Severance

Driving down the Clara Barton Parkway, I could smell the flooding river water still awash in fresh sewage. The largest raw sewage leak in history rushed uninhibited into the Potomac River, a race of humans’ ability to stop our dirtiest excesses from encroaching on our own backyards. The festering fluid pooled in the gutters of the highway, showering each passing vehicle with the bacteria of a thousand digestive systems.

The sky released its inflated bladder across the region with the steady stream of a young man’s intact ureter. My elderly, low clearance Honda Civic sloshed through the torrents, anxious to escape the parkway before it fully flooded. My palms had the steering wheel in a strangulating grip as I squinted between the squeaking wiper blades. I was still reeling from getting fired. Fired for doing the Right Thing. If only I had kept it to myself.

I was waiting for our regular meeting in my boss’ office, just as instructed. Eleanor was running behind, and I was expected to wait without complaint. I checked my texts ten times and picked every cuticle, stared out the window at the threatening gray clouds rolling in, and checked my Instagram til my eyes went fuzzy. Remember when you could get to the end of Instagram, when if you scrolled long enough, it told you you were ‘all caught up!’?

Just before my eyes glazed over, they settled on the flashing red warning light on the desktop printer. Of course Eleanor had her own printer. She was a rain maker, and got whatever she demanded from Management. She had been my supervisor for three years, and had never paid me a compliment or given me a rating higher than satisfactory on my evaluation. She only noticed me when my tasks weren’t done to her satisfaction, and I had given up positioning for recognition.

I busied myself unjamming the printer, opening every flap, gingering pulling jagged sheets and shreds of paper free from the hungry jaws of the Epson, mashing each blinking button over and over in quick succession, shutting the machine off and on again. The printer jolted to life, spitting sheet after sheet into my surprised open palms. I instinctively tapped the pages together, aligning the edges as the words jumped out at me.

Last weekend. Best it’s ever been. Your naked back. Your naked – what?! Aaron. Aaron.

That Aaron?! Yes. My boss was schtupping our biggest competitor.

In a cloud of disgust and confusion, I walked out of Eleanor’s office and back to my desk, where I sat chewing the end of a pen in a daze as I read and re-read the pages that were quickly becoming damp with anxious sweat. Why would she do such a thing? And why on earth would she print such personal emails in the office, even on a supposedly private printer?

Eleanor appeared in my peripheral vision, heading towards my desk.

“Are you ready to meet?” she began, as her eyes settled on the wilting stack of papers still in my hands. Our eyes met as hers went cold. “Were you snooping in my office?! What are you doing?”

I gaped for a moment, my mind tumbling through the paucity of options in front of me, and stood without saying a word. I stuttered a series of sounds more akin to grunts than words or explanations. My eyes bobbled loosely between Eleanor and the papers, still in my sweaty hands as she grew clearly angrier waiting for my response to her pointed questions. With her questions still hanging between us, Eleanor and I turned in unison, and she followed me down the hall at high speed towards HR.

Somehow, I was the one who walked out of HR with a severance agreement. Eleanor claimed she did it to get insider info from Aaron, that it was a strategic hustle. That she’d baited him at the industry conference three months ago, planning all along to get just enough information to undercut his firm on the next big bid. Maybe it was true, but the bid had gone in weeks earlier, and they were clearly still engaged in extracurricular activities. We hadn’t heard anything about the bid so it was hard to say if this plan had worked or was a smoke screen for the affair. For all Management knew, Eleanor was the one who’d given Aaron insider information.

Maybe I was the naïve one. I mean. I was clearly the naïve one, taking those emails, going to HR instead of handing them back or sending them straight to the shredder, thinking I was standing up for…. For what? I had nothing to gain. My employer had no lofty mission statement, no aims of making the world a better place or an easier place for those with less; it was a 100% capitalist enterprise. I was exactly what Lloyd Dobler aspired not to become. I was a cog in a machine that created work for work’s sake to process processes, to generate income.

I didn’t give a shit if the company made money, as long as I got paid. And now, I wasn’t getting paid.

Con-fuck-ulations to me, I thought, as the Civic blindly hit a pothole with a crash, sinking into the boulder-sized crater with a thud as I bounced high enough to whack my head on the low sedan roof. I swore as Civic careened out of the pothole and back onto the road, washing every window in brown streams of - NOPE, DON’T WANT TO THINK ABOUT IT!

And that’s when I realized I couldn’t see out the rear windshield. The trunk had popped open, exposing the box of personal items I’d taken from my desk to the rain and sewage. Lying on top of that box had been the manila folder with my signed severance agreement. The folder must have blown open because in my side mirrors, I could see papers flying down the parkway behind me, floating damply down to land in lakes of sewage.