't rest. He went over to their house and knocked at their darkened door but it was obvious that no-one was home. He didn't know what to do. Should he call the police? He decided to wait till morning, and so he took a sleeping pill and managed to shut his eyes and forget all about Bob and Anne (and the "Buzz off, creep" woman) for something on the order of seven hours.

At noon the next day it did not seem to the world in general that anything had changed; the rubbish flow of 99% useless information and 99% futile activity continued to course through its voluminous veins. Mark went over to ask Bob's neighbours if they'd seen anything; no-one could recall seeing either of them--it was long ago, three whole days--on Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday. Having nowhere else to turn, Mark called the police and explained it all and after more explaining plus some self-abasement and masochism he convinced the police to investigate.

He made a full statement to police two days later. He was told that everything was still under investigation, all leads were being followed, they were ruling nothing out, the Mounties always get their man, murder will out, and crime doesn't pay.

Everything fades; even grief, and even love. Informational entropy takes hold, concrete memories beget gossamer moods, and most of the chiseled beloved husband, wife, father, daughter ofs become erodedly unreadable. Mark's slipping interest in the disappearance was logarithmic, and could have been precisely modelled and functioned on a $1.99 slide ruler; after six months (during which each yesterday was twice as important as each yesterday's yesterday), he spent an entire day without thinking once about his friend: though he didn't know it. Bob and Anne were nobodies, possibly by choice, and that's precisely how their essences had come to be treated.

On that day, when Mark got to the office he noticed immediately there was something up and it was only a matter of time before he found out--and started to join the gossip--there'd been a massive re-structuring of the whole corporation. Some forty executives had been frog-marched out and none knew exactly where in the Great Chain of Being they lay. Tales of horror and broken hearts got exchanged for some time before the announcement was made there would be a corp-wide announcement at 10:30. So, at 10:30, the auditorium was packed, while everyone who couldn't get a seat watched video screens situated in common areas. The CEO, un-applauded, laid out for everyone the new corporate structure, with a new scientifically-proven hierarchy based on the duodecimal system, 'as is found in nature'. Thus, every employee would have to speak to their boss's boss for fifteen minutes apiece, said meetings paced at three per hour for six hours per day two weeks' duration, the whole synergetic synthesis starting thereafter. And then a carefully selected quartet of questions were asked of the CEO.

Mark and the rest stumbled back to their cubicles and offices in a state much like excitement. Up in the emails popped what fragments of the interview schedule concerned each individual, and Mark read he was scheduled to be cross-interviewed at 3:20 by one CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE, executive in charge of N- and E-, Department of W-, H-, and L-. He asked around his closest colleagues to find that each (mostly) was now under the ling of personages unbeknownst to all.

Let us now join, as if we are not already there, Mark at 3:19 as he finds the meeting room in which he will become acquainted with CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE. He sees a young woman sitting within. She has bobbed hair, a pointy nose, and rouged lips. She looks up and smiles when he lightly knocks, says, "Come in!" as she stands and offers her hand. Mark sits down in the warm chair and stares at this stranger who opens a standard folder and passes her eyes over whatever is within.

The questions begin. They are getting to know one another. Though it is quite unlikely they will ever meet again, the procedure is the procedure. Mark opens up and describes his home life, lonely though it may be. They both seem to be making the best of it. CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE talks well-worn sentences about who she is really. This is how things are supposed to operate. Mark knows he will neither willfully recall the interview nor tell anyone that it even occurred. Time passes of its own volition. The counts of their hearts' beats signify to their brains that twelve minutes have passed and they will have to wrap things up.

She says: "Do you have any additional questions?"

He says: "None that I can think of."

"If you do, you can always mail me. Well!" She slaps her hands down on the desk, three times, bang-bang-bang. "I've heard good things about you, and I hope you'll continue to be ... good, Mark."

"Well, okay, see you around."

Mark leaves the meeting room, wondering if his eyes had or had not deceived him when they told his brain that she had winked at him at the parting moment. It seemed unlikely, like an early guess at a puzzle's solution before you'd gotten even what you believe to be a fifth of the way through, when there's still seven hundred pieces on the table. He walks back to his cubicle and he can still see her enough to focus on details. His computer is on, so he consults the charts of the new hierarchy. He clicks on CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE and there's her photograph. She's smiling and confident in the picture. He goes down the tree to his own name and clicks. There's no picture there ... so he finds the one and only picture of himself on the Internet, downloads it to his desktop and uploads it into the corporate directory. Now his picture is just two steps away from hers, which gives him a feeling of ... satisfaction? Incipient satisfaction, hopeful satisfaction? At any rate, TOUCHETTE can't be a terribly common name, especially paired with CASSANDRA. He searches the Internet for "CASSANDRA TOUCHETTE" and all the results on the results page look to possibly about her. He clicks on the top result, and begins to read.