Scheduling Issues
by Richard Dansky
The fear always came at three in the afternoon. It scheduled itself between the pleasant post-lunch drowsiness and the late afternoon anticipation of going home. It balanced itself at the very tipping point of the day, and it would not be moved.
It was not a rude fear that came unannounced. By half past two Harry felt the first tentative knots in his stomach; by quarter of, the steel bands that wrapped across his chest had tightened fractionally.
And then, at three, it descended. Like a hawk swooping down on its prey, it dug its talons into him with pitiless accuracy. His throat tightened so that breathing became an intense, ragged effort, and his heart squeezed into a steel box half a size too small. His eyes widened, his hair grew disheveled, and the muscles of his hands did their relentless best to twist into agonized claws.
To make matters worse, three in afternoon was always, always scheduled for a meeting. Not for Harry was the small dignity of suffering alone in his office and in his own chair. No, three o’clock was always one meeting or another, and contribution was expected from someone in Harry’s exalted managerial position, advancement of the discussion unless one of the senior managers had spoken first, in which case his contribution was expected to reinforce whatever they had said.
Every day he would sit, palms sweating, eyes wide, trying to find a single tidbit to toss onto the table. Whether he actually knew anything about the subject being discussed did not matter. Knowing nothing had never stopped anyone else. What did matter was that he demonstrate his usefulness in countable words. That he contribute. Those who were silent in meetings tended to disappear. The table only had room for contributors.
The fear knew this. The fear wanted Harry thinking about being suddenly gone from that table. It played games with him, kept him on the knife-edge to feed itself. It crushed his throat when he did dare speak, turning his words into a painful rasp. It knotted his bladder like a too-small water balloon and played hob with his guts, forcing him to sit in shameful agony because he didn’t dare interrupt the proceedings to relieve himself. It took his hands and made him scribble things in his notes, terrible things.
“Kill me now,” one of them read, each letter carefully drawn one on top of the other. The casual observer would see only a rough cross-hatching of squiggles. It read like typeset newsprint for him and him alone.
The others noticed. How could they not? They saw him shift in his chair and hesitate to speak, saw his eyes dart around the table and his hands produce unknowable scribblings, and they made assumptions about him and about aspects of his performance he needed to improve.
“We can see you want to contribute,” a fellow manager said, “but you’re obviously holding back, like you don’t trust us to value your input. Distrust doesn’t make for a healthy working relationship. We have to know you’re being honest with us.”
Harry thought about telling his coworker how bloody wrong he was. Harry also thought of his house. He thought of his wife Lisa, of the new car they kind of needed and the new carpet they’d contracted to put in and of the sheer tidal wash of dollars in and out every month that their life in that house required. He thought about what would happen if he had to tell her that the money wouldn’t be coming in anymore. He thought about what he might do if she left him all alone.
The fear knew this. The fear had been with Harry a long time, and it was clever about keeping their relationship close. He’d seen a doctor about it and been given a bottle of pink pills. One a night. One a night, and the barbed wire around your chest will unravel.
For a few weeks, it had. He breathed easily. He contributed happily. Sometimes, he didn’t even know the meeting’s hour had gone by. Meanwhile, the fear sat back on its haunches and formulated a response to its chemical enemy. Three weeks in, Harry felt the first familiar twinge. The resulting panic widened the crack in his defenses, and the fear poured through.
For the next month, it vigorously sandpapered his throat and laid extra weights on his chest as punishment. Harry and the fear belonged together, it told him. Trying to get rid of it wasn’t allowed.
Harry hid the fear from his wife, kept the pink pills tucked inside another bottle and the stories of his troubles at work limited to lighthearted anecdotes of harmless snafus. This was important to Harry. The fear knew this, and for its own reasons respected it, and for the most part stayed out of Harry’s home, which helped sustain the status quo.
By doing so, it gave Harry one small nugget of understanding of the daemon that rode him. Harry understood that the fear would not push him to the point where he would become one of the vanished from the table. If he failed and survived, Harry dimly understood, he would no longer be afraid of failure. The fear would not allow him to be his best, but it could not let him be his worst and dive off failure’s cliff. Thus, the fear could perpetuate itself.
A Wednesday night, or perhaps an early Thursday morning, brought change. Harry lay under the covers, unsleeping, next to his wife. Her stuffed animals formed a corona around the bed. She’d tossed and turned and thrown each one off in some unspoken order until only she and he remained, she with most of the blankets.
“Harry,” she said, and her voice had that careful tone that told him she was edging towards a fight.
“Yes, dear?” he answered, and continued looking up at the ceiling. It made him wonder about when the roof would need replacing and how much it would cost.
“I have a question,” she said, in that same cautious way. “You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
“Of course I’ll answer,” he told her. He blinked. “What is it?”
The words came out in a rush. “Why are you so miserable?”
He licked his lips. “I didn’t think I was,” he said, and the fear woke up in his belly. “I am with you. I am happier than I have ever been.” And that was truth; he loved her, and in those hours when the cold hand around his heart relaxed its grip, he was indeed quite happy.
Lisa rolled over. “Look at me, Harry,” she commanded. He turned his head. Her face was half-hidden in her pillow, but the one eye he could see fixed him with its glare. “I can see it in your face. I can see it in the way you hold your shoulders, tensed up like you’re expecting someone to beat you for the slightest mistake. I can hear it in your voice, and I can feel it when I touch you, and I want to know what is wrong with my husband.”
He reached out to stroke her cheek. The fear sent a spasm through his hand, a small reminder, as he did.
She saw it and recoiled. “Harry!” She put a gulf of eighteen inches between them. “Is it me, Harry?”
“No,” he said, more forcefully than he intended. Her eyes were wide, the same way he knew his eyes pried themselves open every day at three. He dug his nails into his palms to prevent the fingers from clenching, ignored the warning tightness in his chest and the small nest of snakes just hatched in his stomach. “It is absolutely not you.”
She smiled sadly. “Then you are miserable.”
“Yes. No. I don’t know.” He looked at her, helpless. “I didn’t want you to see it.”
“What do you think gave it away,” she said wearily. “Now talk to me, Harry. Please.”
And Harry did, and the fear rose up in him like ants swarming over a dead grasshopper. He talked to her when the fear crushed the air from his lungs and when it clenched his throat so tight the words couldn’t come. He talked to her when his hands shook and his heart pounded and when he was almost deafened by the sound of the blood rushing through his veins. He told her about contributing and three o’clock and how some mornings he wished he’d have some sort of accident, just to keep from facing that terrible hour.
In the end, he even told her why he lived with the fear. For her. For their home and their life together.
Silence descended. She took one of his hands in hers. “Harry,” she said, and her voice was loving and stern, “I do not want you to be miserable. When you are miserable, I am miserable. So if you do not or will not take care of this problem for you, then take care of it for me. I won’t leave you, but if you let this go on, I won’t have to. So do something about this, Harry. That’s how you’ll protect what we have.”
“But what,” and the breath caught in his throat for a minute so that the words crammed themselves into a high-pitched squeak, “if I get fired?”
“Then you’ll find another job,” she said soothingly. “We can live a lot more simply than we do, you know. I wouldn’t mind that.”
He held her then, and he cried, and the fear withdrew itself lest it be broken by the great racking sobs that poured out of him. She held him back, and told him it would be all right, and suggested very practical ways he might do something to defend himself at the very next three o’clock. And if the fear heard her, he didn’t care.
Two thirty the next day, and the snakes promptly stirred in Harry’s belly. Two forty-five, and he could taste blood in his throat. Three o’clock, and the fear was waiting in the conference room like a schoolyard bully who’s missed his favorite target for a couple of days and wants to make up for lost time.
The management group filed into the conference room for a meeting with the project team. The people on one side of the room were laughing, carrying drinks they’d finish halfway and notepads they wouldn’t take notes on. The others, grim-faced and slump-shouldered.
The actual subject of the meeting was something that had been decided on long ago but now suddenly needed to be re-decided, as if they’d grown bored with stability and wanted to make expensive changes for the sake of making change.
Harry took his customary chair, on the left side down near the far end of the table. Everyone had a customary chair. It was an expression of hierarchy. It was part of the ritual.
The project team started the discussion, got halfway in, and got interrupted. That, too, was part of the procedure. Comments were made, suggestions offered, tangents followed, and months of work overturned. Harry could feel the fear inside him, poised and waiting, perched like a gargoyle on the tip of his tongue.
He shifted in his chair. It squeaked in response, as it always did. The squeaky chair was Harry’s and had been since the beginning. The fear liked that, knowing that every fidget and shift drew attention to him. Now it was making the sound echo in his ears, train wheels screeching to a halt and fingernails on chalkboard.
Jaw set, fingers trembling under the table, he shifted again.
His boss noticed. “Yes, Harry?”
Harry blinked. Swallowed. Felt the fear go down with it and lodge in his throat. His hands gripped the edge of the table.
“This,” he squeaked, “is bullshit.”
Harry’s boss sat back in his chair, which did not squeak. “That’s interesting, particularly since we seem to have a good direction on this one. Why do you say that, Harry?”
Harry swallowed again. The barbed wire around his chest tightened, and the fear sprouted hooks around its edges to keep from going down with the bare trickle of spit his mouth was producing. The pain was exquisite.
“I said,” Harry repeated, each word coming as a thin wheeze, “that this is bullshit.” One hand took up a pen and started scribbling on the notepad. The letters spelled KILLMEKILLMEKILLMEKILLMENOW. Harry didn’t notice. He sucked in air, heard it whistle in his windpipe. He’d heard noises like that before—clarinets with broken reeds, old men with emphysema. “We decided on this four fucking months ago. We were all at the meeting. We all agreed on what to do, and we signed off on it and moved on.”
They were all staring at him now, some eyes hostile, some eyes wondering. The fear shot through him, boiling the acid in his stomach and squeezing his chest. He thought he heard something creak and wondered if it was his ribs. His heart felt bruised, slamming against the bars of a too-small cage.
You can stop, the fear told him. You can apologize and save your job. You can do that right now.
He shook his head, felt stabbing pain climb up behind his eyes as he did. “I can get the notes. We were all happy. It looked good. It was within scope and budget. Why do we need to revisit this now?”
The fear squeezed tighter. He heard something inside him give a little pop and was astonished by the agony when he drew his next breath. Broken rib, he guessed. The air was hot and thin in his mouth. Maybe a collapsed lung, too.
I can hurt you, the fear said. I don’t want to, but I will if you keep this shit up. Don’t make you hurt you any more.
“We need to take a look at this,” his boss was saying in his favorite reasonable tone of voice, “to make sure it aligns congruently with the company vision for where we’re going here.”
Harry heard him, understood nothing he said. He thought of Lisa, then coughed and tasted fresh blood in his mouth.
Don’t be an idiot, Harry, the fear told him.
He coughed again and this time spat the bloody froth out onto the table.
The voices rang out. “Harry!” “Jesus Christ, what’s wrong with you?” “He doesn’t look so good.” “Can we get back to what we were talking about?”
“No,” Harry rasped. He forced the traitor fingers of his left hand to seize the arm of his chair and hold tight. The right was still holding his pen; now it stabbed into the pad over and over until the point pierced paper and broke. Ink spattered everywhere the blood had not yet touched. “We don’t need to look at this. We don’t need to look at any of this crap. And we don’t need to keep doing this over and over just to show everyone we can.”
I will wreck you, the fear said, sounding shrill and afraid. You. Will. Stop.
Two more pops, like a shotgun being fired in a panic. Two more ribs, Harry figured. The poison in his stomach climbed up his gullet, mixing with the blood and etching its progress into his flesh as it went. Words were suddenly very precious.
“I… liked the direction… we had before. We all did.” He coughed again and spat out more blood. It spread across the pale wood of the conference table. Someone went for a paper towel; someone else whispered something about blood diseases and stopped them. More cracking sounds filled his chest, and now people were pointing at him and screaming.
He looked down. White, jagged bone was visible, splintered ends of ribs poking through his perfectly sensible button-down shirt. Spreading blood colored the rest of it, as the whole thing surged in time with the jackhammer beat of his heart.
Harry forced himself to look away, tried to force away thoughts of his wife. Lisa would be proud of you, he told himself. There’s no turning back now. “I can guarantee… we will just… argue back to where we were… in the end.” The effort drained him. The last word felt like a prophecy.
Every breath now had a nasty bubbling undertone to it, a sure sign of fluid in his lungs. He didn’t care. In the distance, he could hear someone screaming to get an ambulance, to get HR, to get somebody, but the voice was hard to make out over the roaring in his ears. Blood filled his mouth and ran down his chin. The fear screamed inside his head.
Last chance, Harry, it said. The very last chance. You can’t live without me. I won’t let you live without me.
His lips split in a horrific grin. “I,” he said in a voice that could scarcely be heard, “have nothing more to contribute.”
Then, and only then, did he sag back in his chair and let his eyes close. His right hand spasmed once and lay still, surrounded by a puddle of his blood.
The sick wet sound of his breathing had stopped. The palisade of rib fragments poking through his shirt didn’t move.
“Meeting adjourned?” someone said softly. No one else said anything. They were still seated, still staring when the paramedics arrived, when they called time of death, and when they put Harry on the stretcher and zipped up the bag over his smiling, bloody face.
It took nearly a full hour before someone finally brought up what it might take to clean up the conference room.
Tony, one of the other managers, rested his hands on Harry’s old chair and shook his head. He’d tried to help the guy, tried to give him advice on how to handle himself and how to mesh with the rest of the leadership group. He’d even thought some of it had taken. That last talk of theirs, for example, about contributing—he honestly thought that one had done Harry some real, actionable good.
“Ah well,” he said aloud to the empty and newly scrubbed conference room. “No good deed goes unpunished.”
He stood, easing out of the chair that had once been Harry’s. It squeaked forward, softly.
No one else is going to sit in that chair for a while, Tony thought as he spun it around. The police had been all over it, and so had the biohazard cleanup unit. It didn’t look like Harry had been carrying any sort of weird disease, but these days you could never be too sure. So they’d sterilized the thing from top to bottom, and if it hadn’t been an $800 Herman Miller special, the boss probably would have let them burn it, too.
“Sorry it had to end this way, Harry,” Tony announced and sat down again. The chair creaked again, louder this time and more grating. He sat there a moment, long enough to pay what seemed a fitting tribute, then hoisted himself to his feet.
Maybe we should have let them burn it, Tony suddenly thought, and he walked hurriedly out of the room. He left the lights on behind him as he left.
And as he headed down the hall, for the first time ever he wondered if, just maybe, he should have turned them off after all. Then he found himself pondering if he would be seen as tacky if he claimed Harry’s chair in the next day’s meeting, and if that would then cost him status. That in turn led to worry about whether Harry’s workload was going to fall on him now, which would make him fall behind, because Lord knew Harry hadn’t been contributing, and…. As these thoughts ran through his mind, he felt a twinge of something odd stirring in his stomach, something tight gently squeezing at his chest.
I shouldn’t worry about those things, Tony tried to tell himself. I’ve got nothing to be afraid of….