The Madman's Kiss

Having been affably discharged by the Chairman himself, as a blameless casualty of the Recession of ‘81, Martin Jeppesen was cleaning out his desk, pausing at the window to observe the crowd gathered around the now legless woman in the middle of Sixth Avenue. From his fifth floor vantage point, he could see patches of her, a light blue torso matching the sky, a frizz of blond, shifting with the ebb and flow of the crowd and, through an arm or over a shoulder, a detail of her placid, patient, spectator's face, cradled in the lap of a terrified child, and a few rivulets of blood from the main puddle, obscured by the crowd. Far from putting his own predicament in perspective, the spectacle only intensified a vertigo so compelling that he had to move away from the window, for fear of hurling himself out, on top of the woman. The desk he was emptying had been mistakenly requisitioned only six weeks before. He had intended a larger circular slab of oak but, through a mental lapse, he had miswritten the requisition form and received a somewhat wobbly semi-circle of soft pine in which, wriggling through a knot, was a large clove-brown worm, or possibly a play of light on the irregularities of the wood. Not that it mattered --- he had been dealing with dual possibilities like this for some time, usually in times of stress when a calm exterior and intellectual control was imperative and the only relaxation he would permit himself was an inexplicable worm in his desk, or a huge, archangelic bat wafting about a boardroom, or a glob of molten ink slowly enveloping the head of a garrulous luncheon companion. Whether he actually saw the worm or the bat or the ink was debatable --- Martin tended to doubt it. What was certain was the ferocity of his imagination, which could will a tranquillizing image at opportune moments. Things happened fast at Fedco, the food processing arm of Occidental Life. He had been fired only two days ago and already his secretary had been transferred to a survivor of the current purge and his staff reapportioned among the marketing departments of more viable products. His accoutrements of power were still present, but now there was no nerve-ridden sales manager in the hard-backed Spanish chairs before his desk, no cluster of hungry vice presidents on the Chesterfield couch and easy chairs around the coffee table, no suppliers to admire the Japanese scrolls on the walls before getting down to business.