Andrew Lenahan's Dead

Andrew Lenahan's Death, Part I

Lunchroom with a View

short fiction

by Andrew Lenahan

Chet pressed the red intercom button again. His secretary’s response had more hiss to it than a normal voice, like the playback of a cheap cassette tape.

“Yeah, what?”

“Vicki, did I get any calls?”

“No… didn’t you just ask that like 5 minutes ago?”

“What about any voice mail then?”

“I’ll check… no.”

“Any e-mail?”

There was a long pause. The unmistakable clicking of computer keys resonated through the intercom line. “Uh… just one e-mail. Ancient Chinese baldness something something. I deleted it.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Is that it?”

“Yeah. Uh… what about faxes?”

“You don’t have a fax machine, Chet.”

Chet thought about this for a moment. “I was pretty sure I did have a fax machine.”

“True, but it’s not hooked up to anything, so actually receiving a fax is pretty unlikely.”

“I know, Vicki.”

“Is that it?”

“Um… what are you doing right now?”

“Crossword.”

“Need any help with it?”

“No.”

“Oh, okay. Bye.”

“Goodb--“

Chet pressed the same button again, wondering if there was a world record for pressing buttons, and if so who had the world record for pressing buttons, and how did he prove it, and where might one find out if maybe he could submit a form somewhere just in case he had unwittingly beaten the record, and if there was perhaps some sort of prize money involved, maybe. “Chet, now you’re just being silly,” he thought to himself. Beating the button-pushing record shouldn’t be done for money but for glory.

“Silly, silly, silly.”

Chet glanced around the office, making sure everything was in order. None of the rug fringe had become upturned, as fringe was notoriously likely to do. The paper clips were all linked together like a tiny chain, so that if their container were to spill they’d be easy to pick up. (Confidentially, Chet had glued a magnet to the bottom of the paper clip container for just such an occurrence, but naturally he was hesitant to tell anyone else out of fear that they might steal the idea.)

He even proofread all 250-or-so copies of blank company letterhead paper in his desk, as he secretly believed that those mischievous folk who print up company letterhead sometimes deliberately alter a few copies per hundred, by subtly changing the phone numbers and such, just to keep people on their toes. Chet had been lucky, apparently, as all his letterhead was identical. Of course, he considered briefly, it never does hurt to double-check.

Suddenly, all his carefully-made plans were interrupted by an abrupt gurgling in his stomach. Lunch time! He hesitated a moment, eyeing the blank letterhead paper lying on his desk at a 45-degree angle. “Proofread me, Chet,” it seemed to call to him in an otherworldly voice. “Prooooofread meeeeee…” Chet hated when his office supplies made him feel guilty. He also hated leaving a job unfinished. His stomach gurgled again, louder this time. That decided it, he had to get something to eat, and quickly. You know you’re very hungry when your stomach rumbles so loudly you can barely hear your paper talking.

Chet shoved the paper back in his desk and reached further in the gray recesses of the drawer, pulling out a brushed-metal lunchbox and thermos. The lunchbox looked much like the old-style kind that construction workers like “Rosie the Riveter” used, except his was less shiny and several hundred times more expensive, not adjusted for inflation. He purchased it from a catalogue found on a railway seat, using his Platinum Corporate MasterCard, as a gift to himself, from himself. The latch was a particularly tricky little bastard to open, which almost entirely voided his lunchbox-opening pleasure. Inside was a banana, which was reported in the Times some years back to be effective in preventing or curing some disease whose name he had long since forgotten. Chet examined each banana carefully for tarantula spiders, which he feared would bite him or choke him or capture him in a web and slowly eat him. His thermos matched the lunchbox in style and was of course purchased from the same catalogue at considerable additional expense. It held water which he personally had removed from the plastic bottle it came in, boiled, frozen, then boiled again and allowed to cool to room temperature. According to a photocopied flyer Chet found on the street, this procedure was quite necessary for curing the water to remove bacteria, infectious parasites, magnetic disturbances which damage the rhythm of the blood, and molecular discrepancies. It was the molecular discrepancies which worried Chet most, as they had the power to turn perfectly good drinking water into either pure hydrogen or pure oxygen, depending on the polarity. Furthermore, if the discrepancy had occurred after the water had been ingested, it could cause the skeleton to melt, turning Chet into a soupy goo, destined to life in a little plastic baggie, which someone might accidentally eat or spill or empty into the trash bin. Finally, he had a sandwich of his own design, which was basically two pieces of bread with croutons between them. He figured that by inventing his own sandwich, he greatly lessened the chances that he might read somewhere that his particular sandwich was deadly or harmful in some way, since no-one but him knew about it. Still, he could always chuck the sandwich from his office window should it ever present a danger to himself or others.

Double-checking to make sure he hadn’t forgotten anything, Chet began the long trek toward the lunch-room, which was a cavernous, windowless room with tables and such. It was mostly vacant, even during lunch hours, following a ruling at boardroom level which discourages friendly communication and fraternizing between employees under the level of lower middle management, except on semi-casual Fridays, designated and approved holidays, and the third Tuesday of every second month (for those with special magnetic access strips on their laminated security keycard badges). Luckily Chet was upper middle management, which was considerably superior to lower middle management, and was privileged not only with lunch-room access, but also executive bathroom access, provided he pay a nominal monthly fee for the executive bathroom access key and purchase a board-approved pewter keyring with the company logo on it. Chet loved the lunch-room, for the softly-humming overhead lighting, for the many complimentary condiment packages whose ingredient lists made fascinating reading during dull moments, and for the fact that he, Chet, didn’t have to soil his personal workspace with unsightly banana bits or crouton crumbs. If his office were his home-away-from-home, surely the lunch-room was his home-away-from-home-away-from-home.

“The corridors sure are clean,” he thought absentmindedly to himself, without even realizing he was trying to avoid stepping on the lines between the flooring tiles, a habit he carried since the grimy sidewalks of his Croydon boyhood, where, according to a popular children’s chant, stepping on a line would ‘break your Momma’s spine’. Of course it was less dangerous now, with his mother long-since dead of causes totally unrelated to stepping on sidewalk lines. And besides, this wasn’t a sidewalk, it was just some sort of floor stuff. “Surely,” he thought, “there must be something bad that can happen if I step on a…”

Chet’s skull rammed into the door at the end of the hall with a sound which loosely resembled a coconut being hit by an aluminum baseball bat. The door swung inward slightly, and Chet wound up on the floor, which proved to be a rather frightening and unpleasant place to be. “Damn these solid impenetrable doors!” Thought Chet, furious at himself for failing to watch where he was going, but even more furious at the door manufacturers for not including some sort of device to prevent such accidents. Suddenly an idea came to him… surely he could invent a door which wasn’t solid and would allow people to pass through without bumping their noggin and falling flat on their bum. It would be a sort of hologram door, yes, that would work! Genius! It would be very complicated, of course, so complicated that he might even have to draw up a diagram, but after single-handedly improving a paper-clip cup with a magnet, he felt rather up to the task.

Feeling proud of himself, Chet noticed that the door, in fact, lead to a roof-access stairway. Curious, he began the long ascent up the hard concrete stairwell. Looking down, the stairs seemed to spiral awkwardly down into infinity among the shadows about a dozen stories down. The climb was mostly uneventful, except for a little brown spider on the top landing which he tiptoed gingerly around. Surprised that it did not attempt to bite him or eat him like the spiders in the movies, he concluded that it must have been dead, or sleeping, or perhaps not hungry after having eaten some other employee just minutes before. “That’s silly,” he thought to himself with a shudder, “I’m sure spiders are always hungry for human flesh.”

He was surprised to see that there was no door at the top, just a sort of archway which lead out to the bare roof. He squinted at the bright sunlight as he walked out onto the warm black surface. “Damn sun,” he thought, “surely a civilization that has kitchen knives that can cut through pennies should be able to find some way to turn off the sun while a guy eats lunch.” Reminded that he was even more hungry than when he left the office, he found a place to sit down and eat. He sat down near a metal grating at the approximate center of the roof. For the first time he took a long look at his surroundings: the smooth black roof, the deep-blue afternoon sky, the city skyline which seemed to stretch out to infinity in all directions. “It’s not too bad up here,” he said quietly to himself, “as long as I don’t get too near the edge.” He was, of course, quite afraid of falling off, or being blown off by a strong wind, or being pecked to death by nasty birds, but the scenery made up for all that. Just then, he began to notice a strange voice, almost unnoticeable at first, but building in intensity. Chet looked around, in case it might be the roof inspector or a roof cleaner or a roof repairman or Freddy from those Nightmare On Elm Street movies. He was alone. The voice kept calling, louder and louder, until he could finally make it out. It was calling his name.

on to Andrew Lenahan's Deader...

more info on Andrew Lenahan's Death

Starblind front page