PLEASE SHUT THE DOOR ON YOUR WAY OUT

Gladly.

It's a style thing, the lobster-hued man said, and then he repeats it, slowly as if he was spelling it out. S-t-y-l-e. His words are aspirated lava, a searing, stinging rain that hits me like woe chasing the skyline—in truth, and it's the only occasion I’ll use that word here, this moment has been building for months, an inevitable twister, divine intervention, perhaps, because I prefer to live (work) in a black and white world, where we still tap the most primitive instincts— the wires still connect—and the signal conveyed is clear, straight, and true, North. The man sitting across the desk chose the grinding wheel as his compass and he is a pile of pink talc. His words kick up a cloud of fine dust. I hold my breath. I don’t want to wreck my lungs.

My thoughts drift back to my forefathers and simple, back-breaking labor, where the gauge of a man was a firm handshake and the words he spits directly into your eyes, where authenticity was real and any altered state of being was the domain of conceptual poets who spoke in a secret code that could only be deciphered by standing on one's head to get a right side up view of the world, where function superseded form, now as obsolete as an honest day's pay—a quaint ritual outmoded by gamesmanship and slick interpretations at the expense of an ethic, a dedication, a plain creed that we make to each other as we stoop under the arch that hangs, teeters overhead: we will reward performance, we will embrace excellence. Sadly, most choose to sit in a sterile office and bend and shift and redirect and evade, anything to avoid standing firm or standing for anything except the easy way out, where the entrance and the exit are one in the same door, endless, through which everyone and no one passes. And the doormen relish their anonymity—it is easier to judge and retract and shapeshift. And when they clock out they scatter like so many lying spreadsheets, ownerless bones on a pile of bones, white, harsh. They cast no honorable shadow. They don’t add up.

So, you’re firing me, I ask.

Oh, yes. Sorry if I wasn’t clear, he responds. You do good work. It’s just a style thing.

I know I can press him for exact details, and his answers will be powder, but then I notice a photo of him and his wife on the credenza. They’re in Jamacia, and he’s wearing a blue speedo.

I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.