Saxifrage & Starshine

by Megan Kempston

  “I know, right?” Raj said. “Mindy’s a certifiable genius herself! Too bad she’s not an engineer, or we could hire her.”

  “Just… one small question,” I said.

  “I’ve got one too,” Sheila said. “But you first, Eric.”

  “Right. When you say we’re one of the hottest new companies in our space… do you mean central Nebraska?”

  “And when you say ‘innovative B2B platform,’” Sheila interjected, “do you mean us, manually moving numbers around?”

  “And when you list things like ‘agile ninja’ and ‘Ruby guru,’ do you even know what you’re talking about?” came a third voice.

  Sheila and I both looked up at that, to stare at Javier. He had his headphones around his neck, so the volume hadn’t really changed. He shrugged at our looks.

  “What? This seemed important.”

  “I don’t really think that those things are what matters here.” Raj’s voice was as oily as a used car salesman’s. “The point is, these are the words and the style that attract top talent today. And we all want to attract top talent, right?”

  There wasn’t much to say to that. Even flipping him off didn’t really hold the satisfaction it normally does.

  “Fine, whatever,” Sheila said. “Just don’t waste too much of our time on this, okay?”

  “Of course not,” Raj said, his voice veering into castor oil territory. “At least, not until it’s time for the interviews.”

  We got back to work.

  But later, when I looked up, I could see Raj twirling his wrists in a way that looked suspiciously slow and mindful.

  Mindy probably did yoga. Bad news for Raj.

  ***

  People think of Nebraska as terribly cold and snowy and miserable. I’d like to point out that that’s only in the winter. In the summer, it’s terribly hot and humid and miserable.

  It was Saturday afternoon, which, since it was summer, meant Raj and I were on the front porch, our feet in the kiddie pool, beer in one hand, smartphone in the other.

  (In the winter, we sit inside near the open oven, beer in one hand, smartphone in the other. Raj had once gone out to get more beer and I’d put his phone in the oven until the case melted, then took it back out and blamed it on electromagnetic forces coming through the cell signal. He yelled and called me a bunch of names, but I spotted him looking it up on Yahoo Answers later. I consider that a win.)

  “I think we need a more active social life,” Raj said.

  Raj says this every Saturday.

  “Yeah,” I said, which is how I answer every Saturday.

  Normally we go back to meditatively sipping our beers, compadre-style, as we surf the web or play dumb mobile games. But this time, Raj sat up and turned to face me. That takes a lot of effort in the summer. I managed to turn my head a few degrees towards him, just to acknowledge the gravity of the situation.

  “I’m serious, Eric,” he said. “When was the last time we threw a party?”

  “Four years ago, when we moved in, right after we got hired at Somno,” I replied.

  “See, that’s way too long.”

  It was too much effort to roll my eyes, so I just took a long pull of beer instead. “Oh, because that was such a great success, four years ago?”

  Raj didn’t have an answer. That’s because there wasn’t an answer to that. Four years ago, half the town had come to our party. Several of them had engaged in amorous encounters in both of our bedrooms and in the kitchen. Most of the rest of them got into a massive brawl halfway through the evening. In our living room.

  After hauling the fragments of couches and coffee tables to the dump and selling our beds on Craigslist at a huge loss, and then paying the noise complaint fines and the fees to our landlord and bailing Javi out of jail (we’d served tequila at the party), Raj and I had been too broke to host another bash.

  Now we both had some cash on hand, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to blow it on another night like that. None of the women we’d invited had even looked twice at us.

  “How about a small party?” Raj asked. “An… intimate party, even.”

  I snorted. “You mean the kind where you invite Mindy and I invite a few other people so it doesn’t seem so awkward, and we chill for awhile and have some snacks and drinks, and then me and my friends leave so you can put the moves on her?”

  “Yeah, exactly.”

  “Not gonna happen,” I told him. I splashed one foot idly in the pool. “First, Mindy would never come to a party at our house. Second, I would never do that for you. Third, even if somehow those two things happened, you putting the moves on Mindy would just result in her laughing at you and leaving.”

  “Dude, why are you raining on my parade here?” Raj asked.

  “It’s not a parade. It’s a pipe dream. And I don’t mean the fun stoner kind, either.”

  He splashed his foot too, intentionally soaking me. Since it was about a million degrees out, I just said, “Thanks, man.”

  Raj grumbled to himself for a while and drank more beer and fiddled with his phone.

  Later, maybe because of the beer, his mood got optimistic again. “Whoa!” he said, looking at his phone. “Guess how many emails we’ve already received about our engineering position?”

  “Dude,” I groaned, “what’s wrong with you? I don’t want to talk about that shit on a weekend. Plus, why were you checking your work email on Saturday anyway?”

  He smirked at me. “You’ll understand when you become a manager someday, young padawan.”

  I really wished Sheila was there to growl at him. My growling just isn’t as convincing for some reason.

  Raj had that look on his face like he wasn’t going to give up on this topic, so I hazarded a guess. “Negative one.”

  “Negative one?”

  “Applicants for the engineering position.”

  “How would that even be possible?” he said.

  “Someone hated the job posting so much that they wrote you to tell you they weren’t interested in it.”

  “Very funny,” Raj said. “No, as a matter of fact, we’ve already gotten eight emails.”

  That earned a full on sit-up-and-look-over-at-him. “Eight,” I said.

  “Yep,” he said gleefully.

  “Uh,” I said.

  “You’re speechless, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Because you’re so excited about all the great candidates applying for this position, and how great this will look on my resume, and how Mindy will be so impressed, and—”

  I reached over and smacked the back of his head. “No, moron. I’m speechless because I’m trying to figure out how we’ll interview eight people in one week when we have all those numbers to move back and forth by Friday. And whose ass will be on the grill when management finds out about it.”

  Raj’s face fell.

  He looked so sad that I almost felt sorry for him.

  Then he brightened and said, “I’ll call Mindy.”

  ***

  He came back fifteen minutes later.

  “Did you change your shorts?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, with dignity.

  I snickered.

  “It’s not like that, Eric,” he said. “These are my lucky shorts. I wear them when something really good happens.”

  I eyed him. “First of all, those are Madras shorts.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “So, you’re Indian. Isn’t that sort of, I don’t know, weirdly racist?”

  He gave me a look. “Against preppy white people?”

  “Okay, fine,” I said. “Second question, much more important—if these are your lucky shorts, why have I never seen you wear them before?”

  “Because nothing this good has happened to me since Bianca Masterson kissed me in freshman year of college.”

  “Dude,” I said. “That was during a game of Truth or Dare. And you weren’t wearing those shorts then.”

  “I realize that, Eric
,” he said in a voice of strained patience. “I bought them to commemorate the occasion.”

  “And you’re wearing them now because…”

  He beamed again. The guy was annoyingly irrepressible. “Mindy said she’d make the interview schedule work!”

  “Uh,” I said. “Time machine? Robo-interviews?”

  “She just said magic.”

  “Magic.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like, abracadabra?”

  “It’s called a figure of speech, Eric.”

  “So why is this exciting enough for your special shorts?”

  “Come on, she said she’d use magic! Who says that? Unless they’re flirting. Ergo, she’s hitting on me! And if that doesn’t warrant lucky shorts, I’m not sure what does.”

  I sighed, shook my head, and drank my beer.

  ***

  On Monday morning, Raj sent a meme to the group. It was the one with that scruffy fantasy dude and it said, “One does not simply walk into Somnocorp.” I told him that sentence didn’t even make sense, since plenty of us simply walked in the front doors every day. Sheila launched into a long and surprisingly patient explanation as to why Raj’s meme was not an image we wanted to use as job posting marketing material. Javi ignored us and moved more numbers around on spreadsheets.

  On Tuesday afternoon, Mindy visited our pod-cube. Raj tripped over himself getting up to greet her. Javi even took his eyes off his screen to check out her curves. I played it super cool and didn’t say a word while Mindy reported to Raj that she’d done all the phone screens already and our interviews for culture fit were lined up for the following day, back-to-back, as efficiently as possible.

  On Wednesday morning, we gathered in the pod-cube and waited for Mindy to come get us.

  “I wonder what the candidates will be like,” I said.

  “I wonder if any of them will be women,” Sheila said.

  “They’ll all be rockstars,” Raj said in a voice that was meant to reassure us but sounded like he actually needed some reassuring himself. “I’m sure of that.” He was clearly not sure.

  Javi moved his head to the beat of his music.

  Mindy showed up, distracting in a summery skirt and a white blouse. She smiled at us, told us good morning, and told us to follow her. Three of the four of us did not mind that in the least.

  She led us into a conference room, assured us that our first candidate would be in shortly, and left.

  “Taran Arabesque,” I said, repeating the name Mindy had given us. “Guy or girl?”

  “Woman,” said Sheila. “Probably T-A-R-Y-N.”

  “Yeah, a girl,” Raj agreed. “Gotta be a former stripper with that last name.”

  “Hey,” said Sheila.

  “Reformed stripper, now an engineer? That seems like something a feminist could get behind,” I said.

  Sheila blinked, and then settled for narrowing her eyes and baring her teeth at me.

  “Dude,” said Javi. “Big tall redheaded dude with surprisingly long and graceful fingers.”

  We all looked at him.

  “What?” he said. “I can see him coming.”

  The other three of us turned and craned our necks to look out the conference room window behind us. Sure enough, a man exactly matching the description Javi had given walked a few more steps, entered the room, and smiled at us.

  “Taran Arabesque, I presume,” said Raj with a smile.

  Sheila rolled her eyes.

  “Nice to meet you,” the tall guy said.

  “Please, sit,” said Raj, and proceeded to introduce himself (at length) and the rest of us (at much less length).

  Then he asked the dude to tell us a little bit about himself.

  “Sure,” said Taran. “I’ve been a Python wizard for about five years, working on a range of projects with large and small companies. I also consider myself fairly adept as a Ruby wizard, though I have to say that I don’t think of myself as a guru, per se.”

  We blinked at him.

  “Oh, and I’m originally from Detroit,” he said.

  We looked at Raj.

  Raj ignored us and gave him a shaky smile. “And why do you want to work at Somnolent Industries?”

  “Well, for one thing, I don’t see a lot of postings for Python wizards. For another—” Taran shrugged “—I have to pay the bills somehow. And I don’t know much about fintech, but that sounds like a very unusual and fascinating application.”

  We looked at Raj again.

  Raj swallowed. The silence lingered as he realized he had no idea what to ask an engineering candidate. The rest of us basked in his discomfort, and hoped fervently that he wouldn’t be smart enough to ask any of us for questions.

  “Uh,” Taran said after a long moment. “Would you like a demonstration of my skills?”

  Raj smiled so hard his cheeks creaked. “Yes, please. Exactly what I was just about to ask.”

  Sheila snorted softly.

  “Excellent,” said Taran, and snapped his fingers. With a small poof, a fancy wooden box, inlaid with what looked like real sapphires and emeralds and rubies, appeared on the table. All four of our mouths dropped open.

  With a twitch of his (surprisingly long and graceful) fingers, the lid of the box lifted, seemingly of its own accord, and a long, thick snake swayed slowly upward. Taran met its eyes very intensely, which must have been why he didn’t notice any of the four of us flinching backwards in our seats.

  The python—it was definitely a python—swayed back and forth sinuously for a long, hypnotizing moment. Then it sprang forward (Javi emitted a very high-pitched squeak) and upward, and began doing figure eights in the air. It spiraled and twisted and turned and even did something that looked vaguely like a cha-cha, if flying snakes can do the cha-cha. Then it coiled itself neatly back in the box, the lid closed, and with another small poof, the box disappeared entirely.

  We looked at Taran. Taran looked at us, first with a smile, then with a slowly growing look of worry and confusion.

  I kicked Raj under the table. He yelped, and Sheila shook her head.

  “Thank you, Mr. Arabesque,” she said. “We appreciate your time, and HR will be in touch within a few days.”

  Taran smiled again, looking reassured. He stood and swept us a bow, with fancy hand waves and everything, like he was used to wearing a cape or something. And then he opened the door and left.

  ***

  There was a full minute of silence as we all stared at each other.

  Then Mindy’s perky voice came on over the intercom. “Hey guys! Ready for your next candidate?”

  I looked at Javi. Javi looked at Raj. I looked at Raj. Raj looked pleadingly at Sheila. Sheila cleared her throat and said, in a strangled voice I’d never heard from her, “Uh, not quite yet. We’ll get back to you.” She muted the intercom, forcefully.

  “So,” I said.

  “Um,” said Raj.

  “What the fuck was that?” said Javi.

  “Exactly,” said Sheila. Raj and I both tried to nod in agreement and shake our heads in bewilderment at the same time. It looked dumber on Raj.

  “Okay,” said Sheila, looking a little more poised. She reached down, grabbed her messenger bag, and pulled out a pad of paper. “Okay. We’re each going to write down what we think we just saw.” We nodded. She ripped off a page, tore it into four pieces, and handed one to each of us.

  She started writing. We waited.

  She finished writing and looked up at us. Then she rolled her eyes. “Seriously? None of you have a pen?”

  Five minutes later, we had all borrowed her pen and scribbled something down.

  “Okay,” said Sheila. “Now we all put our papers in the middle.”

  We did.

  Javi’s said, “Flying magical snake.”

  Raj’s said, “Motherfucking snakes on a motherfucking plane. But without the plane part.” (Moron.)

  Mine said, “That dude pulled a box out of thin air, a python came out, flew aroun
d, went back in the box, and disappeared. The box disappeared, not the python. Well, I guess they both did.” (And then I had scribbled out the last two sentences, but not quite enough to make them illegible.)

  Sheila’s said, “Magic! Real magic! MAGIC EXISTS!!!” Except all of her exclamation points had hearts instead of dots, and then down at the bottom, there was just a line of small text reading something like “eeep eeep! squee squee squeeeeeeeeeeeppppeeepp!!!”

  We all turned to stare at her.

  “What?” she said, crossing her arms over her chest.

  “Hearts in your exclamation points?” I asked.

  She narrowed her eyes at me again. But slowly, a smile grew on her face, seemingly despite her best efforts. She clapped her hands over her mouth as her grin grew wider. She started bouncing in her chair. Then, without warning, she blurted out “Fangirl’s gonna fan! Magic is real! Eeep!” and clapped her hands back over her mouth again.

  I looked at Raj. Raj looked at me. We both looked at Javi.

  Javi shrugged. “Weird.”

  “Seriously?” I said. “That’s all you have to say about this whole—” I gestured, trying to encapsulate not only the flying python but Sheila’s (Sheila’s) apparent descent into bubbly cheerful madness “—situation?”

  Javi shrugged again. “Yeah. Weird.”

  We looked around at each other again. Sheila bounced up and down gleefully. The clock on the wall ticked.

  “So,” said Javi. “How many more interviews do we have today?”

  Raj and I blinked at each other. Then the two of us—and Sheila—scrambled up from our seats to look out the conference room window. Javi ambled over to join us.

  We looked down the hall and into the lobby, where another seven well-dressed strangers sat.

  Well, actually, five of them sat. One of them was perched in some sort of upside-down lotus yoga position, which looked especially impressive given the ruby-studded cowboy hat he wore, which showed no signs of budging from its position. Another candidate was only visible in flashes of black and silver as he or she streaked, somersaulted, and spin-kicked through the lobby. A chick in ripped jeans, a crazy hairdo, and sunglasses absently stroked an electric guitar that was completely covered with stickers from Starbucks. Someone in a white lab coat scribbled furiously in a notebook. A lady absentmindedly checked her email on her phone as she fed a handful of hay to a dark brown deer-like creature with black stripes on its shoulders and large, inward-curving horns. One dude wore what looked like a massive condom over his suit, and the guy sitting next to him played a constant, high-pitched note on a flute.