Mason Belber sat at the small white table in his small yellow kitchen drinking of a cup of carrot juice and trying to relax his mind. He hadn't woken up this early in over a month and he was agitated and confused and unhappy.
The only thing more depressing, Mason thought to himself, than being out of work was trying to get a job. Certainly, unemployment had had its drawbacks. Ignoring money worries (which should never be underestimated), Mason felt guilt and shame in his idleness. This wasn't like him! And even if this had actually been quite like him for a while now, there remained a deep sense that he was playing a role he was never meant to play.
As he stared down into the deep red and blue bars of his tie, a tie he hadn't worn since the day he'd been laid off, a distant dull panic started to have its way with Mason's stomach. It all came back to him in an accelerated rush of fear and dread: the beige and the brown, the unforgiving logic of spreadsheets, the unpaid overtime, the lonely lunches on busy midtown side-street mews, miles from everyone else with their tuna melts and gyros and reubens and cobb salads bathed in a gelatinous slather of blue cheese dressing, and the carnage of that day, a year ago, when his whole department had been laid off, one by one, without warning, heads rolling multi-directional like the pearls of a pearl choker torn from an old woman's neck, some in tears, others pink with indignation, all eyes staring in what-the-hell-am-I-supposed-to-do-now paralytic stasis and fear; and Mason, luckier than most as one of the last and offered a moderate severance, riding home in a car the company, in a startling act of cruelty, offered to them all, Mason, sitting there forced to crawl down 7th Avenue, past all the city's employed, like the cousin of a murdered monarch, not important enough to behead, but still royal enough to deserve the agony of penniless exile, paraded down the Avenue des Champs Elysees in a horse drawn carriage, while the peasants throw tuna melts and gyros and cobb salads and snarling leers of hatred at him, Mason quietly churning two emotions he was sure (though wrong, he'd never really gotten to know anyone there) that none of the others felt: regret at failing (finally having been given carte blanche!) to deliver the fustian monologue of righteous invective he'd practiced for months and that ran through his mind, even now, a clarion, alliterative masterpiece of a diatribe worthy of brute Baptist, even evangelical, delivery that would have certainly caused Randy Slough, that manager of the middle, that toady tormentor, that banally evil bureaucrat, to confess his mistakes and his own unworthiness to a tribunal and submit himself to a very public and painful cleansing; and the second emotion, the one Mason had a hard time accounting for (and accounting was his business!) but that once felt, he had to admit was maybe his truest expression of self, coming, as it did, unbidden and shameful...a nonsensical and enveloping relief that had him giggling for the rest of the ride home.
Mason hated his job, hated the people he worked with and especially hate the toxicity of all that hate, yes, but his happiness at this point was the cautious happiness of the wrongly convicted and finally absolved criminal. It had nothing to do with the prison drear, the warden's sanctimony, the guards' sadism or his fellow prisoners' hopelessness. It was the simplest of joys. It was not yet one PM, the sun was out, and Mason had absolutely nothing to do.
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