Dear Friend, it began. Prefer best wonderful Smart lamp for enlarging & shine your business channel?

I admired the phrasing, the &, the capitalization of Smart. His would be the only email worth my attention all week. It would give me the energy to keep going, give me something to look forward to. Before I even finished, I knew I would reply. Enlarging & shine my business channel? And just as I’m noodling up the perfect response, in struts the cheery, reported-for-sexual-harassment-but-nothing-happened-cuz-he-was-the-top-salesman salesman. His first move of the moment was to lean on the receptionist’s desk with an unnecessary lean. Half of that guy’s job was just leaning, smiling, blathering on ‘til he sold a bunch of parts to all the local places because he had great relationships. Depending on which side of the flag he was talking to, Cheery Salesman would reference either: his gay son or his Marine Corps son. It was unclear if either existed.

Howdy! said Cheery Salesman when he saw me looking over from my dark cubicle.

One hand raised itself in a little wave and the other closed my screen. Cheery Salesman did not deserve to be in the loop regarding my interesting email so I pretended to be consumed by the dark grids and light green sketches and little red markups. If my drafting assignment could have had a voice, it would have been that of a long, dull bellow like a barge makes. It’d call to me from the Sea of Boredom, a sad, low-pitched request for me to finish up by noon.

I made one edit then heard, Okay, byebye! And Cheery Salesman was sauntering out of the room, a double-knock on the corner of my desk as he passed. Noon! he called.

Back to my email. Enlarging & shine my business channel? What phrasing. I knew Tim Wu probably didn’t understand that I did not have a business or a channel. I was a freelance engineer contracted to come “clean up” some of the company’s assignments. They’d send me some mess with hard-to-decipher notes, I’d toil away fixing it up then send it back and wait for someone else to take the credit. There’s no way Tim Wu understood my business. Maybe his email wasn’t even meant for me. Still. Tim Wu was all I had that day.

Global Debut! Wu boasted. Shine table lamp. Magnetic! The exclamation marks threw me. He sounded excited about it, at least. That was more than I could say about my job. Light disfigurement terror daytime alternate, said the next line.

Light disfigurement? Did that imply that the lamp itself was disfigured, that the light coming from it was distorted, or–a less likely but still possible scenario–that the disfigurement one might experience in this lighting situation would only be light? And if so, what was the situation we were in in which one might be disfigured in any type of way, especially by way of light?

Dear Tim Wu,

I am intrigued. Do you have photos of these so-called “daytime alternate magnetic lamps?” Can I ask what the terror is, in this situation?

Yours,

T.

Within mere minutes, who appeared in my inbox but one Tim Wu?

Dear friend, he began. Advantage? We blindly sleep. No problem! Magnetic. Extremist groovy.

Best Regards!

Tim Wu | President

It seemed that Tim Wu had been upgraded. He did not mention his presidency in his previous correspondence. And was it intentional that Tim Wu was not answering my questions? Avoiding them, perhaps. But perhaps I was being elitist. Perhaps Tim Wu’s first language was not English. I did not want to make Tim Wu feel stupid. That was against my motto. My ethos. I once had a professor who would say, “There are no such things as dumb questions, only pretentious teachers.” She was the only engineering professor I liked. Perhaps because she was the only one who treated me like a person who wasn’t born knowing every fatherfucking thing about structural design before I even took her class. Who were the other fuckos in there, that seemed to ask no questions unless said question was so smart it almost seemed like its sole purpose was to inform the class that they already knew the thing.

Dear Friend Tim,

I am so curious what you mean by “we blindly sleep.” Can you tell me more? Are you able to send a photo of the magnetic lamp? Do I need to install a magnet on my desk or on the wall in order to use it, or how is the magnet part incorporated? I am still curious about the terror. 

Warmly,

T.

That time, Tim Wu did not reply so quickly. That was fair. He was probably busy. I went back to drafting. I took a long pull of coffee and imagined where my new lamp would go. Perhaps the firm would approve of buying me such a lamp. Although it’s not the first time I’d mentioned needing a little extra light in my dark corner. But when I first asked the receptionist about the lighting situation, some douchebag chimed in with: What, need to add a little light to your dungeon? The other engineers laughed.

Ha ha, very funny, pretty blond boy. He reminded me of all the other pretty blond boys in my college classes who just loved to reference how old I was. At thirty-eight I was so so old. And pale and fattening, apparently. That’s what happened since I’d stopped working for UPS and started sitting in a chair in front of a dark screen looking at Computer-Aided Design Software. I’d never heard the name “CAD” when I started my classes and I was too embarrassed to ask for clarification on my first day in school, where all the pretty blond boys had been using it since programming summer camp.

Well, I imagined retorting: was it so unimaginable that someone wouldn’t want to work for UPS for their entire fucking life? Delivering packages to all the pretty blond boys, dodging their dogs and running for their lives in those times where the gate was open, and the other times, and the others and now they hated dogs? And yet. Sometimes as I sat in my darkest corner, daydreaming about Smart lamps and magnetic terrors, I missed those days. There were no Cheery Salesmen on my route.

Dear Friend,

Certainly. Photos coming! Lamp time.

The deathly painkiller is an angular goon. Emotion guild? Important work you do.

Regards!

Tim Wu | President

I wasted no time.

Dear Tim Wu,

Thank you, friend. It feels good to be acknowledged! Where are you based? Excited to see a photo of these lamps. What kind of work do you do — are you purely a lamp manufacturer? How did you get my contact info?

I stopped. I considered that Tim Wu might be fucking with me. And how did he get my contact info? Mistake? Coincidence? Just the other day I was having a talk with another engineer who’d been in the biz as long as I’d been alive. We used to do this all by hand, you know, he’d say. He was a man from the Philippines who would proclaim with charming bitterness, Ah, I know. I know. Grateful for my job, grateful for my work. But you know what? He’d go, standing over the microwave while he heated up some leftovers. I do my work, I don’t think about it, I go home. Who cares. My life is outside of these walls. And one day, after that same speech—almost verbatim—he said, Is yours? And when I said nothing, having had one of those awful days in which I felt like an idiot (Idiot! Stupid idiot!) he added, Why are you here? And he said it like here, of all places. Why.

I appreciate your reaching out, Tim. It’s hard work we do.

Regards,

T.

I waited to send my response and got back to work. My assignment that day was to review a storage locker facility in Salinas. What if John Steinbeck knew that a storage facility was my only connection to Salinas? After all the Wrath and the Mice and the Men, there I was, making sure the specifications for a storage facility were up to snuff.

“Lunch time,” mumbled my old engineer friend with a tone meant to demonstrate feigned excitement. “Whoopee.”

“Coffee time,” I responded with a tone meant to infer: My only joy.

“Woah, baby!” said the young blond boy who had been an engineer so much longer than me. He was The Lead Engineer. Smart little blond boy. “It might be a two-creamer kinda day!” he declared with a squinty smile as he added one then two creamers to his coffee.

“Don’t get too crazy. It’s only Tuesday,” I said.

“Woah!”  Squinty Blond Boy said, raising his hands like, what do we have here? And he goes, 

“What do we have here?”

“What?”

Squinty Blond Boy made no clarification regarding what we had.

That was when Old Man took his food from the microwave, eyes down, retreat. But I knew that if he’d had the choice he would have given me a look that said: This place. To which I’d look back with an UGH.

“Three creamers?” Squinty Blond Boy pointed at my cup. “T, baby, it’s hardly noon!” His smile was so so squinty, his entire face one overreaction.

“Shut the fuck up, blond baby,” I imagined saying. Mmm yes, that would be nice. Poor Squinty Blond Boy would be so shocked and would go to great lengths to get me fired for the smallest offense. Speaking of which.

“Phew, fishy,” Squinty Blond Boy said, waving his hand back and forth in front of his nose.

“Two more years, then I can retire,” Old Man mumbled toward me as he shuffled away with his heated up, not-that-fishy leftovers.

P.S., I added. “The deathly painkiller is an angular goon.” This part intrigues me most. ::SEND::

By the end of the day, a response awaited.

Dear T.,

Here is the dilemma. The low arch. It is fright. Futureless. Beneath.

Regards!

Tim Wu | President

Wow wow wow. What did it mean? (And also, was Tim Wu fucking with me?) I finished my stupid mark ups on the Steinbeck Storage Units and sent them off to Squinty Blond Boy. Here you go! I wrote, then deleted it and just wrote, “Here!” That’s the ticket. I waited for Squinty Blond Boy’s response. I waited for Tim Wu’s response. I went home. I wrote Tim Wu a quick note.

Dear Tim,

Do you mean the low arch on my…

I stopped. They say once anything is written it is traceable and proof-able. What if Tim Wu was not Tim Wu at all? What if he was Old Man, or no…Squinty Blond Boy? Or Dull Receptionist? Or Nerdiest Engineer or Head of Whatever? It could be any of them. I looked at what I’d written so far. Nothing too incriminating. But as soon as I saw the words “Futureless,” and “Beneath” and then “Deathly?” I was sure I had to act. Someone was warning me, perhaps. I started over.

Dear Tim,

Do you mean the low arch on my design correction? Is it too low? Is there some way you saw the Steinbeck Storage Unit and that, if I do not correct said arch (what arch?) it might fall and someone will be trapped beneath “the deathly painkiller?”

The next morning there were three emails in my inbox: Tim Wu, Old Man, Squinty Blond Boy. I read them in reverse order.

Thanks, dude.

Bests,

Squinty Blond Boy

Then:

Hello,

Did you get my draft?

 - Old Man

And finally:

Dear friend,

Advantage tight, but operatic. Forthcoming: light, Plan, photo.

Regards!

Tim Wu | President

I closed my email. Drafted. Sipped coffee. Dripped with anxiety sweat. Tried to stop thinking about Tim Wu. It must be Old Man. But maybe that was a foolish assumption! Or maybe, it was not. Only one week before Tim Wu contacted me, Old Man and I had a bonding moment. We were at a company-mandated Lunchin! and Old Man was telling a story about being chased by dogs in the Philippines, how the neighborhood he grew up in had so many strays. Squinty Blond Boy made a joke that, hehe, don’t you also eat dogs? To which I made an intentional effort to roll my eyes at Old Man, so he knew that I knew it was not cool. After Lunchin! I’d rolled my eyes again with Old Man then whispered a story about a dog that attacked me on my old UPS route.

I never wore headphones during my route because I wanted to be able to hear their barking, to see them gnashing at the fences. But that dog, it jumped right over the fence, I recalled. Chased me down the drive and into my truck. I told Old Man how the barking echoed so loudly in there, how it made me feel belittled, imagining people seeing me running, hearing me scream. I told him about my supervisor, Elrich, how he got so eye-rolly when I had to take time off to recover. You can come back when your stitches heal, is what Elrich said. But my ligament, I reminded. I can’t walk? Eye roll.

Old Man snarled at that part, so I made a dark joke about locking Squinty Blond boy and Elrich in a storage unit of a similar size to my UPS truck, how we could release a dog in there, listen to the echoes of barking, screaming. To this, Old Man had nodded with a wise look but also an angry look. And then, he walked away.

Could that have been the origin of our camaraderie? Tim Wu, that would be a strange choice for a nom de plume for Old Man. But maybe that was the point. Maybe Old Man was trying to tell me that he was sick of being confused with Other Asians. And also, he told me many times how much he hated it when someone like Squinty Blond Boy or Cheery Salesman charged in and went phew! Stinky! When he heated his leftovers. Maybe Old Man was ready to sic the dogs, so to speak. He was ready for a comrade. And that comrade was me: 38-year-old Pale Rookie.

Dear Tim,

I read you loud and clear.

Regards!

T.

I waited. I thought. I wrote:

Dear Old Man, 

I read you loud and clear. 

Regards!

T.

That would do it. I felt so sly. That morning I poured the amount of creamers I actually wanted into my coffee: four. Look at me! I goaded with every lid I peeled off. Look. At. Me. But coincidentally, no one came into the break room that morning, which was actually not a break room but a crappy little conference room that did not have enough chairs to accommodate all of us, so that the last two people that got to the meeting always had to take the stools that were shorter than the table, so that when they sat down we could only see their heads. One daring fellow, Serious Parts Guy, had leaned against a wall one day when he was last one in. Squinty Blond Boy had said, Hey no, c’mon! Have a seat and join the team.

Team team team.

I don’t want to sit on that low stool today, said Serious Parts Guy, referencing his back and his knees. I considered that I could give up my cushy chair but I didn’t want to make Serious Parts Guy feel even older. Plus, my 38-year-old knees and back also hurt. But mostly, I did not want my pale face to be the only thing anyone saw at the conference table.

I’ll just stand, Serious Parts Guy said. Still part of the team.

I set my creamer-heavy coffee on my desk. Opened the file I’d sent to Squinty. Steinbeck Storage Facility. I looked at the arches. Considered what would happen if I made just the slightest adjustment. Yes. Yes, I will do it. Old Man aka Tim Wu would be so proud. Ever-so-slight angle. He would definitely be proud. I looked at the adjustment. I sipped my coffee. Did the thing where I made it seem like I was working. I watched a flat-bodied beetle crawl along the curtain that hung above my desk. That curtain did not even cover a real window because no one had a real window. We worked in a converted storage facility fitted with a little maze of gray cubicles. They put us all in there thinking that no one needs windows! And when we did realize that we needed windows (I haven’t seen the sun all day, we’d complain; not even a peek of sky) they had Dull Receptionist order curtains and rods, which she’d installed over nothing. Just to give the illusion that, what, we actually had windows but we all chose to keep the curtains drawn? Didn’t that make us all look a little more crazy? And maybe that was the point. To make it look like we had each made the choice to be there, that we’d made the choice to keep our shades drawn.

Hi Squinty Blond Boy,

Here! Corrected file!

Regards,

T.

I sipped my four-creamer coffee and watched the flat-bodied beetle make her way along the curtain. Perhaps she was thinking she’d found a way out of our dark maze of cubicles. There she was, about to make it to the other side of that curtain and find herself a window, and out that window would be the world.

Two emails.

Thanks!

Squinty.

And:

Dear friend,

See attached.

Regards!

Tim Wu | President.

Here we go. I sipped my four-creamer coffee, sat upright enough to see over the walls of my cubicle. No one was watching. I regarded Beetle. She had made no progress. I opened the file. Wuh oh.

I was so shocked by what I saw that it took my bumbling fingers very many seconds to find the delete! key. Enough seconds that the security camera I never realized was above me had seen the image. That’s when Waiting For My Moment Man charged out of his office and into that of Squinty Blond Boy, who met with Head of Everything and the three of them zoomed in on that footage. Me, Tim Wu. Etcetera.

T., 

Please see me in the conference room.

Regards,

Squinty.

I tilted my mug back but it was empty aside from one, goopy drip of creamer-laced coffee. With a gulp stuck in my throat, I deleted every email from Tim Wu. Light disfigurement terror daytime alternate. Delete. Extremist groovy. Delete. And finally, what started it all: Enlarging & shine your business channel. Delete.

As I worked my way through the gray cubicle maze, I could hear dogs’ nails on pavement, teeth gnawing gates. All the barks, snarls, growls. I could see him, too—I didn’t want to but there he was: Elrich, arms crossed and eyes rolled as he said something about my old route. I kept walking. Past the last row of cubicles, past the snapping and growling, the muzzles blasting through cheap barriers, spittle flying. But I didn’t run. I walked.

The short stool was set out for me on the far side of the conference table. Squinty and Head and Waiting gestured for me to have a seat. I sat. Silent. Pale Rookie Face was all they could see. They were saying things to me and I was saying nothing. Not even mmhmm. They kept going while I kept my eye on the door, kept my ear out for Old Man. For Tim Wu. I said nothing as they said, Pale Rookie? Pale Rookie? The scariest of dogs, I thought as my head floated there, were the ones whose gates were already open. They’d hear you coming and get their head start before you could even see them.