(Dionysian Short) #3

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TY72dmYLbVw

.

.

Simone let out an exasperated sigh as she dropped her newspaper among the scattered stock listings that littered her desk. 

.

Despite herself, and though it was clean before the floor opened, her space always managed to fall into turmoil before her half-hour at lunch. 

.

Every morning, at five o’clock, she would arrive early and neatly organize her little section of desk space into a functional and tightly packed square; and by every mid-afternoon, it had never failed to have crested into the anarchy of numerical disorder that everybody else's had a tendency to descend into - amidst the immediate impetus of making as much money, as quickly as humanly possible. 

.

It wasn’t just her things that filled the little surface, the traders and assistants parked at either elbow had their own hog-piles of daily listings, and no matter what she did, their chaos always seemed to find a way of entangling itself with hers.

.

That seemed to be the way of things in Simone's life - chaos begetting chaos and the comfort of her compartmentalization suffering the consequence.

She checked her watch, unusually tired this early in the day.

.

.

(11:37)

.

.

She paused for a moment and gawped at it - she knew she was wasting time, and that at any moment her boss would flag her down with a phone-line attached to her ear, waving over the documentation for a stock that looked just good enough to peddle to whomever it was that was nibbling from the other side. The poor idiots that usually bought these things never seemed to make any money, but her boss collected a commission on the investment, not on the profit.

. 

This wasn’t Wall Street - this was Chicago; and almost all of the staff on this floor tended to trade blue chip stocks between the banks and local firms. Her boss however, was an independent start up; and had to make ends meet by bending people as far backwards as necessary so as to catch a glimpse of the lunches they'd eaten the previous day.

.

Whenever someone let out a shout of triumph and pumped their phone in the air, she pictured some construction worker on the other side, metamorphosing into a perplexed and nonplussed ostrich - peeping its head up into its own backside for a better look at whatever bullshit trade they had just fed them on.

.

At first she felt sorry about it, she had seen the margins on the stocks these people were buying and had a spare landline filled with voicemails from buyers asking for an update, but by now it had become just another part of her daily routine. 

.

Besides, they had a guy that handled complaints - though he worked nights because people were less likely to answer the phone if he returned their calls after sundown. 

.

Despite feeling more than a little guilty, at the end of the day this job paid well and that was a pretty rare thing for most people. After all, she wasn't really the predator here, she was assistant to the predator in chief and couldn't really be blamed for participating as a duo-tang monkey. 

.

As if on que, her boss barged over with a phone-cord tail - shouting loudly over the cacophony that this floor became once the stocks opened up. As usual, she was spouting something about ‘guaranteed interest’ or ‘a premature mark-down’.

. 

Though Simone didn’t know her very well, she had to respect her hustle. This woman was a tigress and worked the phones as if in a perpetual state of winter-starvation.

. 

She waved her hand in a circle for Simone to hurry, and could be heard saying something like: “well if you aren’t interested in BMWs, I’m not sure what I can do for you” - followed promptly by: “the only to way to find yourself parking in one is to invest at the ground floor.”

.

This girl was a pro, Simone thought, as she handed her a folder from the automotive pile, she could sell snow to a f*****g ski-hill.

.

Freshly placated, her boss quickly went back to stomping her paces at the rhythm of her abnormally heightened cadence.

.

It was weird how she’d do this; she would take steps while simultaneously emphasizing her tone upon the landing of each footfall - as if to add substance to her argument and ‘So that She could Sound her Pitch with Enough F*****g Assertion’. 

.

Simone often found herself getting lost in the iambic drawl - staring into the blank nothing behind her eyeglasses while she sipped her tea and let the ‘one-two’ monologues drown out the cacophonous white noise that filled the displaced air.

.

In all intents and purposes, this place was a jungle - and it was hard for Simone not to buy into the watering-hole, money-making routine that seemed to fuel the engine behind the animal-planet charade. 

.

Simone had even considered the possibility of trying to work towards a trading ticket; but that needed a lot of schooling that Simone didn't have and because she was already pretty good at her job, and because she knew her boss' habits well enough to mimic the hunting call that was being a stock trader's assistant, she got paid enough to cover the bills and pocket a little extra on the side - which at the end of the day, was better than most girls her age could ever think to ask for. 

.

After all, a good job was a good job and new shoes were new shoes. She could play along when she needed to and by now, Simone had become a pro of her own in the act of playing along.

.

Coasting with the current seemed to be part of survival in places like these - everybody towed the line somehow, and it seemed to run on the feed to hand manifold that was usually becoming of farmhouses, or of zoos. Simone wasn't even really sure how her boss had managed to secure a position on this floor - independent traders seemed pretty few and far between here - but somehow, be it by internal bribery or back door fuckery, she had; and somehow it had landed Simone a position as a full time secretary and part time babysitter, right there alongside her. 

.

Despite the lowliness of her job description, Simone was actually pretty good at her work; and despite the rarity that became her boss having a secure section here, obviously, she was too. 

.

Simone not only respected her boss, but she had an innate appreciation for the way she carried herself. There was something sexy about her Italian cut pantsuits and the pin-stripe, designer handbags she toted whenever she wasn't on call. It was also decidedly true that Simone was disgusted by the materialism - she was raised catholic and her mother was an old-school Argentinean - but there was something alluring about the way that woman could shout down a grown man's throat until he finally gave in to the purchase. 

.

It was foxy, in a way - foxy in the only sense that a redheaded box, dressed in an eight-thousand-dollar, Gabanna suit, could be - but it was sexier than Simone usually felt and in an odd way, she had to fight the gravitational authority that seemed to circulate her boss' footsteps. It was tempting to want to be like that, after all - to be a shot caller and f**k the city one phone call at a time - but Simone felt it wasn't within her reach to ever be that person, and in many ways, she was actually happier just being herself.

.

Her boss wasn't your usual kind of pretty. She was just short of middle aged, wore that frizzily, manicured haircut that followed the days when women thought it was hot to wear their hair in the shape of an anthill, and overcompensated with a flair of what was probably the most expensive brand of perfume she could find. 

.

In the mornings, when Simone had finished getting her desk ready and was waiting with her head between her arms - trying to milk away a few more minutes of silence before the parade began - she always knew when to perk her head up because her boss' perfume would waft from the direction of the doors. It smelled like a strangled combination of bubblegum and mint, but in that way that expensive perfumes do - like they've got an inlaid tannin or had been milked from the uterus of an Asiatic Pegasus. 

.

By comparison, Simone's perfume was tacky - it smelled like a catholic girl's perfume and definitely didn't run away with a four figure price-tag whenever she reached for it at the department store. But it was alright, besides, Simone's hair was better and she didn't need to smell like a cross-bred evergreen laced with hubba bubba to pull her bi-weekly paycheque. 

.

All she had to do was shuffle binders, say yes ma'am and no ma'am in a succinct order, and remember her goddamn boss' name. 

.

Which, ironically, she never could.

.

.

"Simone!" The holler broke her train of thought. 

.

"You're on break!"

.

.

Her boss was gesturing at her wristwatch with the phone in her off hand, and Simone realized she had just burned away twenty three whole minutes - all with a cooling cup of tea held between both palms and her eyes plastered to the smudged lenses, caught behind the reflection of her eyeglasses.

.

.

"Yes Ma'am," came the hastened reply.

.

"Half an hour Simone, I need you back at 12:30."

.

"Yes Ma'am."

.

"And bring me back a latte!" 

.

She was shouting as Simone retreated for the exit. 

.

"No f*****g sugar!"

.

.

Simone made for the door like a pedestrian would as they scantily escaped a stampede - ducking beneath the profanity and catcalls that were being flung around as trivially as a monkey would throw its s**t.

.

When she got to the door and closed it behind her, she took a deep and tempered breath. 

.

Though this was a great job, with steady cheques and regular hours, it took its toll on those who were looking for none other than getting through the workday. Places like these belonged to the hungry and the ambitious, the inhibitionless and the reckless - they thrived here, and no matter how good she had gotten at keeping her head down, Simone knew in her heart that she was nothing like these people.

.

Though she was determined to see it through, she could never liken herself after those kinds of qualities.

.

As she approached the elevator she took the necessary steps to straighten her appearance - smoothing folds in her pale-yellow work dress, pushing her glasses farther up her nose and running her fingers through the hair that hung just above her right ear. 

.

Though she hated to admit it, she was tired today - and for no reason that she could come up with in particular. 

.

Maybe it was just the nature of the throng; maybe it just sucked the life out of you little by little until all that was left was a skinny catholic girl, standing on brand new pumps and doing so comprised entirely of sticks.

.

Simone knew that was it; but she had also inherited the immigrant obdurance that her mother had brought with her when she boarded a freighter from South America. Even if reduced to sticks, Simone had the means of carving out the rest of her day - as if it were stone and she were Michelangelo - and nothing other than divine intervention could ever affect that.

.

.

She was a headstrong girl. 

.

And she knew she always would be.

.

.

As she touched the down-button inlaid beside the elevator, she had to almost force herself from saying, 

. 

'F**k your throng and bring it the f**k on.'

.

Simone was the kind of person that relied on stubbornness - there was an innate strength to obtuse refusal, and she felt that if she were to ever have been without that quality, she likely wouldn't have made it this far - both at work and in her life in general. 

.

While standing before the elevator, she found herself again, drawing on her recalcitrance - tapping her foot as she watched the little light beside the floor numbers slowly crawl its way to the one she was standing on.

.

.

Five,

.

Six,

.

Seven.

.

.

She found herself swallowing some anger as it bypassed number nine.

.

She was nine. 

.

Which meant that the elevator functioned on a hierarchical bias and was now climbing towards a more pressing occupant, likely tapping just as impatiently from somewhere high above her. 

.

.

Sixteen,

.

Seventeen.

.

.

What the hell? 

.

.

The light seemed to be speeding up, and was accelerating towards the tip of the building's diagram. 

.

.

twenty six,

.

thirty two,

.

forty three.

.

.

There were only forty four floors in this building.

.

.

The light stopped at the highest point, flickered there for a moment - as if it were the lamp in an illustrated lighthouse - than went out completely, echoing an odd hush that Simone suddenly felt wavering about her ears. 

.

Her skin was prickling and she shuddered with a vague, indescribable anxiety.

.

.

That's so strange, she thought.

.

There must be something wrong with the wiring.

.

.

Before she could further the notion, a voice broke from behind her ear.

.

It was distant, and had come from the door she had just left.

.

.

"¡Oye! Simone, espera mi amiga!"

.

"¡Ralentiza chica!"

"¿Que pasa?"

.

.

Simone knew who it was before she turned to look.

.

.

"Nada Maria, estoy bien."

.

.

Maria was strolling from the entrance to the trade floor, dressed in clothes not at all dissimilar to that of Simone's boss. Although, Maria, like Simone, was an assistant and didn't have her trading certification, she had still made the effort to convert into the materialist costume that everybody wore here - it was a pretty convincing effort too; though her attire couldn't have been nearly as expensive as her boss', to the untrained eye it still looked like a high income outfit.

.

.

"How's your mum?" Maria asked, switching to English. 

.

.

Maria and Simone had grown up together - in fact, Maria was one of Simone's oldest friends. 

.

They were both from the south-side, both of their mothers spoke Spanish and both of them had come from a place that was altogether foreign to the cold, wet streets of Chicago. 

.

It was actually their mothers that encouraged them to find work - though how they  had each wound up in identical positions, in the exact same building, Simone never knew.

.

Like herself, she was glad Maria had gotten work here. 

.

Again, it was the kind of job that got you ahead in life - and for a couple Latina girls from the south end, getting ahead was the equivalent of their mother's realization of the immigrant dream. 

.

That was why they came to America - to escape and to get ahead, and Simone always felt close to Maria because they shared a commonality in that struggle.

.

The girl that was standing before her now, chewing bubblegum and brandishing recently manicured nails, didn't quite seem like the same girl Simone had known before. It made her sad to look at, and she often avoided interacting with Maria to circumvent the reopening of that wound. 

.

Beneath the make up and the hair spray was a girl exactly like Simone, trying to mold into the American that this place wanted her to be, and instead of the girl that their mothers had worked so hard to raise. 

.

.

"She's good Maria - tired you know? But good."

.

"¿Y tu?"

.

"Oh you know, same day different week." Maria popped a bubble with her gum. 

.

.

She had this way of acting nonchalant to disguise things that weren't going well.

.

Simone had seen her do it many times, but over the years it had become nearly impossible to determine when she was actually being honest. 

.

.

"I heard she was getting sick." Simone was a little distraught, the news hadn't been good.

.

"Oh she was, but she's getting better now."

.

"The flu you know? It's like she needs an exorcist every time it comes around."

.

.

Maria laughed in that way that was too well practiced to be authentic - deeply, drawn from the base of her stomach and propelled forward with a slight shift in weight from her heels to the balls of her feet.

.

.

"Listen, I'm going to this new club tonight to see a show?"

.

.

It was a statement but she was already positing it as a question.

.

.

"You should come pendeja - I need someone to help me find a husband."

.

.

Simone looked at her - sleeplessness weaving a stranglehold within the veins in her eyes. 
.

She was about to say no; she didn't really have a desire to get to know this new Maria and she wanted even less to catch glimpses of the old one. But before she did she thought of Maria's mother, Evelia, and the times she had spent in their old, beaten down house; she thought of the way she used to run around as a kid, the way Maria and her used to wear Eva's scarves as if they were soap opera skirts. 

.

.

"What time are you going?" Simone asked, trying to disguise her reluctance.

.

"Ay, my girl!" Maria laughed again.

.

.

Simone sighed as she saw her excitement - it was the real kind, the kind of joy that lit Maria's eyes up and made her seem suddenly nervous. 

.

.

"I got to go home after work to change, but I can drive us."

.

.

Simone felt as if she were making a mistake.

.

.

"I don't really have the right clothes for the club."

.

"F**k it chica, you'll wear mine."

.

.

Maria delivered this news as a statement, not as a proposition, and as she did the door for the elevator opened, providing the opportunity for her to succinctly step in - the only thing she needed was confirmation, and having acquired it, she was now in a hurry to get away before Simone could change her mind.

.

.

"I'll come down after five and we'll go," she said, as she repetitively tapped the close door button.

.

"I'll buy the first drink," she was grinning.

.

.

As the doors closed, Simone returned her stare towards the manifold beside the glossy elevator. 

.

It was working again, and Simone still needed to go down for a latte. 

.

She checked her watch.

.

.

(12:22)

.

.

"F**k," she said, as she tapped the arrow aligned towards the street.

.

"Now I have to help her find a husband."

.

.

...

.

.

Rain stuck with repetitious ferocity against the windshield of Maria's Ford Sierra, and her wipers looked as if they were about to burn out, trying to keep up against the accelerated pace of falling water. 

.

They would squeak occasionally, against the glass, and Simone felt that it probably wasn't wise to be in traffic during weather like this. 

.

Maria, however, seemed arbitrarily complacent towards the turbulence in the roads and had been driving for the last fifteen minutes with an arrogant nonchalance - taking intersections and merging lanes while interchangeably babbling about the clothes they would wear, where they should park and how cool this club was supposed to be.
.

.

"It opened out of nowhere," she said as she dialed the wipers back a notch.

.

"Everyone's saying it's going to be the new hot spot downtown."

.

.

Simone still felt hesitant but having already committed, she continued through the motions of idle conversation. 

.

.

"How did you hear about it?" She asked, glancing nervously at the Mercedes Maria had just swerved around - it was black, and swung towards the curb as they narrowly passed it by.

.

"Marcus, this puto on my floor, mentioned it to Samantha and Samantha told me."

.

"It's supposed to be really hard to find you know?"

"Like this underground spot."

.

"Do you know where it is?" Simone followed, her distrust compounding against Maria's thoughtless driving.

.

"Yeah b***h, Sam gave me directions," she pointed towards a folded piece of paper on the dash.

.

.

Simone hated how Maria talked like this. 

.

She had no problem with swearing - it added flavor to an otherwise mundane day - but never in her life had she considered herself a b***h and the idea of insulting someone she cared about by labeling them as such, bothered her in an ignoble and undignified way.

.

.

"There's even a password to get in."

.

"Crazy right?"

.

"Yeah," Simone answered.

.

"Sounds pretty crazy."

.

.

The drive to Maria's house passed relatively quickly - idle conversation and intermittent turns at the radio tended to blur the perception of distance relative to time, and Simone secretly hoped she could see the night out under the same means.

.

As Maria talked, Simone watched the familiar contraction of sky scrapers shrinking into bridges, than corner stores - eventually shaping into the familiar rows of shanty houses and railroad tracks that pervaded the south side of her city. 

.

Simone was used to seeing this, though it was usually from behind the windows of buses and trains. She didn't have a car, gas was expensive and it was harder to disguise your status in life when all you could afford was a streamlined hatchback. 

.

Simone briefly glanced up at the windshield wipers.

.

Damn Maria, she thought, how are you supposed to be a big shot if you drive to work like this? 

.

.

(break) 

.

    

Author's Note

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7pKrVB5f2W0
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO-eAldJmA8
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32kYH6XZrIo
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnauET6TwYI
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyy8bEDi1Eg
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1TM1sqoaMI
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAJgs1P-uUE
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GmP2eI5VFVM
.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDWEz1mia1I&t=778s
.

Reviews

[Stan Lee]

I always enjoy reading your short stories :) thanks for sharing

[Ookpik]

Thanks An, I've never written a novella before and that's really the idea w/these shorts