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If so, what kind?
(The only hint I can give you is the same one I have--the afternoon before my boss had told me about her electronic Pound-the-Gopher-Game.)
Dream, March 14, 1999
I strolled morning streets on the edge of downtown, on my way to work. The city was Austin, the locale the state offices complex, but it resembled the area of Baltimore surrounding the Johns Hopkins undergraduate campus. A multi-level concrete parking garage and a double boulevard with a median full of clipped greenery asserted themselves visually. Small trees, bushes with sparse white and pink flowers, and whited concrete curbs--the grass ever so carefully trimmed around them--made prominent icons, emblematic, somehow, of my life.
I worked in the vicinity, at an organization that formerly had been a large university. Over time, the school had imperceptibly changed into a multi-national corporation, engaged in traditional business. Corporation X had recently proudly erected it’s flagship building, a blockish, windowless structure, southwest of my offices in the twenty-story X Tower Something had gone wrong during construction. The new building, which, compared to the graceful towers surrounding it, presented a looming, oafish aspect, contained the air conditioning plant supplying climate control for the entire business complex. It had never really worked right. Corporation X anticipated a public relations disaster if its defects were leaked to the press.
A mid-level executive for Corporation X, slim, with mid-length brown hair, I wore a lightweight brown suit, a white silk blouse, and brown leather pumps with 3-inch heels.
My job involved rigging the defective air conditioner to keep it running well enough to escape media attention. As I approached my office, I muttered to myself, “Fuck it all to goddamn hell,” thinking of the methods foisted on me by the Corporation X high muckety-mucks.
‘Air conditioning,’ by the way, doesn’t do justice to the seriousness of my work. The people employed at the complex would all suffocate if I failed to keep the plant going.
The technique dreamed up as a ‘fix’ to the problem called for me to sneak every morning into the new building, past the armed guard at the front door. Once inside, I had to secretly install live gophers in the power cells of the air conditioner. The cells were like honeycombs and there must have been over a hundred of them.
Moreover, before I could try to spirit the doomed creatures past security, I had to carefully prepare them in the kitchen. Before a gopher could be placed in a power cell, each animal must be coated with a miracle-working, clear gel and then swaddled in swaths of thin indigo-colored cheesecloth. Getting the fuzzy, squirming rodents basted with the gel was gut-wrenching work. If the jellied solution got on my skin, I could die. And the damn things kept frantically biting my forearms with their beaver-like teeth, trying to get loose.
To make things worse, each afternoon I had to top off the morning’s work by discreetly pouring magic-gel solution into all the complex’s drinking fountains and into everyone’s soft drinks, including their frosty pitchers of Kool-Aid which we provided, free of cost, at breaks.
I hated my job.
“This is ridiculous,” I complained to my cut-throat boss. “You people don’t give me enough funding or enough staff support to keep this thing running! I can’t do a gopher-fix without resources! What do you think you’re doing?”
Continuing in the same vein, I ranted,
“Its a crack-brained, hopeless idea! Before long, I won’t be able to keep it a secret anymore, and the damn thing won’t work, anyway That air conditioner is going to fail anytime!”
As usual, he blew me off
That afternoon, the two of us were huddled over the drafting table on the eighth floor of the high-rise X Tower. The air became close, breathless. The lack of air suggested further deterioration in the air conditioning plant.
My boss, formerly lacking a distinguishable face, morphed before my eyes into my ex-boyfriend. Noting the effects of the climate control plant’s slow failure, he said:
“Look, you were right. I’ll give you $10 million more in funding for the gopher operation. Just get the damn thing fixed, okay?”
Then, his black hair falling down fetchingly over his forehead, he asked if I would like to come over to his house that evening for Mexican food.
“You’re disgraceful, you’re trying to buy me off,” I shrieked, “offering me your money and your allure. That isn’t good enough!--I want much more from you than that!”
In a huff, I ran from the office, and hastily caught a convenient elevator, punching the ‘down’ button with ferocity. Three or four people were already on board. They probably noticed my full head of steam and they certainly heard my litany of “I HATE you. I HATE you!” Two women nervously edged away.
The elevator began to descend. Suddenly my stomach escaped me. The moving box had tipped to the side. One cable had given way, leaving us hanging there, askew like a venetian blind with a bad cord.
Panicked, but determined to prevent my worst nightmare from coming true, I took over the controls, groping for the insubstantial tin metal hand brake that I knew was there—I could see it in my mind’s eye, sticking out of the control panel, painted with white stripes and lovingly decorated with Mexican color and gaiety. I could practically feel it in my hand, but I couldn’t find it.
My terror grew. Just as we lurched into a precipitous slant, my hand made contact. I began to let the elevator down smoothly. We held our breath as we approached the first floor. The doors opened, the floor of the elevator creaked and groaned. We glanced up at the lighted numbers over the elevator doors. Horrified, we saw we had been going up, not down. We were on the twentieth floor.
Desperately, I re-closed the elevator doors, using a balky hand-crank, and then gingerly lowered the contraption oh-so-slowly to the first floor--the strength of my hands and fingers on the fragile tin all that separated us from oblivion.
Stepping out of the elevator, walking with relief through the freedom of the black marble lobby, I made for a folding table on the sidewalk, behind which stood my ex-boyfriend and the Bureau of HIV and STD Prevention (where I, in fact, worked at the time) Staff Services Officer.
The table and its immediate environs were reminiscent of the outside displays that student organizations put up on the mall at the University of Texas. Our folding table faced south; it overlooked a gravel road which ended in front of my yellow adobe-brick childhood home in Brownsville Texas. The three of us bent over the table, feverishly reviewing tall piles of paper-—all of them documents concerning the gopher caper.
My fellow employee at HIV/STD turned to me with a distressed look, tiny double-creases marking a frown between her brows.
“You’ve been reassigned.”
Incensed, my face reddened. I glared at her.
“I can’t believe the two of you are going along with this,“ I hissed.
My ex-boyfreind stepped in quickly, trying to convince me that my next assignment, writing a definitive history of the great gopher fix, should not be construed as a red herring arranged by high-level Corporation X executives. No one was trying to push me aside.
The fiscal, legal, and public relations implications would henceforth be handled by others. Best of all, he reminded me, I would no longer have to enshroud sticky marmots and then listen to them squeal every morning as I pushed them to their deaths in the mechanical maw. I would be free to investigate anything I wanted and be given all the time I wanted to write.
I stood there, half-bemused, taking in gentle sunlight, considering their explanation.
“They’re trying to get rid of me,” I thought.
“Still, what they don’t know is that I think history is awfully important.”
“I’m sure,” I brooded, “they’ll try to stop me from publishing, once its done……But, I’ll publish anyway,….somehow.”
Reflecting, I saw that I could use the time working on the gopher history to shape developments and to better my position within the organization.
Staring into the horizon, I felt a warm breeze round my cheeks and find my hair, pulling it back, exposing gold earrings. I interpreted the tug of air as symbolic—I should consciously let my mind pull back within itself.
I distanced myself heart and soul from them and decided to feign ignorance of their real intentions. I would take the assignment and to use it to my advantage.
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