💄 🙅 The Problem Is Worse than a Small Man

Fiction: if you could lose your job balls intact, would you escape your home?

“Is it okay if I sit here?”

This day and age, he surprises me: an Arab of no more than fifteen, disparaging the inquiry with pride. He has a moosed ringlet updo which blinds me at first.

He’s soon on the line with someone, telling them to not touch that drink and wait for so and so to get there, then asking if dialogist is still there. It’s three o’clock in the morning past New Year’s eve. It fascinates me: just now I liked the boy. Now I do not.

Despite the date, in six hours there is a meeting about a problem I may have caused at work. Afterwards I plan to reverse like a forklift into the aftermaths of last night’s festivities.

“[…] Please, restrain yourself. Or you’ll lose your job.”

For the moment the ethanol has dried me. Such lack of space in the tissues is fire steel for anxiety.

I nod off, shave, shower, am still tipsy. The meeting is fronted by a large woman. Now I am large — skinny, but two meters, so few tower over me. It’s seldom that I meet larger than myself people and when I do I am askew with unknown input.

But there is more. She is not only large but shapely too, and this on a frame almost as large as my own begets a novelty too rare for this day.

Indexing now her and now myself, I say, “Let’s address this”, but the gesture is too slight for her to notice.

Nevertheless she nods.

“Let’s get straight to it.”

She is the commissioner for the preliminary hearing about my breaching of interpreters’ ethics.

I say,

“Forgive me, but I feel there is liability, and I would like to ask for another case worker.”

“Sorry, it isn’t possible”, she says. We sit. “I am not a regular case worker. So. It’s come to our attention you are interfering with the interpretations you conduct.”

“I feel the times call for it.”

“What is the nature of the interference?”

“Is it important?”

“Are you telling flu patients it’s all in their head?”

“Who said that?”

Somewhere in the village, there is my brother, sleeping off the party. As an attender of the promiscuous balls, he has a wholly different relationship to women. Though saying he doesn’t listen to them would be a lie.

It softens you to think such things when faced with bureaus. The reps don’t like the softness at first, but then they soften too and it starts from the feet up.

Only, it can backfire if one of you is drunk. Then it starts from the head down and people see it’s you — me — who’s drunk.

“I told the doctors these things. In confidence!”

“Really?”

“Really’s an unusual word inside the officialities, no?”

“True.”

And my god. She smiles. I have the best of luck getting away with all these things. Screw my brother the prince who is ten times the wreck today with nothing and no one on the line.

Then she sighs.

“Ehrm. I realize it’s unorthodox to have called you in on this day but… we must legally warn you. If this happens again, it could entail, mhm, likewise legal consequences.”

The coat is long — on a shorter man, it would invoke ideas of flasherdom.

“Look, all I do is take the doctors aside for a friendly. I mean, people criticize me saying I belittle this dangerous flu, but they completely miss my point. I am saying the problem is more serious than an infectious pathogen.”

My commissioner sits taller, switches one crossed leg for another.

Why the pad? What artifacts could she wish to produce?

She has jaws and thick, luscious skin. Narrowed slightly through Photoshop, she could have been far away from here now; in another galaxy, perhaps Norway, sleeping off the unctuous Dom Pérignon hangover of a super model.

“You aren’t allowed to express these things, you know this.”

“People are pandemically asthmatic and it isn’t dust mites or fags doing it. It’s stress, incommensurability with the body. They breathe up up up from the throat and are in a constant panic. Imagine a country called Panic. Then you have Major Panic and Lower Panica. Sprinkle respiratory news on Lower Panica and you’re on the interesting side of the Berlin Wall.”

I think to myself: she is spirit. Spirit isn’t bedroom flamboyance or children expressing themselves in the sandbox, but this — geometry in the flesh, still and motioning and capturable thusly by the Bojangles eyes of man, but impossible to tell.

They say you define someone means you’re trying to take power over them. They say you define women this way. I take care to try and understand these things.

Wherefore, I cannot think: people sense your desire as fear. Not here, with her.

It wouldn’t be a problem, people sensing this, except they will fight themselves on it because everyone is in their heads unfriendly with themselves to one degree or another.

“Like we said”, she said. “This is highly unethical behavior on the part of an interpreter. You must constrain your personal opinions.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you mostly do it. Don’t you?”

“I mean about voodoo.”

“Please. I mean…”

“You must know we interpreters are weird potatoes. Too much watching. Too much not-ours flowing through us, messing up our heads. But believe me, it doesn’t prevent us from being excellent discerners. Know what that is?”

“I think we’re done. Please, restrain yourself. Or you’ll lose your job.”

. . .

To the aftermath of the festivities I go. The pub plaza is foul with day-after players, the girls in leopard and Victorianly pasty make-up, the boys in graphic five-o’clocks.

My company is a friend. I think one of us has a crush on the other, but I get mixed up about who. Crushes become anyway monotonous after thirty. They can even help serve the posture.

My friend asks me if I run risk of losing my job and I say please. I ask her if she has ever been with a shorter guy.

“Lucky for me”, she says, “it’s like with cats — the laws of physics don’t apply to shorter guys in bed. A yoga happens.”

“Think the same is true vice versa?”

“What vice versa? There is no vice versa.”

We laugh. I wonder if the two of us will eventually get together but for too short a time. Poor her. Is it always with women the dubious chrysalis of pity clowning as love?

…

Three days later, strangely, I have lost my job. Well, with that one company. The official grounds were however obliquer: unwillingness for cooperation in the workplace. What workplace, I wonder? I am at thirty different workplaces weekly. Never am I at one with the woman who authored these grounds.

I yawn, I cannot help feeding the monkey of nonchalance… it will be my demise, just not yet, not yet.

I have her, the commissioner’s, number.

“Hello”, I say.

“Oh, hello.”

Anything but silence I venture would be unprofessional, even inhumane. The commissioner knows her beats, and I my ears.

“I want to thank you. The proper discord has been established between us. Now I can live free and die young. Case in point — if you thought me a coward, here goes: me sober. I guess the reason I am calling you is to plant a seed in your head re what happens when life is taken out of the the offices. You will experience this. One day you will be shackled by freedom like I am, and no government or public sector will hold the key to your cage.”

“I will call the police.”

“No need.”

We hang up. I kick the snowless gravel, insert my hands into two coat pockets. The coat is long — on a shorter man, it would invoke ideas of flasherdom. My hands grasp various pocket relics, the neocortex fires. The poor man’s piano, I call it. The song is “Too bad”.

Too bad they told you you was only big you’re woman on top of big and you’ll bust up the world Me, I’m small, from now on, I root for you With my squeaky mice friends Some day we’ll amount a farm And you’ll give us your love hence