Austin Insomnia

Abstract

Austin Insomnia Stephanie Dickinson Part 1 I see the dress I wore: blue and short-sleeved with fine white stripes, a white collar trimmed with eyelet lace, and on my feet, Babe slingbacks, pantyhose (the shade called coffee) instead of panties. The dress, a gift from a supervisor, whose daughter had outgrown it, must have been expensive; the tag announced itself, as did the midnight-blue lining, a slipperiness that felt like satin. The first time I put it on I noticed a rip in the seam under the right arm. I continued to wear the dress, always conscious of the hole when I lifted my right arm, my only working arm, since my left arm was paralyzed, after a shotgun accident. Still, I liked the feel of the dress, how it slipped around me, like 3 a.m. in the Dallas heat. I labored as a Wanger, i.e. a Wang word processor, sending out annuitant letters to former Mobil employees regarding their 401K plans. There were four other Wangers. Pauline from Taiwan, who now lived in a Dallas suburb that burglars had broken into, and when they cornered her daughter, Pauline had begged them to rape her instead, and they had; and Cleaster, silken-voiced, raised on a hog farm in Arkansas; Marc, a classical violinist from Tyler, Texas, whose father had run him off for being queer; and Lola, with her elegant frowning face, never letting a day go by that she didn't mention the hell of being bused to the integrated school in Lafayette, Louisiana, and white kids throwing rocks. The word processing pool was an oasis for beautiful people, for refugees, for the big hearted. All you needed was a valid social security number and you could skip the interview, slip in through a temporary agency, no references checked. The two things required of you—to work like a dog and eat lunch at your desk. On this August morning, the coffee cart was nearing and the 10:15 a.m. cowbell clanged to announce it. I sat in front of the WANG's green screen, a slow behemoth attached to a wide-track printer with its continuous roll of triplicate paper and a daisy wheel ready to rattle out endless annuitant letters. On my typing stand sat a brutal twelve-column spreadsheet, the same one that appeared on the green screen with its blinking ruler. Standing over me, Jack Buehler, an Annuitant Services manager on the verge of retirement, spoke in his loud twang, his dung-beetle brown eyes flashing; his breath like a sink drain, as if all the body's un fragrant juices had collected there. Now, Stephanie, I want to move the employer contribution from column 4 into column 6 and I'd prefer the totals displayed in ascending to descending order. [End Page 83] I required the WANG Users' Manual for the ascending order operation steps but couldn't reach for it with Jack perching on my shoulder, and there were some keyboard functions that required two hands. Do you think we can get going here? I'd like this spreadsheet printed before lunch, he asked, tugging at the bangs of his toupee that a dog might have mistaken for something edible. I had some feeling in my upper left arm and partial use of my bicep but the rest of the arm, when it wasn't on fire, tingled with the numbness of a foot falling asleep or a faraway bottle of seltzer water. The function I needed to perform to move the column required two hands. I would use my left elbow to hold down the Ctrl key and on the far side of the keyboard, that may as well have been the continental span between the West Coast and East Coast, I would press the Shift key with my index finger. I would not haul my elbow up and expose my clenched left hand to this man. ________ The cowbell had awoken the sundry annuitant advisors who peered out of their offices separated from the cubicles by glass, their desks grown over with paper foliage, leaning towers of duplicate forms from retirees clamoring for life insurance...