A serialized short story. New installment tomorrow.
Because of the Monument Valley incident, Nicole had made me set the WhatsApp notifications to active. When I felt the buzz in my left cargo pant pocket, I hit Escape to pause the program, pulled the phone out and tapped it on.
> NICOLE: What the fuck are you doing?
I looked over my shoulder. Nicole was sitting behind me. Like everyone else in the room - about thirty odd staffers in their twenties and thirties - she had a laptop on her lap, just like I did. I shrugged at her and then typed back:
> SUSAN: Building a Redstone combinator. But first I’ve got to fight this skeleton so I can illuminate the cave and stop them from respawning.
Looking back over my shoulder, I saw that this wasn’t the response Nicole was looking for. I was used to that. I may not be great at reading expressions, but I could see that Nicole was upset about something. Her mouth - bright red with lipstick - was turned down slightly at the corners, and her brown eyes were narrowed. Her skin was slightly red under her makeup - concealer, I think. Possibly she was embarrassed. I pondered whether she was embarrassed by what I was doing. Maybe.
Nicole leaned forward and hissed in my ear “Think about where you are.”
I looked around. It wasn’t like I hadn’t seen this conference room before. It was different now than when I started here - there were more chairs so we didn’t have to stand, and someone had taped power strips to the floor so we could keep our devices charged. I really appreciated that. The projector was showing a slide that said “Integrity. Honesty. Trust. MacArthur.” Annabelle, the communications director, was standing up at the front, her laptop open on the folding table in front of her, talking. It was something about campaign outreach and the next public appearances for Terence, “the Candidate,”, but I was in the IT staff, not political, so I didn't have to care about that.
Yao, who was sitting next to me, must have heard Nicole hissing and he looked over. He looked at my laptop and smiled at me, the right side of his mouth curling up. I think he was suppressing a laugh. I pondered sending him a WhatsApp message with my laptop’s IP so he could join my survival world, but he wasn’t playing Minecraft. He had his laptop open to the X feed for #macarthur2028. He had been jotting down some notes with a Sharpie on a pad of yellow paper balanced on his other knee. I remembered he was on the social media team, so he had to do that.
I bet he wished he could play Minecraft too.
My phone buzzed again. I took it out of the pocket again and looked at the screen.
> NICOLE: Just close the lid. NOW.
I trusted Nicole about work things, so there was probably a reason for it. I clicked Save and Quit and exited to my desktop, then closed the lid. The fan inside whirred for a few more seconds then was silent. I could hear the other fans in everyone else’s laptops whirring, and wished I had my headphones. But Nicole had told me it wasn’t appropriate to wear them in the office at these meetings, so I’d left them at my desk.
I’d also left a granola bar there - the kind I really like with dried cranberries in it and lots of almonds (no peanuts though, I hate peanuts, though I like peanut butter - go figure). Actually I had left three granola bars there and it was nearly three, when I normally had my afternoon snack. I always liked to have three of something at three o’clock. I had moved my lunchtime to one so I didn’t feel I had to have twelve of something - that was hard to plan for. I got up most days at five for the same reason. Also I had a cup of lime-flavoured Greek yogurt in the fridge that I had labeled SUSAN, so probably no one would have mistaken it for theirs. Yogurt was separate from granola bars - it was a protein top up rather than a snack, so I could have it whenever
I tried to pay attention to Annabelle. Annabelle was always very neatly dressed. She had on some makeup - foundation, a bit of blush. Her black hair was permed, and she gestured a lot with her hands. She wore rattly bits of silver jewelry that moved from the middle of her forearm to her wrist, occasionally clicking on her white smartwatch. I gritted my teeth a bit when that happened, but I was seated near the middle of the room, so I couldn’t hear it.
Much as I tried to pay attention to what Annabelle was saying, the laptop fans were a bit much. Also, I could hear the room AC in the ceiling and feel the slight breeze from it moving the hair at my neck. It was cold, and I didn't have my black SynthesisBio hooded sweatshirt - Nicole told me the campaign didn't want to be associated with “Big Pharma” so even though I was in IT the sweatshirt had to stay back in my condo.
I started to tap the fingers of my left hand on my knee. My Dad taught me to do this to pass the time when I couldn’t read a book or write or draw or cook or stretch or go for a run or masturbate or play a game. The little finger is 1, and from there to the thumb is 2-3-4-5. Then you tap them in sequence to make permutations:
1-2-3-4-5
1-2-3-5-4
1-2-4-3-5
And so on. There are 120 ways to do it. If you want to make it more challenging, or you run out before the time when you can do something else, you can do it in reverse, and then try doing it crisscrossing, doing the forward pattern on your left hand and the backward pattern on your right.
I went slower than I normally do and got to the eighty-third left hand permutation before the meeting was over. Susan had to ask me to stop humming. Yao clearly found something funny, but I'm not sure what. Maybe he thinks the Adventure Time theme hummed by me is funny. I don't think it is, but I was happy I had made him laugh. I like to think I’m having a positive effect on the people around me.
After the meeting Nicole took me aside. She was explaining about workplace appropriate behavior to me, rubbing her temples with the left and forefinger of her right hand. I was doing my best to pay attention when what I really wanted to do was eat my granola bars.
“This is like the Monument Valley thing,” Nicole said.
“Oh yeah,” I said. That made sense. Terence had been making a speech to the campaign staff and most people had their phones out, holding them up. I understood this was one of those expected things, so I took my phone out, held it up, and started playing Monument Valley. It was a bit hard to concentrate with Terence talking, as well as holding my phone up at nearly head height, but I finished the fifth world regardless. Then Nicole pulled my hand down and said “put it away!”
So I understood what Nicole meant: this was one of those situations where you needed to be seen to be paying attention, even if you weren't, because that was how you showed you were polite and engaged and a “team player.” And you couldn’t have anything visible you were actually paying attention to, because then people would know you weren’t pretending, even if it made it easier for you to sit still and be present. I promised her I would try to be conscious of that. I also made a mental note to find a new finger permutation - maybe I could treat the fingers as binary digits and do Fibonacci sequences?
Javier came down the hall and touched Nicole on the shoulder.
“Hey beautiful,” he said, smiling. Javier was the donor management lead. He always wore a blazer with open necked shirts and no tie. He had short black hair and olive skin, and had what Nicole called an easy grin, but I thought looked like he was sleepy.
“Hey handsome,” she said back. She smiled at him as she said this, and turned her ankles slightly to move her body around her axis. He touched a hand to her shoulder and I saw a little shiver go through her.
I decided that the conversation was probably over so I went back to my desk. The granola bars were really good. And while I was there I practised what Dr. Schlumberger had taught me when I was a teenager: think about what you see people doing. I set my mouth in a frown when I remember that. It was hard, and I didn’t do it very often because it was effortful, like figuring out the integrals of third order polynomials, but not as fun. But if you've trained machine learning systems to find candidate molecules for neurological targets, nothing afterwards should be hard. Or so I told myself.
Javier did that thing a lot, smiling and talking to people, and putting his hand on them. I was pretty sure I had only seen him do it with women on the staff. He'd done it to me once getting off an elevator, putting his hand on the small of my back, but I didn't need any help getting off, so I wasn't sure why he did it. Maybe he just wasn't observant, or maybe he tried to be helpful all the time, which was a good thing to be. I'd seen him do the same thing with Nicole quite a few times, and it made her smile.
A week back I had tried the same thing with Monica and Annabelle, putting my hand on their arm while we talked, holding their hand a few seconds longer than I needed to, looking them right in the eye when I spoke to them. They either said nothing or smiled a little crookedly, looking from side to side. When I did this with Annabelle in the hallway, Nicole came out of her office and took me by the shoulder. Then she led me into her office and explained rules about appropriate workplace touching.
“But Javier does it,” I had said, “and people like it.”
“Javier…” Nicole said, “Javier has a different role than you do.”
That didn’t make sense to me - how did being a donor relations lead mean you had to touch people more - but it was a reason. There were a lot of reasons and rules in this place I was still trying to figure out, though I had been here three months. I was wondering whether I’d ever catch up with what everyone else just seemed to know.