The Cursor Falls

Layoffs having cleared out Marketing Communications' cubicles the way a fry cook empties an egg carton, you would have thought there would be more privacy, not less. But with brochure copy spewing out fast, me giddy with productivity, partnership spreading like a smile, when I laughed out loud, Dottie's secretary way down the hall asked, "Are you okay?"

She'd probably heard my Amtrak call, too. Never mind. We were partners. And partners supported each other. They understood each others' industries and processes. Their productivity was our productivity. It was as simple as that. And at 2:30, it was as simple as e-mailing the brochure draft to Dottie. Which wasn't so easy, because I kept getting this "invalid password" message. I phoned Dottie -- gone for the day -- and I was just about to phone technical support when Julia from Human Resources appeared outside my cubicle. I caught her expression, very Personnel, with mouth set, eyes averted. She was clutching the folder which, I knew from observing others, contained my severance pay, cubicle inventory form and pre-execution checklist.

Julia led the way to the small conference room. She was large and her face puffy, but she walked with grace and exuded maternal understanding. Fear was rising in a froth, terror popping up the side of my cheeks. Julia shut the door, opened the folder. "I probably don't have to tell you...." She was a decent person. They all were. And this was my comeuppance. For years of sneering at people who had offices with doors that closed. For sitting sullen when everyone cheered at the annual sales conference. For not finding a new job. For never really knowing her or Dottie or anyone else here..

* * *

I shook Julia's hand when it was all over and definitely felt her cringe. I couldn't tell if it was the awkwardness of the moment or the fact of shaking my left hand while the right one sat paralyzed on my lap. Surely she was used to me after all these years. Or maybe in this final hour she was dropping pretense and giving rein to a certain revulsion at my cripple's bony, withered wrist and hooked, spastic fingers. This thought unnerved me, and I rolled out of the conference room too fast, paying too little attention, and banged my wheelchair into the wastebasket next to the Xerox machine. I had hit the wastebasket before, making it wobble and tip. My boss Dottie had promised at least twice to have Maintenance move the copier so my wheelchair could get by. But now the rubbish container lay on its side, a litter cornucopia of botched Xerox pages spilling onto the carpet.

A momentary embarrassment, and no need to make a valiant one-armed effort to retrieve the contents and right the wastebasket. For it was understood that this was a team effort, that I fit into Red Oak in a certain way. That within the confines of the Americans with Disabilities Act, there was room for me and my wheelchair and wastebaskets and narrow passageways. Thanks to me, no one could say narrow minds were in force at Red Oak, my being employed and all. For which I was grateful, adaptable and cooperative. In all moments, even this one. Except that now I had a certain adrenal flush and felt the daring urge to boot the wastebasket upright, to give it a flip and a tip with my wheelchair pedals, deftly knocking the accordioned papers back into place. I did that now, turning the joystick of my electric wheelchair with a hard left, and knocking the wastebasket not upright, but end over end, so that it emptied itself completely in a vomit of paper, staples and coffee grounds. Which kicked me up an adrenal gear, and into the conviction that one more whomp with the wheelchair would back flip the wastebasket into place, leaving others to deal with the spilled contents. And with another joystick maneuver, I caught only the edge of the wastebasket, which dealt a surprising blow to the cubicle partition behind it.

The electric wheelchair is a close cousin of the electric forklift, a tough, battery-laden vehicle designed to move heavy loads forcefully, between charges. My wheelchair was now nicely charged, thank you very much, and I couldn't resist a head-on probe of the same partition, which had once seemed wall-like in its rooted substance. But with a second slam, it rocked like a stage set. Gasps could be heard in the far distance, but the near distance was much more interesting, things giving way as they were. I knew now that the limiting factor in the cubicle wall's life was its joints. And that a full-speed reversal, wheelchair backing up with joystick bent to the ground, that action aimed at the partition joint, would have more or less the impact of a suicide bomber. I blasted through the wall backwards, hit a desk in Sales Support, then threw the joystick forward and came out the way I came in. There were people watching, but they were standing in groups far up the aisles. Knots of them, terrified and effete. I knew I had a brief opportunity and took it, cruising back to my cubicle and pausing for a 30-second scan of walls, drawers, files, bulletin board. Time enough to grab and run. Glowing in the heat of combat, it would come to me. There it was. I snatched it from the wall, drawing pins flying. It was my nephew's sketch, "My Uncle Playing Tag." An eight-year-old's color pencil depiction of me sitting on a sofa while he and his older brother raced back and forth, daring me to grab them with my good arm. "My Uncle plays tag sitting down," he had explained to a friend.

No explaining now, as I wheeled out of my cubicle and caught a disturbing view of Sales Support's conference area now open and exposed, an upholstered partition sagging over a desk, books spilled in the foreground. Never mind, around the corner and out the back way to the car park. And surely someone was going to stop me. But, no, unimpeded all the way to the disabled parking space where my van waited. I twiddled with the controls concealed in the taillight, then the electric motor commenced pulling a bicycle chain, which yanked the door out, then open. Another twiddle and the hydraulic platform for the wheelchair began whirring up, paused, then rotated out, precise and so ludicrously slow that a secretarial temp, of all people, opened the building's back door and began yelling into the parking lot, Julia peeking over her shoulder. The lift still descending from the van, my mechanical dependency exposed, what to do but throw back my head, bare teeth and emit a laugh, operatic and mad. But they remained gawking at the back door, so I shrieked and cackled, brilliantly recapturing a moment from my fourth form Halloween play. But they were still there so I flailed my paralyzed right arm with the hooked fingers and made to rush them under battery power. They withdrew, and I rolled aboard the wheelchair platform and began slowly ascending, deus ex machina-style. I gunned the engine and made my cripple's escape. My Uncle Playing Tag.

* * *

After Julia's departure, I must have sat in the small conference room for half an hour, spinning these fantasies. When I returned to my cubicle, one of the temps from Sales was waiting with cartons. Kari, said her badge. It was better having a quasi-outsider take down my calendar, roll up my Sierra poster and stash my miniature cactus in a carton. The stapler is mine, I said, lying.