Carbine: Stories

The Bottle Game

The Bottle Game = Jug, jug, she said. I was not inclined to reply. She raised her eyebrows as if to inquire did I take her meaning. I averted my eyes, which, as much as anything, answered her question. First I had been censured at work for looking at pornography on the web. Apparently, it was company time. Company time and a company machine and company electricity. As well, they told me there were ethical and liability issues. I had been in my office with my door locked locked locked. As part of the censure they took my office away and gave me a work space in the middle of a large, open room. The people at the other work spaces could see me at mine and vice-versa. I was on display, as it were. She knew all about it and had asked was I not embarrassed. Should I have been ashamed? Curiosity and biology had got the better of me, but I hardly felt that I was alone in this. Later it took on some implications. She wanted to know all about everything it seemed, yet she would berate me with great enthusiasm if I told her any thing that she felt was the wrong thing. I, of course, had no possible way to know what was right and what was wrong. And yet her desire to hear seemed to border on obsession. I suspected she believed that there was some mystery which could be unraveled by my speech, but if there were, it was a mystery to me. Of course it was someone’s idea, but I don’t know who came up with the  idea that we play the bottle game. I knew that I did not suggest such a thing. It would not be at all like me to suggest such a thing. Think about it, yes, but to verbalize it? That was, it seemed quite clearly to me, beyond my ken. We had heard of the alleged dangers, and certainly we’d paid them no mind. The great surprise for me was the enthusiasm with which she embraced the game with all its complicated rituals and, at times, frankly, demanding format. But we were entirely at play for an hour or two each evening after I returned from my work space and for longer on weekends. It seemed a diversion perhaps or the only activity that could grant us release, no matter how temporary, from the banal concerns of our temporal existence. Later there were some growing concerns. I would like to report that I played with a skill that was phenomenal, that no one would have played or even could play the way I played. And it is true, I played with what seemed to me to be considerable success, and there were times, to be strictly honest, when I felt as though everything was unfolding completely naturally, when I was in complete harmony with the play, when it seemed as though I were a natural with an almost supernatural talent for the bottle game. But, alas, is it not equally true that everyone or nearly everyone who plays has similar, if not identical, feelings? The same self appraisal? There is frequently a caution of balance. This caution of balance is so frequently offered as to be a commonplace although one might question whether the multitudes who so frequently offer it actually observe it. Besides, was it not those multitudes we wished to escape? After all, when we played, we felt in the play that we had separated ourselves in some fundamental way from the mass irregardless of how many others might also even at that moment be playing the identical, save for minor individual preferences and variations, game.  The Bottle Game Sometimes at my work station, I dreamed of the bottle game and was lost in my thoughts. The spreadsheets on my work surface were meaningless then: black on white, numbers and letters spinning free of context. However, I was forced, as others have, to reluctantly conclude that the bottle game changed nothing. Little, of course, changes anything. Except time. And tried though I might to think nothing of it, time came inevitably around. They gave me my office back. There was no explanation offered for this. Even my computer was returned; however, it goes without saying that I no longer had internet access and that internet access was unlikely to...