The Time Traveler

Note: This is what happens apparently when I wake up and try to record a dream. 

Joe Employment is looking for another job, has been for months. He wakes at like 4 a.m. and holds his swollen head in his hands w/neck on fire and stubble all but carving away and his soft and already-sweating palms. At night he drinks cold silted coffee and punches through page after page of job postings and says “fuck my life” in this sort of this emptily abstract but meaningful way.
                So Joe ‘Ployment goes to work one morning and his boss tells him to do the dishes, a whole full greasy sink of Tupperware and stained coffee mugs and forks with inextricable debris entwined in the tines – which is weird, ‘cause to the best of Joe ‘Ployment’s knowledge, he’s paid to take customer service calls where he like gets yelled at for interrupting meal time, as if the printer-warm call-schedule handed to him each morning were strategically arranged to catch each potential customer during dinner, as if it’s some new plan of attack handed down from the corporate heads, whom Joe ‘Ployment figures are at this moment laughing hard and getting loosely drunk on a golf course somewhere and are not taking calls, and sure as hell not doing dishes. But so like Joe ‘Ployment does these dishes, gets in there up to his elbows in the gingivitis-yellow suds, and he figures he’s okay because right then he remembers that this morning, before his boss came down the line with the suds’n’scrub verdict, he sent an application out to a company he’d been fancying in those late night hunts.

                Except then he has a better idea for the final line in the letter and sort of despairs for a moment before he realizes that there in the water, specifically in a sud-less patch with the rainbow shimmer of an oil slick, he can well see himself sitting at his desk getting ready to send the letter, and he gets kind of bright and shiny inside when he remembers that in like 30 seconds he’ll lock his computer screen to stand and follow his boss to her office, where he’ll hear about the whole dishwashing mandate before sulking back to his computer desk and pressing send. So Joe ‘Ployment pinches his nose and just up and dives into the sink and comes sloshing out through the ceiling, landing with a soft enough plop that his earlier self and stocky boss don’t turn to see his sopping mop gaping from the carpet. Joe ‘Ployment creeps to the comp’ and updates as necessary, and then tiptoes back to the sink where the dishes are even taller than they were a minute ago, ‘cause he hasn’t had a chance to scrub ‘em down yet, as least as far as this temporal moment is concerned. So he figures he ought to get to work to help his past self who in a minute’s future will discover the same tower of dishes (though lightly dented, is the plan) when he sort of dies inside realizing he should have made not one but like two changes – and then lo and behold in the shimmering film of one floating coffee cup’s sludge he sees his sopping self tip-toeing away from the scene of the crime, and with what he guesses is his 45 second window he squeezes himself through the mouth of the coffee cup and comes worming up from under the desk, reeking and head-to-toe covered in brown sludge. He punches in, makes the changes, and creeps along the wall to the kitchen in time to see himself starting his plunge into the mug, right arm first, and he closes his eyes because he remembers the part where he got to the shoulder as being like particularly sickening, and when he hears the plop of disappearance ahead and the slop of reemergence behind he dashes into the kitchen, but not without despair because he realizes he said “who it may concern” rather than the proper “whom it may concern” but there, in a single bubble floating like an enlarged monochromatic cell, is the blinking screen available for one last refresh, and so he pulls the elastic sud over his head and crashes right into the stocky boss and premiere Joe ‘Ployment, and then the universe sort of starts folding in on itself, first the building collapsing straight through the three of them in a mess of Ethernet cables and piping and of course a monsoon of dirty dish water bfore giving way then to a sort of firework riot of exploding stars,  which is when the boss tells him Joe Employment he’s fired and shit really hits the fan.