Chapter One

I sat alone in the break room, not killing anyone.     On that day (and on other days, too) peace felt random, permitted by a shrug from happenstance instead of etched into God's schedule. If acoustics in the womb, for example, had vibrated my skull with an alternate average frequency, or if I'd eaten more egg yolks or Blue No. 2, I could have grown into a person who doesn’t fear man-made strictures. Into a committer of workplace violence, bed frame underbelly teeming with journals and a sketchbook that retroactively double as warnings.
    I could hear my parents scoffing at the prospect.
    "Gunman? More like gunbitch. Because he's not a real man, get it? Because he's a bitch."
    "Fifteen? His brother would have shot twenty..."
    I scanned the room for this one big-faced girl who had uneven eyes. One eye was regular, but the other bulged way out as though a decade's worth of overdue conniptions quavered inside it. I wanted to eavesdrop on her end of a cell phone conversation; previously, she had talked about wanting to cook a neutered male chicken, and I still didn't know if she ever got the chance. Unfortunately, she wasn’t there, so I instead looked around for something else to distract me then noticed an older guy eating soup by himself at another table. He appeared tall (even while sitting) and was bald except for a decorative wreath of hardscrabble gray, and although his plainness pushed a vanguard for nothing stare-worthy, his soup-eating did manage to hoard my interest. Immediately after every spoonful, the guy would open his mouth to cram in a couple saltines then chomp chomp chomp until--and I could see it on his face, the moment he decided--all components were mixed up just right. While the mastication did bear an automatic quality, a quality formed over decades of eating certain foods in certain ways since childhood, it also lacked the natural ease of "just chewing." I thought it would be funny if worlds away, in a different realm, a goblin viewed him through a telescope, urging him on as though the specific eating of soup played into an evil plan. "That’s right, first the soup, and yes, now the crackers, that’s a good boy..."
    Turning Alicia From Accounting's head into a mixed media wall collage would pretty much confirm my ugliness, though. Not my ugliness "on the inside" or the ugliness of my morals, but rather...has any symmetrical, classically attractive man ever been a mass shooter? "He was so handsome, I can't believe he would do this. I mean, look at his hair..." That would be the real tragedy for some people, and their survival would be the real tragedy for me. I imagined the click, click, click of mathematical mercy sparing them--not their evasive prowess. A row of women who copied their silhouette from a dull-topped mountain range distended my field of vision, and I concluded that, for them, physical hubris (anything more than straight-line momentum) would shear every link in their posterior chains. If multiple break room ladies hit the tile floor at once, the overlapping shock waves would backhand the tables and chairs into oblivion, reenact the fate of model houses from that Nevada bomb site footage.
    The broken tempo--the jagged report of a battle with gravity, with bipedalism itself--rang out from a staircase.
    Tammy was coming. Tammy from the Claims Department. Tammy who was shaped like two UFOs stacked one on top of the other. I spotted her lumbering toward me and marveled. The amount of energy it took for Tammy to walk was probably the same amount of energy it took to crush a star. Tammy's face blended plush toy with prednisone, and her eyes contained the medium brown of store brand cola. A barley straw bouquet, the apparent survivor of a trampling by draught animals, doubled as her hair, straggling without morale to her lower back. Clothes weren’t made that accommodated both Tammy’s girth and the dress code, so she got away with wearing shirts that, depending on which ones they were, could have moonlighted as floral design draperies or checkered picnic tablecloths. Her pants were always black, always elastic, and always stretched as far as a four-year-old’s imagination. And, I must say, commendations to the maker of Tammy’s white tennis shoes, whose product daily survived pressure that could turn peanut shells into diamonds.
    The universe no longer expanded. Tammy sat down across from me, and the bounds of reality began to shrink.
    "Hey, Greg."
    "Hello."
    "I'm glad I saw you. Don't forget to fax the new reports before five o'clock."
    "No worries. I can definitely--"
    "Dang it."
    After struggling like a debutante to the world of hands and using them, Tammy peeled the lid off a margarine container, revealing the boiled guts of a semolina monster as her lunch. I fixated on the daylight carnage before me. Tammy stabbed a fork into the plain spaghetti pile, raising a bite partway to her lips. Then, using her free hand, she pinched the noodles off the silverware then stuck them in her mouth. I wasn’t sure if this was a one-time event, so I kept watching. Tammy repeated her elaborate process.
    Wordlessly rising from the table, I went downstairs to use the phone at my cubicle.
    "Hello?"
    "Is Ruth there?"
    "Does anyone else ever answer this line?"
    "I’m trying to be polite."
    "Aww. How unnecessary."
    "I called because I miss you."
    "You saw me this morning," she said, tone hardening with confusion, perhaps annoyance. Did she not recognize my earnestness?
    "Well yeah, but that was for the first time in like eight days," I reasoned.
    "My parents have me closing every night," she reasoned back.
    "I know."
    "So, were the mushrooms that bad?"
    "No, they weren’t."
    "So, an omelet with mushrooms isn’t food gone wrong in possibly the worst way?"
    "I ate...most of it."
    "Yes, you did. And next time," she said, "I’ll have you try the tuna salad. Or maybe. Cottage cheese."
    "Gross. Stop it."
    She raised her pitch, song-like. "I’m gonna make you."
    We both laughed.
    "Do you close tonight?"
    "Nope."
    "That’s awesome." I meant it. That was awesome.
    "But I told Fran that we can meet her and Joel at their place. For dinner."
    "Huh."
    "Was that not a good idea? Fran from high school, remember?"
    "No, no. I can go. It’s just that...I was planning to make hot dogs."
    "Yeah, I know," Ruth said, "I saw the can of beans on the counter this morning."
    For some reason, I got kind of embarrassed when she said this.
    "Okay, so you knew that."
    "Can’t you eat hot dogs another night?"
    "If cosmic order is conserved for long enough, I will eat hot dogs on a different night."
    "So, we’re going."
    I sighed. "What are we having?"
    "I’m not sure. Lentils? Legumes? They like to experiment. But also, I told Fran we’d bring some wine."
    "Okay."
    Ruth candied her voice. "Could you maybe...pick some up when you get off work? If you do it, I’ll love you forever."
    "We’re a bunch of twenty-five-year-olds, but yeah, I can pick some up."
    "What, they’re automatically pretending to be ‘sophisticates’ because they want to drink wine?"
    "Maybe. That depends on a precise tally comprising single-function utensils, mentions of Congress, and how many times I get conversationally raped with stories about travel."
    "Sounds objective."
    "My systems have yet to fail me."
    A pause. "Just don’t forget the wine, okay?"
    "I won’t. I Love you."
    "Love you too, Greg."
    Excellent. Plans to see Ruth. And, of course, the idea was to have my real dinner after eating that fake, crappy one. Hot dogs remained on the menu. The menu of destiny, that is.
    I stayed in my chair until lunch was over, wondering if I would have to pretend liking Fran, Joel, or lentils.
    Then, Amber from Q.C. appeared.
    "Can you pull these files for Nadine?" She handed me a list. "I put an empty cart over there."
    Shyness had me in a plum clinch, steering my head downward. I forced myself to answer. "Yes."
    Amber had blonde hair, and from its place of judgment atop her head, clipped up and away from us riffraff, it always disapproved. Her face was sleek and contoured, high cheekbones plus angular jaw, with taut yet somehow soft-looking skin. She wore outfits involving buttons and skirts and outline-affirming tapers, ordering from the same catalog as every white collar romcom antagonist. Amber appeared to be very fit--I could definitely see her on the elliptical machine at a gym, eyes forward, tuning out the apocalypse while setting a P.R. Her body elevated poise; the fast-set metronome of her walk and the aplomb of her posture knifed through hallway lazybones. Even though I saw her every day, she did not seem real. I could not picture her hopping around a messy apartment, brushing her teeth while fixing her hair, kicking things out of the way and cursing because she couldn’t find her keys. She was probably shot out of a tube, ready to go. I assumed other women hated her.
    "Everything needs to be pulled by end of day," she said, powering off in her power suit to go and be Amber somewhere else.
    "Okay."
    Each time Amber talked to me, it seemed as though she came away with something, like within a few seconds could verify a new set of flaws, deep-scanning my every layer until finding cracks even I didn't know about. Before Ruth, I tried to masturbate while thinking of her, but my instant association of her with that flayed-open feeling kept me below-flaccid (even after banging it on the counter a couple times). The worst part was, the next day at work, I think she could tell what I had done (or had failed to do).
    Pushing the file cart past a window, I noticed the world. Beyond the walls where someone paid me to massacre nine innocent hours per day was a world, and in it, a storm harassed mankind with an assemblage of cold and gray, of wind and water and omnipresence.
    A plastic bag ran for safety but got snared on a bush, forced into servitude as a windsock. People ran, too. Some sprinted, others jogged, others clopped all hunched-over as though burdened by the weight of a spectral overlord’s chain. One guy just stood there, arms spread, offering his face to the rainfall. I realized, horrified, that he was attempting to have a spiritual moment right there in the parking lot at work. Maybe the rain indicated the cloud-born blessing of a future endeavor--building a Victorian tree house just like one he saw in a magazine. Or maybe the guy hated himself, or at least what he considered to be his old, crappier self and, tears mixing with raindrops, could feel his past being cleansed away via baptism from the goddamn sky. The pose lasted a few more seconds until he decided to walk out of view, which disappointed, because picturing his head as a rendezvous point for two lightning bolts would’ve been way better had he remained still. I saw him, and he wanted me to see him. He wanted somebody to witness how calm and contemplative and okay with nature he is. It was an act for strangers. An act for himself. Confirmation meant nothing to him; just the idea that any human visual system had received his performance would sate his ego. "The people driving past me were probably like, 'this guy's crazy,' but I don't know, I just love the rain. I'm weird like that."
    Deference to pornography addiction kept me from scraping out my own eyeballs in a logical attempt to reclaim what he'd taken from me. His victory pained my insides like a thousand glowing ulcers. Next time, I thought to myself, lying, I’ll have nerve toxin and a blowgun ready.
    I watched the storm all the way until its end, which did fill me with an appropriate amount of pride.
    Re-manning the file cart, I realized that three morning sodas had ballooned my bladder with an appropriate amount of pee. Chapter Two