The Neanderthal Box Set: A Workplace Romance, 2020 Revised and Expanded Edition

by Reid, Penny

  Finally, he placed his hands on his narrow hips and lifted his chin toward my desk. In his gravelly deep voice, which was just above whisper, he asked, “Need help?”

  I shook my head, feeling like a natural disaster on mute. I knew he wasn’t there to help me. He was there to help me out of the building. I huffed, spurning his offer. I was determined to get my walk of shame over. I turned, pushed my black-rimmed glasses up my lightly freckled nose, and closed the short distance to my desk. The borrowed flip-flops made a smacking sound against the bottom of my feet with each hurried step: smack, smack, smack.

  All my belongings had been packed into a brown and white file box by some employees from the human resources department while I waited, as told, in a conference room. I glanced at the empty desk. I noted where my pencil cup had once been; there was a clean patch of circle surrounded by a ring of dust. I wondered if they removed the pencils before packing the cup into the box.

  Shaking my head to clear it of my ridiculous, pointless pondering, I picked up the box, which, unbelievably, held the last two years of my professional aspirations, and walked calmly past McHotpants and straight to the reception desk and the elevators beyond. I didn’t meet his gaze, but I knew that he was following me even before he stopped next to me, close enough that his elbow grazed mine as I tucked the box against my hip and jabbed a finger at the call button.

  I thought I could feel his attention on my profile, but I did not attempt to meet it. Instead, I watched the digital red numbers announcing the floor status of each elevator.

  “Do you want me to carry that?” His gravelly voice, almost a whisper, sounded from my right.

  I shook my head and slid my eyes to the side without turning; there were about four other people waiting for the elevator besides us.

  “No, thank you. It’s not heavy; they must’ve taken the pencils.” I was relieved by the flat, toneless sound of my voice.

  Several silent moments ticked by giving my brain a dangerous amount of unleashed time to wander. My ability to focus was waning. This was a frequent problem for me. Time with my thoughts, especially when I’m anxious, doesn’t work to my advantage.

  Most people in stressful situations, I’ve been told, have the tendency to obsess about their current circumstances. They wonder how they arrived at their present fate, and they wrestle with what they can do to avoid it or situations like it in the future.

  However, the more stressful my situation is, the less I think about it, or anything related to it.

  At present, I thought about how the elevators were like mechanical horses, and I wondered if anyone loved them or named them. I wondered what steps I could take to remove the word ‘moisture’ or even ‘moist’ from the English language; I really hated the way it sounded and always went out of my way to avoid saying it. I also really didn’t like the word slacks, but I felt vindicated recently when Mensa came out against that horrible word in an official statement proposing that it be removed from the vernacular.

  Sir McHotpants cleared his throat again interrupting my preoccupation with odious-sounding words. One of the herd of elevators was open, its red arrow pointing downward, and I continued to stand still, lost in my thoughts, completely unaware. No one else had yet entered the elevator, and I could feel everyone watching me.

  I shook myself a little, attempting to re-entrench in the present. I felt McHotpants place his hand on my back to guide me forward with gentle pressure. The warmth of his palm was soothing, yet it sent a disconcerting electric shock down my spine. He lifted his other hand to where the door slid into the wall, effectively holding the elevator for me.

  I quickly broke contact and settled into one of the lift’s corners. Sir Handsome followed me in, but loitered near the front of the elevator, blocking the entrance; He pressed the Close Door button before anyone else could enter. The partitions slid together and we were alone. He pulled a key on a retractable cord at his belt and fit it into a slot at the top of the button pad. I watched as he pressed a circle labeled BB.

  I lifted an eyebrow, asked, “Are we going to the basement?”

  He made no sign of affirmation as he turned to me and regarded me openly; we were standing in opposite corners. I imagined for a moment that we were two prizefighters; the spacious elevator was our ring, and the brass rails around the perimeter were the ropes. My eyes moved over him in equally plain assessment. He would definitely win if it came to blows between us.

  I was tall for a girl, but he was easily six feet and three or four inches in height. I also hadn’t worked out with any seriousness or intensity since my college soccer days. He, judging by the large expanse of his shoulders, looked like he never missed a day at the gym and could bench press me as well as the box I was holding, even if it contained the pencils.

  His eyes weren’t finished with their appraisal, but instead lingered around my neck. The tugging sensation beneath my left rib returned. I felt myself starting to blush again.

  I tried for conversation. “I didn’t mean to be imprecise; I imagine this building has more than one basement, although I’ve never seen the blueprints. Are we going to one of the basements and, if so, why are we going to one of the basements?”

  He met my gaze abruptly, his own unreadable.

  “Standard procedure,” he murmured.

  “Oh.” I sighed and started tearing at my lip again. Of course, there was a standard procedure. This was likely a common experience for him. I wondered if I were the only ex-employee he would be escorting out today.

  “How many times have you done this?” I asked.

  “This?”

  “You know, escort people out of the building after they’ve been downsized; does this happen every day of the week? Layoffs typically happen on Friday afternoons in order to keep the crazies from coming back later in the same week. Today is Tuesday so you can imagine how surprised I was. Based on the international standard adopted in most western countries, Tuesday is the second day of the week. In countries that use the Sunday-first convention, Tuesday is defined as the third day of the week.”

  Shut up, shut up, shut up!

  I drew in a deep breath, clamped my mouth shut, and clenched my jaw to keep from talking. I watched him watching me, his eyes narrowing slightly, and my heart pounded with loud sincerity against my chest in what I recognized—for the second time that day—as embarrassment.

  I knew what I sounded like. My true friends softened the label by insisting I was merely well read; everyone else said I was cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. Although I’d been repeatedly urged to audition for Jeopardy and was an ideal and proven partner in games of Trivial Pursuit, my pursuit of trivial knowledge and the avalanche of verbal nonsense that spewed forth unchecked did little to endear me to men.

  A quiet moment ticked by, and for the first time in recent memory, I didn’t try to focus my attention on the present. His blue eyes were piercing mine with an unnerving intensity, arresting the usual wanderlust of my brain. I thought I perceived one corner of his mouth lift, although the movement was barely perceptible.

  Finally, he broke the silence. “International standard?”

  “ISO 8601, data elements and interchange formats. It allows seamless intercourse between different bodies, governments, agencies, and corporations.” I couldn’t help myself as the words tumbled out. It was a sickness.

  Then, he smiled. It was a small, closed-lipped, quickly suppressed smile. If I had blinked, I might have missed it, but an expression of interest remained. He leaned his long form against the wall of the elevator behind him and crossed his arms over his chest. The sleeves of his guard uniform pulled in taut lines across his shoulders.

  “Tell me about this seamless intercourse.” His eyes traveled slowly downward, then, in the same leisurely pace, moved up to mine again.

  I opened my mouth to respond but then quickly snapped it shut. I was suddenly and quite unexpectedly hot.

  His secretive yet open and amused surveillance of my features was beginning t
o make me think he was just as strange as I was. He was making me extremely uncomfortable; his attention was a blinding spotlight from which I couldn’t escape.

  I shifted the box to my other hip and looked away from his searching gaze. I knew now that I’d been wise in avoiding direct eye contact. The customs and acceptability of eye contact vary greatly depending on the culture; as an example, in Japan, school-aged children…

  The elevator stopped and the doors opened, rousing me from my recollection of Japanese cultural norms. I straightened immediately and bolted for the exit before I realized I didn’t know where I was going. I turned dumbly and peered at Sir Handsome from beneath my lashes.

  Once again, he placed his hand on the small of my back and steered me. I felt the same charged shock as before. We walked along a hallway painted nondescript beige gray with low-hanging fluorescent lights.

  The smack smack smack of the flip-flops echoed along the vacant hall. When I quickened my step to escape the electricity of his touch, he hastened his stride and the firm pressure remained. I wondered if he thought I was a flight risk or one of the aforementioned crazies.

  We approached a series of windowed rooms, and I stiffened as his hand moved to my bare arm just above the elbow. I swallowed thickly, feeling that my reaction to the simple contact was truly ridiculous. It was, after all, just his hand on my arm.

  He pulled me into one of the rooms and guided me to a brown wooden chair. He took the box from my hands with an air of authoritative decisiveness and placed it on the seat to my left. There were people in cubicles and offices around the perimeter; a long reception desk with a women dressed in the same blue guard uniform that McHotpants wore was in the middle of the space. I met her eyes; she blinked once then frowned at me.

  “Don’t move. Wait for me,” he ordered.

  I watched him leave and their subsequent exchange with interest: he approached the woman, she stiffened and stood. He leaned over the desk and pointed to something on her computer screen. She nodded and looked at me again, her brow rising in what I read as confusion, and then she sat down and started typing.

  He turned, and I made the mistake of looking directly at him. For a moment he paused, the same disquieting steadiness in his gaze causing the same heat to rise to my cheeks. I felt like pressing my hands to my face to cover the blush. He crossed the room toward me but was intercepted by an older man in a well-tailored suit holding a clipboard. I watched their exchange with interest as well.

  After pulling a series of papers off the printer, the woman approached me. She gave me a closed-mouth smile that reached her eyes as she crossed the room.

  I stood and she extended her hand. “I’m Joy. You must be Ms. Morris.”

  I nodded once, tucking a restive curl behind my ear. “Yes, but please call me Janie; nice to meet you.”

  “I guess you’ve had a hard day.” Joy took the empty seat next to mine; she didn’t wait for me to answer. “Don’t worry about it, hun. It happens to the best of us. I just have these papers for you to sign. I’ll need your badge and your key, and then we’ll pull the car around for you.”

  “Uh…the car?”

  “Yes, it will take you wherever you need to go.”

  “Oh, ok.” I was surprised by the arrangement of a car, but I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.

  I took the pen she offered and skimmed over the papers. They looked benign enough. I hazarded a glance toward Sir Handsome and found him peering at me while he seemed to be listening to the man in the suit. Without really reading the text, I signed and initialed in the places she indicated, pulled my badge from around my neck along with my key, and handed it to her. She took the documents from me and initialed next to my name in several places.

  She paused when she got to the address section of the form. “Is this your current address and home phone number?”

  I saw where I had filled in Jon’s address when I was first hired; I grimaced. “No; no it isn’t. Why?”

  “They need a place to send your last paycheck. Also, we also need a current address in case they need to send you anything that might have been left behind. I’ll need you to write out your current address next to it.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t know what to write. “I’m sorry, I—” I swallowed with effort and studied the page. “I just, uh, I am actually between apartments. Is there any way I could call back with the information?”

  “What about a cell phone number?”

  I gritted my teeth. “I don’t have a cell phone; I don’t believe in them.”

  Joy raised her eyebrows. “You don’t believe in them?”

  I wanted to tell her how I truly loathed cell phones. I hated the way they made me feel reachable twenty-four hours a day; it was akin to having a chip implanted in your brain that tracked your location and told you what to think and do until, finally, you became completely obsessed with the tiny touch screen as the sole interface between your existence and the real world.

  Did the real world actually exist if everyone only interacted via cell phones? Would Angry Birds one day become my reality? Was I the unsuspecting pig or the exploding bird? These Descartes-based musings rarely made me popular at parties. Maybe I read too much science fiction and too many comic books, but cell phones reminded me of the brain implants in the novel Neuromancer. As further evidence, I wanted to tell her about the recent article published in Accident Analysis & Prevention about risky driving behaviors.

  Instead, I just said, “I don’t believe in them.”

  “O-o-o-o-k-a-y,” she said. “No problem.” Joy reached into her breast pocket and withdrew a white paper rectangle. “Here is my card; just give me a call when you’re settled, and I’ll enter you into the system.”

  I stood with her and took the card, letting the crisp points dig into the pads of my thumbs and forefingers. “Thank you. I’ll do that.”

  Joy reached around me and picked up my box, motioning with her shoulder that I should follow. “Come on; I’ll take you to the car.”

  I followed her, but like a self-indulgent child, allowed a lingering glance over my shoulder at Sir Handsome McHotpants. He was turned in profile, no longer peering at me with that discombobulating gaze; his attention was wholly fixed on the man in the suit.

  I was dually relieved and disappointed. Likely, this was the last time I would see him. I was pleased to be able to admire him one last time without the blinding intensity of his blue eyes. But part of me missed the heated twisting in my chest and the saturating tangible awareness I’d felt when his eyes met mine.

  Chapter Two

  The car was a limo.

  I’d never been in a limo before, so of course I spent the first several minutes in shock, the next several minutes playing with buttons, then the subsequent several minutes after that trying to clean up the mess made with an exploding water bottle. It tumbled out of my hands when the driver hit the brakes behind a yellow cab.

  The driver asked me where I wanted to go; I wanted to say Las Vegas, but I didn’t think that would go over very well. In the end, he’d graciously consented to drive me around while I made some calls using the car’s phone. One of the nice things—or not so nice things, depending on your perspective—about not having a cell phone is that you have to know people’s phone numbers.

  Additionally, it keeps you from making meaningless acquaintances.

  It is nearly impossible for most individuals to remember a phone number unless they use it frequently. Cell phones, like the other social media constructs of our time, encourage the collecting of so-called friends and contacts similar to how my grandmother used to collect teacups and put them on display in her china cabinet.

  Only now, the teacups are people, and the china cabinet is Facebook.

  My first call was to my dad; I left a message asking him not to call or send mail to Jon’s apartment, explaining very briefly that we’d broken up. Calling my dad, in retrospect, was more cursory than critical. He never called, and he didn’t write ex
cept to send me email forwards. Nevertheless, it was important to me that he knew where I was and that I was safe.

  The next call was to Elizabeth. Thankfully, she was on break when I called. This was a stroke of luck, as she was an emergency department resident at Chicago General. I was able to communicate the salient facts: Jon cheated on me, I was now homeless, I needed to buy some conditioner for my hair, I lost my job.

  She was outraged about Jon, generously offered her apartment and hair conditioner for my use, and expressed stunned sympathy about my job. She had a nice apartment in North Chicago; too small for long term but large enough that I wouldn’t smell like fish after three days.

  I was relieved when she quickly asserted that I could stay at her place, as I didn’t actually have a Plan B. Elizabeth also noted that she frequently was forced by necessity to sleep at the hospital, so I would likely be at the apartment more than she would.

  We decided on a course of action: I would stop by Jon’s, quickly box up the essentials, then head to her place. I would go back over to Jon’s the next week to pack up everything else. I had plenty of time, since the construct of work hours held so little meaning at present.

  I hesitated asking the driver to wait for me while I packed a bag, but in the end, I didn’t have to. He’d been eavesdropping on my conversation and offered to circle back in two hours.

  As I packed, I was stunned by my lack of material possessions. Three boxes and three suitcases were all it took to assemble the entirety of my worldly goods. One suitcase, the largest one, was full of shoes. One box, the largest one, was full of comic books. This plus my brown and white box from work was the sum total of my life.

  When I finally arrived at Elizabeth’s place several hours later, the limo driver—his name was Vincent, he had fourteen grandchildren, and he was originally from Queens—helped me carry all my belongings up the two flights of stairs to the apartment.