Alpine

Gambit 2 - Origin (1/2)

The next day, I trudged into work with my head down and my eyes darting about. At some point, I would have to face Ryan and pretend the night before never happened. I wanted to postpone that interaction as long as possible. My plan was to get in, turn on the computer, and lose myself in coding until it was time to leave. Assuming I could even stay awake. Sleep had eluded me, and I could feel the dark circles under my eyes. I prayed for no unexpected challenges that day. I had no reserves left to confront them.

Unlocking the outside door and being the first one to stride into the dark office felt good. I flicked on the lights, inviting that familiar dull hum to envelop the space. It felt so normal to walk the stretch to my chair. Past Bea's front desk of organized chaos. Clara's perfectly ordered cubicle with walls covered in photos of her favorite vacation spots. Dave's stacks of textbooks, manuals, and half-filled notebooks. Janice's veritable green house of draping stems and waxy leaves. I stared at the floor as I passed Ryan's desk. Reaching my little nook, I placed my hand on my chair. For some reason, I decided to look back at Switch's desk.

It was orderly. Just enough things on it to not feel empty, but nothing about it was personal. At least not personal to him. There were plenty of odds and ends that our coworkers had gifted him, and he put on display. A stack of lined, plant-themed post-its with curlicues at the bottom. Janice. Three top-of-the-line ball point pens in red, black, and green. Dave. A tin of salon-quality hair gel as a joke. Clara. A psychedelic-colored, stuffed platypus. Bea. A dozen other things that I could drop off at the desk of the person who gave it to him if I had to. Even the Mayan-themed coffee mug came from that intern whose name I forgot. None of it fit together. None of it was really his. None of it had his aura. The gestalt looked more like a poorly planned showroom mockup than a real person's space.

The impulse to take a closer look griped me. More than that, I dared to sit down in his chair. To satisfy my curiosity about what the world looked like from his perspective. I thought something would click. That putting myself into his position would reveal something important about him. Whatever I had expected to find was not there. I saw another angle on the same view I had from my identical office chair. I shook my head, stood up, and returned to my desk.

Comparing his cubical to mine, it dawned on me how stark my space was. Nothing I had brought. No gifts. Just a pile of pens on a messy stack of paperwork. An office artifact someone could have accidently left at a vacant desk in a moment of distraction. The only thing that betrayed the fact that the cubical had an occupant was the lack of dust on the keyboard. Compared to the warren of dust bunnies building up behind the moni—there was something behind the monitor.

I pulled out the object and nearly lost my composure. There was a trash can by the printer. I walked up to it. I moved aside a ream of discarded paper. I dropped the squishy shark into the bottom of the can. I buried it.

The rest of the day was lost repaying code debt. Fixing formatting. Adding and updating documentation. Leaving comments to remind myself to refactor a few poorly written functions. All the mindless tasks that make up the bureaucracy of programming.

I only stopped when Bea flicked the lights on and off to get my attention. It was going on 6:30 pm, and she was on her way out. She reminded me to kill the lights before I left. I told her I would and said goodnight. Another ten minutes of staring at my cursor blink. Finally, I pushed my final commit for the day and stood up to leave. Lights out. Checked that the door locked after me. Drifted to my car. Reached out to open the door. The shark was shoved into the handle.

"I get the feeling that you and Ryan had a fight?" Switch sat cross-legged on the hood of his car just a few spaces away from mine. He was even smoking. I was so out of it that I had not noticed the smell.