The Motions, An Echelon of Beauty Part 5
We are humans, are we not? That must be worth something, something real, something like love.
The lobby was empty and with the lack of customer presence, my manager was able to yell, “what the fuck” and I glazed my own eyes and ears to follow him into the back office. He wanted to know where the fuck I had fucking been, what the fuck I thought I was fucking doing, who the fuck I fucking thought I fucking was, and what the fuck was going on with my fucking shit, and fuck me, I fucked him, do I want to learn the fucking rules about fucking being to the fucking store on fucking time. Jesus fucking Christ. The fucking goddamn fucking store can’t fucking run itself (I didn’t have a chance to remind him it was a fucking restaurant not a fucking store). Rich had had to fucking stay for two fucking hours past his fucking shift and they had called my fucking house ten fucking times and hadn’t been able to get anybody to fucking cover my shift and that they were fucking slammed with tons of fucking shit this afternoon and were fucking short a person and that really fucking made his job so much fucking harder on him and that he had every fucking right to fire me right fucking then. Everyone else followed the fucking rules so why the fuck couldn’t I follow the fucking rules.
I looked around his office, and he wanted to make damn sure I was paying fucking attention. But, in truth, I was counting the pile of empty candy bar wrappers on his desk. The trashcan seemed to be drooling the pile that sat uneasily inches above the rim and bits had begun to surround its base. I wondered who had taken to time to put up the hundreds of signs, papers, emails, notices, covering the tack boards, taped to every wall and hiding his desk. In this mess of business, I couldn’t spot a single picture or anything that could clue someone in that a human being resided in this room for eight to ten hours of every day. The pieces of a broken mug had been swept into a pile in the corner and I wondered with some minute amount of humor whether he had broken it on purpose, perhaps after calling my house for the tenth time. I thought about breaking into his office later that night to replace all those posted emails about company policy, a shortage of 300 dollars on May 5th, new management options, transfers and hirings, and general company bullshit with photographs of Harold in all his splendors. And none of those photos would show the simple man drowning in a striped Mcdonald’s uniform. They would show this fat piece of shit who really cleaned his toilets.
A pot of coffee sat on the corner of the desk, being warmed by the burner and still three quarters full of thick, black, shit. I pictured myself grabbing it, my manager still extruding his speech, by now not even emitting sound that my ears were willing to register, knocking the burner onto his lap and grabbing his thinning hair. I pulled back his head; opening his mouth enough to stick the pot’s spout between his teeth and poured its steaming contents down his throat. He screamed as the coffee burnt the surface lining of his throat and esophagus. I knocked away his flailing arms and he inhaled a good amount of the coffee while he coughed and gasped. As the pain increased, he grabbed his throat in some ridiculous attempt to heal the pain with his miracle-healing hands. I’d drown this man in coffee, counting the pots, as I watched with fascination at how much emptiness remained in this useless human being to fit more pots of coffee.
Suddenly, he stopped for a breath, and I looked into his eyes. I saw the memories of a thousand tears and, for some reason, I couldn’t find a hint of anger. It seemed as though this man was screaming at me because he was supposed to, not because he was actually angry with me. I realized that whether there had ever been anger in those eyes or not, it would never surface above that unmistakable pain. I glanced around his office one more time and saw, with a lack of family photographs, personal objects to remind him that he was a human being residing in this office eight to ten hours of every day, that he was in more pain than anyone I knew. This man was 35 years old, he was overweight, and he managed a restaurant he hated that fed a mass of people who hated him for no reason other than he charged them money for their consumption habits. The compassion I felt for this man and his dried swamp of boyhood hope was overwhelming and I wanted to explain to him that everything wasn’t as shitty as he thought it was. I wanted to tell him that no matter what they thought, I knew he was a beautiful person. The ability to be happy had never passed him by, and he really did have the ability to love. But, I knew he was conditioned, as was everyone else, to ignore such words as the mask for motive, for selfishness. Instead, I lowered my head, and sincerely apologized. I let him believe I was apologizing for being late. The restoration of control could at least give him some satisfaction in this typical Monday and I let him have it. I was sorry, that was genuine truth. But I wasn’t sorry for being late to a restaurant that fed people more miserable than the cows that provided the cardboard meat. I was sorry because I had failed to see that he and I were on the same page. I had been working with him for two years, and only during that breath, that intervention of humanity, that force of nature that made him stop, to give up his will, to pause, to breath because he simply didn’t have a choice, did I think about the things that made him a human being. He ordered me to work, and I complied, cursing my job. As I passed Harold, I smiled to him. He didn’t smile back and it made me love him even more.
CHAPTER 2
When I was seven years old, my dreams were often haunted by a sphinx, smiling calmly, waiting for me to make a daring and senseless move towards it. But, I would always run away the minute I got close enough to hear its voice. It would say my name and I would spin around into a cloud of dist and run blindly for hours until I found myself back at the sphinx.
For two years I’d see its crumbling paws, half buried in yellow sand that reflected the moon in five different places. Half buried, yet still stretching five stories above my head. The beast’s mouth was often blurred by a thick layer of clouds or general midnight fog, but I could still recognize it as clamped shut perfectly parallel to the sandy ground. I never saw anything behind the head, and knew that a stone body existed behind its monstrous catlike head only from assumption based on what I’d seen in magazines.
Shortly after I turned nine, the sphinx changed. On first encounter with the evolved monster, I slipped in the sand as I turned to run and caught a glimpse of its wide-open mouth. I hesitated for a moment, watching the clouds drift straight into its solid throat passage, realizing that the inhalation was in preparation for some speech, or threat. Before it could finish a word, I was swept into the sand storm and the cycle repeated itself. A few weeks later, I met my bottle-smashing soul mate, and not only did the sphinx disappear from my dreams but I completely forgot it had ever existed.
Thirteen years later, that night after I had left McDonalds in the middle of my shift, in the middle of an order, in the middle of a rush, leaving an aged man, not aged from time but rather aged from life, aged from indecision and regret and next wrong action followed by next wrong action, to make a decision, to act, and the man continued his order to an empty register, to no person but to an inanimate object that might actually take his order if he were lucky because the man simply hadn’t any tools, any schema, for alternative behavior, I saw the sphinx again. I was no longer afraid. This time, the statue rose no higher than fifty feet and I noticed for the first time large wings extended from both shoulder blades and piercing the clouds or fog with the confidence of a jagged rock breaking through terrible ocean waves. I vaguely felt as though the air were cooler than when I had stood in that spot as a scared child. That night, instead of running, I simply sat down, shivering, and waited for the sphinx to speak. It inhaled with such force that the stars subtly shifted closer to us and a real life building, miles from my real life sleeping self, collapsed, killing a family of five. In a female’s voice, softer than a butterfly’s wings, it asked, sweetly, innocently, comfortingly, challengingly,
“What makes the world go around?”
I woke up and saw the sphinx flutter out my window, straight into the sun’s morning light. And I had no fucking clue.
I called out of work sick, hanging up on my manager midway through his fourth ‘fucking’ and brushed my teeth. Duncan Sheik played on the radio and I sang along while dressing in my nicest black pants and white button up shirt. It took me forty-five minutes to find the black Armani tie I wanted to wear, knowing full well that if you wanted real answers, an expensive suit made all the difference.
