Inappropriate Behavior: Stories by Murray Farish

for that. It was a clap, then a stomp, then a clap, then a stomp, and soon all the employees on the seventh floor were doing it, clap, stomp, clap, stomp, in unison, and somewhere in the midst of it all, a woman began to sing, the words, if there were words, unintelligible, the tune a whiny, unmelodic descant above the percussion of clap, stomp, clap, stomp. I looked out and saw Smith standing across from me, sweat popping out of his forehead and that forehead red again, much more so than the day before. He was clapping and stomping and clapping and stomping, and his teeth were clinched, his mouth a rictus of pleasure and pain at once, his yellow teeth glowing against the redness of his cheeks and neck, his eyes shut tight behind thethick black frames as if he were so transported that to look on anything in a world as banal as this would be unholy, unnatural.
    Afraid to move from my cubicle, I decided— decided is too strong a word, I was beyond deciding anything—to stay where I was and wait for whatever was causing this apocalypse to come to me. But I was beyond being able to do even that, beyond being able to do nothing. As if some unseen, giant, but still gentle hands had hold of me, I felt myself being led—not drawn, but led—out into the hallway between the cubicles. It was an irresistible force, and I didn’t even try to avoid it. I knew that whatever I would see on the other side of my partition would change me forever, irrevocably, from being who I was to being someone I was not prepared to be, and I could only hope that somehow, as I had been led to Contracts and led to the window to watch Schmelling that first day, I would be led to an understanding of my new self, to adapt and grow and somehow live with what I would soon become.
    There in the hallway, the workers were lined up, clapping and stomping, clapping and stomping. The woman singing was now in a wailing frenzy of sound, and there was no longer any question about words; it was just sound, animalistic, primal, going from groaning to screaming and haphazardly hitting every octave in between. Some people were falling on the floor and rolling about in some kind of corporate Pentecostalism, still clapping and stomping all along. The room, the floor, had become incredibly hot, from all the strenuous activity of the untested muscles and lungs, yes, but also from some other source, as if hell, if you believe in that sort of thing, had opened a branch office right here on seven. I was beginning to come back to myself in some way, to realize that what was happening here was wrong, and again, that urge to flee that I had felt briefly the day before returned to me.
    I thought of the box of stuff on the floor near my desk, turned right to look for it, and there was Smith, grinning wildly. I turned my head left, and there was Smith again, still grinning.I looked away, closed my eyes, and set my feet to run the gauntlet of my writhing coworkers, but just as I did, I felt Smith lean in near my ear. “Are you ready for Schmelling?”
    I opened my eyes, and I saw him.
    It was Schmelling, and this time he was walking—if you can call it that—under the weight of an enormous ledger that he carried on his back. The book was as large as a queen-size mattress, made of brown skin the color of cedar, its brass rings as wide as Hula-Hoops, the pages thick and coarse as canvas inside. I don’t know how he was able to carry the thing by himself. I knew he was strong—you try the crabwalk sometime, it’s tough—but I would have thought ten men would have strained under the weight of the astonishing book, and it hurt me to see him bearing it alone. Forget for a moment that I should have been thinking, What the hell is the deal with this huge ledger? And why is he lugging it through this madhouse to begin with? For all I can tell you is that at that particular moment, my only thought was to help him with his burden.
    So I did. I met him