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  makin’ it.”

  Paul felt a shiver of rage pass inside, a brief lightning bolt of insecurity and self-consciousness flash through his spine. She had poked him in a vulnerable nerve like a deadly kung fu assassin. He hid his angry humiliation. “And make sure the tape sticks. See this? The paint spray will lift this right off—press it down hard. Ted just had a talk with me about that.”

  “Gotcha, Bloss.” Jean seemed to humor him.

  There was nothing in this world—the clubbing of seals, the blinding of rabbits to test eye makeup such as that worn profusely by human beings such as Jean, the potential nuclear destruction of all life on Earth—that Paul despised more than being laughed at or mocked by a female of his species. Nothing.

  He didn’t like being mocked before an audience of other females either. It seemed to make the mocking surround and outnumber him.

  The intercom was still on and Maureen still hadn’t come back from the bathroom.

  “Maybe she got flushed down the toilet,” Paul said, returning to his cigarette in the office. He sucked a comforting drag, told himself that Jean had been made self-conscious by his teasing mockery in front of an audience and had merely reciprocated with similar teasing humor. Paul untensed a little—but still her remark had been a little too mean and personal, calculatedly so, for his taste.

  “I’m back.” It was Maureen, bouncing into the room from the cafeteria. “I haven’t bled to death yet.”

  “I’m ready to operate.” Paul snatched a stapler from Ted’s desk and held it up. Maureen entered the office and presented her injured digit.

  “Kiss a boo-boo?” he offered.

  “No thanks, I don’t need germs.”

  Bad breath and germs. Paul wasn’t doing too well tonight with the ladies.

  He poised the bandage over the wound, contemplated her finger pad a moment. A spiral, like those carved in Celtic monuments, like the spirals of “geodetic earth force” supposed by some to exist beneath the ground, whorls of energy perhaps once tapped into by ancient man, perhaps even utilized to levitate Stonehenge into existence, some supposed.

  The spiral, symbol of formation, reincarnation, eternity, of power modern man, printed on every fingertip, waiting in futility to be used in touching and creating…

  Paul bandaged her bleeding spiral.

  “That fuckin’ intercom is still on?” Maureen noticed.

  “I’ll go down and tell Dave,” Paul said. “There—now if you’ll excuse me I have a brain transplant to perform.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And then I’ll perform a breath transplant on myself.”

  “What?”

  Paul left the office and made his way past the rows of tables toward the door. “I’ll be back—don’t stop working on my account.”

  “Oh boy, break time!” Abby said.

  Ignoring her, Paul swung open the metal door and stepped into the concrete, echoy stairwell, the door banging shut behind him.

  Jean headed for a cigarette in the office and Maureen scampered up from her chair after her, grinning. “Blah-blah-blah,” said Jean.

  ««—»»

  Paul’s bicycle waited patiently for midnight at the bottom of the stairwell, almost under the stairs, like a tethered horse. Once he had discovered a flat tire on the quiet ride home from work and had deduced that some asshole who worked here had done it. He had been furious—some real scumbag low-lifes worked here; druggie losers and arrogant punks.

  Some of them he would love to blast with his cousin’s .357 just for the way they looked at him, and truly believed he would if he could absolutely get away with it.

  Paul only glanced at his bike; it looked unmolested. He stepped toward the door and noticed his shoe had been sticking to the floor. He looked at his sole, expecting to see gum. There was a smudged smear of grease or whatever. Dismissing it, he took hold of the doorknob and pushed the door open, letting himself into the first floor work area.

  ««—»»

  As soon as Paul left the shipping department and Jean and Maureen headed for a cigarette, some indistinct, static-distorted voices could be heard over the intercom. Just a few faint snatches. Someone said, “Want me to (pull?) the (curtains?) for ya?…”

  And, distant from the microphone, apparently a woman’s voice: “I hope I didn’t (screw?) up your (head?)…”

  Maureen threw back her head and shouted, “Turn that fucking thing off!”Since everybody seemed to be having a party tonight, Donna decided to get up and visit the alluring bathroom again. Watching her leave, Abby scowled and became all the more dedicated to her work. Dave wouldn’t come in and see her not working, Ted wouldn’t look at her production sheet and grimace. She was the only one presently working.

  “Hey, wait a minute,” said Maureen, “can I get on the intercom with this phone? Well, only one can get on at a time, I guess.” She lifted the receiver of Ted’s phone, listened to its buzz. A button was lit orange and she punched it. “Maybe I can shut it off from here.”

  Maureen grew still as she listened to something on the line she had broken into.

  “What is—” began Jean.

  Maureen whirled at her and grimaced, cupping her hand over the mouthpiece. Jean kept silent, pulled on her cigarette. She shrugged and mouthed, “What is it?”

  Maureen wagged her head. Whispered very lightly away from the receiver, “Some guy arguing with his girlfriend—I think he’s crying. I don’t think they heard me pick it up.”

  “Which one is in the building, the guy or the girl?”

  “I dunno.” Maureen listened again intently.

  “I wonder who it is,” Jean whispered, drawing closer to Maureen to hear.Abby glanced disapprovingly toward the little office. She’d have to take Paul aside and tell him about all these shenanigans. He wasn’t a good boss to let this happen… she wouldn’t let it happen.

  Before Jean could decipher any words Maureen abruptly jerked the receiver away from her ear and hung it up. Jean asked, “What happened?”

  “The girl hung up. She said her mother was telling her to hang up; I guess she came in and saw her crying. He was still crying, too. He said,

  ‘I love you,’ and she like cried a little and hung up.”

  “So what were they crying about?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “Which one is in the building?”

  “The guy, I guess, since the girl’s mother made her hang up.”

  “Yeah, right. I wonder who he is.”

  “I didn’t recognize him; he was crying too much anyways.”

  “Wow,” said Jean.

  “I know,” said Maureen.

  They were subdued a moment.

  ««—»»

  The molding section closer to the door leading upstairs utilized black foam rather than the yellow foam used in the larger molding area. The finished black parts were more brittle than yellow. This molding area lay before Paul as he opened the door, the greasy molds in their presses attached to the ceiling by chains that could hold them vertically or hori-zontally. The opposite side of the door Paul opened was splattered with hardened black molten plastic, and green plastic from when green foam was used. People, not just doors, got foamed—caps were encouraged, since foamed hair most likely required cutting. During his molding stint, Paul had been speckled on the face, splashed on the arm with searing fluid plastic. Molds that didn’t fit snugly together leaked out the sides and bottom like two pieces of bread with too much peanut butter in-between—a common occurrence, and the resulting tumorous blobs on the floor were called “buns.” They had to be broken up with metal pikes because they kept smoldering inside their hardened shells, and were usually broken up outside the side door in the fresh air because the gas inside them was noxious. Smashed buns were always strewn around the door when Paul carried his bike inside, like clusters of ossified virulent fungus.

  Paul was reminded how lucky he was to work upstairs.

  It was quiet now with the yellow molding area
shut down for repair, and the black area, hitched to an individual control panel, was functional but hadn’t been utilized very much the past week or so. A single radio still played off in the yellow area, though—probably Dave working on the panel. The song was static-jagged and unidentifiable, and the intercom was still on. Couldn’t they tell? It wasn’t so noisy down here that they couldn’t hear it playing back the garbled radio music.

  Paul headed for the adjacent large room where yellow foam was used and where Dave would be nervously assessing the panel’s condition.

  The garbled rock song was loud in the large molding room with its high walls of white brick splashed with yellow foam, the castle-like narrow windows set high and covered with translucent plastic mem-branes. The radio volume was up but raspily distorted as if the tuner were not exactly on the station’s number. The floor was a mess of grease puddles and scattered piles of “flash”—the excess plastic around the edges of the finished parts where the two halves of a mold joined together, the most salient flash stripped off by the molders but eliminated with more attention by the deflashing department in the same central room Paul had just left. To one side of the room were the control panels to which all the molds in this room were connected, and Dave wasn’t crouched at them as Paul had expected.

  Paul glanced around. Dave wasn’t in this room, period—nobody was.

  He stepped back into the central room. Opposite him was the board from which the punch clock projected, the racks for time cards “in” and “out.”

  To his left was deflashing, and beyond that, post operations. Through racks in his way he didn’t see anyone at the tables in deflashing—had they been sent home, too, with the molders and post-ops? Christ. Paul frowned to his right . The “degreasing” area with its cauldron of chemical steam into which parts were lowered by chains, presently deserted, and beyond that the large shadowy machine shop. Past this was a door leading into the main offices, locked at night.

  To Paul’s right, following the degreaser, there was also a door with steps leading down into maintenance. There was an office down there with the first floor telephone in it, though the intercom was on the wall opposite the punch clock. Paul turned to the intercom, reminded himself of its operation, and shut it off. Believing he might find Dave down in the maintenance office trying to get the first shift molding foreman, Roy, on the phone, Paul headed for the steps.

  At the foot of the stairs Paul turned to his left into the gloomy little office with its two desks and overabundance of posters, tacked up photographs, magazine cartoons, and the like. A plastic model helicopter on a shelf, actress Pia Zadora in a marginal swimsuit on a poster, a sexy cal-endar and a motorcycle calender. And no Dave. Paul glanced at the phone, then stepped out into the maintenance area.

  “Yoo-hoo,” he said.

  Only his own voice.

  ««—»»

  On the second floor the young women heard the intercom go off.

  “Yaah,” said Maureen, and she rolled her eyes in exasperation.

  “I’d get back to work before Paul gets back,” Abby called.

  “Blah-blah,” Jean mumbled. Maureen, however, grabbed a last hurried drag on her cigarette and ground it out. She wore a naughty little smile like a child who’s slipped a whoopie cushion onto her school-teacher’s chair and has to hurry back to her seat and look inconspicuous.

  Maureen hadn’t taken two steps out of the office and Jean was still leisurely pulling in a drag when the two of them and Abby heard the wail from upstairs, a long and chilling, coyote-like cry—the shriek of a forlorn banshee—though human. Terribly human.

  ««—»»

  “Yoo-hoo, ma-roo-hoo.”

  Paul walked into deflashing. Four empty tables. He stepped closer.

  There were yellow parts on two of the tables, and files, an open tool box, the floor littered with flash piles. If the deflashers had gone home all the parts would be finished and put away, the tools likewise, the flash swept up. Paul walked around a wooden rack/partition into post-ops. Here everything was put away and cleaned up. So if some deflashers were still here, where were they?

  Paul decided that they must have gone upstairs the back way, through the dark cardboard storage room and into the cafeteria for a drink, at about the same time he was coming down here. Dave too…but funny they should all take a break together.

  The intercom crackled back to life.

  Paul was jolted a little, surprising himself. He turned.

  A voice came over the speaker. “Paul, come to shipping, quick.” He recognized the voice as Maureen’s. “Paul, please come to shipping…”

  Paul trotted back toward the stairs. Something tense in her voice, even through the fizzing distortion…

  ««—»»

  Coming back up the steps, Paul noticed the stickiness he had stepped in before. There was a landing between the first and second floors and a single small window here, close to the landing floor; you had to squat to open it. One of the few windows, excluding those in the office, you could open for fresh air, only tonight it was shut against the cold. The stickiness had run down from the window: there was a resin-colored gum smeared around the four edges of it. It looked like someone had intended it for insulation in place of gray putty. As Paul briefly, curiously looked at it he saw a bead trickle molasses-like down the pane itself. He dismissed it; you could walk around downstairs and all kinds of weird fluids would stick to your feet or plop down on your head from above.

  He swung open the metal door and strode into his brightly lit work area. Before heading for Ted’s office he cut to his right and stepped into the cafeteria.

  Empty plastic tables. No one standing at the soda machine.

  “Dave?” Maybe in the bathroom…

  “Paul!”

  He turned, saw Maureen over the office partition, gesturing to him.

  “Have you seen Dave or anybody from deflashing?” Paul called to her as he trotted toward the office.

  Maureen came out of the office, her plushly cute face pinched with some disturbance. “No. Abby and Jean went upstairs to check out a real freaky sound we heard up there—it sounded like somebody crying or something. A couple minutes ago I picked up the phone and heard a guy in here talking to his girlfriend and they were both crying so maybe it was him, but it sounded so fuckin’ weird, man, I wasn’t about to go up there.

  He might be flipping out or something.”

  “Okay, I’ll got take a look.”

  “Tell Abby and Jean to come back down here; I don’t like being alone!”

  “Gotcha.” Paul moved to the door beside the diagonal freight elevator and squealed it open, gazed up a moment, listened and heard nothing, then began tramping in ascent.

  Maureen hovered at the foot of the steps watching after him, holding the door open against her elbow, her face still pinched. “Maybe somebody got hurt or something,” she said.

  Paul didn’t respond. He reached the head of the narrow staircase and slipped out of her view.

  When Paul had reached the last step a strange feeling or intuition came to him—that there would be no one up here, either, like downstairs: no sanders in the finishing room, no Steve painting, no Abby and no Jean.

  Rows of steel racks filled with parts dominated this corner of the room, three rows deep back to the wall. Paul turned and looked down the length of the room. On the left were five individual three-sided spray booths, their interiors crusted with deep layers of paint, multiple colors blended into a weird uniform gray. There was also the carousel, a rotating ceiling conveyor with hooks, to which small parts could be affixed for spraying. Parts in boxes, more racks along the right. Also on the right were the painting office and the steps that led down to the place where Paul left his bicycle. At the end of the long room were those transparent plastic strips again, hanging down from the ceiling, with the sanding room behind them, but the strips were not to hold heat in the sanding room so much as to keep the gray dust—which clung to all surfaces organic or in
organic—in there from getting into the painting area and perhaps onto the drying pieces. Down the length of this long room and as far as Paul could see through the watery distortion of those grayish strips, there was no one to be seen, as his intuition had warned him.

  He realized he’d been hanging back a moment. Why? Another intuition? He realized he’d been watching and listening closely for something besides Abby and Jean—but what?

  The origin of the sound the girls had heard, he reminded himself, and he bounced down the length of the room with his usual buoyant stride restored. “Yoo-hoo,” he called.

  A blurred figure stepped into view behind the plastic strips, reached and parted them. Jean emerged. “Hey Bloss, there’s nobody up here,” she called to him. “Did they send the sanders home, too?”

  “No Dave up here?” Paul asked, still covering the distance between them, his longish hair flapping with his bounces.

  “No.”

  “There’s nobody on the first floor, either—no deflashers or anything.

  Where’s Abby?”

  “In here.” He had reached Jean and she led him through the dust-filmed curtain into the spacious sanding area. Paul held the strips away from himself as he slipped through so the dust wouldn’t get on his black T-shirt and black corduroys.

  Abigail swivelled from an examination of someone’s ghetto-blaster radio/tape player on one of the tables. “Third World briefcase,” Paul’s cousin Ray’s friend Jay called them. It was on a hard rock station, naturally. “Was that left on?” Paul called.

  “What?”

  “Was that radio on or did you put it on?”

  “It was on…where’re all the sanders?”

  Paul and Jean reached her by the radio. “I don’t know—Dave isn’t downstairs either and the deflashers, too. Dave can’t go home and leave us;; I don’t know if he sent the others home. I don’t see why he’d send the sanders home, ‘cause they got tons of work.” Paul contemplated the radio.

  “This belongs to one of the Vietnamese kids—he takes it home with him every night.”