Unhuman Resources

by
Vin Siegfried

What he noticed about the room in his dream was what wasn’t there. Eggshell white walls but no windows. No posters with inspirational sayings. A grey formica slab of a desk but no drawers or sides, just thin metal legs.  No light fixture visible; the room was lit by a uniform soft glow. A small notebook was in front of him, sitting square to the desk precisely in the middle, a blue ink roller ball pen resting on the unopened cover. A door faced him, it was closed. He could not hear the sound of his own breath or his own heart beating; he felt an absolute silence, like nothing in the natural world of the earth.

He had sometimes experienced vivid dreams, but this seemed too real. Thoughts from somewhere came to him. This was a Human Resources office, and he was there to interview candidates for a job. He knew he could not leave, that on the other side of the door was a vast wasteland of nothingness. He was not scared yet, but getting there.

There was a quiet series of knocks on the door, but in the absolute silence it broke through to his consciousness far out of scale to the sounds. Who or what was knocking? If he opened the door, would this spare dry reality around him get sucked out, like when a window blows out on a passenger plane? Three knocks. A pause. Three more. Suddenly, he heard the latch bolt moving against the cylinder, and he could see the knob turning slowly. The door opened a crack, then stopped. He could see a sliver of a shadow, peering into the room. The door fully opened. Outlined in the dim hall light was an older woman with a thin expectant smile. She was slight of build with grey hair, and was wearing loose-fitting black stretchy athleisure pants with a more form-fitting white V-neck top. In her hand was a single piece of eight-by-ten paper. 

She walked the two steps over to the metal chair that was arranged facing him, sat down, and tried to hand him the resume. He was caught up in his head, frozen. She put the paper on the desk and pushed it over. 

She was still sitting silently, smiling weakly, looking at him expectantly. He felt like if he didn’t engage, there would be no resolution, and that would somehow be bad. He picked up the sheet and read the summary paragraph:

Mother of the main character of your work-in-progress novel. 75 years young, retired schoolteacher, in reasonably good health, goes to the gym twice a week. Widowed 5 years ago. Devoted mother well respected for work in the local school, lots of adaptability and versatility to help reveal multiple conflicts and story lines.

He was still unbalanced, out of place, and fearful, but his professional instincts, a familiar shield, kicked in. As a successful writer he had to deal with editors who made misguided and supposedly helpful suggestions. The novel he was working on was running long, and he had decided not to include his main character’s mother in any meaningful way. He looked across the desk coldly. Thinking this would go better if he played along with the HR theme, he said, “Can you tell me briefly what you would bring to this novel if I gave you a more prominent role?” The weak smile disappeared from her face. She said softly, but with a hint of defiance, “Well . . . love. I bring love. Isn’t that enough?” 

This was not going to be easy. He needed her to be convinced that this position was not for her. He said, “Frankly, no, love is not enough. I need characters that, without supervision, get the reader to sense the broader themes that made me write this novel in the first place. You don’t seem qualified for that.”

She sat upright in the chair, listening, slowly shaking her head no while he was speaking. After he finished, she sat there and let the absolute silence take over the room again for a moment. Then she said, “you know I can do that, I can do all of that, take the ideas you have to make this novel move your readers, make it memorable, make them remember me as they pick their head up from the novel and go about their lives. You just don’t want that. It is too hard for you.”

How did she know what was hard or not hard for him? He was the writer, he was in control. He said, “Sorry, I am not convinced. Can you give me an example of where you have been successful before with this type of work?” He had already made up his mind, she was not getting in, it would be too messy, require too much work. The publisher said he was interested based on the synopsis, and the synopsis did not include a prominent story line around the main character’s mother.

“If you don’t let me do this, your book will be empty. You will be empty.” He was offended by the threat, and said “I do not think so. The thing the critics always mention is that they like my authorial prerogative, what I choose to show, and what I choose to leave to the reader’s imagination. You are in there, but only as a fragment, a fleeting trace of a memory in the main character’s consciousness– and in mine.” 

The author noticed that the woman was becoming slightly transparent and he could see the outline of the door through her shoulder. He was relieved that his argument was persuasive. Soon hopefully he would wake up, kiss his wife good morning and go to his desk and put the in the finishing touches, and soon after his readers would buy the novel and realize that he still had it. Then the screenplay offers would come, and he could push the fear of insolvency back once again. Success solves everything, he thought. 

He could tell that she felt she was losing this argument. She looked down at her hands, which were ever so slightly becoming transparent. She could only argue for her existence with arguments he allowed her to form. Being brought forth from that nothingness had left her with a trace of a memory of what it was like to not exist. She did not seem afraid for herself, which he found puzzling. She seemed to be fighting for something or someone else. He saw her put her semi-transparent hands down on her lap, and straighten her back with quiet dignity. 

“I need to tell you something,” She said, “And it is going to upset you, I am sorry. This story needs me or it will have a big gaping hole, and your readers will notice it. I want to tell you why you are resisting this, I would rather not, but I have no choice.” He felt like this was a conversation he had to hear, in order to close out this dream and move forward. And maybe whatever she had to say would make the novel better. He made a mental note to get a sleep aid from his doctor to prevent this type of thing from happening ever again. It was upsetting. He said “Go ahead, but try to keep it short.”

When she had walked into the office, she had looked sprightly and hopeful, like anyone going on an interview. Now she looked sad and lined, seeming to carry the full weight of her years. She started slowly. “Mothers are blessed to carry the many happy memories of their innocent children, their little bodies held close. They are cursed to never forgive themselves for the many mistakes they make. Sometimes, those mistakes happen before the child has words, or a frame of reference for what’s occurred.”

She had stopped disappearing. “How could you know about something that happened to my main character when he was little, if I do not already know about it?” Her eyes watered up and she said, “Because it isn’t something that happened to your main character. It is something that happened to you.” 

Her eyes were glistening but her voice was clear and strong. “You were four. You had gotten sick at Nursery School, and they called me at the grade school where I worked. I came and got you and we went home. When I opened the door to the apartment I saw a bra hanging over one of the kitchen chairs. I grabbed it quickly so you would not see and then I heard them in the bedroom. I didn’t want to, but I had to open the door just to see who it was. She was one of the saleswomen from his office.” 

“I had put you down but you were clinging to my leg in the doorway, I was screaming at your father and he was screaming back as they both quickly tried to get dressed. I threw the bra at the woman in disgust. She slipped by me, but when your father tried to catch her to explain he pushed me out of the doorway hard, and I went flying. You were still holding onto me, but we flew apart and your head hit the leg of the kitchen table. You were knocked unconscious and laid there, so still. Your father and I instantly stopped screaming, picked you up and drove you to the hospital in silence. As you came around in the hospital bed we tried to determine how much you remembered. But you had hit your head pretty hard and it seemed like you did not remember anything, so your Dad and I just let it go. He didn’t stop screwing the saleswomen, but he did stop bringing them to our house.”

He was trying to hear what she was saying, but in his mind he just kept repeating: Mom. Mom. He was shocked at the apparition, and bothered by not recognizing her sooner. His mother stopped speaking and just sat there with an unfocused gaze. All of his adult life, he had been cold and indifferent towards her, disliking the way she treated his father. She’d suffered in silence. Every year when he was a child, his mother had insisted on neurological check-ups, and would listen closely to the doctor’s updates. When she had passed, some years ago, he really had not felt anything, and went through the motions woodenly. He had never visited her gravesite after she was buried. He had turned away and put all of his childhood behind him.  

She had stopped fading away and had become completely solid. She said “Let me live as the Mother in your new novel. You are my child, I always loved you and will always love you, that love exists, outside of space, time, novels, and dreams. Use it.” He sat there, defenses fading as he assimilated and made sense of her words. His father’s absences for key events in his life had been explained by the demands of his job, but now he was thinking that was not the whole story. His approach to the dream had crumbled, because this was about him, not the story. He felt deep sadness that he had spent this precious visit with the memory of his mother trying to reject her. 

She got up. “You heard me out. This is your story, you get to decide what happens.” She looked more resolved now, and turned, opened the door to the long dimly lit hallway, walked out and closed the door behind her.

Now that she was gone, he sat there and felt the nothingness return to the room. He was  sure that if he went over to the door and opened it, there would not be a hallway anymore. He had always felt comfortable alone, in a restaurant, in a crowd, sitting at his desk. But now he felt uncomfortably alone. He felt like nothing he had ever written mattered, because he had delusionally tried to control rather than just let things happen. He could no more choose who was  in the novel than he could choose who his parents were. The choices were only between authentic and inauthentic, between complete and incomplete. He realized he was incomplete as a person and as a creator. This is what the nothingness in the room was about, it was about the nothingness in his life. He needed to choose to be complete.

He woke up with a jerk and realized he had a massive headache. After his usual morning routine– coffee, treadmill, Email– he sat down and started making changes to the novel. He called the publisher, and though they both knew the changes would delay the publication, she seemed OK, and said she thought his prior efforts might have lacked some depth, and she liked the idea that he was trying to address that. He asked her to give him two weeks.

After a week, deep into extensions and revisions, he was making progress but the headaches were not going away, so he decided to make a doctor’s appointment. He had been going to the same doctor for years, he knew that the doctor was a rabid Yankees fan, and he was a Mets fan, it gave them something to poke fun about depending on which team was doing better that year. The doctor listened to his complaint and was in-progress tapping out a prescription for a migraine medication when he decided to  mention that he had taken a serious fall as a small child and had lost consciousness. The doctor stopped writing and paused, pivoting based on the new information, suggesting a neurologist and an MRI. The way the doctor framed it suggested there was some urgency.

The MRI tech the next day had asked him what type of music he wanted in the headphones to drown out the machine, and he had said “surprise me,” so the young technician had smirked and a moment later he heard incoherent atonal heavy metal, with the vocalist screaming some unintelligible phrase over and over again. Served him right, he thought, even the banging would have been better than this.

As he rolled out of the tube he looked over and the tech’s expression was blank. The music stopped and the tech said “We got some good pictures, thanks. Reach out to your Neuro and he will review the results with you.” This made him nervous, he had taken MRIs before for knee problems and he was used to the techs giving some sort of preliminary thumbs up or down after the scan.    

The next morning the neurologist met him in person. “Your doctor told me that you had some kind of a serious concussion as a child? Tell me more about that.” He said “Not much to tell really, I was knocked unconscious and I was hospitalized overnight. It was an accident. I had forgotten about it, but a relative reminded me.” No need to get into that he had dreamed it, that might trigger a psychiatric evaluation. 

The neurologist looked at him. “That headache might have saved your life. You have a cerebral aneurysm buried deep in your head, probably from the head trauma when you were small. You are only experiencing the symptoms now because of normal arterial calcification that happens with age. The good news is that we can fix this, and we should fix it very soon. If it ruptures you will either lose your life or be a vegetable.”

He was shocked. He thought back to the nothingness of the dream. He imagined living in the nothingness where his characters came from, waiting for someone to call him for an interview. “What is the risk of the operation?” He asked. “Way smaller than the risk of doing nothing.” The neurologist replied. “And in the last few years our ability to fix this with a mesh inserted through a catheter-based procedure has improved dramatically, you are lucky with your timing.”

He scheduled the surgery for the next morning. The prep and additional scans they had to do in order to be precise with the placement of the mesh would take most of the day, followed by a quick procedure to insert the mesh. He needed to be conscious during the procedure so that they could make sure they were not affecting his cognitive abilities. They were going to talk to him while they threaded the mesh in place, which sounded very strange. They would give him a light sedation and local anesthetic to the hip where they made the incision.

This had all happened very fast and in order to keep her from worrying he had not mentioned this to his wife. When he told her, he did not exclude the dream or what his mother had told him. The first look on his wife’s face was one of horror as he described the aneurysm, then when he mentioned it was fixable she calmed just a bit, but he could tell she was roiling inside. “Well, that explains a lot.” She said, “Your poor mother.” Hearing his wife say it broke a wall inside and he could not hold back the tears. With his eyes flooding silently, he reached out to her for an embrace. They held each other for a few minutes. “You know, if I survive this I am going to be a kick-ass writer,” he said. She pushed away from him, “You asshole, that is all you care about?”

During the procedure they kept peppering him with simple questions to keep him talking. “You married?” “Yep,” he said, “She is in the waiting room, so this better go well or you are going to have to deal with her.” The tech laughed, “Don’t worry, we have done a ton of these, just try to stay still.” The doctor threading the stent was behind a large screen and all he could see was the glow of the screen in his glasses. His mind drifted and the image of his mother sitting across from him at the desk appeared. She was completely solid and smiling.

When the first check of royalties arrived for the new novel, he had to look at the amount twice, it seemed too large. Amazon sales had taken off based on social media discussions regarding the life-like nature and authenticity of the characters, especially the main character’s mother. A blogger interviewing him asked if the character was based on anything in his own life, and he said “Absolutely not, as a matter of fact, the character first appeared to me in a dream, if you can believe it.”

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