fiction

In the week before Memorial day, HR sent a cheerful announcement that everyone could wear jeans for the duration of the summer, as though thick denim would render the uncomfortably warm office more tolerable or the walk across the unsheltered parking lot less sweaty. Ignoring the new privilege, Jody Garza continued to wear the same rotation of slightly different colored khaki slacks until the end of June. On the first of July Amazon Prime boxes showed up on his doorstep, waiting for him when he came home, all of them with his wife’s name on the label.

He texted her. “Did you order something?”

She responded with cryptic emojis. The boxes continued to arrive for another week. Darlene let them pile up until Sunday night. Then she spread a pair of scissors into a makeshift knife, refusing his offer to find the box cutter, and opened them all, ripping the tape more than cutting.

“Try these on,” she said.

Jeans.

He complained and snarked and commented on how unprofessional it all was. How it was actually uncomfortable. She said he looked like an old man, refusing to participate in casual dress. He said he was a fiscal engineer and Hastings didn’t hire him for fashion.

Some of them fit, though. She watched until he finished. Bare legs and stocking feet. Jeans on. Holding the shirt up to see how they fell on his hips. Bare legs again. At the end she nodded and left the room.

“What about all this?” he asked, shipping boxes and cut tags across the floor.

“Leave it.”

He put everything in its place. The pairs that didn’t fit back into boxes and padded envelopes. Printed out the return forms, stuck on, taped up. He combed the floor for every tag scrap and stray pin barb. He washed a single pair on the delicate cycle, cold, and dried it on the lowest setting so it wouldn’t shrink.

In the morning, after Darlene had left for work, he stood at the ironing board, legs bare, alone, and pressed the new jeans until they were smooth as a painting. Only then did he notice the unraveling. Just at the pocket. A stitch of thread poking out, unmoored from the line that came before and after. He clipped it, close to the fabric, and put it out of his mind.

His commute was only a few miles, but in the years of his employment, it seemed to grow longer every month. Darlene had suggested this location as close to his work. Her office, she reasoned, was likely to move in the next year and no one had a clue what part of town it would be in, so they should live near Jody’s job. Hastings was going nowhere.

Then the new development on the other side of Piedmont had added a river of cars turning left into his path. Then the charter school had opened in the strip mall. Then construction closed a lane and lasted half a year or more. He now spent almost an hour in the car every work day. He listened to the news on NPR and when that became too much, listened to fantasy novels read aloud. Bleeding swords, lustful knights in doomed triangles of love, traitorous wizards. It compressed the time. The words and narrative a vise on his perception of the passage of time as his conscious mind focused on what would come next, and his reflex and habit drove.

If the nature of this trade had suggested itself, he put it out of his mind.

There used to be a standing meeting each morning at 8:30. The walk from the parking lot to the conference room on the second floor took seven minutes. Ten if he wanted to have coffee for the meeting. He was unfailingly punctual. The addition of the west coast team pushed the daily meeting to 11:30 east coast time. Then it started to interfere with lunch so it got dropped altogether and was nothing more than a dim memory for the corporate old timers.

Nothing could make him late now. That is to say that no one expected Jody Garza to be at his desk at any particular time. If he arrived at eight or nine or even later, no particular event or activity marked him as late. This left him feeling, in some ways, hollow. Not to be expected or required. Not to be missed when he failed to show up on time, which he never did, but the thought of being missed was nice.

He dropped his laptop bag on his desk. 8:29. The cubicles around his were empty, quiet spreading across the floor like a ticking clock. He nodded to the tall guy from customer service on the way to the break room and waited his turn behind the bearded guy from IT before sliding his beige Hastings mug beneath the spout of the coffee machine. Medium medium bold roast was the only option, so he pressed that. He had no idea what the repeated “mediums” might represent. Medium size and medium strength? The other options were grayed out on the touch screen. There was no small or strong. No other roasts than bold.

It was good coffee, though. Much better than what he and Darlene drank at home.

“Are you drinking that?” Jody turned to see Wayne Colley standing behind him. Wayne was in his forties, a few years younger than Jody, but he was an old-timer when it came to seniority. He had been at Hastings longer than anyone Jody knew.

“Yeah. I like it.”

Wayne made a face.

“Well it’s better than the stuff we used to have,” Jody said. “In that grimy pot.”

“It is better than that,” Wayne said. “Come down to the 602 lab. We’ve got a new machine down there that does a fantastic brew.”

He sounded out the individual digits in 602: six oh two.

“Coffee?” Jody asked. “It’s a coffee machine? And what is the six oh two lab? I’ve never heard of it.”

Wayne looked at him as though he were a simpleton. “Dump that swill out and follow me.”

Jody set aside the unhealthy suspicion and guilt that haunted him whenever he wasted anything and dumped the perfectly good coffee that he liked into the sink.

Wayne led him down the back stairwell and into the wing of the building that housed all the servers. All the doors off this hallway were windowless double doors peppered with warnings about unauthorized access and static guard procedures. Some had laser eye warnings. Jody had never been inside any of them.

Wayne explained as they walked. “After the layoffs last Christmas – or was it the Christmas before last? – doesn’t matter. They cleared out all the admins and just hired three contract workers from Seattle to babysit the racks. Like each one gets an eight hour shift to cover the place 24/7 and they just worked them like dogs. No days off. And if you needed physical access to the equipment and the guy was taking a dump, tough luck. You know? Untenable.”

They stopped in from of a set of doors that had a bright orange sign which read “Warning: Hearing Protection Required”. A line drawing of a man in earmuffs illustrated the point.

Wayne swiped his badge and held the door for Jody. “Don’t worry about your hearing.”

Inside, a ramp led up to a raised floor and rack after empty rack with only a stray cable hanging down. It was an enormous room and utterly silent.

“Untenable,” Wayne said. “So they put all the servers in the cloud or maybe just turned the whole thing off. I don’t know.”

“Not the cloud,” Jody said.

“What?”

“Contracts would have been signed or agreements extended or amended. It’s my job. I see those things. You couldn’t move this much off site and not get a bump in the books.”

Wayne shrugged. “Well this is all off the books now.”

“Did it occur to you, Wayne, that the reason no one ever showed me the six oh two lab was because it is off the books?”

“I guess I never considered that,” Wayne said. Then, after a moment, “Well...uh...our little secret then.”

“Where’s the coffee machine?”

“Back here.”

Wayne led Jody around the empty racks, past steel cabinets with once locked doors that now stood open, valueless. At the back of the server room the raised floor dipped back down to a normal level and two glass doors led to a room beyond. Wayne held the door for him.

“This is the 602 lab. The server room back in the day was too loud and too cold for anyone to work in, so they have this anteroom with desks so the guys could work in comfort. Take conference calls and what not.”

The room ran along the width of the server space, but against the outside wall. There were eight desks against the wall, all empty husks with little indication that anyone had ever used them for productive work. The outside wall was a bank of window and provided an unobstructed view of the parking lot and the grounds. Jody had never seen anything like it. No offices had such a view.

“Why have I…”

“You can’t see in from outside,” Wayne said. “It’s tinted. No one knows this is here.”

A man and a woman entered the office behind them.

“Hey, guys,” Wayne said. “Do you know Jody? This is Stephanie and Larry.”

A cold pause while they digested Jody’s presence. They warmed up but the friendliness seemed performative or at least overdone to Jody.

“I think we’ve met,” Stephanie said. “From finance, right?”

Larry said, “Yeah, I’ve seen you around. Didn’t you work on the United Way thing last month?”

Neither Stephanie or Larry were at all familiar to Jody. He tried to place their faces. Hastings employed over seventy-five thousand people, three thousand at this location alone, so it was not improbable that they had never met. The utter lack of familiarity was disconcerting. And they were both overdressed. He was the only one wearing jeans.

“I heard you have the best coffee back here,” Jody said.

They both laughed. Forced.

“It makes fantastic coffee,” Stephanie said. “Let’s brew you up a cup.”

There was that word again. Fantastic. Jody’s mind went back to his grandmother saying “wunderbar” with a German accent even though no one in their family was German.

Larry opened a featureless beige cabinet to reveal the coffee machine. A gold plated hybrid of a space heater and an old timey radio. Knobs and dials protruded across the front and there was a crank on the left side, golden armed with a deep brown handle. To the untrained observer, which Jody certainly was, there was no clear place to put your cup, no designated exit point for the liquid. A stack of bone white porcelain cups and saucers were off to one side.

Jody’s first thought was that it must have cost a fortune and its very presence in this room or even in this building was evidence of gross malfeasance. He said nothing. He didn’t want to be that guy.

His second thought was that he wanted to take a picture to show to his wife.

“How does it work?” Jody asked. “Is it espresso?”

Stephanie chuckled. “We are way beyond espresso, Jody. Turn the crank.”

Jody gripped the wooden knob. It was real wood and smooth. This machine looked and felt expensive.

“We got a discount for buying the left handed version.”

The crank made no sound and offered no resistance as he turned.

“Is this the right speed?” Jody asked.

“The machine will let you know. Try a little faster.”

He cranked faster and the machine resisted, firmly but gently the crank pushed back, refusing to turn until he slowed down again and the mechanism once more became frictionless. Then it came to a gentle stop and would crank no more.

“That’s enough. You can hear it working now.”

A burbling sound came from inside the machine, unlabeled gauges swung their needles from right to left, the plated sides flinched as though something inside were trying to escape, and protuberant arms jerked. Stephanie placed a cup before the machine, gently positioning it with two hands and finishing the maneuver with a slight bow. She toggled a switch and coffee poured out into the cup. The stream fell down like a waterfall from a tiny spout at the top of the machine, splashing into the cup. Not a drop was spilled and when the machine came to a rest and no more liquid flowed, what was left was a perfectly foamed cappuccino, its warm aroma flowering in the air.

Stephanie handed the cup to Jody. “Try it.”

The coffee was delicious. As Jody sipped, Larry made cups for the rest of them. By adjusting certain knobs and turning levers, the machine could be configured to make all manner of drinks. Stephanie preferred a latte. Larry liked his cappuccino with flavored syrup.

“Does it have a reservoir?” Jody asked. “Or is there plumbing back here?”

“Only the purest filtered water,” Wayne answered which was not at all an answer to the question.

“Does it grind the beans? I didn’t hear any grinding.”

Larry touched him on the shoulder. “Just enjoy your coffee.”

He was enjoying it, but at the midpoint of his cup, when he had drunk half the coffee and still had half again yet to go, he noticed that the outer seam of his pants – his jeans – had come unstitched. A loose thread dangled and already the fabric buckled. Jody set his cup on a desk.

“Does anyone have scissors?” he asked.

Wayne handed him a pair from a mesh desk caddy on one of the desks.

“What’s wrong?”

“My jeans are unraveling,” Jody said.

Stephanie leaned close and squinted. “I don’t see anything.”

He twisted awkwardly and cut the thread close to the seam, then caught a glimpse of the back hem at the bottom of his jeans where stray threads sprouted like heads of the hydra.

“I see it,” Larry said. “You have to take care of those.”

“They’re brand new. I only washed them once.”

“Did you do a gentle cycle? There’s a lot of loose threads around the back. You might be able to fix those up at home. Reset the stitch. I don’t know.”

Jody tugged the jeans sideways and twisted, but still couldn’t see. “I’ll be right back.”

Stephanie handed him a thick plastic card on a lanyard. “Take the visitor badge so you can get back in.”

He took the scissors with him. The bathroom was deserted and looked like a place that hadn’t seen a visitor or a maintenance worker in a month. The last round of layoffs had drained this wing. Jody took off his pants and, legs bare between the hem of his underwear and the tops off his dress socks, examined the fraying threads. He clipped each one with care, optimism seeping into the movement of his fingers. He could fix it. It was just a few loose ends that had surfaced in the wash.

Soon he understood that these jeans could not be fixed. They were defective. Every stitch would come undone in time. The seams would pucker, separate, and the whole construction would fall apart. He put his pants on and went back to the 602 lab.

In the quiet and cool server room, Jody recognized now what had been familiar to him the first time he had walked through the door. It was a mausoleum. The stillness. The cool air. The racks like empty graves.

From the middle of the server room, Jody saw his three coworkers framed in the wide glass window, talking, smiles on their faces. He remembered the moment with perfect clarity because of what happened next, but also because genuine smiles were so rare in this workplace. No one ever smiled like that unless they were leaving. Then they dropped to the floor. Jody had no way to make sense of the event. A prank? A game? Poisoned coffee from the gold plated luxury machine? He waited for the them to rise back from the floor into his line of sight, but they did not.

Inside the office, Wayne, Larry, and Stephanie were on the floor as though they were discarded dolls, playthings dropped at the end of the day, where they awaited some more responsible entity to arrive and place them in a box. No coffee had been spilled. Each of them had put down their cups before they fell.

As he called the security desk from one of the phones, Jody thought that something could have been wrong with the air in the room, a poison, or too much carbon monoxide. He held his breath.

“Stay calm. Are they breathing?”

Jody had to let out his own breath to respond. “I don’t know.”

Their mouths were open and slack, but their chests rose and fell, strong breaths as though they were in a deep sleep.

“They are breathing,” he said.

He hung up the phone while the person on the other end was still speaking, then went out into the server room to wait for help to arrive. It felt safer out there watching his three fallen coworkers through the glass window.

At home, his wife, Darlene, streamed music from her phone onto a tinny Bluetooth speaker. Plastic rattled with the lower bass notes.

“Something happened at work today.”

She stopped swiping her phone and looked up at him.

By the time he had held the door open for the first responders, Stephanie had already regained consciousness. Larry and Wayne followed soon after. He watched them being questioned, then being wheeled out one by one on stretchers. They were alert and even kidding a little with the paramedics, but they did not know him. He made eye contact with each one as they were rolled by. Their expressions remained neutral. They shut down the entire campus for the day. Local news arrived to station field reporters in the parking lot. Mysterious illness shuts down Hastings office. But he couldn’t tell her all that.

“Three people at the office got sick and passed out. They don’t know what caused it.”

“Jesus,” she said. “Are they all right?”

“I think so. They took them to the hospital. They don’t know if it was the air or what. Coffee, maybe.”

He sat down next to her on the sofa. She turned to him, their legs touching at the knee.

“Hold on,” she said. “There’s–”

Darlene put two fingers into his mouth and felt along the gumline. The saltiness of her skin brought water under his tongue like an arousal. She hooked his cheek outward as though he were a fish on the line, then lowered herself to eye level with his chin and peered inside. Unsatisfied, she put two fingers from her other hand inside and dug around. She held his tongue down. Saliva rolled passed his lips, a cool stream on his chin and neck.

“You should get that checked out.”