Dream Corpses: 3. Cosmic Reheating

I know little about my job at The House of Balloons, except that it takes place in a freshly beveled office building whose corners are powdered with sawdust; that H. Alan Rasmussen, President and CEO of The House of Balloons, is so tall he has to bend in the doorway on emerging from his office to bark instructions at Betty, a blunt-talking, ashen-haired Executive Secretary who sits at her desk all day reading home furnishing catalogues; and I know that perhaps a dozen other individuals, including Bob and Larry, Co-Evangelists of The Office of Balloon Business and Development, and Laura, an indefatigable recent graduate of the University of Michigan and Assistant Director of Balloon Marketing and Planning, hold similarly distinguished positions within the corporation.

As an Assistant to the Administrative Department, I report to Betty, perhaps the only Balloons employee more feared than H. Alan Rasmussen.  My primary responsibilities are to run errands, process documents and perform “other duties as assigned.”  Daily I wear my paths from office to office, file cabinet to file cabinet, feeling only the imageless churning of the muscles of thought, while my dress shoes cake up with dust, and the furniture, walls, phones and floor gradually become one with my flesh.

And I endure it all to remain above ground with sweet Peg.

Soon after The House hired me, Laura began to fill my mail slot with balloon-shaped slips of paper decorated with rainbows and floating cartoon bears cryptically instructing me to “Call Cal, see about Balloon Campaign Luncheon” or “See Chip about promo radio, can’t find rates listing, okay?  Check with Cindye, thanks.”

The notes accumulated.  I fumbled through the administrative and executive Rolodexes, hoping to come upon a Cindye, but as far as I could determine, no such person existed in The House records.

Now and then, Laura and I passed each other in the hall, nodded and said, “Hello.”

I had nightmares about Cindye, an ebullient young promotional representative dressed as a bear at the Speakers and V.I.P. table in an auditorium stuffed with business professionals dressed also as bears.  She’d take her turn at the podium and growl into the microphone, “And now, please put your paws together to welcome our next speaker, who’s going to present us with motivational insights and recommendations culminating from his extensive research into promotional broadcasting rates for this year’s big Balloon Campaign of the Century—my distinguished assistant, Thomas Cooper.”

And then I’d be floating down the center aisle, clad only in socks, and all the bears on either side, including the lady bears, would be pawing and guffawing at me.

In the gaping spaces between my efforts to please Laura and to carry out random clerical and messenger activities assigned by Betty, I remained secluded at an unvarnished, unanchored particle-board door laid across two mini filing cabinets in a rear chamber, alternately examining a yellowing document and a pamphlet of promotional blurbs from The House of Balloons, sweat droplets dotting my upper lip.

One morning, Laura breezed in and caught me in this cataleptic diversion, my hands wetly clutching the yellowing document.

“Must be boring,” she said.

“Pardon?”

“All that reading.”

She stood there with a clipboard and crooked-lipped smile, licorice-black hair tumbled upon her shoulders, navy blue knit skirt bulging with hips and thighs.

“Ah,” I said, professorially.

“Here.”  She dropped the clipboard on the particle-board door.  “H. Alan wanted me to fill you in on the changes to the executive agenda.”

She stepped behind me.  I felt a puff of her breath as she leaned over my shoulder.  Sun particles filtering through a lone casement briefly tinted her brown face rust.

“Here’s the number to call to confirm the President’s Continental Breakfast in the Blue Room,” she said, writing the numbers and circling them in emphatic graphite at the top of my draft.

I leaned forward into the shadow of her long hair, nodding profusely, regarding the numbers with reverence, as though in the presence of privileged information.

My heart beat in my neck.

She leaned closer, allowing a lock of black hair to brush against my shoulder.

“The balloon conferees will be calling to confirm their attendance.  Check their names off in this column.”

She wanted to know whether I had questions.

Indeed I had many, though none having to do with the subject at hand.

Sometimes while I lie on my mattress at night, with the drapes blowing inward and an old movie flickering on TV, I’ve found myself wondering what it’d be like to live with Laura in a small apartment lit by a series of teardrop bulbs, little wall pockets of free-floating light that deepen and widen the rooms.  I’ve imagined our lying together on my mattress, being nurtured by programs of comedy and drama.  My hand rests on her belly, on the wrinkled untucked tail of her button-down shirt—fingers, knuckles, rising and falling with her breaths.

And in the mornings, she pulls a skirt from the bottom drawer of our dresser, and I listen to the sound it makes—dry and crisp, a broom sweeping over linoleum—as she pulls it up over her hips in the soft teardrop light.

While slumped at my particle-board desk in the rear chamber, I’ve often regarded my indistinct, wax-like reflection in the casement—the white shirt and dark tie, the slight leavening at my belt line, the featureless whiteness of my face.

And once, perhaps twice in the process, I’ve been visited by the ghosts of a June night past, ushered once more to the shore of Lake Pearl in my friend Roddy’s Mustang, where he and I once raised our beers to an approaching storm, toasted Biblical bolts of lightning that tore from the black above to the rolling, rocking black below, drank to the winds that blew in through the open windows and whipped our hair around.

Where is that night, now?  And how is it connected to the documents delineating grants and contests and proposals from and for and by The House of Balloons?  How does it relate to the oceans of paper in which I dog paddle daily?  And whatever happened, anyway, to the good old-fashioned gentleman’s handshake?

Listen to me, as though I remember it well.

I grew up in the Age of Attorneys.