Day 42

           I want ham now.

            There was a letter under Charles door in the morning.  It advertised a mandatory paid company picnic and said he had to bring a dish.  Charles wasn’t much of a cook.  There was a second sticky note attached that said, “Did you look at the black container?  Why would you do that?”  He swallowed a lump of something in his throat and began with his morning ritual again.  It was ten minutes to 9, he had plenty of time.  He got his recently pressed and washed work outfit on and collected the shoddily reconstructed briefcase. 

He checked his messages and realized the time he had been wasting hanging out with Thomas.  Thomas never had anything exciting or productive going on, and now that he had this big job it seemed even less relevant.  He felt something taking form inside of the chamber he may call his soul, or perhaps it was character.  They had good times together, but the thoughts of getting high in a closet and going to a strip club didn’t incur an emotional or sentimental reaction.   He combed his hair and stepped through the door.

            Anne was no longer wearing all black.  She had a suit on which looked similar to his, but closer to hospital scrubs.  She looked between professional and overly formal.  It was an improvement, Charles nodded to himself.  Seeing her inside arguing with the old man, a one sided argument that she was winning, she looked like a younger Annette Benning from her Postcards From The Edge days.  Or The Great Outdoors.  The comparison left his head immediately as she slammed the outside gate shut and shined a snear back over her shoulder which evaported into a curling grin.  It was like there were puppet masters on both sides pulling strings attached to zippers on her face.

            Charles coughed and hit the automatic door open button without looking down at it.  He didn’t bother look up at the house where he was sure the old man was staring at him intently.  The idealized vision he had of a “real life, independent relationship” quickly crumbled and was replaced with this shoddy, ambiguous reality.  There were a lot of other windows out there but he had to perch himself by this one.

            “What’s with the old guy?”  He asked.  He was aware his questions were two dimensional and open ended.

            “My dad,”  She said, planting a kiss on his cheek leaning over the manual transmission.  There was something wrong with this girl.  “It’s my dad.”  She reiterated and turned on the radio.  Some sort of mambo song with a guy calling out at the end of every phrase was on.

            The parking lot was packed on this Monday morning.  Everyone snickered when he accidentally went around to the other side and opened her door for her.  She was fixing her pant legs but he fell right into that trap.  Charles couldn’t tell if they knew something that he didn’t know, but it was pretty obvious there was some jealousy there.  “It’s not that great!”  Charles wanted to call out.  “She’s kind of obnoxious and annoying, already, and it’s only the second day!”  He started to dread what explosion she would have when he told her they weren’t dating.  He knew it was the wrong thing to do, but he was going to wait it out.

            When they got inside, he had bigger things to worry about.  Mr. Pulp descended down the stairs in a windblown avalanche of limbs, like a giant piece of paper flying at Charles.  He plucked the black case out of Charles hand, at which moment a chorus of “oooooh” rained out like there was going to be a gradeschool type of fight. 

            “I… dropped it on the ground and it broke open.”  Charles presented his case.  A guy with his glasses taped together in the middle gave Charles the throat cutting gesture from behind Mr. Pulp.

            Mr. Pulp turned his back to Charles and read the letter slowly, throwing the black case into a round white tub.  “Well, you’re lucky,”  He turned slowly to reveal the persistent smile he had on his face.  It looked unnatural and opaque, and his eyes squinted in a way that made the skin on his face jostle for position.  It looked like a clown car.  “Still, you’re going to have to be my errand boy for awhile.  These other men are skilled.  We love you, Mr. Charles Bruckenheimer.  But we can’t afford to employ you in the same capacity.”

            Shit had hit the fan.  Charles was embarassed and humiliated.  He reached an angry finger up into Mr. Pulp’s face and then slowly dropped it back down.  He turned around looking for support but only saw snooty people looking down their nose at him.  He appealed to Anne who smiled stupidly and oversupportively.  He was still alone in his professional life.

            Charles took the garbage bags out of every room and replaced them with fresh ones.  He went out on coffee runs, took dry cleaning in, posed as a personal secretary and answered phonecalls.  Mr. Pulp repeatedly asserted how important the job he was doing was, stating tongue-in-cheek that someone had to do it. 

            Charles saw a check that next Friday.  He was making more than he deserved to be making, but was it more than the other workers were making?  Was he on an even scale?  Anne herself had joined into the experiments, and he himself was left with a very different job than the rest of the workers.  He clammed up and became shy when he would sit in the living room of Anne’s room with her old man, unable to address the old man at all.  Each time the man talked Anne would shut him up and apologize to Charles for his indecent ways.  She rolled him out onto the adjacent porch once a day, a gesture Charles equated with taking a dog for a walk.  He felt sorry for the old guy, momentarily not feeling sorry for himself. 

            Sitting in his room alone or with Anne late at night he picked up this annoying habit of trying to accommodate people.  He thought it was a self fulfilling prophecy of his job.  He apologized to the man across the hall without any provocation, and a night after he and Anne baked bread even felt inclined to bring it over to the old man.  He wrestled against these impulses, which he was sure weren’t his own, and felt his hands moving on their own like they were possessed by a demon.  Things were moving too quickly, and he felt like he had jumped and caught on the end of a fire escape and pulled himself up to a fourth story without paying proper attention to floors one through three. 

            The next thing he knew, it was the picnic.  He prepared a roast, brazing a newly dead hog with.   He took great joy in going to the local hardware store and buying an electric saw and a boning knife.  It felt like a religious experience on par to buying a gun, and although he felt himself becoming carried away his duty fed his darker side. He removed the head with insensitive exuberance, pitching its eye balls into the garbage disposal.  He followed directions online, splitting the spine and making sure the shoulders lay flat.  Anne watched on in horror and disbelief, with her mouth agape, but when he looked up from his work at her she smiled with raised eyebrows.  He painted the hog carcass with a dry rub, and it felt like attempting to reanimate a dead thing.

            At this point, Charles was the butt of many jokes around the office.  Anne would defend him, only registering in more guffaws and material for more hazing. 

            The keynote speaker at the picnic spoke for hours about hiw success in the railroading industry.  Mr. Pulp sat between a row of foreign investors, who nodded uncontrollably like they were afflicted with a voodoo virus.  Mr. Pulp constantly reached up and straightened out his eyebrows with his hands.  He spotted Charles in the distance, rolling a gurney with an enormous hot plate on it across the horizon line.  The speaker noticed that the audience was distracted and coughed repeatedly into the microphone, waiting for his viewers to regain their composure.  Anne tried to help Charles roll the unwieldy thing but he used his elbows like a rollerderby contestant. 

            “I will allow you to be late this one time,”  Mr. Pulp began, elliciting a laugh from the crowd.  The keynote speaker stepped down from his podium, defeated.  The erratic boss possessed the power to be at once discerning and indifferent.  Charles looked more like a toady than ever, wearing a sweatstained apron and hairnet.  The buffet line was set up outside, flanked by professional caterers who looked at Charles like he was crazy.  He rolled the pig to the end of their line of hot plates, unsheathing a butcher knife and staring at the line of professional cooks and food preparers with a bloodlust behind his eyes.

            “Let me help you with that,” A well-meaning foreman of the group said and narrowed his eyes at Charles, who with difficulty relinquished his grip on the rolling tray.  Other members of the foremans team assembled around him, and Charles resigned himself to having a seat in the last row of chairs facing the makeshift stage. 

            Mr. Pulp went up to the microphone, and flicking it twice with his index finger to test it leaned in and began:  “It’s a great pleasure to have Charles as part of our team!”  The coworkers hooted and hollered, humoring Charles who blushed cheek to cheek.  Anne put a hand on his back which he removed using his hand as a forceps.  He looked at the line of eyes surrounding him like a caged animal, or a gladiator who had just narrowly escaped a battle.

            The rest of the outing was a blackout in Charles mind.  He relived his experience of cooking the hog, a sharp and abrupt sequence where he could not see his own hands or feel them operate.  He watched his forearms with frailty possessing him, imagined these men he barely knew devouring his hardwork.  He sat stationed in the chair listening intently to the speakers words.  He gritted his teeth, staring at the back of Mr. Pulp’s head with a macabre fascination.