2It had all started over breakfast one morning, shortly after I had got my master's degree, when my father for whatever reason became possessed by the opinion that I should get myself a job within the next few days. It happened all so suddenly that I was left in a daze. One moment he was placidly reading the newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee with quiet contentment, and the next thing I knew he was banging his fist on the table, coffee cup and all, covering everything within a yard's radius in coffee and broken pieces of porcelain, and grumbled something incoherent about jobs. It later transpired that he wanted me to desist from being a moocher – as if mooching were anything at all between father and son – and find myself a good, respectable job by which to earn my right to this world.
And so, after being invidiously kicked out of the house, I found myself on the streets with nothing except my dignity, the designer suit in which I was dressed, and a folder containing my résumé. Of course, I had other things on my person, such as my wallet, a little cash in the wallet, the keys for my father's car (which I had stolen by way of exacting revenge against him), and a pair of scissors for self-defense, but they were all of secondary importance.
I realized after I had walked four blocks in the scorching summer sun that I had no particular destination and no particular jobs in mind. I had a master's degree, although I could not remember in what, and stopping in the middle of a busy sidewalk to glance at one's résumé is not something that a respectable young man like me was supposed to do. It was the employer's problem anyway. Once I got the job it was immaterial if I had a master's degree in Philosophy or in Piggery.
A few short minutes later I found myself at the doorstep of George G. George, a close friend of mine. The middle G stood for "George". At high school he was the computer geek; at college he was the computer geek; and now, after graduating, he persisted in being the computer geek. Much to my advantage, of course, for there is no better time to meet computer geeks than when you are hard-up for jobs and are at a loss to decide where to start looking.
I entered the house. The front door was expectedly open. It always was. Daylight robberies were only a natural consequence. As I passed the living room I saw a shady-looking character put an expensive-looking candelabrum into a bag.
"Mornin'," he said cordially.
"Morning," I said.
I walked up the staircase, careful to avoid the step that was missing, and made my way to George's bedroom. I turned the knob. The door was locked.
I proceeded to Stage Two and started to bang my fists on the door.
"George! Open up!" I shouted.
The sound of shuffling was heard from within. This was followed by the sound of a large something, probably a bookcase, crashing down to the floor. A minute's silence, and then the shuffling recommenced. The sound of a mousetrap shutting came next, followed by a long-drawn "OW!" It was only a matter of time before the door opened.
The sound of the lock clicking came next, and I could distinctly see the doorknob turn.
A freckled face thrust itself out from behind the door. Watery eyes were rendered obscure by half-inch-thick glasses. Obnoxious-looking red-curls covered his head. George G. George in person.
"Oh, it's you!" said George with a sigh of relief.
"Who else would it be?" I said, pushing the door open and stepping in, adroitly avoiding the several other mousetraps that were laid out on the floor at strategic points.
"What brings you here?"
I looked down superciliously at George – looked down, for he was diminutive.
"I wanted you to help me find a job that would do justice to my master's degree and at the same time promise me a generous salary."
"Oh, is that all?" said George with touch of disappointment in his tone. "That's elementary! Kid stuff. It's boring!"
"That's beside the point," I said. "Now start researching. I don't have all day."
George carefully treaded over the piles of old clothes and laundry that covered every inch of the floor, made a valiant attempt at climbing over the bookcase – he was, as I have said before, diminutive – fell a couple of times, but continued climbing, and eventually reached the other side, where his computer was.
"Just give me a moment," he said, sitting down before the computer, tongue between teeth and a look of mild excitement clearly visible on his computer screen-illuminated face.
A few minutes later, the printer, having received a command from User, began heaving and panting like a man in agony, but nonetheless succeeded in printing out a document.
A few more minutes later, George returned to my side of the room.
"Here's a list of all the jobs that you could consider," he said, pointing with pride at the paper.
"There are only five," I said in dismay.
"Well, yeah," said George, shuffling his feet uncomfortably. "Well, you see, you were the one who wanted a job that did justice to your master's degree. This is the best I could find."
"Thanks a lot," I said coldly. "And now that your usefulness has ended, George, you may go back to playing with your computer. I don't think I shall be seeing you again until next year."
I made my way down the staircase, reflexively avoiding the missing step, my mind serenely devoid of all thoughts.
I passed the living room again. My shady friend was putting an antique wall-clock into his bag. He looked at me and waved.
"Bye," he said cheerfully.
"Bye."
When I was out on the streets again, I made the mistake of glancing down at the paper George had given me at the same time as I was crossing a busy road. The signal had turned green. A speeding motorbike made away with a sizable portion of my designer coat. It was only after I had reached Mrs. Potts' Gardening Store and the proprietor in person had remarked on this that it came to my notice.
"I am Mrs. Potts," said the fat little woman in a country dress and an apron with a warm smile on her face after she had led me inside her store, a miniature greenhouse on the road, which was sadly lacking as far as the color green was concerned. "You said you wanted a job?"
If everything did not go well, I would be doomed to work for this woman. I observed her with a certain amount of distaste as she bent over a dead rose, singing gaily of true love's first kiss, and kissed it.
I coughed.
She turned.
"Yes, dear?"
"Here is my résumé," I said, extending the folder toward her.
She took it daintily and gave it but a brief glance.
"You'll do!" she said happily, returning my résumé and scurrying over to a decaying desk on the other side of the room. She produced a diary from one of its drawers. It was from 1942. "Now, then. James, isn't it?"
I felt something brush against my leg. Glancing down I saw that it was a two-foot long coral snake, wrapping itself around my ankle, emitting hisses of pleasure.
"Erm," I said nervously. "No, it isn't. You've got the wrong guy. Bye." I extricated myself from the snake's coils and fled to the safety of the great outdoors as quickly as I could.
I spotted a woman old enough to be my great grandmother on Twentieth Street. She made a pass at me, and got away with the remaining portion of my designer coat. But I did not give her much thought. I was nearing my destination.
The Twentieth Street Park, was looking, as it always did that time of year around, or for that matter, any time of the year, a total mess that did not deserve to be called a park. In other words it was the city's pride; a tourist's paradise.
I walked through the rusty iron gates with an air of purpose, which the tourists around me all noticeably lacked, and which made the park workers look at me as if I had lost it. I walked past the dead trees, past the yellow lawns, and past the dried lake. I did not even spare a moment to sit back and admire the sight of the Greek pillars and the pigeons periodically crashing into them that I used to greatly enjoy as a kid. The pillars had been erected so that pigeons could crash into them in abandon. On a somnolent summer morning such as this it should have given the ordinary person great pleasure to see whole flocks of pigeons swoop down and crash into the pillars with deadly precision and amazing coordination.
But I was not the ordinary person: I was a person in search of a job, something that I was to understand could be found at the Head Gardener's office a little distance farther.
The Head Gardener, Quentin R. Hawking, was not even fractionally as respectable as his name seemed to suggest. He was a giant of a man with scraggly black hair and beard that obscured the greater part of his face. All that was visible were a long, warty nose and beady black eyes that peered down malevolently at me from under bushy eyebrows. He wore a shirt that may have fitted him back in the good old days, when men were still children, but now it barely covered half of his expansive upper body.
"Whatcha here fer?" he said, and I noticed that he was missing a few teeth. All of them, to be exact. "Whatcha wan' frum 'Kentun 'Aar Hwakin' 'n-ee-way?"
It is often the case if you want to become an employee for someone and still retain a shred of dignity that you need to have high expectations of your employers. In the list of things that I had mentally made while in 'Kentun 'Aar Hwakin's august society, articulacy came first.
"Sorry, sir," I said to the Quentin R. Hawking. "I don't want anything from you."
Quentin R. Hawking gritted his teeth and went through the motion preparatory to ripping someone's head off. I managed just in time to dodge the blow and escape, but to say that I had escaped unscathed would be inaccurate. Quentin R. Hawking, in addition to inflicting a scratch on my left cheek, had stolen my designer necktie.
When I was out on Twentieth Street again, I looked back at the Twentieth Street Park with a frown. My mood brightened a little when I spotted a particularly fat pigeon collide with the pillar nearest the park gates and drop to the ground and lay motionless, but not enough for me to forget the indignity I had just suffered of having a gardener physically assault me. Gardeners, I decided, were an unscrupulous lot.
I was still in a bad mood when I reached Tanya's Fortunetelling Asylum, and snapped rudely at the secretary when she asked if I wanted to book a padded cell for the day.
When Tanya, a young-looking female with an overly made-up face, finally arrived in person, I tossed my résumé at her. It landed on her face and messed up the makeup. It was then that I discovered that she was in fact an old hag.
"Well, hello!" she said in quivery tones. "Do you want a reading?" She began to caress the crystal ball she held in her hands.
I declined the offer.
"I want a job," I said.
"Well, now!" she said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully, her gold earrings reflecting the light of a dusty old chandelier.
It was as she was thinking that I got a good look at the room I was in. The carpet must have been red at some point in the distant past, but it had become covered under so many layers of dust that it had turned brown over time. The walls were draped in red cloth. The ceiling was painted red. And Tanya herself was dressed in red robes.
"Are you sure you're not a patient?" said Tanya finally.
"Yes."
"Just checking. In that case, you can take that broom and start in that corner over there. This place is so dusty that I think my great uncle Froot is still lying dead here somewhere.
"Oh?" I said. "Well, in that case, I think what you need is a psychiatrist and not a sweeper."
Tanya bared her pointy gypsy teeth and started cackling.
"This place is an asylum where fortunetellers come to repose once their faculties have deserted them. Now isn't that funny?"
I thought otherwise, but I did not pause to reply. The sooner I got out of the store the better. I was beginning to feel like her great uncle Froot.
My designer shirt got caught in the revolving door on my way out. I lost a sleeve. But I had no time to waste mourning over lost sleeves.
My next stop was the Miller Company, an organization that was housed in a grand fifty-storied building in the middle of town. One often asked the question "The Miller Company— of what?" but to date no one had found an answer.
As I reached the middle of town, I found myself surrounded by buildings that were about fifty stories tall – some even taller. They all looked about the same. Their glass façades were a pedestrian's worst nightmare – especially in the middle of the day, when the sun was particularly bright and the tendency of the glass to reflect sunlight into people's eyes particularly pronounced. I found the sound of the sluggishly moving traffic, though perfectly acceptable at any other time, particularly annoying that day.
All of the above factors impeded progress, and it took me a good while to find the Miller Company.
"I have an appointment with Howard Miller," I told the secretary.
The secretary regarded me appraisingly. Evidently designer shirts without sleeves were not the vogue.
"And who might you be?" asked the secretary, feigning equanimity, smiling a strained smile.
"James Klarkson. With a K."
"I see," said the secretary. "James Klarkson with a K." She turned to the register on the desk. "Yes. You do have an appointment with Mr. Miller. Please have a seat while I contact him in his office."
I took a seat next to a fish tank and began keenly observing its inhabitants. One of them was making faces at me. I did not like it very much.
Presently the secretary called me.
"Mr. Klarkson with a K," she said. "Please come with me."
I rose and followed her to the elevator. It was one of those glass elevators that went up and down inside an atrium from where one could see the rest of the building from bird's eye view – not pigeon's eye view, for that would make you blind to pillars.
The elevator came to a smooth stop at the forty-eighth floor.
"Here we are," said the secretary. "Step right this way, sir."
I followed her around the atrium, glanced down once or twice to get a feel of how high the place really was, and felt my knees buckle. It had just occurred to me that among all the places I had gone to that morning, this was the only one where I actually felt like working right from the moment I had laid eyes on the building. Somewhere below the gentle sound of ripples proceeded from a water fountain, creating a soporific effect. It was soothing, and when I reached Howard Millar's office, I felt rejuvenated.
The secretary instructed me to wait outside while she went inside. I agreed to do so heartily. I had forgotten all about the strange Mrs. Potts, the apoplectic gardener Quentin R. Hawking, and the psychotic gypsy Tanya. This was the place for me, I thought.
"Mr. Miller will see you," said the secretary, emerging from the office less than a minute later.
"Thank you," I said with a nod, and entered the office.
It was a spacious room. The walls on either side of me were lined with patents and official-looking photographs. Directly in front of me the entire wall was made of glass. I could see the tops of the neighboring buildings through it. I missed one, though, and I strained to look it, when I realized that my vision was obstructed by something.
"Hello," said that something in a polished voice. "I'm Howard Miller."
"Oh," I said, jerking back to my senses. I stepped forward and shook hands with him. "I'm James Klarkson. With a K."
"Pleased to meet you!" he said affably. "Have a seat."
Howard Miller seemed a nice man, I thought as I sat down in a chair. It was comfortable, unlike most office chairs.
"You're here for a job, I take it?" he said, smiling widely.
Oddly it was a charming smile – of the kind that movie stars usually wear on their faces. His hair was gray, but combed neatly. His gray suit was immaculate. I placed his age at around fifty.
"Yes," I replied. "I want a job." I handed him my résumé.
I noticed that he did not remark on the nature of my clothes. It was nice of him.
"H'm," he said, plainly impressed by my qualifications. "It's been a long time since we've had someone who's graduated from the country's best university."
"Thanks," I said. I would be getting the job for sure.
Mr. Miller rose and walked over to the wall.
"These patents," he said, "are all mine."
I rose and joined him.
"This was my first patent," he said, pointing at one. "I got this in nineteen seventy-six. Just graduated. Can you believe it?"
"That's impressive, Mr. Miller," I said.
"And I got this in nineteen ninety-one. I had to file suit against one of my rivals when he tried to patent the same thing."
"That was low of him."
"Yes it was. And this one over here…" He began to go over the patents one by one, and I listened patiently.
After he had finished showing me the patents he took me over to a wooden showcase. Its shelves were lined with cigars of every conceivable shape and size.
"You collect cigars?" I said.
"You bet I do," he said with a touch of pride. "There probably isn't a brand of cigar anywhere in the world that isn't here."
I was not in possession of enough knowledge about cigars to comment.
He picked one up of them.
"This one here is the most expensive cigar I've got. It's Turkish, and—"
He paused suddenly. A strange look came upon his face. His brows became furrowed with concentration and his lips were pursed. His jaw was stiff.
"Please excuse me for a moment," he said, walking over to his desk. He placed his hands on it and leaned forward with his back to me. And then, without warning, he began to pass wind.
He continued to pass wind for the next two and a half minutes, and I was beginning to feel that the Miller Company was not really the place for me.
Once he was done, he returned to where I was standing, giving vent to a long-drawn "Ah" of relief on the way, a smile of dreamy satisfaction clinging stubbornly to his face.
I noticed that the cigar he left on the table had started smoldering, but refrained from bringing it up.
"Now," he said, sounding as if the burden of his advancing age had been removed from his shoulders and he had become an insouciant young man once again. "Where were we?"
"Nowhere," I said tersely. "I was just about to leave."
"Oh, so soon?" he said in dismay. "Well, I like you, son. If you ever feel like a job, all you have to do is drop by."
"Sure," I lied. "Goodbye."
As I shut the office door behind me I heard him passing wind again and felt relieved that I had come out when I had. Simultaneously I heard an explosion and the word "Ouch!" spoken in Mr. Miller's voice.
I had almost given up trying to look for a job when I exited the building. But then I decided that the last address was near home, so I might as well check it out.
It was the only address that belonged to a private residence. The house was a large one, and the name on the mailbox was Richard Donaldson. I began to speculate on the nature of the job someone could have for me at their house. But I had long given up on the expectations I had had of prospective employers, and was willing to accept any job that paid me upwards of zero dollars.
I rang the doorbell. It was not long before the door opened and a disheveled-looking man poked his head out. He smelled strongly of cigarettes.
"Can I help you?" he asked in breathy tones.
"My name is James Klarkson. With a K. I'm looking for a job."
The man looked delighted.
"Oh, come right inside, then," he said, opening the door wider and admitting me into a small anteroom.
"I'm Richard," he said.
"So what kind of job do you have for me?"
"We'll talk about that later," he said. "Let's have a chat over tea first."
He led me into the living room. It was a room that had too much space and too little furniture.
"Have a seat," he said, leading me to a couch that was covered with a dusty white cloth. "I'll have my wife make you some tea. Jane!" he shouted, turning his head in the direction where the kitchen must have been. "Jane!"
He shook his head and then turned to me.
"Awfully sorry," he said. "I don't think Jane is at home. I'll have to make you tea myself then. Why don't you come along and tell me how you want it?"
I rose and followed him into the kitchen.
The first thing I noticed was a woman leaning serenely over the stove, her head resting on a burner. Then I noticed the gaping wound at the back of her head and the dried blood around it, and realized that the woman was actually a corpse.
"Oh, there she is!" said Donaldson with a laugh. Then he turned to me. "Silly me! I shot her last night. I'd completely forgotten about it. Can you believe it? Ha!"
But I was already making a run for it. Turning your back on a murderer who probably has a loaded gun on his person is not something most people would advise, but I had no other choice. Escaping the house was of paramount importance, and the only way to achieve it was to run.
"Wait!" called Donaldson agitatedly. "Don't you want your tea? Don't go! Oh!"
I did not stop running until I reached home.
"What's the matter?" asked my mother, horrified, when I barged into the kitchen and only then stopped to catch my breath. "What happened to you?"
"Nothing," I said through pants. "I haven't found a job. Instead I invited a whole lot of trouble. George, that oaf. I'm going to get him for this."
Fortified by fresh thoughts of revenge that drowned away the fear I had felt at Donaldson's Residence of Death, I marched briskly over to George's house.
There was a shady people's party going on in the living room, complete with disco lights and a DJ. The shady people waved at me. I waved back.
I made my way up the stairs, not even registering the fact that I had avoided the missing step, and banged on George's bedroom door.
I heard the sound of a computer exploding and George screaming "No!" at the top of his lungs. The sound of shuffling came shortly afterwards, and a few short minutes later, the door opened, and I found myself face-to-face with a teary George G. George.
"You startled me into making my computer explode," he sobbed.
I remained unmoved.
"George, you're a retard," I said coldly, glaring down at him.
"Why? What do you mean? And what happened to your clothes?"
I narrated the day's events and held him responsible for everything that had befallen me.
"And now," I concluded, "I'll leave you to tinker with your stupid computer. And right. Maybe you should try looking for a job yourself."
I felt thirsty after all the talking I did, so I got myself a drink from the shady people's party on the way out.
When I reached home I saw my father waiting for me at the door.
"Son—" Then he noticed the state of my clothes. "What happened to your clothes?"
"Never mind," I said. "Long story."
"Maybe some other time then," he said. "What I wanted to tell you is that Mark tendered his resignation today, so the position of Corporate Vice-President of the Klarkson Software Company is vacant. I was wondering if you wanted to fill it. After all, you have a master's degree in computer engineering from the best university in the country. So what do you say?"
I could not believe my ears.