Before you have to bite the bullet, before the suit across the table makes you a wild offer and quietly pushes the papers with the dotted line towards you, before it all becomes as real as it has never been in your dreams and sometimes nightmares… you wonder, will I do it?
The question mark circles around the morality of it all like a one-man wolf pack.
But that is only before you see the name at the top of papers with the dotted line. It’s your name and they’ve got the spelling right. The pen is brand new. The first thing that ink is going to shape is the curves and slashes, the crooks and dots of your John Hancock.
The suit has been here before, unlike you. The suit is well accustomed to sitting in square little rooms with bright fluorescence resolutely denying anything in the room a chance at privacy. The suit has learned to look at the white walls and dodge all the inane little questions that trot about toying with your attention; what is that, paint? So white, not a single crack in the finish? What if I brush up against it, will I leave a mark? Why are there no windows? Is this room sound proof? Why can’t I hear the air conditioning go whir?
Unlike you, the suit appears to have all the time in the world and an equal amount of options, whereas you have only this time and one of two options. Suddenly, you’d give an arm and a leg to have all the time in the world to think some more… even though motor function has been momentarily arrested by the circumstances and you cannot, in fact, give an arm or leg. One of two options doesn’t sound so bad, doesn’t sound too hard until you’re standing right in the middle and there’s a brand new pen lying in front of you suggesting a world of possibilities with all its inanimateness.
And then there’s the difference in pressure. It’s almost as though the air conditioning is biased and seems to be avoiding the entire half of the room you’re seated in, coolly washing refreshment over the suit’s straight, expressionless face and leaving yours in a clammy, sticky mess. The suit sits squarely in his chair; spine almost parallel to the back, leaning forward ever so slightly towards you. In your seat, a world of fidgeting is mentally taking place; physically, your nerves are shot and so have decommissioned the service of your involuntary reflex. Your body is thinking squirm and squiggle, but it is simply too locked up to initiate these reactions.
Suddenly, everything changes pace and only your heart is aware. You hear its rhythmic thump bang-banging against the inside of your head. It sounds like the patter of feet. Before you wonder whose they are, you are asking are they chasing or fleeing.
Of course, the answer to the papers with the dotted line and your name at the top, the answer to the suit’s question, the answer to the untouched brand new pen whose ink has written nothing yet… the answer already sits fatly on your tongue like a frog waiting to leap out and ribbit triumphantly at no one and nothing. The answer slunk up to your tongue from the back of your throat where it had sat lodged for all the years spent dreaming and fantasizing about a moment just like this.
All those hours, all those dreams, nothing has prepared you for this; for the suit and his blank face, for the little clinical room and that virgin pen, for your name (spelled right) and the dotted line staring you down like an interrogator expecting a specific answer.
How far back do you want to go? What is the countermeasure that you pit against this question of morality? There’s got to be some kind of balance, you know… so what is the opposite of the moral thing? And in what capacity should it exist to be deemed permissible by you, self-appointed judge and jury?
The door stands behind you like a silent sentry, as quietly patient as everything else in the room save your beating heart.
This shouldn’t be taking as long as it appears to be dragging on for. You already have your answer… which poses a new question. What is all this second guessing?
The suit clears his throat, almost as though he can read your mind and shares your confusion. Why have you not picked up the pen and got on with it like a good little soldier on the front? The general cries charge and you take a moment to collect your thoughts? Why, when the papers were pushed towards you, did not your hand leap from your side in a feverish rush to make it all official and start the journey into that wild and fantastic dream you have pursued all this while? What was it all for if not for this moment and the promise it held for the future?
The door behind you swings open. You start in your seat but wait for whoever it is to come round to your line of view. They never do. The suit looks up, nods and the door goes back shut.
In the seconds that it takes you to realize that the suit is reaching for the papers to withdraw them and perhaps his offer entirely, you know without a doubt what is going to happen. You watch the ivory tower of morality tumble from the skies where it had reached and peaked and disappeared from sight, far away into distant heights. What a tumble!
The suit smiles for the very first time since you’ve met him. His teeth are curiously even and remarkably white. The smile is hard to place, is it warm, genuine, plastic, condescending, understanding… maybe even pitying…
“That wasn’t so hard now, was it?”
And somewhere, somewhere far and near, someone screams your name and you can tell they know how to spell it from the way they sound it out.
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
pixelskylines
areudirty
