by Welke, Ian
The coffee maker gurgles and spits steam. One by one, my neighbors’ alarms start their days for them. One after another, car engines in the complex’s parking lot start up. My neighbor two doors down had his car stereo up pounding bass-heavy club music when he came home. It blasts as he turns the key. I can’t help but laugh imagining him dropping everything to turn it down.
I flip on the radio and listen to NPR news as I butter my toast. When the announcer speaks, that buzzing sound starts again, but it clears as soon as I glare at the radio. “And don’t think I’m not paying attention,” I warn it.
~
The Santa Anas have been blowing for weeks now, keeping Southern California too hot for early November. The fiery desert winds blow leaves across the gravel of the parking lot. The scraping sound heaps another layer of white noise on top of the nearby freeway hum, creating a water-against-the-shore sound effect. If the sleeplessness isn’t bad enough, the pollen and dust in the air make my sinuses sting and my eyes puffy. As I close and lock my door behind me, I have to fight the urge to go back inside and call in sick. I have plenty of available sick hours, but people who used their sick time were the first laid off in the last round of “belt tightening.” I test the lock and double check that the deadbolt’s thrown before I head out.
Getting into my car, I turn on the radio, and scan for stations that might have a traffic report. Every station’s on a commercial break.
I pull the car out of the lot and into traffic, hoping for the best.
When the commercials finally end and the station returns to programming, I catch the same buzzing voice from last night. Or I don’t. I’ve just imagined it. I tell myself this and realize that I’m muttering it to myself aloud.
Stop being crazy, and pay attention to the road.
After my third freeway interchange, I finally hear a traffic report, but of course it’s too late, I’m already stuck in a jam. A jam that the reporters mention nothing about, so I have no idea where it lightens up.
Quick calculations on my rate of travel: it’s another twelve miles to work, I’m doing zero miles per hour, at this rate I’ll get to work at the end of infinity.
At last the car in front of me moves a little and I can adjust my figures. At this rate I’ll be twelve hours late, but at least that’s a real number. Traffic stops again. Horns blare. The man in the BMW next to me raves to himself like he’s gone mad. His face twists in anger, and he spits more saliva than words. He waves his hands, neither of which touch the wheel, like he’s conducting an orchestra.
The traffic breaks up enough that I can limp off the freeway six exits early. I fire up the GPS to help navigate the surface streets. My sense of direction is notoriously bad enough that my mother purchased the device for me out of fear that I’ll get lost and end up in the wrong neighborhood.
Nav. System: Proceed to start location.
My flimsy two-door economy car rocks with the wind, making steering like tugging a kite string. The white noise of the rushing wind against the crack of the window counterbalances the rap blasting from the SUV in front of me, and the horn of the man in the Audi behind me. “Like I wouldn’t go faster if I could, dickhead.”
Nav System: Take next right
I smack the top of the machine with the palm of my hand.
Nav. System: Recalibrating. Take the second left.
The device goes offline. At least broken, it’s not buzzing.
The machine off, I drive on, picking my way by using restaurant lunch spots as landmarks. I ease into the parking lot at work half-an-hour late.
CHAPTER TWO
“Who’s Annabelle?” Chad leans in too close over my shoulder. His tie brushes against me as he reads my email on my monitor.
I flinch, but there’s nowhere to go except to squeeze downward. I move closer to my screen, partially to block it, but also to try to move away from him.
“I am.” I minimize my mail, hoping he’ll take the hint before I have to hit him. His breath has a tinge of halitosis that mixes horribly with the BO-stink of his body-spray. He’s been oozing his way around my cubicle more often since Sarah left. I have a pretty good idea why she quit. I know Claire, our HR rep, has warned him about this sort of behavior, but it hasn’t dissuaded him.
“Oh.” He takes a step back, but not far enough for me to relax. “I’ve never heard anyone call you that.”
“Only my mother calls me that, and thankfully, only in private. Private like this email.” I lock the computer and take off my headset.
Mentioning my mother reminds me that I need to call her. She isn’t likely to see a reply to the email she sent for another week at least. My mom treats email like formal correspondence. She takes the time to reflect between “missives,” rather than answering quickly. The phone is the best way to get in touch with her.
We had a scare two years ago. Uterine cancer. Mom barely survived surgery. She had to recover just to get strong enough for the chemo which nearly killed her all over again.
The chemo room was the worst thing I’d ever seen. I don’t know what’s more upsetting, the frail, brittle patients, or the looks of terror on the faces of their loved ones. I did all I could to try and disguise my own fear, but I know I can’t have pulled it off. I was so afraid I’d make her feel even worse by breaking down into tears. Then came the guilt for feeling so selfish. I wasn’t the one being pumped with poison in the hopes that it’s enough poison to kill the cancer, but not so much as to kill the patient.
My mom was always worried about me, how I might be disturbed, instead of worrying about what the poison might do to her or what would happen if the cancer came back. Sometimes I couldn’t stand to look at her. Mom would always put her hand on mine and say “It’s all right, dear.” At the end of the treatment Mom was so frail, I was sure I’d lose her.
With the treatment over she started eating again, and she regained some of her strength. But not all. Ever since, I’ve been spending more time with her, fingers crossed, but expecting the worst at every checkup. So far, the cancer has not returned.
When my dad left, Mom did everything. In addition to raising a nine-year-old daughter on her own, Roosje kept on teaching. She took on summer school classes as well to make sure we could stay in our house comfortably. She put me through college, and never complained about me taking longer when I switched majors.
A blast of hot wet halitosis hits me in the face. “You close with your mom? A frat bro of mine was real close to his mom.” Chad’s staring straight down my shirt. “I know how that is.” He attempts to look sincere, but his lip twitches like he’s about to laugh.
“I think I need a break,” I say, standing. The stapler’s within reach, and for a moment I imagine beating him to the ground with it and repeatedly stapling him. I walk away instead.
He smiles, showing his yellow teeth. “I’ll come with.”
“Don’t think so.” I point at the door of the women’s bathroom.
He follows me anyway, never more than a pace way.
I wonder if I’ll have to knock him over or go to Claire to complain.
He laughs, spraying me with his fetid breath. “Dude. Just joking with you.”
I roll my eyes and duck past him, hearing his words fade as the door shuts behind me.
~
I sit in the stall and watch Twitter updates flash by on my iPhone. Among the comedians and geekerati people I follow, I spot a tweet from Jane.
Jane: Any energy spent today is sleep deficit spending.
There are so many Tweets from people who can’t sleep, insomnia is trending.
Annie: The sleepless sickness is spreading.
I shake my head.
Sleep deprivation symptom number nine, making too much out of coincidences.
Water drips from a faucet. Just when the sound stops reverberating off the tile, another drop falls.
Drip. Echo.
The bath
room door opens. The stall next me creaks closed, and after a minute the droning of a flushing toilet follows. The woman using the bathroom doesn’t stop to wash her hands, which is both gross and annoying as it’s a missed chance to put an end to the dripping water. The door closes.
Drip. Echo.
Metal rattles in the vent above me as the air conditioner kicks in. It blows cold directly into my stall. I check the time on my phone, but I can’t bear the thought of leaving the flawed sanctuary of the restroom. I can sense Chad waiting at the door for me to come out. The thought of his breath makes me sick. Even if I get past him, my reward would just be taking more calls from irate customers.
I stay where I am.
The dripping sink lets loose another drop.
Drip. Echo.
My phone buzzes. A Facebook friend request. ZRJZPST?
I don’t know you and you have no vowels in your name. I think you’re to be ignored.
Drip. Echo.
The memories of my mom in the chemo room have jarred something loose. I grab tissue paper to wipe tears from my eyes. The pressure in my sinuses swells. I blow my nose. Rage at Chad replaces the sadness. His very existence…
Why is it people like him get to enjoy perfect health while the good suffer?
Drip. Echo.
The bathroom door squeaks open again. High heels clack across the tile as someone makes her way over to the sink.
Please turn the faucet all the way off when you’re done, and maybe I can hide here until lunch.
The water comes on. It sounds like television static. The woman washes her hands and turns it off again. She leaves the bathroom shutting the door behind her. For several seconds there’s silence. I get my hopes up.
Drip. Echo.
Okay. Okay. I’ll get back to work.
~
I brace myself for a blast of Chad’s breath as I emerge from the bathroom. I’m certain he’ll be there, waiting outside the door like a dog.
My relief at not seeing him is cut short. Chad laughs from around the corner.
I hide behind a cubicle partition. I crouch down behind the vines coming off a potted plant at the top of the cubicle.
Chad laughs again, too loud, like he’s laughing for someone else’s benefit, making too much of a show of finding their joke funny. “So, we on for racquetball later?”
“Sure. Just got to take care of a few things here first. You know. Keep things in line.” Pete, our General Manager, steps in front of my hiding place.
I inch back as far as I can to put more distance between Pete’s ass and my face. He’s wearing the same beige slacks he always wears.
“See you at the club, bro,” Chad says.
Why’s he leaving so early? It’s not even lunch.
I stay crouched until they’ve both left and the door to the lobby and the door to Pete’s office close. Emerging from behind the plant, I peer around the edge of the cubicle partition.
“Is this a private party or can I join in?”
I jump and spin around. Claire from HR is standing right behind me, laughing at my near seizure. Claire is a tiny Japanese-American woman. She’s wearing a blue business skirt. Her hair has a few grey strands, but she doesn’t dye it.
I’ve always liked Claire. HR seems like the sort of crap that would drive me crazy, but Claire always has a smile for me, and never says a mean word.
“Sorry. I was just…”
“Trying to avoid Chad?” Her smile grows. “I don’t blame you. You have a minute?”
I nod and follow Claire to her office. Closing the door behind me, I take the seat she waves to in front of her desk. Claire leaves the overhead lights off, reaching instead to pull the string on a small lamp with a decorative stained glass cover. The lamp provides soft light in comforting tints of purple and green.
If there were any way to disable to the lights over the cubicle zoo, I’d so get me one of those.
“How are things going, Annie?” Claire sits down. Apart from a flat-panel monitor and her lamp, Claire’s desk is clear of anything work related, leaving maximum space for picture frames. I’d never seen so many pictures of family on one desk before I met Claire.
I shrug. “Not great. But you know… Hanging in there I guess you’d say.”
“Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“Not sleeping mostly.”
Claire tilts her head. “What’s really wrong? I’m betting it’s the same thing keeping you from sleep.”
“I don’t know. The not sleeping is making everything worse.”
Claire turns her chair and reaches to the vertical blinds covering the window behind her. She twists the rod to open them halfway. “It’s a beautiful day out today. Maybe I should make this official, and we should go for a walking meeting.”
“That sounds nice, but I should get back to work. All the layoffs… We’re short people, and there’s a heavy call load today.”
“Isn’t there always?”
I shrug again. “Yeah, but that doesn’t change anything, right?”
“Annie, I want you to listen to me.” Claire stands up and walks around her desk.
For a second I think she’s going to hug me.
“Our employees are people too. If it’s always going to be busy, and I see no reason it won’t be, if the company is always going to be short staffed, if the bosses at corporate are always going to try and get more and more done with fewer and fewer people, you need to take breaks.” Claire sits on the corner of her desk next to me. “You need to look out for yourself. Otherwise it’s just a grind, and I don’t want to see you get ground up.” She says this last bit with a serious tone, but the happy side of Claire is dying to escape, and she’s smiling kindly at me before she finishes.
“Well, thanks. Actually that makes me feel a bit better.”
“Good. Tonight, take that feeling and use it to get some sleep.”
“I will.” I stand up and head to the door.
“Annie, if you ever want to come in here to talk, or even just to hide for a little bit, please do. And you let me know if Chad is giving you any trouble.”
I stop and turn around. Claire has the kindest expression I’ve ever seen on anyone, besides my mother. It staggers me for a moment that in this crappy day someone cares so much. “I thought Chad is…”
“Protected? Because he’s Pete’s friend? You leave that to me.”
~
Back at my desk, I try to focus on the voice in my headset and not on the squeaking wheel of the mail cart. I don’t have anywhere near as many pictures as Claire. Some of that’s just because I didn’t want to have too much of my home life stuck at the office, but I did bring in two framed pictures. The smaller picture is a photograph of my mother, taken when she was a young woman, sometime during the early seventies visiting my great-grandmother in Holland. The other picture is the most work appropriate drawing of mine I could find. It features the character from Munch’s “The Scream” seated at a desk wearing a headset.
Squeak.
My next piece will be about a mail cart.
I’m no longer sure if the customer on the line has a problem with our product or just wants someone to talk to.
If you’re lonely, go to a bar. Drink. Kill yourself. Just don’t call me.
I close my eyes and lose myself in the murmur of my coworkers taking calls. No single voice fully reaches over the cubicle walls, but all of them mingle together in the tech support pit. The line clicks off. Something catches the corner of my eye as it moves past the door. A swift moving shadow shape. I stand up too fast and my headset gets yanked off my head.
Squeak. The sound shoots pins through my spine.
Seeing no sign of the shadow maker, I assume I’ve started visually hallucinating due to sleep deprivation. I toy with getting coffee, but it’s late in the day and maybe I need to go all in on trying to sleep tonight.
Squeak.
The cart thumps over the bump into the next room at last.
&nb
sp; Good. Go torment IT with your squeaking wheel.
My desk phone blinks red for calls in the queue. I press the button to take the next call, eyeing my monitor to see the information that comes up in the call log. There are four windows open. Four instances of the call log. I try closing three of them, but the program just hangs on the frozen windows.
The queue is at forty, which doubles the worst I’ve seen.
“Thank you for calling. How can I help you?”
“Do you know how long I’ve waited for one of you to answer?” a man asks.
“No, sir, I don’t. I apologize for the wait. It seems we have an unusually large call volume.”
“How is that my fault?”
I rub my temples and shut my eyes, but there’s just a bright, searing light. I open them again, feeling the numb dull pain of a headache coming on. “It certainly is not your fault, sir. I was merely explaining why there’s a long wait. Now, what can I do for you?” I wait for the typical list of trouble: can’t install the program, can’t start the program, tried to install the program multiple times, can’t find the “any key.”
For a moment, all I hear is the man breathing hard into the receiver. “Ah… sorry… I just tried it again and it still won’t start.”
“The program won’t start? Okay, was it starting before?”
A long pause follows before he speaks again. “Yessss,” the word hisses out of him. “Before…”
Silence. I check the phone to make sure he hasn’t hung up. My computer claims he’s still on the line.
“Mr. Ramirez, are you all right? Mr. Ramirez?” I ask, looking at the name on the call log. “Are you still there?”
Ragged breathing follows a burst of static. The breathing sounds like someone with pneumonia struggling to inhale. A low hum emerges from the receiver. Somewhere lost in the low hum, words spoken too softly and too fast for me to understand repeat over and over in a low hiss.
“Mr. Ramirez, can you speak up please? Mr. Ramirez?”
The hissing noise trails off and the line clicks dead. My first instinct is to dial him back and make sure he’s okay, but there’s a company policy against making unrequested callbacks. There’s also the huge queue. I close out the call in the log, and take the next dissatisfied customer.