Down the Hall

It was a face emerging from the woodgrain of our office door that captivated me. Throughout the workday filled with mundane tasks of checking emails, typing punch lists, and fielding phone calls, I would study it. More than a nose, eyes, and mouth, it had the features of a little girl. No, more like a doll – a doll resembling a little girl with a page-boy bob curling up on the ends and wearing an A-line dress. From my desk at the end of the long hall I observed its disgusted scowl, with brows pulled sharply together in a deep V and thick lines under the beady eyes. I enjoyed its sassy disapproval.

Leaving at the end of the day, I would speak to her.

“Bye. See you tomorrow.”

“Have a good night.”

“Watch over the place, will you?”

She became sort of an office mascot. Well, at least for me. The only other person in the office was the architect. I showed him the figure in the woodgrain, pointing out its specific features. It took him a while to see it. He didn’t marvel over it the way I did.

“I do see it, kind of,” he said. “That’s neat.”

He ignored my fascination with it as he did my other eccentricities, like my spiked arm bands and the blue dyed under-layer of my bangs… and my political views being completely opposite from his. We agreed to disagree. I chalked it up as being one more thing we saw differently.

While working alone in the office one day, something caught my attention from the corner of my eye. I could have sworn that the figure moved. I stared at it for a full minute, waiting for it to happen again. A passing car caused the light to shift through the window and a shadow glided across the door. I laughed at my own gullibility.

I began calling her Lucy, after the PeanutsTM character. My boss, the architect, frequently left the office to check on job sites. Our office was small and quiet with only one person there. Sometimes I listened to music. I would sing out loud. I talked to myself. One time, while talking about my non-existent plans for the weekend I looked up at Lucy’s unimpressed scowl.

“Well, don’t just look at me like that. Tell me what I should do.”

Silence enhanced her air of condemnation. On a whim, I picked through my purse to retrieve a nickel from my pocketbook. Remembering the iconic trope from PeanutsTM of Lucy having a psychoanalysis stand, I placed it on the opposite side of my desk facing the door.

“There. There’s your five cents. Now will you help me? My old friends are married homebodies. Why am I not making any new friends? What’s wrong with me?”

My question went unanswered, and the scowl remained. I went home to my dog and ate tomato soup with popcorn, watching reruns of scifi TV shows from the early 2000s and falling asleep on the couch.

In a dressing room the next week, I sat on the little bench while buttoning a shirt when I noticed another face staring at me from the dressing room door. Details emerged the longer I looked at it: squinty eyes, a long beard with a moustache covering the mouth, thick eyebrows, and the woodgrain moved upward to a point. It was a gnome! I laughed at my own silliness. What were the chances of finding two well-defined faces in the woodgrain of different doors around the same time? Probably high. It was only that I was suddenly noticing them. That weekend I found a face in the speckled VCT flooring of a fast food joint. The profile of a man’s face caught my attention in the branches of a tree in my back yard. It wasn’t my habit to look for shapes in the clouds or anywhere else, but I was finding faces everywhere nonetheless. It was entertaining but a bit strange.

I talked to Lucy about it.

“Are you sending your friends to check up on me?”

She scowled back at me like I was crazy.

Fidgeting with my pen, I contemplated the uniqueness of seeing so many human-like faces in inhuman places. Isn’t there folklore about spirits inhabiting trees and inanimate objects? There must be. If I were to have seen them in ancient times, surely that is the conclusion I would draw. It would be common sense. And if common sense reflects something true, it should be eternal. Right?

If so, and if these faces represented something real … something other worldly, why were they suddenly becoming visible to me? Was there something about me bringing them forward? Did these faces represent spirits wanting something from me?

I went home to another Friday night of tomato soup, popcorn, my miniature schnauzer, and vintage scifi TV. Why should I miss having friends? I couldn’t afford to go out anyway.

Returning to work Monday I discovered my nickel was gone– the nickel I had presented to Lucy for her psychoanalysis. She never came through for me, but I left the nickel there as a kind of superstitious offering. I’m not a superstitious person, but it seemed fitting to leave it, almost like a contractual obligation. I engaged her services knowing full well she wouldn’t answer, so I should pay according to the arrangement.

The missing nickel didn’t register with me until I returned from lunch. Since I had become blind to it, I didn’t know when it went missing. I asked my boss if he had picked it up, but he didn’t know about it. A strange man and a natural workaholic, the things he could notice or overlook always surprised me. He liked to comment on my shoes because he had learned that ladies always liked for people to notice their shoes. However, he didn’t notice I had rearranged my desk, putting the printer on the other side, for a couple of weeks. There was no doubt that he’d been oblivious to the nickel. We were the only ones in the office, though. Every day, it was just the two of us. There was no one else to move it, and after thoroughly searching under everything on or around my desk, I was at a loss to explain what happened to it.

Lucy must have finally taken it.

That was the thought passing through my mind when I concluded it was gone. A silly thought.

The office was all mine the next day. Clicking my pen, I stared down the hall again, debating with myself over the ridiculousness of what I was considering.

“She’s just a coincidental arrangement of markings in the woodgrain. There’s nothing to it.”

“But it isn’t coincidental. It can’t be. There are other faces, too.”

“How can it be anything but that?”

My brain was suddenly twisted into an odd inability to know what to believe. I eased from my chair and walked slowly down the hall to stand before the door. I studied Lucy’s features as I had many times before.

Tracing her lines with a finger, I asked, “Are you real?”

She scowled back at me like I had just asked the most idiotic question. I cursed my own stupidity and returned to my desk.

A few minutes later, I heard a voice.

“It’s about time.”

I looked up in surprise. Her unchanging scowl stared back at me. Was the voice only in my head? I couldn’t describe its qualities. It didn’t have characteristics like pitch or tone, so it must have been. Yet, it was a voice distinct from my own. I couldn’t say anything back. I didn’t have the nerve.

Another couple of days went by with nothing unusual happening. I avoided looking at her but couldn’t help occasionally glancing her way. I wouldn’t speak to her, either, not even my customary ‘goodbye’ at the end of the day. It was getting too weird. I didn’t need to start hearing things and didn’t want to invite it.

Despite this, the voice returned.

My boss was in the office that day, engaged in a strained phone conversation with a client challenging an invoice.

“You know he took it.”

I looked up at her. I looked behind me to the boss’s desk. He was still on the phone, and it wasn’t on speaker. I paused a moment before looking back at Lucy. Her customary expression was unchanged. She was just a figure in the woodgrain. I returned to work.

“He took the nickel.”

My eyes shot up. This time the voice sounded more distinct. I stared at the figure staring back at me before looking towards my boss’s desk again. He didn’t react. Why would he? Besides the voice being most likely my imagination, he was focused on his phone call.

“Why would he care about a nickel?” I muttered under my breath.

Silence answered me. Silence with a scowl.

The weekend passed. I did my best to not think about the figure in the door down the hall. It was a distraction anyway. What really needed my attention was paying my bills.

The boss came in late the next morning, having visited a job site first. He stopped at my desk to hand over the punch list for typing. While criticizing the contractor’s unfinished, sloppy caulking throughout the site, he stood directly in line with Lucy’s face. I could see her disapproving gaze over the top of his shoulder. It was almost comical how my attention occasionally drifted towards her before snapping back to the architect, like we were both in on a joke.

“Yeah, I know. This guy is a tool, right,” I said to her in my thoughts.

She didn’t respond, but as I kept looking toward her over his shoulder, I started to realize something. Her scowl… it wasn’t for me. It was for him! I had been misreading her disapproving expression all along, thinking it was meant for the world in general and, perhaps, for me as a part of that world.

From that point on, I looked her way to appraise that condemning glare. I was free from her sassy disapproval, never having realized it weighed on me. When the boss was being cringy or unreasonable, I looked towards her. She scorned his behavior in agreement with me.

After a few days, I began wondering what she had against him. How could she dislike him so intensely? I mean, he could be annoying, but not so bad as to warrant seething hatred. What did he do, I wondered.

Concentrating on the question while absent-mindedly twirling a pen in my hand, I suddenly remembered that our office building had once been a warehouse. It stored kitchen fixtures and appliances until a developer turned it into condominiums, and the architect on the project was my boss.The day we moved our office into that space, it felt like we didn’t belong. I thought it was because we were forcing a residential space to serve as an office. Could it have actually been because we were unwanted? Could it be that my architect boss offended the warehouse spirits with his redesign? And then, he had the nerve to move right in!

I sat on that theory for a little while, waiting for the next occasion when my boss would be out of the office. It didn't happen that week. I went home on Friday, sat on my couch with the pup, ate tomato soup with popcorn, and worried about my bills.

Monday morning was my chance to be alone in the office. It was time to have a heart-to-heart with Lucy. I contemplated what I wanted to say over interlaced fingers. Finally, setting my arms down on the desk and leaning forward, I decided to confront the issue head-on.

“What is with you? Why are you always so angry?”

She just stared at me.

“It’s the architect, isn’t it. He messed something up for you. What happened?”

Silence.

“I can’t help you if you don’t talk to me, Lucy.” Suddenly, I remembered how I started calling her that. “Or whatever your name actually is. How am I supposed to know what to call you, though, if you won’t tell me?”

I sighed. This wasn’t working. I went around the credenza behind my desk to start filing.

“Alice,” said the voice in my head.

I looked up in surprised joy. She had never responded to me before. This was a first.

“You’re real,” I whispered, and paused to listen. “Are you going to talk to me now, or is that all I get, because I’ll be honest Lucy… I mean, Alice… I’m getting tired of this one-sided relationship.”

She said nothing. In a temper, I kicked the filing cabinet. It didn’t help. I kicked it again and again until it was dented.

Looking back at Lucy or Alice or whatever she was, her expression startled me. Did she actually look less angry? Was I imagining that the deep ‘V’ between her eyes was less pronounced?

The boss was back for the afternoon. I kept looking back at ‘Alice’ to see if she was impacted by his presence in some way.

“He’s playing you.”

Now she chose to talk. Now, when I couldn’t respond openly.

Two rooms off of the long hall were designed to be bedrooms. Each had a bathroom. I preferred using the one at the furthest end. I left my desk as though headed towards it.

Stopping in front of Alice, I silently stared at her a moment before slipping into the darkened bedroom that served as the office library with metal shelving, binders of specs, industry specification manuals, and architectural samples.

“What are you talking about?” I whispered and waited. “I don’t have all day. Tell me.”

“Check his bag.”

“What? How am I supposed to do that when he has it with him all day?”

She didn’t answer. I returned to my desk.

After a couple of hours, the architect went to the restroom. As soon as the door latched, I leapt into action. He sometimes had me retrieve papers from his bag, so I didn’t expect to find anything surprising. Searching the smaller pockets, I found a loose nickel. Was it my nickel? There was no way to know. Continuing the search, I came across two checks written for monthly dues to his country club and his business club. The amount of them combined was over $500. My hands shook as I looked at them.

This was what he thought of me. I had stayed with him when my paycheck was delayed because our client list dried up during the real estate crisis. I stayed when the one remaining client denied the validity of an invoice and refused to pay. Even though I had to borrow money from my parents to make my mortgage note that month, I stayed. It wasn’t his fault, so I never complained. Now I could see that while I was sympathetic to his struggle, mine was of no concern to him. While I was worried about keeping my home, he made sure to remain in good standing with his social clubs. While I was spending weekends alone eating tomato soup and popcorn, he didn’t sacrifice anything.

I wanted to crumple those checks and throw them across the room. A flushing sound brought me back to the moment. Putting everything back as it was, I returned to my desk and pretended I was absorbed in emails when he passed by.

“You see.”

I did. I did see. I had been a fool, and my boss, who had been like a father-figure, was a traitor. Who was in my corner? Not him. Not my old friends. Where were they? According to social media, still hanging out with each other but not with me. The truth was that they didn’t just shift to focusing on their families. They left me behind. After a bad breakup my friendship became inconvenient. He remained their friend. I became expendable.

I wanted to cry. I wanted to scream.

Staring at the email client open on my screen with burning eyes, I clicked to create a new message.

“Dear sir, we regret an error in our most recent invoice. Services rendered to another client were mistakenly attributed to you. Please disregard.”

The idea to undermine my boss with the remaining client that was contesting his last invoice was a rash one. I wanted to make it so that he couldn’t afford those dumb club dues anymore. I hit send before I could think twice.

Seconds later, panic set in. I pulled up my Sent folder, straining to breathe.

Too late.

I stared absently at the time stamp that proved it was done. My stomach dropped. The architect could lose his business. I would lose my job.

The doll figure in the woodgrain looked different somehow. Her scowl was no longer disapproving. It appeared menacingly satisfied.

“You did it.”

I knew what she meant. I really did it.

And Alice… Alice approved.