WITNESS STATEMENT

by Bud Smith

Last week two chairs broke. I was told to stay home today (Saturday) on what might be the coldest day of the year because I’d caused a rather serious incident at the plant where I’m employed. Now I’m sitting at my desk in one of the chairs that broke. I’ve fixed this one. It’s a wooden chair with green and white cushions and it’s pretty comfortable and it’s from the 1970s. It looks like the kind of chair somebody would put in an atrium or sunroom in Florida. I sit in it and do my creative work here at a metal desk, but I'm not in an atrium or sunroom in Florida.

It’s six degrees today.

Eight o’clock this morning I put on a couple pairs of pants and a couple sweatshirts and a couple pairs of socks and my fuzzy slippers and I walked down the city block to the market on Bergen Avenue and bought two packs of Café Bustelo coffee and a pint of buttermilk. I need the coffee because I’ve been doing sixteen-hour fasts and I’m hungry as shit and the coffee helps that. The fasts have also been good for me because my allergies almost totally go away when I do them (and Jesus Christ did they used to be debilitating). I need the buttermilk because I am thawing out chicken thighs on the counter and plan to marinate them in pickle juice and buttermilk to fry up for a possible sandwich. I brought the coffee and the buttermilk up to the counter and the man said, “That’s buttermilk,” and I said, “Yes, thank you, I was happy you had it.” Some people in the history of the universe have accidentally poured buttermilk in their coffee or cereal but not me. I’ve done worse things. Unpredictable things. But I’ve never made that mistake. All last week I was in interrogation after interrogation about this other thing.

I think it was last Thursday, if I am representing myself accurately. I sat down in my green chair and the glue must have gotten weak because time does that and the chair fell apart and I was on the floor. I took a good look at my chair and saw nothing had snapped. Nothing had even cracked. The wooden pieces that had once fit so snugly together in mortise and tenon and biscuit joint had now just come undone as if running away from each other.

I got out my glue. I got out my screw gun. I got some steel brackets. Not only did I glue the chair back together like Geppetto would have but I also put in additional steel brackets. You know, this world is getting harder, this world is getting more complex and it’s all right to add a bracket or two if you think you can get away with it. I doubt I needed the brackets. I doubt I needed the screws. I’ve gone above and beyond and I think it might be okay. I hope it’s okay. This is my chair and I don’t want to ever throw it away. I’d like to be buried, sitting in this chair, someday.

Let me retrace.

Yes, it was Tuesday morning when I heard about the other broken chair. The safety man was sitting across from me at precisely six o’clock in the morning, in a trailer full of coordinators and managers and planners and the general foreman and he had news to be delivered but you could see it on his face that he was going to have to be brave about delivering this news in front of these people. Whatever humor he was usually faithful to he had to be an atheist toward before this particular grim audience of thirty. There had been an injury at the plant at the end of the previous shift. This incident was minor compared to the future incident I would soon cause. The safety man was babyfaced. He had a slight smirk but he was trying to fight the urge to let the slight smirk become a full grin. He said, “In the tent, a contractor fell out of a chair and had to receive medical treatment.” He went on to explain that the man had hit his head on the ground and had to be taken to a clinic to make sure he hadn’t gotten a concussion. The managers and the planner and even the coordinator began to make disparaging remarks about the man who had fallen out of his chair and hit his head. Was he drunk? Was he fat and drunk? No, he was not drunk and no he was not fat. He was an average contractor and he had sat down in a metal folding chair and the chair broke. I had experience with this. I’d just broken my green chair two nights before. My head was fine though, I believed. The manager of the plant himself wanted to know if the broken metal chair the contractor had fallen out of had been rented or if the chair was the legal property of the facility. It was then reported that the chair had been rented by the facility. Okay, yes, so they could sue the rental company, great news. But beyond that, the injury was a recordable and they had to assign blame to someone or who knew how far it could all spiral out of control. Well, someone said, had the chair been inspected by the employee before he sat in the chair? No. The employee had not inspected the chair, he had just sat in the chair. There was the first mistake. They kept saying “contractor” and would kind of spit it out, this dirty word, and here I was a contractor, listening to the spitting. Which is what I do for a living. Work and listen to a kind of spitting. But what about the contractor’s foreman, had the foreman taken a look at the chair? No, the foreman had not. Okay but what about the contractor’s general foreman? No, not even the general foreman had taken a good look at the chair before the accident.

If you believe in God and you believe in the anamorphic version of God and you believe God sits on a throne somewhere, what do you think? Could God make a throne even God couldn’t break, say if They sat down in it at the wrong place at the wrong time?

None of my real problems have any- thing to do with either broken chair. I am supposed to stay home from work on Monday, too. Unpaid. This is a disciplinary action. I had to sign some paperwork. I had to go into a corporate boardroom, two of them actually, and suffer questioning, hours long both times. When we got near the end of the questioning someone would say, “Wait, I’m not clear on something.” Then I’d tell the facts of the matter all over again. Top to bottom all while some other interrogator tried to trip me up. Hours later I’d be released, each time. Told the matter was closed. But the next morning there would be somebody else to talk to and another interrogation scheduled in another boardroom somewhere. They seemed to have endless boardrooms squirreled away in a place that you might otherwise think had no boardrooms. Deadly serious business. All of this. People can die. People do die. They die every second of the day. Nighttime too. We talked a lot about the imaginary people who did not die in my incident, who could have been sent away in an ambulance, or could have been carted off in a body bag. I’ll be the first to admit I failed to follow all the procedures which had previously been written in blood.

I’ve been interrogated on other occasions at this facility and it’s different than talking to the police. When you talk to the police you could wind up in jail even if you are innocent. It happens all the time. I wasn’t innocent at work and I told them all the ways I fucked up and they said I should start again from the top because there was something else they weren’t clear about. When I explain the situation to my friends who read, they say it all sounds like Kafka, when I talk about the situation to my friends at work who do not read, they don’t know who Kafka is so they just say, “Shit dude.” But all my friends are all right. They’re at work today and still have all their fingers and toes but it’s the coldest day of the year and I am here on the sidelines and I just made a cheeseburger with bacon and I’m feeling like an eternal dipshit unsure what to do with the rest of my day and my evening. The sixteen fast is over. Jewish rye bread and ketchup and it’s almost time to soak the thighs in pickle juice and, following that, the buttermilk.

Last night I got a package in the mail from my editor. He sent me notes on what might be my next book. Eighty percent of it is good to go but I’ve got to do some heavy thinking on that last twenty percent. There are two stories I made worse in the last rounds of work and it would be wise to go back to the original drafts I sent in when I turned the book over in the summertime. I have never had this problem. I’m finally turning in drafts of things that are getting lousier the more I work on them. In life, it seems dangerous to believe you know what you’re doing. The goal posts shift and you’re playing the wrong game all a sudden on the wrong field. But that’s all right.

One time one of my friends at work dropped a crowbar into some vessel and it got embedded, a hundred feet below, into a mountain of pliable plastic and they didn’t know how to get the crowbar out of the plastic without sending someone down on a winch but you can’t just randomly send someone down on a winch, or even a Jacob’s ladder (like the kind you see thrown out of a helicopter). We confessed to the mistake and the coordinator of the job said he’d give us an hour to get the crowbar out of the plastic before he reported the problem to his boss, and we’d all lose our jobs probably. The only caveat of this standing hour before the report being made was that of course we couldn’t rappel down there. So my friend and I got a hundred and twenty feet of manilla rope and made a lasso out of it, and after twenty minutes and about a hundred attempts, finally, blindly got the lasso around the crowbar, choked somehow with a snap of the wrist. When my friend gave a yank, the crowbar didn’t budge at all. He pulled as hard as he could and the rope came flying off and the crowbar stayed embedded.

Another time working in that part of the plant, someone from the plant shut the wrong valve or something and the unit came down in a terrible squealing and shaking and alarms sounding. Days later, when manways were opened at the bottom, the inspectors were amazed to see the reactor floor in good shape, only minimal plastic piled up inside. But as they looked up, they realized, a hundred feet above, in the bell of the vessel, there was a hunk of plastic stuck up there as big as a house. I was in the control house pulling a permit for something else when I first heard the coordinator speaking about the plan to get these thirty tons of stuck plastic loose. He said the plan was to go up on the deck where we had dropped the crowbar into the vessel all those years ago and drill into the house-sized thirty-ton ball of plastic and drop a stick of dynamite inside and blow it apart. I started laughing. It was the most ludicrous thing I’d ever heard. There were pipes all around the vessel painted orange because they had a pyrophoric gas, meaning when the gas came into contact with oxygen, it could erupt into a forty-foot-tall fireball. But the coordinator just looked at me like I was in the circus, which I was, and he said, “No, really, that’s what we are going to do.” And they did do that. They drilled a hole and stuck in the explosives. That’s what they did.

They made a bomb.

We heard the blast and wondered if we were supposed to run or duck or what.

An avalanche of plastic rained down on the reactor floor, and in the distance the managers and planners cheered.

Another thing worked long ago, on that same unit, let me tell you with a straight face in a last-ditch effort the lasso was lowered again, and though you could not even see the crowbar it was so far down in the semidark below, the air roiling with white powder, the lasso somehow caught again, and with a violent snap of shoulder the crowbar popped loose, and slowly, with shaking hands and unrestrained smiles on our faces, we reeled the implement of destruction up to safety.

Hervé Guibert

Thierry lisant dans la sacristie, 1980

Vintage gelatin silver print

© Christine Guibert / Courtesy Les Douches la Galerie, Paris