He’s only thirty seven, but he’s done this before—snapped and run away. Toby’s good at running away. He gets bonus points for leaving the always country when he does it, but loses points for coming back. The last time he spent a week or a seven in Amsterdam, smoked up in little cafes with verbose hipsters that he actually sort of fit in with. They didn’t make him apologize for being an American, but he was always quickly overcompensating with criticism of the US, from the foreign policy to the fact that they subjected the rest of the world to Britney Spears.
He’s there long enough to make a few friends, and even goes on two dates with a girl named Iris, who he meets in a bookstore in the travel section. He was looking for another copy of the local guidebook he thoughtlessly left somewhere during a drunken walk around the city the night before. She was looking for a guidebook to New York City, where she’d be traveling in a few months to study law at Columbia. April, his wife (ex, he reminded himself before ordering another drink), had studied law at Columbia, so it gave them something to talk about. She had blonde hair and green eyes, a nose that looked like it got smooshed and strange teeth and he barely understood a word she said because her accent was heavy and her English wasn’t great, but she found him interesting and laughed at his dumb jokes, so that was something. She invited him back to her apartment after he bought her dinner for the second night in a row, and when she kisses him, it’s nice, not great, but nice. In the end it only made him more depressed than before because this stranger felt more for him than his own wife had by the time they split.
He never saw Iris again after that, because it was then that he figured out that people liked him less the longer they knew him. He stayed in Amsterdam for three more days, booked a flight home, and during a lay over at Heathrow worked out a theory that maybe the living in the city wasn’t for him—maybe he needed a smaller town where he wouldn’t be one an of eight million, somewhere he could buy a house with a swing set in the backyard for Sasha. How he ends up in Scranton is a mystery even to him, but he takes the offered human resources job at Dunder Mifflin because it’s in a town smaller than New York, he can buy a house for pretty cheap, and its close enough to Sasha that he can see her whenever April will allow it, but far enough away that he won’t have to worry about running into her and her new husband at Starbucks.
He’s actually pretty well liked during his first few weeks in Scranton. Michael Scott, upon finding out that he’s single, decides that they’re going to be best friends and hit the town together, that they’re going to go after babes, and Michael gets it into his head that Toby is going to be his wingman in the way that Michael had been Todd Packer’s wingman for all those trips to dive bars in Carbondale. They go to Poor Richards together once, because Toby can’t think of an excuse not to fast enough, and when “the babes” are drawn to Toby because he’s quiet, knows about literature, and just got back from Europe, Michael gets pretty pissed.
He really hits it off with the receptionist, and spends a lot of his time in the first few weeks snacking on jelly beans and talking about art and about books, and it’s a pretty easy way to pass the time because his desk is right up front and its easy to slip back to his desk and get back to work whenever Michael wanders out. Then Jim Halpert starts, and they’re fast friends too, joking around at Dwight’s expense, and for a few weeks he, Pam, and Jim eat lunch together, and laugh a lot, and then all of a sudden he’s being moved to the back with Kelly, because Michael doesn’t want Jim being corrupted by the sex offender. The only real reason Toby can figure that he got attached with the sex offender label was because ‘To Catch a Predator’ had been on Dateline the night before, and Michael had always found that show to be hysterical.
He misses a few lunches with Jim and Pam because of conference calls with corporate over the news that a documentary crew will be coming to film and how there is going to have to be a whole new set of trainings about proper on camera conduct for the Scranton office, because even though it’s supposed to be a reality show, corporate knows that they should try and get a muzzle on Dwight and Michael at the very least. By the time he rejoins them the next week, they’re miles ahead of him with a secret language that he doesn’t understand, with big plans about pranks and hijinxs that seem childish to him and only serves to remind him that he’s not in his twenties anymore.
The more time that Toby spends with Jim, the more he realizes that the only thing that they have in common is the fact that they sit in the same room for eight hours a day, five days a week. Toby drinks wine for the taste of it in the house that he owns, and Jim drinks cheap beer to get drunk with his roommate in his rental unit. Toby has a 401k and Jim plays Madden with his buddies every Sunday. And every Friday that he has to sit and listen to Dwight list off that weeks complaints about Jim, Toby gets a little more fed up because his life would be so much easier if Jim would just…not.
But then again, Jim baby sits Sasha at the last minute when Toby’s babysitter disappears to parts unknown, and when he walks in the door after his rather crappy second date with a nurse, Jim’s sitting on the floor with a tiara on his head and a purple boa around his neck, and Sasha is cracking up at the funny voices that Jim is using as he acts out some sort of story with her Barbie dolls.
And that’s why Toby never submits a single one of Dwight’s countless complaints to HR at Corporate and why Jim has ever had any chance at advancement in his career.
He knows that Jim has a crush on Pam—actually, who doesn’t know Jim has a crush on Pam? He figures it’s hard not to have a crush on Pam, especially in an environment like Dunder Mifflin. She’s soft, kind, and clever, and that’s a nice touchstone to have when your alternatives are people like Kelly and Angela. He knows that Jim is transferring well before anyone else, so it doesn’t seem abrupt, and he never does connect his leaving with anything having to do with Pam, but he does raise an eyebrow when Pam calls off her wedding not too long after that.
He didn’t even realize he was really interested in Pam until he heard that she was dating again. He has a hundred reasons that he knows it’s a bad idea to be interested, but he still stood in front of her, separated by her desk, babbling like a moron and choking on his own indecision.
It’s almost laughable, especially after Jim comes back. Toby’s watching Pam, who’s watching Jim, who’s watching Karen really hard so no one notices him sneaking glances at Pam. It’s a farce in three parts, with special guest appearances by that oblivious doofus Roy Anderson.
He knew from the start that Pam wasn’t interested in him, and a claw machine duck wasn’t going to change that, but every time she unknowingly rejects him, the more determined his is to make him notice her. He makes a fool of himself time and time again.
And in the end, his theory is proven right again. The more time people know him, the less they like him.
It’s not witnessing the nine to five Jim and Pam happy relationship parade five days a week that pushes him over the edge. What little pride he can take in his total lack of emotional stability, at least he can say that something as pointless as a failed office non-relationship wasn’t what really pushed him over the edge.
He had Sasha for the long Easter weekend. They had trashed his kitchen dying Easter eggs, enjoyed the unseasonably warm weather by spending the afternoon at the park, and watched Ratatouille twice. Her mother called around bedtime to say goodnight, and Toby sat patiently at the end of her little bed while she chattered about their day. He was lost in his thoughts, waxing philosophic about how she was turning into a real person now, not a baby that did nothing, but a real person with ideas and opinions. He imagined what she would be like in a year, what she’d be like in five, what she’d be like in ten. It occurred to him that one day this little girl sleeping in a miniature bed with a Finding Nemo comforter was going to be someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Huh. Strange.
“Hi Dad!” she said brightly, jerking Toby from his thought. He opened his mouth to reply, but before he had the chance she was chattering again, speculating about the Easter bunny and what kind of food they had left on a paper plate on his front porch. And Toby sat there, confused for a moment, thinking to himself ‘Well, yeah, Sash, I know, I was there…’
And then it hit him. Sasha wasn’t talking to him, she was talking to Steven. Steven—the freelance writer that married his ex-wife, who lived and worked from his old house, who put his daughter on the bus every morning, the man who got to eat dinner with her every night, the man that tucked her in when April worked late, and woke her up when she worked early. The man that, by all accounts, probably spent more time with her than either of her biological parents at that point. The man that Sasha was now calling ‘Dad’.
He fantasized about grabbing Sasha by the shoulders and shaking her, about screaming that HE was her father, not some asshole named Steven who stole his whole fucking life. He fantasized about burning down his ex-wife’s house, about throwing Sasha in his car and jumping on a plane and flying to the jungles Costa Rica, where they’d never be found. He fantasized about jumping a plane by himself and flying to Costa Rica, where at least he could be a footnote in his own daughter’s life in a nice, tropical climate.
Instead, he stayed very still, kept his careful smile on his face as Sasha finished her phone call, even chatted with April for a few minutes after Sasha was done, confirming his arrangements to drop Sasha Monday afternoon. He wished her a happy Easter, ended the phone call, stretched out next to Sasha on her miniature bed and read her two chapters from the first Harry Potter book, and got her a glass of water for next to her bed. He left the hall light on for her and then went digging through his filing cabinet of old papers until he found the business card of the therapist he’d seen a few times after he’d moved to Scranton and he thought the loneliness was going to eat him from the inside out. Maybe it was time to try that whole deal again.
He goes back to work on Tuesday, and Pam asks how Sasha is. Wednesday they chat at his about the upcoming Finer Things Club meeting. Thursday they eat lunch together, sort of, because Jim’s on a sales call and he sits at an adjoining table and they talk about how they really don’t get American Idol. Friday he forgets for a minute and he accidentally sexually harasses her in front of all of their coworkers, with her boyfriend at her side.
The longer people know Toby Flenderson, the less they like him.
After he gets home, out of breath and sweating through his suit, he pulls out the credit card that he had just finished paying off and booked his ticket to Costa Rica. April was not pissed, like he assumed she would be, but actually sounded worried and he guesses she cracked the Toby code of ‘long term trips abroad of an undetermined length = major psychological conflict’. She doesn’t protest though, and when he asks if she’d be okay with Sasha spending some of her summer vacation in Costa Rica, she tentatively says “Maybe. If you’re still there.” Toby remembers, then, that he had asked the same question about Amsterdam, and that lasted less than two months, but back then his daughter wasn’t calling another man dad.
His last week at Dunder Mifflin is the fourth worst of his life and this proves two things. His last week is really bad to make it all the way up the list to the fourth spot, and Toby has led a pretty shitty life for it not to be in the top spot.
Pam is extra polite to him when he passes her desk every morning with this hyper cheerful pitch to her voice that only manages to make him feel worse. Even Jim’s pleasant about the whole debacle. Its grating and makes Toby feel even more pitiful, as if he’s so non-threatening to other men that all he’s worthy of after publicly feeling up another man’s girlfriend is pity. He supposes he’d rather that than a Roy Anderson-esque public showdown, but only because he doesn’t want to spend his last week filling out paperwork explaining why he got his ass kicked by a paper salesman.
Toby remembers a time when he actually liked Jim, considered him a friend, but now, with mortification choking his every breath, he’s hard pressed now to remember why.
Michael wouldn’t approve the Party Planning Committee’s rather modest budget of thirty dollars for a cake and beverages for his going away party, because Michael said he’d rather throw a party after Toby was all the way gone, not one he’d be around to enjoy. Angela, despite his repeated insistence that he didn’t even want a party, did the best she could with supplies left over from days past and a print out banner that says “Best Wishes Toby”, but nothing matches and there is no cohesive theme, and he can tell that kind of irritates her.
There is nothing to snack on or sip at, but about half the staff stands around in the conference room for a half hour at the end of the day on Friday with their hands in their pockets talking amongst themselves. Toby sits there fielding the occasional question about his plans in Costa Rica. Everyone acts excited for him, as if he’s admirable for finally getting the hell out of dodge, but he also knows they all think he’s lost his mind, and maybe they’re right. Then again, maybe they’re just standing there thinking about his miserable life because it beats sitting at their desk thinking about their own.
Stanley is on a sales call, probably on purpose, and doesn’t join them, and Michael stays in his office for once, but does stop by at the end to try and lead the group in a rousing chorus of ‘Ding Dong the Perv Gone’ has he carries is cardboard box of personal belongings into the elevator. It’s fitting that the last thing he hears as the elevator doors squeak shut is Michael Scott’s cackling laughter.
He’s lucky that he sells his house as quickly as he does, considering the real estate market. His strategy was to put it up for less than market value and just unload it, enough to pay off his mortgage and maybe a couple of grand to live off of for a little while. He sells it for way less than market value, barely pays off his mortgage, and then cashes in his IRA and figures he’ll worry about retirement when he’s not in the midst of what he’ll probably refer to as a nervous breakdown in hindsight.
He left the new HR rep a note wishing him or her good luck and left his email address at the bottom if they had any questions, but gives them the one he uses to register for stuff so he doesn’t get a bunch of spam in his real personal email. He checks it once, during a long layover at Miami International, out of morbid curiosity and when he sees twelve messages in one day from someone at Dunder Mifflin named Prudence Wyatt, he deletes them all without reading them, orders another drink from the airport bar, and smiles despite himself at the irony of someone named Prudence being put in charge of keeping a leash on Michael Scott.
He spends his first week in San Jose, brushing the dust off his high school Spanish and getting the hang of getting around. He rents a room in a boarding house for two weeks, but has moved on to Norosa after ten days, and then moves to a Playa Negra after that. He decides to live it up a little, renting the shack with electricity and plumbing, which he’s pretty grateful of after he spends three days violently ill after drinking local water.
He buys a surf board and has the closest thing to a religious experience that he can ever lay claim while paddling out on early on a weekday morning. He’s alone on the water that morning, and it’s the earliest he’s ever been out, so he flips onto his back and lays across his board and just breathes in his new life. He forgets why he was so sad, forgets what made him so angry as he watches the sun rise over the Pacific.
Sometimes Toby takes a bus into the city and finds an internet café so he can email Sasha, through April, pictures of the waterfalls and the waves, so he can send them pictures of him standing on the beach that he asks random other surfers to take of him. He looks tan, happy, and alive, and he hopes it reassures April that she’s not going to have to fly all the way to Costa Rica and take a long bus ride to Playa Negra to claim her ex-husband’s body because he hung himself in his shack.
He sends some of the same photos to Phyllis, because she writes him chatty little emails that contain just enough concern to be legit without being cloying. She writes back that his photos are so beautiful that she and Bob Vance (of Vance Refrigeration) are considering Costa Rica for their next vacation. Toby doesn’t say anything, because he doesn’t mind a chatty email once every few weeks, but he doesn’t want his old life stopping by his new life for drinks because they happened to be in the same country.
He lives off fruits he buys at a local market and fish he sometimes catches himself and grills in a little pit he digs in his rented spit of land, and once a week he treats himself to dinner cooked by someone else. He smokes grass he buys off a local man who is old enough to be his grandfather, and its better than anything Creed ever sold him. He doesn’t make any friends, because he’s learned to enjoy being alone. He’s happy when he’s alone, because no one gets sick of him and upgrades to someone better after a while.
When Phyllis tells him that Jim and Pam went down to the courthouse and got married during their lunch break on a Thursday afternoon as nonchalant as can be, Toby is genuinely happy for them. He thinks of the people that made him laugh under florescent lights in a bleak break room. He thinks of Pam and how bright her eyes got when she was daydreaming at her desk and he thinks of Jim with a tiara on his head and a boa around his neck. He writes them both a few sentences of congratulations, and he hopes they take it from the Toby that at one time was good friends with them both, not the Toby that had to jump fences and move to different countries to get away from all of them.
Pam writes a thank you note back, and says that she’s seen the photos he’s been sending Phyllis. ‘If we’re ever in Costa Rica,’ she writes, ‘I’ll make sure to warn you so you can avoid us as effectively as I’m sure you’re going to avoid the Vance’s (of Vance Refrigeration) when they’re in town.’
For the first time since he’d left the States, he laughed at something that he didn’t think up himself.
It amazes him that in three months, he’s barely put a dent in his money. He sits in a bar and drinks cheap, local beer on rainy afternoon in July and writes out a budget on cocktail napkins with a fine tip felt pen. At this rate, his most extensive expense was going to be airfare. April wasn’t comfortable with Sasha flying by herself, and frankly neither was Toby, so he was going to go ahead and spend the money to fly to the States and back and accompany her personally. While he was back, he was going to take care of selling his car, which would more than cancel out the three round trip tickets he was going to be paying for in less than two weeks, two for himself and one for Sasha. Even with staying in a nicer hotel for two weeks, because he wasn’t going to subject his daughter to his glorified shack, if he stuck to his tight budget, he could theoretically live for another eighteen months before even needing to consider finding work.
‘And, fuck it,’ he thinks, watching with fascination as droplet of condensation fell from his glass onto the napkins, making the ink bleed out rings of purple and blue, ‘I’ve got a 401k. Maybe I’m retiring way early.’
He takes Sasha to the beach and pulls her around the shallow water on his surf board. He takes her to the rain forest and watches her chase butterflies. They take a zip line tour of the canopy, laughing as she screams with delight as they sore above the world together. A stranger takes a picture of him holding her in front of a waterfall, with her arms wrapped tight around his neck, and he imagines this is going to be the last time he’ll ever get to hold her like that because, really, she’s almost too big already.
He wonders if he understands the magnitude of how lucky she is to go to Costa Rica before ten. The coolest place he ever went when he was a kid was Long Island to visit his great grandmother.
After a week, she starts to seem bored. She starts talking about home a lot more, about her trip to Disneyworld with “her parents” (as if he’s already the cool guy that’s more of a friend than a viable parental figure), about her concerns about cursive and multiplication in third grade. He nods and smiles and frowns at the right time, but its been a while he’s really talked to anyone at all, so he’s a little out of practice. She hates that everything is in Spanish, and he tries to teach her a few words but she just wrinkles her nose and looks disinterested.
He knows she’s eight years old and has the attention span typical of an eight year old, but her joy in the first week and her retreat into books and handheld video games in the second week makes leads him to one conclusion. Spend enough time with Toby Flenderson, even if he’s your father, you grow to dislike him.
Toby loved her visit, he really did, because he had missed his baby a lot, but he was more than a little relieved to see her home. It only taken him four months to really get out of practice of people having expectations of him, and if he’s really honest with himself, he’s grown to like it better this way. He’s grown to cherish his solitude. He speaks Spanish like a local now and he surfs like a pro. He remembers days he got up most morning and put on a tie like something he saw in a movie once a long time ago.
It’s not like he abandoned her, he reasons to himself when their weekly phone calls turn into bi-weekly, then monthly. She has her mother and Steven (nearly a year and thousand of miles, she could still hear Sasha’s voice calling him dad), and she’s always welcome to visit, and when she’s older she’ll understand. Maybe he’ll even fly home for some holidays and her birthday when he can afford it. He doesn’t want to be the reason she needs therapy in her teens and why she has weird relationships with older men in her thirties, but he can’t bring himself to go back.
He supposes he should be upset when he calls one Sunday evening and April tells him in a prim (pissed) voice that Sasha’s not home, that she and Steven are off at the Daddy Daughter Tea Party at their church. He supposes her biting tone is suppose to shock him into realizing all the things he’s missing, into recognizing that his window of being a real father to Sasha is closing quickly. All he can do is be grateful that Steven is there to pick up his slack, because he’s clearly the better man. It’s been six years, and both April and Sasha seem to like him better every day. Toby wonders what that’s like.
It’s a lot easier to justify the abandonment of his responsibilities as father if he takes it in slowly. And if it got to him some days more than others that he was watching his daughter grow up via pixels on a computer screen, it was nothing a joint and a long nap on the beach couldn’t dull.
Some nights, when he’s rocking in his hammock and listening to the quiet tinkle of the little wooden chimes he hung in the window, he wonders if he could be happier if he made friends, if he would date some local girl, if he got his hair cut so he didn’t look like the beach bum burn out stoner he recognized he was. He wonders if he’s missing something without even realizing it, and if he put himself out there he could be complete.
Then for no reason at all, he thinks of blond hair, green eyes Iris back in Amsterdam with the smooshed nose and the interest in law, and he remembered that it made no difference if the setting was the America, Amsterdam, or Costa Rica.
If you knew Toby Flenderson long enough, you wouldn’t like him.
Story Notes:
Well, I thought of the summary line at 10pm last night. And at 6:30am, I'm done. And I can tell you, right now, *I* don't like Toby Flenderson, because I have to freaking work today. Also, this is unbetaed, because I just want it the HELL away from me right now. So the only thing I own are whatever glaring mistakes, you, my dear readers, find for me.
Author's Chapter Notes:
Not mine, never were, never will be. La la la.
Chapter End Notes:
Phew. *wipes off brow* Do you like it? Did I miss Toby completely? Do tell.
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