Meiosis

"This is the last stop," the conductor said, waking Tom. Tom rubbed his eyes and looked out the window. The train took a long time to actually pull into Penn Station. Tom disembarked with the other passengers, shuffling in their steps, going where they went, finding his way into the terminal building and then feeling nervous at the sight of so many people milling about. The digital clock on the schedule board flipped over and read 1:30. Tom hadn't been standing there for fifteen seconds before a heavily-biceped cop said to him, "Keep it moving, bud, there's no loitering allowed in the station." Tom walked on, noticing that many people were standing still, waiting, reading, staring at the train board, and he wondered why it was that he must keep moving. Tom took the escalator up and outside and stood in front of Madison Square Garden. There were signs touting a boxing match to be held there that evening. The photos on the posters showed two mean looking black men staring at each other. "Fight of the century," one sign read. "No prisoners," was a quote from one of the boxers, their red-leather bound hands at the ready. Tom studied the faces of the boxers and one of them turned to him as he stood there on the sidewalk. The boxer on the poster said, "The nigger is mine." Tom was very near fainting. He turned to see if anyone else had seen or heard the same as he, but all people hurried by without noticing him. When he looked back at the poster, all was as it had been.

Tom got into a taxi and said, "Take me to NBC."

The driver looked back at him and said, "Okay, pal, but first, let me see your money."

"What?"

"I want to see your money. I ain't taking you nowhere till first I see your money."

Tom pulled some bills from his jacket pocket and showed them to the driver.

"Okay, then. NBC."

The taxi driver was still admiring his tip when Tom entered the lobby of the NBC building. He walked up to the large circular reception desk and waited for the pretty blonde woman to ask him if he needed help.

"I'd like to know where I can find someone associated with the show Virtute et Armis," Tom said.

The woman looked through the pages of a blue, vinyl-covered loose-leaf notebook on the desk surface in front of her. "That would be studio twelve and that would be on the fifth floor. Do you have an appointment?"

"No, I want to be a contestant," Tom said.

"Well, then you don't want the studio," the woman said. "You want Marketing and Acquisitions and that's on--" She looked through the pages again. "M and A is on the third floor. The receptionist up there will help you."

Tom thanked her and walked to the bank of elevators. Tom rode up in a car with three stiff-haired women and a short, chatty man in a badly fitted suit who was carrying several coffees and a couple of pastries on a cardboard tray. He talked and talked, told that he was currently working for Cinda Hartman up on the ninth floor, but hoped to be moving to Wallace Ackerman's office, and the women paid him no attention. Tom left them when he got out on the third floor.

"Have a nice day," the man called after Tom as the doors closed.

Tom approached the next receptionist who, except for the color of her hair, was exactly the same as the receptionist in the lobby. She smiled at him and said,

"Welcome to Virtute et Armis."

"I'd like to be on the show," Tom said.

"Well, of course, you would," she said. She handed a single sheet form to Tom. "Fill this in and give it back to me and we'll go from there. You may sit over...