The Night Auditor.

In Fiction II, parodies are attempted. There's three or four stories you can opt to parody, and as I remember, two or three had to produced. Then one of those was completed by the end of the semester.


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FICTION II
02/18/08
Parody II: Bartleby
(first draft)


The Night Auditor.

I forget his last name now, Tom Bartholomew, maybe, but I can't be sure. TOM B. is what the gold plate name tag showed, and that's how I remember him. We all had name tags, but no one else really went by what they showed. So it's kind of odd that I remember Tom B.'s name tag but everyone else's nicknames. I guess because I knew everyone else so much longer. Tom B. only worked at the hotel for six months. The last six months the hotel was open.

I supervised three other people on the midnight shift. The night auditor, the maintenance man, and the lounge bartender. Once autumn, the night auditor quit and the hotel searched for a new auditor. Turnkey and Nausica, the maintenance man and the bartender, and myself took out guesses at the sort of person would take the job.

He was like none of us expected.

The hotel was a grand display of crimson red carpeting and wooden gold walls. A massive stone hearth stood in the center of the room reaching the three-floors up to the ceiling of the octagonal lobby. The hotel had been around for almost a century before it had electric light. The lobby was lit with light bulbs that look like flames, but they are in wall sconces where torch and oil lamps once were.

I'd been with the L'Éminence Rouge for a seven years before I was given the position of overnight concierge, which I then held for the next ten. Right up to when the hotel closed.

But however long I had been with the L'Éminence Rouge, Turnkey had been there more than a decade longer. Turnkey was good at fixing things for the first half of his shift, but by midnight, Turnkey would take his lunch break--which consisted of propping himself up on the bed in a vacant room with a bottle of bourbon and a pack of cigarettes and watch t.v. until he passed out around 4 a.m. Around 4, Nausica would have closed the lounge and counted out with the auditor and gone off to find where Turnkey had taken lunch, then wake him up, and go on her merry way by 5.

Turnkey pushed the limits of employment and tolerance only because he got the necessary things done in the short amount of time he actually devoted to work, and because he had worked at the hotel for so long, no one could imagine not seeing him chain-smoke an entire pack of cigarettes in the span of an evening.

Nausica worked more than Turnkey, certainly. More than she maybe should have. It became apparent slowly over her time at the hotel that she had another job as well, one which clients showed up for at the bar from time to time. They'd drop by for a quick drink and leave shortly after, a few grams heavier than when they arrived. But, like Turnkey, Nausica kept her job because she was good at what she did, completed it within the alloted timeframe, and didn't crack up always working opposite the sun.

On the midnight shift, each hour has more significance than during the day shift.

Especially for the night auditor. Each hour meant a different set of reports, a different audit to be conducted. The job went something like this: run a series of reports, and while they're printing, start checking over the house and people count. Then a run down of various accounts and expenses, and everything needs to balance, as close to possible to zero. Then, after hours of printing hundreds of pages of reports, the auditor separated them into various piles to send off to the accountant and the sales office and the front desk manager and housekeeping and maintenance and the food and beverage manager, and so forth and so on. The paper-trail that is the foundation of business operations itself.

Tom B. was hired on as the night auditor, responsible for the meticulous and detailed work of printing and checking the hotel reports. When he first started at the hotel, Tom B. was amazingly quick, accurate, and precise. He ran and checked reports in a third less time than his predecessor, and accurately checked them quicker than seemed feasible. His attention to filing was no less incredible. For the first few months no one could have found a bad thing to say about Tom B. He was the best night auditor the L'Éminence Rouge Hotel had ever had.

So it was immediately strange when I noticed the expanding piles of paperwork that had sprung up around the front desk office; unfiled audit reports dating back a full week. Tom B. had simply not been filing any reports for five nights in a row. He ran them and checked their figures with as much skill and detail as he always had, running a long ruler across each row of numbers, but he just didn't file them.

The next week several departments complained about it, asking why he refused to do his work.

Well, refused isn't precisely accurate. Tom B. never actually refused to do his job. He checked and balanced every report, he just wouldn't file the paperwork. The only response anyone would get from him was, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Each department of the hotel began to print out their own copies of the audited reports, so after the initial drama of it, no one complained very much about not receiving any filed reports. Yet the number and height of the growing stacks of unfiled paperwork was growing. It had filled an office closet already and stood, floor to ceiling, in some dozen or more stacks. And they kept growing.

Tom B. would take his time, sitting in his office chair, going over each line of every single report. But never file the papers when he was done. Every few days someone on the morning shift would ask Tom B. about why he hadn't filed the reports and he would always respond in the same slow tone, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

It was about a week before the fire that we found out he'd been living at the hotel from the very first day he worked there. Tom B. had taken up residence in Room 18 just a few doors down the hall from the front desk. Room 18 was where we put half-broken things. Lamps that flicker when they're on, a t.v. that won't change channels. The hotel didn't like to throw things away. I guess that's why Tom B. was never actually fired for not doing his job. He showed up to work--never really left the hotel--and that was good enough.

That was when I started looking into Tom B,'s background.

I called his former employer and was mildly socked to learn that in his previous job Tom B. filed paperwork for a crematorium. The death certificate, funeral home contacts, the bill for services rendered.

A job like that was bound to change a man. It seemed to be that it was no wonder Tom B. was a bit odd, even considering the sort of people one encounters during the small dark hours.

I looked at the stacks and stacks of unfiled and reports and wondered if maybe Tom B. didn't file them because that might remind him always of death. Perhaps not filing the audit reports was his way of reminding himself he was still alive.

There was one night I was going to asking him directly about that. But that was the night of the fire.

The fire was caused by Turnkey.

Around 4 a.m., April 19th. When Turnkey passed out that night, his bourbon spilled over the bed and the cigarette in his hand when he fell asleep sparked a flame...

Nausica had just begun her Where Has Turnkey Passed Out Tonight? game. She found the fire before it spread from the room, but Turnkey had already become charcoal and the flames were licking at the edges of the room.

Within minutes the entire wing of the hotel was blazing.

As the fire devoured the hotel, I made sure all the guests were out and striding back through the lobby after directing Nausica and the baker-girl, Pumpernickel, out. Turnkey was gone, his burial in a flaming rented bed, but everyone else had gotten out. Everyone except for the night auditor, Tom B.

I found him sitting in his office chair, the fire crawling with branching red fingertips up the floor-to-ceiling columns of unfiled paperwork all around him.

"Tom," I shouted to him above the roar of the flames, "Everyone else is out, come on!"

But he just sat there, holding a ruler to the page of report on the desk in front of him, his head turned to me for almost a full minute before he turned away. I felt my hair singeing in the heat.

I wanted to turn and run out of the burning place, but I couldn't just let him sit there and be roasted in the fire--I was frantic, "Tom, this is crazy. We've got to get out of here!"

Even with my hair sizzling, I was drawn to stand there staring at him. How calm he was, sitting in his office chair. "No," Tom B. said to me, the heat peeling back the upholstery of the chair around him, "I'm not ready to do that yet."

Tom B.'s skin blistered red before cracking, engorged by the flame of his paperwork crematorium.

I ran from the tinderbox lobby and greedily gulped in fresh air when I stood outside far from the fire and smoke. The red-orange glow lit the rest of night, the embers dying only when the sun finally chose to begin the day.

The L'Éminence Rouge Hotel burned to the ground.

It was never rebuilt.


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