The Organizing
by f. Simon Grant
Copyright 2012 f. Simon Grant
Tree :or: The Organizing
Tom Wood wasn’t expecting to find a daisy growing from his computer monitor on a perfectly ordinary Thursday morning at FKM Incorporated, fourteenth floor, cubicle eleven double A. Of course what logical human would expect something like that? Even on a not so perfectly ordinary day Tom Wood wouldn’t expect foliage to be sprouting from his hardware.
“Jane?” he said.
“Yes, Tom?” The lady in gray flannel, rapidly typing in the cubicle across the aisle answered him without interrupting her typing or moving her eyes away from the pale gray glow of the quarterly report.
“Have you ever seen anything like this before?” Tom said.
“Not now, Tom,” Jane said. “I’m busy. And it better not be anything dirty.” The malfunctioning florescent light shuddered above, creating an epilepsy-inducing effect below.
“But it worries me.”
“Is it life threatening?” Jane said with no emotional inflection.
“Doubtful,” Tom said furrowing his eyebrows. “It looks harmless.”
“Is it a bizarre supernatural experience?” Jane said, still lacking emotional inflection.
Tom looked at it, confused. He poked it. “I ... I don’t know.”
“Then there’s no reason to worry.”
“But it’s blocking my computer. I can’t do my work.”
“That’s out of my department,” Jane said. “Joan might know. Ask her.”
“Joan?” Tom said.
“Yes, Tom.” The lady in the gray pant suit on the other side of the off-white partition behind Tom’s flowering monitor answered in a motherly tone remaining invisible behind the four foot imitation balsa wood wall. “What’s the problem dear?”
“Um ... There’s a ... there’s a flower growing out of my computer.”
After an invisible silence, “What sort of flower dear?”
“A daisy I think.”
After another invisible silence, “Go see the supervisor.”
Tom rose from his desk perplexed, rapidly scouring memorized passages of the Happenstance Manual in his mind. “ ‘Bomb threat’?” he thought out loud. “No that can’t be it. ‘Fire injury’? No.” He peered over the infinity of cubicles that converged at the horizon like a hiking trail. It took on the aspect of a Cretan labyrinth made from four foot high off white imitation balsa wood, all stuck together in an orderly fashion in the form of spinal chords and swastikas. Every direction he turned looked uniform. Tom wondered briefly what miracle it took for him to find his desk every morning. “Joan?” he said.
“Yes, Tom?”
“Which supervisor do I go see? There’s 24 of them.”
“You go see Bob Johnson, the Supervisor In Charge of Unrecognized Occurrences.”
“Where is his office?”
“That way,” Joan pointed, still invisible behind the partition.
“Oh, that’s where I thought it was,” Tom said, congratulating his own cleverness for not forgetting where the supervisor’s office was.
“Oh, Tom,” Jane said as Tom was walking away.
“Yes, Joan?”
“Hope was looking for you,” Jane said.
“Who’s Hope?”
“New girl. I think she likes you.”
“I don’t have time to worry about that now. I’ve got more important things to worry me.”
Tom focused his path forward, blocking the off white cubicle haze from his peripheral vision. “‘Electrical malfunction’?” he said to himself still scouring the mental manual. “Highly unlikely. ‘Terrorist attack’? Maybe.”
He was oblivious to a bright blue spot zigzagging through the cubicles on an intercept course. The blue spot finally intercepted her target with such a clamorous wallop all the papers precariously pressed against her chest, the pile of collected pen scribblings on blue Billy the Bunny stationary, fell to the floor, feathering chaotically about. Unfortunately for the clumsy blue spot, this was the exact time of day when the mechanically controlled environment kicked in and the air conditioning made sure the entire office remained the most uninteresting temperature. It kicked up a stationary tornado, burying the homogenous gray flannel typers in pictures of cartoon rabbits and pen sketches of wedding dresses.
The blue spot rose and blushed and brushed herself off and searched for her black horn-rimmed Elvis Costello glasses that fell, she was sure, somewhere around here. Tom continued walking. She abandoned the search for the glasses and chased after him, reaching out her left hand in hopes that he would shake it.
“Hi. My name is Hope Lesko-VanHeffenbeuler,” the blue spot said with an accidental squeak in her voice. Tom turned around and looked at her. She wore a baby blue long-sleeve t-shirt with sleeves too long for her arms; she wore a short red plaid catholic dress and high white socks in an unsuccessful attempt at sexiness; there was a pink butterfly barrette buried somewhere in her hair which made it seem like there was a lot buried in her hair; her eyes didn’t know whether to be blue or green and under the left one a barely visible scar, where fatigue bags usually lie, betrayed her embarrassing abortive attempt at circus performing. She permeated awkwardness in contrast relief, like a newborn fowl imitating a human. “I work in the Creativity Department.” Her illegitimate father was that hyperactive guy who sells get-rich-quick books over the television. Her barely legitimate mother was the millionaire heiress of the guy who invented aroma therapy. She grew up to defy them both and became a painter and an adamant dadaist. (Her first husband of only a few unpleasant days was a painter and an adamant Dadaist, whose defiance of the norm of defiance of social marital norms seemed more pointless in the light of not-so-drunk days.) She dreamed of one day painting Salvador Dali’s “The Temptation of Saint Anthony” on the side of a cow and becoming the first person ever to get a live animal put in a museum. FKM Incorporated was for her a mere pole-vaulting platform for her financially unstable career. “Wuh-we met in the break room yesterday over bearclaws. You were telling me about your accident.”
He squinted his eyes, perplexed as usual.
“Thuh-that’s okay,” she said, glancing at her nervously inward pointing toes. “I suppose I’m easily forgettable.”
“I’m sorry,” he said in an attempt to slip away.
“Buh-but I was wondering,” she said as he turned and walked away. “I remember you said you liked squids.”
“‘Computer virus’?” he muttered, maintaining the singular focus. “I wouldn’t count it out.”
“And and and,” Hope said with caffeine- and anxiety-fueled bombasity.
“I’m sorry,” he said, finally stopping and facing her. “I’m trying to concentrate. I don’t mean to be rude, but you’re not helping.”
“Oh ... oh ... I’m so so sorry,” she said, the original wave of electrical novelty leaking onto the floor. “I didn’t mean to interrupt you.” She shrunk like a backward bloom.
Tom finally noticed his insensitivity. “Oh don’t worry.” He touched her shoulder. “It’s not you. I just have this little problem where if I don’t concentrate I’ll completely forget what I’m doing.”
She snapped her fingers, startling Tom. “Your accident,” she belted with a revelatory shine, the electrical novelty returning, remembering the break room conversation.
“Right. My accident. So you must understand, if I don’t go now I might as well not go at all.” He turned around once more.
“Aaaaaaawwwww.” Her eyebrows crinkled with motherly concern over the poor accident-bound boy, with hair that needed combing, that lacked someone to care for him. “So as I was saying, you said you
liked squids, and they’re having a constellation exhibit at the planetarium, and I was just wondering if you wanted to ...”
“Wait, what does the planetarium have to do with squids?”
“Well, they’ll be displaying the squid constellation, silly.”
He grabbed both shoulders this time stopping her in her hyperactive tracks. “You see, these are the things I don’t need to be thinking about right now. It’s nice to meet you Joy, but ... please ... I’m sorry ... if you don’t mind ...”
She stood in motionless defeat as he walked off muttering memorized silliness. “My name is Hope,” she said silently, poking out her lower lip, with a little bitty lump forming in her throat.
As he walked along the aisle, escaping distractions, Tom stared at the uniform off-white rectangular tiles, and rough dimples and bumps all of a sudden interrupted the floor’s formula. The further he went, the more frequent the upheavals in the solid floor appeared. It looked like roots of an oak when men put roads where nature intended life to be, not concrete. And the life refused to yield. And the oak