New Paint

New Paint

         The office smelled like new paint, the walls colored some version of off-white that begged my mind for a proper name, a taxonomy I couldn’t generate.  Ecru?  Beige?  Mother of Pearl?  No I couldn’t find it.  It was certainly nothing so drastic as 'tan'.  From the sheen I would’ve guessed it was still wet.  I scrunched my narrow shoulders a little narrower and held hands in lap, to avoid the possibility of touching the wet not-white paint.  The managers crammed into the room seemed not to notice, the danger or the smell.
         They each sigh in turn, in a largo four-eight time that made me thing of slow whisked cymbals.  First one, then another, then the third alternating order, like the Budweiser frogs.  The pattern seemed almost choreographed. 
         “Did you see this?” one asked while holding up a Xerox.  Chuckles and chortles were exchanged along with disbelieving retorts. 
         I’d never felt so invisible before, I know something about not standing out.  Even in the offices of distracted college professors, the room seemed to allow us to ignore each other.  The teacher finished an email while the student starred at a gem-studded book shelf trying to peg the proclivities that might make the ensuing conversation sway away from his long list of academic deficiencies.  A memory trickled in of old paper, maybe velum, stacks of papers with coffee rings on the full-color cover letters.
         While the managers wheeled around the almost-white office between files of meaningless paper, drawers of lockless keys, and keyboards which seemed to require index-finger typing, I dwelt in a memory much warmer than the asbestos AC being piped into the management closet.  The kindly bearded professor, as distracted as the managers, but at least by thoughts of his own.  He shuffled through a stack of pages looking from my distinctive name.
“Cadwallader,” the manager said.  “Now I hate to do this to you Cad, is it ok if I call you Cad or would you prefer Cadwallader?”
“I think I’ll know who you mean.”  My words meant as softening of the situation lacked clear and deliberate punctuation, as I’d used the response so many times before.  As they echoed in our ears neither he nor I could piece out the tenor of what I’d intended.  Maybe I was a bit terse, a bit disrespectful.  The manager felt he was exercising understanding as he waded through the awkward moment, chalking it up to the standard short-comings of wage laborers and a necessary allowance for good managers to make. 
“Gotta referee you on this one, I’m afraid, it’s a computer thing and if we don’t take care of it now…”
“It’s fine, do whatever you have to do.”
“CoCoCo-sed-djuwer-wiz…”
“Excuse me?”  I interrupted him out of pure confusion but a twitch of pure hatred flitted across his face before he answered and his response was appropriately colored with anger.
“You know, Co-manager CoCoa, the one who caught you stealing company time.”
A movement on the wall caught my attention.  Its semi-white hide glistened even more now and the smell once a subtle chemical warning was now tactile on the hairs of my nose.
“CoCoa?  I thought her name was Candice?  Should we be in here with these paint fumes like this?”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, I’m asking the questions here, pal.  Heh, probably not.”  The other two managers stopped their two-fingered data entry and gave out a chuckle but I couldn’t follow the timing even enough to know it was a joke.  It seemed more to be a kind of rare satire of good humor as if he intended to mock joviality itself. 
The memory of the professor returned as I rubbed my eyes, stinging now from the fumes.  His chairs were old worn leather with old iron tacks beading the seams.  I remembered asking about his recently published essay, “The Illusion of Ahistoricity in Humor” about Rabelais, Sterne and Dr. Johnson.  I could see, in the memory, his enthusiastic response, though I couldn’t remember the words.  A sense of the genuine remained as I refocused on the little painty room and its occupants. 
“So why do you think you’re here?” asked another manager, swiveling from his computer pointer fingers still posed for action.
“Uh, I guess I shouldn’t have been whistling.  It may have been reducing my productivity.”
“That’s right it was.”  Manager number one retakes the reigns, apparently bulwarked by the double play.  “So we can be sure this won’t happen again.” 
I could see behind him a drop of paint sliding down the wall, leaving a little line of exposed white primer behind it. 
Manager three feeling left out, grabbed a doughnut from a nearby box and started to give me a muffled tear-down, with the aroma of halitosis and Boston cream being the sum total of what I got out of it.  After a moment they all went silent.  More drips of paint had begun to form.  They were waiting for me to say something so I searched, in error, for a meaningful thought. 
“To be perfectly honest, sirs, I find this whole thing a bit out of order.  Whistling may or may not be a distraction for others, but I stand by my record or both work and whistling…”
“I’m gonna stop you there,” said manager one trying to wipe a drop of paint from his glasses.  Paint had begun to drip on the other managers to getting in their hair and on their clothes.  I scrunched under a blue binder, hoping the middle of the room would be driest.  Manager one placed his finger tips together and gesticulated in the manner of a violent if casual prayer.  The paint still dripped.
“Are you saying you don’t agree with our Policy?”
Manager two scribbled on a legal pad through a layer of hardening paint.
“Actually I…”
“Don’t answer that!” interrupted Manager one.
Three asked, “Are you saying you weren’t whistling?”
“Don’t answer that,” Two added while raising his left hand and trying to read through paint-coated policy books.  The nearly-white was everywhere now, flowing off the walls leaving a stunning blankness behind it.  Questions not meant to be answered followed.  “Are you on the clock right now?” “Did you check with management first?” “Would you do that kind of thing at home?” “What are you looking for going forward?” “What are your long term goals for employment here?”
I watched the last of the paint fall over the floor and desks, revealing a bright whiteness behind it.  The whiteness increased to the point where I searched for a word to describe it: luminescent, pearly, neon, void.  As I starred at the blankness on the wall the dim outline of book shelves and framed achievements emerged.  The papers, desks and managers dissolved and I was standing in the memory of that professor’s office, looking through his collection of books. 
The shapes and colors were mismatched, with a minimum of compendia or anthologies.  No reference books.  Most were old and even the new editions were evidently used.  Sacred texts were mixed in with canonical literature; Milton sat next to the Bhagavad Gita.  Dostoyevsky next to the Tanakh.  Ulysses next to The Odyssey next to Metamorphoses next to The Metamorphosis. 
I perused at leisure.  Scanning lines settled on remembering: Ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen.  Whistling and ignoring the extra-dimensional nature of this bibliophilic encounter.  I was rejuvenated.  There was nothing left but to tell one, two and three that I was moving on to greener pastures.  Just before turning to leave the dream-shelf, a large leather-bound tome caught my eye.  On its front cover were three letters: K-H-T. 
I opened the book and became someone else.