Even if she were to, Jean-Pascale and Lewis are already there, and, though the meeting is far more pleasant than the one she just witnessed, it still looks to us like they aren’t to be disturbed. She probably would continue on to her desk anyway. Likely, she would still forget all about the folder, because Eliza is already fired. Out of sight, out of mind. Or in this case, out of building, out of mind. Out of job, out of mind.
Some of us think this is the problem, the heart of it: a nameless blonde woman distracted by a spa. We will argue about its importance—the shields-up cucks among us will tweet in all caps that we are being UNFAIR, that the problem started with 80085 or even with how Lewis holds Eliza accountable for her actions. Some of us will argue that the fault lies entirely with The Inspectre. But the majority of us lay blame here, with a woman we are not sure exists but who has been conjured up as inept. Someone left the folder out.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Jean-Pascale and Lewis’s meeting with Preston is barely important. There are only a few things we need to know. They use the comfortable chairs. Any questions they get from journalists, they are to immediately refer to [email protected]. “We have a whole team with media training and strategies; Legal works at the next desk. Let them take care of all this.” Their sensitivity training will start the next day—they are bringing in an outside firm to do it, something off a Feminist Foundation list in hopes that they will tweet about the sensitivity training as a good solution. “Our PR people really are brilliant,” Preston says, though he doesn’t smile when he says it.
Along with sensitivity training, Lewis and Jean-Pascale will undergo media training. “Just in case,” says Preston. “In case this goes further.” Because they are now one person short on their development team, their various trainings will take place outside the workday. They will be paid overtime for it. “Work-life balance is still important,” Preston says. It’s enough to know all that and not hear them speak.
What is important: what happens at Jean-Pascale’s desk, after. Remember his composition notebook—he always has it with him, and he brings it to the meeting. He puts it down on the table by the window and picks it up again when he leaves. When he returns to his desk, he sets it next to his keyboard and tries desperately to continue working. They are pushing the sex patch the following day, not to mention beta testers with Vive will be in soon, and he needs to put together some documentation still. He tries, but he fails. He texts Delphine. He goes to get a compostable cone of water from the water cooler. Finally, he grabs his notebook to doodle down some ideas for a game of his own. That’s when he sees it: Eliza’s entire file, sitting right there on his desk to the left of his keyboard—he realizes he’d grabbed it, stuck to the bottom of his notebook. The color drains from his already-pale face.
He G-chats Lewis only the words “come to desk plz.”
“Holy shit,” he says when he gets there.
“I have to give this back to Preston right now,” and Jean-Pascale makes to get out of his chair.
“No,” Lewis says as he catches Jean-Pascale’s shoulder and eases him back down. “Look, he’s watching us like a hawk right now, he’s going to think you did this on purpose. Besides, we could use it.”
“Use it how?”
“A little—protection. In case she does something else.”
“No, we are not using it for that. Or at all. For anything. I should just shred it.” A small aside: we want this folder. We want it so badly, we salivate. We want to post it on Reddit, to comb through it, to caress every detail with our eyes, to do something that feels like defending our territory. We want to build our wall; we want to place digital heads on pikes around it, a demonstration of our power, our seriousness. Too long have we been squashed under the boots of women, of social justice warriors, and we are just starting to take our land back. Give us the folder. We ache for the folder.
“No, you can’t shred it,” Lewis says, and we sigh with relief. He is our mind reader, our advocate, our representative in the room, just the person to petition Jean-Pascale on our behalf, to convince him not to be such a fucking pussy.
“And why not?”
“Because if they come looking for it, they have to be able to find it.”
“No they don’t, that’s stupid. Preston could have just as easily shred it by accident. Or maybe that’s what he was going to do with it anyway.” Jean-Pascale coughs—it sounds wet in his throat, like he is holding something down. “Excuse me,” he says, and he runs to the bathroom at top speed.
Out of those of us who think Lewis can back away from his downfall, step away from the precipice off which he will throw himself, only a fraction of us think this is the deciding moment. But it’s worth noting, nonetheless. Perhaps he could choose not to do this. But we want him to. We want him to so, so badly. Give us the folder. We need the folder. We need to run our typing fingers over every inch of Eliza’s life.
Lewis waits until the door swings closed behind his friend, then he snaps a photo of each and every document, every scrap of paper. He thinks Jean-Pascale is crazy not to want a little information, a little padding. Everyone in this industry knows, after all, how powerful a little information can be. A little information can build an entire world, for Christ’s sake.
Lewis is startled when he comes to Eliza’s Career Tree—it looks so very similar to his own. Slightly different order, and he is further along. But not by much. His anger flares, and he feels once again the powerful man that stood in the collaboration room. The only way she could’ve done that was if she was fucking her way to the middle. He is already so resolved; this doesn’t change anything, we think. Or if he feels any sympathy, any guilt, any feeling that prevents him from fighting for his place in the world, battling in this war against men, this burns it away.
He walks over to the bathroom and pushes the door open. A retching sound echoes against the tiled walls; it’s coming from the handicap stall. He walks down the row and knocks. “You okay, buddy?”
“Not really.”
“Wanna go home?”
“I can’t. Neither one of us can. Release tomorrow.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Et maintenant une histoire de Jean-Pascale en les jeux.
C’était un faux ami ça, le mot “donjon.” Mais il ne le savait pas. Il a supposé que ça signifie une fortification. Un château. En anglais, “a keep.” Eh? Mais oui, nous parlons le français, nous sommes internationaux. But probably we can’t all understand that. D’accord.
It was a tricky word, the word “dungeon.” It didn’t mean the same thing in French. But he didn’t know that. He thought it signified a fortification, a castle. A keep. He was interested in building things. He spent long days drawing structures, fascinated with two-point perspective. He spent long hours drawing maps. He mapped everything. The aisles in the grocery, the number of steps from bakery to bakery, how he imagined the phones connected to each other, his own thoughts. It was a natural leap, then, to start playing Dungeons & Dragons.
His friends sure did like battle. But he hinted, pushed them to build a stronghold when they were strong enough, rich enough. He drew it. Painstakingly. So that each player had rooms, territory of their own. They never seemed grateful enough; they wanted to keep killing things with swords.
We should mention all his friends were boys. Not one girl in the group. Frustrated by the lack of care, the way they did not seem to appreciate the verisimilitude of his made-up world, he let that group fall to ruin like they let their keep rot.
He went in search of gamers who appreciated the world-building. He found them. Forums with rules and mechanics where one would post and wait, then another would swoop in and do the same, all text-based role-playing. Problem: they were mostly in English. And his English was only okay. So he learned. And he flubbed. But it was fine, because the native speakers weren’t that good at English either. He played in the world of Dune by Frank Herbert. House Atreides. He never knew the real-world personas of the people
he played with. Their realities didn’t matter much. It was all about the story.
Ironically, he didn’t play a lot of video games until his adulthood—he is a much bigger straight-up computer nerd than the rest of them. Linux, networks, open source software. Hacking. A technical puzzler brain with social graces when he was trying. But he grew into a graceful man, and he found his dexterity suited the simultaneous buttons pressed in arcane rhythms. By then, there was very little difference between the countries—globalization and all. The internet was a vast and wonderful place, now he got games as soon as the United States did. But he still longed for the days when it was smaller. More exclusive. More local. Even as he flew across an ocean to make stories into games, as he had always done. The irony; the hypocrisy. But what choice does one have in this epoch?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Suzanne shows up at Eliza’s apartment with a box of stuff and her coat. At any other time, Eliza would be embarrassed at the state of her living space, which can only be described as “piles.” Piles of clothes sit both inside and outside the bedroom door. A big pile of greasy dishes sits in the sink, still visible because the kitchen is in the same room as the main space. Everything smells like burnt popcorn because Eliza keeps forgetting the bags in the microwave. The term “forgetting” doesn’t even make sense—Eliza keeps losing track while she’s standing right next to the whirring machine. Keeps staring into nothing. So inedible brown-black popcorn sits in a pile that fills a salad serving bowl; Eliza can’t bear to throw it out and thinks of punishing herself with the charcoal taste.
“You know,” Suzanne says, “that’s not the way they’re supposed to do it. They’re supposed to walk you to your desk and watch you clean it out. Sure, that’s still awful,” Suzanne amends when she sees the stricken look on Eliza’s face. “But they’re supposed to let you take your stuff home. I can say something to HR if you like.”
“Up to you,” Eliza says. “Wanna drink?”
Suzanne accepts a whiskey, served in a fine-edged tumbler. “Classy,” she says. “Want me to stay here a little while?”
Eliza is about to say “sure” when someone else raps on her front door. “Who’s it?” Eliza shouts.
“Devonte.” So they let him in and offer him a whiskey.
“I brought fries,” he says, and he holds out a grease-spotted paper bag.
“I don’t deserve fries,” Eliza replies, and for once we all agree. She’s been doing the Strong Female Protagonist thing, which means reskinning herself from villain to hero in her own head. In this moment, she finally tires of it. The mental gymnastics of it all—she’s just a lonely, stupid girl with no job because she can’t take a joke. Since getting embarrassingly canned, she’s been drinking and staring at her wall, occasionally crying or chewing on her nails. Hard to think herself the hero then, isn’t it?
They all sit on the couch for some time, not saying one damn thing.
“Ya know,” Eliza says, and she sighs, “the shit part is all I want to do is play Guilds right now. They just fired me and all I want to do is play that stupid game with you guys. And I still feel like I’m going to work tomorrow. I still feel like I should be brainstorming ideas for a tabletop game. Or pacing around worrying about the patch release. About the announcement.”
Devonte groans. “They’re not still releasing that, are they? After today?” Suzanne is shaking her head too.
“Why wouldn’t they?” Eliza says. “I picked it. That’s what I wanted to work on. The sex part is mostly mine. And they can’t really extricate it now and still release the VR game on time—it’s mixed in with all sorts of other software stuff that the beta testers are gonna need.”
“Did you wind up emailing that other journalist?” Suzanne asks.
“Yeah. And she connected me with someone else and—” She takes a deep breath. “Suzanne, I think I’m going on Last Week Tonight?” Is it glee she feels? The pleasure of striking a match and looking at the flame before tossing it on the curling line of gasoline? Or is it dread, knowing she’s about to show her whole ass on television? Is it the longing to still be part of the group, and the need to destroy that which does not want her? All of it, we think. All of it.
Suzanne laughs, shakes her head. “Then they’re gonna look bad. They’re gonna look so, so bad.”
Devonte’s eyebrows don’t come unfurrowed. “You emailed another journalist? You’re going on a talk show? You’re going on, like, a famous talk show?”
“Yes.”
“Dude. I dunno about that.”
Suzanne hauls herself off the couch and puts her hands on her hips. “What don’t you know about it?” Her voice climbs a tiny bit in register, her hips jut out to one side. She purses her lips. Strident, so strident, so difficult to listen to.
Devonte recoils, seems to sink further into the couch. “I mean, is that a good idea? Don’t you just want to let this whole thing go away?”
“She broke an NDA, Devonte,” Suzanne says. And she says it in a way that it sounds like it’s all one word and like Devonte is an idiot. “She has to go on the offensive or she’s not going to get work again.”
“Okay, okay, Christ.” Devonte holds his hands up. “I just wouldn’t want all the attention if it were me.”
Eliza’s eyes start to leak tears down her cheeks. She tries to suck them back in, but tears do not work like lower stomachs. “You think I want this?”
“Fuck, no, Christ, I’m the good guy here. I’m on your side, I didn’t mean—”
But he is interrupted by another knock at the door. All three jump at the unexpected sound. “Who’s it?” Eliza calls again, taking another sip of whiskey.
“Preston?” the door asks, as if the person on the other side isn’t sure if that’s his name. Or as though he’s bewildered about the series of choices that have led him to this place.
Suzanne’s lip curls and her eyebrow raises. She throws her hands up in the air and we think she looks like a cartoon. “Do not tell him about this,” she mouths. And then she mouths, “What the fuck?” Devonte cocks his head to one side and squints with his left eye. Eliza just sits there, blinking. It is an awkwardly long time before Suzanne gets the door.
Preston stands in the doorway, his hands jammed in his coat pockets and his shoulders up to his ears. He seems a little startled to see the other two. “Hi,” he says. No one answers right away.
Let’s pause. We know he’s there! He has his location services turned on. We know he’s talking to her. But if we were Preston, we wouldn’t do this. There’s so much else to be doing right now. We wouldn’t care about her, because she’s gone now. But Preston, and this is another one of his fatal flaws, is the kind of guy that cares what people think of him. Even the meaningless people. Or they’re already fucking and she’s tricked him into actually caring about her, he just didn’t expect her friends to be there, to get truly caught. Or they’re already fucking and he expected to bone, which even we know is totally misguided.
“Listen,” he continues. “I just wanted you to know that I’m really sorry it had to go down that way. I really didn’t want to.”
“Well you did,” Eliza says. She is furious. The buzzing’s come back, due to anger or alcohol. “You know my address?”
“You’re on my way home,” he says. “I wanted you to know that I’m going to do my best to write you a great recommendation for wherever you end up, seriously, anything within my power to contextualize the—”
“It’s creepy that you know my address.”
“It’s part of your paperwork, it’s—”
“Listen. Thanks and all. But I really don’t want to see you right now.” What a cunt. How dare she. He came to check on her.
A Preston more representative of us might say, “Look, I’m trying to help,” and then maybe stalk off. We wish he were like that; her response is entirely uncalled for.
Instead, he says, “Okay. Then. Bye.” And Preston turns and walks down the hall to the elevator. Suzanne clo
ses the door.
“Well that was fucking weird,” she says.
“Yeah,” Eliza says back.
“So. He’s gone. Just us. What do you want to do?” Devonte asks.
“Be alone and get drunk?” Eliza suggests, but Suzanne is already shaking her head.
“Out of the question. At least, the alone part. The drunk part, we can manage.”
Eliza smiles. “Pick a movie.” She turns the television on and flips the input to the computer hooked into the back of it, the massive hard drive full of media. She smirks, proud even in her sadness, and we admire her setup that her undeserved job paid for, jealous. Everything is a computer. The only piles she doesn’t have are DVDs.
“You pick.” Suzanne gestures to the TV. “Just don’t make us eat that shitty popcorn.”
“I can’t pick. I can’t care.” Eliza adds, “Pick anything but a superhero movie.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
We see three headlines the next day: one in the morning, two in the afternoon. The first reads “Gamer Girl Fired For Speaking Out.” It is on Kotaku first, and The Inspectre reads it with a hearty laugh. But that’s not where we get it first. Recode actually breaks it with something different; their headlines, however, are always more serious and less alliterative. The Kotaku headline, that’s the real good one. We know that one best. It’s shared widely.
The second headline comes in the afternoon. It reads “Sexist Game Company Releases Sex-Patch. Oh Yeah, and Virtual Reality Support.” It is also on Kotaku. It becomes a consistent part of the feeds, gets shared and reshared on our subreddit and 4chan, upvote upvote upvote. It is ubiquitous, every site seems to have their own version. What is different is the commentary. We are a little more civilized on Reddit—we question the idea of the “sex-patch” being inherently sexist. It’s not, we don’t think. Nothing is inherently sexist about sex. What Fancy Dog suffers from, we think, is bad timing. Yes, bad timing—they shouldn’t have released this today. Optics. Optics for the normies.
We Are Watching Eliza Bright Page 10
