Release Date

1.

I have a corner office with windows, but don’t be impressed. It’s on the ground floor and the windows look out at a sidewalk and two ashtrays where my smoking coworkers take their frequent breaks sweltering in the heat or huddling in the cold . Derelicts stop by too, seemingly impervious to changes in temperature—always in their same layering of rags—to pick through the butts left behind. This is what I see when my eyes drift away from my computer screen; my eyes drifting absently, I’m sure, with no memory, only the expectation and eternal hope of seeing some springtime tableau through the glass. Something thoughtful and inspiring would be nice. Some sunlit scene of blue birds and pretty girls in wide brimmed hats. But always it’s just the smoking coworkers of the derelicts picking through their cigarette scraps.

This office is the office I have had since I started with the company. A small, beige-colored box to myself. A seascape hangs on the wall opposite my desk. It’s not mine and I’m not the one who decided it should be hung there, but it seems to me so much a part of the forgotten-corner dinginess of this place that I cannot bring myself to take it down. It’s a painting of a beach at low tide. A ship is stranded on the flat wet sands. A bird flies in front of the sun. It’s not a good painting, but I leave it there because it has always been there. Taking it down and even moving it might or might not be against company policy but really it’s something sentimental in me that prevents me of disposing of it behind some handy file cabinet or potted plant. Some mornings I even say hello to it. "Hello seascape," I might say. Or: "Hello stranded boat."

I don’t get many visitors down here in my office, but on occasion my golden-skinned boss feels compelled to come down from on high (the 42^nd floor) to introduce himself to me. He has introduced himself to me 4 times now, without once betraying any awareness that we have met before. I fully expect these introductions to go on for as long as I remain with the company. I think I’d become worried if he suddenly remembered me from the last time we met.

Whenever Mr. Hanson (my boss) comes to meet me he knocks cheerfully on the door frame--the door is always open to my office, if I shut it an oppressive gray and beige dankness grows in the atmosphere, and I begin to smell stale sea foam and dead fish rotting on the sunny low tide sands of the painting. Having knocked thusly, Mr. Hanson strides into my office. He is not a man for mere walking, my boss. He was bread and built and trained for striding, though in my office, there is not much room for such activities and he must pull himself up short, like a horse being reigned in, at the edge of my desk. Then he extends his hand out to me. And I rise awkwardly and take it. He grips my hand firmly, shakes it firmly, looks at me firmly in the eyes and smiles. It’s the kind of handshake I imagine them teaching in weekend long businessman seminars across the country.

"I’m Bill Hanson," he says "It’s good to finally meet you. Your doing great work. We’re all very impressed."

About this time his eyes--or maybe something just behind his eyes-- begin to wander. He doesn’t let go of my hand but doesn’t seem to be there in front of me anymore either. He is a tall, well groomed, perfectly tanned and handsome man, and I always imagine at this point that he is remembering some recent vacation in Barbados or Acapulco or wherever. In the background I can almost hear seagulls. I can almost see his face dissolve in the wavy distortions of a TV flashback. Is my hand that he will not let go of metamorphasizing before his eyes into a frozen strawberry daiquiri in a tall glass with an colorful umbrella stuck into the straw?

"It’s good to meet you, Mr. Hanson," I always say, no matter if it’s the first, second, third, fourth or next time we are meeting. For some reason, it doesn’t seem right to remind him.

He snaps out of it then, lets go of my hand and gives my shoulder and encouraging little slap.

"You keep up the good work," he says and then leaves.

I have a forgettable face, I suppose. I know it’s not a handsome one, though a woman or two, during charitable, dimly lit moments, have tried to tell me otherwise. At best, I will admit to looking—at certain and unlikely angles—a little like a particular movie star. But it’s a movie star who made his name when he was young and then did not properly grow into his face. A forgotten star who fell into a life of heroin and then Jesus and then heroin again and then maybe some other form of personal salvation. You don’t see him very often anymore though maybe he will make a movie again and surprise everyone with the intensity and depth of his performance .

Even that is only a passing resemblance.

I wonder sometimes if Mr. Hanson is even actually aware of any good work I may or may not be doing. Perhaps he sees and forgets my name, sees and forgets my output the same as he does my face or the many times we have met. I’m not complaining. It’s good enough in this business to go un-noticed.

What I’m working on is the document for a user manual that will go with a new product the company will someday make. It is the only thing I have ever worked on since starting with here more than a year ago. I did not write it myself, but am only going over the work of countless others who have worked in committee or in solitude for who knows how long before I arrived.

I took over the job and the office from a man who I’m told went crazy. I believe it. You can see the signs of his growing insanity in the earlier drafts of the manual. Little phrases, seeming misprints and other things that seem like little twelve point Times New Roman cries for help.

There is a chapter heading about retrieving lost files that my predecessor titled: "What To Do When You Have Lost it". There is a sentence at the end of another chapter that read: "If this does not work, than there is no hope for you. I am sorry. You have my profoundest sympathies" In the middle of another passage, for no reason at all, he repeats the words "me and mine" ten times in a row.

I think about him often, that fellow who sat here before me. I wonder about his family. Did he have a wife and kids? And where did he go from here? Sometimes I look at the derelict picking through the ashtrays outside my window and wonder if he is one of them. I asked the receptionist about him. She said that he had left before she started, though I could swear she has been here since my first day, sitting at her desk in the lobby, smiling prettily as I went by her and turned down the hallway, and went down five steps to a narrower hallway and then entered my office and said hello to my seascape for the first time.

That was more than a year ago. I’ve been coming here five days a week since, eight or nine hours a day. I’ve never taken a sick day or a day off. I have not missed a deadline, but I have not reached one either. By all accounts I’m doing a great job and the gods of the 42^nd floor are happy.

There is only this manual for me to work on, and to gaze at my forlorn little seascape or out the window at the smokers and the derelicts.

The mistakes and surprises and the cries for help or sympathy from my predecessor were purged from the project after my first month of working on it. The work has been less interesting since then. The age of startling discovery over, now it was only a matter of coordinating chapter numbers and page numbers, updating footnotes, re-formatting late additions from marketing, or accounting, or development. Now it is only a matter of time, and then I know I will be done and given another project.

2.

I look out my window some days and wish I smoked. They seem to have so much to talk about, those smokers. They wave there hands about in the smog of their own making and laugh in great big visible gusts. They blow vaporous tusks from their nostrils and joust with them.

I can hear the voices, their boisterous laughs sometime vibrating through the glass. Pretty girls too, holding their thin cigarettes with slender, delicately bent wrists, flicking ashes daintily. Ashes falling away like snowflakes.

It is lonely down here in my office, lonelier still when I can see other people through the glass, and I suppose I could go out an join them without smoking myself, but somehow that doesn’tt seem right.

The derelicts come by mostly in the evening hours, when the sunlight thickens and the sky darkens at the edges like something damaged by water and curling up at the corners. I think about the derelicts a lot. Not just wondering if my predecessor is among them, but wondering how any of them got to where they are. I have been poor in my life. I have even been close to poverty, with debts piling up into abstract numbers I knew I could never erase, but I have never been homeless.

When I walk to my bus stop at night I think about that and wonder what sort of place I could find to sleep if that was the sort of problem I faced at the close of every day. There are bushes in the park that I could crawl beneath, rest my head on a root and sleep poorly but at least unseen. There are shelters for such people I know, but still I see people sprawled out in doorways, on grates, under bridges, laid out on sheets of cardboard, all of their belongings piled beneath their head as a pillow or spread out on top of them as a blanket.

One day, walking from my bus stop to my apartment, I thought about the homeless who pick through the butts of the ashtrays outside my office. They do it so carefully, so methodically, as if it were a tiny, precious harvest that they were plucking from some small plot of sandy ground . And what strange joy they must feel when they find a nearly unsmoked cigarette, discarded in haste by someone in my company who had to rush back to work.

That’s when I got the idea to buy a pack of cigarettes. There’s a convenience store next to my apartment building, but I didn’t stop in that night. Instead I thought about the idea while I was going to sleep. I even dreamed about it: imagining myself as a kind of anonymous saint, sticking unsmoked cigarettes into ashtrays for the derelicts to find. One or two at a time, so that the wealth would be evenly spread, and not just be some happy windfall for the first fallen man who came along, who might even be an undeserving slob who maybe murdered his wife or burned down his own home and was on the street because of that. So one or two at a time was the plan I settled on. And settled on it in a dream.

That morning, before I caught the bus, I bought a pack of cigarettes. I have no idea what a good brand of cigarettes is so I thought of commercials I had seen growing up, when such things were still allowed on TV. There was a commercial that had always annoyed me so I didn’t buy that brand. There was another that featured a blonde who had stirred something in my then growing soul. That is the brand I bought. I put the pack in my jacket pocket and went out to catch my bus.

I owned a car once—long since rusted away into nothingness—and used to see the city through its windows. The city looked different then. The people were prettier and handsomer, the buildings were newer and cleaner. There was no litter or stray dogs tumbling through the streets of that world. But things are different from the windows of a bus. Though you are higher up, it seems that you see the dirt more clearly. You see the frayed edges of everything and smell the sweat and piss of your fellow man. There are crowds of sad, desperate faces at every stop. There are the frightening bumps on the neck of the old man in the seat in front of you. Next to him the tragic dandruff on a young man’s shoulders that dooms him to loneliness. Sometimes I close my eyes and try to sleep until it’s my turn to get off.

When I got to my office the day I bought the cigarettes there was work waiting for me. There had been late additions to three the chapters and I had to go over them and then coordinate the new page numbers with the indexes and the footnotes. I sat down with a cup of coffee , said hello to my seascape, and started right in at it. I did not remember my package of cigarettes until several hours later.

Then I looked out the window. There was no one there. I stood up and began fishing through my jacket pockets for the pack of cigarettes, but then a man and woman arrived outside, lighting their own cigarettes and laughing smoke. I sat back down and tried to go back to work, glancing away from the computer every minute or so to see how far down their cigarettes had burned. When they had finally finished and left, I waited for a minute to see if anyone else was coming. When no one did I grabbed my jacket and headed outside.

It was a nice day out, really. A blue sky with just enough clouds to make it interesting. Cool air, but a warm sun. I fumbled a little with the pack, having never opened one before. Then fumbled some more trying to extract two cigarettes from the tightly packed group of twenty. Finally, using my nails like pinchers, I pulled out the two, stuck them both straight up into the sand of the ashtray and walked quickly away from the scene as if I had committed a crime.

Back at my desk I tried to concentrate on work, trusting my peripheral vision to tell me when the first lucky derelict would happen by. But it was difficult. I found myself staring blankly at the two cigarettes, upright like branchless, barkless white trees, the sort you see left by forest fires. And surrounded too by the more haphazard, and burned down stubs of other cigarettes, some leaning against each other, some nothing more than brown, trunk-like filters. The white sandy soil around them had been darkened to an uneven grey by ash. Such a little dish of apocalypse sits outside my corner office window.

Finally a man came by. I had seen him before. A man of only thirty or so, but a hard thirty that had hollowed out eyes, yellowed his skin and thinned his pale hair. His mouth was shut tightly into a lipless, wrinkle above his protruding, slightly mad looking chin. He was not unshaven, as one might expect, but still his face gave the impression of that. The jacket he was wearing—the jacket he was always wearing--had probably been bright red once, before it had been lived in for a year without break. The elbows, the cuffs, the openings of the pockets and across the waist were soiled, oily and frayed. It swelled from several layers of shirts beneath. His pants were blue work pants with holes worn into the knees. His shoes were scuffed and tattered penny loafers. I could not see if they had pennies in them, which would have been a cheap and unlikely irony.

I had seen him outside my window often. He usually visited the ashtrays there two or three times a week, and I imagined him having a schedule and routes and a deadline to achieve it all by. Nightfall, probably—the time then to find his resting place in the hollow of a park shrub, the hidden corner of a bridge, a shadowy doorway.

He hunched over the ashtrays like a man getting down to his job, pulled out my two fresh, unsullied cigarettes, then sifted through the rest, finding two or three more worth keeping. He pulled out a sandwich bag from one of his pockets and placed his harvest in there, then went on his way, out of my sight.

Nothing about the way he did any of this betrayed any joy or surprise at his unexpected bounty, but I wasn’t expecting any such display and found no disappointment in the fact that there was none. And despite this too, I felt something then—a satisfaction, a sense of saintly charity, a goodness--that I had never felt when giving ten dollars to a labor day telethon or a can of peach halves in heavy syrup to the local food drive. I had done something good, I knew, and better yet, unasked for, unexpected and unrewarded by any pat on the back or teary eyed thanks.

On my lunch break I went out and set two more cigarettes out, this time—for no other reason than aesthetic variation—one in the center of each ashtray.

Then back to work. The cigarettes staid there for most of the day, and after awhile I was able to forget about them and work on my manual. Coworkers came and went outside and maybe they talked about the two strange virginal things, sitting like pedestals in the rubble of each ashtray. More likely, they didn’t. The sunlight thickened. The blue sky deepened. The white clouds became more solid. Birds probably changed their song, but this was not something I could notice through my window. A second derelict finally came by. He was also one I had seen before, though less regularly than the first. He wore a spring dress, and beneath that red sweat pants. He was tall and spindly and walked quickly and hunched over, his face almost completely obscured by a mess of filthy black curls that hung over it and swayed in little jerks back and forth with his odd little steps. He plucked the two cigarettes, and like the man before him, sifted through the others. He had no pockets in his spring dress and no purse to complete the outfit so instead he held his found treasures in his hands. He too did not pause to ponder his good luck but moved quickly on.

It was getting late now, so I did not restock the ashtray. I concentrated on my work instead; lost myself for a few hours in that scrolling current of words until it had carried me successfully to the end of another day.

3.

I wanted love once. I wanted a woman (a pretty one) to share the world and my apartment with. That want has long since been successfully squashed inside me. I still look at the women who pass me on sidewalks and in hallways, and the one or two I can have a friendly word with at work and maybe I wonder a little, but mostly I look at them the way you might look at a beautiful painting in a museum. There is no burning desire to possess in me. Maybe I am deluding myself, but since these are my words you will have to take me at them. .

I don’t think of women much now except in an abstract, generalized and unfocused way. When I masturbate I see no particular face (except maybe the one in a magazine opened before me) and entertain no involved fantasy about love and great sex and happiness. There are men destined to die alone in county hospital beds and I suppose I am one of these.

There have been women in my life, of course, and love now and then, but I will not bore you with the half remembered details of all that.

I have a dog and the dog loves me very much. I open cans of food for him. I walk him in the morning before I leave for work and again in the evening when I get home. Some weekends I take him to the park and let him run free there until another dog comes along (he fights with other dogs, or buries his nose rudely between their hind legs and once even pissed on the head of a smaller dog).

Sometimes my dog pisses on the corner of my bookshelf while I am away, but for the most part he is a well behaved, well adjusted, loving and happy pet.

4.

The next week at work—the week of my great social experiment—went quickly. My ritual had been established: every morning, before going into the building, I would place two cigarettes in the ashtrays. Sometimes two in one, usually one in each. Then I would enter the building, say hello to the receptionist, walk down the hallway and down the steps to my office, say hello to my seascape, and get to work. The cigarettes would be collected some time after noon—by the man in the red jacket, or the man in the spring dress or someone else. Occasionally I would not notice when it happened and would only look up to see that they were gone. I would put two more out at around three o’clock and these would always be taken before I was done at five.

It occurred to me mid week that perhaps I should have left a lighter or matches out there as well. But I knew there was something wrong with this idea. It would have been too much, for one thing. I might as well have left the whole pack then, wrapped in ribbon and a bow, with a touching little note of sympathy for the plight of man. Besides which, it also occurred to me that matches could be gotten free from a number of places: convenient stores, hotel, businesses, any place where the destitute could wander in from the street and appeal too some sympathetic clerks sense of decency or whatever.

Then Friday I got a message on my computer (there was a little beep, when I got it, and suddenly a tiny flashing envelope in the corner of my screen) that the following week our much worked on and worked over product was to be released at the end of the month. The manual had to be finished and ready to send to the printers by next Friday. Everything had to be perfect. Everyone had done a great job so far and everyone was very happy with the progress so far, but now was the time to finish and finishe right. The message was signed: Bill Hanson. It was not sent addressed to me, but was a mass mailing sent to everyone on the project. It began: "Dear Team!"

So I forgot about my fellow man for the moment and concentrated on words and page numbers and glossaries and indexes. I had gotten the document to a point near (or near enough) perfection a few times but then there had always been some new addition to reconsider. So I reconsidered all that for the remainder of Friday, took some of it home with me over the weekend and came back early Monday just to make sure I would meet my deadline with time to spare.

I still had two cigarettes left in my pack

5.

Yesterday Bill Hanson came down to my office. He knocked on the door frame and reached my desk in two and a half strides. He said my name and I broke out into a could sweat. But then he said: "Sorry I haven’t made my way down to meet you sooner. Been a busy time here, lately."

"Yes. Certainly," I said.

"You’re doing a great job," he said, shaking my hand and gazing off dreamily at the seascape behind me. "We’re all very impressed with your work."

"Thank you, Mr. Hanson"

"How’s the document coming along? Nearly release date, you know."

"I should have it finished by tomorrow morning, Mr. Hanson"

"Excellent. Excellent." But already his voice seemed to be fading, not growing quiter so much as growing farther and farther away. His face seemed to relax itself into a dream: a past or future vacation, a beach, a yacht, a morning’s golf game.

Then: "Excellent," he said one more time, slapped me on the shoulder and left.

I worked late finishing the document. When I got home, my dog had pissed on the corner of the bookcase again. I opened him a can of dog food anyway.

This morning I stopped by the ashtrays before coming inside and put in my last two cigarettes. Then I went inside, talked for a few moments with the receptionist (She is pretty. she has changed her hair color. I told her it looks nice) then went down the hall, down the steps and into my office.

And outside the cigarettes were already gone.

I sat down, turned on the computer, glanced at the manual one last time. It was done. I knew there was nothing more to find or fix in it. I am finished with it. But just for fun, just as a tribute to my predecessor--and maybe he took the last two cigarettes; you can never tell and wouldn’t it be the perfect irony? Wouldn’t it be the sort of thing that ends a story?-- but just for him I will write the words: "Me and mine" at the very end of the document. Then I will erase them.