Wiggle Room

Lane Dean, Jr., with his green rubber pinkie finger, sat at his Tingle table in his chalk’s row in the rotes group’s wiggle room and did two more returns, then another one, then flexed his buttocks and held to a count of ten and imagined a warm pretty beach with mellow surf, as instructed in orientation the previous month. Then he did two more returns, checked the clock real quick, then two more, then bore down and did three in a row, then flexed and visualized and bore way down and did four without looking up once, except to put the completed files and memos in the two Out trays side by side up in the top tier of trays, where the cart boys could get them when they came by. After just an hour the beach was a winter beach, cold and gray and the dead kelp like the hair of the drowned, and it stayed that way despite all attempts. Then three more, including one 1040A, where the deductions for A.G.I. were added wrong and the Martinsburg printout hadn’t caught it and had to be amended on one of the Form 020-Cs in the lower left tray, and then a lot of the same information filled out on the regular 20, which you still had to do even if it was just a correspondence audit and the file going to Joliet instead of the District, each code for which had to be looked up on the pullout thing he had to scoot the chair awkwardly over to pull out all the way. Then another one, then a plummeting inside of him as the wall clock showed that what he’d thought was another hour had not been. Not even close. May 17, 1985. Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me, a poor sinner. Cross-checking W-2s for the return’s line 8 off the place in the Martinsburg printout where the perforation, if you wanted to separate the thing’s sheets, went right through the data and you had to hold it up against the light and almost sometimes guess, which his chalk leader said was a chronic bug with Systems but the wiggler was still accountable. The joke this week was: How was an I.R.S. rote examiner like a mushroom? Both kept in the dark and fed horseshit. He didn’t know how mushrooms even worked, if it was true that you scooped waste on them. Sheri’s cooking wasn’t what you would call at the level of adding mushrooms. Then another return. The rule was, the more you looked at the clock the slower the time went. None of the wigglers wore a watch, except he saw that some kept them in their pockets for breaks. Clocks on Tingles were not allowed, nor coffee or pop. Try as he might, he could not this last week help envisioning the inward lives of the older men to either side of him, doing this day after day. Getting up on a Monday and chewing their toast and putting their hats and coats on knowing what they were going out the door to come back to for eight hours. This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt. This made the routing desk at UPS look like a day at Six Flags. It was May 17th, early morning, or early midmorning you could maybe almost call it now. He could hear the squeak of the cart boys’ carts someplace off at a distance, where the vinyl panels between his chalk’s Tingles and the blond Oriental fellow’s chalk one row up blocked the sight of them, the kids with the carts. One of the carts had a crazy wheel that chattered when the boy pushed it; Lane Dean always knew when that cart was coming down the rows. He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and I.D. number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that “boring” also meant something that drilled in and made a hole. His buttocks already ached from flexing, and the mere thought of envisioning the desolate beach unmanned him. He shut his eyes but, instead of praying for inward strength now, he found he was just looking at the strange reddish dark and the little flashes and floaters in there that got almost hypnotic when you really looked at them. Then, when he opened his eyes, the In tray’s stack of files looked to be still mainly the height it had been at 7:14, when he’d logged in in the chalk leader’s notebook and there weren’t enough files in his Out trays for Form 20s and 402s so that he could see any over the side of the trays, and he refused once more to stand up to check how many of them there were, for he knew that would make it worse. He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor. Never before in his life up to now had he once thought of suicide. He was doing a return at the same time he fought with his mind, with the sin and affront of even the passing thought. The room was silent, except for the adding machines and the chattering sound of that one kid’s cart that had a crazy wheel as the cart boy brought it down a certain row with more files, but also he kept hearing in his head the sound a piece of paper makes when you tear it in half over and over. His six-man chalk was a quarter of a row, separated off by the gray vinyl screens. A team is four chalks, plus the team leader and a cart boy, some of these from P.C.B., Peoria College of Business. The screens could be moved around to reconfigure the room’s layout. Similar rotes groups were in the rooms to either side. Far to the left, past three other chalks’ rows, was the Group Manager’s office, with the A.G.M.’s little cubicle of screens next to it. The little pinkie rubbers were for traction on the forms. You were supposed to save the rubber at the end of the day. The overhead lights cast no shadow, even of your hand if you held it out like you were reaching for a tray. Darren and Dianne Lotwis, of 402 Elk Court, Edina, Minnesota, who itemized and then some, had elected to have $1 go to the Presidential Election Campaign Fund, which was box 5 on the 402, and it took several minutes to cross-check everything on Schedule A, but nothing qualified for the specs of a promising audit, even though Mr. Lotwis had the jaggedy handwriting of a crazy man. Lane Dean had filed far less 20s than protocol called for. On Friday, he’d had the least 20s of anyone in the chalk. Nobody’d said anything. All the wastebaskets were full of the curled strips of paper from the adding machines. Everyone’s face was the color of wet lead in the fluorescent light. You could make a semiprivate cubicle out of the screens, like the team leader had. Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn’t allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he’d have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again. The imagined sound made him remember different times he’d seen people rip paper in half. He thought of a circus strongman tearing a phone book; he was bald and had a handlebar mustache and wore a stripy all-body swimsuit like people wore in the distant past. Lane Dean summoned all his will and bore down and did three returns in a row, and began imagining different high places to jump off of. He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connect to nothing he’ll ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never goes down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices. Tell him to pucker his butt and think beach when he starts to get antsy—and that would be just the word they’d use, antsy, like his mother. Let him find out in time’s fullness what a joke the word was, how it didn’t come anyplace close. He’d already dusted the desk with his cuff, moved his infant son’s photo in its rattly little frame where the front glass slid a bit if you shook it. He’d already tried switching the green rubber over and doing the adding machine with his left hand, pretending he’d had a stroke and was bravely soldiering on. The rubber made the pinkie’s tip all damp and pale beneath it. The beach now had solid cement instead of sand and the water was gray and barely moved, just quivered a little, like Jell-O that’s almost set. Unbidden came ways to kill himself with Jell-O. Lane Dean tried to control the rate of his heartbeat. He wondered if, with enough practice and concentration, you could stop your heart at will, the same way you hold your breath—like this right here. His heart rate felt dangerously slow and he became scared and tried to keep his head inclined by rolling his eyes way up and compared the rate to the clock’s second hand, but the second hand seemed impossibly slow. The sound of ripping paper again and again. Some cart boys brought you files with everything you needed; some did not. The buzzer to bring a cart boy was just under the iron desk’s edge, with a wire trailing down one of the desk’s sides and little welded-on leg, but it didn’t work. Atkins said the wiggler who’d been at the desk before him, who’d got transferred someplace, had pressed on it so much it burned the circuit. Small strange indentations in rows on the blotter’s front edge were, Lane Dean had realized, the prints of teeth that somebody had bent and pressed real carefully into the blotter so that the indentations went way down and stayed there. He felt he could understand. It was hard to keep from smelling his finger; at home, he’d find himself doing it, staring into space at the table. His baby boy’s face worked better than the beach; he imagined him doing all sorts of little things that he and his wife could talk about later, like curling his fist around one of their fingers or smiling when Sheri made that amazed face at him. He liked to watch her with the baby; for half a file it helped to have them in mind, because they were why, they were what made this worthwhile and the right thing and he had to remember it, but it kept slipping away down the hole that fell through him. Neither man on either side of him seemed to ever fidget or move, except to reach up and lift things onto the desk from their Tingles’ trays, like machines, and they were never in the lounge at break. Atkins claimed that after a year he could examine and cross-check two files at once, but you never saw him try to do it, though he could whistle one song and hum a different one. Lane Dean watched out of the corner of his eye as a parrot-faced man by the central aisle dividing teams pulled a file out of his tray and removed the return and detached the printout and centered both documents on his blotter. With his little homemade seat cushion and gray hat on its hook screwed into the 402s tray. Lane Dean stared down without seeing his own open file and imagined being that guy with his sad little cushion and customized banker’s lamp and wondered what he possibly had or did in his spare time to make up for these soul-murdering eight daily hours that weren’t even a quarter through until he just couldn’t stand it and did three returns in a row in a kind of frenzy where he might have missed things and so, on the next file, went very slowly and painstakingly and found a discrepancy between the 1040’s Schedule E and the R.R.A. annuity tables for poor old Clive R. Terry of Alton’s pissant railroad pension, but a discrepancy so small that you couldn’t tell if the Martinsburg printout had even made an error or had just accepted a wide roundoff for time’s sake, given the amount at stake, and he had to fill out both an 020-C and a Memo 402-C(1), kicking the return over to the Group Manager’s office to decide how to classify the error. Both had to be filled out with duplicated data on both sides, and signed. The whole issue was almost unbelievably meaningless and small. He thought about the word “meaning” and tried to summon up his baby’s face without looking at the photo, but all he could get was the heft of a full diaper and the plastic mobile over his crib turning in the breeze that the box fan in the doorway made. He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow, unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before, and imagining the second hand was so awful it made his breath catch in his throat, and he looked quickly around to see if any of the examiners near him had heard it or were looking at him. When he started to see the baby’s photo face melting and lengthening and growing a long cleft jaw and aging years in just seconds and finally caving in from old age and falling away from the grinning yellow skull underneath, he knew he was half asleep and dreaming but did not know his own face was in his hands until he heard a human voice and opened his eyes but couldn’t see who it went with and then smelled the pinkie’s rubber right under his nose. He might have drooled on the open file.

Getting a little taste, I see.

It was a big older fellow with a seamed face and picket teeth. He wasn’t from any Tingle that Lane Dean had ever observed from his own. The man had on a headlamp with a tan cotton band, like some dentists wore, and a type of thick black marker in his breast pocket. He smelled of hair oil and some kind of food. He had part of his bottom on the edge of Lane’s desk and was cleaning under his thumbnail with a straightened-out paper clip and speaking softly. You could see an undershirt under his shirt; he wore no tie. He kept moving his upper body around in a slight kind of shape or circle, and the movements left a little bit of a visual trail. None of the wigglers in either adjoining row were paying attention to him. Dean checked the little face in the photo to make sure he wasn’t still dreaming.

They don’t ever say it, though. Have you noticed? They talk around it. It’s too manifest. Like talking about the air you’re breathing, yes? It would be like saying, I see So-and-So with my eye. What would be the point?

There was something wrong with one of his eyes; the pupil was bigger and stayed that way, making the eye look fixed. His headlamp wasn’t on. The slow upper-body motions brought him in closer and then back and away and around again.

Yes, but now that you’re getting a taste consider it, the word. You know the one. Dean had the uneasy sense that the fellow wasn’t strictly speaking to him, which would mean that he was more like ranting. The one eye looked fixedly past him. Although hadn’t he just been thinking about a word? Was that word “dilated”? Had he said the word out loud? Lane Dean looked circumspectly to either side. The Group Manager’s frosted door was shut.

Word appears suddenly in 1766. No known etymology. The Earl of March uses it in a letter describing a French peer of the realm. He didn’t cast a shadow, but that didn’t mean anything. For no reason, Lane Dean flexed his buttocks. In fact, the first three appearances of “bore” in English conjoin it with the adjective “French”—that French bore, that boring Frenchman, yes? The French, of course, had had malaise, ennui. See Pascal’s fourth Pensée—which Lane Dean heard as “pantsy.” He was checking for errant spit on the file before him. One ham in dark-blue work pants was inches from his elbow. The man moved slightly back and forth like his waist was hinged. He appeared to be inspecting Lane Dean’s upper body and face in a systematic gridlike fashion. His eyebrows were all over the place. The tan band was either soaked or stained. See La Rochefoucauld or the Marquise du Deffand’s well-known letters to Horace Walpole, specifically, I believe, Letter 96. But nothing in English prior to March, Earl of. This means a good five hundred years of no word for it, you see, yes? He rotated slightly away. In no way was this a vision. Lane Dean had heard of the phantom but never seen it. The phantom of the hallucination of repetitive concentration held for too long a time, like saying a word over and over until it kind of melted and got foreign. Mr. Bondurant’s high hard gray hair was just visible four Tingles down. No word for the Latin accidia made so much of by monks under Benedict. For the Greek ἀκηδία. Also the hermits of third-century Egypt, the so-called daemon meridianus, when their prayers were stultified by pointlessness and tedium and a longing for violent death. Now Lane Dean was looking openly around, as in, like, who is this fellow? The one eye was fixed at a point over past the row of vinyl screens. The tearing sound had gone, as had that one cart’s squeaky wheel.

The fellow cleared his throat. Donne, of course, called it lethargie, and for a time it seems conjoined somewhat with melancholy, saturninia, otiositas, tristitia; that is, to be confused with sloth and torpor and lassitude and eremia and vexation and distemper and attributed to spleen—for example, see Winchilsea’s “black jaundice,” or, of course, Burton. The man was still on the same thumbnail. Quaker Green in, I believe, 1750 called it “spleen-fog.” Hair oil made Lane Dean think of the barber’s, of the stripy pole that seemed to spiral eternally upward but—you could see when the shop closed and it stopped—really didn’t. The hair oil had a name. No one under sixty used it. Mr. Bondurant used a men’s spray. The fellow appeared unconscious of his upper body’s underwater X-shaped rotations. Two of the wigglers in a team near the door had long beards and black derbies and bobbed at their Tingles as they examined returns, but their bobbing was rapid and back and forth only; this was different. The examiners on either side didn’t look up or pay attention; their fingers on the adders never slowed. Lane Dean couldn’t tell if this was a sign of their professional concentration or something else. Some wore the rubber on the left pinkie, most on the right. Atkins was ambidextrous—he could fill out different forms with each hand. The fellow on his left hadn’t blinked once all morning that Dean had been able to see. And then suddenly up it pops. Bore. As if from Athena’s forehead. Noun and verb, participle as adjective, whole nine yards. Origin unknown, really. We do not know. Nothing on it in Johnson. Partridge’s only entry is on “bored” as a subject complement and what preposition it takes, since “bored of,” as opposed to “with,” is a class marker, which is all that ever really concerns Partridge. Class class class. The only Partridge Lane Dean knew was the same TV Partridge everybody else knew. He had no earthly idea what this guy was talking about, but at the same time it unnerved him that he’d been thinking about “bore” as a word as well, the word, many returns ago. Philologists say it was a neologism, and just at the time of industry’s rise, too, yes? Of the mass man, the automated turbine and drill bit and bore, yes? Hollowed out? Forget Friedkin, have you seen “Metropolis”? All right, this really creeped Lane out. His inability to say anything to this guy or ask him what he even wanted felt a little like a bad dream as well. The night after his first day, he’d dreamed of a stick that kept breaking over and over but never got smaller. The Frenchman pushing that uphill stone throughout eternity. Look, for instance, at L. P. Smith’s “English Language,” ’56, I believe, yes? It was the bad eye, the frozen eye, that seemed to inspect what he leaned toward. Posits certain neologisms as “_arising from their own cultural necessity”—_his words, I believe. Yes, he said. When the kind of experience that you’re getting a man-sized taste of becomes possible, the word invents itself. The term. Now he switched nails. It was Vitalis that’d soaked the headlamp’s band, which looked more and more like a bandage. The Group Manager’s door had his name on it painted on the same pebbled-glass window thing that older high schools have. Personnel’s doors were the same as well. The wiggle rooms had windowless metal fire doors on struts up top, a newer model. Consider that the Oglok of Labrador have more than a hundred separate and distinct words for snow. Smith puts it that when anything assumes sufficient relevance it finds its name. The name springs up under cultural pressure. Really quite interesting when you consider it. Now, for the first time, the fellow at the Tingle to the right turned briefly to give the man a look and turned just as fast back around when the man made his hands into claws and held them out at the other wiggler like a demon or someone possessed. The whole thing happened almost too fast to be real to Lane Dean. The wiggler turned a page in the file before him. Someone else had also called it that: “soul-murdering.” Which now you will, too, yes? In the nineteenth century, then, suddenly the word’s everywhere; see, for example, Kierkegaard’s “Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion.” When he slid his big ham off the desktop, the movement made the smell stronger; it was Vitalis and Chinese food, the food in the little white bucket with the wire handle, Moo-goo something. The room’s light on the frosted glass was different because the door was slightly open, though Lane Dean hadn’t seen the door open. It occurred to him that he might pray.

The man made the same gridlike swaying motion standing. The one eye was on the Group Manager’s door, open a crack. Note, too, that “interesting” first appears just two years after “bore.” 1768. Mark this, two years after. Can this be so? He was halfway down the row; now the fellow with the cushion looked up and then back down right away. Invents itself, yes? Not all it invents. Then something Lane Dean heard as “bone after tea.” The man was gone when he reached the row’s end. The file and its Schedules A/B and printout were right where they’d been, but Lane’s son’s picture was face down. He let himself look up and saw that no time had passed at all, again. ♦