In a dream, all my former bosses appear, one after the other. I think the enforced idleness of quarantine has summoned them, to query the gap between my nose and the grindstone, and give me shit about my timekeeping.
From somewhere in 1986, Ron Wasson shouts my surname. He calls me into his office, a glass box in the corner of the mailroom, and tells me to shut the door. Ostensibly this is about me being late, but really he’s going to tell me a long dirty joke. This isn’t just a dream; it used happen at least once a week.
Even sitting up in bed with my eyes open, it takes me a few moments to accept that Ron is no longer my boss, that I don’t have to laugh at his joke before he will sign my timesheet. I decide to get dressed, even though it is not quite 6am. I don’t want sleep, and the mailroom, to claim me again this morning.
I recall that Ron liked to encase his dirty jokes in a thick veneer of non-fiction. He would first ask me if I knew John from the traffic department – Johnnie Z, not Johnnie C. Yeah, I’d say.
“Johnnie went to the Polish club for lunch last week,” he would say. “You ever eaten at the Polish club?”
“No,” I would say. “I thought you had to be Polish.”
“Nah, you don’t have to be Polish. Anyway, he sees this guy at the bar. And he’s like, a perfectly normal guy, except that he has an incredibly tiny head. Now, you know Johnnie, he would never say anything…”
“Miaow!” the cat says. I am standing in the kitchen, holding my shoes. A sideways morning light catches the dusting of ground coffee on the worktop. You might never notice it otherwise.
“It’s the little things,” I say, to no one.
“Miaow!” the cat says.
“Of course,” I say, pulling open the cupboard where the cat food is kept. “Your bowl is full, but whatever. Let’s just pour more food on top, and then you can eat yourself sick.” The cat’s ability to ignore sarcasm is prodigious. I pour, it eats.
I step into the garden, which still holds a chill. The squirrel hanging from the bird feeder doesn’t run away at my approach; he just watches as I pass under him. The animals are slowly reclaiming the outdoors.
I sit at my desk in my office shed, recalling how a few Polish beers would erode Johnnie Z’s normal reserve, until he was moved to ask the man on the next bar stool about his miniature head.
“I was in the marines,” Ron would say the man said. “I got shot down, and I ended up alone on this desert island. I found this old bottle on the beach, and when I opened it out came this beautiful genie.”
For his one wish, Ron says, the marine requested sex with the genie, but this was against the rules. It took, on average, 20 minutes for Ron’s joke to reach its unprintable denouement.
My coffee is cold. On my way back to the kitchen I find the tortoise lying on his back in a puddle of his own urine. He cranes his neck and fixes me with a look that says: please don’t write about this. “What happened?” I say, turning him over. Evidently he took a shortcut over brick edging and got unlucky. He rests for a minute, catching his breath, and then pushes himself into the tulips.
Half an hour later, my wife finds me sitting at my desk, arms folded, mouth ajar, in a glass box in the corner of the garden. “Busy?” she says. I think about telling her about the tortoise, but it seems disloyal.
“Come in and shut the door,” I say.
“Why?” she says.
“You ever eaten at the Polish club?” I say.
“What are you talking about?” she says.
“It turns out you don’t need to be Polish,” I say. “Anyway.”
