Everyone in the building survived. Fathers will go home to their children, to raise them and protect them; mothers will return home to their children, to nurture them and guide them. Bosses will return to their places of employment and will work hard in fits of execution, enforce policies and double check their prospectuses, while assuaging their board member’s apprehensions and inspiring confidence in their shareholders.
These Executives will win new contracts and execute those contracts, and close those contracts. They will pay their senior managers, who will pay their middle managers. These middle managers will check and double check the timesheets and work product of their line-staff and will disburse checks to them, in a bi-weekly fashion, minus taxes and deductions, such as FICA – which includes payments to Social Security, not their own, but for those drawing on it at the moment. Some of those employees will receive their checks by direct deposit at their bank, where the bank will float the aggregate sums of all of the accounts held at their branch and will invest in stocks and bonds and investment properties. The bank will float loans to first-time homebuyers, and will refinance the mortgage of a family who has a new child. The bank will give an elderly couple a reverse mortgage to supplement the couple’s combined Social Security checks. Other employees will wait on line at a check-cashing location, will pay fees to cash their checks, and will purchase paltry items while there, such as, public transportation cards, and money orders, and a movie sold by the booth off to the side.
The sum of all fees paid for these transactions by the whole lot of employees who do not have direct deposit will combine into the salary for the cashier of the check-cashing location, as well as, pay the month-to-month lease to the property owner of the physical property.
Doctors will survive because everyone in the building survived. Among hundreds of others, there are three doctors in the building, twenty-five nurses, and one airline pilot. There are six people working for the Metropolitan Transit Authority, one of them drives a bus, two of them drive a subway train, three of them are administrators, one high-ranking decision maker and two line-staffers. There are seven cooks, two of which are chefs in well renowned restaurants, five of which work in the fast food industry and so we can hardly call them chefs. Of the five of these fast food workers, four of them have, the misguided notion hitched to a pure-hearted aspiration to start there and work their way up to chef of their very own restaurant –real restaurant. They dream of owning the type of restaurant where men propose to women and fathers eat with their families. Where hard working men go to have a home cooked meal when away from their homes. Of these four dreamers, one dreamer will learn from his ignorance and will go on to work as a cook in a diner. He will do more than just reheat frozen beef patties, and he will work there for several years.
When the owner of the diner dies, his daughter will be at a loss when trying to figure out how to keep the business running and she will offer the dreamer chef partial ownership of the restaurant. Our dreamer will seed his legacy here, his family will take pride in ownership and several generations down the line this partial ownership will grow into a multi-billion dollar, international franchise.
The building has nine computer engineers, three of which are telephone “help-desk”-type operators, two of the nine work tirelessly on hardware, repairing broken components, explaining to customers that using a computer as surface-area to perch liquids on, is a “bad idea”. Four of those nine engineers develop software -- from video games to websites to operating systems. Of those developers one will seed the industry with a new way of looking at artificial intelligence, several iterations later – as this seed breeds new seeds in the minds and computers of other developers and those breeds seed new breeds into yet other developers around the world – several computer generations later, true artificial intelligence will be born.
Everyone in the building survived. The doctors who will save lives, beautify the deformed, and rearrange the mental state of the mentally deranged will continue to do so in full capacity. For this the world will be healthier and more beautiful and more sane. The pilot will safely land a Boeing 747 carrying over 200 passengers, under emergency conditions, with no engines and damaged landing gear. He will keep the nose up long enough to glide the steel bird onto a semi-cushioned, make-shift landing strip. All of his years of experience will allow him to navigate without use of the computers, and though some passengers will be slightly injured, they will all survive.
A little boy named Darius was born on October 13th, nine years ago, to a crack addicted mother. Darius, miraculously, was born relatively healthy given the condition of his mother. However, his heart had an irregular beat. It would palpitate in an unnatural pattern and so the doctors warned that any beat could be his last. Sadly, his stability was more luck than lore.
Darius was separated from his grandmother in the mall, and so he wandered across the courtyard into an office building. Innocently and quite by accident, he slipped by security, and onto an elevator which went to the 23rd floor. The passengers all looked at the child oddly, wondering who he was with, but each quickly dismissed it in their minds, assuming that he was with one of the other passengers on the elevator. In the selfish, self-absorbed fashion that most elevator passengers board and eventually exit the lift, each of the passengers filed out, paying no mind to Darius, who lingered behind and exited last. Young Darius wandered over to the cafeteria on the 23rd floor and picked up candy and cookies because children like these things. Darius did not intend to steal – the open fashion of the strange corporate cafeteria would give a child, foreign to its interior, the impression that all this “stuff” was free for the taking. Darius was not greedy, he only took a small piece of “this” and a little bit of “that”. Darius concluded his full circle about the oval cafeteria and as accidentally as he wandered in, began to wander out.
“Hey, excuse me little boy,” a cashier who happened to be walking by said to Darius. “Who are you with?”
Darius began to answer but was interrupted by the cashier, who had just happened to be walking by,
“Excuse me sir”, the cashier said to a gentleman punching minutes and seconds into the cafeteria’s microwave. “—open that up, let me see what you’ve got in there.”
The man obliged the cashier who had just so happened to be walking by, who stopped for a moment to address Darius. The microwave man opened the microwave without hesitation, with a sort of – dopey, I didn’t have my coffee yet, I work too hard, and I’m going through a divorce – look on his face.
“Sir, you can’t leave that pot pie in the aluminum container when you put it in the microwave,” said the cashier, who just happened to be walking by, who stopped for a moment to address Darius, who just happened to catch a glimmer of foil in his left eye as the morning sun shone through the window of the oval cafeteria.
The dopey man obliged again by removing the pot pie and placing it back on the refrigerated shelf near the microwave – too much work – the dopey man thought. What the dopey man did not know, was that the placement of the microwave was one of poor choice, next to the refrigeration unit. The refrigeration unit’s placement was one of poor choice, on the wall that housed the main gas-line to the kitchen.
What the cashier, who just happened to be walking by, who stopped for a moment to address Darius, who just happened to catch a glimmer of foil in his left eye as the morning sun shone through the window of the oval cafeteria, which in turn prompted him to address the dopey man, did know was that the aluminum on the pot pie would have a bad reaction in the microwave.
What none of them knew, including Darius, who had momentarily became separated from his grandmother, and then walked passed security, and then was ignored in the elevator by self-centered passengers, and who thought he was taking a little bit of free stuff, was this – had the dopey man been just a little less dopey, had he been faster on the draw, he would have pressed “start” on the microwave. After pressing start, the aluminum of the pot-pie container would have began sparking, those sparks would cause sparks to jump out at any metallic object nearby, including the refrigeration unit. The refrigeration unit’s Freon container would have been heated and the super compressed gases inside of that container would have exploded, punching a whole through the wall, rupturing the main gas line that ran through to the kitchen. The sparks from the microwave and explosion of the Freon container in conjunction with the sudden rupture of the main gas line would have compounded into the ignition of those gases, which would have traveled both up and down the main gas line, which ran through the entire spine of the building. The building would have exploded right up and down the center, with a final, secondary, devastating explosion at the base of the building where the gas line receives its accidental incendiary, and which housed a cacophony of other incendiaries. The final explosion would have burned to death, crushed to death, dropped occupants from heights to their deaths, blew apart bodies, limbs – strewn about, internal organs propelled out of their bodies -- finalizing bloody deaths.
No one in the building would have survived. The fathers would have burned. Mothers would have been crushed. The bosses would have been propelled from high places. Sometimes God births a child in subtlety, no one knows of the child’s birth, she is a secret. At other times, God births a child in fanfare -- it is a celebrated occasion. Still, at times God births a child in tumultuous contexts, the child is born in the middle of war, of a great disaster such as an earthquake, a hurricane, moments after a tsunami has struck or levies have broken. However, there is another type of birth, wherein God births the child in a notion -- he thinks it up, and loosely strings together a destiny, and deconstructs it a bit, drafting and redrafting loose odds and ends. Sometimes parts of this notion may be unnatural with a broken, half-conceived rhythm to it. A palpitation that lands on the odd, unhealthy 109th second instead of the perfect, health reinforcing 110th second – this is the meaning between life and death.
Darius, at birth – his heart had many beats -- over one-hundred of them. It was God’s notion that tailored the context of his birth -- the fate of his mother to promise herself to a glass pipe and white rock; and to a man named John, or perhaps he was a john named man. It was God’s notion that she would carry Darius for seven months and that one night, after “turning a trick” she would hop out of a station wagon on a cold winter day and would slip on a patch of ice. Her frail frame seemed to carry a three month-old fetus and not the seven month child, which she did. Her water would break, and if not for the fact that her leg had broken as well, she would not have been taken to the hospital, as her attentions toward her pregnancy took a back-seat to her thrill of the chase, the elusive race to capture the feeling of that first “hit” of crack. In the doctor’s hands, he held the little crack-baby, who seemed to slip out from her gnarled crotch effortlessly, almost dry as a desert, his flesh matching the wavy, and wrinkled grainy texture of the Sahara. Barely any amniotic fluid found. His heart beat its final irregular beat on the 109th second instead of the 110th second. God’s notion, a fate reconstructed – the difference between life and death. Darius died.
Therefore, no one in the building survived.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment