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I.

My head hurts.  It’s bleeding, a little, but I think the top layer of my scalp has toughened over time, so it bleeds less than it used to.  The papers dangle loosely from the back of my head.  My head.  Ouch.  I wouldn’t normally, you know, do this, but today is a tribute to Melora.  Maximilian from Shipping walks up and stares at me for a while and then bends his head forward to whisper in my ear.  “What’d you think of her—The Boss?” he asks.
I think for a while.  “I don’t know,” I admit sadly.
“Don’t worry,” he says, “I don’t think anyone knows how they felt about her.  I mean, The Boss.”
He Meloras my left ear.  The sheet of paper hangs from it like heavy jewelry.  “Thanks,” I say, after I wince and grit my teeth and gnaw on my tongue until the pain abates.  “I gave away all my papers,” I tell him apologetically.
“No problem,” he replies, patting my back in a nervous obligatory kind of way.  He nods and smiles and then moves on to his next person.  I lift the sheet hanging from my ear and look at it.  It is a drawing from his childhood.  Maximilian is depicted as a young boy with a giant sad face shedding giant tears, while he stands next to a grown woman who must have been his Kindergarten or 1st Grade teacher, and I can only suppose by the tender care in each line and the neurotic attention to detail in the teacher’s penciled figure that she must have been extraordinarily beautiful and frustratingly unattainable.
Delmar from Accounting comes up to me next.  “Doesn’t look like you got much room left on you,” he says.
“There’s some vacant space on my back,” I say, pointing over my shoulder.  “My head.  Ouch.”
“Yeah I’ve got a bit of a headache myself,” he says.  “What would you rather have?  Some old baby pictures of my first born son, or my birth certificate?”
“You might need the birth certificate,” I say.
“The birth certificate it is,” he says, with tearful and loving eyes, and then with his chubby, awkward hands he gingerly turns me around so that my back is facing him, and Meloras me along the base of my spine.  The sensation of a million needles disperses from that point through my entire body, and my right leg thrusts forward in a spastic motion.  Delmar pats me on the shoulder.
“How’d you feel about The Boss?—bless that woman’s beautiful soul...”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“She was a good woman, The Boss was,” he says.
“I suppose.”

She was my girlfriend for about five minutes.  I was calling Cindy from Starbucks, and an unfamiliar woman answered the phone.  “Hi,” she said, “I know you.”
“Who is this?” I asked her.
“Whoever you intended it to be.”
“What does that mean?”
“Whatever you want it to mean.”
“What does that—I don’t even know what I want it to mean.”
“I think you do.”
“Really?”
“True or false: In this world we are very much alone.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I think you do.”
“Well you’d be wrong if you thought that.”
“Do you feel that you are alone?”
“No—incidentally, I was just about to call my girlfriend.”
“But you dialed one of the numbers incorrectly.”
“Yes.  In fact I may have hit another button instead of one of the buttons I was supposed to.”
“In this world we are very much alone.  Agree or disagree.”
“Can I answer somewhere in the middle of agreement and disagreement?”
“Agree or disagree.”
“Agree.”
“Then you are alone.”
“Maybe.”
“Alone.”
“Fine.”
“Good.  Where are you?”
“Starbucks.”
“Good.  Meet me at the building across the street on the 24th floor.”
“How’d you know which Starbucks?” I wanted to ask, but she’d hung up right before the “r” in “floor.”
I finished my DoubleShot Premium Espresso and went over to the crosswalk that led to the corner of the large building with large windows that reflected the stinging sunlight.  It was blinding to look at.  When I crossed the street the refracted light from the large windows pounded on me and seemed to heat the pavement as I stepped closer to the building.  To avoid looking at the light of the building I concentrated on something else and my face met with a man who was crossing the street from the other side.  I stared at him like it was his fault that the sun bounced its rays off the windows and concrete and he looked at me like it was my fault.
“What’s your problem,” I said, staring him down defensively as we met in the middle of the crosswalk.
“What’s yours?”  He was glaring at me.  My head was hurting and my cheeks were burning and my shoulders felt like chickens in ovens.
“I don’t have a problem,” I said.
“Yes you do.”
“What?”
“You obviously have some kind of problem.”
“No I don’t,” I said.
“Shuttup,” he said, and now he looked sad, and then he continued walking.
I stood in the middle of the crosswalk, turning my head and staring at the back of his head venomously.  Someone popped their horn at me, and it hurt my ears, and I jumped up and ran to the blinding face of building that hurt my face and making me melt, and I hurried under the eaves of the building that swallowed me in shade and ventilated air and I ran through the glass revolving doors.  The floor was made of marble.  I walked quickly toward the elevators on the other side.  My front foot slipped and then my back one leapt into the air and I skid forward, sliding and waving my arms around and yelling and throwing my feet around wildly.  I lunged forward with my chest and caught the tiled floor with my fingers and palms and then my elbows.  I lifted myself up with staggered breaths and turned to see an old and hairless mop-wielding janitor pointing at one of those yellow triangle signs showing me falling because the floor is slippery when wet.  My elbows hurt.
“You wanted that to happen, didn’t you?” I asked janitor accusingly.
The janitor smiled benignly and began mopping again.  He looked suspicious.
“You look suspicious,” I said, pointing at him while I stepped cautiously toward the elevator.
He shrugged and smiled some more and continued mopping and glanced over conspiratorially at a fancy-looking desk clerk who was following me with his eyes.  I reached the elevator lobby and punched the “up” button with my thumb ten times, and after a couple uncomfortable minutes of waiting, one of the eight sets of elevator doors dragged open and I jumped in and punched “24” and the doors closed sluggishly and the elevator lifted itself as if it didn’t really want to.  I tapped my foot on the red carpeting.  There were mirrors in back of me and mirrors to my left and ride and the support railings on both sides were made of reflective material.  There was a lot of me in the elevator.  It was quiet and all I could hear was the tapping of my toes in my shoes hitting the floor in a self-assigned cadence.  The elevator moved at slug-pace and I was happy and at peace.
The doors slid open and she was standing there as the doors parted and when they were parted completely there was a room but she was standing there and that’s all I saw.  She was beautiful and I had forgotten about my aching elbows.
“You have dark circles under your eyes,” I said.
“Your hair is all messed up,” she said.
She walked into the elevator and kissed me.  I heard phones everywhere.  Her kissing me made the phones sound like the trilling voice of one angel, singing.  She stepped on my feet with high heels while she kissed me and she bit my ear and then kissed it savagely.
“Ow,” I said.
“That was cute,” she said.
“My ear.  My feet.”
She looked at me for a long time and moved my hair around with her hands and took a couple steps back to look at me.  The elevator doors started to drag themselves shut and she threw her hands out quickly and forcefully and the doors cowered back.
“I’m making you my boyfriend,” she declared decisively, and grabbed my hand and pulled me out into the office where people were doing office things.
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Do you have a job?” she turned to me and held my hands and stared up into my eyes.  Her eyes bothered me.  It stung, and she didn’t blink.
“Yes.”
“Do you like it?”
“Not really.”
“You’ll like this one.  I’m Melora.”
“What do you do here?”
A phone rang.
“Pick it up.”
“Me?”
“You.”
I picked it up.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello?” said a voice.
“Hello,” I said.
The voice laughed, and then said, “…Can I order a pizza?”
I looked around the office where the people were doing office things, and there were no pizzas except for a cold slice of spinach-garlic that one of the office people was eating while he chatted on the phone with somebody.
“What did they say?” Melora asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the voice, “But I think you have the—”
“Of course they do,” she said, pinching me.
“Ow,” I said.
“What?” asked the voice.
“Ow,” I said.
“Are you alright?” asked the voice.
Melora pressed her ear to the receiver next to where my ear was and I moved away thinking she was going to bite/kiss it again and she yanked my hair and the phone toward her ear.
“Ow,” I said.
“I want a pizza,” said the voice.
“She wants a pizza,” said Melora.
“I’m sorry, I don’t—”
“Ask the girl her order,” said Melora.
“What would you like on this pizza?” I asked.
The girl hung up.
“She hung up,” I said.
“They do that sometimes.”
I put the phone back on the hook and then it rang again.  I picked it up.
“Hello?” I said.
“Is this Matt’s Tanning Parlor?”
“He wants a tanning parlor,” I told Melora.  She looked down at the drab blue carpeting for a while and then nodded.
“Yeah,” she said, “We can do that.”
“We can do that,” I said.
There was a silence on the line for a while, and then the man asked, “Is this Matt’s Tanning Parlor?”
I looked at Melora, whose nose was right next to my cheek so that when I turned to look at her I jammed my cheek into her nose but she barely flinched because she was so intent on listening to the anonymous man.
“It is if you want it to be,” I told him.
“What does that mean?”
“Whatever you want it to mean.”
“Whatever.  Can you get me tanned?”
“We can if you want us to.”
“Cheaper than it would be at Matt’s Tanning Parlor?”
I looked at Melora while trying not to ram into her nose and she did not move and kept listening with her beauty and black-rimmed eyes next to my face.  I smiled.
“Sure.”
“Good.  Where.”
Melora told me our address and I told the man and the man said he’d be here in an hour and hung up.
“Go down one floor and ask for Mac from Inventory to get the tanning bed out of the crate.  It’s in row 12B, near the back of the storage room on the basement floor.  Get someone to bring it up.”
“Can’t we just call this Mac guy and then have him call us back when he’s ready to bring it up?”
“The phone lines are only waiting for the numbers that don’t exist,” she said,  “Busy, busy, busy.  Now go.  You work here.  And I’ve decided that you’re not my type.”

Mac comes up and hugs me with his giant arms and barrel chest.
“I know how much she meant to you,” he says.
“You do?”
He reaches into his back pocket.
“This is twenty dollars,” he says, and he starts sniffling and choking up, “My grandpa gave it to me when he had cancer.  Told me to buy a car with it.  And then, well, he...” his forehead crinkles as his thick eyebrows raise up as if to say “died” and he hugs me again, and then Meloras the old currency to the back of my right shoulder blade.  I flinch lightly.
“Stronger,” he says.
“Mm?”
“The boss made you stronger,” he declares in his bellowing voice, his stubbly unshaven face beaming with joyful grief.  He rolls his eyes to keep his tears cradled in his lower lids and swallows heavily and his chest heaves as he sucks in air and releases it in a low sigh.  “Got anything for me?” he asks.
“All out,” I say.
“That’s okay.”
He takes in another deep breath and looks down at me for a long time.  Then he exhales onto my head and my hair blows back and my papers flaps around.
“You know,” I say, “I may have something.”
Mac waits as I take an old National Spelling Bee Award off my left bicep.
“Whose was this?” he asks.
“Jenkins, from Phone Maintenance and Upgrades.”
“That’s special.”
“Yep.”
I Melora his wrist with a fragment of Jenkins’s history and it draws no blood.  He doesn’t even twitch.
“The Boss broke my heart,” he says.
“Mine too, I think.”
“On Thursday nights she would come down to the storage room and jump me from behind and wrap her legs around me and kiss me so hard,” he says, “You know, she was so afraid of rejection that she made sure no one could beat her to it.  She really wanted people to feel special, though.”
“There, there,” I say.
“Oh,” he says, “I have something else for you.”
He turns and runs downstairs with his papers flailing about.  I stand and wait.  He dashes back up with his thunderous footsteps, fresh out of the mildew-filled storage basement, panting athletically, with a beautiful giant thing held carefully in his arms.
“What’s that thing?”
“It’s for you to use for The Boss.”
He put it in my hands.
“What’s this thing?”
“It’s an urn.”
“So that’s what those things look like.”

     There was a sad voice on the phone.  It was an old lady.
“Is this the Goiner Funeral Home?”
“No, but I think we sell retail caskets at wholesale prices.”
“So this isn’t the Goiner Funeral Home?”
“Not to my knowledge, miss.”
“Then what number have I dialed?”
“An incorrect one.”
“I know that much,” she said, and then paused, and then asked with suspicion, “Are you trying to take advantage of an old lady?”
“No miss,” I said, “I just want to sell you cheaper death-carriers than Goiner Funeral Home.”
“Where is the proof of your legitimacy?”
I told her that I knew very little about death but knew how to find a quality death box when I saw one, and I gave her our address and told her where she could pick out a nice corpse vessel for her deceased loved one.
“In that case you are a very nice man,” she said.  “You are a man, right?”
“Yes I am indeed, miss.”
“That’s good.  I hate when I get that kind of thing wrong.  Especially with these fruits and dykes popping up everywhere—man, woman, it’s so hard to tell these days.”
“That’s not very appropriate, miss.”
“Why, are you a fruit?”
“No miss.”
“Are you a dyke?”
“No miss.  I thought we already established that I was a man.”
“So you’re a fruit.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being homosexual.  I even know people who have friends that are homosexual.”
“Really?  I’ve never met one.”
“Oh, they’re stand-up folks.  Not that they’re any different from other stand up folks.  It’s not even really a ‘them’ or ‘us’ kind of thing.  I think that they should merely be accepted as people and not be referred to as ‘them’ as if they are vastly different from the American majority, which they are not.”
“Are they friendly?”
“Yes.  Well, they’re just as friendly and bitter and happy and sad as the next friendly and bitter and happy and sad person, I suppose.”
“They sound friendly.”
“Yes.  Shakespeare was gay, I hear.”
“Do you think they have kind fruits that are willing to watch over lonely old women?”
“I don’t know if we have any homosexuals for hire, but I think there are organizations.”
“Dyke and fruit organizations?”
“Organizations for homosexuals.”
“Yes?”
“And you may be able to call them.”
“Will they send one to take care of me?”
Melora slammed her hands on the front wall of my cubicle.
“Ouch,” I yelped, because it felt like she had hit me but she was really just hitting my cubicle with her hands.  She rested her chin on the wall and stared down at me smiling.
“—So you stop by and we’ll take a look at those whatchamacallits, okay?  Alrighty, you have a nice gay I mean day now miss and we’ll look at those burying things.”
“You mean caskets?” asked the old lady.
“Yeah.  We’ll look at caskets together.”
“Who was that?” she asked.
“Just an old lady who needed someone for a casket—a casket for someone I mean, to put them in, you know.  You told me we have caskets for cheap so she’s coming to look at the caskets.”
“You were having a rather heated conversation with her.”
“Maybe.”
“You were.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No, don’t be.  She sounded lonely.”
“Oh.”
“That’s part of your job.”
“What is?”
“To talk to lonely people.  So hey, I want you to stay until after work.”
“You didn’t answer my question.  And why do I have to stay—”
“Because I’m asking you to.”
She climbed over the front wall and sat on my desk and leaned forward.  She was wearing a black skirt.  She had brown stockings and white lace panties.  Her hair was smooth and black and rippled like the waves of some gentle ocean.
“Stop whimpering,” she said.
“Am I really?”
“You are.”
“I don’t mean to.  It kind of just happens.”
“That’s hilarious,” she said, but she wasn’t laughing.  She wasn’t even smiling.
“I don’t think it’s hilarious.”
“I’m going to fix you,” she said.
Maximilian came up to my desk.  “Oh there you are Melo—Boss,” he said.
Melora twitched.
“Yes?” she asked.
“Somebody got a refund for 15 cases of Hershey Milk Chocolate bars from Hershey Foods in Pennsylvania.”
“And?”
“Well…they purchased it from us.”
“Which means?”
“Hershey contacted our customer and they told Hershey that they had dialed the wrong number and that we answered and offered them 5% cheaper per case, and now we’re on the evening news, and Hershey is conducting an investigation because somehow they know that this isn’t the first time their former customers have been offered 5% cheaper goods per case—”
“Why did the customer return the 15 cases.”
Maximilian edged away from Melora, who started to go into a standing position on my desk.  My phone rang.  Melora told me to get it so I got it.
“It was because—”
“Hello, young sir—oh sorry, hello young miss.  Oh, no, this is not the Suicide Prevention Hotline.  No no, oh, no, but, would you like to talk about it?  Well I’m not a licensed therapist, but neither are those operators.  I read a pamphlet once.  It was one of those community outreach things, and they were hiring people that would be willing to listen to people talk about their troubles.  All you have to do is take some counseling courses, and they make you a full-fledged operator.  So what is your name?  Oh Shannon, that’s a wonderful name, Shannon—”
“Because what,” said Melora.
“Because the chocolate bars had arrived melted, and our customer didn’t notice until several hours after the truck had delivered them, and they couldn’t remember the wrong number that they had dialed earlier during the day, so they ended up calling customer service at Hershey Foods and the customer service told them to send in the bar codes on the boxes—”
“You didn’t remove the barcodes?”
“Isn’t that Mac’s job?”
“Mac broke one of his pinkies!  You know that!  Do you think he’s in any condition to remove barcodes from Hershey Foods cases!”
“I—”
“Shuttup.  I’m going to yell at you so I don’t want you to interrupt.  Your transporters didn’t use the freezer truck, did they!  Why, I bet they used the heating truck.  You’re just lucky that Jenkins made all of our phone lines untraceable, or Hershey might have been able to find our area of operations.  Then we’d have to pick up and move shop again—and tell me Maximilian, who’s fault was it the last time?”
“Shannon, Shannon, you should never do that.  Don’t ever do that, okay?  It’s not that simple.  Well you’re just going to have to try, Shannon, alright?  For me?  Oh, but we are getting to know each other just fine, I think.  Me?  Oh my name is—well, my name used to be Carol, but I’m in the process of changing my name, I’m just waiting to think of a really good one, so legally my name is Carol, but I’d rather you not call me that because I don’t much like it since it sounds like a girl, so you can just refer to me as whatever you want to.”
“Can I borrow your stapler?” Melora asked me after much yelling at Maximilian during my conversation with Shannon.
“Okay,” I said.
All of my coworkers were still on their phones and continued to speak to their customers but they all had the other ear pointed toward Melora and she took my stapler and screamed something akin to a barbarian war-cry and she jumped off the desk with weapon in hand and brought it down over Maximilian who kind of just stood there quivering, and then he fell on the floor holding his head, and Melora took a folded stack of papers from behind the back of her dress and turned Maximilian over so that his chest and his nose pressed against the floor and he was crying and seemed to know what was going to happen and it seemed like every coworker except me had an idea of what she was planning to do and then she pressed the stapler with the papers pushed firmly and evenly on the place where the spine met the back of the skull and we all heard that sickening “kachick” that happens when somebody staples something to somebody’s body.  He was going to scream but instead he puffed up his cheeks and held the sound in his mouth and then closed his eyes and got up.  He sighed deeply and then walked away.
“You’re pale,” she said.
“Hello?” said Shannon, worried, “Hello?”
Everyone on the phones mumbled quietly to their customers, assuring them that no one had just been stapled in the back of the head with a stapler.  The cord of my phone dangled over the edge of my desk.  Melora picked it up and said, “Do you enjoy talking to the man whom you were just recently speaking to?  Would you like to speak to this man again some other time?  That’s nice to hear.  Well the next time you dial incorrectly, you know who to ask for—the man without a name.  Yes.  Yes that’s good.  Thank you Shannon, we enjoy hearing your voice.”  Then Melora hung up and looked at me with her beautiful black-rimmed eyes.  “You need to be hazed,” she said.  Some of my nearby coworkers chuckled.  I made to run but she grabbed me by the back of my collar and I fainted and she waited until I came to and then she turned me over and pressed the stapler and pushed the papers and “kachick” and I couldn’t even say “ow” I was in such terrible terrible terrible pain, so much that I started crying and my throat contracted and throbbed and my fingers opened and closed involuntarily.
“Tonight after work,” she said, “You and I will be the last ones here.  I’ll go get you some gauze.”
She rubbed my back in a circular motion for a half-minute before going to get one of the first-aid kits in her office.

II.

“So what’s gonna happen to us?” asks Jenkins.
“Well,” answers Delmar through a large bite of salami and lettuce between two fat slices of rye, “We have to have everything out of here in the next couple of days or so.  There’s 12 major corporations that have already filed suit, and 20/20 is doing a one-hour expose focusing on the shadiness of our business.”
“There’s a half-hour segment on 60 Minutes tonight, I hear,” I add.
“Are we all going to jail?” Maximilian asks with his throat quivering.
“Maybe,” says Delmar.
“We can all skip town,” I say.
“That’s probably a good idea,” says Delmar, chewing and swallowing.  He gets misty-eyed.  He sniffles and gulps a lump in his throat and takes another bite from his sandwich.
“Should we take Melora?” asks Mac.
“Have you tried carrying her?” I ask him, “She’s like a deadweight.  It’s weird.”
Mac walks over and tries to lift her out.  Veins pulse in his neck and arms.  He grits his teeth and flexes his arms and winces his eyes and then finally lets out a poof of air and sighs.  “Sword in the stone,” he says, and walks back toward the table that we sit on.
“We should bring up a couple lounge chairs from storage,” says Maximilian.
“I’m on it,” says Mac who gets off the table as soon as he had gotten back on, heading to the stairway.  I drink some French Press from a fancy brown Styrofoam cup.  The room is blank and the computers are gone and the phone lines are all unplugged and the cubicle boards have all been removed.  The carpeting and the copper socket coverings are the only things left on the floor.  That and Melora in her chair.  Oh, and our table.  Our knees dangle off the edges of it and hover above the carpet.  Melora’s papers sit in the center of the table in a large stack next to the urn.  I listen to Delmar chewing and swallowing and sniffling.  Mac bounds back up with five chairs.  He opens them for us and we sit on them.
“It’s a beautiful day,” says Delmar, looking out the window, where we see a bunch of buildings blocking the view of the harbor.  I take a sip of my coffee.
Maximilian nudges me and says, “Hey, how come you never gave anybody anything of your own?”
“I did.”
“No you didn’t,” says Jenkins, “You just kept telling everyone that you had given all of yours away already.”
“I did not say that exactly.”
“Well something to that effect,” says Maximilian.
They all turn to look at me, except for Delmar who keeps doing what he’s doing with his plump cheeks and dewy eyes, staring at the window in a strange way.  I wait and hope that they will look away and they do after a while, except for Maximilian who seems to be judging me.  His stare stays on me.  He thinks I’m a selfish person.  I fish into my pocket and hand it to him.
“What is that?” asks Maximilian.
“It’s the only thing I own,” I say.
“No,” said Maximilian.
“No?  No what?”
“That’s just an old candy wrapper.  Don’t give me an old candy wrapper if it doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“It’s okay,” says Jenkins, “We’re not asking anything of you.  Besides, her will only asked us to do it for one day.”
“I’m pretty sure she intended for us to continue her legacy,” Mac observes in a dramatic tone.
“You know,” says Jenkins, “I don’t think she was as sure of herself as she made out to be.”
“Who the hell do you think you are?” says Mac.
“She was a constant contradiction.  She wouldn’t even let most employees refer to her as Melora.  Always ‘Boss,’ or ‘The Boss’ when she’s not in hearing distance, yet at the same time she’d always talk about wanting people to be on the same wavelength.”
“Maybe she had some control issues.  This office was full of men,” Mac fires back defensively.
“Why are you going through so much trouble to defend her?  She’s friggin comatose.”
An uncomfortable silence follows, and then Delmar speaks.
“Who broke the window?”

She came up to my desk at about 10:00, slamming her palms on my shoulders.  I jumped, but I was a bit more prepared this time.
“Hey Carol,” she said.
“Don’t call me that.”
“Hey You.”
“Hey Boss.”
“Melora will do.  It’s past working hours.”
“Hey Melora.”
“Do you know why I kept you here?”
“No I don’t.”
“Well, you’ll see.  We’re going to have a fun night.”
“Okay.”
She took my hand and we ran to the elevator and she opened the elevator and we got in and then she jumped on me and wrapped her legs around my back and twisted her heels together and tried to kiss but by I fell forward and when I had fallen on her she grunted in a very feminine way and resumed kissing.
“Don’t bite my ears,” I said.
“Alright,” she said.
There were people moving all over.  They looked like me, and they were all kissing Melora, who was everywhere on so many red carpeted floors in so many elevators that moved in time with our bodies at different angles and projected us in different sizes.
My cell phone rang.
“Hello?”
“Hello yourself, asshole.”
“Who’s this?”
“Cindy? Your girlfriend?”
“Oh.  Hey.”
“You haven’t called in over a week.”
Melora stared at me with her sullen sunken eyes and I stared back at her while I talked to Cindy.  “Well neither have you.”
“Maybe I was waiting for you to call first.”
“Maybe I got a job and I’m really busy.”
“Woah,” she said, “Since when did you give me so much lip?”
“Since I found the lips of someone braver than I am,” I said, squinting and gritting my teeth behind a frown while Melora laughed at me because it was the corniest most emotional thing I had ever said and Melora seemed to know that.
“What the hell does that mean?” Cindy asked.
“I don’t know.”
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I honestly have no idea.  I’ll call back later alright?  Bye.”
The elevator was just as slow going down as it was going up.  Melora pushed me so that I fell backward and she pinned me to the floor and kissed me some more.
“We’re not going out,” she said.
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay.”
“Good.”
I could still feel her staring at me while she continued kissing me, fiercely.  I shied away just when it seemed like she was about to bite my nose.
“Am I really not your type?” I asked her.
She stopped and looked down at me and said with confidence, “Nobody is anybody’s type.”
“How’s that?”
“We’re all matched by mishap.”
“Which means?”
She licked my eyebrows and nuzzled her nose against my neck and said in monotone, “My dad told me that I was a mistake.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No.  He said that being a mistake was a special thing.  He told me that every human individual who gave half a shit about anything was a mistake.  Those of us that believe we’re more than particles, chemicals, neurons…we’re silly…because all our amazing thoughts are just end products to the processes of our brain and body…”
It seemed like she was getting into a pontificating mood, and nothing scared me more than other people’s philosophies, so I tried to move up and kiss her but she leaned up and away and then asked me, “What do you believe in?”
I gave her a moment of sincere contemplation because I knew she actually wanted me to think hard about this.  The elevator creaked and groaned and we heard the cables sliding.  I tried to look away but she wouldn’t stop staring and I could feel all the other Meloras staring at me through all her endless replications in all those eternal mirrors.  Finally I took a deep breath and said, “I believe in particles, chemicals, and neurons.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes.”
“I suppose every sane mind wants to.”
“I guess.”
“My dad told me that everything was ‘delightfully accidental.’”
“That sounds about right.”
“Yeah.  But don’t you just wanna be wrong sometimes?”
“Not really,” I said, in a tone of voice that may have been a bit too frank.  I braced myself and made a kind of preemptory wince, thinking that this would be an opportune time for Melora to Melora me with something.  But all she did was smile sadly, like a frown that was forcefully bent upwards on both ends.
“I’m glad you’re an honest person.”
“I’m glad you didn’t staple my head for being honest.”
She laughed.  It was a beautiful laugh, and it wrapped itself around the squeaking sounds that came from the movement in the elevator shaft.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I only do that when someone does something to really piss me off.”
The elevator stopped and the doors opened and the old janitor stood before us, with that disturbing presence, holding a mop in one of those yellow water-strainer/bucket things with wheels.
“Hi Mikhail!” said Melora to the old janitor.
“It is good, yes?” he said, looking down at us in his strange way.
“This is Mikhail Petrovich Odintsov,” said Melora to me, “Mikhail, this is—this is a Guy.”
“Hi Guy!” said Mikhail Petrovich Odintsov contorting his mouth when he said the “G” part in “Guy”.  He took my hand and shook it vigorously.  They surged with old man muscle and made my knuckles hurt.
“My hand,” I said.
“Sorry Guy,” he said, loosening his grip.  He dropped his mop and it clacked on the marble floor.  He walked into the elevator with us.  I made to get up off the floor but Melora grabbed my crotch.
“Don’t worry,” she said, “He won’t mind.”
She was groping me now, rather aggressively.  The doors closed and the elevator rose and Mikhail stood there staring at the doors, smiling.
“I’m a little—”
“What?”
“You know—” I moved my face up close into her ear and her hair brushed my cheek and eyes and I whispered, “He’s right there.”
“Nobody should be strangers,” she said.
She unbuckled my belt.  The metal made a loud clacking sound as she loosened it and the janitor turned and smiled down at us briefly and then flicked his head back up to stare at the door.
“Stop whimpering.  He’s got a wife.”
“Okay.”
She unbuttoned my buttons and unshirted my shirt.  She unpantsed my pants and slipped off my socks by running her shoes down my shins.  I lifted her skirt a little and the old janitor stood there and smiled at the doors while the elevator creaked up slowly and the cables sang with the wet touching of two people’s lips and the ragged breathing of the old man.  Melora moaned.  She sounded like she was longing for something that she would never be able to have.  She arched her back and pushed her chest into mine.  I was happy, I think.

We had divvied up most of the various products downstairs, and gave whatever we didn’t need to friends and family.  We watch Melora lying there, the only thing left in the empty office.  Jenkins and Maximilian had gone to their respective homes, leaving Delmar, Mac, and me to finish our prescribed duties.
“Shall we start burning?” asks Mac.
Delmar swallows a lump in his throat and sighs.
“I guess there’s nothing else left to do,” he says.
We take the urn and Melora’s papers and Mac gets out an antique Zippo lighter that he’d picked out from a case in the storage facility.
“Ashes to ashes,” Mac murmurs mournfully, flicking the flame on, “Dust to dust.”
We watch as the papers burn.  The edges of the sheets curl and blacken as flecks of orange scatter themselves into the air and then diminish on the floor.  The fire burns itself out.  We stare at the flaky pile of whites and grays and blacks, and Mac gets out the brush and dustpan.

III.

The elevator doors opened and Mikhail walked out while me and Melora put our clothes back on.  The phones were ringing on practically every desk it seemed.  The old janitor picked one off the receiver from the desk closest to him and greeted the person and began conversing cordially in broken English.  Melora got up and walked out and I followed behind her.  She picked up one of the phones and started chatting.  I went to my desk and picked up the phone to hear Shannon crying.
“I just cut my arm in the shower,” she said.
“Oh no.  How did that happen?”
“A fork.”
“Why were you carrying a fork into the shower?”
“Four times,” she said.  She was speaking shakily through the broken ends of her involuntary sobs.
“Should I call some hospital?”
“No—no, it’s not bleeding so much.  I didn’t go that deep.”
“What would you like me to do?”
“Just talk to me.  How was your day?”
“It was great.  Well it started off bad, and then it turned weird, and then it got suddenly much better.”
She laughed.  “I’ve been glad that you called me back this afternoon.  I wasn’t sure of the number that I dialed incorrectly.  This time I just caller I.D.ed you.”
I laughed.  “Yeah, well if you ever forget again, you can always just dial a wrong number on purpose and then ask for whatever operator you want to speak to.  That’s what a lot of people are starting to do now.”
“What kinda business do you guys run anyway?”
“It’s complicated,” I said, and changed the subject.
Shannon went to bed after a while, feeling quite tired and a bit cheered up.  The callers kept calling, few of them wanting to order anything.  Most of them asked for Melora, and hung up when I told them that she was tied up at the moment.  A select few opted to talk with me, and I took down some notes about who they were after I’d written their name and number.  At about 3 A.M. the phones settled down to an occasional ring that the three of us would race to—we turned it into a game: who could find where the phone was coming from first?—until eventually the city stopped calling.  Melora walked up to me and motioned toward the old janitor to come over.
“Should we teach him something, Mikhail?” she said.
“Oh yes, oh yes.”
“Stand still,” she said, running after me and grabbing me by the collar.  I didn’t know what she was going to do next but I had a feeling that I didn’t want to stick around to find out.  The old janitor came up and socked me in the stomach with his wrinkled fist, and it took the wind out of me.  He caught me as I fell into him, and then turned me around with a deft twisting of the arms and held me in a full nelson.  Melora picked up a large metal paperweight from a desk and threw it at the low end of the window next to the rocking chair.  Long shatter-crevices exploded through that small section of the window on contact with Melora’s projectile, which bounced off the glass and plopped onto the carpet.  She picked it up with both hands eagerly like some primitive humanoid and slammed it against the window repeatedly while I struggled to gain my breath back.  The old janitor held me in an iron grip.  Chunks of glass chipped off on contact with the edge of Melora’s paperweight, until finally she lifted it high over her head, and swung it from several steps away into the weakened spot.  The point of contact made the sound of breaking glass, but it was not that normal sound, in the same way that a gunshot does not sound like a gunshot when you actually hear it in real life.  It was more sickening, like an invisible vacuum had just opened up, and was ready to suck all life into nothingness.  Melora nodded to Mikhail and the old man dragged me over to the wide, crooked gap, and I squirmed and writhed but could not shake his hold and Melora steadied my head and pushed it out into the heavy air, and it seemed to grab and suck me in, and I heard papers flying off the desks everywhere, and my eyes squinted and the skin on my face flapped around and my nose and cheeks and ears felt so cold, and the jagged pinpoints of broken glass seemed to sit around my neck like a vicious mane, and suddenly I had the sensation of some great something-or-other—nobody’s ever had any reason to kill me—I had the feeling of kingship, of some fantastic import, like what I said might matter to someone, what I felt would be something that someone might care about, and the wind whipped and howled in my ears and seemed to pound into and out of me through all the open pores and orifices on my head, winding in through one end and flying out another, as though I were a medium through which the microscopic world could transport its amazing messages.  There were no cars below me.  There was no moon above me.  I thought I could see the ocean line through the buildings that hid it.
“What were the most beautiful moments of your life?” said Melora.
So I told her.  I had it all so close to me then.
There was the watermelon in the park, the meat of it such a brilliant pink, glistening in an early morning sunlight.  Mother cut at it with a dull blade as it rested on a large plastic serving tray layered with foil.  Everything was bright.  The day was cool.  We were at a beach.  I had never been to the beach before.  Dad was in there somewhere, doing something.  There was a dog, too.  Mom picked up a paper plate and handed me a giant piece.  I bit into it and it was crisp and cold.  There were no seeds in that first bite.  I hade missed them all by less than an inch.  In the second bite I could see them all sitting there with the white roots like veins, nestled halfway into the flesh of the melon, and I ate some more and stared closer into the watermelon and the seeds looked like so many vessels, and the consistency of the melon like so many crystals, like eating from the earth, or eating the earth itself, eating galaxies and planets and stars and the entire universe with the beach before me and I sat on the sand and Dad was drinking beer on a lounge chair with a straw hat brought down over his face and he was chuckling to himself.  My dog sat by him and barked loudly at the ocean and dad chucked his emptied can, aiming at the water, but it landed on the floor a couple feet in front of him.
“You didn’t make it,” I said.
“Of course I did,” he retorted.
I’m sure he was right, somehow.
I ate so much universe that I was sick for days after.
I felt a fluttering on the back of my head.
There was all the times at the window of my apartment on sleepless nights where I would stick my head out and smell all those things and hear all those things that you can only sense in the quiet and stillness of the night, where every movement seems louder, and seems to be carried from much further distances.  Smell the rain on the concrete below, the birds and their dirty feathers, the perfumes hair gels and deodorants of so many people leaching off their bodies in sleep, the blasting of lonely car alarms, the tumble of cats in garbage, some late-night couple padding over the pavement, shoes, whispers, laughter cutting through muddled footfalls and echoes in the streets, wheels rolling over water, the clicking of turn signals, the flash of sluggish traffic lights, closing windows, opening windows, television static, television infomercials, television advertisements, toll free 1-800 numbers, orgasmic pornography sounds, a sudden screech of tires, hot air followed by short, strange breezes, suggestions of cigarette smoke, post-bar-hopping sidewalk urinations, fluttering old newspapers, the babbling homeless, the far-off cry of an ambulance siren, the baking of bread before dawn, all vaguely underscoring my loneliness, but I’d sit there at the edge of my open window anyway, sensing and knowing things, for so many nights when I did not want to sleep and did not want to be bothered by anyone but at the same time wanted so dearly to lie close and intimately with somebody.
I felt a fluttering on the back of my head.
There was the time in the banyan tree.  I had spent so much of my school life alone.  So many twisting places in which to be cradled by cold, dark wood and shadows of branches blocking the light.  Other kids would pass by and play and shoot each other with invisible guns and do dangerous things, and I was capable of executing all the most dangerous stunts on every Dead Man’s Walk but knew not to show off until the most beautiful girl came to me and lifted me out of the little wooden womb that I was laying in.  She had tired eyes and long flowing hair.  The screams of children blurred into a single sound.  She was engulfed in light from an opening in a twine of branches.  I could barely see her.  A phone rang in some nearby classroom on some teacher’s desk.  We played in the tree all day.  The bells rang and the whistles blew, signifying the beginnings and ends of things, but our time passed in some different zone of existence.  We hid when the teachers came.  No one could find us.  We played and played as the wood grew darker and the coves of lightlessness turned into total pitch and the sunny cloudless blue turned to graying sky.  She smiled and kissed me and it was the only thing.  She took a used pink candy wrapper out of her hand and placed it into one of my open palms and she closed my fingers and I held it tightly, and then that was the only thing.  And then she jumped from the tree and then real time resumed and I realized that it was night and that I was alone.
I felt a fluttering on the back of my head.
There were all the other kisses from there, but none of them mattered and all the other birthdays and funerals but none of them mattered and all the little religious awakenings and all the pragmatic de-awakenings but none of them mattered and all the cakes and ice creams and steaks and potatoes and glasses of water, I could remember them all with my head forced out of the broken window, but there was still only the one thing, and I told her that, and the janitor loosened his grip and pulled me gingerly back into the building.
“It is good, yes?” Mikhail asked.  It was more statement than question.
We sat down to a table that Melora had ordered us to drag to the rocking chair, and we shared some prosciutto wrapped over melon and ham and Swiss cheese on crackers that Melora had purchased and prepared for us.   Melora sat in her rocking chair and moved gently in it, back and forth.  We ate without talking and then Melora asked, “What happens to deleted emails?  And deleted word documents?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
The old janitor ate and giggled innocently to himself.
“They must go somewhere,” she mused.
“Somewhere in ones and zeroes in cyberspace.”
“They must be lonely.”
“If Word and html have feelings.”
“Have you ever deleted poetry?  Or creative writings?”
“Yeah.”
“Where do you think those went?”
“Where all other deleted things go.”
“There was this one time,” she said, staring down at the table of food, “When I was in a plane where—well, here’s how it went.  They were playing some shitty in-flight movie.  Most of the people were sleeping, and all of the shades were closed.  I was watching the shitty movie and then over the audio in my headphones I hear, ‘This is your captain speaking.  I regret to inform you that this plane is going to crash into the mountains.  We are all going to careen toward an inevitable death in a matter of minutes.  I’m sorry.’  It was loud enough to wake everyone up.  People started murmuring and frowning and panicking.  Then the captain came back on in the intercom and said the same thing, speaking of engine failures and fuel-leakage.  The plane descended a little and the facemasks came down.  We all started screaming and crying to ourselves, like idiots, of course.  Families hugged families and apologized for so many things and exchanged all those sappy loving words you find on Hallmark cards, grandmas kissed babies, quarrelling lovers reconciled, it was all so corny, but everyone was just completely wrapped up in it, you know?  The in flight movie was still playing, and that was pretty much all we could see.  It was this long scene of a guy running.  He looked exhausted, but he kept going, like there was something to get to, someplace worth being.  Then the captain said that there would be no audible evidence of engine failure until about—ten minutes later I think it was.  So we waited.  And I think everyone was alone to themselves for those ten minutes.  We were thinking, ‘When am I gonna die, and what’s gonna happen to me.’  I’m sure almost all of us were so sure of ourselves before that point in time—it wasn’t even time, it was something between time and death—like a pit stop.  Some people were praying to themselves.  Others were just staring at the seat in front of them or watching the guy running.  It seems like even when we think we’re sure, we never really know who we are—we only know who we used to be before we became someone else—and sometimes we’re even wrong about that—when it comes down to those huge moments, we’re strangers to everyone, even to ourselves, and it scares me—it probably scares everyone.  It shouldn’t be that way.  Nothing should be that way.  Everybody should know each other.  We’re too afraid of everybody else.  If we could all just talk and be together, have close ties but not too close, build a bunch of weak little chains to make something huge—it would be beautiful that way, you know?”
“What happened to the plane?”
“Oh nothing.  It was fine I think.  The pilot was probably bored to death by so much safety—seems like he wanted to get a real response from people.  I’m pretty sure they put him in jail after.  He didn’t deserve whatever happened to him, though.  He was doing us a service.”
She leaned back and forth in the rocking chair.  It squeaked rhythmically.  The wind that blew through the open window died down.  Mikhail was dozing off in a swivel chair with cracker crumbs on his janitorial jumpsuit.  My eyes were getting heavy.
“What time is it?” I asked.
“It’s about 3:45,” she said.  I looked around.  Melora never wore a watch and there were no clocks in the office other than the ones that people placed clocks on their desks, which were blocked by cubicle walls from her vantage point.  A long yawn escaped from me, and I apologized.
“It’s okay,” she said with a kindness I’d never seen in her before.
“Do you ever sleep?”
“I haven’t slept in 15 years.”
“I’m actually willing to believe that.”
“Yeah.  Some try to act surprised, but they never question it.”
She rocked, and my lids lowered and my head drooped.  The adrenaline from the window incident drained out through my thighs and spilled over my knees and out my toes.  Things blackened and I shook my head and swallowed hard and saw that she was still looking at me through those dark eyes, lovingly.
“No one deserves to be by themselves,” she said.
“Agreed.”
“Didju forget about the papers stapled to the back of your head?”
I felt it and remembered.  “Oh yeah,” I said.
“It’s a copy of my tax returns.”
“Yeah, I looked at them in the mirror of the bathroom.  I don’t know why I didn’t try to take them out earlier.  I was probably afraid that you’d do it again.”
“You know,” she said, “Nobody ever bothers to read those papers.  They think I’m all business.  I guess that’s the image I like to get across though.  Gotta break through the glass ceiling and all.”
“Why, what else is on these papers?”
“Oh, just, things.”
My eyes shut themselves and my head drooped.
“I won’t mind if you fall asleep.”
“No.  I want to stay up with you.”
I fell asleep.
When I woke in the afternoon the old janitor was standing before Melora, waving his hand over her face and asking things in Russian.  Her eyes were closed.
“Is she alright?” I asked.
“She is sleeping,” he said.
“I thought she never did.”
“She doesn’t.”
Her chest moved up and down.
“Well she is alive,” he said.
“I guess so.”
I walked to the bathroom and tore off the papers.  I scanned through them and found paragraphs that she had typed into the body of antiseptically formal text.
“Where do the deleted things go?  I sent an email to someone and he said that he didn’t get it.  I don’t want to end up like one of those deleted emails.  I bet the deleted email doesn’t even know where it is.
“I met a weird boy once.  He was a cute and quiet strange little loner.  Back then and even now, it’s just as hard to go up and talk to an introvert as it is to go up and talk to someone tremendously popular.  No one should be a loner.  I’m going to talk to everyone.  I’m going to bring everyone to me, and everyone to everyone else.
“Grandma would always sit in a rocking chair facing the balcony after the bearings holding down the banister dislodged from the concrete mold.  Grandpa was leaning on it one day.  It was at night.  He was a mess on the ground the next day, scattered and mixed with the skeleton of the black metal banister.  We had grandpa and the banister moved from the pavement before morning.  Grandma ate candy with me on the balcony without a banister every day, and she would rock in her rocking chair.  My feet always felt tingly when I hung them over the edge.  She always told me not to do that but I think it kind of excited her too.  She laughed a lot.  I liked her.  She did not smell like most other old ladies.  She had pretty, antique bottles with expensive perfume that she kept next to her chair.  Whenever she felt like it she would spray a whole bunch into the air.  We would watch it rain down and fade away.”
On the last page was an informal Will and Testament.
I took the papers with me and went back into the office, where Melora still lay.  Mikhail put his hands in his face.  He was crying.  There was no wind coming through the broken section of the window.

The whiteness of the roof is intensely bright.  The sun beats down hard on us and everything is surreally lighted, and the only thing real is the urn.
“Hello Guy!” says Mikhail, running toward me with waving arms.  He catches up to us and we look over the edge down at the street and the cars and the people.  I place the cover of the urn on the ledge of the wall.
“Should we say something before we do this?”
“What is there to say about anything?” asks Mac, and he holds the words in his mouth, coming to the greatest realization of his life in the form of the greatest and most unanswerable question worth answering.
“Bless her soul, she was a good woman,” says Delmar.
I want to tell Delmar to shut up, but I turn to see Mikhail smile, and it seems that he doesn’t mind about anything, so I bend the urn over and let Melora fly out of it.
Delmar hacks and coughs and rubs his hands over his face.
“What’s wrong?” I ask.
“I think I got Melora in my eye,” he says.
“Sorry.”
I pour until every fleck of dust is out.  I shake it vigorously, and when it is empty I hold it upside down for about a minute more, and then turn it over, place the cover back on, and then throw it on the ground before us and the bottom breaks and the top cracks and the scattered pieces bring life to the white paint that glares at us so plain and bleakly.

Sometimes on late nights I’ll call strangers in the phonebook.  Some get aggravated.  They think I’m trying to sell something, or maybe that I’m right outside their homes, watching through the window, waiting to kill them and sack their houses.  I tried to keep in touch with Mac, Delmar, Jenkins, Maximilian, Shannon, and some of my other customers and coworkers, but eventually the ties broke off with the passage of time and separation.  So now I am here.  Maybe it’s that I’m not trying hard enough, or it’s that I’m not very fun to talk to.  So I call random numbers.
Sometimes I’ll ask the people, “Have you ever talked to a pretty young woman named Melora?”
“No,” they’ll say.  Either that or they’re thinking about some other Melora.
Some will simply say that I have the wrong number, but a few will chat with me for quite a while about trivial things, nothing in the way of their truly personal lives.  Then when they get bored or uncomfortable they politely tell me that they’ve got some pressing chore or errand to run, and promptly hang up.

Sometimes I walk into the old abandoned office.  Melora is still there.  She is still breathing.  As far as I can tell there are no more working bathrooms on the floor, and I have never seen her get up to eat or drink anything.  She rocks quietly in her chair, resting.  Over these past years I have managed to gradually turn and push her in the rocking chair inch by inch toward the window.  Now she faces the buildings that block the view of the harbor.  Her skin is soft and she smells nice, but she is still as heavy as a giant boulder, and she has neither spoken nor opened her eyes.  When I go to visit I’ll tell her about my day, and all the days succeeding the last visit up to the current one.  I’ll tell her what’s changed, the new people I’ve met, my plans for the future—but one day I realized how pointless it was.  It’s been about half a year since I last visited.

Sometimes I go back to the memory of scattering those paper ashes into the wind.  I wonder if I’ll ever sense those words of hers when I lean over the window on sleepless lightless mornings.  I wonder if anyone else will.  If they’ll hear her or feel her or know her subconsciously simply by taking in some breath of air—and I am being mystical, of course, though I certainly shouldn’t be.
Particles, chemicals, neurons.
And yet I’d like to think it’s all still possible.  I want them to know about the time she stole a box of chocolate from a candy store and shared them with a hobo next to a fire hydrant on a snowy winter evening; the time she saw her dog get pummeled and crushed by a speeding car; the time she lost herself in the city and spent the night in a motel with nothing but a Barbie doll and a suitcase packed with money and clothing, crying on a vibrating bed watching a television with only 13 channels; the time her kid brother dismantled the dollhouse she had been building and maintaining for five years; the time she stuck her hand into a campfire on purpose; her aggressive gestures; the sweet tired sound of her voice; every curve of her beautiful body; that sad pretty face; the grandmother on the balcony and the sound of her rocking chair; every poem, short story, and letter that she wrote, kept, and threw away; her first kiss; her last one; the way she stared into people so deeply that it hurt; the way she held me so desperately; the way she gently closed my hand over the only real thing that anyone’s ever given me.