We Are Watching Eliza Bright

by A. E. Osworth

  “And?”

  “And they said they were just keeping an eye on your code because you’re new—to the position and to programming—and they thought this was a funny way to do it, being you’re the only one who has—well.” Preston blushes. “They didn’t mean anything by it and were sorry if it hurt your feelings. Lewis expressed a sadness that you didn’t come to them about this first, as they would have apologized and corrected their behavior without me getting involved.”

  Eliza is about to defend herself, but stops short—perhaps she should have gone to the two of them, no fuss? Some of us think so—it’s the same dilemma we have with Lewis. How much can her actions change things? If she is someone’s tragic hero (certainly not ours), or if they both are, then she’s hurtling through destiny toward the inevitable. But if not—what if she’d called Lewis and JP jerks to their faces and left it at that? Then we’d have no story. Nothing to watch. Do we prefer it this way? Or do we stick to our ideological guns and say shame, shame on her?

  “They’re undergoing mandatory sensitivity training so that they will better understand what kind of humor is office-appropriate in future.” Preston pauses. “I’ve also let them know your promotion was earned and that you’re a spectacular coder, you know a lot for having started fairly recently and you’ve come along so far so quickly. Off the record, I told them they were great big morons for not trusting your code.” Preston smiles shyly. He feels like this is winning, paying her this compliment.

  Eliza glances out the office window. She could decide this is enough. She almost does. Except it isn’t. To her, it isn’t, and Eliza can’t pretend. She is so close to swerving around her tragic flaw: the need for vengeance. The part of her that is Circuit Breaker won’t stand for it because it’s not fair. She shouldn’t have to deal with this, she thinks. We think she’s just a whore. A slut who wants to get Lewis and Jean-Pascale fired for a stupid joke. Not the tragic hero at all, but a villain. So: “May I have a Conversation about the work environment this places me in?”

  The last thing Preston wants to do is give her permission. But: “Of course, Eliza. Conversations are always gifts. I’m all ears.”

  “First, I want you to know that I feel it is unlikely that Jean-Pascale and Lewis will ever take me seriously, given that before my first week on their team was even over—before it had even begun—they reduced me to a body part that is associated mostly with women.”

  “Now Eliza, we can’t—”

  “May I—” Eliza clears her throat again, turns redder. “May I finish having a Conversation with you first, Preston?”

  Preston closes his mouth, embarrassed. It is a policy of his own invention, after all. “Certainly. I apologize.”

  “Okay, so I find it unlikely that they will take my work seriously because they reduced me to a body part. And I also think that giving them mandatory sensitivity training might not address the environment that’s been created now that they know I’ve spoken to you about sexism. Their sexism.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Eliza sighs. “They know I told on them so—”

  “Oh, right, of cour—”

  “They might take that out on me, you know? Professionally? And then lastly, I think that giving two people mandatory sensitivity training fails to address, um, the systemic—the, uh, larger issue of sexism in the gaming industry—in the world at large, right now—that will inevitably color some of our, um, the women’s experiences here, even in a place like Fancy Dog which is largely—or, um, entirely—almost entirely—progressive.”

  Preston pauses. “Are you finished?”

  “Yes. I think.”

  “Well, I want to say that I hear your concerns. But to have a Conversation about your Conversation, when you said that there’s a systemic problem here, frankly that made me feel hurt.” Preston takes a good deal of pride in the “action-feeling” speak. Concrete action, personal feeling. He is better at this than anyone else. He will win this Conversation, he is sure. “Because I try very hard to be one of the good guys. I promoted you with next to no professional development background because I believe that you really can do great things. You’ve shown immense drive, which is why I’m so surprised that your co-workers playing what is, in the end, a silly and stupid little joke has thrown you so much. Or at least, I perceive it has really taken your mind off work and off the goals that we set together. Moving forward, I would suggest working on forgiving and forgetting—don’t let adolescent pranks stand in the way for you. Let me handle them and you just keep your nose to the grindstone. Do good work, be a good person, that’s all anyone cares about around here.”

  Eliza almost blurts out that no, they also seem to care that she has boobs. Instead: “Does it weird you out?”—she tiptoes around her words carefully, like they might bite or escape out a sliding French door before she can close it; or, she calculates—what tone of voice will make this seem natural, like she is not a conniving bitch?—“that they chose to label my code with an area—a part of a woman’s body that’s normally extremely sexualized? That doesn’t, I don’t know, create a tension that doesn’t belong in a workplace?”

  Preston is in the middle of sipping from a glass of water when she reaches the word “sexualized.” He stops, puts the glass down and blinks at her once, twice. “Are you saying that Jean-Pascale and Lewis sexually harassed you?”

  “I mean, maybe! I don’t know! I’ve never been sexually harassed at work before, is that what this is? I’ve always thought of harassment as, like, wolf whistles when walking by construction sites. But even Fancy Dog orientation says it’s harassment when someone feels uncomfortable, and I feel extremely uncomfortable.”

  Preston neatly folds his hands on his glass desktop and looks out through his glass wall. He sees Joe turn his head back to his computer. He can’t even speak to the man about eavesdropping—he isn’t sure where the ADA stands on that.

  Preston turns back to Eliza. “I want you to think long and hard before we fill out paperwork stating that. I want you to think very, very carefully before you accuse anyone of anything. Look, candidly, just between you and me: all it was was stupid. You didn’t get hurt, your job is safe, I don’t think less of you, no one thinks less of you. No harm was done, they were just idiots. And they’re not even normally idiots! They’re good guys. They write great code. They do nice things. They just fu—slipped up. Once. If you say sexual harassment, I have to pull HR down here and put them on documented training with notes all over their records or terminate their employment with no references. But I want to stress to you, remind you, that no harm was done to anyone. It was just a joke and I really don’t want to ruin anyone’s life over this. Now. Knowing that I am strongly suggesting you let this go, don’t let it bother you and we’ll just keep moving you toward your goals here, what would you like to do?”

  “Preston, please, I don’t want to ruin anyone’s life here either. But I do think they’re getting off pretty lightly for what could be a really big deal.”

  “Let’s not keep score, Eliza.”

  “And I do think harm was done—I have to work with these guys now.”

  “Well what do you propose I do?” Preston snaps, losing his cool. He will regret this later, but now he looks at Eliza and feels only rage because she is wasting his time, his brain space. What if this is the very moment he is supposed to be coming up with his next big idea, and instead he is dealing with this? “Demote them? Fire them?”

  “How about informal probation, no notes on their records?” Eliza asks, tentative. “That way, if they do something else to me, or to anyone, something more serious could be—”

  But Preston is shaking his head back and forth, and some of us are doing so too; we know the policies. “No. We don’t offer probationary periods at Fancy Dog for any reason. It makes people feel like they’re not part of the team.” The only sound for a few seconds is the blowing heating vent as the hot air clunk-clunks through the system. It is extremely uncomf
ortable.

  “Move me!” The idea sneaks up on her suddenly and pounces. “Move me to a different team. It’s still in line with my goals. I would love working with Devonte.”

  Preston rubs his temples with his fingers. “There are no lateral positions on any other team right now. I’d have to promote you or demote you. And frankly, I’m not prepared to do either. You shouldn’t get demoted for something you didn’t do. And you shouldn’t get a promotion until you’ve earned it. And no one in this company is moving at all until we—” He stops short, remembering the wall and Joe. Joe is not part of the team that knows about the launch. Leaky Joe would give us more on 4chan if he were. Joe can’t keep a secret.

  “Then I don’t know what to do,” Eliza says. “But it just feels like—something. Something should be done. It should be addressed somehow. It feels like—it just feels like a big deal to me. It feels like an injustice.”

  “I have dealt with it. I have addressed it.” And we agree with him, yes. It should be over. “Now, you go and do your thing, working for Fancy Dog. And I’ll keep doing mine: running it. And making decisions like this.”

  Eliza stands but doesn’t move toward the door.

  “Unless of course,” Preston continues, “you’d like to say they harassed you. Sexually. Then we’re not finished here at all.” We are all on edge right now. We don’t want her to ruin their lives over this.

  She stumbles from the glass office. Preston leaves by himself under the pretense of grabbing coffee, needing to get out for a few minutes, to breathe air, to be unwatched. He Instagrams the butchered name the barista writes on his coffee cup: Pearson.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  LFleis: here she fucking comes

  LFleis: joe says she asked for promotion

  JPDes: no shit, rly?

  LFleis: yeah. she didnt want to work with us anymore

  LFleis: and she almost accused us of sexual harassment

  LFleis: cunt

  JPDes: i mean, okay

  JPDes: we definitely didnt do that

  JPDes: how are we supposed to handle this?

  LFleis: dunno. just a joke

  LFleis: if she were cool at all, shed just laugh

  JPDes: i guess

  LFleis: delphine laughed, right?

  JPDes: yeah

  LFleis: see? delphine is cool

  JPDes: but she didnt say sexual harassment?

  JPDes: in the end?

  LFleis: joe says definitely no

  LFleis: p talked her out of it

  LFleis: then they talked about a promotion

  JPDes: if she gets a promotion

  JPDes: im gonna be pissed

  JPDes: even if we were mean

  JPDes: thats not fair

  LFleis: if she gets the promotion

  LFleis: shes definitely sleeping wit him

  LFleis: joe said he didnt do that tho

  JPDes: see shes not sleeping with him

  LFleis: it dosnt mean shes not

  LFleis: i just said if she got the promotion, then she definitely is

  LFleis: if she doesnt, that doesnt mean shes not

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Eliza walks up to her workstation. It would be too kind of us to call it a desk; it is a sparse, long table she shares with one of the other developers, someone on Devonte’s team. Across from her at their own long table sit Lewis and, next to him, Jean-Pascale. Their view of her is unimpeded by cork walls or any other cubicle accoutrement. It is, at the moment, an open-office purgatory. As she sits, unsmiling, she notices Lewis’s raccoon-like eyes pop up above his monitor for a second, and then flick back down to his screen. He begins to type such that the clacking from the keys on his keyboard isn’t separate: instead, one long, slightly varied click, modulating according to the difference in applied pressures between a pinky and a middle finger.

  Jean-Pascale types back. Slower, but banging heavy with each keystroke. It isn’t normal for him; he generally has an incredible amount of finesse. Silence. Then Lewis again.

  Eliza needs to finish her part of the project, so she begins working. But she isn’t above the keyboard Morse code as emotional display—she hacks away furiously, like the semicolons offend her, hoping they’ll interpret it as her own discussions with allies on the other side of the screen. It isn’t a difficult charade to pull off—she is angry. And uncomfortable. In actual fact, neither of her allies are particularly responsive: Suzanne is fielding questions about rumors that there’s a big launch coming, though what it is no journalist can say. As we pepper her with questions, she can rightfully reply she knows nothing about it. Devonte debugs at breakneck speed, or what passes for it in the glacial environment of programming. Runner Quick is an apt alter ego for him; relative to the rest of the world, he is fucking fast. The way he interacts with his computer is practiced, elegant, efficient. Like watching an ice skater glide or a cowboy ride a horse.

  No one speaks out loud to each other for as long as is sustainable. Jean-Pascale and Lewis keep volleying their clicking noises back and forth; Eliza figures they are lobbing balls of pure hatred over the net at each other. In her effort to broadcast her feelings, she ham-fingers everything. Eventually she looks down at the two lines she’s added and can’t even figure out what she was trying to do. It feels like she’s dipped her hands in the tension and it’s hardened, gluing her fingers or possibly her brain and making her clumsy.

  “Hey,” says the programmer next to her. “Are you okay? You’re turning a bit green in the face.” He has discarded his headphones and looks concerned; he’s been watching her struggle for a while. In his lap sits a dog, a pug with bulging eyes wearing a tiny tee shirt that says “UpDog.” The dog’s tongue sticks out in perpetuity. We have barely seen this dog on Instagram. He pets it absently.

  “I’m fine. Fine,” Eliza says. She forces a smile. “Thank you.” Except she doesn’t sound grateful; she sounds tight-lipped. Peevish. She grimaces.

  “I can’t concentrate with all this noise,” Lewis says to the air around him. “We may as well skip right to our pre-announcement meeting, if we’re going to talk instead of working.” He unplugs his laptop from his monitor, flourishing his fingers and savoring each cord pulled; “pointed” is the word, we think. He is pointedly undocking. He stands, computer under his arm. Once he is halfway to the stairs, he turns around. “Jean-Pascale? Are you coming?”

  Jean-Pascale looks up, startled. He’s fallen into his work and has forgotten all about everything. “Uh. Yes. I—I suppose I can’t concentrate so well up here either. Plus we can, er, talk openly there. About the announcement.” He unplugs quickly. Lewis opens the door to the stairs and disappears. Before JP follows, he turns. “Eliza?” he says, and he clears his throat. “There’s uh. Does that work for you?”

  Eliza forces a smile, one that makes her look like a wolf with a facial tic or a violent offender. She half salutes at JP—what a weird gesture—and it looks so much like she’s raising her hand to hit her deskmate in the face that he flinches in his chair. “Sure,” she says. “Yes, coming. Just give me a minute to wrap up.” She can’t make herself say thank you. He turns his back to her and Eliza’s shoulders slump forward. She becomes bean shaped as she pushes her glasses up her nose. Dog moseys up to her and whines; puts his paw on her knee. She scratches his white mop of a head and pushes the fur out of his very sincere eyes.

  Eliza leans down and whispers in Dog’s ear. “Even all the dogs are male.”

  “Hey.” Her deskmate is back in her field of vision. “I have this ginger gum if you’re nauseous. It works wonders.”

  “Thank you, I’m actually not—I’m just going to go. To the meeting. I’ll be fine. I’m fine.” She undocks her laptop as well and sets off toward the collaboration room, almost catching up to her two teammates.

  “Hey!” she hears from behind her, and she rolls her eyes as she turns around. The programmer jogs up behind her, his dog now sitting at the computer as though it were in charge of the
Guilds of the Protectorate landing page and not the human.

  “What?” Eliza says, fixing her face as best she can. For someone with an unfixable face.

  “When you feel better, I’d love to ask you out for a drink or something. Maybe tonight, even. To celebrate the announcement.” We imagine what she thinks of him—that he is asking her out on a date when she’s visibly distressed and at work is bad enough, but then he waggles his eyebrows up and down. See, this is why we hate her. She thinks he’s a nerd, and so she shoots him down.

  “I’m sorry, I have a boyfriend,” Eliza says. Perhaps at another time, she’d have been flattered, some of us think. Almost all of us think she should give the nice guy a chance. He isn’t bad looking, and he works for Fancy Dog, so he is clearly smart, competent. Maybe the eyebrows are a joke; maybe he is funny. A few of us, though, we get it: everything is sour. She just wants to work, and now this.

  Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Lewis and JP turn to face each other, but she can’t see what their faces do in that moment of connection. We can see it, however, and it is a knowing smirk, Lewis’s lips curling up in disgust.

  They settle into one of the collaboration rooms. That’s what Fancy Dog calls the very tiny conference rooms created for the teams to meet together. Big screens hang on the walls for employees to dock their computers so everyone can see their work. They are honeycomb shaped and fit together in a cluster of six on Preston’s floor, their floor-to-ceiling windows facing his glass wall. It wasn’t consciously intentional, we don’t think, but he probably put them there so he could get off on seeing these people he brought together succeed together. Because he does; he figuratively gets off on that a bit, who wouldn’t? Who doesn’t look every so often at the moving parts of something they’ve created and think, fuck, I am good?

  The meeting should be short: they are close to finished with their part, with only the documentation left to write. Tricky problems have been solved. The code is so neat it looks like poetry. There should be a hefty amount of congratulations, even in the face of the all-nighters the entire company is going to pull. It should be the kind of meeting where employees can be excused for popping open a bottle of cheapish champagne, doled out in recycled-paper cone cups from the water cooler. Instead there is silence, a quick divvying up of the remaining work by Lewis, the unofficial captain, and more silence.