Office Girl

by Joe Meno

  SO AT THE OFFICE THAT FRIDAY NIGHT.

  Odile is dressed all in black and Jack smiles at her as she takes a seat but she only frowns. She leans over, placing her face before his, peeking from behind the cubicle wall, and says, “Listen, I need to tell you something.”

  “Okay,” he says, unsure of the look on her face.

  “I can’t sleep with you anymore. We can hang out together. But no more fooling around.”

  Jack feels his face tighten into a rictus of both surprise and disappointment.

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “It’s just that … I’m supposed to be leaving in eight days and I dunno. It’s too weird already.”

  “You’re leaving?”

  “I am.”

  “You really are?”

  “I have to. If I don’t go now like I planned, I never will.”

  “But why do you have to go anywhere? I mean, why do you want to go to New York so bad?”

  “Because if the world’s going to end in a year, at least I’ll be in the middle of it.”

  “Funny. Why are you really going?”

  “I don’t know. I already made all these plans. I never follow through with anything, so I think I have to. I like you. I really do. But I don’t think I can have anything complicated in my life right now. So if you want to hang out, that’s cool, but other than that …”

  “I just don’t get it. When did you decide you were leaving?”

  “I don’t know. A couple months ago. And then my friend Jeannie called yesterday and I dunno. I knew this was going to happen. This is why I didn’t want to fool around with you.”

  Jack sits there stunned, feeling the stiff back of the office chair poking into his spine. He touches his black glasses, feels the weight pressing down against his face. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say here,” he mutters.

  “Nothing. You don’t have to say anything. It’s just how it is.”

  “Well, that’s good because I can’t think of anything.”

  “I’m sorry. I tried to be up front about it. I mean, if you still want to hang out before I go, we can. I just can’t fool around with you.”

  She crosses her arms in front of her chest and Jack can still remember the feel of her soft mouth against his.

  “I’m sorry to be so weird about this,” she says, her eyes going gray.

  “Okay, cool. Great. No big deal,” he says, feeling his forehead tighten sharply.

  “Okay. Good.”

  “Great.”

  And then both of them glance away, unsure where to look. The phones go on ringing but the two of them ignore everything.

  “We should probably get back to work,” Jack says, wanting this uncomfortable moment to end, end, end. And the moment does end, and then there is the feeling that this is the end for the two of them; there is the feeling that this is the end of everything, and the feeling climbs, propulsive, decidedly, into the air. And then that is it. The last four days, some of the best days he’s ever had, are now over. And then. Then nothing. Then a kind of informal, intractable despair. Calculator watches are broken later that evening when certain people punch the restroom walls out of frustration. Young persons who had been sleeping together act like sitting in cubicles beside each other means nothing. And then it does. Means nothing. And there are the ringing telephones. And the office, absent of both furious attraction and longing. Everything slows to gray-green gloom. And it’s like nothing interesting has ever happened to anybody.

  AFTER WORK THAT FRIDAY NIGHT.

  Odile rides home alone at one a.m., feeling more than a little sorry for herself. And then, after heaving her bicycle up the moldy steps and unlocking the front door with a groan, she sees Isobel’s shoes are gone, which means she’s at Edward’s, and so she smiles inwardly and then stands over the answering machine, listening to the messages, hoping that there’ll be one from Jack, something telling her how stupid this all is, asking if it’s okay if he comes by. But there’s only one message and it’s from her mother, in her typically sedate voice.

  “Hi, Poppy, it’s Mom. We’re just calling to see if your brother is there with you. He’s been gone two days now and we’re starting to get worried. If he is there, do you mind giving us a call and letting us know? You can tell him he’s not in trouble, we just want to know he’s all right. If not, then you can disregard this message. Okay, hope everything is good with you. Talk to you soon.”

  And then the answering machine beeps, ending the message.

  Odile, on a whim, peeks out from behind the blinds at the snow-swept street. She half-expects to see her brother there, staring up, but there is nothing, only the useless footprints of strangers leading nowhere. She turns back and begins to get undressed, pulling her sweater off, unclipping her earrings. She gives her bedroom door a shove, nudging it open with her hip, and there she finds her idiot younger brother sleeping in her bed in his stupid green sleeping bag.

  “Ike, what the fuck?” she shouts, waking him up.

  He looks groggy. And it appears he’s now trying to grow a beard. The bristles look ridiculous on his slim, pallid face.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I had to come back. I can’t handle being alone at home. Nobody gets me.”

  “When did you get here?”

  “Today, tonight, while you were at work. Isobel said it was okay if I waited.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Isobel didn’t know the number there,” he explains.

  “Jesus, Ike. You can’t stay here. You have to go back.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Mom and Dad are shitting themselves. Did you call them and tell them where you are?”

  “No. I called but I didn’t tell them where I was. I just said I was all right.”

  “They are going to have my ass for this. You need to call them and tell them you’re coming home tomorrow.”

  “But you said I could stay. If I called.”

  “You didn’t call.”

  “I did. After I got here.”

  “Ike. You have to go home. You can stay tonight, but tomorrow you have to go.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. Because I’m moving in a couple days. And you need to finish school. You’re not going to be able to do shit if you don’t get a high school degree.”

  “What do I care?”

  “Jesus, Ike. We need to call Mom and Dad right now.”

  “No way.”

  “Okay, well, I’m calling then.”

  “See if I care,” he says, sounding just like an eight-year-old.

  She grabs the phone and drags it into the bathroom and dials her parents, but of course her mom doesn’t answer because she takes a sleeping pill every night. And her father won’t pick it up because he doesn’t answer the phone past ten p.m. on general principle. But she dials again, and then a third time. And still, no answer. And when she walks back out into her bedroom, she sees Ike is gone. His clothes, his green sleeping bag, all of it. She throws the phone down and runs out into the hall and the front door is partly open, trapped by the snow, and she hurries across the front steps in her socks and looks both ways down the street but all she can see are the avalanched cars and the bored, bald-looking trees.

  AND WHO DOES SHE CALL?

  But Jack, and says, “Please, please, I need your help,” and he says, “You got to be kidding me,” and she says, “Please,” and he says, “You just broke up with me. Why would I want to help you?” and she says, “Jack, please, this is an emergency, I don’t have anyone else I can ask, Isobel is gone and I don’t have anyone,” and so together, on their bicycles, they traverse the neighborhood at two a.m., looking for her younger brother. They stop in all-night Laundromats, at a copy shop, at a twenty-four-hour record store, the two of them riding up to the establishment’s door, Odile leaping off her bike, Jack staying outside, holding the handlebars of her bicycle while she searches inside, watching as she reappears wi
th the same spooky expression on her face.

  “What if he killed himself or something?” Odile asks, and Jack shakes his head.

  “He’s okay. We just have to keep looking.”

  In and out of diners, and an all-night pharmacy, and a supermarket that’s open around the clock, but he is nowhere, there is just no sign of him. And so they decide to split up. Riding past Division and Ashland, Jack gets an idea and hops off his bicycle, locking it to a parking meter, and then he runs down the steps of the Blue Line subway station, and fumbling for his dollar and change, he puts it into the machine and hurries across the dirt-speckled steps to the platform, and at the end of it is a small rectangular wood bench, and on the bench is a boy who must be sixteen or seventeen, a gawky kid, tall, with an irregular-looking Adam’s apple and a scruffy face, but the shape of the eyes, the features are mostly the same, and so Jack walks up to him cautiously and asks, “Are you Ike?” and the boy’s eyes go wild at the insinuation, and he grabs his green duffel bag, pulling it close, and Jack smiles, holding out his hand to shake, but the boy gathers up his bags and stands, stepping away, and so Jack says, “We’ve been looking for you. Me and your sister. Are you okay?”

  The kid looks guilty then, his face going a little white, and he asks, “Who the heck are you?”

  “I’m Jack,” he says, holding out his hand again. “I’m a friend of your sister. We’ve been riding all over trying to find you. She’s really worried.”

  “Why are you looking for me?”

  “Because your sister asked me to.”

  “Are you having intercourse with her?”

  “What?”

  “She’s a bitch. She’ll sleep with anybody. She’s like the most selfish person in the world.”

  “I think she’s really worried about you.”

  “Sure she is. She doesn’t care about anybody but herself.”

  Jack frowns, pushing his glasses up against his face. “How about we go back up to the street and try and find her and then you can talk to her about all of this?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No way. I came here because I’m in trouble and I thought she would help me, but no one wants to help me.”

  “She does want to help you. I mean, you wouldn’t believe how worried she is. That’s why she called me.”

  “No. She’s just like my folks. All she wants is for me to go back home. She doesn’t really care what’s going on.”

  Jack nods, unsure what to say. The kid stares down at the gray steel of the train tracks and mutters, “I’m not cut out for this kind of life. I should have been a wizard. Or a mage.”

  “What’s a mage?”

  “I don’t know. A different kind of wizard, I guess. He doesn’t need a staff or amulet to perform his magic.”

  “Oh,” Jack says. “There’s not a lot of people like that floating around.”

  But the kid doesn’t even smile. “Do you know when we were kids, Odile and me, we used to take a bath together? She’s only six years older. We did everything together. Now there’s nobody but my weirdo parents in our house. And they don’t get me. They’re high half the time anyway.”

  Jack nods, again unsure what he’s supposed to say.

  “I’m tired of high school,” the kid says. “I’m tired of my friends. Everybody keeps telling me how important high school is, to get into college and everything, but it just doesn’t interest me. I think I’d like to travel. I’m thinking of maybe joining the navy.”

  “You are?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, I’m afraid to because I’m not tough enough.”

  “That’s all right. Neither am I,” Jack admits. “But you could always travel somewhere on your own.”

  “I know,” the kid says. “But that way, in the navy, you’d have all these buddies. It would be exciting, like we were on a mission. I don’t know. I don’t have friends like that anymore. Nobody likes to do anything. There’s nobody I know who likes to do things.”

  “Me neither,” Jack admits. “Except for your sister.”

  The boy, Ike, nods, smiling for the first time. “We used to pretend to go to the moon. When we were kids. She’d turn the entire basement into the surface of the moon. Or we’d make our own circus. Or a jungle in the backyard. I don’t have anybody like that anymore. There’s nobody to make-believe with. Nobody wants to have an adventure.”

  Jack sighs into the cold, cavernous air. “Your sister does.”

  “Yeah,” he says with a soft tone of resignation. “But just watch. She’ll leave you too. She quits everything.”

  Jack feels the cold air pierce his chest. “It’s pretty hard not to like her,” he says. “Even when you know you shouldn’t.” He looks over at the kid and tries to summon a smile. Both of them nod then. Jack fixes his glasses again and then puts a hand on the kid’s green duffel bag. “What do you say we go up to the street and see if we can find her? She’s going to be really glad to see you.”

  The kid scratches at his nose and says, “Okay. If you think she’s that worried,” and Jack nods and helps him with his duffel bag, walking up the sloping steps, pushing through the silver turnstile, climbing up the concrete stairs to the near-empty street.

  After a half hour or so of waiting in front of the apartment, Odile finally rides up on her green bicycle, spotting the two people there waiting for her, hopping off, throwing her arms around her brother’s neck.

  “You scared the hell out of me,” she says. “You got to promise not to do that again.”

  “I won’t,” Ike says sheepishly. “I’m sorry. I just … I’m really having a bad year.”

  “Me too,” Odile says.

  “Me too,” Jack adds, and everybody laughs, but cautiously, their eyes moving back down to their own feet.

  In silence then, the three of them stand in the dark, Odile still hugging her brother a moment longer, until she turns and grabs ahold of Jack’s ungloved hand.

  “I can’t believe you found him. You … you’re really amazing.”

  Jack feels his face getting flush.

  “We’re gonna head upstairs,” she says. “Do you want to come up with?”

  The rough stitch of her mitten clutches at his hand.

  “I could make some coffee,” she says.

  “Do you want me to?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I really don’t know,” he says glumly.

  “Then we probably shouldn’t.”

  “Probably not,” he says, only wanting her to say, Yes, yes, yes. Come upstairs with me. Forget the whole thing.

  But she doesn’t. She plays with her white hat and says, “Well. Okay. I guess I’ll see you on Monday. I owe you one,” and Jack nods and says, “Don’t mention it,” and rides off into the distance, the sound of his bicycle, its rear tire slipping against the snow, the exact sound of his thoughts going dark.

  AND THE WEEKEND GOES BY LIKE THIS.

  Imagine a toilet flushing down everything important. A gargantuan pile of shit.

  SO IN THE OFFICE THAT MONDAY.

  Things are still really fractured, really weird. He thinks about saying something to Odile but he doesn’t. He pays attention to the phone, types an order with the yellowed keyboard, hangs up the phone, and then answers it again. It goes like this hour after hour until Odile, brushing her bangs with her fingertips, finally leans back and says, “I put my brother on the bus yesterday.”

  “You did?”

  “He wasn’t too happy about it.”

  “I bet.”

  “He said he liked meeting you, though. He said he thought you were pretty nice.”

  Jack nods, not saying a word.

  “So,” she says, sighing, “I’m leaving in like five days.”

  “Wow,” he responds, trying to speak without interest or heat.

  “On Saturday. It’s weird.”

  “It is.”

  “I’m not even packed yet. I was going to try to have a gara
ge sale sometime, but I don’t know. I might just end up throwing a lot of stuff out.”

  “Did you tell Gomez yet?”

  “No. I guess I have to tell him. I was afraid if I told him before now, he’d fire me. I mean, I plan on working all the way to Friday. I need all the money I can get.”

  “So you’re not going to tell him until Friday?”

  “That’s the plan. Do you think he’s going to be pissed?”

  “Probably.”

  “What can I do? I guess I can just add him to the list of people who are mad at me.”

  Jack smiles softly, against his better judgment. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  She smiles at him. “So.”

  “So.”

  “I was thinking.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I know this is kind of weird but I was thinking of doing something to that professor I had. The bad one. From the gallery. Before I leave on Saturday. You know, like one last act by the great Alphonse F.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. It’d be great if you wanted to come,” she says.

  “When?”

  “I dunno. Tomorrow afternoon. I was thinking of maybe doing something to his car. I figured out where he parks. I was thinking of maybe decorating it. Or gluing stuff to it.”

  “What were you going to glue to it?”

  “I dunno. Household items maybe. I haven’t really figured it out. Do you want to come?”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Do you want me to?” he asks.

  “I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t want you to,” she says, and it looks like she’s blushing.

  “I guess so. I mean, I will, if you want me to.”

  And she nods, tucking a strand of her dark hair behind her ear. “Okay. We begin our attack tomorrow afternoon at one p.m.”