IV. Operational Context Zones
Type 0 for neutral. Type 1 for strongly agree. Type 2 for agree. Type 3 for disagree. Type 4 for strongly disagree.
You feel this incident could have been handled more properly.
“4.”
You feel this incident could have been avoidable.
“4.”
You took every step to avoid the incident.
“1.”
You are in complete control of your mental and physical faculties.
“1.”
You sometimes get angry and do things to lash out at your employer.
“4.”
You sometimes act irrationally out of spite.
“4.”
You sometimes feel it is necessary to sabotage the work place.
“4.”
When you are bored with your environment you create operational zones of confusion and observe the effect it has on those around you.
“…0…”
You employ anti-authoritarian Marxist concepts in the workplace.
“…0…”
You feel that in a perfect World there would be no law, theft and drugs would be more readily available, and that people would be less responsible for their actions.
“…”
Please press send and wait in the Pre-Evaluation Room.
I saw Willis in another office on my way to the Pre-Evaluation Room. He was nodding his head at a man standing up behind a desk. The man was talking wildly about something called, Operational Context Zones. His hands were moving in thick blows and his oversized suit seemed to be covered in sweat. Willis was tilted back in his chair so as, I gathered, to avoid contact with the man’s sweeping gesticulations.
“…You’ve got to analyze and evaluate! You’ve got to know what is going on and what’s going on behind what’s going on! You’ve got to evaluate those goings on and analy…”
A woman wearing a polka dot blouse and thick red-rimmed glasses closed the door to the room. The placard on the door read, Administers Administration Meeting Room. And another, smaller one below it read, (A.A.M.R).
Assessing which was the Pre-Evaluation Room nearest the Evaluation Room was geometrically impossible; there were four Pre-Evaluation Rooms, the Evaluation Room being directly in the middle. The building had the layout of some kind of government experimental facility. I Chose P.E.R three and had a seat.
Instead of magazines there were training manuals and highlights with several crayons to fill in the lines in bowls on the coffee table.
There was only one other person in the room. He was a thin, elderly, turtle-like man wearing glasses and a bow tie. He had one of the highlights out and was coloring a picture I couldn’t make out from where I was sitting.
“Mr. White?” A woman called out from the Evaluation Room.
Mr. White put the highlight down and went inside, leaving me alone in the room.
After a while I stood up and went over to where he was sitting. I turned to the page marked with a red crayon. There were smiling butterflies and several trees with flowers growing around them. In the middle was a smiling squirrel holding an acorn. At the top was a picture of a crayon indicating the artist should color in the cartoon. But Mr. White hadn’t colored anything. Instead, he had drawn little pictures of daggers around the edges. There were X’s over the squirrels eyes and DIE, DIE, DIE written everywhere.
About half an hour later the door opened and a woman walked out asking for Clement Landers. “They are in the room to see you now,” she said.
“Where is the other guy?” I asked, sitting down and looking around the room for the elderly man.
“He is being processed,” replied one of the four members of the board sitting at the desk.
“What does that mean?” I asked, looking around the small, white room for some kind of device.
“Not to worry,” said an athletic man wearing a t-shirt and cut-off jeans at the desk, “I know how that must sound, but he’s actually just a new-hire out-patient driver and those guys are processing his driver’s license.”
“I see.”
“So let’s get down to business.”
“Yep.”
“We’ve interviewed Willis and the success management system (S.M.S) has interviewed you, now all we need is any additional statements you would like to make before we make our final decision,” said a man wearing a shirt that read, take me to your mental healthcare employee evaluator. Pictures of an alien with his eyes crossed and flying U.F.O.’s adorned the shirt.
The other man was wearing a tuxedo shirt and the woman next to him had on a hooters tank-top.
“Listen, we know how you must feel and we support you all the way. After all, you are an Estate employee!” the man with the tuxedo shirt said.
“You are valuable to us, a member of the team!” said the woman in the hooters shirt.
“Well…”
“You are lucky Mr. Landers, you are an elite behavioral healthcare assistant; you assist those who are crazy and they get better,” said the man with the tuxedo shirt.
“Um…what he means is, we assist those who are behaviorally challenged. We don’t use the word ‘crazy’ Mr. Masterson,” the man with the cut-offs said, leaning forward in his seat nervously and rubbing his hands together.
“I was just testing him Matt!” said the tuxedo shirt man in a flamboyant tone of voice.
“Enough!” the woman in the hooters-top said standing up. “All we need to know is do you think this could have been handled more efficiently?”
“I don’t...”
“Okay! Excellent, well listen…if you need any Traumatized Victims of Traumatic Event Assistance, or T.V.T.E.A, just tell us. Do you think you need that? How are you feeling?” The woman asked.
The evaluation panel sat smiling at me anticipating an answer. There were framed pictures of cats hanging from branches on the walls. There was a photograph of a fence line, maybe, I thought, of somewhere in the UK. The grass was wet. The sky looked damp and had that special color that meant it had been drizzling like that for weeks. The wooden fence was downed at the gate, twisted as if with warped wood, something irreparable, something that would stay that way not because it was unfixable but because it seemed more itself broken than fixed. I turned away from the picture and looked out of the small window where I saw something moving. It was Willis. He was standing in such a way as to evade the line of sight of the evaluation panel. He had his thumb and index finger in the shape of a gun and pointing at his head, pulling the thumb trigger over and over again like Robby Roulette, one of our clients, laughing so loud I could faintly hear him through the window.
“How are you feeling Mr. Landers?” said the man with the tuxedo shirt.
“Is any assistance necessary Mr. Landers?” blurted the man in the cutt-offs.
“Um…”
“Mr. Landers, how do you feel?” The first man said.
Willis stretched his arms out and cocked them, as if pumping a shotgun, and aimed the invisible weapon to his open mouth, crossed his eyes, and pulled the imaginary trigger, laughing hysterically.
“We’re here to help you Mr. Landers, please, if there’s anything, anything at all.”
I got up quickly and made my way towards the door.
“No problem! Let me know!” I hollered nonsensically, rushing out of the room.
“Mr. Landers, we’re here to he…”
I found Willis in the parking lot smoking a cigarette and sitting on the hood of the highway-worn beat up brown hatchback he one day borrowed and never really returned.
“They really make these solid,” he said, indicating the car as I walked up, “how did it go?”
I put my hand out in the air and gestured quickly for the car keys.
“That bad huh…” he said, opening the driver’s side door and pointing at the passenger seat.
“I quit,” I said, making my way towards the passenger seat of the car while Willis started the engine. “I’m thinking I’m going back to Idaho to finish my degree, maybe major in business like Thom…public relations or something…move out to Seattle and buy a condo, learn how to ski, maybe buy a blender…you know…so I can blend my own fruit?”
“Don’t do that, the real gold is in Yachima, Washington. There’s a sign out there that reads ‘WELCOME TO THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE.’ There’s an old man about 80 miles from the sign that’s real excited about the Frosty Prince moving in next winter. You should go there instead, more of a statement.”
He started the engine and we drove out of downtown towards Crane Street in the Northeast.
“Don’t take those people too seriously. They don’t get much sunlight,” he said after a while.
It began to rain and I watched the patterns of water move down the windshield as we drove. Willis didn’t have wipers. He said he didn’t like the sound and the movement of the blades. Squinting made one pay more attention.
We hit the bridge and I watched the big red beams move across the sky.
“What was that place?” I asked laughing.
“That was the Complex. It’s funny, after all these years I’ve only been there twice.”
“What was the first time for?”
“Same deal, but that time a guy blew a few people away.”
“Really? Why?”
“I don’t know, but after that we stopped encouraging freedom of expression.”
I searched him for some sign he was joking.
“They actually call it ‘the complex’?” I asked after a short silence.
“Yep. You know, kind of the end of the line?”
I thought about that. Lance had mentioned something about being ‘way out on the line.' He was on this line at one point, the Complex now being the end, where, incidentally, I was sent to be evaluated for sending him, although I work for the Complex people, thus working on the end of the line. What does that mean? I wondered.
“But what was it?” I asked after a while.
“What, you mean the enthusiasm?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“That’s the whole policy. They want to ‘jazz’ people up. You met Roswell, you know what I’m talking about.”
“He’s a little much.”
“Well that’s the idea. You were trained that way. That’s what we’re supposed to be doing. They think a man doesn’t show signs of progress until he knows he’s showing signs of progress and he won’t do a thing if he has time to think about it. So you don’t give him any time, you smile in his face and dance around him like an idiot trying to keep him happy and ignorant of where he really is, that being here…” he said with a wave of the hand, indicating the happenings of whatever was outside the car window.
One of the four Wonder Bread convenience outlets in route from the complex to the Plaza drifted slowly past our field of vision.
“I’ve seen some of our clients, like at the Golden Sun for instance…not at the Plaza, we have lighter conditions here, but I’ve seen some instances…there have definitely been instances…” Willis broke off. His tone of voice had changed from his usual sarcasm and tired way of speaking to something I hadn't quite heard from him yet, possibly bordering a line of empathy.
“What are you getting at?” I looked over at him. He was concentrating on the road, looking at the dotted lines far ahead of him.
“Like Charley, you remember?”
His eyes were red now and I could see he was waiting for me to respond. This new face of Willis' startled me and I tried imagining the person he was talking about. An image of a man sitting in a chair in an empty room with the sun coming up kind of materialized and evaporated when he started talking again.
“Imagine you’ve got it really bad, the voices, the anti-psychotics, the usual alleviation meds, and you’re sitting there at a place like the Golden Sun, and for a brief moment you wake up absolutely lucid and look around you. You look in the mirror. Can you imagine? We keep them sedated and happy not because they are potentially violent to themselves or to others, but because a brief dose of the active reality we all live in will bury them further in than before. The disease here is environmental, not necessarily the cause, but the total lack of a cure. If they could ever be the delusions there wouldn’t be a problem to begin with. If that reality were somewhat managed accordingly…you know…like if Justin was actually engaged in global combat with the Chinese, if the voices in his head were Russians attempting to detonate some magnetic pulse in the earths core, if the occasional hemorrhages meant the clock was ticking down and he had to act. You know? If all of that were real the tables would be reversed here.”
Willis adjusted himself in his seat and looked over at me to see if I were following him. I shrugged my shoulders to indicate I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about, or that I did and thought it nonsense.
“Well alright,” he said after a while.
“Why do they do it with us?”
“Who, the Evaluation People?”
“Yeah, ‘Team Teamwork’, why do they treat employees like clients?”
“Are you kidding? Have you seen that room? They’re in there eight hours of the day…they are so far gone…”
“What do you think they’re going to decide?” I asked.
Willis paused for a moment and looked at me out of the corner of his eye and turned on to Crane St. “I don’t know exactly, we’re going to see how this whole thing reverberates through the media and all of the receiving outlets and then make a decision.”
“What was your suggestion?”
“I think you need a break, sure, but you followed procedure. Although you thought he was an employee, and showed him how to do meds for fucks sake, you still followed procedure after the fact. Once you saw him with the pills you tackled him, turned him over on his side, put your hand down his throat and tried getting the pills out. But there were too many. Theoretically he should have just been really sick but it was a pretty intolerable mixture, like as if he knew what he was doing. Anyway most of the debenzapine’s and benzisoxidil’s and the others are fast dissolving, they got into his bloodstream, into his brain, and zip.” He made a zipping gesture with his hand.
“That’s enough,” I said finally.
Willis shrugged and looked back at the road. “We’re just going to see how it goes over for a while Clem. They’re afraid of…relapses.”
“Relapses?”
“The depression,” he let out a long sigh, “…after having accidentally murdered a man might cause a relapse in your drug history.”
“What? Who told them about that?”
“Well, when you were 17, coked up out of your gourd, flying down the road at untold speeds at 4:00 in the morning yelling like a lunatic and doing God knows what else, Sgt. Downer pulled you over for narcotics possession, Sgt. Downer checked you into county. Mom made a deal, you being a minor and all, and off you went to a short stint at the clinic. All of these computers talk to one another, Clem. All Roswell had to do was type in your name and let the information feed through.”
“Then why did he hire me? He hired me almost three years ago, if he knew I had a ‘drug history’, why didn’t I know about it?”
“They do that a lot, hiring former drug addicts. They feel hardened drug addicts offer a degree of down to earth, ‘I’ve been there’ sort of relief. You can communicate with them…because you are the same.”
“Are you fucking nuts?”
“Well, not necessarily the same, just ‘life-hardened.'”
“A lot was going on. I did some coke. I was 17 years old. I spent about four hours in that clinic, you know, just paperwork. ‘Do you feel you need assistance?’ ‘No’. ‘Do you sometimes lash out at others?’ ‘No’. And what am I, a recovering drug addict? You know that is complete bullshit.”
“I know, but they don’t. That isn’t the way they think. They think whatever the computer gives them.”
“You’re an administrator.”
“I think what they give me.”
“But that’s different from what you know?”
“Yes, it’s different from what I know.”
That would be the fourth and final Wonder Bread outlet.
“You’ve been working here a while now Clem,” he said, pulling into one of the parking spaces behind the Plaza, “but you’re not cut out for this climate. Also, you’re beginning to get the drift, you know, the stellar drift into their World?” he said, and shook his hand around his head whistling the X-files tune. “When you first came here I liked you immediately, I said, ‘this is a sound, rational, uptight human being.’ But now, well, you’re beginning to get out there on the line. You want my advice?”
I shot him a questioning glance with this last part, wondering what all this about ‘the line’ really is. “I bet you’ll tell me,” I said, turning to the window where a tired Randall stood on the blacktop looking up at the basketball hoop.
“Thicken up the receiving filters in your subconscious. Build some walls. You’re supposed to communicate on their level, not exist on it. You’re beginning to be too goddamn sympathetic instead of using the artificial sympathy you learned about in training. Remember this bud; sympathy must be artificial, otherwise you get too close, and when you get too close what happens? That’s right! You’ll be swallowed up in the God-awful abyss people dwell in.”
“Take me home Willis.”
“Erica was summoned to some kind of religious meeting, you’re on graveyard tonight.”
