What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and
ate up their brains and imagination?
—Allen Ginsberg
Can you actually die of boredom, Finn thought, and if you did, would it be a work-related injury?
The staff meeting with Bagby Barr took place as usual in Conference Room No. 5. Due to its airlessness, No. 5 was casually referred to as Big Stuffy or The Nap Room.
Bagby Barr, the partner in charge of the asbestos group, sat at the head of the table and did all the talking. Due to the lowly status of those present, Bagby had removed his coat and loosened his tie.
Bagby Barr was a man of substance, with his jowls and gray hair perfectly styled. Many years ago, Bagby Barr had come up the brilliant stratagem of boring everyone around him into submission. It had served him very well.
Opposing counsel, judges, secretaries and court clerks all filled with dread the minute Bagby Barr opened his mouth. His victims shuddered as they watched a river of gray sludge surging toward their homes. Nooo, make it stop, they screamed, like a chorus of bad actresses in a cheap horror movie.
There had been a major plaintiff's judgment in Los Angeles and two in San Francisco. Finn strained to remain awake as Bagby Barr reviewed each case in excruciating detail.
Once again, his Employment-Related Deficit Disorder was raging out of control. Finn's ERDD made it impossible for him to fake paying attention, even while he was being paid. Maybe the firm could issue Finn some toothpicks to prop open his eyelids.
Finn slumped in his chair and realized that he was listening to language sicken and die. Maybe language was too strong and Bagby Barr couldn't kill it off all by himself, but Bagby Barr could make language wish it were dead. Bagby Barr could reanimate verbs from the boneyard and set loose an evil army of flesh-eating clauses. Bagby Barr could create a sentence that finished first in its class at zombie law school.
Why was Finn in this room, pretending to pretend to listen? Why did Bagby Barr hate him so much?
At least Finn still had his self-pity. They could fire him or evict him or repossess his car, but they could never take away his self-pity.
He might be stuck in this room and this daymare job, but Finn's self-pity was always there, steady and reliable, no matter what happened.
The gray noise poured from Bagby Barr's mouth for another thousand years.
"But, Bagby, didn't the plaintiffs consolidate all the cases in Orange County?" Michael Gill said. There was no end to the madness, somebody had asked a question.
Bagby Barr frowned and said, "No, Michael, the motion to consolidate was denied." Bagby Barr didn't appreciate having his droning interrupted by the drones.
The gray sludge continued rolling downhill. At 2:00, since no one was brave or conscious enough to ask another question, the meeting ended right on time.
Finn shuffled back to his office on the fine, thick carpet of Loreck Eastman Kelly. Loreck was a Big Firm, a white-shoe powerhouse. Loreck litigators were famous as corporate gunslingers, battle-scarred players of hardball, specializing in the aggressive defense of the powerful and rich.
If some CEO had problems with asbestos or antitrust or militant workers, Loreck was the answer. In a hard, unforgiving world, Loreck had the courage to stick up for the overdog.
Finn's office was about the size of a box of cornflakes, with a fine view of nothing. There were three emails and two voicemails waiting for him when he returned. Despite the popular outcry, the Geneva Convention still didn't ban meetings with Bagby Barr.
One email, from his supervisor Tom Roth, reminded him to have the Juan R. Hernandez case finished by the end of business today.
One of the voices on the vmails was quieter and more familiar. "Charles," Katherine said, "I took your Supra this morning and found three cigarette butts in the ashtray. I thought we agreed you'd quit smoking. We need to talk about this tonight."
Finn didn't have time to hash this out now. His wife Katherine was a wandering scholar in the wilds of suburbia, and she wasn't real happy about it. This wasn't exactly how their lives were supposed to work out, him a paralegal and her teaching basic composition at three different community colleges.
Finn powered up the Law-Link system and searched for Juan R. Hernandez. Finn was the Data Pharaoh for all the G-H plaintiffs, so his odious chore was to monitor thousands of cases as they sludged through the system.
He thumbed through the Law-Link screens and dug out the information for the Claim Evaluation Form. Since the asbestos defendants were so hilariously negligent, the CEF was crucial to floating the logs downstream.
Name: Hernandez, Juan R.
Occupation: Diesel mechanic.
Exposure: Asbestos brake linings @ Co-Def Charlie's Truck Repair.
Asbestos-related condition: Lung cancer.
If cancer, tobacco hx: Ten pack-years.
If cancer, metastasized: No.
Benzene exposure: Yes.
Dependents: Four, two already reached majority. Wife, Maria, alleges loss of consortium.
He spent the next two hours slogging through the case of Juan R. Hernandez, et ux, v. General Motors Corp., Johns-Manville Corp., et al. When he was done, he emailed the CEF to Tom Roth.
Finn leaned back in his chair. He'd had another smoking dream last night. As he lit a cigarette and considered the nature of woman, the smoke rose and grew and swirled around until it completely filled the room. He'd awakened that morning with a warm glow of well-being and self-pity.
Charles Finn preferred dream-smoking to working at Loreck Eastman Kelly. And how did he end up here, again? What had he done to deserve this?
Finn could hear his wife warning him about dwelling on things, but dwelling was his life. This might be his job, but self-pity was his calling. It was his art.
In his self-pity, Finn could feel the power of the universe surging through him. Self-pity felt juicy. It felt right.
Somebody knocked on the door and cracked open his reverie. Finn called out, Come in. It was Michael Gill, smiling again, meaning he had some hot work-gossip that afternoon.
Michael Gill's father was the chairman of the gigantic MGE Group. After law school, Michael would get a job with a Big Firm that represented one of his father's companies.
Michael Gill would spend his life gently rowing downstream at ten grand a week. His future was so bright, he'd probably qualify as legally blind.
But, despite the fact he wasn't older than twenty-six, Michael Gill was bald. Not shaved or receding, but baldly bald. Medieval monk bald. As Finn's grandmother said, Into every life some rain must fall.
"Hey, Charles," Michael Gill said. "Cheer up, man, you're so morbid. Like I say, conceive, believe, achieve. So did you hear Loreck's leading the league in lung cancers?"
"No," Finn said, "I hadn't heard that."
"Yeah, Cohen and McCalahan has more mesotheliomas, but we're number one in lung cancers."
"Hooray," Finn said.
"Did you hear Tom Roth's gonna make first-tier partner?"
"Didn't hear that," Finn said. "Tell me more."
"Yeah, this fall, that's all I know. So when you applying to law school?"
"Right after I kill myself," Finn said. "Any good law schools in Hell?"
"Charles," Michael Gill said, "you're so morbid."
The phone buzzed and Finn picked it up. It was Iron Sharon.
"Tom needs to speak with you in his office, right now," she announced, and hung up. Iron Sharon wasn't big on hellos and good-byes.
Finn told Michael Gill he had to go and took the internal stairs up to the 27th floor.
Sitting at her workspace in front of Tom Roth's office, Iron Sharon nodded him in. Her Easter Island face revealed nothing, but then Iron Sharon didn't get where she was by being nice.
Tom Roth sat behind his Enterprise-class desk in his banksta suit and dark tie. Roth was slightly short and kept his curly curls cut close to his head. His sneer didn't exactly coordinate with the glasses sliding down his nose.
And what a nose Tom Roth had. A true honker, a pole-vault pole, Roth's nose stuck out so much that it frequently tripped innocent file clerks.
Roth cranked up his prefabricated sneer and snapped, "All right, you sent me the Juan Hernandez CEF. That's all wrong. Where's the Jesus Gonzales work-up?"
"Tom," Finn said, "I've been working on the Juan Hernandez case. You'll recall you told me to work up the Hernandez case."
"Don't tell me what I said," Roth shot back, "I know what I said." Roth fired Finn a piercing look and did a little karate chop on his desk blotter.
Finn had seen this movie before and said nothing. There was not much point in arguing with Tom Roth, given the way that Roth mixed the charm of a car alarm with the integrity of a crack whore.
"Stay late and finish the Gonzales case," Roth ordered, and returned to his PC screen. Although he didn't sympathize, Tom Roth knew it was hard to work in the shadow of Tom Roth's brilliance.
Trudging back down the stairs, Finn diagnosed that Tom Roth had contracted a bad case of desk-job machismo. Instead of a legal administrator, Roth imagined himself a dark warrior, a sweaty Spartacus in the arena. Roth's prognosis was poor, since there was no known cure for desk-job machismo.
Back in his cereal-box office, there was a message on Finn's PC screen: This program has performed an illegal action and will be shut down.
Finn rebooted, but all his work that afternoon had already been deleted and slid into the vortex. The Law-Link system, Loreck proprietary software, crashed and dumped all the time.
His message light was blinking again. It was another voicemail from Katherine. "Charles, I'm at home," she said, "You need to come home early tonight. We need to talk."
It had been a rich, full afternoon and was shaping up to be another fun night at home. Maybe he could just jump off a bridge after work.
Luckily for Finn, he still had his companion, his best friend, his self-pity. For Charles Finn, to feel that self-pity, to burst with that runny, phlegm-like flame, was success in life.
Jon Alan Carroll is a fiction and humor writer, so his path is a lonely one.