Emma Rathbone - Losing It

“I’m getting off the phone now. Joe Cutty,” he said. “Yes, Mom, it’s still Joe Cutty, and I’ll call him tomorrow. Yes. I’m going now. I’m going now, Mom, bye.”

He put it down. “Julia,” he said, looking at me with a hassled smile. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” And then, before I could say anything, he pointed to my hand. “What’s that?”

I was holding a gift I’d gotten for him at a store that sold healing crystals and menstrual calendars and homemade soup spices that I happened to pass one afternoon downtown. It was a transparent disk filled with layers of different-colored sand on a small plastic platform so you could put it on your desk. It was his birthday — which I knew because Jeannette had invited the whole office to cake later — and I’d planned to give it to him in a casual way, like an afterthought, no big deal. It was meant to strike a balance: to encourage him if he was interested in me but not seem too pushy. I hadn’t seen him too many times since our last conversation. He’d stopped by my desk once, as if to say something to me, but I’d been on the phone.

“It’s for you,” I said. I held it out. “For your birthday.”

“Really?” he said.

I handed it over. It was wrapped in many layers of tissue paper with mystical glitter in it.

He started unwrapping it.

“You really didn’t have to…”

He continued unwrapping it.

“The anticipation is killing me,” he said.

Finally, he withdrew the sand disk. “Look at that.” He held it up. “Are you supposed to shake it?”

“No!” I said. “Well, you can. If you want to. That’s up to you. But I don’t think you’re supposed to.”

He slowly lowered it with a perplexed smile and then looked at me, and in the short silence that followed I’m pretty sure it became clear to both of us that any leverage I’d had by being more conventionally attractive had just been canceled out by this naked and unasked-for gesture, as well as the fact that the sand disk was, I now realized, a complete piece of crap that could even be considered faintly insulting. I watched, with mounting unease, as he registered all of this and started to form a response that would probably have attempted to politely paper over the whole thing, but then, instead, his face became alert and he looked behind me.

“Grousey Grouse,” said James Kramer, walking into the office. “Grousey Grouse Grouse.”

James Kramer was the head partner, and when we’d met I’d immediately disliked him. He was a big, rotund man, white-haired and jowly, who steamrolled everybody with a loud, aggressive good cheer. He was the kind of older man who seemed to take it as a challenge when a woman sustained eye contact with him or countered him in any way.

“James, hello,” said Elliot, putting on a pleasant smile.

“Just wanted to pop in and say a quick happy birthday,” said Kramer, “because I won’t be able to make it to Jeannette’s little get-together.”

“Ah, got it,” said Elliot. “Well, thanks.”

James leaned back, his eyes ran over us, assessing. It seemed like he was going to leave but then he said to Elliot, “How are the little green men? Are they gathering?”

“Ha-ha,” said Elliot. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Have they started a conference? Are they going to invite you?” James’s eyes flitted over to me with a mean sparkle.

“No,” said Elliot, smiling thinly. “I don’t think so, not yet.”

“Are they gonna”—James made a phone gesture with his hand—“are they gonna phone home?”

“Probably not.”

“Well, you’ll let me know if they do,” said Kramer loudly.

“You know I will,” said Elliot.

“You know I want you to,” said Kramer, pointing a folder at Elliot, walking backward out of the room. I looked quickly back and forth between them.

“Will do,” said Elliot.

“Happy birthday!” yelled Kramer as he walked away from the office.

Elliot glanced at me, shook his head, and started straightening the papers on his desk.

“What was that all about?” I said.

I could tell the interaction had been unpleasant for Elliot, but a part of me was glad it had short-circuited the awkwardness of the previous few minutes and put us back on regular footing.

“It’s nothing.” He sighed. “It’s…” He scratched the back of his head. “I made the mistake a couple years ago of telling the guys about this thing — we were just making small talk — this project I was interested in.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.” He squinted at me, gauging my actual interest. “It’s this thing out of SETI.” He put down a pen and leaned back. “They — this started years ago — but they started releasing data they were collecting from a radio telescope in California, where they’re sort of sifting for signals from distant technologies, or other civilizations.”

“Oh, cool,” I said. “UFOs?”

“Yup,” he said, “well, exactly. And for the first time they’ve made all of this data available to the public — you just have to download a program — because they figure a human brain is actually better than a computer algorithm at detecting whether something is just interference from our world, or an actual message from, you know, from outside.”

“Got it. Wow,” I said.

“So yeah,” he said, “and anyone can participate.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“I just like the idea that you, me, or any old person could identify the first signal like that — what would essentially be the biggest discovery of humankind.”

“How much data is there?”

He slowly exhaled. “It would be a needle in a haystack,” he said. “A million times that.” He smiled. “Are we alone?” he said. “That’s the question.”

“Yes,” I said. “That is the ultimate question.”

We made some uncomfortable eye contact. I started blushing.

“Anyway.” He shifted in his seat. “Thanks again for the…” And he held up the sand disk.

“You’re welcome,” I said. I hesitated. I wanted to keep standing there. “See you at the thingy later.”

“Sounds great,” he said, and watched as I turned around and left.

About forty minutes later we all gathered in the kitchen, a fluorescent-lit area that smelled faintly of rotting banana. Jeannette was elaborately cutting the cake she’d made, hustling around the table and moving things back and forth. I was talking to Allison by the refrigerator, but all I could do was glance over at Elliot. This was the first time I’d seen him in a social setting, interacting with other people. He was talking to Ed Branch, his hands under his armpits and leaning forward as if he was really hunkered down in thought.

“My college roommate was from there,” Allison was saying. “Where did you go to high school?”

“Wilson,” I said. I watched Elliot absentmindedly take a bottle of seltzer from the table and twist off the top. His eyes wandered over to me for a second. I thought about what he did when he got home. If he loosened his tie and untucked his shirt and walked around like that. Maybe that was when he took his hair down. I wondered if he sometimes absentmindedly tossed a grape into the air and then craned his neck back to catch it in his mouth, exposing his Adam’s apple.

“… outside of Plano,” said Allison, “but it was more like a lodge than a hotel.”

“Uh-huh.”

He was still nodding slowly and considering what Ed was saying. Did he pull his cheek taut when he was shaving like men did in movies? And then did he wolfishly towel off the rest of the shaving cream?

Now Jeannette was with us. “Cute haircut,” said Allison.

“Thank you, thank you,” said Jeannette. “I went to that place Reflections?”