Slathingering

The restaurant was one of those muddling fusion-cuisine places that had long ago shed its chic allure and was now just another bland gastronomic experience in a strip mall. A local business guide claimed the restaurant’s menu had something for everyone, which I interpreted to mean everyone would be disappointed by something different.

I had done my usual half-assed reconnaissance, because I wanted to know exactly what culinary options I would be flouting. This so-called eating disorder of mine? Eating disorder was a misnomer. There was no disorder to it—no chaos or mess. The tyrannical suppression of appetite requires great tactical precision. Also, a tremendous amount of noisome despair and self-loathing, which I tend to stockpile by the gross.

I was here at the behest of my supervisor, Bosley. Bosley’s wife was pregnant, Bosley said, and the gnarly expulsion—his words—was imminent. I didn’t realize Bosley’s wife was pregnant. I didn’t realize Bosley had a wife. Who among our disoriented coterie of desk lackeys and cubical ascetics and malcontents suspected the guy had any kind of existence outside of the hourly pitch and yaw of unballasted office life? The fact that he had managed to brainwash a woman into the rigors of marriage and procreation made me think he was perhaps not so ill-suited for upper management after all.

Me, I didn’t have a spouse. I didn’t have any offspring. I didn’t have anything, really, besides this harrowing anti-life and lightweight clerical job that I escaped to five days a week, smiling and befuddled, in order to escape my cramped, depressing apartment. Now I spent most of my hours slumped inside a cramped, depressing office, surrounded by artificial horticulture and a rotation of smiling and befuddled coworkers who eagerly sidestepped my empty desk to avoid catching whatever mordant pathology was incubating inside me.

Anyhow, Bosley had this work dinner he’d been duped into attending, but since the gnarly expulsion was imminent, he duped me into attending—again, his words—in his stead.

The people were representatives from some sort of consulting group for an ambiguous project yet to be announced. Or maybe we were the consultants, and they were the project managers. Bosley had never been foolish enough to drag my blathering carcass into any departmental meetings or strategy sessions, so I was blissfully oblivious of the particulars. The dinner group was large, thank god, fourteen or fifteen warm bodies I could cower among for an excruciating hour of feeble banter and light aperitifs before I snuck out the emergency exit. My exodus wouldn’t be easy. The group, as I found it, was seated around a big banquet table in the restaurant’s main room. The rest of the place was empty. The few employees working this hapless happy hour sat in outlying booths, lazily polishing silverware or reading dog-eared paperbacks. Should I get blockaded at the table, without any clear path of egress, my plan was to keep ordering dishes, sniffing each with a tart expression, then sending them back to the kitchen, meal upon meal, until the restaurant staff got fed up and—like everyone else in my life—ordered me to leave.

As for the consultants, they greeted me with puzzled head-tilts as I traipsed into the room, somewhat late, I gathered. I wasn’t very good at arrivals or introductions. Departures and hostile ruptures were more my mode. At work, I avoided small talk and direct eye contact whenever I loitered in the lobby or elevator or halls. I only used the spacious special-needs stall in the restroom, never the urinals, so I could circumnavigate those awkward groin-ward half-conversations that other men tend to relish. When lunchtime arrived, I never ventured anywhere near that mythical cafeteria of ours. Instead I spent the hour sitting in the backseat of my car, pounding my face against the foam headrest, loathing myself, starving myself, flagrantly weeping, etc etc.

Now, the restaurant was so quiet, I could almost hear my imprudent brain cells imploding in the airless vacuum of my skull. I just stood there in my poofy winter parka and mittens and black ski mask, like a bank-robber dressed by his elderly mother for a snow day, and I blurted, “Bosley sends his regards.”

The congregation of heads wobbled. Someone dropped a fork on the floor.

“Say again?” asked a man with an ineptly repaired harelip.

I unwound the scarf that was muffling my mouth, shucked off the rest of my girthy winterwear, and plopped down in the only available seat.

“Lem Bosley,” I said. “My supervisor. I’m here in his stead.”

Everyone shrugged and resumed eating. Eating what? I looked down and saw that a server had already brought me a plate of what appeared to be orange lava on a bed of waterlogged rice. Had someone ordered in my stead?

The table conversation picked up, but I had trouble tracking the rival streams of crosstalk, and I didn’t know where or to whom I should direct my howling, unvarnished anguish. The majority of the consultants were pushing their glances and strained chitchat towards a young man slouched cattycorner from me. At least I thought he was young. He was stunted and scrawny, with smooth, unspotted skin, almost like a teenager’s, except his hair was preternaturally gray and he had an old man’s riddled cantankerousness about him. Everyone seemed to be deferring to the kid, yet the kid said very little. I assumed he was some kind of free-market prodigy or nepotism hire. He had the sour-sullen air of the reluctant scion who hungers not for the corporate spoils foisted upon him, yet hoards the piggy bank all the same. He didn’t nod or chuckle. He didn’t chip in. The group seemed charmed by his reticence, invigorated even. They kept murmuring the name Slathinger, Slathinger, Slathinger, trading meandering anecdotes and hearsay, all manner of trifling minutiae, as the kid crumpled a little deeper into himself.

The kid, I realized, was Slathinger. And this horrible dinner that Bosley duped me into attending in his stead? Tonight had nothing to do with a consulting contract. It was an occasion to fete and flatter the geriatric wunderkind while everyone ladled colorful geologic slush into their faces and got soused on the company dole.

Sitting next to me was a middle-aged woman in a sweater vest and men’s striped dress shirt, elegantly untucked. The vest was a rigid argyle that induced in me the gentlest of vertigoes. Her hair was chopped in a slanty swoop. She looked like the type of arty photographer who takes portraits of naked homeless men in stark chiaroscuro and sells the prints to billionaire hedge-fund managers hoping to introduce some urban sophistication to their mistresses’ summer homes. The woman smiled and said her name as Charlotte.

“Hi, Charlotte,” I said. “I’m the quiet and chronically unsociable guy who is dying a slow death next to you.”

She pointed her fork at my plate of orange whatever. “Not hungry?”

“I have a weird thing about food.”

“You don’t like eating in front of people.”

“I don’t like eating in front of myself.”

I leaned a little closer, despite my general ambivalence about other people’s breathy germs and maladies and concealed carry permits.

“When I walked in that door and everyone looked at me, I thought I was about to get Haufsteaded.”

“Haufsteaded?” she asked.

Haufstead was our supervisor before Bosley, I told her, but the guy self-immolated during a seven-hour performance review that was really a pretext by some supra-corporate entity to knock his dick in the dirt. The incident was so vile, so notorious, Haufstead got fossilized into one of those flinty artifacts of office lore. We were always cracking sadistic jokes about who was slated to get Haufsteaded, who was a potential Haufsteader or Haufsteadee bound for Haufsteadville, etc etc.

“Oh,” she said. “You mean Gombrowitzing.”

“Gombrowitzing? Is that what you people call it?”

“It’s natural to harbor those fears about work,” she said. “Gallows humor for the ambiguously condemned, etc etc. It’s the paranoia of our age. Then again, paranoia often feels like the narcissism of our age.”

She forked up some kind of morsel—shellfish? rabbit? flank of Gombrowitz?—and chewed it with mild displeasure. I still hadn’t touched my plate. I still hadn’t made a frantic dash for the exit. I did order a beer, but I refused to drink it.

“Not thirsty, either?” Charlotte asked. “The way you’re throttling that bottle, I keep thinking you’re going to smash it.”

“I used to be a nervous, agoraphobic type,” I told her. “Then I recognized that certain deprivations, especially arbitrary ones, help level me out. The venom gets diluted. You wouldn’t want my gills full of venom, would you? Now I can go to a job almost every day and pretend I am a human being.”

“And what do you do for this job?”

“I don’t know. There isn’t anyone competent enough on the premises to explain my responsibilities to me. I feel like I just take up space—space that could’ve been taken up by someone much worse. I think I’m pretty good at it, this job.”

Charlotte dabbed her lips with her napkin, inspected the napkin, then repeated the action several times.

“You might want to pace yourself,” she said. “We have a long night ahead of us.”

“A long night of what?”

She indicated Slathinger. He was making aggrieved gestures at the twig-garnished shrimp lump in red sauce the waiter had handed him. The waiter stammered an apology, scooped up the plate, and rushed it out of the room.

“What’s his deal?” I asked. “He looks so otherworldly with that hair, that arthritic hunch. Does he have some kind of congenital disease?”

“He’s just old.”

“How old?”

“Slathinger is the oldest soul here,” said the guy with the harelip scar, licking clean his bowl of purple lava and rice.

I could almost see what he meant. The kid’s youthful appearance was an optical fluke, or maybe a weird side effect of maturation, as if the years had burnished his surfaces, chafed away his cuneiform wrinkles and liver spots and precancerous moles, reducing Slathinger to an earlier, inferior version of himself. An old man marooned in nightmare adolescence.

“He looks so unhappy,” I said.

“Well, how happy would you look,” said Lip Scar, “if you were about to get Slathingered?”

“Slathingered?” I asked.

Charlotte pressed against me, as if to whisper some revelatory business into my ear. Instead she softly stroked my chin, my fast-flushing cheek. What at first seemed a lighthearted seduction actually didn’t have much heart in it. This was more like, I don’t know, the idle inspection of discount baubles at a flea market.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“Quiet,” she said.

“Are you a seductress or just the weekend-antiquing type?”

“Please stop distracting me. I have a job to do.”

The woman buried her face in the crook of my neck, snuffling around my unperfumed gulches and nooks. Several consultants watched us, slow-chewing their food, a tad bored. Was this something they had seen numerous times before at other professional gatherings? Was this another blasé case of Charlotte Charlotting? Finally she detached and disinfected herself with multiple sanitary wipes, then announced to the whole table:

“I think we found our man.”

Half the group groused in exasperated disappointment, the other half sighed with exasperated relief. Slathinger rattled his cutlery in agitation, but nobody would acknowledge him now. The harelip man came over and knelt beside me. “Don’t fuck this up, buddy boy.”

He inventoried his pockets and extracted a few items that he spread across my share of the table. A buck knife. A loaded syringe. A plastic bag smeared with chemical grease.

“Dealer’s choice,” he said.

“What am I dealing?”

Harelip shrugged. “Mercy. Infinitude. A vast, untroubled sleep.”

“You want me to murder the kid?” I asked.

“Murder? That’s your word, buddy boy. Our word is a different word. A more humane word.”

Was this some kind of test or initiation ritual? Was their office trying to poach me? Was I poachable in any way? Should I ask for something a little more deliberate, a tool of unequivocal dispatch, like a garrote or flamethrower?

The consultants turned their attention to the dessert cart that another stoic waiter, his ears stuffed with cotton, was wheeling our way. I took this opportunity to rise from the table and visit the restroom, where I shut myself in the special-needs stall and phoned Bosley.

“How is the gnarly expulsion going?” I asked.

“Huh?”

“The childbirth.”

“Oh. Right…I’m trying not to think about it.”

“I’m sure your pregnant wife appreciates that,” I said.

“Anything else?” he asked.

“This might be pure ignorance on my part,” I said. “But do dinner parties usually devolve into bizarre murder-for-hire plots? It’s been a while since I went to one of these things.”

“Ah, shit,” Bosley said. “Didn’t I tell you? The dinner got cancelled. Sorry about that.”

“Cancelled? You sure?”

“I didn’t think you’d actually go.”

“Welp, I’m here. I walked into something.”

“My advice? Don’t overthink it. Just be yourself. Be charming.”

“Which is it? If I’m charming anyone, I’m clearly not myself.”

“I don’t care,” Bosley said. “This wife of mine is experiencing the miracle of childbirth, and the miracle, apparently, is that her body turns into a slimy, shredded tube sock that complains about everything.”

As a supervisor, Bosley was a benign sovereign, not particularly shrewd or decisive, certainly not very competent, but he wasn’t a terrible guy. He just had terrible ideas and affectations and a furtive shamrock tattoo inside his bicep, even though nothing about him was Irish. Did I forget to mention the heinous goatee? The napalm-like saturation of tacky cologne? He insisted on wearing glossy, wraparound Oakleys at all hours, even indoors, and his slick-bristled hair was so lacquered with commercial product you could inspect the seams in his piebald scalp, whether you desired the view or not. Until now, though, I’d never had cause to wonder: What kind of spouse was Bosley? Was he ready for parenthood? As a husband and father, could he ever be anything more than a benign disappointment? I felt sorry for the gnarly fetus. I felt sorry for the swollen wife. For reasons not entirely explicable, I felt sorry for myself—then I felt angry for feeling sorry for myself, and putrid, and ignoble. I wanted to bash in my brainpan with something large and unyielding. Hadn’t I been improving? Was I really so gullible?

“You don’t have a wife,” I said. “Nobody is pregnant.”

I could hear Bosley using the phone to itch his heinous goatee. He was waiting me out, I knew, filibustering whatever meager willpower I’d somehow amassed in my single lousy year at the company. Who had willpower anymore? Who had courage or character or fortitude of the soul? Who even had a soul? On occasion I could sense a cool sea breeze blowing across the fetid marshlands and mossy plains that comprised the spiritual hole in the center of my life—a hole that was not to be mistaken for the cantaloupe-sized craters I pounded into my apartment walls with my forehead every evening. That salty draft? It felt a lot like solace.

After a listless pause, he spoke. “Are you doing that thing with your face right now?”

“My face?” I asked.

“It hurts to look at it.”

“It hurts to have it.”

“Listen,” Bosley said. “What do you have against me building a beautiful home life for myself? I could have a wife. My wife, what’s-her-name, could be having a child. What is so wrong with a man pursuing all the domestic contingencies that will secure a thoroughly mediocre, untenable, and emotionally vacant future for himself?”

“Good point.”

I hung up and went to the mirror and tested out a gallery of bewildered expressions. I pulled a few Haufsteads. Some Gombrowitzs and Charlottes. Even a rankled Slathinger or two. Nothing stuck. I couldn’t even get my own face to show up.

When I returned to the main room, the other consultants were gone and the table had been cleared. All that remained was little Slathinger curdling into his oversized chair, chipmunk-chewing a hangnail and glowering at the trio of euthanasia tools.

I took the chair next to him. The seat was warm. The kid seemed more interested in gnawing his ragged thumbnail than assessing me or my tawdry hospice options. Maybe I could sit and wait him out? How long does it take someone to die of impatience? If I stayed here long enough, would a kindly stranger amble up and sink a claw hammer into the meat of my skull, too? How much would I have to pay them?

Eventually the headwaiter approached. I was half-expecting her to hand me a revolver or candlestick or rope, rounding out my clueless arsenal. Instead she gave me the bill. It totaled six hundred and sixty-two dollars, plus a mandatory 25-percent gratuity for parties over ten. I looked to Slathinger for help, but the kid was scowling with such exertion, his face had become a dark, snarl-puckered hole, from which no light or sound or financial largesse could ever escape. Certainly not any joyful feeling. I almost envied him.

“I almost envy you,” I said.

He spoke up in that wispy, lispy voice of his: “I don’t know why everyone makes such a big deal about it.”

“Dying.” I nodded. “Death.”

Young Slathinger shook his old, gray, sandblasted head.

“Life,” he spat back.

I put the bill on my credit card. I never paid off those things anyway.