Hell in Office 601
Working 9 to 5 for Eternity
Article by Conner Crosby, art by Alex Wollinka
He wasn’t the prettiest fellow. His long blonde hair swung down over his eyes like he was still in high school. His nose was fat and gray and bore the resemblance of a miniature elephant. Maybe the elephant found a watering hole between the gentleman’s eyes and mouth. Maybe not.
Unlike typical lips, his dove inward at the mouth cavity, rather than outwards. Anybody in the office would have had a very hard time trying to kiss those lips. The elephant nose would surely get in the way, and even if you managed to reach his mouth, there would be nothing at all to kiss. More trouble than it was worth, certainly.
He was six foot four inches and thin in all places save for the belly, where a healthy lump of flesh bulged under an Oxford shirt and some white buttons. The lump was shaped like the football he threw in high school.
No matter how you sliced it, Michael Pummel was not a handsome man.
Of course, it didn’t help that he was dead.
But he had gorgeous, gorgeous teeth. They were fake teeth, special-ordered them from a small factory in California. They did not make the nasty clicking sound of most fake teeth, nor did they dry out easily.
I loved those teeth.
The morning began in all the usual ways. I pulled the restless covers of my bed back at six o’clock. I accidentally whacked my husband, Earl Lyle, with the heaviest bedsheet, as I did most mornings. We showered together, as we always did.
While I examined myself in the bathroom mirror, pushing my slowly wilting cheeks upward, toward my shiny eyes, I thought about how old I looked at forty-six.
I kissed my husband goodbye and sent him off to work at First National Bank, and then caught a taxi to the office.
I needed the ninth floor. I had to wait five minutes for the elevator next to a man who held two screaming babies and smelled like a gruesome mixture of vomit and baby food. I grimaced and pinched the shaft of my nose. I tried to pretend I was just itching it, so as not to offend him, but it didn’t work.
“Sorry,” he whispered. “I think I bit off more than I can chew.”
“Clearly,” I said, and forced a smile. His cheeks became very red, and we waited in silence for the elevator. One of the infants vomited some baby food.
The elevator hummed a short “ding,” and two metal doors slid wide to reveal Darin Deeterdotter, a man from my work, with his hands clasped over his groin.
The vomit-speckled man sprinted onto the elevator, while Darin waddled off it as quickly and deliberately as was possible for a man of his great weight. The unfortunate result was that the two men collided, smashing one of the babies between them.
The infant smashed between the two gentlemen screamed ruthlessly, and the other child vomited green a second time.
“Terribly sorry, sir,” said the man flanked by the babies.
Darin Deeterdotter said, “Er…um…excuse me” to the other gentleman, then proceeded to cough in fits on me without covering his mouth. He cupped his hands tighter over his groin as he clumsily padded to the restroom marked “men” on the other end of the lobby. I didn’t think he would make it, and I didn’t find myself wishing he would.
When I stepped inside the elevator, the man with the babies asked, “Which floor?”
“The ninth, please.”
He punched the button for the ninth, and all at once, the elevator leapt abruptly upward, worsening the headache of the child injured a minute ago. The infant screamed relentlessly. Her father turned away, plugging his ears.
I walked two paces to the baby and patted its head. The baby calmed and began to giggle. I worked up a laugh, too, but for one reason or another, couldn’t let it out. I thought maybe the man would look over from his place on the other side of the elevator-- maybe he would be impressed at my ability to calm and soothe his child.
Instead, he just kept staring at his reflection in the warped metal of the elevator’s insides. He looked awfully sad to me.
Tired of her father, I gazed at the laughing baby, admiring her pearly teeth. They were just coming in, protruding through her gums, but the tips of them glistened softly as they caught the cold light of the fluorescents.
“If only I could have those pretty, precious teeth,” I said aloud.
The vomit-covered gentleman had walked over to the other side of the elevator, leaning on the doors, next to a yellow sign that read, “DO NOT LEAN ON ELEVATOR DOORS.”
I did have those teeth, once. I had those teeth when I was the baby’s age and coughed up baby food and vomited on my father. I wondered what happened to those teeth.
A small digital display on the upper left-hand side of the elevator counted down the floors to nine. Long seconds lingered between the numbers seven and eight. Longer seconds lingered between the eight and the nine. The elevator was still learning how to count.
Finally, a tender “nine” fluttered onto the digital panel, next to a pointy pyramid made of tiny red rectangles. The elevator squealed a little, giving a brief “ding” exactly like the one it gave in the lobby. The sound was familiar to me. The smell, on the other hand, was not.
When we reached the ninth floor, the entire elevator filled with a wretched odor. The stench was very much akin to a mixture of iron and dog excrement, with a few hairs from the dog thrown in for good measure.
After another ding, the elevator doors parted. The man’s shoulder slipped on the laminated yellow sign telling him not to lean on the doors, and he fell headlong into the widening gap between the doors. Though I had no idea at the time, I would later take a fall just like it.
His chin greeted the carpet unkindly, and the carpet replied in turn. When he lifted his head from the floor, his left cheek bore a long and red streak, as though a couple of racecars had used his face as a race track. His lips were swollen and he was missing one of his front teeth.
Incidentally, the other baby had been crushed in the fall. The man checked to make sure it was still breathing, then fished around for something in his mouth with his tongue. After a minute or two of search-and-rescue, the tongue emerged from the caverns of his mouth with a short yellow tooth. He drew his hand to his mouth, and delicately lifted the tooth from the very tip of his tongue, as if he was a waiter, the tongue a large platter, and the tooth an appetizer plate. He looked at me, and winked. A thread of saliva dangled from his chin, and a trail of blood from his tooth.
I hesitated inside the elevator, contemplating whether I should get off on the ninth floor. The elevator became impatient, and started to close its doors. I thought about letting them close softly, without fuss, letting them suppress the awful aroma, letting the smooth smell of tulips in the lobby rinse my nostrils clean. But routine was an able persuader.
I stepped out onto the ninth floor and stood a few feet from the man, who was still wiping green vomit from his tie.
I patted one of the children on the head, then said, “Goodbye. It was nice to meet you” to the baboon man. He just smiled and started polishing his shoes. I shrugged and faced in the direction of Office 601, headquarters to The New New York, the newspaper I wrote for.
As I rounded the corridor before Office 601, the iron-excrement smell grew progressively stronger, so that soon the fingers on my nose shaft made no difference at all.
When I made it through the corridor, I saw a crowd gathered around the doors of Office 601. Editors, writers, photographers, lampooners! Window washers, for Christ’s sake!
Everyone stammered something, and everyone pointed their eyes and fingers at a curious object on the carpet. I was still too far off to make out the object of their fascination, or hear what they were saying. Their words congealed in an ugly mess of profanity, insanity, and disaster.
I became increasingly curious about that smell, about the crowd, about what lay on the carpet. The smell bothered me less and less. I flung a few strands of chocolate hair off my forehead, cleared my throat, and headed for the doors.
“Hello, Rita!”
I sunk my eyes into the crowd, expecting to see a familiar face staring backwards at me. Nothing.
“Over here!”
This time, the strange voice came from the west, and not the north, the direction it had come from when I first heard it. I swiveled my head, and saw Miss Kitty, the receptionist, sitting in her usual spot at her pink plastic desk.
“Hello, Miss Kitty.”
I worked through her features with my eyes. She had short, frizzy gray hair that she liked to pick out of her scalp at various intervals of the day. Now was one of those intervals. She plucked a hair and studied it calmly, turning it 360 degrees in her hands. A brown louse clung to one end of it, fearing for its dear life.
Miss Kitty was often quite difficult to spot because her skin that was so white and worn blended in with the equally weary walls.
As I approached her desk, the camouflaged receptionist flicked the strand of hair and the louse on it behind her chair. I took a complimentary peppermint candy from a dish on her desk, hoping it would help with the smell.
Kitty chortled, then said, “You should really see it in there, hon. Quite the spectacle.” She tried to wink but failed because she never learned how. She paused, staring at a fleck of white dandruff on the pink of her desk, then said, “Enjoy yourself.”
Now more curious than ever, I hurried to the doors of Office 601. I struggled to see over the scores of New New York employees, each of whom were much taller than I remembered. While I waited to squeeze through a gap in the crowd, I heard rumblings:
“Ha! What an ugly jerk.”
“Yes, but at least he’s made a scene!”
“Dee Dee! What a terrible thing to say!”
“I thought it was a compliment.”
At least two of the voices came from the mouths of Darin and Dee Dee Deeterdotter. They should have filed for divorce three years ago. I had little idea how Darin got back up to the ninth floor so quickly after emptying his bladder.
Eventually, I found a gap in the crowd and slipped through. When I saw the spectacle with my own eyes. I nearly fainted.
I screamed, “Michael! Oh, Michael!”
I sank to my knees. My outburst attracted the attention of the crowd. Every eye landed on me, and the room grew silent.
My cubicle neighbor, Michael Pummel, lay dead on the carpet. A small pool of blood gathered around his hips and stomach, drenching his clothing.
The cry prompted my boss and the editor-in-chief, Mr. Carmacki, to emerge from his private office. As I watched him shut his door, I looked around the office, expecting something to be awry. But Office 601 was muted, and dry as dirt. None of the workers in the office except me thought to decorate their cubicles with personal belongings. They hesitated to bring anything to work remotely capable of disrupting the boredom that pervaded Office 601. I, for one, brought a framed picture of my husband and my dog, and a little statuette of Wonder Woman to remind me of my undiscovered strength.
Mr. Carmacki hurried into the crowd and vanished from my view for a while. After a minute, he reappeared, across from where I was kneeling. Between Mr. Carmacki and me was Michael Pummel.
I looked up from Pummel at Mr. Carmacki. He was a short, thin man of only five feet, and he was slowly losing his hair. Unlike Miss Kitty, though, he did not pull it.
He always wore the same white shirt and blue sports jacket and it was easy to tell he did not own a washing machine because he reeked. He attempted to mask the odor by applying liters of extra duty cologne. It tended to make the situation worse.
Mr. Carmacki sweat profusely at all times. He and his secretary, Dee Dee Deeterdotter, had this in common.
“What the hell is going on?!” Mr. Carmacki shouted. When no one answered, he looked around the room, until his eyes fell upon me. He paused for a moment, guffawed, and said, “Rita. Oh, Rita.”
He walked past the body to my place on the carpet, accidentally stepping on Michael Pummel’s pinkie finger.
He said, “Whoops!” and laughed.
Dee Dee Deeterdotter echoed his laughter from somewhere in the crowd.
When he had finished laughing, Mr. Carmacki kneeled next to me on the floor.
I resented his embrace at first, fighting the body odor, drowning in the fumes of expired cologne. But as Mr. Carmacki pulled me closer and the hair on the tops of our heads tangled together, I found that I was grateful for the new smells. They overpowered the smell of Michael Pummel lying lifeless in front of us.
“There, there,” Mr. Carmacki whispered.
Just as I was about to say something, he untangled my hair from his, coughed, and stood abruptly. I was surprised to discover that I had leaned into him so much during the embrace that when he stood, I fell forward onto the carpet.
Unlike the man I met in the elevator I caught myself with my hands. If I had not reacted so quickly, the blood from Michael Pummel would have moistened my hair and face.
Mr. Carmacki loomed over me and giddily shouted, “Whoops,”. He bent backwards and bellowed with laughter. It looked suddenly like his spine might break. That would have been nice.
Without hesitation, Dee Dee Deeterdotter broke from the crowd and joined Mr. Carmacki. She placed her hands on his chest to balance herself as she, too, shook with laughter.
“Oh, Missus Dee Dee Deeterdotter!” Mr. Carmacki said.
Dee Dee Deeterdotter was exactly like Mr. Carmacki in every way, except that she was female. She, too, decided to buy a twenty-ninth pair of shoes rather than a new washing machine. Like Mr. Carmacki, she sweat profusely at all hours.
She liked to wear revealing purplish shirts and flirt with Mr. Carmacki, particularly when Mr. Deeterdotter was watching. Often, she unbuttoned the top three buttons of Mr. Carmacki’s shirt so that equal portions of their chests showed. When she did so, she and Mr. Carmacki were practically twins.
I gathered myself, and stood, peering at the body of Michael Pummel. I gagged twice.
“Has anyone called the police?” I asked.
“Called the police?!” Mr. Carmacki replied in astonishment.
“Oh, honey,” said Dee Dee.
When Mr. Carmacki realized I was serious, he walked very methodically over to where I stood, staring at Pummel’s body until he reached me. When he stood directly in front of me, he drew his finger below my nose and wagged it.
“No, no, no. Absolutely not. Dear, dear Rita,” he said.
“Deary,” Dee Dee echoed.
“We are the finest newspaper in New York.”
This time, Dee Dee raised one of her bushy brown eyebrows and tilted her head a little.
“This is the greatest story of all time. And Rita, darling, you’re going to write it.”
“What?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, darling. You knew him best, after all,” said Carmacki, with a smirk.
Dee Dee’s pet Yorkie lapped up some of the blood around Michael Pummel. It acted like it had not had a drink of water in days.
I said, “Um…Dee Dee…your dog.”
Dee Dee beat the Yorkie violently with her purse. I had to turn away.
Mr. Carmacki said, “Now, Rita, we will all help you with the–er–investigation, with the analysis of the body. We begin by soliciting the aid of your new cubicle partner, who shall replace the delightful Michael Pummel.”
I felt a nudge behind me. Something struck my backside. I turned around, only to see the man from the elevator. He no longer carried the two babies.
Solomon Summers waded inside the waters of the crowd, then emerged.
“Hello, sir,” Summers said, straightening his tie and checking his reflection in the face of his watch.
Mr. Carmacki said, “Perfect. Well, Rita, don’t be rude. Say hello.”
I answered, “Yessir. We met in the elevator, sir. Hello again.”
Carmacki nodded and smiled without parting his lips. “Good, good. Very good. Now, Solomon, I want you to make the first observation about Mr. Pummel here.”
Summers walked in a couple of circles around the body, then turned to face Mr. Carmacki and said, “I notice he has no teeth.”
Everyone gasped, including me.
“Very good. Very good. Now everyone here knows that Michael Pummel had beautiful white teeth from California. But the gentleman could have easily left his teeth at home or forgot them in the restroom or something. No. I’m concerned with the method of murder. I notice, for example,” Mr. Carmacki said, as he circled Michael Pummel, “that he’s bleeding from his stomach.”
Everyone oohed and ahhed at the exciting discovery from Mr. Carmacki. I did not think it was a very good discovery. I noticed Michael Pummel bleeding from his stomach when I entered the room.
Mr. Carmacki said, “Now, Dee Dee, what can you observe? Give Ms. Rita something good now, for her article.”
“I notice he is staining the pretty pretty carpet the handsome handymen just laid,” Dee Dee said, with a wry smile at me. “And I notice he’s the ugliest man in Office 601.”
Mr. Carmacki said, “Excellent, excellent, Dee Dee! The finest observations thus far.” Then, he looked at me, and said, “Now it’s your turn, Rita. What do you notice? We want to capture an audience, now. Remember that. Capture your audience, Rita.”
Mr. Carmacki beamed at me, drawing his lips high on his cheeks. I looked from Mr. Carmacki to Dee Dee and Darin Deeterdotter to Solomon Summers, then back to Mr. Carmacki. “I notice,” I said, twisting my mouth into a frown, “that Mr. Carmacki wears Michael Pummel’s false teeth.”
Everyone gasped except me. They looked toward Mr. Carmacki, dying to have a look at his teeth.
Mr. Carmacki gathered his lips to one side of his mouth, and chuckled with his lips closed. He was careful not to open his mouth. Everyone in the cool room looked toward him expectantly, entertaining the new possibility. A man in the back eating an egg sandwich curled his eyebrows a little and Darin Deeterdotter choked on his iced tea.
Even Dee Dee Deeterdotter, who had flirted with the editor-in-chief only moments ago, stepped back a little, putting some distance between herself and Mr. Carmacki. Her Yorkie followed suit.
With a nervous smile, she said, “Mr. Carmacki, that can’t be true. Of course not. It wouldn’t be. Is it?”
Mr. Carmacki smiled, and for several long seconds showed Dee Dee two rows of gorgeous, moist false teeth from California, then replied, “Of course not.”
But Darin Deeterdotter said, “Miss Rita is right. Those are Michael Pummel’s teeth!” pointing at Mr. Carmacki’s mouth. The crowd agreed, shouting and jeering at dear Mr. Carmacki. The man with the egg sandwich pushed through the crowd, tipping some of his coworkers over. He walked to Mr. Carmacki, shoving his face in front of his, and said, “Open your mouth.”
Mr. Carmacki sweat more than I had ever seen him sweat, making him smell worse than the dead body of Michael Pummel. He slanted his eyebrows downward and sucked his lips into his mouth like he had just dined on a lemon. He rubbed his hands together, stomped his feet, and refused to open up.
The egg sandwich man screamed, “Open up!” and the crowd thundered in unison, “Open up!”
When Mr. Carmacki did not open up, the man’s hand darted to Mr. Carmacki’s mouth. He tried to pry Mr. Carmacki’s mouth open with his index fingers, but Carmacki pressed his lips together so tightly it was impossible to get a good grip. When the crowd saw what trouble the egg man was having, they catapulted into motion. All at once, editors, writers, photographers, and lampooners hurtled toward the editor-in-chief, pulling at the sides of his mouth, his lips, his gums, his tongue.
As torrents of The New New York employees punched and kicked and drew a little of Mr. Carmacki’s blood, he responded in turn, biting and clawing. A couple of lampooners grabbed their fingers and howled in pain when Carmacki nipped at them.
Miss Kitty’s voice came somewhere from the west—no, the east—and soon, she too joined the fray, helping to wrench Mr. Carmacki’s jaw. As his hair escaped from its prison of gels onto his forehead and as he pressed his lips inward and as a few of his writers pummeled him, he almost looked like…almost like…
“He almost looks like Michael,” I whispered.
Suddenly, Mr. Carmacki screamed, “It was Summers’ idea! It was Summers’ idea!”
I had forgotten all about Solomon Summers. He was no longer in Office 601.
I thought about helping him look for Summers, but I was so tired of voices from the crowd. I was tired of Mr. Carmacki and Solomon Summers and Darin and Dee Dee Deeterdotter and the egg sandwich man and Office 601. I was even tired of Michael Pummel. Even tired of his smelly, wet, dead body.
I picked up a pen I had accidentally dropped amid all the ruckus and hurried out of the wretched Office 601. I found a little bench next to the ladies’ room to sit and rest. I rocked back and forth in my chair and crossed my legs. I thought about the time Michael asked me to come to dinner with him, the time he asked me on a date, before I married Earl.
Michael and I each held an edge of the dessert menu and each drew a finger to the third item down, “warm brownie with soft ice cream.” When it came, Michael was the first to attack it with his fork. As the fork carried a morsel of brown to his mouth, I saw a short slice of white chocolate submerged in the frosting. Just another false tooth.
After the brownie, we walked the pier. He held my hand and we trotted quietly in the direction of a little lighthouse on the horizon. I let the sun sparkle on his false teeth without saying anything, staring into his mouth. His mouth and those false teeth had a strange effect on me, and I thought maybe, in hindsight, that it had a similar effect on Mr. Carmacki. And that was why he killed Michael and stole his teeth. Or maybe it was just envy.
We traveled the length of the pier without speaking a word. I looked out onto the ocean as it stole a little piece of land and then returned it, over and over.
I looked over at Michael, to see whether he was watching the ocean, too. The more I peered into his dull eyes and balanced my gaze on his too-long face, the more my hand slipped from his. I felt myself pulled from him, as though caught in the ocean’s current. I released his hand, surprised to discover that mine was shaky and clammy. I asked him to take me home.
We saw a lot less of each other after that. Michael was still my cubicle neighbor, but I edited my own pieces, without him or Mr. Carmacki, and found another photographer for my articles. Every once in a while, he turned his head in my direction, looked into my eyes, and smiled and, for a brief moment, I felt like I did in the restaurant or on the pier.
All of a sudden, something caught the corner of my eye. A man walked out of the men’s restroom next to the bench where I sat. As the door swung shut behind him, I thought I saw a child through the narrowing crevasse. After a couple minutes, another man exited, flinging the door wider than the last gentleman. When he stepped aside, I again studied the gap between the door and its frame, getting a rare glimpse at the inside of a men’s restroom. Once more, I saw the round, fat face of a child. No, two children. They were sprawled on the ground in the back of the restroom, crawling on four feet and wailing. Just as I began to study their figures, the bathroom door slammed shut. The only thing I could see after the door closed was a section of toilet paper caught between the door and its frame, wavering, trying to decide whether it should unstick itself.
Panicked, I made for the men’s restroom, marked by a white placard in the shape of a body. Above the body, a circle floated, and when body and circle came together, they formed a person. Of course they did. But because of the funny way the circle levitated just above the body, it looked as though the person had been decapitated.
I hoped everyone had left the restroom, so I could investigate the matter of the children in private. I looked to the left, along the wall with the urinals. No one. There were no legs dangling from the toilets in the stalls, either.
I reached for the lock on the back of the door. A piece of pink squishy gum was plastered onto it. Little black hairs from an unknown animal strangled the gum, twisting around it like anacondas.
I screamed when I saw the children. Good grief! They were Solomon Summers’ babies! He had left them in the men’s restroom and fled.
Long tears trickled down each child’s face in a gentle stream. As I met them on the other side of the bathroom, I could not help but echo their tears. I was not sure what I was crying about. Was it the plight of the babies, rolling in puddles of urine on the floor of the men’s bathroom? Was it Solomon Summers, their father, and sweaty Mr. Carmacki, and wondering how the world slept knowing it bred such cruel men? Was it Michael Pummel?
I traced the temporary crow’s feet that gathered along the corners of the babies’ eyes as they screamed and I thought about how such agony, such suffering wasn’t supposed to happen until they got older, when they were my age. Or maybe suffering was only supposed to happen and crow’s feet were only supposed to gather if you were like their father or Mr. Carmacki.
I reached for their foreheads and gently stroked each of their skulls in turn. Each infant grew calm and quieted at my touch, like they had on the elevator. They still sobbed, but they sobbed silently, like me.
I admired the real, unstolen teeth arriving in their mouths, and cried a little harder. As I looked at the teeth and felt their soft, shallow hair between my fingers, I whispered, “I hope you grow up like Michael Pummel.”
I paused, resting my hands on their heads. I looked at the yellow stained walls and the curse words on the empty paper towel dispenser and the fallen urine beneath the toilets and said, “But I hope they let you keep your real teeth.”