Map of Outworn Days

There was a manager from my time at the firm who had a drawer full of teeth. He would present biweekly awards to the team with names like Admirable Brutality and Vain Desolation with the expectation that we would live up to these sorts of abominable articulations, and for the most part we did. 

Mondays would entail meetings with charts, diagrams, population patterns, costs of medical test kits, speculations on how many poor people could die before the populace cared. Claire, due to her background in etiology, spearheaded our Monday meetings. There was always a blasé medieval lucidity in her intonations when she spoke of the disease and global infection rates.  

I sat alone at night. In my apartment. Streaming psychological thrillers between news-updates about the spread of the disease and the best preventative methods. My apartment was next-door to Claire’s, and I could hear her through the thin walls crying.   She cried constantly in her apartment, though never at work. They used to tell boys not to cry, now they tell everyone not to cry.  This is how the system works, or at least the brand of conspiratorial patriotism I adhere to says that is how it works.  

On Thursdays, during our lunch breaks, I plotted long literary digressions to Claire on notebook paper, digressions, I knew, she would never see. It wasn’t that I loved Claire, love wasn’t allowed anymore, rather the fact that I knew secret information about her, her crying, endeared her to me. Made her interesting to me, and being interesting to another is very fashionable these days.   

I cleaned my workspace and my apartment with a brand of disinfecting wipes recommended by the firm. There’s a certain guaranteed percentage of germs the cleaning agent kills. The cleaning agent has a tropical scent, which is pleasant, most things now are pleasant.  However, the scent is also a bit discomforting, for the disease originated in the tropics, and I cannot help but associate the scent and the disease’s point of origin. 

My former manager, the one with the drawer full of teeth, vacationed in the tropics every July. He would return to work sunburnt with small cloth bags full of new teeth for his collection. Our team would watch him through the glass walls of his office open the drawer, scoop up handfuls of teeth and shove them into his mouth. Danny was his name. Danny would rattle the teeth around in his mouth, like pebbles, then spit them out, one by one, back into his drawer.   

The afternoon I quit the firm I sent our team a group text, which included an original sonnet about the importance of washing your hands, covering your sneezes, and coughing into your elbow. Art must always acquiesce itself to some ideology or other.  We were always told this. Of them all, it was Claire, who I hoped would keep herself germ free, and that the numbers, stacked against us all, would spare her.