The Apocalypse is Always Tomorrow: Story One

It all started with that damn door that laid the divide between purchasing and billing. It had its own personality; stubborn, sarcastic, and if you had a sense of humor, playful... I guess. The corner of that black steel framed full glass door with blocked lettering, scraped the thin granite-speckled blue carpet with every push and pull.

Every push and pull.

It never ceased.

You might come in on a particular morning with high hopes that the door gave up its old joke, or that maintenance finally found one of the 116 iterations of "Requests for repair" that were filed three years ago before everyone gave up. But every morning you would be let down.

Honestly, it was better if you just gave up believing that anything in the world would get better. That's how the door made you feel. You could hear the deep sharp breathes; hisses like snakes, from those that hated the sound of the scraping, as they tried to overcome the menacing blockade. You saw the eye squints from irritated employees that were stopped mid swing because they didn’t put enough body into it.

Every now and then, when this particular scenario would play out, Vladimir, the Russian guy from tech support would say, “Not enough balls!” in his thick accent. Everyone would laugh, except for the skinny guy with both hands on the handle shaking the damned door from hell until it cut loose from that paper thin carpet that made your feet ache by two pm.

There was this menacing tangle of carpet fibers that looked like a tumbleweed or the head of Medusa, right in the middle of the path where the edge of the door swung. It would wrap itself all up in the corner of the steel jamb. The damned door had little creases where the frame was fused that would lock the fibers of the unstable carpet into a handshake of death.

It was only a matter of time before the office melted down into complete chaos. And as always, it all started with that damn door.

I’d never seen a fight in my life. I mean, I’ve seen a married couple argue about how to discipline their children in public or two bros debate about what dip is better with a bag of potato chips, but I’d never seen a fist fight. Until the door had decided to be extra playful with poor Bob and Larry. It was the most pathetically entertaining event one could possibly endure while working at a job everyone hated.

Bob and Larry got along quite well. Well, they weren’t going to parties on the weekend but they shared a genuine laugh at the water cooler on Friday and recapped those great games from Sunday, on Monday. That all changed that fateful today. Today they were pulling at each other’s ties like nooses and delivering blows I never thought two men in their late forties could. It seemed crazy of course, but that damned door changes people.

No one stopped them, not even me. We were all frozen. The screaming and grunting. They sounded like wild animals. I just couldn’t believe what I was seeing. At one point Bob took a hold of Larry’s dress shirt and ripped it clean off his chest. Three buttons popped off and shot through the office. Two pinged off the large glass window overlooking the parking lot, while another hit Nancy from HR. Poor Nancy was just passing through. I mean, she had enough to deal with, with Vladimir screaming “balls!” all the time.

You should have seen Larry’s face. He must have really liked that shirt. He lunged at Bob, taking them both hurdling into a cubicle. The entire sectional divider that defined Peter’s personal workspace went bottoms up. Papers flew up into the sky , flying around like startled white birds. I felt like I was in a movie. Larry was grunting like a gorilla. He looked like one too, with that hairy chest and sturdy gut sticking out. It was a jungle in the office. At this point everyone was on their feet, surrounding the two of them wrestling and squirming, mashing fists into each other’s faces at high speeds. I watched the extra skin around their cheeks ripple and curve like waves. People were screaming and jumping like monkeys.

It was just hard to wrap your head around it when you think about how it all started…

It was about 2:30 pm. Larry and Bob had both stepped to the door on either side at the same time. Bob opened it slowly as it scraped for the billionth time on that carpet. You could see the old wood underneath from what was the door’s hundred year crusade on textiles and patience. Stubborn and relentless as the door was, I imagine in ten years you'd be able to see the plumbing.

Bob offered for Larry to go first. Larry was on the push side and so Bob was on the pull, holding the door open with the right side of his chest. Larry wasn’t in a hurry I guess, so he told Bob he could go first instead. Bob obliged, but as he went to walk through the door, it issued a new practical joke by snagging his coat which pulled him in reverse making the door swing backward. The door gained momentum and started its back swing which Larry tried to catch, and in doing so, jammed his ring finger.

After a quick consoling of the injured digit and a few colorful adjectives, Larry helped Bob get unstuck. The door was now closed too far and snagged once again on the thin granite speckled blue carpet with its protruding storm of violent frayed fibers. They managed to open it all they way and without asking they tried to go through at the same time bumping into each other. They both postured up and took deep breaths. It was funny to watch. It looked like a mirror except Larry was fat and Bob was more fat. “You go.” Bob said “No, you go.” Larry replied. This turned into a very strange and frivolous argument where they began shouting at each other over why it was more logical for the other person to go first. Bob finally conceded and tried to go through the door, but just as he was, as if by twisted fate, Larry had gotten so sick of the conversation and tried to slam the door. As a result Larry smacked his head right on the steel frame. He grabbed his forehead, looked up with what must have been the most ferocious look, being that Bob’s eyes widened like a spooked cat. As if it was some great eruption long suppressed by the weight of life, Bob screamed in a surprisingly manly roar, “God Dammit Larry!” He ripped open the door, and they clashed like titans under the arch of the arena.

That’s how it started. With that damned door. There wasn’t any deep seeded anger between them. Bob and Larry got along just fine. They were the last people you would have expected. But there is hatred here. There is sadness and depression, and desperation in this place. It aches in your bones, were it grows roots and pins you to the floor.

That door just agitated the darkness we felt for the whole damned thing. The three ring circus we called life. That door was like the guy at the party that gets everyone riled up with subtle teases and attacks; his eloquence and mastery not in his sophist remarks, but in his deception and his ability to evade detection or blame. He’s the one stirring the pot, but no one can quite finger him. He’s more like a senseless force of nature.

That was the door. A senseless force of nature. Left us all pissed off and looking for trouble with someone else who didn‘t deserve it. Somehow we didn’t realize it was always the door. Maybe we just forgot, or maybe we didn’t care.

And me, I didn’t even care that these two men were fighting at my feet. I felt, apathetic about it. I had the backside of my hand pressing into my cheek, holding my head up, staring at the entertainment in front of me. It was like a 3D HD TV with a thousand channels and nothing on. I stopped changing channels, not because I had arrived at a program I enjoyed, but because

I gave up. The blank stare I expressed not indicative of a treasure found, but instead, of a journey lost. I was living vicariously through their aggression and hate for that moment they were living in it. It was a moment where they had abandoned being civilized to say how they really felt about that fucking door that ruined the whole thing Monday through Friday. I felt like it didn’t even matter to break it up. Everyone still jumping and screaming almost in a rage of ecstasy like a bunch of dancing monkeys. Assholes in pleated Chinos. Dapper apes.

That damned door was just a snow ball at the top of a hill; going from negligible to unmanageable in the blink of an eye. From “You first” with a smile, to “God dammit Larry!” and a punch. It’s funny. You know when you hit your head on something, and then you punch whatever it is because your mad at it, but then your hand hurts, so now your mad, hurt and embarrassed too? But mostly you’re so fucking mad!

But you don’t do anything constructive about it. You don’t do any critical thinking. You could have laughed, rubbed your head for a minute and vowed to be more aware of your surroundings. Instead you let it eat at you. You give it to you neighbor, and let it eat at them too. You watch it boil over while you sit there and do nothing. You put it off till tomorrow, you imagine that someone else will fix it or by some cosmic miracle it will just stop on it’s own. You imagine Jesus Christ himself blessing the door and taking away its sins. But it never happens. It just keeps getting worse. And worse. Until it’s too late.

It was just a door hinge that needed to be replaced. It only takes about five minutes to unscrew the damned thing and put a new one on. I could have grabbed a kit from the home improvement store on the way in and fixed it before the printers warmed up…

But I didn’t…

I mean, the world is ending anyway, right? Polar ice caps are melting, sixty billions tons of CO2 gas are being pumped into the atmosphere, every year. There’s been a major conflict occurring once a decade every decade for the last hundred years. And all those starving children around the world. It doesn’t matter. It’ll all be over soon. Might as well watch the end of the game. We lost. We lost the battle of man versus himself, rolling around on a cheap carpet staining it with blood saturated with caffeine and regret. We lost something, or better yet, we missed something. We fucked up.

But where?

How?

I guess it doesn’t matter now. Bob and Larry are making asses of themselves on the third floor of an office building in “No one gives a fuck” Ohio, “Selfie” is actually word in the dictionary and I haven’t had enough coffee to give a shit.