Ready, Fire, Aim by Jared Lipof

It’s fifteen minutes to lunch break when Madison, that prick, points his phone out the window and starts filming the scene taking place below.

“Look at these morons,” he says.

Madison always has to have the latest gadgetry. He’s the kind of guy who’ll camp out in front of the store for three days just to have the privilege of being the first idiot in town to fork over three hundred bucks for the brand new phone. The missed work more than doubles the cost of the thing, but then the following week he gets to strut around the cubicles with everyone in the office looking over his shoulder and gasping as he wows them with feats of micro-technology he had absolutely no part in constructing.

“4K chip on this thing. I could shoot a movie on it. I’ll upload this shit and have fifty thousand hits before I get home tonight.”

JJ walks up behind him and instead of looking through the window to see what Madison’s filming, he looks at the phone’s screen and I’m like, crane your neck three inches, you lazy fuck. Real life is right there.

“Holy shit,” says JJ. “How many of them does it take to stop that thing?”

I try to ignore them and focus on the spreadsheet that’s open on my computer. I’ve got to pull the data from each column into a word document, which in this case is a letter to our shareholders, otherwise I’d have to write up the letter and then enter all the pertinent information—which means the shareholder’s name and address, plus all the relevant numbers of shares and cash amounts—into the body of the letter by hand for each one. When I say by hand I mean by computer, of course, but still, I’d have to mouse over each item and type it out myself and then save as a new document each time, an endeavor that’s rife with opportunities for error. I can’t remember from which side of the transaction the command originates, the spreadsheet or the letter. By now I’ve spent so much time dropping down menus and typing keywords into a help window that has never once answered the question I’ve asked it that it’s hard to tell if the automated task I’m trying to get the software to perform will end up saving time in the end.

I’m beginning to feel like Madison in a tent on a sidewalk on a weekday.

“Alex, you gotta see this!”

“I’m busy,” I say. If I can’t figure it out by lunch then, fuck it, I’ll do it by hand.

“Here comes another one,” says Madison. “That makes fourteen.”

Our company’s stock is going to split 2-to-1 next week and give everyone twice as many half-price shares, with more potential for growth. It’s kind of like clipping a rose bush so it’ll grow back even bigger. All these rich bastards will get even richer. The spreadsheet has over a thousand names so I’d have to troubleshoot my shortcut for, like, a week straight for it not to save time. There’s a name for this task I’m trying to get the software to perform but for the life of me I can’t remember it, and the last thing I’m going to do is ask one of those two blowhards by the window for help.

JJ says, “Alex, this guy’s got a two-by-four!”

That’s it. Now I have to see what all the fuss is about.

I hit save and stand up and walk around the cubicle walls to the window. How a dumbass like Madison got a cube with a view, I’ll never know.

He says, “Thing’s been spinning for two minutes straight.”

Three stories below us, on the freshly laid and still-wet foundation of the new addition to our corporate headquarters, a concrete buffer spins counterclockwise, unmanned. I deduce that someone powered it up and it got away from him and, overtaken by torque, the thing took off on its own, its handle revolving in opposition to the buffing surface. It’s late November, and cold out there. Our corporation has been in business for nearly twenty years and we’ve never once turned a profit, but nevertheless the investors and advertising revenue keep pouring in, and the stock price keeps rising. I work in Human Resources so I can’t really say how this is possible from a financial standpoint, but from my amateur perspective it seems like a shell game, a little bit of now you see it, now you don’t, and I’m not entirely sure what role I play in the con. Probably I’m the shill who appears to be winning, even though I can be cut loose at the drop of a hat. Down on the ground more than a dozen construction workers, most of them Latino— probably day laborers, possibly undocumented, which would mean the contractor, and, by extension, The Corporation, are not paying taxes or worker’s comp or social security or unemployment insurance—all stand outside the perimeter of the wet concrete, bundled into heavy jackets, wringing their gloved hands, trying to figure out how to stop the rogue machine without getting their heads knocked in.

“Dios, mio! What are we gonna do now?” JJ assumes the role of one of the men down on the ground, adding a clumsy Spanish lilt just in case we didn’t get the picture.

I’m like, What the fuck would you do for five bucks an hour and no health plan?

“Kay lastima!” says Madison, like he can speak the language. “El bosso is going to fuego my culo when he sees this!”

“Well, where is the foreman, anyway?” I say.

They both look at me like they regret inviting me over. Like I’m the buzzkill here, the downpour on their superiority parade.

“Here we go,” says Madison.

“I’m serious,” I say. “Isn’t that the foreman’s job? To be, like, accountable?”

Down below the machine spins away, the handle’s centrifugal momentum now causing the buffer itself to describe its own gentle arc. One worker approaches it with a two-by-four and the spinning buffer slaps it clean out of his hand.

“Arriba!” yells JJ.

“Who’s next?” says Madison, narrating his own movie.

Another worker approaches from the opposite direction carrying a bucket of water that sloshes over the rim in time with his tentative footsteps.

“Brilliant,” says Madison. “Hang a bucket from the handle.”

Instead the guy reels back and hurls the whole bucketful.

“Ho!” cries JJ. “Better yet. We will drown it!”

The guy didn’t throw hard enough to hit the engine. All the water spreads across the concrete beneath the spinning contraption.

“All you have done, hombre, is anger the machine,” says Madison.

Both of them are cackling like ravens as another worker approaches with a blue tarp, poised along the perimeter of the machine’s path like he’s about to tuck it into bed.

“That’s it,” says JJ. “Smother it with a tarp. This can’t miss!”

These two are like those assholes that watch shitty movies just so they can offer up witticisms the entire time, appending their own ironic lines to the terrible dialogue. And here I am on the soundtrack with them.

The guy throws the tarp and the machine catches it and wraps it around the handle and now it twists in the wake of the machine’s spin like a gust-blown windsock.

“Ole!” yells JJ. “He is bullfighter now!”

I say, “That’s Spain, not Mexico, you asshat.”

“Whatever, douche,” says JJ.

“The machine is now blinded and mad,” says Madison.

“It’ll run out of gas eventually,” I say, knowing as it comes out of my mouth that I have just pitched the most boring of possible conclusions to our daytime drama. What these two crave is the explosion, the dismemberment, the blow to the head that knocks a man unconscious. Somebody else’s injury to witness from the safe confines of comfortable employment. I look at the clock and it’s three minutes to lunch break. I could walk out now if I really wanted to.

Madison and JJ shake their heads at me and resume their commentary.

“Fifty bucks to the first person to stop this thing. Fifty bucks and a free lunch.”

Madison’s laugh is an asthmatic wheeze blown through a rusty harmonica.

The addition to our corporate headquarters building is bigger than the existing building. By a large margin. The new foundation the workers are trying to smooth over stretches out beneath us and wraps around the west wall, out of sight.

“They’re like lions around an injured gazelle,” says JJ.

“I think it’s the other way around,” I say. “I think the machine’s in charge.”

Madison turns to me, still framing the scene with his camera, and says, “Alex, you should’ve been a public defender.”

“Or worked at a non-profit,” says JJ.

“Yeah, you have such lofty ideals.”

“He’s right though,” says a voice behind us. “The machine is always in charge.”

We spin around. Our boss, Betsy, stands there with her arms crossed, and the three of us snap to attention like academy cadets. The Compensation Department that we comprise falls under the auspices of the Human Resources Division, and concerns itself, for the most part, with the incentive plans (stock options, annual raises, and year-end bonuses) of the Corporation’s upper management. Elizabeth Ross, Director of Compensation, hired me at the tail end of a probationary temp gig last year, mostly due to my proficiency with one of Microsoft’s lesser-known office applications, and has instructed everyone to call her Betsy. I’m guessing that, at some point along the way, she attended one of those managerial strategy seminars and now has it in her head that finishing other people’s sentences for them is how you assure them that you’re listening. Madison realizes he’s now filming his own shoe, so he aims his phone behind him, trying to frame the fracas in the courtyard without looking.

“I’m heading out to lunch,” Betsy says. “I’ll be back late, I’ve got a meeting with Berger over at W&H at one-thirty.” She turns to me. “How’s that mail merge coming?”

Mail merge! That’s what the fucking operation is called!

“Great,” I lie.

Despite an overstaffed in-house Compensation Department, The Corporation has secured the services of an outside consulting firm called Wyatt & Holmes, specifically those of a consultant named Aaron Berger, to calculate the salary increases and bonuses of upper-upper-management, as if such numbers were beyond our comprehension. Madison and JJ don’t care. Less work for them, more time to capture horseshit on camera and roam the fourth-floor hallway, trying to impress the ladies in Accounting with their freewheeling lifestyles. I get the feeling that Betsy’s got her sights set on Berger, and that, as the newest hire, if I’m not careful, she’ll poach him from W&H and put him in my cubicle and send me packing. Which is a ridiculous notion, I suppose, as such a move would be a lateral one for Berger, but then what if Betsy herself gets promoted to VP of HR and pulls Berger in to replace her as Director? Then Madison, JJ, and I will have to adjust to a whole new hierarchy and I’d really prefer to remain in my current situation, unpleasant as it may be, than roll the dice on some future circumstance, no matter what improvements might be made. The devil I know and all that.

“You’ll have it done today?” says Betsy.

“Absolutely,” I say.

“—lutely,” she says over me. She turns to leave and stops. “What’s going on outside?”

“Nothing,” all three of us say in unison, like it’s a one-word pledge of allegiance.

She laughs and shakes her head and walks down the hall toward the elevators. The three of us turn back to the window. Leave it to an authority figure to force me to align myself with idiots.

Madison reframes his camera and says, “Shit, now I’m gonna have to make an edit in there. Uploaded videos work better uncut. They’re more like, what do you call it?”

“They’re longer,” says JJ.

“Yeah, no shit they’re longer. That’s not what I’m saying.”

“Verisimilitude,” I say.

“That is clearly not the word I was looking for,” says Madison.

Below us the machine continues to spin. We could twist the window blinds closed and it would all still be happening out there unwitnessed.

Madison’s like, “What I’m saying is, when the video is uncut it seems more, like, truthful, like, what, real, when you don’t make an edit.”

“Verisimilitude.”

“Alex, no. I would never use that word. It’s like—”

“Legit?” says JJ.

“Sort of . . .”

“Honest?” says JJ.

“Mmmmmm . . . ”

“Verisimilitude?”

“Fuck off, Alex. No, wait. I got it: authentic. It’s more authentic.”

“Whatever,” I say. Feeling superior to people who feel superior to people inspires a hollow sort of despair, like discovering that you’ve got some totally useless talent like driftwood-sculpting or macramé. Outside, most of the workers seem to have resigned themselves to waiting the machine out. Eventually it will burn all of its fuel and shudder to a halt and then they can refill the gas tank and start over, holding on firmly this time, smoothing over the imperfections the thing has carved into all of their previous labor. In the end it will have cost them nothing but time.

JJ says, “Let’s go get some authentic lunch, yo.”

Madison says, “Yeah, man. This shit’s boring now, anyway.” He presses stop on his phone’s camera’s video recorder. “I’ll end it back there with the tarp. Leave the audience hanging.” He and JJ high-five. “Alex, you coming?”

“Nah,” I say. “I brought something from home.”

The two of them snicker at my domestic inclinations, no doubt picturing me in my kitchen with an apron and a rolling pin, and they saunter down the hall and when the elevator doors close a calm silence descends on the place. The noise floor that under normal circumstances recedes into nothingness now swells up into the sonic foreground, unimpeded by distraction. The hum of the building’s heating unit. Cubicle after cubicle of whirring hard drives. The traffic grinding by on the freeway outside. I sit at my desk and take out my brown paper bag. Turkey sandwich on wheat, Swiss cheese and a touch of cranberry sauce, leftovers from the holiday just concluded. I take a bite and look up at my computer monitor. Sure enough, under the Tools drop-down menu is an item called Merge Documents. It was there all along, hiding. And as I chew on my sandwich and set up the incorporation of the spreadsheet’s cells into the word document, I hear, through the window, above the heat and computation and automobile tires, the sound of the concrete buffer still spinning away below. I take my sandwich in one hand and wheel my chair back to the window, leaving the computer to do the rest of my job for me. With the depression of a lever, I raise the seat to maximum height and set my sandwich on the windowsill and watch, like I’m in a movie theater. Or better yet, at a play, because whatever happens next will go unrecorded for posterity by Madison’s goddamn phone.

All except one of the workers have broken for lunch. But one guy’s still down there, a kid no older than eighteen, eyeballing the machine’s circuit, waggling his fingers, balanced on the balls of his feet like an athlete waiting for the starter pistol. Steam wisps from his nostrils when he breathes. Cranberry sauce drips from my sandwich and lands on the toe of one of my Calvin Klein Oxfords, a hundred-dollar pair of shoes that I didn’t even try on, delivered to my door within forty-eight hours of a single mouse-click, free shipping in both directions in case they didn’t fit. The kid seems determined to stop the thing himself. The rest of them, like me, watch from a safe distance, all of us chewing our food and waiting. The older workers shake their heads at his youthful pride, the fool’s errand he’s about to embark upon, risking injury to accomplish something that will accomplish itself if given enough time. Of course my position, up here, is safer than theirs. The kid will not receive stock options or a bonus check for this particular job. His paycheck will remain the same whether he does it or not. It’s about something else for this kid, something I used to know myself, but have forgotten. Something it’s not necessary for me to know anymore. A steady paycheck can offer all manner of comfort: savings accounts and new-smelling cars and firm mattresses wrapped by warm blankets beneath a roof that keeps the elements at bay. You might even rationalize it as the means to turn a dream into reality, but it requires shockingly few of them, arriving with the unbending punctuality of a calendar’s grid, to reduce that dream to an abstraction that grows fainter by the day. Either the kid senses my face in the window or he’s known I was here all along, because he looks up at me and nods once and then he dives into the mayhem in front of him.

Jared Lipof is a sound engineer for documentary television programs. He lives in Tallahassee, where he is at work on a novel.