Before We Die Alone

by Ike Hamill

  “How do you know it’s a rodent heart?”

  I’m stumped by this question. Why do I think that?

  “I just assumed. It’s very small.”

  “What if it’s an infant’s heart? What if it came from an abortion clinic?”

  I drop the plastic bag and make a disgusted sound. I hadn’t even considered something like that.

  “What a terrible thing to say.”

  “You don’t know where it came from, right?”

  “Right.”

  “So how do you know what’s terrible?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “But still, that’s just a terrible thought. Why would someone do that?”

  “Why would someone bring any disconnected organ into your lab? Like you said, it was probably a psycho. Given that, I wouldn’t make any assumptions about exactly how psychotic the person is.”

  “Yeah, I suppose,” I say. I had resolved to take the thing to Human Resources in the morning. Now, my resolve was faltering. What if they thought I was the psycho? I should have called someone right when I found it. I should have pulled that guy into the room, so he could witness it. “Boy. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

  Adam has no answer either.

  “You want a job?” Adam asks.

  “No!” I say, immediately. I did a job for Adam before, and I hated it. Adam is my one real confidant. He’s the person I can say anything to, and working for him temporarily ruined that relationship.

  Just for clarity—a relationship is an undefined contract where you trade some amount of your own well-being for the promise that someone else will be able to make you cry or amp you up into a murderous rage.

  At one point, Adam had needed someone to attend to his collectors. He controls these sections of roof on our building. Mounted to those sections, are these structures that look like giant mushrooms. The white tops of these fungi are solar collection panels, connected to fiber optic lines that snake down into his living spaces. With these, Adam’s dwelling is filled with natural light, despite the fact that it apparently has no windows. Adam needed his collectors cleaned.

  Before me, he had contracted a company to wipe down the collectors once a month. At some point, the workers decided that the collectors were haunted, so they broke their contract. Adam wanted me to find him a new company. I had to make phone calls, set appointments, and then wave and gesture at the mushrooms to managers who nodded emphatically before they turned down the job. Word had gotten out, and nobody wanted to branch out into cleaning giant haunted mushrooms.

  That job had been a nightmare, and it had colored my conversations with Adam. Each night, when I talked to him, he wouldn’t ask. Still, it would be there, right behind every sentence I spoke. I wanted to commiserate with him on how difficult the task was, but I figured he would judge me. When I had finally found the right cleaners, I convinced Adam to use a rental property management company for his future needs. It took months for our relationship to return to normal.

  “You haven’t even heard the job yet,” he says.

  “Still no.”

  “It’s not for me,” he says. “It’s for you.”

  “Humph. What?”

  “There’s a software house around the corner. They’re looking for a manager for their R&D team. Sounds right up your alley.”

  “What kind of software?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t heard them talk about what kind. They mostly talk in jargon and product names.”

  “What’s the name of the company?”

  “Not sure,” he says. “Go out to the street. Walk north about eighty-one yards. Take a left. Go another forty-two yards, and you should see the entrance to their offices.”

  “What, you just overheard that they had a job open to manage their R&D team?”

  “Yeah. Or they’re about to. Just go ask. It could be a good job. It’s close, and you would get away from all that ritual sacrifice.”

  “Hey, just a second. Just because I found a beating heart wired to a circuit board, doesn’t mean it was ritual sacrifice. Let’s not jump to conclusions.”

  Adam laughs.

  ---- * ----

  I find the place. It’s called puzzleBox Software. The letters of the logo are cut like jigsaw puzzle pieces and fit together. On the street, they have a glass door with a buzzered entry. I hit the button.

  A little box on the wall says, BOOP.

  I glance up towards the camera and then lean towards the box. “Hi, I don’t know if you’re hiring or anything, but I would like to drop off a résumé?”

  The latch on the door buzzes and I head in. There’s a little landing, and then steps up to the office. I guess they’re not worried about handicapped access for this place, unless they have another way to get in. They probably do. Maybe I came to the back door or something.

  At the top of the stairs, a heavy wooden door opens to a nice lobby. A young man sits behind a high counter. He has a decent setup for a receptionist. Below the top of the counter, monitors are curved around him. Looks like he’s working on code. His fingers are going a mile a minute. He barely pauses to glance up at me. I guess he’s not a receptionist after all.

  He gestures towards another door.

  “Janice would like to see you.”

  Does he know that I’m a stranger who just walked in off the street?

  “I’m sorry,” I say, trying and failing to make eye contact with him. “I don’t have an appointment or anything. I just wanted to drop off my résumé and see if you have any openings or whatever? I just live around the corner and my friend said you might be hiring?”

  He’s still typing when he points towards the door again.

  Not friendly, but at least efficient.

  I start to head for the door and then stop. “By the way,” I say, “you didn’t close your virtual destructor there.”

  His eyes dart towards me and then back to his code. He gives a quick nod and fixes his mistake. I’ve gained at least a little confidence as I head towards Janice’s door.

  I knock.

  The door opens in.

  “Good morning?” she asks. I don’t know why, but it strikes me as funny. Is she asking me if she is having a good morning? If so, I’m going to have to do some research and get back to her. Maybe I’ll interview her friends and family, trace her route back to her house and ask bystanders if she had a bounce in her step, or was maybe whistling. Did she file any police reports, or perhaps win the lottery? These are all questions I’ll have to find answers for before I can determine if she’s having a good morning.

  Hopefully, all these thoughts have passed in the blink of any eye, and I haven’t just been standing there staring at her for several seconds.

  “Good morning,” I confirm. “I pass by your offices all the time, and I thought I would drop off my résumé, in case you’re ever looking for a senior software engineer.”

  “Oh!” she says. “Interesting. I’m waiting on an appointment, but please, come in? We can chat for a second until my appointment arrives?”

  It seems like everything is a question with her. I nod in agreement. She closes the door behind me and waves me to a chair. I’m instantly set at ease by her office. It’s nearly an interior office. There’s one high window through which we can see a patch of the morning sky. Her desk is wooden, and old, and worn in. Her chairs are comfortable. Opposite the window, she has a seascape in a plain frame. In the painting, the beach looks sunny, but cold.

  I try to settle my eyes, but they can’t help but dart around.

  Back at my job, the HR director has a set of voodoo dolls on her bookcase. She has one for each of the executive directors, and their cloth heads have cross stitched Xs for eyes. In her drawer, she keeps a length of thick rope that’s tied into a hangman’s noose. If you have a meeting in there, she’ll pull it out and fiddle with the knot while you talk.

  This office, on the other hand, has nothing that even remotely speaks of death. I like that.

&
nbsp; We introduce ourselves.

  “So, how did you hear of us?”

  “I just noticed your place as I walked by,” I said. “Actually, I think a friend of mine mentioned your office, and then I noticed it. I figured it would be interesting to come see what you do. I brought a résumé.” I’ve got nerves. Somehow, I think if I keep talking, the action of my jaw might cool my body so I don’t break out into a nervous sweat. So far, it’s not working.

  “And you’re a software engineer?”

  I nod. On the plus side, I’m not blabbering, but I can’t stop my head from nodding. This is not how a first impression is supposed to go. I’m the talent. I have the desirable skills. I already have a job that pays perfectly well. They should be nervous about talking with me. The thought calms me down.

  “Yes,” I say. “I’ve been writing software for over twenty years. I’ve worked in big and small shops. I prefer a team environment with good collaboration. My forte is managing other engineers while still contributing code to the project. I have about seven-thousand hours towards the PMP, so I have the training to keep a project on track.” I pull my documents out of my shoulder bag and hand them over.

  “And you have good timing.”

  “Pardon?”

  She smiles. “Your timing is perfect. We just had a meeting yesterday where we decided to look for a development manager. We lost our old manager about six months ago, and since then we’ve been attacking projects with a set of tiger teams. It has been a difficult transition.”

  For clarity—a tiger team is usually a group of hackers who are turned loose on a system to look for flaws or security risks. Imagine super-gluing five cats, back to back, and dropping them through the skylight into a gymnasium filled with balloons. They might find the ground peacefully, but more likely, a set of claws is going to come out. Then, pandemonium ensues.

  “You do security? Penetration testing?”

  “No,” she smiles. “We broke the project into portions and assigned each team a piece?”

  “And the teams veered away from each other, and now nothing can be integrated.”

  “It’s like you already work here,” she says.

  I might as well have. Software engineers always have the notion that if management would just leave them alone, they could build something twice as good in half the time. They’re always wrong. They need a strong vision, and someone who can trim all the little offshoots of effort before they blossom into full-fledged shit flowers.

  “How many coders do you have?”

  “Uh? Sixteen? Give or take.”

  Interesting. Usually, a business has a pretty good idea of how many people they employ. Maybe the receptionist only does code when they have a visitor to the building who is looking to drop off a résumé.

  “What type of project management did you have before, waterfall?” I ask. This is an educated guess, based on where they’re at now.

  “Yes,” she says.

  “Well, I have a lot of experience transitioning projects to a scrum model. It will keep the engineers happy, because they’ll keep a little autonomy and they’ll feel like they’re still accomplishing something every day. Have you tried that? Start and end the day with a five-minute huddle and then manage over their shoulders?”

  She’s barely listening. She’s flipping through my documents, and nodding as she sees the future.

  Her eyes come up to meet mine. “Want to give this a shot?” she asks.

  “Pardon?”

  “Let’s talk numbers.”

  This has turned bad very rapidly. With at least sixteen employees, this place must have more management than just Janice. There’s no way that the position of manager should be filled on a whim with someone she has known for one minute. And if she does have the power to hire me on a whim, then she will be just as likely to fire me tomorrow. Who wants to work for a place that acts so recklessly?

  Maybe she sees the concern written on my face.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, smiling and looking back down. “I’m being really impulsive. We’re trying to get out of analysis paralysis, and I thought I would make a snap decision for once. But that’s not right. We need to make sure this is a good fit for both of us before we leap into something.”

  She’s right.

  “You want to go grab a coffee and we can talk?”

  Why not? Avoiding the whole heart-on-a-circuit-board thing, I’ve taken the whole morning off. I have time to kill. Even if I don’t end up working for puzzleBox, networking is always good. Hell, maybe I can poach some of her developers to come work for me.

  “That sounds good, but aren’t you waiting for an appointment?”

  “He’s fifteen minutes late, he can reschedule. It’s just a furniture rep trying to sell us new chairs.”

  “Ugh,” I say, smiling. I like this new Janice. She’s calmer and doesn’t end everything like it’s a question.

  “You have time for a walk, too?” she asks. “The good coffee is a few blocks.”

  “Rittle’s?” I ask. It’s my favorite coffee shop. People our age don’t tend to go there.

  “That’s the one!”

  I smile and nod.

  ---- * ----

  The receptionist doesn’t look up from his code as we exit the building.

  Janice walks fast.

  “You live around here?” she asks.

  I’m struggling to keep up, but I try to sound nonchalant as I gulp down air and answer. “Yeah. Pretty close.”

  In fact, our buildings are physically connected. In fact, my best friend and neighbor probably shares a wall with her office space, based on his insider information. Adam seems to share a wall with everyone on our block. His world is the in-betweens, and everywhere is bordered by an in-between.

  “I live across the river,” she says. “But the commute isn’t terrible as long as I come in early.” Her heels clop on the sidewalk as she races down the street. I hope she doesn’t drive the same way she walks. She tilts her hips a fraction of an inch to the side so her legs don’t clip a fire hydrant. When someone approaches from the opposite direction, Janice stares them down until they swerve around us. “The problem is that when I leave in the afternoon, I’m right in the worst traffic. I would take the bus if I didn’t value my life so much.”

  “It’s not so bad,” I say. The bus gets short shrift around here. There were those stabbings a few years ago, but they were targeted stabbings. The takeaway shouldn’t have been that the bus is dangerous. It should have been that the bus is dangerous if you’re an ex-convict who testified about the crimes of other prisoners.

  “Maybe in general busses aren’t bad,” she says, “but not my bus. The bus that goes to my neighborhood is driven by a convicted serial killer.” She turns and smiles when she says that. “I mean, he was convicted at his first trial and then won his appeal because the police didn’t handle the evidence properly or something. What would you call that? Acquitted? Exonerated? Both of those sound like he didn’t do it. But we know he did it, they just couldn’t convict him. I’m not getting on his bus.”

  “Oh,” I say. “Why would they hire him for a job where he has to interact with the public?”

  “I don’t know, some union thing. But I want to talk about you. You said you manage software development? Would you say you’re more of a people manager, or a project manager?”

  We pause to wait for the signal at a crosswalk and I finally have a chance to catch my breath.

  “You have to do both,” I say. “If you’re not mentoring and keeping everyone engaged, your project isn’t going to succeed. But I’m staying on top of the deadlines and the feature lists.”

  “That’s smart,” she says.

  I talk a good game.

  “How long are your projects?” I ask. I expect to learn a lot from her answer. Too long, and you know the company is mired. There’s a limit on how long a software project can go before it bogs down. If you have a year-long project, you’ve failed to limit the scop
e of your release. On the other hand, if you expect something to get done, start to finish, in one month, you’re dreaming.

  I don’t learn anything at all.

  “Quick,” she says.

  The light hasn’t changed, but there’s a gap in traffic. I chase her as she darts across the street. She heads for the side door of Rittle’s.

  ---- * ----

  Rittle’s Coffee is a mad house until about 9. We get there just after. The floor is littered with bent stirrers and napkins. I pick up an overturned chair as we thread through the spills of latte and half-and-half. Janice gets to the counter first, but defers to me to order. I try to let her go first, but she insists.

  “Yeah,” I say. I’m looking at the menu board on the wall. Typically when I go in there, I order a large dark. This turns into a debate. They have two dark roasts, one darker than the other, and their large size is called “The Drop.”

  Trained to push their lexicon, the cashier will ask, “You would like a Sumatra Double-Roast Mix-Blend Drop?”

  At that point, I usually make a face and demand the biggest, darkest, hottest coffee they have on the premises. It’s a whole thing. I enjoy it, they enjoy it. We have a good time. However, every now and then, I run across a sour cashier who has had one too many difficult interactions that day. Then, we have a little argument. Today, I would prefer no argument, so I look at the board and try to piece together how to order in a way that will make the cashier smile.

  “You go ahead,” I say to Janice. “I’m still deciding.”

  The cashier screams.

  I look at her as she scrambles backwards. For a second, all I can think about is Janice’s killer bus driver. She thinks I’m him. I put up my hands and I’m about to explain. The cashier is already disappearing through the door to the back. I look to Janice to explain to her that this is a misunderstanding. Something at the main entrance of Rittle’s catches my eye.

  Janice turns to look too.

  “What in the fuck?” Janice asks.

  It’s a black bear. He has a brown spot on his chest that almost looks like a tie.