Infantile Copybooks

I sit by the windows. They’re huge. They gape out at the street scene. Funny how the street scene doesn’t gape back. No one looks up. They’re all clutching something, or somethings. They have a voluntary dowager’s hump, male and female, young and old.

Our windows are tall because the room is tall. Not stupid tall like those snouthouse great rooms, which is just one room on top of another, with a floor missing. No, rooms used to be designed with the volume of the thing in mind, to be in proportion. No bowling alleys or elevator shafts, please. The ceiling is up where I can’t get at it. I’ve never lived in a place like that before. So the windows are not portholes. They are drive-in movie screens.

The windows don’t face north but they don’t face south, either. It’s a canyon of stone, mostly in twilight. I can sit on a sofa with my elbow on the sill and read in the nice, even light. There’s a bigger building across the street. It’s a bank with no money in it. My father worked in a bank, and used to josh with me and tell me he could never understand why people try to rob banks. There’s no money in them, he’d say, just rolled coins and IOUs.

But his joke has come true because there’s really no money in the bank across the street. It’s just a big sign they’re too lazy to remove. The bank got over their delusions of Christmas Club grandeur and wandered off to one of those squat places in the stripmall that you can’t tell from an Outback or a massage parlor without reading the signs. The ex-bank is a state gummint office now. I guess that’s where the money is these days anyway, might as well acknowledge it. The building is nine or ten stories high, depending on how you count, and mostly empty, or should be, by the look of the number of people who file into it. But the drones spread out like plankton to take up the whole thing. They all leave all the lights on all night, but close all the blinds during the day. Funny, that.

The eighties style of the building is familiar to me. It’s like Clark Kent and Stalin designed a building. It’s postmodern. It’s post everything. They tried to break up the facade with bricks and blocks and bands, and I appreciate the effort, even though it failed. But any sun I get is reflected off the plate glass across the street. I never get the real article. Everyone talks about Plato’s Cave. Talk is cheap. I’m living in it.

I watch the Maine Municipal Morlocks file in every morning. They consist of 500% women, of course, with a smattering of men in high heels. The word HEALTH is bolted right on the building, mixed in with some other text. That word is like a gauntlet thrown down to the world. I’ll pick it up. They’re all fat. If not fat, obese. Check that. Clinically obese? I dunno. Maybe morbidly obese, I don’t have a veterinary scale to check.

They’re all clutching a bucket of sugar chum. You’d think they’d catch on, since they’re in the HEALTH business, but they don’t. They wander down the street in packs to get more, discovering additional coffee breaks like goldbricking Magellans, and I swear I hear the concrete groaning under their feet. It’s summer and they wear muu-muus draped over their widow’s hump, hanging down to their sandals, and they shuffle along, and I can’t think of anything but Vogons. A building full of Vogons, obsessed with HEALTH they don’t have and forms no one will read.

Day after day, it’s natural to start to notice smaller things. Everyone entering the building has a huge backpack. I mean, big enough to camp with. That’s for starters. The few men who shamble in carry only one. The women generally have a huge backpack, plus another big satchel over their arm or over their shoulder, sometimes two, or even three more. They can’t get in the building because they’re carrying all this stuff, and clutching their binkie bottles and phones and satchels and buckets of coffee goo, and they can’t wave their badges over the sensor to get in. It’s a vaudeville with dropping and catching and shifting and juggling.

I began to wonder what you could possibly need to bring with you to an office job that required more luggage than I took when I drove across the country. I cast my mind back to my own jobs, different kinds, all serious things, and me walking in the door with just a wallet and keys in my pockets. My thinker-upper crapped out on me. What could these people possible need like that?

Then I remembered. We had little children once. They’ve escaped into the calendars now and drive to visit us by our big windows, where we amuse ourselves by watching these people trying to parallel park. But I remember diaper bags. My wife used to be able to reach into one, and pull out just about whatever was needed to keep an infant amused, or clean, or fed, or bottom-wiped. It was Felix’s magic bag, and I never understood how she managed it.

So all at once it hit me. These people pack their own diaper bags, for themselves. They are their own infants. The office building is just a daycare, where the Vogon toddlers check themselves in, and then gather in circles to recite their Vogon poetry, and try to color between the lines of their infantile copybooks. I anxiously await their destruction of the building I live in, to make way for a hyperspace bypass, or maybe another Dunkin’ Donuts. I’m sure the plans are currently on public display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.’