The Comment

Off-topic: "Our canteen cook ran out of the room screaming after watching THE video, lmao" (posted 11:06 PM by A_Cole_Case)

cold_open_77 · 11:21 PM · 780 likes: Bro. I'm crying. Did he drop the soup??

mothlight · 11:34 PM · 695 likes: The deadpan "I showed him a video." Legendary.

m_aurelius_jr · 11:40 PM · 512 likes: Index update: audience reaction authenticity: 10/10.

quill_and_ink · 11:58 PM · 61 likes: Very interesting. What did he say, exactly? What did he see that scared him?

The woman from Human Resources had a name plate on her desk that said Margaret Sloane, Director of People, and a small potted fern, and a framed photograph of a sailboat, and she sat behind them with her hands folded in front of her and looked at Asher as if he were a file that did not quite close.

It was ten past nine on Thursday morning. He had been summoned by a note on his chair at eight, in Dana's handwriting, and had come up in the elevator with his hands wet. The office was on the sixth floor, at the end of a long carpeted corridor, and it smelled of coffee and lavender. There were two other chairs. In one of them, with a leather folder on his knee and the pen in his fingers, sat Hargrove.

He did not look at Asher. He looked at a point on the carpet, a little to the left of the desk.

"Mr. Cole," said Margaret Sloane. "Thank you for coming. I'd like to say at the outset that this is not a disciplinary hearing. It's a conversation."

"Of course."

"Yesterday, at around eleven in the morning, an employee of the firm's catering contractor, a Mr. Tomas Varga, was subjected to what the canteen manager describes as a highly distressing experience in the presence of the public. He left the premises in a state of evident panic. He abandoned a shift and destroyed some forty quarts of food. The canteen was closed for the afternoon." She paused. "The manager and the security guard tell me that you were the only person present. They also tell me that you showed him something on your mobile phone."

"Yes."

"May I ask what?"

"It was a video," said Asher. "A film clip. I'd had it sent to me by a friend. I didn't know it would upset him."

"What was in it?"

"It was a kind of horror thing. A short film. There's an online community that makes them. I thought, since he'd asked about it before, that he might find it interesting. I had no idea he was so sensitive."

"He had asked about it before?"

"Not the video. The group. In general."

Margaret Sloane's eyebrows rose a fraction. She wrote something on the pad in front of her. "I see. And where is this clip now?"

"I've deleted it."

It came out so easily that he nearly believed it himself. He sat there with his hands on his knees and a faint, clear coldness in his chest, a feeling that was almost pleasure, because it had been so simple. Nobody asked to see his phone. Hargrove, in the other chair, did not move.

"That is for the best," said Margaret Sloane. "I'm sure you'll agree that the workplace is no place for material of that kind. I'd like you to take this as a formal warning. It will go in your file. It's not a black mark. It's a record." She smiled thinly. "If it doesn't occur again, I expect it will be forgotten by the end of your placement."

"Thank you."

"Mr. Hargrove, did you wish to add anything?"

"No," said Hargrove.

He rose. He tucked the folder under his arm. He glanced at Asher for the first time, a brief, flat, tired look, the look of a man observing a persistent leak in a ceiling, and said, "My office, Cole, when you're done. Please." And he went out, and the pen clicked once in his pocket.

Asher sat there a moment longer. He looked at the fern. He looked at the sailboat. He thought, with a flare of heat that went from his stomach to his ears, that they were all against him. It had been the same since the first day. The firm, the floor, the whole hard shining apparatus of the place, with its quiet rules and its clean rooms, had been arranged for the purpose of finding him wanting, and he had been right to suspect it. He had told them nothing but the truth, and they had taken it and made it into a file.

…

In Hargrove's office, on the fifth floor, with the blinds half drawn, the conversation lasted three minutes.

It was not an angry one. That was the dreadful thing. Hargrove sat behind his desk with the pen in his fingers and spoke in the dry, low, even tone he used on the telephone with clients, and he said that the firm had a duty of care to its contractors, and a duty to its clients, and a duty to the standards of the profession. He said that in thirty years he had never had a young man leave the canteen under such circumstances. He said that he did not know what Cole had shown the cook, and had no wish to know, and that if there was ever again a complaint of this kind, there would be no placement, no reference, and no future with the firm.

"Do you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"You have a good mind, Cole. I want to say that. I mean it." There was something odd in the way he said it, a tiredness that was almost gentle. "But you have no sense of other people. None. I don't know whether that's a defect of upbringing or of character, and I don't think it's my job to find out. But the world will not give you many warnings. This is one of them."

"I understand."

"Then go back to your desk."

He went. He walked down the corridor with his head up and his hands at his sides, past the glass doors and the rows of nameplates, and the laughing of two paralegals at the copier stopped as he came and began again when he had passed. He did not look at them. He sat at his desk. He took out the Pelham binders for the clerk and began, deliberately, to check the tabs.

He thought: They're all looking at me.

He thought it again at noon, in the empty canteen, where a new notice had been taped to the door, and the girl at the register was not at her post. He thought it at four, when Dana put her head round the partition and said, in a low voice, "Hey. Are you okay?" and he said, "I'm fine," more sharply than he had meant, and she looked at him a moment, and said nothing, and went away.

He thought it all day long, and by the time he reached the room on Pruitt Street, in the early dark, with the rain on the window, it had grown in him to something hot and tight and perfectly clear. He was alone. He was always alone. And in the whole wide, indifferent city there was exactly one room in which anybody wanted to hear what he had to say.

…

He wrote the post at eleven.

He did not plan it. He sat on the bed with the laptop and a bowl of cereal and an overpowering need to be understood, and the title came to him at once, whole, in a rush, as the best jokes do. It came with the particular warm sparkle that he had learned to trust. He typed it, grinning a little, and watched it appear on the page.

Our canteen cook ran out of the room screaming after watching THE video, lmao.

He wrote the rest more slowly, savoring it. He had always been good at this kind of thing, he thought. It was a matter of detail. It was a matter of knowing which small touch to leave in. He told it from the beginning, from the sleepy morning, from the strange pale old man with his huge steel pot, and how he had held out the phone, in an empty room, and watched the big fellow's face go the color of paper. He put in the sound. He put in the pot, and the lid ringing on the tile, and the long brown wave going out across the floor. He put in the girl at the register, who had screamed. He described the old man's flapping apron and his wild eyes and his slippers slapping in the soup as he ran. He described himself, standing quite calm in the middle of it, with the phone in his hand, saying, to the woman from Human Resources, in a voice of the purest innocence, I showed him a video.

He wrote that in capitals. He wrote it so that no one could miss it.

It was funny. He knew it was funny. He had never written anything so funny in his life. He laughed aloud, alone, in the dark, at the line about the slippers. And at the end, as a flourish, in a spirit of the purest high spirits, he added the last piece, without thought, as a man throws a coin into a fountain: the name of the firm, and the name of the street, and the words ground-floor canteen, Wednesday, 11 a.m.

He did not name the cook. It did not occur to him. It was nothing to do with the cook. It was only about the story.

He pressed Post.

…

It began slowly. Then it went like fire through straw.

By eleven-twenty the post had four hundred likes. By midnight it had fifteen hundred, and a hundred and eighty comments, and the number beside it climbed so fast that he could not read the figures, and the thread ran down the screen in a river of laughing faces. I'm crying. Did he drop the soup?? The deadpan "I showed him a video." LEGENDARY. A woman wrote, This is the best thing that has ever happened on this site. A man wrote, OP is a menace and I love him. He read them all. He felt the warmth of them go through him in waves, great soft hot waves, until his cheeks burned, and he got up and walked round the room, and sat down again.

He had been right. They were not against him. They loved him. They were laughing with him, a hundred and eighty strangers in the dark, and the sound of their laughter was the sweetest he had ever heard.

At ten to midnight a new name appeared at the bottom of the thread.

It was quill_and_ink. He knew the handle. It belonged to a man who had written, long ago, in the days of the drawings, a long and rather excited post about an Italian film. It had a small green cartoon feather for its picture. The comment was short, and it was polite.

Very interesting. What did he say, exactly? What did he see that scared him?

Asher smiled. He typed an answer. Didn't say a word. Just looked at the screen and went white. And ran. He added a laughing face. He thought it was rather a good answer, and waited.

A minute passed. Two.

Then the little red notice blinked on the corner of the page, and he thought it was another like, and clicked on it, and found that it was not.

It was a private message.

Hi, it said. Don't mind my being direct. I think you may have stumbled onto something that matters a good deal more than you realize. Do you have the video? Did he react to specific things in it? A man doesn't run for no reason. I'd like very much to know his name, where he works, and what hours. Anything you remember. I won't post it. I'm only curious.

It was signed with the green feather.

He read it twice. He was conscious of a small, odd, warm sensation, high in the chest, which took him some moments to identify. It was not fear. It was not even surprise. It was the sensation of being needed. Of someone, somewhere, in the dark, leaning forward and saying, you, you're the one who knows.

He thought: I don't see the harm.

He thought of the old man's face, for a second, in the white light of the canteen. It came to him very clearly, a heavy sad gray face with a cap on it, and the big hand on the rim of the pot. And then it went, as a face does, and what stayed was the green feather, and the warm bright wanting in his chest.

Sure, he typed. Happy to help. What do you need?