I was sitting in their offices. Perhaps there was some music playing now I look back on it, but it was so innocuous - like the magnolia walls. Maybe the walls swallowed the music - magnolia would do that to most music. The reception area felt more compact than it was. It was quite a few metres from the sofa to the sleek reception desk. I remember looking at the trim carpet, with its vacuum lines scraped across it. I'd imagined a heavy metal vacuum cleaner, early morning, sucking on the carpet for all it was worth, some mundane cleaner sweeping at it haphazardly - thinking about her next haircut or what to have for supper, or her last fuck, but not the carpet. I was spending more time thinking about this carpet than she had in the whole past year. I didn't have my notebook to jot down this idea of a visitor to a place thinking more about someone's work than the worker did, but it was a decent distraction anyway - it took the edge off the nerves. Until the receptionist spoke in a voice she'd withdrawn from interest by about ten thousand miles:
'The Mr Smiths will see you in a side room now.'
I waited for her to finish, but she had already - at least that's what her retracted head and silence told me.
'Sorry - where is the side room?'
'It's here on your left. Go straight. Go in the third door on the right.'
There'll be stages in robot development that'll surpass her before they reach anywhere near most humans I thought to myself. I liked the thought this and figured I should use it in a story sometime - not a full story in itself, but just for a line. I like to shoot the odd line in, see how it goes. I always think of Raymond Chandler when I do that - stupid really. By the time I was done throwing some shoddy grammar into the line and thinking of a context, I was at the door.
I was really quite nerved up now - sometimes it's so hard to enter a room - it's like the door is throbbing - behind the door is about six tons of my blood being pushed by my heart. My heart thrashing about in my chest so much now I felt it smacking sucker-punches anywhere it could hit. It kept getting me in my ears:
'Thwuck! Thwuck! Thwuck!'
I don't know if my hammering chest had covered his voice, but it sounded impatient - like a repeated phrase.
'You can come in now.'
When I'm nervous I think of everything useless, all the permutations of a situation - it stops me acting, but gets me thinking, mulling. Fear would be a great creator, were it not for the pausing it has - an intelligent, slow creature. And that's how my hand approached the handle, like a slow intelligent creature, but shaking.
I wondered if I would use that line too - I didn't like it as much as the one about the robot. The robot was better - it had avoided the word 'like'. What a bitch it is that good similes paint you into a corner with the word 'like'. But, 'fuck it' anyway I thought to myself - it's good practice if nothing else to describe an emotion - fear - the slow creature. Yes, I'll try it some time.
'Jesus - fucking - wept! Come in already!'
It was time to start turning the handle too.
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