His eyes weren’t finished with their appraisal, lingering around my neck, and the tugging beneath my left rib was back; I felt myself starting to blush again.
I tried for conversation, “I didn’t mean to be imprecise, I imagine this building has more than one basement although I’ve never seen the blueprints. Are we going to one of the basements and, if so, why are we going to one of the basements?”
He met my gaze abruptly, his own unreadable.
“Standard procedure.” he murmured.
“Oh.” I sighed and started tearing again at my lip; of course there would be a standard procedure. This was likely fairly common for him. I wondered if I were the only one he would be escorting out today.
“How many times have you done this?” I asked.
“This?”
“You know, escort people out of the building after they’ve been ‘downsized’. Does this happen every day of the week? Layoffs typically happen on Fridays, the last day of the week, on Friday afternoons, in order to keep the crazies from coming back later in the same week. Today is Tuesday so you can imagine how surprised I was. Based on the international standard adopted in most western countries Tuesday is the second day of the week. In countries that use the Sunday-first convention Tuesday is defined as the third day of the week.”
Shutupshutupshutup!
I drew in a deep breath, clamped my mouth shut, and clenched my jaw to keep from talking. I watched him watch me, his eyes narrowing slightly, and my heart started to pound with loud sincerity against my chest in, what I recognized as, embarrassment.
I knew what I sounded like. My true friends softened the label by insisting I was merely well-read; everyone else called it coocoo for co-co-puffs. Although I’d been repeatedly urged to audition for Jeopardy and was an ideal and proven partner in games of Trivial Pursuit, my pursuit of trivial knowledge and the avalanche of verbal nonsense which spewed forth unchecked did little to endear me to men.
A quiet moment ticked by; for the first time in recent memory I didn’t have to try to focus my attention on the present. His blue eyes were piercing mine with an unnerving intensity, arresting the usual wanderlust of my brain. I thought I perceived one corner of his mouth lift although the movement was barely perceptible.
Finally he broke the silence, “International standard?”
“ISO 8601, data elements and interchange formats. It allows seamless intercourse between different bodies, governments, agencies... corporations.” I couldn’t help myself as the words tumbled out. It was a sickness.
Then, he smiled. It was a small, closed lipped, quickly suppressed smile. If I blinked I might have missed it; but, an expression of interest remained. He leaned his long form against the wall of the elevator behind him and crossed his arms over his chest. The wrist length, blue sleeves of his guard uniform pulled in taut lines over his shoulders.
“Tell me about this seamless intercourse.” His eyes traveled slowly downward, then, in the same leisured pace, up to mine again.
I opened my mouth to respond but then quickly snapped it shut. I suddenly felt hot.
His secretive and amused appearing surveillance of my features, the openness with which he stared was beginning to make me think he was just as strange as I was. He was making me extremely uncomfortable; his attention was a blinding spotlight from which I couldn’t escape.
I shifted the box to my other hip and looked away from his searching gaze. I knew now I’d been wise in avoiding direct eye contact. The customs and acceptability of eye contact vary greatly depending on the culture; as an example, in Japan, school aged children-
The elevator stopped, the doors opened, rousing me from my recollection of Japanese cultural norms. I straightened immediately and bolted for the exit before I realized I didn’t know where I was going. I turned dumbly and briefly peered at Sir Handsome from beneath my lashes.
Once again he placed his hand on the small of my back and steered me; I felt the same charged shock as before. We walked along a hallway with low hanging florescent lights and walls painted nondescript beige gray.
The smack smack smack of the flip flops echoed along the vacant hall. When I quickened my step to escape the electricity of his touch he hastened stride and the firm pressure remained. I wondered if he thought I was a flight risk or one of the afore-mentioned crazies.
We approached a series of windowed rooms and I stiffened as his hand moved to my bare arm just above the elbow. I swallowed thickly, feeling that my reaction to the simple contact was truly ridiculous. It was, after all, just his hand on my arm.
He pulled me into one of the rooms and guided me to a brown wooden chair, authoritatively taking the box from my hands and placing it on the chair to my left. There were people in the room, in cubicles and offices around the perimeter; there was also a long reception desk with a women dressed in the same blue guard uniform that McHotpants wore. I met her eyes; she blinked once then frowned at me.
“Don’t move. Wait for me.” he ordered.
I watched him leave and their subsequent exchange with interest: he approached the woman, she stiffened and stood. He leaned over the desk and pointed to something on her computer screen. She nodded, looked at me again, her brow rising in what I read as confusion, then sat down and started typing.
He turned and I made the mistake of looking directly at him. For a moment he paused, the same disquieting steadiness in his gaze causing the same heat to rise to my cheeks. I felt like pressing my hands to my face to cover the blush. He began to cross the distance toward me but was intercepted by another, older, man in a well-tailored suit holding a clip board. I watched their exchange with interest as well.
It was the woman who finally approached me after pulling a series of papers off the printer. She gave me a closed mouth smile which reached her eyes as she crossed the room.
She extended her hand as I stood, “I’m Joy. You must be Ms. Morris.”
I nodded once, tucking a restive curl behind my ear, “Yes, call me Janie. Nice to meet you.”
“I guess you’ve had a hard day?” Joy took the empty seat next to mine as I also sat; she didn’t wait for me to answer. “Don’t worry about it, hun. It happens to the best of us. I just have these papers for you to sign. I’ll need your badge and your key then we’ll pull the car around for you.”
“Uh... car?”
“Yes, it has been arranged and will take you wherever you need to go.”
“Oh, ok.” I was surprised by the arrangement of a car but didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.
I took the pen she was offering and skimmed over the papers. They looked benign enough. I hazarded a glance toward Sir Handsome, found him peering at me while he seemed to be listening to the man in the suit. Without really reading the text I signed and initialed in the places she indicated, pulled my badge from around my neck along with my key and handed it to her. She took the documents from me and initialed next to my name in several places.
She paused in once place. “Is this your current address and home phone number?”
I saw Jon’s address and I grimaced, “No, no- it isn’t. Why?”
“They need a place to send your last paycheck. Also, we need a current address in case they need to send you anything that might have been left behind. I’ll need you to write out your current address next to it.”
I hesitated. I didn’t know what to write. “I’m sorry, I-” I swallowed with effort and studied the page. “I just, uh, I am actually between apartments. Is there any way I could call back with the information?”
“What about a cell phone number?”
I gritted my teeth, “I don’t have a cell phone; I don’t believe in them.”
Joy raised her eyebrows, “You don’t believe in them?”
I wanted to tell her how I truly loathed cell phones. I hated feeling like I was reachable twenty four hours a day; it was akin to having a chip implanted in your brain which tracked your location, told you what to think and do until, finally, you would become completely obsessed with the tiny touch screen as the sole interface between your existence and the real world. Did the real world actually exist if everyone only interacted via cell phones? Would Angry Birds one day become my reality? Was I the unsuspecting pig or the exploding bird? These Descartes-based musings rarely made me popular at parties. Maybe I read too much science fiction and too many comic books but cell phones reminded me of the brain implants in the novel Neuromancer. As further evidence I wanted to tell her about the recent article published in the journal of Accident Analysis & Prevention about risky driving behaviors.
Instead, I just said: “I don’t believe in them.”
“Oooo-k. No problem.” Joy reached into her breast pocket, standing, and withdrew a white paper rectangle, “Here is my card; just give me a call when you’re settled and I’ll enter you into the system.”
I stood with her, taking the card, letting the crisp points dig into the pads of my thumbs and forefingers. “Thank you. I’ll do that.”
Joy reached around me and picked up my box, motioning with her shoulder that I should follow, “Come on, I’ll take you to the car.”
I started to follow her but then, like a self-indulgent child, allowed a lingering glance over my shoulder at Sir Handsome McHotpants. He was turned in profile, no longer peering at me with that discombobulating gaze; his attention was wholly fixed on the man in the suit. I was dually relieved and disappointed. Likely, this was the last time I would see him. I was pleased to be able to admire him one last time without the blinding intensity of his blue eyes. But part of me missed the heated twisting in my chest and the saturating tangible awareness when his eyes met mine.