injection.”
I reread what I’d written. I almost stopped there. I almost moved the cursor to the beginning of the line and pressed the delete key.
Almost.
My hesitation lasted only a second. I knew I could be fired if I distributed these corrections and someone read them, but in a way I would have welcomed that. At least it would have put an end to my misery here. It would have forced me to find another job someplace else.
But I knew from experience that no one
“An employee terminated for poor work performance can no longer be drawn and quartered under the new regulations,” I typed. “The revised guidelines state clearly that such an employee is now to be terminated by hanging from the neck until dead.”
I grinned as I reread the sentence. Behind me, Lois and Virginia were talking as they did their own work, discussing some miniseries they’d seen the night before. Part of me was afraid that they would come up behind me, look over my shoulder and read what I’d written, but then I thought no, they’d probably forgotten I was even there.
“Unapproved, non-illness-related absences of over three days will be grounds for termination by electrocution,” I typed. “Department and division supervisors will flank the electric chair as the death sentence is carried out.”
I waited for repercussions from my Termination Procedure stunt, but none came. A day passed. Two. Three. A week. Obviously, Stewart had not bothered to read the update — although he’d had a bee up his butt about getting it done instantly, that day, as if it were the most important thing in the world.
Just to be safe, just to make sure, I asked him about it, caught him by Hope’s desk one morning and asked if he’d gone over the update to make sure it was correct. “Yeah,” he said distractedly, waving me away. “It’s fine.”
He hadn’t read it.
Or… maybe he had.
I felt a familiar churning in the pit of my stomach. Was what I wrote as anonymous as what I said or did? Was my writing ignored, too? I had not thought of that before, but it was possible. It was more than possible.
I thought of my C’s in English on that report card.
On my next set of screen instructions for GeoComm, I wrote: “When all on-screen fields are correct, press [ENTER] and your mama will take it up the ass. She likes it best that way.”
I got no comment on it.
Since no one seemed to notice me, I took it a step further and began coming in wearing jeans and T-shirts, comfortable street clothes, instead of the more formal dress shirt and tie. There were no reprimands, no recriminations. I rode up on the elevator each morning, denim-clad amidst a sea of white shirts and red ties, and no one said a word. I wore ripped Levi’s and dirty sneakers and T-shirts from old rock concerts to my meetings with Stewart and Banks and neither of them noticed.
In mid-October, Stewart went on a week’s vacation, leaving a list of assignments and their deadlines on my desk. It was a relief to have him gone, but his absence meant that what miniscule interaction I had with other people was for that week suspended. I spoke to no one at all while he was gone. No one spoke to me. I was unseen, unnoticed, entirely invisible.
Friday evening I got home and I desperately wanted to talk to someone. Anyone. About anything.
But I had no one to talk to.
Out of desperation, I looked through an old magazine and found a number for one of those porno calls, the ones where women talk to you about sex for a three-dollar-a-minute toll. I dialed the number, just wanting to speak to a person who would speak back.
I got a recording.
Twelve
When I arrived at work the next Monday morning, someone was sitting at Derek’s desk.
I literally stopped in my tracks, I was so surprised. It was a guy about my age, a little older maybe, with a brown beard and thick, longish hair. He was dressed in regulation white shirt/gray pants, but his tie was wide and silk and brightly colored, with a print of toucans standing on pineapples. He grinned when he saw me, and his smile was wide, generous, and unaffected. “Hey, dude,” he said.
I nodded hello, unsure of how to respond.
“David’s the name.” He stood, extended a hand, and we shook. “I’ve been transferred here from Bookkeeping. You must be Bob.”
Again I nodded. “You’re taking over Derek’s job?” I asked dumbly.
He laughed. “What job? That position’s gone. It was nothing but a title, anyway. They just let that guy hang on until retirement out of pity.”
“I always wondered what he did.”
“So did everyone else. How did you get along with him?”
I shrugged noncommittally. “I didn’t know him too well. I just started working here a few months ago — ”
“Come on. The guy’s a dick with feet.”
I found myself smiling. “All right,” I admitted. “We weren’t bosom buddies.”
“Good,” David said. “I like you already.”
I walked over to my desk and sat down, feeling good. It had been so long since I’d had an actual conversation with anyone that I was emotionally charged by even this small contact, my spirits absurdly buoyed by the fact that I had a new office mate who had actually noticed me.
Maybe my condition was reversible.
“So what is your job?” I asked.
“Still bookkeeping,” he said. “Only for your department now. I think they invented this job so they could kick me upstairs a floor. None of the old farts in my department like working with me.”
I laughed.
“I’m stone serious.”
I smiled. The people in his department might not like working with him, but I could tell that I would.
I was right. David and I hit it off immediately. We were close in age so there was that generational connection, but he was also friendly and easygoing, one of those people who were naturally open and accessible, and from the beginning he talked to me as though we’d been close for years. There was nothing about himself he could not discuss with me, no opinion that he would refrain from expressing. The wall of formality that seemed to exist between me and everyone else did not exist between David and myself.
He not only noticed and accepted me, he seemed to like me.
It was Wednesday before he asked The Question. I knew it would come up eventually, I’d been prepared for it, but it was still something of a surprise. It was afternoon, I was proofreading the GeoComm instructions I’d printed out earlier in the day, and David was taking an early break, leaning back in his chair and munching on Fritos.
He popped a chip in his mouth and looked over at me. “So do you have a wife or girlfriend or anything?”
“Girlfriend,” I said. “Ex-girlfriend,” I corrected myself. I felt a funny sort of fluttering in my stomach.
My feelings must have shown on my face, because David quickly backed off. “Sorry, man, I didn’t mean to pry. If you don’t want to talk about it…”
But I did want to talk about it. I hadn’t talked about our breakup to anybody, and I found that I had a sudden need to tell someone what had happened.
