Michael Seidlinger: The Strangest

I agree with her, “Yes.”

“What do you mean ‘yes’?”

“What you said,” I reiterate while gently pushing aside another employee’s lunch. Back corner of the top shelf of the fridge is where my lunch has been stored for over a year. I wonder what the employee meant by using my corner of the fridge.

I think about it while she continues talking.

She starts talking in the third person—

“I’m talking to myself and saying things like, ‘Veronica, why would you go back to places you can’t stand? Veronica, why would you work for Elite Aesthetics again, pushing stupid trendy wares for stupid trendy people? Veronica, you’re better than this.’ Zachary, you have no idea how many times I tried to get myself to believe it. I’m always saying, ‘Veronica, there are better jobs. Veronica, there are better lives with better people.’ They’re all more interesting and this is all so boring. But here I am and I’m so happy but I’m also so bummed out because doesn’t this make me spineless, going back to some job I swore off as career suicide?”

“Yes,” and then I add, “Veronica you’re right.”

“Maybe I should go back to school and get my master’s …”

Veronica holds onto my arm.

I don’t tell her to stop.

I tell her, “Yes,” in response to something else she said.

My stomach tightens, and it makes me lose my voice.

I think she asked me a question. I say the only thing I’ve said and she seems to not like it anymore. She squeezes my bicep.

She says, “What, you want me to leave you behind and become some big fancy business genius, a big-timer CEO?”

I blink twice. Look over at the other two employees.

I think about the food that took up my spot in the employee fridge.

Boss walks in and only has to look at me. I know.

I know that much. He didn’t need to say anything.

He didn’t need to call me over.

“Zachary, may I have a word?”

He can have a word, yes.

Veronica keeps talking but I’m not there to be talked to so that complicates things. I can still hear her voice as boss and I walk down the hall to his office. The room has a desk in it with three chairs and very little space. Space is so limited that he has to walk in first and then me second. We can’t both walk in. He has to squeeze around cabinets and stacks of office supplies and boxes to get to his seat behind the desk.

Then it’s my turn.

He starts talking.

I begin to understand something — he is faulting me for my absence.

I agree with him. I look down at the phone, see that I’m doing really well in terms of number of likes, few comments.

“You’ve been with the company for … twenty six months now …”

Is that a long time?

Should I have been with the company for less time, more time?

I can work on it.

There is a lecture about employee responsibility.

I hear bits and pieces. His voice has that way about it where it can blend so well with everything around me.

Wonder if someone can really memorize an entire ten minute lecture, word for word.

“Zachary, this is unacceptable behavior.”

I agree.

I apologize.

He says he understands, but that it can’t happen again.

I tell him it won’t and that I had to attend a funeral.

He sympathizes. “I understand, but you should have called. We wouldn’t have had to have this talk if you had just told me. You left us hanging here, short on staff on the busiest day of the week.”

I say something.

He accepts it.

“It’s understandable. We don’t need to remember phone numbers anymore …” He makes sure to give his name as he hands me a card, his business card, “and the email was appreciated. If even a little too late.”

Okay.

I take the card.

We sit there.

I think of something to say and I say it.

Then I leave.

I hear him say, “Oh … alright then.”

I go back to the break room to check on my food once before the shift starts. When I return to the counter, where I am tasked to greet customers and provide information about our products, Veronica is standing in the area where I am going to be standing.

She continues where she left off, talking.

I look at the time on my phone.

10 minutes before the store opens.

I set the phone next to the cash register, in the area of space where it is hidden behind pamphlets about Elite-brand e-cigarettes.

I like when I am tasked to stand at the counter. There are outlets, plenty of outlets, to charge phones, laptops, and other devices.

I can work the counter by myself.

I don’t need help. This is routine.

Day has begun by the time Veronica starts talking about yesterday and the days long before it.

Veronica says, “We had some real good times.”

I don’t say anything. I go over what I need to say to customers:

May I help you?

Greetings, welcome to Elite Aesthetics, where trends are born!

Hey, how’s it going?

Looking for something in particular?

Every single query should be met with a genuine grin.

I practice that genuineness like I always do; I visualize the transfer, how I need to be someone else to be genuine. At work I am Zachary the employee, on the street I am Zachary the person on a street, at the apartment I am Zachary. On the computer I am Meurks. I see the relationship clearly, and to be Zachary the employee, I am basically what I know to be, and that’s enough to have worked here successfully for two years.

Two years is a long time.

Two years isn’t that long for a lifetime of work.

There’s more to work, and there will likely be no change. Veronica’s return is a change that is unexpected.

Someone I knew that was fired from her job, someone that I have a past with, has miraculously returned, got her job back, and I’m all knotted stomach and dry mouth, more than usual anyway.

I don’t look for an understanding, but I am given one. I am given over fifteen of them. But she’s still talking and I am still having a hard time listening.

Zachary the employee cannot function well if he has to listen about everything he’s done.

She knows me more than I seem to know myself.

“Zachary, do you remember that one time we got lost in the bad part of town looking for authentic Japanese sushi but we didn’t even know what that meant? Do you remember?”

“I don’t care.”

Two more likes.

“Lay off the act. You do care.”

Someone commented, an understanding.

She keeps talking about the past like it wasn’t ruined at a later date; she thinks we can just pick back up where we left off.

I don’t look at her, I look straight ahead, imagining where the customer will stand. I go over the possibilities once more in my head.

I feel my heart beat faster when I think about the likely average, the amount of customers Zachary the employee will serve over the next eight hours. The number varies but on a Monday it can be:

40.

60.

80.

But not 100. All numbers take on a density that makes me dizzy.

Ever thought about how much of a person is judged in the first encounter, the first ten seconds, maybe twenty seconds? How much of a person is remembered from first encounters even after they become an active part of your lives. How much of this requires our best performance? How much of what we do is an act, and who is really genuine anyway?

I don’t delete that one even though I should.

It isn’t something that can be monitored, not with the few minutes I have that remain.