Der Komplex

I dreamed of the dog humping my leg, again, last night. It’s recurred for months. I don’t recognize the dog; its breed is different in each dream. None of which matters as I writhe with that unbearable naked-in-the-classroom embarrassment, struggling to make it stop. The dog humps my leg with Prussian determination. My arms move as though under water—my punches no more violent than playful pats on its head. The dream’s setting varies nightly. Sometimes I’m in a crowded living room during a party, other times in a park, or on a street corner. And while the embarrassment of being so rigorously enjoyed by the animal is excruciating enough, there is something worse: the look in the dog’s eyes. As I lethargically flail at its head, I see in the dog’s gaze the look of a marathon runner who has the finish-line in sight. Then I burst awake.

The global technology conglomerate, Oldham Herschel Systems, has been my employer for six months. It’s my fifth job in two years, after bussing restaurant tables through college, tending bar, working a hotel front desk following graduation, then writing sports articles for a community newspaper. After an editor said my story about a local softball tournament lacked “zing,” I enrolled in a twelve-week IT crash-course. Soon after, I was hired as a technical writer with OHS. Getting my head around my job description has taken longer than I expected: managing documentation for software that’s used to build visualization products with which mechanical engineers create computer simulations of engine parts and components, factory lines, or scenario recreations, like the auto crash that killed Princess Diana. Developers, quality assurance personnel, and Customer Care techs—stationed in Canada, England, Germany—send me e-mail containing updated strings of DOS and UNIX code, which I cut-and-paste into specified documentation.

“I don’t want to talk you out of a job,” said my friend, Wally, one night, “but why don’t the developers do that?”

“Remember computer manuals in the ’80’s that skipped ten steps at a time, and never described what you actually saw onscreen?”

He nodded.

“That’s why.”

The office is trimmed with plants, and earth-tones; four floors of ice tray cubicles hyper-illuminated by fluorescent lights. Although I prefer working alone, the quiet of the office was disconcerting at first: a loaded silence, like the sudden hush that comes over a crowded restaurant when a dish clatters to the floor; accentuated by the insectile hum of the lights, the muted clack of employees typing on keyboards, isolated coughs and sneezes. The office smells like an antiseptic meadow courtesy of the “outdoor” scented garbage bags and sprays used by the afterhours cleaning service.

None of my co-workers work here. Even my boss, Uma Subbiah, works out of corporate headquarters in Nebula, Oregon. Her boss occupies an office here on the first floor. The developers, programmers, QA, build team with whom I work are scattered across the world. Voices on the telephone. Names on e-mail. Indistinct photographs on the WHO WE ARE pages of the company’s intranet.

My first day at work I noticed the cubicle next to mine: plastered across its walls were photographs of every conceivable variety of dog—ugly, awkward looking animals that seemed like cruel jokes of nature or breeding. It took a moment to find the nameplate on the far wall: Nula Baughman.

“What breed is your dog?” a voice came from behind, startling me.

I turned to find a slender handsome woman with green-yellow eyes, dressed in black, standing behind me. She was about thirty, had shoulder-length brown hair, and reminded me of Julie Newmar’s Catwoman on the old Batman TV show. She held a mug, and I saw a ring on her little finger.

“I don’t have a dog,” I said.

Nula strolled past, sat in her chair, and swiveled around, fixing me with her dual-hued gaze. “These are my babies,” she said, with an accent I couldn’t place—sounding British and Eastern European at the same time. I noticed a framed photograph on the desk: Nula with her arm around an equally attractive redhead.

“You own all of these?” There were dozens.

“We’ve never owned any of them—my partner is a professional groomer and trainer, and we get very attached to her clients. Are you interested in a pair of gorgeous bichons frises? I know a breeder willing to take fifteen hundred for them.”

“I’m not looking for a pet.”

“Pet?” Nula said. “Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“What?”

“Animals are the highest life-forms in this world. They’re not pets, they’re our instructors.”

“Sorry.”

She swiveled toward her PC, and put on a set of headphones.

When I returned to my desk, I looked up “bichon frise” on the Internet, and found a photograph of what looked like a marshmallow dog—round furry astronaut’s helmet for a head—its coat like a puffy white ski suit. Amid all the prissy puffiness was its grim pug face, like that of a surly barkeeper.

That night I dreamed of a bichon frise with the face of Ed Asner humping my leg as I stood in the OHS conference room, meeting Uma for the first time.

Wally thought the recurring dream was related to my job.

“What makes you say that?” I asked, when he first brought up his theory. We were at my apartment for our weekly movie night. I had been working for OHS just over a month then, and mentioned my dream to him the previous week.

“The mind channels anxiety through dreams,” Wally said, opening a beer. He had never worked in an office, claiming the film Wall Street frightened him into becoming a freelance Web designer. “Remember tenth grade biology?”

I inwardly winced: while dreading my way to the final unit of biology class—and its requisite dissections—I had recurring dreams that my bed was filled with live frogs.

“That was legit—I’m squeamish as hell. Anyhow, the dreams stopped after we cut up the frogs. What am I worried about this time?” I said, grabbing pizza from the carton on the coffee table. ”I’ve got a decent-paying job with an easy workload—nobody’s breathing down my neck.”

“A very light workload from what you were saying.”

“The industry’s cyclical—I came in at a slow time.”

“Has your boss finally explained anything about your project?”

“No, but she’s managing a dozen others. What’s the sudden interest in my job?”

We were watching Michael Crichton’s 1981 sci-fi thriller, Looker—the blank concrete corporate headquarters of Digital Matrix flashed across the TV screen. Wally nodded at the television. “Sounds like you’re tangled up with Der Komplex.”

Our favorite films are bleak futuristic classics, like Soylent Green, Omega Man, Rollerball, Looker, where the villains are corporations benignly named Digital Matrix, Soylent Corporation, Energy Corporation, headquartered in bunker-like buildings that Wally dubbed “Der Komplex.”

“What’re you talking about? There’s nothing sinister about OHS,” I said, though I didn’t mention my office fit the Der Komplex model: a modern architectural monstrosity resembling a collection of concrete boxes stacked by an inept giant, dotted with large octagon windows tinted dark as a blind man’s glasses.

“It’s just interesting that your boss flew to Michigan to interview you, rather than hire somebody locally.” He laughed. “And I still say there’s no such place as Nebula, Oregon.”

“Well, her boss is in my building, so she came for a meeting with him, too. Anyhow, they want a writer in Detroit—the auto companies are some of our biggest customers.”

Wally and I had been friends since elementary school, back when people called him Peter. After drifting apart in high school we reconnected in university: I was in English, he did Business Admin. We’d meet for lunch at the campus pub a couple times a week, where he first told me about his Law of Opposites.

“Law of what?”

“Opposites. Like Murphy’s Law,” Wally had said. “It hit me while watching Wall Street. At one point Michael Douglas’ character says to a shareholders’ meeting, ‘Greed is good.’ And I thought, ‘Holy shit—he’s wrong, but he’s right.’”

“Yeah?”

“Take cops for instance,” he said. “Popular thought is they’re the most upstanding, honest, law-loving people in society. But everyone I know who’re cops were the worst troublemakers I ever met.”

“Not all cops.”

“Or, driving in bad weather—the worse the conditions, the crazier everyone drives.”

“I’ll give you that,” I said, though I was skeptical. Then I reflected on how Wally got his nickname.

The popular image of children is one of innocence, fragility, and purity of heart. When Wally moved to the neighborhood in first grade, he was Peter Calhoun. We nicknamed him “Wallop” because his mother hit him all the time.

“If you’re happy, I’m happy for you,” Wally said, as we watched Looker. “It’s just a strange situation. You’ve been there five weeks and haven’t seen five hours’ work. You haven’t met any of your co-workers, and you’re not even sure what exactly you’re working on.”

“I smell a ‘Law of Opposites’ lecture coming.”

“If the Opposite fits...”

“But it doesn’t.”

“While doing Business Admin I heard no end of CorporateSpeak about ‘teamwork,’ being a ‘teamplayer,’ ‘there’s no “I” in “team.”’ And where are you? In an office filled with people you don’t work with, stuck with a project you don’t understand.” He finished his beer. “Who’s that developer you were talking about the other night?”

“Bundun Oon.”

“You work closer with Bundun Oon than anybody else, right?”

“Yeah.”

“And you still don’t know if it’s a man or a woman?”

“I can’t tell over the phone, and Bundun’s picture on the intranet is like a passport photo from 1940. That aside, you haven’t said what I’m supposed to be so worried about.”

He gazed at the TV. “If you’re happy, I’m happy for you.”

I looked at him.

“You’re worried about the ‘tap,’” Wally said.

“The ‘tap’?”

“Some manager tapping you on the shoulder and saying ‘You’re fired.’”

“You’re crazy—they just hired me.”

“Let’s drop it, Susan Dey’s gonna be naked in a second.”