by Si Transken
Twenty-six humans sat in an oblongish shape on a Friday afternoon at 4:10. Our starchy lunches weighed heavily in our bored bellies. At the only opening in the oblong shape stood the Other who could fire any of us. She was giving information no one wanted. She had been told to tell us. Again. She wanted to fire herself but she was without fire. Flourescent lights were the warmest entities in the room. The Other’s mouth remained floating in place. Her lips swished, swivelled, and swooped like an unexpectedly appearing hummingbird. I noted the oddity of this. The mouth that was hers continued making comprehensible sounds. All the words were apparently coherent and matched precisely to the prepared multi-paged handouts that were given to every person in the room. In a large organization, such as this one, rational linear displays of information are necessary rituals. Data always has a consistent flow-pattern. The most cost-efficient routes for information distribution have been studied extensively. Route canals exist. Here, today, the professional best was being given to the best professionals. We were engaged in a consensually participatory win-win situation.
My heavy eye lids boldly held themselves up while my eyes focused on the Other. Her body moved further away from her mouth. Her head, neck, torso, outer limbs shifted away and then to the left as they disconnected from her suspended well-groomed mouth. Her lipstick was precise and it made crisply visible the edges that had until this moment blended into the rest of her face. We all saw it happen. We knew this was breaking at least one bureaucratic rule. Several people became uncomfortable and reached for their policy manuals. They did so discreetly and politely. No one wanted to be rude. No one wanted to respond in a rash way that would have pointed to their imprecise reading of some document that might have been distributed to prepare us for this event. Papers rustled. Non-ergonomically designed chairs with wheels underneath them gave tiny squeaks of questioning and reorientation. One person in a corner duplicated the speaker’s rebellious behavior and separated her mouth from her face also. This mouth-from-the-corner was not trained in leadership skills so she made no sound.
A covert posse of people who had been partially punky during their teen years made eye contact with each other. They felt their polyester and rayon suits cling only slightly to their shoulders as, one at a time, they also disassociated. This posse gently flung their authentic personhoods away from their contractually ensnared bodies. Now there were ears and mouths floating in space above chairs all around the room. The parts were separating from the wholes. Like LEGO constructions we disassembled and became silently and unimpeachably disorderly. Our hearts and spirits drifted around. Some minds remembered words and feelings from their childhoods. Some minds thought about their weekend’s schedule. A man on my right found his mind seducing his neighbor’s wife but then his mind saw his own weight problem, his impotence, his hemorrhoids, his fears about AIDS and his spirit become depressed and sank sullenly into his chair-contained body again. My spirit witnessed this and felt disappointment for eleven seconds and then I fantasized about my lover’s body and felt my thighs straddle him in his office chair. On that chair in that room my imagination renewed my passionate vows to him. His tongue forced itself against mine. I bit his lip. He bit my neck... The rocking of my chair brought my attention back into this unairfull room.
The mouth beside the overhead projector at the front of the room continued twiddling and twirling in space by itself. Fifty-one percent of the eyes in the room flickered while attending to the lip-bird’s twitchy movements. Most eyes held hostage in this room were glazed. Most eyes had been unplugged from the messages potentially going or coming from the frontal lobes of the heads they’d been attached to. The sound from the hovering pinky-red lip-bird clicked and clacked like M & M candy hitting the shiny precision-installed linoleum tile squares on the floor. Only a few humans in the room remained cognizant and connected to all their seven senses. Most of us had some of our senses drifting and floating away away away... Five thought-juicy people in the room knew how to benefit from this interlude. It can be a gift to leave our bodies and spread portions of our identities creatively and unexpectedly around a foreign room. My psyche slithered and strayed about for a few moments under the chairs, into people’s brief cases and purses and around the room. Unescorted and unobserved my psyche slithered into their pockets. Although curious and questing my psyche found only pennies and lint. Nothing here caught my frolicking psyche’s fancy. Dutifully and with icy discipline my psyche returned to my body for an instant. All my seven senses noted that the lip-bird continued. It’s dusty-rose colored wings were resisting gravity, pleasure, comfort, rest and the offerings of mercy. It buzzed, flittered, clacked in it’s energetic inexplicable suspension.
There were too many white walls holding us prisoner . The clock now said 4:25. The walls held their sterile breath. Four of the eighteen women’s bodies in the room were waiting to go to the bathroom. The duration and intensity of waiting to go to the bathroom was expanding. Almost imperceptibly but certainly irresistibly visions of toilet seats were capturing attention spans and pinning down some minds. The lip-bird’s overheads were being shone onto a bland brick wall painted an unwholesome sour cream color. Some of the overheads now had pale peach or blue colored designs on them. All of her over-heads had arrows pointing to other arrows or squares. Everything pointed to something else which pointed to something else. The Other’s unbodied hand pointed to the arrows. Some eye lashes blinked a minimal necessary wetness onto the held-in-space eyes that directed their retinas in the direction of the overhead and its arrows.
Now and then an intestine gurgled or murmured. There were also the intermittent sounds of those habitually emoted insincere minimal encouragers. The underbelly of the now slightly-more-slowly- flapping lip-bird was an uncurdled cream color. The feathered edges of this underbelly blended into and matched the shade of the wall. Almost. Two male bodies and three female bodies were now about to fall asleep. Their breathing slowed and quieted. Their shoulders drooped just slightly. All the curdled-cream-colors leaked into all the other curdled-cream colors of all the faces, chairs, bodies, tables, hands, and flourescent lights.
Opposite to the chair where my body was waiting to reclaim its senses there was a sign that said, "EXIT". This was an unfulfilled promise.
Down a formal corridor somewhere closer to fresh air a woman’s heels clicked as she followed a non-discoverable route to freedom. Contradictory unplanned combinations of caffeine, Valium, Prozac, Paxil, Tylenol, Codeine, white sugar, and/or other unnatural substances pulsed in the blood of every body in the room. One woman’s body began squiggling. Her hip gestures were almost unnoticeable. The intimate folds and closures around her vagina and anus were trying to ward off the sneaky tentacles of male-designed and aggressively creepy underwear. She would not be successful. The demands of her panties conquered the sensitivities of her skin. Upon realizing defeat her frontal lobe sent a message to her parasympathetic nervous system telling her buttocks to tighten. A memo spontaneously appeared on her frontal lobe. The memo restated to this woman how much she hated her husband. Her eyes glanced at the black and white of the watch on her wrist. Her frontal lobe began planning the conversation that she would make happen tonight. She planned her divorce.
The room smelled like yesterday. The lungs contained within nine aging and disenchanted bodies were about to stop inhaling and exhaling. The large font on the overheads on the wall at the front of the oblong switched from darkly-grey and lightly-grey to olive and mucky-green. Not one person on the planet cared about this color change. My retinas began absorbing information about the ceiling. Even the ceiling wanted to get away from this room. Chunks of the flecked-with-mild-grey ceiling tiles had run away. Their escape had left holes behind that were big enough for a rat to climb into or out of. No human body could as-of-now climb through those holes even though group asphyxiation was becoming subconsciously recognized as a possibility. The unbodied hand at the front now held a pencil which pointed to the arrows and the olive-inked designs and words. Nothing at the front of the oblong pointed to relief. A body near the back of the room’s oblong coughed. Soon another cough echoed back from another vulnerable representative of humanity. The room maintained its right to smell like yesterday.
The biomass of us was beginning to solidify in a sticky way; the way strings of spaghetti stick to each other when left uncovered for too long on an August day. Lip-bird was moving forward and backward, forward and backward rhythmically. Lip-bird quivered and flew upwards by four inches and hovered thoughtfully. Silence flooded the room like abandoned bath water about to drain. Silence. My senses began groping their way back to my body. The overhead projector murdered itself. Lip-bird disappeared as miraculously and unexpectedly as she had appeared. It was now three seconds past 4:30. Human life began again.