The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [104]
To make matters worse on this particular afternoon, Martin was informed by the supervising associate that he, along with a team of his fellow corporate slaves, could expect to remain on the premises for at least the next twelve to fifteen hours, and probably most of the weekend as well, in order to execute some “important” redactions on a mountain of evidence scheduled to be turned over the following Monday to opposing counsel as part of a complex trade-secret litigation between the two largest lipstick manufacturers in North America. In practical terms, this meant cutting out blocks of white paper and pasting them over portions of documents deemed irrelevant—i.e., unresponsive to the opposing party’s discovery requests—by the team of associate attorneys and supervising partners, and then photocopying said documents, skills that Martin, along with 99 percent of the population, had mastered in kindergarten.
It was after midnight when an associate named Joe Klint—a tall, preppy guy with an aggressive chin and Clark Kent glasses—stormed into the conference room and threw several sheets of paper down onto the table where they were all working. “Someone’s not doing their job,” he yelled as he pointed to a highlighted portion of the text that had not been covered. “Wake up!”
“Jesus,” Martin muttered.
Klint exploded. “Do you think this is some kind of joke?”
“No, I kind of think it’s pathetic.”
“Well, if you think it’s so pathetic, maybe you shouldn’t be working here.”
“I didn’t say you were pathetic,” Martin replied, drawing smirks from the rest of the paralegals.
“It’s fun to be a wiseass, isn’t it? But in the real world, which you obviously haven’t quite joined, our client pays my salary—and yours—which doesn’t include making stupid mistakes like the one you just made. So don’t do it again.”
Martin had visions of smashing one of the office chairs through the plate-glass window. It would be so satisfying to see everyone’s expressions as they witnessed an act of violence that served the bottom-line interests of nobody except for maybe the chair company and whoever repaired the glass, but it was really the riffing distortion of the previous night that inspired Martin as he addressed Klint: “This is fucking bullshit. I quit.”
“Ouch—I’m so hurt.” Klint stepped back to address the remaining paralegals. “Does anyone else want to join Martin? If so, please—the door’s open.”
In fact, nobody did want to join Martin, which barely tempered his joy as he was escorted off the premises; he couldn’t wait to tell Jay—and Keith—about it. But as he was pulled uptown by the somber streetlights of the nighttime city, he began to worry about the implications of what he had done; not in terms of work—quitting had never been more satisfying, and he was already writing music reviews—but in terms of what he realized with a shudder might be love, at least as he understood it; or at least some form of it, because how else could he explain the queasy anticipation he felt even now as an image of Keith drifted past him, and the sense that this entire day had been a performance for Keith’s benefit?
As much as he recognized this, Martin was terrified as he envisioned the walking skeletons, many no older than he was, staggering through the city. He saw a future in which, no matter what he did, he would be branded: the homosexual doctor, the homosexual athlete, the homosexual music critic. Martin Vallence, homosexual. To get AIDS, which seemed like an inevitable consequence of his feelings for Keith, was not just to join the ranks of the walking dead in New York City, with their skin sallow and drawn, their eyes intense and hollow, their limbs wasted and starved, but to be a dead homosexual, as though, no matter what else he did with his life, illicit sex—i.e., abnormal, perverted, immoral, unnatural sex—would always be the essence of his lost existence.