Chapter Sneak Peak: Jailbreak!
Set eighty years into the future, Preston's new literary fiction explores the collapse of shared meaning and the rise of proceduralism in an hyper-agentified world.
And so it came to pass Glover Peerless would be two minutes late to his next meeting if he couldn’t stomach unwrapping another squanderence of two-ply and applying it to the place(s) of genuine soreness. Or at least would be genuine by the time he sat down in his meeting, where he would be required to think and say things.
Really, he wouldn’t be thinking about things, more about the absence of a thing.
Gold Bond. His travel size expired the week prior, and while a standard container sat in his legal drawer (a name that implied he had schooling in statutory sciences—he did not), he wouldn’t tarnish a carefully crafted image by carrying such a garish looking orange bottle to the hallway lavatory. He could pass it into his backpack, but carrying a JanSport to the toilet wouldn’t be appropriate so early in mid-morning.
Let’s say if it were nearing end of business, he could take his backpack to the restroom, as it was assumed he would leave the building shortly after the conspicuously timed sojourn. That would make sense.
Thus it came to pass that Glover Peerless would be at least two minutes late to this meeting, but it didn’t matter because the more aeration his soreness received before a lengthy encasement meant less a chance for swamp stench and more chance for being able to say and think things in the meeting.
‘Sorry, I’m running late.’
‘No problem, take a seat, Glover.’
Right cheek first, Glover spreads while acting like he’s stretching. Very good. With the left cheek down, we still have airflow, and we have, for now, only the specter of impending pain. There is proto-pain, yes, but it is subtle, and we can work with that.
In fact, it was better for Glover to have background noise swimming in his head as Stefany Beleecker went about the normal Monday rigmarole, of which he had missed a tiny portion. The sensation allows Glover his usual thoughts when Stefany spoke:
Bridge! The bridge of your nose had work done! I think about you naked a lot! Your husband cannot please you like I can!
‘And Glover has the amended reporting?’
‘Yes, boss, no problem.’
‘You have it or will do it?’
‘I have it, and can send it after the meeting, but wanted to run it by Amory first.’
‘Amory’s not in until Thursday.’
‘Is he? Well, yeah, I’ll send it to you by end of day.’
Vagueness usually worked on Dryden Andrews, who just wanted to seem authoritative before going on to the next thing to think and say about. Dryden nods at Stefany, who resumes control over continuing the ritual.
Client visit Wednesday, and the month-end accounting is on Friday. All the typical topics are touched, as they were during the same slot last month, and the one before that provided it wasn’t a subnational holiday on a month’s third Monday.
‘As a reminder, our annual charity drive is Saturday at Warmbringer Park, so bring those extra clothes and toilet paper for the feral. We’re serving coffee and donuts at 7:30, so plan accordingly for shuttle disembark.’
‘Serving the volunteers or the homeless?’ Glover asks.
‘I don’t think you can call them homeless anymore.’ Dryden says.
‘It’s too early for this,’ Stefany says.
Not too early to get it up for you, toots. Gold Bond or no Gold Bond.
With the desecrating thought expunged, Glover metabolizes the hollow ring of Stefany’s comment versus its accuracy. She has the right idea of a place to say, ‘it’s too early.’ It is the Monday morning meeting, after all.
The first meeting of many, in what would be a long week, culminating, of course, at the company outing where employees awkwardly interact with Warmbringer Park’s feral population on a day Glover normally reserved for endurance wanking and bowls of Cinnabar Toast Crush. The weed strain, not the archaic breakfast cereal of corpulent children.
But since Dryden moved the Monday morning meeting to mid-morning and not start of business, theoretically Stefany should be at her cognitive peak by this time, and able to parse whether her and Glover’s feral folk characterization was above board, or subject to human resource disciplinary action for purporting harmful labels, which is indeed the point of a label. Purporting harm.
Do not ingest. Do not collect $200k settlement for choke-dead child.
Glover didn’t care about his wording being polite. The homeless in Warmbringer Park didn’t have the luxury of labels. Or the need. As if being without a permanently structured domicile was worse than being purposeless.
‘Let’s circulate a memo once we figure out the right term. I don’t want to piss off the nonprofit team,’ Dryden says.
Happy to take the win of his ass not itching within fifteen minutes of last wipe, Glover leaves the adjourned meeting without clarity whether he’d be ingesting the coffee and/or donuts come Saturday.
Monday luncheon brings with it the typical encumbrances of the crammed cafetorium—people jockeying for position at the distributive islands called ‘bars of varying degrees of temperature.’ Namely hot, working all the way down to salad and then finally, very optionally, dessert.
By Friday, the harangues of the week would have forced most of these individuals to nearby restaurants with the very boss whom earlier, on Monday (today), would order them to finish swallowing their quinoa scramble faster so they can finish and send adjustments to analytically superior yet ideologically derivative spreadsheets of said bosses’ own bastardized ideations that occur between the preceding idle Friday’s happy hour and now, the end of the two-day interregnum where the worker-self is wiped clean, only for the golem’s exhumation earlier that morning. This morning.
Incidentally, Dryden, aside from being repulsed at the idea of Glover pondering ideas with dogface Glenn Amory instead, would never ask Glover to lunch on a Friday. However, nor would he impede Glover from enjoying an itch-free, thought-free luncheon today.
Dryden isn’t all bad.
Realizing there is no honor in assuming a ‘rightful’ place in this trough, Glover turns for the door and walks two blocks to the alcohol bar. Reemer’s. [1]
‘The usual?’
‘Mondays aren’t usual, Cliff. But yes, the normal usual.’ Glover says.
Cliff isn’t Reemer, nor is he related to the namesake, who likely sold the idea of their [2] dive bar to a property management group whose founder offers Cliff a job because they attended high school together. That’s why Cliff is the last of his breed in this neighborhood teeming with insufferable fools stumbling through different striations of believability.
Circumstance.
Cliff was in proximity to a person who would matter in a time and instance later to be named, where their superposition allowed Cliff to get back on his feet after his crippling dependence on speed hollowed out any other career prospects.
Where Cliff and his meth mouth would amble after this place closed in favor of some new, colder industry, Glover hadn’t the slightest clue.
Two frothy glasses came and went under his (Glover’s) mustache before the Cuban Dip, chemically unchanged from two weeks ago when it was unloaded from a 53’ wheeled Sysco truck, came to rest at his elbows after being slid over by a despondent Cliff.
That’s when he noticed the itching again.
‘Say, Cliff, did you guys upgrade your toilet paper like I asked?’
~/footnotes/~
[1] Note: Reemer’s is not a sanctioned eating and drinking establishment of GoJuBranCo—Glover’s employer. In fact, as an establishment, it is the antithesis of what GoJuBranCo would advocate for its employees to healthily consume.
[2] We find ourselves using the ungendered ‘their’ because we are not sure the biological sex, nor the identified gender of that person, and despite it being a dive bar frequented nearly entirely by downtrodden ironworkers performing various enhancements to the neighborhood’s girding, we cannot assume a woman/NB didn’t opportunize serving such a demographic.