He shook his head. “No, this isn’t anything. Television gaffes are just that—gaffes. Jeff doesn’t know what’s going on, he just knows something is going on. He never explicitly states anything. It’s like it’s on the tip of his tongue. I think that’s how it is for a lot of people, some people are closer to it than others.”

  “Jeffrey fucking Masha.”

  “Jeffrey fucking Masha,” he agreed. After a moment, he looked at his phone. “Let’s go crack some eggs, dude.”

  And really, it was because of Jeff Masha that we did what we did.

  11

  WE WAITED OUTSIDE for Kev. We were in Ollie’s car, which we didn’t usually take to work because it was an old junker. Ollie always seemed to wilt at the idea of people seeing him as lesser, so as soon as we moved in together, it became necessary to take my vehicle.

  “How many times did they call you today?” he asked.

  “Just once.”

  “Yeah, same.”

  “One call—no check up at all.”

  “It’s fucking insulting,” I said, trying to get my blood heated.

  “It is!” Ollie agreed. “Here we are, obviously the two most depressed motherfuckers in the whole office, and all we do is talk about dying. Every fucking day—or used to, when Kev hadn’t become a hall monitor yet—every fucking day we’d be talking about how we’re just daydreaming of getting our brains blown out by some masked gunman, and now, the day we don’t show up—a total no call, no show situation—they only call us once. They don’t send anyone to check on us. Nothing happens.”

  “Because no one cares.”

  “No one fucking cares.” He sighed. “Do you want a cigarette?”

  Ollie had decided that when the Tide was high, he should start smoking.

  “Sure,” I said.

  We lit up and waited. Sure enough, at 5:05, Kev was walking across the parking lot, typing something on his phone.

  “Alright, this is it.”

  “Should we cover our faces?” I felt stupid when I asked it. “Never mind.”

  Ollie got out of the car first. “Kev, my man!” he called.

  I followed him, keeping my hand behind my back. “What’s happening, dude?” I tried to sound genial.

  He looked up and swiveled his head from one to the other. “You two weren’t at work today.”

  “Nope, afraid not,” said Ollie.

  “Okay,” said Kev, looking more confused than anything. “Whatever.” He looked down at his phone again to type something quickly. Something about his utter dismissal of us, as colleagues and people, enraged me. And if that weren’t enough, when he turned, he said, off-handedly, “Not that it matters, made the quotas anyways.”

  Ollie nodded to me, but I was already making my strides.

  You might be wondering how this happened. How one man can become so prone to violence after fretting about it constantly the entire morning. Well, the secret was in the Tidal Reality. Because the secret of the Tidal Reality was that it wasn’t a secret—we all knew about it innately. We couldn’t articulate it, but it was always there. Some days it urged us to strike a loved one, or wear a different tie, or drink regular instead of decaf. It was always there when it needed to be to heighten our impulsiveness.

  So, when it came time to reveal the heavy wrench I had behind my back, it was no problem. On a normal day, Kev’s comments would’ve wounded me. But when the Tide was high, they enraged me.

  I swung the wrench at Kev’s shocked face, knocking his open ‘o’ of a mouth closed upon impact. It landed with a wet crunching sound, and I was sure that I felt the vibrations of his teeth shattering down the handle and into my hand.

  Kev staggered back and Ollie and I both froze, just for a moment.

  “What?” was all our victim could manage.

  And as soon as he said that, Ollie pulled a steak knife from his back pocket—one of those small, serrated blades straight from our kitchen’s knife block—and lunged at Kev.

  Kev jumped back, of course. But I was faster with my wrench than Ollie was with his knife and I did the action hero thing and ran toward him and slid down on my knees in the asphalt (which hurt like fucking Hell), and slammed my weapon into his kneecap.

  A sharp yell. “Holy shit! Fuck!” and Kev crumbled. Ollie was already on top of him.

  We didn’t want to kill him, but we were testing our limits. We were testing Kev’s limits.

  Ollie jabbed a knife into his arm (“Only the arm, man. I don’t want to gut the poor dude. Not that it matters.”) while I held him down. I’d never done anything like this before, obviously. Never. Ollie hadn’t either. Kev squealed like a pig as Ollie pushed in and pulled out with his knife. And somehow, it was all too easy. Like, who wouldn’t do this? Why wouldn’t you do this all the time? As Kev squirmed under my weight, the effete little squirmer he was, I felt some great resolve, like the weight of a word, lost on the tip of my tongue, finally materialize. Yes, my body screamed.

  He tried to get up, he tried to escape. At some point, sawing at Kev’s flesh had grown tiresome for Ollie and he threw the knife aside, and seeing a chance at escape, Kev flexed his muscles and jumped up. He was hobbling on one good leg and I was behind him in seconds. I didn’t do anything fancy, I just pushed him down.

  Kev’s arms flailed, comically, as if he were miming a windmill or some shit. And just as I caught up with him, soon Ollie caught up with me. Our victim rolled on his back and looked up at us with horror in his eyes. “Why are you doing this?” he cried.

  And we looked at each other, me and Ollie, and I don’t think we were sure ourselves. Then, one of us kicked him, right in the guts. And then the other did. I’m not sure who went first, but we couldn’t help ourselves. There was something so whiny, so pathetic about the mewling creature—Kev of the Quotas—who thrashed back in force and screamed in an empty parking lot. I thought about it for just a moment—why the fuck wasn’t anyone coming to help him?—but then my mind drifted to better things. Like the dull, wet impact my shoes made on his stomach. Or the way Ollie’s sweat dripped from his forehead onto Kev’s white shirt. And then I started to savor our Lordship over our Lord. The disgusting child below us, the wounded animal, the omnipresent, ever-looming, proverbial Enthusiastic Participant.

  I didn’t know who started delivering the kicks, I really didn’t. It was like a dream. Somehow, our actions meshed together as one. We did things without understanding them fully. One kicked and it could have been either of us. But I did know it was I who put my foot on his head.

  It was I who looked up at Ollie and gave him that shit-eating, let’s end this fucker grin.

  It was I who pressed down on Kev’s head, grinding his ear and cheek into the pavement as his screams got louder and harsher.

  Ollie took a step back, and I didn’t know if he was smiling or opening his mouth, shocked and appalled.

  I used Kev’s head as leverage, like a stair step, propelling myself into the air, where for a moment I was weightless. In flight, I leveled my feet out, bringing my knees to my chest. And then, in one harsh movement, I slammed both feet down.

  Below me, his skull cracked.

  It took us a second to realize what had happened. A long second. And me and Ollie, we both kind of just looked at each other, vaguely aware of some great emotion climbing up through us that we couldn’t name.

  Finally, he said, “We should go.”

  I nodded, eyes downcast, avoiding Kev’s involuntary twitching with all my might.

  12

  BACK HOME, we didn’t talk to each other much. Ollie told me to write everything down, he was going to do the same. As the adrenaline wore off, I felt absolutely sick to my stomach. I felt disgusted with myself. I would’ve cried if the feelings themselves weren’t so large, so difficult to process.

  Worst of all, though, I knew that Ollie was upset with me. And that bothered me more than Kev dying did.

  I knew he was upset because he pretended he wasn’t. “No, it’s fine, dude. Shit happens.” His voice sounded choked, quiet. “I’m just tired, need some sleep, you know?” He chuckled a little, like a half-hearted sort of cough, and disappeared into his room.

  At home, I was reliving the murder. Writing it down, I felt like I was there again, feeling Kev’s head break like a cantaloupe. I kept wondering what he felt, what he was thinking as the two losers in his office fucking killed him.

  Nausea had overcome me and I threw up several times. I kept listening for police sirens. I figured I made a big mistake, the biggest mistake ever and soon I would be in a cell, because surely, surely—you could not do something like this and have it be okay. That just wasn’t possible. Kev was dead and I killed him.

  The sun was barely down when I finally got into bed. I couldn’t hear Ollie on the other side of the door. I didn’t know what he was doing. It worried me that I didn’t know what he was doing. I imagined him deciding that his friendship with me had run its course, that I’d taken things too far and he needed an out. He would go live alone and I would be stuck in this stupid two bedroom luxury apartment that I couldn’t afford, and somewhere, far away from each other, we’d be counting the seconds on the same clock.

  Eventually, I went to sleep, but I wasn’t sure when. I tossed and turned for hours until at some point, my eyes closed and they stayed like that, for at least an hour or two. I was asleep, technically, but still so wired that the slightest sound would’ve sent me leaping from my bed.

  In the morning, I was tired, but eager.

  Ollie would be the same, I knew. And more than ever, I hoped that he was right. That everything would be reset and Kev would be alright and our memories of the whole thing would be this fleeting thought, a half-remembered melody, a memory sapped of all form and substance. I was up first. I wasn’t sure what was supposed to happen. I tried to sort my feelings on the couch, before Ollie woke up.

  If I was being honest, I still felt pretty torn up. But the more I thought about it, the more I came to understand my feelings. I wasn’t thinking about Kev anymore or what I did to him. That part of it was foggier, or more distant, or both. Me stomping down on Kev’s head was like something that happened in a movie, played by actors—irreconcilably distant. I couldn’t quite conjure the emotions attached to it, just like you wouldn’t be able to feel the emotions of an action hero gunning down dozens of faceless bad guys—it felt more like cinema than experience. I did feel bad, though. I was worried what Ollie would say, how he would feel, just as I was last night, but now those feelings were distinct, separate, no longer intertwined with yesterday’s violence.

  When Ollie woke up, stumbling out of his room like every other day, he looked at me, nodded, and said, “You’re still here. That’s good.”

  “Still here,” I said, trying to keep myself together, to be nonchalant.

  Ollie brushed the hair out of his face. “How do you feel?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know yet. A little weird, I guess.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I think things just progressed a little far for me last night. Further than I was ready for at the time. No cops came, right?”

  I was confused. “No, no one’s been by yet. They’d have been here by now, right? If things hadn’t reset?”

  “Most definitely. You’re safe, don’t worry about that.”

  I breathed in. “We should go to work, check in on...make sure things are alright.”

  “Yeah, agreed.”

  We both waited for a moment. I decided to start, to be the straight shooter, lest it loom over us for the rest of the day. “About last night, dude—I don’t know what happened.”

  Ollie put a hand up. “You don’t have to explain.”

  “No—no—I just wanted to say—like, it was all a blur. I didn’t know what I was doing. Except, I did sorta. I don’t know. I just took things too—”

  Ollie shook his head, he cut me off. “No, I should’ve explained earlier,” he said. “I knew what was going to happen, before we did anything. It was my fault.” He stopped, taking a breath, rubbing his brow. “You know how I said that the unreal days make it easier to . . . do things differently, I guess? Easier to break routine, skip the decaf, live life on the edge? Well, what I should’ve said is that they allow less impulse control. When the Tide is high, it’s easier to do the things you don’t wanna do. Whether that’s shitting in the coffee pot or, well, you know.”

  “Jesus,” I said, shamefully alleviated of at least a little guilt. It wasn’t my fault.

  “Yeah.”

  “But he’s okay, right?”

  “He’s gotta be. Might have a little bit of a bad feeling—like he did something wrong yesterday. You ever get like that? Some days you just wake up and feel off, like you’re guilty for something and you don’t know why? I sometimes wonder if someone killed me the day before, and it just washed away like a dream.”

  “I can’t believe I did it though.”

  “When the Tide is high, you’re liable to do anything. I’d try not to dwell on it. I was there too. I wasn’t much kinder.”

  “I just feel like shit.”

  “I bet we’ll get used to it.”

  I laughed. Ollie had that boyish look on his face. He looked mischievous.

  “And besides,” he added, with a touch of sorrow. “The next Tide doesn’t roll in for another month. We’re gonna be in a desert. I think we’ll have other problems.”

  My heart dropped. “A month? How do you know?”

  He tapped the side of his head. “It happens every so often, you know? The cycle repeats. I’ve been keeping track of this for like almost a year, and it seems like every seventy-nine days, it starts over. It’s like a pattern. Maybe we’ll get lucky and I’ll be full of shit though. Fingers crossed, right?”

  I couldn’t stand the thought of what I did to Kev—but now that I had a taste of freedom, I couldn’t stand to go back either. “A whole month,” I said.

  “Yep, thirty-one days from now.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I said.

  He sighed, I sighed. We looked at the clock, hoping to catch another second. “Alright,” he said. “Let’s go to work.

  ***

  We expected Kev to be fine, of course. I mean, there was always that little voice in the back of my head that screamed: this is all bullshit, what the fuck are you doing—but having gone in twice now, having seen the blasé reports of the Tidal Reality from Ollie, who didn’t seem crazy, but knowledgeable, I had accepted the Tide as part of our lives. A crazy bit of magic that had blessed me thus far, that had made life worth living again. So, I expected to see Kev, because I knew somehow that if he were still dead, I’d already be in jail.

  Still, even if I expected it, I felt relief blossoming within me when I saw him. He turned to us, brushed his stupid, generic, white-guy middle-manager haircut to the side and said, “Morning, fellas,” as if we hadn’t jumped him the night before. “Best get straight to work,” he said. “Corporate is beyond stoked at our jump in productivity. They think we can beat our record. You ready for that? You bros up to the challenge?” He had the light and enthusiastic voice of a motivational speaker. It made me grind my teeth.

  Kev moved from desk to desk, explaining the new quotas, relishing the word and its thudding musicality each time he said it. Ollie and I sat down and I think we both gulped at the same time. Like a fucking cartoon. We would’ve laughed about it too, had Kev not been hovering in the middle of the office like some jungle idol.

  “He fucking loves this,” I said. “He really fucking loves this.”

  “You should’ve cut his fucking head off,” said Ollie.

  “I could’ve put it on a spike like Vlad the Impaler. We could’ve paraded it around to ward off the Turks.”

  “Quotas,” came a voice and I turned to see Kev behind me already. “So,” he started again, as if tediousness was the remedy to our slacking. “Corporate has been really excited by the progress at this branch—”

  “We know.”

  “God, Kev, we heard you the first time.”

  “You need to get back to work,” he said simply. “That’s what we pay you to do.”

  “Alright, alright.”

  “Fine, fine.”

  And then, when he left, we mouthed to each other, “Fuck off.”

  But, even being the more cavalier of the office, we still were afraid of losing our jobs. It took me six months to find this shit job. Ollie said he didn’t care, but I could tell he did, at least a little. He was the one who suggested the apartment, after all. So, we shut up and we worked and we tried our best to make our jabs when Kev was out of earshot.

  By the time five o’ clock rolled around, I felt like my eyes had liquefied. The spreadsheet’s grid had started to bend and curve. All of the lines were wobbly and the numbers looked to be from a numerical alphabet I could no longer recognize. I rubbed my eyes. I felt like a leaden blanket had fallen over me. In just one full shift, I was lobotomized. Ollie and I went home, tired and depressed, to our “luxury two-bedroom,” where we drank and made attempts at small talk.

  The next day we woke up and I think we both were thinking the same way—a new day, new me sort of thing. We were going to try to be good and do the job we were paid to do, because we thought there was no reason why two reasonably smart people shouldn’t be able to do it. Everyone else in the office could do it. They managed to get up every day and do the same thing, every day, and not feel like their head was going to explode. Or rather, that it would be worth it if it did.

  We took our deep breaths. We talked about it on the way there. We practiced mindfulness, plugging in our earbuds in unison and listening to YouTube videos that told us to breathe into our toes. We couldn’t help but break out into the giggles when we tried it, but we kept doing it anyway, eyes closed, anxiously waiting for our bodies to answer the woman’s voice in our ear.

  “It might’ve done something,” I said.

  “I definitely feel looser,” said Ollie.

 

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