Manual Labor by Adam Means
Manual Labor
The fiction below represents a selection from a group of inter-related short stories about a character named Glen.
(Fade in: the camera descends, as though through the ceiling, to reveal a squalid box of a room. Dirty and ramshackle. The colors are fading reds and oranges. Two people--an emaciated man and sleeping woman--are naked on the bed.)
Glen looked at the prostitute, sleeping comfortably one foot to his right. Sleek lines, shiny with a layer of post coital sweat, drooling a gray question mark on the yellowing pillow. He grabbed his water bottle off the rickety night-stand and examined it -- closing one eye and holding it up horizontally, in such a way that it was suspended over the girl and, as a testament to the fantastic tricks of perspective, the same size. They, the water bottle and the girl, had virtually the same shape. The sweeping Coke bottle contours. And she, like the bottle, was also filled with water. She was, in fact, nothing more than a massive water bottle. That seemed simple enough at first blush. Of course, then there were the expected and confounding complexities of this gigantic water bottle sheathed in a hermetically sealed, fleshy veneer, straight-jacketed in a haphazard weave of color coded wiring -- all of it held together by a series of metaphysical inconsistencies. Glen shook his head -- hard.
Where were the instructions for this? He thought.
He directed his attention back to the home printer manual in his gummy hands. The pages were sticking to his fingers, thwarting the prospect of an easy read (in the manual sense). Washing up after the sex had proven futile. He’d discovered, over the course of his trip, that washing away the adhering residue of a fondled and fouled prostitute was next to impossible. There’s a scent, rich and cloying, like cigarettes and honey, that seeps into the pores, gloms onto follicles, coats the dermis like wet cellophane.
The Canon BJC-4300 series, color bubble-jet, photo realistic printer. He straightened himself a bit by shifting his buttocks on the satin bedspread and wiped his hands (again) over the fuchsia on pink swirl pattern -- careful not to disrupt the engorged rasps of his sleeping hooker. The liquid slimy texture of the sheets, which ignored any sort of acknowledgment to the principals of friction, pulled him down into a strained slouch. Neck bent at a 90 degree angle, double chin pinching itself against his sternum, he squinted intently at the page.
He read:
BJ Cartridge Guidelines
(inter-cut here a close up of Glen’s “well-of-course,” sarcastic expression. We hear an abrupt, empty spitting sound [the “neigh” of a tiny horse] -- we see his thin, yellow lips emit minuscule particulates of spittle which are breathed in by the thick, acrid European air before they reach the manual’s glossy, coated pages.)
BC-21e Color BJ Cartridge
Contains the print head and two replaceable
BJ tanks--the BCI-21 Color tank contains color
Ink (cyan, magenta, yellow) and the BCI-21 Black
BJ tanks contains black ink. You can replace the
BJ tanks without replacing the print head unit.
“You, you, you!” Oh, how Glen did enjoy the empowering script of the random instruction manual. Second person, every time. “YOU!” You got to do so much! That is, someone did. Unfortunately, Glen didn’t actually own any of the fantastic items necessary to apply the fastidious lessons in the manuals, so it was more like the proverbial “you,”-- the theoretical “you.” Nevertheless, he enjoyed reading the manuals for the hearty glow of potential self-improvement. It was important to know how things worked -- to understand and embrace the structure and mechanics of the things that filled the world. Ambiguities were the enemy. Organization and careful study -- tab A fitting into slot B -- these were the elements of an sensible existence. He may not possess the items he read about but through tireless empirical scrutiny, he’d learned there was always the chance that something unexpected would come up. Glen was confident he could aptly command the operation of any number of household appliances, personal computers, gas powered yard machinery, et cetera. He‘d covered a broad spectrum and had the swelling bookcases, overstuffed with these bibles of practicality to prove it. He could dismantle and reassemble anything. Should the opportunity arise.
(Back story: our subject’s passion dates back to his tepid adolescent years when he once spent an entire day reading the “suggested configurations” for his “Space Town” special edition Lego set, rather than constructing anything at all. His fat, bored parents, slackened and browned by the dulling throb of countless consecutive hours of cathode radiation, didn‘t notice.)
Lucinda the whore began to stir. Her tender auburn curls contracting, flexing independently along her long, white neck (the rigid steel springs in the black powdered gut of a Hoover SJ-2, hand-held vacuum). She was configured on her side, one thin arm pinned under her naked body, the other slowly flopped, fish like, in search of circulatory comfort. It finally settled, bridging his damp lap to her softly thrumming runner’s pose. Her back was to him. Glen had paid for the whole night (500 Euros) so, felt resolutely justified when he placed his flaccid organ in her delicately splayed fingers. Her thick French accent and unkempt, black, bramble of pubic hair disgusted him but she did have that hard sculpted, almost mechanical jaw line he liked so much.
She’d feigned exhaustion (along with other things) in dutiful homage to his vigorous pounding, and offered to “go for another,” if he would only be so kind as to allow her a few quick winks in solemn repose.
“Sure, sure,” he’d said, his hand already in his tattered travel bag by the night-stand, anxiously fingering the razor cut pages of any one of thirty manuals. “You get some shut eye. Recuperate.”
She was asleep within seconds.
He wondered absently, how close he had come to guessing her name. When he’d inquired out on the street, she’d responded with the expected, “What do you want my name to be?” Lucinda was the name of a disembodied tech support voice--a recording. On speaker phone, it was like she was there in the room with him. And there was something profoundly comforting in hearing that choppy, computerized voice, generated and programmed to respond to certain commands, squeak thinly from his Panasonic Corded 2-Line Phone with DECT 6.0 optional cordless headset. Technology’s perfect cohesion.
“All our old loves are corpses or wives. All our sorrows are virgins or whores,” he whispered to himself as he thumbed to the dog-eared page in the BJC manual. It was a phrase he’d read when he was young -- something by a snooty European author. It’s meaning escaped him but its relative pejorative nature -- its bleak, broad commentary on love had struck a chord. Also, saying it to himself from time to time made him feel smarter--worldly somehow -- in touch with the tragedy of life. The phrase -- as innocuous as it may seem, especially due to Glen‘s limited understanding -- was partly responsible for engendering the impetus to board a plane and travel to Europe. In Glen’s romanticized vision, the hop across the pond would reveal something momentous regarding the human condition. He imagined the magnetic heat signature of thousands of years of humanity careening, ghost-like, through narrow, cobblestone corridors -- leaving the ectoplasmic residue of countless generations of profound meaning and understanding. The ancient stone walls would be practically hemorrhaging with the compounded knowledge of humanity’s greatest minds - -seeping out, viscous and tacky -- waiting for someone to bask in its glory.
This notion, however, had not lived up to expectations.
All Glen was seeing was the inside of trashy hotel rooms, the vapid stares of sagging prostitutes and the ubiquitous filthiness that layered the laughably “modernized” streets. The cerebral osmosis he’d imagined was replaced by a sinking sense of soul-crushing emptiness. The ghostly vapors of history’s most industrious minds became the sticky film and deep stink of a two-bit whore.
And to bring him further from any sense of enrichment -- to expand the gaping distance from anything remotely historically significant… there were the tourists. Particularly, the Americans -- fat, greasy, clad in catch phrases and garish colors -- festooned with cameras and smart phones. And although Glen had done his best to blend -- to disguise his nationality by wearing muted earth tones and avoiding tour books -- there seemed to be some kind of internal tractor-beam that honed in and snared these blights on humanity, bringing them to Glen with sweat drenched, hearty hand-shakes and big toothy smiles.
On a jarring train ride between Brussels and Berlin he’d encountered one such American. A writer -- or, actually -- screenwriter as he‘d promptly classified. The man’s flouting quips and canned cynicism poured liberally from his flapping gash of a mouth which was, ineffectively, imprisoned by an explosively tawdry beard. At first glance, one would guess the oafish man to be in his late thirties, judging from his stolid gestures and receding hair-line but in actuality, was closer to twenty-five. A façade of pretense in concert with some gaudy non-prescription, horn-rimmed spectacles added to the ruse but the disguise could not persuade Glen’s tenaciously critical eye. He knew when something was manufactured.
Glen had tried to occupy himself with the streaked green vistas and quaint, snow capped villages fussily ambling outside the window but Mr. Intellectual, who’d claimed he was “escaping his art” and hadn’t seen another American in two weeks, decidedly graced his fellow patriot with the deigned privilege of divulging his mundane exploits. Finally, after an hour diatribe, roaming from the ignorance of Andalusian townspeople to the sun-leathered breasts of the Italian Rivera, he asked, “So, what’s that you’re reading?”
Glen had given up on the asymmetry of the landscape and had been trying to remain passively rude by deeply engrossing himself in the owner’s manual for the Minolta Autopak-8 D10.
(inter-cut here CU shot on the bloodless knuckles of Glen’s left hand as it grips his water bottle. Water inside bottle: “tasseled, captured storm.”)
“Manual,” he said, keeping his reddening eyes fixed to the same paragraph on specifications and accessories he’d been unsuccessfully trying to complete.
“Manual? What for?”
“Camera.”
The man‘s face lit up. “You a film maker?”
Glen realized in a cold rush, this was the most horrifically appropriate manual he could have been reading. It’d been the one on top of the pile--arbitrarily picked. Did he deserve this?
Glen reacted inappropriately.
“No, you fucking imbecile! I work at a Radio Shack in Seattle, Washington. I’m on vacation to get away from spurious geniuses with a penchant for agonizingly insipid small talk and preposterous philosophies, such as your-fucking-self! Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get back to my reading.” Glen sat back in the deluge of stares as the other passengers craned their necks.
“Spurious geniuses… I like that,” the shrinking, humbled screenwriter said to himself as he made his way down the aisle to find a more accommodating travel companion.
Glen was now back up north in Amsterdam where, upon his arrival, he’d disembarked from the train, walked past the Van Gogh Museum and immediately found the red-light district. He’d rented a room and in short order, found a “friend” for the night.
He tried to straighten up on the slick, stained sheets only to once again slump down, wedging his head between the wall and his boney chest.
“Shit. All our sorrows are intellectuals and Americans,” he said not really sure he was saying what he meant.
Lucinda stirred again.
“Are you ready, big boy?” she slurred in an ardent, dreamy voice, glancing over her shoulder but not committing to releasing the cream folds of the pillow she was embracing.
“No, I’m fine. You just go back to sleep.”
She did.
He read:
Removing the Color Image Scanner Cartridge
CAUTION!!!
Always remove the Color Image Scanner Cartridge as soon as you are finished…
Glen dejectedly slapped the open manual down on his pale legs. He knew what it was going to say. He’d read enough manuals on bubble jet printers to construct one out of thatch and twigs.
The room, with its paint-peeling walls and lumpy ceiling, mocked his quest for structure. It said that all things eventually succumb to entropy. Hard angles will soften and lean, machines will rust and fail. This was the universal European message. Everywhere he went he witnessed the slow death of industrious design.
He closed his eyes hard.
The flouncing weekend din outside, reverberating off tired, crumbling walls, began to grow more enlivened. The usual red-light tumult of bottles broken, scattered, swelling shouts and loud techno music recruited into its aural body the piercing sounds of scrapping metal (or, was it the characteristic banshee screech of a woman’s desperate plea for help?) Glen got up, manual still in hand, and slammed shut the dilapidated wooden shutters on the window.
“What is it?” asked the back of Lucinda’s palpable curvature, the slow slopes going taut for an instant in preparation for the supine, waking writhe. She rolled over, stretched and looked at naked Glen who was contemplating whether to drop the BJC manual into the wastebasket.
“Are you ready?” she asked through a gaping yawn, her eyes vacant. Another screech tore through the blotchy slats in the blinds. Lucinda didn’t even flinch.
Glen tossed the manual on the buckling orange carpet. “Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“Was that a woman screaming?”
“You want I should scream for you?”
Glen glanced back at the closed window, debating the idea of further investigation into the tortured noise. He turned back to Lucinda. “No, I’m done for the night. You can keep the money.”
Lucinda eagerly collected her strewn clothing and was out the door, leaving in her wake the sad truth of her falsified slumber and the beautifully coiling wings of smoke trailing from her gold filtered cigarette.
There was another scream.
Glen fell on the bed, face down, disrupting the three legged night-stand which, in turn, toppled his water bottle. The glistening cascade dove into the open flap of his travel bag, painting the leather a darker brown. The screams outside the window began to transform into drunken laughter.
(The camera pulls back on his sprawling pink body, panning a bit to the right, backing toward the window. We see the gurgling mouth of his water bottle vomiting into his bag of manuals. Camera backs out window [crane shot] and we see, below the suspended, ivy drenched terrace, four people excitedly kicking a portable television against a wall. The antenna screeches on the asphalt. Fade out.)
* * *
ADAM MEANS has suggested that it is only moderately important that you know the following details about him as both human and writer.
- Writer/director of terrible reality TV shows.
- Married to a writer.
- Baby boy named Maddex.
- Enjoys gloom, gigantic knives, Satanic imagery and kittens.
- Military brat—moved every three years until I was 16.
End transmission.