3.

By around 8:30 p.m. Marty was moving on to the fifth floor. The only floors left were this and the sixth, and the sixth usually was the easiest. He noticed that this one--the fifth--was always the dirtiest. He had a theory that much in the way that delinquent teens all gather together into their cliques, the mischief of each feeding on that of all the others, so too were the bankers on the fifth floor dirty for the simple reason that the rest of them were filthy too. This was the floor where Hal Killigan had his office, in which one of these days or years Marty would be caught jacking off to porn and probably fired. He was not conscious of any motivation to soil this floor--or Killigan’s office--in recompense for the fact that this floor was such a struggle to keep clean. But he could not deny that Killigan’s office, which he supposed he’d settled on because Killigan viewed porn on his computer anyhow--he could not deny that Killigan routinely left the most paper cups, pen packages, crumpled papers and so on about his office desk and floor.

Tonight he passed by Killigan’s door, and suddenly realized Killigan was an Irish name. Marty’s paternal grandmother was Irish too--Marty was a quarter Irish, then. Presently he wrote a poem in his brain, which made him smile:

My grandma’s named McGee:

makes one-fourth Irish me.

But an optimist I am,

so I’m three-fourths non-Irishman.

He really didn’t know what people had against the Irish; in fact he had only a vague notion that they were thought badly of. Now it suddenly occurred to him, as he was emptying Killigan’s wastepaper basket and picking up the crumpled papers from his floor, that he could be dreaming, here, right now--that this could be a dream. But he knew for certain he was not dreaming--how could he be?--this was obviously nothing like a dream. But when he was in fact dreaming, he was sure he was awake no matter what nonsense would happen, which was just one more absolutely absurd thing about dreams. You could fuck your brain up good with thoughts like these, he thought.

Presently he glanced longingly at the black computer monitor and considered masturbating to some porn. But he had some presentiment suddenly--a feeling similar to déjà vu--that told him tonight was the night he’d be caught and fired for it. He listened to the presentiment and shelved his passions for now and moved on out of the office to finish emptying the wastebaskets and gleaning up the trash before vacuuming.

This was Friday night. He suddenly realized he had a date Saturday night, a first date with someone he’d met on Yahoo! dating; and suddenly his hands felt cold and hot at the same time. A date. A first date. Fucking shit, that’s scary for a loser like me.