As Baumauer hangs his shit-coloured coat up on a hook he takes clandestine pleasure in engulfing Obelmäker’s less impressive attire with his own. Privately, he warns the inferior coat, “Don’t suffocate in there.
Baumauer secretly fears Kalist – and Kalist knows it.
An overnight bag with the company logo – a white silhouette of a finch (which once perched on the curved back of a stallion representing cofounder, Orwell, but has now been ‘adjusted’) – sits motionless beside him on the carpet, sucking up be...
Baumauer has been lured into the exhausting habit of supplying Kalist with ever more exceptional quality work just to appease him and often survives all day and all evening without food, but Maxwell D. Kalist is never satisfied. He heavily criticises...
Don’t you know that Orwell and Finch have a problem with insects?” snarls moody Baumauer. And, he’s right. : bedbugs. Hitchhikers. Fine purveyors of traumatic insemination. People are always itching. Itching itching itching. Twitching fingers; ...
Baumauer sits at home in silence in the evenings planning how to impress his rigidly strict father who’s in his late seventies, but who still enforces the same dynamic between himself and his three, guilt-ridden sons as he did when they were childr...
Pamela Geiger is Kalist’s secretary and she’s forty-five, lean and tanned, but more attractive from behind than in front, according to sexist Pissec, who thinks his own wit is as sharp as a hawk’s beak. He sees a beagle sniff her leg, just belo...
Pissec approaches Pamela Geiger’s cubicle, itching in rhythm with her. He wants to ask her a question while Kalist is out of earshot. She’s not a grass, he’s sure, but stupid people die first.
The beagles are partying under Geiger’s desk.
Heads swivel. Whispers erupt. As Kalist returns to his desk, bone cane by his side, he indulges, briefly, in horse practice, neighing lightly as he scrolls through a few mental images of busty secretary, Geiger, and pretty blond, Brichacek, rolling a...
Obelmäker is eating at his desk, a habit both Baumauer and Pissec find repulsive.
Baumauer wants a life in which he cannot be belittled, judged or controlled by worse men.
Obelmäker always suspected Kalist of being a driven man with a determined selfishness that verged on sociopathic, but he actually appears to be suffering for once, in a humane way, like one who has been driven and selfish previously, but has slowly ...
Are there not times, Ridley, when you yourself wish only to hear the best in people – and not to be dragged downwards into the underworld we all regularly inhabit?
You are a more powerful person than you might have ever imagined.” Maxwell D. Kalist.
Opposite Pissec sits ghoulish Gottfried Baumauer, a tall, skinny workaholic with dark-ringed eye sockets and long, yellowing smoker’s fingers. He’s thirty-eight. He doesn’t say much. He drinks a lot of tea – likes it strong as tar. He lines u...
Men circle like bees around honey, buzzing to communicate their sexual despair.
I working with sexy women.” Dimitri Pissec.
A black-haired bitch with man’s hands, widow Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch makes all the important decisions. She is a power-hungry dominatrix. Orwell is her slave. (No one ever sees him.)
Do I need to fire the little prat yet?” Liza Van der Bruggenziltch-Finch.
You’re a fat cunt and you can’t add up to save your life.” Dimitri Pissec.
