IGMS Issue 49 (12 page)

Over the next week, the contest mushroomed. Graham devised a plan to chill his hand-bottled beer in a minnow trap in the river, accessible from a pulley system on the ground floor. He savored the look of envy on Ed's face when he explained that he'd donated the office's Freon nightmare of a fridge to a soup kitchen. By now the chart Graham had pinned to the office corkboard was covered with green stick-on stars in both columns. The blog updates multiplied accordingly.

Graham found the aforementioned sandwich wrapper tacked carefully to a new section of the corkboard labeled "Wall of Shame."

On another day:

The number of comments Ed's posts received baffled him. "Right on, bro!" "Fight the good fight, man. You can do it!" Graham clenched his jaw, reading them. Ed never mentioned friends. Where was he getting all these connections? In all of the responses, one odd comment stuck out.

Graham's finger hovered over the 'reply' tab. Who was this guy? He shook his head and deleted the comment instead. The business didn't need to attract bad press by encouraging posts from weirdos.

Just then, a resounding plunge distracted him from his computer. He tiptoed down the decrepit steps to the ground level, where a floor grate opened to the river forty feet below. The rope and pulley for the beer remained undisturbed. The noise had come from Ed, swimming in the calm, foam-flecked water of the natural basin, not far from the dormant turbines.

He could have asked permission
, Graham thought.

Ed scrubbed his darkened curls with his fingers and made strokes back and forth, his freckled body stark and white against the cola-colored water. As Graham stared, the uncanny idea struck him that he didn't know his office-mate at all. Ed lacked Graham's height, but he moved with a pared-down self-possession. The sinewy kind of strength that competed and won.

He shook off the thought.

Graham couldn't pinpoint the exact moment when the irritation of the contest began to eclipse its entertainment value. Was it when Ed uprooted the office's potted palm to make a composting toilet? Or when every bite of packaged food Graham took resulted in a long-suffering sigh from the next desk?

He coped with his resentment by working odd hours for a week, coming in at 6 a.m., while Ed lazed in around noon. The mutual avoidance might have eased Graham's mind, if it hadn't been for the odd increase in the mill's electric bills. "You're leaving the lights on at night, Ed. It's got to be you," he said. Ed responded only with evasive shrugs.
I won't let him force me into becoming some micromanaging bully on this
, Graham thought. But after his third night lying awake, obsessing, he could no longer stomach his own passivity. He bought coffee from the all-night diner a few exits down the highway and headed for the mill.

From the last quarter-mile of dirt road, he could make out the cold LED light shining through the trees from the warehouse windows. The play of jagged shadows on the ceiling suggested movement on the floor. What the hell was Ed doing at two in the morning? "I should have checked in sooner," he muttered. His reluctance toward the impending altercation pressed him to his seat. He pounded a fist on the steering wheel and forced himself out of the car. The mill was his, dammit. He yanked open the unlocked door and entered the ground-floor vestibule. The door at the very top of the stairwell gaped open, and pulses of light and clicking noises ricocheted against the brick walls as he climbed.

In the center of the warehouse, Ed leaned over a tangle of partially constructed steel frames. Graham recognized the lines of his shoulder blades beneath his t-shirt, but then Ed turned. Graham cried out at the featureless black mask that confronted him.

Hurriedly, Ed snapped off the torch in his hand and flipped up the visor of his welding helmet. In the glare of the work lights he had the frightened look of a discovered child.

"Graham!"

Graham took in the six-by-four-foot cardboard boxes stacked nearby. Each was marked "Solar Solutions."

"Ed? Explain this."

Panting, Ed squeegeed sweat from his forehead with one finger. "The mill needs... adjustments. That's what I've been working on."

"Solar panels?"

"I figured I'd save money by building the frames myself."

"You bought how many?"

"As many as the roof could hold."

"How many?"

"Two dozen."

"Two - " Graham sucked in air.

"They'll more than pay for themselves. Green thinking is long-term thinking, right?"

Graham turned away from Ed's beseeching expression.
You shouldn't be planning anything long-term, Ed, the kind of crap you're pulling.
He suppressed the urge to kick the boxes across the room.

"You can have all the contest points," Ed said. "I know it's the business's money paying for this."

"You can't return them, I'm guessing," Graham said.

"Not now that they've been modified to fit the mounts. It was going to be a surprise for you!"

Graham pressed his lips together. Too angry to look at Ed, he aimed his words at the floor.

"Go ahead. But only because getting rid of them would waste a stupid amount of materials and money."

"Graham, you won't regret - "

Graham flashed his palm. "Don't waste my time as well. Understand me. You act without my permission again and you're finished here."

I've given the warning
, he thought as he drove home.
Next time, I can fire his ass with no conversation. No emotion. Clean. Done.

The next day, it might as well not have happened. In fact, Ed was downright chirpy around the office water cooler. Much too chirpy.

"You should try commuting on two wheels, Graham. I ride ten miles each way. No carbon footprint at all. And a fit body processes nutrients more efficiently." As Ed's rapturous voice pierced his pre-caffeinated brain, Graham seethed with resentment. He couldn't ditch the contest, not with the public eye on the blog. But just then, in an instant of terrible genius, his misery offered a glimpse of what might shut Ed up for good.

"Yeah?" he said nonchalantly, giving his revenge plan time to fully unfurl. "I'm thinking of modifying my car to run on fryolator oil."

"Sure, you can support the lard-giants." Ed shrugged. "I guess it just depends how deeply you're committed."

Graham exhaled slowly, deliberately. The smug bastard. That was it.

He fixed Ed in his gaze. "You hardly make a footprint, you said."

"Yeah. I've been uber-responsible. By now, I hardly carbon tiptoe."

"I'm afraid even decades of that won't atone for last night's misstep."

"Misstep?"

"Those two dozen solar panels you bought. They're great now. But what about the long-term, like you said? When those panels wear out, they'll leak as much cadmium as a million double-A batteries. Where will you put the waste?"

Ed's mouth went satisfyingly slack.

"I don't know," he stammered.

Graham didn't know whether to laugh or feel sorry. By god, it had worked. Messing with Ed was almost better than firing him.

"Billions of toxic molecules, dispersing into the air and groundwater," he said. "Oh well. We're stuck with it now."

Ed's lips trembled. Graham hid his smile as he refilled his mug from the water cooler.

That afternoon, the sound of banging, whirring tools, and metal sliding across the floor rained down from above. Ed had apparently returned to his work with the renewed vigor of an ant on crack.

Ed's blog post the next day, however, unsettled Graham:

One reply followed:

At five o'clock on Friday, Graham noticed Ed sitting paralyzed at his desk, his face forlorn. He paused on the elevator threshold. A new vision of himself formed in his mind. A good boss offered firmness, yes. But also emotional support.

"What's up, Ed?" he asked.

"I can't stand it," Ed said. He tapped his fingers against the security glass, squinting. "I sit here at night, working. The light from my desk makes insects fly up against the window. Look what I've done."

"I see some cobwebs . . ."

Ed's voice sounded pained. "They're there because of me. I attracted the flies, and as a result, the spiders have completely altered their habits. The bugs are feeding the spiders, not the bats that pollinate the flowers and trees."

It occurred to Graham to wonder if Ed was stoned. But in the light of the desk lamp's compact fluorescent bulb, his pupils were focused and tight.

"That's you, Mister Natural Selection," Graham quipped. But Ed continued on.

"Yes. I am. Earlier this week, I didn't think about all the acorns I stepped on in front of the building. That's two dozen nuts the squirrels didn't crack open by themselves. That means more nutrients for those squirrels per day. More squirrel babies per litter, more litters per year. I'm changing the ecosystem."

"Get serious."

"If I'm not part of the solution, I'm part of the problem," Ed said. "Just like the solar panels. Always, something crowds in to ruin your best intention." His fingers worried his lips. "I have to balance it somehow," he whispered.

Graham opened his mouth to speak, but found his sense of charity replaced by exasperation. Kind boss, tyrant boss.... he realized he wanted neither. He just wanted Ed gone.