November 19, Tuesday
She scrubs.
She will change her white blouse before work, if she spots the tiniest spill. Nobody else can see it, but she will know it is there.
Her dry cleaning bill is huge. That is a joke in the house, how much she must spend on dry cleaning.
Her office desk is immaculate as well.
She is not exactly afraid of being watched; she just has a sense that she always is. And so, because she has no privacy, no sense of secrets, that she always behaves as if all of her actions will be made public. “As if your love letters will be read in court”, “As if everything you write will be published as front page news tomorrow morning” Add to that, her company’s motto: “Don’t be evil”.
She was careful, except when she wasn’t.
Sometimes, she found herself, in the middle of her journal of her day, the report that goes in to her boss, describing her duties, estimating what percentage of time she does which activity. His name would crop up. Her brother. She always made sure to edit it out. Maybe she did leave it in a few times. Just his initials. Everything was in code, was in capitals, that thing businesses do-to save time and money-to reduce long systems into their capitals. SWAT analysis. PTO. Shortening everything. Quick references.
Little did she know, in the corner office, her boss was looking for her tiniest mistakes. It started simply. He had done internet research on her before she was even interviewed. When she was hired, he continued to dig for more dirt. Every few months, he’d do another search, hoping to find something, a key to her personality. Not much. Mostly links with names that matched hers, but were not her.
He had been periodically doing reviews of her correspondence, a live shot of her screen. Using programs designed to make sure workers were not wasting time on social media. A minor invasion of privacy that they had agreed to when they signed the contract for “at-will employment” offering a full health care plan, 401K and vested stocks after the first 4 years.
“I know it’s absolutely impossible. But some days, I feel that you are still here. I had a dream last night, you were on the other side of my window. Like you were watching me, and you have been this whole time. I shouted and pounded on the glass, but all you did was smile and look into my eyes. Like you knew it was all impossible too, but you were happy to see me.”
He caught her writing it, live. Could see her typing from where he sat. But later, when he searched for the document, it was gone. Why would she write such a desperate letter only to erase it?
There WAS a certain amount of leeway when it came to personal lives in the Office. The idea of a Startup didn’t include Big Brother or the watchful eyes of any parent type. There was a pingpong table outside the lunchroom and a beer cart that would show up every Friday afternoon. He took scrupulous mental notes about who was abusing the system and NOT putting in work. Some equation (Time of Morning Arrival until Time of evening departure) - time taken off for breaks, lunch and any non-work activities* the productivity of said worker (as defined by the number of times the CEO mentions their name and department in the quarterly company calls. It was a difficult number to keep track of exactly, but he always had a rough idea of who was scoring what. The ping pong table was there, but if you were seen there and only riding the coattails of a team member, you were ushered out the door.
He only had her to keep track of, but he was careful of the day when he’d have a much larger team.
Another day, it was a random set of initials that caught his eye. She had been writing a schedule out. “6AM Swim LG” what could that mean? Long? Legs . . . Low ground? The name of a gym, a pool, a pond? He put it away in his photographic memory, with a million other details he had yet to categorize.
One day, after another letter, (SCENE) she left for work and he wanted to snoop. He started on his computer, and then, realizing that everyone had left him completely alone in the Office, he moved to her computer.
He did an internet search of her name. Mostly links with names that matched hers, but were not her. There was one article he could never understand. An obituary. (AND THE LINK WAS IN PURPLE, she had been here before!!)
Buried in the results, her name, yet not her name. Her last name was mentioned, but not connected to her. He’d seen it many times before, a usual suspect, but never clicked. This time he did. A young man drowns. The stepfather of the dead boy, the last name first, then “survived by his sister--” AHA!! Her stepbrother had drowned, “he had been lost in the river for 5 days before fishermen pulled a body resembling the description” What year was that? She must’ve been 14 (OR 17???) Wow. Poor kid. Something like that can mess you up for life (and I guess it did).
Then he did a search for the Boy’s name. A random article about teen drug & alcohol abuse. The boy is quoted as saying, “It really helps a kid if you know how grownups are struggling with that. Personally, I’m never going to take up drinking!” Famous last words, he thought. And kept digging.
He found another story about a Woodstock reunion, a guy being quoted. But it wasn’t the same guy, this was 10 years after he died (SCENE??) It gave his full name and the title Dr. (Dr LG of McLean Hospital) Dr of The Center, a place not 5 miles away from their Cambridge Office.
He wondered how encrypted the records were of places like that. Doctor and patient records, medical records. That’s a little bit of a coincidence that someone with the same name would be a DOCTOR there. (He heard his own thoughts with a kind of ironic tone, as if he knew he was about to discover the Boy was a PATIENT there, and the reporter had left the association vague. OR maybe he had just lied. Heck, if I was from a mental institution, I’d lie.)
He stumbled across the boy’s death certificate. (The link was already purple) There was a police report alongside it.
“Sister made an identification of the body. Confirmed it at first, but then she got brave and demanded to look for a certain mole on his neck or something. The coroner claims that all identifying marks on skin are unreliable when the body has been in the water that long. She couldn’t find anything and we wouldn’t let her touch the body. Her last word was a positive identification, but she looked awfully unsure about it. (Does this body match up with any other recent missing persons??)”
A few more quick searches found a few missing persons in the state of NH in the month before his “death”. Unsolved cases, it seemed, but by then he was out of steam. He went home wondering how easy it would be to fake your death, to emerge from the water like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and start over. Or at least plan to, until someone else got ahold of you and imprisoned you. But why? Just for being a drunk kid? For being crazy? Her letters had a certain tenderness, no lingering resentment over anything. He’d have to do more investigating.
==
He then went to The Center. Didn’t quite visit him (SCENE) but watched him through a glass window. Her Brother had been especially violent that morning, that day, that week. He was not allowed to accept visitors. But there was a sympathetic young nurse, she let him in.
Her Brother was sitting on a chair, in profile, staring out at a fountain outside the window. The fountain was old and artificial, hadn’t been cleaned in a while. Not very deep, the bottom seemed to be covered in a layer of deep green algae. But it was still acting like a fountain, and the same water flew through the air, dribbling from the mouths of the cherubs and raining down on the marble heads of fishes.
“We usually don’t allow this. But I won’t put it on record. You can come in for a second. Just to observe, just to see. He doesn’t have ANY family that comes to visit at all. I think they’ve written him off. Everyone else, but you, I guess. You see how quiet he is. A Gentle Giant, that’s what we call him. Except when he goes into his rages. He’s heavily sedated right now, so he’s just sitting there. You wonder what they think about.”
“Swimming. He’s thinking about swimming,” he said, looking her in the eye, with his hand on the doorknob pulling it shut behind him.
==
A typical weekday. And so, after finally putting it all together, he sat before his computer. Looking at the screen that was her screen, a window into her life, a window on his desktop, a screen that was her screen-live. He wondered what to do. He read the letter she was writing. She hadn’t discovered her brother yet.
He was wondering what to do. This woman who didn’t seem to flirt with him (which made him mad), who fought him about work (most time for legitimate reasons, which also made him mad). This woman. He had the power to tease her, to hurt her, to help her, to trap her.
He still had memories of being a child, inflicting pain on another kid until they cried. (SCENE) Trapping an animal and hugging it so tightly, to prove how much he loved them. He liked the fight, them straining aganst him. Then he let go. He always let go. But he knew he had the power to hold on.
If he was caught, he’d certainly be fired. (Helping or hurting her) Unless he could have another explanation. Unless he could log on from a non-work computer. He had extensive experience as a hacker. Paid for college by breaking into people’s accounts, for purposes both good and evil and then good again. That’s what made him so good at his job. Hacking brought him this career.
==
(Incest survivors are susceptible?? DOES HE SUSPECT HER OF BEING DEPRESSED? In that case, all his snooping would be legit, heroic, even!)
===
==
“i find myself typing in your name more and more frequently. This morning, I was lost in some kind of haze. I don’t know why, but I did a search of your name. Before I knew it, the whole page was filled with purple links- I had clicked on things without ever realizing it. Your obit (police report?) and then I found something. A picture of you, Woodstock reunion. 10 years later. At first I didn’t believe it (and I still don’t, mostly) the guy in the photo is wearing sunglasses. But I WANT it to be you. And so it IS you. There. How easily, I have brought you back to life.”
==
When she arrives home, nobody noticed her except the little girl.
“Did you get a haircut in the last 2 minutes?”
(She lied and said she just did her hair differently. But yes, she had to cut out a piece of algae. Evidence.)
It pained her tremendously to have to lie to the little girl. Because of this she noticed that it was the first time she had lied to a child. And how all her conversations with grownups is a lie.
The little girl also noticed her laundry. How much there always is piled up. To take to the cleaners. She joins in the jokes.
Both of them notice that there is a tiny handprint on the mirror in the living room, but neither tells Dona Manuela. It is their private secret.
And that is why the little girl KNOWS that the Woman is not crazy. Because if you are crazy, you don’t know it. But if you KNOW that you are acting crazy, then you are just acting crazy.
“I don’t have OCD. I just REALLY like for everything to be clean” she says while scrubbing.
2102, Nov 19
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