Free Apathy and Other Small Victories by Paul Neilan

reflection in a storefront window. Sitting high on a girl’s bike, my bulky rain pants yanked up to my neck, my shiny yellow Gorton’s fisherman slicker, my tiny child’s helmet like a vulcanized yarmulke on top of my head. Those smiles and thumbs-up were really saying, “Look at that retarded boy riding his bike in the rain. And all by himself too! Good for him!”
    And I wept as I sailed through those intersections, the pissing rain washing away my tears. I was something of a celebrity, a neighborhood folk hero. Just not the kind I would choose.
     
    If Tolstoy were alive today and working as a temp at Panopticon Insurance, he’d say that all insurance companies are the same, then throw himself through an eighteenth-story window and plunge to his death in a hail of glass and shattered dignity.
    I worked on the eighteenth floor, but the windows were too thick.
    It was all cubicles and narrow walkways formed by the walls of cubicles, so it really was all cubicles. Their paneled walls were upholstered in heavy burgundy fabric that looked like it had been cut from medieval death shrouds, and the carpeting was mausoleum headstone slab gray. The fluorescent lights in the ceiling filtered a basement morgue pallor over everything, and the frenetic light panels screwed under the cubicle shelves to illuminate the desktops were like the caged bulbs in suburban backyards that bugs fly into to die. The thick windows didn’t open, so there was the constant hum of stale air being recirculated through the vents. It sounded like nighttime on a transatlantic flight, one where you’re getting screwed on the time change but it doesn’t matter because the plane is slowly, almost imperceptibly descending right into the fucking ocean.
    These people, my teammates, they had to have known. They had to have realized, in their own small, terrified way, that something about it all was horribly wrong. That’s why they packed their little cubicles with old Mardi Gras beads and postcards from far-off Hard Rock Cafes, with signs saying “You Want It When?” that had little cartoon men underneath bent over laughing at your unreasonable request, with trinkets, with framed certificates saying they’d been certified in CPR, with photographs of confused babies with big heads in frames titled “Spit Happens!” and school portraits of awkward kids with braces smiling in front of sky blue backdrops and Polaroids of dogs and fucking cats, all the shit that people and pharaohs surround themselves with to make it seem not so bad.
    I knew why they did it, but that didn’t make it any easier to stomach. They seemed like nice enough people in their own creepy way, and I’m sure they meant well, but that just wasn’t good enough. They’d probably made some bad decisions along the way, decisions they’d long since rationalized to themselves to keep from suicide. Or maybe they’d just done what they thought they had to do to pay the bills. And that’s fine. People have families and mortgages and other responsibilities. But that doesn’t excuse all the goddamn misplaced enthusiasm.
    Nobody there hated their job nearly as much as they should have. That always bothered me. I heard them complain sometimes, but it was the ineffectual bitching of people who didn’t expect anything about their situation to ever change, and who wouldn’t know what to do with themselves if it did. They were all older, rounder, more compromised versions of each other, all of them middle-aged, if not in years in appearance and aspiration. It was like time-release photography of humanity in slow decline. The mushroom cloud was Hawaiian shirt day. It was depressingly easy to picture the new girl, with her bright scarves and flipping hair thinking she was only there until she found another job at a non-profit, ten years later wearing a business suit and white sneakers as she power-walked around the building on her half-hour lunch break.
    That’s what I thought on a bad day. And