“Charlotte?” he whispered in a kind of squeak.
One of the men at the urinals hawked and spat, and both men zipped up and moved around the privacy barrier to the sinks, where Paul lost track of what they were saying. He took advantage of the commotion to stand, keeping an eye on the ceiling panels above. As scared as he was, he didn’t want his coworkers to know that he came in here every day at the same time and for what purpose. While the faucets hissed and the men laughed, he hauled up his trousers. But he waited until he heard the door open and the men’s voices echo down the hall before he let himself out of the stall and hurried to the sinks. He watched the ceiling behind him in the mirror as he washed his hands. It’s not her, he told himself. I was dreaming. But his hands shook as he dried them with a length of paper towel, and with one last, nervous glance at the panels overhead, he fled.
FOUR
BY LUNCHTIME PAUL HAD managed to convince himself that the creaking he’d heard in the men’s room ceiling was a product of his imagination brought on by his anxiety; no doubt he’d simply dozed for a moment and dreamed the noise. In the meantime he’d come back to his cube to find Olivia Haddock in the middle of a tense exchange with the dying tech writer. Paul could not see the poor man, could only hear the wheeze of his breath, but as he slipped into his own cube he got a good look at Olivia posed in the tech writer’s doorway, one foot slightly behind the other, her hands clasped palm to palm just below her breasts. It was a stance from her college cheerleading days, no doubt, taught to her by a dance instructor or a drama coach. She looked ready to fill her lungs and deliver a soliloquy or launch into a pirouette, but instead she aimed her wide-eyed gaze down her sharp nose at the tech writer.
“I don’t see what the difficulty is,” she sang, as Paul lowered himself gingerly into his squeaking seat. “I read the contract to mean that you work until the job is done.”
From the other side of the partition came an extra long, extra loud wheeze from the dying tech writer.
“That’s not how it works,” he said in a ragged, froggy rumble that was exhausting to listen to no matter how many times Paul heard it. The tech writer drew an even longer breath through his tube. “My agent books me for a fixed period of time.” Another long, whistling breath. “If I work past that time, I’m not being paid.”
The next few words dropped below Paul’s hearing as the tech writer ran out of breath. Paul had been listening to this argument for a week now, in halting installments, as Olivia posed in the dying tech writer’s doorway and delivered ultimatums with a sadism barely disguised as professionalism, and the dying tech writer responded in ragged gusts of hard-won air. After a bloodbath of downsizing several years ago, many workers in the General Services Division had been asked to take on extra responsibilities beyond their expertise in purchasing. Olivia had been tasked with the design and implementation of an intranet Web site where TxDoGS offices statewide could order their own office supplies; this site would automatically monitor supply usage and regulate the inventory, even to the extent of automatically generating bids from vendors when necessary. The dying tech writer had been hired as a freelance Web designer to create the page. In other words, on top of keeping the Texas Department of General Services in highlighters, manila folders, and jam-free printer paper, Olivia was also pursuing her own redundancy with kamikaze determination. If the project worked the way it was supposed to, she’d be out of a job.
“As I understand it,” Olivia continued in her steel magnolia singsong, “you don’t receive your final paycheck until I’m satisfied with the work. And I certainly can’t call unfinished work satisfactory.”
Another desperate, dying wheeze. “It is finished,” said the tech writer.
“Not until it’s tested.”
Paul could feel the grinding of Olivia’s joined palms like a pressure on his heart.
“You hired me to write it.” Inhale. “Beta testing is not my job.”
“But until it’s beta tested, it’s not finished, and you haven’t done your job.”
They went on, but Paul was already preoccupied with his own racing thoughts. First, Olivia’s bound to win, if only because she can breathe. Next, my life could be worse — I could be working for Olivia. Then, if the state legislature has its way, someday we’ll all be temps — except for La Cucaracha, who’ll always find a way to survive. And, tech writers have agents? Like actors and authors? Even if it does mean working for Olivia Haddock, this guy must make, what, twenty, twenty-five bucks an hour? I have to talk to Rick, Paul decided. Today.
“Do what you have to,” Olivia said, “but don’t forget? You don’t get that last paycheck until I sign off on it.”
Olivia marched past Paul’s door and into her own cube. Paul stared unseeing at his computer screen, trying to gauge if the rhythmic whine of the tech writer’s breathing was more agitated than usual. There was no way to tell.
On the dot of noon, Paul took a book out of the cabinet over his desk and went downstairs to the hall outside the lunchroom, where he retrieved his bag lunch and bought a Coke from one of the machines. A line snaked out the door of the cafeteria, and the smell of deep-fried potatoes and grilling hamburgers was almost visible, like a haze. Paul edged past the crowd around the microwaves — men reheating last night’s cheese enchiladas, women heating up their lo-cal frozen lunches — and from the archway of the dining room, at the edge of its busy roar, he looked for a small table where he might sit by himself and read. The only empty table was the one next to the Colonel’s in the far corner of the room, between two wide expanses of amber-tinted window overlooking the river. The Colonel sat at this same table every day, with his back to the corner, where he could command the widest field of fire. His wife was Japanese, and today, as always, the Colonel used his chopsticks to eat the marvelously compact lunch she’d prepared him — rice, sushi, seaweed — out of a beautiful, enameled black box, his only purchase a steaming Styrofoam cup trailing the string of a tea bag. To the Colonel’s left, J.J. glowered over his hamburger, fries, and jumbo soda the way he glowered at his computer screen, while on the Colonel’s right, Bob Wier crunched carrot sticks out of a Tupperware tub, his mournful eyes as bright as polished buttons. Across from the Colonel was an empty seat where no one ever sat, and which no one even dared borrow for another table.