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“Why do you hate them so much?” she asked.
“They’re always there. Out in the darkness, a fugitive running, fallen from God. They see everything, watch everything, even inside. They see what you do wrong, they will catch you. Only one thing can keep their eyes off of you,” he snarled.
“When’s that?”
“Last night. When they’re blocked by something within their own domain, we are safe.”
“Wouldn’t the sun do that just as well?”
He reacted to this suggestion violently. “No. The sun is one of them, trying to hide their faces. The sun might be in their domain, but if he really wanted to block them, he would have to do better than light. They’re nothing but light! No, he only wants to hide their positions.” He seemed to forget that he was speaking to anyone. “But you can’t hide from me. You can watch me from where I can see you, you little jerks. You will one day make a mistake, and I will be there to see it. I will catch you! You cannot hide from me forever! You—”
“Jack,” she coaxed.
The man called Jack started, as if he had forgotten she was there.
“Sorry. But they scare me. They need to be restricted. They need to be shown days where they can’t watch us—more than just a few days each year, many days. We need enough cloudy days that I can be free at least half the year. Remember that, Jo.”
“I will.”
****************
Jack woke up the next morning and immediately got ready for work. He was a tall man, 6 foot 2, although he sort of crouched as he walked, as if trying to make himself seem smaller. He had dark brown hair—almost black—and hazel eyes. Those eyes were always glancing in all directions, as if scared that something was watching him just out of his vision. He, as usual, rushed everything he did in the morning, not because he was running late, but because he thought of his morning routine as when he was most vulnerable. As soon as he was ready to go to work, he hopped into his red SUV and drove to work.
He had always loved the drive to work more than other car trips. Most of the time, he disliked car rides because of the danger involved. But the drive to and from work was not a very major road. He saw cars rarely and buildings even less often. It also gave him a lot of time to escape from his life. Most of the time, he was doing things teetering on edge: at work, he was working while assessing the likelihood of something going wrong. At home, he was oftentimes making sure that nothing could kill him—that or walking the streets, hoping someone would notice him. But while driving a car, Jack never did anything but drive. He didn’t trust himself to not crash, even on a completely straight road. He didn’t want to be stranded on a place that no one could save him, so he put his entire mind to work at getting to his work.
His work was not a very interesting place. The stuccoed walls were foreboding, as if there were dangerous things to be found in that tall, grey building. Jack, as usual, hesitated before going in. From Jack’s perspective, it all looked like a large prison, with walls of stucco on one side and the roaring and exhaust of cars doing nothing to still Jack’s beating heart on the other, and no end in sight before him or behind him. A man named Lewis Carroll had written about a wabe, which went a long way beyond it, a long way behind it, and a long way beside it on each side. Jack had thought of this wabe many times when hesitating before his work, and he always thought that he was not living in one. Where he was, there was no “way beside it” to make it a wabe. It was a claustrophobe’s nightmare—or at least, it was a person like Jack’s nightmare. But as he walked into his building, something changed. He lost the claustrophobia and gained something different: acceptance.
“He-hey! Jack’s here! We can get somethin’ done now, y’all!” Eric called jokingly, referencing how Jack tended to remind his workmates to stop playing around and to get to work. Jack greeted Eric, and also Jessica, Tommy, and his boss, Paul.
“Jack, I need to speak to you,” said Paul. Jack looked at his boss and nodded. He let himself be led away from the front door of the building, and he went with Paul into the beige-colored facility to Jack’s boss’ office.
“We need that program you’ve been working on finished. We need it done soon.”
“My team and I will definitely have it finished by the end of March, and probably have it done before then.”
“This is the third week in January. We don’t have a month. We have two weeks. Can you get it done in two weeks?”
“Two weeks? We can’t have it done within two weeks! We could do it in two weeks if we spent every hour of our lives here, working, for those two weeks. We can’t do that! Some people on my team have lives, you know.”
“I didn’t think so. You can do it in four weeks, though, right?”
“Possibly, but it’s unlikely. We can do it if nothing goes wrong, I think. But I would much rather have eight.”
“Well, you don’t have eight. You should be done in four. If you follow the trend you’ve been setting recently, bad things will happen to you, so get working!”
Jack went back to the main part of the beige building that he and the rest of his team worked. Eric was the only one actually working among the four people: Tommy and Jessica were talking about a new exercise regime, and Mohammed had to take care of his son, who had gotten the flu. “Bad news. We have to be done with our current project by…today is Monday, so in four weeks, that makes…we have to be done before Valentines’ Day.”
“Is that even conceivably possible? I mean, for us,” pointed out Jessica.
“Yeah—for other people, maybe, but for us?” voiced Tommy. “We have about two months left, if you consider the amount of time we spend working.”
“Then spend more time working and less time playing around!” chastised Jack. “We have to spend all our time here working, or we won’t make it. Anyone know when Mohammed’s coming back?”
“Yeah—actually, he’s coming back tomorrow.”
“Good. Jessica, you will fill him in on the details of what we did during his absence and how much time we have left. Now all of you—get to work!”
****************
When Jack got home that night, he started pacing. His house was set up so that you could get to any room in the house through a central circular hallway. He walked around and around through that hallway, occasionally turning around and going the other way. He paced through the house, desperately talking to himself about what he was to do. He stormed into the computer room, checked what was happening in the next month, and stormed out again. He fixed himself something to eat. He desperately looked around his house with the blue carpeting, with the plain, bare white walls, the tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, and tried to think. He tried, but he couldn’t; there was too much stress to do something. Then, Jo came.
Josephine, Jack’s sister, came most nights to let Jack get some things off his chest. Jack knew he was closer to the Cliffs of Insanity than most people, but he also knew that if he didn’t tell someone about it, he would tumble off the cliffs and be lost forever.
Jo immediately saw that something was wrong. “What’s happening?” she asked urgently.
“I’m going to lose my job. That’s all there is too it.”
“What happened?”
“We have to do a job that will normally take six weeks in four. Worse, the ‘six-week-job’ will for us end up taking eight. Everything possible will go wrong, and I’ll be a random hobo on the streets!” As Jack said this, he got more and more hysterical until he was almost crying.
“Why do you think you’ll get fired?” was Jo’s gentle response.
“He said I would! He said that if we followed the normal trend, ‘bad things would happen.’ We’ve been late for the last few projects. Don’t you get it? That’s the trend. Bad things will happen and I’ll get kicked out of my company!”
“What’s keeping you from doing it in four weeks?”
“We don’t work efficiently enough. We will hurry through it, making many mistakes that we have to later fix. We also don’t spend as much time working as we should. We always end up with a broken mess days before I think it should be done.”
“When do you think this should be done?”
“Six weeks from now, as I said.”
“What if you take your time to do everything perfectly?”
“Then we might make five, possibly.”
“Try to do it in five, then. Enforce your group. Make a list of when things should be done, and police them. Never let them slack off. Make sure they do things to the best of their ability.”
“I’ve tried—it doesn’t work.”
“They know the deadline, right? Spend time reminding them of it, threatening them, making sure they do everything right. Do not do or let them do anything that would be detrimental to the final product. Make sure nothing is wrong.”
“But what if that doesn’t work?” Jack cried, almost desperately.
“Then I will make it work.” Jo stated firmly.
For most people that phrase would not calm them down, but Jack was not a normal person. He needed confidence, and that was what Josephine offered. He took it gladly.
“Thank you.”
****************
During the next few weeks, Jack followed Jo’s advice almost to the letter. His team responded wonderfully to the treatment. Contrary to pretty much everyone’s expectations, the code was almost finished the Friday before Valentines’ Day (which was a Monday that year). Almost, but not quite.
“I ain’t coming next week: I have to go to Texas to visit my family,” confided Eric.
“I cannot come either: my daughter is exploring universities on the east coast,” remembered Tommy.
“I guess it’s too late now to finish it on time anyway,” responded Jack gloomily.
“Come on, Jack! We might not get it in on time, but he’ll forgive us if it’s a day late, right? We might as well finish it anyway, now that we’re so close.”
“Sure. I guess. But it’s late. Start again on Monday.”
Muhammad and Jessica did exactly that. On Monday, the two workmates set to work harder than they had even in the previous four weeks. Jack tried to help, but he was so nervous that Jessica ended up sending him home.
“You don’t need to help us. You can just decide what to tell Paul. We are fine, seriously.”
“Sure, sure.” Jack dejectedly added, “You don’t need any help at all do you?”
“No, you can go home if you want.”
Jack followed that advice. He felt as if a huge weight had suddenly attached itself to him. He sighed, climbed into his SUV, and drove home. He then just sat in bed for a long time.
Jack didn’t bother coming to work on Tuesday, but at the end of the day, he got an email from Mohammed saying, “Come to work tomorrow. We’re almost done.”
That day, Jack came to work. As he always did when a project was completed, he went to Paul’s office to give the news.
“We’ve completed!”
“When did I say I wanted it done?” Paul sternly
Jack had been hoping that Paul would give him some slack. He sighed. “Before Valentine’s Day, I know.”
“Actually, I said ‘four weeks from today’ but that comes out to the same thing. But don’t be sad, my boy! There’s nothing that you have to be sorry about.”
“Unless you count being fired for having to do an impossible job ‘nothing,’” Jack growled in response.
“Jack, Jack, you won’t get fired. Our contractors think your two weeks early!”
“Wait, what?” Jack looked up, confused.
“I told our contractors that you would be done six weeks from the day I told you four weeks.”
“But you said I’d be fired if we were finished late!”
“No, my boy, I said you would be fired if you continued the trend. You’ve been setting a trend of finishing everything at least two weeks late. That would have gotten you fired—this job was too important. But three days late—that’s great, for you guys! I’m sorry I deceived you, but that was amazing!”
That evening, Jack lost no time calling Jo. “Jo,” he said, “We need to talk. Nothing bad happened: in fact, I just want to say, ‘thank you.’”