The first few times he saw Andriy, Symon didn’t do much more than nod and say “S’up?” He’d spent a lot of time lurking in the cafeteria before Andriy was due in, just to get that far. And he was proud of the way he gradually insinuated himself into Andriy’s awareness, commenting on a hockey game from the previous night, wearing a sweatshirt from Andriy’s school, and organically leading up to them eating their organic lunches together.
Over those initial weeks, using strictly non-verbal cues, Symon pieced together a (completely artificial) narrative of their friendship. He was the delicate one—the one who had trouble making friends. It was he who accepted the protectiveness of the wealthier, more established Andriy.
There was a balancing act, though. It was Symon’s idea that he should be the needier of the two, and need to be rescued by Andriy. Yes, said his employer, but you also have to take up less oxygen in the room. After all, we aren’t paying you to really have Andriy rescue you—quite the contrary. So Symon came up with the artifice of being not only needy, but introverted. Andriy would get most of the air time.
He still hadn’t fleshed out whether he was in a romantic relationship with anyone, as far as Andriy would know. The problem was, it would have to be a woman. Andriy was clearly only comfortable around straight males. Symon wasn’t sure he was ready for that level of fiction.
He reached a security door, and used the fake ID card his employer had given him. He had his phone out and had already “answered a call” (actually a Duolingo lesson—Portuguese).
Now out of sight of Andriy, he relaxed, and concentrated on the lesson through the rest of the building and out into the parking lot. It took a long time to find his ten-year-old Renault in that huge sea of cars. Which doubly irritated him. You guys all make two hundred K. I mean, buy yourselves a fucking Z8, it’s the greatest car ever built.
Symon turned the key. The engine clicked but didn’t turn over. Fuck. So embarrassing. He tried twice more, but it was going nowhere.
“Need to get jumped?”
Symon turned to see a remarkably buff young woman, maybe late twenties, holding a set of jumper cables. She’d had an obvious Irish accent, and her foreignness became even more obvious when she said, “Go on, open the front. I fix it.”
Opening the hood was about the limits of his mechanical abilities. He watched her with some interest—doing something to his battery using hers. That was all he knew.
“Don’t try yet. Give a chance to charge,” she cautioned as he reached for the ignition key.
He nodded and sat with his eyes on her until she gave a thumbs up. His engine coughed to life, a small white cloud forming behind him.
“Thanks!” he called.
“Maybe need new alternation part,” she called as she removed the cables and let his hood drop. She pulled her old truck in after he backed out. The lot was otherwise completely full.
Good thing she needed my space, Symon thought. Couldn’t call Andriy. His boss had been very explicit on that point: “Any imposition of the contractor’s personal life onto the client’s was grounds for immediate termination of contract.” It was like a whore expecting her customer to satisfy her.
Symon tried to squelch that image. Whores don’t do as much acting as I do, he frowned as he merged onto the freeway south. They just look the other way the whole time the Ivan is banging them. Although maybe the high-end ones are more artful about it. Like geishas.
The whole technopark is just engineers and their whores, he’d heard someone say once. He pushed the uncomfortable notion of prostitution from his mind, mulling instead over friends who who’d found themselves serving the engineers. Barristas, a coach driver, and a few private school teachers. All those food-service people and real estate agents and hangers on and sycophants keeping the mighty engineer happy. Some kind of modern-day feudalism, with techies instead of royalty. Meritocracy, not aristocracy. Though the distinction to him was moot—either way, he wasn’t in.
Like his liberal-arts buddies, he’d tried to get a job in his field. But good jobs out here were scarce. Unless you were an engineer. Of course, there was always a class of people that were stuck doing to grunt work, he reminded himself. There were always the high-school dropouts, or the ones who never went to college. Us history majors never thought we’d join their ranks, or we never would have paid for all that school.
Symon took the job of friend-for-hire from XZ, a secret Facebook spin-off whose motto was “Super high-quality, super low-maintenance.” Their sole purpose was to provide pals to prized tech employees. At Symon’s orientation session, he was told he was going to bring a critical dimension of social interaction to left-brained people whose job was to create social media. But he could suss the subtext: it would help distract them from the fact that they’d sold off all their waking hours to The Man.
He felt ambivalent about it. He really did. Sure, the pay was great, and the hours were ridiculously low. Facebook’s engineers didn’t have more than a few minutes per day for doing anything social, which was why they didn’t have friends in the first place. And he was working in his field of mental health therapy, helping these hopeless nerds—most of whom had all the personal charm of a KGB interrogator. But on the flip side, he was enabling billionaires and the Stock Exchange to continue to exploit some of the brightest people in the country.
Lately, he’d found himself crossing a boundary of sorts, in his conversations with Andriy. Like that invitation to the hockey game. XZ wouldn’t like it if they heard about that, he thought as he parked in the little numbered spot underneath his apartment. Their employment metrics all pivoted on metrics like productivity, not happiness.
1 Comment
What a wacky story!