Business Man: 1

Listen. I’m at the top of a fifty storey high-rise with my laptop. I’m tapping out the letters that make up these words, and I can see a body falling down, down, down, off the edge of a stone half-wall, which I happen to be standing on, my black shoes bright as spit in the sun, my dress pants dancing absurdly in the chemical wind of this frantic city. Yeah, the body is mine. The imagination, too, and there I go splat, though I’ve fabricated the sound of it. The wind is so loud up here, blowing radiation right into my ear drums. A crowd gathers, little specks of volcanic sand collecting on a cement frying pan, momentarily made motionless, and certainly less stupid. I can see the sirens all the way from five blocks down, but I can’t hear them for this blasted hurricane. Emergency! No, listen. It hasn’t happened, I’m just imagining it, but I’m doing it because work accomplishes the same thing. It’s all politics. No, that’s cliché, lemme’ explain that. It’s perceptual positioning – desk-jockey hockey, all grim and brimstone gossip, but as calm and clinical as elective surgery. We’ve all voted for insanity. It’s not as though we have no choice, we keep on voting, as we assemble the morning’s data and slosh it around like mouthwash, as we spit it out into meaningless report after report, as we graph every conceivable variable on the face of earth to fluff up presentations (I’ve thought of graphing graphs, but no one would get it). “So yes, it seems as though Fart is rising far more quickly than Burp, as you can see by this jutting red line here, and this sagging blue line here.” Do you see my body falling now? So we are in agreement. The inaudible sirens, the state of emergency, brain splatter on the light post, and just another morning.