Punch Bowl

No one had really taken the “no fraternization among coworkers” policy seriously. And when Boris Spivak had been fired for unrelated offenses three months after his affair with Margaret Gorp began, the point seemed moot anyway. Maybe in light of what happened last Wednesday we should reconsider.

If anyone had noticed a change in Margaret’s demeanor after Boris left, they never mentioned it. She had retained her usual level of professionalism, though in retrospect she was perhaps a bit more reserved; however, she had never really been very outgoing to begin with. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into a month and a half, the furor and awkwardness of Spivak’s sudden departure, highlighted as it had been by the intervention of three members of security and two cans of pepper spray, began to die down, and the comforting monotony of office life resumed once more. And of course the drudgery and boredom at this time of year serve a useful purpose: to heighten the anticipation of the one event when all the strictures of corporate authority and structure weaken and sometimes fall, the office Christmas party.

It is easy enough now to say we should have seen it coming. Maybe that’s true. After all, the man was a chemical engineer with deep connections to purveyors of pharmaceuticals on an industrial scale. Spiking the punch with a proprietary blend of psychosis-inducing hallucinogens was child’s play for him. It was the girlfriend we had not counted on. We made the unfortunately near fatal assumption that she could remain loyal to love and career in equal measure. We never anticipated her capacity as an engine of vengeance. 

It all began with Mort in accounting.

“May the God of my fathers bring a plague upon you all!” he shrieked, whereupon he dropped to his knees and began weeping inconsolably. We all knew Mort to be a good, church-going man, but this level of religious commitment seemed a bit excessive, especially to Sid Suskind, a man of generally benign agnostic/atheist persuasion, who was suddenly inspired to reply with a solid right cross. The slightest bit of busted lip blood spray metastasized in the minds of wild-eyed coworkers into a shower of such psychedelic menace that Mindy Frumpkin was trampled into traction in the ensuing rush by those of us still ambulatory enough to stampede toward exits real and imaginary. The howls of the damned reverberated off the sinisterly undulating walls, causing Frank Stanby from marketing to attempt to Van Gogh himself with a plastic fork in search of relief.

It is not as if we did not all know that discussions of religion and politics can stir up rancor in the modern office setting and were thus best avoided. Apparently, under the influence of Boris Spivak’s unique synthetic cocktail, so could innocent inquiries into a coworker’s new hairstyle, a generally harmless debate on where the best sushi can be found on Christmas morning, and the question of what an acceptable tip to an airport baggage handler should be. Blood was shed and bones were broken over just such trivial topics. As brains were awash in a stew of sensory perceptions incompatible with standard biological wiring, a friendly argument over who the best left offensive tackle in the Canadian Football League is resulted in serious bodily injury to Stevo, Freddy, Chip, Skip, and Clive from the mailroom, as well as the death of the water cooler. 

We cannot say with any assurance when the police arrived exactly. They could have been among the thousand burning skulls that showered us with flaming purple laughter as we watched our own limbs become the evil serpents of our most terrifying nightmares. Then again, that could have been the firefighters. Apparently, there really was a fire at some point. The most accepted theory is that Jonathan Colquist, passed over for promotion one time too many, found the conference room carpeting a suitable vehicle for an arsonist fantasy as disturbing as it was deeply withheld. None of us, however, was in any position to function as a credible witness to this, or most other events for that matter. 

We seem all to have retained one final image from that night, perhaps because it left us with some sort of communal sense of justice. In the widespread mayhem that was the Hawkhead Amalgamated Industries Incorporated annual Christmas party, the punch bowl ended up, somehow still upright and, like some unholy grail, containing the tainted beverage, on the floor, which beverage Marco, Claire Purseweiller’s therapy dog, was happily lapping up. Like any good dog in his line of work, Marco retained a remarkable equanimity under every set of circumstances, and this was no exception. With the eyes of an avenging, yet thoroughly demented angel, Marco wandered through the crowd of flailing and screaming celebrant-victims until coming snout to face with Margaret Gorp. The last thing most of us remember before being carried away into existential darkness and various emergency rooms, was Marco, still retaining his customary calm demeanor, gnawing on Margaret Gorp as she frantically tried to crawl away to safety. Good dog was our final thought for the night.