Alan Lennox and the Temp Job of Doom

by Brian Olsen

  “No. Sorry. I can’t. I have way too much to do, I’m just going to eat at my desk.”

  “Oh.” Mark stood there awkwardly for a moment. His opportunity to get through to her was slipping away. Should he launch into a description of the weirdness again? Ask her about Dakota’s useless department?

  “Mark,” she said, a cold timbre entering her voice. “I’m not being clear. You need to go.”

  Any trace of apology or even kindness was wiped from Pickle’s face. She was staring at him like he had just pissed on her rug.

  “Right,” he said. “Sorry. Did I...are you mad at me?”

  “I’m not anything at you, Mark. You’re not required anymore. Goodbye.”

  This wasn’t good, he thought. He needed to talk to her. She was his only source of information as to what might be going on at AmSyn, and he didn’t want to go back to his roommates with nothing to contribute.

  He walked up to her slowly, and stopped. He was almost close enough to rest his head on hers. He looked down at her, and she looked up – their eyes met. He was going to hate himself for this.

  “I’m sorry, Pickle,” he said quietly. “For everything.” He put his hand under her chin, bent down, and kissed her.

  Considering the height and weight difference between them, her right hook packed a terrific wallop. Being so much shorter than him she hit from almost directly below, and as his jaw smashed closed he had just an instant to be grateful he hadn’t used tongue before the pain gripped him. He staggered and fell against the back of one of the armchairs. He barely managed to catch his balance and keep himself from crashing to the floor. “Ow! Fuck!”

  “How dare you!” Pickle advanced on him, and he quickly hurried around the armchair, keeping it between them. “I am engaged to a wonderful, successful, handsome man! I have a perfect life ahead of me! You think I would throw that away, throw him away, for you?” Her voice dripped with disgust. “For a stupid, worthless gym rat? For lower class, West Coast garbage? Get out. Get the hell out of my office before I call security.” She scooped up the files she had brought in with her, walked past him to her desk and sat. She started flipping through the folders. She didn’t look at him.

  Mark stood there for a moment, watching her, in shock. He had gotten somewhat used to her rapid mood swings, but he hadn’t expected anything like this. Her attraction to him had stayed mostly consistent, even if her guilt about it had come and gone, and he didn’t understand what had changed. He couldn’t think of anything to say to her, so he silently slunk out of her office.

  Dell was waiting. Pickle had never closed the office door, so he had seen the whole thing. He whispered to Mark through gritted teeth, “I’ve already called lobby security. If they don’t see you walking out the front door in the next five minutes, they’ll come looking.”

  Mark gathered his dignity as best he could and made his way to the elevator bank, rubbing his jaw. The receptionist smiled at him, unaware of anything that had transpired. He forced himself to smile back.

  While he waited for the elevator, he tried to work out a course of action. The security guards would be looking for him on this floor, but he could always hide out in Dakota’s office. Alan would be there too, and Caitlin was supposed to check in there when she finished with her acting thing. They could all get together, compare notes, and work out what to do next. Maybe Dakota could make sense of Pickle’s behavior.

  He couldn’t remember what floor Dakota was on, so he pulled out his phone to text her. As he did so, it vibrated, and he saw a message from Alan appear. Meet me at slot machine for happy hour 911.

  Mark frowned. Happy hour? That wasn’t part of the plan. He texted back: What’s up? Are d and c with u? I’m in the building should I come to your office?

  After a pause, the reply came: d and c are with me. Meet us at slot machine for happy hour 911.

  Mark was worried. Something must have gone wrong if they had to get out of the building. He texted back that he was on his way, and stepped onto the elevator.

  * * *

  Caitlin thought she should feel guilty about enjoying herself so much, given the circumstances, but she just couldn’t bring herself to care.

  It had taken some time for the crew to be ready for her, so after filling out Cynthia’s paperwork she had used somebody’s laptop to idly surf the net and check Facebook until the wardrobe people were set. As soon as she put on the motion capture suit, her boredom evaporated and she felt like a movie star.

  Most of the motions Doug had her perform were simple gesticulations, but she did just enough running and jumping and rolling to imagine herself an action hero. She had felt a little embarrassed when Doug asked her to stop making her own sound effects – he had asked her to jump forward with her arms extended, and she had made a “crash” sound while picturing herself diving through a plate glass window seconds before the bomb she had set in the master criminal’s lair exploded. Doug had seemed more amused than annoyed. She hoped the green screen would be replaced by fire in the final shot, that would be cool.

  After an hour or two of random motions she got out of the body suit and back into her own clothes. Doug asked her to sit on the stool while they focused the camera on her face. She expected them to cover her in dots or something, but Doug said they didn’t need to. She didn’t understand the technology behind it, but she tried not to take offense when he told her that the camera would track her facial expressions by the movement of her wrinkles. This wasn’t as much fun as the full body motion capture had been, but she prided herself on her professionalism, imaginary action movie aside. She emoted wildly on Doug’s commands: “You’re angry! You’re sad! You’re happy!” It was a bit like an acting class for five year olds she had once taught, but she stretched her face into the required shapes with gusto.

  After every emotion had been captured from every possible angle, Doug gave her some text to read. It was similar to the initial audition, but more thorough – there were a few complete words and sentences, mostly meaningless, along with some more complicated phonemes. He had her read them with various intonations – “Like it’s a question! Now it’s an exclamation! Now it’s a command!” – and while the situation didn’t exactly lend itself to an authentic performance, she executed each bit of direction precisely.

  By mid-afternoon, Doug seemed satisfied and called for a break. He joined her as she grabbed a bottle of water. “Great job!” he told her. “Thanks for this.”

  “No problem,” she replied. “It’s fun. Do you do this all the time?”

  “Not all the time, no. We’re usually post-production, so I always jump at the opportunity to work with an actor. And this was a weird one, so I wanted to do it myself.”

  “Weird?” Caitlin said, her attention piqued. The past few days came crashing back, and she remembered she was supposed to be on weirdness watch. “How so?”

  “Usually we know what the end product is,” he said. “Like, when we do motion capture for a video game, we have a prescribed set of movements from the game designers. Cynthia gave me so much for you to do, it seems like AmSyn doesn’t even know what they want it for. Like they’re just going to take the footage and then figure out what to do with it.”

  He saw the look of dismay on her face, and hurriedly added, “I’m sure that’s not what’s going on, I mean, I’m sure they know, I’m sure they’ll tell you. They have to tell you, right? They can’t just use your likeness without telling you what it’s for.”

  “Right,” Caitlin said, although she wasn’t confident on that point at all. Her excitement was fading, replaced with a dull unease.

  “This must have been the weirdest day you’ve had in a long time, right?” he asked, laughing.

  She refrained from mentioning that she had recently found her friend’s dead body and witnessed his murderer slit her own throat. He was a nice guy and that seemed like it might be a conversation killer.

  “Right,” she repeated instead.

  “Anyway, sit tight
, we’re probably done but I want to go over everything with Cynthia, make sure she doesn’t want anything else before we release you.”

  “Not necessary,” Cynthia said, appearing beside them. She stared coolly at Caitlin. “We have everything we need. Miss Ross is no longer required. She may leave.”

  Doug looked back and forth between them. “Uh...well, Caitlin was so good today, I thought she might like to see some of the...”

  “Unacceptable,” Cynthia cut in. “You have work to do, Douglas. Amalgamated Synergy wants today’s footage processed immediately. Miss Ross is an unnecessary distraction.”

  Although her tone was sharp, Cynthia’s expression was blank. Caitlin recognized that look, and unconsciously took a step back.

  “Wow. That’s harsh,” Doug said. “Caitlin did a lot of work for us today, you don’t need to be rude.”

  Caitlin wanted to warn him, to tell him not to antagonize the woman, but she didn’t know how to do it without sounding like a lunatic. “It’s fine, Doug, really,” she said. “You have work to do, I should get going anyway. Thanks, this was a lot of fun.”

  “Okay, well, thanks. Sorry. Hey, I wanted to ask you...” He glanced over at Cynthia, who was staring blankly back at him. He looked at his feet.

  He wants to ask me out, Caitlin thought. How surreal. I would totally be into that if I wasn’t afraid that a middle-aged English woman was seconds away from killing us both.

  “Find me on Facebook,” she said, trying to end the conversation. “Let me know how all this comes out.”

  “I will,” he said, looking up at her. “I definitely will. Okay. Take care. Great to meet you.” He stepped in and gave her a quick hug, then wandered back towards a group of techies huddled around a computer.

  Cynthia continued to stare at her, silently.

  “So,” Caitlin said cautiously. “When will I get to see...whatever this is for?”

  “You won’t,” Cynthia said. “We have no legal obligation to show you anything. Leave now.”

  Under normal circumstances Caitlin would have gone into attack mode, but the circumstances were anything but normal. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going. I just have to get my bag, it’s back where you had me fill out paperwork.”

  “Quickly,” came the curt reply.

  Caitlin hurried to the back of the room and picked up her bag from where she had left it. She noticed the laptop she had borrowed a few hours earlier sitting open, still logged in to her Facebook account. Shit, she thought. Better sign out.

  She would have sworn that the last page she had looked at had been her inbox, which was full of messages from her theater friends asking about Derek. But on the screen was the page for Slot Machine, the lesbian bar she and her roommates frequented. Somebody must have been rooting around in her Facebook account while she was filming. There wasn’t necessarily anything sinister about that – she probably would have snooped too if somebody had left themselves logged in on her laptop – but it worried her nonetheless. She hurriedly signed out and snapped the laptop closed.

  As she returned to the main door, she saw Cynthia looking around with a puzzled expression on her face. The older woman spotted Caitlin and the confusion was replaced with a smile.

  “Are you leaving us, dear?” She stepped forward and clasped Caitlin’s hands in hers warmly. “Thank you so much, I enjoyed watching you today, although I confess I hadn’t the foggiest idea what you were supposed to be doing! I’ll be in touch if we need anything else, all right? Get home safe.” She marched over to join Doug and his crew, humming a little tune under her breath.

  Caitlin was speechless. Cynthia’s sudden friendliness was as terrifying as her coldness had been. Uncertain of what to do, she walked out the door and up the steps to the lobby. She passed Officer Johnson at the door but stopped as she heard a ringing from her bag.

  She pulled out her phone to see a text from Alan: Meet me at slot machine for happy hour 911.

  She texted back: Y not D’s office? I’m downstairs.

  After a moment, he texted his message again: Meet me at slot machine for happy hour 911.

  Uh-oh, she thought. This can’t be good. She replied: C u there.

  She jumped as the guard behind her growled, “Keep moving, Miss Ross. You’re not needed anymore.”

  She looked up, and he was staring at her with a blank expression. She moved quickly towards the door, and saw that Officer Wilson at the front desk was also watching her, similarly expressionless. She hurried out the door of Amalgamated Synergy and headed for the subway.

  * * *

  Despite his resolve to do something productive, Alan had wound up going back to playing games for an hour or so. He justified it on the basis that video games helped him think, even though his entire life up to that moment would suggest the opposite. Nevertheless, while playing he had somehow come up with a course of action.

  He leaned into the doorway of the large office his four supervisors shared. Dakota was taping sheets of paper to the wall behind her desk, while the other three were buried in their computers.

  “Hi,” he said. They all looked up at him. “Um. Sorry. I have to head down to Human Resources. Is that okay?”

  “Why?” Mei asked him.

  “Uh...” He tried to think of a convincing reason. “I’m supposed to.”

  “Oh. Okay,” she said, and looked back at her computer.

  As he started to leave, he heard Sandra say, “Why don’t you play some more video games?”

  Alan turned back to see her staring at him with a peculiar expression on her face. It made him think of Marisol and his pulse raced. “What?”

  “Video games. Why don’t you just keep playing games?”

  “How did you...why do you think I was playing video games?”

  Before she could respond, Dakota came to his rescue. “Let him do what he needs to do, Sandra. Go ahead, Adam.”

  “It’s Alan. Thanks.”

  He headed to the elevator bay and made his way down to floor twelve. He figured that whoever ordered him from the temp agency knew that Derek wouldn’t be in today, which means they knew Derek would be killed, which means they had something to do with it. So if he could find that person’s name, he’d be one big step closer to having something concrete to tell the police.

  But how to find that name? Could he just ask someone? He supposed that was the simplest way; the worst they could do was not tell him. Or stab him to death with a cake knife. But probably they just wouldn’t tell him.

  The Human Resources department had a more open floor plan than Marketing. When Alan got off the elevator he was faced with HR’s front desk receptionist. Behind her was a sea of cubicles, bounded on all sides by the glass-walled offices of the higher-level executives.

  “Can I help you?” the flat-faced woman at the receptionist’s desk said to him, looking up from her copy of Cat Fancy magazine.

  “Hi, yes,” he said quickly. “I’m a new temp in Marketing, and I was hoping to talk to somebody about my assignment?”

  “We just place the orders, we don’t deal with problems with your assignment details. You need to talk to whoever in your department handles temps. Did you say Marketing? You want Marisol on fifteen.”

  “Right. Marisol. She’s not in today, but I did talk to her last week and she said she didn’t see any request for me. But I was requested by name and I’m just wondering if there’s a way for me to find out who put in the request.”

  She put her magazine down and looked at him skeptically. “Marisol didn’t know about it?”

  There was a large swatch of cat hair on her shoulder. Alan resisted the urge to pick it off. As he averted his eyes from it, he noticed a squinty-eyed young man on the near side of the cubicle farm, with a plain manila file folder tucked under his arm. He was pretending to fix his garish canary yellow wide tie, but Alan could tell that he was listening to their conversation intently.

  Alan looked back at the receptionist. “No, she didn’t. Nobody was expect
ing me, and Marisol’s not here, so I was wondering if there’s some mistake. I wouldn’t want to work for free.” He laughed weakly.

  She pulled her keyboard out from its sliding tray underneath her desk. “What’s your name?”

  “Alan Lennox.”

  She typed a few characters and stared at her screen. “When was this placed?” she asked without looking at him.

  “I got the assignment on Thursday.”

  She typed some more keys and clicked her mouse. She seemed unsatisfied with the results. “Well, you’re in here, but...Thursday, you said? I should still have the hard copy on my desk...”

  She reached to her inbox and ruffled through a small stack of papers. After not finding whatever she was looking for, she ruffled through them again, then again. She lifted up the inbox and looked underneath, then peered uselessly into her wastepaper basket. “Huh.” She went back to her computer.

  Alan hesitated. He noticed the man with the yellow tie was still eavesdropping, although now he was pretending he had something in his eye.

  “Is something wrong?” Alan asked the receptionist.

  “I can’t figure out who placed this order. It doesn’t say, and Marisol never signed off on it...I don’t understand how this got through. There should be a hard copy, all the temp orders are hard copies, but I can’t find it...” She looked up at him and smiled. “You’re fine, though, don’t worry, you’ll get paid. It says Dakota Bell is your supervisor, have you met her?”

  “Yeah. Yes.”

  “Just make sure she signs your timesheets and you’re fine. Somehow the order got here without anybody signing it, I suppose, and someone else filled it even though they weren’t supposed to. It happens.” She paused. “Well, it doesn’t happen, really, I don’t know how it got past me without either of the signatures it’s supposed to have, and I don’t understand why there’s no hard copy. It’s almost like nobody requested you at all. Still, you’re here and you’ll get paid, that’s what matters.” She looked back at him. “Was there something else?”

  “Uh...no, I guess not.”

  Alan noticed the strange man gesticulate frantically at him, then disappear into a conference room. The man closed the blinds on the large glass window and peeked through them.