The first girl that came out was a lava lamp. As if her arms moved through water. Her warm motion practiced and secure. Shadows gathered under her breasts. Copper light ovaled across her belly, licked down her thigh. Her eyes never focused. Not once. I thought she'd look at someone, perhaps the lawyer with the courtroom voice and glinting watch. Maybe the bouncer with the rough knuckles and thatchwork stubble. But no. She was aloof. Unattainable. Full of the distance tendered by power. The pale head of a scar wriggled out the top of her red g‑string and plunged back under with her motions. A quick, scabrous exposure. I sat there and watched the scar, hoping it'd reappear. Those glimpses of the real are precious.
This was years ago. Back when I worked at a technology shop in Dallas, when I commuted three hours a day and read books about UNIX and drove back home wearily, delighted in the dust of the road that weaved to our house. Lunch at the strip joint was T's idea. He'd appeared in my office door around 10am, shirtsleeves rolled up, his hairy forearms thick and purpled with veins.
—Titty bar for lunch?
I hesitated. I always did.
—Don't be a pussy. It's only 8 bucks. All you can eat buffet. Tons of titty to look at. You'll want to go home and bang your wife after. T held up his fingers in a V and slithered his tongue through the gesture. —No better way to spend lunch. Let's go. We're all going.
All was a group of geeks that I worked with. The UNIX team. Terminal users. Command-line kung-fu. Thick, stubby fingers on most of them, made for pounding keyboards and fondling plastic pens with chewed tips. Bellies that had never known flat. Mouths ripe with technical acronym. Our faces glowed in the operose jihad of computer monitor radiation. We were all better than our cubicles, smarter and bigger than our jobs. Right? None of us resembled our walls. None of us were average grey men. This was always the fear in the hive, the mumbled rumor of the farm. We'd look around at the whiteboards, at our drooping plants, at the office dust glinting in the hair on our arms and think that surely there must be a mistake. Surely we have just been overlooked.
The bar was shadowed and loud. Some men were stiff in their seats. Sweating glasses squeaked under their fingers. Others so relaxed they might have been on a couch in their house, their hands moving conversationally in the air, their faces open in a very human, masculine way. Some had a dark, desperate look and huffed their hot breath into the clinking ice of their empty glass. A few women as well, with thin arms draped over broad shoulders in suits. Naked knees at eye level. Clenching tendons, an etching of muscle along a calf. Gooseflesh around a nipple. Bellies wet with light. Music that thumped in the gut. A scar of some sort in everyone.
The UNIX team was quiet. Studious in their eating for the most part. Chicken ripped from bone with bared teeth. Gelatinous sauce quivering on the tines of forks. The reflection of a breast swelled in the cold hollow of my spoon. T wantonly gazed at the women, punched those of us in the shoulder sitting next to him. —Imagine pinning those legs back behind her ears, he said. —God, I'm going to fuck my wife so hard tonight. With his eyes, he gestured down at a bulge in his pants as a dancer moved past. She never focused. —I think it scared her, he said to everyone on the way back.
The boss was waiting for us when we returned to the office, tapping his pen on the desk. —The Kansas City upgrade needs to be reapplied. It was messed up last night. His eyes focused on T. —They're running on half-capacity with no backup. You've got to watch this shit. No more screw-ups!
We retired to our chairs and grey walls, the thrum of the machines around us. A cool hiss of recycled air. The light in the office was unrelenting, harsh in its exposure. T worked his fingers into his dry scalp, scratching. He shrugged his shoulders at the rest of us. —Wasn't that last bitch hot? We should go again. Sometime real soon.
I thought he was going to put up the V sign again, but his hands slid into his pockets and he slid into his cube out of our sight. Monitors flickered on. Gray walls rose around everyone. Our thoughts rendered into strangling wires. We approached our lives and work with the same lack of focus that the stripper offered us. Our fingers thickened and blunted to our tasks the way her body curved into hers. We manipulated that which doesn't exist. At least the stripper worked in the realm of the physical, in the currents of deep need and that which is inescapable. Our toil was contained in a screen. A plastic, humming square, only able to endure as long as the black cord wasn't yanked from the wall.
Brad Green's fiction has appeared or soon will in The Blue Earth Review, Storyglossia, elimae, Word Riot, Thieves Jargon and several other journals. He's currently at work on a novel. Read his blog at http://elevatetheordinary.blogspot.com.
