I Am Corporate Camouflage by James Henschen

James Henschen is the author of the award winning short film 'Looking in the Fishbowl' as well as a film adaptation of the short story 'The Monkey's Paw' which screened in film festivals throughout the country. James currently resides in Orlando, FL.

It’s what they call average. Caucasian. Brown eyes, brown hair. Maybe six feet tall. Probably 180 pounds. Three scars, or maybe four, possibly one on the knee. One tattoo of some mushy tribal symbol hidden behind a sleeve or a pant leg. Slightly crooked teeth and a general understanding of current tax laws with very little knowledge of world politics or biological sciences. Most likely speaking only English with a shoe size of eleven, or maybe ten and a half. Because twelve would be wishful thinking and so would the words handsome or beautiful. This is what they call average. And this is what they call me.

You probably wouldn’t notice me if I walked by, staring you in the eye. You might not even hear me if I said “hello,” or “excuse me.” I doubt you would care much if I bumped into you. Because I am camouflage. Middle-class, Middle-American white male. I disappear in a crowd.

Every day is exactly the same. It starts with walking to work in my corporate camouflage burgundy polo shirt, two buttons neatly fastened, tucked into my aerodynamically dull khaki pants. At 7:52 A.M. every morning, my brown shoes match my brown belt as I open the door to a world of cubicles, the ones everyone laughs at on television and in movies. This is every day, that is, every day except today. Today is different. Today my incredibly average khaki pants sport an incredibly un-average single wrinkle snaking proudly from pocket to mid-calf like a stray vein. Un-average pants make an un-average day.

If you saw the wrinkle, you would think it was because I don’t iron. You would think it was because I’m a lazy slob male or that I’m overworked and under-slept and probably constantly whining about time. You would think that some stereotypical reason would cause me to never pick up an iron or even own one. But I do own an iron, a Rowenta DX-6700 Power Duo Vertical Steam Iron. And not only do I own this 1500 watt anti-drip 3-way auto shut off gift from Jesus or Satan, I use it. Religiously. But today a wrinkle still journeys proudly across my mid calf like a khaki scar, regardless of my obsessive ironing. I saw it and I left it. There was something about the gentle arc that it made or the fact it defied the laws of fabric grain, and I couldn’t bring myself to heartlessly snuff it out with the flat steamy-nostril beast. So I left the wrinkle and dropped the Rowenta DX-6700 Power Duo Vertical Steam Iron in the garbage and cursed its non-drip 1500 watts of power that have so controlled my pants for the last million years. And to hell with Jesus or Satan or whomever created the steamy monster. This wrinkle was my god today.

As I shuffled through the drab parking lot to my unremarkable office building, the wrinkle buzzed in my brain. When I didn’t look down at it, it was huge, maybe 80 feet coiled around my leg. Everyone was staring and pointing, but not really. In reality, no one looked at any part of me, as much as I secretly prayed to my now-dead Rowenta that someone would notice my wrinkled pants. The Rowenta is not a good god to pray to.

So I found the average door to my average job and slinked into my average cubicle. It’s gray, or taupe, whatever that is. But the thing about today was that although my brown shoes matched my brown belt as I reached for the brown office door, it wasn’t 7:52 A.M. I was late. I’m not sure by how much, maybe four seconds or 35 minutes. Something felt off. I was late.

There’s a peculiar feeling when you’re late. A feeling that the world forgot you, like some enormous ferry leaving a dock from somewhere heading someplace important. It just didn’t care if you were four seconds late. The ferry won’t wait, and neither will the world. It goes on with or without you. So, you can choose to jump and hit your head on the side of the giant world-boat and slowly sink to the bottom of the sea, partially conscious, watching the clouds of blood form around your wounded head like little red puffy cotton balls. It’s either that, or you swim to someplace important.

I don’t know why I was late. Wind resistance, maybe. Average pants can be quite aerodynamic when properly pressed, which mine typically are, other than today, of course. The wind drag caused by a pair of khaki pants can change your life, sometimes more than cancer or the lottery.

What I did after I settled into my taupe square was push down the letter ‘S’ on my keyboard. It could have been ‘T’ but probably not ‘X’ because most sentences don’t start with ‘X,’ even though I secretly wish they did. As soon as I pushed the key gently down, it did what it did every day: it stuck. There it sat, defying the rules of keyboard-dom, refusing to go back to working position, like a stubborn child or a rebellious slave. A little shallow hole in the middle of my keyboard stared back at me. Within seconds the monitor that sits too close to my eyes and has caused me to have a serious night-vision-driving issue over the past few years was suddenly swarmed with what looked like insects running across my screen shaped like the letter ‘S.’ Or maybe it was ‘H.’

One thing to remember, when you try to fix the ‘S’ or ‘H’ key by banging your keyboard briskly against your desk, is that sometimes the spacebar stops working. Today, the spacebar stopped working.

So this is what it comes to. Here I am, right now at this dazzlingly average moment, staring blankly at my mocking, disloyal keyboard, my ‘S’ key leading a revolt and my spacebar running a distraction. This is my day, this is everyday, only I’m three seconds late today. And this is where it changes.

His name is Cambron. No, not Cameron. Cambron. And he doesn’t know my name even though he’s been here 85,743 times to fix my ‘H’ key. He’s the computer tech, Cambron. He’s not average. He smells strange. Not bad, just different, like jelly-beans dipped in steak sauce. He wears a T-shirt, black, with something weird on it that I’m afraid to ask about because it would show my lack of understanding diversity in the world of T-shirts. He doesn’t wear the standard issue American G.I. office uniform. There is no collar and no khaki and wave upon wave of endless powerful wrinkles swirl randomly around his non-uniform. My wrinkle is intimidated. Rowenta is displeased.

There is an odd orange streak running around his thigh, and a deep red circle stains the knee of his jeans. It could be blood, but somehow I doubt it. He wore these jeans yesterday, and the day before that and the day before that. I look down at his jeans. He watches me do this. I know he hasn’t changed his pants recently, and he knows I know, and I know he knows I know. But we don’t say anything to each other. I just point to my rebellious ‘H,’ or was it ‘T’?

He motions for me to stand up so he can sit down in my chair. What I don’t like is the noise that he makes when he sits in my chair. It’s like a frustrated sigh, but not about my keyboard or computer, about my chair. It’s as if he is angry that I don’t know how to keep my adjustable swivel chair at a proper height for whatever it is I do during the daytime hours. His head cocks to the side and his hand slips under the chair fidgeting with that little bar-handle thing under the seat, the one that when you finally push or tug or pull it correctly, drops you six inches unexpectedly. He fidgets with that and drops six inches unexpectedly. He sighs again. I feel responsible. Did I design that chair? I must have.

In case you were wondering, he eventually found the proper height. I make note of it. I don’t know what he does after this; I stop paying attention. I stop paying attention because deep inside I want to make fun of him. I imagine scenarios of giddy ridicule. Not because I’m mean or a bully or an aging frat brother that doesn’t get enough attention, and not because I have a secret homoerotic crush on him, and not because I’m jealous of his…whatever redeeming quality is buried underneath his caked on jeans. What I want is that terrible feeling that you get when you know you’ve done something wrong, that bile that rises in your throat, the gurgle that pushes your bowels, that weird hot flash on the top of your cheeks and the back of your neck, when you know you have just done something terrible, on purpose. I’m not sure why I want this, but I do. I dream of apologizing and hugging and crying and going for a beer and making up while watching football. Then he’ll say my name.

Right now, he continues to type and point and click and fidget and sigh and groan. He is irritated with my computer, or with me. This frustrates me. My unimaginative grand scenarios continue to compound like a cancer.

Now I want to point at him and tease him, call him fat steak sauce jelly-bean guy. He’s fat, but I figure you assumed that much. I want to laugh loudly at whatever bizarre TV shows he watches at night, those special shows that come from places like Japan or Mars and have plot lines about octopi with laser eyes and ducks that drink tea. But what I’d really like to do is just punch him. Once. Hard. But not in a manly movie style bar room fight way. I’d hold my arm out to the side and swing it around awkwardly in a full arc. In a strange girl-like manner, I would hit him with the front side of my closed fist square in the ear or somewhere on the side of his face. And most importantly, he wouldn’t expect it. I want to hear that realistic thud followed by that crack from my knuckles as my curled-in fingers meet skull. I want to watch the unexpected jolt his body makes after it realizes it has been attacked by a predator. Then I want to see that split second where his brain shifts to automatic mode, where evolution takes over, where it decides whether to fight or flee. I want to listen microscopically close to hear the sloshing endorphins pumping through his gray matter as the synapses fire ones and zeroes calculating this complex equation. Then it would happen, that feeling in my gut. Guilt. Horrible teary-eyed guilt. But he would back down. That’s because I would never do it. Average guys don’t punch Cambron in the ear.

He stands up and tells me in a venomous tone that he is going to bring me a new keyboard later. He told me that yesterday. He told me that in 1942 or whenever the ‘S’ key first decided it wanted to escape its up and down prison. He walks away, but something stunning happens first. I notice his eyes, diverted for a flash of time that could only be measured by those tiny clocks used by wild-haired scientists who study things like electrons and blue whales. His eyes briefly creep down toward my wonderfully average khaki. The wrinkle has caught his eye. He stops, thinks, then he tells me that he will also fix some other items on my computer, something about new upgrades and other nonsense. I don’t care about that. But I do care that he noticed my pants. Praise the wrinkle. Rowenta, I defy you.

Now if you are beginning to wonder what it is I do in my taupe square, then you are missing the point. Besides, it doesn’t matter because I am going to get fired today. Sorry to ruin the surprise. It happens at the meeting.

Every Tuesday there is a staff meeting in a white room with dark blue fabric covered chairs with little threads of gray weaved in to accent the ugly plastic handles. These chairs don’t swivel and they are permanently set at the proper height. A bunch of white males crowd around an oversized over-glossed over-dark wood table, each with a legal pad or spiral notebook and a pen with some other company’s logo plastered on the shaft. They are all white men except for one Asian woman and a Latin man. The Asian woman doesn’t even work for us. One person wears a tie. This is how you know who is in charge, by the tie. It matches the chair.

Today, someone has my shirt on. Exactly the same burgundy polo shirt. He wears it better. I slip in the room and slink into my seat. No one notices me. I am corporate camouflage.

When the man in the chair-colored tie says this, it is a starter’s pistol for my pen. The laps begin. I make the typical rounds of tapping my pen against my yellow legal pad followed by tapping it on the ugly plastic chair handle then down to my leg and back around to the legal pad to complete the loop. Lap one. The man in the chair-colored tie says something about new additions to the Com-Ops group. It’s because using terms that sound military makes everything sound important, on the edge of constant danger, ever alert. Because business is war. Lap two. New rules of engagement for the sales staff. More military talk because your client is your enemy. Because anyone not freely handing you money is your enemy. Because we need that money to give to another “soldier” following different “rules of engagement.” Lap three. Interruption. This is the furthest my pen will ever travel.

Now normally, I don’t pay attention to anything, not even interruptions. Normally after about four laps of pen on pad to pen on chair to pen on leg, I pretend to write something important. Today, though, when the interruption came, something was different.

The moment the talking stops, I feel something. There is that little crackle inside your inner ear, signaling that something has shifted. The hammer and drum are out of sync. This is followed by a burst of heat encircling that round ball in your cheeks, slowly cooling, making its way down to your stomach, pushing downward on all your organs. That interruption is for you, and somehow you know it. It is the sixth sense that God or Satan or Rowenta gave all of us. The one we all know about, but blame on ghosts and fake dead people. My face is flush-hot and my stomach is knotting.

I hear my name and I am excused from the meeting. This is the first time someone said my name this week. When I stand, sweat forming under my arms, confused, I decide I don’t want anyone to notice my pants. They all do.

Everyone snickers. Meetings are an easy audience; maybe I should tell them my iron did break, for one last snicker. I don’t; average guys don’t tell jokes.

A stranger leads me back to my computer. His suit matches my cubicle walls and his demeanor is stiff, machine-like. I feel like I should make small talk because I know something is wrong. But my mind is swirling too fast to think straight. I think I say, “So how’s your day going?” but it comes out weird. It’s more like, “How’s the weather treating your day?” The stranger doesn’t flinch or smile or giggle. Rules of engagement in action. He answers “fine” or “okay” or something.

At my computer stands Cambron. It turns out that his shirt has a mechanical moth eating an apple on it. This moth wears pants. Cambron has my new keyboard and he says my name. Normally I would smile at this success, but my name is followed by, “We found some interesting items in emails that you’ve sent out. You’ve violated privacy policy and shared client information with outside sources….” He talks fancy, like he’s reading a script. I stop listening. I don’t know what he’s talking about, but I’m sure I’m guilty of it. There are rules here, and I pretend to know all of them, but I don’t. It’s not because I can’t remember them all, it’s because I don’t care. I don’t feel like punching Cambron any more.

I say “Bye, Cameron.” He doesn’t get it. He smiles and jelly-beans off into a sea of taupe colored squares.

Today, I missed the ferry and bumped my head on the boat. Today I emerged from the camouflage. And today my life changed, even though I’ve done nothing different other than wrinkle my khaki pants. I am no different than yesterday, but today people remembered me enough to scour useless emails and take the time to learn the “correspondence protocol” that most people erase from their under-used brains on the first hour of their first day. Today I was the same person I have always been. But I will be different tomorrow. Because I’ve learned something, I just don’t know what yet. Sometimes khaki pants can change your life more than a malignant tumor lodged in your esophagus or a high six-figure inheritance from a nearly unknown great uncle or grandmother. Sometimes.