It's FINALLY finished! The first chapter of Therapy Recommended is done!
Therapy Recommended
Chapter 1: Hell's Elevator
Includes language, this time. Ahaha.
So he just happened to get stuck in the elevator on the day of his job interview. Really, it’d figure that an elevator would come to a sudden halt on the way to the eighty-ninth floor. Oh yeah, that’s right.
There was no eighty-ninth floor to begin with.
That crazy receptionist on the first floor practically threw him into the shaft and pressed all of the buttons at once. He sighed and checked his watch. Three minutes late to the interview and not an escape route in sight. He opened the emergency call box and found the telephone’s wires were disconnected. Perfect, he thought, a perfect day to leave his cell phone somewhere in the disheveled heap of sheets on his bed. The hopeless man pressed against the elevator wall and slid to the floor. First he was told to go to the fourth floor and enter the third door on the left, which he found was merely a closet full of cleaning supplies. Then he was told that the seventeenth floor’s fifth right door would lead to the CEO’s office, yet he only faced more brooms and buckets. Unless the boss of this company was a disinfectant aficionado, the receptionist had no idea what she was doing.
The receptionist alone was a mystery. She looked no older than eighteen, but could have been at least twenty-three if she was dressed in normal office attire and not pink pajamas with stars and footsies. Greeting him with a “Hi! My name is Yoko and my favorite color is blue! What floor do you want me to take you to?” the man read her nametag and asked Yoko if he could get to wherever the interviews were being held and she sent him on this hellish elevator ride. Maybe she was an imposter. Maybe the real Yoko was tied up in one of the cleaning supply closets and he just didn’t hear her muffled cries.
The man felt the cold marble floor shake beneath him as the elevator recovered from its button overdrive and began moving downward. He ran his fingers through his short dirty-blonde hair and got up. His panic attack might have ceased if he didn’t check his timepiece, but he gave into temptations and found that he was now seven minutes late. so that was around ten minutes spent in an elevator shaft and ten minutes of his path to a decent salary gone. Time was neither a restraint or a comprehensive idea in his mind now that he knew he probably couldn’t make his rent.
To keep his mind on “happier things” he examined the cell he grew to know. It was oddly nice, with cherrywood and sliver railings on the sides and chilly white marble tiles. Nice was an understatement. Pricy was more fitting (he never excelled in English classes.) Even if he only acquired a pity job it’d probably cover his rent. Maybe an Xbox.
He was snapped back into reality and Unemployment Land when the elevator stopped at the third floor. A woman, somewhere in her late twenties in a lab coat with a cup of coffee pressed the glass button for the eighth floor (a glass, not plastic, button the man realized.) So much for getting to yell at Possible-Yoko. Xbox be damned, he just wanted to see something other than the interior of an elevator. He got a closer look at the woman, who was trying to flatten the creases in her black button-up shirt and constantly drank her coffee as if she was downing shots at a local bar. Reddish-brown hair draped over her shoulders and her hands were covered in notes from “File pickup at 3:30” to “New sushi restaurant at Fillmore and Post.” To be honest, she scared him more than Pseudo-Yoko’s pink pajamas.
She obviously felt his staring and glanced up at him.
“Do I know you or are you looking for a quick way to get fired?” she asked harshly. “You know very well that I have the power to do that to you.”
“Er, well,” the man sheepishly said while stumbling into the elevator’s corner “I’m supposed to be at a job interview, but I’m not sure I know where to go.”
“Sixty-fifth floor, back room, I’m going there myself so I guess I could drag you along.”
“Thanks, I’ve been having a bit of trouble because of-”
“The receptionist?”
The man blinked in surprise. “Is she that big of a problem?”
She laughed. “Well, Yoko isn’t always there, y’know? Don’t worry, if you get the job here you can watch her get newbies and clients lost and laugh at their expenses. I’ve been doing that for as long as I’ve been here.” Her eyes ran up and down his figure, and only she could tell that from his passive investigation skills and slouch that he probably wouldn’t last through even the interview. “By the way, what are you applying for?”
“I didn’t know there were different positions,” the man said, distracted. He pulled a cut-out piece of newspaper with a used car sale advertisement on the back and the help wanted ad on the front. “File clerk, secretary, janitor, or beta-tester. Which one is better,” he asked while looking at her name tag “Desdemona?”
“Hm. File clerk means that you’ll be working with Yoko, so-”
“One down, three to go.”
“Janitors have a pretty lax schedule, but does blood make you squeamish?”
“Well I guess…wait, what?”
“Do you mind working late shifts?”
Rockwell raised an eyebrow at the sudden change of subject. “I think I’ll pass on janitor.”
“You’re very picky about jobs, aren’t you? Well the lab secretary position was taken yesterday, so how do you feel about testing products…what’s your name?”
“It’s Rockwell. Rockwell Nava.” he sputtered, “ I guess I don’t mind, but what exactly am I going to be testing?”
“I like to think of Kamura as a company that defines the saying ‘a jack of all trades and a master of none.’ We kind of do a lot of everything, from appliances to prescription drugs, so it depends on your luck really. Do you consider yourself lucky?”
“No. Oh god, no.” Rockwell certainly didn’t have the best luck this week. After being fired for a job he steadily held for two years and ending a relationship, he was nowhere near lucky. And now that he knew he was stumbling over his words around someone in the field he was interested in, it didn’t seem any better.
“I don’t know what techs have spots for testers though, I mean I spend all my time by myself and there’s this-”
“Is it just me or did the elevator stop again?” They both paused and felt that the shaft was indeed stuck again on the seventh floor. Oh, how this elevator loved to taunt him.
“Oh no, no, bad timing,” Desdemona said, her brow furrowed and eyes aflame. She stepped a few inches closer to the door and out from her brown-and-cream pinstriped skirt came black combat boots that furiously kicked the door. “Why is it,” KICK! “that every,” KICK! “fucking,” KICK! “time I get into,” KICK! “this stupid piece of,” KICK! “shit elevator it breaks on me?!”
“Is that really going to do anything?” Rockwell asked.
“Don’t question my methods!” she screamed back. KICK!
“No, really, you’re going to hurt yourself. There’s no way that the door is going to magically open by you standing there and kicking it.”
Or at least that’s what he wanted to believe.
The ground underneath him began to move again and the lights atop the door flashed to the eight. The Redhead Wonder and her boots of justice were able to best him and fix the elevator. Just magical, he thought.
As the doors slid open there was a desk covered in manila folders and blue carbon copy slips of paper centered between two sets of double doors. The computer screen was turned to the elevator and flashed error messages, and from there Rockwell jumped as he saw a hand reach up from the floor like an undead secretary.
Well, maybe she wasn’t a zombie, but a little hung over.
A woman with smooth brown skin and bags under her eyes rose like said zombie and Desdemona smirked. “Technical difficulties? It’s only eleven thirty. The hell did you do this time, Chizune?”
“You know that menu that comes up with all your programs when you hit the little flag button at the bottom?” the secretary twitched. “Every program was named ‘dickwad’ and the Ethernet cable caught on fire.”
“I know nothing about computers, but I know that you have done something seriously wrong,” Rockwell commented in astonishment.
“Well thank you for giving me your very much needed opinion. Who’s this guy?”
“This is Rockwell. He’s applying for one of those positions we put an ad in the paper for.” Chizune’s eyes widened.
“You really shouldn’t have come in today.”
“And why is that?”
“Let’s just say someone is in the boss’s office right now trying to justify taking he day off for religious purposes.” Rockwell wasn’t a protocol expert, but knew that there had to be something that would justify that on its own. And then realized that protocol was already not being followed because the secretary was, mentally, a ten-year-old and the operating system for the elevator was kicking. This boss would have to follow suit in hellishness. Obviously.
The three surrounding the receptionist’s desk turned at the sound of incoherent shouting muffled by closed doors and fax machine whirrs. “See,” Chizune continued “Kamura is a very special place to work. Great pay, great benefits, probably one of the worst work environments by ‘normal’ standards, and a very interesting boss. When is your birthday?”
“How is this at all relevant?”
“She’s a very interesting boss.”
“April 30th.”
“Okay, you’re good. No worries. As long as you can come in at least four days a week and you shut your mouth when the boss is talking―” The technologically unfortunate woman was interrupted by the slamming open of doors at the far end of the hallway and the heavy footsteps of a man walked out. He pushed his glasses further back on his nose and put a hand through his matted hair and gripped it so hard he could pull it from the roots. Rockwell looked to Desdemona, who sighed and placed a hand on her forehead.
“Someone is about three seconds away from getting their ass handed to them.” She saw Rockwell’s puzzled look. “You’re about to see why you should try for an interview tomorrow.”
Rockwell honestly didn’t think that this boss would be as bad as the tech and the receptionist alluded to. At his last job (which seemed more professional than this, because he was pretty sure he couldn’t remember anything catching on fire) he had a female supervisor that was a bad 1980s stereotype. The tight bun that stretched every hair follicle back, odd-fitting power suits, and a cutthroat work ethic that really didn’t make her unlikable. He was too sheepish for the machismo that would make him feel threatened by whatever came following the aggravated accountant.
And then he saw Jun Lee, CEO of Kamura Corporation, and he felt some if not all of his body shrinking in fear.
Everything on the sixty-fifth floor seemed to freeze. Clients were put on hold, spreadsheets went on the backburner, and even the copier realized it needed to shut up and listen. Rockwell trembled; his eye twitched, his hand spazzed, and his whole body felt this poisonous aroma fill his lungs and his bloodstream as this woman walked out of her office in silent rage.
More importantly, Rockwell never thought he would ever be this afraid of anything under five feet. Then again, this was the man who was once afraid of a hand mixer while baking.
He was guessing she was in the four feet, ten inches range, but it didn’t matter because no matter how short one’s legs are, they will move fast if you have a purpose. Or a target. If she could emit this kind of aura, the accountant was definitely a hunting target. Or, because of her untamed black hair that gave her the appearance of a Japanese demon in a horror movie, the object of her vengeance. He looked back at Desdemona and Chizune, who recognized this behavior as routine. He looked for the elevator to see if he could just escape now.
The aggravated man that Desdemona later pointed out as Travis turned around and faced his boss of a smaller stature. “I’m not going to stand in front of you and listen to your bullshit. I take one day off for a holiday and you try to nail me for it? It’s in my vacation hours. I’ll call the fucking San Francisco courts if I have to so I can sue your ass for discrimination.” Desdemona and Chizune giggled at his threat. Jun, now caught up to Travis and brushed some of the hair from her smoldering brown eyes. Chizune pretended to work on her broken computer so that she wouldn’t burst out laughing. Rockwell avoided eye contact with Jun because he thought he’d be turned into stone.
“Listen to me, you fuckhead, for just one minute of your obviously precious time,” the boss calmly commanded. “While I don’t approve of the fact that took some hours off for a religious holiday, there’s something I appreciate a little less.” She took a crumpled up paper out of the pocket of her slacks and blankly stared at its contents. Then smashed it onto Travis’s face like a nursing home attendant smashes a pillow onto the face of a dying grandmother. Jun called it a service to society. She was smothering the unwanted.
“These are your hours for the past month. Can you read it you fucking blond? You‘ve been playing hooky from work for as long as I remember! You really think you’ve got the brains to start using bullshit excuses this early?” Travis attempted a “Fuck you, bitch” from underneath the paper but his words were jumbled . Jun finally pushed him off his feet and his lanky legs and he fell backwards. Jun made sure she stood over him at chest height, high enough on his frame where she would tower over his stupidity, and so he could get a view of the metaphorical balls that were bigger than his own.
“And more importantly? I don’t give a flying fuck if your leg falls off due to a plague of locusts eating it, or if Jesus comes by the office to take you on a lunch date. If you’re going to be working in my corporation, I am your god. Your father, son, and holy ghost. Your Virgin Mary and Slut Magdalene. I am your final judgment and your rapture, and I want you to get your stupid ass out of my building, and don’t expect a final paycheck!”
The preacher of insanity, Conquistador of Testicles, stood triumphantly over the shaking former employee, who scrambled to his feet and headed for the elevator Rockwell and Desdemona came from. Jun remained in her stand. The other accountants took her impromptu sermon as word. As if he there was something important enough back at his desk that he was willing to risk his life for, he turned around and made a dash for his cubicle.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“But my car keys are in-”
“Fuck your car keys, I will shoot your dick off with a staple gun if I have to.”
Suddenly, taking the bus seemed like a great idea to Travis, who ran in the correct direction.
And suddenly, Rockwell didn’t think he wanted that job.
In this sick alternate universe Rockwell stumbled into, everything went back to normal in seconds. Phones rang, orders were placed, and printers were jammed. Even Chizune resumed her slurs of profanity aimed at her computer.
Jun sighed, and walked with the same tenacity back to her office, and caught two figures standing idly by the reception desk.
“And why the fuck are you still standing around?! Fucking blonds, it’s always the blonds. You know what? We’re financially stable this year. You’re fired.” Rockwell blinked. Desdemona laughed furiously.
“B-but I don’t even work here!” he stuttered. Jun looked back it him with an irritable scowl.
“Then why are you just standing around and wasting my oxygen?”
“Because I was going to apply for the tester position, but now I’m afraid that I’m going to end up with staples on my genitals, ma’am.”
Jun smirked. “Is your birthday in September?”
“No, it’s in April.”
“Then I think you should step into my office and we can look at your resume and psychiatric history.”
The man gulped. “Psychiatric history?”
“She’s a very interesting boss” Chizune added.
+++++
It all began with “How much trauma do you think you could endure?” when Rockwell lost his mind in the wide open space of Jun Lee’s office.
Now shaking on a sleek silver chair that matched the rest of the furniture, he asked “What the hell kind of company is this?”
“It’s a standard interview for all beta-testers. Now, do you have allergic reactions in response to any medications, red dye number three, or macadamia nuts?” Jun said with irritation as she tapped a pen against the glass of her desk.
“N-no! And can I ask another question?”
“For chrissake, what now?”
“Why are they still here?” Rockwell pointed to the scheming women sitting on one of Jun’s leather couches: Desdemona, who loudly clacked on the buttons of her cell phone, and Chizune, who was sharpening a letter opener for the next time her computer decided to take a dive on her. “I don’t think they’re part of the hiring board, now are they?”
“Sure we are!” Chizune said with a disturbing amount of cheer for someone who looked like a member of the walking dead. “Think of us as members of a special committee.”
“The kind of committee that looks like it wants to stab me?”
“Who said this shank is for you?”
“Less shanking and more interviewing,” the agitated Jun said. “Desdemona, get the fuck off the phone for a few seconds.”
“Fucking hell, what?” Desdemona looked up from here most likely unimportant conversation and glared. How was it possible that neither of the two women were ever fired for defiance or destruction of company property?
“He’s not braindead and his medical records seem fine, so we’ll take him. Meet your new beta.” The lab tech looked at him with a sour expression. “You start tomorrow and hopefully you can stick with us long enough so we can groom you into exactly what we need.”
“I’m a bit scared to ask what that is.”
“A few sewing pins less than a human voodoo doll.”
“See, this is why I’m a bit skeptical about this whole job.”
“You haven’t a thing to be worried about” Desdemona assured. “Just stick the right needles in your arms, make friends with the right people, ignore the right people, and you’ll have a set job for life!”
“It sounds like high school.”
“What the hell were you shooting up in high school?”
Jun cleared her throat. “You signed a contract. Kamura basically owns your soul for the next two years unless you’re sent to prison or you die.”
Rockwell scratched his head, trying to remember when he signed a contract. The problem was that he never did. “But―”
“Did you drink any of the sparkling water that was in the icebox?” Jun pointed with her ballpoint pen to a cart on the side of her office, both shelves filled with glass bottles of exotic alcohols and an ice bucket.
“Yeah, your secretary said I should stop worrying so much about the interviewing process and have a…” Rockwell looked at the sinisterly-grinning Chizune, who held a letter holder with a blade as thin as paper. “Please tell me I wasn’t just date raped.”
“A chemical isomer of Kamura’s brand of sparkling water is often used as a drink that can plant suggestions into one’s brain. We never figured out what the use of a carbonated hypno-potion would be until our employee number needed a boost. It’s a lot easier to get people to sign a contract under a trance, right?” Jun waved a signed paper in front of Rockwell’s pale face as he melted into his chair.
“But here’s the kicker,” Desdemona said. “It’s something I made by accident. And it didn’t kill you. SO you won’t have to worry about dying on the job while you’re bound to me for two years!” She stood up off the taut leather couch and wrapped an arm around the shaking thirtysomething.
“I guess you have a point,” Rockwell sighed. Maybe he was taking this whole thing a little too seriously. Sure, his free will was captive for the next two years of his life, but he wasn’t unemployed anymore. What could go wrong?
“Just remember this,” Desdemona whispered as Jun was busy filing the new contract. “Jun once sent a man, this middle-aged human resources worker, to the hospital for intensive care. No one knows exactly what happened, but they say it took three hours for a decorative cactus to be dislodged from his ass.” She gave him a hard pat on the shoulder and looked him straight in the eyes. “Don’t let that be your ass.”
+++++
Jun knows very well the meaning of the word sacrifice.
For example, if it’s around four o’clock on a Monday and one wants a fresh, cold Frappuchino, then there’s only one direct route from her office to the elevator. In hindsight, the secret passageway through the walls or the landing pad at the bottom of the street would have been perfect escape mechanisms.
However, Jun without an alternate route meant that she had to walk by a certain cubicle with a half-Korean halfwit and his girlfriend, who was dumb enough to think plate tectonics had to do with flatware, but smart enough to plan her breaks for when Jun’s thirst kicked in.
However, Jun without coffee was a lot worse. And holding back the urge to smash that new blond employee’s face in took a lot of energy that only coffee could get back.
Instead of keeping herself captive and caffeine-deprived in her office she courageously walked out and down the rows of cubicles that sprawled across the floor. She weaved in and out of the few aisles, making sure she didn’t walk by that cubicle, and was pretty damn successful.
That is, until a cart from the mailroom blocked a safe pathway and she was forced to go left instead of right.
Note to self: fire the mailroom clerk for this floor on the basis of tardiness and making my life miserable.
It’s a pathetic sight, this mess of bleach blond hair (come to think of it, there’s no childhood trauma associated with that color hair, but a lot of stigma attached to a painfully true stereotype) and horrible tan and acrylic nail draped over this limp body in the office chair. And they way the obnoxiously smack their lips while sucking face, and the way he makes the most long-winded grabs at her chest, it all makes her want to go buy that coffee, consume it in record time, then vomit its remains onto the heap of sap that’s in front of her eyes like a car accident.
Ah, what is it they say, it’s in the name of love? Well Jun never really bought into that anyway.
“You know how they have these things called outdoor voices and indoor voices?” Jun mused, startling the couple in the cubicle. “I’m pretty sure they don’t just mean voices. No, scrap that. Even in the outdoors, no one wants to see a couple fucking on a park bench. So I don’t want to see you fucking on my floor.”
The man, Seung Park, tilted to the side of his girlfriend and rolled his eyes. “Babe, let’s take this outside. Apparently we’re violating some company code by taking our break in here.”
The woman, a Miss Melissa Winterson, combed a hand through Seung’s greasy and spiked black hair. She pursed her lips and glared at Jun while saying “Isn’t there a house you need to go haunt or something? Can’t me and my fiancée have some alone time?”
Fiancée, now there was something that Jun kept repressing in her brain. The fact that these two were supposed to have a holy union and get married. Why hadn’t humanity placed an IQ barrier on marriage yet? “Yes, I’ve never heard the joke about me looking like some terrifying creature before. Hopefully I can haunt the shit out of you when I commit suicide from the amount of torture I was just placed under. Now get out of my office. Fuck on a park bench. Please.”
They both rolled their eyes and walked away from Seung’s working space. Jun walked behind them, proud of the fact that her work in getting rid of two of her least favorite employees was successful.
That is, until Jun realized that walking behind a couple meant that a clear view of ass-grabbing was imminent, and that they’d be in the same elevator.
Today was a good day for taking the stairs. And maybe a new haircut. The jokes about Ringu and The Grudge were amusing at first but grew trite since Melissa couldn’t think of anything better. No, Jun was going to find a new style that would strike fear in a different way.