Dead End Job (21 page)

“No shit.”

And with that I opened my front door, stepped inside and slammed the door with all of my might. I leaned back against the closed door and sank to the ground.

I don’t think I breathed while I sat, holding myself together, for the thirty seconds I assumed it would take for Rocky to the clue and evacuate my patio. My ears strained to hear any hint that he was still lurking outside of the door. When I didn’t hear anything, I took a deep breath in, grasped the hair on either side of my face with my fists, pulled for dramatic effect, and screamed as loud as I could.

“What IS going ON? Am I going CRAZY? AHHHHHHHHH!”

When no one answered I rolled over, leaning on the door for support, onto my hands and knees. I stood up and kicked my shoes away, slamming them against the wall, chucked my purse onto the floor and started climbing the stairs. I got about halfway up when I realized that I needed to talk to a girlfriend or sister about what had happened as quickly as possible. I turned around to collect my phone from my purse, but I must’ve spun around a bit too quickly, because the next thing I knew, my heel was slipping upwards off of the carpeted step and up, up and away from my body. My ass went the exact opposite direction, down fast and hard onto the stairs where I landed with a loud thump. Unfortunately, the slippery silk material that made up my shorts expedited my trip down the steps, and I careened down wildly—driving drunk down a hill on some old fashioned toboggan, hitting each step with one or both butt cheeks while desperately dragging my useless fingertips on the walls to stop the momentum of my fall. I failed. I landed at the bottom in a shocked, sore and desperate heap. 

After a second in the fetal position, I opened my eyes and blinked, mentally completing a checklist of functioning body parts. Fortunately everything seemed to be in working order. I heard a loud grunt coming from the top of the stairs. I looked up, and saw Winston perched on the top step staring down at me like some kind of wrinkly deity. 

Because there was really no other option at the moment, and I had already run the gamut of emotions that evening, I started to laugh. I laughed so hard that my body convulsed into hilarity, giggles escaping my mouth instead of breath. I laughed at the absurdity of my life, at the seriousness and the sheer amount of pain and sadness I’d let in to my being, at the righteous indignation I harbored that kept me going. But mostly I just laughed at myself.

Chapter 15: Group Think

The rest of my weekend was extremely uneventful after Friday night’s drama. I spent Saturday hungover and drained, and Sunday I did my grocery shopping, puttered around the house and went for a bike ride along the Burke-Gilman trail with Alex, starting down at Shilshole Marina and ending up in Fremont, where we had a few beers on a sunny bar patio. I didn’t hear from Either Rocky or Clark, not that I blamed either one of them for not rushing to pick up the phone and call me. I would’ve been mortified about the events of the previous evening, but I was too low on emotional energy to muster up the feelings, which was a blessing.

When Monday morning finally arrived, I dialed in to the office closure line apathetically, and heard the message that the office had re-opened.
Oh, what the fuck ever
, I thought to myself as I climbed out of bed and got into the shower. By this time I was so emotionally drained that I couldn’t muster a moment of enthusiasm, anxiety or annoyance at the prospect of returning to the office. I slowly dried my hair, barely opening my eyes wide enough to see myself in the bathroom mirror, and equally enthusiastically selected an outfit that consisted of my laziest office attire. I didn’t bother with make-up. This was not a day to impress.

It was after 9:30 by the time I sat down at my desk, and although most of the group’s employees were present, the silence in the office was palpable. Even though I was hours late, I received no reproachful looks as I booted up my computer. Elaine was in Portland at a meeting with Norcom, and no one else in the group seemed to be acknowledging each other’s existence. I guess there just wasn’t much to be said. Honestly I felt a bit relieved. I didn’t want to talk about the horrific things that had happened in this room any more than anyone else did. I especially wanted to avoid talking about my experience with jail, Rocky, Clark and the Seattle Police Department.

I’d been working at my desk for thirty minutes in silence and then got up to go to the ladies room when I passed by Priti sitting at her desk. We made brief eye contact as she glanced in my direction, and I paused for just long enough to notice that she looked like shit. Her face, with its normally perfectly tan skin tone, was drawn and grey. Her large brown eyes were bloodshot and surrounded in dark purple bags, and her normally tiny frame looked even more emaciated. I realized that I didn’t need to pee that badly, so I altered my course and headed over to her desk, where I pulled up a chair and sat down.

“Oh Priti, I’m so, so sorry,” I said, patting her tiny tan hand gently. It didn’t take a genius to know that she was sad about losing Maya, her best friend at the office. “How are you holding up?”

She looked up at me, her eyes welling with tears. “Honestly, not too well.” Her voice cracked with a sob.

Her pain was palpable. I felt so sad for her, and the sadness overwhelmed my body and became a black, choking pit in my stomach. I put my arms around her, and she started crying in earnest. Even though it felt like shit to acknowledge the torrent of emotions—fear, pain, stress, sadness—I was happy that I’d done it. Connecting with poor Priti reminded me of all of the people that had been affected by the horrible things that were happening in our office. Not only the employees, but Sarah and Maya’s families, friends and acquaintances. The people who cleaned the office, watered the plants, served us coffee downstairs in the deli. While I was at home wallowing in self pity, I had forgotten about all of the other people sharing this horrible experience. Opening my eyes long enough to see Priti’s pain made me feel that much more human.

“I am so scared, Louisa,” she said, damply. “What are we supposed to do? Just go on like nothing ever happened?”

“I don’t know, Hon,” I said gently, my own eyes welling up with tears. I wished that I knew how to answer her, but I didn’t. As I quickly wiped my face I felt a hand on my shoulder. Michelle was standing behind me, also teary. Behind her were Nathan and Laura, who had their arms loosely wrapped around each other. There in the back of the group was Mark, who was quietly sobbing into his fist. And several steps behind Mark was Ari, looking concerned, and standing up behind him was Clark, staring at the ground blankly.  Finally there was Jenny, standing awkwardly apart from the group, pale and silent.

Michelle spoke first. “I don’t know what to do either,” she said. “I’m really scared. I’m scared to come to work. I’m scared that something is going to happen to me, or to someone else I know. It’s horrible.”

“Me too,” said Laura. “This has been the worst couple weeks of my life. I could never have imagined going through something like this. And no one has been talking about it. We have no one to talk to.”

“You can talk to me,” said a male voice. Ari stepped up to the front of the group next to where Priti and I were sitting. “I know that I’m not an expert, but any of you are welcome to come to my office or call me at anytime to talk. I know it’s not much. I wish I could do more,” he said. “But I hope it helps a little bit.”

God, Ari was a decent person.  

“Thanks Ari,” I said. “I think that would be great. In fact, why don’t I find some time on our calendars for anyone who wants to meet with Ari and discuss, well, anything that’s been going on here. You can send me an email if you’re interested. Would that be OK with you guys?” Everyone, even Clark, looked at me and nodded.

“That sounds good Louisa, thanks,” said Priti, turning away from us back to her monitor and wiping her eyes with a tissue.

The group slowly started to break up, but at least now the employees were talking amongst themselves. I saw small groups form and walk together slowly. A couple of people were giving each other hugs. I got up and pushed past Clark, who was still standing there, caught up in a conversation with Jenny who was proselytizing about the benefits of Merit leadership’s decision to call in Dr. Michael Castro to help with employee grief. I wondered if she’d also been to talk to him, and surprised myself by making a mental note to ask her later if she had. 

When I got back to my desk I began sifting through my emails, motivated to actually get some work done. I found several tasks associated with the merger that seemed important and I was busy copying a bunch of files onto zip drives when Clark approached me.

“Hi Louisa,” he said, tentatively. It was odd to see Clark acting shy

“Hi Clark, what’s up?” I asked, still typing.

“About the other night,” he said, giving me a small smile. “I just wanted to say that it was nice to see you. I don’t know about you, but I had a good time,” he looked down at his shoes as my face turned a deep shade of crimson. This was not what I’d expected from him, especially in the office. I guess I’d just assumed that Clark would keep up his nearly professional habit of pretending like I didn’t exist. When confronted by the reality that we did, in fact, make out in his car previous to me vomiting all over my porch, I was really at a loss for words. I’d had a crush on Clark from the day we’d met, and thought all along that it was what I wanted, for him to finally pay attention to me, but all of the other occurrences surrounding our potentially romantic situation had sullied it. Now that I’d finally got my wish, it didn’t feel nearly as good as I’d thought it would. There was no way to express the complexity of these emotions to Clark while he was hovering over my cube, so I just looked up and smiled at him and said the only thing that I could think of.

“Me too.”

“Good,” he said, tapping his hand on the top of my cube wall. “I’ll let you get back to work. I don’t know about you, but I’m slammed today.”

“Yeah, I have a lot to do to, but I’m probably not as busy as you are. Let me know if you need help with anything and I’ll make some time, OK?”

“I will, thanks.”

“You’re welcome.” With that, Clark walked away. I looked back at my monitor for a second, thinking about what had transpired. It did take an enormous set of balls for Clark to walk up to me and say something like that, but even so, I was relatively unmoved. I found myself not sending excited texts to Alex, not obsessing, and not spinning myself into an emotional frenzy about the possibilities of a relationship. I sighed, went back to the piles of zip drives on my desk and didn’t think about it anymore. And it felt really, really good.

Chapter 16: Walking Papers

After I got home for the day I grabbed another coffee and headed to the gym to meet my trainer Jay (aka Satan), for my workout. It had been awhile and he put me through the paces, so by the time I left my muscles were so burned out that my ass felt like a huge ball of rubber bands. I wasn’t ready to go home, so motivated from my workout, I went over to the Target by the Northgate Mall and shopped around in the athletic apparel department for a bit, finally settling on a couple of new sports bras and a tight pair of black yoga shorts.

By the time I’d eaten dinner and taken a shower, the sun was already going down. I was just changing out of my bathrobe and into a pair of cotton pajama pants when I heard the text alert from my phone. I bent over and rummaged through my purse until I found it, then opened it and read the message from
Martin Cell
:

Louisa, Please Please Please help me. I need you to come down to the office as quick as you can. It’s a total work EMERGENCY. I screwed something up for the merger and if I don’t fix it tonight, I will get fired. I really, really, really need your help. Please don’t tell anyone. TEXT ME BACK ASAP.

Great. Going down to the office and helping Martin with his ‘emergency’ was exactly what I did not want to do. A huge part of me wanted to ignore the text, and I was already coming up with excuses for when I ran into Martin the next day, but the guilt of abandoning my friend when he needed me was winning out over the desire to just turn of the light, go to bed and forget about it. I sighed and swore under my breath as I typed the text back:

OK, heading down now. See you in 30 min.

As I walked down the stairs to leave, I was feeling really irritated. I barely looked up as I passed by Kathy in the kitchen, eating a bowl of cereal out of a plastic lunch-meat tub—she insisted upon recycling
everything
.
              “Hey Lulu, whatcha up to?” she said cheerily, through a mouth-full of Cheerios.

“I have to go down to the office for a bit,” I sighed, not in the mood to chat.

“Bummer.”

“Yeah, apparently Martin is having some crisis that he needs my help with.” I tried to send the message that I was busy by continuing quickly down the stairs.

“Oh, tell Martin that I want to talk to him about the magazine’s gay outreach program!” Kathy yelled after me. She’d met Martin last winter briefly when he’d stopped by the house one evening before happy hour.

“OK!” I bellowed in return, rolling my eyes and shutting the front door a bit harder then I’d intended to.

When I walked out of the elevator on the 29th floor the lights to the left in the reception area were off, but the right side of the room was still lit-up with the overhead neon lighting. The office was much scarier at night, and suddenly I was genuinely afraid. What if Martin was in trouble? What if the killer had him and he was torturing him? I shuddered, knowing that if there was really something wrong there was no way that I could save Martin by myself.

For a second I thought about dialing the Seattle Police Department and reporting the text from Martin, but I nixed that idea almost immediately when I remembered screaming at Rocky over a pile of orange vomit a few nights before. I stood for a second, wondering what to do, before I finally convinced myself that nothing was the matter—I told myself that because I suffered from irrational anxiety, I could not be trusted to sort a dangerous situation from a safe one.
It’s fine, it’s just Martin, Louisa. Jeez.
I set my jaw and went about entering the office.