Noisy

Music. White noise currents. “Sea goes out, sea comes in,” he used to say. The odd ring penetrates the huff and hiss of facsimile machines. A monkey's cry over the monotony of the rustling jungle. An uncalled for “boo” cutting through the filibuster.

The copy machine hits a high note as the final page is extruded into the lower tray. There was once a time, I remember, when men collated their own documents. When the ear would be treated to the rhythmic stomping and periodic bell of typists, rather than the cut-rate banshee wail of processors and scanner trays. The hushed moan of silicon brains.

Here in the center of the mess, the sounds become environmental. Paper cutters hack six sheets thick, a pedicure for your documents. Three ring binders snap their off-kilter applause—aluminum beatniks at an open mic for ringing phones and squeaky office chairs. A heavy file drawer rolls shut, its contents swaying inside with a protesting rumble. And amid all of it, the voices. Singsong greetings and the practiced cadence that has grown like ivy on the best rhetoric since Cicero himself turned a phrase. The same phrases, the alphanumeric hum of product codes and invoice discrepancies.

Cubicle walls offer a thinly padded maze for my thoughts to rumble through. Tension grates at the edges of the voice. Strips them off to reveal a lack of substance. Like taking the oven-bronzed crust off of white bread. These voices in the dim, syncopating light are revealed for the tired, imperfect humans behind them. We are painted a cheery blue by the phrases and scripts of managerial control, but under our enforced veneer, lives poke through.

They bleed through the bandage...

And they spill on the carpets...

The carpets you pay so much to keep clean.

Corner of Dawnfire and Starmist

I slogged through all the questions I was supposed to ask Annabeth on our first date. Danielle said that a guy has to ask some questions, because it keeps him from talking about himself. She prattled on some metaphor about a teeter-totter. Kicking up a little. Whatever. From where I sit, if I want to learn about someone, they should write an essay. If we all had an essay, and we exchanged them before dates, everyone would do a little better. Like resumes, but with better prose.

Annabeth managed to put on a convincing facade of adulthood, with a job in urban planning, a wardrobe full of sensible heels and a tuned and washed Elantra parked outside her well-lit apartment, living happily in a field of sedans and SUVs at the Oxtail Creek apartment complex. I didn't even notice she was wearing makeup at first: the sign of correctly applied facial enhancements. She was this beautiful, fulfilled, happy young woman on her way up. The essay, of course would have taken a turn, somewhere around the fifth paragraph.

“I may look like the complete package, but after you talk to me for a half hour or so, you'll see that I'm just a painted marionette, propped up by two loving, parents and all the adulation they can churn out. They're the ones pulling these strings. They're the ones manufacturing my credit rating. You won't really fall in love with me, you'll fall in love with the shadow of what they wish someone had forced them to be, all those years ago... and when you take off the little costume I wear when I'm meeting men or naming streets in a new development, you'll find that I'm a struggling infant who still needs someone to wipe her nose, and tell her where to go when her dishwasher breaks.”

Also, she had this thing about unicorns.

Let me take that back. She didn't have a thing about unicorns, she was pulling a Walter Mitty about unicorns. There was this farm when she was a kid where she met one. Rode it. They told her about the best new restaurants in her dreams. A unicorn disguised as a drunk old man told her to put forty dollars on black in Vegas, and she got a hotel room comped.

About the time someone starts telling you they get advise on their drunken fiscal misadventures from cryptozoological good Samaritans in disguise, I think you're allowed to get off the see-saw. Of course, now I was interested. That's not interested like: “I wonder what this new Ethiopian place is like,” it's interested like: “how many ping pong balls can I fit in my roommate's mouth while he's asleep.” Interested at your expense.

The questions went out the window.

“Funny you mention that. I used to work for an advertising firm.”

She started laughing. “What's funny about that?”

I dunno, you tell me. “We used unicorns in a couple print adds.”

“Oh!” I don't know how she managed to make the gleeful sounds she did, but it chimed like little bells ringing. The dogs in the alley behind the restaurant started salivating. “Did you work for the Stolman company or something? I love crystal animals.”

The permafrost smiles of my grandmother's private collection made an icy little tickle at my forebrain. “Ah, no, actually, American Express. You remember?”

If I'd have said, no, you can't have a pony, I couldn't have dimmed princess Annabeth's veneer any faster.

Plodding onward: “Plane ticket to Scotland, $750. Bus ride out to the country, $60. Entrance fee, $35. Giving her the ride she'll never forget, priceless.”

Despite my fervent jazz hands, and attention grabbing announcer voice, she didn't soften in the least. “I guess there was some kind of cross promotion with a theme park near Glasgow... They dress up horses with horns...” The explanation felt weak, even if I didn't know what the problem was.

She finally parted those rosy lips, brow furrowed into a Gordian knot of consternation. “I've heard of that place. That's an exploitation of true miracles. And besides, every time you use a credit card, a unicorn dies.”

It wasn't that I expected gravity to affect her flights of fancy at this point, heavens no. I just don't think a jack-be-nimble could've made that kind of leap. The minotaur would've lost its way in the logical labyrinth she was constructing. The event horizon of her superdense illogic-matter black hole was pulling my lips and cheeks into all sorts of contortions. Unicorns... Credit Cards...

You may as well have said the Yeti was driven to extinction by New Coke, or that space aliens won't reveal themselves until men stop wearing sideburns.

“You know there have to be billions of credit card transactions every day, right?”

“What's your point?” Ah. There's the sort of witty retort one expects from a government bureaucrat.

“I don't remember. But are you really okay with the fact that being surrounded by a theoretical-cash phlogiston is causing a nuclear holocaust level extinction event in the single-horned quadruped population every single day?”

“Unicorns aren't native to our reality.”

“I'll admit it's probably less on Sundays, but I fail to see how that helps matters.”

“There are limitless unicorns, Robert. You can't cause an extinction.” Is condescension easier to take when it doesn't come from the logical high ground? I'm not sure.

“So, if there are limitless unicorns, in a scarcity based economy like ours, what possible value can a unicorn's life have?”

Deluge. Downpour. Lemon fresh. Her water glass certainly didn't upturn itself, and I don't think her parents' careful moment to moment construction of her life could be blamed, either. Clearly, that was the most poignant decision she would make all week. Score one for me.

Weeks later, long after killing another mythical ungulate by paying for dinner, I was taking a shortcut through a patch of new houses, and noticed I was at the intersection of Starmist Avenue and Dawnfire Way. I didn't laugh out loud, but rather smiled to myself, drove to the nearest 7 Eleven and bought a pack of smokes on my Mastercard. Sure, the clerk looked at me funny as I walked out the door, singing Another One Bites the Dust and strumming air guitar, but it's not every day that economic theory and magical flights of fantasy come together to provide me with a moral leg to stand on as I become a willing participant in multi-dimensional equine homicide.

Here's to you, Annabeth.