That pink shadow of light reflecting off of the buildings is the first sign I have only two hours left of work. Around this time one morning I hear the nerd slamming around with the copy machine. The bleach blonde woman left early, and it is just the nerd and I working with the old men. The old man seemed kind of absent minded as usual. Whenever I looked at him in his stiff cowboy hat and red flannel I wondered silently how he had ended up at this shitty job so late in his life.
The nerd and I hadn’t spoken or so much as made eye contact throughout the whole shift thus far, and I didn’t know why. I wanted to talk to him but I didn’t want to be the one to start the conversation. I felt obligated to emulate his distance. But I knew we have to talk at some point and I had been patiently anticipating it up until that point. I knew the time had come when he started clumsily slamming the copier around.
He turned abruptly to me and said, “The copy machine needs toner.”
“So you expect me to change it?” I said, mildly annoyed.
“Well, I changed it last time, it’s your turn.”
“But I have all these papers to sort through and you have nothing to do, why don’t you just do it?”
“I’m not going to pick up your slack,” he said in a seriousness that surprised me. He stared at me in that way again, smiling slightly with contempt as his eyes glared. It only took a moment of looking into his face to know that he was not teasing me; he was absolutely serious and his smile was just a throw back. A wave of emotion hit me in the stomach and my throat instantly went dry. Who did he think he was, bossing me around that way?
“You are an asshole,” I said, my face feeling flushed and hot. I stormed out of the room and went outside. The morning wind was colder than I had expected, but I hadn’t thought to grab my jacket. Part of me expected him to run outside and apologize, but deep down I knew he wouldn’t. I stood there outside, feeling stupid since I had no reason to be outside. I tried to think of an excuse to be there.
‘I’m being so overemotional,’ I thought, knowing that I shouldn’t act this way at all. I went to the bathroom and fixed my hair. I would just have to make it look like me excusing myself had nothing to do with him. It was a bathroom break; one of those things girls did when they were afraid their make up might be running.
I walked back in the room. Nothing had changed. I would of expected him to at least change the toner when I was gone as proof that he felt a little bad for being so impolite, but he didn’t. He didn’t even look up when I walked into the room. I went back to filing papers for a moment and waited for the nerd to say something. He didn’t. Finally I spoke up.
“So are you really going to make me change the toner? Is this for real?”
He rolled his eyes and looked up from the book he was reading. As he stared at me like a child, I stole a look at the book in his hands- an old paperback version of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He looked like he was almost finished with it. He knew I was looking at the title of the book; I could tell by the way he held it that he wanted me to know he was reading it. I tried not to show that I was impressed.
He sighed loudly. “Why do you have to be so immature? Why can’t you just do it?”
“Because you are sitting there reading and I have all this work left to do by the end of my shift, and you’re finished and have nothing to do.”
“That’s because I finished all my work faster,” his eyes were like cold hard beads.
The old man walked over to use the copier. When he saw that the toner had still not been changed, a look of disappointment crossed his face. He slowly shook his head and began to replace it himself. He did not say anything to us or even look at us. The nerd and I sat there silently. I saw that the nerd’s face revealed some embarrassment as his eyes returned to the book, and I almost began to beam, realizing that some action of mine had caused him shame, and that maybe I had won the argument. Then I realized that the old man was shaking his head at both of us.
My anger with the nerd was accelerating by the day, watching him ride his bike with a look of cold indifference like he is such tough shit, uncaring and unaware of everyone but himself. Yet it is in this attitude, this behavior that I find him most attractive. In fact, at night I started having dreams where he is following me through the downtown on his bike. Downtown is empty, except for this hot dog stand. I only have one dollar in my wallet and that’s how much the hot dogs are and I’m a vegetarian. I’m not hungry at all, in fact there is this great weight in my stomach that almost makes me want to vomit. But the nerd is following me, sneering and smiling and I feel forced to stop even though I don’t want to, and he says “buy the hot dog” with this command in his voice. I can’t say no.
So I take the dollar and I hand it to the man at the hot dog stand. The man at the hot dog stand slightly resembles an even more haggard version of the old man at our work. He hands me this hot dog, brown and glistening and bloated like a moist balloon between the sterile bun.
The nerd looks at me and I see that his forehead is glistening like the hot dog, his eyes are big round globes hiding under his glasses.
“No ketchup, no mustard, no relish, you are going to eat it just like that,” he says.
I don’t even bother telling him I’m a vegetarian. It’s one of those dreams where my legs can’t move. So I eat the hot dog as he watches. It tastes disgusting and it burns the insides of my stomach and I know there is no way for it to all fit inside me. I hate it but I keep eating anyway, because I know I have to and I can’t stop.
Every time I wake up from this dream, my stomach feels so bloated and full I have to skip breakfast.
But I would think about him everyday after I had the reoccurring dream. When I woke up I felt an urgency to get ready and go to work. I suddenly wanted to be at work all the time. I could admit myself that I was very attracted to him, but at the same time I wanted to fight him. At work I’d watch him move the papers to the copy machine and fantasize about jumping him from behind, with my arms around his neck. He’d struggle, but it would be no use because his skinny arms aren’t that strong. I’d win because I could never imagine him fighting back, only standing there smiling with his sneering eyes, cold and inconsiderate. I wanted to fight him but I wanted him to let me win, even if maybe I could really win on my own. I wanted him to make me believe that he had power over me, both physical and mental, even if he didn’t. I wanted to be put in my place just to break out of it. I wanted him to let me fight him and let me win, and the idea of this was making me feverish with sexual desire.
I tried to stop this fantasy from happening, but it always did, every day without fail, like a television screen built into my mind. And this made me wonder even more about my fate, and if I was doomed to work these temp jobs and be attracted to these asshole guys and never write anything passionate at all.
One day after work, I was riding home, my back sore and eyes tired. To get home I had to ride over this huge hill that curved upwards. It had taken me time to comfortably get up the hill without struggle, and riding up it had become a marker letting me know that my day was over. It was still hard after all the practice, but I had learned the best gears to get me comfortably up the hill. It was something I both looked forward to and loathed doing. But on this particular morning, I saw the nerd riding on the other side of the street. I immediately knew he was doing this to play games with me, after all, he’s on the completely wrong side of the road. I didn’t even know why he was riding that way, as I was almost positive he lived in a completely different direction. The knowledge that he was going this far out of his way to torment me sent bolts of both anger and arousal through my body.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at him from across the road, the morning traffic beginning to pour down the hill and into the city.
He smiled widely. “Do you want to race up the hill?”
I looked at him in disbelief. His bike was much bigger than mine and his legs were much longer. There would be no way that I could beat him, but I felt my body respond before my mind could think. I smiled and took off, pedaling hard against the hill. He was already ahead of me, although his start was slow. I knew he didn’t expect my eager, sudden reaction. I didn’t even expect my eager, sudden reaction. I pounded my legs against the pedals, watching him out of the corner of my eyes. My legs were beginning to burn and my lungs hurt, but I tried to use all the anger and passion to fuel my body. It came in spurts, but could not fight hard enough against my short breathes and aching muscles. The nerd pulled ahead. I was tired and there were still two blocks left of the hill.
I knew then that I had lost. Months of riding up that hill taught me to be slow and persistent, to save my energy and my breathe. I had made a mistake thinking that I could use emotional energy to fight against him, and he had beaten me. He was at the top of the hill. I had slowed down, my face obviously red from both the cold wind and my embarrassment. I wanted to get off the bike and catch my breathe, but I didn’t want him to see me do it. I snuck a glance at him hopping off of his bike. He turned around and smiled.
“I’ll see you at work tomorrow,” he said. He then got on his bike and rode away. I waited until I was sure he was out of sight before getting off of my bike. I didn’t want him to see me give up.
I hadn’t dated anyone since my college boyfriend, the writer with the coke problem. I just found that I could no longer trust people anymore after that. The sexual part of me was completely removed. I stopped going out with the hopes of meeting someone; I stopped looking at myself in the mirror and judging what I saw. The opposite sex had stopped mattering, and I found myself both free and trapped in my lack of sexuality. The nerd was the first person that had made me feel this way; I felt so turned on by his attitude, by his intelligence, by the way he knew his image was ironic and contradictory and had no desire to change his ways. But I wondered why these things were attractive to me, when I had spent so long swearing off boys with his same qualities. He was an exaggerated caricature of everything I hated, and yet it only made me want him more.
The next day in the office, the papers were scattered all over the place and the old man and bleached blonde woman had left. It was just me and the nerd in the office, and he was ignoring me as usual.
Just then, a stack of papers fell to the ground over by the table by him. I knew almost instantly that he had done it on purpose just to bait me, just to get me angry, and I knew without looking up that he was going to ask me, no, he was going to demand that I pick them all up. But he didn’t say anything. I could feel him standing frozen with his eyes cold and taunting. I knew he was going to torture me like this until I reacted to him. He knew I had no choice.
So I knocked the papers off of my desk and turned to stare at him coldly, listening as the papers fell into a disheveled pile on the floor.
“Why are you such an asshole?” I finally asked him when the silence had become too much to bear.
“Why are you such a bitch?” he counter responded immediately, like my comment had no effect on him at all.
“I’m not a bitch, I’ve never done anything even remotely bitchy to you, so why would you call me a bitch?”
“Because that’s what you are.”
“How do you know? You don’t even know me!”
“But I know your type.”
“No you don’t.”
“Yeah, actually I do.”
I sighed loudly. There was a ball of stress building in my chest and I released it with a frustrated laugh. “This is so cliché. Do you get your range of conversation from television?”
He threw up his hands and sighed, still smiling. “Whatever.”
“No, not whatever,” I said. “Pick up the fucking papers. All of them.”
He stood there, staring at me solemnly. It was the first time he seemed to be caught off guard by something I had said. He didn’t expect me to be at all assertive towards him.
Finally he said, “Fine. It’s a deal. I’ll pick up mine, you pick up yours.”
And we did, saying nothing to each other. The noise of the papers being removed from the ground only intensified my feelings of discontent. I wanted to say something to make the nerd aware of his behavior, maybe even in the context of our discussions about literature, but I couldn’t. Something made me feel that he was aware of our situation, he was aware of his behavior. And this was what left me with the most distaste, that he could know he was doing something wrong, and choose not to change.
“We need to sweep before we leave,” he said uncommitedly. “You should get the broom.”
“You should first show me where the broom closet is,” I replied hastily.
He rolled his eyes, as if I should of known the location of the broom closet from the first day. As if I, as a woman, should dutifully obey him when he asks me to clean. He started to walk towards the door, skinny arms flapping as his sides. He made a gesture with his head for me to follow, so I reluctantly did so.
The hallway was empty, so much so that our footsteps coldly echoed against the linoleum. I followed him quickly but without urgency. He glanced over his shoulder at me and smiled slyly.
