Garden
The first time I encountered public nudity was during my 7th year at Pacific Solutions LLC as HR manager.
Our chief director, Mr. Artal, has a reputation for bright and bold ideas of enhancing the workspace. In less than a decade, his stately figure scaled the dizzying heights of the Pictorial Secretions Inc hierarchy and now stalks the beige corridors of our office. A man of few words and even fewer actions, he established a healthy tradition of weekly Artalpraisal carols and rented the ladies’ room to a family of migrating badgers. Words from the 52nd Artalpraisal ode are inscribed on the door to his office: “A shiny head, a smart mustache, legs spread wider than the universe, legs that say: I’m in control of my company.”
It was of course his idea to install one of these hip rooftop gardens in our penthouse. He said that a touch of nature could “elevate our everyday corporate experience.” He brought in numerous brochures and pictures from MOMA with glossy covers and archer typeface. It was up to us in the HR to choose a garden that would appeal to IT-dwellers and manly-men alike. We ended up ordering the Garden of Eden 2.0.
It had a separate smoking patio with transparent walls in the far corner of the garden, a kidney-shaped pool in the middle, encased with seven perfectly trimmed palm trees, numerous mechanical birds with custom tweet-tones fluttering restlessly between them. Finally, an enormous organic avocado tree, sunbathed handsomely in the North-East corner.
The whole thing cost us a couple of turbines and a graphic designer. It was somewhat exhortative to estimate a man’s life in turbines. Half a turbine, apparently.
Once they set it up, it took a day for the garden to bloom. Smokers hated their new pennage. The invisible room they were tucked into was so suffocatingly small that you could hardly make out their decaying profiles between the layers of thick grey smoke. It was part of the concept, promoting a healthy lifestyle and whatsit.
Three of the smokers gathered one morning and strangled the fourth to make life easier. Their designated garden room did in fact become more agreeable. Next week another one of them was stabbed on the way to work, and before long the remaining two strangled each other fighting in their fight for space. Mr. Artal ordered that the smoking room and the remains of its unfortunate frequenters be recycled into a set of yoga mats.
It was all beautiful and splendid until one day a naked couple appeared resting nonchalantly under the organic avocado tree. They didn’t seem to belong to any particular department, and to make matters worse, couldn’t answer a single question adequately. Taking into account these qualifications, Mr. Artal moved them into HR with us. They were given magnetic badges to cover their bare genitals. As soon as their shameful parts came into contact with corporate mugshots, names and barcodes, a rightful sense of shame finally dawned upon the couple.
Still, the naked couple wasn’t adapting to the office environment all that well. They never learned to use the phone and kept coming to work in the nude. One morning I confronted them in the garden and took the trouble of explaining our dress code in its full holonic detail. On casual Fridays frivolous attire is acceptable, I said pointing at my blue jeans. They stared at me with the same vacant gaze that hadn’t abandoned their hollow eyes since the day they appeared in the garden. The female lazily picked one of the avocados and started fiddling with it fecklessly. The male grabbed it from her and pushed his teeth into the fruit fruitlessly. That’s not how you eat an avocado, I said.
I returned from the canteen with a knife, held the fruit before them and cut it in two. I handed the avocado to the couple, a half for each of them. They ate it with a moronic expression of mute appreciation, and for the first time started talking like proper human beings.
A rather pleasant couple they turned out to be after all. I took them to Macy’s, where we bought a slim grey suit for the gent and casual dress for the lady. By the next week they were already uploading new tweet-tones into the birds. It was all lovely and Mr. Artal personally thanked me for turning a couple of imbecilic exhibitionists into healthy HR units of Perfectionist Siblings CLC.
Every other other week we would find a new naked couple in the garden. We keep a knife around to cut a fresh avocado for the newcomers, and the office closet is always stocked with sharp suits and casual dresses for their first day at Pastoral Solitudes LLL.
Originally published in My First Time anthology by Soft Copy.
