Chapter 86
During the drive to FoodTech labs Avery was abstracted in her own thoughts, and none of us wanted to talk anyways. We let the road roll behind us, steaming hot under the summer sun.
When Avery dropped us at Food Tech labs she told me she would either come or send someone for me at six.
“If anything happens, call. If you want to leave before or after 6 let me know, but don’t go around on your own. Clear?”, she said
“Yes ma’am”, I replied teasingly, making the military salute, and Avery drove away fast, barely having said goodbye.
When I walked in the building it felt like the last time I saw the place I was in another life and in another century. I knew where everything was, but it was as if I was holding in my hands a floor plan that allowed me to move around, but without any sense of personal familiarity with the environment. In the elevator I looked at the numbers ramping up with a regular blipping sound, my sense of anxiousness increasing at each floor.
“I wonder what I will do today…”, I wondered out loud
“I would do my best to make myself invisible to the boss”, Brad replied, smiling bitterly
“What’s the point? If he wants me out I might as well learn it today”, I shrugged
When the elevator opened to our floor we found a man in suit waiting for it. He looked familiar, although I couldn’t locate him. But before I had the time to browse my memory’s archive further, I understood from Brad’s and Alice reaction that this was the new boss. I looked at him with a dumbstruck face for few seconds, before managing to put up a lopsided goofy smile and say, “Good morning”.
“You must be Iris”, he said
“Yes, why?”, I replied, stunned by the fact he knew.
Had he been looking up my picture on the employee profiler to make sure he knew me at first sight?
“Michael Gill, good to meet you”, he said smiling an overly-confident smile and tending his hand, fingers straight, palm open, wrapping me with the net of his inquisitive gaze
I took his hand and kept smiling, without talking
“I would care to speak to you. Come to my office in 15 minutes”, he said, blocking the elevator door that was about to close.
Then he stepped in and the door closed before I could reply.
“Ah well, if you wanted to meet the man soon you’ve totally succeeded”, said Brad, chuckling with bitter irony
“But from the way he approached Iris it didn’t seem like Gill wanted to dismiss her”, Alice intervened
“These people are assholes, not humans. You can’t understand what they have in mind using the criteria that apply to you and I”, Brad answered
“Ok anyways, let’s go inside and wait to see, eh?”, Alice said, patting my shoulder
We did, and by the time I had turned on my PC and started to familiarize myself with my work folders 15 minutes had passed.
“Good luck”, Brad said when he saw me walk away
“Yeah…ok, I’ll be back”, I said, all of a sudden carefree, because I didn’t care to keep this job anyways.
No matter what happened in Gill’s office, I knew I would make a change in my life. I still didn’t know where I would be going, but wherever that was it had to be far, very far from where I was now.