A Bazillion Banana Republics
Joan Frank

I know what you're thinking.

Known it forever.

Seen it in every least crease at the edge of your eyes each time we glide past one another, determined ghosts turning sideways to fit the passageway, carpet walked so often the middle has grown mashed and bloodless. My grin vacant, amiable. Yours, clenched: How much longer, dear God stencilled across your forehead. Moving around one another, turning sideways to fit the passage, floating toward file drawers, bathrooms, kitchen. To and fro all day like underwater weeds, movement itself a kind of postponement of the inescapable.

Your smile a flinch. A reflex. Pinched, glassy, as if the tops of your cheeks hurt. Sometimes you remember you have been wearing that tight expression all day like a coat, greeting delivery people (Livin' the dream! crows the UPS man). Clients, sales jocks, baffled elders, sullen kids looking for the law office or radio station down the street; types who wander in asking for a job, as if they've come from another century when that was how jobs were obtained; other employees parading through, offering the same language about weather, recipes, hangovers, precisely how much sleep was or was not enjoyed the night before: the back-and-forth of it a swing, always in motion: words and meanings evaporate like steam. Sometimes when you think no one's looking you let your face fall, eyes tracing, out the window, the serrated tips of the eucalyptus at the far end of the parking lot, dark branches in low mist, marking the boundary of the rest of the world. 

Sometimes when you stand at the copy machine looking out the window this way, and I approach from behind without making enough sound, you gasp and jump when I speak as though I had stabbed you. Then you press a hand to your heart; the other hand grasps for the nearest surface to lean against: your breath panting. I always apologize, laughing a little, and you always look away, mortified at your own nerves; then your face softens with relief: it was only me—you believe I am generic, unconscious, cheerful and stupid as a dog—and then (and this is always curious to me) your face seems to grow very sad.

When I pass your desk I say good morning, words about the weather or the next holiday, or my truck or motorcycle, or my kids. I herd our remarks, as if they were lazy cattle, toward my setting up a joke, often a pun. I love puns. I cannot hear them often enough. Like many men, I think them marvelously funny and clever—though I would never say words like "marvelously funny and clever." (You would.) I can feel my own face light up when I make a pun: cannot conceal the pride it gives me to formulate them. When I do, you look at me with a congested air, and you muster the wince that means to pass for a smile. You never tell me outright that you hate puns, though at some bottom-of-the-sea level it appears clear you do. Still, I cannot permit that notion to penetrate the daylight hours of consciousness. So I tell myself that I can never decipher your expression. I tell myself it may actually be suppressed mirth, some spasm of an attempt at demure restraint. At the same time part of me understands, with confused disappointment, that you are truly not amused. You seem to genuinely wish, for both our sakes, that you could be.

Sometimes we pass twice in the space of that many minutes: full circle. Your curly dark hair floats along just above the fabric-and-metal partitions between cubicles while you distribute office mail, or make your way to the kitchen to wash your apple under the faucet. By the time I feel the air pushed away by your motion past the opening of my cubicle and turn my head, you are gone.

But your face. I've seen it ten thousand times.

You think I don't know what that look declares? What it tells me is scampering through your head? Your estimation of the empty swimming pool of my mind?

It's just that I cannot—cannot counter it. Don't have the skills to—argue it away.

At least I think that's what I mean.

I cannot say what I mean. I can think it, as I do now, but can find no words to speak it. No one equipped me—at least, not the way you've been equipped. You have words ready to hand at both flanks, like a gunslinger. You can toss them into the air in a blurring spin, snatch them back as they fall: give them a couple of lightning-twirls before pocketing them. I can just barely absorb the light they throw. Not much else, to be honest.

I have words—somewhere. They're like coins trapped in the deep, too-narrow seam of a wallet. I fumble for them while time pours over us: heavy, ticking moments like swaths of wool. The phone rings. Other people approach. I become invisible again, never able to grasp the words and pull them up in time.

Sometimes I conjure the words later, dimly. I perfect them after a few beers. By then it's far too late, and there's no one to tell.

More baffling: I really don't want to have to think about all that.

I just want to eat my sandwich and spoon up my canned soup (beef vegetable), which I heat in the microwave in the lunchroom every day at noon sharp, and not feel like a horse behind a fence taking a piss, which is the judgment you give off like a scent as you stalk past to wash your apple at the sink. (The actual scent in the room is that of the beef vegetable soup, a cafeteria smell that always excites me and also makes me sleepy.) You are striving for neutrality when you glance but that glance, in a whoosh, takes in the food and the folks I am sitting with. Among them would be Lucy, my longtime colleague who weighs close to 300 pounds and votes Republican, and who every Christmas gives a handmade candy house to each of the five bosses.

It's like something hurts you to glance at us. Something sticking in your ribs. You never say anything, but accelerate your pace. The rest of us talk about television shows, recipes. One day we talked about what direction water turns as it funnels down the public drains during rainstorms. Hey, we're engineers. That's the kind of talk, the kind of activity that makes us happy. It pays our bills and gives us habits.

Habits. The pure comfort, the deep pleasure of repetition, of routine. I want to collect my paycheck every other Thursday and have pizza or Chinese takeout with my family Friday nights, once in a while go to a movie with my wife, who has awful morning breath and could wash her hair more often and maybe get it cut to something shorter than Old Hippie length now that she is fifty-odd, but I would never dare say such a thing, and anyway she is faithful and kind and a good mother to our kids. Some years we go to the Renaissance Faire, where I wear my pirate bloomers and swashbuckler boots and my Three Musketeers hat with its huge dyed-turquoise feather, floating along like an airborne pet. Or the Dickens Dinner, for which I wear my black silk vest and bowler, spats and of course, my watch fob. I bring the watch to work: love retrieving it from my pocket on its glittery chain, love feeling its pucklike body in the center of my palm, love the click that swings open the spoonlike door from its little face. You have looked on while I perform that ritual—hauling up the watch, clicking it open, examining, nodding, clicking it shut—your expression doing its supreme best to hold something in check.

And if at the lunch table my co-worker Lucy and I talk about latest episodes of American Idol with unwavering gravity, if we bat around opinions of our favorite shows' characters and what we estimate will be their likely next moves—well, that is a thing that I am willing to bet that many, many other upright individuals are doing during their simultaneous lunch hours in cities and towns across the three thousand miles of this glorious continent of ours (which my wife and I hope to tour in a recreational vehicle after I retire) where a person is free to hold tightly to a good job like mine. My lunchmates and me are not saints and we will not be curing cancer anytime soon, but we are the building materials; we are the buildings themselves, streets and sidewalks and traffic lights and all-you-can-eat restaurants and roadside rest stops and K-Marts and Olive Gardens and True Value Hardwares—even, if you will, the Disneylands of this best of all countries we live in. I cannot see how seeing and hearing us gives you pain.

What do you want? What would you rather I, or the rest of us here, said or did?

I don't mean we would obey you as though whatever you say is one of the ten commandments or something. I am a grown man in the last clasp of middle age; my history has sculpted me in a way that cannot be undone. Of course I could never describe myself aloud like that to you. These are inarticulable thoughts, remember, including the word "inarticulable."

But how can anyone know what you want if you don't tell us? You must want to be somewhere else. Your face pretty much announces it. Where would that be? Maybe you are a writer—I see you working on stuff on your computer screen which you flush as soon as anyone comes into earshot. I can only make out lines. Sentences, like horizontal columns of ants. And always books in your handbag. Library books: I recognize their clear plastic covers. You have a lovely voice, too, you know. Someone must have mentioned it to you by now. Alto. People who phone here always tell us they love listening to you. You should sing with my Unitarian choir. We could use an alto. Would you like to use your voice somewhere else? How about New York? You look like a New Yorker to me; seem to have the markings, if you'll pardon that sort of slang. I'm a duck hunter, so it comes out unbidden that way. Did your relatives happen to start their American lives in those parts? Not that I mean anything by that, of course. Mine come from midwestern farmers, and before that they were Scandinavian or Irish, or both—the wife made a hobby of tracking it down. I think I tried to tell you about her findings once; you suddenly got very busy and then hustled out the door, claiming you wanted some air.

I know you need money. But—no offense—you don't exactly seem the type to be doing a front desk job. You're a bit old for it. It's just that some stretched-out ordeal seems to be cooking you on a low flame, under our small talk. Painmaking. Maybe it's about money. Well, everyone has that, can't much help you there. Myself, I've had this job so long that if the bosses laid me off, I don't guess I'd know how to recommence. But I know the bosses will go on needing me: I do the muckwork, the sludge-raking no one else has patience for. I'll stay on until retirement, which I'll postpone to the last minute, so that by then I'll have saved a fat fortune, including the 401(k) the bosses have matched these many years. My wife and I will be all tucked in.
Of course I feel happy about that. Who wouldn't? None of us here talks about those matters to each other. It's one of the built-ins among us, a protocol. Your face, however, often seems to dare us otherwise.

Once you actually said it:  I wish everyone here wore a sign around their neck showing the amount of their pay, the way they did in the early days of Dorothy Parker.  At least that's what I think I heard. You said it in the form of a sigh. No one was around: I happened to be ambling by. Besides not knowing who Dorothy Parker was (and sorry, really not caring to know)—I firmly believe that wearing signs like that would not be a good idea at all. I mean, the bosses are millionaires. That's just understood. Unspoken, naturally. It wouldn't be a good thing to advertise. Make the natives restless. We're like a small third world country in certain ways. One false word or move, off with your head. (Just think of it: a bazillion banana republics, flung like a sequined net over this great land, each point of light its own cuckoo sovereignty.) Of course we try not to suck up too obviously, though the realities are plain as your nose. We all sit around that big table at staff meetings listening to the financial report (the part they let us glimpse), mute as mice. Someone cracks a feeble joke. That's an effort to show we're at ease here. Family.  Everyone turns a bright, empty face toward the bosses: sunflowers toward light, attentive and wide and perfectly blank. Capitalism: can't shoot it, can't respect it in the morning.

I know it chaps your backside when Lucy deposits those hand-built chocolate houses every Christmas, one for each of the bosses to take home, onto their desks. Fussy sugar-architectures, size of a birdcage, sitting on cardboard platters covered with foil. Is it because Lucy guards tender feelings in her heart for each of the 40-something millionaires and their non-working wives and best-of-everything children?

I saw you pause and stare one day, maybe your first year here, at the candy-house perched on Manny's desk. You were dropping off his mail. Your face stopped and emptied as your eyes traveled the M&M roof-tiles and peppermint-stick window trim, the Hershey's Kiss shrubbery.

You stared as if you'd stumbled upon a corpse dangling inside a closet.

Then you wheeled around fast and fled the room, rushing past me, your eyes filled with something I'd be forced—were I buttonholed about it on a witness stand—to call despair. But look at it closer. Maybe that is the only way Lucy can say hey, fellas, thanks for my job. Maybe that's her best shot, her finest gift, like the Little Drummer Boy drumming his drum for baby Jesus. And look at it from the bosses' side. How could they say no? They have no time to dick around (you'll excuse me) with parsing those sorts of boundaries. They juggle more urgent worries, like keeping the whole damn Ferris wheel rolling—waterwheel, more like—from which paychecks continue to flow.

Which is why I am so sorry—truly so very sad, and sorry—that yours had to stop.

When JW, the top boss, called you into the sound-sealed, vertical-louver-sealed room to speak with you the first week of this month, your voices weren't audible, but there was not one human being in the building who did not know what was transpiring in there. Other heads had been severed. One day we saw them: the next, they were gone, and JW would announce it at a specially-called staff meeting. Some of those layoffs had hurt you, I could see. You missed some of those people; you'd liked a couple of them a lot. You kept your eyes down awhile.  But later, when the bosses swung through the big glass front door with their autonomic howareyou, you arranged a shining, seamless face. You gave the impression that instant of an alert, smart, attractive, even refreshing operation, in sparkling productive order since the beginning of time. You seemed to embody that operation. It was a kind of genius, from my view—maybe pathology, from yours.

But once in a while, if someone mentioned the recently departed, you allowed your face to drop. And looking at no one, you began to sing, very softly, those first singsong lines of a familiar childhood tune. Ten little nine little eight little Indians, seven little six little five little Indians.

Which must have had a lot to do with why, after your meeting with JW, none of us had the nerve, for the rest of the day, to emerge from our cubicles and pass by your desk. Not one of us. We could not risk looking at you. So we never saw your face when you left the conference room, though I can imagine it contorted, drained, pale.

Maybe JW's was too, though he disappeared back up to his office. And we never saw you fetch a couple of big cardboard boxes and begin, with dazed movements, to place your private possessions inside them. Maybe that was a scenario you had already thought about, maybe even prepared for. You emptied your drawers pretty fast, that much is sure, because within an hour you had carted the boxes out (through a cold, heavy rain—ropes of it, like in an old movie) to the trunk of your car, and after two more hours of sitting motionless at your desk staring at the clock, you scrawled on your final timecard that you were taking a sick hour.

And you left.

A terrible economy. Oh, yes, everyone knows it. And JW even said, in the special meeting he called next day for those of us who still remain, that the layoff had nothing to do with you, with anything you had done or not done, that he knew we all loved you. There just wasn't any longer enough money to pay you. Put another way, if there are too many folks on a lifeboat with limited supplies, the boat's owners have to make some harsh decisions about who gets to stay on the boat. Right? We listened silently. One woman raised her hand and said, "Does this mean we have to do our own filing now?"

Isn't that how business rolls?

Business has to destroy each unsupportable entity, like any healthful organism. Well, org. Duh! As in organization. Hah. Good one, yes?

Of course the bosses have a standard packet they give out, with that little cardboard booklet from the unemployment people. All the women said they were sad they didn't have a chance to say goodbye, throw a nice farewell lunch—though we know you told JW that you wanted nothing to do with that. I guess I can understand. I don't myself know what I'd have said, had I found the nerve to face you that last day. What none of us can ever say, or even cop to awareness of, is how we feel like the shamed citizens of a murderous autocracy. That the best we can do is stand by trying to look elsewhere while the excreted unfit gets led out into the empty field, is forced to kneel, and shot point blank in the head.

We are sincerely hoping you'll be our Facebook friend.

Certainly you must have much to do, much to think about, since that day you drove away from the office, your old hatchback's trunk holding the boxes containing your classical guitar CDs, framed photos of your sister and nephews, greeting cards, hair gel, toothbrush, favorite rollerball pens, postcards from the Met (Edward Hopper and Cezanne), sack of raw almonds, scraps of paper with funny pictures on them drawn by co-workers' kids, mine included.

These words come from a place I never go.

But in some deeper place, locked into the marrowstream of veins and arteries where at night I hear blood rushing and see red cells pushing along like a ragged tide with every thrum of that brave electric muscle at the body's center . . . the melody plays.

I hear your voice. Clear, soft, innocent, in perfect imitation of a child's singsong. Ten little nine little eight little Indians.

Slow, pleased, careful.

Waiting.

Joan Frank is the author of four books of fiction: her recent story collection, In Envy Country, won the 2010 Richard Sullivan Prize in Short Fiction, and a new novel called Make It Stay will appear in 2012. The recipient of many grants and awards, she has taught creative writing at San Francisco State University and in private consultation. She lives in Northern California. Visit Joan at www.joanfrank.org.

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