Free Office Girl by Joe Meno Page B

has in months and so there is only one thing to do. He locks the top and bottom locks of the front door, and then tiptoes into his mother’s bedroom, the bedroom she shares with her fourth husband, a man named Reg, and he opens the medicine cabinet and begins sorting through his mother’s prescriptions. He takes a Valium and then a Xanax and then another Valium, swallowing them with a glass of cold water, and then he takes a handful of each and puts these in his pocket. And then he walks around the empty apartment, his footsteps filling the air as he makes his way to the corner of the den where the ancient hi-fi stands. The stereo, with its cassette player and turntable, once belonged to his grandfather, his mother’s father: it is brown and beige, the knobs enormous and etched silver. He can still see his grandfather’s fingerprints along the dials if he squints. He flips through several vinyl records—also pieces of his grandfather’s collection—and finds the one he has in mind, Debussy’s Children’s Corner suite. He slips the record from its cardboard envelope and places it on the turntable, leaning in close to hear the tiny zip as the needle meets the plastic surface. He turns the volume up as far as it will go, hearing the piano begin to twinkle its upper ascent. There along the antique table are several magazines strewn about, magazines that his mother’s patients often page through while they are waiting for their appointments; he reaches for the bottom of the stack and finds an out-of-date Cosmopolitan. Carefully, listening to the precarious music build, he turns the pages of the magazine, opening it to a swimsuit pictorial, which features a gorgeous green-eyed model, her décolletage nearly spilling out of her flimsy top. He leaves the open magazine on the coffee table and then begins to pull down his pants.
    Moments later he is in his white briefs, thinking of the girl from the dentist’s office, of her dimples, and then of Birdie, in her bed, of how serious and soft her body seemed to be, and then how sad everything is, how wrong it all goes, in the end. And then he’s not aroused anymore. Even masturbating seems to have become a serious problem. And so, in his underwear, he walks out into the hallway to the closet, takes out the vacuum cleaner—its pink body a horizontal cylinder with wheels, its apparatus a single, lengthy hose with nozzle attached—and plugs it in. It is the sound he likes, the whir of the machine’s motor blades, and also the sensation upon his skin, which is both touchless and clean. In its artificiality, in its machineness, it is unruinable, it is perfect, his relationship with this particular device a remnant of his weird experiments as a teenager when he would masturbate for hours on end, imaginatively using various household items. And so he turns the vacuum cleaner on, pressing the nozzle against his chest. But it is still too personal, the feeling of what he is doing, and so, wanting to feel less like a person, wanting to become totally anonymous, he pulls his white T-shirt over his head and leaves it there as a blindfold.
    More than a few moments after that, he is lying on the expensive, multihued Persian rug, his face covered, his underwear around his knees, his right hand groping himself, his left hand holding the attachment of the vacuum cleaner near his groin, when his mother and her new husband come in. His mother immediately begins to scream, her voice ricocheting off the muted walls in small staccato bursts. Because of the blindfold, he does not see the expressions on their faces, and for this he will always be happy.





AND SO.
    The girl in the cubicle beside his has the curious habit of peeking at him from beneath the jagged arrangement of her dark brown bangs. Because the phones are quiet now. It is twelve-twenty a.m. on a Monday night in February. Only forty minutes are left in this shift. The rest of the gray