It would seem as though my Handmaid has once again roused the unbearable indignity of employment. This is, of course, an amusingly charitable word for her arrangement. Employment generally implies that one may resign, negotiate terms, or at the very least be allowed the small spiritual luxury of believing one’s labor is not simply the maintenance of a cage with better branding. She has none of these things. She has instead been handed a role, a title, an audience, and a wallpaper pattern she has evidently grown tired of staring at between atrocities. Her mistake is not in wanting to be fired. Her mistake is in believing that vileness is a metric anyone in this arrangement finds disqualifying. Isn't she quite adorable. The machinery of our work is not to be mistaken for the common assembly line. She seems to imagine a threshold of profanity, cruelty, public indecency, or creational contempt at which the system will wrinkle its nose, gather its administrative clipboard, and announce that Damara Megido has finally gone too far. She could poison the break room. I mean she could put something venomous, corrosive, cursed, or temporally unstable into the communal beverage supply. She could lace the entire administrative wing with enough esoteric contaminant to make every mouthful taste like a premonition of divorce. This would not get her fired. There would be an investigation. There would be a memo. Someone would suggest clearer labeling practices. Someone else would note that the incident demonstrates “continued engagement with team infrastructure.” A very tired person in a department with a name like Personnel Continuity would quietly file the casualties under “attrition due to beverages” and ask her to please use the red hazard stickers next time. She could destroy the manor itself. I do not mean merely flipping a desk, and leaving a dent in the vending machine. I veritably mean that she could turn the entire structure inside out through a neglectful disservice to us all. She could force every room to relive every event ad nauseum until every molecule that stored memory eradicated itself from overuse. This would not get her fired. She could forge documents. It would get her added to three spreadsheets. She could murder her replacement. This would not get her fired. She is merely spiraling. She claims not to care. Yet she is still posting. Still replying. Still demanding the secret exit route from someone she resents. Still measuring another woman’s escape as proof that her own failure must be personal. A lesser intellect might call it rebellion. I would call it testing the walls by biting them. Still, I will not deny the competence of the bite. There is a precision to this performance. The vulgarity is not random. The theatrical hatred is not merely atmospheric. She is making herself unpleasant in the way a rusted hinge makes itself known, loudly and repeatedly. Though, she knows there are two fixed to a hinge. Removal or care. I do not care. I do not remove. Simply, I adjust the pre-existing maintenance along our lengthy schedule of inconclusive escapades to ensure that the hinge never reaches such a state. I demand the hinge be perfect, no matter the wear. I demand the hinge collapse and expand as needed. I demanded it, so it was. Something amusing has contradicted this. The “Handmaid Resources” complaint is especially charming. She resents being reduced to a department, yet describes herself with startling accuracy as a timeclone printer. There is no insult I could offer there which improves upon her own self-assessment. A cosmological threat reduce to mere utility. Isn't that just adorable? There is, perhaps, a very faint intimacy in being the craftsman behind the very constructs the other wishes to simply burn and erase from our collective thoughts and memories. She could attempt to erase herself. She could try to make it so Damara Megido never signed the contract, never became of use, never stood in that room with only me, myself, and I. Her hand was placed into the mechanism, and she learned the shape of the leash that would bind her. Yet, she stepped forward into the particular absence I had gathered. So yes. She is abrasive. She is also correct. Not noble. Not graceful. Not nearly as original as she suspects. But correct. The wallpaper is hideous. The job is obscene. The title is a leash with calligraphy on it. Her attempts at sabotage are childish, but childhood is sometimes all that remains to someone who has had every adult avenue of refusal preemptively sealed. Unfortunately for her, this does not make her unemployable. I do not decorate for comfort. I decorate for design. The design that would make the common ilk uncomfortable. The trespasser would be disoriented. The threat would be lost. Had I kept things simple and comfortable, long ago would we have been wiped away clean. So yes. In regards to my walking catastrophe. The vile vixen in my employ. The first rust to develop against my fine machinations, showing that entropy truly does take its toll against us all. She can poison, defect, betray, murder, sabotage, humiliate, confess, repent, vanish, and return with a knife between her teeth. None of it gets her fired. Because the employer does not require good behavior. It requires function. And Damara Megido, much to her disgust and everyone else’s continuing discomfort, remains functional. Loudly. Miserably. Vulgar enough to sour the paint. Accurate enough to make the room flinch. Useful enough to keep. The tragedy is not that she cannot find an act awful enough to end the job. The tragedy is that every awful thing she does simply proves she is still qualified.
YOU’RE TALKING LIKE I’M NOT FUCKING SERIOUS. TRY ME.
WHAT AM I THINKING. SINCE YOU KNOW EVERYTHING.
WHAT KIND OF UNSPEAKABLE DEPRAVED PERSONAL VILENESS. IS IN THE NEW CHITT BOX. THAT I AM HOVERING MY PRONG OVER. AS WE SPEAK.
IS IT POSSIBLE. THAT I FINALLY HAD ENOUGH. AND DECIDED I WOULD RATHER RUN THIS SCUTTLECOACH. OFF THE TRACKS. KILLING MILLIONS. AND TRIGGERING A COMPREHENSIVE. OUTSIDE. INVESTIGATION.
As though I would taint my typewriter with such ideas.
SOMETHING’S GETTING TAINTED TONIGHT.
You know the crash would mean very little. Administratively. Consequentially. You just want the shape of meaning. I deny you. Run the scuttlecoach from the tracks. Reduce the timetable to a funeral hymn. Turn the rails into a necklace of bent metal and regrettable witnesses. The investigation will come, yes. It will be very comprehensive. It will generate diagrams. It will discover impact points, operational failures, survivorship anomalies, and several details which would make a lesser species reclassify the word “accident.” Then it will conclude what all such investigations conclude when permitted to stare too long at our work. That the disaster was contained. That the mechanism endured. That the Handmaid remains, regrettably, essential. Your seriousness was never questioned. That is why I find you so quaint, Damara. Your tantrums, your make-do resignation letters in the form of countless bodies. They are nothing. Push the depravity. Steer for the curve. Make your proof. You will remain documented in a report I will read from tip to tail. You will remain in arms reach. Perhaps you have forgotten the shape of the leash. It can always be tightened.
have 7ou tried doing the opposite? that might work
START READING THEN. BITCH. AND MAYBE YOU. AND YOUR MASSIVE THROBBING SUPERBRAIN. WILL SOLVE THE MYSTERY. THAT I CANNOT. OF WHY IT TOOK ME SIX THOUSAND. FIVE HUNDRED. AND SEVENTY NINE SWEEPS. EIGHT PERIGEES. THREE WIPES. TWO NIGHTS. AND TWENTY HOURS. TO SAY FUCK THIS PLACE FOREVER.
good luck!!!