Then we heard loud laughter coming from the other side of the door.
This unnerved us, made us feel uncertain and more frightened than before. It was the kind of laughter you heard at a party or a bar or a reunion.
We couldn’t imagine, in other words, what had made them laugh so hard. Or maybe we could but would rather not have. And maybe this was what made Karen — quiet, unassuming, prudish Karen — say, Guess they found Richard’s monkey video. And this. This made us laugh, laugh so hard. Maybe because it was Karen who brought it up after making such a fuss over the video in the first place. Or maybe it was the idea of those goons huddled around one of the computers in the cubicles watching that video on YouTube. Or maybe it was just the stress of our situation, the urgent need for some kind of release. Whatever the reason, Richard’s monkey video had never been as funny to us as it was then. The video showed a chimp, a trained chimp, taunting a baby, first with a bottle and then with a squeaky giraffe and then the baby’s blankie, coaxing the baby to it each time with this thing or that, only to snatch the item away at the last second just before thumping the baby hard on the forehead. The baby fell for it every time and then wailed and screamed and cried this big openmouthed, toothless cry after the chimp thumped him on the forehead. It was a cruel but really, really funny video. Karen, who’d just had a baby four months ago, and was maybe a bit bitter coming back to work so soon, made a number of complaints about the video. She complained enough and to enough of the right people that we had to attend a seminar. Control software was installed onto our computers. Every minute of every workday was tracked. No more social networking. No more personal e-mail. No more porn. Was it surprising that none of us really liked Karen all that much? She knew that we didn’t like her much, but she thought it was because of what she did, when really, and it is a nuanced argument, we admit, but we already hadn’t liked her because we’d already decided that she would turn out to be the kind of person who would do what she did.
So her joke here, in the middle of all of this, surprised us, made us reconsider her and our dislike of her, though the more honest of us knew that if we all got out of this alive, or even if only some of us did, including Karen, it wouldn’t be long before we shifted back into our established and familiar office roles.
But still. In that small, brief moment, each of us loved Karen.
Then the door opened and we shut up, afraid they were coming in there to make us shut up.
Hostages, we figured, weren’t supposed to break out in spontaneous, raucous laughter.
But they weren’t there for us. They were there to add to our numbers. Two men marched into the office holding a woman between them and then they threw her into the lot of us and left, shutting the door behind them.
William moved to help her up but stopped. He looked back at us, his face white. She’d been beaten up badly, we could all see that, but we couldn’t see what had freaked William out until he stepped back and then we saw what was utterly, horribly wrong with her, which wasn’t that she was black-eyed and bloody-browed, wasn’t even the long, thick gash down her arm that extended from her shoulder almost to her elbow, but rather that her other arm was missing entirely. Her blouse had been ripped off at the shoulder of the missing arm. We could see the seams and the jagged edge of the material. We couldn’t see what was underneath the material, but it was in the shape of a shoulder, a truncated shoulder.
Then we got a glimpse of her, got a look at her face, and we realized who she was.
Sarah O’Hara.
We knew her, but the way she looked now, her eyes downcast, her face bruised, her shoulders slumped, jerking with silent sobs, we couldn’t believe how afraid of her we’d been, and we were once very, very afraid of her.
For one, she was generally very mean. She arrived out of the blue on occasion, stormed through our offices, yelled at our various managers, and stood haughtily over our shoulders as we made our calls, as we coaxed our clients into ever-bigger vacation packages, as we tried to up-sell the sixth Sherpa since no one, not since the Krakauer book, attempted Everest with fewer than six Sherpas. No matter what we said or how much we sold, we could never seem to do enough for Sarah O’Hara.
Once, she hung up Kelly’s phone, Kelly who shortly thereafter succumbed to a nervous breakdown and quit. Hung up Kelly’s phone in the middle of a sales call with one of her biggest clients. No one knew why. Not Kelly, not our manager, Benjamin, also no longer with the agency. None of us could figure it out. The call was going well. Before that hang-up, Kelly was our best salesperson. She had convinced her client that there really was nothing more spectacular than to travel with one’s own hot-air balloon and hot-air balloon crew. You never know, she was in the middle of saying, You never know when you might want to go up in a hot-air balloon. Say you are casting about in the Antarctic waters south of Argentina and you want to take a hot-air balloon over the Perito Moreno Glacier. Unless you bring your own, she continued, and that was when Sarah O’Hara pressed her index finger down on the phone and hung up the call. Then she looked at Kelly, who had turned abruptly around to see what the fuck had just happened, and she waited. She waited to see if Kelly would say or do anything, waited for an outburst or tears, or something. With Sarah O’Hara, no one ever knew. Kelly turned back to the phone, not a word or a look, and redialed the number, which none of the rest of us would have had the balls to do, not with Sarah O’Hara standing right behind us. She redialed and then, with a smile on her face, she apologized, a mechanical issue, she had moved to another phone, wouldn’t happen again, and what did they decide about that balloon? And sure, credit where credit is due, she made the sale, but those of us who knew her best could hear the slight hitch in her voice. Just a tremor. A blip. Nothing at all. Sarah O’Hara made a note on her clipboard and then walked away. We consoled Kelly. Patted her gamely on the shoulder. She smiled and shook her head and gave out a long, relieved sigh. And then the next day the tremor had become a trill, and then a shake, and soon enough, she couldn’t talk on the phone without stammering or stuttering. She lost her clients. Had her breakdown. Quit and moved back to Kansas to live with her folks.
The week before all of that happened, she’d won a trip to Costa Rica for having the best monthly sales record three months running. She never claimed it.
What had poor Kelly done to deserve any of this? What, other than stand out as a brilliant sales associate? Kind and generous and glowing? Nothing. Nothing that we could see. Some of us speculated — she had made some cruel joke at Sarah’s expense (a lot of us had, but we couldn’t remember hearing anything of the sort from Kelly), or she had discovered the real agency below the fake agency (though she never let on anything of the sort), or she had e-mailed Sarah one too many times asking for a new order of Post-it notes or copier toner or a new mouse pad — but really, none of this made sense, and in the end, most of us decided it was all arbitrary, that Kelly was offered up as a sacrifice, an example to remind us how replaceable we all were, how powerful Sarah was, how unnerved we should be around her.
And we were. Unnerved. But the real reason, or maybe the other reason, some of us — not all of us, but those of us who knew something about what really went on there — had once been very, very afraid of her was because of a rumored mechanical arm, one she could use, the rumors went, with fearsome and deadly force.
Which seemed to us now both less of a rumor and less of an arm, having been indelicately removed.
She pulled herself up enough to push herself across the carpet and to the wall. She sat there, her knees against her chest, her arm draped over her knees, her head, sobbing and weeping, cradled in the crook of the only elbow she had left to her. We were at a loss. Even William, who never missed an opportunity to unsuccessfully try to comfort someone. Even Karen, who believed her faith could heal all wounds. None of us knew what to say or do in a situation in which we were tasked with comforting a woman we hated about her superpowerful mechanical arm, which had been torn from her body.