The man had gripped his shirt-front so fast and so hard, Chuck never saw it coming. His feet lost proper contact with the ground and he stumbled, held up only by the man’s fist and the tips of his own toes.
‘You’ll do it,’ the man had said calmly. ‘You’ll do it or you’ll watch your mother scream and sizzle in the deep-fat fryer of that greasy fucking hole they call a restaurant. I’ll put her fucking face in there. By the time I get through with her she’ll look like a fucking won ton, you slimy little Chink, you hear me?’
Chuck heard him.
Chuck could hear him again now, loud and clear, the words pounding in his skull, like a headache, making him feel queasy and watery-bowelled.
He crossed the production-line gantry without even glancing at the half-formed engines he’d wanted so much to build, to improve, to beautify with his first-generation brilliance.
The canteen was a blur, with thrumming vending machines spotlighting the curled sandwiches and sad fruit that was all that was ever left at night.
Then long dark corridors like tunnels with no light at the end of them. If this had been somebody else’s life, Chuck would have laughed at the metaphor. This being his life, he never got close to cracking a smile.
There was a light on in Engineering.
Maybe Nicholas had come up for something. He must’ve used the front stairs, direct to Engineering. Chuck would have to chew him out for leaving the screens un-monitored. That was why they were called monitors, Lyle had told him redundantly when he’d started the job, what felt like a million years ago.
Chuck sighed. He already felt bad about telling Nicholas ‘Fuck you’ earlier tonight; he wouldn’t say anything about the screens.
But it wasn’t Nicholas in Engineering.
It was Annette Lim.
*
Annette had gathered all she needed for the report. Scott was waiting in the parking lot with the engine running and half a hard-on. She smiled to herself at the thought. She’d been a virgin until she was twenty-three. Scott had been her first and, the way they were going, he’d be her only. The thought didn’t disappoint Annette: it made her feel lucky that she hadn’t given it up for some dolt who wasn’t worth it. She and Scott had tiptoed round the subject of marriage by comparing hypotheticals and commenting on the relationships of friends, families and celebrities. They both knew they were on the same page and Annette knew that it was only a matter of time before Scott asked her. Every time he squeezed her hand, every time he went quiet and thoughtful, her heart skipped a beat. And even though it hadn’t happened yet, she knew it would, so every time he failed to screw up the courage, it just added to her anticipation and secret store of happiness.
Sure, she earned more than he did but it didn’t bother either of them. She’d worked hard to get this job, denied herself plenty to get through school with a 4.0 GPA. Her mother was a fiend for denying herself pleasure, and that had rubbed off on her only child. Annette was a poster girl for delayed gratification, and when she’d got the WAE job and met Scott the same week she’d moved to Texas, it had seemed that all the delaying was suddenly paying off big-time, gratification-wise.
Every time she came into the engineering office, she got a little thrill that sometimes brought a sheen to her eyes and made her nose tingle. She knew she had a long way to go before she was at the top of her profession, the way she’d been top of her MIT class, but she also knew that her characteristic diligence, coupled with real talent for the job, meant she wasn’t lying to herself about getting to the top.
Annette occasionally lied to others about her abilities, but she never lied to herself. Her natural modesty dictated that any compliment paid was a compliment skilfully deflected, but it was also a compliment stored up and taken out later to be examined like a rare jewel. She had quite a collection.
But if Annette Lim had had a gun put to her head, she might finally have admitted that everything was not perfect with her life. The imperfection was tiny and probably inconsequential, but it niggled like a hangnail.
Someone messed with her stuff in the office.
Just a few days after she’d arrived someone had taken her tampons.
When Annette had gone into the single-stall ladies’ room that she alone used, with the intention of getting a tampon from the machine on the wall, she’d found the floor awash and the toilet bowl bulging with white cotton wadding and blue string. She’d spent twenty minutes digging swollen, mushy tampons and plastic applicators out of the pan in a panic that at any moment one of the cleaning crew might appear and compound her humiliation.
The only other women who worked at WAE were Cindy and Jennifer in Reception, and they used the ladies’ room near their desk downstairs.
Since then, she had found a postcard Scott had sent her from Vegas crumpled in the wastebasket, a coffee ring on a report she’d completed and left in her out-box, and she had almost suffered a fertility setback when a nut on her swivel chair had apparently worked loose.
The other engineers seemed to like her. Jennifer and Cindy seemed to like her. The other rookies, Neil Abbotsham and Jerry Gobereski, seemed to like her. But somebody didn’t, that much was plain, and it gnawed at Annette’s sense of well-being. She hadn’t told anyone about it. She hadn’t told Human Resources and she hadn’t told Scott. Scott was a gentle man in every respect, but Annette knew he’d insist that she made a fuss about it, and she didn’t want to do that. She’d never done that. She’d experienced male jealousy before in high-school physics classes and at MIT, and she knew that the best thing to do was to keep her head down and wait for it to pass. Things always did.
Annette looked up as someone opened the door of her office. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hi.’
The guy gave her the creeps but she tried not to show it. After all, there was no reason for the security guard, whose name-tag boasted the very un-Chinese name of Chuck, to wish her ill. She just didn’t trust security guards the way some people didn’t trust circus clowns. And this particular guard just had something about him. Something that made her wary.
Chuck said nothing, just blinked at her. He opened the door wider and looked around the office as if checking for enemies.
Annette stood up, keen to be out of there and already thinking of Scott waiting for her in the car. She moved towards the door.
Chuck saw the papers in her arms. ‘Taking work home?’
Annette was relieved to hear a normal question come from the guard. She smiled ruefully. ‘You know how it is.’
‘No. I don’t.’
She was surprised by his slightly hostile reaction to what was, after all, just by-the-numbers small-talk. Screw him, she thought, with an unaccustomed little wave of anger. He was a security guard: he should be making her feel secure, not uncomfortable.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘good night.’
Chuck stepped smoothly between her and the doorway. Annette felt an electrical flicker of disquiet pass up her spine and burn on her ears. She met his eyes in surprise, then ducked her head submissively low. She had not come this far in a man’s world without knowing when to make concessions, and her mind raced as she made this one.
What did he want? Why was he doing this? Was he the one who didn’t like her? The answer seemed suddenly clear. But why? The first surge of confused panic gave way to more sensible flashes: Scott was in the car. She was not alone. He wouldn’t dare do anything. She would tell. In the morning she would tell. She would get him fired. She would feel bad, but she would get him fired. This was too much.
With her anger came strength.
‘Excuse me, please,’ she said, surprising herself with the steadiness of her voice.
Chuck said nothing. He could see the report was on rudder-servo assemblies. He’d done his senior-year final paper on rudder servos: ‘Rudder Valves – Faults, Failures and Fine Tuning’. Dr D’Agostino had told him he loved the alliteration. He’d got an A–.
‘Rudder-valve assemblies,’ he said mildly.
Annette felt a rush of relief. He wasn’t being threatening: he wanted to talk shop. The guy just had no social skills, was all. She could handle that: she’d been surrounded by science geeks with no social skills since graduating from high school. Relief washed over her, like a cool breeze on a hot day.
‘Yes.’ She smiled up at him.
And he hit her with Neil Abbotsham’s backstroke trophy.
25
SAFETY – WHEN THEY’D both expected to be dead at several points during the day – brought more tears to Ness and cold anger to Tom. Mostly at himself. His inability to protect Ness filled him with frustration and made him long stupidly for a big gun and a second chance.
He had put her in his perennially unmade bed and sat with her as she sobbed. She flinched when he touched her shoulder, and he didn’t blame her. He was relieved when she slept so that he didn’t have to pretend to be strong for her.
What a fucking joke that was.
She had been the strong one. He had leaned on her narrow shoulders as they stumbled away from the warehouse-for-hicks, his balls protesting at every footfall; she had sat him down beside the two-lane blacktop and flagged down a truck; she had concocted the story of carjackers and escape to account for their injuries; she had kept it together for both of them.
His only contribution had been a pained expression of thanks for the ride, and the donation of a quarter so they could call a cab to the gas station off the 710 freeway, where the cheerfully incurious trucker had left them.
At the hospital he’d been steadfastly ignored as his leg bled steadily onto the floor, until someone who looked like an angry janitor fetched a junior doctor to stitch him up.
Dr Joi was young and pretty but her name was deceptive. She had closed his wounds with all the finesse typically shown by a Civil War field surgeon. If Ness hadn’t been with him, Tom would’ve left halfway through the twenty-eight clumsy stitches. Or cried. Possibly both.
