Long Color
THIS DOCUMENT DETAILING THE EVENTS OF */**/17 (OMITTED) ACCORDING TO MY EXPERIENCE WHICH WILL, I HOPE, BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION WHEN YOU, YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE—THOSE THAT FORCED ME UPON THIS UNCOMFORTABLE RECONSIDERATION OF AN EVENT THAT HAS ALREADY, QUITE PERMANENTLY, AFFECTED MY VIEW ON EVERYTHING RELATED TO INTRA-OFFICE EXISTENCE AND, INDEED INTERPERSONAL INTERACTIONS ON AS A WHOLE—DECIDE WHETHER OR NOT YOU HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THE HELL ACTUALLY HAPPENED ON THIS DATE, WHICH YOU DON’T. I DO HOPE YOU FIND SOME WAY TO CATEGORIZE AND QUANTIFY THIS IN A WAY THAT POSITIVELY AFFECTS OUR PROFIT MARGINS. GOOD LUCK, AND MAY GOD HAVE MERCY UPON YOUR SOULS.
Mathew Royal
WALLACE & FINNEGANS
*Reflective inserts also provided by Mathew Royal.
Cubicle-bound, I raised my glassy gaze from the proposal, a recent transfer from Incoming Projects flashing across my Mac’s screen—an opaque rectangle, no more than four inches across by four inches upwards but substantial enough in content to encapsulate all of the active-thinking sections of my brain, detailing a campaign organized by a musician from the East Coast and an alleged “scientist” to change the general public’s vernacular in regard to the pluralized noun we as a people use to describe a plurality of moose[1]—and my cubicle mate, a genial, decent, two hundred and ten pound man with a very business-basic sense of style, a hairline taking a valiant but futile stand against genetics and time, a shave job that assured all onlookers that his choice of razor was certainly economic in nature, and a look of satisfaction upon his face that somehow captured my puzzled eyes, despite the—or perhaps due to—my previously mentioned total lack of available brain power. Todd Stephens invaded my eye-line with a presenceful smile that was too full for common office elicitation, and I—despite the who-can-possibly-give-a-shit-about-this proposal drifting half a foot from my face—shifted my attention, without overt awareness, to this big, dumb, impossibly sincere expression.
There was no reason, as far as I could retrieve from recent memory, for my co-worker to elevate to such elation; our morning had been fairly standard[2] and, in fact, the reason I was looking over the proposal at hand was that Todd had found it so patently odd, even for Wallace & Finnegans[3]—a non-typical-Todd reaction for sure. Between Todd and I, he generally received the more liberal ambitions of our clients and handled them with a consistent optimism. I pored over the most salient sectors of my short-term memory and found no credible answer—had we been talking about something? I couldn’t parse together anything specific. Prior to his announcement of perplexion over the new message from Incoming, I had not been thinking of Todd but instead had been occupied with the Rubik’s cube that sat aside my monitor.
See, I’d decided that one of my office co-inhabitors had, whilst avoiding my attentions, sabotaged my efforts at coordinating this children’s toy from the bowels of hell. The nature of our work’s being non-traditional manners of promotion and cultural cultivation had led my boss, a forty-year-old, too-well preserved, minimal-grey-hair-having, five-foot, ten-inch, beacon of totally unironic positivity, named Aleksander Masons[4] to purchase every member of the organization a new Rubik’s cube—part of a policy of “innovation on all fronts.” Mace had insisted that he would be making fairly regular check-ins on progress, so I saw an opportunity to put on a bit of theatre[5].
I made a habit of occasionally revealing my cube from my bag and adjusting said cube a few memorized steps further towards completion; the then advanced cube would be left on my desk in the large, open-style, interaction-encouraging office’s main floor, where any random passerby was going to notice the menagerie of hues against my desk, which is soft-grey on top because I’m an adult.
The nature of my attention having been cast on that cube, had been concerned with my certainty that my cube had in fact been fucked with. See, I had memorized my next necessary series of movements for that day, and it had been three days or so since I made a point of demonstrating my work towards setting the stickers into hue-based homogeneity, and I felt it was time to drive the narrative one set of turns onward, but the completed twists and adjustments only served to scramble the puzzle deeper. I knew the steps and I know I did not make some sort of blunder in my contorting of the polychromatic plastic, yet I still found weeks of progress completely undone; the gig was up, and one of my cohorts had got me good[6].
While this mental retrieval didn’t raise my spirits, it did provide a small fact that relieved my Todd-centric embarrassment; I had not forgotten a subject of conversation or some inside-joke or a quick quip or a whatever-name-a-thing. Still, I wanted to know what begat Todd’s beaming. Turning in a soft hundred and sixty degree arc, I looked over the main floor to ascertain what was so satisfactory. Amid the menagerie of productivities, no super-distinct person or practice jumped to the fore.
The drones[7] dived in and out of their desks and others’, searching for a new task to demonstrate that they were aware there were hoops in this office and they would, by god, jump through them. They melted into a stream of seekers and searchers, desperate to be consistently creating something of need, whether they felt their function fit anything even close to essential to the company as a whole. I recalled having assigned jobs to lower-ranking interns or recent hires, with the intention of just being left alone by the eager beavers, at least six times that week alone[8].
It was always amazing to watch them hunt down some reason to be amidst the errata of our office that rakes in cash for selling strategy—not exactly a commodity that we are going to run out of with any foreseeable recency. They buzzed and wound about each other in not-always-parallel but not always-not-parallel patterns of must-belong urgency: can I file that for you; here’s that report sir; I’ve got your coffee, boss.
The forms of exhaust.
The “People” present at the time of Todd’s paranormal joy didn’t solve the mystery any more than did the cogs. Carren Caldwell stood near the entrance to the floor with a stack of basic-brown folders and wore a face that made certain something was amiss. Carren is our office coordinator for H.R. and is also, in yours truly’s humble estimation, a perfect balance of pain-in-the-ass and utter importance. She is older—well, forty-three, but, like, old forty-three, not I-live-on-spinach-and-lean-sources-of-protein forty-three, like Mace, who genuinely considers fast-food poisonous.
Carren is a mother, a fact made obvious as much by her generally involved way of interacting with others as her tendency to talk about her three children ad nauseum[9]. Her office is a shrine to her work as a care-giver, complete not just with the over-abundancy of photographic evidence of her and her husband’s successful procreation but also the kids’ various scholastic awards, assorted mementos[10], and a long sign that reads, “We love Mom,” which Carren was given for a recent birthday in which the children and husband put on a short play that culminated in Carren receiving the much-esteemed, banner-based form of admiration[11].
Carren’s motherly instinct is actually pretty perfect for an office that contains people like, well, me. I do not want to do reports, memos, files, notices, and all other forms of paperworkery, and she has an outstanding skill for prodding me just enough that I feel like a dick when she really needs me to make a sacrifice in the name of bureaucracy. This carries a peripheral characteristic on Carren’s behalf that she must be capable of at least generating enough displeasure to make me actually turn my attention onto whatever typically tax-related and often time-wasting whatever-it-is she needs, but the fact is she keeps me at this desk making this cheese, so Carren is alright in my book.
Carren’s presence offered no insight into Todd’s secrets, and the other present “Person” on the work floor offered only a new complexity into our midst—Becky Layson—a Person by office standards but barely deserving of the title of human being by my own—had a pack of some two to five drones circling around her finger’s end; she had certainly been assigning some task which would, in true Becky-Layson style, be quite intentionally overly complicated in nature[12].
Becky’s orchestration would not elicit any pleasure for Todd, who generally despised her, and her looks alone, whilst admittedly outstanding, would never suffice to cause the creation of Todd’s suddenly onset enjoyment. The beauty of Becky would not off-set the long inlaid sense of danger that one carries after watching her feast on the souls of her underlings. Velociraptors are beautiful—though my knowledge of their species comes exclusively from that series by Stephen Spielberg[13]—but I wouldn’t run the risk of being their temporarily displaced snack[14].
One may hypothesize that perhaps Todd was in the midst of a fantasy in which Becky is greeted by the wounding of an intent rapping upon her door caused by her landlord—a short, stern, strong man, with a thin but long enough haircut to cover his ears, who only wears Cuban suits, named Kaiser. His right hand glimmers with a red glare from the ruby he always seems to wear and, though it is but six thirty in the morning, he is smoking a light but zesty cigar, and Becky has forgotten that Kaiser is owed not one but two month’s rent, and he laughs as he strikes a match against his dark but soft face—rendering Becky deservingly streets-bound, subversive bitch.
But such a fantasy being the solution to the question at hand is extremely unlikely; Todd is genuinely a rather kind human being and likely not incapable of but rather lacking the motivation necessary for constructing such unhinged and elaborate fantasy. While less fantastical in nature than the aforementioned daydream, the presence of Percy Williams, who made his way through my field of view with a something-time-sensitive-needs-attention pace, did not at all untie the Gordian-knot good mood in the slightest. Percy was and is a company agent for field development; my job is to work with Todd and come up with a strategy to market or otherwise publicly advance whoever has paid for the company’s attention, while Percy is one of the “People” that then makes said plan a reality[15].
He’s a shorter African-American man with a stocky build, visually athletic, a short, tight haircut, and a perpetual smile; he’s a high-fiver and has given away his lunch more than once—his lunch of which he brings one and makes at home every day. Percy had merely been crossing the office floor in the direction of a woman named Mindy Russels’s office; he was not facing my general direction. Mindy handles our communications and all general interactions with the two satellite branches; it seems reasonable then to assume that Percy had some necessity to coordinate with one of our other branches, but I can’t say with certainty; the restrooms are also by Mindy’s office.
Barring that Todd was just ecstatic to see Percy in an act of utter banality, it seems safe to assume Percy had nothing to do with his condition. I decided at that moment, when I recognized no simple solution to Todd’s gaiety, that I would return my attention to the man in question himself, specifically the feature most flooded with the unnatural ecstasy. The smile, the damn smile, it grew somehow wider. Todd’s face drew back, and the joy in his mandible stretched him to his limit; he had hit that unnatural point of emoting that more overtakes our faces than appears as a preprogrammed or naturally occurring expression—the maximum facial-space utilization had been reached, and there was a lack of Todd for any further expansion. He looked like a child, a giant, over-giddy, dad’s-home-early, man-child. I felt like the rest of the office had just missed the sudden appearance of Santa Claus.
Then the light came.
Initially, I was certain some refraction behind me had occurred. Todd’s skin filled with a sun-soft touch of a whiteness, but the part of my brain that so naturally said, “turn around, let’s see what jackass is carrying some cartoonishly bright thing and bathing the office in this just-mild-enough-to-not-be-an-issue annoyance,” never took flight, due to the gravity of my realizing the newly genesised gleam was not exuding upon but rather from Todd himself. The light shone from all directions outwards from my grinning and now glowing office mate. The cubicle wall, a dead-pale, tired-white, now suddenly woke with this soft brightness’s stroll over its surface. Then I needed: needed to ask for anyone’s confirmation of my detection of the supernatural lumens, needed to turn away and see anyone else perturbed by the suddenly upon us light source that now eschewed shadows from my space in our place of business, needed to hear someone’s concern outside my own, needed to think I maybe still sat on planet Earth, needed to know that I wasn’t dreaming or dying of an aneurysm, needed too much for the mere seconds gone by: I was in the neutral gear between fear and fascination, perplexion and petrification[16].
The light didn’t mind my lingering inspection, my lost-for-answers stare. It only came on in insaliently miniscule adjustments. There was no discernable measurement of the growth of the glimmer; in the same way that sitting in warming water seems to suddenly shift from clammy, to comfortable, to frog-killing conditions, so too did the white shine seem to overtake me and the rest of the every-last-thing around me in its haughty, bold, caress that impossibly only told me to watch and not to run—I was so naturally unnerved by the novelty of Todd’s radiations, but only my instinct-derived compulsions told me to retreat, not the light itself. The light made no malice for what my measurements are worth[17].
I don’t believe in the supernatural in any propensity—no, I don’t make any exception for whatever pet subject you would like me to—but somewhere in that silk-soft illumination, something soothed my panic and proliferated my patience in the face of its waning; I felt some small, nearly silent assurance that I was okay, and that I should accept this glow with ease, with calm, with some silent illumination’s assurance, with a promise I could not but also should not look away, so I looked on and on. I did not turn from the growing glow, though the light flooded now and the intensity of running rays bounced from every surface, the cubicle bounced Todd’s alabaster flood over the rest of the office in gleaming rivers, gravity-less and unyielding in intensity, that ricocheted onward like the tendrils of an earth-side supernova. I couldn’t see the wall, my computer, or even my hands; my periphery had so yielded to the preposterous non-consuming pyre so near. Whiter and whiter the space Todd became, and, now that the seconds had ceded more and more of the world to the exponentially growing light, Todd’s face held its position in reality as nothing more than an outline, a crude sketch of the satisfaction that had so held my attention just seconds before the brightness breached into life. His caricature floated alone and aloft in the white-out; the last bits of the black that constituted the place where Todd now truly “was” drifted upwards and away from me, cindering into nothingness. Ash in a rain. Black in a hungry white.
Then came the rippling red and yellow and purple and royal and every other hue of a festive nature in a furtive eruption. The Long Color rippled forth from where the vacancy left in the wake of Todd’s voiding. Streamers, confetti, paper pieces, shredded bits of tissue-soft signs of mirth and dirge shot past my amazement maintaining face and over the less aware members of the audience in volcanic, violence-less force; the firmament beneath the econo-green lighting swam in a turbulent tempest mass of vibrancy. It flowed through the air in heavy, every-colored rivers that spilled past us without warning and without tripping to touch us too taken in the totality of the to and too and to-ever-more torrent of shifting, drown-you deep hues that had no need to acclimate us so new to its saturating arrival, as all-encompassing as it were nestling. Screaming past my firmly set inquisition, the variant features of the different breeds of streamer became apparent. While all segments were fingernail-thin, the length of the free-flying party supplies varied in nature like their particular species had shattered in its early evolution. Confetti pieces were on a range of so curtly short that they seemed merely misplaced morphologies of airborne refuse to streams of brilliant, bright ripples that stretched so far as to bind the foremost corners of our workspace to the most secluded and behind-the-boiler-room hidden catacombs of our cubicleminium.
Colors wound round and round and round their new place in space with a wanton way that seemed, initially, wantless, but, as the moments passed in the sea of polychromatic tid-bits, I found that the nature of my questions would only deepen like the variety of the shades overhead—all the while I watched, I watched with inspections completely uninhibited; I saw all which I sought to see. When the projectiles would collect to make an impermeability in the path of my vision, I needed only maintain my inquiring eyes against the coalitional resistance and it would yield in reflection of its individual member’s self-thin constitutions; it let me see[18].
I saw the unending and lost-beggininged swirl overtake and overrun every life sign in the cubicle rows; the office was consumed in the heterogeneous coloration that crashed and settled like snowflake-feathers that only seemed to touch the earth as much as the Earth rose to meet them. We stood, spellbound and asking, each of us in our own hyper-honest way that was so very much our own individual expression that we may as well have shown each other our naked souls. Knees were dropped to and shelter sought beneath any desk that would welcome the drones, suddenly finding the sacred and sought-after command coming not from a department but from within them. Carren screamed her father’s name. Percy wept and laughed in equal proportion. Eyes wide, Mace raised his hands to the sky as if transposed into a ceremonial worship, spilling the heavy slime of a health shake over his head and never seeming to mind, so intense was his baptism in the iridescent. Becky’s mouth filled with a prismatic paper encroachment and was for a little while silent.
I was so unscared, unafraid, unperturbed, non-unnerved, without-haste, without-worry, at ease, and pacified. I did not need or want to run. I just watched the hues go and go and go—everywhere that was for them to be. I saw, incapable of understanding and not even disheartened by my own heart’s beat never breaking into an irregular rhythm, never matching Todd in his sudden departure into the white, clean immolation or the expression so loud and variant that no shade could circumscribe it so well as to contain it—Todd’s giving gave us parts and that could only carry whatever individual sliver of that man’s moment he peripherally placed therein, just like me, just like me, just like me.
[1] The client was seeking advising services in order to drive public action which, ideally, as far as the client was concerned, would result in the national norm, eventually global, I could only assume, being that English speakers no longer recognized the plural form of Moose to be Moose and would instead recognize said form to be Meese.
[2] This is not altogether accurate. We had both brought in doughnuts for breakfast, an activity which we normally did singularly and only once a month or so, thus, since the statistical likelihood of us both bringing them in simultaneously was pretty negligible, we did not coordinate our respective bring-ins, and we had a fairly amazing start of the work-day as a result of the cornucopia of cooked carbohydrates; spirits were artificially and unlikely high for this part of the day is the ultimate fact of the matter.
[3] Founded in 2009, Wallace and Finnegans is a business dedicated to assisting with the public awareness or general marketing of non-typical businesses and causes. The main building holds thirty employees, if the necessary interns and temporary help are present, and the two satellite branches share another twelve between them; each person employed by Wallace and Finnegans works with conviction to make the world more aware of new-neumetal albums, vaccinate-the-whales campaigns, hybrid library and gymnasiums available for public use, and whatever obscurity may have the funds to announce itself to the world. We make money; we have a reputation.
[4] Everyone calls him Mace though—a childhood nickname that drove the kind of parents who elect to use a K in what would normally be spelled Alexander, with an “x,” completely nuts.
[5] Literally everyone else in the office, except an intern named Gary, took their cube home, where I am confident they never touched the things again. Gary scrambled and solved his immediately, which was cool, but he undercut himself by doing it so easily. The game was to demonstrate the willingness to learn, to suffer a while and scrape your way towards the solution, or, in my case, to cheat in order to appear to possess said willingness, which I do not.
[6] I am very willing to bet they were watching this trap unfold from some stealthy corner of the workplace; good on you, whoever you are. Fucker.
[7] The office nickname for virtually everyone not on salary.
[8] I had one of them salt my parking space. It was summer. I am a bastard.
[9] I sincerely know more about Stephanie, Brandon, and Kale than I do about my own nephew. I have never asked about Stephanie, Brandon, or Kale.
[10] Her office contains a baseball bat, a bag of sand, a stuffed squirrel, and an absurd amount of Kale’s drawings, which he mostly does with colored pencils whilst waiting for his mom to pick him up from school on Thursdays, when he goes to his cousin Jeremy’s for a playdate; I have never asked about Kale.
[11] I have never asked about Carren’s birthday.
[12] The animosity I hold towards this woman may seem fierce, but it is totally, totally vindicated. Becky is a god damned demon sent to show humans the most convoluted ways possible to masturbate and inflate one’s insatiable ego. Scientists who observe the activities of black holes would find an uncanny resemblance between the two’s ability to pop up in the vicinity of other perfectly agent entities in the universe and swallow them in their entirety; the most impressive part of said swallowing being the fact that in both occasions the swallower would indicate no sign of having even noticed that they had say: torn apart a planet on a molecular level, interrupted the process of a star bursting into being, or completely ruined the office summer barbeque known as Jamming in July, hosted by Big Jay and The Squid from 99.3 the Jam Dam.
[13] I have only seen the third installment.
[14] Though I will give credit where credit is due; Becky is hot. She’s Stella, like the poem. She is five-feet, nine inches of slender symmetry, with black curls, a snow-white smile, and the hottest part of a flame for eye color. She is aware of these features and dresses in accordance with her genetic gifts.
[15] Percy is generally awesome. Men are more the exception than the rule for me, but, if the circumstances were right, I wouldn’t mind taking Percy out. First off, he can dance like a complete professional, which I have no personal interest in but will outright acknowledge is patently bad-ass. Second, the dude can drink. Two Christmas parties ago, we quit counting his at seventeen assorted cocktails, of which the bartender at The Mansford casino’s conference area was an absolute master craftsman. Lastly, he’s younger than me by some seven years, so I doubt I’d be bored as he’s just interesting, to a degree, in any state.
[16] I can’t recall a lot of good examples to really put this exact emotion into context, but I remember being a child and watching a car accident. Seeing the mini-van, red like a soccer-mom needing anyone’s attention’s lipstick, and the black, short-bed pick-up collide. The mom, so obviously oblivious, careening towards a truck just slipped into the street, the youth—seeming so badly cast—in the driver's seat of the truck, the speed, the violence, the newness, every single element of the situation was so, so pronounced and promised, but I just watched like I viewed an impossibility. The mother was supposed to be better; she was old. The Kid in the truck looked more like myself than her. I had learned that there were rules then, and they all shattered with that woman's then-red, once clear windshield.
[17] Albeit that measurement is only as good as any other eye-witness testimony, i.e. totally worthless.
[18] The natural questions, as I’m sure you’re well aware, are thus, “Does the yielding of the sudden, surging mass of colorations imply an awareness? Is the eruption a desire to allow or is the complacency just a surrender? Did it see some danger in denying this thirty-four-year-old, upper-middle class, professional day-dream assembler his eyeline? Does it seem somehow more likely that some hive-mind held a hand on the whole roiling swirl of shredded paper pieces? Was there some divinity here? Was there some need to hope a divinity had his eye fixed upon this that may be a devilry? Was there something here that mattered? Did all of it have some impossibly insignificant but ultimately true and valued multi-valency? Was this all just a dream, my dream?” All perfectly natural reactions.