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Lamentably, Aoyagi chose that moment to enter the room eating a cheese Danish and whistling "My Sharona." To his credit, he never would have done it if he'd known what was happening. However, so few people visited the office that it was usually ninety-nine percent safe to assume no one would be there.
Be that as it may, the moment went up in smoke. Right the hell up!
"Sorry! I didn't know we had a visitor."
Always the professional, Kropik hid his anger behind the mask of an impassive face. "I was just telling him about his file before handing it over."
Aoyagi's eyes flicked back and forth between the old man and the boy. He knew what was about to happen and was checking the temperature between the two to see how things were proceeding. Unlike his priggish, self-satisfied colleague, Aoyagi did not enjoy this job. He enjoyed Icelandic women and Japanese literature but could not bring those things into this office. He could only bring himself from nine to four, five stupefying days a week. Always waiting for the hapless few, like this poor chumpy kid, to come in with their hopes sky high and their guards down. All of them naively certain they would discover in lost memories what was missing from their lives. Instead what they found was that most of those memories were a writhe of poisonous snakes set to strike. No one got out of this office alive. And the older Aoyagi got, the more he came to realize that applied to Kropik and himself as well.
"What's your name, son?" he asked.
Surprised by the question, the boy looked at him. "Milton Kropik."
The red hair struck Aoyagi more than anything else did. He looked at the boy's strange hair and then immediately at the old man. Old Kropik had no hair. According to him, he had been shaving his head since he was twenty-five. Red hair, no hair. All Aoyagi could focus on was that difference. Not the fact the boy had exactly the same name as his tiresome colleague. Not the fact that there probably wasn't another person on earth who owned such a lousy name. No, all Aoyagi could think about was one had hair and the other didn't.
But old Kropik didn't appear affected by this staggering coincidence. He had picked up a perfectly sharpened Yellow pencil and was softly tapping its pink eraser end on his desk – one of the many signs he was irritated. He was staring at Aoyagi with his patented "Can we move forward?" look. Kropik and his looks. Kropik and his life.
Once again Aoyagi realized how much he disliked his coworker. Disliked him and his abstemiousness, his Orderly life, his oh-so carefully wrapped sandwiches. Disliked Kropik's opinions on everything (even when he agreed with them), disliked his safe, never more than all right, no-risk days, no-risk anything. The pressed slacks, the nest egg of safe investments, the professional (dead) smile when in truth the only smile he had in his heart was for order. Because Kropik was nothing else but order – alphabetized and color-coded. Aoyagi was sure if they cut the other's heart open they would find brown file cabinets and bar codes inside instead of blood and muscle.
In this miserable room where people came to try and undo the tight knot of their failed lives via lost memories, Kropik was content pulling files and handing them over. With never so much as a grunt or a lifted eyebrow when he saw these sad sacks one and all melt into jelly when they were confronted by the full ugly magnitude of their lives in Cinerama, Dolby surround, eight-track twelve-track give the dog a bone ….
At least he could have been a sadist. If only Kropik had gotten a sick kick out of seeing these people laid flat time after time after time. But not even that. He would hand over a file, watch the person implode and then offer them exactly one pale yellow (always yellow, never any other color) tissue out of a box he kept in the upper right hand drawer of his desk. Aoyagi often peeked in those drawers when Kropik was out of the office to see if anything was amiss, had changed, moved, was different. Never. Never once was a thing out of place. The eternally fixed longitude and latitude of his scissors, paper clips, rubber bands. Everything exactly where it should be and always was.
Yet how could that be when day after day the man's job was to toss bombs into people's lives and be there to see them explode? How could he never be touched, affected, worn down by the years of this terrible job? Where was his soul?
Aoyagi often wept. He would tramp disconsolately home from a bar, a movie, or a park bench, and sitting alone in his apartment, weep. He'd had a wife, a dog, a cat. All gone. None of them had cared what he did for a living so long as he brought home a paycheck. His wife left, the dog died, the cat jumped over the moon for all he knew. But that was okay because he didn't miss them. Over the years this job had stripped him bare. The only things he seemed to have left were a desire to read, look at tall blond women and hope that whatever life he had left would be better in eleven years when his retirement began. Nevertheless he still had enough compassion left to carry a truckful of sadness inside his soul for the people who came to this office hoping for redemption, a small miracle, at the very least a way home. Weirdly enough, he knew he wept sometimes because he missed these doomed strangers. Whoever came here was an optimist, a never-say-die who believed redemption was still possible. Aoyagi missed them because he missed that wonderful quality in himself and knew it was gone forever. He had given up hope decades ago on realizing he would never leave this job. He hadn't had the strength or the necessary stuff to walk away while his courage still had a heartbeat and the horizon wasn't an inch away from his nose.
"Okay. I'll look at that folder now."
Aoyagi's self-pitying reverie was broken by the boy's voice. His hand was out, palm up, waiting to be handed the blue file on the desk. Kropik asking Kropik. Pass Milton the file, Milton.
The only sign of the old man getting ready was a stiffening of his spine and a ceremoniousness in the way he pressed his hands together, cleared his throat. Pompous old ass. lust give the kid the bad news and run for cover. That was always what Aoyagi wanted to do, but that wasn't allowed.
"Here you are."
The boy took the folder and flipped it open. From years of experience, Aoyagi knew it took about ten seconds for the enormity of the first memory to hit and then the emotional fallout would show. "And how was your lunch?"
Fucking Kropik! What a time to ask that question! He was cold. One cold heartless bastard.
"Fine." Aoyagi retorted, not looking at him, trying to brush him off with the word, the ugly tone with which he said it.
"And did you end up having the meatloaf?"
Lunch? Meatloaf? How could he ask such stupid irrelevant things when this kid was about to go nuclear? Brute. A weird word, a stiff antique word, but it was the one that flew into Aoyagi's mind. Was the guy still human? If so, he was a brute.
Aoyagi glanced at Kropik a moment and in that instant he missed everything. As the two bureaucrats looked at each other, the boy's eyes sca
"What is this shit?" The boy held out the single sheet of paper and waved it up and down. "I don't know any of this stuff." His voice was accusation and question in one.
Now they looked at him and the men were more confused than at any other time on this job. Kropik had made a mistake? Turned over a wrong file? Impossible! And to his namesake, no less! Once his initial astonishment passed, Aoyagi could barely contain his glee. This was one big booboo! Their superiors would know about it before the day was over and Kropik's ass would be toast.