“Thank you so much,” I said, feeling at once deeply moved, and almost physically aching that this man was already attached to someone else.
“I mean it,” he said. “Things will get better, you’ll see. It’s only a matter of time.”
“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and lifted up my glass. “Cheers.”
“Cheers,” he repeated, and both of us drank, maintaining eye contact over the rims of our glasses. I couldn’t get over how much better he made me feel, or the degree to which he actually made me believe the things he was telling me. For the first time since Dennis had uttered the word “settling,” I actually felt like I could recover from this- and indeed, that the best days of my life were still yet to come.
The two of us placed our tumblers back down on the table and just sort of stared, smiling at one another, for an awkwardly, intoxicatingly long while.
My lips started tingling. God, what I wouldn’t give to lean across the table right now, plant my lips on this man’s, and taste the alcohol still fresh on his tongue…
Perhaps sensing this desire, and rightfully disarming it, Malcolm’s eyes at last parted from mine, and I followed the line of his gaze to a television playing in a corner of the bar.
I turned in my seat to watch what was on. It was either CNN or MSNBC, I wasn’t paying much attention to which. But I do remember clearly that it was a report about some pandemic in China, about which I was only vaguely aware at this point. Video footage of men in masks and vacated streets flashed by onscreen, and I noticed a few other faces at the bar turned to examine this as well.
“Have you heard about all that?” Malcolm asked me, his eyes still fixed on the screen.
“Yeah, it’s crazy, isn’t it? I mean to think it all started from a bat or whatever, and now the entire country is shut down. Like, can you even imagine?”
“It’s nuts,” he agreed. “Some people are even saying it could spread over here.”
“Maybe,” I said. “I mean, I’ve heard people saying that, but I dunno. I feel like the media kind of does the same thing every couple of years. Not that it’s not serious, obviously…”
“No, no, I get what you’re saying. They like to overhype things, keep people afraid. It keeps people tuned in, it’s good for ratings.”
“Exactly,” I said. “And you know, maybe it could happen, but I’m not lying awake at night afraid of it or anything.”
“Right,” Malcolm agreed, turning back to me. “This country’s already got enough on its plate without making up new things to be afraid of. I figure this will probably just come and go like everything else, and it’s one of those things we’ll all just forget about in a year or two.”
“Exactly,” I said again. “Then it’ll be on to the next thing.”
And in the hundred thousand times or so I’ve replayed that conversation in my head, I still can’t decide whether either of us really believed what we were saying, or whether it was just a matter of self-preservation to avoid facing what was right in front of us…
2-
Swelter-In-Place
Spoiler alert: it wasn’t all just media hype.
In a few short months, the four walls of my New York apartment had come to feel like a prison cell, and even then I knew I was one of the lucky ones.
I was working a steady job, with excellent pay and benefits, and of the many things I had to worry about, being evicted, running out of food, or winding up unable to access healthcare were completely absent from the list. I can’t even begin to imagine what things must have been like for people without the same privileges.
Still though, the isolation of lockdown was absolutely starting to get to me by now. In my months of sheltering-in-place thus far, I’d already exhausted just about every single avenue for self-distraction that I could think of. I’d read pretty much every one of the books in my apartment I’d been meaning to get to, but had never quite found the time. I’d watched every halfway decent show on the company streaming service, Goldfinch+, from start to finish. I’d even caved in and bought a Nintendo Switch Lite at one point, after every single person on the internet started going nuts over Animal Crossing. I’ve never been a huge gamer, but I’m almost embarrassed about how many hours I spent selling fruit and catching bugs just to try and get a cartoon dog to play his guitar on my digital island.
I’d staved off insanity for as long as I possibly could, but by now I was starting to get desperate. And it wasn’t as if I didn’t have plenty to do as I worked from home, either.
You see, people suck. And they really do their best to suck a thousand times harder when there’s a pandemic going on. And as someone in charge of managing projects for a social media conglomerate big enough to rival Facebook or Twitter, I suddenly found I had my work very much cut out for me as far as preventing the whole damn thing from imploding on itself.
Fake news was one of the biggest headaches I had to work to try and deal with. Between bad information being spread about COVID-19, with nearly the same deadly speed, and the outright conspiracies about where it came from, and what James Bond-esque villain was responsible for its proliferation (I swear to God, I’ve never been so tired of reading the name “Bill Gates” as I was during this phase of the pandemic,) it was almost as though the staff at Goldfinch was playing a game of Whack-a-Troll. No sooner would we put out one fire than another was raging up to take its place, and I was largely responsible for strengthening the systems already in place to try and put an end to this nonsense, as well as creating some new tools for fact-checking and preventing the spread of fraudulent information from the ground up.
Suffice it to say, I was being worn down to the bone by all these efforts, and the fact that I had to juggle a million things at once while being cooped up inside my cramped apartment wasn’t doing much at all to benefit my mental health.
Malcolm Finch, the secret object of my affections, had been conspicuously absent from my life in the months since this whole rigmarole had begun. Myself and several of my higher-up co-workers had been conducting regular video meetings throughout the course of the pandemic, but Malcolm, for whatever reason, had yet to attend any of these meetings. Liz Cummings, his second in command, would always begin these teleconferences with something like “Malcolm sends his regards,” but then we would plow straight into business with no further explanation as to his whereabouts.
However arrogant or ridiculous it might sound, I found myself hurt by my boss’s silence, perhaps to an unreasonable degree. I mean sure, I understood, he had a lot on his plate at the moment. He was the man in charge, and it was silly of me to expect him present at every single meeting that took place between his underlings.
Still, though, I was so used to him treating the people he worked with like family. Maybe it was naive of me not to simply take the whole “family” business as the feel-good corporate doublespeak that it was, but I really had thought that Malcolm himself had believed in it. If we were back at the office instead of holding meetings at home, I told myself, Malcolm almost certainly would have been in attendance. Or at the very least, we would hear from him about why he wasn’t.