Giddy Up Hannah Montana

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Allen Wonkin was an emotional man, but he didn’t know how to express it.  He sat at his desk, thinking what was the best way to be emotional, but all he could do was scrunch his nose as hard as he could and then twitch the side of his eye for a few minutes.

Cici, the teenage beauty, was watching him from across the room.  She stared at him in horror.  She was crazy in love with him.  Cici was the star cheerleader and chess club champion from Popealomaloma High School and told herself so often.

Jeeter leaned in next to her with his hand on the wall.  Jeeter had truckloads of confidence, wide-open eyes, and a voice like a guinea pig.  In his spare time he built model airplanes and then buried them in his backyard.  He ran his fingers through his hair and said, “Wanna play airplane?”

The Xerox machine, sounding as if it ran on gasoline, was struggling to drown poor Jeeter’s small-whinnying-rodent voice, but somehow the little legs of Jeeter’s voice just kept kicking.  Everyone in the room thought it was only a matter of time before the Xerox machine finally overwhelmed the little feller.  When the time came, they planned to put Jeeter’s voice in a shoebox and bury it outside.

Oskar, the maintenance man, was kicking the Xerox machine with his boot and chewing on his tongue.  His tongue had all types of holes and scars and was almost always bleeding.  Sometimes he knelt by the wastepaper basket and spit blood.  When people asked him what was wrong, he would say, “I’m dying” or “I’m looking at God,” and the people would say, “Go back to work, Oskar,” and he would stare down into the mouth of the waste paper basket, the shadows’ fingertips reaching up towards him, and all the while the Xerox machine would whine and click in some murderous calypso.

Meanwhile, Dottie drew itsy-bitsy kittens on her nails with huge adorable eyes.  Her desk was full of Chinese mechanical cats that waved their arms back and forth.  She had them wired so that they waved at her on the hour, only once.  At the Christmas party last year, she had showed up late in the night, after everyone had had too much to drink, and meowed at people.  She was the most popular person in the room.

Little Billy Demeanor was asleep on the toilet.  His eyes had a bright spark in them, but every visible piece of his skin sagged, like someone had stuck two marbles into a clump of putty and dressed it up in a small business suit.  He drank whiskey and almost never ate. He was afraid of the waste paper basket and everyone knew.  Somehow the waste paper basket always found its way next to his desk no matter how many times he told Oskar to move it.   Billy didn’t want to touch it, didn’t want to go near it,  didn’t want to see it.  Whenever he had trash, he just threw it under his desk.  One day, he was eating marshmallows and threw one in.  The waste paper basket spit it right back out.  Billy wasn’t surprised.

Lana saw it too, but she never said anything.  She hated how people talked about the universe as if it was so mesmerizing, how something had splattered all the stars out there, all the ones that she used to look up to in Montana, the billions of little white dots barreling down on her every night, barreling down on Montana, and she guessed that Montana was barreling too.  Lana believed everything was part of some fancy-schmancy explosion that had always been there, that will always be there, and that comforted her because she could see it all happening as if it was swirling around in her cornea, like an eye floater, a visible tear casting a shadow on the retina, that strange grey shape on the eye lens that moves further away the harder you look at it.

Beethoven, Mary’s boy, was opening and closing the curtains, flooding the room with light and sucking it back out again.  The sun was right outside the window.  “Behold,” he screamed as he pulled back the curtain, “the awful power of nuclear fusion!”  Everyone in the room squinted up for a moment and then went on about their business.  Beethoven, roused with the anxiety that he had become a hallucination, continued to open and close the curtain with newfound fury.  He looked up at the wooden rings sliding along the curtain pole, smiling frantically.

Sitting next to the window, Bankot, ruthlessly pensive, cared little that Beethoven was pulling the curtain.  Bankot too believed that Beethoven was a hallucination.  Bankot also believed that he himself did not exist and was sorry to see young Beethoven beginning to come to terms with it.  Over the years Bankot had been so consumed in his thoughts that he had stayed at his desk for days upon end staring at Dottie’s Chinese mechanical cats, or the waste paper basket, or Allen, or Cici, or anything really.  His eyes followed everything and for the most part he remained still and quiet while the others swirled about the room.  But at the present moment, he rocked back in his chair and heard it squeak.  He rocked back again and listened to the squeak again.  He rocked back again, slow this time, and the chair belted out a long, crackling groan.  He rocked again and again and again and again and stood up, kicked over the chair and threw his arms up.  He stood there like that for ages and ages, long after everyone had died and sand piled up all around him.  He stood there until other beings found his arms sticking up out of a river.  They dug him out, shipped him to a museum, and put him on display as “Man Without A Gun.”

One day he let his arms fall, blinked his eyes as if he had been daydreaming, and sniffed.  All around the room were horrified faces.  Bankot said “Hello,” but they stood still like a crowd of statues, watching him.  They watched him climb down from the display and walk out of the museum.  They watched him walk further and further, his detail crumbling away, until he was only a small speck on the horizon.