Tom's Private Room

by Cassandra Leo, 2015

Author's note: As this is the first short story of my canon of work, bear in mind that it isn't my best. In fact, it's terrible. It begins with an alarm clock, the protagonist was entirely unrelatable to me (a high school student at the time), and it makes use of tropes which stigmatize the mentally ill. The only bits here I'm still fond of are a few jokes and some imagery, plus the idea of the twist, even if the execution was messy. I don't know why I ever considered writing a prequel to this to take place in an aquarium. Read the following only in service of morbid curiosity.

The room could be described quickly and acutely: barren. It could even be said to be bland. The walls were all the same, beige tone reminiscent of an IBM PC from the 80's, missing any real identifying features. It was a bright, boring nothingness.

It could have been pink with sparkly mauve polka dots as far as Tom was concerned. He was much more focused on the fact that he couldn't remember why he was there. The more he thought about it, the more obvious it seemed that he had no idea what had happened to him in the past week, let alone what led him here. So Tom sat, thinking. Thinking thoughts, thoughts only a very worried man might think. Then, it hit him.

It was a dark Monday morning. Not dark due to weather, not dark due to it just being Monday, it was simply dark because Tom got up very early in the morning. If he didn't, he wouldn't have enough time to take his bike to work, and if he didn't take his bike to work every day instead of a taxi or bus, he would very quickly go bankrupt. He'd worked it out.

Tom rolled over and stared at his wailing alarm clock. "5:00" it read as it played the worst known cover of "Sweet Child of Mine" the world has ever known. He hit the snooze button, saying, "Just five more minutes."

An hour later, Tom woke up, glanced at the alarm clock, and panicked.

"Why the hell do they put the 'OFF' button right next to ‘SNOOZE’?!?"

Tom quickly rushed out the front door to catch the bus down the street. Right as it was leaving, he jumped in and paid the bus driver the last of his earnings in exact change for bus fare. It was one of those buses with subway-style seats running the length of the vehicle, which are inefficient and very rare. As he sat, he realized that a man, possibly of over 80 years, was eyeing him from across the bus as a wolf eyes a plump chicken. The man slowly scooted closer to Tom. The minutes on the bus felt like hours as the man inched his buttocks along the slightly disgusting bus seat. When they were directly parallel, the bus driver shouted, "Second and Towne, this stop!" Tom quickly got up and exited the bus.

He spent the rest of the walk to the office looking over his shoulder, feeling as though he was being watched. Luckily, the old man never appeared, so Tom continued into the building, through the new automatic doors which had cost the company more than his salary (after taxes).

Like every Monday, Tom went through his routine: up the elevator to the tenth floor and down the stairs to the ninth floor.

"They really should have rethought the elevator system instead of installing new doors." Tom grumbled. But soon enough, he arrived at his musty cubicle.

As he sat down in his slightly disfigured swivel chair, the intercom proclaimed, "MEETING AT EIGHT O'CLOCK!" He checked his watch and saw that it was 7:55.

"So much for an hour notice."

The conference room, compared to other conference rooms, was how a teenager perceives his childhood bedroom compared to how he saw it when he was three feet shorter. Because of this, the less important employees (Tom) had to stand in the corner.

A silence fell over the room as the boss, Richard, entered. "This meeting was called on short notice because I wanted to see who of you are punctual," he stated, "and it seems all the office was early today. This is a shame, because it means my job of deciding who to lay off is going to be more difficult."

Tom crouched a little to make himself less of an obvious choice.

"I'll be assessing your work performance this week. Be forewarned: the least valuable of you will not be returning next week." Richard paused for a moment, as if anticipating people would read his mind. Seeing as they didn't, he muttered, "Please get back to work."

Tom wasted no time in obeying this order. He returned to the cubicle and resumed work on his quarterly financial report (I'll spare you the details).

At five, the work day ended. The office could have resembled a prison releasing all the felons to a casual observer. Since Tom wasn't particularly pushy most of the time, he was about last out, only ahead of Bill, the assigned hapless IT of the floor who was pondering over why the PC without a heatsink was turning off five minutes after booting.

After a long stroll home in the rain, he walked into his house and smelled a familiar odor: meatloaf. Again.

Tom heard an equally familiar voice. "How was your day, honey?," his mother said to Tom as she hemmed a gown on her mannequin. "I'm putting this dress together for Martha. Could you model it for me?"

"Mom, you ask me that every day and I always say 'no.'"

"Don't embellish, Thomas, I don't ask every day."

"You ask every day you're working on one."

"Okay, you've got me there. Dinner's on the kitchen table."

Tom would have normally sneered at the specific belabored dinner before him, but he was tired and broke. He walked right into the kitchen, sat down, and ate the whole beef-based loaf in a manner only comparable to the Namco arcade game, "Pac-Man."

The next morning, Tom actually woke up on time: he was able to have his usual three cups of coffee and two slices of toast, one buttered, one jellied. He rode his bike to work, like he usually did. Tom ascended the elevator and descended the stairs, went to his cubicle, and began working on the financial report. An eternity later, Tom went down the stairs to the eighth floor and rode the elevator the rest of the way down, got on his bike and rode back home. Meatloaf, again, was waiting.

Tom decided to spice it up a bit Wednesday morning: both slices of toast were jellied. Regardless: bike, elevator, stairs, cubicle, stairs, elevator, bike, meatloaf.

Thursday didn't go so well. Tom, minding his business, riding his bike, just pulled up at the intersection of Second Avenue and Towne St. when his brakes locked up. He got off to examine them, still in the middle of the intersection. Not a single car was on the road, what was the harm?

Well, a semi came out of nowhere. It was surprisingly quiet until the driver started honking the horn, about twenty feet away from Tom, headed straight for him. Needless to say, Tom panicked. He jumped out of the way, and there went his bike. He'd just paid it off, too.

When Tom arrived at the office after a long walk of shame, Richard walked right up to him, clearly with a purpose. "Tom," he said in his ever-derogatory tone, "I'm going to need you to get that report done by tomorrow morning."

"Richard, with all due respect – that's still twenty hours of work."

"I wouldn't ask this of you if I didn't need it. Get it done, or you're out of here. Understand?"

Richard walked away. The question must've been rhetorical.

Try as he might, Tom simply couldn't finish by five. So, he put the file on his trusty dolphin-shaped flash drive, his prized possession: 32 GB capacity, USB 3.0, an LED in the blowhole. He'd gotten it in the gift shop on a trip to foreclose an aquarium, a singular memento of one of his least favorite jobs that ended in one of the worst ways possible. At least it paid well: that’s how he could afford it at its exorbitant price at the time.

Tom had a bad habit of moving files instead of copying them, but it had never caused him problems before. He put the files on the drive, the blowhole blinked, he safely removed it, and he put it in his coat pocket. The coat pocket he'd asked his mother to fix several weeks ago.

After what happened that morning, Tom had no bike. Well, he had a pile of scraps, but he couldn’t ride them particularly quickly. He had to walk home again. It didn't seem so bad – Tom rarely had much time outdoors. But then, the old man showed himself: and this time, he was riding a Rascal. At first, he seemed harmless. But then, it was zero to twenty in a second. Tom began to run, making sure to go the wrong direction so the old man couldn't track him down to where he lived. Eventually, Tom ditched the old man by hiding in an alley. But he realized, as he slumped against the remarkably clean Waste Management dumpster, that he'd lost his dolphin. The dolphin that contained three weeks of work...

Oh, he searched for it. Two hours were spent in that park. But around 7:00, he just gave up. He knew Friday would be his last day of work there, or possibly anywhere. He didn’t have good references and got really lucky with the job – until now.

A broken man, Tom headed to the local bar. He held his latest cashed paycheck, most likely his last. After many hours, he became inebriated and began thinking. Thinking thoughts only a very distressed man might think. He settled on a solution to all his problems.

Buses, bosses and bikes swirled in Tom's intoxicated mind. The bartender came up to him and told him of the night's special, on request of the waitress across the room: pork meatloaf.

Tom jettisoned up from the chair and gripped the bartender's collar. "Tell me about meatloaf once more and I'll kill you!" The bouncer figured he must've had too much to drink and kindly threw him out the front door, ruining his clothes. Tom simply stated, as the bouncer walked back inside, "They'll pay."

Tom reasoned that since he had to go home for an axe, he might as well start with his mendacious mother. Then, his backstabbing boss, his least favorite ex-coworkers, the bartender, the bouncer, and the creepy old man that had really particularly ruined his life. Yes, he would be last: it's harder to track him down, not knowing his name.

He was planning to break the law anyway, so he smashed a window and hotwired the fastest car he could find. Being drunk, he chose a Volvo.

The drive was one of the most life-threatening situations Tom had been in so far. He didn't know this at the time, of course: he was still drunk. And really, that was the cause of the near-misses and mailboxes hit on the way to his destination.

Tom pulled up into his mom's driveway, running over the already dented trash cans. He walked into the garage and grabbed his favorite axe. He walked into the living room and saw her. Tom attacked. The blood covered the room like red satin, the organs flowed out of her body like cotton from a teddy bear in a wood chipper. Tom saw what he had done. He fell down to his knees and began sobbing as the police sirens sounded in the distance.

Tom was in the room again. He was done remembering. He knew, knew of his final matricide, his meltdown. But he sat there, still thinking, motionless. The strait jacket seemed to get tighter as timeless moments passed. Then, the previously invisible door opened.

"Mom?"

"Thomas, you ruined that dress. I have to start again from scratch. I don't know how I'll find more red satin, though. Martha understood, but – why are you looking at me like that? Surely you don’t think -"

"Didn’t I…"

"Luckily not. I know what happened, honey, and I’m sorry about your coat pocket. Your boss called and told me about the paperwork you were doing... and that you’re fired. I'm beginning to think you need help rather than work, it seems like you've had a meltdown every week since the incident at the aquarium."

"Don't embellish, mother. It only happens every two months."