Louise and The Men of Transit

New Manual

Louise swept her hands wide across her clean new desk. Her cheeks puffed out as the corners of her lips lifted. Her eyes sparkled like topazes. She inhaled deeply and drew her hands together. She grinned at them as they reposed side by side on top of the black metal of her new desk, her new TTC desk. She danced a little jig in her chair, her brown curls bouncing from side to side as a hum emerged from deep within her happy place. She detected Jim's shoulders twitch in her peripheral vision. Oops. She refrained from saying sorry, sorry. She spread her hands wide again and brought them back together again. She wondered what she was supposed to be doing in this new job at the TTC. Her brows knit together. She wasn't sure what her title was. Would Jim know? She shifted her eyes from contemplating her companionable hands towards his strong back and parted her lips to speak. But something about Jim's stiff posture stayed her. You'll just have to figure it out on your own, Louise, she told herself. Until Andy came back, she added. He'd tell her. He must've been late to an important meeting or something otherwise he wouldn't have left her like that without telling her her role, her title, something about her job, she thought. Maybe he was meeting with the CEO, she breathed in awe silently to herself. Maybe one day he'd take her there. Louise shook her head and laughed at herself. You're getting ahead of yourself, Louise.

I know, she thought, I need a nameplate. The others have one. She stretched her neck and leaned sideways, scanning their desks. Yes, they all had one of those black angled nameplates stuck in faux wood bases. One of those would get her started, she decided.

That room.

Maybe she'd find one in that room. After all, Louise wasn't too uncommon a name, she assured herself.

She pushed her chair back, trying to be silent. The duct tape on the carpet behind her chair wheels wouldn't let her out silently though. She wriggled up and out from between the edge of her chair seat and the front of her desk. Standing up, she shook down her pants and smoothed down her cardigan. As she looked down at the cuffs of her pants, she noticed fine white sticky strings clinging to her right hem. Louise puckered her eyebrows. What were —? Ohhh. The spider webs. She'd forgotten to clean underneath her desk. Pulling down her mouth in disgust, she told herself that she'd just have to get right to it. She opened her purse wide and fished out the package of cleaning cloths. Hunching down, she poked her head between chair and desk. She duck-walked forward, squeezing in between the unyielding desk and unmoving chair until she could reach far enough in to flick the cloth at the webs and dust bunnies. The cloth snapped quite a few and caught enough for Louise to feel her pants and shoes would be safe. Duck-walking backwards, she extricated herself from the tight space and straightened back up to standing. Where to put the cloth? She looked around and spotted the little pile of them on the floor on the other side of the chair. She tossed it; it landed on top of the pile, spreading itself out like a drunken parachute. Louise rummaged in her purse again, found the baby wipes, took one out, and cleaned the web debris off of her pants. She tossed that wipe over to the pile too.

Picking up her purse and shoving it over her right shoulder, she walked swiftly along her accustomed path between the men's desks and the outside wall, around the front of Harold's desk, and over to the door. She carefully twisted the knob and crept out, closing it cautiously behind her, one hand on the knob, one hand on the door as if willing it to behave.

Once released, she hustled down the corridor, looking behind her. She still couldn't believe that no one was around. She whipped into the room with all the higgledy-piggledy chairs and desks and trash cans and searched. She craned her neck to lengthen her short stature and see over the tops of a couple of desks piled on end against each other. She stepped through the mounds to the perimeter where one of the bookcases still stood on sentry. The shelves within her eyesight held dust and old pencil stubs and bits of erasers and ripped pieces of paper. Nothing hard like a nameplate. She raised her head to see if she could see what was on the higher shelves. She couldn't. She went up on to her toes. As she stood on tippy toe, Louise stretched her hand up to reach the upper shelves, tapping her bent fingers on the shelf above her head to feel for something hard and angled. Those shelves too had gathered odds and ends of office supplies and accessories. A pen rolled away from her questing fingers and dropped off the shelf to land with an unnoticed thud on the threadbare carpet. Louise trod on it as she stepped forward to search along the length of the shelf. Her toes rolled forward. She counter-balanced back. Her heel hit hard; her arm was flung off its high reach and smacked against the bookcase wall. She tried to grab the case, and her left arm flew upwards to join her right. She wheeled her arms backwards. She staggered backwards, her purse's weight like an anchor pulling her down, down. Louise felt herself falling and lurched her body forward, bending herself at the waist and grabbed the nearest thing. A shelf. It slid out and fell from her grasping fingers, flinging her to the left. Louise banged her hip against a desk, smacked a trash can lying on the desk, and landed hard on her palms on the desk's top. The can rolled away from her, bounced off of a pile of worn phone books, rolled back faster towards her, off the desk, teetered on its rim, fell over on to its side, and rolled until it came to a rest in front of her shoes. Unseeing, Louise shifted her weight to rub her hip and somehow tripped on the can. Louise careened forward, her arms shooting out ahead of her, her purse flying off her shoulder to sail across the room and bang against the only part of open wall. Her purse slid downwards and came to rest on the carpet while Louise came to rest against the bookcase that started it all.