Spanish Bay

               “Clean your desk,” said Wigwam, the boss. “It’s a disaster area. Look at that mess.”

               Stonz Pharoh looked at the papers and pens and books and trinkets on his desk. He didn’t see the problem.

               “Junk everywhere! Get it organized!” Wigwam insisted.

               “Sir,” said Stonz, “what shall I do with everything? I have only this cubicle, nothing else.”

               “You have drawers on your desk. And that trashcan. How you clean it is none of my business! Only this business is my business.” Wigwam waddled away, back to his own office, which had a door and air conditioning and its own set of lights and shelves.

               For the rest of the day, Stonz worked slowly. Cleaning his desk was not a priority, but it had to be done. The boss wanted it. There was plenty of other work to do, most of which consisted of pressing keys on the computer, making phone calls, writing things down, clicking a mouse, and wishing he were someplace else. While he sorted through the papers that covered his desk, and rifled through discs and receipts and books and pens and newspapers and trinkets, he, from time to time, glanced at the 2005 calendar hanging from his cubicle wall. On it was a picture of a sailboat. For eight years Stonz had left that calendar up, after receiving it as a new-employee gift from Wigwam. That sailboat looked majestic. When Stonz stared at the sailboat on the moody blue waters of what he imagined was a Spanish bay, he could imagine himself sitting in it, the Mediterranean sun warming his face, with his arms open wide, as if to hug the wind. He didn’t know anything about sailing, but that couldn’t stop him from dreaming. It couldn’t put a damper on his flights of fancy.

               By the end of the day Stonz’s desktop was empty. Only his computer sat on it, with its rousing background of merry-go-rounds and its fanciful icons.

               “See? Now isn’t that nice?” Wigwam was standing in the cubicle doorway, or what served as a doorway for a doorless cubicle.

               Stonz sat in front of his computer, examining his empty desk. “No. It’s not.”

               “What do you mean? OF COURSE IT’S NICE. Your desk is clean! Look! So fresh and barren!”

               “It’s empty. I feel like I’m in an empty prison. It’s not stimulating.”

               “Stimulating? Haha! Stonz! You’re breakin’ my bones. A clean desk means a clean mind. A clean mind is a happy mind.”

               “This desk is empty. I imagine your head is much like this desk. Vacant, bare, and deserted.”

               “Whoa, now. If my head is like this desk, I take it as a compliment. Organized, clean, ready for anything. Uncluttered!”

               “Empty and dull!”

               “Well, Stonz. Then your head is like your old desk, messy, disorganized, cluttered, total disorder, a complete disaster. Shit everywhere!”

               “It was organized. Just because you saw no order to it doesn’t mean I didn’t know where things were. It wasn’t chaos, it was order! Your head is like this desk: there’s just nothing there.”

               “It’s all in those drawers, isn’t it? That’s where you put everything, Stonz. See, that’s like me. Like my head. My thoughts and ideas are organized, placed nicely into drawers and folders and accessible places, so they can be accessed when necessary. But on the surface, I’m all clean and undisturbed, with just plenty of space!”

               “My head is like the old ‘mess’, with everything right there, immediate, together, unhidden. I hide nothing! It’s all there, it’s all honest! It’s a mind of honesty and a desk that stood for the same thing!”

               “And with all those papers and toys and valuables sitting out like that, one wrong move and you’ll spill your coffee all over everything, ruining half your shit. Maybe all of it! That’s how your mind is with clutter and disorder, everything’s easy to lose or ruin or mess up. See, Stonz. I’ve got this all figured out. That’s why I’m the boss and you’ve had the same cubicle for eight years.”

               Stonz reflected silently for a moment that in all his eight ambivalent years with the company, his most enjoyable and memorable experience had been the time when he and the boss had argued about cleanliness, using desks as metaphors for the mind. That thing that had just happened. This was it. This had been the peak of his eight year career.

               “Sorry, Stonz,” said Wigwam. “That was unnecessary. Shouldn’t have said that. How about I buy you a drink? We can talk more about desks and minds.”

               “But it’s Wednesday.”

               “A fine day to drink, like all days.”

               “Could you buy me a sailboat?” asked Stonz, his voice a monotone business-formal.

               Wigwam cried out in business-casual amusement. “Haha! So you can mess it up like you mess up your desk? I might be a boss, I might make big boss bucks, but I can’t be bothered to buy you a boat, buddy! Not that I would, anyway! Wife and I are saving up for a hovercraft to take out with our houseboat.”

               A triple-threat was detected. Stonz languished at the thought that Wigwam not only had a wife, which put him immeasurably higher in the social order than he, but a houseboat, and soon a hovercraft. The sorts of pleasures this  man must experience on a daily basis were unfathomable to Stonz. Stonz daydreamed of sailboats and a glass of wine. His musings were the musings of the low class, the cubicle worker, the miserable desk servant, the lowly office chair pilot. He said nothing to his boss.

               “So, drink. Yes or no?”

               Stonz looked at his calendar. He pulled up the page, to the next month. June 2005. There was a gondola on this one. All these years and he’d never looked ahead to June 2005. The gondola sparked even more exuberant notions of fun in him. Piloting a gondola of his very own, down the Venetian canals. What a thought! And here he was at an empty desk, speaking to someone he considered to have an empty mind. But that empty-minded man had a wife and a houseboat and soon, a hovercraft.

               “OK,” said Stonz. “A drink.”

               The lights in the office dimmed behind them as the two left the building. Stonz climbed into Wigwam’s BMW SUV, and saw pictures of the boss’s wife all over the dashboard, which was a massive dashboard, bigger than Stonz’s desk, he estimated. As they drove to Wigwam’s favorite bar, they talked more about desks and minds, but never about boats or women or Spanish bays or Venetian canals. Stonz probably wouldn’t accept an invitation like this again, he decided. Wigwam had already decided he’d never extend an invitation like this again. But for the time being, they would make the most of things. 

the end.