We were always shimmying around the outside of the edifice, inquiringly, tenderly rude. We used bungee cords and various kinds of cup which required little pressure for attachment. It was great. At times we noted each other, the firm outlines of one another's thighs, the way one or another would cock his head, the effect of the cold on his belly under the half-shirt. Most of the time we peered into the offices and cubicles and decided things on our own about the way things were working inside.
I was the one who saw Johnny slip. Whammo! I could speak it quite accurately--"He slipped. He put on the cup and whammo, it slid and his arm was a windmill and whammo, he plummeted as the facts attest and whammo." I was not argued with. No one sputtered. There was, moreover, no reason to do so. Johnny was on the other side of the building from me. We hadn't touched each other's equipment; no one had touched anyone else in three months. Johnny had not fallen then. Three months and whammo, fallen. Not my fault.
Inside the building, many people were packing crates with notepads, computers, desks, pens, sheafs of 50 bond, sheafs of 100 bond, letterhead, envelopes, miscellaneous plastic desk-jobbies. One woman was on the phone, so they hadn't cancelled service yet. The company was insolvent, it seemed; we turned that over for quite a while, raising our voices against the northerly blasts. "An affair with fallaciousness and general no-goodness?" someone asked. "More like total nothingness. Absence of anything vital." "Like a lack of control?" "Like the whole shebang of the inner office shtick, compelled into whole office gluten, left whiningly in a purse in front of the CEO's terrarium. What would you do?"
Johnny gone, I voted twice. Johnny and I felt it was all the CEO's fault. Someone was there saying that wasn't so likely but the CEO was walking around in there in a dog collar, largely undercutting his defense.
A few other things happened up there. There were wine, malevolence, biscuits, derision, paternity, phlegm. There were massive debts to the host country, mighty forgiveness in tense situations, laughable lurchings in and out of paternity (bis).
Edmund recounted the horrors of matching swingle singers to their prospective admirers, and we each one of us lip-synched to him as if there were no tomorrow.
Later, we spun some tales that horrified the music-lovers clustering about the beams of hardwood that made the ceiling so interesting to many.
Plaster was invented by nuns. Really. Among the decisions the nuns made those days they were making up plaster was (a) dance with those beasts that forgive, and (b) succumb to the rindpest.
I myself was born in the lower part of the Californian coastline. I was educated at Montessori and later, in Arizona, in public schools of varying density. The highlight of my education was the myriad of shocks I and my mind endured at the hands of the Arizona scholarship machine. Not that I'm complaining.
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