Attach ments(7)

“I sleep, Mom.”

“During the day. We’re meant to be awake with the sun, soaking up vitamin D, and sleeping at night, in the dark. When you were a little boy, I wouldn’t even let you sleep with a night-light, do you remember? It interferes with melatonin production.”

“Okay,” he said. He couldn’t think of a time he’d argued with her and won.

“Okay, what does ‘okay’ mean?”

“It means, okay, I hear you.”

“Oh. Well. Then that doesn’t mean anything at all. Take the chicken, would you? Eat it?”

“I will.” He held the bag against his chest and smiled. He tried to look like somebody she didn’t need to worry about so much. “Of course I will,” he said. “Thank you.”

GREG WAS WAITING for Lincoln when he walked into the IT office. It was always a few degrees colder in there, for the servers. You’d think that would be nice. Refreshing. But it was more of a clammy than a cool.

“Hey, Senator,” Greg said, “I got to thinking about what you were saying a few days ago, you know, about not having enough to do. So I found you something.”

“Great,” Lincoln said, meaning it.

“You can start archiving and compressing all the user-stored files from the last six months or so,”

Greg said, clearly thinking this was an inspired idea.

Lincoln wasn’t so sure.

“Why would you want me to do that?” he said. “It’s a waste of time.”

“I thought that’s what you were looking for.”

“I was looking for …Well, I wasn’t looking for anything. I just felt bad getting paid to do nothing.”

“And now you don’t have to feel bad,” Greg said. “I just gave you something to do.”

“Yeah, but archiving and compressing …That could take years. And it doesn’t matter.”

Greg put on his Windbreaker and gathered up a stack of folders. He was leaving early to take his kid to the orthodontist. “There’s no pleasing you, is there, Lincoln? This is why you don’t have a woman.”

How does he know I don’t have a woman, Lincoln wondered.

He spent the rest of the night archiving and compressing files, just to spite Greg. (Even though Greg would never notice that the work was done, let alone that it was done spitefully.) Lincoln archived and compressed and thought hard about quitting. He might have walked out, there and then, if anyone had been in the IT office to accept his resignation.

It was almost ten o’clock when he remembered his mother’s tandoori chicken.

The container had tilted open in its paper bag, and there was a pool of bright orange sauce on the carpet under his desk. The girl who sat there during the day, Kristi, would be angry. She’d already left Lincoln a Post-it note asking him to stop eating at her workstation. She said he was getting crumbs in her keyboard.

Lincoln took what was left of the chicken up to the second-floor break room. Almost nobody used the break room at night—the copy editors ate at their desks—but it was still livelier than the empty information technology office. He liked all the vending machines, and sometimes his break would overlap with the janitors’. Not tonight. Tonight, the room was empty.

For once, Lincoln was glad to be alone. He grabbed a plastic fork and started eating his chicken at a table in the corner. He didn’t bother heating it up.

Two people walked into the break room then, a man and a woman. They were arguing about something. Amicably. “Give our readers some credit,” the woman said, wagging a rolled-up Sports section at the man and leaning against the coffee machine. “I can’t,” he said. “I’ve met too many of them.” The man was wearing a dingy white shirt and a thick brown tie. He looked like he hadn’t changed his clothes or gotten a good night’s sleep since the Carter presidency. The woman was younger. She had bright eyes and broad shoulders and hair that fell to the middle of her back. She was too pretty to look at.

They were all too pretty to look at. He couldn’t remember the last time he had looked a woman in the eyes. A woman who wasn’t his mother. Or his sister, Eve.

If he didn’t look, he didn’t risk accidental eye contact. He hated that feeling—at the bank, in elevators—when you inadvertently catch someone’s eye, and she feels compelled to show you she’s not interested. They did that sometimes, looked away pointedly before you even realized you were looking at them. Lincoln had apologized to a woman once when their eyes had met, unintentionally, over a gas pump. She’d pretended not to hear him and looked away.

“If you don’t get a date,” Eve kept threatening, “I’m going to start fixing you up with nice, Lutheran girls. Hard-core Lutherans. Missouri Synod.”