"3…2…1…HAPPY NEW YEAR!" The TV screamed into the quiet apartment.
Ishmael had never realized that leaving was a thing you could just do on a whim. He had reread the letter over and over again to try to find something that gave a reason for her leaving.
Loving women didn't seem like it would have anything to do with someone leaving this suddenly. After all, he loved men, and he still didn't feel any motivation to leave.
Huh.
He had never considered his feelings towards other men to be loving. In fact, he had never truly thought about love at all. It's odd, in all the years he and Maria had lived together, they only had 3 truly loving experiences. These included:
1.The time he picked up a very nice baseball cap for her as a gift for their 5th anniversary.
2. She made him his favorite dinner when he had come down with an incurable case of being a nervous wreck.
3.They went on a date one time to somewhere that he couldn't remember.
Ishmael wanted to be wrecked with sorrow, but unfortunately, he couldn't bring himself to feel any kind of emotion. Feeling nothing is confusing for people who spend their entire lives thinking, so for someone who is just now learning how to think for themselves, it's nearly debilitating.
The once thoughtless man sat in his living room alone for a while before deciding that he might as well appreciate how much room there would now be for him on the bed that Maria and he had once battled for space on. He laid in the silence of the new year and found himself wishing for something. If you were to look it up in the dictionary, you would find it listed as contentment.
As he wandered into dream, he saw her face so very clearly. For the first time he looked at her and was able to see her truly. He had never noticed that she wasn't attractive in the way that most were.
She was attractive in the same way that being related to one of the senators who killed Caesar was interesting. That is to say oddly and terribly.
He assumed he ought to have been feeling guilty over driving his girlfriend to leave and leave so abruptly at that. People only leave that fast when they've gotten sick of something.
He wished he was sick of something. Being Sick would feel better than this.
When Ishmael awakened the next morning, he noticed an empty bottle of champagne in his hand. Sleep drinking was a serious medical condition that ran in his family that had up to this point seemed to skip him by some miracle. Turns out the only thing miraculous in his life at the moment was how terrible his current string of luck had been.
If it were possible he would have stayed in his bed all day, enjoying/agonizing over the new sensation of thought. Instead, he was forced to pull himself out of bed and go to work. Most places of business allow the first day of the year off, but not Swishter Inc. They believed that every hour that could be worked should be worked. No one really knew what they did outside of owning things such as sweatshops, not even Ishmael really knew what was occurring behind closed doors, as he had never thought about it.
He had decided to make that his goal for the day. He was to find out what it was that he actually did at his job. So, he washed up and threw on his work clothes.
When he went to grab his keys however, the space they had once occupied was now taken up by another small letter from Maria.
Dear Ishmael,
I need the car to get where I am going. Sorry for the inconvenience.
From,
Maria
Now carless, Ishmael was forced to use a rusty old bike they had kept in the garage for a reason he couldn't remember to ride to work. This was of course made difficult by the fact that he had never truly ridden a bike while also thinking. To those thinking readers out there, this would be like trying to learn an incredibly complex linedance, while having the entire script for the film "Notting Hill" blasted into your head by brain blasting cables.
When he finally reached his job and was granted the mercy of no longer having to make an attempt at riding the bike, he was disheveled and slightly bloody(he fell. A lot) On any normal day he would've just walked into his workplace and cleaned himself up in the bathroom, but today was no normal day.
In front of the Swister offices was a large group of people protesting the corporation's abhorrent actions. They carried large signs that didn't depict the owner of the company in an all too favorable light. There was one sign that used a photo of the boss that just so happened to also have Ishmael in it and he thought that it felt nice to be included.
Trying to make his way through the crowd he was filled with a deep sense of dread. He feared that, at any moment, the crowd could realize that there wasn't anything stopping them from rushing the building and putting the CEOs head on a staff.
Ishmael hoped they would not make this connection until after he had figured out what the purpose of his job was.
Out of nowhere a man flew into his side and would've knocked him to the ground, if it weren't for Ishmaels seemingly inhuman ability to keep himself upright. He was able to gracefully remain standing by balancing on his foot like a ballerina. The man who had done the bumping was about to apologize when he noticed the company logo on Ishmaels suit pocket.
"How can you live with yourself making money working for a corporation that makes its money through blood and suffering?" The protester accused.
What a question! How did he live with himself? How does anyone really? After a moment of pondering this moral quandary, he responded as honestly as possible.
"I don't know, but I'm trying to find out." While saying this he noticed a typo on the man's large picket sign.
"You spelt Nicholas wrong." Ishmael said pointing at the sign. The man's face went red, he had been in enough arguments on the internet to know that a single spelling mistake can invalidate someone's entire argument.
"What?" the man sputtered out, embarrassed to have such a blunder pointed out.
"You spelt Nicholas wrong on your sign? You wrote "Nicolas Swister is a shit eating dog", you forgot the h in Nicholas. It's an honest mistake. Here let me fix that for you." Ishmael pulled a pen out of his pocket and added the H.
"Thanks?" The protester was confused by this random display of kindness.
"No problem, sir." Ishmael commented as he continued to push his way through the rowdy crowd. He noticed that all of the protesters had very nice pins and patches and made a mental note that he needed to get some pins and patches for his own clothes. This thought was interrupted however by him finally reaching the front doors that led into Swisters HQ. What a relief.
Though, in a cruel act of fate, just as he was about to open the door, a protester nailed him in the back with a carton of milk. What a not a relief.
Why someone had brought a carton of milk to a protest is a question that the great philosophers would continue to ponder for the next several millennia. Mayhaps she had been very tired when she was writing her protesting shopping list and accidentally bought milk instead of eggs (the much more iconic grocery store item of protest) or maybe she was confused or maybe she just really liked milk.
Whatever had led to the women bringing milk didn't matter much at the moment as it was now splattered on the back of Ishmael's jacket and pants, making it sadly undrinkable.
Turning back to face the crowd of people, he felt a rage begin to boil inside of him.
"HEY! That wasn't mighty kind of you" he squeaked out before turning back around and storming inside.
The headquarters resembled something out of a utopia, perfect in all the right places. "I worked in a very nice place", Ishmael thought to himself.
Caught up in thought, he almost forgot to check in before going up to the work floor, which seemed like a redundant title to him but the people who had named it had likely been thinking for a lot longer than he had, so who was he to question them.
The elderly secretary, Denise, let out a horrible growl that alerted Ishmael to the mistake he was currently making.
"AYE! Check in first before you head up. It's like they just keep getting dumber and dumber." She muttered that last part and though he did hear her say it, Ishmael decided to let it slide just this one time. He handed her his key card and stood there while the dinosaur of human being attempted to click clack her way into the computer system. One would assume she would have had computer work done to a T
after doing this for 50 years, but alas she was not paid enough to do it efficiently, so she didn't.
While she typed, Ishmael attempted to familiarize himself with his surroundings. He assumed that the lobby of business as successful as he thought this one would have some decor inside, but this lobby seemed to be completely empty.
The slick white walls created an almost void like look. The only thing that broke up the seemingly endless abyss of marble were the doors that he had entered through and a giant screen that displayed the man who some had criticized for being a, and I quote, shit eating dog.
"Mr.Swister is not terribly or oddly attractive like Maria" was the first thought that came to Ishmaels mind when he saw him, in fact he was a boring kind of attractive. The kind of attractive that says "I own a boat that I don't use" or "I was very cool in high school". This, Ishmael thought, was a terrible kind of attractive to be as it didn't exactly lend itself to drawing attention and deep-down attention was all that Swister wanted.
Men will at times do terrible things all in the name of getting attention.
The giant version of Swister that was on the screen welcomed people in. The TV Swister was actually an intelligent being. He had been programmed to tell people all of the most brilliant things about the company that had created him. Ishmael now remembered that he had been on the team that made TV Swister, which made him feel terrible.
Deep down he wanted to go over and apologize for cursing this poor creature of code with sentience, but he knew the robot wasn't programmed to handle questions of existence and if one was posed to him, he would likely destroy himself out of pure unbridled fear.
"Looks like you're all good to go up. Have a wonderful day on the work floor" Denise said these words with the same sense of robotic joy that TV Swister used. She handed Ishmael back his key card which he plucked from her hand gratefully. Denise then pushed a button which unveiled a room of elevators behind her, each one specially marked with which specific floor they would take you too.
Ishmael worked his way down the hall reading off all the names that the elevators were labeled with, until he finally got to the one marked work floor.
He pushed the button to activate the elevator causing the doors to immediately fly open without hesitation. Ishmael did not reciprocate this same lack of caution back to the elevator.
The ride up was about what you would expect from a functioning piece of high end machinery, though one of the lights inside of the elevator had gone out many years ago. No one bothered to fix this because they were all so preoccupied with work that they didn't have time to pay attention to lights. Ishmael hadn't noticed it either at one point in time, but now it was all he could think about. He thought about the light, even after he had sat down at his desk and began to work. Of course, he no longer knew what work needed to be done since he was no longer on autopilot as he had been for the last 29 years.
He tried to look around his small cubicle to see if there were any hints as to what it was that he actually did, but the only clues he found where a picture of him standing next to TV Swister and a crumpled up little sticky note that had the words "spreadsheets due" scribbled onto it. This was not much, but it at least gave a jumping off point.
So, he sat down and began to make a spreadsheet of everything he knew about TV Swister. He worked on it all morning, only being disturbed by the occasional attempted conversation by his coworkers. These conversations ranged in topics, from the new year's resolutions to sports to obscure 80's sitcoms. Ishmael talked mostly about how that afternoon, he was supposed to be getting lunch with his sister at the local 50's diner, Route 66.
Conveniently though he left out the part about how Maria was also meant to be attending this lunch. Eventually when he finished his spreadsheet, he went to check the time only to notice that he had only been working for 45 minutes. With his work for the day completed, he figured he might as well just pull up a rather simplistic computer game and start playing that until lunch. When it was finally time to go out for lunch, He had mastered the game. He played brick buster 5000 with the same poise and care that Da Vinci used to paint. Once he had worked it down to a science, he was able to score higher than anyone ever had. If it weren't for lunch, he likely could have done that forever and if he had it is incredibly likely would have played himself back into a thoughtless state. Fortunately, he stopped playing 39 seconds before that would have happened.