CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

As I was walking back upstairs, I ran into Masako Ueda. I was, at this point, basically insane and careening out of control, and Masako was exactly as calm as she is in every circumstance. This was both a comfort and a consternation. Mostly the latter, but I do take pleasure in the unchanging.

“Dahlia,” said Masako flatly.

“Masako,” I said not at all flatly. “Don’t go upstairs. Everything is horrible up there. There are two drugged men, one of whom who is naked and missing, a journalist, a police detective asking questions, and two insane and vengeful engineers who are doing unspeakable things with the furniture.”

Masako simply continued walking up the stairs at the same pace as before and said: “I’m having lunch with Tyler.”

“Yes, but,” I said, “maybe you don’t want to go up there.”

“I don’t want to wait downstairs,” said Masako. “It smells like dog.”

“Okay. But it could be crazy in there if the police get free. Also—you didn’t by any chance play the eighties hit ‘The Lady in Red’ on a speaker system downstairs?”

“No,” said Masako.

Masako opened the door.

And just like that, the situation went from being metaphorically on fire to literally on fire. A pyre of cubicles was in the middle of the room and there were literal—not metaphorical—flames coming from it.

“We didn’t mean to!” said Quintrell.

“We didn’t start the fire,” started Gary, normally, and then gradually turning into, if not song, at least spoken poetry. “It was always burning, since the world was turning!”

“No,” said Quintrell. “You did. You literally started the fire when you threw those Christmas candles at it.”

“It was for luck!” said Gary.

I was going to ask—against all logic—if there was tea near the Christmas candles—but was interrupted by Tyler, leaping from his office with a fire extinguisher and spraying the burning box of office furniture.

Vanetta and Detective Tedin also ran from their office.

“What the HELL is happening here?” Vanetta screamed. “I leave you alone for two minutes and this is the shit you pull—”

“They’re going to sell Cahaba, Vanetta,” said Quintrell.

“What?”

“DE is selling the company. They’re taking the Peppermint Planes IP and they’re going to make us do hidden puzzle games!”

“What?!”

Vanetta was, as they say on the Internet, SHOOK.

“Did you know about this, Tyler?” asked Vanetta, and the question was sharp enough to cut the air. Honestly, the flames subsided on their own, out of concern for Tyler’s well-being.

“I can’t hear you over this fire extinguisher!” said Tyler.

“Let’s just everyone calm down now,” said Tedin, apparently the voice of reason now that he wasn’t arresting people willy-nilly.

Ignacio Granger escaped from the bathroom yet again, probably to yell out something incriminating to the police, like “I’ve been drugged!” or “That woman is a liar!” but he didn’t get very far because Daniel was pulling him back into the bathroom. The best he managed was an “Aaarrggh!”

“What is going on here, precisely?” asked Detective Tedin, which would have been scary except he was tackled to the ground by Lawrence Ussary.

I will now describe this for you in slow motion, which is how I remember it in my nightmares.

Tedin, who had crossed the room, presumably to get farther away from the flames, was standing in front of the door to the break room, which was closed.

The door opened, silently, or at least silently in comparison to everything else.

Lawrence was not naked, in fact, but was wearing Vanetta’s teal ikat dress from a few days ago, which was just as alarming as you are imagining.

Lawrence knocked down Tedin. Tackled him. I told you earlier that I thought he looked like a 1920s football player for Harvard. He tackled like one too.

Tedin, for his own part, seem astonished that a drugged man in a dress had sneaked behind him and taken him down so easily.

“Stay away from Vanetta!” yelled Lawrence as he was rolling around on the floor with Detective Tedin, who, if he will forgive the phrase, was too old for this shit. “Stay away from Vanetta!”

Cynthia opened the door to Lawrence’s office—having apparently been inside—and said: “I found the tea! It was in his desk drawer the whole time!”

Archie entered, naturally, because why wouldn’t he, with flowers. He did not have a bouquet, but a preposterously large terra-cotta-colored pot, which was filled with marigolds. He saw Vanetta first and said, “Vanetta, these flowers aren’t part of a proposal or anything, but I just wanted to say—”

And then he noticed the smoldering fire, and the CEO in Vanetta’s dress rolling around on the floor with a policeman, and Cynthia, and also Ignacio, who was trying to get out again. He seemed not to know how to take all of this. “What the hell is happening in here?”

The phone was ringing, and I was still the secretary, and so I picked it up. While this was happening, Vanetta walked over and took the flowerpot, then walked back to where Tedin and Lawrence were wrestling on the floor and smashed the pot over Lawrence’s head. However, being cheap plastic, this did nothing except get dirt on the floor.

“I spent eight dollars on that!” said Archie.

“That’s a good price,” said Cynthia. “Where did you get them?”

“Cahaba Apps,” I said into the phone. “Cynthia speaking.”

“How much longer are you going to be in there?” a voice with a Southern accent said. “You’re taking forever.”

“I think I quit,” said Quintrell.

“No quitting,” said Vanetta. “No one can quit! We can still save this!”

“Seriously,” said Gary. “Don’t quit. Make sure you get your benefits. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live without health insurance?”

Lawrence, on the floor, gradually seemed to realize that he had not tackled Archie, but in fact, someone else. “Wait a second,” he said. “You’re not Archie.”

“The hell I’m not,” said Tedin.

“Now that I’ve found that tea,” asked Cynthia, “any chance I could get my five dollars back?”

And then the Herman Miller hellbox collapsed. Perhaps the flames had destroyed its structural integrity; perhaps it had decided that it did not want to live in a world such as this. It was like the lily of the Cahaba River. Beautiful for a moment, and then gone in an instant.

I just sat there for a moment and let all of this chaos wash over me. It was madness—almost Lovecraftian madness—where normal people had too many nights of not sleeping bring them over into a place where it seemed like a good idea to set office furniture on fire.

These people were nuts, but I was no better than any of them. I had blabbed like Cynthia. My love life was as messy as Vanetta’s. I had made unwise romantic gestures just as Archie had done. I had even had my own flirtations with not-as-yet-legal drugs like Lawrence had, which are not detailed here.

“Are you okay, Cynthia?” asked the voice on the phone. “Or has the lily finally wilted?”

But somehow, amid all the chaos, it came to me. I could see the answer swirling through the hell farce. I knew who was on the phone.

“Joanne,” I said in a poor but apparently serviceable re-creation of Cynthia’s voice. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Don’t let them rope you back into that horrible place,” said Joanne. “There’s no saving it. It’s quixotic to even try.”

“Hang on,” I told Joanne. “I’m going to have to call you back.”