So They Can Scan a Navy In

By Adam Kaz

Lately I’ve been thinking a whole lot about all the (*insane*) mystic figures throughout history with big eyes and resonant voices. There was Diogenes, an ancient philosopher we remember fondly for masturbating in public; Elizabeth Báthory, the inbred Hungarian countess who bathed in peasant blood; and all the oracles who writhed on the floor until something God-like came out. 

And I finally get it: mental illness is determined almost entirely by a person’s status.

When you think about it, important people can’t be insane (at least not completely) because then we couldn’t make them important. I, Delaney Locklear, 22-year-old Content Writer at Hansen’s Medical Devices who makes $40,000 a year, have a Disorder; but what if I were Delaney Locklear, 50-year-old Editor in Chief at The New York Times who makes $200,000 a year? Would she have a Disorder? Of course not. She’d be “eccentric,” a real card—the way she yells at her coworkers and grinds her teeth and bites her nails and breaks up with her boyfriend and throws things at the wall.

So now that I see a rise in social credibility will retcon my mental illness, at least in the eyes of the huddled masses, I’ve been finding ways to up my status. Which is why I’ve been off my meds for a few weeks, because they slow me down; it’s also why I’ve been buying so much art.

Oh my god so much fucking art!

The way I see it the people with high status, the landed gentry if you will, have a monopoly on beautiful things, like paintings and books and old timey clocks; and they lock them away in their little “fortresses” or stores, and I can only get to them if I play along with their suicidal capitalist game. But I’m winning the game right now, for the most part, what with my regular salary and my living in my parent’s basement with no real expenses and all. So why not spend $500 on a collection of folk art? Why not buy the entire Ultimate Classics Collection at Barnes and Noble? Important people surround themselves with beautiful things, lest they forget how important slash beautiful they are.

And my boss, who right now is sitting across the table from me, he has so many beautiful things in his softly lit office. There’s a tiny bust of a man with a sharp nose and curly hair, framed authentic 19th century pencil sketches of all the muscles and tendons in the human arm, and (wouldn’t you know it?) an old timey clock right there on his desk. And I’m so enraptured by all the beauty around me, and so fascinated by the way my boss’s skin wrinkles and folds like dough around his lips, that I can barely understand a word he’s saying.

“So, here you are, 90 days in: how do you think you’re doing at Hansen’s?” 

“Great!” I say.

“Why do you say that?”

“Oh.” I think of an answer. “Because I’m learning a lot?” It feels like a question coming out like that. But it being a question makes it no less true, insofar that it’s definitely a lie.

He wriggles and scrunches his beautiful, wrinkled lips. “It’s important to ask ourselves these questions because it’s so easy to make assumptions, to assume everything is OK, you know?”

This seems serious, so I lower my chin and try to look concerned. “Are things not OK?”

My boss sighs, removes a piece of paper from a manila folder. “Things are not perfect.”

He’s sliding this beautifully clean piece of paper across his desk, and I see it’s a copy of an excellent article I wrote about Hansen’s knee replacements earlier this week. They (the knee replacements) aren’t really so bad as the lawyers on TV say—it’s just younger people are getting more surgeries these days because they’re more active than previous generations, and you can’t expect an artificial knee to manage the wear and tear you get from mountain biking or climbing or playing tennis.

It’s 850 words of solid web content, but I see it’s all marked up in red ink by my boss’s surreal, squiggly, wrinkly, wriggly handwriting; and I think about how a linguistic archeologist in the post-apocalyptic future would learn so much if he/she picked this page from the rubble.

“You need to learn our style guide,” he says, “because at 90 days I shouldn’t be seeing all these careless mistakes.”

I try to focus on his corrections, but I find myself lost in the paper as a whole, how the red and black and white contrast and coagulate. My boss has soft lamps in his office because the building’s fluorescent lights give him migraines, and in this room the page looks muted, like I’m staring at it through Scotch Tape. 

Meanwhile my boss says, “Look here, there should be a comma there. You wrote ‘On Thursday the CDC announced . . .’ After Thursday there should be a comma. That’s something you should catch before you send me a draft.”

“Well, you know, I kind of have a rule with myself that I don’t put commas after introductory clauses if they’re fewer than five words,” I say. “Like if the sentence were, ‘Suddenly George went to the beach,’ would you put a comma after ‘Suddenly?’”

My boss considers this for a moment, but only for a moment. Obviously he didn’t expect to be confronted by a Goddamn Gorgeous Goddamn Greek Goddess, a Woman of History with big eyes and a resonant voice. 

“It’s not what I would do,” he says. “It’s what the style guide tells us to do. I’m not going to debate you on this, do you understand?”

And just then I think about all the thoughts careening through my mind. I can feel them crashing and burning, metastasizing and contorting; turning into more and more thoughts piled on each other; processing and dissecting information and sensations and emotions, like the most perfect machine on the planet. And I think about how right now, while my perfect machine operates behind the scenes, my boss has one of his own chugging away inside that leathery scalp of his. And we’re just two beautiful beings slipping and sliding through this reality, thinking and feeling, two orchestras playing over each other at full volume—and it strikes me as odd that we aren’t in love right now, my boss and me, that we aren’t using this beautiful power to connect and contort ourselves into a stronger single synergetic mind, that we aren’t, in a word, “vibing.”

So I say, just to break the tension, “Why do Scandinavian countries make foreign navies put barcodes on their battleships before they come to port?”