The Boss
by Thomas J. Stanton
The boss was a very good boss and so of course he knew about some of the more savage aspects of institutional profits and control, but he also knew how to connect on a quality fist bump. He was somewhere between 40 and 55 and his certainty was wide, and his brain was valuable; fraught with circumstance and encased under a full head of wavy side-part. The key for the boss was to not be like a boss at all, to seem less meaningful than he really was, to blend in, to let the products do most of the talking. He had middle managers handle the boring parts and human resources handle the firing parts. He did the toasts at parties. He was capable of displays of lightheartedness. Improvisation is a lesser-appreciated trait of executives. Case in point: the boss gave a junior employee a thousand dollars cash for beating him at a first-person shooter video game; their muscular, rifle-wielding avatars turned corners and turned corners and aimed and fired and fired and fired. The crowd of onlooking employees cheered. They teased the boss, punched his shoulders lightly. They treated the boss like one of their own. The boss had designed this particular first-person shooter game years earlier in his parent’s garage, before he had diversified his skills into all kinds of lucrative projects, before he had shown that time could not make him irrelevant, that technology may be flat and vertical but it could go on forever.
But the boss’s life – the one in three dimensions – was not all great. While he created vast technological systems that made people’s lives more enjoyable and efficient and lined the pockets of free market capitalists, another system, a beyond-system, churned outside of him and his elegant mechanical platforms. At times, this system, this weird order, was not working properly for the boss; it had specific, tragic glitches. Engaging with matter could at times be terrifying. Recently, the boss became obsessed with an unsolved murder that he read about in a financial newspaper. Another wealthy man, the story read, had been killed, seemingly for no reason. None of the dead man’s money was taken. His body was found, face down, in the middle of a public park. A family had gone out for a picnic and came across the corpse. The wealthy man’s hands had been tied behind his back and he had been struck on the head with a blunt object two or three times, the police said. It was a terrible injustice, the police said. The boss stared at the picture of the dead man’s body. It was brutal stuff. He pinned this picture to the wall of his office next to the pictures of the other bodies.
The boss went to the wealthy man’s funeral. He was surprised to find that there were very few people in attendance. The dead man’s wife was there, her face obscured by a dark veil. She was holding the hand of their young son who was mostly oblivious, mashing the compassed button of a mobile gaming device with his free hand. The boss recognized the tinny soundtrack that the device emitted as a game his company had created.
The police searched for the murderer but ran out of leads. The boss asked about the dead man at an athletic club at which they were both members and got differing stories. The man was a hedge fund manager. He was very smart and kind. He was a no-good son of a bitch. He had good ideas but was also a scam artist. Out of this contradictory morass, the boss was forced to create his own facts. Imagination is how he did this.
Beyond the burial, the wealthy man’s inert body would remain only in the boss’s memory. The boss tried very hard to understand this memory, the idea of someone else’s lifeless form, someone he had never met. He imagined the wealthy man to be very important. He imagined him skiing and golfing and dining on an expensive Cornish hen. He imagined the wealthy man being murdered, without being able to stop the attack. Thinking about how certain things happened without his control moved the boss to tears and he cried often in his small office. The boss once had a very large office, as part of a very large industrial complex full of tech start-ups which the boss thought would keep his company free and agile, but he had recently downsized. His wife had helped him do this. She was once an architect, before the boss told her that he would take care of everything for the two of them from then on. Collective wealth is one of the lesser discussed aims of love. The boss’s wife, back then, wanted to go into city planning and the boss assured her that she would have plenty of time to pursue her creative dreams. “We’re like a company now,” the boss explained soon after their wedding. “A really, really good company. Our stock is as high as it can go, and it looks like we’ll live forever.” They both laughed but didn’t quite know how long to continue laughing.
The boss moved his offices from the large industrial complex to a cramped bungalow with a neat, manicured lawn on a dead-end street. The boss’s wife found the property and laid out a floor plan. This was likely a larger favor than the boss’s wife knew because the boss had long figured the large industrial complex to be haunted. The elevators were always breaking down and the men in their crisp suits were banished to the dingy stairwell, forced to climb, to grunt and burden, to be directly faced with the noises of their own feeble exertion. The vertical cave went 53 stories up, a sizable swath of real estate that was difficult to patrol. Drifters from the area would commune with some of the younger tech employees about peculiar strains of marijuana and cryptocurrency in the stairwell’s jagged expanse. These gatherings created sundry ecosystems, accumulating geometrically across various floors until the space’s lawless climate became unrelenting, culminating with passed-out bodies sprawled out on the stairwell landings in the morning and piles of trash gathering at the corners, after which there would be an aggressive clearing and then increased security and then a brief week or so of respite and then the cycle would begin again. The boss found that even when the stairwell had been newly flushed of derelict activity, it still carried traces of an inappreciable disorder, an occult presence, a relentless momentum swirling within its soup of echoes. The thump of a blunt object resounded behind the boss on each of his stair steps and he thought of his childhood.
The boss resisted sensualism as much as possible. He did not become the boss by paying inordinate amounts of attention to the supernatural, by communing with the ethereal. He was only moved by actual corpses, only haunted by imperceptions, by transfiguration. At a certain point within the eerie walls of the large industrial complex, the boss knew he needed to exercise the evil forces from around him, to be fluid like his business model. Fantasies of safety are how he accomplished this, along with his wife’s keen eye and design acumen. Two months later, she flung open the doors of the tiny bungalow, newly furnished, and the boss nodded at its refreshing simplicity. They paid in cash. They called the police on a homeless enclave that was starting to gather at the end of the street. The tents were moved out the next day.
Efficiency means invisibility. The boss’s factories went overseas, and the mechanisms of his company became mostly unseen to both the boss and to his millions of customers. His corporation became the ghost and data became a resting place. The market became the conduit, the thing the boss understood and so he let the market move him and became vastly richer. His money’s money made money. He got wealthier in his sleep, but difficulty always lurked. The boss started to have dreams of embracing dead men, of holding them tightly. Come morning, the boss’s jaw ached.
The boss told his wife about the unsolved murders. He told her he had decided to fix it all though. He said the solution that evaded the police was out there in a vast architecture of confusion, that it would be difficult, but it could be located. He said he needed to internalize the confusion and then birth a solution. His wife told him that she admired his focus, and she was sorry to hear about what was happening, but that he could never bring back the dead.
The boss’s wife had fallen in love with him slowly, in bits and pieces. There were parts of their love that they built together and parts that they built alone and the two of them progressed along a wide-open plane of low visibility but limitless possibility. This was borne out, in part, through small fights. One of their small fights went like this: They were watching a television program together and one of the central characters on the program made a very ostentatious romantic gesture toward another one of the show’s central characters. The boss turned to his wife and asked why she didn’t treat him to any ostentatious romantic gestures like the one they had just seen. After a pause, his wife said she was sorry and she would try harder, but what she was really thinking was that the program they were watching amounted to a series of metaphors, a profound distortion of love. It was a dream, in a way. Things worked much slower than that on Earth. The two of them had real time. They had longer than the brief slot of a television program. The silent things would construct their love, not the boss’s mind and hands and anxiety for discovery. The boss’s wife did not vocalize this wish, because it too, was also a kind of dream. Theirs was a love of space. She took up a lot of space in certain parts of their shared world and stayed small in others, and the boss did the same.
The boss was a concerted man of mostly bleak pleasures. He loved to watch a television program called “Courageous Demigod of Nature” about a former financial consultant who let his face grow stubbly and walked away from a large salary and a penthouse suite to pursue dangerous adventures. On the program, the man was air dropped into strange and faraway locations with only a mallet and minimalist running shoes. His home base was a cave in the middle of nowhere. The man was forced to use his survivalist dexterity to stay alive for a handful of days outside of mass culture. Oh, to be this inventive man in the woods, thought the boss. He secretly yearned for this kind of hushed vesicle of acute problem solving. He wanted to be rugged, hard, irregular, a man without parameters. The boss watched the man on the television noiselessly creep through a faraway jungle and heed for prey. The boss was not a very good listener. His only conversational skill was for converting exchanges into sealed soliloquies about his narrow area of focus, his concealed precinct. The boss’s wife begrudgingly accepted this character deficit, as she had all his other ones. Imagination is how she did this. She tried to get to know the boss the best she could. Total connection was impossible, she had decided. They both had their own problems. They spent their money in different ways.
The boss and his wife made love one night per week and afterwards the boss had his wife pretend she was dying. This was part of a very important project on which the boss had been working. He was designing technology that would comfort the dying by embracing them, and to do this, he needed to intimately understand the body in rapid decline. He took notes and collected data and searched the computations in his brain. The boss’s wife held her breath. She opened up. The boss stacked pillows around her in different configurations. She preferred the more animate versions of erasure: spasms, lots of splaying. The boss tolerated this for a time, but eventually asked her to be still, like the way she calmly laid at the end of her yoga classes, like the way from active to completely passive. When she wanted to be, the boss’s wife was good at playing this kind of dead too, the kind without force or presence. She had learned over time. The boss looked at his wife differently when she was like this, when she became a sterile abstraction. He went to work. He built tiny microchips and placed them inside his wife as she lay frozen in different positions. The silicon wafers inside his wife collected information, which was turned into number clusters, into algorithms, and the algorithms were turned into knowledge of the unknown, from completely passive to active. The microchips cut his wife’s insides, imperceptibly, without complaint from her. The boss trusted this new math within his wife, the inexorable logic of digits, imagining it all unfolding like a gene sequence.
After learning of this latest man’s murder, the boss worked on his wife with a new vigor, as if borrowing from the memory of the dead man, channeling its fire. He became both observer and maker simultaneously, and the microchips, in turn, carried with them the remnants of the boss’s power, his genius. This was a process all his own, it mirrored nature but was not quite the same. The microchips lay buried in the warmth, humming with energy.
The boss and his wife had been married 10 years. The wife’s father, a preacher, had presided over the service. Her preacher father was a large, ostentatious man. A few days after the couple’s Connecticut wedding, the preacher disappeared and turned up in Baja. He did this often, disappearing and reappearing. He was mercurial, a preacher with few boundaries. He did not use language carefully;, rather he let the spirit guide him and barked like a seer, a salesman. He was interested in converting, in making spiritual deals, in creating transformative experiences. He continually sought new followers, and then he released them out into the world just as quickly. He was interested in creating temporary families. He found that thousands of people wanted to be closer to their ideals, to find God, and he was less interested in showing these seekers the particulars of the way to God than he was in showing them that a way to God existed. He liked the initial shock of revelation. He baptized as many of his followers as possible. He folded them in his large arms and dunked them into the void. He told them they would come up a new being. His religion became less and less organized. He spoke in tongues. He dunked people in oceans and in rivers. He could almost feel them drowning, almost lose their last breath. He knew both sides of this spiritual transaction. He had had visions of drowning himself. He told one of his temporary congregations that the ocean would eventually eat the whole depraved lot of humankind. “Water will take everything from us,” he warned. “The ocean does not care what you have made. It picks winners and losers without thought, easy as that,” and he snapped his thick fingers.
The boss gathered up the board of directors of his company for an important meeting. They sat around the carved oak table in the bungalow with the manicured lawn. The boss told them about the idea of the comforting robots. A few of them vocalized doubts but said they would trust in the boss’s vision, that he was the boss after all. The boss thanked them and then asked if they would participate in a birth ritual for the project. Most of the board of directors vocalized doubts but followed him out to the front lawn. He was the boss, after all. The eight men stood on the lawn. They wore various assemblages of professional dress. Cars slowed as they passed. The men made a tunnel with their frames. Some of them had played football in college. They knew how to tense up and make their bodies tough. The boss told them to make the birth canal very small, to grasp each other’s arms as tightly as they possibly could. The boss rolled through this human tunnel. The board of directors tried to hold him in. They did their best. They rocked him around, they really got into it, they roughed up the boss’s embryonic version, writhing for freedom. The scene mirrored nature but was not quite the same. It took several minutes, but the boss burst through in the end. He congratulated the group. The board of directors sat with their heads between their knees and found their breaths. The boss punched their shoulders lightly. They all had grass stains on their dress pants.
A flood wiped out a village in Argentina where the preacher had been staying. He was there spreading the word, cultivating spiritual conversions. The ground shifted suddenly and many of his followers lost their homes. The preacher feared he would be killed in the flood’s destruction. A group of them took sacred shelter. They ran to the village’s small church. The structure swayed and the pulpit toppled, but the group was spared. The water only lapped at the stairs of the steepled church attic where the people huddled around the preacher. It was all over in a few hours. The preacher filmed the flood through a cross shaped hole, the womb from which they had massed together as the bodies of whole families slid by in the current outside, spirited away. Staying in one place was an impossibility. The victims struggled at first, but then they melted into the moment. The preacher uploaded the content to the internet.
The boss called another meeting. They all sat around the carved oak table. He showed his board of directors the footage from the flood in Argentina. The board of directors sat silent and confused. The boss became airless, intense. He wanted to watch them watch, a tragedy reasserted. He wanted to make sure that they knew what was at stake. He commented on its beautiful destruction, he said, “you think the worst that can happen to you is financial bankruptcy? You think the ghosts that keep you up at night are market losses? The flood is the unfinished business of the world.”
The boss showed his wife the footage of the flood. Her fingers flexed involuntarily as if trying to reach out. Something vaguely hormonal, thought the boss. Vaguely Pavlovian, thought the boss’s wife.
***
The boss’s wife had lunch with a friend the next day at a corner bistro. They had just finished yoga. They always did a dance at the end of the yoga class, just before the final dead rest. This dance was the wife’s favorite part. People writhed and chanted; they did what they imagined truly free people might do. “Lose your body,” instructed the teacher, but the boss’s wife wouldn’t lose her body with the dance, she would come into connection with it. She felt more in control in this frenzy than she did at any point in her daily life. She felt holy, closer to her roots. She felt a number of ways in which she was too embarrassed to admit publicly. But then the slow comedown; the slipping back on of the shoes and the professional face.
It was a sunny day. The boss’s wife and her friend both had iced tea. A homeless man on an adjacent corner yelled into the open air about all the things that the state had taken away from him. “It’s all gone,” he shouted. “Everything!”
People walked by on the sidewalk and looked over the low fence at the food that the boss’s wife and her friend were eating. A woman on the sidewalk stopped and asked them if they could feel it. The woman had her arms outstretched. “Can you feel it?” she asked again.
“I don’t think so,” said the boss’s wife.
“Do you ever get lonely?” the woman asked.
The boss’s wife and her friend went back to their meals. “Are you two married?” the woman asked.
The boss’s wife and her friend looked up and nodded. “That must be it,” said the woman and walked off.
There was a silence, until the boss’s wife said, “the microchips are starting to speak to me.”
“What are they saying?”
“The messages come at night,” whispered the boss’s wife. “They keep me up sometimes. I think it’s saying that a darkness is coming, and we need to band together and embrace the unknown. It’s saying that we don’t have long.”
Consumerism is healing, and so the boss’s wife and her friend went to their favorite row of over-engineered boutiques on a narrow span of street designed to look like an early American country marketplace, with its steepled roofs and quaint Dutch doors. They strolled for hours among the racks and folds, squeezing into smaller and smaller spaces, briefly forgetting about their families and their bodies.
“I love this street,” said the boss’s wife.
“I know, there is so much to see here.”
The two of them craned their necks at free offerings, like everyone else. Their luxury basics were mostly indistinguishable from the rest of the evening shoppers, and they too were looking for the joy that was promised inside practically every made thing under capitalism. It was only the pair’s way of expertly navigating through the knots of people as if they were avatars controlled from afar, which gave them away. The final store flipped its lights off and they were forced back out onto a dormant street. It was then that the boss’s wife felt a disturbance in the air, a vague sense of dislocation, of slow disappearance, as she drove home. This happened sometimes at night.
***
The boss read an expose about how the bespoke demigod from “Courageous Demigod of Nature,” a man, who in actuality was named TJ Stevens III, may have been staying at hotels when he was not being filmed in what everyone had assumed were remote locations. The cave that served as his home base was only a Hollywood set, the story alleged. This depressed the boss. He had trusted in the demigod.
The boss bought the whole lot on the dead-end street of his new offices, and they started construction on three more buildings, curved and vibrant. There were only a handful of employees still working in the bungalow office. The rest of the jobs moved around the world, like a scattering of birds. The remaining bungalow employees were mostly young. They were nice to the boss. They tried to include him in conversations. They mentioned an art installation that he needed to see. “It’s not exactly an installation,” they said. “It’s an event. It’s amazing.” A group was going after work on a Friday. The boss said he would meet them there.
The installation was in an old brick -lined apartment building lined with skeletal trees at the periphery of the city. As he pulled up, the boss worried about the logistics. He wondered how this exhibit could be properly zoned. A lot of the streetlights were out and the boss was nervous about parking his vehicle, a bone white sedan with windows tinted midnight. The group of employees were waiting for him. He didn’t recognize some of them. They looked relaxed. The boss tried to relax too, but it was hard among so much unfamiliarity. He followed the group. They went around the side of the apartment complex and then took the stairs down and down and down and around a few corners and through a dark hallway and then they knocked on a door in a certain sequence, and it was opened to a room of folding chairs surrounding a glass tank and inside the tank floated a large cast-latex vibrator fit inside another device of roughly the same size. The two objects hovered at the center of the tank, working against each other like a perverse Newtonian Demonstrator. The room was quiet, save for the small friction of the two devices.
“What is it?” whispered the boss to the employee next to him after a few minutes.
“It’s a vibrator inside a synthetic orifice.” The employee was a little embarrassed in informing this. “They go on forever. They never stop. They’re just floating in space.”
“So, like a vagina?” the boss asked.
“The artist said that’s a common heteronormative assumption about the work, but it could be any orifice,” answered the employee. “I guess that’s not the important part of the work. It’s about something he calls ghost labor, something that is both productive and not.”
The boss frowned, less concerned about the way their conversation had suddenly veered into inappropriate territory than having made such a flagrantly pedestrian mistake in front of one of his junior employees, unknowingly cornering her into a moment of awkward condescension. But he could see that the employee was already beyond this gaffe. She was, in fact, mystified by the artwork. The boss looked around the room. It was dark but he could make out some faces.
They all appeared as if held inside a pleasant drug nausea, lustful and sedate. Sexual pleasure is one of the widely known but lesser discussed aims of technology.
“How long has this been going on?” asked the boss.
“Two weeks,” said the employee. “Some people have been in here the whole time, just watching. They are waiting for a moment of completion, but it never comes, or at least it hasn’t yet.”
***
The boss watched for a bit more and tried to act relaxed and cool but then felt a tingling travel up his throat that he was not able to suppress with a swallow. He needed to excuse himself. He quickly strode out the door and around the corners and took the stairs up and up and up. The street wasn’t much lighter than the dank basement. The boss spotted his car. It looked unharmed. He briefly unclenched.
“Hey,” a man said from behind him. The boss, startled, turned around. A man in a leather jacket was standing about five feet from him, pissing on the side of the apartment building. The man shook and buttoned his tattered jeans. The boss could not tell if this man was homeless.
“That stuff make you as horny as it made me?” the man asked the boss. The boss didn’t know how to respond to this. He turned back towards his car and started walking. He kept his eye on the hood. It wasn’t too far away, just 30 seconds or so and this uncomfortable exchange would be over. The boss tried to remain composed. “I’m kidding,” said the man with a deep laugh and ran up behind the boss. “I’m the artist,” said the man. “I made the work in the basement.” The artist pointed back at the apartment building. He was wrapped inside a dirty blanket with a large, blooming rose, upon which sat two bumblebees. The artist was now close enough that the boss could see this knitted depiction clearly. The two men were then standing on either side of the boss’s vehicle, mutually oppositional. “My roommate works for your company,” said the artist. “She said you’re pretty cool, that she beat you at some video game you designed and you paid up. She said you’re the boss, but that you’re cool.”
“Oh, right,” said the boss, fumbling for his keys.
“Can I get a ride?” asked the artist. “I need to get some food. It’s not far.”
The boss was the boss but was also still nagged by small insecurities, by even the most remote possibility of bad press, a man beholden to the culture that he was positioned to dominate. He disdained his own striving for acceptance, but wealth was not cool, the boss knew this as well as anyone. The boss pushed a button and the doors on either side of his car opened out and up.
The boss started the vehicle, its initial gastric rumble leveled out into a hydraulic whir and then the gentle rhythmic blink of a radar. They pulled away, oozing along the city’s thick arteries. “You’ll need to guide me,” the boss said to the artist, to which the artist nodded slowly.
They traveled in a silence that the boss found immediately uncomfortable. “What does your art mean?” he asked to fill the space.
The artist ignored the question. He was considering the vehicle’s interior. “My grandfather worked on car engines in Lansing, Michigan,” he said as his eyes scanned around the immaculate upholstery. “Real cars, with loud, obnoxious engines. My mother and I stayed with them when I was little. My grandfather would let the engine run in his rusted-out Chevy Caprice for 15 minutes every morning before he drove to work and then for a while when he got back home. It made this great big rumble, and he just revved the engine slowly, sitting in there, all that power underneath him. It was almost like he became part of it. To me, a dumb little kid back then, it felt like the whole house was shaking. Now I realize that he was trying to communicate something. I come from a long line of these men, men who could not communicate properly. I’ve had people tell me that they can’t understand my art because they aren’t inside my head. They tell me that the art needs to first get out of my head and go out into the world before it can truly be defined. It needs to gather momentum; it needs to gather…” The artist trailed off.
They pulled away from the receding city center, it glittered radiantly in the distance. They floated above the suburbs on the freeway with the artist pointing out directions here and there, eventually landing on some secluded exit. The boss was, at that point, pathetically dedicated to finishing this mission.
“Gather what?” said the boss finally.
“It needs to gather whatever my grandfather was looking for out there in his Caprice.”
The artist smelled like the ripe interior of a fulfillment center, a detail that did not become apparent to the boss until he was faced with the full weight of its power, well into the trip, the stink marinating inside his sealed car. When the boss was much younger, he ran with the tasteless children of bond traders. The young boss mostly loomed in the background; his presence terribly off-putting, his ways deeply uneasy. These children developed a very early sense of Manichean speculation and used it to make sense of everything. They investigated opportunities like animals, honing their sense of the auspicious as well as the afflicted, the mislaid. They referred to the miserable things as “the stench,” and the boss, back then, with his uneven haircut and eerie focus, was the closest thing they found to a bad investment. They deployed his awkwardness against him, not as a pocket knife but as a measuring tool, a fate far worse. These children only came calling again when the boss had sold his second company, and how strange it was for the boss to hear the change in their voices.
The boss rolled down the windows. “So then what does your art mean?”
The artist scoffed but then considered the question seriously. “It’s how I get there,” he said.
“Get there?”
“It’s how I enter the portal. It’s how I connect two things at once, private and public. It’s like I can see forward and backward at the same time.”
It was the boss’s turn to scoff. “But in the end, it’s just existing objects, material things,” he said. “It’s just a gimmick, a very clever one, but still just a gimmick. It’s all dead already and only someone dead could appreciate something dead. Are you dead? Are you a zombie?” The boss’s body filled with adrenaline, and he sped up. The road veered beyond the suburbs and into the woods, to a more primitive place, as if swerving into the past, before the skyscrapers and condominium developments and high-net-worth individuals.
“A winner owns things though, right?” said the artist. “Everyone knows that.” They drove again in silence.
“So there’s a market out here? A restaurant?” said the boss. “It’s just around the corner,” said the artist.
They rounded another corner and then the artist motioned for the boss to pull off onto a dirt road into remote territory that the boss had never seen. The darkness was somehow familiar, though. They tipped up and down as if on an amusement park ride. The gloom swaddled itself around the vehicle lovingly like a dream and the boss felt an ease come over him. His anxieties peeled away. Something was calling to him. They parked within the tall, dense trees and they could hear chanting rising up from somewhere in the distance. They got out and the boss followed the artist’s faint figure through the obscurity, making his way without thinking.
“This is the place you’ve been looking for, whether you like it or not,” said the artist as they walked. He left the blanket in a pile in the woods and then began to remove articles of clothing, one at a time, as their pace accelerated. He was in his underwear before long. The boss could have turned back at any point, but it was the chanting, which got steadily clearer, that moved him. “This is your home,” it repeated. It sounded like children. Soon they were in front of the yawning mouth of a cave and the modulation of the chanting contorted into something much tinnier. The boss was trying to figure out where he had seen the cave before and then it dawned on him. It was the home base of the demigod.
“Is that…?” The boss was stunned.
“It is,” said the artist. “This is where we do our research, a location of warmth and love.” They both stared for a moment.
“Do you know the demigod?’ said the boss. “Does he live here?”
The artist laughed and this laughter went on for longer than the boss had patience and so he started into the cave.
“I have to warn you…” the artist called after the boss, hurrying up behind him, but the boss did not hear this because he was taking out his phone for a light. The artist tried to stop him. He saw the boombox first, the pre-recorded, looping chant now becoming something completely fabricated. The boss turned with the light and the rest of the cave was suddenly illuminated along with all of the bodies, packed into crevices, among the columns and the corridors, layers and layers of them. The boss turned to face the artist, whose expression had changed to something lopsided, something the boss couldn’t solve.
“How do you like being an animal?” said the artist flatly as he lunged, all bone and skin, at the boss. The boss dodged out of the way and the artist moved through him like a ghost, spearing into the jagged wall of the cave, opening his face up and then falling, almost elegantly, onto a protruding rock. He coughed a few times and then went very still and then began to swell and bleed, a body releasing itself out like a blistering peach in the midday sun.
What sort of thing is an artist? thought the boss.
“What were you doing?” The boss stood over the artist, but the artist was silent. He was dying, he was almost there. It was different than the boss had imagined, different than his bedroom simulations. It always was. How quickly a body could go from a conflagration to absolute stillness. It was merely a management issue now. There was no comfort to be had except to study and wait for the terminal moment.
The boss thought of his mother, the way she had gently shepherded him into sleep as a child. He’d had night terrors. He was asked to describe the things he saw at night but found the description to be the hardest part. The experience was so slippery, both real and not. Sometimes his dreams felt like a video game, created one pixel at a time, he kept turning corners and turning and turning and turning. Sometimes they were a slow drive at midnight. But then the fabric of his dreams ceased to become an edged investigation and turned to water and then to a flood. Or maybe it was water all along, and it’s how he positioned his body. Not his real body, but the body in his mind.
***
The boss packed the artist neatly into his trunk and arrived back at his home. This is all the boss had ever wanted to do — to transport people, to unburden them. He could not bring himself to leave the body of the artist among the filthy corpses of that cave. He yelled for his wife as he crossed through their house into the backyard, but there was no answer, only the sound of the artist’s feet sliding along the natural stone flooring.
The boss started to dig a hole and when it was sufficiently deep, he threw the body inside. He registered his wife in his periphery. It was the noise of the digging that had drawn her, and now this scene: her exhausted husband, shovel in hand.
“I thought you were gone,” said the boss. “I thought you’d left.” He breathed heavily. They both looked at the hole he had made and the body that laid inside it. “We’re still a really, really good company,” he said to his wife. “Our stock is still high.”
The boss’s wife reached for the shovel.
Thomas J. Stanton received a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Southern California. He has been on the editorial staff of both Flaunt Magazine and ATOMICA Magazine. His writing has been published in various places. He lives in Los Angeles. Instagram: @_thomasjstanton.
An Analogue by Leah Ryu
Leah Ryu is a visual and digital artist based in Seattle, Washington. You can find more of their work at https://nonsensicle.github.io