ganymede

Author’s note: When I left work yesterday, there was a ‘luau party’ happening in the lobby of my building. It filled me with some kind of bemused revulsion. I wrote this using that imagery/situation as an attempt to get at the hollow heart of the horrors of capitalism. Note the word ‘attempt’ there. Maybe this is overly simplistic and overly Foucault 101?

She’d been practicing her pasted-on smile all day in a cosmetic mirror so that it didn’t look quite like a photo-grimace; she had to have some semblance of authenticity, after all. She was on the clock.
She tilted her head like an owlet. “Wine or beer, sir?”

She was briefly glad that there was a solid bar, draped with cheap fake flowers (after the Event they’d go back in the storage closet until the dog days of next summer), between her and the executives. It was a rare one that didn’t raise his eyes from her cleavage, rest his elbow on the bar, give her his answer between yellowing teeth with a little fat salamander tongue. They couldn’t touch her, and she couldn’t punch them.
The executives were mostly male, Hawaiian shirts slightly unbuttoned, greying chest-hair spackling their pallid flesh; of course they were. Even the women, slightly uncomfortable in their sundresses, looked at her down the sides of their noses. She figured their patronizing glances were tinged with fear; they could have been her, might have been her, might lose their glass slippers and become her. Their privilege hummed with taut tendons, high vibrato.

“Louie Louie” distorted over the PA. Nonsense words. Harmless. Everyone knew it. It sounded like blurry noise to her.
In the corner, two of her coworkers were trying to set up a limbo stick. People on the edge of retirement acting like they were at a junior high school mixer. Pathetic, this tilt at innocence.

“Wine or beer, ma’am?”

Loud colors clashing. Inflatable, replaceable, fake. Everywhere the simulacrum of – she reminded herself – what may have been once an indigenous tradition. Was it ever? She didn’t know. She knew little about Polynesia. Did it matter what was real once?

She felt, all over, as if she would crack. What would leak out when she did? What kind of iron-black slime? The smiles were getting tinier and more brittle on her mouth as the evening wore on; she hated that she’d been roped into this, afraid she’d lose her job if she wasn’t a “team player.” Her heart exploded for the service industry. What did these (“Wine or beer?”) interactions enforce, if not the steel girders of a hierarchy that had and would exist no matter the firebombings, no matter the toxic hatred of the workers propping the whole thing up?

They all assumed she belonged to the catering company. She’d let them believe that. She’d keep what she did all day a secret, keep her intelligence, keep her dedication. She wouldn’t give these fools one piece.

The PA began blasting “When a Man Loves a Woman.” She teetered on the edge of frowning and raised her eyebrows to lift the drawbridge of her coffee-stained, well-lacquered-and-lipsticked mouth.

She knew how this would play out. They’d get drunk and the men would get more flirtatious and the women would get more twittery and sealed-off and someone would win a blender or something in the limbo contest and her HR director would pass out donation forms and information packets which would get discarded discreetly and she’d be the last one to leave, pushing the wooden bar into the service elevator, helping the janitors pick up the scraps of bright paper, and they’d do it all again next year whether she was there or not.