Alia's Adventures in Illumination

Diana lit another smoke, inhaling deeply as she watched the young couple kiss: tattooes, pierceings, skinny hipster pants and studded belts, his hand groping her ass. Diana hated them. Not personally; it was nothing personal. They were just young, beautiful, and in love, and Diana was not. Then the crowd surged, the kids were swept away, and New York honked and blared around her once again. She sighed, shifted the strap of her heavy laptop case and headed out into the stalled traffic, ignoring the red light, weaving between cars, clutching a paper cup of coffee (light, one sugar), the lid already smeared with expensive red lipstick. She stopped outside the office to drain the coffee cup, toss the empty in the trash, and take a last, loving drag on her cigarette. She knocked off the coal and left the rest of it on the [water hose thingy] outside the building. Some homeless guy would would claim it before five minutes passed, lipstick stains notwithstanding.

The elevator was crowded, hot after the grainy November cold outside. No one talked. It was Monday. On Five, the elevator dinged, the doors slid open, and Diana pushed her way out, arriving into the sea of grey cubicles and morning chatter—which ended abruptly once her underlings caught sight of her. Diana glared at all of them and stalked into her office.

She was five minutes late today, and she knew this would be the topic of everyone’s conversation, since she was usually here before any of them arrived. They all kept a constant lookout for any chinks in her armor, any weapon at all they could use to hurt her. Diana threw her coat on a chair and slammed her office door. She knew they were all out there, muttering away to each other, guessing wildly about what must have made her late. There was probably a betting pool. She wanted another cigarette, but smoking was forbidden in all City buildings now, and she would not give any of them the satisfaction of nailing her for smoking indoors.

There was a tap at the door. It opened a crack and Ed, her secretary, put his head around the door. Ed looked like a Hereford steer, red, meaty and vapid, with a curly little scruff of pale hair, but he was fairly competent. “Ms. Cassel, Mr. Reed called earlier. He’d like you to call him.” Diana swore silently. The one morning in her entire life she was late.

“I told him you were in the restroom,” Ed said, then removed himself from the doorway. Diana wanted to slap him. The nerve of thinking he could curry favor by covering for her. Someone would have to be hurt today. Diana swung the door open and looked around. She saw that little snot Rafe with a donut in his hand.

“Rafe,” she barked. “I want a full status report for that project I gave you last week. Ten minutes!” Rafe looked stunned. She had given it to him at 4:50 on Friday afternoon, and it was now 9:15 on Monday. Diana shut the door again and settled happily at her desk. They all resented her and took little trouble to hide it, so she made their lives as miserable as possible. She might as well get some pleasure out of this stinking, lousy, suffocating excuse for a career.

Director of Marketing for the NYC Department of Finance was not what Diana had in mind when she graduated from Smith with a degree in Communications. But, at 56, this was where she had been stuck for the last twelve years, and all she planned to do now was twist the leash until she could retire. Not that her pension was going to be any kind of cake walk, but still. It beat being here every day.

At first she had been excited - it was a big position, and she had a lot of responsibility, with fifteen people under her. But soon the suits upstairs put the thumbscrews on, and Diana had to beat more work out of her team than they could really do. She had tried being nice and going to bat for people, but all it got her was reprimands and a pay cut, while the sonofabitch she covered for got a promotion. That was the end. Diana started looking out for Number One, and God help whomever got ground underfoot. This did not sit well with the rest of the department. The mutual resentment built and crystalized into the web of nasty backstabbing viciousness that currently characterized the department, but Diana no longer cared. The work had to get done, and she had to get credit for any that did get done; mistakes were to be blamed on someone else, and that was all there was to it.

She got Ed to get Reed on the phone; fortunately he didn’t mention her lateness. But he wanted an update on the redesign of the Department’s website, the very project she had sadddled Rafe with on Friday. “We have a status meeting this morning, Sir.” The old bastard had handed it to her minutes before she handed it to Rafe. Diana’s head began to pound. What the hell did he think, redesigns hid in trashbaskets just waiting to be pulled out? She at least knew the expectation was ridiculous, but Reed seemed to forget people actually had weekends off.

Diana squeezed her hands around her head, willing the headache to go away. She fished a couple of Advil from the bottle in her her desk drawer, tossing back the little pills with a swig of bottled water. Diana lived on Advil. The bottle rejoined all the other crap in her desk, random paperclips, pens, Post-it notes, rubber bands, and lip balm, as Diana prepared for the meeting with Rafe and the web team.

The meeting room fairly reeked of hate. Rafe’s team consisted of three men, all geeks of one stripe or another; a bluff, one-of-the-guys woman named Heather who wore khaki pants, played softball, and was happily married with two teenage kids; and Elise, a lesbian with slim, perfect ankles, short tailored skirts, exquisitely cut hair, and degree in computer science from MIT. Rafe was a pie-baking Teddy bear, a kind, soft, warm sweetheart who brought home-made snacks into the office to share. Diana particularly detested him. “Well?” she snapped, as she pulled her chair up to the chipped, ugly table, “What have you got for me?”

The meeting room did have windows, thank God, but that was all it had in the way of charm. It was an ugly room lined with dented metal filing cabinets, painted a particularly vile shade of grey-green. The table hearkened back to the days of in-office smoking, its Formica top edged with little charred stripes where countless cigarettes had burned down to the nub during meeting after endless meeting. The rest of the place was no better. Everything about the entire department was grim and depressing and desperately needed a coat of paint. By Diana’s fiat, no one was allowed to have personal items in their cubbies, though people did sneak in the odd photo of their spouse or children. Diana’s own office was a model of Spartan austerity, relieved only by the sleek silver skin of her laptop, and the flash of expensive, brightly-colored clothing that she draped around it.

Diana spent her money on clothes. Today she wore an elegant charcoal silk knit pencil skirt with a cranberry cashmere cowl-necked sweater, and none of that crap from China either; this was the real deal, straight from Italy. Her stockings were Wolford, and her shoes were Comme il Faut. That raincoat she had thrown on the chair when she arrived was a designer number with a dull copper gleam and ruffled hem. It had cost $450 on sale, and rich women stopped to stare at it.

All of which gave Diana a nice feeling of accomplishment. If her apartment was a crappy fifth-floor walkup almost as depressing as her office, who cared? Nobody saw that but herself. She turned her attention back to the meeting.

Labels: nanowrimo 2009