The End of the Day

Rory looked at the clock again—one more hour. His eyes dropped. He was conscious of nothing but his posture. As long as he appeared in thought, he could not be interrupted. If his posture were to slacken, it would become immediately clear: he wasn’t fit to work. His supervisor had left for the day, so he was only obliged to stay in order to clock out. The last hour sitting would be worth close to $13.00. Before taxes.
So Rory considered this his sixty minutes for ten dollars, net. That’s a dollar for every six minutes of idleness. Imagine, he thought, if he’d be able to stretch out that rate, of one dollar for every six minutes, over forty or fifty years. What, the typical work week was supposed to be, what forty hours? 2400 minutes? What, that was only $400 a week? For 50 weeks? And that’s only $40,000 in a year? And over forty years that would be, $1.6 million dollars? In idleness?
Rory considered that this would not do. Eventually, somebody would have to realize that he wasn’t doing anything. He’d have to find some mode of occupation, otherwise he would never be able to hold down a job. He’d be fired for idleness. But if he did his job well, promotions would happen eventually. The budgets would get bigger and bigger, as they were intended to. Eventually his cost of living would go up too, and no matter how much more he was earning, it wouldn’t feel like he was doing any better. In his mind, he was glad to be working. He was glad he actually had a job, so he could at least appear normal, as when he’d be on the train with all the other urbanites in the morning commute. He hated his job though. His job position wasn’t a necessity for the company, and everyone knew it. He was just there to do all the extra tiny busy work tasks. He was supposed to be filing in his last hour, but he had finished it long before. His supervisor was gone, and the clock was ticking. 58 minutes. He’d take out his book of the moment, his trusted Goethe, but if any other of his co-workers saw him reading they’d snicker and make some disparaging comment in the back about dedication and commitment.
He thought again and realized that this was a perfect opportunity to daydream. He thought about Ireena. He hadn’t talked to her since Saturday night, technically Sunday morning but not actually Sunday morning with the sun having risen, now it was Monday afternoon with the sun having almost set and he wondered if it would be a prudent time to call. She had said after 5. So he could call her right after he clocked out. He could call her and she would be on her way back home from work too. She would be walking to a train and he would be walking to a train and then he could ask her what line was she getting on, and where she was coming from. And it would turn out that they would both be going to the same station, and they could meet on the train, and they could decide what they wanted to do, and in the course of it they would get into an argument about which neighborhood was better for nice restaurants for dinner and when it became clear that that would be the order of the night she would insist that she be allowed to go home to shower and get changed because she was disgusting and he would oblige and do the same for himself and later on they would meet up, back not far from where either of them lived but on the street, in front of their pre-planned restaurant and they would enter and he would let her go ahead and order first and he made sure to order a meal that wouldn’t permit stains and while waiting they would sip wine, selected by her, talking about their jobs and their stupid managers and their restlessness in life but their listlessness in the workplace and how all of the movies they had just watched were too obscure to be appreciated by the mainstream and how they had both been at the same Nada Surf show months earlier and about how many times they went to the MOCA in the course of the year and about their stance on drugs, and how long they had been doing them, and then they would get the check and of course he would pay for the whole thing and after her insistence at splitting it he would casually suggest that she could pay for ice cream, if she cared for sweets, and they would walk slowly through the street, not wanting to leave each other, not wanting to go back to their apartments to be alone, even though it was getting late and they would need to get enough hours of sleep for work, they would stroll through a bookstore, get lost from one another, find each other again and have things seem far more familiar than they really were, and he would buy a book for her and she would smile and say she had get back to her apartment and he would say goodbye but in the course of it he would kiss her on the mouth and she would accept it and he would ask her to come back with him and she would accept it and then they would go on his couch and they would caress each other as they smoked a joint, anticipating every last rivulet of sweat about to brush back and forth between them, tenderly kissing, recklessly pulling pants and shirts off, a shifting between both tender and aggressive sucking, neither totally satisfactory at the present moment, really the power lying in the feelings associated therein, trust, security, ultimate empathy, no task too great, no idea too insurmountable, and he would come in her and she would want it that way and they would lie together afterwards and they’d decide to stay together that night and every night after and they could do all the cute things that couples did like eat breakfast together in the morning before going off to work, that would be much more enjoyable than the present state of affairs in the depths of solitude and mistrust and maybe here was finally somebody that could take everything else away from his mind and give him the purest object to fixate on, a reason to be, to do everything, to strive for, to earn 1.6 million dollars in idleness for, and to be more than happy to give it up, and to be more than happy knowing that she wasn’t a sheep, and to think that if he played his cards right it could be the one thing that changed his life but who knew what the future held and who knew that there wasn’t some other side to her that she didn’t show and maybe she was just a nympho but if she were she would have slept with him the first night but if she were a nympho and she were waiting to sleep with him for some reason that would be okay too, because then at least he could consummate these feelings he had, and then maybe it would reach his expectations and maybe it wouldn’t but he would have at least known what the truth was, and sometimes the truth hurts.
The clock struck five. Rory grabbed his card, punched it, slung his bag over his shoulder, turned out his cubicle lamp, and left the office.