To Be Named Later
Posted: 2003-12-12 02:15am
Part One:
“Ah, good,” she said, lowering her wrist and smiling up at the cab’s rear view mirror, “Just about there, and on time too! Hopefully no one at the meeting will die of shock.” The cab driver muttered something that Alexis determined was decidedly not English, and she gave up trying to start a conversation. They were nearly there, anyway, so there wasn’t much point. Idly she tossed her long strawberry hair over her slim shoulder, and glanced down at her lap.
With a scowl, she noticed that her black woolen skirt had gotten rather crooked sometime between when she first put it on and at this very moment, which was a considerable amount of time for it to potentially have been so crooked. She frowned as she straightened it, remembering the battle from that morning, trying to find pantyhose that a) fit, and b) didn’t have a snag. After an alarmed phone call from a neighbour asking if she needed someone to call the fire department, entirely too much explaining, and overall just way too much time on something trivial like stockings, Alexis had successfully gotten dressed. The one and only feminine outfit she owned had almost defeated her, but ultimately she had escaped her apartment clothed and on time, with the apartment still intact. For the most part. She sighed, put a finger to her forehead, thinking of the cleaning that awaited her arrival back home tonight. Her frown deepened as her phone beeped insistently from inside the pocket of her black wool peacoat. She decided that, since it was the fifth (or was it the sixth?) time that morning her phone had beckoned, she should probably see what her boss wanted.
Great, she thought sarcastically. Eight new messages. Must have missed some beeps when I accidentally set fire to those—no, no, not going to think about it. Mustn’t let trivial things ruin my day. Must focus for this meeting. Must be calm, collected, attentive, and most definitely not fall asleep like I did at the last one. Err, two. …Ok, five, but I only got caught twice, so—
The cab screeched to a halt outside Alexis’s office building. Shaking herself out of her inner monologue, she handed some wadded up cash to her muttering driver and pulled herself gracelessly out of the cab, stumbling up the curb and nearly taking a fall onto the slushy, half-melted snow covering the sidewalk. Straightening her skirt yet again, pulling down her grey turtleneck sweater so it didn’t feel left out and checking her nemesis stockings for runs, she cheered silently when she found no rips and made her way toward the small, windowless room where she’d be trapped for the next four hours.
Glancing at her watch for the seventeenth time in exactly nine minutes and twenty-two seconds, Alexis sighed theatrically, turned to the women on either side of her, and hastily drew a sketch on her notepad of the three of them at the conference table, poking out their own eyes with nearby office equipment. Sandra, to Alexis’s left, had a metal ruler protruding from one of her eyeballs, and Gabby, to Alexis’s right, had two pencils sticking out from one of hers, with three other newly-sharpened pencils in hand, ready to skewer should the need arise. Alexis herself decided mere poking was beneath the level of torment she was suffering, and had the sketch of herself stapling her eyes shut with the company’s brand-new staple gun. She decided to elaborate a little, claiming artistic license, and wrote “MIGLIARA KAPLAN” across the gun in large, dark letters as a not-so-subtle way of voicing how she felt about the company for which she worked. Sandra and Gabby glanced down at her work and chuckled quietly, giving Alexis a thumbs-up underneath the table.
“WOULD. YOU. MIND.”
Quickly covered the drawing with her arms, Alexis smiled radiantly up to her boss, Earl, a surly, middle-aged man with a comb-over and entirely too many hair care products in not enough hair. He cleared his throat in what he hoped was a meaningful way, and glared down at her. She blinked once. Twice. Waited. Blinked again. Then, realizing it couldn’t possibly be her day anyway, since no one she knew had ever started off a good day by setting an article of clothing on fire, she resigned herself to defeat. Plastering a smile on her face, Alexis replied, “I’m sorry, Earl, I missed what you said last, since I was busy taking notes. Would you mind repeating it? Please?”
Earl cast his best attempt at a withering glance around the small, oblong conference table, passing over one vacant face after another. He sighed to himself and turned again to Alexis. “Ms. Grainger, did you or did you not recently receive a promotion here at Migliara Kaplan? You did, did you not? Of course you did. I was the one who gave it to you. Lord knows why.” He paused to sigh again, shook his head mournfully, and continued. “Would you please focus? We’re discussing research—your department, in case you’ve forgotten—and it would be a most joyous occurrence if you would contribute something other than the occasional snore to our meetings.”
Humouring him, Alexis batted her eyelashes and turned her chair to face him directly, giving him her undivided attention, which lasted all of six minutes and forty-nine seconds. She kept her body turned toward Earl and her eyes fastened to his plain countenance, but her mind started to go fuzzy as it drifted back to what happened last night. She had awakened suddenly and bolted upright in bed, hours before her alarm was set to go off, heart pounding, face flushed, the sheets of her bed twisted furiously, the pillows from her bed strewn all across the room. She remembered feeling like she had been doing something deliciously naughty in her dream, but the memory was just out of reach and she was left with only the warm, tingly residue of whatever had taken place.
Now, watching Earl click through an irrelevant slide presentation of what looked to be pictures from a hospital trauma unit, Alexis felt her brain reach out in an attempt to rediscover what it had tragically forgotten once consciousness had returned to her during the night.
Staring directly at her boss, eyes starting to glaze over, Alexis felt the small hairs on the back of her neck rise as a husky, gravelly, undoubtedly male voice breathed against her left ear, “Now, now, you don’t want to fall asleep at another meeting, sweetpea. You’ll get fired for sure if it happens again.”
Alarmed equally by the fact that a disembodied voice had apparently decided to take an interest in Alexis’s employment status and the fact that she had most certainly felt the warmth of the breath behind the words tickle her ear and the side of her neck, she whipped her head toward Sandra, almost expecting her to have turned into a man. When Sandra merely looked at her quizzically, she then turned toward Gabby, who only raised an eyebrow and then went back to feigning interest in the meeting.
Don’t panic. Nothing’s really wrong. Perfectly normal, she thought, unconvincingly soothing herself. I’m just going mad. That’s all. My mother told me this would happen if I didn’t marry by the time she was married, she told me I’d end up being that crazy woman who lives in that house at the end of the street, with twenty-nine cats. She warned me, but did I listen? Nooooo. I had to choose insanity. Would I have felt relieved or more freaked out if Sandra HAD turned into a man? What the hell is going on here!
“Alexis? Are you alright?”
Shaking her head frantically, she looked up at Earl, who for once looked at her with concern. “I’m not exactly sure what just happened here, but if you need a breather, go ahead and take a couple of minutes. You look a little…off. Maybe splash your face with some cold water? I don’t know. Just do something, you look awful.”
Shakily, Alexis exited the conference room and made her way to the nearest ladies’ bathroom and splashed water on her face because it was something to do. She looked up into the mirror, her green eyes looking wild and afraid, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and confusion.
Maybe I just need a vacation, she consoled herself. Maybe that’s it. I’ve been working too hard, no matter what Earl says, and I just need some time away from work. That’s all.
“Nope,” the voice spoke laughingly, brushing up against her other ear this time. Warm, gentle, and masculine. “Not that. Try again.”
She whirled, expecting to see someone there this time, and was baffled to find the bathroom completely empty. “Who are you!” she yelled, feeling more than slightly dizzy. “What—? How—?”
Her stammering not eliciting any response, logic dawned and she realized she was hysterically questioning a vacant room.
Lifting a shaking hand to her forehead, she leaned back against the sink countertop and tried to collect herself. Her voice full of bravado, she announced to the room at large, “I don’t believe in ghosts, so fuck off.”
“Ooh, such language.”
Heart pounding in her throat, Alexis held her ground. “I’ve seen ‘The Invisible Man’ too, you know. I won’t fall for that either.”
Feeling the air get suddenly warmer, she knew he had moved closer, whatever he was. “Good. I’m not either, for the record.”
“Oh, great, you’re a figment of my imagination. Fabulous. My mother will be so pleased she was right. She lives for stuff like this.”
“Oh no, I’m real,” he answered. “A bit beyond your perception, but just as much flesh and bone as you are.”
Voice still trembling slightly, she demanded, “’A bit beyond my perception?’ That’s supposed to make me feel less crazy?! Thanks ever so—”
At that moment, she stopped speaking as the most curious sensation, like a warm shadow briefly falling upon her lips, made her frantic heart stop beating for what felt like an eternity. “Maybe next time, bella, you will understand.”
Plopping herself back down into the neverending meeting, pretending like nothing had happened, she was simultaneously amazed and not surprised at all that there were absolutely no signs of Earl wrapping things up. Within seconds she was bored to tears again, and subsequently glanced down at her notepad. A blank white envelope sat on top of it, obscuring her most recent artistic achievement: “Rendering of Three Beautiful Women in The Meeting From Hell.” She chuckled softly to herself and added the title to the top of the sketch.
Ah, Alexis lamented, that drawing was done such a short time ago. Back in my Pre-Insanity Era. But hey, maybe I’ll become famous like Van Gogh or Picasso or whoever. Those great artists, they all went a little nuts, didn’t they? With the ear-cutting-off thing, and the scary block people thing? This drawing will go down in history! Copies will sell for hundreds each! Alexis Grainger: the last work from her Pre-Insanity Era! Buy it today!
Sighing as she started to feel more normal again, she began to open the envelope. Sandra leaned over and whispered, “Your secretary, Betsy—that’s her name, right? You’re always changing them—Betsy dropped this by while you were in the bathroom. Said she left her desk to get a cup of coffee and it was lying on top of your mail, so she brought it straight over, since apparently she has as much respect for sacred office meetings as everyone else around here. Couldn’t stand to wait ‘til it was over because, really, who knows when that will be, and it’s sealed shut, so she couldn’t pry and snoop without making a mess... Ah, you got it! Here, now, let me see—what is it?”
Before Sandra had completely taken in what the contents of the envelope contained, Alexis had already thrown the piece of paper out of her hands with a strangled cry and bolted from the room. Sandra waited for the paper to flutter to the table, then reached out, grasping it to examine it more closely. Paling, she saw an exact duplicate of the drawing Alexis had sketched in her notebook earlier that morning during the meeting, the same Sandra with her same ruler, the same Gabby with her same pencils (the ones in her eye and the ones in reserve), and the same Alexis with her same staple gun. And across the top, in Alexis’s own handwriting, read the words, “Rendering of Three Beautiful Women in The Meeting From Hell.”
“Ah, good,” she said, lowering her wrist and smiling up at the cab’s rear view mirror, “Just about there, and on time too! Hopefully no one at the meeting will die of shock.” The cab driver muttered something that Alexis determined was decidedly not English, and she gave up trying to start a conversation. They were nearly there, anyway, so there wasn’t much point. Idly she tossed her long strawberry hair over her slim shoulder, and glanced down at her lap.
With a scowl, she noticed that her black woolen skirt had gotten rather crooked sometime between when she first put it on and at this very moment, which was a considerable amount of time for it to potentially have been so crooked. She frowned as she straightened it, remembering the battle from that morning, trying to find pantyhose that a) fit, and b) didn’t have a snag. After an alarmed phone call from a neighbour asking if she needed someone to call the fire department, entirely too much explaining, and overall just way too much time on something trivial like stockings, Alexis had successfully gotten dressed. The one and only feminine outfit she owned had almost defeated her, but ultimately she had escaped her apartment clothed and on time, with the apartment still intact. For the most part. She sighed, put a finger to her forehead, thinking of the cleaning that awaited her arrival back home tonight. Her frown deepened as her phone beeped insistently from inside the pocket of her black wool peacoat. She decided that, since it was the fifth (or was it the sixth?) time that morning her phone had beckoned, she should probably see what her boss wanted.
Great, she thought sarcastically. Eight new messages. Must have missed some beeps when I accidentally set fire to those—no, no, not going to think about it. Mustn’t let trivial things ruin my day. Must focus for this meeting. Must be calm, collected, attentive, and most definitely not fall asleep like I did at the last one. Err, two. …Ok, five, but I only got caught twice, so—
The cab screeched to a halt outside Alexis’s office building. Shaking herself out of her inner monologue, she handed some wadded up cash to her muttering driver and pulled herself gracelessly out of the cab, stumbling up the curb and nearly taking a fall onto the slushy, half-melted snow covering the sidewalk. Straightening her skirt yet again, pulling down her grey turtleneck sweater so it didn’t feel left out and checking her nemesis stockings for runs, she cheered silently when she found no rips and made her way toward the small, windowless room where she’d be trapped for the next four hours.
Glancing at her watch for the seventeenth time in exactly nine minutes and twenty-two seconds, Alexis sighed theatrically, turned to the women on either side of her, and hastily drew a sketch on her notepad of the three of them at the conference table, poking out their own eyes with nearby office equipment. Sandra, to Alexis’s left, had a metal ruler protruding from one of her eyeballs, and Gabby, to Alexis’s right, had two pencils sticking out from one of hers, with three other newly-sharpened pencils in hand, ready to skewer should the need arise. Alexis herself decided mere poking was beneath the level of torment she was suffering, and had the sketch of herself stapling her eyes shut with the company’s brand-new staple gun. She decided to elaborate a little, claiming artistic license, and wrote “MIGLIARA KAPLAN” across the gun in large, dark letters as a not-so-subtle way of voicing how she felt about the company for which she worked. Sandra and Gabby glanced down at her work and chuckled quietly, giving Alexis a thumbs-up underneath the table.
“WOULD. YOU. MIND.”
Quickly covered the drawing with her arms, Alexis smiled radiantly up to her boss, Earl, a surly, middle-aged man with a comb-over and entirely too many hair care products in not enough hair. He cleared his throat in what he hoped was a meaningful way, and glared down at her. She blinked once. Twice. Waited. Blinked again. Then, realizing it couldn’t possibly be her day anyway, since no one she knew had ever started off a good day by setting an article of clothing on fire, she resigned herself to defeat. Plastering a smile on her face, Alexis replied, “I’m sorry, Earl, I missed what you said last, since I was busy taking notes. Would you mind repeating it? Please?”
Earl cast his best attempt at a withering glance around the small, oblong conference table, passing over one vacant face after another. He sighed to himself and turned again to Alexis. “Ms. Grainger, did you or did you not recently receive a promotion here at Migliara Kaplan? You did, did you not? Of course you did. I was the one who gave it to you. Lord knows why.” He paused to sigh again, shook his head mournfully, and continued. “Would you please focus? We’re discussing research—your department, in case you’ve forgotten—and it would be a most joyous occurrence if you would contribute something other than the occasional snore to our meetings.”
Humouring him, Alexis batted her eyelashes and turned her chair to face him directly, giving him her undivided attention, which lasted all of six minutes and forty-nine seconds. She kept her body turned toward Earl and her eyes fastened to his plain countenance, but her mind started to go fuzzy as it drifted back to what happened last night. She had awakened suddenly and bolted upright in bed, hours before her alarm was set to go off, heart pounding, face flushed, the sheets of her bed twisted furiously, the pillows from her bed strewn all across the room. She remembered feeling like she had been doing something deliciously naughty in her dream, but the memory was just out of reach and she was left with only the warm, tingly residue of whatever had taken place.
Now, watching Earl click through an irrelevant slide presentation of what looked to be pictures from a hospital trauma unit, Alexis felt her brain reach out in an attempt to rediscover what it had tragically forgotten once consciousness had returned to her during the night.
Staring directly at her boss, eyes starting to glaze over, Alexis felt the small hairs on the back of her neck rise as a husky, gravelly, undoubtedly male voice breathed against her left ear, “Now, now, you don’t want to fall asleep at another meeting, sweetpea. You’ll get fired for sure if it happens again.”
Alarmed equally by the fact that a disembodied voice had apparently decided to take an interest in Alexis’s employment status and the fact that she had most certainly felt the warmth of the breath behind the words tickle her ear and the side of her neck, she whipped her head toward Sandra, almost expecting her to have turned into a man. When Sandra merely looked at her quizzically, she then turned toward Gabby, who only raised an eyebrow and then went back to feigning interest in the meeting.
Don’t panic. Nothing’s really wrong. Perfectly normal, she thought, unconvincingly soothing herself. I’m just going mad. That’s all. My mother told me this would happen if I didn’t marry by the time she was married, she told me I’d end up being that crazy woman who lives in that house at the end of the street, with twenty-nine cats. She warned me, but did I listen? Nooooo. I had to choose insanity. Would I have felt relieved or more freaked out if Sandra HAD turned into a man? What the hell is going on here!
“Alexis? Are you alright?”
Shaking her head frantically, she looked up at Earl, who for once looked at her with concern. “I’m not exactly sure what just happened here, but if you need a breather, go ahead and take a couple of minutes. You look a little…off. Maybe splash your face with some cold water? I don’t know. Just do something, you look awful.”
Shakily, Alexis exited the conference room and made her way to the nearest ladies’ bathroom and splashed water on her face because it was something to do. She looked up into the mirror, her green eyes looking wild and afraid, her cheeks flushed with embarrassment and confusion.
Maybe I just need a vacation, she consoled herself. Maybe that’s it. I’ve been working too hard, no matter what Earl says, and I just need some time away from work. That’s all.
“Nope,” the voice spoke laughingly, brushing up against her other ear this time. Warm, gentle, and masculine. “Not that. Try again.”
She whirled, expecting to see someone there this time, and was baffled to find the bathroom completely empty. “Who are you!” she yelled, feeling more than slightly dizzy. “What—? How—?”
Her stammering not eliciting any response, logic dawned and she realized she was hysterically questioning a vacant room.
Lifting a shaking hand to her forehead, she leaned back against the sink countertop and tried to collect herself. Her voice full of bravado, she announced to the room at large, “I don’t believe in ghosts, so fuck off.”
“Ooh, such language.”
Heart pounding in her throat, Alexis held her ground. “I’ve seen ‘The Invisible Man’ too, you know. I won’t fall for that either.”
Feeling the air get suddenly warmer, she knew he had moved closer, whatever he was. “Good. I’m not either, for the record.”
“Oh, great, you’re a figment of my imagination. Fabulous. My mother will be so pleased she was right. She lives for stuff like this.”
“Oh no, I’m real,” he answered. “A bit beyond your perception, but just as much flesh and bone as you are.”
Voice still trembling slightly, she demanded, “’A bit beyond my perception?’ That’s supposed to make me feel less crazy?! Thanks ever so—”
At that moment, she stopped speaking as the most curious sensation, like a warm shadow briefly falling upon her lips, made her frantic heart stop beating for what felt like an eternity. “Maybe next time, bella, you will understand.”
Plopping herself back down into the neverending meeting, pretending like nothing had happened, she was simultaneously amazed and not surprised at all that there were absolutely no signs of Earl wrapping things up. Within seconds she was bored to tears again, and subsequently glanced down at her notepad. A blank white envelope sat on top of it, obscuring her most recent artistic achievement: “Rendering of Three Beautiful Women in The Meeting From Hell.” She chuckled softly to herself and added the title to the top of the sketch.
Ah, Alexis lamented, that drawing was done such a short time ago. Back in my Pre-Insanity Era. But hey, maybe I’ll become famous like Van Gogh or Picasso or whoever. Those great artists, they all went a little nuts, didn’t they? With the ear-cutting-off thing, and the scary block people thing? This drawing will go down in history! Copies will sell for hundreds each! Alexis Grainger: the last work from her Pre-Insanity Era! Buy it today!
Sighing as she started to feel more normal again, she began to open the envelope. Sandra leaned over and whispered, “Your secretary, Betsy—that’s her name, right? You’re always changing them—Betsy dropped this by while you were in the bathroom. Said she left her desk to get a cup of coffee and it was lying on top of your mail, so she brought it straight over, since apparently she has as much respect for sacred office meetings as everyone else around here. Couldn’t stand to wait ‘til it was over because, really, who knows when that will be, and it’s sealed shut, so she couldn’t pry and snoop without making a mess... Ah, you got it! Here, now, let me see—what is it?”
Before Sandra had completely taken in what the contents of the envelope contained, Alexis had already thrown the piece of paper out of her hands with a strangled cry and bolted from the room. Sandra waited for the paper to flutter to the table, then reached out, grasping it to examine it more closely. Paling, she saw an exact duplicate of the drawing Alexis had sketched in her notebook earlier that morning during the meeting, the same Sandra with her same ruler, the same Gabby with her same pencils (the ones in her eye and the ones in reserve), and the same Alexis with her same staple gun. And across the top, in Alexis’s own handwriting, read the words, “Rendering of Three Beautiful Women in The Meeting From Hell.”
Funny yet damn weird.
