Abraham Lincoln and My Desk

I used to work with this guy, his name was Abraham Lincoln. Really. And the thing not many people knew about him was, he wasn’t even named after the President. I mean, he had heard about him many times by the time I met him, but when I asked him if he was named for him, he sighed a little and I could tell he had been asked the question a million times before, but then he looked up and asked me, “Okay, I’ve heard about that fella all my life. But I gotta ask you: is he real?”

Not only did he have the name. He was tall and gangly, with a thin, lined face that made him look older than he was. He had the wiry dark hair and everything. No beard – he looked like the Lincoln pictures from before he was President. You got the impression that all his life people had taken him for some impersonator, and thought he was putting them on when he told them his name.

But he wasn’t. I saw his driver’s license. Also I met his brothers. I was the only one who worked there who did that. He never spoke about them, and all those years we worked together, he never mentioned them. I don’t think anyone who worked there even knew he had brothers. But one night he and I were working late, and the door was locked, because in that part of town even then you didn’t keep the office open and unlocked after dark, and suddenly we hear the buzzer. I looked up at Abe, and felt my mouth going dry, and I said “That’s probably the neighborhood kids. They –”

But Abe was completely calm. “No,” he said, standing up. “That’s Isaac and Jacob. My brothers.” And he started to amble slowly toward the door, his long long arms hanging down. A second or two later I saw them. One of them only about three-quarters as high as Abe, and probably three-quarters heavier, baldheaded. You’d never have known they were related unless you really studied their faces, and after awhile you’d see it, that heaviness around the eyes, the melancholia of their downturned lips. That was Isaac. And the other one, Jacob, he was like a cross between the two: not as tall as Abe, not as fat as Isaac, and not as smart as either one of them. Or as morose.

Isaac looked up at the ceiling, with all its exposed pipes and peeling paint. “Abe,” he said quietly, “this place –”

“I know,” Abe said, in a tone of finality. I got the impression they were used to that kind of half-language. They didn’t need to finish their sentences. One always knew what the other was thinking.

And that’s what got me into all this trouble.

I looked at them. They were looking at me. So I introduced myself. They kept staring, and said nothing. Finally Abe took a step forward and said, “Bob, these are my brothers. Isaac and Jacob Lincoln. Boys, this is Bob.”

Still they said nothing. I was starting to feel as nervous as I had been when I thought that it was neighborhood crackheads pushing on the buzzer. Then Abe spoke up again. “Boys, let me show you around the office.” And he started to take them around the whole dump, and make it sound as if he was describing the Louvre. “This here is the warehouse, as you can see. All the stock is here. We don’t have none anywhere else. So you see here, we have five of these bracelets right here, and that’s all we got.”

Jacob started to chortle and guffaw. “You gonna need a lot more’n that,” he said, and laughed some more, kind of a breathy, wheezy laugh. Abe didn’t say anything to that at all, as if he hadn’t heard a thing.

We stepped out of the warehouse into the office area, me following even though none of them had asked me to. “This here,” Abe said, “this is Mr. Baker’s office. He is the head man. He founded this place, got it going. A great man.”

This made Jacob Lincoln laugh even more, until he was gasping for breath, and then wheezed out, “Yeah, a great man, with a building in the ghetto,” he said it like Elvis did, get-toe, “and all these here pipes exposed.”

I started grinning in spite of myself. Jacob was right. The place was a dump, and Dr. Baker was a blowhard. I had no argument there.

“And this here,” Abe was saying, “this is Lázaro’s office.”

“Office?” leered Jacob. “It’s a durn space between some pasteboards.”

Now Abe was getting just a bit annoyed. “Now, Jacob, be charitable.” He said. That was that. We went on. “And this is Bob’s office, Bob here,” he said, pointing to another space between some more pasteboards.

I looked inside, seeing the place where I had spent most of the last ten years with a stranger’s eyes. There was my gunmetal gray desk. Dented, grime and scuff marks on the legs, beat up, papers stacked high and haphazard. I was embarrassed. There was the metal bookshelf with the broken shelf and the books on it all leaning down with the shelf for lack of any better place to put them. And on the top shelf, unbroken, samples of this and that, things I liked to look at, things I was trying to figure out how to sell, things I thought were funny. And the picture of Doris and the kids.

Jacob was right. It was a dump. I decided to stay in my office and finish up rather than continue on Abe’s tour. I sat down at my desk and started typing, finishing up for both Abe and me, hearing his unexpectedly high-pitched voice explaining this and that about our big nothing of an office as if he were a tour guide at the British Museum, and occasionally Jacob laughing and gasping for breath, and Isaac not saying a single thing the whole time.

After awhile I got caught up in the work and stopped paying any attention to them at all. Then Abe surprised me, poking his head into my cubicle and saying, his face as melancholy as ever, “Well, Bob, thanks for finishing up. And thanks for being so friendly to my brothers.” No, he wasn’t being sarcastic. He never was. “Me and the boys are gonna head out.”

“All right,” I said, “I am almost done. Y’all have a good night. It was good to meet your brothers.”

I got up and walked to the door behind them. I had to. Only Baker and me had keys to the place. Baker didn’t like too many keys floating around. “Too many variables,” he liked to say. “Too many risks.” So since I was the CFO (yes, really, that was my title), he gave me a key, and he himself had the other one. That was it. In that neighborhood I wasn’t going to leave the door unlocked behind them, and the building was built in something like 1935 by some crazy man who put outside locks on both side of the door, so you could only lock it and unlock from either side with the key.

I locked the door behind Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Weird fellows, but then again, I had worked with Abe all those years, and he was pretty weird himself. He really did ask me that one time. Only once, but that was enough. “Was that fella real?” – meaning Abe Lincoln the President. I looked at him for a minute, thinking he was putting me on. But it was obvious he wasn’t. He was never known for deadpan or dry humor, or any humor at all. A solemn and serious guy.

So I felt like I kind of had to answer. “Of course he was real, Abe,” I said. “Our sixteenth President. Born in a log cabin. Freed the slaves.”

Abe started shaking his head. “Yeah, I know, he freed the slaves and they shot him down at the movie theater. I heard all that. I just wondered if you was gonna tell me straight, if that whole thing was all made up, or if it really happened.”

I scanned his face again, still wondering if this man who had never been known to put anybody on was putting me on.

“Abe, I’m telling you, this is all real. This is basic American hist—”

“Yeah,” Abe waved his hand dismissively. “Yeah, I heard all that. But I don’t think they even had movie theaters in them days.”

He had me there. I went back to work. And thinking of all that again, I locked the office door behind them, finished up what we had to show Baker in the morning. Then I also left – when I stepped out of my cubicle, I saw a folded piece of paper taped to the entrance, labeled “BOB” in Abe’s big spiraling handwriting. I opened it up. “Thanks for being kind to my brothers, Bob. Yrs, Abe.” Well, that was nice. I was  careful to lock the door behind me.

Baker didn’t get in til around 10am. One time he told me why. “I grieve, Bob,” he said. “I grieve.” His wife had died about fifteen years before that. Cancer. “I grieve, and I can’t get out of bed too fast. The darkness overwhelms me. The dawn challenges me. Midday rebukes me. Evening mocks me. I grieve, Bob. Of course, you can’t know what this is like. But I can’t face the mornings. I can’t simply be expected to come in here at the crack of dawn and be up to speed.”

I really didn’t want to hear this. “Sure, Boss,” I said, as affably as I could. “That’s perfectly understandable. “Don’t you worry about a thing. I’ll get here at 8 and open the place up.”

So I did. Every day. All those long years. In fact, the early mornings, before Baker turned up, and Abe, and Connie and Abdullah and Steve and the rest of them, those were the best times there. Quiet. No worries. Work, sure, but peace.

And so I opened the place up the next day, as usual. Turned on the lights, turned on the modem (this was way before the days of hi-speed Internet. We had to announce on the office intercom that we needed to go online for some reason, and convince Baker it was worthwhile, and negotiate with the others when would be a good time to do it). Put the newspaper on Baker’s desk. Started the coffee in our old coffee machine – one time Abe said to me “That coffee maker, it looks like something out of the Sixties,” and I said, “Abe, it is from the Sixties.” It was.

Anyway, it was when I went into my office, or my area, my cubicle, whatever, that I saw it. The first thing I noticed was the rectangle where the old cheesy linoleum was less discolored, less yellowed. As if someone had come in and cleaned and scrubbed that area and no other. I was actually wondering who had started cleaning the floor when I realized that the rectangle was where my desk had been.

My desk was gone. Gone. It was so unexpected, so strange, so inexplicable, I actually walked away and came back in again. Then I went by everyone else’s area, peeking in. My desk was in none of them. Not only was it gone, but all the papers that had been on top of it. They were gone, too. It wasn’t until later, when the police were at the office and I was showing them the rectangle where my desk had been, that I noticed that my picture of Doris and the kids was gone from the bookshelf as well.

First in was Abdullah. I was waiting by the door for everyone to start to arrive. “Abdullah,” I said as soon as he stepped inside and punched his time card. He was startled; hadn’t seen me by the door. “Abdullah, come here for a minute, okay? I want to show you something.”

“Bob,” he said, “I’ve got a lot of orders to pack—”

“Abdullah, come on, really, it’ll only a take a minute. Please.” He followed me, looking uninterested and unhappy. When we got to my area, he said, “Where’s your desk?”

“That’s what I’m wondering.”

He looked at me. “What are you talking about? You getting a nicer desk or something.”

“Abdullah,” I said, my voice rising in spite of myself, “my desk is gone.” I tried to keep my voice from going even higher, pitching it low when I spoke next, but it just went higher again. “I came in this morning, my desk was gone.”

“What do you mean, your desk is gone?”

“Well, look. Do you see it?”

“No. Where did you move it?”

“I haven’t moved it anywhere. It’s gone. It wasn’t here when I came in this morning.”

“Come on, guy,” Abdullah said, “I gotta get my work done. I need to take the afternoon off.” And he walked away.

Pretty much the same thing happened with the rest of them. Some were skeptical, some were polite, some thought it was a big joke. Abe was very serious, but that was true every day. He asked me where it was. I explained to him that this was the very question I didn’t have the answer for. “But Bob,” he said, “what are you talking about? It was here last night when we was working late and the boys came to pick me up.”

“Yes, I know that,” I said, nodding up at his sad and solemn face. “Not too long after you and Isaac and Jacob left, I left, too. It was here then. It was gone when I came in this morning.”

“Was the door busted in?”

“No. It was locked. I unlocked it as usual. I checked all the windows, too, after I saw it was gone. Not that anybody could have gotten a big heavy metal desk like that through a window, anyway.”

Abe looked at me unblinking. He didn’t know what to say. Neither did I.

Just then Baker came up to us. “Let’s go, gentlemen,” he said – no “good morning” – “I don’t pay you to stand around.”

I spoke quickly. “Mr. Baker –”

Not quickly enough. “Go on, Bob. Didn’t you and Abe finish the reports last night? I need to see them. I need to see them now.”

“Mr. Baker, my desk is gone.”

I felt my face going red and hot.

Baker had been on his way to his office, and he stopped. “What?” He turned around.

“Gone. It’s gone. I came in this morning, all my papers, and the desk. Gone. The reports, too.”

“What are you talking about?” Everyone was asking me that on that morning. “The dog ate your homework, is that the situation we have got here?”

“No, Mr. Baker, I’m serious. If you’ll please just come to my cubi—my office.” He hated when we didn’t call them “offices.” He came. I showed him.

It was all so strange. The police duly came, a couple of young guys with guts – I don’t mean courage, I mean they looked as if they were on their way from Krispy Kreme and couldn’t wait to get back there, and I gave them a report, and all the employees were interviewed, and we got new locks – I didn’t get a key this time, Baker kept the only one, and forced himself amid his grief to come in earlier.

The police said they’d investigate. They left. We never heard from them after that. Once I asked Baker if he thought I should call them and ask about it. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses. “Robert,” he said – he called me that when he had wisdom to dispense, and he put on his little wisdom-dispensing smile – “you know what kind of a neighborhood this is. Don’t you think the police have more important matters to deal with than the mysterious disappearance of an old gunmetal desk and some reports from a small and largely unprofitable wholesaling company?”

I didn’t know what to say, and there was no use saying anything, anyway. I went back to my cubicle. At least I got a nice new desk out of it, straight from Goodwill. It was oak. It was scuffed and dingy, but it was a lot more handsome and dignified than the old one. It made me feel important. I fell into work again. Forgot about the whole thing. Chatted over coffee with Abe, always about hockey and fishing and printing costs, never once about his family or mine or anything close.

It was about six months later. Baker had sent me downtown to plead with one of our regular customers to increase his order. There was always a lot of begging involved with that job. I drove downtown, I did the job, and I was on my way back to my car when I saw it.

It was a cold day. I was keeping my head down against the wind, but when I got to the curb I had to look up, I had to cross the street. And it was then that I saw it. An old truck, a pickup, a drab green, 1960s Chevy pickup. I’ve always loved old cars and it isn’t every day you see not just a classic car, but a classic pickup. It was stopped at a red light, which gave me a chance to admire it. And then I saw it. It was my old desk. I sat in front of it for eleven and a half years, I would know it anywhere. Where it was, was in the bed of that old pickup.

My mouth fell open. That was my old desk. I didn’t know what to think, but I did have the presence of mind to look at the driver, and try to make out who he was.

As it turns out, it wasn’t hard to do.

It was Isaac Lincoln.

Before I thought, I called out “Hey!” But just then the light went green, and Isaac sped away. I rushed to my car, thinking I would give chase, but by the time I got in and got the thing started, which took me a minute because my hands were shaking, Isaac was nowhere to be seen.

I drove back to the office, my thoughts whirling. Why did the Lincolns steal my desk? And all my papers? And how did they do it? And what had happened since then, that Isaac would be driving around with it now?

And then I thought, What do I care, anyway? My new desk is better. Leave well enough alone. Just be quiet about it.

I was all set to be quiet about it but when I got back to the office my feet took me straight to Abe’s cubicle.

“You stole my desk!” I announced.

Abe turned around and looked at me, sadly.

“I what?”

“You stole my desk! I was just downtown, I saw Isaac your brother driving a pickup, a Chevy” – why did I mention that? What difference did that make? – “and in it, in it, Abe, was my—”

“Now come on, Bob.” Abe had stood up by then. He put his big hand on my shoulder and looked seriously into my eyes. “What would my brother want with your desk? It’s not like it was some kind of heirloom—”

I swatted his hand away. “I saw it!” I shouted. I realized my voice was getting too loud for Baker’s office. I said it again, more softly. “I saw it. I don’t know what you boys are up to, but I know it’s y’all that are up to it.”

Abe didn’t say anything. Not a word. What he did do was walk over to the coatrack, take his coat, and walk out of the office. He didn’t tell Baker he had to leave. He didn’t say anything to me.

I didn’t know what to do. Should I call the cops? It was all so strange. The desk was worthless, anyway. The papers even more so. And my new desk was nicer. I decided to shut up and go back to work.

As it turned out, I never saw Abraham Lincoln again. But I did see my desk. When I got to work the next morning, it was there in my cubicle, right where it had always been. The new one? Nowhere to be seen. And stacked on the top of my old desk were my old forms and reports from seven months earlier, when they had all disappeared in the first place. I took the whole stack and put it in a corner and stared at it, trying to figure the whole thing out. Where had they gone? And why? And why were they back?

There was only one man, or maybe three, who even knew the answers to those questions. But I never got a chance to ask them. Abe was gone. He didn’t show up for work that day, or any other day. Baker even sent me around to his place once. No one home. Pretty soon the letters Baker sent him were returned, unopened.

It wasn’t until a couple of months after that, in a fit of cleaning frenzy, that I decided to tackle that stack of old papers, and get them filed where they needed to go, as if anyone might ever need them again, which they wouldn’t. The note was about halfway down the stack, written in Abe’s big loopy handwriting.

“Bob,” it read. “With malice toward none, and charity for all. Yr obedient servant, A. Lincoln”

Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of 30 non-fiction books. Sometimes he writes stories that mean nothing, go nowhere and make no sense. He can be reached at director@jihadwatch.org.