Janet Ames came stomping down the hallway. She was a compact ball of fury, and in these parts, we respect women whose fury leads them down hallways stomping. We send them elaborate clockwork geese as presents to express our solemn appreciation. Each clockwork goose is made in China by the expert hands of a man we have known and trusted for generations. His name is Henry Chin, and there's no chance that a mistake has been made when I declare that Henry is of dynastic stock. If anyone around here is making mistakes, we'd certainly like to know about it; but we're equally certain that the mistake-maker wouldn't be Henry. Henry never makes mistakes. He makes one perfect clockwork goose right after the other. Well, maybe not all are quite perfect. How could they be? But we'll get deeper into the goose fiascos later on, after we've had a chance to assess our chances at fleecing you.
What we want to do now is to take from you all that's yours, and make it ours. Mine, actually. My accomplices are not here, so I'll let you in on a little secret: they are so dumb that they are fleeced themselves -- regularly -- and yet the sunniness of their dispositions remains as unclouded as a sky which remains unclouded, there being no clouds on the day in question. About now you are realizing that I am no great shakes myself in the ``whiz'' department. I'm as dumb as the cloudless day is long. Which it is.
The story that I tell is the deeply disturbing tale of love gone awry. It's about how I got fleeced, not only by accomplices, but by clockwork geese. I'm sure it was the geese because of the regularity of the fleecing. When something happens with regularity, it is said that it happens ``like clockwork,'' and it was this clue which led me to deduce that I am a sheep. First of all, I'm a sheep in that I'm sheepish. I'm sheepish about how often I'm fleeced. Secondly, there's the fleecing itself. And lastly, there's the fact that I like to eat in the company of sheep. My accomplices have just arrived; they will verify that what I say is true, that I like to sit down to a good meal among sheep. Don't I always say that? I do; you can ask them. But don't tell them, while you're in conversation with them, don't mention what I said about fleecing them. It wouldn't do for them to know.
Janet Ames came stomping down the hallway, a compact ball of fury. We give her clockwork geese. That's out of our admiration, and the money required for the geese comes out of our own pockets. Our pockets are lined with money we get by the fleecing we do. The money we don't have is due to the fleecing we are subject to. We buy Janet Ames clockwork geese with what's left. The geese are made in China by Henry Chin, who charges an arm and a leg per goose, wrongly believing each goose to be perfect. Each just like the last. Well, maybe each is like the last, but the last was not at all perfect. We'll tell you just how imperfect as soon as we've prepared the background. That is, it's imperative that you understand completely a few essential story elements before the ensuing narrative will make sense. You already know all the stuff related to the fleecing of myself and my compatriots. That's about all you need to know. In fact, it's more than enough for this story. The sad history of fleecing, tragic as it undoubtedly is (and I should know, as one being fleeced, and the circumstances are right, but curiously, I don't know how it feels; I guess I've never stopped to notice), has nothing to do with the story at hand, except for the part I've already told. Let's get on with our story, shall we?
Janet Ames came down the hallway, a compact ball of stomping fury. She wasn't exactly mad, so why she stomped no one knew, but we sure did appreciate it, and around here, we show appreciation through the purchase of clockwork geese. Janet Ames saw us coming with our little clockwork geese clutched to our chests. We were shuddering in trepidation, and that made her close her eyes and shake her head violently, and she grimaced in a kind of impatient disgusted way she has. When that happens, we know that she's going to say some impatient disgusted remark, like, ``Oh God; they've got more of those goddamn geese! They're going to try to give me those geese, and much as I like receiving presents, I hate those geese!'' What makes this sentiment remarkable is that Janet Ames doesn't even know about the goose that wasn't perfect. It makes us nervous that she hates the geese irrationally. When we get nervous, we look around ourselves frantically for hiding places. Our heads twitch like those of some small multi-headed mammal. But Janet was upon us before we could decide which way to run. We kept looking around desperately anyway, not that we expected to be able to get away, but that's the way it is: your head just twitches faster and faster, your legs are running in place in tiny little steps, and you clutch that goose tighter and tighter, and your whimpering rises to an audible whine. We felt that feeling of being cornered, and we clutched the geese even more tightly to ourselves, whined, grimaced, allowed our eyes to bulge, and we huddled together, our little feet shuffling. Janet Ames frowned fiercely. ``You guys are so pathetic! Haven't I asked you not to give me geese?'' One of our number, undoubtedly made crazy by the tight quarters and excessive fear which permeated our ranks, smacked Janet on the arm with his goose. We all cringed. Janet was cool, though. ``You guys are dead fucking ducks,'' she said. She spun on her heel and walked right back up the corridor. ``Oh no!'' said I. ``She's headed for Mophead's office!'' H.~Mophead Esquire is our boss. We don't know what to expect from him. He's erratic in his treatment of us. Sometimes he hits us, and when he does, it hurts lots more than the little goose-tap we'd given to Janet Ames. He's not very nice. We think he hates us. We try to please him. We take him out for special fun times. He's even been in on our fleecings. He chortles during the fleecing, making the experience humiliating as well as financially devastating. We're left quivering and nearly naked, and it's really cold where we are. I suppose you'd say we're resentful.
Back down the hall came Janet Ames, stomping. She used to be married to a guy named Rick Ames. How he put up with her was anyone's guess. My guess is that that she was appealing to him once, but that he decided the fantasy was better than the reality, so he kept the fantasy, and now they're separated or divorced, so she had Mophead trailing down the hall behind her. Mophead's a vain and nasty guy, but Janet Ames had him both cowed and buffaloed. She did both; she cowed him one minute, buffaloed him the next. The animal metaphors are used with some precision. ``I'm pawing the ground,'' snorted Mophead.
``Cut the bullshit,'' we said. ``This is between us and Janet.''
Mophead raised an eyebrow. ``I'll see who will be the judge of that,'' he said, but he retreated to his office in the face of our smirks. Even though he's our boss, we don't let him push us around.
But then Janet Ames started pushing us herself, and we fell over each other and into walls, and when we got up she pushed us down again, and she said that she didn't need anyone to push us around; she would do it herself; she'd just thought Mophead would get a kick out of the way we say ``Whoa-a-hoa!'' as we struggle vainly to keep our balance. ``You guys,'' she said, shaking her head. ``You guys! You're so annoying! I wish I could be through with you! I wish I could just do my job, and go home on time for once, but it's impossible with you grinning maniacs cluttering up the offices all the time!'' We imagined how we might look from her point of view: we saw a picture of hundreds of little swarming and chattering monkeys with great-big goofy grins and goofy clockwork geese, other-worldly, pathetic and obsequious. We shook our heads to clear them of this shudder-inducing imagery. Meanwhile, Janet pushed us up and down the halls. We were one big tumbling mass of arms and legs, and we were all yelling ``whoa-a-hoa!'' as we fell, scrambled to our feet, and fell again. The water cooler got caught up in our tumbling mass, and then the fax machine. Janet just kept pushing us into walls and onto the floor, and there was nothing we could do because as soon as you got up, some idiot was lurching into you, and you had to go down too, or else Janet pushed you herself, and you tried to grab someone for support, but then they'd just fall. It was like someone rolling a giant snowball, but the snowball was us, with our heads toward the center and our limbs flailing out the surface. We got kind of tangled together, and it was difficult to sort out whose arms and legs were whose, so as the scene progressed, the ball of us became more compact, sort of like how black holes are formed. The analogy is nearly perfect. Our heads were drawing in our feet, both due to gravitational effects of head over feet, and then there was a strong desire to regain the fetal position. It wasn't just Freudian; it was that our shoes had started to come off, and Janet was tickling our feet, so we had a good reason for trying to draw our feet in as far as possible. We became a dense ball which Janet hardly had to push; we were rolling freely. She bounced us off walls for a while, and then into the elevator. She could have used the stairs, we thought, but it turned out that she wanted to go up. We were trying to nod our heads in understanding, but it was too crowded in the center of the ball where our heads were to do so. Janet contented herself with rolling us around the elevator as we rose to the top floor. When we got there, she rolled us past the maitre de, and it was only then that we remembered that we work in a building that has a revolving restaurant on the top floor. We also remembered that we'd asked Janet out to lunch. We remembered that we'd asked her to lunch several times. We'd never gotten around to actually attending any lunches with her; we'd always forgotten or just decided not to. Besides, lunchtime is usually the time at which we fleece. Janet order a drink for herself, and gazed sadly out the window, spinning us quietly and absently. She'd apparently ordered while we were in the men's room urinating. That had been a difficult and embarrassing time for us, and our faces were still crimson. She was served from a tureen. Whatever it was she ate smelled good, but not as good as Janet herself. She smelled like sweet jasmine roseflowers. Janet uses a body oil that is distilled in France by nuns who work for perfume companies when their churches are closed for repairs, or cleaning. When the churches re-open, the nuns are welcomed back by the staff, who tell them stories and serve them hot chocolate before bed. Those are the best days, and the perfumes the nuns make in anticipation are the finest I've ever smelled on a woman. Less enchanting are the fragrances manufactured just down the road by the railroad tracks by a different sort of nun; the sort who don't give a good goddamn for things of this world, or even of the next, from what they've heard about it. Their factory windows were broken long ago when distressed customers threw rocks in celebration of their dissatisfaction with a fragrance that reeks of carelessness and ill-humor. These poor women (both nuns and their erstwhile customers) were long ago shunted off into the back allies of olfactory history, whereas the chocolate-drinking sorority are being elevated -- one by one, with each death -- to heaven, where they are greeted by angels who make them feel appreciated by rubbing their feet and cooing in a soothing manner.
Janet Ames wore the delicious scent of jasmine roseflower, and we loved her for it. Ordinarily any one such whiff would inspire a new gift of clockwork geese, but on this occasion we were tangled up in a spinning ball, and we couldn't break free, even to offer the geese we already had. Janet ate sumptuously from a tureen. I gather that the food was to her liking, as she would not give us even the tiniest of the many morsels with which her plate was piled.
After lunch, Janet took us back to the office, and with Mophead's help slowed our rotational velocity to match that of the earth, at which point it was possible for us to begin to disentangle ourselves. That task took the remainder of the afternoon, so it was not until the following day that anything else germane to what shall be a brief account of vile episodes could begin.
On that following day, the biggest clockwork goose any of us had ever seen ran amok and killed seventeen people. They weren't real people, they were fictional, but it disgusted some and enraged others. ``Even though they were fictional, that clockwork goose shouldn't've offed them!'' said the first group. The second group shook their heads. `` Especially since they were fictional!''
I'd already alerted you to the imperfections in Henry Chin's perfect clockwork geese, but maybe you hadn't imagined that things could ever get so bad, even in your wildest dreams. You'll consequently be required to experience eye-popping sensations when I tell you that the first goose that went bad killed One Million People exactly, each of whom was made entirely of strawberry sauce. Not one of the exact million was fictional! These were people who could have been just like you or me, except for their unique composition. When it happened, I sent a note to Henry Chin in which I told him repeatedly that his clockwork geese might not be as wonderful as all that, when you sum up the good and the bad, and divide it all out. He sent me a note back saying that it didn't matter, as long as I would keep it under my hat, he wouldn't tell if I didn't. ``Let's keep the pretence alive, baby!'' He wrote. ``The smell of perfume with which your letter reeks alerts me to your intense desire to have a goose, free of charge, to take charge of you. The bigger the better,'' he wrote, ``no doubt about it!'' ``Your letter reeks of perfume,'' he wrote on another occasion, in response to a second letter which I'd sent informing of the massacre of the many chocolate-livered boys and girls who had lately occupied my daytime thoughts. ``You're in need, buddy! You wanna the big goose!'' he scrawled, each letter ablaze in his peculiar passion. ``Oh, I smell your goose-desire; no need to tell me all about it in every stinkin' word, you bastard, what do you think I'm made of?''
Every last goose since then has killed many. Seventeen is small potatoes next to the number of asparagus-people that were mowed down. Not knowing whether they were or were not, my horror stems the tides of the rushing torrents of tears which have been shed for the slaughtered. What I mean is it's bad whichever way you look at it, even from the perspective of the clockwork goose who is suddenly horrifyingly well aware of its imperfection inasmuch as said imperfection is the angel of death and dismemberment to perhaps an entire planet of imaginary folk who are resembling as closely as possible those particularly robust sorts of pink pigs that five-year-olds draw, under the impression that a pig is basically a giant ham.
The geese are abominations of creation. Eternity shall damn them, but I find them wonderful -- albeit somewhat complex -- gifts for the gift-giver in all of us.
Janet Ames came stomping down the hall to our office the day after two nearly-entirely-real penguin janitors were discovered with their mocha almond brittle extracted and eaten. We cowered before Janet's wrath. ``My wrath is nothing compared to what I'm prepared to do to you! How could you dare to give me one after another of these death-dealing geese? You knew I hated them even before I knew they kill all categories of people from the really real to the obvious phonies!'' She looked cute and wasn't pushing us, so we knew she wasn't as angry as she was pretending to be. We decided to tickle her. ``Hey! Cut that out! I still am mad! I'm not playing with you!'' She took out a clockwork goose. We were still giggling, and some were poking her with tickly intent. Then she set the goose down and wound it up. It immediately killed all those who were realest and all those who were totally pretending. The rest of us weren't worried. No one can be that scared of a clockwork goose!