I was hanging out at the window by the coffee area, watching the construction crews going at it across the street. They were working on another gigantic office building a lot like ours. We’d watched them from the hole in the ground phase and now the scaffolding and rebar framing was up to five or six stories. Pretty soon they’d get as far as ten, where we were, and we’d be able to practically look out and wave. We all liked watching them. In our jobs we worked with words on computer screens and numbers on paper. There were plenty of times when I thought it would feel good to be out in the open air, getting my back into it, with an actual physical thing you could point to as a product.
I had a pretty good view of them, looking across and down. A construction crane was lifting big sections of girder up to where the ironworkers, I guess they were, little bugs in yellow hard hats, guided it onto a big stack of girders. We’d watched them do that over and over these last few months, and we always got a kick out if it.
But today something went wrong, big-time. The crane arm swung too wide and hit one of those industrial-grade extension ladders, and there was a guy on the very top of the ladder who paddled and flailed as it tilted at a crazy angle, then the whole thing went over.
He landed somewhere below my line of sight. The other little bug guys scattered. The next minute you couldn’t see any of them.
Just then Brian, whose work space was next to mine, came by and asked me what was up.
“The weirdest thing just happened. A guy fell off this really tall ladder and probably pancaked himself.”
Brian peered out the window. “I don’t see anything.”
“You had to be looking right at it.”
One of the supervisors came by and we got moving. There had already been a few remarks passed about window time.
Our work areas were not equipped with windows. We had a lot of bleary fluorescent lights that somebody at corporate was experimenting with. They were supposed to prevent eyestrain, but they made you feel like you were breathing something other than air. A full day of them made me groggy. Walking from the window back to my chair was like submerging. I sat down but I wasn’t able to pick up my work where I’d left off. I wondered if the guy who’d fallen was dead or alive. It was like a part of me was still looking out the window. That’s how peculiar it felt. Like I’d seen it all happen on some outer space TV channel. It wasn’t like me to get worked up about some strange guy, even if he did take a header onto concrete. I’m just not famous for things like that.
I went out to the reception area to bullshit with Steph. She’s my age and we kid around a lot. Steph had her earphones in and was bopping around to her music. I was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to do that. I had to stand in front of her and wave to get her attention.
“Hey Matt, what’s up?” She still had one of the earphones half in. I could hear the scratchy, miniature music.
“Not much. Did any ambulances pull up around here, anything like that?”
“Unless they came up on the elevator, I wouldn’t know. Why, how come?”
“Nothing.” I didn’t feel like going into it. Instead I asked her what she did over the weekend, and she told me and told me. There’s times I think that Steph wants to be my girlfriend, and I have to be careful about that. She’s a nice girl, but it’s not going to happen. I could just sense she was way ahead of me, like she was already telling her relatives at the wedding reception how we met while working at the same place.
I finally got into the work groove and knocked out my day’s quota. None of it’s that hard, to be honest. A sheltered workshop could probably handle it. I was always tired at the end of the day, but that was probably from boredom. That night I watched the news, flipping back and forth between channels, but nobody mentioned the guy who fell. I bought a paper the next day and turned to the part where they had the car crashes and stray murders. Nothing there either. I couldn’t believe the guy wouldn’t have hurt himself pretty bad, enough to be noteworthy. If it was you, wouldn’t you want your own square inch of ink? I’m just saying, it was weird.
Our group leader had called a morning meeting, so that was the first order of business. We all filed into the conference area. There was a coffee setup and some of those disappointing healthy snack cakes. Corporate was trying to direct us into better lifestyle choices. The group leader got right down to it. She said that we were not performing up to expectations. “Productivity has remained static, as opposed to the five percent increase that was projected. I don’t have to tell you the consequences of being a consistently underperforming unit, except to say that they would be serious.”
I was trying not to look at Brian. He never managed the neutral, attentive expression required of an employee who was getting his ass kicked. Brian has a narrow face that just naturally settles into a smirk. I knew if I even looked at him, he’d have me rolling my eyes right along with him at the horseshit the group leader was dishing out. Five percent, what did that mean? These people had no souls.
Instead I used my trick for getting through meetings, which was to rehearse detailed sexual fantasies while I stared at the group leader. The fantasies weren’t about her. That would have been, well, unpleasant. No, just your ordinary porn stuff. See, I’ll admit to things like that, things guys really do. Those girl magazines with articles about how to figure out what men really think, or want, or why he’s not calling, or letting you move in, or whatever the program is? Believe me, you probably don’t want to know.
I snapped out of it when the group leader began passing out papers, one for everybody. Employee Responsibility Checklist, it read, and beneath that, a series of questions:
1. Have I established ownership of team objectives?
2. Have I implemented best practices?
3. Have I learned from my mistakes?
4. Have I looked on each new day as an opportunity to excel?
There was more, but before I could finish, a piece of paper nudged into my lap from beneath the table. On the back of his Employee Responsibility checklist, Brian had written:
1. Have I gotten anything like a raise in the last year and a half?
2. Have my best accounts been outsourced to Malaysia?
3. Do any of you assholes even know my goddamn name?
I didn’t dare raise my eyes from the page.
The group leader was saying we were supposed to answer each question on a one-to-five-point scale, with one being Needs Improvement and five being Exceptional. We were supposed to do this daily for six weeks, then plot our responses on a graph. In this way it would be possible to chart the trend of our deficiencies.
Honestly, there were times I wondered why I worked here.
The rest of the day I put my head down and just cranked. I was like the poster boy for Employee Responsibility. Sometimes that happens, they’ll get me mad enough that I decide I’ll show them, and I blast through all the crap like a comic book hero putting his fist through a wall. But I do it for me, on my own terms, not because of their cheapo motivation games.
So it wasn’t until the end of the day that I made it over to the coffee area. Just to stretch my legs, because by that late the coffee turns into sediment. I couldn’t tell if they’d made any progress on the building across the street. The workers were gone by then; they started early and knocked off early. It was one of the those gray days that made it hard to judge distance, like I could have moved my hand just beyond the glass and practically touched the other side of the street.
I heard the elevator chiming in the distance as people from the office left for the day. I guess it was later than I thought. After awhile I could tell I was the only one there. It was a feeling, a particular kind of quiet. But I didn’t leave yet, even though I could have. I was trying to clear my head, travel between work and not-work, when your mind unties the knot of itself and comes floating back to you.
Maybe the guy I’d seen fall was really all right, maybe he had a safety harness or something. I hoped so. You wouldn’t want the guy’s family to have to think about him cashing in every time they looked at the building. It would be like a tombstone twenty stories tall.
I don’t do real well with heights. Most people don’t know that about me because, think about it, how often does it come up? But I never went off the high dive when I was a kid. Never climbed a tree or a water tower, never even liked sleeping on the top bunk. All this is to try and explain what happened next: I fell.
Not actually; it just felt like it. One second I was standing at the window, and the next it gave way and I was clawing at the gray sky. My stomach somersaulted. The speed pushed the air out of me and all I could manage was a strangled yelp before I landed, feet first, on the exact piece of floor where I’d been standing all along.
The back of my shirt was damp, and it hurt to breathe. Have you’ve ever had one of those dreams when you’re falling and you scramble around and wake up in your own bed? It felt like that, except, of course, I’d been awake the whole time.
I got myself out of there pretty quick, I can tell you, and went to a bar and drank a beer, and then I drank another one. I was beginning to feel really stupid. It was a good thing nobody had been there to watch my little performance, or else I might have gotten a call from HR to come in for one of their friendly chats where they try to determine if you’re a mental health risk and should they start giving you bad job evaluations.
Maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea to call my old girlfriend who doesn’t like me very much. But I still felt shaky, hollow underneath the beer buzz, and I didn’t want to be alone, and at least with her I always knew where I stood.
So I called. She let it ring awhile. “Hey, pretty lady.”
“Who’s this?”
I hate that. Like she didn’t have Caller ID. “It’s me,” I said.
“Oh, Mr. Rat.” That’s what she calls me. Matt the Rat. I think that’s cold. “What do you want?”
“I was wondering if I could buy you a drink.”
“Hah.”
“Dinner, then. Come on. I’ve been thinking a lot about you.” Technically true, if you counted the last fifteen minutes.
I could hear her working it over, looking for angles. “Dinner but no dessert,” she said, which meant, no sex, and I said, Fine.
She walked into the restaurant half an hour later, totally done up, hair, shoes, the wicked makeup. Like she spent her evenings by the phone, all primed and ready for when a call came in.
I stood up, like a gentleman, and wondered if I should try to kiss her on the cheek just so she could have the satisfaction of shoving me away. But she sat down across from me before I could make any move and looked around. She said, “I was here once before and it wasn’t that great.”
We ate some food. I pounded back a few more beers. Everything in my head had become complicated. I’d been afraid of something, which shamed me, and I couldn’t remember exactly what, which made me mad and was probably her fault.
One of the things she said was, “How’s work these days?”
“Why is that always the hot topic of conversation? Why is work the only thing that people ever ask about?”
She was eating this salad she’d ordered, the kitchen sink kind that has everything in it except a cheeseburger. “Okay. How’s everything aside from work?”
I said something like great, everything was great, but I couldn’t come up with any particulars.
After a minute she said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened at work?”
I started out with the bullshit meeting, because that was the ordinary part, and then I told her about working myself into some kind of fit so I spaced out standing at the window, and then about the guy who did fall, the construction worker. “Can you imagine falling what, twenty-five, thirty feet, and maybe the ladder lands on top of you? I mean, what wouldn’t you break?”
She was mopping up the last of her salad. I waited for her to say, that’s terrible, or some other normal response. Instead she said, “It’s like there’s some part of you missing, isn’t there?”
“Excuse me?” I said. Very polite, in case she had suddenly turned into a mentally disabled person.
“I mean, that’s what it takes for you to notice another human being. A tragedy happening right under your nose.”
We were on familiar ground here. My old girlfriends, this one and I guess all the others, were always accusing me of not noticing things. Their bad moods, which they called their needs. Their absences, and occasionally, their presence. I said, “Yeah, but think of all the other great working-condition parts I have.”
She wasn’t impressed with my humor, but by now I was just trying to piss her off. I didn’t much like it when she started in on the medley of her greatest hits, all the things that were wrong with me. Was it too much to ask, if you paid for somebody’s dinner, you got a little pleasant company in return?
She said, “When’s the last time we talked?”
I knew that this was a test, and that I wasn’t going to do very well. “I don’t know. Not that long ago. Two, three months.”
“Six. I remember because my mother was in the hospital having heart bypass surgery.”
“Oh yeah, I remember.” I didn’t. “How’d that turn out, how’s she doing?”
“She died two weeks later.”
“Oh man, that’s terrible. I’m really sorry.” And I was, I felt bad for not calling back, like she meant me to feel bad. But it also seemed like, excuse the pun, overkill, using a dead mom to beat me up. I mean, I never even met her mother.
She said, “You never called about my mother, but some gruesome accident has you all excited. Excuse me if I’m not impressed.”
“And here I was sure you would be,” I said, sarcastic again. I couldn’t win, she wasn’t going to give me a break. Next time I’d be sure not to mention anything heartrending. She wouldn’t understand, it was precisely because I didn’t know the guy that it was so freakish. Like any of us could go that fast, zap, a bug hitting a bug zapper. Like it could happen to me! But what did she care? She was too caught up in her own head games. I never set out to make her, or anybody else, unhappy. More like, they had this idea of who they wanted me to be, then they blamed me for not living up to it.
I walked her out to her car. And I admit it, I tried to get something going. Is that so terrible? Does anybody look down on birds or bees or monkeys or whatever, just for doing what comes naturally? And believe it or not, it was my way of trying to make it up to her, apologizing for the dead mom and everything. Sometimes it really does work that way, making love: you get past all the bad history and hard words and you’re happy with each other again. Anyway, it was what I had to offer just then.
Of course she wasn’t having any of it. “Thanks for dinner,” she said, once she’d pried herself loose from my unwelcome advances. “I hope that one day you decide to upgrade to actual human status.”
Yeah, and she could just bite the back of my knee. I went home and fell asleep on the couch without taking my clothes off. The next morning I woke up unfit for duty. It felt like my skin shrank a size overnight, like my tongue had warts on it. It was truly ugly. But there was no calling in sick these days, not unless you wanted some gimlet-eyed supervisor coming around and expressing fake concern for your health once you got back. You had to figure they all knew the symptoms of brown bottle flu.
So I showered. Applied caffeine. Et cetera. Steph was already
at her desk when I got off the elevator. “Mattie, you look
terrible.”
“And top of the morning to you too.” Talking made my teeth hurt.
I told Steph I was probably coming down with something, and she knocked herself out fetching me vitamin C, throat lozenges, hot tea. She thinks that all I really need is the love of a good woman.
When I got to my work area, I looked over the wall for Brian, but he wasn’t there. I figured he was in the john or something. I opened my computer and stared at the screen. It was like staring at a goldfish in a bowl and waiting for the fish to do something.
I had my choice of rotten thoughts this morning, except I didn’t want to be thinking about anything. Last night had been a total disaster. Next time I wanted cheering up, I’d call one of my old drinking buddies, not that I’d done that in awhile. I wasn’t even sure I had their numbers anymore. Well, anyway, I’d learned my lesson. No more sniffing around girls when I was at a low point. You should only take them on when you were primed and ready, like going on safari.
I did a little bit of feeble work. The hands of clocks moved backward. I think I slept some, right there in my chair. Then a wad of paper hit me between the eyes. Brian had thrown a note over the partition. It said, “Meet me at noon at Subway. Tell no one.”
I wasn’t in the mood for Brian’s fun and games, but by then I was hungry. I got there first and ordered a sub with a lot of mayo and a lot of bacon. It sounds bad but trust me, your hangover craves it. When Brian showed up he said, “You look like, I don’t know, a hit-and-run victim maybe.” He got his sandwich and sat down. “Guess what Brickhouse did to me.” Brickhouse was our group leader’s boss, and serious asshole.
“Invited you home to do his wife.”
Brian held up one finger while he worked on a corner of his meatball sub. “Put me on probation,” he said, his mouth still half-full.
“You’re kidding.” Brickhouse putting you on probation was like Darth Vader putting you on probation. “How come?”
“They’re using some new point system. It’s not real clear. I think you get points for poor telephone manners. For using too many office supplies. Not returning a salute. Liking dogs instead of cats. They’re making it up as they go along.”
I didn’t know what to say. If I was Brian, I’d probably start sending my résumé out.
Brian said, “So, I just wanted you to know, if I don’t hang out with you like I used to, goof around, it’s because I’m trying to save my ass.”
“Oh sure. Jeez.” I shook my head, commiserating. Brian looked sort of serious. I guess he really was worried. “But hey, worst comes to worst, there’s other jobs, right? When one door closes, another opens.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say.”
“People with our skills, we’ve got it made. We’re like the top of the food chain.”
I was just giving him shit, trying to screw around like we always did. We didn’t have any skills. He didn’t even crack a smile. He said, “No, man, we’re like, the bottom.”
“Duh?”
“We can’t do squat that’s really useful. Can’t grow our own food or hunt for it, or build a shelter, or make our own clothes. Just think about shoes. What the hell would you do for shoes? We couldn’t keep ourselves alive for a week if they turned us loose in the woods.”
“Then it’s a good thing this ain’t the woods,” I said. I didn’t know what his deal was. He was tripping.
We finished our sandwiches. It wasn’t like Brian to be so uptight about work. He was always the one who had the big bad attitude, even more than me, and I wondered what was up with him. But I didn’t ask, in case it was something I’d be embarrassed to find out, like, he needed the health insurance because he had AIDS.
We went back to the office. I got through the day, but not in any fashion I’d brag about. The rest of the week I just did normal stuff, watched TV after work, cooked up some pork barbeque that turned out great. People always act surprised when I tell them I can actually cook, like they think I live on cold pizza with bits of the box stuck to the crust. Work was pretty boring since Brian really did turn into Mr. No Fun. I hardly ever saw him, and I missed things like him hoisting a little skull-and-crossbones flag above his desk, or texting me during meetings with comments about the group leader’s poor wardrobe choices. Was I supposed to be the bad influence, or was he? It was probably a toss-up.
Meanwhile, the building across the street got taller. It did that from time to time, had some kind of growth spurt. It was easier to see what they were doing now. A few stories down, there were walls and windows, and you could see the workers walking around in there. They were putting in the plumbing and electrical and heating and air-conditioning, all the things that make a building a building. Actual skills. Brian was probably right about us, we were pretty useless when it came to practical, regular-guy knowledge. I couldn’t so much as rewire a lamp. If my car didn’t start, I called a mechanic. I bet the guys across the street had whole garages full of automotive tools.
I tried to think positive. I had to believe there was something I was good at that maybe nobody else was. I took a quick inventory: music arts sports, nope nope nope. Academic achievement, back in the day, better not go there. Big financial success, still coming up craps.
It was getting to me, and I felt, no lie, pretty dismal. Maybe that’s why I let Steph talk me into going out after work. Happy hour, she said. I didn’t think I could get all the way to happy, but crawling into a big glass of alcohol sounded like just the thing.
Of course Steph acted like it was a date. I saw that right away. She steered us into this fancy place, little tables, low lights, a piano playing lush cocktail music. She probably wanted to be able to brag to her girlfriends about it. And here I’d been thinking sports bar.
Never mind. I made the best of it. I paid for our expensive drinks and watched Steph wiggle around in her chair trying to see if anybody she knew was there. “Nice place,” I said, being totally sarcastic, but of course she didn’t get it. “Very uptown.”
“Oh yeah, it’s great.” She babbled on for awhile and I smiled and nodded. Steph is one of those girls who dresses kind of slutty but really, it’s just a fashion thing. There were times when she pushed the envelope for business clothes, and today was one of them. She had on a corset-type top, and I guess there was a jacket over it for the office, but now that was gone and we had the tits-on-a-plate effect. Who was I to complain about that, it’s not like I find the view offensive or anything. But that’s our Steph. Always trying a little too hard.
We talked about work for a while. Exciting. I hit the bottom of my glass. I started shifting my weight around, getting ready to pick up and leave, but before I could, Steph’s waving money at the waitress and we have two more drinks. “Oh relax, Mattie. You aren’t some old fossil who objects to women paying for things, are you?”
“No,” I said truthfully. “I just don’t want to get too sauced and spend tomorrow at my desk with Apache mouth.”
She hit me on the arm. “You are seriously the funniest guy I know.”
“Thanks.” My elbow had cracked against the table where she shoved me and I was trying to rub it without her noticing.
“Deirdre’s always saying how funny you are. Deirdre in the processing department,” she prompted me, because I was drawing a blank.
“Oh, Deirdre,” I said, still not knowing who the hell she was talking about.
“She thinks you’re hot.” A pause, where I guess I was supposed to react, but nothing came to me. “So what do you think of her?”
“Honestly, she never crosses my mind.”
Steph sat back, looking pleased. I guess there was some kind of girl war going on that I wasn’t aware of. Whatever.
I got up to go to the john and when I got back, there was silverware on the table, and napkins folded into shapes, and a couple of plates. “I got some appetizers,” Steph said. “In case you were hungry.”
I see where we’re headed here, down your basic slippery slope, but I decide to play along with it, at least for a little while. Be Steph’s trophy date. In her mind, I mean. It wasn’t like I had other big plans for the night. And I have to say, my bad mood was long gone. She bought the appetizers and I bought the next round of drinks. Then she wanted some ice cream drink with a stupid name and I bought that for her too.
“Bottoms up!” she said. “Arrr!” We were talking pirate talk.
“Gold doubloons for your pantaloons.” I don’t know where I came up with that one. It started her off on a championship giggle fit. I was afraid she’d squeeze herself right out of her top.
Here’s where things start to get fuzzy. I guess we had some more drinks, and since we were having such a good time, we decided to leave the fancy bar and go somewhere more pirate-like. I threw a bunch of money on the table. It was probably enough, and anyway I’m sure they were glad to get rid of us by then. We staggered out on the sidewalk and the world was a hilarious place.
Steph said she lived just a few streets over and we could chill there, she had stuff to drink. I didn’t mind the idea of not spending more money and besides, I was losing altitude fast. I wasn’t sure I could make it all the way home just yet. Of course I should have seen a big crane arm swinging my way. Should have felt that ladder rocking. What can I say, I was drunk? I mean I was, but so is every other poor slob who ends up standing in front of a judge.
Steph’s place was okay. She liked Ikea. She liked stuffed animals. Do I have to say anything else? She had a roommate but the roommate wasn’t around. Right away I had to excuse myself to the restroom and that was a little weird, being in this girl bathroom with makeup and worse spread all over it. I came out and flopped on the sofa and Steph brought me a beer I didn’t much want by then, and she sat down next to me. It’s not like there was a big choice of places to sit, but I was reminded that I didn’t really know Steph all that well. She’d put on some music and I nodded off listening to it.
I woke up because Steph was wedged right under my arm and it was kind of uncomfortable. I tried to work my arm free and she must have misunderstood the gesture, because she started nudging up against me, kissing my neck.
Now I’m getting actively concerned. I patted her head, pat pat pat. Friendly, not encouraging. I was embarrassed for her. Girls shouldn’t come on like that. “Hey matey,” I said in my cheeriest voice. “I have to be shoving off.”
“Naaww.” She wasn’t as drunk as she was making herself out to be. Don’t ask me how I knew that, but I did. “You gotta stay an be a pirate.”
“Not a good idea,” I said, in a burst of brilliant thinking. I was trying not to panic. I made a sudden move, designed to detach Steph from my neck, where I swear, she was trying to give me a hickey. I knocked her off balance and she slid all the way off the sofa and landed bump on her ass.
What she did then was grab on to my knees. “Whoa,” I said, keeping it all light and easy, just two old pirates messing around. Avast. Shiver me timbers.
I’d like to say, before I knew it she was giving me a blow job, but who’s going to believe that. Here’s the truth: I froze. Like when people see a train or a charging lion coming straight at them and they can’t move to save themselves? Something like that. I just couldn’t fathom it at first, why she was pulling at my belt and zipper.
Am I saying she raped me? No, but pretty close, and if you’re thinking heh, heh, bet you enjoyed it once she got going, yes and no. For one thing I seriously had to pee again by then, ask me how good that felt. And then there was the whole bizarre, bad dream part of it, I’m in some place where I’ve never been, and the music’s too loud, and there’s this girl pumping away between my legs where I never expected her to be, did I say bad dream? Christ, it was a nightmare.
It just kept getting worse and worse. I grabbed her shoulders and tried to pry her loose, but she was on a mission, and I was actually afraid she might hurt me, you know, do serious, sexual-function damage if I made a wrong move. By now I had to piss so bad I was practically crying, there was no getting around that to any successful conclusion, she was going to keep going until my dick fell off. Which is why, when my cell phone rang, I answered it.
The phone was in my jacket pocket. I didn’t think about it. I didn’t even look to see who it was. “Hello?”
It was this guy I know, though it took me a while to realize who it was. He said, “Hey, Matthew! What up?”
“Not much.” Trying to sound, what, nonchalant.
“Yeah, same old same old.”
“You know it.”
“Talk to Daniels lately?”
“No, what about him?”
All this time Steph was keeping on with the chore, like she wasn’t going to let a little thing like a third-party conversation stop her, but the guy on the phone was still talking, telling me a story about the other guy, and every so often I said “Uh huh,” or “Sure,” and finally she stopped abusing me, thank God. I kept my eyes on the ceiling, but I could feel her sitting back and watching me.
“Mattie,” she said. “What are you doing?”
“Really,” I said into the phone. “No shit.”
Steph got up and ran into her bedroom and slammed the door. I have to admit, I stayed on the phone a little while longer, then I have to admit the first thing I did was duck walk into the john, my fly still open, and thanked God I’d lived long enough to take a piss.
I straightened myself up as best I could. I was trying not to look at all the crap in the bathroom. I’m not one of those people who go through medicine cabinets; honestly, I’d rather not know people’s private business. But I couldn’t help noticing this huge tube with For Facial Use on it. I turned it over and it was hair remover, which gave me all these unpleasant thoughts like, maybe she was really a wolverine or something.
When I came out I could hear Steph in her bedroom, crying. I knocked on the door. “Hey, Steph?”
“Oh God.”
“Steph, I should probably get going.”
“I’m going to kill myself!” She was still blubbering and her nose was all stuffed up: Ib going to kill byself.
“Come on,” I said. “Don’t talk like that.”
“You hate me!”
“No, come on. I don’t hate you. I think you’re a really nice girl.”
She didn’t say anything else, just more of the blubbering, pretty loud now. I didn’t think the door was locked. Maybe she wanted me to go in there. But I didn’t see how that was going to make anything better in the long run. “Hey,” I said, practically shouting to make myself heard. “Take care of yourself. You’re a peach. See you tomorrow.”
I don’t even know what time it was, pretty late, because the streets were all dark and quiet. I got myself home and pulled the covers over my head and I slept like a baby. Woke up feeling not as bad as I might have expected, aside from a little souvenir dick soreness. But at least I woke up alone.
Of course I was a little nervous about seeing Steph at work. I decided the best course would be to act like nothing had happened. Be absolutely normal, and pretty soon things would be normal again.
Except Steph wasn’t there. Usually she was at her desk all bright and shiny early. I guess she needed a little time to pull herself together. I didn’t seriously think she’d killed herself or anything. Girls are always saying things like that to get attention, and anyway, she had a roommate.
Meanwhile, I had a new worry. There was an email waiting for me. The group leader wanted to see me at my earliest convenience, which would be now.
I started toting up all the things they could hang me for. Nothing big, but they didn’t need big once they had it in for you. Hell, they didn’t even need real.
I chewed some peppermint gum in case there was any stink on me. No use putting it off. I set out on the death march that led to the group leader’s office. She had an actual office with a door, probably so no one could hear your screams. You had to go through a long corridor to get there, lit with the same godawful fluorescent lights, except these were half-burned out and making fire hazard noises. Somebody was headed toward me coming the other way, but because of the freaky lights I didn’t recognize Brian until he was really close.
“Hey man,” I said. “What’s going on in there?” Because he couldn’t have come from anywhere else.
He muttered something and I swear he tried to walk right past me, but I wouldn’t let him. “Hey,” I said again. “Talk to me.”
Brian just stared at, I was going to say, his shoes, except I just then noticed he was barefoot. “Man, what did they do to you?”
“Nothing,” he said. He could have used a shave. “Look, no offense, I have to get back to work.”
I just stood there watching him. The door behind me opened. “Matthew?” the group leader said in her happy voice, like it was time for milk and cookies.
I put on a smile and marched inside. The group leader was sitting behind her desk, and Brickhouse, the old horror, was there too, looking like a toad in a business suit. There was a window behind them but they had it all covered over with curtains. Now that was just sad. “Good morning, Matthew,” the group leader said. “We’re conducting some training exercises and we hoped you’d help us out.”
Like I had any choice. “Sure. Happy to help.” They waved me to a chair facing them and I sat. Still smiling. The important thing was not to show fear.
The group leader said, “If we could ask you to watch the screen.” She was wearing a giant pink dress. I mean, we’re talking tent.
I hadn’t noticed the computer setup a little to one side. I hitched my chair toward it.
“We’re going to show you a series of images and we’d like you to indicate a response to them, positive or negative, by moving either forward or back.”
Well okay. That didn’t sound so hard. There was a keyboard and a joystick. I gave it a few test moves. Things started off easy. Pictures of kittens, daisies, chocolate chip cookies, forward. Dead fish, car wreck, nuclear holocaust, back. Brickhouse still hadn’t said anything, just watched me out of the corner of his puffy toad eyes. He creeped me out. I couldn’t believe they were spending time on something so simpleminded, but then, this was the same outfit that had us play rock, paper, scissors as a leadership exercise. Sunset on the beach, good. Starving African children, bad.
The screen went blank and I eased off the joystick. The group leader said, “Thank you. Now that we’ve established a baseline, we can move on. We’re interested, Matthew, in questions of incentive and motivation. That is, how they optimize, or hinder, employee performance. For this next series, the goal is to complete the course as quickly as possible. Are you ready?”
I said that I was. The screen brightened and one of those highway scenes appeared, like a video game or in driver’s ed. There was little red car, that was me, idling at the start of the track. Then it started moving. I set a good speed, steering wide around the curves. A duck with her ducklings was crossing the road and I slowed down. Then a lady pushing a baby carriage jumped into the lane and it took some fancy braking to get past her. Other cars cut me off and I had to hang back. A clanging railroad signal made me stop entirely and wait.
Over the computer’s sound effects, its zooming and squealing, I heard Brickhouse talking to the group leader. “… average . . . already knew . . . rather limited.”
Oh yeah? Talk about incentive. Hatred coursed through my blood like gasoline. They wanted fast, I’d give them fast. I bore down on the joystick with a heavy hand. I sideswiped a school bus. I mowed down a puppy. I took on a speeding semi and forced him off the road. Pedestrians threw up their hands and vanished beneath my wheels.
Sweat was flying from me. My hands shook. My teeth were bared and I wouldn’t have been surprised to find some kind of virtual bug stuck in them. I mean, I was into it. I was almost disappointed when the road ended at a big red Stop sign. It seemed a little anticlimactic.
The computer sounds ceased, and the screen went blank. The room was silent. Then the group leader said, “Thank you, Matthew. Give us a moment, please.”
I was still breathing hard. My upper lip twitched. Of course it had been part of their plan, pushing me to some kind of edge. Everything was part of one big experiment, which was still going on. I should have seen it from the start. This was how they ran things. These people just like screwing with you. You had to put up with so much shit to get your food pellet.
Brickhouse raised his evil head and blinked at me. “Room for improvement, Matthew. Definitely room for improvement.”
I nodded. It wasn’t like I expected them to say anything positive.
“We’re going to be doing some belt tightening, Matthew. It’s come down to that. Tough times call for tough choices.”
Here it came. From out of nowhere I remembered something I’d read once, that if you were going to have your head cut off, you should relax your neck muscles so it wouldn’t hurt so much. I don’t remember how you were supposed to do that.
Brickhouse said, “And as one component of our decision-making process, we’re soliciting peer reviews. Entirely confidential. We expect your absolute candor.” Brickhouse stopped and fixed me with one of his favorite nasty looks that he probably practiced in a mirror. After you saw it a few dozen times, your sphincter didn’t automatically clench. “Tell us what we need to know about Brian.”
That was when it all started to make beautiful sense to me. The thing I was so good at, my special skill. I was a genius at self-preservation. I would do whatever it took. I guess they knew that now. I had my eyes on the prize, which was me. You could even say I was a triumph of natural selection.
And so I made a point of hesitating, and looking reluctant, like the truth was being dragged out of me in spite of myself. I said, “Actually, I’ve been a little worried about Brian.”
Afterward, I walked back to my work area. Steph still hadn’t come in. Brian wasn’t anywhere either. I did another lap around the place, just to make sure. I knew I was going to have to say something to him and I wanted to get it over with. But it looked like that was going to be put off until tomorrow, or maybe never.
I stopped at the window. The construction guys were going at it, all busy-looking, as industrious as hell. Another week or so and they’d be up to where we could wave. I wasn’t envious of them anymore. Let them knock themselves out. Let them die a bug’s death. Once they were through, it would be people like me moving in, drinking our coffee, sitting in the nice chairs, taking advantage of everything they’d built for us.
I went out for my lunch break, and on the way back I decided to call my old girlfriend, the one who didn’t like me very much. I was full of confidence. I knew exactly how to get things right between us, make it work out the way I wanted.
The phone rang and rang. “Who’s this?” she demanded, once she finally picked up.
“It’s me,” I said. “Mr. Rat.”