Old Things
By Avram Leib ben Gordon

I shut the little juicy glob of tuna inside the wall, where it would shrivel to just a speck, perhaps never to be seen again, or maybe to be rediscovered in 2037.

I started a new job this week. For two months prior, I had done nothing but sit on my ass, writing, smoking weed, and fantasizing about a romance that could never occur with J----, my superbly talented, stunningly beautiful editor.

Now, I'm part of a three man crew subcontracted to replace all the smoke detectors and fire alarms in the monolithic, high-security eight-story Senator Richard B. Russell Agricultural Research Facility, in Athens, Georgia.

Richard Russell must have been one heck of a Senator, because he's got everything named after him here in Georgia. Aside from the building on the wooded outskirts of town where I work, there's a Richard B. Russell federal courthouse downtown, and to the north there's a Richard B. Russell Dam, which of course frames, yup, you guessed it, Lake Russell. The lake is Georgia's second largest, and it's probably big enough to float the Destroyer USS Richard. B. Russell. Something tells me this Senator used his influence to bring high-dollar construction jobs to his home state.

The late Senator must have served in the 1960's, because the Russell structure where I'm employed proclaims "1967" on a bronze plaque out front. The place is a simple oblong rectangular prism, cream-tan in color, with just as much style as the 1965 Zenith black and white television I grew up with.

The building is gracefully plain, not unlike the sans-serif fonts favored by Establishment Madison Avenue during the early-to-mid-60's when the blueprints were drawn. If I knew my architecture better, I could describe more eloquently the building's utilitarian, bureaucratic-utopian ideal.

Everyone who works there permanently is either a lab-coated scientist or a stuffed-shirt bureaucrat, except for the secretaries and janitors, who all seem cool when no bureaucrats are watching. The secretaries even sneak us homemade cookies sometimes. I say "sneak" because the building exudes a sense that such friendliness is prohibited.

The bureaucrats seem to still be stuck in their 1967 attitudes of attempting to re-live the complacency of the 50's by enforcing it, a la Nixon, upon those who would buck the code with undisciplined behavior such as smiling, laughing or listening to any music written after 1850.

We (the service employees) share an unspoken joke every time two or more of us are caught in a hall or an elevator or a security checkpoint with one of the bureaucrats. All of us workin' men and women have become expert at sharing our derision, via wordless glances and hints of smiles to each other. We use sickeningly sweet politeness to the bureaucrats, who sometimes fail to note our obvious insincerity.

Apparently, blue collar workers have long behaved this way at the Richard B. Russell federal complex. I found the evidence on my first day there, buried deep in the building.

Placed carefully on a perch high in the guts of the first floor's ceiling, amidst the plumbing, wiring, and ductwork, I found an old Coke can, steel like the huge beam upon which it had been perched. It had not only been there since the building's original construction, but it had obviously been placed and left with some degree of care: it was not dented or crumpled, and was set open and upside down in a place too precarious to set down one's drink, and too visible to be considered hidden. Someone had left their trash as a memento for me to find, thirty-five years later. Coca-Cola only used steel cans briefly, and so the artifact is actually rare and precious.

I was probably personally responsible for placing it there, in my last incarnation, before I got fried in an electrical accident and reborn in 1969. I have no recollection of this past life, but it sounds good, doesn't it?

Have I been a naughty tradesman in all of my past lives? I sat pondering that very question today on the job, the Friday of my first week there. I was deep in meditation, nibbling my tuna fish and tomato sandwich absentmindedly as I attached a "horn-strobe" (sounds like "horny-toad," doesn't it?) to its wall mount and wires.

As I was leaning over the hole in the wall where I was working, a thumb-sized, mayonaisse-y dollop of tuna slid out of my sandwich and fell into the hole. I reached out to remove it, but at the last moment, my hand was stayed by conscience - I couldn't let my fellow blue-collar workers down like that.

Finishing my sandwich and licking my fingers, I shut the little juicy glob of tuna inside the wall, where it would shrivel to just a speck, perhaps never to be seen again, or maybe to be rediscovered in 2037.