Fiction: The Man Behind Me
A short story about an anxious copywriter, his shadow and a deadline.
I can’t see him. But everyone else can.
He follows at a distance of three feet. That’s my guess, judging by everyone’s line of sight as they stare over my shoulder at him. Every day, he follows me to work, waits while I pour a coffee, then stands behind me as I sit at my desk and pretend to know what I’m doing.
Janice is one of the worst for staring at him.
“Leo,” she says to me.
I meet her eyes in the gap between my two computer screens and her two computer screens.
“What’s up?”
“Stop shaking your leg.”
“Shoot, sorry!” I spring up, the chair rolling and spinning away from the backs of my knees. It clatters against the wall. The clicks of mice and keyboard keys pause as the dozen others in our open-concept studio turn their eyes toward me, collectively surprised I still have a job here.
“I’m gonna get coffee—you want one?” I need to get out of the room.
Janice flicks her eyes up to mine. “Coffee will only make you more restless,” she says, and then glances at the man behind me. My cheeks burn and I look away from her, to the near-dead arrowhead plant on her desk she doesn’t seem to care about.
“Good point,” I manage.
Instead of coffee, I escape to the bathroom. Relief wraps around me as the heavy door clicks closed. In the mirror, sweat circles the armpits of my baby blue Henley. I fan my shirt while tilting my head this way and that, trying to get a look at the man. If only I could see him—look him in the eye—then maybe I could understand what he wants. Maybe I could reason with him. But he matches my movements so I never get a glimpse. He’s crafty that way, always anticipating me. Always finding new ways to punctuate his torment.
His latest trick is disappearing for brief moments at random. Just like that he’s gone, and then just like that he’s back. My doctor seems to think the disappearing act means something. But it doesn’t. There is no pattern. That would be too easy.
Besides, the doctor prescribed me a way to make the man go away for longer periods. I slip out the clear plastic case where I keep my Mhelt pills and tap the last three into my palm. Under my tongue they go. The doctor said I should only take one at a time, but I’m up to three now because the drug must lose effectiveness over time. I know three pills are too many, that the doctor is suspicious of the lies I spin to explain why I always need more.
But then the pills disappear and my body sinks into warm sand, my care melting away with it.
It’s past six and just me and Janice are left in the office. We’re on a deadline, having been paired up to work on the marketing for Space Exterminators. It’s about spaceships orbiting Earth that become infested with cockroaches. The twist at the end is that the cockroaches evolved to have a singular consciousness. I guessed that early on while watching the advance copy.
In the gap, Janice has that glued face like she’s in sync with the poster she’s working on. We’ve got two solid options and she’s working on our final one. The client pitch is looming. Tomorrow morning, 10:30 AM. Problem is, I’m stuck on the tagline for the third poster option. For poster one I came up with, “There’s a bug in the system.” And for poster two, “Intrusion alert.” That one I’m most proud of, having discovered that a group of a cockroaches is called an “intrusion.” The client will pick that one. I’m sure of it. But still, we need to have three options we’re happy with.
“It’s a living,” I say, thinking out loud.
Janice’s face twitches between the computer monitors, her eyes not moving from her work. I wait. Two seconds later: “Doesn’t quite land.”
I highlight the tagline and strike delete. Maybe a little too hard. The Mhelt has that effect on me, where I sometimes don’t edit myself.
Janice turns her eyes to the in-between gap. “You’re overthinking this one, Leo.”
I hold her stare, waiting for her to glance at the man behind me. But she doesn’t falter. The Mhelt must be working. The man must not be there, for now at least.
“How ‘bout a beer?” she asks. She pushes up from the chair.
“Beer?” We’ve never socialized outside of work hours. She acts like I said nothing and leaves the room, coming back sixty seconds later with two bottles.
“All we’ve got is this pumpkin shit left over from Halloween.” She sets the orange-labeled bottle on my desk and skirts around to her seat.
“Thank you,” I say. A tiny fire has ignited in my chest. Between our screens, Janice tucks her hair behind her ears, revealing little gold hoop earrings and a neck I hadn’t appreciated for its shape. The top button of her denim shirt must have come undone while she was grabbing the beers.
She hits a few keys and looks my way. “Check your drop box. Option three work-in-progress is there. Might inspire something.”
I open the file to Janice’s third poster option. It’s brilliant as usual. The poster shows a long corridor inside a spaceship—all metal siding and oily shadows. At the end of the corridor a hatch stands open, light spilling in, our lead space exterminator standing there in half-silhouette, insecticide spray gun held at her side. Over her head sits the title in a font that reminds me of the eighties, even though I was born in the nineties. Below her feet, Janice has left an open space for the tagline.
“It’s a living,” I say again. It fits.
Janice looks away, thinking.
Then says, “Nope, it doesn’t land.”
On our third beer, we teleported over to the couch. I’ve never been a drinker, and my doctor warned me alcohol would “amplify”—his word—the effects of Mhelt. But for now, I’m enjoying the way my thoughts don’t lace together.
“… but the neighbor’s tree was leaning over my yard and I was afraid it would fall on my daughter. So, I had it cut down while he was at work. Fucker’s suing me.”
I simultaneously realize Janice is midway through a story and that I know nothing about her except she’s a magician with poster art. She’s won many awards in her over ten years’ experience in the industry. And here she is stuck working with the intern they kept on a couple years ago because I had one good guerrilla marketing idea. To paper the city with “Missing Dog” posters for that horror movie about the woman who finds a baby werewolf and raises it as a pet. It eventually eats her of course.
Even Janice was impressed by the idea.
“How do you know that you’re good?” I ask.
“Good?”
“I mean—” I poke through the mud of my brain for the right words. “I mean, how do you know that you’re good at what you do? Here, at work.”
“Experience.”
“Is that it?”
Janice’s face is so impenetrable beside me. “You’re young. You need to just give it time. You need to loosen up.”
“Loosen up?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
Janice’s eyes change. The way she’s looking at me has flipped over to something foreign. She pokes my shoulder. It’s like I’m watching a movie of Janice I can’t pull my eyes away from. She tugs the sleeve of my shirt. She’s bugging me. Then it clicks that this is happening, that she’d been playing up to this ever since she gave me that first beer.
Janice pulls me down on top of her. She starts kissing my neck. I push up with my arms, our faces a foot apart.
“I thought you didn’t like me,” I say.
Her face is all business, hair sprawled out on the couch.
“Like you? I don’t know if that’s what this is.” But she’s not even looking at me when she says it. Her focus is on the man behind me. He’s back, the Mhelt has failed me. I see his silhouette on the lenses of her eyes. He must have leaned over my back, wrapped his hands around my hips.
“I can see him.”
“What?” Her eyes tighten with doubt. “See who?”
“The man behind me.”
“What man?” Her face fully creases, and then I’m slammed by what I’ve said.
“Shit, sorry, no one. Shit.”
Her body has gone rigid under mine. “Are you alright, Leo? Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.”
I shrink off her and slump into the couch, taking on the shape of embarrassment. My mind sloshes in and out of the moment.
But Janice is back to business, fixing her hair. She rebuttons her shirt like nothing happened.
She’s off the couch and sliding on her jacket from the back of her desk chair, heading toward the door, car keys jangling in one hand.
“What about the third tagline?” I ask.
“Sleep on it. Text me something before nine.”
“What if I can’t think of anything?” I hate the sound of my voice right now.
Janice sighs, giving me a hard stare. “We’re all just faking it, you know. There’s no secret formula. You just gotta do your best.” She hangs there a minute, but now I can’t find her face—it’s gone black, covered in shadow.
Then she’s gone too.
Before I leave, I tip some water into the arrowhead plant on her desk.
On the way home, I find myself wishing the man behind me would just get on with it. I imagine ways he might as I wander along sidewalks, passing strangers with blurred faces.
He could strangle me with a piano wire in an alley, leave me slumped between two garbage cans.
He could push me in front of the streetcar rumbling past.
I unlock my apartment door and climb the stairs, waiting for the man to slide a knife into my buttery organs.
But I know he won’t. He will never make it easy.
Once I’m inside, the quiet and the four walls enclose me with relief. I don’t think I can ever go outside again. I don’t think I can be around people for awhile.
I think this every night and every morning I get up and do it all again.
I sit on my couch that’s pressed tight against the wall. I enjoy this because it forces the man behind me inside the wall, where I imagine him penetrated by wires and pipes and roaches.
In the black TV screen, I’m a half silhouette, side-lit by the end table lamp. I lie down on the couch, watching myself lie down across from me. Does the man also lay down inside the wall behind me? I wonder if he cradles his hands under his face like I do. Will he smile with blades in his eyes as I drop into a black space and dream of things that never finish?
I might only have blinked when I wake to a bright day. Brighter than it should be. A mental pin jabs me into wakefulness. I scramble for my phone.
10:17 AM.
Three missed calls from Janice.
Client meeting in thirteen minutes.
I turn into a tornado.
It’s 10:41 as I blast through the doors of the office. The receptionist barely flinches from behind her desk, eyes stuck to her computer screen.
“Is the client here?” I ask her, breathless.
She looks up with all the time in the world, glancing at the man behind me before meeting my eyes.
“Yup.”
“My phone went dead.” A lie.
“Whoops.”
This is the first moment I’ve stopped to collect myself since throwing on clothes, wetting my hair and exploding out of my apartment. I’m covered in sweat. I forgot to put on deodorant.
I take what my doctor calls a “cleansing breath.”
It does not help.
I’ll have to walk past the glassed-in boardroom where the meeting is underway to get to the creative studio. Maybe I could slip into the meeting and no one will notice or think it odd. Halfway past, I pause at the glass door, my legs not working. The boardroom table is surrounded by people: Janice, my boss, the project manager, the account manager, the client. The second poster option is up on the screen, plus the client is holding a printed version in his hands.
I put my hand on the cold metal doorknob.
Janice sees me over the shoulder of the client. She shakes her head no just enough. I shrivel away from the door and survive the last few steps into the creative studio. The other creatives glance my way like they might a fly, then turn their eyes back to their computer screens.
I sit at my desk. The man takes his place behind me. I should just pack up now. Surely, they’ll fire me for messing up. Surely, they now know that I have no idea what I’m doing. I think this everyday, waiting for the call from Human Resources to summon me upstairs for an icy conversation.
I jiggle my mouse. A blank document stares back from the monitor. I click command-z and “It’s a living” pops back in place. That’s the line Janice rejected. More from last night bubbles in the runny eggs of my head. The beers. The couch. The unedited words that escaped my mouth. Across the room, our empties still sit on the coffee table, the scene of a crime preserved.
Everyone knows.
I try to slow my breathing, my heart, sweat droplets cutting down my sides. Reflexively, I reach for the pill case in my pocket, its permanent home, hot dread surging as I remember the case is empty. I’m on my own, and there’s Janice coming back into the creative studio, the posters rolled up under one arm. The meeting is done early. She ignores me at first as she sits at her desk. Then finally she looks up and passes through one of the posters and says, “Client picked this one. He loved it. Nice job.”
I unroll the poster. It’s the third option with the space exterminator at the end of the ship’s corridor. My eyes land on the tagline Janice used.
It’s a living.
“And Leo?” Janice says.
I meet her eyes once again, my body tightening. But this time she doesn’t look over my shoulder at the man behind me. Only at me—right in the center of my eyes—and for a whole moment he’s gone. For a whole moment it’s just me sitting here. And Janice is over there doing her best. And the perked-up arrowhead plant is between us, reaching for the fluorescent light.
“What’s up?” I say.
“Stop shaking your leg.”