Free The Deep Whatsis by Peter Mattei

about,” HR Lady says with a mock-serious look that hides a smirky smile.
    “Is she suing us for age discrimination?”
    “What?”
    “Juliette. Is she suing us for age discrimination?”
    “Ssshh,” HR Lady says, annoyed that I would even speak such words outside of our cone of silence. “No, it’s not her. Something else.”
    We get into my office and she closes the door and looks at me.
    “She’s doing fine,” she says.
    “So you fired her?”
    “No, no, she’s still at the hospital.”
    “Wait, she tried to kill herself? What are you saying?” HR Lady has this way of talking around the truth; I’ve noticed it’s a common advertising-based personality meme.
    “Not Juliette, Sabi,” she says.
    Sabi? “Who’s Sabi?”
    “Eric,” she says, giving me a look. “The production intern.”
    Her name is Sabi? Did I know that? “What happened to her?”
    “Why don’t you tell me?” she asks in a tone that I don’t appreciate. I don’t appreciate the barely veiled news it conveys that we are no longer on the same team. I think about it and then I say, “You know, I don’t really appreciate that tone,” my mind lurching in and out of clichés perhaps due to the fact I haven’t eaten and I’m still as always demihard from my meds.
    “Look, just tell me what happened. She’s got a massive bruise on her face and she wouldn’t say how she got it but she did say that she spent the night with you. Then she teared upand walked away. I realized we potentially have a situation here and so I sent her to the hospital to have it looked at.”
    “To have what looked at?”
    “Her face.”
    I thought about it and decided the only thing to do was tell the truth, or as close to the truth as I could muster.
    “I saw her last night,” I say. “At a party. That’s all there is to it.”
    HR Lady looks at me knowing full well that I’m witholding the sexual relations part but I’m guessing she knows better than to go there right at this moment. I am wrong.
    “Did you fuck her?”
    “Pardon me?”
    “Did you have sex with her, Eric? I know this is uncomfortable but if you want me to get Barry involved in this I’ll have to. Actually, I could get my ass in a sling for not having done so already.” Barry is the company’s general counsel, and the de facto president of the agency since the former president had quit, and he was one of two people in the entire building who could actually get me fired, the other being the chairman of the entire Tate Worldwide agency network. I didn’t like Barry and he didn’t like me. He had worked here for thirty years and was the kind of person who was loyal to the people he came up with, and he didn’t like me for reasons I totally understand; I’m an asshole and not loyal to anyone, not even myself.
    “No, I did not have sex with her, we just hung out a bit at my place,” I say to HR.
    “Are you kidding me?” she says.
    I pause for a moment to watch her body twitch almost imperceptibly. “And as far as her bruise goes,” I continue, “she was fucking wasted and she slipped and fell and hit her head. It had nothing to do with me.”
    “Really?”
    “Really.”
    “Where were you at the time?”
    “I was standing about ten or twelve feet from her.”
    “Doing what?” she asks. Do I tell her I was modeling her sock on my penis? Her sock she had transmogrified into something anthropomorphic?
    “OK I’ll tell you the truth,” I say with a laugh. “We did some meth and went back to the trailer and I found out she’d been screwing my cousin Elrod and so I beat the shit out of her. Come on, this is ridiculous.”
    “A black eye is not ridiculous, Eric, and if a doctor says she’s been, you know,
abused
…”
    “You mean like hit? Like I hit her? You can’t be serious.”
    “And if she says she was, you know,
raped
—and the doctor does a
test
…”
    “A test? You mean like a DNA test? Jesus this is really getting silly.”
    “Of course I don’t