Google “corporation” and “surrealism” and you won’t find much. I’ve always been puzzled by this because the corporate life can be quite surreal. Odd things happen, especially when the business starts to decline. We start looking for help in foreign places even as we know that help isn’t going to arrive.
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Vocation
I’m going upstairs to the CEO. The elevator doors open, and I enter the management wing. Deep, plum-colored carpets. Mahogany doors. A receptionist is talking low into the telephone. She looks up, still talking, and her eyes follow me as I pass. I wander down hallways big as a landing strip. The floor is quiet and filled with light. Each room is empty as I walk by.
When I reach his office, the secretary is gone. I push at the steel door. It slowly swings open like a vault. The CEO is sitting behind his desk at the far end of the room. As I walk across the thick carpet, I can see that his eyes are flat and milky. The wind whistles faintly at the windows. He stares at the horizon, head tilted to one side, thoughtful. Like a desert king, his body has dried into a question mark, fragile and papery, the skin pulled back from his teeth. His hands rest lightly on the desktop. Through the broken skin, I can see the hollow bones in his wrists—small bones, like a bird’s.
I’ll have to rethink everything. I look out the window. Far below me, on the sidewalks, tiny figures are crawling back and forth, too tiny to be heard, too tiny to scream. I rearrange his arms. He’s about my size. There was something I was supposed to do, but I slip and the whole body abruptly slumps to the carpet. For a moment, the office slowly rises and falls, like the deck of a ship. Half in, half out of the world. The secretary appears cautiously at the door with a question. I tell her not to worry. I smile. I tell her to hold all my calls.
