Lam glared frustratingly at the shirt in his hands. He had tried putting on the shirt the night before, and wasn’t able to manipulate his arms and shoulders into it unbuttoned, so had buttoned half of the buttons in order to put the shirt on akin to his customary t-shirts. Slowly, the stillness of his face belying his mental efforts at controlling his movement, he put his arms, twitching and convulsing, through the shirt sleeves. He raised his arms and ducked his head, trying to pull the shirt over his head and onto his torso. His arms started to shake erratically at the strain, and the back of the shirt got caught on his head, stretching. He willed his body to stillness, his arms still raised and twitching. Vision obscured and his glasses now hanging from the strap around his neck, he tried to feel his way into putting on the shirt, haltingly waving his arms and head, shifting at his waist in his chair. Eventually, the shirt was satisfied with its configuration and slid onto Lam. He replaced his glasses onto his face and, sighing, buttoned the shirt, concentrating on the timing and direction of the movement of his fingers and hands, working with the tremors and convulsions, frequently checking to make sure that that each button was properly aligned. Redoing misaligned buttons meant more movement, which lead to more trembling convulsions, which lead to more pain. He glanced at the tie lying on his bed, and dismissed it as a lost cause. The rest of his clothes were designed for people with movement disorders and were more readily donned albeit doing so was still relatively slow.
Had he had more forewarning he would have ordered a more accommodating shirt online, but the email requesting his attendance at the office had been received fairly late yesterday. His response, seeking an explanation for this unprecedented request and attempting to beg off, went unanswered and probably unread given the time it was sent. Mr. Black, his manager, had been considerate enough to Lam’s special needs in the past; hiring someone with so pronounced a disability, allowing him to work at home—even if Mr. Black had done so at the urging of Lam’s social worker—whatever reason for Lam’s presence at the office must be important, especially during quarantine protocols during the pandemic. Lam still resented having to go and having to dress in what he imagined his coworkers wore, thus the shirt and now abandoned tie. The elastic of his face mask dug his glasses painfully into his ears, but he resigned himself to dealing with it.
He was somewhat excited, however, at further testing the app he developed in real world setting. Last night’s impromptu shopping trip had been a successful, if succinct, test of his text to voice app. He had only used it to direct the driver and to thank the cashier. Although initially nonplussed, they both seem unaffected by the mechanical sounding, open-source voice emanating from his phone, a much more favorable reaction than what his voice generally engendered. Talking required movement, which, for Lam, was accompanied by convulsions and pain, so he tried to speak as little as possible. When he did speak, it was with a squawking, pain-stricken voice frequented with discomfiting pauses. His broken teeth and scarred tongue, damaged from past seizures and eating-related injuries, made him even more difficult to understand. Text to speech applications were nothing especially innovative, but while Lam had become fairly adept at communicating online with his specialized keyboard and years of accrued macros and shortcuts, typing on his smartphone was problematic. His app utilized his individualized gesture-based macros, working around his lack of dexterity and frequent extraneous movements to contextually select and play stored phrases. Rather than a typical QWERTY keyboard, he typed using an over-sized number pad—the ‘0-9’ buttons— plus the pound and asterisk buttons to type with his right forefinger, while his left thumb and forefinger were used as shift and alt keys, so he essentially had access to 48 different keys and key combinations. This, along with the auto-completion feature included with the phone’s operating system made using the phone to communicate possible for him.
Lam strapped the phone to his left hand with a strip of velcro and activated a sound recording application. The app would automatically upload any sounds with an accompanying time stamp to his home computer. Lam would review the recording when he got back home to review how his app performed among other things. He walked in a shuffling gait, hands in his pockets, to the porch of his house before ordering a driver. Over the years, and with a lot of physical therapy, he had found this method of walking most effective. Keeping pressure on his legs and minimizing the time they spent aloft lessened their convulsions, and restraining his hands, and thus his arms, in his pockets allowed him to concentrate on walking without worrying about his arms striking bystanders or causing him to overbalance. His pocketed hands didn’t completely prevent his arms from twitching and he had on more than one occasion been accosted as a pervert based on their ostensibly surreptitious movements, but he had long been inured to any embarrassment reactions to his appearance provoked in onlookers. The pockets were more than large enough to allow his phone-strapped hand ready access.
Giving the driver the address of his office was as easy as it was last night. Upon reaching the large, reflective glass office building, Lam realized that he had no idea where to go; getting to the building itself was straight-forward, but where was he supposed to go from here? Was he even at the right entrance? He assumed that there would be a directory and proceeded to the what he hoped was a lobby. Automatic doors opened to a security kiosk with a metal detector.
“Personal effects in the basket, and show the camera your face without the mask,” said a bored security guard seated behind the kiosk, behind a transparent plastic shield, stopping Lam before he could go through.
Lam started to manipulate his phone, to apologize and explain why he needed it to communicate, but was interrupted.
“Get off the phone, you’re holding up the line” the guard said, more angry than bored now, lumbering around the kiosk towards Lam.
“Lam, is that you? What…,” Mr. Black said, walking up to Lam and the now red-faced security guard, bypassing the non-existent line. “Hold on a second Jim, this guy works for me.” Mr. Black said, holding up his hand, directing the security guard to stop.
He’s gained some weight, but it’s been almost 10 years, thought Lam, feeling relieved at Mr. Black’s timely intervention. Mr. Black was tall and fairly large, almost rotund now, with short, gray streaked brown hair. He was dressed in a dark gray suit and striped tie. Lam had stopped trying to speak through his phone and waited for Mr. Black to extricate him from this security mishap.
The guard mumbled incoherently and waddled back to his station. “He still needs to go through the metal detector and show his face to the camera, even if he does works for you,” Jim said, sounding skeptical at the thought that Lam was capable of doing anything, work related or otherwise.
“What are you doing…later, let me help you through,” Mr. Black said, reaching for Lam’s phone and a plastic tray. Lam surrendered the phone, showing visible strain at the phone’s separation from the velcro strap around his hand. Then Lam slowly grabbed his wallet and house key and dropped them into the tray that Mr. Black was holding. He pulled his mask away from his face, accidentally snapping the elastic off of his ears.
“Looks like a friggin’ meth head…put your mask back on.”
Lam fumbled with his mask, his face turning red, and, then, paused, visibly calming himself, before finally getting the mask on his face. He reached for his glasses, but stopped himself, realizing that the plastic was unlikely to set off the metal detector, and shuffled through. It, predictably, went off.
“Un-frickin’-believable,” Jim exclaimed, grabbing the portable wand from besides his seat behind the kiosk.
“Metal…in head,” Lam squawked.
“He has a head injury from when he was kid, Jim. There’s a metal plate in his skull,” Mr. Black interpreted Lam’s utterance.
“Fine, whatever,” Jim muttered, waving the wand perfunctorily around the rest of Lam’s body. It squealed at Lam’s head, and no where else. “Go on,” Jim said, waving dismissively at Lam and Mr. Black. Lam spent almost a minute securing the phone onto his hand and his wallet and key back into his pants with Mr. Black looking on, and then looked at Mr. Black expectantly. Mr. Black walked towards the elevators, matching his stride to Lam’s shuffling gait.
“So, Lam, what are you doing here?” Black said somewhat nervously, walking in fits and starts towards the elevators while looking at Lam. Lam stopped walking, and started swiping his fingers at his phone. Lam couldn’t concentrate on walking and keeping his arms from windmilling, much less walk and type on his phone at the same time.
“Didn’t you email me?” Lam asked through his phone, and continued walking towards what looked to be an elevator bank.
“That’s…so that’s what you were doing messing with your phone at security,” Mr. Black said, looking a little uncomfortably at the phone. “I was promoted a month ago, so I’m not your manager anymore. I told Watkins about you needing to work from home—he’s a prick, not just about you, but in general. He must have called you in anyway,” said Black as they waited in front of the elevator. “I’ll deal with him.”
Mr. Black and Lam ascended to the 12th floor alone on the elevator, other would be occupants looking at Lam and electing to take wait for the next one. They entered a fairly expansive space filled with short walled cubicles grouped in fours and fogged-glass walled rooms interspersed sporadically along the edges of the room. A thin carpet in muted gray adorned the floor. Lam glanced at the cubicles. If Wilkins made him start coming in, he would have to get a new keyboard and a chair to accommodate him. There were very few people in the office. Lam had left fairly early, prepared for delays.
A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.
“Meetings are usually, there, Mary’s already in the room,” Mr. Black said, pointing and walking towards one of the glass rooms. Lam dutifully followed Mr. Black as he walked towards the room and it’s open door.
“Mary, how’s it going.” Mr. Black said as he entered the room in front of Lam. Mary was seated at the conference table in the center of the room and looked up from tapping at a tablet.
“I’m fine Tim. How’s the promotion treating you?,” Mary replied, looking up from her tablet. Looking at Mary, Lam figured that he hadn’t needed to dress up, though Jim might have just tazed him or something upon Lam entering the building if Lam had dressed more casually. She had spiky, green tinged black hair, and was wearing jeans and a dark green hoodie, with an assortment of cheap plastic and metal rings adorning all of her fingers; Mary wasn’t the most professional looking person Lam would have envisioned, looking more suited to a rave or a music store than an office.
“Pretty much the same as working with you all, just a little more lucrative. Mary, this is Lam Marshall. Lam, Mary. She’s on your quality assurance team,” Mr. Black, or Tim, apparently, said, waving his hand towards Lam, and then towards Mary, presenting one to the other and then back.
“Lam? From the…good to finally meet you. We’ve been really impressed by your work. You’re probably the reason why Tim got promoted, isn’t that right, Tim?” Mary said, a fleeting look of consternation on her face as she looked at Lam standing and twitching beside Mr. Black.
“Probably,” Mr. Black replied, looking furtively at Lam. Lam started typing on his phone. Mary looked towards Tim disconcertingly.
“Just wait a second, Mary,” Tim said, waving his hand in dismissal at her glance.
“Thank you. Nice to meet you Mary,” Lam’s phone said. Lam continued typing. “Sorry about the phone. It’s much better this way than trying to understand my talking.”
“It really is, I’m sorry to say,” Mr. Black said. “Mary can tell you how much of a prick Watkins has been. Here, sit down Lam. You look like you’re about to collapse.” Tim pulled out a chair next to Mary, and gestured Lam into it. Lam shuffled towards the chair and slowly collapsed into it, face placid. He pressed his forearms into the edge of the conference table, fingers poised over his phone.
She looked uncomfortably at Lam, then back to Mr. Black and shook her head. “I’m not really comfortable with... But looking at how hard it is for you just moving around and typing on the phone…you go into the programs much more in depth than the rest of us, and we don’t really make recommendations for fixes either. Watkins has been complaining about your working from home and not coming to all of these useless team building exercises and seminars, and we’ve shown him the difference between your work and ours, but still…frankly, he has been kind of an asshole about it.” Mary trailed off, looking at Lam.
“My set-up at home has an over-sized keyboard, and I use a lot of macros and shortcuts, so typing speed isn’t as much of a problem as it was when I started out. Over the years, I’ve developed a lot of programs, or scripts really, that look through the programs and find common errors. I can read through the programs pretty fast, and I have a good memory, though I might take a comparatively longer amount of time for the same amount of work, just on the documentation. That isn’t much of a factor when I’m working from home though,” Lam said. He was glad that he had already typed out a statement explaining the dichotomy between his work output and his movement disorder. Though he wasn’t aware of the change in management, he had prepared for several different scenarios.
Mr. Black waited impatiently as the phone played Lam’s message. “I’m going to go find Watkins. Did he say what this meeting was about?” he said as he started towards the door.
“No. He does call a lot of meetings…” started Mary, and suddenly stopped, looking back down at her tablet, face reddening.
“Very important thing, meetings,” said a short, wiry man, walking in behind Mr. Black. A bow tie, Lam thought, incredulously. “Do you have a problem with effective management Ms. Sullivan?“ Mary shook her head, continuing to look at her tablet.
”First time actually showing up to work, and you’re riling up the natives, Lam is it? What kind of screwed up name is Lamentation Absolution Marshall anyway? I was convinced you made him up Black, outsourcing the job to India or something and collecting the pay,” the man said, sneering at Mr. Black. Mary gave a short gasp of shock at the man’s statement.
“Watkins, I told you not to call Marshall in, that he needed to work at home. Look at him?” Mr. Black said, pointing at Lam, standing over Watkins. Lam sat, looking at Mr. Black and Watkins, slightly twitching in his chair.
“You have no say in how I manage my department, Black. If he can make it in for this meeting, he can make it in for work, like every other employee here. He isn’t even in a wheelchair,” Watkins said, making a shooing motion towards Lam. ‘This guy really is a dick,’ Lam thought, heart sinking. ‘Calm, keep calm,’ Lam concentrated on keeping still.
“Watkins, shut up. I’m sick of hearing HR complaints about your management style, as it were. You were hired to curry favor with your uncle, but there is a limit to what I’m willing to endure to garner his approval and you’ve been fast approaching it,” said a short, plump woman in a gray skirt and white blouse as she walked into the room behind Watkins. He turned to look at her, a haughty expression on his face and moved to speak, but was interrupted by Mary.
“Good morning, Ms. Adams.”
“Good morning Mary. Could we have the room please, and intercept the rest of your team if they show up before we’re done. I want to discuss some issues with the gentleman here before your team meeting,” Ms. Adams said, sitting down across the table from Lam. Watkins sat at the chair next to her.
“Of course, ma’am.” Mary left the room, giving an encouraging look towards Lam before she closed the door.
“Ms. Adams, I was very adamant with Watkins about Mr. Marshall’s circumstances and he…,” Mr. Black started, and was interrupted by Ms. Adams.
“It’s good that you’re here Tim. I would have called you in otherwise. Please, sit.” Mr. Black sat at the chair abandoned by Mary, next to Lam. “And you, Mr. Marshall. I’m glad that you’re here too, although I wouldn’t have called you in, given your circumstances. Watkins here has been whining about your employment, and, despite his atrocious management style, the quality control division hasn’t been nearly as affected by Tim’s departure as I assumed it would be.” Ms. Adams said, looking at Lam. Watkins started to speak, looking irate, perhaps about the ‘whining’ or the ‘atrocious management style,’ but Ms. Adams raised her index finger towards his face without looking at him, and he deflated. He looked daggers at Lam, though why he would blame Lam for her characterization of Watkins, Lam had no idea. Lam wondered, briefly, about Ms. Adams management style. He didn’t think that publicly admonishing Watkins, especially so frequently, was appropriate in a professional environment, but dismissed the thought. Lam figured Watkins just brought it out of her, based on his personality.
“A cursory review of your work, Mr. Marshall, showed why that was the case. After learning of your circumstances, I told Watkins to leave you alone and thought about promoting you, but he insisted on this meeting beforehand. Well, Mr. Watkins, why are we here?
“I called him here to fire him,” said Watkins, a gleeful lilt to his voice.
“What the fuck, Watkins!” exclaimed Mr. Black, looking like he was going to leap across the table at Watkins.
“Language, please, Mr. Black, though I share the sentiment. Why are you firing your most effective employee, the one we discussed promoting?” Ms. Adams, asked pointedly, staring at Watkins.
“The rest of the team’s been whining about having to come to work during this fake pandemic. With him gone, they won’t have any excuse.”
“We had already agreed to allow non-management personnel to start working from home.”
“Am I in charge of my department or not? I never agreed to having my employees work from home when I have to show up to the office. It’s bad enough I have to wear this mask, I refuse to video chat with my employees while they laze about in bed.”
“Why do have to video chat with them? I hardly needed to chat with the team, just assign them projects and review the reports before sending them to the programmers,” Black interjected.
“You’re shoddy work is hardly the…I don’t have to explain myself to you, Black. Well, am I charge of my department or not?” Watkins asked, looking at Ms. Adams.
“How are you going to justify firing a disabled employee for working from home, especially in the middle of a pandemic. Why should the company spend the money on defending itself from the absolutely legitimate litigation he would no doubt be bringing against us for violating, whatever its called, the thing that protects disabled people from being discriminated against?” Ms. Adams said to Watkins, sounding particularly put upon.
“This is a right to work state, and I doubt he has enough saved up to hire a lawyer. It would be our word against his, and he can’t even talk,” Watkins said, getting up from the table and walking to the door. Jim, the security guard was standing there.
“It’s about time. That one,” said Watkins, pointing at Lam “has just been terminated. Throw him out.”
“Sure thing sir,” said Jim, looking absolutely giddy at the prospect. Hitching his pants up, he lumbered over to Lam, hand poised over his taser holster.
“Ms. Adams, really?” protested Mr. Black.
“Hold it, security person. Watkins, this situation isn’t close to being resolved,” Ms. Adams, said in a raised voice.
“I apologize for the inconvenience Ms. Adams, Mr. Black. It was nice to meet you,” Lam’s phone said, as he stood up, rolling his chair away from the table. “I believe that my presence may be an impediment to this discussion. If you would, please inform me whether I still work for here.” The voice was pretty shit at conveying sarcasm. Lam was feeling worn out. Just getting to the meeting had been a trying experience, much less meeting Watkins and now, this. Lam needed time, alone, at home, both to emotionally deal with maybe being fired and how to leverage his condition and the pandemic against Watkins, before Watkins realized that the meeting was being recorded. Leaving now, as if escaping, would both give him time, and, perhaps, make Ms. Adams feel sympathetic and, thus, more susceptible to future, emotional manipulation.
Mr. Black stood up with Lam, and leaned over to speak into his ear, grabbing Lam’s upper arm. “Listen, I…” Lam’s head jerked, the side of his head hitting Mr. Black in the nose. A loud crunch of breaking cartilage resounded into Lam’s ear. A hot spurt of blood shot into Lam’s ear, and caused a strange sensation; an immediate loss of equilibrium and dizziness. The sound, the blood, the actual impact between Lam’s head and Mr. Black’s nose, all combined caused Lam to violently recoil away from Mr. Black. Amplified by an ill-timed convulsion, Lam flung his head into the side of the conference table with a sickening thunk, Mr. Black’s grasp of Lam’s arm acting as a sort of pivot. Disoriented, Lam lost consciousness to Black bellowing in pain as he clutched his nose, Jim fumbling with his taser, Ms. Adams shrieking, and Watkins yelling at Jim.