I looked at the water filter indicator as it blinked yellow at me. Like a credit card, the carbon had been activated and spent to its limit. The smiley seemed unnecessary, though I guess if I knock that I’m obligated to knock every game to ever end in “THANKS FOR PLAYING.”
I pull the phone out of my left pocket and waggle it until it gives me the camera function I used to point-and-click order a new filter as soon as I aim the fucking QR code reader right. The convenience of tomorrow, today, with minor assembly required to save you money now. This is late stage capitalism, where we’ve grown such a tolerance the phrases aren’t catchy and the word’s don’t so much as gurgle—forget buzzing!
Whatever.
I get to work 15 minutes later than I did yesterday, which was also 15 minutes later than it was yesterday, and so on and so on, such that I’m up to lunch time by the time I settle in. It doesn’t matter, time doesn’t matter, time is not the real number. Time is a proletarian concern and I made it out of the clockwork game of mousetrap they call being working class. I wear looser and looser clothes every day; the old timers basically wear gis like they’re about to fight Cell for the Dragon Balls or whatever, I seriously never watched that show past the super saiyan moment. Anyway, intervertebral discs are important, I say to myself as I take off my belt and slide into my chair. I’ve gotten better about my entertainment regimen; I start the morning with news, then comedy, then music; I set the playlist up as I make my lunch the night before. Efficient, calculated, ready to get on with the day. I unwind my headphones from the left armrest and plop them on as I lean back and take the chemolyzer and shove it directly into the guideport right below my voicebox.
Natural talent at this job consists of what psychologists call a labile personality. I feel like Ripley in the first Alien as I load the production slate onto the screen being projected at the end of my desk: distress, eustress, tranquility. I toggle distress first and the noisy graph screens showing my internal chemical balance and levels pops up, all my levels at a light red, trailing green and unnaturally smooth ghost lines. My brain waves show up in a picture-in-picture window off to the corner. I don’t understand any of this beyond having to hit the targets. I keep thinking of Alien. I had a fear when I was a child of sitting with my legs dangling in front of bed or a couch with a gap for fear of a xenomorph lashing out at my ankles. The image was regular and intrusive; I don’t fear it as much anymore but I still see it lashing beneath every sofa sea, trying to thrash and claw its way to my feet. I indulge this a little bit and my levels start to shift.
I couldn’t name the hormones or the compounds, but I could stress out like no one’s business. It didn’t take me long to get to the green and start racking in research points—getting and staying in the zone gave you “research points” as a way to gameify and quantify what we were doing to ourselves as the chemolyzers sucked and studied us like sex predators. Getting to your targets and staying there was a challenge for most people who had to do a lot of therapy, drugs, and yoga to get where they needed to be. I just sat down and thought of a movie I hadn’t seen in fifteen years—does that seem right to you? The news was all foreign policy stuff, mostly chucklefucks bumbling senselessly through gimme-gimme peace talks for the sake of points at their home camps. I have no trouble getting right to green when I’m on distress.
An hour later I was way too hungry to be doing this. I hit peak distress quota—four hours worth of work in one—and yanked the chemolyzer from my chest. I pushed myself up and staggered away from my desk like most people did; you could try really hard and hold it together but if you were keeping it real, sitting there having your bloodwork actively fucked with is kinda like a waking death.
I packed a sandwich that day and ate it as I stared out window at the mountains on the horizon, dark green and brown and snowcapped like zits on an earth giant. I couldn’t imagine living far from a mountain range. A person (ok, I) needs an easy way to remember sublimity, a way to feel grandeur and remember the sound of the ineffable. Keeps you grounded, reminds you of your size. People in flat lands forget their limits, forget their bodies. I appreciate my own zen enough and get back to work, zoning into tranquility. This one is the money maker: peace of mind sells like a motherfucker. Forget selling insurance: how much money could you make selling the feeling of having insurance? Money means nothing to me right now. Everything is as it should be, the heavens are in order, my pulse brings me closer to a corpse.
This was my life, this was my job, and then I lost my goddamn mind.
1/3