quislibet | Fragmentary fiction

Bits of this came to me as I walked home from the train last night; I don't know why. Here's a rough draft. It seems like the opening vignette in a longer piece, like the part before the opening credits and the first commercial.

You can probably look at this and name two or three authors right away that I like to read. So it goes.

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Gerald's last day at work had not been a particularly good one. It had been, in fact, particularly bad, and not even knowing (had he known, for we want to state at the outset that he did not know) that it was to be his last day at work would have made it any more bearable, because of why.

Gerald worked with computers. This was, more or less, true of everyone at that particular small company, but it was not a computer business: it was a business that used computers. The result of this was that when something went wrong with the computers -- a not infrequent occurrence -- no one could do much work, and it fell to those very few employees who had any idea how to fix computers to fix them. Gerald was one of these unhappy few. And so it came to pass that, since nearly all of the computers where Gerald worked had been laid low by a fierce virus (designed, apparently, to punish not only those who would read on company time the sort of personal e-mail message the virus carrier pretended to be but also those who suffered them to be employed), most of Gerald's co-workers left early and went to the bar down the street, while Gerald (and, we must admit, certain others) stayed to battle the virus.

At long last, when Gerald and his fellow initiates into the deeper mysteries of computing had overcome their foe, having stayed rather later on a Friday night than anyone should have to, Gerald left quickly to join his coworkers at the bar. Lisa from Accounting, for one, had seemed particularly insistent that Gerald do so once he had, as she had said, conquered the virus by means of his "leet skills," and, although it vexed Gerald that she had actually said "leet skills," Lisa had just been through a bad breakup, and so he, eager to get in on the ground floor of her rebound, had assured her he would join her there as soon as possible.

The bar, we regret to say, was a bust. The war against the virus had taken too long. Gerald arrived to find Lisa already sitting in the lap of that bastard Roman -- and who the hell was named Roman outside of daytime television, anyway? -- and so, while Lisa greeted Gerald's arrival with drunken cheer, he was clearly not going to get any.

(Neither was Roman, as it turned out, but Gerald could hardly have known this, and again, foreknowledge would not really have made it better, not at all.)

Gerald chose economy over quality so that he could afford to get himself good and drunk. But really, all things considered, one might feel that it is too bad Gerald did not drink the good beer, because that, at least, would have been something.

After a bit, Gerald watched in despair as Roman and Lisa left together, giggling. He was not terribly responsive to his friend Margaret's attempts to engage him in reminiscence about how tough it had been with the virus, all those quarter-hours ago, and after a bit longer he excused himself curtly and went out into the night.

(We think it is not inappropriate here to point out that, had Gerald stayed to make awkward small talk with Margaret, he would have had a considerably better night -- although he had never thought of Margaret before in That Way. Possibly they would have ended up married, raising Maine coon cats together at a B&B on the coast -- this was, at least, Margaret's dream; but even though Gerald was allergic to cats, we cannot consider his escape from this potential fate in any way a stroke of good fortune.)

A couple of blocks away from the bar, as Gerald walked in the direction of the bus stop, he noticed Lisa's coat on the ground near the entrance to an alley, and heard the most extraordinary sounds coming from not far away. Apparently, they couldn't even wait to get home! Some perversity made him decide to -- what? confront them? It wasn't as if she were cheating on him or anything, as if he were going to say, oh, Lisa, oh, I had thought so much better of you (for in fact he hadn't). We are afraid that we must admit Gerald entered the alley almost entirely with the hope of seeing Lisa at least partly naked; he'd think of a better excuse if they happened to notice him crouching there.

But Roman and Lisa were not alone.

Gerald could not quite make out the other two figures pressed up against his coworkers, nor could he tell just what they were doing. It was as if his eyes could not properly focus on them, in a way that wasn't entirely to be attributed to at least two pitchers of cheap Pilsner-style.

Something, his mind was trying to tell him, was very wrong.

And then Gerald saw clearly, saw exactly what it was that they were doing, and that's when he started screaming, and he screamed and screamed and did not stop screaming, not until they had done it to him, too.