A Return to the Office

I have a singular loathing for  séances, Ouija boards, past life remembrances, narratives of the uncanny, ghost stories, hauntings, vampires, werewolves, monsters pieced together from the discards of other people’s limbs and organs, witches, spectral visualizations,  phantom lights, the living dead, apparitions known as The Hook, The Fang, The Man Without a Face or any other such sobriquet, the ethereal reenactments of tragic events on certain nights in certain atmospheric places, revenge from beyond the tomb, ancient curses, walking mummies, spooky faces in the window, fairies, sprites, goblins.

I categorize them, along with the brotherhood of man and the milk of human kindness, as fairy tales of one sort or another.

As a selections editor in the publishing business I saw enough of these come hopefully across the transom and land in the slush pile of unsolicited manuscripts — and quickly discarded — to last me a lifetime, or in the case of the untalented authors who believe in such things, an eternity.

That was in the old days.

At the point of the next generation taking over Dillerby & Sons Publishing, we may not have been the most prolific or admittedly the most profitable of the presses in New England, but we were the most….decorous and stately.

We were honorable.

We preserved out dignity, and while others of our competitors picked up every shiny toy there was in the publishing game – true crime, science fiction, self-help (God help us), and simple-minded doctrines of watered-down religions from the other side of the world – we were proud to stay with safely republishing the classics already (and inexpensively) in the public domain, rebinding them into handsome editions. Hefty volumes of history, essays, and culture, and the occasional foray into sedate biography.

We had substance!

That is, until the ‘Sons’ of Dillerby & Sons took over the Press. Did the floodgates open on every sort of popular trash?

Oh, my, did it ever!

I told young Donald Dillerby that I would have nothing to do with it. I had no intention of diluting the reputation that his father and his uncles had built over decades. These sorts of excesses undercut a firm’s good name until in the end it is irrecoverable.

As the young people say, ‘count me out,’ that was my message, and I delivered it in no uncertain terms.

But they were determined, with the stubborn attachment to an idea that often characterizes those burdened by a lower intelligence.

It wasn’t long before I was shunted off – yes, shunted off! that is the only phrase for it, I won’t hear of another – from the inner workings of the firm.

Were there meetings that I was no longer invited to?

Was my voice at the weekly Editorial Meeting on Monday morning passed over and passed by and generally neglected?

Were my red-pen edits upon numerous manuscripts ignored and their publication shoved forward anyway?

Oh, yes, yes, and yes, that, and much more!

Well, so be it. There would be at least one voice of reason and taste in the building and if I was the only one left to fight this battle then let me go down honorably, let me go down swinging.

I say again that I told Donny and his sister Elle both that I wanted nothing to do with it, nothing to do with this new line of supernatural tales and spectral investigations and monthly newsletters and emails absolutely proclaiming the fact that we had now, after 120 years of publishing, abandoned our standards and were peddling the most worthless of the worthless.

I do not care what profitability they bring or what return on investment. Better that we should sink beneath the cruel waves of commerce than cater to faddish trends and foolish public tastes.

Ghosts! Ouija boards! If you can believe such a thing. I tell you as I told them!

And in no uncertain terms.

So I retreated to what I knew best, the essay form.

Let the staff grow younger and the lithesome young women come to work in clothes that common streetwalkers were wearing the year before. It was no concern of mine. In the offices of a publishing house yet, if you can believe it!

Ah, the essay. The most elemental of the forms of literature. The play of ideas across the human mind tracked with words upon the page.

A single topic – On Character, On the Freedom of Man, My First Acquaintance with Poets – stated, isolated, explored, supported, challenged, all in sterling prose that had survived the test of time.

Addison, Steele, Hazlitt, Lamb, Coleridge, oh, the irreplaceable Coleridge, the immortal Shelley, the irrefutable Johnson, Carlyle, Mill, simply to recite their names is to breathe the air they breathed. Now this was writing as writing was meant to be!

I shifted and shuffled my stack of dignified authors like a deck of cards and published them at a steady, some would say stately, some would say sedate pace, in keeping with the dignity of the work.

New editions, new introductions, collections of essays written upon the original canon of essays, explorations of the form.

I spent my time gloriously!

And while the rest of the staff ran around like headless chickens trying to keep up with demand, edition after edition, book-signing this, wine-tasting that, live television goings-on here, historical reenactments of supposed hauntings there, I kept to my task, my schedule, and my commitment.

Why, look at tonight, this very night, very late into October.

Pulled from the very deepest of sleep by a sudden concern summoning me back to the office, I found myself in the underground parking having followed unconsciously, as we all do, the drive to work that we make every day.

I had forgotten, you see, something at the office – some task undischarged, some deadline unmet, some letter unposted, though I couldn’t recall exactly what, that was the maddening part, only that I had forgotten it – and had come back after hours.

I expected to find the place empty – you should see them clear out at the stroke of five — and sometimes before! — but lo and behold, tonight there were still cars in the Dilby section of the parking lot.

Hallelujah for this amazement is all I can say.

It was cold outside and of course dark by now, as though all the shadows of the day and night had gathered and layered themselves here just for my arrival.

The express delivery man had the door open as I came into the elevator bay. Seeing that he had already pressed the button to my floor I stepped in beside him.

Did I greet him?

No, certainly not. My behavior was formed from my very earliest days to converse with my peers…but never with the help.

The hallways were darkened – maybe they had all ‘vamoosed’ as the young people say today – but then I heard voices in one of the offices.

By the sound of it, all of them were in there, or all the ones that counted in the new ‘regime’! Yet another meeting without me! They waited until after hours to convene it! This really was beyond the pale.

I had to walk by the so-called executive offices – let us call them what they were, the rooms of people with titles attached to them who actually needed training wheels, not elaborate job descriptions – and saw that it was Donny’s office itself that was closed.

The windows were frosted glass so I couldn’t see directly inside, only that there were five or six of them standing in a circle holding hands, shadowy behind the glass..

Now what nonsense was this? Some corporate bonding folderol? I gave out a noise which others have described as a snort; I wanted no part of it, whatever it was!

Down the hallway to my office.

Oh, my office, my lovely office.

All oak and leather and padded chairs across from my wide-spreading desk. This, this is the way that a publisher’s office should look: dignified, measured, thoughtful, an environment conducive to thoughtful evaluation.

I still couldn’t recall what I had come back for, only that it was urgent to come back.

I admit to some momentary failings of memory at 86.

Momentary.

I looked around the room and gave out a ‘pshaw!’ this time.

That silly ass of a secretary had forgotten – again, again, again! – to switch the date on the small office calendar on my desk.

How many times have I told her? Her last duty, her very last duty before she left each evening, was to flip the page over to the next day so that I knew exactly what the day was to hold once I came in. That was the extent of it! She had one job and she couldn’t even do that.

And now look. The date showing was a full five days ago.

This was really too much. I am a patient man, but this was really too much to bear.

I marched right down to Donny’s office, to give them all a piece of my mind. It was all coming to a boil for me and I realized now that this is what I had come back for, this was the urgency, to finally give my last defense of a way of life, a certain way of managing existence, a short but powerful recital of all that I had seen in my time and how much of it was slipping away.

Funny that such a purpose could be hidden away from myself, but now I felt it all so strongly that there was no doubt in my mind what my purpose was. This is what I was there for, this was my purpose on earth.

I nearly flew down the darkened hallway.

Young Don’s door was open but there was no movement within, again simply this stock still scenario, all of them looking at a lettered board on the desk, some product as though a publishing house should traffic in products, some silly game no doubt, and all of them reciting, nearly chanting.

Oh, is there no end to foolishness?

“If you were wondering, here I am!” I said, entering the closed room with a great deal of suddenness, and saying it in no uncertain terms and with as much asperity as I could muster, which on a good day is quite a lot. “What is the meaning of this?”

One by one they each looked up at me with horror, each with the same desperate surmise.