I poked my head out of the empty ninth story office and stuttered a few syllables to get the attention of the woman walking towards the elevator. “Hey the e-mail I got said to come to 942, but it looks like it’s empty? Am I missing something?”
She smirked, the way you do at questions you’ve heard a thousand times before and said, “Just climb through the window.”
I inched out onto the narrow fleur-de-lys ledge, and sure enough, there was King Kong right above me, clinging to the side of the building. He was even larger in person, which felt weird since large was literally the only thing I should have expected. His computer, telephone and ergonomic keyboard were all poised on the edge of the roof.
“Are you my 2:30?” he asked, with a distinct transatlantic accent. He lowered his palm to me and I had already lifted my leg halfway up before I realized he was asking for a handshake.
King Kong brushed off my embarrassment and said, “Why don’t you tell me a little about your tax situation?”
So I explained the side hustle I had selling miniature tea sets on Etsy and how it finally started to take off after TLC launched that new reality show about competitive miniature tea set collectors. He asked me a few questions and took notes with a Bic pen that he pinched between his finger and thumb. At one point, he had me stop for a second so he could swat a biplane out of the air. It dove to the ground in a column of smoke and landed smack in the middle of a heap of wings and rudders.
“You know, I used to be an Etsy seller too,” he said, without warning. “Mostly dinosaur skulls, but sometimes other bones too. Whichever ones I happened to have lying around. The only problem was, there was another dinosaur, and he undersold me. Isn’t that weird? One dinosaur selling another dinosaur’s bones?”
“So you became an accountant?”
“No, I killed that dinosaur too and sold his bones for double my usual price.” He stared wistfully at the building next door to us; it was two stories taller than this one. “I wish more problems could be solved by killing dinosaurs.”
I noticed for the first time that King Kong was being split-screened in. It was subtle, but he didn’t quite belong where he was standing.
“It’s all easier when you’re bigger. The little people tell each other it isn’t, but then they get caught in a giant spiderweb. The spider knows the truth and the truth is that it all makes sense from above, and even when it doesn’t make sense, at least it’s far away. Whenever I don’t understand something, I climb up until I do. If this building were only a few stories higher, I could see taxes. Not the forms or the money, but the thing itself. All of it, across the whole country. Isn’t it funny that you have to pay more taxes the richer you are? When else has that ever happened?”
Another biplane buzzes by and he doesn’t even pay attention to it.
“The truth is, I just wanted to be a part of something bigger than myself.”
