“Ted! You’ve got to hear this one,” László said as he ran up to me when I came through the door. “He’s finally lost it! This is nuts!”
“Oh boy, what now?” I knew László could only be referring to the boss, and I’d frankly had enough of that guy’s nonsense for the day. Notwithstanding, I knew this had to be humorous if Laz was so animated. He couldn’t stand still from the excitement and had clearly been waiting for me to come back from lunch.
“Phil just walked in, right? He’s looking down at his feet, looks up at me, then back to feet. He stops dead in his tracks and stares back at me like he’s just seen a ghost!”
“Okay…”
“He stands there for a second, and he says, ‘Laz… how did you get in here?’ I tell him I’ve been in here working all morning. He says, ‘No, how did you get in here? I was just talking to you outside.'” Every clause of his story was accompanied by a gesture, but at this dramatic pause he was still. His eyes went wide and he forced his ear-to-ear grin into an expression of slack-jawed dumbfoundment.
“Whaaatthuhfuuuck…?” I could only guess the look on my face was mirroring that on his. Laz was fidgety, demanding my engagement to pry more out of him. There couldn’t have been any doubt that he had my full attention; I was snared into this wild story with very little invested in the hook. This was at once an endearing quirk and a source of frustration whenever I wanted Laz to get to the goddamn point. “So then…?”
Laz shrugged his shoulders so high they nearly brushed his earlobes, and then he put a short and rapid oscillation to his head. “Nothing! He just stared at me as he walked away very slowly. It was like he thought if he stopped looking at me I would disappear.”
“Or jump on his back and suck his brains out his ear.”
“Yes!”
Another pause. At this one I didn’t feel like Laz was prompting me to prompt him. This was the end of the story. I can’t say it was anticlimactic or even mildly disappointing, but it wasn’t fully satisfying. I don’t know what I wanted in an ending, however it was more than an apprehensive walkaway. The initial humor of the situation was now past. Not forever; references to this event would live on for years, I had no doubt. What we were left with, now that we realized the distinct lack of a punchline, was searching for a deeper comprehension. Sensing from Laz the same unsaid quest for reason, I set the mental gears a-spin to apply logic to Phil’s illogical response.
Phil’s head was firmly implanted up his own ass; he navigated existence viewing life and business through the veil of his own rectum. This he readily and frequently proved. Today’s incident encapsulated three distinct opportunities for Phil to demonstrate his particular aloofness. First, he took no notice that he was talking with (at, more like) someone who was not Laz. It would have caused me no further shock if “I was just talking to you outside” was in point of fact “I was just berating you for something inconsequential because sometimes I can’t not be a dick”. As an aside, empathy for the unintended target never entered into my calculations because anyone Phil could have scolded in Laz’s place was most assuredly one of the trashpiles who worked in the unit next-door. They were the types who reminded you where they were from as a way to garner respect or instill fear. Getting all puff-chested and telling me you’re from Crapguttertown doesn’t alert me you are to be carefully regarded, it tells me you have a fifth-grade education and are a drain on society. Fuck those guys. Given this, the greater mystery was how Phil escaped a curbstomping by a Crapguttertown lowlife for such a misstep. Unless Phil was in reality attempting a civilized conversation with Laz… But I couldn’t be distracted by that train of thought just yet.
Second, Phil was so ignorant of his own ignorance that his reflexive thought upon seeing Laz was not “Oh shit, who did I just bark at outside if not Laz?” it was “Laz is a voodoo witch and has mastered bilocation”. Whose mind makes that leap on instinct? Moreover, who then verbalizes it? Someone who is so self-assured that the only possible explanation is not mistaken identity coupled with aggressive obliviousness, but a rending rift in the whole of known science—which he was chosen by divine decree to witness.
Third, while we speculated Phil instinctively made the fantastic jump to the supernatural, I do not believe he kept himself in that headspace for more than a few stuttering heartbeats. Phil admitted fault only in the most begrudging manner he could. He was irrational, volatile, although predictable in his manic overreactions, so this nonconfrontational tact was quite out of sorts. It seemed much more likely that he would have denounced Laz as a liar on the spot. Especially because this involved Laz, whom Phil routinely referred to as “full of shit”, most often behind Laz’s back to his co-workers and even subordinates. Regardless, I posited that rather than deal with his error through acknowledgement or table-turning, Phil decided to simply disengage by maintaining the appearance of his confusion and walking away.
I conceded I might be wrong about this oh-fuck-it-nevermind-get-back-to-work gambit. Perhaps I was too cynical about Phil and gave him too much credit for such machinations. He was on a number of medications, some of which I presumed were at least anti-anxiety drugs but, based on his slapdash management style, could reasonably be anti-psychotics. After all, that he may have legitimately thought he was caught up in a doppelganger conspiracy was no more unbalanced than how he elected to run a business. Of course, all of this dissection assumed—and it was a goliath assumption—that Phil gave half a shit about any part of this saga, and it was a dubious inference that he would even recall any of it occurring were anyone to shrewdly inquire about it a day later.
This was the output from my outmoded, well-worn intracranial processing plant. The operation wasn’t smooth, and it wasn’t fast, but it served well enough to keep me from voluntarily shutting down the whole enterprise. Booze helped, but later. Returned to the external world and the spirited Eastern European in front of me, all this was a deeper discussion than I was willing to have with Laz in the moment, and I decided to drill right to the core of it. “Not that this changes much,” I asked him, “but was he actually talking to someone outside?” I hadn’t thoroughly entertained that he may have been in full discourse with the dumpster.
Laz scrunched his furry eyebrows together and his gaze drifted upward. “I don’t know. Karl said he thought he saw him say something to someone out there.”
“So maybe it was one of those scumbags from next door, and he thought it was you?”
“Hmm. Yeah, probably.”
“You know, this might not be mental illness at all. It’s very possible he hasn’t gone crazy, he’s still just an asshole.”
Laz nodded slowly and raised one of those shaggy eyebrows. “He is definitely an asshole.”
“Yeah, he just assumed the shit-heel outside was you, and he didn’t bother to make sure.”
“Oh,” Laz said, his shoulders slumping forward a bit as he visibly deflated. “You are probably right, Ted. This is most logical explanation.”
I felt bad for simplifying his flawed tale of the metaphysical. This screwy encounter served as a twisted bright spot in a humdrum workday, and I had sucked the perverted joy from it by ferreting out a more plausible interpretation. I never (almost never) sought to do this, but it was a particular skill I had: the dropping of a turd into the punch bowl. A turd, however well-formed, is a turd nonetheless. Laz would think twice before bringing me the next wacky narrative for worry of me kicking it in the crotch rather than just slapping my knee and guffawing. It was probably for the best; this kind of workplace psychoanalysis was utterly draining, and I had too much shit to do.
“But he could also be totally cuckoo,” I said, endeavoring to sanitize the befouled punch bowl.
Laz perked up. The caterpillars on his forehead reached full zenith, he smiled broadly, but the mischief in his dark eyes was unmistakable. He leaned in close. “I think I might prefer to let him think I’m a fucking wizard of dark arts. Don’t say anything to him, okay?”
“Sounds good, man. A fucking wizard you shall be.”
Spew Forth Your Blather