“Joe Here.”

“Joe here,” was the way Joe answered the phone when he was behind his desk at the law offices of Sobchak & Sobchak. 

“Joe here,” he’d say. Every single time. He never juggled anything up. He was staid and steadfast when it came to telephone etiquette.  Joe never flirted with variety.

His delivery was deadpan, all business. He didn’t string lights on the vine. He cut the vine with a machete. He had a jungle to conquer. He had to keep things clear.

One imagines Joe at home, practicing his vocal tones in the bathroom, dressed in a business suit and sitting in the tub for acoustic reasons. He trains himself to speak with authority and force. Yet without bouncing an echo against the walls of the shower stall. His words must land with weight and finality. No further reverberations will be tolerated.

“Joe here.” And that was it. You knew who you were dealing with in no uncertain tones.

Speech practice in a bathtub. It’s a compelling image but it yields a counterfeit portrait of Joe. His enigmatic character is defined by his job and workplace only. Full stop. Everything else is conjecture. Meaningless hearsay. Opaque inventions puffed out by a lackadaisical brain. Drained of verisimilitude in the cerebral drought that knowing Joe induces.  

It’s chemically impossible for our brains to imagine Joe at home. Not with any degree of accuracy. It’s a significant roadblock, monkeywrenching our ability to conjure something that resembles an honest conception of the man. It’s like having a calcified amygdala and a dehydrated hippocampus. We can’t engage with that stalactite formation imposing on our brain. Our imagination has become a pillar of salt for the crime of attempting to decorate the stage of a one-act play: “Joe Here: or the Song of the Vocalizing Lion.”    

Spotting Joe out in public, wearing casual civilian attire in a neutral environment would be like getting stabbed in the eyes with a Technicolor pitchfork. It would wreck your visual reception. Forever.

Try to picture Joe’s refrigerator and you’ll create vague, generic images torn from an old Sears catalog. Or you’ll picture the hip fridge from My Three Sons or Dick Van Dyke. Iconic refrigerators we all grew up with. Or maybe you’ll plug in your own ten-year-old Frigidaire with all the funny-face magnets and Chinese takeout menus and a little whiteboard that’s never been written on. Why not? It’s YOUR fantasy. It no longer has anything to do with Joe.

“Joe here.”

Picture that bathtub he’s sitting in. Are there no-slip decals under him? What are they? Flowers? Seashells? Are they bland geometric puzzlements? Or bright rainbow-colored fish? Are they letters that spell out his name?

No. Joe wouldn’t own any of that crap. Any guesses relative to interior decorating will inevitably fall short. When you only know Joe through work, all notions of an “off the clock” Joe cease to exist. Like a loving chokehold that slides into murderous suffocation. 

What about friends? Or clubs? Surely you can’t deny that man is a social animal.

One cannot imagine anyone willingly spending time with Joe unless they were getting paid for it. 

Um, that last statement was not intended to imply that Joe hired sex-workers. That too is impossible to imagine, chemically speaking. The amygdala creaks. 

But Joe is a human being, you may say. The man must have hobbies, interests, things that entertain him. He must have more than one dimension—vocational. 

Maybe that’s true. But it’s impossible to prove. And, again, such interests don’t seem to apply to him at all. Think of anything; Dungeons and Dragons? Foreign films? Collecting taxidermied marsupials? Or does he just watch a lot of fetish porn? Does he go to the gym? Is he politically active? Is he a secret boozer? A hoarder? An organ donor? A cokehead? Does he worship a god? Gods? The ghost of Jim Jones riding a UFO?

All of these things plus a hundred more suggestions evaporate like dew on a lawn (at dawn) when considered with scrutiny. None of these unlikely possibilities are even remotely compatible with Joe. He simply cannot be separated from his well-regulated, HR-approved persona at Sobchak & Sobchak. You cannot force Joe into an outlandish fantasy involving a quirky pastime. He’s not collecting stamps. Or analyzing sand. It doesn’t compute. And neither does Joe. At least when he isn’t at work. It’s hard to imagine Joe logging online at home after spending all day staring into the bright flickering maw of a Dell monitor. Joe doesn’t know what a Tor Browser is. He does not have dark thoughts to explore.

But then, I can’t imagine Joe at all. Old football injury; I tore my amygdala.  

Joe only works at work. 

Wait, why don’t you just ask him about his life? Or, if that’s too awkward and forward for you, follow him home after work and see where he lives. The mere  appearance of his house would do wonders for your impressions of the man. It’s concrete evidence of Joe utilizing his leisure time. Hell, peek at his mail. Maybe he’s into some weird shit. Speaking of weird shit, is it possible Joe’s married?

“Joe here.”

Married? Are you fucking kidding me? Joe’s wife is the picture that came with the frame. She’s a regional spokesmodel for the demolition derby contingent. She smiles down from a billboard on the Route 14 overpass. Apparently, she gets her car fixed at Jimson Motor Repair (Expert Service! Low, Low Prices!). Joe is married to a cardboard cut-out of a soccer mom. She will inherit his wealth. He will inherit the earth. She will drag Joe down into the abyss. She will kill him with cholesterol and sugar. She is not impressed by his amygdala. If his imminent demise starts taking too long, she’ll sweeten his soda with a couple glugs of  yellow Prestone.

Then she can spend her money in peace. 

But, no. I can’t imagine Joe ever having a wife. But I can’t see him as a lonely bachelor either. Neither scenario works. Nor does the third option. Dating? Is Joe a love `em and leave `em type Lothario slash lady’s man? The theory is not merely implausible —it rubs corrosive salt into imaginary wounds.

These three pieces of our profile of Joe cancel each other out, leaving nothing to measure them against. All three sit locked under a mocking beam of light, light that pools around a functioning gallbladder as it hisses its bilious kiss into the restless mouth of the duodenum. All the organs are at play, and working hard. Under a spotlight. Joe’s thin, glowing strand of pathetic incandescence. A warm mucus lubricant slips inside a spleen. Feels like a wet mushroom under a humid tropical sun. The silent shriek of a liver drowning in fluids better left exempt. The dark pulsing song of the pancreas. An enzymic lament that swells and crescendos into a symphony of painful inflammation.   

Anyway, I don’t have to sneak into his house to learn anything about Joe. I can construct my own house in my own mind. A Colonial revival house, painted an off-white color that fools the easily-deceived eye into thinking it’s light blue (on occasion, when the light’s right, anyway). There’s an upstairs with three bedrooms. Below are the “living quarters” (kitchen, dining, living, bath) that stretch from the front porch to the back patio. You can cut through the kitchen to get there. There’s that damn refrigerator again, with the amusing magnets, menus, etc., probably stocked to the chilly gills with Swanson TV dinners and colorful clumps of mold within shrouds of loose Saran Wrap.  

Is there a family there, waiting for Joe to come home? 

No. Of course not. Don’t be stupid. 

Then, what’s he doing alone with all that empty house around him?   

Nothing. He’s not there because there is no house. No home at all. You can search it top to bottom. You can use forensics to scour the place—anything you want. Pluck the hairs from the mint-flavored glop that clots around the threaded orifice of the toothpaste tube. You could even burn the whole house to the ground and sift the ashes through an electron microscope but you wouldn’t find Joe. 

Why not?

Joe’s not here.