Chapter 2: Idle Tools

David has difficulty at work and goes into strange perceptions of reality.

David sat so he imagined in the middle of his own hell affected by it, and decreasingly affected by the unhappy alternative really around him. He had no place to go, and didn’t know what to think, what message he could extract from the essences of this new reality that surrounded him. Then looking up he saw there was no need for a God to punish him; reality was punishment enough. Besides he couldn’t see where he had done anything all that wrong to begin with or all that right to catch the eye of someone who might want bad fortune to come upon him.

He waited until four o’clock in the afternoon as usual to go to work, but he did not speak to anyone even the girl who in her silence seemed to like his dark complexion and curly dark brown hair, nor the guy at the gate who always called him Ali though he was not even familiar with the name or the term, whichever it was.

“Ali,” he said this time, “maybe you should go home, eh? It’s nine eleven again and all. Go home. Take the day off.” Then he giggled.

David had no use for him and never spoke to him. He was just another reason not to like reality.

He clocked in and went automatically right to work barely noticed at all. Amid thoughts the world ended on September 11,2001 only no one who knew it could face the fact that so many of us went right on in our own little part of Hell and never noticed, he wondered if it might just be real rather than a mere fanciful distraction of sorts.

Work was slow. Work always went slow. What he had to do required he concentrate only on the repetition and not the difficulty. He could do anything while he worked, even not pay attention to what he was doing, and still get it done. But such was the reality of the factory in real life.

Some guys did drugs. Some told dirty stories they had heard a thousand times. Some were women; some even not hard to look at. None were beautiful really, and none were really all that ugly either; it was all somewhat uninteresting.

So David pictured a spot in the entire boring scene and found it interesting that it could even be done. Then he created another arbitrary spot; then three, four, five and more. Soon he had an entire factory built of little places he had created; a world of his own making conjured atop the real world.

The box where he put the short tubes that the punch press operator cut off the seemingly endless stream of steel tubing was not there. It was only a place in the imagination of David Suez that could stop the things inside them from getting out.

However, it could not stop David’s imagination. David imagined he was not part of the physical world but part of the world he had just imagined. He could go anywhere. He was neither contained nor excluded by any physical barrier even his own body or the physical universe as a whole. Where the universe ended he could continue, and even the smallest possible space was as large as the universe to him; even larger. He was free, free like he had actually always been.

The loud annoying buzzer that sounded for the entire factory to take a half hour break was not binding to him. He could continue his work by rote. So he laughed as he chose to use his physical eyes to watch the caged fools he worked with escape so they thought to the break room for a half hour. But he was free of his body, his cage if you will, and continued to pile tubes in the huge box. His coworkers walked by and looked at his strange acting body. They laughed, some even jeered but it continued to stack the short little tubes one by one in its other waiting hand and then transferred the consequent handfuls into the box, keeping the rows as neat as always before. Then he left and went to the lunch room himself not letting them know he was already there ahead of them and it was only his body they had seen still piling tubes in that box.

He smiled as the foreman came first along with the scowling lead man. Then he milled around among them as they chose their food from the vending machines. He even sat alone as always when limited and laughed quietly to himself to think they had all thought he was not even among them. He would drop a tube every once in a while just to ease the boredom. Then he would bend down to look at it, and retrieve that one also before placing it alone among the others.

That was what he had been like. A single quarter inch tube, three and five eighths inches long among so many boxes even the management had no idea how many it made, nor how many of the missiles the little tubes needed to use in order to all be used up. The missiles were made in some other factory someplace else.

But now it was as if one of those tubes came alive, became a conscious living being, knew what it was, where it was going and what it was going to be used for. It knew everything knowable in the life it shared with the man that put it there.

His eye fell on that particular one by accident. He looked at it. He could see it knew him. He understood he too had been selected at random to do just that. And they were one, he a man, the tube a living entity that looked precisely as it had but was now alive.

“Hey! S**t head! Pick them damned tubes up; all of them,” the punch press operator said.

But David was free to hang from the high trusses and laugh at what was happening. Free from physical needs altogether. What did he care about a body, even his own?

Then the machine operator looked around a bit to find the power button and shut the machine down for David’s body was just standing there buried to the upper shins in short thin steel tubing. What else could the operator do?

“What in the God damned hell are you doing? You don’t shut a machine down? You don’t just do s**t like that on your own. What the f**k is wrong with you?” David heard the foreman yelling at the punch press operator as he neared to see how it was going to come out. But he said nothing as they argued and screamed above the factory noise removing the tubes from around the machine and carting off his body as they did.

When they had gone he tried to move one of the tubes with his imagination. So, he picked one out. He even concentrated on it, but it would not move. He couldn’t move the thing enough to make the light glitter on its surface, and so he realized, he needed his body to move it.

When he had his body in close proximity of the tubes he could use his imagination to make its brain think enough to force his hands to move. Then they could grasp the tubes and place them in the box on the pallet, causing the operator on the fork lift to move it then and so on. But it all depended on having the right tools. Just like a fork lift driver he needed to have just the right ones.

So he popped back into the body he had ignored so freely and said, “What the hell is going on? I must have stacked one too many of them damn tubes in that goddam box!” Then as they stopped the gurney and took in the phenomenal sight, he sat up and looked around. Soon realizing they were still in the factory he got off the gurney and guided his body somewhat less than normally at first. But in the end back to his work station he began picking up the mess of tubes and piling them neatly in the huge box again.

As far as he ever knew that was the end of it. But, he never lost the truth of his freedom. But he never made the mistake of letting his tools sit idly by at the work station with no one to use them either.

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