It’s designed like this on purpose, he thinks, this office, with the chairs he’s sitting on dramatically lower than those on the other side of the desk—that imperious desk. He is alone in the room because he’s been told to wait. And he’s been waiting. For what, now? Twelve minutes. This, too, must be by design, the long wait.
Eventually, the head of human resources shuffles in, holding papers. Her physical features and manner of dress are plain in a way that defies explanation. She just is. A pitch-perfect HR representative, he thinks. Her name is Maren; he’s known her for years.
“How are you today, Terry?”
“You know,” he says. “Pretty bad.”
“Okay, well, I know you know why you’re in here.”
“I do. I do.” Terry’s trying to wipe the hangdog look off his face as he’s handed a stapled three-sheet packet of paper with his Christian name, middle name, last name written in bold on the top page. Which reifies or really worsens the hangdog look on his face. He lets out an audible sigh.
“Well, I think we should just get into it. What do you think?”
“Sure, Mare. Let’s get it over with.”
“Okay.” She’s looking down at the papers before her. Holding a pencil eraser-side-down with the fingers of her right hand, she is absentmindedly drawing invisible circles on the big desk. She continues. “We have received a complaint from an employee. So, what I’m going to do is, I am going to read the nature of the complaint as it’s written down here. Okay, Terry?” followed by the soft plugging sound of her tapping her stacked packet with the pencil’s eraser.
Terry makes a face that’s like, proceed.
“We’ve received a complaint from an individual who works here. About unwanted attention. In the form of overly familiar and non-work chat, it says here. And unwanted, um, trying to think of a word that’s not—what’s written down here is staring. So, staring I guess. Also, that the individual in question feels uncomfortable, at times, with what they perceive to be an asymmetrical amount of, well like I said, attention being paid to her. Them. It’s not a sexual harassment allegation per se, Terry. It’s—do you understand the nature and severity of the complaint?”
“I do, of course.” Terry looks down, embarrassed, and then up at the one small window in here, which does the Hitchcockian dolly zoom it feels like, his necktie an anaconda, a deeply green and nauseated feeling roiling up in his guts; with attendant perspiration of the brow, the neck, the chest, the ears. Feels like he’s being cooked in his own shame.
“This is what’s called a, um, verbal warning. Our advice is, well, our advice to all faculty is to keep things, keep conversation strictly professional. Try to avoid topics that could be seen as, in any way, contentious or risqué, or, you know. We’re not saying you need to avoid this individual entirely but, it might be better to…it could be advantageous to…”
“No, I get it. I understand. I’m sorry, and I understand,” Terry says trying to let Maren off the hook a bit.
“Thank you, Terry. I know you are.”
Terry rolls the papers he’s holding into a tight cylinder. He slaps his palm with the roll like, welp.
“Is that it?”
“That’s it.”
“Thanks, Maren. I’m real sorry about this. Have a good day.”
“You too, Terry,” Maren says.
II.
Terry wallows down the halls he knows so well, heading for the quad. He stops outside the double exit doors, pulls out a cigarette and turns his back to the wind to try and light it. It’s a nasty day out—and how—a rain getting flicked and whipped about by a corkscrewing wind. The leaves, which’ve all lost their Titian orange, their cherry red, are only brown now, and stick slimily to vertical surfaces like wheat-paste posters.
After Terry’s got his cigarette lit—last man on Earth who smokes regular cigarettes, he sometimes thinks—he plunks himself down on the stone bench that overlooks the quad. It’s a stone bench he’s plunked himself down on many times before. He smokes and surveys the scene.
Shag-topped undergrads in ridiculous outfits scuttling under umbrellas in various zigzags. Two identical Fathers, a twin set, in black-and-white lockstep, look at a distance to be floating, their tidy steps concealed by their cassocks. Two square-headed jockey-looking goofballs with curly hair curling around and out of their visors and light beers wedged into the grass near their ankles throw around a football. A statement chucking-of-the-pigskin, in the rain; a testament to and showcase of their shared character, if anybody cares.
And then.
There she is, because of course, she is.
Looking particularly young and fragile in the light rain. How young? Terry does the math and it makes him sick in two directions. He can’t remember having an onrush of feelings like this since his early twenties; a broken sieve feeling, like the tap had been cracked on something highly pressurized.
She’s right there.
Close enough to call out to.
Something overcomes him.
“Hey, look. Listen. I know I am supposed to, from here on out, you know, avoid you. I respect that, and I am sorry for any stress or like, discomfort I caused. I truly am and after this that’s the last you’ll ever hear from me. I just need to say this one thing. This is not an excuse for my actions by any means. Only, an explanation, I hope. Let me say this one thing. I didn’t know. Truly, I didn’t know. It feels like it was just yesterday that women universally welcomed my advances. I feel like yesterday I was twenty-five. It’s like, one day you’re witnessing creepy old men hit on young girls and it curls your skin and then, nobody tells you, it just happens one night overnight, you wake up and you’re the old man. But you go around living your life as if nothing’s changed because you don’t realize that anything has. I look in the mirror and I am still me. I guess, no, you’re right. There must’ve been some part of my brain that deep down was doing the computations. I just feel like an idiot. I feel like the guy who thinks the stripper loves him. It’s funny, right? It’d be funny if it weren’t so god damned sad. I’m sorry I made you feel that way. I never would’ve done it on purpose.”
Is what he would’ve said. Whatever overcame him subsides and dies. Terry flicks his cigarette and it chandelles in the volted wind. She goes passing by, laughing with who she’s with, oblivious, Terry’s attention far enough outside her radar display.
He looks south, down past the brick gymnasium, the registrar. Then towards the sky.
Looks like more rain.
Dillon Droege is a 39-year old Fordham University graduate currently residing in Sunnyside, Queens with his girlfriend and their 37 house plants. He is a contributing member of the New York City-based literary forum Woodside Writers.
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What stayed with me was the unspoken confession, cutting back to silence. It trusts the reader and hurts in the right way.