The Beginning
You feel you've been here before, somehow - perhaps it was
school, your mind babbles - the heavy door swinging open to take you in and
closing behind you like lips behind a big gulp, as your feet
begin to move you down the fluorescently dim corridor along which
glaze-eyed workers wander with sheafs of paper in their hands past
doorways opening on small rooms issuing eerie sounds where people talk
into phones while staring glaze-eyed out of windows at other walls or
at computer screens aglow with waterfalls of numbers.
You open the door at the end that says Mr. Pinkney scratched into a pro tem
plastic tag in a metal slot on the veneer and nothing more, and step
into the interview room where you are asked by a personnel individual,
whose desk also says Mr. Pinkney, in a portable plastic equivalent of
the tag on the door, to take a seat while he glances at your resume
with vacant eyes, then raises those same eyes to you and you feel them
pulling like glassine octopus limbs, causing you to shiver with
premonitory horror just as the man of the eyes begins asking vapidly
pointless questions about your past and how it got you here and why and
all that academic drivel, when like an icy hand on your shoulder it
suddenly dawns on you that he and they might really want you to come
and join them in this office, which is why you're here isn't it, you in
fact seek to drift along these corridors with sheafs of office papers
in your hands and glazegaze at computer screens and out windows at
other walls of other offices even now filling with employees, other
offices of the living dead, to join the mobs of LD thronging at rush
hour to the various dens of continued non-existence-- never quite born,
never quite free of the grave, never quite full, never quite empty,
never able to simply walk off for life into the actual world...
And
looking into those eyes glazing into yours, you ask yourself for the
last time, as if it were one final breath at the surface of a shoreless
sea: do you really want to be one of them? This is it... as you hover
there on the brink, the spark of free will in your eyes flickering and
dimming as it flashes like a life passing before a stranger's eyes,
when you realize with an inward squeal of horror, like an iron trunklid
closing on a brightly beating heart, that you have no choice, you never
had a choice - I mean look at those fucking student loans - and you too
are now one of them... Welcome to the organization...
