The Nebuchadnezzar magazine

Chapter 1

1. The Big Idea

This is how Xavier Djembe quit his job.

The Big Idea came to him after he placed his last box of Jiffy blueberry muffin mix on the tip top shelf of the pastry stand. If you could see his expression, you’d have noticed the spark of revelation in both his eyes. It was new. It was dissociation.  

It was one of those lingering thoughts–the kind that caught you by the scruff of the neck, and shook you like a dog. It’d been hanging there, in the musk and brine of subconscious for a while, waiting for the breath of life. Against his better judgement–he ignored it. But he could not do that. It didn’t matter how much he wrung the towel, the work was endless. So, it was time to throw it out. Any fucker could confirm that To be lost in fruitless labor makes you forget where you are in space and time.

He forgot where he was. 

Then the Dog came, a brawny guy from Kenya beset with muscle, and a gridiron expression. “You betta hurry,” the Dog said. He stood, at six feet tall, huffing and puffing. Ire was in his eyes, and likeness –or his countenance–was as an ape. 

Xavier came back to himself, dressed in his smock, he stood in Bloomies grocery store, aisle six.

“Of course, sir!” Said Xavier Djembe.

It was his eighteenth birthday.

Then, Bossman’s voice blared over the intercom. It blared over the radio too. The announcement interfered with a song, (which bothers him , because he loved to pace his work to music). He remembered the song that played too, because he had just gotten used to the rhythm of it. San Francisco by Scott Mackenzie.

“X, please report to the office. X, report to the office immediately!”

Because he was a stubborn youth, he took his time rearranging the box of Jiffy mix. He even fixed the display, and made sure the boxes were flush: that the “facing” was exactly as the Marketing team had wanted. That the precise angles flayed out in a floral arrangement so as to entice the customer. 

Then, like a jackass, he set off to the boss’s office.

In his head this scene played, like a tape recorder:

He was going to quit his job, then and there, like Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. he’d yell, “Good day sir!”  and throw his smock on his desk, without a two-week notice. Also, he’d flick off Bossman, just for the hell of it.

After he’d run home, and tell his mother that he’d already dropped out of college, and was moving out with his pot-smoking, Satanist, sexually ambiguous, trannie friend Vincent. Don’t bother to write Ma, we’re moving to a trailer park in Los Angeles. PO Box No Man’s Land. Yes, the apartment they eyed was a shithole, but that didn’t matter much. Despite his parent’s seething anger, he’d insist that there was nothing they could do about it–that it was his life. X was El Capitan.

He slowed down when he got to the door of his boss’s office. Losing his conviction, he decided he wouldn’t yell, that he’d be assertive. And when he turned the knob, he decided he wouldn’t talk at all.

Bossman sat, watching the Powerball on television. He was on the phone too, haggling over some other gambling bet he’d lost. For a minute he didn’t seem to notice him , so he waited. helike observing things while he waited he took note of the him ss on his desk: the scattered paper clips, the paystubs, the bulletin board laden with Post-It notes. There’s a window in the back of his desk overlooking the parking lot, and in the morning when the sun rises in Wisconsin you feel set free. To cut the imagery shit, it gives you good vibes. 

Bloomie’s a twenty-four hour grocery store in Madison—the place is cheap too, but if you work nights (especially with a Sunday differential) you make a killing.

That “killing” had done him in, and the mind numbing repetition of stocking took a toll on his back.

“X!”

“Sir!”

“Just the boy I wanted to see.”

He would drift off into hyperspace with Leonard Nemoy. That’s what he called day-dreaming…