10-cent pen

WRITTEN BY ERIC A.

There’s a certain click the policy analyst’s pen makes as he caps and uncaps it. It’s a flimsy, 10-cent pen, of pellucid blue plastic and flaccid rubber grip, the latter now worn to nubs by the rhythms of his rotating fingers.

    You could assume he’s had this pen for a long time, the way he handles it: adroitly, and without that trace of brusque utilitarianism so observable in those guys who keep their pens tucked dormant in breast pockets, nestled there, visible, until they take them out to write. 

    No, he’s not like them. You’ve seen him accomplish tactile acrobatics with this pen, bobs and weaves between manicured fingers, rhythmic fluxes, totally competent.

    His hair is blonde and groomed. 

    His eyes are an unidentifiable ochre you can’t distinguish, from where you’re sitting.

    With his free hand, he pushes his glasses up his nose.

    The environment is sterile but at the same time it is somehow coldly hostile, made so by the policy analyst’s presence, by the intrusive staccato his fingers make with the pen, by his analytical gaze, by the too-sharp odor of Pasha de Cartier coming off him in plumes, somehow smellable even through the pane-glass of the air-conditioned office, the kind ceiling-stocked with those fluorescent lights which you’d prefer kept some things un-illuminated. 

    “So,” the policy analyst says. You maintain a cold sweat. The policy analyst’s name is Timothy. He doesn’t look like a Timothy—your appendix of Timothies contain no persons who look or act like this man. You want to address him by his name, but you don’t know if he knows you know his name. An epistemic conundrum. You were told his name by Janine, at the front desk, before you entered the room—which had proven to be a mistake, probably, on your part. Entering the room. The policy analyst never expounds on the SO, and instead keeps on inspecting his papers in a real sang-froid way. For a second he stops the tic with the pen. 

    You clear your throat. He doesn’t give any recognition to your un-occluded throat. You wonder, briefly, whether guys like him really do get so absorbed in their papers that they tune out their environment. 

    Flakes of sun escape through the windows and cast long shadows about you and him, as you sit facing each other. You twiddle your thumbs.

    “So.”

    Two hundred-some-thousand miles away, a huge rock, pitted, marred and ugly, some remnant of a long-unknown spatial collision b/t unsung astral bodies from aeons past, jagged and looking rhombohedron-esque in the cold anti-light of space, glides silently and predatorily toward the moon in a killer trajectory. This rock is huge, being approximately 8 miles long and 16 miles wide. Men with telescopes stare voyeuristically. They are quiet.

    You see Scott exiting the bathroom, without having washed his hands, and, unbeknownst to him, without zipping his pants up. 

    “So.”

    And for a second, blinding light from sun-rays exposed and crystallized redirect obtrusively and implacably into your eyes (the activation of the room’s air conditioning creates a slight atmospheric disturbance near the windows, perturbing the blinds, whose outer layers are comprised solely of retroreflective plastic material--not a very aesthetically enlightened decision. In your opinion, it's incongruous with the rest of the room, and as far as you can speculate w/ your untrained eyes, the blinds would’ve been better if they were wooden and preferably shale-tiled; and so b/c of the activated air conditioning, the perturbed blinds quiver almost unnoticeably, and a bit of the aforementioned retroreflective material bounces sunlight directly into your eyes), which causes you to go momentarily blind, and in your state of optical interregnum you—and this is hard to explain—you SEE GOD, the real thing, the God your mother told you about, you SEE GOD, obscured by heavenly radiance, anthropomorphic and vaguely Semitic, just as the Bible said, his feet steepled upon pink-golden clouds, cherubim and seraphim twittering among his corpus, the crescendo of a thousand angelic harps resounding in your ears as you recoil, diving off your chair, quailing in a state of utter deference, the likes of which you have never felt nor experienced before—and in a completely newfound and divine afflatus, you realize his hand is outstretched to yours, to your mundane and unshaven form, and you feel an awesome emotion come before you, as you genuflect in total awe, kissing the ground in delirium, you, prone, supine upon the carpeted floor of the window-walled office, the laser-etched mahogany of the desk now above you, you making out the shape of the policy analyst’s leather-laden feet—

    “Jack?”

    —and God’s hand makes his way, snakelike, to your unworthy form, collapsed on carpet—

    “JACK? Someone, come here!"

    —spit escapes your lips in tendrils long and your eyes germinate with saline-heavy tears—

    “What’s happening?"

    —total deference—

    —and God wraps you in his gigantic hand, pulling you skyward, past your office's shitty, retroreflective blinds (are you now, somehow, trans-physical?) and through the pane-glass of the office’s window, into the saturated blue of the daytime sky--your building turns into a dot below your feet, and the harps’ consonant resound grows ever more euphonious as you, approaching God, receive His Light, and His Way. Your inchoate eyesight provides a blurred but recognizable peripheral of Paul of Tarsus and of Elijah and David and of the Virgin Mary and Samson and Noah and the rest of the Bible’s caste of characters, who wave to you affably from clouds of their own, as you approach your own, personal Nirvana—

    “?”

    —a blissful smile—

    —an understanding love—

    “Jack, are you okay?”

    “Jack?”

    “Someone! Call 911!”

    “Oh Jesus Christ what happened?”

    “I’m CPR certified.”

    “GetoutoftheWAY! GETOUTOFTHEWAY!”

    “JACK?”

    The men with telescopes adjust their telescopes’ mechanical stages, peering through their cynosures simultaneously to see a flit of brimming white light (an anomalous discharge of photons whose origin will remain unknown to these astronomers for, assumably, forever) shoot up past Chicago’s skyline and into the heavens. This takes their attention away from the huge, pitted rhombohedron, which they refer to as KQR-1179QB—or, more colloquially, as Galileo’s Passing. 

    —and, as you wave back to your Bible’s heroes, you feel something, drawing you, drawing you ever downward, like someone just tied cinderblocks to your incorporeal and supposedly trans-physical form, and your trajectory peaks—the clouds fade as soon as they’d appeared, and God’s hand is suddenly and abrasively relinquished—there is a free-fall, almost instantaneous, as you are sucked vituperatively back into your workplace’s building.

    “Jack?”

    You take deep breaths.

    The moon is so big that, really, what were these astronomers ever expecting? The rhombohedron, whose mass and volume are so utterly insignificant that they would not even compel the Moon to slow for but a fraction of a second, is sucked into the Moon’s gravitational field at sub-sonic speeds and is crushed and destroyed, utterly, like an eggshell to concrete. Notepads are broken out and are scrawled upon illegibly by freely perspiring fingers, holding ten-cent pens not unlike the policy analyst’s, but in grips untrained, unlike the policy analyst.

    You take deep breaths.

    The policy analyst stands before you, above you, looming, parental.

    “Jack?”

    Your face is curled into a look of confusion, and then of recognition, and then contorts into an expression of rage, eyebrows slanted in layered circumflex, complexion akin to a beet, spit and foam riddling the lips, nostrils flared. You’re sort of puerile looking.

    And, mouth opened, body rigid, about to scream, you scream: