The postbox contained sales circulars, but no mail.
The exterior theatre doors across the street were again open; Liam pressed his curiosity as far as the lobby. The auditorium stage was visible passed the next set of doors, and on the lit stage, where before the gaffer’s tape was noted, a door frame and door occupied centerstage—the trespasser gasped.
He was certain this was the ornate door seen days before at the standing tower.
A straw broom was heard brushing against balcony steps above him from the lobby. Darkness was seen in this direction—a darkness so uniform that the searcher feared it to be autogenous. The obstacle it presented to his mind sent him stumbling back onto steps that, seconds before, brought him confidently onto the premises.
A janitor was slow to emerge in his field of vision.
“Has the hypnotist left town?” was put to him.
The fellow parried, “I do not venture near the stage area unless told to do so by the stage manager.”
“You see productions come and go. You see what is unpacked, and how the stagehands arrange props. What is the point of the door?“
The custodian leaned away under an overgrowth of wiry brows, which shielded his eyes from direct detection. “Door…?” he dissembled. The broom handle was twisted like a crooked wand, and more prevarication was offered. “It’s like the plot of some old sitcom,” he began, “where the guy is hypnotized while watching someone else be hypnotized. He doesn’t know he is hypnotized, and is unable to wake up until someone discovers the goof-up, at which point the hypnotist is called in to wake the guy. The joke turns on the trigger: the thing that the hypnotized guy sees or hears or whatever… This trigger initiates behavior that is inappropriate to situations, whereupon laughter ensues.”
Liam did not confess his confusion.
“Do you hear a laugh track?” asked the gentleman.
The substantial curtain draping the back stage wall fluttered and enlarged, as it was about to be carried higher into the fly loft. This updraft likely owed to a rear stage door opening and closing. Tread (or the low chime of a hammer) sounded.
Liam was soon away.
That evening’s dream began unpromisingly. The dreamer stood on the deck of a small boat. Despite his morbid fear of water, nothing in the cloudless blue sky indicated alarm in its reflection below. He looked skyward along the tall mast to anchor himself against the possibility of rolling waves. His squint eased down its sun-piercing pinnacle and found the shadowy entrance to the cabin below deck. Here a landline telephone rang.
(No one, the passenger believed, should respond to this high-sea absurdity.)
The untested landlubber turned his attention next to the stern of the boat where the broad sail cast its triangular shadow over someone facing the rudder. This seafarer with salt and pepper hair wore a skipper’s hat, and smoked a cigarette. He seemed unaware of his onlooker while he gazed fixedly at the horizon.
The telephone was answered below deck. A woman’s voice materialized and, from the sound of her sobbing, was believed to be Liam’s mother. Whatever sorrowful news greeted her, it did not match the bright day, the sea, or the contemplative smoker.
The skipper’s outline remained squared to the stern, with no profile of his face shown. When the shadow of the sail shuffled off his outline, Liam was certain this was an uncle of fond memory.
Presently the relation raised his hand to the back of his head. He began to scratch beneath the lining of the cap, just when the shadow’s penumbra again settled over him.
In this dim light, his fingers appeared to move unnaturally, as if partially detached. Within creases of skin and disturbed tufts of hair a miniature portrait formed. A knuckle became a drooping eyelid, and then, inconceivably, an eye formed in the arch below it. A second eye next appeared—it formed with effort among the remaining fingers. These sightless eyes hung on the back of the uncle’s scalp and resembled the exaggerated, bulging eyes on a child’s crude Halloween mask.
The uncle was famous for mischievous humor; and the nephew suspected he was the instigator of a prank phone call below deck. No doubt he impersonated a state trooper with tragic news of a highway fatality to provoke his gullible sister.
The sea and sky gave him anonymity; and as the dark theatre of the broad sail was prolonged, his backward-facing visage did not soften with laughter. Truly the independent fingers reached for greater grotesqueness, yet did not gain true vision by this license.
So little detail in the horizon was troubling, but only the broad sail was seen to menace the boat.
Arriving to work the following morning, Liam found it less vacant than the day before. The subcontracted employees had packed and crated molds for fabrication, and it now appeared that others would replace them. These were the first pallets to arrive from North Korea, and an overabundance of shrink-wrap compounded their mystery. One intelligent guess was made: These aluminum molds’ dimensions roughly matched their antecedents, so life-size human figures would be their likely product.
The propagation of these new pallets was an activity of evening hours, and suggested that an end of employment was near.
It was with this looming prospect that surprise greeted Howard and Liam when they converged on the break room. Another non-Asian employee sat in a chair sipping coffee. He introduced himself as Jonah and, in context of a cane and dark sunglasses, appeared to be sightless.
Howard inquired, tentatively, “Are you a consultant?”
“I am brought here to uncover commercial espionage.”
This proclamation did not fail to startle, since any planned reconnaissance was compromised in being made public knowledge. The listeners assumed a joke was made. Lacking confidence in their judgement, however, they gave the unsmiling stranger latitude over his end of the table.
Apropos of nothing, the man gestured toward the bulletin board; the flyer of previous discussion was still tacked there. Its curled edges, like theatre curtains, prevented any aspect of the artist model’s face from being seen. The folded shape similarly attracted a draft.
“Is there anything that you can tell me about that noisy sheet of paper?” was asked.
This question was put to Liam, or at least the questioner lobbed the volley in his general direction. “Well,” he stammered.
“Anything will do,” insisted the questioner.
“The woman in the picture wears a charm, or necklace.”
A pause followed, but no attempt was made to ascertain whether this information was true.
The interrogator continued, “I only have three fingers on this hand because of a snapping turtle I kept as a pet when I was a boy.”
(This declaration was patently false. Four intact fingers were held up as a visual aid.)
“What did you pull down from the dropped ceiling the other day?” Jonah inquired.
“Malformed plastic.”
“You do not know what it was?”
“It might have passed, with imagination, for a replica of a sea turtle.”
The questioner did not like this flippant answer. He again held up four able digits and ruminated. “My other fingers believe that my missing finger still belongs to this hand, even after, by way of a domesticated reptile, it was snipped, digested, defecated, and entered the life cycle of a weed bed. What is there to dissuade their belief where they always travel in the company of a phantom? What is there to dissuade my belief that I have four fingers on this hand where four fingers regularly appear in my dreams?” He rose abruptly from the table. “Think about it,” he advised, and stepped heatedly out of the room.
Liam, baffled, commented, “He left his walking stick behind.”
“Perhaps he only dreams he is blind and requires it,” observed Howard.
“Do you think our daily discussions here in the break room are broadcast throughout the building?”
The friend gave no reply to this but was presently on his feet. He unfolded one side of the bulletin board flyer. The artist model wore an open collar blouse in the picture, but no necklace. “I am too inured of this environment to refute your understanding,” he muttered.
The pallets from North Korea were piling up in Building B, while Building A increasingly came to resemble the barren prairie landscape outside its doors. Due to this process of gradual evacuation, spookiness found ample space to invade, and carried throughout both buildings like a contagious airborne disease.
As a practical matter, fewer obstacles should have improved opportunities for seeing fellow employees at work, but Liam was convinced there were fewer of these. One may attribute this elimination to a self-selective process, or to natural attrition where an unsympathetic landscape made off with the weak. South Dakota had a terrible habit of gobbling up individuals who did not conspicuously name family members in the region, or speak responsibly of mortgages. At any rate, termination notices had yet to go out with paychecks.
While this queer vacancy continued, the Korean supervisors became less adventurous in roaming the plant. They presumably huddled in their offices where a row of tinted second floor windows overlooked much that concerned them. The new hire had put in one dramatic appearance in the break room, and was not seen again.
Copyright © 2008-2022 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.