The Sting

[wpaudio url=”/audio/6_8/Laich.mp3″ text=”listen to this story” dl=”0″]

It was only natural Gwen should feel nervous on the first day at her new job. A short, simple man in half sleeves led her around the office, pointing out all the wrong things while neglecting the important ones: “this is where we keep the office plant,” he said, flying past vital filing cabinets, the fax machine, other things.

They came around a corner to emerge at the front desk where a young man sat. He wore a white button up shirt with tattoos poking out through the cuffs, a scruffy half-beard, and tiny hoop earrings. He had blue, penetrating eyes. If they belonged to a woman, men would have compared them to space crystals. On a man, they were obscene. The most striking thing about him though was probably the huge protrusion sticking straight through his chest and out the other side. Gwen tried not to stare.

“So that’s the office,” said the tour guide, whose name turned out to be Billy. “Any questions?”

“Yeah, one. Why does that man at the front desk have what looks like a javelin or a bee stinger jutting through his chest?”

Billy looked at her with drowning eyes. He’d been poised for an unanswerable question and now, with the dream realized, mewed in its heaviness.

“Who, Jacob?” Billy said. “You can’t have any funny hair colors or facial piercings, but ear piercings are allowed. I don’t know if they’re appropriate on men, but it’s kind of a, you know, weird issue I guess.”

“I’m talking about the spike through his chest.”

He looked at her as though she’d abandoned English for the clicking tongue of the !Kung people. “I hope you don’t write advertising the same way you talk. Confidentially,” he leaned in and whispered:  “Jacob’s okay. I mean, I don’t have anything against the guy, but I think the only reason he has a job here is, well, you know.”

“Billy, I don’t know.”

“Let’s just say the women seem to like him. And women kind of rule this place.  I’m not saying I have a problem with that at all.  I think women are great.” Billy got all red. “I mean, I don’t think they’re worse than men or anything. Smarter I mean. I mean I don’t think they’re not as smart.”

So began Gwen’s career at Smith & Winston Incorporated. That first day she felt distracted by the spike sticking through the receptionist’s chest, but anytime she mentioned it to anyone, they looked at her like she was crazy or stupid, and since she didn’t want to get the reputation as the woman who on her first day goes around asking everyone about the handsome boy at the front desk, she abandoned the questions and tried to forget about it. Still, it was a hard thing to let go. In the beginning she made a point of coming through the front door so she would have to pass by his desk, but something always seemed to come up. He was late that day, or he was at the printer, or he’d gone out for an early lunch with one of the girls and the others were left behind to chatter about the event. Gwen began to think she’d imagined the thing entirely, when finally, on her first Friday morning, she walked in and there he was. He cradled his head in his hands as if his entire family had died in a horrible fire and the police had just come around to tell him he was responsible. The spike was still there, plain as ever, like a grotesque special effect in a film. She had not imagined it. It looked organic in matter – like the arm of an insect broken off at the base, or more likely, a giant hornet’s stinger, left inside after the angry attack. He had on an argyle sweater with a hole cut out around the point of penetration. Oddly, it looked like the most natural thing in the world. Of course the sweater would do that. He looked up when she walked past, and she found herself lock eyed with the office dreamboat. She knew that she looked guilty, but surprisingly, so did he, and in the stare down they came to an agreement that seemed to say, “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

When she got the job at Smith & Winston she decided she wasn’t going to do the same thing she always did, which was to fall immediately and deeply in love with one of her coworkers, to obsess about him until something monstrous happened between them that made further employment impossible, and then to move on to another office where she would make the same mistake over again. The economy was ill and she wasn’t getting any younger. It had taken her three months to land this job. In the mean time she’d had to move back in with her mother in the suburbs. It was the town she grew up in, but she’d been gone so long it felt like a strange place. It was depressing. If she lost this job, that was it. She was toast.  She was so determined to the cause this time around, she’d bought ugly black slacks and sweaters to wear to work in place of the sexy, office chic wardrobe that was her usual. When on Sunday night she found herself laying out the tailored suit with seemed stockings and the blood-colored pumps, she did it with a hint of self-awareness, but ultimately, resignation.

Jacob wasn’t at the front desk when she came in Monday morning. She stood around for as long as was at all prudent, and then for a few more minutes after that, but she had no business being there, and so went back to her cubicle hidden away in the corner. She thought about Jacob all morning, scrambled with pictures of cotton balls and peroxide. She thought of wounded animals and the petting of soft fur. It wasn’t until late that afternoon that she abandoned pretty things and allowed her face to attend to work with ugly concentration. She had a chewed up pencil between her teeth when she noticed him standing in the doorway of her cubicle. He turned his body and she saw again that the stinger went straight through the other side, ending in a point that sort of drooped down a little. It likely had been sharp once but became dull from sleeping on or leaning against things.

“Hi,” he said.

It was the first time she’d ever heard his voice, and consistent with everything else about him, it dripped with the sultry cadence of delicate lovemaking. Gwen crossed and uncrossed her legs. She took off her blazer and arched her back. For a second she thought her self-control would betray her and she would rip her blouse open and drop down on her knees in front of him.  It occurred to her then that an uncomfortable amount of time had passed without her responding.

“See you around,” he purred.

By the end of the day, all the women in the office somehow knew everything and offered their opinions. Apparently Jacob didn’t say “hi” to just anyone. This was like the equivalent of second base. “I would stay away from him,” the plump, married women advised.  “We heard he just broke up with his girlfriend,” one of the customer service reps said. Another commented under her breath: “Not that that ever stopped him before.”

Gwen collected a wealth of dizzying, conflicting facts about Jacob. Some said that he’d been in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. Others said the prison rumors weren’t true and those three years were spent instead in a Hindu monastery. He was either 28 or 31. He may have been married once. Everyone agreed he had a problem with alcohol and possibly drugs, but that the hung over, strung out look suited him. Billy told her one afternoon with a beet red face that Jacob didn’t even like girls, that the woman he was purported to have been involved with was actually a man named Chris, but where this information came from was “confidential.”

In matters of the heart, once a thing is decided upon, the facts make little difference.  Jacob was always in her thoughts. Every night she had elaborate, cinematic dreams that all stood for a future where they would be married, have children and stay together forever. One night she was a nurse running across a post-apocalyptic battlefield, when she came upon a fallen soldier.  There was no time for anesthesia.  With shrapnel buzzing all around them, and with a mother’s tenderness, she pulled a piece of broken glass out of the wounded soldier’s leg. She turned into a sleek black panther and licked the wounds. Somehow, with paws and not fingers, she dressed the gash, and the soldier rode on her back into a sunset ripe with nuclear holocaust, exploding in firebombs. She felt the dreams were important clues.

Gwen had been employed at Smith & Winston nearly a month before she found the courage to bring up the thing.  The conversation started routinely enough. “What are you up to this weekend?”

His words were always perfectly normal, almost boringly so, but to her they felt like feathers gently teased across her bare shoulders. She shuttered before answering. “The girls from the office are going out tonight, to the new Martini place downtown.”

He nodded. “I thought I might stop by.”

Her heart started beating out of her chest. She couldn’t hear herself think. This was a date. They were going on their first date. She remembered then that the man she was obsessed with had an unnatural and disturbing protrusion in his chest.

“Jacob, I have to ask. What’s with the…” she pointed at his torso, not knowing what to call it.

He looked down at the stick or spear or whatever it was. “Oh. It’s just this thing I had done.”

“A thing you had done?”

“It was a while ago,” he said. He looked like he might start crying. It was incredibly sexy.  “See you later.”

The girls were supposed to meet at the Martini bar “nine-ish” and she’d arrived pathetically, exactly on time on the off chance Jacob planned to get there early. It was an exotic place filled with good-looking people and glass tables lit from underneath in neon. Gwen took comfort in some of her more frumpy co-workers discomfort. A tiny voice inside her warned she shouldn’t feel so smug, but she swatted this away. The Martinis were fattening and like twelve dollars. It was well after midnight. She’d already run up an astronomical tab and there was still no sign of Jacob. She felt her red lipstick fade with every sip, until all at once she was so drunk and upset that she decided to sneak out the back door and smoke the joint she’d put in her purse by way of consolation.

The drugs worked. She sucked down the entire thing and leaned her head against the brick wall with her eyes shut, thinking of nothing at all. When she finally looked out at what she now considered an indifferent world, she discovered Jacob standing in front of her, grinning wickedly. His stinger looked glossy and ready to party. She saw too his forearms for the first time.   They were inked in serpentine dragons swirling through Asian characters. She decided to be different and never ask him what the tattoos meant.

“Does somebody smell a skunk?”

He sounded loud and gruff all of a sudden, and she realized he was one of those types to arrive late to bars, already sauced, to pick up women.  She laughed nervously at his not very funny observation.

“So are all of those office whores inside or what?” he barked.

Gwen felt herself getting incredibly depressed.  It hadn’t occurred to her that Jacob’s facial hair really did tell the story and he was just an uninteresting asshole. She decided not to believe it, that he was having a bad day or he was drunk, or maybe the puncture wound had become infected and it was going to his head.

They went inside and continued to have a terrible time together. Jacob tried to buy her and several other women a drink, which she haughtily refused. He began loudly talking to a short, blond girl about the tenants of Buddhism, and then drinking. “Half of these fucking drinks aren’t even really Martinis,” he told her.

Gwen tried to hide out in a corner, where the women followed, prodding for developments. “He’s just an asshole,” she said, glumly. The girls from customer service rattled off a number of alternative explanations for his behavior, while the remaining, homely woman reminded everyone that she had been right about Jacob all along. Two of them had the idea to bring her a Godiva Chocolate Martini independent of one another and she sucked them both down without a thought.

Jacob walked towards the back door, pantomiming a smoking gesture in Gwen’s direction. Although she didn’t smoke, she decided to give him one more chance and followed him outside, where he grabbed her by the arm, pulled her in close and kissed her on the mouth. It felt wonderful and dynamic, except her chest bumped against the blunt end of the stinger and it was hard to get her face close to his. He turned to the side. She ran her tongue along his neck and sucked on the tiny hoop dangling from his earlobe. Mouth on metal; she tasted chocolate gurgling up her throat, and just managed to turn away from him in time to vomit a kaleidoscope of Martini flavors on the pavement. One of the office girls came out and tried to drag her off by the elbow. He said: “It’s okay.  I’m okay to drive.  I can take her home.”

Gwen had heard people compare heavy drinking to time travel, but this was the first time she’d experienced it firsthand. She woke up to find the two of them cramped in the tiny guest room she was staying in at her mother’s house. She wondered why they’d ended up here instead of Jacob’s place, how they’d snuck by her mother’s room, who paid her outrageous bar tab. In addition to a single bed, the room contained a random smattering of books, all of her clothes separated into senseless piles on the floor, and her mother’s sewing machine, draped in torn panty hose and the evening’s carefully selected cocktail dress. Gwen looked down to find herself in a Pink Floyd t-shirt and checkered pajama bottoms. Jacob had his back to her and was examining a hardback copy of Dennis Rodman’s autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. (Her mother had a hard time throwing anything away.) Gwen was thirsty. “Do you want some water?” She asked, casually, the way she imagined someone who had not been blacked out for God knows how long might ask something.

“I brought you some earlier. It’s on the table next to you.” His voice had returned to its original, sexual hum.

She drank the entire glass down in one gulp and went to him at the bookcase. They tried to come together, but again the spike came between them. She felt not at all sick and sexually confident. She whispered hotly in his ear. “I wish you’d let me take out this stinger.”

“Oh yeah?” he said. He pushed her down on the single mattress and they rolled around atop the Care Bear bedspread.

“I’m serious,” she said. “It can’t be comfortable. We can doctor up the wound once it’s out. I have hydrogen peroxide and gauze. I can give you one of my mother’s Vicodin.”

“I’m six months sober,” he said.

They kissed and touched and clawed off each other’s clothing. She touched the stinger.  His head tilted back and he moaned softly. “It won’t hurt at all,” she whispered. “I can do it in a way that will make it not hurt.”

“It’s just that it’s so close to my heart,” he said.

They continued to kiss, but the burden of the thing never left their minds. They panted together in passionate frustration.

“Okay,” he said breathlessly.

“Now?”

“Do it quick, before I change my mind.”

She took the thing in both hands at the base. It was maybe the width of a babies arm.  With a single tug, she pulled the stinger from his chest. It made a brief, vacuous sound and then it was out. The thing looked like a single, fat eyelash, and she threw it down on the floor next to them.  It was as simple as removing an earring.   Jacob flipped Gwen onto her back and slipped himself inside. They fucked for several ecstatic, wanton minutes, their bodies wrapped together as closely as two humans can.

They came apart and stared up at the ceiling with shallow breath, an island onto their own thoughts. Gwen opened the window and they smoked cigarettes. They used the floor as an ashtray and she only coughed once. Gwen listened to his heart beating rhythmically, like a song.  “How does it feel?” she asked. They put out their cigarettes.

“I’ll be honest.  It feels weird.”

These were the moments that everything else in life led up to. She felt happiness running up and down her body, like her blood was carbonated. Gwen thought about not just then but how pleasant the memory would be later. In the moment, she imagined herself running the encounter over and over in her mind.

Jacob talked about different things. He believed that humanity was doomed and life was meaningless. She agreed. He wanted to save up for a new place. Sometimes he wrote songs. “I should tell you: Lydia, my ex girlfriend. We still live together.”

“Mmm,” Gwen said. But she was asleep.

“It’s just, we’ll have to tread carefully from here on out.”

When Gwen woke up in the morning she was the only one in the room. She looked down at the stinger on the floor. It had started to shrivel up, which was interesting. Jacob must have been pumping some kind of life into it when it was still lodged in his chest. She noticed two single drops of blood on the sheet, and for an irrational moment she wondered whether the blood was his or hers.  It felt profoundly religious.

She waited a full twelve hours to text him. “how r u feeling?” she wondered. It took him around four hours to respond. It was disappointing but not surprising. Gwen had never known a man who responded promptly to text messages. “ok” he said.

There were no correspondences between them all day Sunday. She was only just beginning to allow herself to worry when late Sunday night, her phone exploded with the ring she’d assigned his number: harpsichords. But it was a woman’s angry voice. “Bitch, what have you done to Jacob?”

Gwen was very bad at confrontation in the moment and began stuttering a tattered defense.

“Who the fuck told you you could take it out in the first place?” Lydia wanted to know.

“He did.”

“No, he would never do that,” she corrected him. “Where did he say he got it?”

“He just said he had it done,” Gwen said, lamely. The stakes were unknown, but nevertheless she felt strongly that she was losing the argument.

“He said he just ‘had it done?’ Ha,” Lydia snorted. “He didn’t have it done. I did it. I had it done.”

“Oh.”

“He’ll probably die now, you know. I hope you’re happy about that.”

“Don’t be absurd,” Gwen said. It was her boldest stance yet, but it was just good luck; she was only channeling something her mother would have said.

“Fuck you,” Lydia replied. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gwen felt confident that once they had a chance to really talk, everything would right itself. When she finally saw Jacob on Monday morning, he looked as though he’d crawled out of the cemetery. She put her hand on his clammy forehead and he pulled away. “I’m okay,” he said. “I just don’t feel well.”

Later that afternoon, the office chattered with news about Jacob. He had reportedly come out from behind his desk, as if in a trance. They said that blood poured through his shirt as though he’d been shot in the chest, except of course he hadn’t been. He collapsed and the ambulance took him away.

The drama of the situation had reached a baffling crescendo, and Gwen found herself unable to even comprehend a logical next move. She spent Monday night in front of the television with her mother. They knitted scarves and watched Dancing with the Stars. They did not talk about what happened. Every commercial break Gwen snuck off to try calling or texting Jacob’s phone, but no one ever answered. “Hey, this is Jacob. Leave a message.” She considered playing the greeting over and over and masturbating to the words, but it would be too much hassle, to keep calling.

On Tuesday the office air felt heavy, as though everything were draped in black, suffocating cloaks. It didn’t take long to overhear the big news that Jacob was dead.  “They say he died of a broken heart,” a girl in accounting said, shaking her head. “That’s stupid,” one of the few men in the office replied. She heard everything from diabetes to a drug overdose, to a mysterious puncture wound that suddenly started bleeding, to a weak heart, as in “perhaps Jacob was just born with a weak heart.” Later that morning, Billy came by Gwen’s cubicle to take her to see the handsome, redheaded woman in the HR department.

“It’s weird, what happened,” Billy said. He pulled at his necktie and walked at a double pace to keep up with Gwen’s long gait. She held her chin up high and pushed her shoulders back. Billy lingered at the door. “I always liked you,” he said. He turned red and looked down at his shoes.

“I always liked you too,” she replied. She didn’t know if it was true because she’d never considered the question, but it felt like the right thing to say.

A lot of things were said in the HR office, but really it’s only the last bit that mattered:  “Anyway, we’re going to have to let you go.”

Gwen found the news underwhelming. She looked down at her hands folded sadly in her lap. “Okay,” she said, “But why exactly?”

It turned out the redhead had a fiery personality. She slammed a pile of papers down on the desk in front of her. “Do not even think about giving us a hard time on this one, Gwen. Do not even think about it. Why, why, let’s see. Well, you murdered our best receptionist, for starters. I mean, unless you want us to take this to the police.”

Gwen considered saying, “Don’t be absurd,” but decided instead to say nothing. They wanted her out immediately. They would mail her any paperwork. She took off her heels and walked around the office in stocking feet, collecting her stuff. She looked like a little girl on the playground, but then, so did everyone else. She felt surrounded by whispering. She slipped out the back door without ceremony, having talked to no one.

It was early and her mother was still at work when she got home. She pulled off her nylons and threw them on the couch on her way to the refrigerator. She ate ice cream out of the carton and radishes drenched in salt. The rest of the afternoon she spent under the covers in her bedroom. She played the movie of the martini soaked night with Jacob over and over in her mind.  His voice lingered like a tongue.  It travelled through her toes and out her mouth.  She touched herself and thought of nothing.  “Dead,” she whispered.  “Dead, dead, dead,” until the word itself meant nothing at all.