Senseless

Do you ever have something happen that in no way really directly affects you but you still feel really bothered by it? A haunted and unsettled feeling that creeps up, with no warning, and no real explanation? Maybe a horrible story on the news, or the death of someone you once knew but have not seen for years? Maybe a family tragedy of someone you know online which could be completely fiction for all you know? Maybe the divorce of another Hollywood couple, or an earthquake at some exotic locale?

When I worked, at Heartless Cellular Company, I had this supervisor, we will call Fannie. She had been in the business since cell phones were invented and knew EVERYTHING. She could talk down an irate customer, sweet talk technicians into climbing towers in ice storms, and coax cheerfulness from the surliest of employees. She was not an easy person to work for because she demanded everyone’s absolute best. Slacking was not allowed. But, if you ever needed her help, or were having a bad day, or needed to be off for some random reason…she was there for you. She was not what gave Heartless Cellular Company their name.

Miss Fannie had flaming red hair (bottled I am sure), wore purple at least three times a week, and drove a big white Cadillac. She was exactly the same age as my mom, and reminded me of her in more ways than one. Fannie told me once she married the love of her life when she was very young, and when he found someone else she never felt the need to look for love again. She had no children, and always called the group of mostly twenty something people who worked for her, her kids. Every few days she would pop her head over the edge of my cublet (no real cubicals for this company) and show me a new picture of her “son with fur”, a black lab she adored. I worked directly under her for exactly a year, the length of time you had to work for the company before you could be promoted. The day of my anniversary at the job I planned just to keep for a few weeks while I looked for something else, she called me into a conference room and told me I had an interview the next day in a different department, a change that would mean a promotion, a pretty big pay raise, and a move to a different building. She had gone to the head of that department and told them that they would be losing out if they did not have me working there. I of course got the job. I moved buildings and only saw Miss Fannie a couple of times a month, and then it was once every few months, and then it was just the occasional emailed pictures of her dog. I owed her a lot, but never even said goodbye when I left the Heartless Celluar Company’s Campus for the last time.

A year passed. I never talked to Miss Fannie, and to be honest, I rarely even thought about my time there at all. I was sitting on the edge of my bed watching the evening news while The Son sat beside me chewing on the remote. It was grainy because we do not have cable, and the volume was turned low so as not to interrupt The Son’s babbling to the remote. The overly hair sprayed man said something about a Heartless Cellular Company employee. I looked up. I saw a white Cadillac behind yellow crime tape. I saw bullet casings on the ground circled by cruelly cheerful orange chalk. I heard her name. I heard dead at 54. I heard a gasp, mine.

Her elderly parents were on an anniversary cruise. She stopped by the mall to get them a new shower curtain, and a mentally ill person took note of her car. He followed her to her parent’s house, pulled up in the drive behind that damn white Cadillac, and stole her life before she even knew she was a statistic. The neighbors knew the sound was more than a car backfiring, more than teenagers playing with bottle rockets. The police arrived fast, but too late, to the quiet neighborhood, in a decent suburb, to find someone, shot dead, who should have died of a heart attack when she was 80.

I emailed a friend who still worked for the company to see if maybe it was another Fannie, but of course knew the answer. I did not go to the funeral, what would I say to those elderly parents who thought they were going to come home tan and relaxed instead of pale and bereaved? I saw on the news a month later that Heartless Cellular Company had planted a tree in her honor on the river bank which our cublets overlooked.

Another  year passed, the man on the news told me the office building is being sold to a new faceless corporation, with employees who will smoke under that tree and have no idea whether it was planted, or a random act of life on the steep riverbank.

I am bothered. Haunted. Unsettled. Sad.

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