Fiction: “Launch Night at Dante’s Ad Agency” by Ben Parzybok

This is an original fiction submission based on the prompt “Launch,” in celebration of the launch of our new website. We will be partnering with Publication Studio to collect all of the “launch” pieces into a limited edition chapbook, that will be available for purchase through our website. We are currently accepting submissions based on the prompt “Gus,” for our new Weekend Originals series. Please click here for more details.

Launch Night at Dante’s Ad Agency

by Ben Parzybok

On the night of the website launch, Elizabeth sweated profusely, and smelled too, she realized with some dismay, having forgotten to put on her deodorant that morning. It was hot, ungodly hot. The heat in the building was ratcheted up so that they all had a sheen of sweat on their foreheads.

The building was old in a fashionable way. The clients, when they arrived, would find the steam radiators a charming anachronism, but for now the radiators rattled and belched and threatened. The CEO himself had gone to inspect the problem in the furnace room, spittle and curses issuing from his mouth like bees, but finding the situation far beyond his meager skill-set, a man had been called from across town to tinker with the beast.

Elizabeth went from staff member to staff member in search of someone who might carry deodorant around in her purse or his glovebox.

For the website launch they had pushed aside dozens of cubicles, shoving the things wholesale, their desks and computers and the lot swept with them. Underneath, a rot was revealed that was surprising to them — food that had been left under desks, smells that had settled in, stains that had not been addressed. But no matter — when the cubicles were gone, a tremendous screen was brought in the likes of which few had ever seen, and the floor was forgotten. Ten feet tall it was, and twenty feet wide, and here they would gather, when all was ready, with the last flourishes and polishes of the website tidied up, to watch the unveiling with their prestigious clients. They would eat catered food and listen to their CEO roll out all his big words. In the air was a palpable, terrified excitement. Months of work were at stake and a series of television commercials were set to introduce the site to the world.

It was Elizabeth, as the primary client contact, the ambassador between the wealthy nation of the telecom firm and the strange country of the agency, who would steer them through the experience of the launch. She would meet the client at the door — all four or five or six of them, take reassuringly the arm of their leader, a wiry-haired, five foot tall woman named Liselle who had more in common with a yakuza-boss than a marketing chief for a hardware company, and guide them with gentle persuasion. A proper appearance and aroma were imperative. Earlier her CEO had cornered her to talk about the importance of this client visit. Her CEO: picture here for a moment Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent, but add a tie permanently pulled askew, looped around the neck of a man who steered his ship calmly, until, as did happen occasionally, he utterly lost his shit, which he had been doing for last 48 hours. In this particular case, they had nothing. Everybody knew it: the website was buggy, the commercial was dull, the campaign was crap. But sometimes it was not the work itself, but how you presented the work. And tonight, by god, they were going to fall to their knees in homage to the genius of it. They were the purveyors of cool and the client would witness and be pulled into their sway. They would perform a collective act of fraud.

Elizabeth traveled through each of these crammed-together cubicles now, the smell of the hunt on her. In one she found Damon the web developer, still working. She hesitated at the entrance. It was only thirty minutes before the client arrived; she tamped down a seed of anxiety.

“Hi Day,” she brushed aside a strand of hair with her right hand while attempting to keep some distance between them. Damon had many times queried about the possibility of dating her, and she preferred not to give him any cause to query again.

Damon did not answer. She studied his fleshy back as he stared intently into the screen. She did not know it at the time, but he was scrolling through hundreds of thousands of lines of code looking for a line he’d written in an anger-induced lapse of sanity. A line that could, under the correct circumstances, cause the website to churn out raunchy pornographic content like a geyser, like a ruptured hydrant, that could cause the website to email every one of its  registered users — one million, six hundred forty two thousand and ninety three, at last check — the same pornographic content, like a burst dyke, a vomiting infant, a line of code that could, in effect, ruin everything that all of them had struggled so long for.

Elizabeth watched him for a moment. He was oblivious. He sweated too, his back wet with it. Damon had often received complaints from neighboring cubicles for his hammer-handedness, his violent keystrokes, and now she watched him pause in the scrolling to ratchet away on the keyboard with machine ferocity. She decided to leave him be.

She made a hopeful pass through the woman’s bathroom. At the door she paused, there were sounds coming from within, a yelping of sorts, as if a dog were trapped inside. She sighed with disgust at the rampant irresponsibility of her co-workers. This was an extra complication she did not have time for. And yet all other things aside, she liked dogs, and she didn’t care for the idea that someone had trapped one in the bathroom. She couldn’t just leave it.

Slowly she eased the door open. “Here puppy puppy,” she said and the yelping quieted to breathy whispers. It was not a dog, it was two people going at it like dogs in one of the stalls.

“Goddamnit,” Elizabeth said. It wasn’t the first time it’d happened. “Does anybody have any deodorant?”

“Sorry!” It was Denise, the project manager for content strategy, whose voice sounded like a helium balloon, except now there was a panting tenor of ecstasy and regret to it.

“There are two people in here, are there not? Or are you solo-ing here?” Elizabeth said.

There was a whispered, scuffling silence.

“Well?”

“He doesn’t have any either,” said the balloon.

“And who is he who has none?”

“It’s me, E,” said Danny.

“Danny? What are you doing?” she said, though it was rather obvious what he was doing. A sense of loss overtook her. Danny was — though certainly not their only gay man, their most important gay man. His flagrant gayness was vital to their credibility as an agency. She slammed the door shut. She was on a mission, and she must not let the transgressions of others impede her progress.

Elizabeth wandered from cubicle to cubicle, most of them empty now as the agency employees waited in front of the big screen. She found Kaitlin, their resident server scaling expert, at her desk where she appeared to be methodically paging through every LOLcat picture ever posted to the internet, chuckling softly to herself, her body bent in such a way as to suggest the sheer volume of days at her desk had given gravity its pleasure over her body.

“Hey Kaitlin,” Elizabeth said and paused to read a monorail cat caption.

“E.”

“Say — embarrassing to ask, but do you have any deodorant? I guess I forgot.”

“Drawer,” Kaitlin said, nodding her head subtly to the desk drawer to her left.

Elizabeth sighed with relief and opened the drawer. Inside she found the most incredible mash of objects and junk she’d ever seen. The stock items were there: paper clips, rubber bands, thumb tacks, note cards, pens, pencils, erasers, a coffee mug with a buoyant fuzz of green at the bottom, paycheck stubs, sharpeners, mints, candy wrappers, various cables to devices long-since lost. There were plastic forks, hundreds of pennies, used gum stuck to the sides, CDs….

“Hey, this is my Pixies CD.”

“Oh?” Kaitlin said with disinterest.

“I gave it to you to burn like months ago.”

“Yeah.”

There were hairbrushes and tampons, a pair of underwear, condoms, earrings, a screwdriver and pliers, a jackknife and a banana peel that had shriveled into a stiffened little corpse of driftwood. “Kaitlin, this is a mess dude.”

“Yeah.” Kaitlin said.

At the back Elizabeth found a stick of strawberry deodorant, covered in its own goo. “You use strawberry deodorant?”

“No, that stuff’s awful. Gave me a wicked rash down there.”

“What?” Elizabeth said and un-handed it. “This is the deodorant you were talking about?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.” She shut the drawer, leaving the deodorant where it was, and wiped her hands thoroughly on her jeans. Then she patted Kaitlin on the back. “Well, will the system hold up?”

“mMmm mMmm,” Kaitlin said, mumming through the words ‘I don’t know’ with her lips shut.

Before she could stop herself, Elizabeth said: “Isn’t that…? I mean if?”

Kaitlin spun round in her chair and studied her. Her eyes were ringed with dark circles and her head bent at an awkward angle. “You mean,” she said slowly, “isn’t that my fucking job? And won’t everything be fucked if it doesn’t hold? You mean, isn’t the heat in this fucking hellhole at this very moment cooking the servers in their own grease?”

“No no — no! No I totally have faith in you, “ Elizabeth said. “Just looking for, you know.” She took a step backward out of the cube. She pointed at Kaitlin’s screen in an off-handed gesture, where a squirrel was caught on a spinning bird-feeder.

“You do smell,” Kaitlin said.

“I know, okay?” Elizabeth backed out of the cube.

Elizabeth found Javier, the art director, in the lounge of the agency. Because they had clients to impress, a mystique to uphold, and a coolness to portray, the lounge was an exorbitantly decorated expanse of  couches, chairs and collectible video game arcade consoles. The walls were artfully painted in a Salvador Dali-ish take on Asteroids.

Javier was splayed out on a leather couch with an iPad resting on his chest, his tousled hair a weathervane of the day’s pressure. The incoming gray stubble around his sharp chin gave a sophisticated look to his raw beauty.

Because of her repeated failures and newfound sense of impending doom, Elizabeth’s inhibitions were lowered. She slumped dramatically onto the couch across from Javier.

“I stink,” she said.

“Oh? You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”

“Not a soul in the place has a useable stick of deodorant.”

“Hm,” Javier said.

“You don’t have any?”

“What?”

“Deodorant,” Elizabeth said.

“What for?”

“I stink?”

“Just a sec.” Javier tipped his iPad up and futzed with the screen for several minutes.

“So you have some?” she said finally.

“What?”

“Damnit Javier, deodorant, it’s not like I like asking the question.”

“Who the hell brings deodorant to work?” he said.

Elizabeth scowled and stared up at a splintered asteroid from which a mustached man was emerging.

“This is going nowhere, isn’t it,” she said, meaning: everything. Her quest for deodorant, her career at the agency, her love life, and more specifically, the conversation she was having with Javier.

“Absolutely nowhere.” Javier checked his iPad again.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, tell me.”

“You don’t want to know.”

She looked at the perfect specimen of a man across from her. In her mind, the work he did for the agency was brilliant, if derivative. She pondered the idea that he was involved in some devious scheme, that underneath that beautiful veneer and poised facade there was something rotten. “Tell me.”

“No.”

“Come on, Javi. I’m here drowning in my own stench. Throw me a bone.”

“I’m refreshing the Google News page on James Franco.”

Elizabeth sat up and leaned forward to look at his screen.

James Franco Will Pursue Second Ph.D  in Creative Writing At Houston University, the top headline read.

“You do stink,” Javier said.

At the company get-togethers Javier always brought some gorgeous, fashionable woman, she remembered, though she knew almost nothing about his personal life. He was clearly out of her league, so she’d never bothered with him much.

“You’re… attracted to him?” she said, unable to keep the sound of hope out of her voice after her incident in the bathroom with Danny. “You like James Franco?” They could have a quiet, poised gay man, a brilliant stoic. It would take some getting used to, but it might work.

“No…” he sighed and put the iPad face down on his chest again. “I hate James Franco. I just want to be James Franco.”

Elizabeth laughed and he gave her a wounded look.

“I told you didn’t I?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? You asked and I told you.”

“No that’s cool, yeah no – I’m just surprised.”

Javier grunted and turned away from her so that his face pressed against the back of the couch.

“Listen Javi, he’s like — very talented and — but so are you!” She realized suddenly that they were on the cliff’s edge of a creative breakdown, and she couldn’t handle this alone, or more specifically, she didn’t want to be there for it at all.

After all, there were people on staff to handle just these sorts of breakdowns, hired for their soothing ways, their pep-talkery, their ego-boosting. They had other, more officious titles, but everyone knew what they were there for. Later in life they would find work as hostage negotiators and life coaches, as press secretaries and mothers. Elizabeth patted Javi on his hip, inspected the perfectness of it, even in pout. He was a lovely creature.

“Yep well, I’ve got to go subject a few other unsuspecting bystanders to my aroma, pancho. If I were you, I’d leave Franco alone.” She reminded herself to call in one of the meltdown-team.

Javier stared into the leather at the back of the couch and said nothing.

“Right.”

Elizabeth headed back to the bathroom, this time skipping the women’s. She called into the men’s bathroom: “Anybody here?” It was empty. She stood in front of the sink and looked suspiciously at the general uncleanliness of it, certainly no different than the women’s, but in gender segregated bathrooms she suspected some kind of unusual cootie. The soapy smudge across the counter a likely candidate for a semen-smear, or something worse.

But she couldn’t be stopped now. She removed her shoes and propped them against the door — a temporary, if ineffective block. Then she took off her shirt, folded it carefully in a stain-free area and stared at herself there in the mirror.

Not too bad, came the verdict. Inevitably, as with every exposure to a mirror, she pondered again the gym membership the agency paid for but which she never used. Maybe she would this time, maybe she’d start tomorrow morning, or the morning after that, maybe she’d been waiting for just the right time, and that time was now. She lathered up some hand soap and applied it to her under-arms. The client would be arriving in just under ten minutes now, and she could hear the flurry of caterers finishing up details.

Someone barreled with a thud into the door. The rubber of her shoe’s sole dug in and barred the way. She reached her leg out and stepped on her shoes so they wouldn’t give as the gorilla on the other side lurched against the door again. Stupidity is the mother of repetition, she thought. The sink was situated so that she could just see herself in the mirror and reach the faucet with one foot holding her shoes in place.

“Hello?” came a man’s plaintive voice. “Can I come in?” The door rattled back and forth.

She wondered if it were an emergency. She rinsed her underarms and replaced her foul-smelling blouse.

When she was finished, she opened the door wide and Anthony Drybyzek in sales, bald and built like a standalone ATM,  blundered in.

“Hullo.”

“Tony.”

“Hey Lizzie! They’re nearly here and the boss is freaking out wondering where you are and the furnace dude is AWOL and hey what are you doing in the men’s –” he said, but she maneuvered out and let the door close between them.

There. She sniffed herself and felt moderately satisfied with her success.

She removed the paper towels she had wadded in her arm pits and dropped them in Damon’s trash. He was still feverishly at it. The heat in the building was stifling.

She hurried to the front door. She would take Liselle by the arm and guide her through it all. They would gorge themselves on cheese stuffed mushrooms, deviled eggs, chocolate truffles and expensive red wine. It would be OK, everything would turn out alright.

Liselle waited on the other side of the ad agency’s glass door with a cadre of well-dressed men with immaculately combed hair. Elizabeth opened the door and a gaseous cloud of noxious, hot air rushed out of the mouth of the building, causing Liselle to squint and wrinkle her nose distastefully, and the men to hand-check their hair-dos.

“I love your outfit,” Elizabeth said, and wiped a drop of sweat from her brow. Liselle wore a baby-blue cashmere sweater with men’s slacks and a vaguely military hat. Elizabeth hoped she had something appropriate underneath to strip down to. “It’s hot in here, furnace on the fritz, sorry!” In Liselle’s burly squatness and unwaveringly stern expression, one might expect a samurai sword to be affixed to her back, or for her right hand to bear a large hammer as might be used by a dwarf at war.

Elizabeth sat them in the direct center of their array of thirty chairs in the impromptu theater, flanked on all sides by agency employees. The CEO hand-picked those that would sit directly next to them, those who may laugh the most at the CEO’s jokes, or who had a modicum of social skills or an intimidating sense of cool.

“Aren’t you just so excited?” Elizabeth squeezed Liselle’s arm. She tried to remember what they had in common, certainly she’d managed some idle chatter with her before.

Liselle sat very still and gripped the seat back in front of her.

“It’s going to be really great,” she patted Liselle’s knee reassuringly.

“We certainly hope so,” Liselle said, “it cost us six hundred thousand dollars. So far.”

Suddenly the CEO was there, the mere mention of money manifesting the man. His tie was straightened and the Clark Kent ‘S’ on his hairline was perfectly formed. “Worth every damn penny!” he said. “Liselle! How are you doing? Looking great. Sorry about the heat — want to see the furnace? She’s a beaut! Made in 1951 when they were making things to last a millennium, and here we are, right? How are you doing, and you are?” He held his hand out in turn to the small army of men Liselle had brought with her.

“Yes, I would,” Liselle said.

“I’m sorry?” the CEO said.

“Yes I would like to see the furnace.”

“Oh! Oh-ho! I just sputtered that out, didn’t I? Well of course, she’s a beaut. Did you all already get some food? What can I do to make you comfortable?”

“Let’s see the furnace,” Liselle’s mouth tightened into a steely approximation of a smile.

“Yes, well let’s do it right now — how much time have we E?” He put his hand on Liselle’s upper arm. “I’m completely a fan of that era, right? The war was over, hope was in the air, the modern age was upon us.”

“Twenty-two minutes,” Elizabeth said.

“And looky here,” the CEO said as two caterers materialized, one bearing wine and the other with some kind of glistening spleen-like meat appetizer. “Eat, eat!” He took two glasses off of the wine tray and handed them out, repeating until everyone was armed.

“Let’s do it,” Liselle said.

“The furnace?”

Liselle and her companions stood, and the CEO gave Elizabeth a quick, hopeless expression.

“This way, my friends,” he said, “though, I should warn you, it is after all, just a furnace.”

At the center of the old, brick building in Chinatown, they had installed a spiral staircase. They took this now, lining up in single file to descend toward the source of heat.

Elizabeth wondered what they’d left down here, what incriminating evidence they might find. The stairway seemed to go on forever, and even as she came to the stained concrete floor at the bottom with its numerous doors leading into odd, spider-webby rooms, one of them holding the roaring, pumping furnace, others housing servers and prisoners, probably, from bygone eras, she heard the metallic thudding of people descending the stairs behind her echoing on. She had always been afraid of basements.

“This way,” the CEO said. He opened a door that vibrated with whatever force was behind it. A red glow spilled out from within. The room was large enough for the eight or so of them to cram into. In the corner the furnace dominated the room, taking up a good half of it with its girth. It reached its large tentacular arms to the ceiling, its bulging belly rattled with anger, its many doors and vents and hatches opened and shut in weird syncopation. They stood in awe of it.

A gnarled, ugly man appeared from behind it suddenly, where there seemed to be no space to come from. The CEO jumped and sung out, his urge to keep his dignity cutting the holler off mid-way through, “HARRR! are you? furnace man.”

The furnace man wiped his hands on a blackened cloth and inspected the assortment of people in his room. He wore a be-smudged baseball cap that said “I like it hot”, glasses and a sweater whose original color — gray? tan? — was no longer recognizable. He was not sweating, Elizabeth noticed, as her antiperspirant-free underarms issued forth like burst dams. It had to near a hundred degrees in the room. Finally he settled his gaze on Liselle, perhaps assuming, correctly, she was the most powerful person in the room.

“She’s malcontent she is.”

“Who is,” Liselle said.

“Speak up, she’s drowning us out,” the furnace man said.

Liselle took a few steps toward him and planted her feet. “I said who is.”

“The old lady, she’s angered.” He yanked his thumb over his shoulder at the furnace. “Never seen her worked up like this. You’all been sinning?” The furnace man chuckled and then fell to coughing. The glow reflected a deep orange off his spectacles. “She knows,” he said, and Elizabeth shuddered as if an icy wind had just blown through the room.

Liselle turned to look back at the CEO.

“Alright, well hey thank you furnace man, we obviously needed your talents! I hope you can save us sinners!” the CEO laughed.

The furnace man took on a grim expression. “I handle furnaces.”

He turned and threw one hand up in the air backwards, as if they’d been dismissed. He continued to talk, Elizabeth heard, but the syllables were drowned out by the roar of the furnace.

Back upstairs Elizabeth excused herself to go wash her underarms in the bathroom again before joining them in their make-do theater. There everyone was stuffing their mouths madly. She entered the room and heard only the sounds of thirty people eating in unison, smacking their lips, the sound like hundreds of trout slapping about on a formica countertop. They snorkeled in their wine and belched garlic fumes into the heat.

They had wished to watch it live, of course. To see it as others saw it, sandwiched between other commercials in the middle of a basketball game during playoffs. When it came on, everyone held absolutely still.

It was, she saw again, a meaningless montage of imagery. An utter heap of bullshit, an attempt at conveying: Even though you might think of us as staid, conservative business-nerds, in reality we’re awesomely fun and hip, and totally into you.

Elizabeth glanced slyly at Liselle, who continued to wear the same expression she’d arrived with, or perhaps it was a few degrees grimmer.

Still, they were conservative business nerds. This came through especially when the projection followed the website link advertised in the commercial over to the website the agency had built for them. Where there should have been a tasteful graphic at the top, instead flashed hardcore, pornographic images at an incredible speed, a strobe-light of flesh and humping.  One by one they watched various areas of the website spontaneously convert over from pompous hardware messaging to surging porn conduits. Liselle stood up, her mouth open.

“Turn it off!” screamed the CEO, unable to tear his eyes from the screen.

One of Liselle’s employees went into violent epileptic seizure, likely caused by the flickering of the screen. His body writhed on the ground and knocked the legs out from under the cheap plastic chairs they’d set up for the viewing, hurling others to the ground and scattering everyone in a circle.

“Turn it off!” the CEO cried again.

Damon sat and watched his work in horror, transfixed by its beauty and repulsiveness. He had found the line and removed it, hadn’t he? In just a moment now, he realized, everyone would realize it was all his fault. On the right side of the screen they had another projection monitoring traffic to the site and the health of Kaitlin’s servers. The number continued to rapidly ascend, probably as the hardware company’s porn phenomenon was passed via social networks at alarming speed. The site was quickly going viral.

I despise this job, Damon thought. They expect too much of me, he tried to convince himself. For a brief instant he wondered if they wouldn’t just fire him, but perhaps also do him harm, a violent mob-attack, pulling him limb from limb. He began to feel very sick. He reached forward to eat another cheese-filled mushroom but quietly vomited between his feet instead. After that came another heave, and another, with increasing force and volume, all of the appetizers he’d hastily eaten were now in a tremendous hurry to get out. He submerged Javier’s shoe in it.

Javier’s face was frozen in outraged disgust. The images he was seeing on the screen were in place of where his work should have been. He turned that outraged disgust toward the mess made of his shoe and Damon and leaped athletically away, splattering the vomit and crushing others as he went.

“Please, for the love of god,” the CEO said.

Liselle reached into her small, conservative handbag, pulled out a can of mace, and proceeded to spray down the entire room, starting with the CEO and ending with Javier, so that such a chaos erupted as has never before been experienced in an advertising agency, with bodies writhing and tearing at themselves, others compulsively throwing up as Damon’s awful progress triggered their own reflexive vomit switches.

Over the top of all of this a thunderous voice was heard. The room shook with its power: “The furnace is fixed! Repent!”

At that moment the clever sad-face graphic someone had created to indicate the demise of the servers flashed onto the screen, the website stopped geysering out porn, and the room calmed into quiet weeping, moaning, and the occasional disgorging of previously eaten food.

Elizabeth picked herself up off the floor and felt her way to her cubicle. She wiped the tears from her stinging eyes and the vomit from her pant-leg. This place is going to hell, she thought.

All at once, every phone in the agency began to ring.

Elizabeth sighed and headed back to the theater. She found Liselle, frozen in a state of horror, and took her by her arm. “Come on dearie,” she said. As she led Liselle back toward the door, her men, now humbled and disheveled, covered in vomit, their eyes burning, one with blood on the edges of his mouth after the seizure, followed behind. She waved to them after they’d exited the building, stumbling wearily into the startling sunlight and fresh air.

Elizabeth lingered there at the door for just a moment, staring into the living world beyond the gates of the agency, before she returned.

————————————————–

Ben Parzybok is a novelist and web developer living in Portland, OR. His first book, COUCH, came out from Small Beer Press in late 2008. He also runs the startup Walker Tracker. He’s married to the writer Laura Moulton.