On the day of the prank, Jim realized he actually didn’t have a lot to do. He had laid all the groundwork; he and Steve had spent hours together hashing out a gameplan for the day, an approach that would let “Jim” get enough work done to satisfy Dwight’s accusing mind without actually requiring Steve to be a paper salesman. He set up easy to dos for the day—a task made simpler by his better recordkeeping—and fortunately Steve seemed more amused than annoyed by the need to actually get things done.
Jim, on the other hand, had nothing to get done because he wasn’t at his job. But he did feel the need to be doing something as he watched the feed from Pam’s webcam, which he’d told her to turn on when he signaled her by bowing when he came into work. He figured she was tuned in enough that if someone came in, bowed to her, and went to his desk to log in, she’d turn it on anyway.
He hoped, at any rate. If she did, it was another sign that she was on the same wavelength as him, and he was rather pathetically invested in finding out whether she would for exactly that reason.
But he didn’t want to just sit at home in his underwear and watch the prank go down. He needed to be doing something. As luck would have it—or rather, extensive preparation—it had taken so long to plan out the prank that Fiddler was coming up on tech week, which meant he would have to spend next week and then the two following weekends doing the follow spot. He’d actually been in touch with the lighting designer about helping with other odds and ends of the production, as he and Steve had found themselves talking about the show as well as the prank, and he’d been in that weekend hanging lights and helping focus them. He texted with Alicia, the LD, about coming in that day and helping her set up cues (she was paid staff at the community college theater where they were putting on the show, so she could come in during the day) as long as she agreed to let him run the feed from work on a laptop in the corner of the stage while she ran things from the booth, and she agreed. He’d mentioned the prank to her during the light hangs and it had tickled her fancy, so she was happy to see the end result, she said, and anyway it would be helpful to have someone else looking at the cues as she scripted them—and climbing in the rafters if they had to move a light.
So at 8:50 am sharp he was sitting in the People’s Security Bank Theater at Lackawanna Community College watching Alicia run some basic diagnostics on the light board from the booth, and connecting to the private YouTube channel he’d set up to watch the feed—assuming Pam turned it on. He supposed he could always call and ask her to turn it on if she didn’t catch on, but he found himself really hoping that he’d judged her right and she’d catch on without an explicit cue. It felt important. Almost as important as the prank itself, but unlike the prank he didn’t feel at all in control of it, which put a strange twist inside his gut.
But for now, the channel wasn’t live, which made sense since he’d told Steve to come in no earlier than 9:10, it being Jim’s habit to roll in just late enough to annoy Dwight but early enough that no one actually missed him at work. So he didn’t mind when Alicia asked him to start walking up and down the stage to give her a chance to judge the gaps and hot spots in the current setup. He unplugged the laptop—if he was going to spend hours watching not-him do work, he knew the computer wasn’t going to last on battery, so he’d brought his charger—and started pacing around with a hand in the air so she could better analyze the quality of the light.
He was about a third of the way through the stage when the laptop blinked to life, and he was presented with a compressed but recognizable image of Steve logging into his computer. He let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding that Pam had indeed chosen to recognize this as a cue just as his phone beeped to life in his pocket.
WHAT THE HELL HALPERT
Pam always texted in all caps, because apparently her old flipphone had gotten stuck that way and she didn’t know how to turn it off. They didn’t text much; he never initiated, and she didn’t choose to very often. But he could still tell it was her from a mile away, even without the all-caps.
SERIOUSLY YOU HAVE TO WARN ME NEXT TIME
He smirked, and texted back.
Where’s the fun in that?
:-P
But then the text chain died as both he and Pam were distracted by the scene playing out in front of them—though he did have to keep moving in order to keep Alicia happy, his focus was entirely on the small patch of screen in front of him.
Dwight entered from upstage center, and as Jim had asked him to, Steve took the initiative. “Morning, Dwight.” One of Jim’s prime pranking rules, which he and Pam had discussed but never written down and which he’d been sure to drill Steve in over the last few weeks, was that every prank had its own pace. For some pranks—the nickels in the phone, for instance—you had to play it slow, let Dwight come to you, ignore him as much as possible until he made it impossible. For others, you let third parties take the lead: coconspirators like Pam or Toby, or unwitting allies like Michael. For a significant subset, however, you had to take control of the situation and force Dwight off-balance. This was one of those times.
Dwight was, as ever, predictable. Faced with someone greeting him from Jim’s desk who was not Jim, he went on the offensive. “Who are you?”
They were still in the playbook Jim and Steve had drawn up between them, so there was only one possible answer: “Who am I? I’m Jim.” They’d agreed, however, that that answer alone didn’t push Dwight quite in the direction they wanted, so they’d designed a follow-up. “We’ve been working together for three years. Ha, Weird joke, Dwight.” Dwight hated being called weird, not least because he knew he was, and so Jim knew that comment would keep him just enough off-kilter to move things along.
“You’re not Jim. Jim’s not Asian.” They’d expected Dwight to deny Steve’s Jimness, which was only fair of course since he wasn’t Jim, but the explicit move to race so quickly was something they hadn’t expected out of even Dwight. Steve, however, had three years of improv—good improve, he’d assured Jim, not Michael’s sort—and so he was up to the challenge, smoothly countering Dwight’s thrust.
“You seriously never noticed? Hey, hats off to you for not seeing race.” Jim was pretty sure he could hear Pam snort on the webcam feed, then turn it into a cough, and he grinned himself. Steve was pretty damn good at this.
“Alright then Jim.” Something about the way Dwight said Jim told Jim that they were exactly on track. “Why don’t you tell me about that sale that you made yesterday?”
This was like taking candy from a baby. Jim and Steve had stayed up until 11 going over every detail of yesterday at work. Steve cocked his head to the side—do I really do that? thought Jim, then realized that in the very act of thinking that he had done so, and shuddered at the realization that Steve knew him better than he’d known himself—and Jim could only imagine the puzzled look that must be on his face from Dwight’s answering glare. “Lanopy Networks? You know, I wouldn’t have thought an Internet company would need 10 cases of 24-pound letter stock, but hey, maybe paperless isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Or did you mean the Slocum law firm? Because I didn’t close that one yet, but I’m hoping I’ve got a call from Andrew Slocum, or at least his paralegal, waiting for me.” Ironically, Steve had recommended Jim to Slocum via the local paralegal networking group. He turned smoothly to the phone and hit a few buttons—conveniently, Dunder Mifflin actually used the same phone system that Richardson’s used—then turned suspiciously towards Dwight as the phone requested his voicemail password. Covering the dialpad with one hand, he typed Jim’s password in.
“You have one new message.”
Dwight moved surprisingly fast, turning into a shower of pixels on the low-quality webcam feed.
“How did you know? No! No, no! That is sensitive information only for employees, not outsiders!” He hung up the phone and Steve sighed. Again, Jim wondered if he sighed the same way. It was eerie watching someone play yourself.
“Dwight, cut it out, I’m trying to work.” The pained resignation in his voice was perfect—but then again, he did a lot of pained resignation as Tevye in Fiddler, so he should be good at it by now, even if he wasn’t wearing a fake beard and aging makeup.
“You don’t work here! You’re not Jim!”
Jim could have kissed Toby when he sauntered out from the annex just as Dwight exploded and handed Steve a piece of paper. “Jim, corporate says they need you to fill out the change of emergency contact form again, they couldn’t read your sister’s phone number. I tried to read it to them over the phone, but they said you have to fill it out again and sign it.”
Steve took the form, rolled his eyes at the camera—or, Jim supposed, probably at Pam—and pulled a pen out of the correct drawer of Jim’s desk (the second drawer, the first drawer currently being reserved for prank supplies). “Thanks for trying, Toby. I’ll have this back to you in a moment.”
“No rush. It’s not like the fax takes a long time to get there.” Toby stopped short and looked at Dwight. “Oh, Dwight, they said you need to fill one out too. Apparently your cousin Mose isn’t considered a responsible adult under Pennsylvania law.” He handed the dumbstruck salesman another piece of paper, winked at the camera—or again, possibly at Pam, and the inability to tell the difference was driving Jim crazy—and headed back into the annex.
Dwight let out a huff, balled the form up, and threw it in the trash. Then he apparently thought better of it, dived into the trash, pulled it back out, and carefully unballed it so that he could fill it out. Only then did he turn back to Steve, a thunderous look on his face that suddenly turned sly. “I don’t know who you are, but you are not Jim. This is Jim!” He grabbed the picture frame off Jim’s desk that until 8:30 this morning when Toby had arrived at work, had shown off Jim and his niblings. He brandished it in Steve’s face, and seemed discombobulated by the look he saw there. He then turned the frame around stared open-mouthed at Steve and his two cousins.
“Oh my—! Oh d—! Oh, how did—?” He set the frame down almost reverently and backed out of the room.
“Jim!” Alicia’s voice shook him out of his reverie. Fortunately, she seemed more amused than annoyed that he’d zoned into the computer so much he’d zoned out. “Dude, don’t walk into the wall.” He blinked: yes, on autopilot walking around the stage he’d almost walked into the back wall. Good thing he wasn’t walking forward, or he might have ended up in the pit! Dwight seemed to have fled the scene, and Steve was quietly working on something (probably the back catalogue work Jim had been saving for this—it was tedious, but didn’t require knowing the paper business well, and Steve had assured him nothing could be as mind-numbing as going over legal contracts). That meant it was time to get back to earning his keep: he put the computer down, keeping the volume up in case Dwight exploded again, and started back downstage, hand out at Alicia’s direction to let her see the light in different places.
He spent most of the day there, climbing ladders, shifting lights, and then going and standing on stage while Alicia futzed with the details. Apparently this was important work, and much easier to do with just him and her than it would be with “a dozen lazy actors sitting around and complaining. Not your friend Steve—he’s chill—but, well, you know.” Given that Michael was the only other ‘actor’ Jim knew well, he assured her that he did understand, and he and Alicia parted on friendly terms, with an assurance that “dude, you’re gonna rock the spot.”
He did find some opportunities to check back into the feed from the camera, but apparently Dwight had acknowledged defeat in the matter of the frontal assault on Steve’s identity, meaning it was mostly just Steve casually doing Jim’s work. This gave him a twinge of guilt, but it was quickly extinguished every time he saw Dwight’s beady eyes focus in on a detail of the scene and narrow in suspicion. No, it was necessary to have Steve doing work—otherwise, Dwight wouldn’t believe a word of it.
But not too much work. Early in the afternoon Jim realized the one thing he’d never put into his journals, never coached Steve on, that might undercut the whole plan. He pulled out his phone and called the office.
“Dunder Mifflin, this is Pam.” He could, he supposed, have dialed his own extension, but where’s the fun in that?
“Hi, I’d like to speak to Jim Halpert.”
“And who may I say is calling?” Pam’s voice sharpened and he could tell she’d recognized his voice. “I’m happy to transfer you to Jim, but I really do need to know who’s on the phone.” Her voice had gone syrupy, and he recognized the implicit instruction to tell her not who was on the phone but who the hell was at his desk.
“His friend, Steve Kim.”
“Just a moment, Mr. Kim.” This last he thought was at a slightly higher volume, though his cellphone audio wasn’t that great.
“Steve!” The incongruity of Steve greeting him with his own name made Jim chuckle, and Steve chuckled too, but in a way that let Jim know he was impatient to know why he was being called. “What can I do for you?”
“You need to visit reception and tap on the desk.” Jim kept his tone neutral and deepened his voice in case the sound from the phone against Steve’s ear leaked out to where Dwight was now listening in intently. It was surreal to watch Steve talking to him with a slight video lag at the same time they actually spoke. “I forgot to tell you, I talk to Pam several times a day at her desk.” Now that the words were out in the air he felt the absurdity of them. “So, you know, do that. So Dwight doesn’t suspect.”
“I’m so glad to hear that.” Steve was evidently quite capable of having a conversation within a conversation. “I’ll be in touch about how it goes, and we can touch base maybe next week? Great.” He hung up, and Jim saw him stand, stretch a little, and saunter over to reception.
“Hey, Pam.” He reached over and took a jellybean, and Jim let out a sigh of relief. “So, the Kim account—he just called to say I should check in with you about its status?”
Jim couldn’t see the expression on Pam’s face, but her voice was light and lively as she responded. “Oh, of course. He just wanted you to know the new delivery went through without a hitch.”
There was more to the conversation, but after that Jim shut down the feed. The prank had obviously worked, and he was still glad he’d done it, but he really didn’t need to watch Steve taking his place talking to Pam. Even if it was the crowning glory of his Jim impression, something about listening to it just didn’t feel right.
