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Terry Terwilliger arrived in his cubicle
on Friday morning, forty-five minutes late, to the stale smell
of yesterday's half-eaten lunch. Having been in meetings most
of the previous day, he had not taken the time to walk to the
kitchen to dispose of it properly, and had simply shoved it to
one corner of his desk. He'd taken just a few bites of the grilled
cheese sandwich but hadn't touched the pickle. Pickles stink
if you leave them overnight. He stood staring at the dirty white Styrofoam
container, breathing through his nose, focusing on the stench
of the pickle, letting his nostrils acclimate to the odor until
he could no longer detect it. That was how he dealt with the
problems in his life. He then carelessly tossed his windbreaker
over the cubicle wall. The wall was topped with a slick metal
rim so that the vinyl jacket slid right off and onto the floor
but he didn't pick it up. Instead, he collapsed into his desk
chair as if someone had just thrown a dark and heavy rug over
his five-foot-seven frame. His thin, hairless arms dangled over
the armrests and his head flopped to one side. His gaze came to rest on his jacket heaped
on the floor, and on the tear in the elbow. He had torn it a
month ago on a sharp corner of his filing cabinet. The day after,
in the drug store next to his office, he noticed a small sewing
kit beside the checkout. It contained twelve small spools each
wrapped with a different color of thread, and two small needles.
He was buying dental floss and impulsively tossed the sewing
kit in with his purchase. He pretended he had bought it for fixing
the tear in his jacket but it was really the vivid colors that
had seduced him. They reminded him of being a child, of a simpler
time in life, when one of the most important things about someone
was their favorite color. His was orange. Some kids liked blue;
others, mostly girls, liked yellow. Red seemed the most popular
but everyone had their favorite. He wondered how many of his
coworkers still remembered or even cared about having a favorite
color. In a rare moment of enthusiasm when he returned to his
cubicle, he created a monument to those better times by clearing
a space and lining up the spools on a shelf above his computer.
Whenever he tired of sifting through reams of figures that wouldn't
balance, which seemed most of the time, he would stare at those
multi-colored spools, pondering their arrangement, often spending
an entire morning or afternoon shifting them around. He had carefully matched the sky-blue thread
to the light blue vinyl of his jacket but as the weeks wore on,
realized he would never make the repair. At first when he thought
about the tear, he would catch himself tugging at his scraggly
black beard, often painfully, just to divert his attention from
this undone chore. But then he came up with a simpler solution:
If he waited until winter, the necessity of switching to different,
heavier jacket would solve the problem for him. Although he would
need his still-torn windbreaker again in the spring, the months
separating October and April seemed to him as impenetrable as
the Great Wall of China. His trance broke when he heard the voice
of Skip, his boss, echoing from down the hall. He gritted his
teeth, narrowed his eyes, and sat up in his chair so that he
could reach the keyboard to type in his password. He didn't want
the boss to see him slouching in his chair staring at the screen-saver.
But when he hit the Enter key, the computer beeped and a message
popped up informing him that what he had typed was invalid. He
smashed the keyboard with his fist just as Skip walked into his
cubicle. "Is everything okay, Terry?"
Skip asked, having just heard the smash. Terry had reopened a
nagging cut just above the nail of the little finger on his right
hand and Skip watched him suck on it to stem the bleeding. "I'm fine," Terry replied murderously.
He avoided looking up at Skip before retyping his password. This
time, he got it right. "God, what stinks?" Skip grimaced
and looked around Terry's disorganized cubicle. Every available
square inch of desk and shelf space was covered with precariously
stacked accounting reports, some of them a foot high. That is,
except for the small shelf above his computer that contained
his constantly shifting arrangement of colorful spools. Skip
didn't particularly notice this however. He wanted to know where
the stink was coming from. "The cleaning crew didn't empty the
trash last night," Terry told him. "Hmmm…" Skip looked at the
trash can and could plainly see that it was empty. He usually
avoided entering Terry's workspace because the sight of old food
covered with thick layers of dust made him want to wretch. Terry
had only one coffee cup, which he had stopped washing long ago.
The outside of it was white but the rim was stained dark brown
and the inside looked black from years of accumulated sludge.
Skip suddenly felt as though he would heave but managed to stifle
the urge by quickly looking away. He never did locate the source
of the foul smell however; the Styrofoam container with the offending
pickle sat in the corner of Terry's desk that lay in the shadow
of the filing cabinet, and Skip could not see it. Besides, that
wasn't what he came for. "I was late this morning because of
traffic," Terry said, hoping to pre-empt Skip calling him
on the carpet for it. "You were late? Well, don't worry
about it." Shit!
Terry thought. I should have kept my mouth shut. To change
the subject, he asked, "When is that meeting with the auditors?
I think I've almost got these numbers to balance." "It's been postponed until Monday."
Skip pursed his lips and looked away. "Really? They've been screaming for
it all week." "I know, but I managed to put them
off. I just stopped to make sure you were free later this afternoon." "If we don't have to meet the auditors
until Monday, I'm free now." "I can't. I'm busy." Skip rapped
twice on the metal rim of Terry's cubicle wall before hurrying
away. Terry stood and stretched the tiredness
from his limbs. The news of the postponed meeting meant that
he would have most of the day to himself and he looked up at
his spools. He reached for the one with the orange thread then
set it down at eye-level on top of his filing cabinet. He leaned
his forearms on the rounded edge of the grey metal cabinet, shivering
at the coolness he felt through his worn cotton shirtsleeves,
and rested his chin on his interlocked fingers. If he squinted, he could see the tiny strand
as it wrapped round and round the spool and he unconsciously
began to count the number of revolutions. When he had finished
counting, an hour later, he measured the radius of the spool
and from that, calculated the total length of the thread. Of
course he already knew its length; it was stamped on the top
of the white plastic spool: 50m. But he liked counting, and he
liked balancing independent sources of information. That was
why he had become an accountant. His calculated value came out
to 48m, just short, but that didn't mean he had made an error.
It was just as likely that the manufacturer had made an error
or that they had intentionally shorted the customer to increase
their profit. He pictured the thread company executives, with
their MBA diplomas proudly framed and hanging on the oak-paneled
walls of their elegant offices, laughing at the ignorant customers;
laughing at him. Who would ever know? he imagined them asking.
Only a nerdy accountant would ever actually measure it. He bit
the inside of his lip and tore off a chunk of tender flesh. The
taste of blood flooded his mouth and at that moment he wanted
to murder Skip. Skip, only a year out of MBA school, and
five years younger than Terry, had nevertheless risen past him
in the corporate hierarchy. What went wrong? At twenty-two, Terry
had graduated from college with a degree in accounting and at
twenty-three, earned his CPA designation. He had worked at Washington
Life Insurance Company his whole career, seven and a half years. "Terry!" Skip stood several yards
away and could see Terry leaning against the filing cabinet staring
into space. "Terry!" "Huh?" "About meeting this afternoon…I'll
be busy. Stop by my office at five today." "When?" "Five-o-clock." "Got it. Conference room at five with
the auditors," Terry answered, forgetting that Skip had
already told him that the meeting with the auditors had been
postponed until Monday. "Not in the conference room. In my
office." "Got it. In your office." Skip threw up his arms and mumbled something
under his breath that Terry didn't hear. He started to ask Skip
to repeat it, but Skip had already turned and disappeared down
the hallway. Terry looked at his watch: eleven-o-clock.
"Great! I've got six more hours to figure out why those
reports didn't balance." He went to lunch, came back to
this office at one-o-clock then put his head on his desk and
slept until four. When he woke, his mouth felt like the inside
of a wrestler's sweat-soaked jockstrap so he rummaged through
his desk drawer for his toothbrush then shuffled along to the
men's restroom. The bristles on his toothbrush, the ones that
remained, were bent and worn, and the hard plastic beneath the
bristles made as much contact with his tender gums as the bristles
did with his coffee-stained teeth. After rinsing his mouth, he
took a fresh package of dental floss from his shirt pocket. He
began flossing meticulously between each pair of teeth: back
and forth, up and down, back and forth, up and down. He believed
that layers of plaque lay hidden between his teeth and beneath
his gums, but no matter how hard or how long he flossed he could
not pry the bacteria out. At two minutes to five, still standing
before the mirror in the restroom, gums sore and bleeding, the
tips of his fingers blue and numb from the tightly wrapped length
of floss, he checked under the stalls before unraveling the floss
from his fingers. He shrieked inhumanly from the sharp pain
caused by the sudden rushing of blood back into the constricted
vessels of his fingers. He would have continued flossing until
collapsing from exhaustion were it not for his five-o-clock meeting
with Skip. He hurled the box of dental floss against the white,
tiled wall and flew out. Halfway to Skip's office however, something
came over him. He felt light-headed and thought for a moment
he would faint. What in the world am I doing here? He leaned with his clenched fist against the prefabricated wall of the hallway to steady himself before returning to his desk. Without hesitating, he grabbed his colorful spools, cramming half of them in his right pants pockets and the other half in his left. With a powerful stride, Terry Terwilliger walked straight past Skip's office and out into a world that he believed bulged with possibilities.
Graham Gersdorff is the publicity director for the Writers' Group of the Triad, which is based in Greensboro, NC. He holds a bachelor's degree in Mathematics from the University of Toronto, and works in the actuarial department of an auto insurance company in Winston-Salem, NC. He is pleased to have recently become a dual U.S./Canadian citizen.
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