Re: Notice of intent to evacuate

Dear Monsieur or Madam,

This expertly crafted letter constitutes my written notice that I will be departing from the plush comfort of my basement chateau on August 15^th, at the end of my ethological study into the life of the native species Tipsy Kickface, or alenniam drakus.

Enclosed you will find $63.00, which will cover the last portion of August I will spend in my chateau farting on all furniture in preparation for my tragic departure.    

I expect that my security deposit of $10,000, given to you in the form of gold bullion, will be refunded in full, since the room has been left in quasi-alright condition. I have full confidence you can remove the human pee stains and dried vomit in time.

I can be reached via homing pigeon or fire signal after the above date. Please take care not to do so, however, as I loathe human contact.

Sincerely,

The Farting Duchess Anastasia

“Becky,

So you’re eating at the cafeteria, that’s good. You can cook in the apartment Buttermilk pie becomes famous all across Spain because of Becky Strohl; families demand buttermilk pie at all their meals. The craze spreads. She has to drop out of the University and start her own dessert and bbq restaurant. Supplied by KC Masterpiece as an incredible advertising phenomenon she is launched into the dizzying stratosphere of 5-star restaurants. People take one bite of her incredibly awesome pies and swoon from the amazing sugar overload. Men throw themselves at her, cabs stop for her, women emulate her. Buttermilk pie sweeps the world. (Well at least where they have buttermilk) Becky becomes an icon of tastiness.

But someone else comes up with some second-rate, fly-by-night dessert made from recycled tires and cardboard. Becky’s empire collapses. The last time Becky Strohl is seen, she is eating buttermilk pie with her fingers and swigging KC Masterpiece. A sad end.

Better stay in school.

Love, Mama”

Maybe.

My boyfriend shook his head.

“You shouldn’t go to any meeting with this guy,” he told me, “but if you do, bring your mace, please.”
I nodded, with hesitation.

“He doesn’t ask for anything, though,” I pointed out. “Only tells me to call him.”

A few days prior, I had responded to, in my best estimate, roughly a million Craigslist ads for writing or editing jobs. I applied to financial investment companies, schools, organizations – any office environment that could offer me a desk, benefits, and career growth. Only one had emailed me, and naturally, it was not the one I had in mind.

The ad was titled “ADMINISTRATIVE 11:00-7:00PM FT” and the body was one short paragraph explaining that a small company in Annapolis wanted a long term assistant to help them out with writing for the website and handling customer service calls. That was it. It didn’t describe pay rate, specific duties, or even the company’s name.

When I’d run across this ad, I was already on a roll. In a few practiced clicks, I attached my resume and generic intent letter to a short “Hi, I’m so excited about this job!” email and sent it off, moving on to the next listing without looking back.

The initial ad had been suspect, to be sure, but email responses from scammers were absurdly easy to spot. The email I received back in this case, however, was slightly different:
“My name is Ahmad. My company placed an ad on Craig’s list for an administrative assistant position. I would like to meet with you. Please call (410) XXX-XXXX.”

It had some hallmarks of a scam – poor syntax, a Middle Eastern connection – but he only asked for me to call him, and the number wasn’t even some oddball 800 number. I was torn; cautious profiling based on past experience clashed with my liberal scorn of anything remotely racist.

I called him.

Once I talked to Ahmad for five minutes, it was clear he was no scammer. His accent was thick and though his enthusiasm for me as an employee did border on the unreal, he spent time explaining the company and the job and where his business was located. He did not once mention a relation to an African prince or the need to have money wired in order to review my application. Much more comfortable, I set up a meeting for the following day.

At 7:45am the next day, I found the address.

Two large black gates framed on either side by seemingly animate, roaring golden lions. Something you might see out front an embassy, or an eccentric celebrity’s house, perhaps.

Ahmad had warned me his office and his house were the same, and that he lived on a five acre lot, but he didn’t mention it was also a farm. I parked beside an inexplicable twenty other cars in a dirt lot. Behind a large house in the foreground, I saw a small building to the left, chicken coops, and other equipment and small buildings I couldn’t identify.

Then there were the cats. They sauntered all over the property, mewling and batting at wisps in the air. I counted a dozen, but some disappeared behind buildings and others appeared from behind cars, and for all I know it may have been one very ninja-like cat.

With some time left before the interview, I took a few breaths and checked how I looked in my rearview.
I’m a terrible introvert and hate interviewing. An interview is essentially an impromptu, impossible-to-completely-prepare-for test of my speaking abilities with a complete stranger (or I shudder to think: strangers). In other words, my worst nightmare.

The extra time before the interview was beneficial, as it allowed me to compose myself and force my mind to settle before entering the unfamiliar situation. I pulled out my phone to organize my calendar, breathing a small sigh of composure.

The passenger side window suddenly boomed, jolting me out of my Zen state and sending my heart into space. A bushy bearded man peered in to me through a dirty window and waved. He then abruptly turned and walked into the house.

My composure shot, I left the car and followed him in.

Thankfully, blissfully, I needn’t have worried. Ahmad didn’t ask me a single question or give me any “imagine a customer is angry at you…” tests at all.

I should have known driving up that this would not be that kind of meeting.

After taking me downstairs to his basement (I checked my bag for my mace), Ahmad showed me his office. Piles of paperwork on every flat surface and hundreds of business cards pinned to corkboards were only the beginning of the chaos. Two small rolling chairs squeezed between dusty columns of forgotten boxes and my knees bumped into his large desk multiple times. Old computer monitors peered at me across the mess, waiting.

Ahmad explained the company and what he did, his other branches, and what he found hard that he needed help with.

“I hate customers. I hate them.” His conviction was unexpected and it amused me. Of course, everyone has to deal with difficult customers, but everyone also knows they are a necessary evil.

He was amusing to listen to in other ways, too. Ahmad rambled on, often losing focus and wandering along bunny trails as he desired. After a large pause in his monologue he would gaze upward, stroke his beard, then lean forward suddenly and say, “Here, let me show you an example!”

For one such example, Ahmad right then pulled up Skype and called someone working in Egypt. The mystery man and Ahmad had a ten minute conversation in Arabic, and then with a note of finality Ahmad said goodbye and hung up.

He said, “There, you see.”

I took Spanish in high school.

I nodded obligingly.

Ahmad told me about his – no lie – thousand domain names. He’d bought them with the intention of replicating his website many times over, to bring in more traffic.

“But Google has gotten very smart,” he warned me with a hint of admiration in his voice. “Now Google can tell if you plagiarize. I put in a chunk of words, a few sentences, and it will tell me where all the sources are that this was stolen from.” He shook his head, almost sad. “This means I cannot plagiarize myself! I cannot copy. I must make whole new websites, and it is too much. I do not know what I will do.”

I am not a computer savant by any means, but what he described sounded to me like… the results from a search engine. Perhaps the experienced, older man knew much more than me; perhaps he knew much less. I said nothing.

Ahmad had owned his company since 1995 and it was clear he did things his own particular way, regardless of its conventionality. While the ‘interview’ progressed – I use that term extremely loosely now – work continued as normal for Ahmad and his assistant, Dolly, who joined us a third of the way into the meeting. Ahmad stopped talking to me multiple times to answer phones and argue about packages with the elderly Dolly.

Ahmad’s phone etiquette, I noticed, made his distaste for customers clear. Not for the first time, I wondered how he had stayed in business so long.

After talking to Dolly about the handling of an envelope the day before, Ahmad grew disgruntled and Dolly defended herself by weakly blaming someone in another office. Dolly was about 80 years old, I decided.

We returned to the meeting, but after some time Ahmad couldn’t think of anything else to say and called Dolly over to explain to me what I needed to do. Dolly stood there, mumbling, even more uncomfortable than I had been in my pre-interview anxiety.

“Well, I don’t know… I guess just work on the website and… answer the phones? What do you think Ahmad?”

Ahmad shrugged. “I don’t know. You know better.”

Apparently each thought the other knew something the first did not.

She then mentioned helping Ahmad’s kids with homework. I thought she was joking, but Ahmad nodded.
“Oh yes. Sometimes my children need help with homework, and I am so busy.” He gestured to a pile of boxes. I thought of the thousand domain names.

Dolly smiled, as though it pained her, and nodded. “I try to help them with what I can.” Dolly spent several minutes describing Ahmad’s three children.

I was a tutor at this time, so teaching children was not the most abhorrent idea, yet it wasn’t what one expects when applying for a desk job with an international company. Every minute with Ahmad was more unusual than the last.

Around this time, Ahmad’s wife brought us all down milky sweet, hot tea in teacups, poised over delicate saucers. I thanked her, but she said nothing as she turned around and shuffled back up the stairs.
“That was my wife.” Ahmad explained redundantly.

It was now over an hour into the interview and I had spoken four sentences. Ahmad had not asked me anything, but would occasionally pause in what he was saying and stare at me, as though he expected me to sprout fins and swim away.

Ahmad did this now, while we were drinking the tea. I smiled and mumbled something about how good it was.

He stood up. “Let me show you my peacocks.”

We left the tea and Dolly behind in the basement as he led me back out of the house. We walked through the small building I’d noticed earlier. It was a new office he was preparing, he told me. At first I was somewhat relieved; he sees that it’s a mess down there in his basement too, I thought, prematurely. We entered the building and I realized with mild horror it was the mother ship from whence the basement mess had originated. Tables were piled almost to the ceiling with paperwork, envelopes, random equipment, boxes, and other, smaller tables. Dust frolicked in the air as we entered, and I could taste mustiness on my tongue. A small path was carved through a pile of broken telephones, and I followed Ahmad through it.

“I just have to clean it up some first before we can use,” he told me, casually.

The mess certainly took one aback, but Ahmad’s understatement and unpredictable mannerisms pushed the situation into the absurd.

I suppose you may have realized by now, in addition to being introverted, I enjoy organization. We all have a dirty room sometimes, to be sure – a messy desk, perhaps – but this, this was worthy of a spot on Hoarders. Did he know he could be a TV star? I didn’t know if he owned a TV.

As we toured the dusty space, he indicated one side of the room.

“This would be where your desk and things would go.” I nodded, once again thinking his quick interest in me was surreal. To my relief, we only spent a few minutes in the office space before we went out the back door. Just outside, he pointed. “Look.”

Directly in front of me I saw a lawn table and chairs, caked in snow from a recent downfall – nothing spectacular. He gestured again. There: to the side stood a large enclosure, in which pranced three large male peacocks. He hadn’t been kidding.

The peacocks ruffled their feathers. As I neared, they glided sedately to the far side of the cage, putting on what appeared to me to be a show of cool, bored apathy.

The cold didn’t bother them at all, Ahmad informed me. Though I was dressed for an interview with black suit pants, heels, and a blazer covering a nice white blouse, Ahmad nonchalantly put a small, dirty bucket of pellets into my hands and told me how to feed the birds.

I was learning not to be surprised, so I smiled and did as he instructed. The peacocks eyed me with distrust.

“They are very smart,” he said, “they will not eat unless they also have water.” He dragged a large water bucket that had frozen solid from their cage back into the new office building. “I leave it here for it to melt from ice,” he explained, filling the now empty food bucket with fresh water for them in the meantime.

After watching the peacocks for a few minutes, we began our walk back towards the front of the property. He had long since run out of job-related things to say, and rambled idly. I asked if he had any questions for me.

“No, no,” he said, apparently surprised I would even suggest such an idea. “I have no questions. When can you tell me your decision?” I told him I had other interviews that week, and would let him know by Friday. He nodded. “Ok.”

It seemed all I’d had to do was email him for me to secure the position. I’d spoken all of a couple dozen words. He’d mentioned he liked that I had a degree and spoke Spanish, and I told him I could write for websites, but it still felt much easier than it should have been. Perhaps their vague ad and unique work style had not attracted many applicants.

We neared the lot where I was parked, and I absently glanced around. My gaze froze.

An enormous bird sat perched on a fence behind Ahmad’s house. It was the size of a Labrador and had shiny black feathers that encased the whole body, except the rubbery neck and head that protruded from the top. Its eyes were small and severe, and seemed to watch us pass even as it used its beak to clean its feathers. The animal was too big to be a vulture, I thought, and didn’t have the vulture’s red head. It wasn’t another pet; it had no tether, cage, or food. It was too close to the house and too relaxed to be a wild bird. It was so supremely out of place, I couldn’t fathom what it was.

Perhaps it was a black guardian, I imagined, as my heels crunched through frosty grass and dirt. It certainly looked the part: a large black mass of life, huddled on a brown fence powdered with winter. Apart of life, but not belonging. Watching without cease.

Or perhaps it was a ‘who’ instead of a ‘what’. Maybe Ahmad had made a bad deal with someone long ago, before he came to the United States. He was desperate and needed money for his family, I invented, and fell through on a deal with one of his colleagues, thereby ruining the other man’s fortunes and securing Ahmad’s. He got what he wanted, but the other man’s sorrow and tragedy, and Ahmad’s own burning shame never left him. Ahmad came to United States with his his family and started a business. He grew successful and even needed extra help. Yet the black cloud of regret and shame followed him. It flew beside him when he traveled, stalked him in his sleep, and perched on the fences of his home. Ever watching, ever silent, ever knowing.

The falter in my step didn’t register with Ahmad and we continued along. He said nothing about the enormous bird a few feet from his home. When we reached my car, I assured him I would let him know my decision soon, and we parted ways. I got into my car.

I leaned my head back on the headrest and closed my eyes. Did I imagine the bird? Was I letting my tired self dip a little too far into the unusual? I knew I hadn’t invented it, though, and that most likely it was only a wild bird that they fed on occasion, or just happened to be there when I passed. Even so, it seemed like an omen. A last, eerie, surreal decoration on top of this many layered cake of the dreamlike.

Two days later I checked Ahmad’s craigslist posting, and it had been flagged for removal. Someone else had the same initial suspicion, I thought, but decided not to take the risk. It made me sad.

I couldn’t take the job, but I wanted to. I could see Ahmad’s need for help, and his willingness to trust in someone willing to apply. I envisioned seeing the beautiful peacocks and the watchful black cloud every day during work. Ahmad’s wife quietly bringing tea and Dolly teaching his kids about phonetics. And leaving every day, as I did that morning, through the tall lion gates.