When he stepped from the elevator, everything on the third floor seemed almost caustically just as it had been before; everything except Charleston and a red square of card stock that sat on his desk and read:
Mr. Sutterfeld,
Tomorrow, at 3:17 p.m., the red light will come on in the elevators. Please take an elevator up to the eighty-seventh floor. Your position at Thundercom will be discussed.
Timothy Spall
Vice President and Special Assistant to Mr. Twytharp
Please bring this card with you. Please show this card to no one. Please do not discuss the contents or existence of this card with anyone.
Charleston folded the card over once and placed it in his pant pocket, looking about to make sure that no one had seen him with the card.
The timing of the card’s arrival upon his desk made Charleston unclear as to whether or not this had anything to do with the little man-like thing he had just seen. The reaction time seemed a bit fast for the card to be about this jolting incident, but this incident seemed a bit jolting to not receive a fast reaction. Either way, Charleston was back at work now. He had never before noticed how truly quiet it was on the third floor. He felt guilty of being offensively loud with every move he made. An overwhelming uneasiness was tugging at his chest and throat. He was sure that he looked a fright to any and all passersby. Fortunately, though, no one was passing by.
Whenever Charleston got uneasy, he made a practice of extrapolating upon the potential causes of his uneasiness. This exercise always created a long list of concerns while failing ever to abate the feelings it was meant to extinguish. Indeed, if anything, Charleston’s lists often just made him all the more uneasy as it made him systematically aware of those things about which he was uneasy. More often than not, time, and only time, would bring Charleston back to a reasonable state (even though Charleston hated resigning himself to something so uncontrollable and unreasonable as time).
Nevertheless, as the day grew later, time’s healing powers helped Charleston grow more and more relaxed, even though his ominous morning meeting was drawing perpetually nearer.
Time, thought Charleston, cannot be counted upon to make any sense at all.
As if to further his hypothesis, Charleston slept surprisingly soundly that night. It made some sense in that his sheets had been laundered but two days before and his bedclothes, too, were fresh and clean. But none of this alone could even possibly account for the lucid, almost enlightened, and certainly uncharacteristic moment Charleston experienced in the instant before he drifted off to sleep.
It is okay, thought a drowsy Charleston to himself, if I am fired tomorrow. I have not, in truth, done anything wrong.
“This,” babbled Charleston to himself, “is not my fault. No matter how my employers view it. And no matter that it involved a strange, man-like thing.”
For the briefest moment, fleeting as any whisper, Charleston felt truly blameless, felt truly free.
In the morning, Charleston did worry that the personal alleviation of responsibility he had felt the night before, if shared, might be perceived as inconsiderate or even rude. And he was loathe to think anyone would take offense to anything he said or did. This was precisely why he was always explaining himself even though he hated doing so.
Such thoughts started Charleston feeling uneasy all over again, so he decided to get out of bed, as if it were the bed that made him uneasy.
Charleston got up, crossed the bedroom, and came to gaze upon his reflection in the mirror. In retrospect, Charleston would be unsure as to why, on this particular morning, he chose to gaze upon himself in the mirror. He had never, not even once before, done such a thing. Nevertheless, in the mirror, Charleston discovered his aforementioned swollen and bruised left eye, black eye number seven.
“On any day but today,” pleaded Charleston into the mirror that hung on the back of his bedroom door. But his eye did not seem to listen. Nor did the mirror. So at the eye, Charleston just stared. It was purple and it was huge. If they had not a good reason to fire him before, then they certainly could easily conjure one now. There were few things, and none that came presently to mind, less professional than a black eye. Unless…
Charleston immediately crawled back into bed in search of the one thing for which he would invariably be asked: a reason. A good reason, Charleston had found, always seemed to satisfy even the harshest curiosity. So Charleston lay prone, as he had found himself upon awakening. Without moving his head, he attempted to look about the room for the potential culprit of his black eye. He turned his eyes this way and that. At first he found absolutely nothing irregular. But then it occurred to him that since his left eye was swollen shut, he could see only half of the room. Further, the half of the room that he could see was more than likely not the offending side, otherwise Charleston’s right eye would have been blackened and swollen shut. Charleston gave a chuckle at his own cleverness before he inched his body over until his right eye was positioned where his left eye, estimably, would have been positioned in the night, and gazed upon the potentially guilty portion of the room. While Charleston, again, could find nothing he could even possibly blame other than the smooth, unperturbed ceiling, he did not yet entirely rule out the possibility that something was going unseen. After all, the peripheral vision of his right eye was antithetical, in terms of directionality, to that of his left eye. Additionally, Charleston had different vision in each eye. He did not recall the specific numbers, only that they were different. The optometrist had told him so. And the optometrist would have no reason to lie. Charleston also could not remember which eye was supposed to be the better one. Further, Charleston was presently in no position to try to figure this out, and he was unsure how much it really mattered anyway.
Suddenly then, Charleston had a thought…
It could have been a bug.
And while Charleston looked about the room and found neither a bug nor anything suggestive of the presence of a bug, Charleston did not see this as a definitive denial of the possibility that a bug could have come in during the night and then left.
But could a bug have bruised me so? he wondered.
The swelling indeed made that argument seem plausible. But the bruise? People would not find such an explanation plausible. No bug could cause such bruising. Moreover, if Charleston attempted to persuade people that a bug was the cause of the black eye, everyone would suspect him of attempting to cover up the real culprit. This would only lead to more questions and more explanations. Or, worse yet, people might think his attempt to falsely satiate their queries a rude and inconsiderate gesture.
All of this, bemoaned Charleston, would be manageable if I only had a reason.
Charleston’s windows and front door showed no signs of forced entry. Charleston had no history of sleepwalking or of self-abuse, lucid or otherwise, for that matter. No one other than the landlord had a key to the apartment. And the landlord was always drunk and passed out by eight o’clock in the evening. (Charleston knew this because of one time that his shower was leaking. He had to have it fixed on a Saturday morning, because the landlord was too drunk on weeknights to fix the problem, and Charleston did not want a drunk in his apartment unattended. Saturday mornings were when Charleston typically enjoyed listening to the radio, reading, or taking a walk. The landlord made it impossible, however, to do any of these things on that morning because Charleston liked doing these things alone. And that the landlord not be left alone in Charleston’s apartment was the entire reason why Charleston was having the problem fixed on a Saturday morning in the first place.)
Everything, Charleston was left to conclude as he stood, dumbfounded, in the middle of his living room, seems just as it seemed last night.
Not eight hours before, albeit for the briefest moment, everything had seemed so clear.
Charleston came to stand one last time in his bedroom’s center. He turned about in a slow, imperfect circle. He pleaded with reason to please show itself.
“Please, please… Please.”
But reason did not.
So, after wasting nearly twenty-eight minutes searching, Charleston came to the following conclusion regarding the cause of his latest black eye: I don’t know how it happened.
Then he resigned himself to preparing for work, unsure how, exactly, he would explain his eye at his presumably very important meeting.
Helena Birnbaum, the lobby receptionist with pretty, clear skin, gasped upon seeing Charleston.
“Are you all right, Mr. Sutterfeld?” she queried.
Charleston always found it funny that Helena called him by his surname.
“I am fine, Ms. Birnbaum,” he replied.
Charleston also found it funny that he always called Helena by her surname.
“How did it happen?” Helena asked, as everyone invariably and always did.
So Charleston took a deep breath.
There is, he thought to himself, no way for me to explain.
And although it made him nervous, although it all but promised to seem flippant, although it ran contrary to every impulse in Charleston’s anything-but-inconsiderate nature, Charleston decided that he would have to tell the truth, to tell the truth and simply see what transpired.
But, he noted, I will certainly not be making a practice of this.
“I don’t know how it happened,” he said, sharing his earlier revelation with Helena.
Then there was a pause.
Charleston’s tongue was shot through with needles of anxiety, so he scratched his tongue against the edges of his teeth.
Then Helena burst into laughter. A heavy, teary-eyed laughter that lasted a good ten seconds before she waved her hand at Charleston and declared, definitively as a card catalog, “Oh, Charleston, you’re going to be just fine.”
Charleston was relieved by her reaction, but troubled by what she had said.
How does she know, thought Charleston, how I am going to be?
And then, quick as electricity, something occurred to Charleston.
Has she heard something from Timothy Spall?
Or did she simply mean that he would heal? But he had had no fear that he would not heal in the first place. Certainly none that he had shared with her.
She must’ve just been talking, figured Charleston on the elevator ride to the third floor, only to have his resolution of the situation upended upon running into Millet von Straup, a third floor coworker, who, at the sight of Charleston, gasped and asked, “Are you all right?”
“I am fine, Millet,” replied Charleston, prompting the obligatory follow-up.
“How did it happen?”
Charleston, again, could do nothing more than give an honest reply.
“I don’t know how it happened,” Charleston said.
Then there was a pause.
And then, just as Helena had before him, Millet von Straup burst into a solid ten-second foray of laughter which he concluded by declaring, “You’re going to be just fine.”
Charleston could not pinpoint when, where, or why people began using this turn of phrase, nor could he fathom what was so humorous about any of this. This turn of phrase seemed to suggest that there was something wrong with him to begin with, something from which he would, apparently, heal. But if there was, indeed, something wrong with him, then why did everyone know about it but him? Charleston was terribly confused. And his confusion did not abate whatsoever when Curtis Ames, Greg Cooper, and Marah Abrams each individually responded to his eye and his explanation in precisely this same fashion.
He wanted to tell each of them, “You will be fine, too,” and to see how they liked it.
But he did not. He feared it might be considered rather rude. So he smiled instead. This way, at least they would not think poorly of him. He did, however, wish that they at least understood how they made him feel.
Once at his desk and settled into work, Charleston began worrying about the elevator coming at 3:17 p.m., specifically about what all of his coworkers would think upon seeing him enter the elevator when the red light was lit. They might think him simply mistaken as he stepped onto the red-hewn elevator. Someone, perhaps Greg Cooper, whose desk was nearest the elevator, might call after him, “Charleston! The light is on!” Greg’s voice would echo, too, carrying through the whole office and pulling everyone’s attention away from their work and onto Charleston, immersed in what might well appear to be a plaintive breach of contract.
Or, perhaps his coworkers would perceive his act as one of civil disobedience. While this, at first, seemed downright heroic to Charleston, it occurred to him only an instant later that his coworkers might then look to him in the future to be a leadership figure regarding policy and injustice. Charleston was not comfortable with such a position. Surely it would require directly and intentionally confronting a good number of people.
Perhaps his coworkers might think his act one of personal whim. They might think Charleston just boarded the elevator for no reason at all, just because he felt like it. Then they would think Charleston futile. Or worse, meaningless.
Or, and this would be the worst of all potential possible scenarios Charleston could dream up, someone, if not everyone, might witness Charleston’s boarding of the red-lit elevator and some, if not all, might think to themselves, “How terribly, horribly inconsiderate!”
This would be more than Charleston could bear.
Charleston had stress infused into every synapse, every nerve, every breath, every blink. It was bad enough not knowing what his future held at this company, but he also did not know how he got a black eye, how to answer people when they asked about his black eye, why people laughed when he answered them honestly about the black eye they had just asked him about, or who the strange, little, naked man-like thing was. And now, to boot, Charleston did not even know how to get on an elevator without offending his coworkers. Charleston felt like never moving again.
When 3:17 p.m. finally came, no one on the third floor was even looking at the elevator.
It opened just as it normally did, only now it was all red inside. Charleston just stepped into the red light. Everyone was, seemingly, too busy to be bothered.
I, thought Charleston with more than a whiff of exasperation, could be committing a very serious act of civil disobedience, and no one even cares.
The doors closed, then, and Charleston exhaled.
Again, the ride was quiet, smooth, and fast.
And yet again, Charleston came to the eighty-seventh floor, which did not even exist. There was not even a button for it.
As the door opened, Charleston was greeted by Timothy Spall, dressed meticulously in a tidy, navy blue suit as wrinkle-free and perfectly fitting as a mannequin’s attire might be. Charleston had only once before met Timothy Spall, just as had all new Thundercom employees upon commencement of their employment:
“Hi, I’m Timothy Spall,” Timothy Spall had said, dressed as tidily then as he was now, “vice president and assistant to Mr. Twytharp. Welcome to Thundercom and I hope that you won’t hesitate to contact me regarding any concerns you have during your employment here.”
Then he had shaken Charleston’s hand.
And then he had left.
Charleston imagined that this was how all new employees had experienced meeting the man.
Today, Timothy Spall looked considerably older than he had looked but a year and a half ago on Charleston’s first day. Charleston could not decide whether it was Timothy’s hair, perhaps more gray, or his skin, perhaps deeper with wrinkle. Everything was just as well-kempt, but the colors had simply grown more muted. Before Charleston could too profoundly contemplate the topic, though, Timothy welcomed him.
“Welcome, Charleston,” he said and extended his hand.
Charleston shook Timothy Spall’s hand, just as he had on that day a year and a half ago.
“It’s nice to see you again, Timothy Spall,” offered Charleston as he stepped from the elevator.
Once off the elevator and an instant before the doors closed, the red light inside flicked off.
It is, Charleston thought, incredibly hot on the eighty-seventh floor, which doesn’t exist.
He remembered that he had observed this same truth yesterday when he was on the selfsame eighty-seventh floor, which did not exist then, either. Charleston almost immediately began sweating.
“I’m glad you could make it, Charleston,” went on Timothy Spall. “I understand there was a bit of an…incident…yesterday…”
“An incident,” echoed Charleston, expressing his acceptance and understanding of the establishment of a vernacular while simultaneously quenching his curiosity as to what this whole meeting would be about.
“…and I’d just like to take an opportunity,” Timothy Spall went on without hesitation, “to get your side of the story. If you wouldn’t feel too uncomfortable sharing it with me.”
Then there was a split-second of silence in which Charleston tried to figure the most effective presentation of his story. And he decided upon…
“I had run to the fourth floor and was in a hurry to get back to work…”
“You’re on the third floor,” assisted Timothy Spall.
“I am on the third floor,” repeated Charleston with affirmation in his tone. “I had to run from the fourth floor to the third floor. And in my haste I did not notice that the red light in the elevator had come on.”
“Because we’re not casting blame,” explained Timothy Spall.
“Oh, no,” confided Charleston. “I…by the time I was aware of the red light, I tried hitting the buttons but nothing would stop it.”
For some reason, Timothy Spall’s alleviation of blame made Charleston feel guilty.
“I also thought that…” and then Charleston stopped.
Charleston wondered why Timothy Spall used a first person plural pronoun to discuss who was or was not casting blame.
Was this issue a topic of conversation amongst multiple persons? Charleston wondered.
Charleston only now realized that he had been sweating. He suddenly wondered if it was his sweat that motivated Timothy Spall’s attempt to diffuse any potential blame that Charleston might have felt.
Charleston then noticed that Timothy Spall, although dressed in a perfectly pressed three-piece navy blue suit (and a handsome one at that) and having been on this floor for presumably considerably longer than Charleston had been, was completely void of any and all visibly or olfactorily discernible signs of perspiration.
How, wondered Charleston, is this possible? It is hot.
“You thought that…” Timothy Spall started Charleston again.
“I thought that,” went on Charleston, more nervous now than before, “there were only eighty-six floors.”
“That’s what we tell you. Yes.”
“Even the newspaper says so. So I didn’t know how the elevator went to eighty-seven. But it did.”
Then it fell silent.
Charleston noticed that Timothy Spall was ever so gently nodding, his eyes locked upon Charleston’s.
“The doors opened,” Charleston continued, “and then I saw…”
It fell silent, again.
“You saw,” prodded the calm, cool, sweatless Timothy Spall.
Charleston glanced over Timothy Spall’s left shoulder and passively watched the large metal teeth of some large metal cogs turning, if at all, very gradually inside one another. Charleston had noticed these cogs yesterday on his first trip to the eighty-seventh floor, which he now was thinking maybe did exist.
“We can talk about the cogs later,” explained Timothy Spall without even following Charleston’s gaze. “What is it that you saw?”
I, Charleston reminded himself, am blameless in all of this.
“I saw,” said Charleston reluctantly, redirecting his stare to the focused and dry Timothy Spall, “a little naked being who seemed to have no bones and made a squishing sound when he moved.”
Timothy Spall straightened his posture.
And in so straightening, Charleston noticed for the first time that Timothy Spall had been slightly hunched over so as to be nearer to Charleston and perhaps to express his intense interest in Charleston’s tale.
Timothy Spall took a deep breath, waited, and then exhaled.
This led Charleston to the realization that the air on this floor was incredibly humid, and that the humidity was perhaps seventy percent of the discomfort in the room’s climate. The humidity also made Timothy Spall’s lack of perspiration all the more remarkable to Charleston. Almost as remarkable was the fact that Charleston was thinking about climate and humidity at a moment such as this.
Timothy Spall then said, “Okay.”
He reached up and touched Charleston on the shoulder. Timothy Spall, aside from a handshake, had never touched Charleston before. Timothy Spall looked Charleston directly in the eyes, one of which, of course, was nearly swollen shut.
“Wait here, Charlie,” said Timothy Spall.
He turned and walked off, around a corner and out of sight. His footsteps echoed and trailed off until they were no longer audible.
It was very quiet now but for a sort of hiss of steam (although no steam was perceptibly present) and the slow, occasional clank and grind of the almost imperceptibly slow turning of the cogs, if they were even turning at all.
Only now did Charleston realize how he was sort of awkwardly standing three steps from the elevator. He presumed, though, that he was not to move any further onto the eighty-seventh floor. So he just stood. And as he stood, although his fate at Thundercom was very likely being decided at that very moment, Charleston was thinking but two arbitrary thoughts. (Plus that any other man might not stand and think but two arbitrary thoughts while his fate was being decided. Another man might do something tangible, something pronounced, something bold, something violent—if necessary—to swing the scales in his favor. But Charleston was not this man. Charleston was unsure as to what he thought his future should hold. After all, he was just a man. He did not control people’s fates. He did not know what was his own justice. Surely that was the domain of someone else who knew far more than he.) The two random thoughts knocking around in his mind were these:
One: Why didn’t Timothy Spall say anything about my eye?
And two: No one has ever called me “Charlie” before.
Upon their second meeting, Charleston could see that the little, strange man-like thing was indeed more like a man than he remembered it being, more like a man than like anything else Charleston could really name. Nevertheless, it was far from plainly being a man.
Upon their second meeting, the naked, little man-like thing sat behind a large, sparsely adorned desk in a large, sparsely adorned room with gray concrete walls and a darker gray concrete floor. He had small tufts of wiry black hair behind and above each ear. Charleston had not noticed these tufts the day before. He also had not noticed that the naked little man-like thing had sad, tired brown eyes that seemed somehow lonely, if eyes could be such a thing.
Before Charleston could even take a seat in the chair in front of the desk, the naked little man-like thing, in a thin near-screech of a voice, began quite aggressively explaining…
“I’m sorry that I’m nude, but I have incredibly sensitive skin that is irritated immensely by clothing. It’s torture, really.”
“Oh,” replied Charleston, unsure what to say to this and only now really becoming aware of the social awkwardness of the man-like thing’s nudity. Prior to this moment, Charleston was too fixated upon all the other oddities of the man-like thing’s physical nature to offer even the slightest attention to its nakedness.
“And I require humidity in the air,” said the man-like thing bitterly, in a tone that somewhat embarrassed Charleston, that caused Charleston to divert his eyes. His eyes, in searching for the next most intriguing sight upon which to affix, landed upon a nameplate, one of the only accoutrements upon the little naked man-like thing’s desk. The nameplate was old, made out of a pastel orange-coated plastic the color and engraving style of which, coupled with the yellowing of the once-white letters, indicated that the item had been made at least two decades prior to today’s meeting to discuss Charleston’s future at Thundercom. Nevertheless, for those at least twenty years, and for today as well, those yellowing letters read the same thing: Mr. Twytharp.
Charleston only now realized that he had always imagined that Mr. Twytharp would be certain ways (tall and solid and, at the very least, strong-jawed). Charleston looked immediately back up at the mythological man whom no one Charleston had ever met had ever met; whom no one Charleston had ever spoken to had spoken about, because no one Charleston had ever spoken to had ever acquired any knowledge of the man about which to speak.
“I was born,” declared Mr. Twytharp unprovoked, “with certain afflictions, as any man might be, even though most are not. And so my lifestyle,” he went on, “is different from that of most men’s.”
Charleston again knew not what to say in response. So, this time, instead of, “Oh,” he said nothing.
“It is no different from having a black eye, really,” Mr. Twytharp said, gesturing towards Charleston, “much like yours.”
With this, Charleston recognized that his presence was making Mr. Twytharp feel extremely uncomfortable. Charleston also recognized that, even though a person might not directly mention a black eye, that same person probably still noticed that black eye. That person was probably merely acting politely.
His discomfort with others is likely why, thought Charleston, Mr. Twytharp does not make himself known to all the people that work for him. This must be very hard for him, to sit here with me now.
“It was an accident, my getting on the elevator yesterday,” Charleston explained.
“I know that. Don’t you think I know that?” Replied Mr. Twytharp. “My mind works just fine, thank you. My affliction is merely physical. I do own and operate the biggest business in the world.”
Mr. Twytharp was already making the, apparently rather large, gesture of having Charleston in his presence, and in a strange way, Charleston found this very touching. So Charleston let slide Mr. Twytharp’s gruff retort. Mr. Twytharp obviously had enough weighing on him already, what with his condition and all.
“I have you here, Mr. Sutterfeld, because we have a bit of a problem,” explained Mr. Twytharp unsentimentally and in his hollowed, cracked falsetto.
“Do we?” replied Charleston, in a sympathetic tone.
“Yes, you see, no one has seen me. In the thirty-two years that this company has existed, no one has ever seen me, aside from Mr. Timothy Spall, of course.”
“Well, I certainly have no need to discuss this event with anyone,” explained Charleston, warmly.
“Oh, no,” replied Mr. Twytharp, now downright cold. “I don’t trust you. I only trust Mr. Timothy Spall. And you are not Mr. Timothy Spall.”
“Oh,” said Charleston, having no way to counter Mr. Twytharp’s perfectly logical point. “But I am a very trustworthy man,” he added, almost as a suggestion.
“That’s what all untrustworthy men say,” explained Mr. Twytharp, unimpressed. “Otherwise there would be no advantage to being untrustworthy.”
“But all trustworthy men say it, too,” added Charleston.
“Exactly. And that’s precisely why I do not know what to think of you and your trustworthiness. Thusly, I don’t trust you. So, Mr. Sutterfeld, I am left with only one option…”
At this very instant, Timothy Spall entered the room (calling Charleston’s attention to the fact that Timothy Spall had not been in the room heretofore). Timothy Spall carried in his hands a heavy stack of bound papers. Once he had made it across the rather sizeable room, Timothy Spall handed the heavy stack of bound papers to Charleston, who placed the papers in his lap and politely thanked Timothy Spall. Before looking down at what he presumed to be his termination papers, Charleston looked back to Mr. Twytharp. And just as Charleston began quietly conjuring to mind forays into new careers, Mr. Twytharp sat up in his chair and dryly and reluctantly stated, “I have decided to make you the new chief executive officer of Thundercom Corporation.”
The high-pitched words bounced off the barren walls of Mr. Twytharp’s office.
Charleston was silent and utterly confused.
He lifted the robust contract out of his lap.
The massive stack of papers had been prepared with a cover sheet that read:
Contract and Stipulations for Charleston Sutterfeld’s
Employ as the new CEO of Thundercom Corporation
It was humid and for some reason all Charleston kept thinking was this:
Did Thundercom have an old chief executive officer?