by Nino Cipri
“I don’t know why you say that like it’s a bad thing,” Dirk said. He occupied the hallway between the breakroom and office, leaning against the wall. Derek had a brief flashback to that morning, Tricia eavesdropping in the hallway. “We’re all company men.”
“We are definitely not all men,” Dex said as he walked past to the sales floor.
Dirk shrugged. “Fine. Two company men, one company woman, and one fluidly gendered company individual, who, despite all being genetically identical, can’t even agree on the pizza toppings.”
“Hawaiian or get the fuck out,” Dex called back.
“Meat-za or bust, bitch!” said Darkness.
“Why would you get pizza when you can have a calzone?” Delilah argued from the hallway. “They’re objectively superior.”
Derek looked at Dirk, who shrugged. “Any topping fancier than pepperoni or sausage has ideas above its station.”
Checking in! How harmonious are you?
The LitenVärld family believes that individual voices create the most beautiful music when singing together. A single off-key note can ruin the harmony, and that’s never truer than when it comes to our special exempt employees.
If you’re reading this, it’s because someone has raised concerns about your performance that might suggest a potential discordance. This is nothing to worry about! Feedback is a necessary part of growth.
Please rate the following questions on a scale from one (this is not at all true for me) to five (I agree wholeheartedly and unambiguously).
EMOTIONAL HEALTH
I am happy and fulfilled in my work and life.
I relish the chance to do better at my job.
Most of my waking thoughts are devoted to improving the performance of my teammates and managers in any way I can.
My greatest ambition is to be an exemplary employee.
I do not dream. My mind is unclouded.
PHYSICAL HEALTH
I am in perfect physical health.
My body does everything I or anyone else needs it to do.
I sleep well and wake refreshed, ready to start the day.
I have never experienced any of the following: illness, injury, hallucinations, phantom limb pain, personality changes, sudden hemorrhaging, or inexplicable subdermal growths.
SELF-PERCEPTION
I lack nothing.
I am grateful that I exist at all in this chaotic universe filled with random chance.
I am lucky. So lucky.
If you find yourself answering anything below a 4 (strongly agree), and especially if you experience any signs of illness, injury, hallucinations, phantom limb pain, personality changes, sudden hemorrhaging, or inexplicable subdermal growths, call the following number immediately and await further instruction.
From The LitenVärld Special Employee’s Handbook
Chapter 5: Expecting the Unexpected
The breakroom was too claustrophobic with all five of them, so they settled around a farmhouse-style table in a nearby showroom.
The team had been given a map of the store, but it was already out of date. The VIP lounge wasn’t included, and the maskhål and Derek’s encounter with the toilet had disrupted several showrooms.
“That fuckin’ figures,” Dex said grumpily. He was doodling something onto the scratched surface of the bench he and Delilah were sitting on. Derek frowned at him, but decided if it was anything too explicit or company-unfriendly, he’d clean it off later.
To his surprise, Dirk casually pulled the pen out of Dex’s hand and hit him on the nose with it. It was an oddly immature move.
“What the fuck, man!” Dex spat, rubbing at his nose. “That hurt!”
“No destruction of company property except for defekta,” Dirk said, and Derek felt himself nodding. “And watch the language. Resource Management has already flagged our team’s unprofessional demeanor.”
“I can talk however I—”
“Dex,” Darkness hissed.
Dex shrank a little. There was a moment of awkward silence.
“I can correct it,” Derek said, pulling out the pen he always carried with him alongside his wrench set. “The map. I know some shortcuts that wouldn’t be recorded.”
“Good, that’s good, Derek,” Dirk said. “Mark those on the map, if you don’t mind.”
Derek snuck looks at each of his team members while correcting their map. Delilah and Darkness spoke among themselves. Dirk paced back and forth, routinely checking each quadrant of the room, making sure no defekta had snuck up on them. Dex ran his fingers over the half-finished doodle, which seemed to be a stylized version of his own name, and a fairly artistic one.
He couldn’t help seeing each of them through the lens of himself. Delilah channeled the calm and capability that Derek felt when completing familiar tasks, although she seemed alternately weary and harried. Dex boiled with the twitchy energy Derek felt when thrown into a new challenge or unfamiliar territory. He was constantly looking around, observing, taking the emotional temperature of the group—but where Derek would try and calm everyone, Dex seemed to enjoy poking and prying at the little cracks in people’s moods.
When Derek looked at Darkness and Dirk, he saw only what he lacked. Derek lacked Darkness’s directness, their nerve, and, seemingly, their comfort in their own skin. Darkness seemed to fill the spaces they occupied. Everything about them distracted him. It made Derek distinctly unsettled; he’d grown so used to staying in the background, trying to be invisible.
And Dirk . . . Dirk was a leader. Dirk was the largest presence in the room, larger even than Darkness. Derek could feel the way everyone orbited around him, including Derek himself. Even when Dirk wasn’t talking or looking at them, Dex, Delilah, and Darkness maintained a constant awareness of his presence.
Derek was good at watching and understanding the moods and dynamics of the people he encountered. It made him an excellent sales associate, but Derek was not a leader. He had never thought of himself as one, and felt relieved that he’d be able to follow someone else through the night.
He could see that the group had faults and fissures—which group didn’t? Despite that, Derek couldn’t help but think about how he could fit into their dynamic, maybe even improve it; bring Dex out of his shell a little, share Delilah’s work so she wouldn’t look so weighed down. Offer himself as a buffer for the odd tension between Dirk and Darkness.
“There,” he said, finishing with the map. He flipped it around, presenting it to the rest of the inventory team.
Darkness sighed. “These layouts are all the same but changed just enough to disorient you. It’s like déjà vu.”
“The disorientation is by design,” Dirk said, coming over and looking down at the map. Darkness and Delilah both silently moved out of his way, so he didn’t have to loom over them, but he barely noticed. He traced his fingers through the store’s veins and arteries, tapping on the secret throughways that Derek had marked in red. Dirk looked up from the map and met Derek’s eyes in an unblinking gaze.
“This is good work,” he said. “Thank you, Derek.”
Derek flushed, equal parts pleased and uncomfortable with public praise. Tricia had very rarely offered any, and his coworkers barely acknowledged his presence.
“It should be easy to cover in teams,” Dirk said. “Dex and Delilah on the north side, me and Derek on the south, then we’ll tackle the VIP lounge as a team. Darkness can keep an eye on CCTV from the customer service desk and coordinate us, give us a heads up if that toilet drops stealth long enough to pin it down.”
The other three Ds shared a look. “You wanna take the green kid with you?” Dex asked.
“He isn’t even trained,” Delilah added.
Darkness just shifted their gaze between Dirk and Derek, who was still blushing. He’d never really been chosen for a team like this before—only assigned. It felt very different.
“You learn best by doing,” Dirk said, and Derek nodded. He’d found exactly the same thing
to be true in his work.
“Sure, for like, arts and crafts,” Darkness said, standing up. “Gotta make a mess with finger paints before you can paint Starry Night or whatever. Not with this.”
“He evaded a level-four defekta with stealth capability until backup arrived. And now he’ll have an INVENTERA of his own, and he’ll be on comms,” Dirk said calmly. Then he smirked—a strange expression to see on what was, essentially, Derek’s own face. “You’ll be able to swoop in and save him if it gets too scary.”
The air between them was tense. Derek looked at Dex and Delilah to see their reactions, but they were both looking intently away; Dex was engrossed by his phone, and Delilah was checking her equipment with the same intensity.
“I don’t need protection,” Derek said. The two of them looked over at him; Dirk with a considering look, Darkness with a trace of pity. The latter irritated him enough that he repeated himself. “I don’t need it, and I don’t want it. I want to help. I’d be proud to help.”
Darkness’s jaw clenched. “Well, far be it from me to suppress your LitenVärld spirit.”
He didn’t understand Darkness’s bitterness, and it hurt to have it aimed at him.
“I thought you’d be happy to coordinate comms,” Dirk said to Darkness. His voice was flat, but there was a subtle undertone of mockery. “You do love the sound of your own voice.”
There was a thunk from the table. Dex had slapped his hand down on the scratched finish. “Are you all done with this pissing contest? Thought we were on a schedule.”
Darkness grinned at that, Dirk rolled his eyes, and the tension between them seemed to collapse. The five of them divided up the rooms, with Darkness barricaded at the customer service desk in the center of the sales floor. Dex and Delilah would take the kitchens, bathrooms, and children’s sections. Derek and Dirk would tackle the northern end of the store, which held the bedrooms, living areas, and backyards and recreation. The VIP area was right in the center, not far from the customer service desk, and they would take that on as a full team.
“Once we’re there, we’ll figure out a strategy to flush out the toilet from . . . what?” Dirk said irritably. Dex had snorted in laughter. When Derek looked over, Darkness was grinning, and Delilah was trying very hard to keep a straight face.
“What?” Dirk said again.
Delilah, not quite able to keep the amusement off her face, asked, “Your plan is to flush the toilet?”
Dex’s snort was loud this time, and Darkness threw their head back and laughed. Derek smiled too—it was such a stupid joke, but it was funny, and it was nice to see a joke played so harmlessly at someone else’s expense.
“Oh, ha ha,” Dirk said sourly. “I can’t believe you’re all older than me and still haven’t grown the hell up.”
Derek wiped the smile off his face and looked down before Dirk noticed, but couldn’t quite stop his lips from twitching when Darkness said in a not-really-undertone, “Guess we have proof that a sense of humor isn’t genetic.”
* * *
The five of them traveled as a pack to the customer service desk first, with three people setting up Darkness’s communications and surveillance hub, while the other two kept watch.
Derek felt nervous around Dex. Part of it was due to residual anxiety and wariness around all teenagers, who seemed to sense Derek’s innate love for rules and authority, and either mercilessly made fun of him for it or avoided him altogether.
But Dex wasn’t any teenager. He wasn’t a coworker or customer—he was Derek, or rather, they were both something made from the same source material. Derek wanted to believe this gave them some sort of connection that they could build a foundation on.
And since Derek was technically the adult, it was up to him to lay the first brick.
“Whatcha doing?” he asked, squatting down next to Dex, who was holding a phone a few inches from his face and typing sullenly into it.
Dex slowly turned his gaze up to Derek without moving his head, eyebrows tilted in a disbelieving gaze. “Posting a SnapYap,” he said drily.
“Oh, that’s cool!” Derek said. “I love SnapYap.”
Dex regarded him warily. “You know what it is?”
Derek nodded eagerly. He had helped maintain the store’s social media in the weeks before Christmas, since nobody else was interested or willing to take it on. He had carefully researched best practices, brainstormed different aesthetic and rhetorical approaches, and kept careful notes on engagement so he could send Tricia weekly summaries of their analytics. And in his off hours, he had ended up using the app as a blunt weapon to beat back the loneliness that haunted his nights and mornings; watching endless videos of porch container gardeners in Brooklyn or the daily trials of twentysomethings living out of a van in the Yucatán Peninsula. It had been a great distraction, until LitenVärld had decided to consolidate all social media accounts under the main corporate office’s control.
“Did you ever see the Unlikely Umbrellas account?” Derek asked.
Dex’s stare shifted in intensity, from wary hostility to passionate fervor. “I fucking love Unlikely Umbrellas,” he said. “Do you know Only Good Dogs? I chatted with the girl that runs it, she gave me all this awesome advice about running an account.”
“Really? How cool.” Derek had never heard of the account, but if it featured only good dogs, it was probably great.
There was a disgusted scoff from behind them. “Great, this team needed another wannabe influencer,” said Dirk, imbuing the last word with an acidic disdain.
Derek shrank from his disappointment, quickly trying to explain himself. “I mostly used SnapYap to help out the store.” Dirk looked mollified, so Derek added, “I just think it’s a great platform to connect to our quirky customer base.”
“That’s good,” Dirk nodded approvingly. “I’m glad to know some people have their priorities straight.”
The praise did not make Derek feel very good, since it came at the expense of Dex going utterly stone-faced. Once Dirk had wandered back to do a final equipment check, Dex yanked his phone back out, typing furiously into it. Once he was done, he leaned back a little. Derek was unable to stop himself from sneaking a peek.
The post was an unflattering up-angle selfie of Dex’s glaring face, along with the words, MY FACE WHEN MY COWORKER NARCS ON ME FOR USING SNAPYAP THEN LOOKS OVER MY SHOULDER TO SEE WHAT I’M POSTING
FUCK YOU DEREK U NARC #HATEMYJOB #KILLMENOW
* * *
Dirk and Derek made their way back to the northern end of the store, while Darkness, Delilah, and Dex went south. The three of them gave him odd looks before they left; slightly wary, maybe a little sympathetic. It was too similar to how his normal coworkers looked at him. He felt as if he had somehow been put into place, written off. Just Derek being Derek.
Dirk must have sensed the shift in his mood as the other three left, because he clapped him on the shoulder again. “You ready for this?” he asked, but then didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course you are. You were born ready for this.”
He pulled out one of the INVENTERA scanner guns, holding it out handle-first to Derek. When Derek hesitated, unable to forget its violent whine when it was shot over his head, Dirk pushed it, gently but insistently, into his hand.
“You were made for this,” Dirk said. “You don’t have to pretend to be meek and mild right now. Stop analyzing every situation and trying to figure out how to please everyone.”
He grinned, and Derek couldn’t seem to look away. So strong, fierce, independent; as if Dirk had been freed from all the turmoil and loneliness that Derek could never seem to shake.
“Do you trust me?” Dirk asked intently.
“I trust you,” Derek said, though that wasn’t quite true; he didn’t trust himself, and Dirk seemed like a version of himself that was too good to be true.
But he wanted to believe Dirk, in what his existence seemed to promise. So he took the INVENTERA.
“It’s . . . light,” he s
aid, surprised. He shouldn’t be; he’d carried the entire box of them upstairs, but in his hand, it felt lighter even than plastic. Its black sheen seemed slightly iridescent in the yellow emergency lights. It reminded him of a beetle’s carapace.
“I know,” Dirk said. “They’re perfect tools for the job. Just like us.”
He whipped his own out, swinging it around the room to aim it at an end table. “They’re lightweight, intuitive to use, almost impossible to break—you really have to stomp the heck out of one to crack the casing. They can’t hurt anything except defekta, so there’s no danger of friendly fire, no collateral damage to the stores. They send out clean energetic pulses that target the mutagenic agents and render them inert.”
The scanner beeped, and a small flood of information filled the screen.
Derek had leaned close into Dirk to read it, and he was aware, like with Darkness, of the other person’s nearness. Darkness had felt warm, their touch soft and careful. Dirk’s presence was a little more electric, like the air around him was charged, crackling.
Dirk tapped the big red X at the top of the screen. “That means it’s safe. For now, anyway. So for now, we move on.”
Derek was able to intuit the rest of the process himself, troubleshooting as he went and solving problems with minimal effort. Dirk didn’t praise him again, but he did notice, and never hesitated to give him a proud nod. It didn’t feel patronizing or forced, the way Tricia often did when complimenting a worker’s performance. The brief acknowledgment made him feel warmer than any coupon for a free day-old pastry—Tricia’s normal reward for being the top-rated sales associate in their weekly survey results.
Almost despite himself, Derek fell into a fantasy of joining the inventory team, taking on special inventories across LitenVärld’s networks. Derek liked being busy, liked exacting tasks that were detail-rich but not complex. In some ways, it was disappointing to know that he’d been created for this kind of work. But it made a huge difference, knowing that all of the things that others treated as idiosyncrasies, or worse, helped him serve a purpose. Seeing Dirk perform the same behaviors and tics that had always set Derek apart—shifting his weight back and forth when he was excited, hyperfocusing on a single task, even the way he frequently blinked, which at least one coworker had told Derek was weird and distracting—was enormously validating. He’d felt so anomalous and so lonely. Maybe he was still an anomaly, but he was no longer alone.