Leon Woo’s Failed Accounting Firm
Leon Woo’s Failed Accounting Firm
Inflatable Nation - Part 2
Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction. Influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald (all lovers of SEO). Now it’s time for the news:
In his early twenties, Charley Pratt stood seventeen feet tall and wore only underwear. As his toned body glistened from implied sex, an equally stunning woman gripped his muscular shoulder. Together they stared down the endless horizon in black and white, dotting Australia’s highways, shopping centres and industrial parks like an army of model citizens, sentries standing watch.
When Charley gave up modelling to pursue law, his looks remained noteworthy. One afternoon, when he was in his thirties, a man named Forrest (no last name) praised the ex-model’s left hand. Caressing the palm, Forrest remarked how it was masculine yet soft, strong yet delicate. Then he fetched an old paper guillotine and severed the pinky finger.
Charley screamed, but gathered himself within three deep inhales and stared defiantly at Forrest, who discarded the digit like he was pruning a bush.
“This can stop,” said Forrest. “Just tell us what we need to know and it will all stop.”
Charley was tied to a ripped-fabric office chair found either in the 1990s or now in hard-rubbish collections all over Melbourne. The ropes limited his movement but he was able to thrust his shoulders forward and spit in his captor’s face.
“I will never tell, never,” he said.
The others removed Charley’s trousers and underwear. He was now dressed Zoom-professionally: naked from the waist down but wearing a bloodied white shirt and suit jacket. His tie and watch were on a fax machine beside the chair. His briefcase, shoes and pants were intermittently visible on a cubicle desk beneath a flickering, grey light.
Forrest appraised Charley’s penis and revealed a sharpened letter opener.
“Look at him,” he said to the others. “You’d think a man this fortunate would do anything to survive, but he will give his looks, his fingers, his cock for a… salary.”
When Forrest placed the letter opener between Charley’s legs, Charley felt the cold metal, and goosebumps - a useless gift from our ancestors - rose over his toned body.
“This is bigger than me,” he said, eyes to the ceiling. “This is about the future-”
“Ah, the ‘f’ word,” interrupted Forrest.
He caressed the prisoner’s swollen and cut cheek with his spare hand. Despite the staples in his forehead, the hole-punched ear, Charley remained impossibly handsome.
“To me,” continued Forrest, “it feels like we’ve been at this for centuries: I ask, you don’t tell; I threaten, you remain stoic. But how long can this go on? Surely we’re not still here in five hundred years, bickering by the water cooler. Surely by then whatever race we’re running will be… run.”
Charley clenched his jaw, faced Forrest. “Men like you will be bred out by then,” he said.
There he is: Michelangelo's David hovering above the afternoon commute. There he is again: more than a decade later, cut and bruised, staring down the narrowing gap to Forrest’s creased and grey face.
“There will be men like both of us,” replied Forrest, “or there will be none at all.”
He said this as a statement of fact without malice, and then carefully removed the letter opener before heaving himself up and limping to the door. Below the fluorescent EXIT sign, he turned.
“To five hundred more years then,” he said, and left.
That night, Charley dreamed of the Shakespearean theatre classes he took as a child. Considered a waste by his father (Charley was second choice for the 1993 Lube Mobile commercial), the memory at least provided some respite: his tiny hands gripping a replica human skull, the boy mouthing incantations, the dreamer reliving that age of painless confusion.
When he awoke, throbbing pain from the severed stub caused him to grit his teeth and wince. On the carpet, teeth glistened like tiny white boulders, so Charley shied away and felt with his tongue the gaps in his once-perfect smile.
Before him, cross-legged in an office chair sat Forrest. In his grip was a golden door-plaque he removed from the corner office, and it rested across his thigh like a jockey’s whip. The plaque read ‘L. Woo (Manager)’. The windows were all blacked out but the plaque, in combination with the large fax machine, tacked cubicle walls and inspirational cat poster, gave away their location; they were in an abandoned office.
“On the third day,” announced Forrest, “the future’s fearless leader arose.”
Forrest had replaced yesterday’s blood-splattered shirt with a fresh, white copy. The shirt matched his pale, almost white eyes and bare scalp. In the grey lighting he resembled a ghost.
“I came to the realisation yesterday,” he said, “that I couldn’t make you talk. Sure, I could have turned you into a castrato and had one of my colleagues here juggle your testicles, but you still wouldn’t have talked. Why: because you’re a true believer in ‘tomorrow’s innovative today’. At least, that’s what you said in your inspiring TEDTalk and the near-constant LinkedIn posts.
“I tried last night to imagine why you have such strong faith in the future, and I think I figured it out. Charley, you are beautiful, athletic, well-educated, determined… At thirty-four you’re the head of legal for a cutting-edge investment firm. You’ve lived abroad. You’ve travelled. You’ve gone viral. Your girlfriend, your apartment, your salary - my god. Point is: of course you think the future is bright. What is the future, after all, if not a projection in our minds, a line on a graph that says here I am today so there I will be tomorrow. Tomorrow.”
The door beeped and a face-tattooed man wearing a rainbow lanyard appeared. He was one of the men who abducted Charley, and he nodded at Forrest who in response raised his palm.
“But you’re intelligent, Charley, so you know as well as anyone that projections - daily highs, fifty-day moving averages - can go up,” he raised the L. Woo (Manager) plaque, “and they can crash.” He slashed the metal edge on Charley’s shin, drawing blood and muted cries.
“I want to introduce you, Charley, to your new future. Send in,” Forrest called to the man in the doorway, “the da Vinci of torture.”
In the corridor a black silhouette appeared. With each step it took on strange, jagged proportions - at one point pressing the ceiling, at another halving in size. The visual was disconcerting but nothing compared to the sound. The shifting silhouette moved with the high-pitched scraping of a knife on a drainpipe, the only relief from which was the barking of a monstrous dog, a bark so intense that the walls shook and the violent men backed away, some retreating to a small break room filled with stale tea, rotted biscuits, leaving Charley to attempt once more to wriggle free, his mind too numbed with fear to accept what was coming.
When the da Vinci of torture appeared, Forrest leapt from his seat. He straightened his own jacket lapels, cleared his throat and bowed. He thanked the da Vinci of torture for coming on such short notice, and remained bowed until a hand graced his humbled shoulder.
“I see you already removed the kid’s pinky,” said da Vinci, deep voice matching his gigantic frame.
“Yes, sir, and he still won’t talk,” replied Forrest.
“Of course not. A man must be uniformly broken, not divided.”
“So beautifully put, sir. Truly inspiring.”
Forrest turned to Charley. “The da Vinci of torture,” he continued, “does not require weapons. He has never used one in his life, yet he can make mothers turn on their sons, and holy men turn on-”
“Forrest,” interrupted da Vinci. “Aren’t you a little old to be as excitable as a horny dog?”
Da Vinci removed his jacket and rolled up his right sleeve. Forrest’s posture remained hunched as he explained to the giant man that Charley possessed the locations and access codes for the investment firm’s blockchain wallets. With the wallets and codes Forrest hoped to steal a portion of their holdings - a single asset to be precise, worth $91.8 million.
Without warning, da Vinci spun and cracked Charley in the left cheek, right cheek, and ribs. Like a bass drum came the thud of knuckles. The way his strikes flew suggested a lifetime of technique and experience, but of all the blows thrown against Charley, of all the fists, slaps and the fury, not one strike hurt, not one tickled, not even a little.
The man was a giant, yes, but apart from his size and the missing ear, da Vinci more resembled an old chess player, a very old chess player.
He had emerged in an unassuming brown suit, yellow shirt and spotted tie. The ominous scratching was evidently a faulty wheel on his walking frame, and the frightening bark was the man’s emphysema echoing among the filing cabinets. The ghoulish silhouette reflected tubes that ran from his bulbous nose to an oxygen tank, and the shifting size was because several times he had to sit on the walker to gather his strength. Even a modest estimation put da Vinci at eighty years old, nearly two-hundred in torturer years.
But on the desk behind Forrest and da Vinci, devices were laid out in a torturer’s mise en place (a stapler, hole-puncher, keyboard, mouse…). Charley was intent on avoiding further finger pruning and teeth pulling, so the old man was a welcomed change. Then it hit him: the idea.
“Oh,” he wailed. “Thyne pain... Thyne humanity… I might talk-eth soon, spill the beans-eth… I shall soon-eth know what dreams come in thy sleep of death. Tis a vile thing to die… Oh, how oft expectation fails and oft it hips where the hose is oldest and an eclair most fits! To be, or not Toby…”
The post-monologue sobbing was a tad contrived, but that was not the time for notes. What mattered was that Forrest and da Vinci were fooled, and that Charley could now plot his escape or at least buy time for the police while ‘unconscious’.
They ordered UberEats from a Chinese restaurant that was secretly a backyard kitchen, and ate at different spots in the abandoned building. Some men ate in the grey cubicles, others in Leon Woo’s office. Forrest, however, dined in the chair facing Charley before receiving a call.
He sounded troubled, and suddenly the scuffling of feet filled the room and all the face-tattooed goons with their lanyards swiped their access cards and left.
The only one to remain was da Vinci. He guaranteed he would have answers before Forrest returned, but once Forrest swiped out, da Vinci took his blood pressure medication, retrieved a blanket from the tray in his walker and switched on the television. There he caught the end of an emergency press conference from the prime minister, before dozing off to an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
Charley heard snoring and opened his eyes.
Poking out the side-sleeve of da Vinci’s walker he saw a copy of Golfer’s Digest, and on the walker’s left handle was a tag that read: my name is Gavin Green. I am a resident at Falksridge Aged Care. Please call this number to help me get home if I am lost.
On Murder, She Wrote, Jessica Fletcher threw a tea party. As her thrilling conversation flowed, Charley tried to escape the binds but it was no use, so he changed tactics.
If Charley could not reach Gavin (to steal his lanyard), then he needed Gavin to approach, and fast; Forrest would return any minute. So to wake the old man, Charley began shouting and rocking the chair up and down like a rearing horse.
Gavin’s eyes flickered, opened for a moment, then closed.
“Oi,” yelled Charley. “Thou art chicken shit, art though?”
Jessica Fletcher offered a look of maternal disappointment, a subtle shake of the head. Gavin nestled his chin against his clavicle, while Charley glanced at the door, knowing any minute it would open.
“I said,” he added, louder, “you're a washed-up old man, a worthless piece of merde.”
The last man to speak that way to Gavin Green was swimming with the fishes, that was until Gavin beat the French aquarist to death and dumped his corpse back in the tank to swim with the fishes. Fun fact: the Melbourne Aquarium now vets its employees’ financial positions and checks for underworld connections. They are also careful - really careful - with primary school tours. Though the millennials were a soft youth, there is no generation in history that could have avoided counselling after witnessing the wrath of hungry and necrophiliac dolphins.
Upon hearing the slur, Gavin’s oxygen mask clouded and he lowered it to his chin. His eyes - those ancient eyes lined with red veins that resembled a city roadmap, a path to every horror - sprung open.
“Kid,” he said, “I was getting atheists to believe while your mother was still in diapers.”
“Oh yeah, well… you’re probably wearing a diaper right now,” replied Charley.
Though Gavin was unaware that Charley was his school’s debating captain (and hence well-versed in witty badinage), it was obvious that the prisoner wanted him to approach. Why else would someone hurl insults during Murder, She Wrote? Who - on Earth - would do such a thing?
But despite the rope binding, Gavin felt afraid. He was constantly aware of his frailty, and it sickened him to know that some young nobody - a desk worker - could likely beat him while tied to a chair. He felt worthless, just like the prisoner said.
Gavin was a proud man, however, so he gripped the walker’s armrests and heaved himself up. He stumbled to the desk, and there he retrieved a box cutter as Jessica Fletcher cried out: One of us doesn't leave here alive.
Charley was now playing for it all: either he got the lanyard and the blade, or he died.
“They once sent me to the docks,” started Gavin, staring at the box cutter resting on his palm. “This was 1962. A union boss was causing trouble and I was sent to talk sense, but he wasn’t scared of me - of me. Can you believe it? Turns out it was a set-up. Six other guys came from behind a partition carrying bats and tyre irons and everything. I had nothing, never needed nothing.” Gavin flicked out the blade, felt a lump in his throat. “Seven men went into the water that night. Seven men beaten and dead, but I’m still here…”
“But you’re not,” replied Charley. “That man died long ago. You’re nothing now. Whatever you were-”
“I was the best,” interrupted Gavin.
“Were you? Are you sure about that?”
Gavin smiled but his tears gave away his heart. He steeled himself and stared at the younger, stronger man. “This is all I have,” he said, “all I ever had…”
Then he dug the boxcutter into Charley’s gut. Charley groaned, felt pressure and pain but maintained his composure enough to throw a headbutt. The old man staggered backwards out of reach. He approached again, but through the door came Forrest.
Forrest had returned alone and was staring at his phone as he entered. This gave Gavin enough time to quickly slide the boxcutter into his pocket. He took one glance at the growing red stain on Charley’s shirt before breathing deep through his nostrils and standing tall. Suddenly he seemed thirty years younger.
“What took you so long, Forrest?” he asked.
Forrest slid the mobile in his pocket. He was momentarily distracted by Jessica Fletcher on the TV, who was looking under a couch for clues.
“Sorry, sir,” he said. “We… had another errand to run and got caught up. It looks like you’ve made progress though.”
“Of course I’ve made progress,” said Gavin. “What are you saying?”
“Nothing, nothing, of course…”
“I should hope not. Anyway, this prick was just about to talk.”
Again none of Gavin’s strikes hurt Charley but again he wailed as if they did. He cried for help and during their performance the two men, the two liars, locked eyes. Again in those ancient eyes he saw a roadmap, each red vein called to a single frame, but a shot rang out and the eyes went blank, the map turned to paddocks, dreams and places no one can drive, to the moment - played on loop, again and again - when Google Maps directs you, your sweetheart and your old 1995 Ford Falcon off a cliff, and you fall for the rest of time, again and again and again...
Gavin collapsed into his walker, and Forrest stuffed the pistol in his trousers.
“Are you aware,” Forrest began. His expression now that of someone waiting in line at a fruit shop. “That you and I have never existed in a world without that man until right now? This second - another, another, again and again. And, are you aware that this is true for every death of someone older, so with each moment this world becomes more yours - shaped to a greater percentage by you, your kind and your values - until…”
Forrest kicked Gavin’s walker across the office. The dead man crashed into the junior accountant’s cubicle, the body flopping on the desk in a twisted heap, bullet hole to the ceiling.
“... until one day it is no longer your world at all.”
At the moment of death, Gavin Green was eighty-seven years old. In his pocket was a seniors card and the eyeglasses his grandkids borrowed to melt ants. On the desk before him rested a dusty pen cup, milky tube computer. There was a photo of somebody else’s kids, now all grown up - kids of their own - and blood trailing down the dead’s wrinkled and confused brow like a spiritual offering, some gesture to shepard him to the next world, whether that be a digital paradise, a place reserved for killers and men, or no place at all.
Forrest dropped into his chair and patted his jacket pocket. He found his cigarettes, and when he flicked the lighter, his pale, white eyes burned red. Where before there was a vague ghost there was now nothing vague at all; the eyes fixed on Charley.
“Hard to believe,” said Forrest, staring, “but he was the best to ever do it.”
To Charley, the dead usually looked fake, made of wax, but never before was a corpse staring back, wide-eyed and bullet-holed. In response, Charley said nothing so the two men stayed silent through the Marlboro's demise.
Then Forrest twisted his spine and surveyed the office: the giant printer, the water cooler, the 1999 footy tipping results: Leon Woo, the die-hard Collingwood fan, dead-last because he refused to bet against his team.
“Do you know where we are?” he asked.
Charley shook his head and a sharp pain radiated from the staple in his brow.
“This was once an accounting firm run by a man named Leon Woo.”
“Am I supposed to-”
“No, of course not,” interrupted Forrest. “Leon was a nobody. If the windows weren’t blacked out though you’d see we’re on a suburban strip. Do you remember - of course you don’t - how in the ‘90s every suburb had a little accounting office, a bakery, a milk bar, a law firm? There was usually a VideoEzy. You could rent Gene Hackman films, six weekly films for six dollars…”
Forrest ceased talking and again searched for his cigarette packet. This time he had placed the packet in his trouser pocket so he hitched up on one butt cheek to loosen the fabric.
“Can I have one?” asked Charley.
Forrest smiled, then tapped the packet on Charley’s knee to remove two cigarettes. He placed one between Charley’s lips, flicked the lighter, and in the flame a replica of Forrest’s fist danced on the prisoner’s face.
“Most of these strips,” continued Forrest, “have been replaced by mid-rise apartment buildings, cafes - avocado on toast, that sort of thing.” Forrest reached for the paper guillotine on the desk and fixed it under Charley’s hand. “That’s what happened to Leon. A portion of his business got swallowed up by bigger firms, the internet hit, and at the same time the land values skyrocketed. Selling the shop made sense so we - the firm - bought it. We bought the entire strip in fact, and we’ve kept it exactly how it was originally; that’s what we do. We leave the files in their disorder, the rosters on the walls - everything, except the blocking of some windows, stays how it was in 2001.
“I mention it only because I often wonder how long the cafes and the mid-rises themselves will survive. It can’t be forever. How long do you give it?”
“I hadn’t thought-”
“Well think about it,” interrupted Forrest, cigarette in mouth.
Charley tried, but Forrest crunched the guillotine. It took three strikes to break the bone and several more to separate the meat, though Forrest still had to twist and rip free the last segment of stubborn flesh.
Forrest held the finger close. The tip’s circular pattern was not dissimilar to indigenous art, the ridge of the nail manicured and solid.
As Charley moaned in agony, Forrest leaned back and placed the tip in his mouth. With his lighter he tried to ignite the bloody end like a cigarette. It is a rare event to smell oneself cooking, a rare and nightmarish event.
“There are entire empires forgotten,” continued Forrest, louder, more animated than before. “Entire cultures wiped out. Hundreds of thousands of lives, millions, forgotten. And you, you’re the bulldozer knocking it down, you see. You always are, always were. But when you look at me, Charley,” he said, throwing his arms out and smiling with the finger between his teeth, “do you see a better, more innovative world coming?”
Sweat pooled on Charley’s brow and when he shook the droplets flew to the floor in unique arcs. “It won’t make a difference,” he replied. “Not to my firm, not to anything, anyone. Me telling you won’t change a thing. There are safeguards, failsafes…”
By this, they both knew what Charley meant, and within minutes Forrest had the codes and locations and now the two sat waiting for the asset transfer verification.
During the wait, Forrest dropped the theatrics and sat with the pistol in his lap, fiddling with his iPhone, while Charley, whose right hand was now unbound, smoked another cigarette.
Echoing what Forrest did before with Charley’s finger, Charley twisted the cigarette, analysed it closely and laughed. “A crab smoking a cigarette,” he said after a few nods.
Forrest looked up and smiled. “Yes,” he said, copying Charley’s bemused tone.
“An image of a crab smoking a cigarette,” repeated Charley. “There’s an orange background; it’s a blue crab and it’s wearing sunglasses - an NFT, a single asset worth $91.8 million.”
“Asset,” repeated Forrest. “That’s more than a hundred Leon Woo’s put together, employing no one.” He scanned the office once more. “Leaving no trace.”
“Still,” refuted Charley. He peered beyond Forrest to Gavin’s frozen-scared face and just started nodding, at nothing. “Still,” he repeated, and then Forrest’s phone rang.
Transfer complete.
Without ceremony, Forrest pointed the gun and pulled the trigger.
But the world is a strange place full of coincidence. They drove the corpse out west in a hearse, as per their processes, and when they reached the edge of the Melbourne sprawl they turned into an abandoned industrial lot. There, overlooking the men as they dug the grave, stood a long-faded billboard. The billboard was torn in places, graffitied and ripped, blasted by sun and rain and hail and dust and fumes and microplastics, yet it was there, and it would stand for five hundred more years, long after the man it displayed had decomposed and everything else had burned down.
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Profitron contains absurd, satirical and funny short fiction and prose. Literary influences include Pynchon, DeLillo, Vonnegut and Norm Macdonald. That’s all we have time for, folks.