CHAPTER 3
Maurice worked from 11pm until 8am with, presumably, an hour break for what Reginald had to assume he called “lunch.” His job seemed to be doing a lot of technical stuff that Reginald didn’t understand and didn’t particularly care about.
After a few weeks, Reginald’s rut began to settle into a familiar rhythm of intersection with Maurice’s rut. They started to run into each other at precisely 7am each morning when Reginald, who preferred to get in early and get out early, walked down to the kitchen for his second cup of coffee. That’s where he found Maurice one day, sitting at one of the tables with a cellular phone in his hands, using both of his thumbs to text or email someone at an inhuman speed.
“Holy crap are you fast on that keyboard,” said Reginald. Then, deciding to go for broke with his new office “friend,” he added, “My fingers are too big for one of those things, but even on a regular-sized keyboard I’m pretty slow.”
Maurice jerked his head around and uttered a noise of surprise. The door had been propped open and he hadn’t seen Reginald enter.
“I’m sorry,” said Reginald. “Thought you saw me here.”
“Nah, it’s… it’s cool,” said Maurice, stowing the phone with a self-conscious glance around as if he’d been caught doing something private, lewd, or both. He paused, then answered Reginald’s observation: “Practice texting is all.”
“You work at night, right?” said Reginald. He didn’t wait for an answer because he was only making preamble. “So when you take your hour break, do you call it ‘lunch’ even though it’s like 3am?”
Maurice nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
“So do you eat lunch foods, or is it, like, your dinner?”
Maurice’s mouth made an amused half-smile. “I just grab a quick bite,” he said.
“And so, if you work at night, how do you have a social life?” Then he realized how forward that question was, especially with the corporate culture being what it was, and muttered an apology. It was the fact that the clones weren’t here, he realized. None of them arrived before 8am, and most arrived closer to 8:30 or 9. These were the sweetest hours of the day — another reason he liked to come in early.
“It’s cool,” said Maurice. “I don’t mind you asking. And to answer your question, the truth is that I don’t have much of a social life. It’s one of the downsides of living how I do.”
“Maybe we could hang out,” Reginald blurted. It was out before he gave himself permission to say it, and he immediately regretted it. Maybe he did have a man crush. This was odd of him, odd at the office, and odd in a dozen other ways.
“Sure,” said Maurice. “It’d have to be right before I get to work, though. Like nine or ten at night. I get up around eight PM, and, honestly, I can’t get much sun.” He shrugged. “I’ve got a condition.”
“That’d be cool,” said Reginald. Cool. The word felt foreign on his lips. It was something he never had been, and definitely was not currently. “Let’s do that sometime.”
“Cool,” said Maurice. He stood to go, tipping an invisible hat at Reginald and then stepping sideways to move his skinny frame around Reginald’s formidable protruding stomach. He didn’t ask Reginald to move aside, even in a polite way, and made no show of holding his own tiny gut in as he passed. Reginald silently thanked him for the courtesy.
When Maurice was halfway down the hallway, Reginald decided, in the spirit of the moment, to ask one final question.
“Hey,” he said. “Why do you wear a sword on your belt?”
“I use it to trim my hedges,” said Maurice.
He waved and was gone. For some reason, Reginald decided he was dead serious.