There was truth and as briefly as it lit, it was dismissed. It wasn’t a candle being snuffed, nor a light switch thrown, it was simply not there anymore, like when one says of the fat girl in the back of the class, “She’s been sick for a week? I hadn’t noticed.” Though, this fat girl never returns. She hasn’t moved away, she hasn’t the chicken pox, she is just gone, no forwarding address.
I was lucky for I got to see that brief moment of truth shining in slow motion as a still frame of a hummingbird’s hover for nectar, and even then I wondered if what I saw was the real for it was so incredible my eye and mind did not correspond on the matter. Speaking each a different language, my mind translated this brief moment in time as incompressible, though my eye impressed upon it to believe. Over the years, I think my mind has relented somewhat, and the photograph my eye took that day has come more into focus than before.
It was when I was younger, of course, but not so young not to be of use. I was through with my schooling, that much I can recall, for I remember being world weary of the pressures of being needed at a specific time, in a specific place and all of the chores and duties that needed to have been completed in order for me to arrive at that destination. There was laundry and lunches, the cleaning, always cleaning, of the floors and the dishes, the gathering and re-gathering of all the little chicks of maintenance, bodily and otherwise, that made a woman wonder if entropy wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
I was at my appointed place, at my appointed time, on my appointed day, one of six for the week, when I noticed that I was the only one there. The only one I recognized, that is. There were other people, although people unfamiliar to me. As was my loathing to situations unfamiliar and people of the same, I believe they looked quite rubber and too pale, as one might think of a robot, or an automaton. I began to wonder if that is what perhaps they were as no one had yet spoken to me about what the day’s agenda might be as of yet.
I went about my work waiting for guidance, keeping my eyebrows from rising too often at their strident, stiff movements about the floor. Thankfully, I hadn’t long to wait for my neighbour and partner, Sasha, sauntered in her painfully high heels. Effortlessly she made her way over to my desk, when I had hoped she may stumble only a bit to see her human and fallible and graceless. I hardly wished a broken ankle on her, for she received enough attention from the others without having them at her feet to pen their names on an imagined cast. She was wearing a cotton candy nail polish and probably underwear that matched her brassiere. According to my desk clock she was 23 minutes late. I would never be able to get away with such tardiness and I both adored and despised her for it.
“What’s with all the mannequins?” she asked, jerking the chains on her handbag toward a particularly stiff man in beige pants, white starched shirt and a baby blue necktie. He didn’t notice her gestures or her question, though he was within earshot.
I raised my shoulders slowly in an ‘I don’t know’ motion and looked at all the beautiful bodies roaming about. They were mannequins, certainly, for not a one of them were unsightly, or out of shape, or even very noticeable. They were fixtures of the clothing they wore, not the other way around. The faces bore no expression and I watched carefully for the brunette by the water cooler to blink until Sasha interrupted my observations with another one of her own.
“Do they ever sit down?” she asked, her voice lowered now that she had a minute to notice that she was not the center of attention. “Do they ever stop moving?” she asked, a question that intended to be rhetorical, for her voice had dropped to a near whisper.
“You should just go to work,” I said to her, and then I blushed. I wasn’t her boss; I didn’t need to tell her to get to work.
Her face stared in my direction, while her eyes bored through the back of my skull and looked at the fake gold framed Klimt print on the wall behind me. I believe it was called “The Mermaid” and had been the subject of a matter of sexual harassment in the office. The lady in the picture was topless and a concern had arisen over the state of her undress with the female colleagues on this floor. This was followed by fraternity-like behaviour by the male counterparts who diligently covered up the mermaid’s breasts with bikini tops fashioned out of newsprint or plant fronds or the like. When the picture was asked to be removed, Sasha took the side of the men saying dreamily, “I think she’s beautiful,” and the vote was majority rules. The Klimt stayed.
I turned around to look at the Klimt. There was nothing extraordinary about it, although it seemed someone had been blowing spitballs near it and one had stuck at the bottom of the poor lady’s throat.
“I abstained from voting,” I told Sasha, in case that was the reason she was looking at me so intently.
She blinked a few times and seemed to come back to reality and looked at me directly in the eyes. “Abstained? Voting?” It was like she didn’t comprehend the language I was speaking.
“I didn’t vote the painting to go. I really like it actually,” I said, turning toward the wall again. I didn’t like the painting at all. I found it terribly obscene with the woman smiling and her bare breasts just hanging out there for all the world to see but since Sasha was the only one in the office today, I thought a little flattery couldn’t hurt.
Sasha shook her head as if to clear it, or perhaps she had water in her ears from her morning shower. I have had that problem from time to time and have missed entire conversations because of it. Thankfully, none of them I was directly involved in for I would have died of embarrassment.
“Cyn-Cyn, I don’t understand,” she shook her head and waved her hands. I preferred that she call me Cyn-Cyn over my given name Cydney, which people tended to pronounce Cindy, including her. I was never much of one for protocol, so I didn’t correct her.
“The Klimt painting..,” I began.
“No!” she barked at once, cutting me off mid-sentence. Her eyes shot little darts in my direction, “That is NOT what I mean.”
Sasha had a tendency to be a little touchy. It was what made her so efficient, Mr. Peebles, our boss, said. “You can handle her, Cindy,” he told me once, “You’re patience enough.”
Sasha got up and stood in front of a dashing ‘mannequin’ with a cleft in his chin and the squarest shoulders I’ve ever noticed on a man. She looked at him defiantly in the eye, trying to challenge him into speaking with her, but he simply slid around her, much as a stream will avoid a toddler’s attempt at crushing it with a stone. She tried the same thing with a few of the others bustling about and with the same results.
“HEY!” she shouted all at once from the middle of the office. I jumped out of my seat but no one else in the room even flinched. “Do you think they’re deaf?” Sasha questioned, but she wasn’t directly looking at me so I assumed it was another one of those rhetorical questions she didn’t want an answer to. “HEY!” she shouted right in the ear of a pretty blonde zooming past her on some unknown course with an unknown destination. The blonde didn’t even blink.
None of them seemed to blink.
Sasha was getting more frustrated and the vein over her right eye started to bulge. Rocky Johns, who works in accounting, likes to call her “Tapeworm” when she gets this upset because he says the vein in her head feeds off anger. Of course, he doesn’t call her that to her face. And, not to encourage him, I’ve only laughed aloud at that joke when I’m at home by myself.
While I was smirking about her having a tapeworm in her head, Sasha had grabbed the blouse of a petite redhead. She was pulling back on it as the redhead kept trying to stride forward and the effect was something like that of a husky dog pulling a snow sled five times it’s weight. The pale green blouse was straining at the buttons, but still the redhead walked, held tighter and tighter by Sasha until it seemed she was only marching in place. One by one the buttons shot off with an audible ‘pop’, ‘pop’, ‘pop’ and released of her shirt the redhead confidently strutted through the doors and on to whatever task was so urgent ahead of her. No once did she make a sound, or slow down her incessant feet.
Sasha turned to me with the green blouse hanging limp as a shot duck in her hands. Her eyes were questioning, her jaw was slack. I had watched “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” on a late night movie channel last fall for my birthday (I had the next day off) and the fellow at the end of the film looked something similar to Sasha right now. Sasha wasn’t drooling, though.
“Maybe we should just get to work…?” I suggested and bent my head down to be an example – and prepare myself for the barrage of verbal attack Sasha might choose to give instead.
After a few minutes of work, I had forgotten Sasha was even still standing there when I heard a small noise like a mouse’s tail being stepped on. Sasha was still holding the deflated green blouse.
“Sasha?” I said. “Did you hear a mouse?”
“She had no nipples,” Sasha whispered, and now she was drooling a bit, the wetness leaving a slippery blotch on her silk shirt the colour of old tea.
“What are you talking about Sasha?” I said. I made a furtive look back over my shoulder at the Klimt mermaid, for Sasha’s eyes didn’t seem to be focused on me. The mermaid smiled gaily in my direction, oblivious.
Sasha repeated herself more loudly. “She had no nipples,” she said again in amazement, “She was like a Barbie doll.”
Before I had realized she was talking about the redhead, Sasha had stripped out of her shirt and was in the process of removing her bra as she walked out the door. There was a unspoken truth in her eyes as she left, but I didn’t notice whether or not she had nipples.
After looking at the doorway for a moment, I put my head down and went back to work.
