ask.
I drank more coffee, and went to my desk, and crossed my arms and lay my head on them, and although I had every intention of staying that way for thirty seconds, no more, when thirty seconds came I decided that I could do with one more interval, and when that interval had passed, I’d fallen asleep.
I woke about an hour later; no one had noticed, or, if they had, they’d either been good enough not to disturb me, or they just didn’t care, if that was even a distinction worth making. I felt better, but the bad coffee and the long weekend and perhaps the weakness of my intestinal fauna or what have you caught up to me, and I walked quickly and quietly to stairwell C, which I took down to the twenty-third floor. This was still officially a part of the Global Solutions office suite, but it had been almost entirely abandoned over the preceding five years as the Global Solutions Solutions Desk operations had been outsourced to Bangladesh and the Global Solutions TransSolve document translation program to India and the Global Solutions BrandSolve brand management division simply and unceremoniously euthanized when its last client departed for the sharper-focused shores of a real marketing firm. Some cubicles remained, and the conference rooms remained, along with the janitor’s closets and D-marks and break rooms and a few outdated copiers and something in the quiet hallways that suggested someone had recently been there, although of course no one had.
I’d surreptitiously snagged a newspaper from Leonard’s desk on the way down. I found a story about Councilman O’Bannon’s bigfoot-hunting measure in the B-section, written in that wry tone that tells you, reader, that you’re a little too sophisticated to believe it, but you’ll be amused to read it anyway. The article made a couple of references to taking a bigfoot, and I made a note to mention it to Johnny, who’d appreciate the double entendre, but it was the opening graf that really got me: As if the flying-saucer traffic weren’t enough, Councilman Jack O’Bannon (12th District) has introduced legislation that if approved by City Council will make it entirely legal to hunt an animal that most say don’t exist. Now some on Grant Street are suggesting that Pittsburgh’s growing tourism industry could look to these popular tales as a potential source of dollars and new investment.
So UFOs were a thing now. It made me slightly queasy. I hadn’t said anything to anyone except Johnny, but suddenly it felt as if everyone would know.
9
By the way, I never did tell anyone about that bathroom on twenty-three. I don’t know why. Secrecy, in the protection and in the breach, is the currency of an office much more than money itself, the small secrets worth more than the large. Nor did I mention to anyone that week, not even to Marcy, that I’d met a sort-of lawyer who’d confirmed the rumors of an impending sale or takeover or Other Important Event by an amoebic Northern European conglomerate, and when the week passed without my seeing or hearing from Mark, whom I’d unrealistically expected to pop by my desk for lunch on Monday, I began to reconstruct my memory of my weekend around a theme of uncertainty that it had not theretofore possessed, which was reassuring.
But I did ultimately mention to Leonard that I’d seen the UFOs. It was Thursday. Back when the original sightings had been reported, he’d mentioned to me in an offhanded and unembarrassed way that he’d once seen a UFO, but—he shrugged—I was doing a lot of dope back then. I always forgot that Leonard was actually older than Tim, which probably made me a racist. He didn’t look older than Tim. Leonard liked to tell stories about working at Global Solutions in the early eighties, when it was Allegheny Shipping and actually shipped things. Worked in the stockroom, he told me. You don’t even know what a stockroom is.
I know what a stockroom is, I said.
Yeah, academically, he
I drank more coffee, and went to my desk, and crossed my arms and lay my head on them, and although I had every intention of staying that way for thirty seconds, no more, when thirty seconds came I decided that I could do with one more interval, and when that interval had passed, I’d fallen asleep.
I woke about an hour later; no one had noticed, or, if they had, they’d either been good enough not to disturb me, or they just didn’t care, if that was even a distinction worth making. I felt better, but the bad coffee and the long weekend and perhaps the weakness of my intestinal fauna or what have you caught up to me, and I walked quickly and quietly to stairwell C, which I took down to the twenty-third floor. This was still officially a part of the Global Solutions office suite, but it had been almost entirely abandoned over the preceding five years as the Global Solutions Solutions Desk operations had been outsourced to Bangladesh and the Global Solutions TransSolve document translation program to India and the Global Solutions BrandSolve brand management division simply and unceremoniously euthanized when its last client departed for the sharper-focused shores of a real marketing firm. Some cubicles remained, and the conference rooms remained, along with the janitor’s closets and D-marks and break rooms and a few outdated copiers and something in the quiet hallways that suggested someone had recently been there, although of course no one had.
I’d surreptitiously snagged a newspaper from Leonard’s desk on the way down. I found a story about Councilman O’Bannon’s bigfoot-hunting measure in the B-section, written in that wry tone that tells you, reader, that you’re a little too sophisticated to believe it, but you’ll be amused to read it anyway. The article made a couple of references to taking a bigfoot, and I made a note to mention it to Johnny, who’d appreciate the double entendre, but it was the opening graf that really got me: As if the flying-saucer traffic weren’t enough, Councilman Jack O’Bannon (12th District) has introduced legislation that if approved by City Council will make it entirely legal to hunt an animal that most say don’t exist. Now some on Grant Street are suggesting that Pittsburgh’s growing tourism industry could look to these popular tales as a potential source of dollars and new investment.
So UFOs were a thing now. It made me slightly queasy. I hadn’t said anything to anyone except Johnny, but suddenly it felt as if everyone would know.
9
By the way, I never did tell anyone about that bathroom on twenty-three. I don’t know why. Secrecy, in the protection and in the breach, is the currency of an office much more than money itself, the small secrets worth more than the large. Nor did I mention to anyone that week, not even to Marcy, that I’d met a sort-of lawyer who’d confirmed the rumors of an impending sale or takeover or Other Important Event by an amoebic Northern European conglomerate, and when the week passed without my seeing or hearing from Mark, whom I’d unrealistically expected to pop by my desk for lunch on Monday, I began to reconstruct my memory of my weekend around a theme of uncertainty that it had not theretofore possessed, which was reassuring.
But I did ultimately mention to Leonard that I’d seen the UFOs. It was Thursday. Back when the original sightings had been reported, he’d mentioned to me in an offhanded and unembarrassed way that he’d once seen a UFO, but—he shrugged—I was doing a lot of dope back then. I always forgot that Leonard was actually older than Tim, which probably made me a racist. He didn’t look older than Tim. Leonard liked to tell stories about working at Global Solutions in the early eighties, when it was Allegheny Shipping and actually shipped things. Worked in the stockroom, he told me. You don’t even know what a stockroom is.
I know what a stockroom is, I said.
Yeah, academically, he
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