“I thought you were applying to grad school this semester?” she asked. “What happened? What changed?”
“I’ve thought about it a lot,” he said, running his thumb along the side of his nose. “I’ve got too much going on. I don’t need to pile on more junk. It’ll weigh me down.” Somewhere outside, in the deep blue distance of the skyline, zipping above the horizon, the sound of a jet ripped through the air, rattling the windows of the building like the tail of a coiled snake. He let his mind race along the cliffs, out into the ocean, into the frothy, churning vastness of the water.
“But you’ve been wanting to get back into school for so long, ever since I first met you. Remember when we first met and you were starting that program? You were so excited. Why didn’t you finish it?”
He looked past her for a moment, thinking back on how different things had been back then, back when they had first met. It felt like it had been a lifetime ago. Some things he could remember so clearly. Other things were floating just on the periphery of his memory, just out of reach. “I got distracted,” he said at last. “I had too much going on. I was working too much. I was burning the candle at both ends. It was a recipe for failure. I was bound to fail, actually, given what I had going on. Who could have succeeded with all that on their plate? I don’t want to do that again. I’m not going to make that same mistake.” He stopped and looked at her for a moment. “Besides, I have so much more going on, now. I have the kids. I have to think about the kids. I’d rather spend my time with the kids than in a classroom, listening to someone drone on about whatever.”
“Was I the reason that you dropped out of school the first time? Was I a distraction?” She smiled as she spoke, her red lips and white teeth grinning, her black hair hanging like a sheet of silk across her shoulders, down her back.
He hated her. He told this to her every day. “I hate you,” he would say, “please leave me alone. Please get out of my life.” But she never left. She was always with him, everywhere he went. Sometimes she would disappear for a few minutes and he would take a deep breath and feel a profound sense of relief, but then she would be back again, staring at him with her dark, unblinking eyes, clicking the stud in her mouth against her teeth.
“Yes,” he said, at last. “And no. I can’t blame you totally. It was just too hard to work full time and take classes, especially those classes. I suck at math. I’ve always sucked at math.”
“But you’re an accountant,” she teased. “You’re so good at math. You always help me when I’m stuck on something.”
“I am not an accountant,” he said, shaking his head. “I still don’t understand how I got into this field.” He thought back to when he had been hired, to that very first day and the interview that had landed him the job. He had just moved back from the Bay Area and had been struggling to find work as a programmer, like what he had been doing in Oakland. He had applied to hundreds of jobs, but had had no luck in even landing an interview when this call for a position as an accountant had come out of the blue. Desperate for an income, he has accepted the position, even though he had no formal training as an accountant. Now, six years later, he was still working that same job, even after everything that had happened. His job was a prison. He would never get out.
“You can get out of it, just go back to school!” she said, encouragingly.
“I can’t,” he said. “I just can’t. I’m not going to spend all that time, when the kids are so young, away from them. I’d rather be with them. I’d rather spend my time with them and raise them and give them as much of myself as I can. They’re the only thing I care about in the world.”
“What about me?” she asked. She looked genuinely hurt, but he knew that it wasn’t real. Nothing about her was real. Everything she had ever told him had been a lie.
He turned and walked away, toward the floor to ceiling glass windows in the conference room. The windows faced west, overlooking a golf course that stretched off toward sheer cliffs that dropped into the churning Pacific hundreds of feet below.
“I won’t do it,” he said out loud, to himself. “I’m not going to be away from them.”
When he turned around, she was gone.
He stepped out of the small conference room and walked past a large C-shaped couch, and then down a short hall. The hall opened into an intersection of other hallways. One led straight ahead, one to the left, and one to the right. He turned right and followed the hall past the men’s restroom, past an elevator, and then to the office that he worked in.
The office was full of small cubicles and the tiny sounds of clicking keyboards. Everything was gray, from the floors to the ceilings. The southern face of the office was lined with floor to ceiling windows that looked out on a small lawn studded with large trees and hedges. Across the lawn, there was another office building with a red brick facade and black mirrored windows. He meandered through the maze of identical gray cubicles with small gray nameplates on them.
His own cubicle opened to the south, so that his back was toward the windows when he sat at his desk. He would often peer over his shoulder while pretending to work, turning his head so that he could see through a narrow path between cubicles to the world outside the office, to the sun and the sky, the grass and the trees, the wind and the birds. He had spent time in jail before, in solitary confinement, locked away for months straight, never being allowed to go outside and smell the fresh air or feel the sun on his face. Being in the office, being at work, reminded him of that confinement, only here it was worse, because he could see freedom anytime he wanted by simply turning in his chair, but it was always just out of reach, always there but never accessible. He spent his days trying to imagine a way out of the prison that was a “successful” career, but all of the things he came up with fell flat. At the end of the day, he needed the money, and he needed the benefits. He had two small children. He would make any sacrifice to provide for them, even if it meant trading away his happiness for the security of an office job.
He sat at his desk, staring blankly at the computer monitors in front of him. The walls of his cubicle were lined with pictures of his wife and his children, notes with account numbers for write-offs, interest, and bank fees; drawings his kids had made, and other miscellaneous printouts. Two cubicles over, he could hear the jolly voice of the office manager, Maria, chatting loudly with one of his co-workers.
“Did you love it? Was it great? How did she like it?” Maria asked in rapid fire succession. Maria was in her early sixties. She was overweight and quite homely, with a mannish face and short, thinning hair, but she was the kindest, most jovial person in the office.
“Oh, she just loved it,” the co-worker, Nicole, said. “It was great, really just amazing. It was different than when you and I went, just different. But the man who played Mufasa was the same. We met him after, outside; we stayed after to go and meet up with him outside. But all the children were different. They had different children. It was just so good.” Nicole was incredibly fat and very short. She was in her mid fifties but acted like she was in her teens. The world revolved around her and her opinions and she had no time for anyone that didn’t agree with her or at least submit to her point of view. Her moods would swing wildly from moment to moment. She hated fish and was allergic to coconut.
“It must have been great,” Maria said. “We didn’t have that drive - I mean you didn’t have it. It was right here in town. You know, they say that it’s the best musical of all time.”
“It really is,” Nicole said. “I just love that soundtrack. It’s so good.”
Meanwhile, in the cubicles adjacent to his, the four people in his team, the small group that handled cash and compliance in the office, were discussing Diana’s dinner plans for the weekend.
“I don’t want anything sushi,” she said. “After Tuesday, I was sick. Tuesday night and Monday morning were not good for me. It was not good. No good.” Diana was in her late fifties. She owned a motorcycle and fantasized about living off the grid. She had no children and her elderly mother was still alive, so Diana had never grown out of being a selfish teenager, interested in nothing but her own gratification. She was deeply conservative and believed wholeheartedly that there was a vast liberal conspiracy aimed at depriving her of her freedom and her liberty. She kept her hair in a short perm and wore long flowing outfits that hid her wide hips and de-accentuated her short stature. Diana hated all things ethnic or un-American.
“But you had the chicken,” Natasha told her, “even the chicken made you sick?” Natasha was in her early thirties. She had the body of a ten-year-old boy, if a ten-year-old boy were capable of growing basketball-sized breasts. Natasha’s job in the office was to scan documents and then index them in the convoluted electronic document management system that stored all of the office's digital files and correspondence. She owned a camera in addition to her cell phone and this fact made her the unofficial office photographer.
“I know I had the chicken,” Diana said, “but it must have been something… It was something at that place…” She let the implication hang in the air without explicitly telling everyone that the reason she had become sick was the inferior quality of the food, inferior because it was Asian, and that it had been prepared by people of an inferior race. All of this had conspired to guarantee that she would become ill. In fact, she hadn’t been sick at all. But now that she had told everyone that she had been sick so emphatically, she herself already believed the lie so sincerely that it had become a truth.
“What exactly are you interested in eating?” asked Kate, whose cubicle opened towards Diana’s so that their backs faced each other while they were working. Kate’s cubicle used to be Diana’s, but Diana moved to her current cubicle nearly five years ago because the light coming in from the floor to ceiling windows on the south side of the office was too bright and was giving her headaches. Kate had taken a promotion about three years ago and had moved into Diana’s old cubicle, which had been vacant up until that point. Kate had a two year old son that looked like a tiny doppelganger of Mao Zedong. Her husband was most definitely a closeted homosexual.
“You know,” Diana teased, “salad… steak… normal stuff like that.”
“So you want American food?” Kate asked, laughing.
“Yes!” Diana said, exuberantly. “And if it’s gluten free, of course.”
At this moment, Ryan, the newest member of the cash and compliance team, chimed into the conversation. His cubicle was on the other side of a wall from Kate’s, caddy corner to Diana’s. Ryan had only worked in the office for about three months, but he enjoyed injecting himself into every conversation that he overheard, no matter the topic. He was secretly in love with Kate and every action he took in the office was in fact part of a plan he had devised to impress her and win her affection. Ryan was in his mid thirties.
“Y-y-y-ou know, D-d-d-iana,” he said, his voice building in volume as he stuttered over his words, “if you’re looking for American, because t-t-that’s what you’re looking for, American, and you’ll be Downtown, you know, like that’s what you said, American and Downtown, then there’s this place.” As he spoke, he lost his stutter. Diana, chirped her acknowledgement of what he was saying in all the appropriate places to show that she was listening attentively. “Well, like, you know, there’s like this place,” he continued. “It’s, uhm, well, like, it’s this American place, Downtown. Like, it’s so good. Like, it’s really good. So, like, well, y-y-y-ou want to go there, okay - if you aren’t going anywhere else, you know? Like, if you don’t have any other plans. Because, like, if you have something else, then whatever, you know? But, like, if not, then totally do this, okay? Like it’s so good. It’s called Sully’s. It’s American, Downtown, and, well, like, it’s great. You have to try the fries. That’s it. If you go. Like, if you have no other plans. Like, if this is the place you go to, because you can’t choose or something, like, then, like this is the place you should go. And go to the menu and choose the ‘Sully’s Fries’.”
“I will, thank you!” Diana said after a moment of uneasy silence following Ryan’s verbal outburst. “I really will, that sounds so good.”
“Just, like, check it out or something, if you have no other plans, you know, if you aren’t going somewhere else,” Ryan continued, encouraged by Diana’s positive reception.
“I really will,” Diana said. “Thank you, Ryan.”
He sat motionless, listening to the banter. Everyone here bantered. They had so much to say, so much to share. The sounds of their voices got under his skin.
“Let’s get out of here,” she chided. She was sitting on his desk, wearing a purple turtleneck dress and a pink wig with stark bangs that hung just above her eyes. “You hate being here, I hate being here; let’s just go.”
He put his earbuds in, ignoring her. He clicked around on his computer aimlessly, opening and closing windows robotically. The electronic buzz and pulse of downtempo instrumentals hummed in his ears like a digital mosquito. He felt as if there were a weight crushing down on his chest, on his hands, and on his stomach. She sat staring at him, her legs dangling from the gray desk. The sounds of clicking mouses and tapping keyboards wiggled into his ears, around his earbuds, like a thousand little chisels chinking away against his concentration.
“Come on,” she said, smiling. She put her hand on his hand. He looked down at where her fingers would have been. Her long nails. Her tanned skin. He was alone, surrounded by people who knew nothing about him, surrounded by people he couldn’t stand, surrounded by people that he felt no connection to. He was completely alone. He looked at where she had been sitting on his desk. He looked at the gray walls of the cubicle, dotted with photos, and odd notes. He felt nothing inside, nothing but weariness. A vision of falling flashed before his eyes. Falling through the sky; down, down, down.
“Come on,” she said. She was standing behind him, wearing gray leggings and a black tank top. “Let’s go.”
As he stood, the weight that had been crushing him slid from his body and clattered to the floor with a sound like two trains slamming into each other at full speed. He took a deep breath and then walked into the sea of gray that surrounded him.
He walked through the maze of cubicles, past people melting into their chairs, fusing with their computers, evaporating into the aether of the office. She went just ahead of him, her long black hair flowing in a non-existent wind that touched only her, carrying the scent of her to him so that he was floating in her essence. As he watched her move, he thought to himself that she wasn’t real. Nothing about was real, and nothing about her ever had been. She was a figment of his imagination. She always had been. She always would be. Where was she now? What was she doing? He hated her. He felt it deep inside the core of his body. He hated her so very much for what she had done to him, how she had used him and then abandoned him. She turned to look at him over her shoulder, her teeth flashing white in the fluorescent lights, her hair framing her face like a black and purple crown, billowing in all directions like the rays of an anti-star; darkness, all consuming, all knowing.
He burst into the hallway, unable to breathe, the sun pouring in through tall windows running the length of the hallway like the luminescent ribs of a sleeping monster, pulsing with light as the dappled shadows of trees played across the panes. He walked down the hallway, his legs made of sand, melting into the gray ocean, his blonde hair hanging in his eyes like rays of the shining sun stabbing into his pupils, his lungs shriveling in the recycled air. She stood at the end of the hall eating a cookie, admiring her own reflection in a large glass door. Every step was like moving a mountain. He felt on the verge of collapse. She laughed gayly, the way she used to when she wanted to emphasize the point of what she was saying. The sound of her voice filled the hall, echoing like the laughter of a thousand Buddhas, shaking the building violently. On all sides a grim funeral procession moved past him, candles held in gaunt hands, faces covered by white shrouds, bodies draped in white robes.
