“DO YOU THINK,” I ask, “that you might have time to talk with me for a while?”

“Yeah.”

I shift the weight of my body from the left to the right in the quieting pause.

“Oh, now?” he asks.

“Well, yeah, if you have time.”

He strikes his lighter, cups his left hand against the wind, and drags hard on a bowl of ditch weed.  He’s transported to unearth-bound peace, to a barefooted calm of the medieval saints, then issues a fiery sigh.

“Sure.”

It’s Monday afternoon around six o’clock, and I’ve come from campus to visit Pierce after my classes have ended for the day.  Pierce has been off work since three.  He rents a room in a large house on the shore of Lake Mendota in Madison, Wisconsin, and we sit on an old picnic table overlooking the lake as the sun drips into the water on the first warm night of the year.

“So, what do you do?” I ask him.  “You know, I mean, what is your job title?”  I’ve known Pierce for about a year, and I’m visiting him now on the pretence of interviewing him for a class project.  I need to know about his work life.

“Business Interiors Technician” he answers after thinking about it for a while, running his index finger back and forth across his lips.

“Where?”

Another long pot-filled pause before answering: “A&M Business Interiors.”

“How did you get the job?”

He smiles: “Signed up.”

This interview is not going particularly well.  Partly, because Pierce is stoned out of his fucking mind, and partly because in my mind we are fucking.  I have never crushed so hard in my life – his pondering voice, his bouts of the Montana stares, his toothy smile enclosed in parenthetical cheeks.  I went to a party at his house once: a phantasmagoria of costumes, dewy skin, and light, everyone kissing like fireflies.  He came close in to me, running his lips and tongue against mine, and burnt the small of my back with his cigarette.

Drill, rubber mallet, and level: these are the tools of the Business Interiors Technician.  Pierce’s drill is a yellow and black DeWalt 12 volt DC 727, 510 series.  It’s cordless, so it has a large battery pack on its base for the dual purpose of allowing it to sit upright, like a gopher, and also hooking into the holster that looks for all the world like an upside-down candy cane, which Pierce wears on his right hip.  But he’s altered his drill.  He’s made it personal by putting stickers all over it.  One is of a yellow crucifix on a pale blue background; another is of an overly excited squirrel holding onto a hugely rotund acorn.  A third has a smiley elephant triumphantly praising “Big Improvement!”  While the last shows a pair of opened hands and the phrase “God’s luminous energy will always find a way to touch us.”

The sun has almost entirely dripped away when Pierce hands me the drill, and the porch light behind us flickers on and off as passersby trip the motion detector.  I’ve known enough about drills to discern a flat head from a Philips since I was five, but this drill had some sort of squarish knob on the end.  When I ask about it, Pierce tells me that it’s called a Robbie bit.

“You sometimes can’t put enough torque on a screw with a Philips or a flat cut in it,” he says.  “A Robbie bit fits into a square-cut gap at the top of a screw and the increased amount of surface area allows you to put more force into the screw without stripping it.”

Ingenious, I think: form follows function, that old truism.

But it’s not really about function, is it?  Not really, not essentially.  Sure, the Robbie bit is supposed to put the screw to something, but lots of different shapes might have made their way to the head of the screw.  And lots of them have: Philips, flat, and who knows what else people have tried.  A triangle, maybe?  And the shape of the cubicles that Pierce the Technician assembles is nice, but maybe one day they will be hexagonicles, maybe they once were.  Maybe one day I will date Pierce.

Like the changing screws, our relationship has been taking increased torque: strangers, then chatterers, and then friends.  Maybe stripping would be a good thing.  But he had a girlfriend, so he functions straight, right?  Hell, I had a girlfriend.  Pierce and I have known each other for months, wouldn’t we have figured this out?  Then again, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that foresters weighted the side opposite to axe blades with a heavy poll so that the air drag would keep the blades actually pointed at the tree.  That took 40,000 years.  Pierce and I were once strangers, and Providence wasn’t satisfied.  We were chatterers, and neither of us was satisfied.  Now friends, and I’m not satisfied.   The fact that anything human-influenced – from tools, to chairs, to each other – is as it is means simply that alternative designs didn’t do the job well enough to satisfy.  Form follows failure.

Although I had not been able to inspect Pierce’s drill until twilight was thick, this time was not the first that the drill had appeared since I had arrived.  When I got to Pierce’s house, he was out back working on a table.  Pierce, incidentally, is also a thief and steals from work.  So far, he has two desks, two dining room tables, several chairs, a score of keyboard trays (why?), and innumerable little things that people left lying around their cubicles when the technicians came to work.  Pierce was working on a purloined table – one of many that he had strapped to the roof of his rusted out Honda and driven back home at a safe 30 mph.

In fairness, this table was trash.  It had a white-oak veneer top, soft gray rubber banding around the edges, and Pierce was attaching the steely legs when I arrived.  I watched him move around from leg to leg as he screwed the pieces together.  His right hand pulled the trigger of the drill, his left pushed downward, and as he leaned his weight into it, his right leg would lift slightly into the air in front of him.  He knew that I was there, but we didn’t talk.  Instead, we smiled, and I let him finish his work.  When he was done, I helped him flip the table onto its feet.

Over the course of our conversation that evening, a line of his housemates moved in and out, each seeing this recent find for the first time.

“Oh!” said Zon, “that’s a . . . marvelous table.  Fuckin’-a.”

“Oooh!  Fancy table!” Molly exclaimed.

“It’s a swank table!” Carolyn cried.

“Is it really?” asked Pierce.

No, really, as far as a table goes, this one is almost a complete failure, as all tables are.  The table is confined to failure by the mere fact of its being.  Its gross physicality condemns it to always being nine feet long, 29 1/2 inches tall, and 37 3/4ths inches wide, not to mention its geometrically aligned legs.  What if there are only two diners?  So much of the table goes to waste – inefficient excess being!  And there is no way that it could comfortably seat fifty.  What if a diner who stands 6 feet 3.928 inches needs to cross his legs and requires 31 and 1/4th inches of space to carry out that action?  The table fails by 1 and 1/4th inches.  Or, what if a 4-year-old child wishes to enjoy a peanut butter and jelly sandwich at the table?  It is far too high for this hungry babe to eat at it comfortably.  The perfect table would instantly accommodate its proportions to the physical needs of each one of its guests.  For that matter, the table would have no cumbersome legs that simply get in the way of guests and their own legs.  The perfect table levitates in air.  The perfect table has perpetually varying height and no thickness.  Think of all of the space that a regular table wastes when no one needs it at all.  It sits there: a cold undigested lump.  The perfect table, the swank table, the fuckin’-a marvelous table immediately disappears when not needed so as not to weigh forever on the dwindling resources of our finite earth.  Anselm’s Ontological Proof for the existence of God assumed that anything perfect necessarily had to exist because anything that didn’t exist would be missing one perfection, namely that of being.  But the act of being, in and of itself, is immediate imperfection, as anyone who has stubbed his toe on a table leg will attest to.

Form is ever destined to chase phantoms.  Being, feeling, thinking, seeing: objective stasis of fleshy materiality, defined by what is not.  Pierce builds cubicles, which are not offices.  They are, he tells me, “skeleton walls covered by a skin of fabric.” My mother calls me “the best son on earth.”  My ex-girlfriend calls me “the scraggly little queer” with a “road kill of a face.”  Pierce once called me “kind, loving, and a joy to be with.” 

To be: it’s beyond the indisputability of taste.  Seeing material, seeing form, for what it is and what it is not, while cognizing it as something – son, boyfriend, and table – is a composite act of manifold creation; mere but foliating noumenon, existing only in the mind.  Worlds and lives are synthesized in the moment of recognizing shape and calling it something.  Form follows fantasy.

Pierce has a theory about the fabric, or skin, covering cubicles.  Touching the fabric too long, he’s observed, irritates human skin.  He thinks there are micro-fibers woven into cubicle fabric that purposely fester in human flesh.  “Bosses don’t want their employees rubbing holes in the cloth, and without the irritant people like to rub cloth.” 

I tested this attraction by asking him a question about the cloth of his work pants in order to touch his leg just above his ankle.  I told him one day that I loved him, hoping fantasy would change function.  He told me, so sweetly, to “kill it.”  I can do that, I thought, I said.  Yes, of course I can do that.  I have to do that.  Queer boys continually have to protect their hearts from the ravages of straight boys.  As I fall in love, I have to stop myself, run through the cognitions : you’re gay; most boys are straight; you can’t love this person because they can’t love you.  Fuck.  It hurts.  So, I have been smothering love.  I have snuck into love’s bedroom as it lay dreaming in the moonlight and pulled silk tight against its face, its body thrashing.  Today it barely has a pulse.  Sitting on the picnic table, I test this attraction, the dissolving sun half illuminating Pierce’s face, dying love twitching to life for a moment.  And then it is still.  Pierce giggles like a ten-year-old thinking about people rubbing fabric.  He’s as stoned as a Puritan sinner.

Jason Rozumalski grew up in the woods just outside of Bancroft, Wisconsin. He attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, having graduated in May 2006 with degrees in History and Political Science. Beyond a summer job in Virginia, the great question mark of the future awaits him.