James is a worker, profoundly straight, wonderfully green, and heavily weighted in good. He ignores the names thrown at him, the occasional scream, for often he daydreams. He wanders, his boss claims. “He is often not here.”
The boss contends James' aims curve into clouds and clear skies, that his eyes sometimes wander the wharf and peer through telescope lenses, that his senses love routini and roses, and the religion of business and its cries fade to rivers running wild and wide, He says they bound into crystal blue sleepy lagoons and silent tides or merchant ships, fishing nets tattooed to their sides.
“James dreams of games of catch in parks, Paris shimmering in the moments before dark, monks in Eritrea, market places in Senegal, Taiwanese skyscraper builders in a shower of sparks.”
Indeed James' boss claims that James is not in the game. Each day there is more of the same clear-eyed daydreaming, more hours awash, more of the deep afternoon, a new window in the office each day. Yes, the 2pm oceans at the shore of James' desk, children at play, caravans of camels in the narrow halls, fields of unharvested hay, New England meadows, Diego Rivera murals, and beautiful opal eyed horses in wooden stalls. Oh, James does travel sometimes. He is a nomad with all the Gobi desert to call home, all Venice and Rio De Janeiro and Libreville to roam, James ferried by a myriad of hot air balloons sunblown. James carries the world in his pocket. Cairo to Dallas, Capetown and the Czar's winter palace, millions in haj to Mecca's sacred stone. James suffices to be alone.
And while Serengettis bask in the heat of a beautiful day, as the great wall of China reclines in its strength, or a young couple drives the coast and sparkles along its sunlit length, somewhere a long lost friend is on the phone. For James there are afternoons everywhere to call his own.
"JAMES JAMES, where is your working?! Oh, James," the boss exclaims."Effort has gone amiss! There is nothing much plainer than this. Would you much rather kiss rich ladies and remain forever in that bliss? Would you rather nap or tote tea while your coworkers hiss? That is that and this is this! James, I see flowers in your hair. I see air between your ears. I fear, yes I fear what I see and what I hear! The nothingness from your desk. The lack of hurried mess James, I fear not meeting projections at the end of the fiscal year!"
Oh, the apologizing James, abandoning the Mediterranean, hitching up horses and trekking in from the plains, kissing Paris goodbye, regretting Kilimanjaro's high trails and leaving Fijiian skies and confronting stacks of files, leaving his laughter wafting in the Nile to negotiate the piles and piles of figures
at his lonely little desk. He is immediately hurrying from parades in New York to work the insurance claims. Outside, under the scheduled squares of city sky, a Ferris wheel is slowing. In the northern thickets Thoreau has gone for the sake of going. In the wince and stammer attendant the tumult of falling back to earth, the music and events are lost among the names. Like a coming godhand, the great panes of afternoon grey to rain and the apologizing James, adjusting his frantic heart and eyes, mountains stitched together with cascading railroad ties, tufts of Mozart in Austrian winter skies, majestic dragonflies, Samuri warriors turning east, waving heartfelt goodbyes…
