Greetings from Sunny California by Hudson Aimless

With a self-satisfied grunt, the young man tipped the handcart back and slowly rolled the stack of heavy boxes out of the small room leaving it fully denuded of old posters, broken chairs and boxes of assorted crap. The carpeting, which didn't match the newer style of the hall, buckled slightly in a few places and the small window had been left with its blind raised, resulting in most of the wall's original rich butter-colored paint fading to the hue of blanched almonds with the occasional protected stripe. The result of the discoloration, the heaving floor and the oddly sized window was to immediately disconcert the visitor. But it was, in the end, an office, and Sayles regarded it with a blush of pride. It had a door (which he could close -- and lock) and enough room for a desk and a chair. Against one wall sat the peculiar window and against it's adjoining wall, like a swollen eye, was a faded red corkboard, just a hair larger than the window. After nicking his thumb somewhat while trying to get the small window unlatched (it was a shallow cut), Sayles struggled to lift the window high enough to let some air in and flush the moldy scent out of the office, his office. It wouldn't budge.

Tall and thin and never complimented by his clothes, Sayles was a rather unremarkable fellow who neither made waves nor rode them. He had, in the last few months, found himself shifting from a lifestyle that included a few friends and family to one of dull monotony. By some miracle (and in the face of common sense) he had grown happier as a result. His workload, larger than ever, wasn't of enormous pressure, just a steady stream of documents in and documents out. And unlike his personal life, he understood the elements and forms of the writing he was being asked to review and correct. It was a black and white exercise, a job of lines and curves and dots and the meaning that they conveyed in concert, and he was good at it. To Sayles it was soothing music that placated the world beyond the elevator. His boss had not noticed this change in Sayles, but had recognized his tireless hours and rewarded him with an office.

It was a few months ago, when his girlfriend left him, that he started getting to work earlier than usual. He had trouble sleeping, often waking up with discomfort from dry skin (he had always been plagued with shallow cracks in his knuckles and around his finger nails). When at first he couldn't relieve the buzzing in his hands and feet with creams, he found himself choosing instead to turn the lamp on and read the paper or watch the sunlight break across the jagged metropolitan horizon. Soon after he realized if he got to work early he could get a jump on things and maybe meet a friend in the evening. And this happened, once or twice. But it wasn't long before he would work late instead. Just half hour or an hour at first. He found a particular sense of comfort when the office was empty and when he could concentrate on his work without overhearing the phones and the conversations of people whose names, he realized, had grown more and more distant from having meaning. The people around him (his coworkers) had become sounds with no particular coloration or value. Their names, actions, conversation had a single scale of measure: volume.

His efficiency was amazing and his boss called Sayles into the office a few months later. His boss, a sandy-haired man, short and to the point, grinned at him and bounced a business card on his worn desk. Sayles was doing a fantastic job, his boss pointed out, and was there anything he could do to make the job more pleasant? (This wasn't what he said, in fact, but what he intimated. His boss, unbeknownst to Sayles, had one night realized that he could save the salary of nearly one and half employees if Sayles could maintain his current pace. Normally, he would scoff at making an offer to such a low-level employee. Normally. But he also wasn't an idiot.) Sayles drew a blank for a moment and could feel his wool pant legs pinch at the hair on his thighs -- he hadn't considered such a situation and had no answer prepared. What he found himself wanting to say, what erupted into the back of his throat that he had to violently swallow, was that he wanted to work alone, at night when people weren't there. But that, he knew, wasn't possible. And it was an odd and disquieting idea, even to Sayles to whom it appealed. Instead he simply said 'thank you' and that he got more work done when he it was quiet -- in the mornings and the evenings.

A few weeks later and he found himself hardly sleeping at all. In fact, when he laid his head down on the thin mattress he rarely had peaceful dreams. Often they were violent and bloody and filled with screaming horrid. The images were starkly colored and of people in great agony. In his dream he would be standing above them, taller than he'd ever been (and he'd been tall for most of his life). He could feel their fingers scraping at his shins and at his dry feet, trying to claw their way up him, out of the muck, away from whatever it was that was sucking them into dark shadows and -- what? butchering them? stuffing them in tin cans? Their eyes would bulge, eyebrows arched, pleading for mercy of any kind. And always one of them would start to speak, start to tell him something and it was then that he would wake in a light sweat. But his hands and feet would be bone dry and he would grind his palms on the rough sheets until he'd chafed them good and red. He didn't really need to sleep and, given the images that haunted him, he didn't want to sleep. Instead he'd shower and dress and stumbled out to the curb. Eventually the bus would roll down the empty boulevard and he'd hop on, often the only one on the bus until it got further into the city.

There was no fanfare when his boss had decided to make the office available. "It's just filled with crap -- I'm going to have the guys throw it out, then you'll move in" he said in passing, clapping a small hand on Sayles' worn heather sweater-vest. Sayles knew the room as he often poked his head in when wondering if there was a less dodgy chair he could switch for his own, always misremembering the offerings of the unused room. His chair was worn in spots and on occasion the bare metal frame would bite at his backside and he would have to shift his weight. But inside him the news of the offer set his heart athump. It meant that Sayles could get away from the noise and the hustle of the office which ate at him through the day. Wilson, across from him, would often hum snatches of a pop song and this could drive Sayles to distraction. But far worse than that -- the most horrible offense to his concentration -- was Maylene who, three cubes down and one cube over, was still so loud on the phone that he had been tempted on a number of occasions to walk over and hang her phone up in mid-conversation. (But he hadn't. He had only asked her to try and keep her voice down, and that was just the once.)

A good portion of the back wall of the tiny room, adjacent to the dirty window, was taken up with a dusty corkboard with a painted metal frame. On it Sayles had posted a list of phone extensions he had carefully collected since he had started with the company, each separated from their owner by a line of twenty-five dots. Most of them he hadn't called in months, and a number of them he had never called. And one of them, Maylene's, he kept on his list simply because he used to curse at it under his breath. He also placed a postcard on the board that he had found in the drawer of his original desk. On the front it showed a picture of a Spanish mission, somewhere in Northern California. On the back it read "To Everyone: Having a great time -- Cynthia" The message was followed by a quickly penned smiley face. He pinned it up with the face of the card to the wall so that he could read the inscription and study the poorly-rendered glyph for clues as to the kind of woman this 'Cynthia' was. And that's all he pinned up, on the corkboard or elsewhere. Once the guys in the technology group had relocated his computer and made all the inane comments they were bound, by loyalty to their profession, to make, Sayles was free at last to take a seat on his old chair at his new desk in his new office and resume that which gave him the greatest amount of peace, his work.

Within a week Sayles had become officially addicted. He found that with proper timing, he could minimize the amount of time he spent outside his office to an occasional brief visit to the men's room or to step out for lunch. Often he would shut the door and leave only twice during normal business ours (these were pleasant days indeed). And in the free time between sending his assignments back in for review and reviewing the assignments that had been sent to him, he would consider methods to cut those two interruptions down to a single, well planned event. The main challenge he faced was that, as a matter of need, Sayles drank nearly four liters of water a day. Food he could restrict rather severely, but water was something that, should he forget to drink, would torture his hours with nagging dryness in his mouth and itchiness in his eyes. His hands and feet, which were sufficiently sensitive as to keep him awake at night, could grow painful if he didn't watch his intake. This had the none-too-surprising effect of requiring at least one (blissfully satisfying) visit to the urinal to relieve himself, after which he would refill his large water bottle at the company's 'complimentary water fountain'.

Sayles found that leaving for home at night -- and by this time he had grown comfortable staying until long after ten o'clock, was a rather depressing affair. By contrast, arriving at seven in the morning (and on occasion earlier) provided an airy relief to the cloud that followed him home. Around the end of his second month, Sayles had his first all-night experience and it filled him with a unique joy. It wasn't until a few minutes after midnight that he realized, as he checked his scuffed, plastic wrist watch, how late it was. He probably wouldn't have noticed even then except for the temperature in the room.

Over the last few hours it had risen steadily and was by that time noticeably warm, warm enough that he willingly shed his thin beige sweater and unbuttoned his cream shirt to the center of his chest. Maybe they had turned the air-conditioning off, he thought to himself. He stood and looked out the window momentarily, but his view was obscured by countless layers of filth on the outside of the glass. Instead, he took the chance to re-examine the mysterious 'Cynthia'. Lost in thought, he hardly noticed his own actions as he removed his topshirt altogether, stripping down to the greying undershirt that rested directly on his thin frame. From somewhere, very distant and remote, he was vaguely aware of the sound of a piano, an etude. Normally such and interruption might have bothered him, but it was half past midnight and, he reasoned, as good a time as any to be lenient with the neighbors. Sayles took the dreary trip home sometime later.

Sayles was tall enough that by standing on a chair he could reach well into the drop ceiling and push aside the acoustic tiling. Held in place by thin metal wires, the grid of ceiling tiles were clearly not meant to serve as storage space, but they confidently handled the weight of a few folded shirts, a stack of underwear and a pile of socks that he gingerly placed about . It was his heavier items - his footwear in particular -- that proved more difficult and these he resigned to his file drawers. By trudging in once a week with a stack of freshly laundered clothes and a change of shoes, Sayles found that he could limit his nights at home to two a week. By the middle of the fourth month of his residency he had marked the fifth day (and the second day in a row) that he had gone without direct contact with another human being. Aside from a few snatches of conversation uttered loud enough from outside his door (loud enough to bleed up under the threshold and through a stack of ), the only other intrusion into his sanctuary was the silvery notes from the nearby piano that seemed to float toward him when the room was at it's warmest -- around half past one in the morning.

The heat was initially a source of serious irritation to Sayles but he soon realized that his privacy at that hour was relatively assured, proven wrong (dramatically) only one time. He had been standing next to his desk in short sleeves and boxer shorts reviewing in close detail the sloppy loop that served as ambassador of 'Cynthia''s exuberance when the door to his abode swung open and standing at the entrance was a horrified Latino woman in her mid-forties holding a white plastic garbage bag. Dressed in a faded lavender smock, her lipstick in thick rings of plum and raspberry, she appeared at that moment to Sayles to be a specter of death come dressed as a life-sized paper-dollie. Frozen in place, arms spread wide like a determined Beefeater, she stood in stunned silence one golden moment before starting a complex series of shrieks in tones of immeasurable pitch and clarity, her eyes bulging out of their sockets like a child's mouth expulsing a milky egg.

Sayles startled, cringed and winced, then rushed at her, his long, pale hairy legs and sinewy arms themselves presenting an image of cadaver-come-alive horror to the poor, baffled woman. She watched him come at her, arms and legs rocking in a wide, awkward stride, his face twisted in anger and the fly of his underwear gaping open and closed like a hounds maw, his purple member swinging back and forth behind the gap like a fierce tongue. She collapsed to the ground, overcome with the horror of her imminent and grisly death. But it didn't come. Merely he leaned over her, his breath cascading down in moist waves, and barked "I'll thank you to leave me be." And the door closed, the beast again safely ensconced in his cave. News spread throughout the janitorial staff of the building and from there to the staff of many other buildings in the city and soon to other cities.

At the end of the year the company hosted a small ceremony to thank the employees for their dedicated (and underpaid) labor and to honor a few of its outstanding workers. Sayles was a natural choice, his effect on the bottom line undeniable even if no one had seen him in weeks. Sayles penned a regretful note, which he drafted immediately upon receiving the distinguished invitation, that told of the unexpected passing of a loved one. At the time, Sayles stopped to consider which loved one might have passed so unexpectedly but drew a minor blank while searching his brain for a candidate. Instead he left the reference vague and found later, when giving it one more read through before submission, that the absence of detail gave the note a tone of respectful quiet. He found it so delicate and comforting, that he placed a copy of it on his corkboard next to his card from 'Cynthia'.

It's not clear when he first realized that the piano playing was drifting in not from the window but from the corkboard (he had stopped paying attention to the days of the week by that time). It was shortly after he had found himself dumbstruck with the notion that he had completely forgotten about the potential clues on the front of the postcard. Certainly there must have been dozens, if not hundreds, of cards to pick from when 'Cynthia' had drafted the note a few years ago -- why had she picked this card? He had been standing a hair's breadth from the corkboard and the card, now turned about, when it dawned on him (somehow) that the piano was louder here than by the window. He scratched at his bare chest and considered why this might be. Recalling a neat trick he had seen in a movie, he licked the tips of his right middle and index finger and slowly ran them around the seam between the board and the wall, stopping as needed to rewet his fingers. He could feel it, sure as he was alive. There was a thin, cool draft leaking in from behind the corkboard.

Dressed only in a faded pair of boxer shorts, he looked around the small room for something he could use to pry the board from the wall, but there was nothing obvious in his field of vision. On the floor, abutting the foot of the door, were a few piles of papers and a empty white plastic garbage bag. On the desk was his computer and monitor. Within the drawers of his desk an assortment of ballpoint pens and pencils and a few memo pads printed at the top with the name of a plumbing supplier. He rummaged around thinking he may have stashed away a ruler or pair of scissors, but in his heart-of-hearts knew that this couldn't be the case. Under the desk were his bottles, mostly filled with water, a few empty. Toward the farthest corner under the desk was his waste bottle. In the ceiling was an assortment of clothes, some still packaged as the dry-cleaners had left them, others in sloppy piles, but nothing of use.

Surely, if he opened the door, he could find what he needed. But it was early yet, not even half past two and the cleaners would be stalking the quiet halls. He shuddered. It was unthinkable. On the face of the postcard a pretty woman in a yellow sundress and a man in blue shorts and a bright white shirt were walking by the golden-hued mission, it's bells gleaming in it's rustic spire. In the background a small, dark dog considered its options. In the center was the entrance to the mission and from behind the oversized doors of the church, which opened into cool darkness, came the soft chimes of a piano. Was 'Cynthia' still having a good time? Today, even? Sayles tried to return to his work but found that for the first time in as long as he could remember, it did not sufficiently satisfy him. He needed to look behind the board.

Less than an hour later he regained consciousness. He was lying on the floor of the room covered in a thin sweat. He was staring at the ceiling and licking at his lips obsessively, worrying a raw patch in the corner of his mouth. He noticed, as he regained control of his thoughts, that from this angle the top quarter of the window seemed much cleaner than the rest of it, a fact that had since gone unrecognized. It was as if someone had started cleaning the window and had left to place a casserole in the oven or take a phone call and hadn't yet returned. He further noticed that the blinds were attached to the ceiling with a set of metal brackets that, removed from the wall, would fit nicely behind the corkboard and prove as sensible a tool as one could hope for. Sayles, tongue lashing back and forth against his bottom lip, stood and pushed his chair over to the window and stood on top of it, quickly yanking the blind first from one bracket and then from the other. And it was there, on the chair, lowering the blind from above, and down past, his face, that Sayles first took a moment to look out the window. It was chilling.

The window looked out on a large interior space between the backs of four abutting buildings. To his right he saw a few more windows from his own building and on his own floor. They were all dark. Below him, far at the end of the same building, there was a lit window and he could see (occasionally) a man pacing back and forth, smoking. The man appeared to be dressed in a pair of pajamas, dark blue with wide white striping. Farther on was another building, this one parallel to Sayles', and it afforded perspective on many windows, three of which seemed to reveal a living presence. In one, fairly high above, he could see a woman's face in profile. She was, perhaps, in her late twenties. She faced a computer screen and spoke at it animatedly (though Sayles could not hear her), occasionally stopping her chatter to look down and furiously type before returning to, he assumed, review her work. She was pale to the point of ghostly and her hair was the color of ruined wheat. Below her and to the left of Sayles' view were two windows fairly close together. In one a man in his underclothes was reviewing a large and dense ledger book, alternating between carefully tracking a columns of numbers with his dark fingertip and reviewing complex set of additions on the paper tape that hung out of the back of his calculator. He stopped only once, as Sayles was watching, to cough violently into a wad of paper towels. Sayles could see a pile of similar paper towels discarded by the man's feet and he felt a slim spike of nausea in his throat. There were others, above him, to the left and far out in front, looming in the distance. He knew that, aided with a good pair of binoculars (or a telescope) he could spy on dozens if not hundreds of these gaunt workers of the night, each obsessed with their particular set of duties. These, Sayles realized, were his kin.

The rough edge of the metal bracket slipped nearly effortlessly into the gap with a soft scraping sound that pierced the room and brought Sayles an immense sense of satisfaction. Eyes closed, he ran his sandy tongue against the fine bumps that bordered the top of his mouth. Putting his limber arms to work, he pulled the bracket forward, slowly feeling the corkboard release it's ageless connection to the wall. He worked the slice of metal in on opposing sides, rocking the frame of the board out in a slow and steady motion. As the gap widened he felt the drift of cool air escaping more steadily and the tone of the piano notes, which now came across with romantic abandon, grow in timbre and hue, more clear and more sure than before. Eyes once again closed he slowly lowered himself by bending his knees so that he could feel the comforting cold spill from the sizeable gap across the bridge of his nose. He could feel it wash over the stubble of his upper lip, down across his chin to his sinewy neck, Adam's apple paused expectantly, and down into the folds of his damp undershirt. And in the air that licked at him he noticed one thing more, the smell of another. It was a gingery scent, sharp and sweet and, like the music of so many notes before, distant and enticing.

Snapping back, he placed the now bent bracket on the table and painfully stuffed the gaps on the left and right with his pale fingertips. Though slow in coming, the corkboard steadily slipped out of it's frame as if it had been designed to do so, had been placed there with care, waiting for someone of distinction to remove it. It came out quietly with sureness and he lowered it to the floor respectfully. In the gap where the corkboard used to reside was a second window, painted over in black. Uncovered, the music and the refreshing air leaked from it excessively. The glass was cool to the touch and Sayles delicately put his bruised lips and throbbing fingertips against it's painted surface. He inhaled the now fragrant air through his nose and released a soft moan that felt unfamiliar. The notes had grown soft again, but this time because the music was in a lighter passage. Sayles stood, turned out the lights and resumed his prayerful position, kneeling so that he could rest his forehead against the refreshing glass. "Where am I?" Sayles wondered to himself.

The music stopped and Sayles startled. Had he been asleep? He looked up and it was at this time that he noticed the light -- the faintest light -- seeping through the darkened glass. With his thumb he scraped at the surface until he had removed enough of the paint to make out an image on the other side of the obscured portal. He was looking into another room. Frenzied, he took to pulling up strips of the latex paint until he could see with both eyes, into the dark room with it's dusky colors and, on the opposite wall, a standing mirror. By squinting, and selectively focusing beyond the opaqueness of the glass window, he could just make out the reflection of his wall in the mirror. Sayles very nearly screamed at the top of his lungs when a woman's head came out of nowhere and moved quickly past his viewing position. His heart now in his throat, his muscles tense as if conflict was imminent, he hardly heard the music begin once more as the needle hit the groove of the record.

She appeared again and this time she seemed to look at him straight in the face. She was soft and young and her skin was smooth and perfect. To Sayles, who hadn't looked on a woman with anything less than scorn since his girlfriend had left him so long ago, she was angelic. Her hair was dark and fine and pulled back and tight across her head into a small bun. Her eyes, white and clear with fine disks of chestnut brown flaked with honey and dotted in the center with cold ebony, sat below thin brows that pulled Sayles' attention to her neat ears. Dipped in coral and pearl, their tiny lopes (soft like cotton) encouraged him to lose himself in the perfect pinkness of her full lips. She stood there only a brief second before smiling, as if she knew he was there. Her smile was reserved, knowing, delicate, liberating. Her lips split almost not at all, the dark line that where they met tortured him with its delicacy. Her eyelids closed slowly and she filled her lungs through seashell nostrils. As she stepped back and began to dance Sayles could see her fully in the mirror opposite him and his legs twitched, unsteadied by the vision before him.

She wore a canary leotard and rich, red leggings, her feet bare on the wooden floor. Her movements were fluid and effortless and Sayles felt himself flying, spinning with her, cut from his body, liberated from his long limps and exhausted flesh. His eyes fluttered as he tried to track her across the floor, her arm bent at her waist, her extended up, toe pointing, painting symbols he could neither comprehend nor deny as heartbreaking. She was calling to him to move but he could not. She turned and bent forward, her hand reaching endlessly out, a display of perfection in form, and he felt himself rolling inside, unsteadied by the gracefulness that challenged him. The music grew and she stood, spun, lifted her head high, neck extended like a flower basking in sunlight.

He felt the first tear roll from his tired eyes, and maybe he felt the second, but the rest came too fast to count and he slid down onto the dusty carpet and cried in a growing crescendo of sobbing that deafened him. He pounded the flat of his chapped hand against the floor and raised his head, mouth gaping, bridged with thick strands of saliva, eyes shut hard, rolled back, in agony. For a brief second not a sound came from the blackness of his throat and the pinlights of the offices around him danced in the wet edges of his worn teeth and in the slick rivers of anger that ran from his nose. One hand reached out in front of him in an agonized strain, knuckles white, fingers clawing the carpet for something so deep it had no name.

And then it came, harder and faster and meaner than his taut body could stand, and he shook with the wailing that erupted from his soul, mute so very long, now crying out for everything he had ever set aside, ever left beyond the door, ever given up in trade for the stillness of his space, for the complacency of his days, for the sanctuary of his room.