Seeing Travis Colt in my favorite coffeeshop, when I had no idea he was in town, set off a series of internal alarms… but I ignored them all.

In my defense, I’m not sure what a rational response would have been. Now, I have to write up a report on the whole thing for HR. Over and over they assured me I wasn’t in any trouble – they did, however, realize certain structural improvements needed to be made. Passive voice, of course. I wouldn’t expect HR to make anything other than cosmetic changes. Still, they insisted I could help them avoid similar circumstances in the future.

Similar circumstances? That seemed unlikely. I decided not to restrain myself, to tell them how it felt, what I actually said, did, thought. Someone had to lift the veil, the shadowy cloak of self-importance, that made them believe they would’ve known how to handle an unprecedented situation. Documentation is a panacea for HR, a shield, but I’m more convinced than ever that no explanation, written or otherwise, can reveal the nature of human interactions. Professional or personal.

***

I’m not exactly young, but I’d never managed anyone before my promotion, and Travis was the first person I’d had sole responsibility for hiring. Before sending him an offer sheet, I didn’t spend too much time worrying about whether he was the “right” person for the role. When I was an anonymous grunt reporting up the chain, I scoffed at managers who spent months trying to fill a position. We’re talking about clerical work here, I ranted internally, spreadsheet monkeys plugging in numbers and writing a few formulas. It’s not that hard. Managers would interview, re-interview, administer personality tests and aptitude tests and probably other tests I hadn’t heard of. Each manager had a pet interview question they believed could unearth hidden qualities about each candidate. Elementary school stuff, like, “If you could be any kind of vegetable, what would it be, and why?” I could barely believe how many people agreed to submit to this degrading parade of supposed skills and talents… until I remembered I had submitted to all of it and more. For the privilege of entering numbers on a computer in exchange for (barely) enough money to stay afloat on the unforgiving river of daily life.

I swore not to replicate these managers’ tedious self-seriousness if I ever got a promotion. Which I did, after seeing a chance to apply for a job with most of the same responsibilities but more pay. Even as the managers congratulated me, I stayed completely clueless as to what made them pick me. I possessed very few unique qualities – besides my pliability, which, I see now, made me the perfect middle manager. And, probably, a target for Travis.

When I officially became a senior data science administrator, I inherited two employees from my predecessor, who’d quit suddenly and without another job lined up, an unthinkable act that shook but didn’t shatter management’s worldview. My new direct-reports performed their tasks well enough, but neither would’ve been my choice. If I could have combined them into a single person, retaining only their desirable qualities, they would’ve made the ideal employee… but that’s ridiculous, magical thinking, totally useless for getting through my daily tasks.

Sofia was what people used to call a go-getter, though “rock star” is probably more appropriate now. When she finished a project, she never relaxed or clicked around on the internet. Instead, she pinged me incessantly, asking for new work, offering to help with my tasks, making suggestions for improving workflow and user experience, and on and on. During a video call right after I got the promotion, I could tell she’d been crying – her puffy red eyes accentuated the stiff, perfunctory hello she gave me – and I gleaned from various chats and channels that she’d applied for the same job. Apparently, Sofia told anyone willing to listen that she considered me a mediocre employee, an insult that barely even registered as one to me. She didn’t realize my mediocrity and pliability combined to make me an unstoppable force capable of cutting my way, promotion by promotion, through the soft midsection of a bloated bureaucratic profit machine. 

For most of her life she’d probably been told to be proactive, to demonstrate an eagerness to overperform, as though this would somehow help her live her dreams or one of the other trite slogans fed from slop buckets to low-level workers in their dingy pens. But her efficacy made her indispensable at the lowest rung of the ladder, cutting off any chance of advancement. Without her to step on, no one could move up.

It seemed Sofia was incapable either of learning or changing, or both. Not only did she approach her work in exactly the same way when I became manager, she logged on even earlier and repeatedly sent messages about staying online after work hours. Sofia genuinely believed her work ethic exacted some kind of psychological revenge on me, that her constant displays of competence wounded my ego. I couldn’t have cared less. Her messages annoyed me, yes, but I also knew that if I felt squeezed, I could throw extra work at her and she would jump at the opportunity like a puppy eager to show its newly learned obedience.

Jason was a different story. He left me alone, which I loved. Except sometimes – often – it turned out he wasn’t doing any work at all. When I first got the promotion, Jason congratulated me profusely before telling me, in a grave and formal tone, he showed up for a paycheck, nothing more, nothing less, and if I really needed something from him I should make that clear, because otherwise I shouldn’t expect him to prioritize or expedite any task. I had been in his position, he pointed out, so I must understand where he was coming from. Again with my pliability – I told him not to worry about me. As long as he finished what he was supposed to, there wouldn’t be any issues.

I could go days without speaking to Jason or even messaging him directly. This usually suited us both, especially since Sofia occupied more than her share of my time. But when an important project or other mandate from on high touched the invisible bubble around us, I found myself scrambling to keep it from popping. It was almost impossible to get him on the phone, and messages went unanswered for hours. I hated to be the kind of boss who constantly checked in, and I certainly didn’t want to admonish another adult for transgressions I didn’t believe mattered much in the context of all human activity under the sun. Fortunately for me, Jason understood himself and the work: When I spelled out deadlines and expectations, he submitted whatever I asked for exactly on time. Not a minute early or late. No above and beyond for Jason, no signs of a highly motivated self-starter, and forget about exceptional communication or detail-oriented work habits.

My team’s yin and yang approach apparently served us well. After overseeing my first major project, the managers told me they had some good news and scheduled a meeting for later that day. Thinking a raise might be coming my way, I allowed myself the rare indulgence of excitement.

Within a few seconds, they shot down my silent hope. The bosses smiled – giant, toothy, proud smiles, like they’d raised a good boy – and informed me I would have the opportunity to grow my team. I would be making my first hire.

Well. I tried to hide my disappointment. Did they truly believe, in their heart of hearts (if they had hearts of hearts), that I cared about growing my team? More employees merely meant more data processed, organized, analyzed, which presumably made more money for strangers who didn’t know me and never would.

I didn’t say this, obviously. I smiled my own dumb smile, thanked them profusely, probably uttered some platitudinous nonsense about not letting them down and appreciating their belief in me. Pliability.

But after the meeting, I was surprised – and disappointed – to feel hints of revival, energy, enthusiasm pricking the outer edges of my consciousness. Was I as susceptible to encouragement, a pat on the head, as a pet? Did I still have some respect for authority, despite what I told myself? Or was it the sense of autonomy – hiring someone I chose, without evaluations and feedback and second-guessing – that lifted my mood? Had the managers known I’d react this way? Did they understand me better than I understood myself? Had their management training worked, had it accurately predicted my renewed sense of purpose and improved motivation/engagement?

I would fight back against their imagined clairvoyance. No personality tests, no waffling, no second, third, or fourth interviews. All I needed was someone capable and willing.

The obvious argument against my approach is: Look what happened. But I suspect no amount of background checking, testing, interviewing, and so on could’ve revealed Travis’s inner self – if he had one at all.

***

My bosses dumped this supposedly exciting news on me at a particularly busy time: Q4. I wanted a languid holiday pace, not tedious extra hours spent searching for a person who might help us achieve the marginal improvements in output and efficiency the managers desperately wanted. I also assumed hiring in the winter months would be especially challenging, because who, other than the desperate, unqualified few, would actively be looking for a job this time of year?

A symptom of my naïve distance from unemployment – within a week I’d received several hundred resumes, most of which I dismissed after a glance. It was a depressing reminder of my hunt a few years earlier, when my own desperation bled onto my resume and cover letters, traveling digitally to faceless recruiters and HR reps with fingers hovered over imaginary rejection buttons they pressed almost as soon as my applications arrived. Which made me more desperate, of course, compounding the problem and leading me to express profound gratitude for the chance to accept mind-numbing work at a rate much lower than what I’d told myself was respectable.

Now I was the faceless human responsible for denying opportunity, money, hope to others. At the end of each day, I had to purge the horrible, anxious pit creeping steadily up my gut toward my heart every time I sent a form rejection letter.

When Travis’ application came through a week after the job posting went live, it looked error-free, polished, professional, relevant. He seemed amiable during his screening, and he showed up early and dressed appropriately for his full video interview. Asked questions politely, didn’t seem overly concerned with knowing every detail about the job, what his days would look like. That was one benefit of our remote-first culture, I robotically repeated, hearing my bosses’ voices reverberating through my vocal cords. He had flexibility to work on his own time, and I was nothing if not an accommodating manager.

This guy is fine, I thought, convinced that other managers lacked my intuition and hiring competence, which went a long way toward explaining why our company tended toward inefficiency, hand-wringing, over-conceptualization, and other forms of aggravating tedium.

Travis started right before Thanksgiving, and I knew instantly I’d made a good choice. We were under the gun – Sofia messaged me nonstop about the overload of work, the questions she had about certain pivot tables and datasets, the issues she had with process and timelines and expectations. Jason was absent as ever, but at the end of each week his spreadsheets came in according to schedule, with their usual number of errors. Within the first week, before he’d even fully completed his training, Travis was handling small datasets I threw his way. By late December he’d been fully onboarded, and I felt confident sending him as much work as I sent Jason.

For all my reticence about getting roped into a position of more obligation for the same pay, the results pleasantly surprised me. My team got an unexpected year-end bonus for our productivity boost. Sofia and Jason fist-pumped and smiled from their blurred-out rooms. Travis took the news sanguinely. He was always the first to leave our meetings, his feed disappearing instantly, reshuffling the screen for the rest of our extended goodbyes. This time was no different – he didn’t even stay on to crack a beer or glass of wine, do the virtual holiday toast I’d planned. But I reminded myself not to worry about the personalities of my direct reports. He did his job and helped bring in extra money for all of us. That was enough.

During the annual dark week between Christmas and New Year’s, I disconnected and relaxed. Cleansed my mind of cells stacked on cells, cells filled with data, formula cells spitting out answers automatically, cells highlighted in slightly different neutral shades of gray and beige – dead cells in need of erasure and living cells evolving, adapting, telling stories in the language of probabilities and inferences.

***

Nothing changed in January. Sofia pinged me at 7am the day we returned, and I spent most of my first morning back writing a detailed email to Jason. He responded within a few minutes; I wouldn’t hear from him the rest of the week. I continued funneling tasks to Travis, and he kept eating them up, churning through them with precision and speed that outshone even Sofia.

My managers remained impressed. At a strategy meeting, they revealed that my team had been selected as the test group for proprietary AI technology our company was developing. We would feed our data into the model, and eventually the model would handle the most tedious aspects of analysis, which would give us our time back. To do what? I wondered, knowing the answer was either more work or get laid off.

Travis was my first choice for the project, given his unblinking acceptance and robotic work ethic. Was Travis AI? No one I’d ever worked with possessed his combination of efficacy and ambivalence. At the end of our team’s weekly huddle on Thursday, I asked (never ask!) Travis how he felt about taking on this new project, which was high priority and high visibility and lots of other highs.

He went silent and stayed almost perfectly still. I thought his screen was frozen. When I asked if he was still there, if he’d heard what I’d said, he calmly responded, “I don’t really have the bandwidth for that right now.”

His tone – its flat, self-satisfied confidence – caught me so off guard I couldn’t find my words. Sofia mercifully stepped into the silent void and offered to take on the project. I accepted, annoyed and flustered, then ended the call.

The rest of the day I tilted slightly off-axis, wobbling like a top beginning its final rotations. Cells on the screen collided, blurred, and I tried responding to long-neglected emails as a distraction. Nothing worked, my productivity was shot, I couldn’t dip into my typically full well of willpower to slog through my mind-numbing work. I needed to leave my apartment, get some sun – vitamin D might restore a semblance of normalcy.

Like so many other transplants, the steady, reliable sun was one of my favorite parts of living in Los Angeles. Somehow, I routinely forget how much I needed it, how I craved the invisible chemical reactions that take place when radiation bakes my skin and illuminates my mind. Isn’t it strange, I wondered (allowing my brain a free moment, a chance to go slightly off the well-manicured rails work had built for it), that the human eye never evolved to look directly at the giant nuclear reactor fueling all life? Shouldn’t a powerfully resistant, mutant eye have evolved at some point? There were obvious scientific reasons it hadn’t happened, I knew. But I couldn’t help thinking there were more poetic explanations for our feebleness, that it was no accident we couldn’t stare at the source of our power, just like it was no accident the sun and moon appeared the same size in the sky. But these were errant, infantile thoughts.

Small sweat droplets crept to the surface of my forearm, and my mind inevitably returned to earth… and to Travis. If he was busy, he was busy – I’d given him plenty of work, after all. And he hadn’t started all that long ago. Maybe he was part of this new generation who felt overly comfortable stating their needs, their wants, their emotions and desires clearly, unafraid of retaliation or missed opportunities. I certainly couldn’t relate, but I should commend Travis for admitting he couldn’t handle a new task rather than trying to impress me by stretching himself too thin. This was social progress! Maybe my lack of understanding was just a sign of aging.

I turned the corner and started walking down a steep hill toward the main business drag. In the middle of the empty street, beneath perilously thin palm trees standing at attention, a blonde woman with dark roots, tight pink shorts, and a white sports top stood in front of a tripod. She began talking – I couldn’t hear the words clearly, only the bouncy uptick of her exaggerated tone – then proceeded to do some kind of dance. I smiled to myself at her lack of self-consciousness, her comfort, ease, and the expectation that I would pass without staring, commenting, interrupting.

For some reason, the scene made me think I should follow up with Travis. I pulled out my phone and tapped out a quick message.

hey, just wanted to say thanks for being honest about ur workload

lemme know if you need help with anything, or if i should take something off ur plate

I stuck my phone back in my pocket, self-discipline that lasted less than two minutes. New message. I tapped the alert and saw only:

👍

Hmmm. The old “thumbs up.” Why did it sound like “fuck you” in my head? I allowed two more minutes to pass, then checked my phone again.

Nothing. I thought that if I had received a similar message from my boss when I was in Travis’ position, I might have broken down and wept – in what world did anyone respond to such empathy and grace with a callous emoji? Was this simply the way people communicated now? Did I have any right to be angry – no, not angry – disturbed? Or was it anger? I couldn’t even sort out my own emotions.

I reminded myself: My feelings were not unique, Travis was not unique, we worked for the same company and were, despite our supposed boss-employee relationship, indistinguishable to the vast majority of the world. He and I were nobodies, spreadsheet monkeys, human puppets, automatons. Sofia could handle the AI assignment, and I could pick up whatever slack was left. None of this was a huge deal.

As I returned to my apartment, iced coffee in hand, I saw the blonde dancing woman sitting on the curb, staring at her phone. Again she ignored me, but I knew she could feel my eyes boring into her, willing her to look up, meet my gaze, smile, nod, or yell at me to fuck off. Any kind of acknowledgement to confirm my existence.

***

January rolled into February into March. Time meant little to me. Only the expanding length of the days felt relevant, and data flowed without regard for time. As the AI project pushed forward, I found myself committing more and more effort to it, offering input on the model, where it succeeded, where it let us down. Sofia dutifully – and annoyingly – provided updates on the extra work she was taking on. I knew she was creating a paper trail in the hopes of eventually getting a raise. It wouldn’t work, but it wouldn’t do any good to warn her.

Jason steadily cleared the lowest bars, but I practically worshipped this consistency compared to Travis’ regression. Not only had he refused the AI project, but even his regular work had started coming back incomplete – if he turned it in at all. When I tried to nudge him about his progress, he would always respond with some comment about his bandwidth.

I’m doing the best I can with my bandwidth.

My bandwidth is a little tight right now.

I just don’t have as much bandwidth as I thought I did.

I offered to help him expand his bandwidth, asked him if he needed me to better manage his time, or if he wanted to consult with one of the company’s mental wellness professionals. But he always demurred with plausible enough excuses about getting to know the systems, workflow, culture, and so on. I didn’t want to push. If I got anything out of Travis, it was better than the nothing his absence gave me just a few months earlier.

Six months – to the day! – after I hired Travis, I called a meeting. It went unremarkably well for 45 minutes. As we approached the end of the hour, I noticed movement disturbing one corner of my screen. Travis was shifting back and forth in his chair uncomfortably, running his hand through his hair. I could see redness rising from his neck to his cheeks and forehead. Then he broke out into some kind of attack, or fit – his eyes rolled up and he leaned his head back, gazing toward the ceiling, like he was going to sneeze. Instead, he started coughing, hacking, then left the screen… he returned a few seconds later, chugging an enormous jar of water. His eyes looked bloodshot through the computer, and he started scratching his head, his neck, his chest.

I muted him. “Are you ok?” I asked, devoid of any other language. Sofia and Jason stared, bug-eyed. Travis intensified his scratching – then he took off his shirt and looked like he was screaming before he disappeared from the screen.

A ding rang out from my computer. Message from Travis.

something’s wrong… need to take some time off.

I shook my head, told Sofia and Jason we were done, ended the meeting. Messaged Travis back.

yeah, that looked bad. do you need anything? are you ok?

👍

The thumbs up again. I tried a different tack.

keep me posted… happy to help if you need help.

Nothing. I waited the rest of the day, not finishing any work, hoping I might get some human confirmation from Travis in his moment of weakness. But he remained shielded as ever, impossible to penetrate, a mind made unbreakable by pure, unrepentant disengagement.

***

Travis vanished for a week, burning through all his sick days. Technically, I wasn’t allowed to message him, but his behavior genuinely worried me. I tried variations of checking in, asking if he was ok. No response.

Early Monday morning, I went for my usual coffee, a reward for continuing life for another week. I had to force myself outside, into the public, however briefly, before hunkering down for five days.

Waiting in line, I glanced up from my phone and almost stumbled into the person in front of me when I saw Travis sitting in a corner seat, alone, gazing intently into his laptop screen.

I stared him down, but he didn’t look up. He may not have even blinked. What was he doing here? Not just in LA, which I knew wasn’t the address he listed on all his official work documents, but at this coffeeshop, the one I went to every week. It couldn’t possibly be a coincidence.

I paid for my coffee and cautiously approached his corner, the farthest seat from the front door. He didn’t type or click; just stared, motionless. I was practically in his lap when I got a reaction, and only when I waved my hand between his face and computer, saying his name.

Travis looked up blankly. No trace of surprise or warmth, disgust or avoidance, appeared in the lines on his forehead, behind his gray-green eyes. I wasn’t even sure he recognized me until he spoke.

“Oh, hi,” he said.

“What are you doing in LA? You don’t live here, do you?”

“Not exactly.”

I waited for more explanation, even though I already knew I’d get nothing without prying it from his lips.

“Are you back at work?”

“Yeah.”

“What happened? It looked pretty serious.”

“Just a bad reaction.”

“Allergic?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Did you go to the doctor?”

He grimaced slightly, put his hands out to the sides, palms up – completely ambiguous, he could’ve sworn off doctors years ago, or he might have been an incurable hypochondriac. He offered no hints, no peek into his soul, not even an indication of whether he had a soul, or believed he did, or believed anything at all.

I couldn’t analyze Travis beyond the obvious: He didn’t want to talk to me.

“I hope it doesn’t happen again.” 

I hovered over him, trying to use my awkwardness to force him into offering more, if only to get rid of me. Travis was impervious to awkwardness. He looked at me calmly in the eye for so long I could see his left nostril flaring and a minor twitch in his lower eyelids.

“Well, I’m glad you’re ok. Are you working here for the day?”

That prompted a flurry of typing and a silent nod. I retorted with my own silent, sarcastic nod, then walked home, more confused than ever.

Why hadn’t I questioned him more? Asked how he’d found that coffeeshop, whether he knew I’d be there? Typical – the situation had surprised and overwhelmed me, and I left with no useful information, thinking of everything I could’ve and should’ve said far too late to make a difference. I kicked myself, but refused to return, to give in to Travis’ ambiguous force. Every few minutes, though, I looked over my shoulder to make sure he wasn’t following me.

***

My doorbell rang early the next morning. I ignored the digital chimes, the delivery guy would leave whatever package I’d already forgotten ordering. But when the chimes rang out again, I checked the video monitor. There, staring at me through the screen like he had so many times over the past six months, was Travis.

“Travis?” I said, like an idiot.

“Hi. Can I come in?”

 I couldn’t think of a plausible reason to refuse, so I buzzed open the door and watched Travis stomp past me, carrying a backpack stuffed nearly to bursting, with broken zippers replaced by plastic zip-ties. He exhaled an exasperated sigh, then flung his bag onto the couch and sat next to it, rubbing his eyes.

I tried to get my bearings.

“How do you know where I live?”

Travis shrugged nonchalantly. “I looked you up.”

Inside me a rage started to bubble, threatening to boil. But I had to stay cool – I was still his boss.

“What are you in town for? You don’t live here, right?”

“I’m kind of on an extended road trip.”

“OK, but… why are you at my apartment?”

“I thought it might be a good place to work while I sort out some stuff.”

He stunned me into paralysis. It was so audacious – but done with such quiet assurance, like it was normal – that I questioned my reaction. This wasn’t normal… was it? But looking at what he’d done objectively, I couldn’t find anything explicitly wrong. Working at a public coffee shop, ringing my doorbell, asking to come in. He’d violated unspoken rules, which was – what was it? I grasped for the word… an impertinence! Like I was some kind of Victorian aristocrat whose sensibilities had been offended. Did I really want to be that kind of person?

I told him he could take the couch for the day. Without saying anything else, Travis removed his laptop and started typing manically. He never attempted to make eye contact, initiate conversation, or take in his surroundings. A steady, quiet keyboard clicking urged me to leave him alone.

“Good talk,” I said sarcastically, not expecting a response. I would deal with him later – I had my own work to do. I was still his boss, so if he got his work done for the day, fine. Even if he did it from my apartment. It’s not like he was moving in. A single day was a minor inconvenience.

Two hours later, I got up for a glass of water. Travis sat on the couch, fixated on his computer, which had its entire screen filled with a video of a hydraulic press destroying various items: cans of soda, stress balls, clarinets, stacks of paper thousands of sheets thick. This went on for almost five minutes, entrancing me. Travis never flinched, never turned around, didn’t seem aware of my presence. Eventually I couldn’t stand the silence, the lack of acknowledgement, the… the whole situation.

“Hard at work?”

He didn’t even turn around while replying. “I think I’m done for the day.”

It was 2:30 in the afternoon. Did he not realize I was his boss? Was I no more than a face that showed up on his screen regularly, a mirage that served no actual function? I enjoyed skirting by on as little work as possible as much as the next middle manager, but the tacit agreement we all made (I thought) was that we would pretend to work.  Did he possess no self-awareness? More confidence than anyone I’d ever met? Maybe these questions had answers, but I realized Travis wouldn’t be the one to give them to me.

“Well, I’ve still got some stuff to do the rest of the day, so maybe you can find somewhere else to watch those videos.”

Barely mumbling his assent, Travis packed up his computer, slung his bag over his shoulder, and disappeared into the beating California sunlight without saying goodbye.

***

As 7am approached the next morning, I gritted my teeth. Sure enough, a ring signaled Travis’ arrival at 6:59. I opened the door, he muttered hello, then strode past me to sit down on the couch and open his computer, like he’d been there for years – forever – and had every right to work in his section of my apartment.

“Good morning,” I said with brutality. Travis looked at me and nodded, then pulled up a browser window and began watching videos of military-grade projectiles destroying a lifelike dummy in hyper-slow-motion. I watched as some kind of cannon ammunition the size of a human head cratered into the jellylike model, exploding it outward into millions of pieces as the artillery round passed through it, unphased, unmoving. When the video cut to the host removing his protective gear while sitting in the seat of what appeared to be a tank, I interrupted.

“Travis, I gotta say – I don’t really know what’s going on here. Like – what the hell are you doing? I mean, I’d be happy to let you use my place to work for a few days, but you didn’t give me any heads up, no info on how long you need to work here. I mean, I’m technically your boss, and –”

“Technically?”

“I am your boss. This is all… it’s weird, man. I’m giving you assignments and you’re blatantly ignoring them. You’re just watching random videos. In my apartment. On my couch.”

He looked at me without speaking. Was he smiling? Leering? For years I’d taken the inscrutability of others as a given not worth exploring, but now this cliché stared me right in the face, mocked my lack of access, my perpetual position outside a locked house with curtains drawn. 

“Your conditions of incarceration fascinate me,” Travis finally responded.

I once read – years ago, during a younger, more enthusiastic time in my life when I was actively trying to improve the person I could become – that anger is self-destructive because it surrenders your will to another person. But he’d pushed me too far. I started yelling.

“Are you fucking kidding me? No one is imprisoning you, Travis! Maybe I’m too nice – or a pushover, or crazy enough, or something – and I let you waltz into my apartment, unannounced, to do your work. But you don’t work! You stopped that charade right after your probationary period ended. You’ve barely acknowledged my existence, let alone thanked me. We’re not friends. Beyond the fact that we work for the same company, I know basically nothing about you.”

My chest heaved. I felt lightheaded, like my brain had left my body and I was now peering down on myself, wondering what I would do next.

Travis said nothing. In the background, another video had begun autoplaying. A succession of smaller bullets passed through a different gelatinous human model. I thought I could hear Travis breathing.

“I meant your conditions of incarceration,” he said after an eternity.

I didn’t want to hear any more. I told him I was going for a walk – a long walk – and that if he wasn’t out of my apartment by the time I got back, I’d report him to HR and call the police. I’d never threatened to call the police on anyone before, and even as I said the words, disgust flooded my body as the cool, indifferent version of myself ridiculed my own threats to call the cops. Travis’s behavior had overwhelmed my sense of self, the stoic, isolated identity I’d built. What I thought were my personal beliefs, my so-called morals or ideals or whatever, disintegrated more quickly than I could’ve imagined in response to his inscrutable boldness. I transformed into my animal self, defending my territory instinctively, wildly.

During my rant, Travis never budged. I had no choice but to follow through, but after I closed the front door behind me, a wave of terror crashed down, a horror at what I’d said and what I was now doing. I didn’t know this deeply antisocial man at all, had no idea what he was capable of.

A name flashed through my mind: Stephen Paddock. What he did was an atrocity, obviously, a crime against humanity. Yet it was the lack of explicit warning, the absence of a manifesto or explanation, that was the most terrifying aspect of his character. Without motivation, carrying only an apparently instinctive antipathy toward other people – an antipathy with no origin, a feeling that existed outside of cause and effect, space and time – he’d committed mass murder, a tragedy made smaller only by the daily mass casualties we see and ignore as an inevitable symptom of contemporary life.

So how could I know what Travis was planning? What kind of logic or code guided him?  I’d likely be a target if he got violent. Nothing I could do now except hope he left quietly.

I walked down the hill, where again the blonde in workout clothes had set up her tripod and was performing a different dance. I tried to lock eyes with her – tried to elicit a human reaction. For a second, she seemed to glance sideways, like she might recognize me on my usual path. But she simply returned to the tripod to examine her phone.

I kept walking.

Filling time was easy. Paid twenty dollars for a fancy salad from the café I always expect to be better despite its consistent mediocrity. Browsed through a record store without buying anything. Walked by the tent city at the park, where strung-out stick figures and composed workers wearing uniforms of the service industry cooked canned food over small propane fires. Traffic rushed past, spewing exhaust into my lungs. I turned back onto residential streets. Saw loquat trees, avocado trees, lemon and mandarin trees, blackberry bushes, tiny pomegranates forming at the base of crimson flowers. Unstoppable growth everywhere.

By the time I returned to my apartment, I had calmed down. But my anxiety spiked as I turned the knob – what would I find? Total destruction? Slashed couch cushions, broken dishes, a smashed television screen?

“Travis?” I called out before entering.

No answer.

I braced myself and swung the door wide open. The room was pristine – someone had cleaned it, arranged everything neatly in its place. It must have been Travis, but that seemed even more unlikely than any of the terrible things I’d imagined. In my room, I found my bed made – had I done that this morning? No. Probably not.

Guilt and shame flowed like acid through my veins, making me want to escape my skin, leave my body and fly straight into the sun. What had Travis done that was so bad, so threatening? Skirted work? Sat quietly in my living room? Sure, it was strange – no one could say otherwise – especially since he hadn’t even attempted to explain his behavior. But maybe I’d gone too far into my own interior to imagine mass murder and psychopathy. I wanted to apologize. For what, exactly, I wasn’t sure. But still. I couldn’t ignore the impulse.

***

I didn’t have anything else to add, really. HR already knew no one had heard from Travis Colt since that day – he hadn’t appeared online, hadn’t called into any meetings. Various staffers had tried to message, email, call him, but he’d fallen off the map.

A few months after Travis left my apartment, when my team had returned to some degree of normalcy, Jason uncharacteristically sent me a message. He said he’d recently visited Los Angeles, and had stayed in Venice. As he walked along the beach one evening, he swore he saw Travis in the near distance. Surprised, he began to approach him. When he got closer, Jason realized that Travis – if it was him – wasn’t lounging in the twilight sun. A backpack and a sleeping bag had been set up beside him, and it looked like he was arranging his scant belongings for the night.

he was homeless?? I typed incredulously.

i mean, this guy was homeless… i’m still not sure it was travis, i got weirded out and turned around

i know the feeling

especially after what happened to you

exactly

It was the last time I heard anything about Travis. But the phrase he’d used – your conditions of incarceration – popped into my head uncomfortably often. I heard the words at the start of every meeting, each time my phone buzzed with an incoming message, whenever I checked my inbox. The illusory incarceration that closed in each day, constricting my thoughts each time I casually resigned myself to a minor humiliation or degraded standard of living. These conditions must burrow into other people’s brains like parasites, too. They alter chemistry, change neural pathways, and it’s impossible to predict the result of this infiltration and rewiring.

Another strange thing started happening almost every day since Travis left. Memories, phrases from my childhood come back to me now in vivid detail, like waking dreams. In school, one of my favorite teachers insisted that graffitiing a chair was a form of violence – you are inappropriately damaging something for no reason. She claimed it wasn’t art; it was anger expressed as destruction. Even though I believed she was close to a god, I didn’t think her assertion made much sense. What is violence without harming another person? But I’ve started to think she was on to something. Inadvertently, no doubt.