Nite fren
Doin me a sleep
About two oāclock, after lunch, the director came in to the discing room.
I have something to tell you, he said. He looked terrible; his hair was untidy, his eyes were pink and wobbling, as though heād been drinking.
We all looked up, turned off our machines. There must have been eight or ten of us in the room.
Iām sorry, he said, but itās the law. I really am sorry.
For what? somebody said.
I have to let you go, he said. Itās the law, I have to. I have to let you all go. He said this almost gently, as if we were wild animals, frogs heād caught, in a jar, as if he were being humane.
Weāre being fired? I said. I stood up. But why?
Not fired, he said. Let go. You canāt work here anymore, itās the law. He ran his hands through his hair and I thought, Heās gone crazy. The strain has been too much for him and heās blown his wiring.
You canāt just do that, said the woman who sat next to me. This sounded false, improbable, like something you would say on television.
It isnāt me, he said. You donāt understand. Please go, now. His voice was rising. I donāt want any trouble. If thereās trouble the books might be lost, things will get brokenā¦
He looked over his shoulder. Theyāre outside, he said, in my office. If you donāt go now theyāll come in themselves. They gave me ten minutes. By now he sounded crazier than ever.
Heās loopy, someone said out loud; which we must all have thought.
But I could see out into the corridor, and there were two men standing there, in uniforms, with machine guns. This was too theatrical to be true, yet there they were: sudden apparitions, like Martians. There was a dreamlike quality to them; they were too vivid, too at odds with their surroundings.
Just leave the machines, he said while we were getting our things together, filing out. As if we could have taken them.
We stood in a cluster, on the steps outside the library. We didnāt know what to say to one another. Since none of us understood what had happened, there was nothing much we could say. We looked at one anotherās faces and saw dismay, and a certain shame, as if weād been caught doing something we shouldnāt.
Itās outrageous, one woman said, but without belief.
What was it about this that made us feel we deserved it?
Iāll post the joke somewhere you wonāt be able to undo it
and itās not even in dms
