C4 antho - Chamber Four

~286~ The Chamber Four Fiction Anthology
too, but only to try the Wiener Schnitzel and spend a few
days in seminar rooms.
Joe Stone was the exception. He was American and the
company hadn’t even sent him to Europe yet, but his was the
cubicle that opened like a secret on to the boss’s door. Despite
various drawbacks, the arrangement suited him well.
He preferred to be visible to no one, and at midday Herr
Halsa would close his door and tighten the slats on the narrow
shade covering the long, tall window beside it and
(Joseph was fairly sure) nap. Herr Halsa idolized the chief of
the Volkswagen company, and the chief of Volkswagen held
as his guiding principle that nothing must remain on his
desk overnight. So, to ensure that nothing violated this
adopted dictum, Herr Halsa forbade everyone from putting
papers or objects on his desk during the day also. Which left
him with extraordinarily little to do.
Herr Halsa opened his door with the fresh snap of someone
about to take the air and disappeared into the matrix of
grey-walled cubicles. Joseph pasted another block of boilerplate
just where it belonged, then plucked the lemon out of his
iced tea to resqueeze it. The rind of a lemon, with its regular
dimples and high yellow complexion, cheered him so extraordinarily
that he plucked and resqueezed several times as he
drank each glass. The sun warmed his back, the sky had receded
higher than ever, it was an uncontainably beautiful day.
The silence broke.
“I don’t care if the file is on your hard drive!” Herr Halsa
cried. He was straining to yell as loudly as possible, no doubt
to make an example for everyone in the building. “I expect to
see it in the next ten minutes, or your job will appear in tomorrow’s
classifieds!”
Whatever else one could say―such as “Joseph Stone was
badly paid” or “Joe Stone the PhD was out of place here”―he
did not forget to enjoy the small pleasures of his job.