Preface to a Meltdown

Preface to a Meltdown Timothy Laurence Marsh (bio) In the earliest memory of my father, we are standing in a cold bright room at the back of his office building. A server room, he explains. The floor is checkered tile like the floor of a supermarket and there are giant machines everywhere. Mainframes. It's the early 1980s. Computers are much larger. They stand as tall as refrigerators and whirr and moan like tormented brutes, dozens at once, each with reel-to-reel tape drives and erratic winking lights. Some are contained in glass lockers. I do not like the server room. I do not like the naked rods of fluorescent light that sear the place in punitive brightness. Or the savage A/C, fanged as winter gale, that bites against my neck. The machines are so deafening that my father does not try to speak over them. The two of us stand there holding hands, staring at the spinning tape drives. When I lean toward one of the computers, drawn to its size and complexity, my father clenches my wrist and holds me back. No reason is given. Walking back to his office, I'm led down a corridor of peculiar boxes. Inside each box sits a single person about my father's age. The box people have neat haircuts and button-down shirts. Their short walls are decorated with picture calendars and comic strips. Some have a tiny desk plant. The box people are pleasant and say friendly things when they meet me, but I'm vaguely conscious that something is wrong with them. They look dazed and dour, not altogether healthy, like fish in a pet store tank. My father guides me from box to box, introducing me correctly, and in his own cube afterwards, he drops to a knee, places his two cold hands on either side of my head, and declares with quiet, startling power, "If you end up here, I wasted my life. " It's the first time I've seen where he works, and I'm never taken back. ________ Two decades later, I land a job with a Boston publishing vendor that's hiring anybody of any education as long as they can fog a mirror. I've never been to the East Coast and have zero interest in publishing, but this is a year after college when I'm neck deep in liminal angst and willing to go anywhere I don't want to End Page 11 go, and be anything I don't want to be, as long as it provides the feeling that I'm at last doing something adult with my life. I lease a one-bedroom in Plymouth, thinking the South Shore is all somehow Boston. I heat instant oatmeal in the mornings and drive 45 minutes up Interstate 3 to a former halfway house in East Bridgewater that's been converted for the production of textbooks. On paper my title sounds respectable, even imperative: Assistant Editor. I picture myself involved with intelligent literature, having smart dialogues with authors in the margins of manuscripts, assisting the quality of education through keen, insightful edits. Instead, I am banished like a freak spawn to a bare and reeky basement. My workstation is a folding banquet table with peeling laminate, my computer so dirty with viruses contracted during the last user's surreptitious porn binges that one coworker suggests I wear condoms on my fingers while typing. I am neither imperative nor respected. I'm not even an editor. I keep track of other editors' edits and log the data into spreadsheets. The work is so impeccably trivial I can hardly perform it. I repeat mistakes, forget instructions, take forever to finish tasks, and am routinely less indispensable to operations than a good stapler. ________ I bomb my first performance review three months in, though I am never reprimanded or summoned to account for my inefficacy. Excellence is preferred but a warm body will suffice. Some of my coworkers have been with the company for decades. Others are faded industry vets who've pinballed the Boston publishing circuit and guttered-out in East Bridgewater. Most are fungible mirror foggers like. . .