Down the Rabbit Hole

Great, he thought, closing the app immediately. Just what he needed right now, a dating site. He hoped it wasn’t a sign that things with Macy were well and truly finished.

He turned the chair away from the screens and looked out at the empty hall. “His” cubicle was on the edge of the farm, so his view out was a white wall. It might have been the cubicle where he’d started his career, except that the wall was not dinged up by people racing office chairs down the hallway for late-night stress relief.

In fact, the whole place seemed recently built and sterile as an operating room. He listened again, straining his ears against the silence. Not even the tapping of keyboards could be heard. It was a weird sort of solitary confinement, being among hundreds but completely alone and seemingly invisible. Rising from his chair, he lifted his chin, then stood on tiptoe, to try to see across the sea of cubicles. He was about to dip back down onto his feet when another head popped up ten or fifteen yards to his right.

His toes went numb and he dropped to his soles, heart pounding rapidly. He immediately went up on tiptoe again and didn’t see the first guy, but a few yards to the left, another head appeared. It was like a life-sized game of Whack-A-Mole.

“Yo!” the second guy said, waving a hand. “Can you see me?”

Jeremy’s heart leapt. He raised a hand in return. “Hey. Can you see me?”

“Yeah! Yeah, I can! And you can hear me, right? And see me?” He continued to wave his hand. He had a thick, dark thatch of hair and a broad forehead.

“Loud and clear, and I’m looking right at you.”

“Finally!” It was hard to tell the guy’s expression, since only the top of his head and his eyes were visible, but he seemed to be smiling.

“Where are we?” Jeremy called.

The guy’s eyebrows fell. “You don’t know?”

Jeremy shook his head. “You don’t either?”

The guy disappeared, and Jeremy heard a small, discouraged “No.”

“How about you?” Jeremy called. “The other guy—there was another guy over there. Hey!”

Nobody answered. Had the other guy left, or been a figment of his imagination?

“Hey, did you see that other guy? Are you still there?”

“What?”

Jeremy took the moment to drop back to his feet, then exited the cubicle. “Hang on!” he called. “I’m coming to find you.”

He turned right and headed down the long hallway. He passed multiple cubbyholes just like his, all occupied by people staring at their screens, until finally he reached the corner. He turned and started down another interminable row.

He should have reached the one who’d spoken to him by now, but nobody seemed the least bit aware of their surroundings, let alone to be looking for him, so he stopped, hands on his hips, and called, “Are you still there?”

No answer.

Disappointment threatened to swamp him. He was crazy. Someone had put him in an institution and he was imagining the cube farm, the silent preoccupied people, the colorful screens. The only real things were the four white walls and he was actually in a straitjacket. Or he was wandering around some giant man-made rat maze, perhaps observed, perhaps failing this test, failing all the tests.

“Hello!” he yelled, fear giving his voice volume. He began to jog down the aisle, arms out to either side slapping the wall, the cubicles, the wall, the cubicles. “Answer me!”

The industrial carpet, the fabric-lined cubicles all conspired to suck his voice into an abyss. The room was huge, and there was no echo, just the dead thumping of his feet on the rug. He ran until his breath ripped audibly from his throat and his chest burned.

“Dude!”

The voice from behind him made Jeremy damn near jump out of his skin. He spun around to see a short, dark-haired, square-headed guy in a shirt and tie and wrinkled khakis. He was built like a wrestler and stood with his arms out from his sides as if about to draw in a gunfight. It might have been aggressive except he looked he like might cry.

He panted as he took the guy in. “Are you the one I was just talking to?”