I spend my days at work staring at my coworkers wondering about their lives, wondering what sequence of events could have possibly led them to Talking Drum, wondering why they would need to slum it so low and filthy. Imagining their secret lives, their private follies and vices, wondering what kind of people they were when Mr. Charles's back was turned, when his eyes were away, when they breathed free air and lived on their own time. I see Fate prowling libraries and comic stores, bike shops and online dating sites. I see Jerome drunk and stumbling, puking in an alley, holding a stereo over his head outside some girl's window in the 1980s. I see Kittie Lee draped in leather, flat on her back singing murder ballads to a mirror hung on a stone ceiling.
I spend my days at work composing tiny stories, stories that fit neatly onto single sheets of paper. Stories about roses growing from the top of a mother's head; about fish pouring from a priest's mouth; about young boys living in subway tunnels, living off dog meat and day-old doughnuts, tattooing each others with images of crows circling five-spointed stars; about the hilarious fate of the Collosus of Rhodes; about urban trolls selling hot dogs and prophecy; about a man whose social life is impeded by his enormous beard which is perpetually and permanently on fire; about a company marketing taco-flavored pizza and, six months later, pizza-flavored tacos; about psychic hospitals and seahorses; about postmodern novels sitting on the burning shelves of the ancient Library of Alexandria; about men with holes in their chests filled with nothing but tiny moving creatures and spreading black ink.
I take these single-sheet stories and distribute them one by one, leaving them in people's deskdrawers, in the bathroom, in the mailslots of other businesses in the building, taped up in the elevator, folded under the wipers of random cars in the parking lot, in Sammy’s Super Sandwiches, in the Subway or the Chik Fil-A, at Father and Son, at Algino's, maybe at Baja Grill or the Kitchy Kitchen. Anywhere, really. I take a stack of every story I've written, the complete works of me, I take them up on the roof and let them blow away in the wind, to the four corners of the city, to the bottom of the lake, to burn up in the center of the sun.
Then I go back to my desk, back to work, back to staring at computer monitors and shuffling papers.
Maybe you can read them some day, when we're together again.
"What the fuck?" says Jerome.
"What?" Kittie replies.
"Someone left something in my desk again. Something about seahorses having sex in living seas of tea. This shit doesn't make any sense," he says, shoving the paper at her. "The last one was about a kid with no eyes being abandoned by his mother behind a Dairy Queen shaped like a Disney castle."
"Hey, I got one of these too," she says. She looks over the sheet. "Where do you think they're coming from? The janitor?"
"What janitor?"
"Wait. We don't have a janitor?" She pushes her glasses up on her ridgeless nose.
"You think this building would have a janitor?" says Jerome. "Does anything in here ever look like its been cleaned? Do you think Mr. Charles would ever spring for cleaning service?"
"Who then?" says Kittie, kicking at a dust bunny.
"My guess is the white guy, " he says.
I look up from my desk and swallow. They're on to me.
"The old man that's always in here to tutor Mr. Charles' daughter. Guy creeps me out. He's always asking me about the mall and web design and cartoons. And he's always got a stack of papers with him. All hunched over carrying that briefcase. I bet he's the one leaving his perverted weird stories everywhere. I bet he forces them on Alise."
"Oh come on," says Kittie. "I wonder where they're coming from." She took the story and pinned it to the wall, under a framed cover of Talking Drum with a picture of the president of Ghana on it.
"Who knows, but I'm gonna beat the crap out of them when I find them," Jerome says, turning back to his computer. "What was yours about? The story you found."
"A perverted old man who gives weird stories to a little black girl."
"Whoa. Seriously?" Jerome looks up and looks worried. He touches the back of his head.
"No, it was about a day in the life of a lynching tree in the deep south. When the tree rustles its leaves, it's trying to scream the word 'no.'"
