INTERFERENCE. Part One: Chapter Nine.

Chapter nine

Fritz was incredulous, but he did not spare his newfound acquaintence another moment of his precious attention.

He glanced up at the clock overlooking the neighbouring cubicle. The time was 11:30 pm all ready. 'I can't believe this,' thought Fritz as he ambled down the aisle, the closed door to the angular spiral staircase approaching him. He didn't dare to look out the windows lining his side of the building from top to front, feeling as though at any moment one might rupture and feeling (although he acknowledged the absurdity of the phobia) as though he would be blown out of the building with the air in the office escaping like a gale into the vacuum of the obsidian night.

His reflection followed him along the corridor, appearing from black, diagonal bars of night segregated by the pearly, whiskey-yellow lights of the sulfur overlooking lamps. Fritz avoided his eyes as if at all costs.

His hand reminded him of a tiny, rosy flower, whiter where the skin was tighter, as he clutched the sterile gray knob of the frank door. It was at that moment that he felt as though whatever monster had been dogging him had suddenly pounced on him. Some part of his mind that he had never known or had neglectingly forgotten that he had flung open like a door opening out of a darkness where one was to find a door, revealing a reenactment played in memory of an episode from a Discovery Channel program set in a trailer parked in the African Savannah, owned by two American, bearded, brothers, beer-besotten, having in common only that, their blood and their mutual intent upon finding the lion first, now finding the lion an uninvited guest now within, its hind claws digging into the ribcage of the brother occupying the bottom bunk opposite the entrance as the upper half of its body paid visit to the top bunk.

Fritz felt all of a sudden as though his kidney stones had fallen through the fabrics of his large intestines and were now lodged in the midst and within his rectal muscles, like bars of solid soap unyielding at the bottom of a progressively flooding toilet bowl.

He turned to see his own reflection glaring at him in terror as an invisible bird seemed to tear into his pectoral muscles. One more moment, and this imaginary raptor would fly him through the window and release him to have the black pavement promptly greet him with a bone-crushing embrace.

As every breath that he had hoarded throughout the day in his body seemed to escape his sinews like smoke evacuating a chimney with the extinguishment of the fire at its root, Fritz allowed himself just barely the humiliatingly painful pangs in his knees of not collapsing to the gray, carpeted floor.

Rather than opening the door, he strained every convolution in his beloved brain in an attempt that he knew to be futile to Will the door to remain closed as though the very desperation of this hope could dissuade any intruders from it in the absence of a lock.

Like the losing, inebriated refugee of a fist fight, set in the nightfallen parking lot flanking the left side of a crowded bar, he ambled to his home in the cubicle.

Fritz, deliberate on grabbing his laptop, contemplated, momentarily, if he was or was not going to exit the cubicle. He allowed himself to collapse on the floor of the nurturing square cell and, longing to shut a non-existent fourth door behind him, he rolled tactfully into a lying position from which he fumbled on the floor under his desk for his laptop.

Withdrawing it, he did not dare to look up at where the coveted fourth wall would show him instead the austere black window, until a few seconds had elapsed.

Digging elbows gently into the gray artificial grass, he allotted himself a look at that intimidating obsidian window from a position reminiscent of a fallen soldier.

The window stared at him like the black eye of a giant squid, a window into the Soul of an apathetic night.

How would he escape the top floor? The prospect of getting up and stepping into the corridor seemed, to him, akin in judgement to stepping out onto a freeway.

Getting to his feet suddenly, he climbed onto his desk gripping the wall of his cubicle, and peered slowly over the argile edifice, feeling as though he were surfacing from a sea and emerging into the light of a burning shipwreck.

The door to the spine of the building remained locked. He squinted at it for about fifteen seconds, squinting with irregular muscle tension in his eyes, testing every possible different way of looking at the door and compiling, upon descent again into the swimming pool of his cubicle, the crowded memories of the rapid experiments into a whole like a Cubist painting. The verdict was definite: The door was closed.

Yet an apparently mad part of his psyche allowed him no solace. I must be going mad, thought Fritz. The door couldn't be closed still. Somehow, he knew, or otherwise felt, that it was open.

Fritz, at that moment, the laptop firmly pressed between his armpit and his protective hand, hopped down from the desk. His feet, having just moments ago dangled a few inches from the desk, landed on the floor. He sprinted straight at the black window, stopping just short of contact with it, turned an angle, the ominous door behind him, and sprinted away from it.

Within seconds, he dodged the peering gaze of the door, escaping into a perpendicular corridor that ran through the cubicles and culminated in a brown elevator door.

Dm.A.A.