The Rat

Landon didn’t like talking about work, but it was still the first thing that came up when he met Charles at some picnic in Dolores on somebody’s birthday. Landon was always trying out new alternative conversation starters, like “What’s something you’re really passionate about?” or “What’s something surprising about you?” This time, he tried:

“What are your hobbies outside of work?”

Charles didn’t roll with the question, but he didn’t look bothered by it, either.

“Well. I hang out with people. You know, Tahoe, stuff like this.”

“So you don’t have any, like, passions, side projects?”

“We’re doing a startup, you know, me and Natasha” — he indicated her — “so that takes up most of my time.”

“Huh. I mean, that makes sense.”

“What do you do?”

Landon said where he worked.

“Huh, yeah, seems like most people from your school end up at the same few places like that.”

Landon laughed, a little; he didn’t know quite how to respond. In any other situation, he would have been the first to downplay his company. It wasn’t a particularly sexy job, he’d say; their product was only of interest to other companies, and it had been stagnant for quite a while. But never before had someone else downplayed his company first. It was objectively a great place to work, everyone knew that, they had great perks, engineering talent from top schools, and all sorts of complicated and prestigious technical problems to work on. But of course Landon would never say any of that.

To have this interaction with Charles was particularly disconcerting; he hadn’t met Charles before, but he knew enough by reputation and social media. Charles was a few years older than Landon (well, Landon was 22, so pretty much everyone was older), six foot nothing, slender but not slim, with a sharp angular face, striking dark eyes, a slight overbite, and a smile that made him look like he was trolling you at all times. He was not “popular,” as such — that is, he was not in himself a locus of popularity — but Landon would see him pop up in photos at parties with the right people, and especially with the right girls. His association with Natasha on its own would be evidence enough: she was mysterious-Russian rich, blonde, and loved to party.

The conversation moved on, and Landon would have eventually too, except that Charles walked right by his desk the next Wednesday, at dinner time. The office had catering, and in Landon’s pod, one of his coworkers was making cocktails from the bar cart.

“Whoa! Hey.”

“What’s up.”

“Nothing, I just…you know, I didn’t think you stopped by places like this.”

Charles looked like he didn’t know quite what that meant. “I’m just visiting for dinner.” Taylor, a staff engineer, and Melinda, the product manager from growth, were a few yards ahead. Melinda looked expectantly at Charles.

“Yeah! We have tonight. Although” — here he was doing it again, why? — “I’d recommend sticking to the tuna, the rest is kind of mixed quality. Oh, but, uh, I don’t want to keep you, looks like you should get going.”

Charles nodded and smiled. “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah. See you around.”

Landon saw them a few tables over, later. While half-listening to his fellow junior teammates rehearsing the pessimism they’d picked up from senior engineers, and slowly sipping his way through the cocktail — the would-be mixologist coworker had recently discovered Cynar, and used it ambitiously — he kept stealing glances. It was too loud for Landon to hear what they were saying, but whatever it was, they both seemed very engaged, especially Melinda.

Charles began to appear at the office periodically, usually in the same company, or a small rotating cast. But one day Landon saw him there about an hour before dinner, sitting on his own in the dining area, with his laptop in front of him, but looking out the window. Landon decided to take a chance and approach him.

“Hey! You’re here early today.”

He half-expected Charles to look bothered, but he didn’t at all. “What’s up. You’re Landon, right?”

“Yeah, and you’re Charles,” he stated.

After a brief hesitation, he added: “I’ve just been thinking about what you said when I met you in the park, and like, I think it’s really cool that you’re working on a startup. So I just was curious and wanted to chat with you about what that’s like.”

Landon hadn’t meant to be that honest, but it didn’t feel half bad, and seeing the expression on Charles’ face, it didn’t seem to have gone over that badly.

“Alright then, yeah, sit down! Let’s talk.”

So Landon sat down, and they started talking about Charles’ work, and Landon’s career.

“It just seems like a lot of work,” Landon was saying. “I don’t get, isn’t it just, like…you get diminishing returns after the first 40 hours. I feel like it’s important for me to balance work with other stuff in my life.”

“I don’t know, man. I think that’s just not true. Look, if you have someone who’s working 80 hours a week, and someone who’s working 40 hours a week, the first person is going to be more productive. Even if those 80 hours aren’t as efficient as the 40 hours, it’s still just more time, and that advantage is going to compound. It’s not the kind of thing people will say because, like, they have to pay lip service to work-life balance, but that’s just the truth if you want to be the best.

“If I were like you, starting my career at a bigger, more established company like this, I’d be spending all my spare time looking through the codebase. Just seeing how it all works, seeing how these very experienced engineers have done everything, and really trying to understand it, you know? Not just surface-level. Because if you understand all that, then you have a really strong foundation to work with.”

Landon had to admit, this all made sense. Nobody had ever told him that he could, or should, want to work more, but like Charles said, maybe that was just something nobody would explain to you.

He tried to practice what Charles suggested, in small doses, taking time here or there to look at some pieces of infrastructure he didn’t know as well, but he’d just find himself lost, and after navigating up and down the stack for about an hour, he found himself little wiser than before. So eventually he tapered off, but he was no less impressed with Charles; in fact, he admired him even more, if Charles was single-minded enough to get something out of this exercise.

They continued to talk about work, and occasionally about their personal lives, but Landon became increasingly interested in a topic that never quite came up: who exactly had Charles dated, or hooked up with? Probably not Natasha, you didn’t sleep with your cofounder…well, not like it hadn’t been done, but their relationship seemed too functional for that. Melinda was a definite possibility. Landon assigned a great deal of significance to her pattern of presence and absence: when she was there, perhaps she’d been flirting with Charles, and now that she showed up less, perhaps it was because something had ended badly. And then, as everyone knew, there was Hannah.

Landon figured that he might need to set the stage away from the office to produce the kind of conversation he wanted, so one week he suggested meeting at a bar. They’d never had more than a beer at the office, but Charles was entirely amenable to the change of setting. They met there around 5.

After about two drinks, Landon dove in: “I was curious if you had any tips about, like. Dating. You know, I’ve been trying to use the apps and it’s pretty rough.”

Charles shook his head. “I don’t know, man. It’s mostly just worked for me, it’s not really that complicated. Just present yourself well, be serious about the things you’re good at, be a good conversationalist. I mean, you hooked up in college, right?”

“Yeah,” Landon lied.

“Well, as long as you know your thing, just do it. I haven’t used the apps, I can’t help you there.”

“Ha. Well, of course you haven’t. I just thought, like…I always see pictures of you at parties and stuff. And you’re always dating these really interesting girls. Women.”

For the first time since Landon had met him, Charles looked less than totally present: “You’re thinking about me and Hannah.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to, like…”

“It’s okay, I get it, natural curiosity. I don’t know what to say. She’s a good person, she’s a really good person.”

“And she’s, like, objectively beautiful. Uh, I’m not, like, interested in her myself, but. Not that she’s not worth it or something. Uh. I just mean, it’s pretty cool that you were together.”

“You know, she’s a human being. It does happen.”

“Yeah, of course of course, I don’t mean to, like, objectify her, but like. She’s not just any human being, you know? A lot of guys really liked her.”

Charles laughed. “I didn’t know I had a reputation.” After a moment: “You know what. I’ll tell you something funny about her. You cannot tell this to anyone else.”

Landon sat up straight.

“When we’d been dating for about three months, I went over to stay at her parents’ house for Thanksgiving weekend. She grew up in this huge house in the suburbs in Ohio, they left her childhood bedroom empty, same with her two older brothers. When we got there, there was a toy rat on her bed, like one of those cat toys that makes a sound when they chew on it, and she made a little shriek and started giggling. Apparently one of her brothers put it there. This was a thing they did growing up. They all get along pretty well now, but as a kid, she was really afraid of rodents, and they would hide the rat in different places where she would find it and freak out.

“Anyway she put it on the nightstand and we forgot all about it. Later that weekend, like Saturday afternoon, the rest of the family was out. We hadn’t fucked the whole weekend — I know I said it was a big house, but they definitely would’ve heard us, and it would’ve been weird. So obviously we wanted to fuck in her childhood bedroom, right?

“We get into it pretty quickly, and I was fucking her, like, she was laying down on the bed, with her legs up, and I was standing — it was weirdly high for a kid’s bed — and out of the corner of my eye, what do I see but this rat. So I grab the rat and I start squeaking it in her face, and she’s like, oh my god! And then, in a moment of inspiration, I take the rat and put just the nose of it — I don’t want it to get stuck, right — I put just the tip of it, which is this, like, hard bulbous plastic nose, inside her asshole. And I keep, you know, fucking her like that, and because the rat is stuck between her ass and the bed, every time I thrust in, it makes this squeaking noise. Squeak! Squeak! Squeak!

“Um. I guess I should say, because this sounds pretty cruel now that I’m saying it out loud, but she liked me being a little rough, she was into that kind of spontaneous scene, and the way she reacted was, like, she was clearly play-scared, not real scared. And, like, she told me later she thought it was pretty hot and pretty funny. Man, I don’t know, I probably shouldn’t have told that story. I feel like an asshole. Telling it to you it doesn’t sound very funny, but I don’t know, something about that way it kept squeaking to the…ah, fuck it.”

Landon quickly changed the subject, trying to keep down whatever expression he was making. Of course he knew, intellectually, that people did that sort of thing…he felt like his belly was charged with energy. When they left the bar, he went back to the office and kept drinking, sitting with his team but getting up every few minutes to pour himself another shot of bourbon (eyeballed, over ice) or pace around the office, pretending he had something to check at his desk.

Eventually some combination of drunkenness and nervous energy propelled him out, and he strode home down Division Street, with cross-traffic and a few impetuous cyclists swirling around the tents beneath the overpass. He saw a rat scuttle into a drainage gate on the curb, and he was reminded, suddenly, of a joke he’d heard once, how the human body is topologically equivalent to a torus, and he felt something whooshing through the hollowness inside him, a column of air.