A Bad Day at Work

By Lawrence Miller

He called me into His office, which is almost never good news. As I walked down the hall, I tried thinking of a good excuse that I hadn't used yet. But after so many years, all the good ones were pretty much gone. But, then I remembered that I had excellent job security, and a year's paid vacation coming up. That made me feel a whole lot better.

I was smiling when I arrived at the outer office. The secretary sat behind a huge mahogany desk, and as I approached, she motioned me to a chair. "He'll be with you in just a moment, Sir," she said, and I sat down. The secretary just kept typing. The magazines on the table in front of me were really old, but I didn't really feel like reading, anyway.

After what seemed like hours, the door to the inner officed. The secretary just sort of motioned to me without looking up as she said, "He'll see you now." I got up and walked through the door. I'd been here before, and the only word that comes close to describing it is "amorphous". You don't come in and take a chair in this office; you come in, and if it is Meant To Be, the chair takes you.

"Lije," He said, "what happened this year?" I started mumbling some answer we both knew to be lame, and he held up a hand to stop me. "Let's just go to the Video Tape," He bellowed.

As if on cue, the lights dimmed, the screen lit up, and the the Greatest Surround Sound System in the History of Creation came alive. Theng titles sequence has different music up here, as the carefully placed quartets of cherubim delicately played their strings. The percussion rolled gently from somewhere behind us. And then the music abruptly stopped, and the action shifted to the screen:

It's nighttime, and the footage is pretty grainy. The caption reads, "WEDNESDAY, MARCH 31st, 8:43 PM. REPORT OF INTRUDER." The officer on screen has very short hair, and the camera bobs up and down as its operator follows the man up the walkway. The door of the house, and a nicely dressed woman with blond streaks in her hair comes out and stands in the doorway. "Thank God you're here," she calls, sounding calmly terrified. She trembles slightly as she waits for the officer to approach. Both the woman and the house are occasionally speckled with red and blue lights, apparently from the squad car out on the street.

They step inside, where a group of people still sits around an ornately prepared table, complete with wine glasses, water goblets, and plate after plate of food. One plate in the middle is a sampler platter of some sort. The woman continues. "We were just up to the fourth cup of wine, when the doorbell rang. I got up andd the door, and there he was. Everybody at the table laughed, cause we all thought it was Uncle Melvin, you know, he's always playing jokes like this." The camera pans quickly over to the other guests, who are still just sort of sitting there, some sipping at their wine.

"So he comes inside and sits down at the empty place at the table, and I get a good look at him. And I'm thinking, 'Oi, that's not Uncle Melvin!' But the guy just picks up his wine glass and snorks it down like it's club soda." The woman starts shaking her head.

"Was anyone hurt?" asks the officer. "Did he harm anyone or attempt to take anything?" He scrawls something in his notepad. The woman shakes her head, and a clank of silver hitting china comes from off-screen. You can feel the cameraman resist the temptation to turn towards the sound as the officer adds more notes to his notepad.

"He just drank the wine, stood up, and left," she says. "No 'thank you', no 'oops, wrong house', no nothing. Oi, who comes into someone's house, drinks, and then leaves? I mean, whoever heard such a thing?" She raises her arms into the air, palms facing up as if pleading for answers, and then lets them fall to her side, where they make an exasperated slap.

"Can you give me a description?" asks the officer. The woman does - white male, dark complexion, beard, medium build, wearing some sort of gown or robe. The officer closes the leather cover to his notepad and returns his pen to his left side breast pocket. "Ma'am," he begins, "we're gonna make a report of this, and we'll let you know if we find anyone matching this description. Okay, ma'am? Do you think you might be able to identify this man if you saw him again?" The woman nods.

The action on the screen sort of freezes for a moment, and then a commercial comes on. Something with dancing toothbrushes. ["Oops," He said. "I meant to edit those out. The screen flashed brightly for a moment, and then the show continued:]

The caption reads "MARCH 31st, 9:04 PM, TRAFFIC INCIDENT." The camera is apparently in the back of the squad car, and as the officer drives, he's talking to the camera. "This is the fifth report we've gotten tonight of someone unexpectedly interrupting a family dinner. And that's just in Suffolk County. Two more have come in since then from Nassau County. Three of the reports match this guy's description. So what we appear to have is some unknown assailant who is systematically terrorizing the residents of this area." The radio squawks something totally incomprehensible, and the officer picks up the thing, oh, I don't know what you call it, you know, the thing attached to the cb radio that you talk into? You know, that thing.

Anyway, the officer speaks into it. "Unit kilo-27 responding, en route. ETA four minutes." He turns the blinky lights on, but not the siren, and starts talking to the camera again. "One of the previous reports mentioned an automobile, and we've just received a report of a single vehicle accident involving an automobile that matches our description, so we're going to procede to the scene, and hopefully apprehend our perpetrator."

The squad car continues to speed the Sunken Meadow Expressway for another two or three minutes, and then turns off to a side road. Up ahead, another squad car has already pulled off to the side of the road, and the flashing lights are illuminating the surrounding trees like a disco ball on acid. One of these illuminated surrounding trees has what appears to be a 1937 Bugatti Type 57 Ventoux, with the yellow side panels, wrapped around its trunk in an unfortunate way. I think maybe it's an oak. The tree, I mean.

The squad car (the one that the camera is in) pulls off the road and slowly approaches the other squad car, finally coming to a stop directly behind it. The surrounding trees are even more illuminated than they were before. Our officer the car door and gets out, followed clumsily the camera. As the camera hangs back, the officer confers with officer #2, who's still in the other squad car. After a brief moment, our officer approaches the Bugatti.

"Sir," the officer asks, "Are you hurt?" Miraculously, the driver, who is apparently me, is totally unhurt, and says so. The officer surveys the wreck, and talks into his radio, now attached to his epaulet. "Can I see your license, registration, and proof of insurance, please, Sir?" he asks me.

"Izz 'ere a problem, Ossifer?" I ask, obviously drunk off my tuchus, as I hand him what I can only hope are the right slips of paper. I have an odd, almost glazed look in my eyes. The ossifer - I mean, officer - studies the papers I've handed him for a long moment. The camera zooms in on my New York State Driver License, and especially my name, "Elijah T. Prophet." Finally, he steps back a few feet, and says, "Okay, Mr. Prophet, can you step out of your vehicle, please? And let's just take it nice 'n slow, okay, Sir?"

I fumble with the door handle as the camera droops down to show the officer with his hand on the handle of his Smith and Wesson 5906 9mm pistol. It's just sort of resting there, just in case, and the camera raises up to watch me stumble from the car and fall to the ground. I start to get to my knees. "That's okay, Sir," the officer says, "you just stay down there. Okay, Mr. Prophet? Just stay down there."

["Look," I said, "this looks a lot worse than it is. I mean I'd already been to like twenty houses. If you'd only-"

"I'm not interested," He said.

"But-"

"Shh!"]

On the screen, I start mumbling something to myself while the officer talks to me. "Have you had much to drink tonight, sir?"

"...(incoherent mumble)... A little wine... (incoherent mumble)"

"Where are you headed, Mr. Prophet?"

"...(incoherent mumble)... All the towns... (incoherent mumble)... houses... (incoherent mumble)"

The officer steps back, and hands his gun to officer #2. He then approaches me with his handsand in front of him. "Okay, Mr. Prophet, here's how it's going to happen. Your going to put your hands on the top of your head, and then I'm going to put these handcuffs on you. Okay, Mr. Prophet? And then we're going to drive on over to the stationhouse, and we'll get you a place you can sleep it off, and then we'll talk some more tomorrow. Okay, Mr. Prophet? Do you understand? Okay, here we go. Just put your hands on the top of your head."

I'm flat on my belly, and I start sliding my hands up towards my head. After several tries, I get them there. The officer sort of kneels beside me and leans over me. "Okay, Sir, now I want you to bring your left hand down to your back. No, your other left. Okay, that's good." He cuffs my left wrist and holds it there. "Now I want you to bring your right hand down, nice 'n slow. Okay, good." He cuffs my right wrist.

Officer #2 comes over and takes position on the other side of me. Together they lift me to my feet. I look from one to the other, a ridiculous grin on my face. They walk me over to the first squad car, and officer #2 the back door as the other puts one hand on my head while holding my arm with the other. "Watch your head," he says, as together they fold me into the back of the car, where I promptly keel over, drooling and mumbling.

Officer #2 drives off with me in the back, while the camera returns to its position in the back seat of its regular car, driven by its regular officer. He fastens his safety belt, and begins to drive away. "Well, it looks like we have a name to go with our description. Officer Nelson is taking the suspect down to the stationhouse, where he'll sleep it off tonight in the drunk tank. He may be Brethalyzed down there, but we didn't see any need for it here; he was pretty clearly intoxicated. Tomorrow he may have to stand in a line-up for these intrusion complaints, but we'll just have to wait until then."

The officer continued to talk, but his voice was covered by the music as the closing titles began to roll on the screen. The cherubim played their horns in a majestic fanfare as the lights slowly came up.

He just looked at me. Didn't say anything. After about a minute, I said, "Look, I really think we need to change the system. I just don't think it's going to work. I mean, how am I supposed to hit four million houses, drink four million glasses of wine, all in one night? Who am I, Santa Claus? -Oh, sorry."

"That's the way the system was set up, that's what we promised, and that's what we'll deliver," He said. "The world will just have to wait until we can get it right."

"I'm not sure the world still cares," I answered. "Some of the people barely put any wine in my glass. I mean, it actually helps, but in principle it's not right. And you know what I heard some guy say when it was time tothe door for me? 'If Elijah wants to come in, he can come through the doggy door.' How am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to bring about the Messianic Age if I'm crawling through doggy doors all the time?"

He stroked His beard while he thought it over. "I'm sorry, Lije," He said after a moment, "that's just the way it's gotta be. We have certain expectations to meet, and we absolutely cannot compromise on them. Sometime, when the world is ready, we'll be able to do it. Until then, all we can do is keep trying."

The doord, and I left. "What you mean 'we', Kemosabe?" I muttered, in my best Tanto impression, which isn't very good. But I returned to my office to check in before I left on vacation. The usual assortment of junk, including a memo informing me that the police were "baffled" by the mysterious escape of their prime suspect in a number of home invasions. Oh, well, next year in Jerusalem, I guess.

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