Jabberwocky

How can you describe that which is indescribable? Something that is so vivid and ghastly yet intangible, something obvious yet invisible and undetectable. The streets feel it. There’s something in the air or underground. It’s nothing you can touch or smell. Sometimes you can see it or feel it. It touches everyone. I myself have no word for it.
Anton was a desk jockey. He wore it well. The building he worked in wore it’s cold sleek monolithic metal like appearance well. His job was one of those types where if you do a whole lot of nothing and everything is still fine, you’ve done your job. The company respects you. His life was a nice place to be. Nice, not great, not particularly exciting, or fun, or even interesting; it was ordinary; uninspired. I present Anton’s life as a case to prove the existence of the monster that feeds off dreams. The creature that sucks meaning from existence, the dreary skies that bear down upon blackened bruised imaginations; the digital emptiness of negative land is the Jabberwocky.
Anton had enough. He wasn’t poor. He had a wife, a family, a car and of course he had his job. Every day he would wake up get out of bed, shower, dress for work, eat breakfast, talk with his wife and drive to work in his car. Like clockwork. Every day the same little routine. Every day at work he would sit at his desk, trying to sort out some problem that the company had assigned him. Every midday he would join several of the company’s employees in a cafeteria for lunch. This is where it gets spicy: the conversations ranged from four wheel drives to politics. Then he would mosey on back to his cubicle and try to figure out how to implement his solution to the problem of the day. At 5, he would drive home, occasionally singing along to a commercial radio station’s 80s pick of the day. At around 6 p.m. (traffic permitting) he would arrive home. The evening’s activities varied from time to time but usually involved watching the news, eating dinner and maybe tinkering around with his 1967 Trans-Am, Anton’s pet project. “Hey, you gotta have a hobby.” He’d say to anyone who would listen.
So, what made Anton special? What was unique about his existence that makes him a perfect example to write about? Nothing. Nothing at all. Anton was completely without culture (unless you call the discovery channel culture), inspiration, or difference. He was un-unique, so ordinary that he was extraordinary. You probably know someone like this. It is so common that it is not at all extraordinary that there are so many people like this. But that in itself is extraordinary.
Anton’s life was like this pretty much up until the day he died but there was nothing ordinary about the day he died, at least, not what he went through. I’m not talking about calamitous airline disasters or spontaneous combustion or anything as stupid as that. The best way to give it justice is to simply tell the day as it happened.
One autumn day Anton woke up and went through his ritual of going to work. It didn’t occur to him that anything was wrong or different about this day because there was nothing spectacular about it. He got to work on time and ready to solve yet another problem with management; a few performance records needed to be reviewed. He went to lunch with his co-workers where the conversation had taken the ordinary route of weekend getaways. None of his co-workers made any kind of interesting statements.
The interesting part of this day began at about 2:30. An hour and a half into working out a way to make the art department run more efficiently, Anton had some kind of breakdown. He began to sweat. This is one of the first signs of an anxiety attack which could account for what happened next. Anton looked at his desk, looked around his cubicle and then the office. “This is the world.” He muttered. “This is all we know.” He stood up. The patterns and fluorescence swirled and bore down upon him. He walked swiftly into the bathroom. Even the bathroom was no consolation. The cool tiles and the running water only stirred his stomach acid. A co-worker walked in on Anton as he was washing his face.
“Hey what’s up?” His voice was like a mincing machine, grinding Anton’s thoughts like a chicken carcass and driving away any focus that his eyes could grasp. “Not much.” Anton said.
“Still feeling the heat of the summer?” The blur inquired.
“Yeah it’s a hot one today.”
“Tell me about it! I wish I hadn’t worn wool!” A laugh, so hideous and infuriating, arose from the blurred grey and white suit and bounced off the porcelain like machine gun fire, each bullet hitting Anton in the face, chest and stomach. “Ha, ha!” Anton said and added: “See you later” as he walked out the door. No solace in the bathroom, no solace in the office. With no where to hide Anton returned to his desk.
The airlift seat sank under the weight of fear beating down upon him. The fear of being alone, the fear of being in a crowd, the fear of failure and success; fear. Great, painful, unimaginable fear washed over Anton. Afraid and alone in a crowd he did the only thing he could: he worked. He organised a management plan with the machine guns pointed at his head and ringing out around the office like a Muslim wedding, threatening his very being.
The patterns swirled and became more patterns. Even the chaotic nature of the human element of the office became a series of movements to be repeated at identical intervals. Anton didn’t even have to look up to know that the patterns were there. A phone rings, someone deletes something, the scream of a modem, photocopier, small talk, the shredder, a silence, a politically correct joke, machine gun laughter, another silence, some murmurs from accounting... the phone rings...
Anton was stifled. He had stopped sweating and was now in the first stages of a migraine. The bleak musical patterns squeezed his mind. “How can we do this everyday?” He thought. Denial hit him like bricks toppling off a wall. He got up. The patterns were still swarming but at least now his head had stopped pounding. A familiar smell invaded his nostrils. “Ooh is that coffee?” He said to his neighboring co-worker. “Yeah, Jan just put on a fresh pot.” The man sipped the hot, dark brown liquid out of a forest green mug. “I think I need one of those.” Anton said and wandered over to the coffee table.
He picked up the jug. Anton’s thoughts disappeared. He looked aimlessly at the room. The patterns were still there. Green mug, grinning idiot, busy power pussy, shredder, silence, a joke and machine gun laugh... Anton shuddered as he poured the coffee into his “Worlds greatest husband” mug. Anton was not the world’s greatest husband. In fact, he was having adulterous thoughts about a busy blonde, two cubicles away from him, right at that instant. He slobbered on the mug. This, for now, was his oral fix. He stared at the woman. He didn’t ogle her. The office is too much of a bland place for ogling. His eyes were transfixed. He was hypnotised by her, by the mind-bendingly neutral way in which she moved. She was without sex. She was without a face, breasts or hips. She did, of course, have all of the afore mentioned but it was as if they didn’t exist. Anton blinked. She moved again and looked up to him. Somewhere in the recesses of Anton’s delusional mind it looked like she was winking at him. The same way a prostitute winks at a potential customer: business like and with a purpose; the hard sell.
The woman’s face transformed. Where once she wore brown lipstick now he saw a sickly syphilitic red. Her cheeks became blushed like that of a drunk. Her hollow, bored eyes filled with the fury of a tropical cyclone, a flicker of ice surfaced in Anton’s direction. She pulled herself out of her chair in the most difficult way one can get out of an office chair, with her back hunched over the desk. She moved towards the tearoom where Anton watched on against every instinct in his body.
The strange creature that lurched towards him was neither woman nor beast, it was much worse. A corporate whore, a company slave. She threw herself into the isle and shuffled up to Anton. He was afraid. She now stood less than inches away from Anton’s face. With all of Hells might, all of the rage of the eternal fire, with every stolen breath from the lungs of every victim she screamed. She screamed in Anton’s face. Anton didn’t move. The creature lifted her hand and brushed his cheek softly and gently like the way a mother would wipe the tears away from her child’s face. The screaming ceased. Her hand moved away from Anton’s face and explored its own. She pinched her nose and pulled off her face. It all came off in one go. Blood flicked onto Anton’s face and down his shirt. The woman was faceless. Such a vial little Freudian image but this is what she was. The skin gone, there was nothing left but a grey pattern. Anton spat out some of the creature’s blood and doubled over. When he stood the woman had vanished down the corridor and was walking into the ladies room. A co-worker coughed, a modem screamed...
Anton recollected his thoughts. “This isn’t right.” He wandered back to his cubicle. It was there that he realised he had spilt coffee down the front of his shirt. He shuffled some of his papers and passed time by formatting some disks. The computer at least didn’t pretend to be anything so despicable as a half-biological, semi-existent automaton. Computers are without pretence, if you are lucky. Anton sweated as the clock ticked. It reminded him of some TV show that he had seen when he was a child about a guy with one eye who was dead and whose heart had been stashed under the floorboards. The second hand beat into his mind like the tell tale heart; infuriating, godless, ticking. Another minute passes and nothing gets done.
Anton left work five minutes early. The clock had mocked him enough with its arrogantly infinite toll. He avoided any contact with the people that he ascosciated with in the office on his way to his car.
The parking lot. More patterns. Anton took his keys out and searched for his car. He looked down the isle. “Its Ok.” He said to himself. “Just don’t worry about the patterns.” He assured the concrete columns and the Saabs. Just a little further and the whole world will be fine.” But Anton’s car was not where he thought he had parked it. Three stories underground and without a soul around, Anton felt assured that no one was watching him. But he was unaware of the three eyes that watched on, one was digital and closed circuit, the second was not so easily defined as alive or not alive. It was not a machine, or an animal. There were no people in the car park. The thing that surveyed Anton wretched and the car park wretched with it. It was in the building, in the walls and floors, and the concrete columns and Saabs he had sought a sympathetic audience with. Anton dropped his case. The fear came flooding back all at once. Slowly the creature writhed, heaving its breath over Anton’s back. Anton shuddered. He could hear nothing but white noise. This worried him even more. If there had been an explosion, a bomb, he could explain the way the floor rocked and teetered like an aerial in a violent storm. No, this was not a bomb. He wished it were. The car was not on this aisle. Anton turned and went down the second aisle. The building reared and continued heaving as though it were an Iron lung hooked up to emphysemic old man. Anton stopped. “Is it fear that this thing thrives on?” He thought. He turned around. The car park was breathing in great, furious gasps like a fish out of water. “I’m not afraid of you!” He yelled but in a way as though it were open to debate. His voice trailed off into the cliffs of metal and concrete. The creature was unperturbed. Its wheezing continued.
Anton found his car. He hurled himself into the driver’s seat and took a second to calm down. The building was still gasping. He turned the key in the ignition and reversed out of the park, wheels squealing like a pig being led out to slaughter. The car was in motion and Anton was struggling to handle the wheel but he was out of there. The second story whirred past. The first story threw itself at him. The ground floor barely ruffled his hair. The parking guard, a beacon to life and the outside world sat in his cubicle, face down in a book. He smiled and waved Anton through after Anton had slid his ticket into the machine.
Daylight trickled down from the buildings that loomed over head, the only source of life in the corporate district. There was no sunshine but the sky was lit. Anton’s eyes adjusted. His pupils dilated and contracted. He almost laughed at his big, dumb fear. The weight wasn’t gone but the shock had left his system. The sky was a shade of gold, draining into the west on the obscured horizon. There were other cars on the road. Normal cars, cars that were rusty or patched, cars with bumper stickers that said: “Mafia Staff car,” cars with Garfield on the rear windscreen, Taxis! God forsaken, slow, rusty old taxis. Cars meant life. Life meant reality. Reality meant real people, not corporate logo banners.
Anton turned on the radio. Static stifled the song. The radio farted; someone was on a cell phone near by. The shops bustled with noise, movement and colour. Real colours, colours you would never see on TV. Anton relaxed and fiddled with the dial but he still felt that all was not right. Something itched at his subconscious. He felt under the seat for where he hid a packet of cigarettes from his wife. They were still there. Relief washed over him in a deluge of satisfaction as he pulled out a smoke and put it to his mouth. He pushed in the car’s cigarette lighter but it didn’t work. Luckily, the man in the next car at the lights had a cigarette. “Can I borrow your lighter please?” Anton said as he wound down his window.
“Sure buddy.” The man reached into his pocket and produced a green lighter. Anton took it and rolled his thumb over the ignition. The lighter sparked. The flame rose beyond the end of Anton’s cigarette and balled around the car. It consumed the other cars. The people on the streets and the buildings were crumbled as the flame devoured the entire street. Ashes swept through the void in a digital breeze. Anton was alone, in oblivion. He fell into the void without screaming.

Two months later, Anton’s decomposing body was found in the gutter of that same street. His body was bloated and blue like he had been sitting in water for a long time. The coroner put the cause of death down as drowned but there was never a full autopsy conducted on Anton’s body. The company paid for his funeral and his boss read a eulogy.
©Amber Waves 2003