Limited Hangout
Two CIA operatives were completely botching an assignment.
They sat wedged in small desks inside an airless field station where sunlight interfered with their screens. Illuminated dust mites manipulated sensitive data. Ribbons of glare obscured critical plans. The sun was less disruptive in the morning, so from eight to noon they worked as fast as they could, making frequent, flagrant errors. Then all afternoon they unconsciously adjusted their heads to obstruct the worst of it, oscillating with the molten core of the sunbeam. From behind they looked like twin glacial metronomes, soiled shirts sprouting tufts of hair, keeping languorous time.
One was updating an Excel spreadsheet of terrorists. The other was redacting a world map.
They were both incredibly bad at their jobs.
“I ran the numbers again,” said the younger operative, Wyatt, despondent.
“Did you.” Jimmy, his elder companion, grew more quietly apoplectic by the day. He was sick of the whole CIA thing and wished he’d never even heard of covert war. His fists glistered white clenching the arms of his chair. All he wanted was to retire and plan ground invasions against his dipshit neighbor’s garden, maybe plant a dirty bomb on that schmuck’s model train. “And.”
“Still got two billion terrorists.”
“Crap.”
“Two billion...that can’t be right, can it? That’s so many terrorists.”
“You used the algorithm?”
“Yeah I used the algorithm.”
Jimmy sighed, jutting his bottom teeth. The teeth matched his khakis. His fraying navy-blue CIA Family Fun Picnic ’98 polo evoked simpler times, back when the CIA held team-building picnics, and also when he had a family. It was Casual Saturday at their field station. Wyatt wore crisp coffee-colored boat shoes and a sweatshirt that said Yale, under which he wore a T-shirt that also said Yale. He could trace his family’s lineage back to the British Secret Service Bureau.
“Alright, lemme see.”
“You wanna come over here?”
“I’ll come over.”
The mid-afternoon glare compelled Jimmy to read Wyatt’s screen through an ornately choreographed office chair rearrangement, complicated by the busted wheel on Wyatt’s chair and three busted wheels on Jimmy’s. They’d emailed facilities@CIA.gov repeatedly with requests for functional equipment, as well as thick blinds to blot out the enemy sun. They never heard back.
One hindrance in their effort to acquire these items was that they didn’t know where they were. It wasn’t that their location was classified; they just couldn’t remember. It was somewhere hot and slimy: Bangladesh, say, or South Florida. Their field station had a door and a parking lot like everywhere else. And they couldn’t gaze outside for identifying landmarks on account of the sun.
Also it was hard to keep track of their location, owing to frequent transfers. Transfers kept prying locals from uncovering their true purpose. They’d lost count of the times the agency evacuated them from Eritrea or Montenegro or Tacoma mere minutes before intelligence suggested that enemy guerrillas were breaking down their door. Unfortunately, the transfers prevented the two operatives from uncovering their true purpose either. Anyway, you shouldn’t befriend potential enemies, who were everyone and lurked everywhere. The employee handbook stated the directive: don’t ever have any friends.
Often their errors had grave consequences, and on occasion got people killed.
Sometimes Jimmy opened his dipshit neighbor’s mail for clues to his ethnicity as part of his larger mission to figure out where he lived. He spied on the man’s dinner to see what foods he ate, Ethiopian or Cambodian or North Jerseyan or what. No dice. Wyatt was useless on that front. He could reply to hot girls’ social media posts and think about getting strong from anywhere on earth. Give him an internet connection and he could be in Bangladesh or South Florida for all he cared.
Be careful, Jimmy warned, don’t get too chummy with those girls.
Don’t worry sir, Wyatt assured him, they really don’t like me at all.
Wyatt venerated his older colleague. He didn’t know what else to do. The only relationships he understood were father-son and hunter-hunted.
Jimmy scowled at Wyatt’s screen. Sure enough, the gray box read 2,000,000,000 TERRORISTS FOUND. It offered options to Submit, Cancel, or, curiously, Surrender. “Sure it’s the right algorithm?”
“There’s only one, right?”
“Hell if I can follow this computer bullcrap.” His spittle speckled Wyatt’s screen. “Back when I came up, all you needed to identify subversives and radicals was a felt pen, an Instamatic, and an index card that said South America.”
“Whoa.”
“What.”
“There’s a South America?”
Several months or years earlier, the CIA purchased a bleeding-edge terrorist-identifying algorithm from the celebrated consultants KcMinsey. All it required of its user, the manual declared, was to input information gleaned from hair data, infrared spying, attacks on America, and rental car trends, among 800 other official variables, to uncover how many terrorists lurked in an assigned populace. It was the same algorithm, the firm’s brief proudly stated, used by the National Football League.
“What if…” Jimmy trailed off.
“What?” Wyatt searched his colleague with panicked deference. He was intimidated by everyone older than him, and also everyone younger than him. Every instant of his conscious existence felt precarious, although perhaps it was just his broken chair. In his darkest moments, when he’d scrolled to the end of the image results for “hot girls,” he wondered if it were possible to stabilize one’s delicate, fleeting existence, like a cloud with a concrete floor.
“I’m thinking,” Jimmy lied.
“What do I do? I can’t run two billion up the chain unless I’m sure.” Wyatt percolated with wet tension. Two billion was more than his quota required. Suspiciously more. Although if the algorithm was right, they’d give him a medal for sheer numbers. “And I’m not sure, sir.”
“It’s a mad world, kid.” Jimmy wondered if his dipshit neighbor wasn’t a foreign agent. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t clear from looking at him or his mail or his meals where they lived. He must be trained in the arts of ethnic secrecy and dinner subterfuge. Of course—that was it. Jimmy was pissed it hadn’t occurred to him sooner. “Have faith,” he said absently. “You’ll figure it out.”
“Thanks.” Elation filled Wyatt at his father figure’s magnanimous show of support. “Man, Jimmy, they sure don’t make em like you anymore.”
Faint snort of approval. Wyatt drag-dropped a few more spreadsheet terrorist cells, then gave up, awaiting a breakthrough. Jimmy pinkied ear gunk and jiggled his leg, agitating both desks.
As the sun warped his screen, Wyatt combed the data in a bright new light. He read between the numbers. Suddenly, it crystallized: a breakthrough, a sun-dappled epiphany. He tried to compose himself, failing. “Maybe my data’s wrong because someone gave it to me wrong. On purpose. Jimmy, what if we have a mole?”
“Don’t say that,” Jimmy hissed. “Don’t you ever say that.”
Wyatt panicked. He covertly scanned the area to gauge if anyone had overheard. A passing coworker who hadn’t overheard still noticed how bad Wyatt was at looking around covertly and wondered if she should quit.
“What? Mole? Can we not say mole anymore? Did we switch back to rat?”
“No.”
“Snake eyes?”
“What? That’s never been something we say.”
“The only other terms I can think of are racial slurs—”
“It’s we. Don’t say that word.”
“We?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Why?” he said, lower.
“Lower.”
“Why?”
“Because,” Jimmy whispered, “saying that word risks implicating each other. It raises questions they’ll expect us both to answer. It risks your history becoming my history.”
“I thought we were a team.”
“Christ my god kid what did I just say?”
As Wyatt drew his chair closer to Jimmy, the wheel snagged and he slid forward, jostling the skull holding his coffee. HR had sent out reminders that the skulls were Iraqi and not dishwasher-safe. He righted himself, ignoring and internalizing his partner’s disappointed sighs. “Okay, but what if there is a mole? Or rat? That would be really serious. But why would someone try to ruin me with fake numbers?”
“Christ, kid, relax. Take it easy.”
“Are they trying to get me demoted? I run the wrong numbers up the chain and I’ll be pissed out.” For decades, the punishment for failed CIA operatives was to be “pissed out”—reassigned to a urinalysis lab deep in the Apennine mountains where they ran inscrutable tests on world leaders’ urine.
“Relax, kid. You’re twitchier than a suspect on his fiftieth straight Enter Sandman.” Jimmy frowned at his redacted map like he wanted to fight it. “What’s gotten into you? Don’t tell me you didn’t eat lunch.” Wyatt shook his head mournfully. “How many times have I told you? Eat.” Jimmy pointed to his paper plate piled with slices of rancid ham and turkey.
Wolfing meat, Wyatt cursed himself inwardly for irritating his paternal idol. He bemoaned his lack of good manners. At his boarding school back in Vermont they’d tie impertinent boys like him to a flagpole. Then they’d lower the flag onto him until he began to suffocate, at which point he learned his lesson.
Wyatt wished that lessons could be taught with such directness and lasting effect in adult contexts. He joined the CIA partly due to his family legacy but also to observe, and perhaps even initiate, such straightforward teachings of lessons. It frustrated him to discover how much the agency prized secrecy. Circumspection could help in a pinch, but if you really wanted to challenge your enemies, not to mention inspire patriotic resolve in the fundamentally treasonous American populace, you’d conduct your business more visibly, and with greater flair. If only they operated more candidly, the CIA could offer all those treacherous Americans endless teachable moments. What a gift that would be.
“Tried that,” Jimmy replied when Wyatt shared this notion. “They’re doing Guantanamo right in the open, hasn’t made a lick of difference. Come on, I’ll show you,” he said, trying to locate the prison on his redacted world map.
Watching his colleague click helplessly, Wyatt grasped the real reason for the CIA’s secrecy—to punish operatives by keeping news of their victories secret even from them. He dimly recalled learning of successes in Chile and Guatemala and elsewhere, but those were all decades ago. A previous generation, if not two or three. His heart lurched. Was the CIA no longer peppering history with victories, like a machine gun headshotting a turbaned target? Although officially their gun range targets no longer wore turbans—more red tape. Mentally rifling through anecdotes he recalled from his introductory course, which he’d passed thanks to studying hard the night before and some money his father fortunately had lying around, few if any recent wins stood out. No wonder Jimmy was so demoralized. No wonder he, Wyatt, harbored doubts about the agency’s greatness.
The agency hid its successes from agents, and by doing so made it seem like it had hardly accomplished anything in recent memory. Which made prospects of future accomplishments seem small indeed. Surely that factored into the operatives’ confusion over their current assignment, which neither of them had any clue they were comprehensively fucking up. The CIA, Wyatt decided, should be better about informing its agents they were all doing a good job. Maybe they could get a mole to do that.
Jimmy seethed at his cursor. All he wanted was to leave the facility for the last time, get in his car, yell in his car, drive home very fast, and spread sadistic rumors about his bastard neighbor until the homeowners association rallied together to overthrow him. Then he’d never have to spy into the man’s bedroom window at his stupid face ever again.
Through the blinding reflection of the vile sun, a notification alerted him to a message from a coworker whose name he didn’t recognize on the workplace chat app, Hello CIA. He was sick and tired of not having a moment’s peace and being Hello CIAed every single goddamn time he was trying to work. Cursoring his redacted map away, he read the message from Melissa, wondering who she was.
She was the woman who’d walked by the desk earlier during Wyatt’s pitiful effort to covertly suss out eavesdroppers, but Jimmy didn’t know that. Besides Wyatt, he didn’t know any of his officemates’ names, although there were only twelve or thirteen. Wyatt knew their names but was too afraid of saying the wrong name or accidentally calling them an obscure racial slur to utter anything in anyone’s presence. Sometimes he was interrupted scrolling through image results for “hot girls” by picturing people he’d helped turn into ghosts. He hoped the hot girls had been spared.
Melissa had sent a picture of Sri Lanka, under which she wrote “Thoughts???”
Wyatt noticed Jimmy’s face paling and his arms flaring scarlet, like they were where his outrage went to be stored. He exuded an ominous mood. Wyatt paid close attention to Jimmy’s moods. It was research, as he was angling to someday develop moods of his own.
“The problem is—” Jimmy began. Wyatt hoped he was circling back to the pressing two billion terrorists issue. “People are asked to change too many times in one lifetime. They said stop being a kid, so I stopped, right? Grow up. So I did, I made good. I got a decent job and a family. Then the court said okay you don’t have a family anymore and I adjusted to that reality too. Now they say become a tech whiz, become this, become that. I’m old and my knees hurt. What more do they want from me?”
Wyatt glanced around to see if anyone had overheard Jimmy’s unprofessional lament, demonstrating even less clandestine skill than before. Through the window he inadvertently looked straight into the sun.
“Wait, there’s something,” he blinked electric violet, trying to reroute their discussion. “I read about it in an article.” He liked reading articles. Sometimes he Hello CIAed them to Jimmy, who ignored them. All Jimmy read were old case files and his dog-eared copy of 10,000 Tips for Divorced Dating.
“What was it?” His dipshit neighbor was surely a plant, possibly Russian or at least Balkan, directed by a nefarious underworld cabal to undermine his current mission, which he didn’t technically grasp, couldn’t accurately explain, and was, furthermore, bungling.
Wyatt paused, petrified by Jimmy’s erratic attention. He imagined himself cornered by wolves and trying to send them an email explaining everything before they dug into his neck with their slobbery teeth. “It was an article about the ways different life forms cope with stress and danger.” He plumbed his memory. “Mechanisms, I think they’re called.”
Jimmy peered at Wyatt’s pleading face, his drooping lanyard. “Where’d you read that?”
“Uh. A website. Can’t remember the name.”
“Well what kind of mechanisms are we talking?”
“That’s the amazing part. They’re all different.” Wyatt grew more pleased and terrified at Jimmy’s attention. “For instance did you know that algae send out a low-tone distress signal to alert other algae that there’s a predator nearby? They evolved that way over time, like how beaches evolved from sand, I think. That’s why algae grows in clumps, so they can be close enough to other algae to send the warning down the chain and escape predators.”
“Algae.” Jimmy seemed intrigued. “I thought that was a plant.”
Eyebrows climbing, Wyatt nodded. “Plants are capable of astonishing things.”
He remembered now where he’d read about algae. It was a site called Fun Plant Facts, and as it materialized in his mind, he was fairly certain from what he recalled of the fonts, colors, and cheerful cartoon animal friends that it was a website for children. How had he found it? Did it even cite sources? Dismissing these impressions, he pressed on.
“I wanted to tell you because it seemed like we’re both thinking about change, and how it’s kind of demoralizing to work here because they keep forcing us to learn new computer programs and keeping our victories secret and not giving us blinds to prevent the sun. Maybe they want to make us adapt to these new realities, like, against our will.”
“Hey yeah. Like forced evolution.”
The ecstasy of being understood flooded Wyatt’s chest. “Like, why don’t we understand our assignment? Because they want us to think that if we don’t understand, or can’t keep up, we’re the ones who can’t get with the program. But what if we don’t understand because we’re unconsciously resisting their mission to adapt us into people who understand? What if we were hired by the CIA in an experimental project of evolutionary control? Like, testing out evolutionary weapons? But on us?” They nodded furiously at one another. “We have to fight fire with fire. We have to become like the algae—we have to evolve to warn each other before it’s too late.”
Jimmy sank in his chair.
“What?”
“What if it is too late?” Morose, he searched his screen for hidden advice, but all he noticed was Melissa’s follow-up to her previous message, a picture of Mount Kilimanjaro under which she’d written “??????????????” Annoyance at his job’s demands rammed through his repressed central nervous system. “Why does everyone ask me everything all the time?” His hoarse low tone frightened Wyatt. “What do they want from me? I’m just a working stiff who wants to disappear a few troublemakers and accuse an activist of Russia and go home to my fam—to my fucking neigh—to my goddamn house. There’s too much.” A single tear ground itself from his eye, glinting on his cheek like ice in the terrible sun. “There’s too much.”
Moved by his colleague’s humiliating release of emotion, Wyatt tried comforting him by staring at his own screen and pretending he wasn’t there. It was a small gesture but he hoped it helped. He wondered why he brought up reading articles at all, given the consequences. Going forward he’d remember to never do anything again.
They sat quietly, perspiring, the only sounds the muffled voice of a colleague one cubicle over selling automatic rifles to Burger King. Wyatt resolved to keep his head down and focus solely on his work, as if he had sold his soul to the devil in order to be able to focus solely on his work. In exchange for his soul he would work nights, Christmas, whatever it took. While Jimmy wept beside him, he ran the terrorism algorithm again. Estimated terrorists: two billion and one.
“It’s mind control, is what it is,” he said aloud, knowing the devil was coming for his soul because already he’d broken his promise to work forever in exchange for the gift of shutting up. But his newfound soullessness was immediately assuaged when Jimmy began nodding.
“Mind control.” Jimmy auditioned the phrase on his tongue, rifled it through his underbite khaki teeth. He began making connections. He eyed Wyatt. Then he quickly thought about baseball to distract anyone trying to control his mind. Kirby Puckett. The Minnesota Twins, their barren farm system. Knuckleballs. Joe Buck announcing home runs with smirking self-loathing on a Sunday afternoon. There was something odd about his colleague’s remark, something that hung in the air like a victim. “Evolutionary mind control—Agent Greeves, what was that you said to me earlier?”
Wyatt was stumped. “That I accidentally shipped fifty caches of AKs to the Serbs?”
“No, the other thing.”
“That I repeatedly sent state secrets to terrorists catfishing me?”
Jimmy shook his head.
“That I disagree conceptually with the idea of freedom?”
“No, a minute ago—you said, they don’t make em like you anymore. What did you mean by that, Greeves?”
Wyatt slowly spun in his chair to face Jimmy. His colleague’s face was impassive but his arms flared crimson, veins protruding.
“Wait, I didn’t, I didn’t mean anything.”
“No?”
“I mean, yeah?”
“Because it sounded to me like you accidentally admitted to participating in a longstanding covert operation that uses mind control to make operatives blindly serve agency objectives. And that I have been made to be one of those operatives. I’m being controlled.”
Attempting to increase the distance between them, Wyatt thrust backwards, collided with the laminate cubicle wall, and toppled to the floor. Jimmy loomed over him.
“And here you are admitting it, and spouting all this science-y bullcrap to throw me off the trail. Tell me the truth: is algae even real?”
“I think so, it was online—”
Jimmy slapped his hand on Wyatt’s desk, leaving a partial sweat handprint. He could hardly contemplate the scope of the betrayal, the manipulation from the agency, his bosses—whoever they were—his dipshit neighbor, the malevolent force of the sun. But Wyatt’s complicity, that was the worst. He’d long entertained doubts about his young colleague’s capabilities, but he expected Wyatt to revere him, to not judge him by his low-ranked status relative to his years with the agency, nor the timeliness or lack thereof of his child support payments. Yet here Wyatt cowered, admitted plotting against him all these years, or months, or however long it had been. At the boarding school he attended long ago, in New Hampshire, they punished lying by collaring the liar and marching him straight to the authorities.
“Get up.” He stood.
Wyatt half rose but stopped himself. “Where are you going?”
“You and I are going to HR.”
Visions of himself walking out of the building into the hot sun carrying a box of his things danced in Wyatt’s addled brain—things the agency would never in a million years permit a terminated operative to remove from the premises.
“You’re not going to tell them about me saying we, are you?”
“I don’t know what I’m going to tell them.”
Like many company men, Jimmy and Wyatt held a fervent respect for the whims of superior officers, and the creation a year or so prior of an agency-controlled neutral third-party human resources department for remedying disputes was surely one of their best ideas yet. No matter where they were, whether it was Haiti or Algeria or Myrtle Beach or what, the HR office stood enshrined like an American embassy with the principles of fairness, equality, and getting one’s just desserts. Jimmy marched headlong toward the HR office. Wyatt, trailing, knew they’d gone the wrong way, but didn’t want to correct Jimmy in front of colleagues peeping from cubicles, especially since Jimmy now believed them all enmeshed in the CIA’s mind-control operation. It would exacerbate things. Wyatt felt thrown adrift, like his information had toppled a great leader and now a city was collapsing around him.
After several wrong turns, they entered the dim sanctum outside the HR office. In the vestibule they hesitated, clenching and unclenching their hands, tapping the carpet like it would give way. The inner office door opened and they glanced at Tracy, the regional HR manager of whichever foul humid region it was.
“I’ll be with you agents momentarily. Sit.”
In the chairs they were tempted to stretch their tight limbs. Unlike their claustrophobic cubicle, there was room. Wyatt didn’t, lamenting inwardly that some people are born afraid. Beside Wyatt, Jimmy felt a rising buoyancy. At last he’d discovered the source of his lifelong consternation and pain.
“...just burn it,” they heard as Tracy opened the door and composed her face in a weary smile. “Agents Vargas and Greeves, what can I do for you today?” Her response gave both agents pause. Jimmy wondered how she knew their names. He only knew hers because it said on the door, although he’d already forgotten it. What puzzled Wyatt was her inflection of the word “today,” as if it meant “this time,” as if she’d made this same inquiry to them many times before.
Standing and shoving his polo shirttails deeper into his khakis to emphasize his seriousness, Jimmy spoke. “I am a victim of mind control.”
She looked at Wyatt expectantly. Wyatt resolved to say nothing and let his fate fall where it may.
Jimmy thumbed his way. “And he’s helping.”
“Yikes,” Tracy said. She grasped the severity of their predicament immediately. “Would you like to file an official incident report?”
They followed her into the office. From a file cabinet she extracted a massive three-ring binder labeled COMPLAINTS and flipped through handwritten and heavily handcensored pages, wetting her finger with each corner turn. It took several minutes. Finding a fresh page, she bade the agents sit so she could waterboard them a few questions.
“You’re going to waterboard us?” Wyatt asked. He sounded skeptical.
Tracy seemed surprised. “Otherwise how will we know that you’re telling the truth?”
“Makes sense to us,” Jimmy said, envisioning himself winning. “The truth will set you free. Sun Tzu said that.”
“I know.” Tracy gestured to a lone skier gliding over snow-capped mountains toward a cursive caption framed on her wall. “Now let’s start at the beginning.” From behind her desk she wheeled out the waterboarding unit, which Wyatt recognized from using on detainees in Beirut, and Jimmy recognized from using on detainees in a Wisconsin Culver’s who kept screwing up his order. Each, though, upon further recognition, experienced a faint jolt of phantom pain in the nostrils, like water had been shoved up his nose. “Who wants to file their incident report first?”
“I will.” Wyatt wanted to impress his elder colleague, a talented agent he felt was more a father to him than his own father, who’d abandoned the family to a life of CIA and died in Cuba trying to convince Fidel Castro that if his hand was bigger than his face it meant he had cancer. Loneliness had curdled Wyatt, ravaging his attempts to live a normal life, and he recognized that only the truth could heal the fissure threatening his sole meaningful human connection. He lay down on the waterboarding table, hoping to make a difference. Tracy tightened a thick leather strap across the Yale, then covered his face with a crisp white CIA-monogrammed cloth and pressed it to his eyes and mouth. He saw stars, great big ones.
“Can you please state the date and time of the incident?” asked Tracy, then poured water onto his face.
Jimmy watched his gagging colleague with the impassive expression befitting a man of his rank who wished to be a much higher rank. He shifted his shoes out of the path of water pooling on the floor.
Tracy removed the blindfold. “Well?”
Wyatt wheezed. His eyes were bloodshot. “Jimmy,” he gasped, “what’s today?”
“What do I look like, a calendar?”
“I’ll ask you again,” said Tracy, returning the wet monogrammed cloth to Wyatt’s face. “What was the date and time of the incident?”
On the third waterboarding Wyatt said the wrong date, and recanted this testimony by the fifth one, when he remembered the correct date and a time. Tracy asked more questions. Her inquisitive nature was a great asset to her as a human resources manager, Jimmy decided. He might have grown to hate the CIA through years of neglect, but you had to admit they hired good people.
“You’re a natural,” he told her after watching her waterboard Wyatt several follow-up questions about whether he felt comfortable returning to work until the issue was resolved. He did. I’ll keep his nose out of trouble, Jimmy said. The HR office windows faced the brick wall of the building opposite, keeping the merciless sunlight at bay, and Jimmy could have sat there all afternoon, silently plotting how to assassinate his neighbor and make it look like an accident over the gentle slosh of water on his young colleague’s face. He realized he’d forgotten the impetus for their trip to HR. Then it hit him: mind control. Even now, its long tendrils invaded his thinking, plotting to make him forget. But soon the agency would cease its callous mistreatment of himself and the other men and women who wore the faded navy-blue polo shirts of the CIA, who worked every day in godforsaken hellholes like wherever he currently was to keep the world’s nightmares at bay. He was lodging a formal complaint and there would soon be piping-hot justice on the way. After his betrayer Wyatt was done with his enhanced HR interrogation it would be his turn, and then they could return to their snug shared desk to see if they couldn’t get that tricky algorithm down to a manageable number of terrorists. Then maybe they could get some ice cream.
“Associating with Agent Greeves in public will completely blow your cover, in which case the agency will have no choice but to terminate you and then make your life a living hell,” Tracy said when Jimmy suggested getting ice cream to Wyatt as they traded positions on the waterboarding table. Wyatt nodded, wheezing.
“They don’t make em like me anymore, you know,” said Jimmy, lying down, ready to get this mind control situation cleared up so he could return to work. Wyatt hunched wetly in his seat, peering between his fingers as the HR manager interrogated his colleague and decanted water over his face. In between pours Jimmy shouted “They don’t make em like me anymore.” This was the wrong answer, according to Tracy, who poured more and more water, but to Wyatt there was something about it that seemed right. He squinted transfixed, deeply impressed by Jimmy’s commitment to his idea of himself.
“See you tomorrow.” Tracy sighed them out of the HR office into the fetid labyrinth of their dismal outpost. Shivering, pale, Jimmy went first, muttering indistinctly to himself. Wyatt tried to overhear him but couldn’t comprehend his mumbles. Still disoriented, he stopped in the hallway. He didn’t know whether to close the door or leave it open. He looked at Tracy, immersed in paperwork, debating whether to interrupt her. Doing so felt rude, after all the help she’d given them. What should he do with the door? What was the policy? Staring at her to summon her attention didn’t work. He felt idiotic for bungling even this basic task. Jimmy stumbled down the hall, turned the corner, and disappeared. His hand grasping the handle, dread rose within Wyatt at the very idea of a door.
Devin Schiff is a writer and comedian in Chicago. He was a staff writer and editor at The Onion for nine years. His work has also appeared in Jacobin, Vice, and the Chicago Quarterly Review.
Artwork by Sam Keshishian