Hell Is Other People

by Danielle Bellwood

  The lights in Roger’s office subtly brightened, signaling that his 7:30 appointment had arrived. He cleared his throat and shuffled the stack of papers on his desk. The click of the latch on the door around the bend sounded the same as any other day. But when the footsteps rounded the corner, it wasn’t a part-time temp desperate to prove himself. It was the receptionist, Bertha.

  Bertha tilted her head to peer at Roger over the tops of her cat’s eye spectacles, massive beehive hairdo wobbling dangerously.

  “Roger,” she said. “Your 7:30 hasn’t shown up.”

  “Who was it?” Roger asked in a bored voice.

  Bertha glanced at the clipboard clutched in her arms. “Arlo Black.”

  There must be some mistake. Arlo always shows up, Roger thought. Sometimes he’s a bit early. Sometimes he’s covered in coffee. Sometimes he’s babbling that his whole life is just a nightmare, but he always shows up.

  Roger began to sweat, the yellowed stains on his too big work shirt getting yellower and damper by the second. Convinced now that he really should ring up that discount shrink, his heart began to palpitate in a most unhealthy way.

  “Check the can,” Roger said. “Or the lobby.”

  “I did. He’s not there. Gillian isn’t at her desk either.”

  Roger blinked slowly. Just how many people were missing today? Turning his head to the right, he gazed on the glowing red numbers reflected on the glass wall. 7:31.

  This was bad. Someone higher up the food chain was going to blame him, Roger knew. Straightening his tie and sighing sadly, he pushed the padded chair back from his desk, wobbly wheels grating across the carpet. It looked like the Mountain was going to have to go to Muhammad.

  Roger Goodspeed plodded despondently along the sidewalks between the firm and the watering hole, aka: Forever Pharma and Java Joe’s Coffee Haus.

  Roger hated being responsible for other people. The idea that his job depended on whether or not someone else was doing their job was hell for Roger. But it wasn’t as though he had a lot of options. There was just so little that he was good at. He used to work in acquisitions, but he’d failed miserably at that job, seeing as he was sorely lacking in interpersonal people skills. He was quickly replaced and shunted down to the firm where he was given a job so easy that a trained monkey could do it. In fact, a monkey was who Roger replaced when the charming chimp got promoted to accounting.

  As Roger approached the watering hole, commuters moved haphazardly along the sidewalks according to their individual programing. Roger paused outside to read the sign on the door. Joe liked to write anti inspirational messages on the bulletin board. Things that usually gave Roger a teensy bit of amusement. Things like ‘Never. Give up.’ or ‘Thank you for smoking.’ Today, he’d written a slightly longer message on the white board. Two-inch red letters spelled out ‘It’s okay to quit. Nobody really expected you to succeed anyway.’

  Roger pushed the door open and glanced around the mostly empty room. No Arlo or What’s Her Name. Joe Jr was waiting behind the counter calmly. Phil from accounting sat at one of the small tables with a ceramic mug of boiling coffee, reading a newspaper.

  “Phil,” Roger muttered morosely.

  The newspaper crackled as Phil turned a page. Without looking up from the text, the balding, middle-aged man with the thick glasses said, “I’ll expect a full report on my desk by the end of the day.”

  “So… you know?” Roger asked.

  The crinkle of the newspaper being folded sounded especially loud in the empty shop. Dropping the paper on the table top with a plop, Phil shoved his chair back with a screech of legs on linoleum to stand at his full height of 5’ 3”. Straightening the vest of his three-piece navy-blue suit that made him super sweaty in the sweltering heat but looked dashing and debonair enough to be worth it, Phil looked up at the underling towering above him.

  “That your employees are MIA? It’s what I do.”

  “Of course,” Roger said.

  Phil frowned at the thin man in the rumpled over-sized shirt and too-wide tie with the frolicking kittens/palominos prancing across a background of pale sand.

  “And you do know where they are, of course.” It sounded more like a question than a statement.

  Roger swallowed. “I think so,” he lied.

  “Sure, you do,” Phil said. He pulled a slip of paper with an address written on it in cursive from his pocket, and slapped it on the table top. “Here. Go retrieve your runaways. I expect you all back at the office in the next twenty minutes.”

  Grasping his mug of boiling brew, Phil breezed out of the watering hole, the smoked glass door swinging shut behind him.

  Roger shared a long look with the pimply adolescent behind the counter.

  “Bureaucrats,” Joe Jr muttered.

  Roger’s face fell as a fatalistic feeling overwhelmed him. Sinking onto a spindly stool at the tiny table, he wished for the millionth time that he could be anyone other than himself. He didn’t like being a supervisor. He wasn’t very good at it. And other than the tidy salary that paid for his high-rise apartment in the slightly more fashionable 4th circle, there weren’t really any benefits to the job.

  “Do you ever feel like you just can’t do anything right?” he asked Jr morosely.

  “If you’re looking for someone to cheer you up, you’re in the wrong place.”

  ***

  Roger stood on the patio outside Gina’s apartment, eight minutes later. He could clearly see her and Arlo on the sofa through the sliding glass door to the patio. They were watching TV.

  “You know what this film is missing?” Arlo’s voice was clear through the glass.

  “A qualified director and a budget larger than $5,000?” Graciela said.

  “No. Well, yes but also, nudity,” Arlo said. “Nudity makes every movie better.”

  “What?” Georgina asked.

  “Well, maybe not every movie,” Arlo said with a nervous giggle. “I don’t think it’d be better for say… family films. No. Or documentaries about old folks in rest homes. Gross. But most movies? Definitely.”

  Ghislaine’s sigh was loud.

  “Take Night of the Living Dead, for example,” Arlo said quickly, desperate to convince her that he was on to something, “What’s scarier than brain-eating zombies? Naked brain-eating zombies, that’s what. Zombie dudes with their rotting junk falling off. Zombie chicks with rotting chests drooping down to the ground in long, stringy chunks of flesh. Terrifying.”

  “There’s something very wrong with you,” Gladiola said.

  “Yeah,” Arlo said. “I’m supposed to take pills for it but I don’t like the way they make me feel. All dead inside. Like a zombie. A naked zombie all exposed for the whole world to see and judge, unable to do anything about it because, you know, I’m just a walking corpse.”

  “Why do you worry so much about what everyone else thinks?”

  “Why do you worry so much about cleanliness?” Arlo countered. “We all have our little quirks. I like people. Even you, Gillian.”

  “Well, don’t,” she said. “Like me, I mean. And there’s no use trying to get me to like you, so don’t bother.”

  “You know, that’s a pretty fatalistic attitude...”

  He broke off at Jacinda’s startled cry. She jumped up from the sofa to stare out at the 4 x 4 of swept concrete where Roger waited, absorbed in their conversation.

  “Is that…” she whispered.

  Roger was shocked when she ran to the door a moment later and yanked on the latch, the aluminum frame of the glass panel squealing against the track as the door slammed open.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I’m not really sure,” Roger said.

  “It’s okay to quit. Nobody really expected you to succeed anyway,” Arlo said quietly from the sofa.

  “What did you say?” Jezebel’s voice held a faint warble of fear.

  She didn’t take her eyes off Roger, standing before her with more than a litt
le confusion mirrored on his face.

  “I said…”

  “I heard you,” she snapped.

  “Well, then why did you…”

  “Oh, I remember,” Roger said slowly. “Janelle, you have a new trainee.”

  Roger waited patiently for his employees to acknowledge the fact that they were supposed to be at work right now and not discussing naked zombies in Jocelyn’s living room, but they just stared blankly back at him.

  “Ummm…” Roger said uncertainly. He wasn’t very good at confrontation.

  “You’ve never come here before, Roger,” Jocasta said.

  “Hey, that’s a good point,” Arlo said. He bounced up from the sofa like an excited kid on Christmas morning. “This is big! Roger, why are you here?”

  “Because…” Roger said, searching his brain for the answer, but it eluded him.

  “Did someone tell you to come here?” Arlo asked.

  Roger nodded slowly.

  “Who, Roger?” Griselda said. “Who told you to come here?”

  “Phil.”

  “Who is Phil?” Arlo said.

  Roger shrugged. “The Accountant.”

  “What does he account for Roger?” Arlo asked.

  “That’s a silly question,” Gypsie said with a rude laugh. “What do all accountants account for? Money, obviously.”

  “Oh,” Arlo said.

  “No.” Roger said. “He mostly accounts for the bean counters, I think,” Roger said.

  “Huh?” Arlo and Galaxia said together.

  “But also, I guess, the drones,” Roger said. “Every drone has their role to fulfill. There are no exceptions.” He sounded like he was reading from a script that he’d recited a thousand times before.

  Arlo and Jell-o exchanged a curious glance.

  “Roger…” Arlo said slowly, “What are the drones?”

  “Not what,” Roger said, shaking his head. “Who.”

  Waking Up Is Hard to Do

  Roger lazily scanned the email for Phil in accounting. He didn’t actually remember typing it but there it was on his computer screen. Just waiting for him to hit send. Easy enough to do, but the thing was, Roger couldn’t seem to bring himself to hit the button. Something had happened that forced him to ‘see behind the curtain,’ so to speak. A breakdown in the not so perfect machine that was the universe. A loose cog or a dead squirrel stuck in the engine, jamming up the works.

  Until yesterday, every day of Roger’s life felt exactly the same as the one before. His job had become tedious to the point of martyrdom. Roger suffered from unrelenting bouts of depression, so every single second of every single day spent sitting at his desk was enough to make him want to hold a pillow over his own head until he passed out. But he didn’t because the idea of somehow botching the job and being left half-alive, a coma patient trapped forever in his own deranged mind, was even more depressing.

  Roger had been assistant supervisor in charge pro tem for… a while now. Every day, he would wait for new temps to show up for their pointless appointments. Every day, he would guide said temps to meet their senior counterparts. And every day, he would sit back down at his desk and wait miserably for the work day to end. His job was not that difficult. In fact, it was so basic that it should have caused a chemical burn. But, meh. It was a living. Sort of.

  At 7:29, the lights brightened slightly and the faint click of the door opening around the bend eased his troubled mind a tiny bit. Footsteps on the short beige Berber echoed through the empty halls. Same as every other day. As 29 rolled over to 30, Arlo Black opened the door to Roger’s glass box. Same as every other day.

  “So,” Roger droned dejectedly, “The agency sent you?”

  “No,” Arlo said. Not at all the same as every other day.

  “Call me… what do you mean, No?”

  “Oh, you know,” Arlo said. “I know you know what I mean by no.”

  “Ummm,” Roger mumbled as his muddled mind tried to wrap around the convoluted sentence filled with NOs. “Call me Roger,” he finally said just to say something.

  “No,” Arlo said again.

  Roger stared at him. This didn’t feel quite right.

  “You will be shadowing a senior staffer,” Roger said.

  “Oh, you mean Gillian?” Arlo asked. “Yeah, I don’t think so.”

  “What?”

  “She’s not at her desk,” Arlo said. “In fact, she never even got dressed this morning. I swung by her apartment when I saw that she wasn’t at Java Joe’s. She said she’s taking a vacation day. Real progress, if you ask me.”

  Roger thought of the angry-looking bald accountant in the navy-blue suit. Phil would shake his head and hold up a sheaf of copy paper. He would tell Roger to “fix it” even though Roger wasn’t really sure what was broken or why he was picturing this scenario so vividly.

  “I think maybe we need to take a little walk and talk about what’s going on here, Supervisor Goodspeed Call Me Roger,” Arlo said with an anxious little chuckle.

  Roger stood outside the door to the coffee haus with Arlo and stared at the nonsensical words scrawled on the white board. Java Joe liked to write amusing notes or puns about life, the universe, and everything. Things like ‘If life gives you melons, you’re dyslexic’ or ‘It’s a dog eat god world.’ Today, the words written in two-inch red letters spelled out: ‘404 ERROR. FILE NOT FOUND.’

  “What does it mean?” Roger asked.

  “Does it need to have a meaning?” Arlo laughed nervously. “Dude seems a little off his rocker, if you ask me.”

  Roger pushed the door gently, careful to avoid hitting anyone who may be waiting just inside. The shop was empty but for Joe Jr, standing behind the counter with a bored expression on his face.

  “So, what are we doing here?” Arlo asked Roger.

  Roger blinked at him blankly. “You’re asking me?”

  “Yeah,” Arlo said. “This is your shitshow, boss. I’m just along for the ride.”

  Roger turned to look at Jr waiting patiently behind the order counter. Something about this whole situation felt wrong. Like he’d slipped on a bar of reality and conked his head on the floor of some other universe’s shower. Was he drowning right now in a sudsy spray of water? Was he, in fact, bleeding from a cracked skull and slowly slipping into unconsciousness as he waited for the pimply young man to give meaning to his trek into this coffee bar? He didn’t know and he really didn’t want to think about it. Block it out. Move forward one heavy step at a time. The end will come eventually. It always does.

  “Were you going to order?” Jr asked suddenly, breaking the paralyzing silence.

  “Where is Phil?” Roger asked, more to himself than the barista.

  “Am I my accountant’s keeper?” Jr said.

  “I’ll have a large…” Arlo began.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’ve got it right here,” Jr said and motioned to the 20 oz cup waiting on the long counter.

  “Perfect. Thanks,” Arlo said.

  He picked up the cup and took a swallow as Roger stared in disbelief. A tiny vein began to pulse in the middle of Roger’s forehead. His generally dispassionate persona was being overridden by the strangeness of the whole scene. Arlo seemed to be taking everything in stride. Odd, considering the fact that Roger would have pegged the guy as vapid and self-absorbed, not a champion of the weird.

  Roger watched as Arlo spun the cup slightly to see the name that Jr had written on the side in black sharpie.

  “Try Again Later”

  Arlo laughed and took another gulp of coffee as Roger watched him with a growing sense of alarm.

  “Ready to go talk with Gillian yet?” Arlo asked around sips of his sweet coffee treat.

  “Who?” Roger asked.

  “Gillian,” Arlo said. “Tall. Leggy. Not really one for chitchat or social situations. Really good at spilling coffee all over herself though. You know, my training supervisor. The one taking a me day.”

  “Oh,” Roger said noncommittally.
>
  None of that really rang a bell, although to be fair, Roger had never taken the time to get to know any of the workers at the firm except for his receptionist Bertha. At 400 lbs., with cat’s eye glasses and a massive beehive hairdo, Bertha was kind of hard to miss. Roger secretly had fantasies where he would curl up in her large lap and she would sing to him about expense reports and employee handbook updates. He didn’t care that anyone else might find that vision equal parts disturbing and fascinating. It was his fantasy. He’d do what he liked.

  “Seventy Saguaro south,” Arlo said. “With any luck she’ll have at least brushed her teeth by now.”

  Roger shook his head slowly. This morning just kept getting curiouser and curiouser.

  As Roger and Arlo stepped past frozen figures perched precariously on sidewalks and street, Roger felt an overwhelming feeling of déjà vu. He couldn’t remember ever having experienced that particular sensation before, but when he tried to stop his feet from moving forward, it felt like an oppressive cloud of time was shoving against the back of his head, forcing him toward the apartment complex on the corner. Toward the destination that Arlo assured him held all of the answers.

  Apartment 42 sat just off center on the ground floor. A tiny square of swept concrete held a small table and a wobbly folding chair. Through the sliding glass doors, Roger could see into Gale’s living room. She was sitting on the sofa in her pajamas, holding an enormous bowl of buttered popcorn which she shoveled into her face as the flickering lights of the TV screen reflected blurry images against her face and the blank wall behind her.

  Arlo pushed past to open the slider and beckoned Roger inside. As they stepped into the tiny living room/dining room/kitchen area of Grace’s apartment, the woman never once glanced up from the screen where a Japanese game show host jumped up and down excitedly and the words SUPER MEGA AWESOME GOOD TIME scrolled across in giant red letters. Hypnotized, she stared at the bright, pulsating colors. Her hair was loose and fell in dark waves around her face. She wore no makeup, and her cream-colored pajamas were wrinkled. Wholly unlike her usual perfectly put-together self.