MTee's Lament

By Mark Buchignani

Emmett Taylor – what can you say? He's a guy. He works a lot. Way too much. He wants a girl – he has a girl, or he thinks he does. Sometimes. When she's not seeing someone else. So, he writes to her. He writes to a lot of people, usually late at night – the only time he has free. He works *a lot*. He started a blog – Overworkers. That's where he exhorts everyone to get a life, but doesn't get one himself. He meets lots of people through the blog – and writes to them. They're mostly women. Maybe he will hook up with one of them. But then there's that girl he thinks he has. Sometimes. When she's not seeing someone else. It's complicated. And Emmett – he's going about it all the wrong way.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mark Buchignani
• Release date: Jul 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215992920

Mark Buchignani

An avid reader of literary fiction, fantasy, and science fiction, Mark Buchignani has more ‘favorite’ authors than he can count, among them George R. Stewart, John Wain, Martin Amis, John Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, Nicholson Baker, Richard Flanagan… The tip of the iceberg.  Novels of my own began spilling out in 2005, resulting in, among others, MTee’s Lament, a twist on a post-apocalyptic tale.  Many more narratives followed.  Some are published here; others languish behind “fair use” entanglements. My stuff tends toward societal commentary, presented via normal people who find themselves in unexpected, offbeat, or abnormal circumstances – circumstances replete with threatened or actual upheaval.  The choices these folks make move the action forward and expose brokenness in the culture and in the actors themselves. I’m also a huge Tolkien fan and have written volume one of a loosely-planned five-book set: The Recitation of Ooon.  Though in the same genre as Lord the Rings, Ooon is definitely not Middle Earth, and there are no Hobbits.  Just people trying to find their way while engulfed in a magical upheaval driven by a clash between followers of the ancient ways and those seeking a new, less-fettered life.  The narrator is a thousand-year-old man, trying to see forward, while looking back, as his existence comes to a pre-destined end. And I have devoured everything Theodore Sturgeon and quite a bit of old school SF.  Though I have yet to draft anything within this genre, ideas continually percolate.

Book preview

Maureen

Two days ago, Maureen’s age advanced to thirty.  It had been an uncelebrated moment: her friends didn’t know (what friends?) and her family – she hardly communicated with them any more.  One or more had probably dashed her an email, but she seldom checked every account.  Who could spot best wishes in all the spam?  And she hadn’t disclosed to her workmates, nor had she divulged on the employment forms. Her omission had been ignored: that field in the database had defaulted to January 1, 1980.  The office admin knew that was wrong: there would be no collegial celebration of her escaping youth.

Maureen had no gray on her head – at least none anyone could see.  The color of the week took care of that.  Her laconic, diminished-blonde hair accepted new hues enthusiastically; she applied easily-washed-out varieties, ones she refreshed or replaced every Saturday.  Who could tell senescent gray from an intentional shock of gunmetal spikes?  In spare seconds, she surfed for unusual shades, keeping a web site minimized on one of her monitors.  But ads for the products she viewed kept popping up wherever else she browsed.  Damn ads.

When she had a free moment and was in good humor that amused her – her own profession was trying to out her, her age.  She was a tech grunt for Rage, an adolescent agency trying to fill a niche in technology-based advertising.  She had brought her MBA with internet specialization to their mixer seven years ago, and as always seeking differentiation had worn shabby, laceless black and white sneakers, red jeans with torn-out knees, and a threadbare brown T-shirt commemorating some concert she had attended when she was in high school.  She’d abandoned the people she’d gone with in moving to a university campus, and the names of the bands they’d seen had become indistinct memory – loud, harsh, and best enjoyed through a pot-smoke haze.  Pun intended.  But she still had all the shirts, and still easily fit into them.

Her actual interview had been pro forma – she had an offer after few questions and little dialogue.  She shrugged, minutely grinned, and shook hands.  Considering it on the bus ride home, she concluded that her look had won her the job.  She spent the next few days expanding her clothing collection.  Now she had a dozen shades of jeans, two or more pairs of each, varying in degree of fade, abrasion, and dilapidation, twice that number of ratty defunct rock band T shirts (the more recent acquisitions representing hours of scrounging online auctions), a few men’s button downs for variation, three pairs of low-top sneakers, one with holes, and seven flip-flops for mixing and matching (the eighth had been partially dissolved by some goo she had stepped in walking home one night).  She changed up usage often enough to make unique each sandal in color and wear – none of the original pairs truly matched any more.

To complement her wardrobe, she’d cultivated personality – a blunt terseness, mostly tired and sharp, because she was mostly exhausted, and it fit.  This she on occasion spiced with inexplicable sweetness, which typically, though not certainly, indicated a good night’s sleep.  And she backed it all with absolute informity, a noun she had coined (the state of being informed), as she had several words, usually negations (unstupid).  She calculated her blunts and sharps and depth of knowledge and coinages to in-part reveal her own unstupidness.

To augment her clothes and uncharisma, she put on makeup rarely and only for effect (or to cover the odd blemish), and instead applied temporary neck and face tattoos, chosen, as mood lighting might be, from among hundreds she had accumulated – some disturbing, some placid, some unintelligible, but none obscene.  She stayed behind certain lines, no doubt ones her parents had repeatedly repeated or entrenched before her.  No doubt – she couldn’t remember.  So: no sex acts or violence or aberrance, but, sure, totally weird stuff with bones and sideways religious symbols or mock political statements (like military equipment juxtaposed with factional insignia) or plain arbitrariness – Wile E. Coyote chasing an allosaurus driving a motorcycle.  But she could say or imply only so much in the space of a tattooed necklace.  And anyway, she replaced whatever in a day or two to fit her spirits.

And of late, as if to fence her youth, she’d incorporated colorful sports bras to peek through shirt holes, added the odd tramp stamp (the lower back was a larger canvas, but challenging to decorate solo), allowed peeks at her panty waistbands (or wore no underwear), and never put on socks, never, no matter the weather.  That brought her feet and ankles into play – additional spots for expression.  She also bought several colorful pairs of heavy framed unprescriptioned glasses.  She kept some in her desk and wore them whenever, no predictable pattern, or none she could discern, if she thought about it.

She painted her nails on whims, never all the same color, occasionally only a few of them, with or without images.  She found that decals from model kits adhered nicely, so she collected plastic planes and vehicles from the World Wars.  Looted for their stickers, numerous broken-into boxes had taken over a corner of her apartment.

Her talking points were her rings – nose and both ears (no eyebrows, lips, or other stuff).  Her standards were tiny nuts and bolts.  If nothing else occurred, she did all three in these, even though the miniature nuts were difficult to screw on, for their size and for the resistance they offered, meant to keep them from unscrewing and falling off.  Or she dangled great hoops or kite tails, matching smaller sizes in her nose – not too long there; she hated when she accidental bit them.

Her eyes were smart (if tired).  When she was younger, those eyes used to dart from face to face in conversation, not missing much, and catching a few seconds of TV (if it was on) between spoken sentences.  And then as now she was the antithesis of fat – maybe 95 pounds.  When she ate – if she ate – it was in front of her monitors at work.  Physical fitness?  Employees at Rage laughed about that, before or after the occasional team meeting and while eating the cookies and guzzling the coffee they brought in to keep everyone alert.  Even the Asians and the Blacks made fun of their own (relative) pallor.  Hers fit right in.

But overall, her looks had held up.  The tattoos and rings and wild hair added sophistication to her teenaged-cute face, or so she believed, judging from various attempts at compliments her parent’s friends used to make.  But that had been many months ago, when she still saw her parents once in a while, mainly at holidays.

The high school weed, she was off that now, she had been for years – no time.  She was practically off food too – no time for that either.  And although she looked – she looked often – she had begun to consider she might never again befriend another person.  When she had started at Rage there had been a few who had made preliminary eyes at her, but either they had quit or she’d moved downstairs, and now no more.  Is anyone else ever down here?  Not that I ever see – hear, yeah, but it’s like they’re invisible or something.

The Rage offices were in an old brick building off downtown.  It had been built in the 19th century, and now was lined with diagonally intersecting I-beams reinforcing the walls (earthquake reinforcement), with groaning stairways weaving amongst them.  Once Rich – an overenergized, unintroverted guy brought in his climbing gear and scaled the beams.  He’d fallen – and scared HR half to death – but he bounced: he was fine, and scampered back up.  But now signs festooned: Please Stay OFF the Beams.  But since then she had been moved downstairs – a management reward of sorts – a nice, stark basement office, with a slot for a window, peering up to the sidewalk.  If she’d cared, she often had a view up walking women’s skirts.  But that wasn’t her thing.

A reward for having created a program to modify an active website, to insert text and pictures by either replacing or supplementing existing content.  The linguistic analysis of that content was sophisticated, making her infixed language difficult to differentiate from that of the actual site. At first she wrote the transitional material herself, but as her algorithms improved, she was able to turn the writing over to the software.  Imagine reading about the latest development in rocketry only to find the article drifting into toy space ships, and the just-released film in which the big-screen versions appear.  Before you know it, your mouse pointer is over a link to the movie trailer or to a toy store near you.  And then farther down the story artfully transitions back to the original content.  To date, this technology had been Rage’s most profitable, and had earned her the reward. Before she had sat with two indistinct grunts in a sweaty spot upstairs, with too much sun and not enough A/C.  That was when she knew a number of people were employed there.  Now she maybe bumped into other cellar dwellers, but that was a happenstance of work hours, which were entirely up to individuals.  As long as you produced something – reports or ideas or, well, something that might increase cash flow, they left you alone.  Management – some guys upstairs – left you alone.  Her website augmenter had earned her nearly complete solitude.  Whether it actually was a reward, she couldn’t decide.

She spent a dozen or so hours a day bolted to her desk at her keyboard. Her window angle also took in a portion of a digital billboard, cycling glowing images – cars, movies, alcohol; cars, movies, alcohol… She tweeted something just to tweet something, took an action in a video game on one of her monitors, switched to a competitor’s YouTube video, and typed a few sentences of an email she was drafting to her boss.  Her boss she never saw, just texted and emailed.  Not even a call.  Brian was just like she was, only older.  Or had been at Rage longer.  Seniority = boss, maybe.

Her constructed appearance – the colorful, worn jeans, mismatched flip-flops, ancient-rocker T’s, and the hair and tattoos and decals and ear and nose rings – she wondered why she had assembled it.  Closed up in her basement cell (cars, movies, alcohol…), co-workers seldom saw her.  People she did encounter, mid-morning or late-night riders of the bus, gave no second looks.  Just another weirdo – the city’s full of them.  Once in a while, they did gape, turning to avoid when she troubled to meet their eyes; or they glanced at her, glanced away, back again, away again, like she was some kind of gory accident – you shouldn’t but you couldn’t not.  Once, she’d snarled, something like, You have some kind of problem?  The guy had grinned – an ugly warping of his face, not a pleasant one – and slipped a knife out of his jacket pocket.  She’d stared at him long enough, and expressionless enough to – she’d hoped – exhibit unfear, and then got off at the next stop.  And after that she’d altered her routine, coming in earlier or later, taking the subway or walking, and interacting with – speaking to, looking at – nobody.

She stayed home as seldom as possible.  It was an unfilled place, ignoring the pile of model boxes, and noting the single chair behind the round dining table.  The table – it was old wood – her parents had made her take it, had moved it there for her.  It sat where they’d put it.  Mostly she used it to collect dust, but on it had once tried to put together one of the models – a Sherman tank.  She’d given up quickly, though, not liking the meticulousness required or the smell of the glue.  Eight percent assembled, it sat in its box in the mass of boxes.

The kitchen cabinets had in them four cereal bowls and four dinner plates, and a few mismatched glasses.  She had four place settings of flatware in a drawer, and two pots – one large, one small.  If she cooked, it was to heat up leftovers carried home from work a prior night.  She also had several half-empty boxes of cereal she ate from on the weekends.  Or sometimes fruit she picked up when she had to go out to get some milk.  Leftovers and milk – those were her refrigerator’s life.

Her bedroom – it was a one bedroom place – had in it a sagging single mattress, the least expensive nightstand in the city, and shelves of boards and bricks for her folded clothes.  She didn’t hang things in the closet, except a few jackets.  She had planned to make that into her tattoo room, in part by stacking all the model boxes in there.  But that would mean doing something at home.  The idea hadn’t yet advanced past the planning stage: the closet stood empty, except for three occupied hangers (the jackets).

The livingroom had in it the only thing she cared about – if cared is the right word.  It was more a symbiotic relationship than an emotional: she need it, it needed her.  She would dematerialize without her computer and its five monitors (mirroring her setup at the office), her electronic spy-on-the-world windows.  The real ones wore thick drapes, blocking sunlight and all nosiness.  And it – the machine – would cease if she didn’t visit it often.  It would turn into an overpriced doorstop.  A handful of them had: she’d stashed her last six CPUs in her apartment’s carport storeroom, the door into which was miss-hung, and if not blocked creaked itself closed.  She used one old computer or another to hold it open whenever she went in there.

She didn’t know her coworkers – not so much, not any more, not since they’d rewarded her with the basement office.  Until then, she’d socialized occasionally, when her mood dictated or when a person approached, drawn by some aspect of her appearance or some motivation obliging interaction.  But those interactions had withered – maybe she’d snarked; maybe the other person had gagged and uninteracted.  She shrugged as the individual departed, stinging or astonished or smothered.  These contacts had normally taken place in the common room upstairs – games in one corner (foosball, video), refrigerators in the other (drinks, snacks), tables in the middle (loose-knit cliques).  Sort of a lunch room – and people did eat there.  She did, at first.

Even Brian seemed afraid of her after she’d interrogated him about personal aspects – or so it felt to him.  Not to her – she was just asking some questions, her version of friendliness:

Hey.

Hey.

What’s with the eye makeup?

Eye makeup?

Yeah, you going for the strung out look?

?

"I mean, it kind of doesn’t go with the I’m shaving my head because I’m going bald look."

Um…

Maybe if you grew out those ear hairs even more…

?

They regarded each other.  Brian said:

Um, sorry, I just remembered, I have a lunch meeting.

Later.

Later.

She hadn’t meant anything – just making conversation.  If he’d asked about the bruising and bright red garrote line she had tattooed on her neck that morning, she would have answered candidly, I feel like someone killed me last night – didn’t get home until 3:00, didn’t get much sleep – so this kind of spoke to me.  Even if he misinterpreted or didn’t like or criticized it – Isn’t it gruesome or, I dunno, kind of ugly? – she would’ve taken his questions at face value, perhaps responding, Maybe.  You think so?  I’ll probably change it tomorrow anyway.  Nothing personal.  Just data.  Something to consider, to examine.

But that was why Brian liked Maureen, for her analyses, her objective reactions – she didn’t get rattled, even in failure.  If a campaign flopped or had to be scrapped because someone else did something similar first, beat Rage to the punch, she wasn’t angry or demoralized; she didn’t grumble – she pondered.  She figured out why and outlined improvements for future ads.  His job was to request her analysis via email – in written form – so as to avoid more dialogues about his ebbing hairline.  But those emails suited: he got cogent scrutiny and ideas for betterment – work betterment – and didn’t have to wade through emotional reactions others might issue.  No time for that.  And when she showed everyone – remotely, they all logged in – her website augmenter, he was all smiles.  He gave her the basement office.  More space and more isolation for her, and more isolation of her for everyone else.  Win, win.

Not that she complained about it.  It was a reward, a perk for her efforts, the isolation.  But – and she barely admitted this to herself – people had mood altering effects, usually to the good, or at least away from whatever pit she had ruminated herself into that day or that several days.

At first, after her move down below, she sought others, maybe hiking upstairs or visiting, but they reacted poorly to her company, scrambling any which way away, like poked ants.  This didn’t depress her, though, not so she recognized, but her tattoos, they darkened, with increasingly obvious grisliness.  That she noticed.  She altered them to happy and smiley, fixing blame on them for her gloom.  But that was wrong too – a band aid can’t fix a cleaver gash.  So she returned to her usual self, letting whatever dictate whatever and expressing whatever via whatever body art. Still, she did realize she missed people, some minimal connection with them.  She even went so far as to prove it with data tracked in a spreadsheet, charting her body art and moods.

She also attempted to attract consideration via sex appeal.  She turned a couple pairs of jeans into cutoffs, and wore only a sports bra on top.  Look!  Boobs!  She noted odder reactions from people on the street or bus or train – her clear, pale skin drew eyes, eyes which, at noting her other decorations, quickly closed or leapt sideways or were propelled elsewhere by feet attached to legs, body, and head.  For a while, she was willing to take this as interaction – greater than the usual anyway – but unless she initiated, no one spoke.  And her few attempts to chat ended poorly.  She inevitably opened with some caustic- or invasive-sounding comment or question, which resulted in dumbfounded silence or expression-expressed anger or full reverse.  She gave up on talking to people.

And at the office she saw so few individuals… She wandered around, flaunting her partial nudity to instigate, but reactions of her coworkers were similar to those of strangers, adding hasty utterances – Changing your look, Maureen?  Nice – followed by flight.  Or references to the temperature, calling attention to her goose bumps.  She was cold.  It could be frigid there, with the A/C cranked.  But these did constitute conversational openings.  She responded with observations about their outfits: Is that retro mishmash?  Kind of clunky, isn’t it?  Or – accompanied by a forced chuckle – "Can hardly tell you’re a human in that getup.  Shopping at the simian consignment store?"  These did not lead to return volleys.  People shuffled off.

In the end, she dropped the clothing variations – too cold, but also because in the final tally she saw no increase in encounters with people, or at least none lasting longer than two sentences.  These did not boost her morale, not even temporarily.

A typical night at Rage.  Maureen’s phone buzzed – a text announcing receipt of her food order. Buy! (cars, movies, alcohol) shouted the billboard outside her window. She corrected a typo in the report she was composing.  Her phone belched at the delivery of an email.  She restarted an online video – more competitor research.  Buy! yelled the billboard.  She’d get another text when her food arrived.  Somebody would carry it down, leaving it in the kitchen – a dark room with a sink and mini-fridge, and a cabinet-scatter of paper plates, plastic forks, and napkins. Buy! shrieked the billboard.

Working late again.  It was better than going home to a heap of ransacked plastic-model boxes.  Although maybe her computer and its five glaring eyes did miss her…

She glanced at the phone email – an automated notification from Overworkers, a networking site she joined one night, while digesting the numbers from a campaign.  One night: about quarter to two.  Sleep had invaded her consciousness, forcing a retreat of the numbers.  Attempting to flank its advance, she surfed.  She found a community blog purportedly written by someone working as many hours a day as she was.  Or written so far – it was open: anyone could post.  She signed up.

She started reading from the top, the author’s name, his or her identity no more than a pseudonym, a label: MTee.  No photograph, not even a sketch.  The site held open a box for one ("photo not provided").  She stared at this, a generic human figure, a pale blue watermark inside a rectangle of four black lines.  She stared at it, then she read:

A Small Corner

No time today – never any time, or not much.  A small corner – of your life.  That’s all it takes for sanity.  Find one, fill it with you – with you, your interests, your choices, your decisions, your love.  Wrap your arms around you, block out all else.  Block out work!  Demand that work leave you alone, there, in your small corner.  No work admittance.  Put up a mental sign, and enforce its message.  Do it now, before… Before there are no small corners left, and you is gone, consumed, processed, spat out as productivity.  Get that sign up, get behind it.  A small corner.  For the love of… you.

Posting intermittently, the author continued on this theme:

Ever or Never?

When was your last time?  Be honest – no maybes or thought about its or almosts.  Be honest.  The last time you shared hearts with someone outside work.  And, no – work dalliances don’t count.  No hallway encounters or watercooler gossip.  None.  Don’t count.  A real person, not a work person.  Different interests.  Different backgrounds.  Not there day after day.  Not just routine bumping into.  You have to make an effort.  Speak up.  Reach out.  Try.  Consider speaking to a stranger.  Yes, a small risk of rejection.  Better than dejection.  When was your last time?  Ever?  Never?  Objection!

Cecelia

After weeks of trial and error, Cecelia had mapped the route perfectly, stops, traffic signals, possible alternatives, and hands-free phone just in case – she could ask it to dial a number, if needed.  School, soccer field, school, Marjorie’s (her younger child’s best friend), a hit and run at the office – she was a part-time buyer – for 113 minutes of actual duties, before back to the soccer field, back to Marjorie’s, then a swing past her husband’s, her children’s father’s workplace, then finally home to try to determine what they all might eat that evening.  She mentally reviewed the contents of the refrigerator and freezer, wondering what she could concoct.

This was Wednesday’s routine. That of the other days was similar, except on weekends.  Then it was distance driving to tournaments or events.

Cecelia had had promise once, or so they said.  They: administrators, high school, then college.  She was cute, pert, gregarious, curious, talkative, affectionate, flirty.  She got along with folks, and they liked her, her energy, her smiles, her brains.  Taken, those administrators saw in her potential.  They encouraged, urging her "Cece, you’re so smart and so charming, you could do anything, anything you set your mind to.  Anything!  What do you like?  What do you want to do?"

In high school, she wanted to make friends.  Grades?  Yeah, okay.  She got A’s, but didn’t really apply herself.  And now and then a teacher by way of attempted motivation slapped on a minus, thinking it would coax from Cecelia greater sedulity.  It didn’t; instead she visited the classroom after hours,