The Meeting

Off-topic: "Worst boss I've ever had. Anonymous, obviously." (posted 10:47 PM by throwaway_8841)

mothlight · 11:02 PM · 288 likes: The tapping pen?? I would have lost it.

cold_open_77 · 11:09 PM · 301 likes: He makes you present in front of everyone and then says "next item." Evil.

marrow_and_salt · 11:14 PM · 190 likes: Bosses like that are why this room exists.

velvet_hour · 11:21 PM · 144 likes: Sorry. Hugs. It isn't you.

The client arrived at ten o'clock on Wednesday morning in a camel coat, with two assistants and a leather folder, and was shown into the large conference room on the fifth floor, where a pot of fresh coffee and a plate of pastries had been set out on a white cloth.

His name was Mr. Delacroix-Amis, and he owned eleven warehouses in three counties, and for the next several hours, on the strength of a single fee that would pay the firm's rent for a year, he had the entire fourth and fifth floors on their toes. Hargrove had briefed the associates on Monday. Hargrove had briefed them again on Tuesday. The briefing had ended each time with the same instruction, which was that Cole would sit at the far end of the table, take notes, and say nothing unless spoken to, and Asher had agreed to it each time with a grave nod and a feeling that he would be very good at it.

He lasted fifty-one minutes.

It began innocently. Mr. Delacroix-Amis was explaining, in the soft, rolling, unhurried manner of a rich man who had never been interrupted, the history of a lease dispute with one of his tenants, and Asher, who had read the file four times, heard him say the second quarter of last year, and knew that it was the third. He sat with his pen above the paper. He felt the correction rise in him, like a sneeze, and he looked down the table at Hargrove, who was nodding at the client with a faint attentive smile, and he thought: he'll be grateful.

"Actually," said Asher, "I believe it was the third quarter."

The client stopped. Both his assistants looked up. At the head of the table, the pen, which had been lying quiet on the cloth, lifted and tapped once.

"I beg your pardon?"

"The default notice. It was filed in the third quarter, in September. The second quarter is when the tenant first fell behind, but the notice itself..." Asher heard himself going on, and could not stop. He explained the notice. He explained the statute of limitations, in a clear, sincere voice, with an expression of helpful intelligence, and he reached the end of it and said, in the cheerful tone of a man delivering good news, "So, you see, it actually works in your favor, because the sixty days run from September, not from June."

There was a silence in the room.

"Sixty days," said Mr. Delacroix-Amis, gently.

"Sixty. Yes."

"I believe," said the client, with a smile that did not touch his eyes, "that it is ninety. Is it not, Mr. Hargrove?"

"It is ninety," said Hargrove.

He said it very quietly. He did not look at Asher. He looked at the cloth, and at the cup in front of him, and Asher saw for the first time the tiny muscle at the corner of the older man's jaw, working under the skin like a second pulse. The client's assistants had gone politely still. The coffee had stopped steaming. And Asher, who had been so sure and so warm only a moment before, felt his face drain to a coldness that went down through his collar and into his chest, because he knew, in a flash, with the clarity of a man falling from a ladder, that he had read the number off the wrong page.

"I apologize," said Asher. "The sixty-day period applies to the other lease."

"Cole," said Hargrove, "would you step outside, please?"

"I can clarify..."

"Outside."

He rose. He walked the length of the table with the eyes of six people on his back and the folder of notes in his hand, and when he reached the door he heard, behind him, the soft sound of Hargrove's voice resuming, smooth and warm, as though a lamp had been knocked over and replaced. "Mr. Delacroix-Amis. I do apologize for that. Shall we continue?"

…

The men's room on the fifth floor was tiled in a pale institutional green, and it was empty.

He stood at the basin and ran the cold water over his wrists, as he had once seen done in a film, and looked at himself in the mirror. He was pale. His hair stood up at the crown. He had a feeling in his stomach as though something heavy had been dropped there from a height, and he was angry, with the blind formless anger of a child who has been struck, and who cannot find the hand.

It had been an honest mistake. A man could misread a number. And in any case, he told the mirror, he had been right about the quarter. The man had said the second, and it was the third. He had been right. He had been right, and no one had said so.

The door swung open behind him.

He knew the sound of the shoes before he saw her. It was Dana, in the corridor, standing with one hand on the frame of the men's room door, which she had pushed open an inch and was now regarding with an expression of great embarrassment, as one might regard a lion in a hallway.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I saw you go in. Is anyone in there?"

"No."

She came in anyway, and let the door fall closed behind her. It was a very strange thing for her to do, and she knew it, and she stood against the tiles with her arms folded tight across her chest and her eyes fixed carefully on the wall behind him.

"I just want to say something," said Dana, "and I don't want you to be mad."

"I'm not mad."

"Okay. You are, a little." She breathed in. "You need to learn how to listen, Asher. I don't mean to be rude. I mean it. In a room like that, the whole job is to listen, and you didn't, you were just waiting for your turn. And it wasn't even about the quarter. It's that you don't know when it's the moment to talk."

"You don't understand the pressure I'm under."

"Everyone's under pressure."

"Not like this. Nobody else is expected to prove themselves every single day, in front of everyone, with people watching for the first mistake." His voice shook, and he hated it. "You have a job. They're not going to let you go in two months. I have to be perfect or I'm out."

"That isn't true. Nobody is expecting you to..."

"You don't know what they expect."

She looked at him for a long moment, and in her tired kind face there was no anger, only a quiet and terrible gentleness, as though she were sorry for a person whom she could not help. Then she nodded, once, and said, "Okay," and pushed the door open with her shoulder.

"For what it's worth," she said, just before it closed, "I never needed you to pay me back for the coffee. Not once. I just wanted you to say hello."

He did not answer. The door swung shut behind her with a soft pneumatic sigh, and he stood a long time in the green light, listening to the water run.

…

He came home at eight, and by nine he had a bowl of cereal and an idea.

He sat on the bed with the laptop open and stared at the blank field where a post would go. He had never written an anonymous post in his life. He had never needed to. He had always had a perfectly good name, and his own opinion of it, and he had never imagined that a day could come on which he would want to say a thing and have no one know he had said it.

He made the account in four minutes. He called it throwaway_8841 and chose a gray silhouette, and in the title field he wrote Worst boss I've ever had. Anonymous, obviously.

Then the words came out of him in a stream.

He wrote about the pen. He wrote about the tapping, the slow even rhythm of it, which the whole staff knew as a warning, and about the way the man looked past you when you spoke, and said next item in the middle of your sentence. He wrote that the man took credit for everything and gave credit for nothing. He wrote that he had been humiliated in front of a client that very day, and that he had been right on the facts, and that it didn't matter, and he wrote about Section 7, and the way the room had laughed. He wrote four hundred words, and he did not use a single name, and he read them over twice, and every line was true. He left out the number, the wrong page, and the sixty days that were ninety, and he left them out as naturally as a man leaves out the one stair he trips on.

He posted it at 10:47. He lay back on the bed with his arm over his eyes, and counted to a hundred, and looked.

The number beside the title said 41. It said 120. It said 288, and by midnight it had passed six hundred, and the comments under it formed a wall, each one shorter and warmer than the last. The tapping pen?? I would have lost it. Evil. Bosses like that are why this room exists. A woman called velvet_hour wrote, Sorry. Hugs. It isn't you, and he read that line over and over. It isn't you. He could have wept.

At twenty past midnight there was a small gray notice at the corner of the post.

Exterminators liked this post.

It was a tiny thing. A tiny gray dot in the lower corner of a comment on a message board. But it went through him like warm water, and he sat up in bed, with his hand pressed flat against his sternum, because at last, at last, he had been understood. A man like that, a man of that experience, with ten years in the service of the state and a mind like a scalpel, had read his account of the worst day of his life and found it true. He had not said a word. He had only pressed a button, but the button was enough. He no longer felt alone in the room.

He put the laptop on his knees and typed a comment of his own under the post. He wrote it slowly, with two fingers, and in the middle of it his hands began, without his permission, to sweat.

Honestly, I wish he would just disappear.

He looked at it. He took his fingers off the keys, and felt the old white heat creep up through his neck. He deleted it, letter by letter, and watched the cursor eat the line. Then he typed it again, a little differently, Sometimes I wish he'd just disappear, and looked at that, and deleted that too.

He wrote it a third time. His thumb hovered above the button for a long while. The dryers turned in the laundromat below, and the yellow light slid across the ceiling, and from the stairs a floor below came the muffled sound of a neighbor's television, laughing.

He erased it again, and put the laptop to one side, and lay in the dark with his eyes open, and the cursor went on blinking in the empty box…