The Inevitable Roundness of Everything(Christopher K. Miller) Dana, the office manager, gives me shit. Dana used to work in customer support. There, she would routinely scream obscenities at our clients after she had hung up on them. Then she got promoted. Now she is responsible for ordering toilet paper and other office supplies, recording sick days and vacation requests, and for assuring the owner of the company that he is always right. But I do not see her as a sycophant. I see her as a firewall.

Dana was once a lovely young woman: wavy blond hair, a creamy complexion, big blue eyes, and a figure that was both fragile and voluptuous. But years of slamming down handsets, squinting at forms and sitting slumped in ergonomic chairs entertaining the bizarre and egotistical ramblings of a third generation business savant have drained off some of her loveliness. Today her eyes are tired, her posture stooped. Her figure has tipped sloppily toward the Rubinesque. Even her hair has lost its sheen, grown frizzier and more dun. Only her voice has preserved its original beauty. Even yelling, it is still dulcet, still soft and melodious. “Why can’t you just follow f***ing procedure?” she yells at me with her beautiful voice. “One of these days you are going to really screw things up,” she predicts. “It’s inevitable!”

“Give me a break.” My voice has a nasal quality. “All I did was tweak a prompt on the allergies screen. Did you really expect me to slog through a day-and-a-half of testing just for that?” When whining, my voice is too high for a man’s.

Dana thrusts her chin forward. “Yeah, and now Riverdale Clinic isn’t seeing the second page of patient allergies. How in the f*** do you explain that?” Her cheeks are puffing and red. It is like a cold wind is blowing directly in her face. Her chest is heaving. She has not upgraded her wardrobe in compliance with recent weight gains. I am trying not to look at her breasts.

“Come on. Nobody has more than ten medical drug allergies anyway,” I rationalize. “Besides, the problem is already fixed. Some numbskull deleted a semicolon in the production source,” I explain.

“That’s why we test!” She tries to hiss, but it comes out as a whisper. “That way we don’t wind up with different versions of the code splattered all over the place.” Hyperventilating has made her calmer. “Remember the old days?”

***

I remember my first job in the medical profession. Long before I began developing medical software, I was as an orderly for Pinehaven, a privately owned retirement home in north Waterloo. Today you have to take a government course and undergo supervised field training to get into this line of work. Twenty years ago any moron that could muscle an old woman into a bathtub was hired on the spot. Though, in effect, not much has changed. On my first day, the floor nurse cut the ring finger off a plastic glove with a pair of scissors and presented it to me along with a foil-wrapped Ducolax suppository. Using only her economically apportioned protective sheath, I was directed to insert the suppository into the rectum of Jack, a totally aphasic but fairly ambulant stroke victim who had once played second trombone for the Toronto Philharmonic Symphony. Sensing perhaps my queasiness and my verdant trepidation, Jack tried to run away. But I cornered him in the bathroom and managed to wedge him in between the sink and the door jamb. Then, holding him by the neck with one hand like a puppet, I administered his anal medication with the other. Somewhere in the course of our struggle I lost my finger baggie. Later I met his wife, an attractive lady of sixty. She told me about the man her husband had once been. It was hard for me to accept that this bent and scrawny wreck with arms and legs peppered with fresh-picked scabs, and whose frustrated monosyllabic stammering and weeping served as his only form of communication, had not six months prior been a creative, jocular and rotund fellow. I began to respect the future. I began to take hypnotic tranquilizers.

***

Dana does a sharp about-face, the equivalent of a hang-up, and stomps back into her tiny windowless office with its fake cherry desk, slamming her hollow veneer door behind her. From the other side I can hear papers being slapped, muttered derisions, muffled vulgar lamentations. I test the doorknob to see if she has locked it. She has not. But I do not go in. I have to pee.

***

I worked at Pinehaven off and on for the three years I attended the University of Waterloo, trying to discover the faculty that would let me graduate with the least amount of effort. I started in math and computer. Next I tested psychology. Then I explored philosophy with a smattering of fine arts. Eventually I tried sociology—and stopped looking—having found my quintessential flock of bird courses. Pinehaven provided the weed money for my sociology “studies.”

The last resident I helped at Pinehaven was Roy, an eighty-three year old minister who, after suffering a heart attack, had gone for eight full minutes without oxygen. Roy had a solid torso, arms like a gorilla, and a full cube-shaped head of curly brown hair. It was easy to imagine what he had looked like at thirty. Although he could walk and talk and maintained a perplexed sort of dignity, he had lost the bulk of his cognitive abilities. It was easy to make him mad when trying to get him to obey. He would call you “a big silly” and try to grab you. He was pretty quick. If he got hold of you, there was no wresting free. You had to wait for him to forget, which, fortunately, was never long. Once, during such a wait, while his vice-like grip on my forearm cut off circulation and we made small talk about his previous life, as my hand grew slowly numb, he unzipped his pants and urinated in his closet. He did this very nonchalantly.

***

I pass by Dana’s office again on my way back from the kitchen. I am carrying a cup of green tea from our Flavia, hot drink dispenser. Her door is again open. The owner of the company sits sprawled in a steel-frame chair across from her. His back is to me. He is probably regaling her with tales of his tribulations and conquests as a negotiator. They both look bored. One of his feet is up on her desk, almost in her face. It rocks hypnotically from side to side on its heel like a windshield wiper. Her eyes roll up a smidgeon more than necessary as she glances up at me. The underpinnings of a smile subtly animate her features.

I continue on to my office, to my desk, where I begin to sip my tea. It occurs to me that I no longer have to pee—because clearly I already have. My bladder is wrung, my prostate unencumbered. A tiny drop of urine wells in the eye of my member like a tear. But I can’t remember having used the washroom. Probably, I tell myself, with the amount of tea I drink, it has become a subconscious act. But I can remember the Flavia machine squirting its stream of hot water through my foil wrapped selection, pale green tea trickling and splashing down into my ceramic cup. And I do this no less regularly. Years ago, at my surprise fiftieth birthday party organized by my wife, under the duress of many introductions, I momentarily forgot the name of a man with whom I had been good friends for many years. I think about Frank, who resided “behind the doors” at Sunnyside Home for the Aged, where I worked for seven years after graduating with my useless general arts degree. On Frank’s last day as a barber, he was said to have shaved off a customer’s eyebrow. In this locked ward, teeth were randomly distributed from a communal shoebox for special visitations. I can still see Frank, trayed into a tall orange vinyl geriatric chair, smiling up at me with his two sets of uppers. I think of Reverend Roy casually pissing in his closet while we discuss his erstwhile ministry.

***

On my last day at Pinehaven, I remember strolling down a corridor with Reverend Roy beside me. He had just spooned down a crushed 10 mg. Valium tablet with some Smucker’s Homemade Raspberry jam. It was time for him to go to bed. My hand lay heavily on his shoulder. I had just dropped my sixth 500 mg, spansule of Placidyl from a prescription that Dr. Koo, my Korean general practitioner, had that very afternoon phoned into the Rx pharmacy across the street from the commune in which I was staying. Roy helped steady my course, helped hold it true—but not true enough to fool Ms. Martell, the charge nurse who tagged along behind. After we fastened Roy to his bed with a vest restraint, she fired me. She cried a little as she did this. It was the second time. I stopped taking downers shortly after. Her tears had helped me to realize something: drugs could not forestall future.

***

Sitting, drinking my tea, I am still unable to resolve the missing minute of my life. I sniff my hands. I cannot say with certainty that I have washed them recently. I cannot deny the possibility that I have peed somewhere other than in the washroom. I feel my face grow warm. Carrying my cup to stay in office character, I retrace my steps. The boss is still slouched in Dana’s office. Both his feet are on the floor now. His knees wave open and shut to some internal clock. There are no dark stains on the carpet by her door. But there is a puddle in the kitchen that gives me a start. Then I see that it is only clear water that has leaked out from the refrigerator. The janitor’s closet smells of solvents. The big yellow mop pail is empty. I allow myself a yawning inhale, a sighing exhale. I mop up the refrigerator spill. I refill my cup.

I don’t really need to pee again already. But I can. I count the holes in the bottom of the urinal. I wonder how many more proper trips to the bathroom I have left. I feel the way that I imagine sailors of old felt as they were blown out towards the edge of the world. There are thirteen holes. I do not want to forget this trip. It leaves me with one less.

Dana is again alone in her office. She is on the phone. She raises a finger as I walk by, indicating that I should wait. I stand just outside her door. She looks at me while she listens. Her look is not apologetic, but I can see regret in it. I can hear a voice buzzing on the other end of her line. She holds the phone away from her ear and peers at the receiver. Then, silently, she hangs up. She removes her rimless reading glasses and looks up at me again. Her eyes glisten. She blinks as she swallows. Her email client beeps the arrival of new spam. “It’s inevitable,” she repeats.

***

After Pinehaven, I worked for Central Park Lodge. They got a lot of graduates from the mental institution up in Pentetang. Because Willfong, a veteran of two wars, could only say “Got a smoke Mac?” he was teased relentlessly by the nurse’s aids. Bailey never spoke, but would eat cigarette butts out of ashtrays given the opportunity. Karl, a young man with the mind of a one year old, wore splints on both his arms to prevent him from swallowing his hands. Crudely lobotomized Edwin, who paced the halls like a ghost, once showed me a drawing of a new life form he had invented—a symmetrical creature with a double eye through its head that could walk forwards and backwards with equal ease—a creature that never had to turn around. The fifth floor was mostly old alcoholics. When the Salvation Army distributed gift hampers containing Aqua Velva to them one Christmas, all their lips turned blue. Fred, who except for a lame arm and chronic dandruff, did not appear to have anything wrong with him, escaped by throwing himself from the fifth floor balcony.

***

Shuffling back to my office, I think about lives as stories for which there are only unhappy endings. So I had not peed on the floor or in my pants. Not this time. I wonder what my unhappy ending will be. I think about Dana’s breasts. I realize something: the world is not flat. The world is round. The universe is round too in its own way. Everything is round. There is no edge from which to fall, no nothingness in which to disappear. I now understand the owner’s foot waving, his knees rhythmically swaying.

I walk back to Dana’s office. “I love you,” I say to her. “I thought I should finally mention it.” She laughs—more of a bark really, and uses her mouse to close something on her desktop. Clasping her hands together, she forms a steeple with her forefingers. Her mouth hangs open. It is as though she has forgotten something necessary that she was about to say. Her teeth are very straight, still very white. Her gums are pink and healthy looking. “Don’t worry,” I say. “It’s not inevitable.”

“No?” she asks. She cocks her head and lengthens her focus, as if the answer were standing there behind me. In the stillness of her pose, she is beautiful again. I can see now that her loveliness has not drained away, that it has only swirled into a different shape. Her phone rings. Reflexively she punches the button to transfer to her voicemail.

“No,” I reply. “Everything is cyclical. Everything is round.”

---