by B K Nault
He selected a clean shirt, planning his appeal. He would remind Georgia that he was no longer going to be “mind-numingly dull” as she had scrawled on the back of his dry cleaning receipt as a form of farewell—he’d noted the misspelling. A strange sense of relief had washed over him after the turbaned shop owner impaled the thin paper and then handed over the filmy bag for his weekly three pairs of black slacks and five-button down shirts, lightly starched. He was focused; “meticulous” was not a dirty word, nor was it spelled with a “k.” Georgia never was the scholar; that was his contribution to the relationship. She was wrong about him. He had plenty of passion, and somehow, he would prove to her how he hadn’t withdrawn into himself. Because solving problems was what Harold did. Methodically, logically, and with focus. Everything could be explained.
****
Later that morning at work, Harold chased down a set of anomalies he’d been following for weeks. He’d written code to find the source of what at first tracked as sloppy transfers. Somewhere along the line, though, either because of his training or because of the sophistication involved in the coding, he had begun thinking downright fraud. Since his last catch was called a lucky break, Harold was determined to prove he had the chops to catch a crook on purpose, not by stumbling on awkward code a high school hacker could decipher, but by applying sophisticated algorithms.
While he traced the program for errors, Harold was devising a new tactic for retraining Rhashan. With that accomplished, and when he’d unraveled the last few glitches to find the leakage, he would once and for all prove his qualifications to the interview committee. And Georgia would be proven wrong. She didn’t understand the mysteries behind computer software like he did.
He flipped open the notebook he’d filled with remarks for the promotion committee and scanned the bullet points, searching for a few more sharpened arrows to fill his quiver. Then he arrived on an idea. He would do something to clean up the park of all the bums. If they wanted to know if he had management skills, he would show them and get something done for the community at the same time.
He picked up the phone, called the city clerk’s desk, something he’d seen Georgia do many times, and left a complaint about the eyesore that was a disgrace to him as a taxpayer and resident of the neighborhood. Check, and check.
Struggling to rein in his giddiness, he noticed the time, and got up for his 9:30 restroom break. His hands slick with Purell when he returned, Harold noted that the corner of his desk was still empty. Perfect.
At 10:32, the familiar whistle and disruptive morning chatter lifted over the cubicles like the LA marine layer on a summer morning. Harold stretched his neck until vertebrae popped, determined to keep his head low, his powder dry. Rehearsing his speech, Harold’s lips moved in rhythm to the squeal of the wheels on Rhashan’s cart. Harold counted to ten. Then, when the screech stopped, Harold swung his chair to face the opening. Eye-level with a leather pouch hanging in the V of Rhashan’s green, blue and yellow tie-dyed shirt, he waited for the dark-lashed eyes to settle on him.
“Good morning, Mr. Harold.” Rhashan’s baritone singsong rang out, and his gap appeared.
Was the man that oblivious to the dressing down that was about to commence? “May I speak a word with you?” Harold decided to keep his seat. He had practiced standing, but even if he stood, the man would still tower over him by at least half a head. Chills of expectation ran from his ginger sideburns to the tips of his freckled fingers.
“Of course, Mr. Harold. What is it?”
“I wanted to thank you. For setting down the mail as I like it. And then moving on.” Nodding briefly, he returned his gaze to the monitor, pretending to be absorbed in a string of numbers. It seemed to work, for Rhashan’s whistling moved off down cubicle road.
That went well, Harold congratulated himself. First praise, then the next phase would be correction. Earn his trust, and then he’ll be more amenable. What works on circus animals should also work on a Rastafarian. Tomorrow he would proceed to the next attempt at correcting the man, move closer to the promotion, and prove Georgia wrong on all counts.
****
Instead of going back to the empty apartment, weaving through the winding queue of sneaker-shod secretaries and stroller-pushing nannies moating the playground, Harold had begun bringing his lunch. He calculated he’d save approximately eighteen minutes, making the change quite satisfactory.
Harold aimed for a picnic table in the building courtyard that boasted the correct balance of shade and privacy. But the warm temperature had drawn out more people than usual, and the table was already occupied, so Harold selected a bench and shoved aside a potted plant someone had set out to catch some sun. Harold doubted anything could save it; the crackled leaves indicated its final days drew near.
He considered tossing the plant into the trash, but when he reached for it, he noticed a woman, sitting alone across the courtyard, watching his every move. He pretended to admire the final petal, cupping it briefly before sitting back down to unscrew the lid off his thermos. He then unwrapped today’s bologna on white bread, one slice of tomato, and a V-8.
Willing his transitions glasses to darken enough to hide him from the woman’s intrusive stare while he chewed, he turned toward the shaft of sunlight. The petal had fallen, and he brushed it off onto the concrete. She continued to stare, and he stood to turn his body away from her. A message clearly sent. Probably a visitor to the building, unfamiliar with the unspoken agreement to keep your attention focused on your own business. He finished eating and went back upstairs, mentally composing a memo about proper attire and courtyard etiquette for his management spreadsheet.
His boss motioned to Harold as he passed the door to his corner office. “Got a minute?” Clyde’s cheeks wobbled in his exuberance.
Harold chose one of the leather visitor chairs, and diverted his gaze from a rhombus patch of chest hair exposed between popped shirt buttons. He imagined placing in order the confusion of files, framed photos of children and pets, and candy jar on Clyde’s desk. He mentally lined up the company-issued stapler, in-box and telephone for maximum efficiency. “Yes?”
Shoveling aside a tumble of paperwork, Clyde lifted a manila file. “You’ve been here for, what, nearly five years now? I see you’re interviewing again.” Jowls opened in a forced smile, then bobbled closed as he skimmed Harold’s application. “Perhaps I can help make the process go a little smoother for you this time.”
Smoother? Harold searched for a response. “Actually I’ve been here three years, six months. Is there something you’ve seen lacking in my work?” He strained to see what page Clyde had landed on.
Sausage fingers thrummed Clyde’s leather executive chair as he rocked back, gaze focused on Harold. “Your attention to detail is legendary around here, you’ve gotten us past some sticky audits, and happened upon a major inconsistency.”
Harold blanched at “happened upon.” He cocked his chin sideways, preparing a respectful, but more accurate description of the episode that had taken him hours of overtime to track down. “The ‘inconsistency’ was sloppy code, and we could have lost—”
“I’m not diminishing your value to the department in that respect, Harold, but a management position?” Clyde swiveled several degrees, and seemed to focus on a photo of himself with a trophy fish next to a boat captain. “Let me see how I can put this. Perhaps we can think of something you could do to, shall we say, soften your delivery.”
“My delivery?”
“It may help to raise your interpersonal scores, which play into the decision at this juncture. We appreciate your diligence, and we’re impressed with what I consider your genius at forensics. As you so rightly noted, it required a great deal of skill to find the error. But we also need a manager with, shall we say, attention to people skills.”
Harold’s mouth opened and closed.
Clyde scooped a handful of jellybeans and tipped the jar toward Harold. He declined, imagining germs swimming in the chro
matic pool where many fingers had groped.
Tossing the candies one by one into his mouth like little cannonballs, Clyde regarded Harold. “Perhaps Gordon could give you some pointers.” He gestured, and Harold realized the captain in the fish picture was his co-worker, also up for the promotion. Always tanned and tousled from deep-sea fishing off his thirty-foot yacht, Gordon had invited Harold and Georgia out once. From his perch behind the chrome wheel, he’d bragged about the boat’s features until Harold could recite them by heart. The blisters Harold suffered from that outing peeled for weeks, and for a couple years, Georgia begged Harold to find a boat they could afford, until she finally gave up.
“Now there’s a fellow with some real charisma. I believe he volunteers at the soup kitchen. Things like that make a person, well, easier to work with, in case there are issues.” Clyde dropped his voice to a conspiratorial growl. “Oftentimes people of a special caliber may find other parts of their makeup need a certain amount of shoring up. While I can’t tell you how to run your personal life, perhaps there’s something you can do that would show the committee you can handle people as well as you do lines of code. I know you’ve recently had some personal setbacks, and while it’s none of my business whether you’re married, divorced…” Clyde clicked the space key on his keyboard with a crooked pointer finger. “Anyway, good luck, Harold, and again, thanks for all you do from that cubicle. The pennies certainly add up.” A trace of spittle worked its way down a fleshy groove.
Harold left the man suddenly absorbed in something important on his monitor, and stepped into the hall. He noticed too late that pretty boy Gordon was holding court just outside Clyde’s office, and he wondered how much he might have heard. Harold didn’t have time to turn left and avoid him.
“Good day, Harold Donaldson, how are you this fine afternoon?” Gordon cast green eyes the women called his “go-lights” on Harold. “Did you get a haircut? Your Annie Warbucks ringlets seem more tightly wound than usual today.” Gordon winked at Harold from behind the one lock of bleached blond hair that always fell over his left eye. “If that’s possible.” Once, in the men’s room, Harold saw him in the mirror, arranging the stray, until Gordon caught him watching. “Ladies love the bedhead look, don’t they?” Gordon had clicked his heels, winked at Harold, and sailed out of the restroom, leaving Harold to wet down and pat in place his own unruly waves.
Head down, Harold hugged the opposite wall. “I’m okay.” He hoped Gordon would let him pass without additional comment. The others snickered, and he knew there were innuendoes flying he probably wouldn’t understand even if he could hear them. He just wanted to be left alone.
“I understand Mrs. Donaldson will be back on the market soon.” Gordon’s smug comment was directed more toward the others, as if it was his duty to inform them. “I suppose she’ll be snatched up pretty quickly, though. Right, Harold?”
A couple of them had the decency to act embarrassed, but Harold tried not to react.
“I’m sorry to hear that.” Millie Grubbs was one of the only people in the office who ever made an effort to befriend Harold. “I met her once at a holiday party. She seemed…nice. Good luck on the interview, by the way.”
“Thanks. Millie.”
Gordon formed a pistol over her head. He pretended to shoot and blew imaginary smoke from the tip of his barrel finger. “May the best man win, Harry.”
“It’s Harold, if you don’t mind, and good luck to you as well, Gordon.” Gordon said something he couldn’t hear, and a surge of laughter fell over Harold as he slid into his chair out of their sightline.
Gordon continued his performance; probably boasting about a fish he’d wrestled for hours before landing. Harold had a recurring fantasy that Gordon was fighting the line, and imagine his surprise when, wham! A whale pulls him overboard and out to sea.
He tipped two aspirin into his mouth. Harold dry-swallowed and checked the clock, doing his best to shake off Clyde’s well-meaning but off-the-mark observations, and went back to practicing his speech to Rhashan. Employees were allowed to rate each other’s workplace performance, and Harold knew the Rastafarian could fill out an “atta-boy memo,” whose timely arrival into HR could find its way into Harold’s file just in time for the review committee to see before his interview. When Rhashan realized Harold was at the same time helping his own prospects for promotion and his own best interest, the man would surely be inclined to sing Harold’s praises.
With renewed determination to prove his grandma, Georgia, and now Clyde wrong, and show them he was not somehow lacking, he set to his self-devised plan to prove his worth. Calculating he had three minutes to work on Operation Rhashan and fine-tune his delivery of the opening pitch to the committee, he sensed he still had to come up with something else for his bullet list.
What would be the feather in his cap to prove his humanity to the suits who held his fate in their hands?
Chapter Two
Walter rose from his rumpled cot and shuffled to the workbench, painfully aware of the long hours he’d spent on his knees scrubbing the kitchen tiles until long after midnight. Almost a decade had passed since he’d begun working and living at the church, and while the small room had its limitations, he at least could get from his bed to the workbench in three short steps. His custodial job would soon come to an end, and it was good timing because he had stretched and pulled every sinew and tendon to its aching limits. Even his home, St. Mark’s Community Church, was no longer a safe sanctuary. The death knells tolled, prophesying the end of the building whose bones creaked with more sad conviction than Walter’s.
While living downstairs in the structure that had been around since De Mille directed epics beneath the Hollywoodland sign, Walter had persevered through his own endless trials, which took longer because of his equipment—an outdated computer, laughable to programmers pecking and coding elsewhere in the world, and a temperamental Dremel he’d found in a second-hand shop years ago. If he’d toiled in a state-of-the-art laboratory, his invention might have been ready years earlier.
Forced into hiding and sacrificing everything precious to him, Walter had accomplished something the rest of the tech-world vigorously debated was impossible. He’d worked as quickly as his limited resources allowed, but he finally reached his goal.
Now the prototype awaited one final step, and it would be ready for real-world testing. A few more tweaks and the soft launch of which he’d dreamed was within his grasp. He unwound the protective length of fabric from the metal tube and exhaled a breath of adoration and pride. He’d polished the creation until it glimmered in the rays probing down through the high window into his basement workroom-slash-bedroom. He sighted down the shaft. His masterpiece, his swan song, was almost ready for the world.
One more piece of the puzzle, and the technology anticipated, even feared, would be born. If he’d calculated correctly, and Walter was meticulous about calculations, the day’s mail should contain the gem he’d saved and scraped for. Every tip, handout, or penny literally scraped from the gutter had gone into a jar, and last week he’d exchanged the sum for a cashier’s check and placed the order. If this final trial didn’t work, he’d lose everything he’d slaved over. His ideas were running out, his home was about to be razed, and what made the urgency even more crucial, he sensed “they” were about to discover his hiding place.
Flipping the wall calendar over his workbench, Walter circled a date two weeks hence. That would give him sufficient time to install the final part, to test, and make note of his achievement. Perhaps even enjoy it himself before he turned it over to the one who would carry it to the world, who could safely deliver the technology where it would do the most good. It was time to plan the handoff.
The sun’s rays pouring from a high window warmed and loosened Walter’s back muscles. The glint on the shaft of metal, as thick as a Cuban cigar, the length of a number two pencil, gave him more than a few moments of pride he’d not felt since the birth of his long-lost son.
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He held the eyepiece up and sighted, spinning the dial. It caught and stuck in place. He wrapped it once again in the cloth, gently rested the device between the jaws of the vise and slowly cranked it shut, stopping at precisely the point where the Kaleidoscope would be held firmly in place, but not harmed by the firm grip. He filed and sprayed, working over the delicate prize until the dial spun like butter and the magnificent colors fell into place.
A freak hailstorm, or something, had damaged the church’s stained glass depiction of Christ the Shepherd. Bits of glass had flown into the sanctuary, and when he swept up the damage, he had an idea.
“May I keep the broken bits?” Walter had asked Father Tucker, glass bits tinkling in his dustpan.
Father Tucker agreed. He gave his handyman freedom in his off hours, and carte blanche access to his office computer to research the project he had fiddled with for years. “Perhaps you could make these as keepsakes for the devoted,” Father Tucker had suggested when he saw the Kaleidoscope beginning to take shape. “God has blessed you with a unique talent.”
So Walter had sifted through the shards and laid them out in shades of garnet red, amber flesh tones from the Lord’s cheek, and sky blue from the cloud-filled heavens. To thank Father for the years of allowing him free passage into his church and computer files, Walter had made an identical kaleidoscope to present to the man who had rescued him from the street, a bedraggled, anonymous face in the soup line years ago. The bits of stained glass tumbled in the chamber, arranging into patterns of exquisite beauty, each tiny piece hand chosen for its color, shape, and clarity, polished and smoothed for hours.