On May 12, Toby Flenderson left his house wearing:
two white crew socks which, on closer inspection, almost but did not quite match
a necktie purchased by his ex-wife for his daughter to give to him last Father's Day, patterned in the paisley she knew he hated
and his remaining clean shirt.
His car was down to the last quarter-tank of gas, and the maintenance light had been on for three weeks. The passenger seat was stacked with unopened mail, cassette tapes, and wrappers from Arby's; the backseat held his gym bag, several overdue rental DVDs, six half-empty water bottles, and a child's booster seat, carefully covered with an old brown towel wrapped around the lap bar and pinned underneath. The car groaned as he backed out of the driveway, until he remembered to take the parking brake off. On his way down the street, his bumper scraped his neighbor's garbage can and knocked it over, spilling trash everywhere. He kept driving.
He was feeling good.
Two hours later the feeling had been nearly stubbed out, like the cigarettes he'd given up nine years ago, replaced with his customary sensation of dread and foreboding. After an hour spent discussing logistics with Darryl and trying in vain to find an alternate catering service, he surrendered himself to the fact that the casino fundraiser was going to be almost, but not quite, completely terrible, in addition to breaking several state and federal laws. There was still a tiny flicker of good feeling left, like a low pilot light, and he cupped his hands around it and ate his roast beef sandwich at his desk and waited for the next bad thing to happen, just like every other day.
He didn’t go home to change that evening like everybody else, instead supervising the setup for tables and lighting, and surreptitiously paying off the fire dancers when Michael was preoccupied with playing with the roulette wheel. Michael looked like a jackass in his tux, and he kept spewing phrases in a terrible English accent which Toby thought were supposed to be from James Bond movies. Toby hadn't seen any Bond films since Connery retired, but he didn't think that was the reason he was having problems placing Michael's quotations.
At 8:27 PM he was up $145, mostly because he played a lot of online blackjack at home. At 8:48 PM he doubled his earnings betting on Dwight at the craps table, and at 9:03 PM he quietly dropped most of his chips next to Meredith at the roulette wheel, where she'd been steadily losing all night on 21 red. Then he got a drink.
The cameras never paid much attention to Toby, but he knew the whole crew pretty well. It was his job, really, to follow what they were doing and who they were filming, and sometimes they came back and chatted with him about office dynamics and who wasn't speaking to who and which computer games were most popular at the moment. Sometimes they'd show him a little footage on the sly, and afterwards he'd go patch up relations or gently chastise someone for screwing off too much during the day or just make another note in one of his bottomless files. He was the only one in the office who'd seen any of the documentary yet, and he was already pretty sure that whenever it aired someone was going to get fired. Possibly him.
Tonight they followed Michael, and the blonde woman he'd brought as his date, although sometimes he could see them turning to get another shot of Jan, sitting ramrod straight at the end of the bar and staring with a fixed expression at the olive in her martini. He would have gone to sit with her if it wasn't for that, but he always felt weird when he was being filmed.
Toby hated the cameras for:
Heightening the always-simmering tension between the employees and thus increasing his workload
Giving Michael a reason to perform each and every single day
Always being in his way when he tried to walk through the kitchen into the main office
Ruining his friendship with Jim, because the crew had picked up right away on the epic love story being played out on the fourth floor of the Scranton Business Park, and Jim was a nice guy with a flair for self-dramatizing who'd bought right into it, and now Toby wasn't sure if Jim was his gym buddy-slash-co-worker or the leading character in a drama of quiet desperation
Also, the power bill had gone up dramatically.
The crew was still pretty nice, though; three camera guys, two young female PAs he always mixed up, and Adam, the brains behind it all. Tonight just one of the camera operators had made it in, a tall, quiet, burly guy named Les, and Adam was running another on his own. He sat down heavily next to Toby at one of the tables in the back, late in the evening, and set the camera down on the table like it was a precious gem.
"You will not believe what I just filmed."
"Hm," Toby said.
Adam shook his head, digging his fingers into his dark hair, gelled Tarantino-style. "I'm serious. There's no way – I shouldn't even show it to you. It's the fucking jackpot."
"No pun intended."
Adam stared at him for a second, blank-faced, then snorted. "No pun intended. But jesus, this is the money shot."
"Does it involve Meredith?" Toby asked warily, looking around for her. "Because if so, I have some concerns – "
"No way," Adam said. "It's – damn, I have to show somebody. Where can we watch it? Is the office unlocked?"
"I have the key," Toby said, not moving.
"Can we go? Now? I'm dying here."
"This doesn’t involve nudity or anything illegal, does it? The waiver – "
Adam lifted his hands in protest. "Totally G-rated, suitable for primetime. Man, PBS is gonna -- "
"OK," Toby said, standing up.
"You're gonna die."
"Oh boy," Toby said, under his breath.
They didn’t flip on any lights, just sat back in Toby's cubicle watching the monitor. Adam rewound it and they watched it twice more, in silence.
Mostly what he noticed was the hurt in her body, the way she hunched her shoulders, holding herself together. She'd turned into a character too, somewhere along the line, playing the part she was supposed to even when she didn’t know she was on camera. There was nothing real in her voice, except a little catch, a little breathiness. Every single time they watched it Jim walked away five minutes too soon.
That was Jim, though; hanging on when he shouldn't and quitting just when he had a chance. Even turning himself into a one-man Greek chorus hadn't changed that.
Adam was just turning to say something when they heard the clattering of a phone handset out in the main office, and they both got up at the same time and tiptoed into the kitchen, still not turning on any lights, and when they looked through the glass door Pam was leaning against Jim's desk, phone cradled to her ear. Adam turned the camera on.
The crazy thing was that they were still wearing their mikes, and so Toby could hear, tinny and distant through the camera's speakers, the quick intake of breath she made when Jim kissed her, and the soft, almost inaudible sounds of their mouths together. Then they were speaking, and just as Toby was about to look away, leaving them their moment alone, Pam was saying no with her words and yes with her eyes again, and Jim was looking everywhere but the right place and walking back out the door.
Pam cried afterward, and Adam filmed thirty seconds of it before Toby put his hand on top of the camera and pushed down, gently.
They sat at Toby's desk for another ten minutes, not saying anything. Toby read everything on his bulletin board twice, from the sexual harassment pamphlet to the inspirational card his mother had sent him for his 43rd birthday to the poorly translated label from a packet of Japanese crackers that Jim had pinned up there years ago as a joke. Adam just looked at his hands, picking at his nails.
When they heard the door shut at last, Adam got up first, tucking the camera under his arm.
"You're not going to use that," Toby said quietly. Adam looked at him with wide eyes.
"What?"
"That's – their lives. It's private."
Adam raised an eyebrow. "They signed their waivers."
"They didn’t know we were here."
"The terms – "
"I don't mean the terms. I mean – that's their lives. You can't just take that and splash it around for everyone to see, like it's some kind of entertainment."
Adam looked sad now, and horribly condescending. He was almost twenty years younger than Toby. "That's what I do."
For a second Toby thought about grabbing the camera and pulling the film out, or just smashing it with the stupid glass paperweight corporate had sent him on his fifth anniversary of working there. It seemed like a lot of effort.
"You should think about getting a new job, then" he said instead, and turned back to his desk.
Adam let himself out. Later Toby wandered back to the warehouse, half-empty now, and followed the patch of sky-blue to the back of the room.
"It looks like you could use a ride home," he said, standing beside her at the bar.
"Probably," Pam said to her half-empty glass.
"Come on, you don't really want to spend the night here," he said.
"I guess not," she said, and if he were anyone else he would have put his hand on her shoulder, or slid his arm along her shoulders and given her a quick hug. He was her HR representative, though, and he knew what she looked like when she was kissing someone, and when she was having her heart broken, and if he didn't know better he'd say he'd fallen a little bit in love with her tonight, like someone had blown on a tiny spark long-since kindled and dormant.
That was all wrong, though, so instead he opened his passenger door for her and threw the mail and the tapes and the wrappers into the back of the car, raining down on the empty booster seat, and followed her directions home. She rode with her eyes closed, hands plucking again and again at the clasp of her purse, and there was nothing to say to her at all.
"Did you win big tonight?" he asked.
"No," she said.
When he pulled up to her house, a little stucco-sided duplex in a middling neighborhood, flanked by patchy grass and chainlink fence, she opened her eyes, slowly, like a dreamy siren in an old French movie, or like it hurt her just to do that much.
"Toby?"
"Yeah?"
For a moment he thought she might say something real, words tumbling out like the tears that threatened in her eyes, even if it was just I'm lost and sad and I don’t know how to fix it, but then a tremor went through her and she pursed her lips and drew in a breath and pulled her shoulders back.
"Did you get your save-the-date?"
"Yeah," he said softly. "I got it, Pam."
"Good," she said. "I thought – I thought I might have mixed up the unit number."
"You did just fine," he said.
She didn’t say anything, and then she looked down and unbuckled her seatbelt, clutching her purse.
"Thanks for the ride," she said. "I appreciate it."
"No problem."
"Have a good night," she said, opening her door. She slid from the seat with a swish, her dress gathering around her knees, and her heels clicked on the cracked cement of her driveway.
"You too," he said, and she shut the door.
Toby drove home the long way round, past work again, where none of the lights were on and all the cars were gone from the parking lot. He poured a drink for himself when he got home, just a splash of scotch over two ice cubes, and by the time he finished it he was already tired of feeling sad and sorry for other people. He turned on his computer instead, and won nine hands of blackjack before going to bed.
Story Notes:
Spoilers through "Casino Night."
Author's Chapter Notes:
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
sophia_helix is the author of 19 other stories.
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