Do Not Deny Me

by Jean Thompson

  I went out to the reception area to bullshit with Steph. She’s my age and we kid around a lot. Steph had her earphones in and was bopping around to her music. I was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to do that. I had to stand in front of her and wave to get her attention.

  “Hey Matt, what’s up?” She still had one of the earphones half in. I could hear the scratchy, miniature music.

  “Not much. Did any ambulances pull up around here, anything like that?”

  “Unless they came up on the elevator, I wouldn’t know. Why, how come?”

  “Nothing.” I didn’t feel like going into it. Instead I asked her what she did over the weekend, and she told me and told me. There’s times I think that Steph wants to be my girlfriend, and I have to be careful about that. She’s a nice girl, but it’s not going to happen. I could just sense she was way ahead of me, like she was already telling her relatives at the wedding reception how we met while working at the same place.

  I finally got into the work groove and knocked out my day’s quota. None of it’s that hard, to be honest. A sheltered workshop could probably handle it. I was always tired at the end of the day, but that was probably from boredom. That night I watched the news, flipping back and forth between channels, but nobody mentioned the guy who fell. I bought a paper the next day and turned to the part where they had the car crashes and stray murders. Nothing there either. I couldn’t believe the guy wouldn’t have hurt himself pretty bad, enough to be noteworthy. If it was you, wouldn’t you want your own square inch of ink? I’m just saying, it was weird.

  Our group leader had called a morning meeting, so that was the first order of business. We all filed into the conference area. There was a coffee setup and some of those disappointing healthy snack cakes. Corporate was trying to direct us into better lifestyle choices. The group leader got right down to it. She said that we were not performing up to expectations. “Productivity has remained static, as opposed to the five percent increase that was projected. I don’t have to tell you the consequences of being a consistently underperforming unit, except to say that they would be serious.”

  I was trying not to look at Brian. He never managed the neutral, attentive expression required of an employee who was getting his ass kicked. Brian has a narrow face that just naturally settles into a smirk. I knew if I even looked at him, he’d have me rolling my eyes right along with him at the horseshit the group leader was dishing out. Five percent, what did that mean? These people had no souls.

  Instead I used my trick for getting through meetings, which was to rehearse detailed sexual fantasies while I stared at the group leader. The fantasies weren’t about her. That would have been, well, unpleasant. No, just your ordinary porn stuff. See, I’ll admit to things like that, things guys really do. Those girl magazines with articles about how to figure out what men really think, or want, or why he’s not calling, or letting you move in, or whatever the program is? Believe me, you probably don’t want to know.

  I snapped out of it when the group leader began passing out papers, one for everybody. Employee Responsibility Checklist, it read, and beneath that, a series of questions:

  1. Have I established ownership of team objectives?

  2. Have I implemented best practices?

  3. Have I learned from my mistakes?

  4. Have I looked on each new day as an opportunity to excel?

  There was more, but before I could finish, a piece of paper nudged into my lap from beneath the table. On the back of his Employee Responsibility checklist, Brian had written:

  1. Have I gotten anything like a raise in the last year and a half?

  2. Have my best accounts been outsourced to Malaysia?

  3. Do any of you assholes even know my goddamn name?

  I didn’t dare raise my eyes from the page.

  The group leader was saying we were supposed to answer each question on a one-to-five-point scale, with one being Needs Improvement and five being Exceptional. We were supposed to do this daily for six weeks, then plot our responses on a graph. In this way it would be possible to chart the trend of our deficiencies.

  Honestly, there were times I wondered why I worked here.

  The rest of the day I put my head down and just cranked. I was like the poster boy for Employee Responsibility. Sometimes that happens, they’ll get me mad enough that I decide I’ll show them, and I blast through all the crap like a comic book hero putting his fist through a wall. But I do it for me, on my own terms, not because of their cheapo motivation games.

  So it wasn’t until the end of the day that I made it over to the coffee area. Just to stretch my legs, because by that late the coffee turns into sediment. I couldn’t tell if they’d made any progress on the building across the street. The workers were gone by then; they started early and knocked off early. It was one of the those gray days that made it hard to judge distance, like I could have moved my hand just beyond the glass and practically touched the other side of the street.

  I heard the elevator chiming in the distance as people from the office left for the day. I guess it was later than I thought. After awhile I could tell I was the only one there. It was a feeling, a particular kind of quiet. But I didn’t leave yet, even though I could have. I was trying to clear my head, travel between work and not-work, when your mind unties the knot of itself and comes floating back to you.

  Maybe the guy I’d seen fall was really all right, maybe he had a safety harness or something. I hoped so. You wouldn’t want the guy’s family to have to think about him cashing in every time they looked at the building. It would be like a tombstone twenty stories tall.

  I don’t do real well with heights. Most people don’t know that about me because, think about it, how often does it come up? But I never went off the high dive when I was a kid. Never climbed a tree or a water tower, never even liked sleeping on the top bunk. All this is to try and explain what happened next: I fell.

  Not actually; it just felt like it. One second I was standing at the window, and the next it gave way and I was clawing at the gray sky. My stomach somersaulted. The speed pushed the air out of me and all I could manage was a strangled yelp before I landed, feet first, on the exact piece of floor where I’d been standing all along.

  The back of my shirt was damp, and it hurt to breathe. Have you’ve ever had one of those dreams when you’re falling and you scramble around and wake up in your own bed? It felt like that, except, of course, I’d been awake the whole time.

  I got myself out of there pretty quick, I can tell you, and went to a bar and drank a beer, and then I drank another one. I was beginning to feel really stupid. It was a good thing nobody had been there to watch my little performance, or else I might have gotten a call from HR to come in for one of their friendly chats where they try to determine if you’re a mental health risk and should they start giving you bad job evaluations.

  Maybe it wasn’t the brightest idea to call my old girlfriend who doesn’t like me very much. But I still felt shaky, hollow underneath the beer buzz, and I didn’t want to be alone, and at least with her I always knew where I stood.

  So I called. She let it ring awhile. “Hey, pretty lady.”

  “Who’s this?”

  I hate that. Like she didn’t have Caller ID. “It’s me,” I said.

  “Oh, Mr. Rat.” That’s what she calls me. Matt the Rat. I think that’s cold. “What do you want?”

  “I was wondering if I could buy you a drink.”

  “Hah.”

  “Dinner, then. Come on. I’ve been thinking a lot about you.” Technically true, if you counted the last fifteen minutes.

  I could hear her working it over, looking for angles. “Dinner but no dessert,” she said, which meant, no sex, and I said, Fine.

  She walked into the restaurant half an hour later, totally done up, hair, shoes, the wicked makeup. Like she spent her evenings by the phone, all primed and ready for when a call came in.

  I stood up, like a gentleman, and wondere
d if I should try to kiss her on the cheek just so she could have the satisfaction of shoving me away. But she sat down across from me before I could make any move and looked around. She said, “I was here once before and it wasn’t that great.”

  We ate some food. I pounded back a few more beers. Everything in my head had become complicated. I’d been afraid of something, which shamed me, and I couldn’t remember exactly what, which made me mad and was probably her fault.

  One of the things she said was, “How’s work these days?”

  “Why is that always the hot topic of conversation? Why is work the only thing that people ever ask about?”

  She was eating this salad she’d ordered, the kitchen sink kind that has everything in it except a cheeseburger. “Okay. How’s everything aside from work?”

  I said something like great, everything was great, but I couldn’t come up with any particulars.

  After a minute she said, “Why don’t you tell me what happened at work?”

  I started out with the bullshit meeting, because that was the ordinary part, and then I told her about working myself into some kind of fit so I spaced out standing at the window, and then about the guy who did fall, the construction worker. “Can you imagine falling what, twenty-five, thirty feet, and maybe the ladder lands on top of you? I mean, what wouldn’t you break?”

  She was mopping up the last of her salad. I waited for her to say, that’s terrible, or some other normal response. Instead she said, “It’s like there’s some part of you missing, isn’t there?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. Very polite, in case she had suddenly turned into a mentally disabled person.

  “I mean, that’s what it takes for you to notice another human being. A tragedy happening right under your nose.”

  We were on familiar ground here. My old girlfriends, this one and I guess all the others, were always accusing me of not noticing things. Their bad moods, which they called their needs. Their absences, and occasionally, their presence. I said, “Yeah, but think of all the other great working-condition parts I have.”

  She wasn’t impressed with my humor, but by now I was just trying to piss her off. I didn’t much like it when she started in on the medley of her greatest hits, all the things that were wrong with me. Was it too much to ask, if you paid for somebody’s dinner, you got a little pleasant company in return?

  She said, “When’s the last time we talked?”

  I knew that this was a test, and that I wasn’t going to do very well. “I don’t know. Not that long ago. Two, three months.”

  “Six. I remember because my mother was in the hospital having heart bypass surgery.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember.” I didn’t. “How’d that turn out, how’s she doing?”

  “She died two weeks later.”

  “Oh man, that’s terrible. I’m really sorry.” And I was, I felt bad for not calling back, like she meant me to feel bad. But it also seemed like, excuse the pun, overkill, using a dead mom to beat me up. I mean, I never even met her mother.

  She said, “You never called about my mother, but some gruesome accident has you all excited. Excuse me if I’m not impressed.”

  “And here I was sure you would be,” I said, sarcastic again. I couldn’t win, she wasn’t going to give me a break. Next time I’d be sure not to mention anything heartrending. She wouldn’t understand, it was precisely because I didn’t know the guy that it was so freakish. Like any of us could go that fast, zap, a bug hitting a bug zapper. Like it could happen to me! But what did she care? She was too caught up in her own head games. I never set out to make her, or anybody else, unhappy. More like, they had this idea of who they wanted me to be, then they blamed me for not living up to it.

  I walked her out to her car. And I admit it, I tried to get something going. Is that so terrible? Does anybody look down on birds or bees or monkeys or whatever, just for doing what comes naturally? And believe it or not, it was my way of trying to make it up to her, apologizing for the dead mom and everything. Sometimes it really does work that way, making love: you get past all the bad history and hard words and you’re happy with each other again. Anyway, it was what I had to offer just then.

  Of course she wasn’t having any of it. “Thanks for dinner,” she said, once she’d pried herself loose from my unwelcome advances. “I hope that one day you decide to upgrade to actual human status.”

  Yeah, and she could just bite the back of my knee. I went home and fell asleep on the couch without taking my clothes off. The next morning I woke up unfit for duty. It felt like my skin shrank a size overnight, like my tongue had warts on it. It was truly ugly. But there was no calling in sick these days, not unless you wanted some gimlet-eyed supervisor coming around and expressing fake concern for your health once you got back. You had to figure they all knew the symptoms of brown bottle flu.

  So I showered. Applied caffeine. Et cetera. Steph was already

  at her desk when I got off the elevator. “Mattie, you look

  terrible.”

  “And top of the morning to you too.” Talking made my teeth hurt.

  I told Steph I was probably coming down with something, and she knocked herself out fetching me vitamin C, throat lozenges, hot tea. She thinks that all I really need is the love of a good woman.

  When I got to my work area, I looked over the wall for Brian, but he wasn’t there. I figured he was in the john or something. I opened my computer and stared at the screen. It was like staring at a goldfish in a bowl and waiting for the fish to do something.

  I had my choice of rotten thoughts this morning, except I didn’t want to be thinking about anything. Last night had been a total disaster. Next time I wanted cheering up, I’d call one of my old drinking buddies, not that I’d done that in awhile. I wasn’t even sure I had their numbers anymore. Well, anyway, I’d learned my lesson. No more sniffing around girls when I was at a low point. You should only take them on when you were primed and ready, like going on safari.

  I did a little bit of feeble work. The hands of clocks moved backward. I think I slept some, right there in my chair. Then a wad of paper hit me between the eyes. Brian had thrown a note over the partition. It said, “Meet me at noon at Subway. Tell no one.”

  I wasn’t in the mood for Brian’s fun and games, but by then I was hungry. I got there first and ordered a sub with a lot of mayo and a lot of bacon. It sounds bad but trust me, your hangover craves it. When Brian showed up he said, “You look like, I don’t know, a hit-and-run victim maybe.” He got his sandwich and sat down. “Guess what Brickhouse did to me.” Brickhouse was our group leader’s boss, and serious asshole.

  “Invited you home to do his wife.”

  Brian held up one finger while he worked on a corner of his meatball sub. “Put me on probation,” he said, his mouth still half-full.

  “You’re kidding.” Brickhouse putting you on probation was like Darth Vader putting you on probation. “How come?”

  “They’re using some new point system. It’s not real clear. I think you get points for poor telephone manners. For using too many office supplies. Not returning a salute. Liking dogs instead of cats. They’re making it up as they go along.”

  I didn’t know what to say. If I was Brian, I’d probably start sending my résumé out.

  Brian said, “So, I just wanted you to know, if I don’t hang out with you like I used to, goof around, it’s because I’m trying to save my ass.”

  “Oh sure. Jeez.” I shook my head, commiserating. Brian looked sort of serious. I guess he really was worried. “But hey, worst comes to worst, there’s other jobs, right? When one door closes, another opens.”

  “Yeah, that’s what they say.”

  “People with our skills, we’ve got it made. We’re like the top of the food chain.”

  I was just giving him shit, trying to screw around like we always did. We didn’t have any skills. He didn’t even crack a smile. He said, “No, man, we’re like, the bottom.”

  �
��Duh?”

  “We can’t do squat that’s really useful. Can’t grow our own food or hunt for it, or build a shelter, or make our own clothes. Just think about shoes. What the hell would you do for shoes? We couldn’t keep ourselves alive for a week if they turned us loose in the woods.”

  “Then it’s a good thing this ain’t the woods,” I said. I didn’t know what his deal was. He was tripping.

  We finished our sandwiches. It wasn’t like Brian to be so uptight about work. He was always the one who had the big bad attitude, even more than me, and I wondered what was up with him. But I didn’t ask, in case it was something I’d be embarrassed to find out, like, he needed the health insurance because he had AIDS.

  We went back to the office. I got through the day, but not in any fashion I’d brag about. The rest of the week I just did normal stuff, watched TV after work, cooked up some pork barbeque that turned out great. People always act surprised when I tell them I can actually cook, like they think I live on cold pizza with bits of the box stuck to the crust. Work was pretty boring since Brian really did turn into Mr. No Fun. I hardly ever saw him, and I missed things like him hoisting a little skull-and-crossbones flag above his desk, or texting me during meetings with comments about the group leader’s poor wardrobe choices. Was I supposed to be the bad influence, or was he? It was probably a toss-up.

  Meanwhile, the building across the street got taller. It did that from time to time, had some kind of growth spurt. It was easier to see what they were doing now. A few stories down, there were walls and windows, and you could see the workers walking around in there. They were putting in the plumbing and electrical and heating and air-conditioning, all the things that make a building a building. Actual skills. Brian was probably right about us, we were pretty useless when it came to practical, regular-guy knowledge. I couldn’t so much as rewire a lamp. If my car didn’t start, I called a mechanic. I bet the guys across the street had whole garages full of automotive tools.