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Hello, Dolly

Until Dolores.

It isn’t easy figuring out her name. My new place of work is a massive termite colony, each department compartmentalized and unto itself, and it’s difficult to find anyone who knows anything about the woman dressed like Satan’s shadow, always in black, with long sleeves and high collars; the one with the vibrant lipstick and the cruel heels, who swirls through rooms without others registering her presence. Purposeful but aloof, like a malevolent spirit with shit to do.

“Who was that?” I ask Tricia-from-Marketing after another spotting in the break room.

“Who was what?” Tricia-from-Marketing asks, attempting to eat her yogurt daintily, not realizing she has a smear on her chin.

I trail the shadow down a hallway, round a corner, and she’s gone.

Another time, she materializes in a packed elevator next to me. She doesn’t acknowledge my existence, and I certainly don’t say anything. I watch to see which button she’ll push, but she doesn’t so much as glance at the numbers. She steps off at the sixteenth floor when it opens to let someone in, and I watch, waiting to see if she’ll go left or right, but she does neither. She dawdles, looking at her phone, and just as the doors slip shut, she looks left, then right, and ducks into the stairwell.

“Who was that?” I ask Brennan-the-Intern.

“What was who?” Brennan-the-Intern asks, swiping right ten times in a row on a dating app while waiting for his floor.

Whoever she is, she acts like a secret agent. She gets off at the wrong floor and uses the stairs to throw off anyone who might be watching. She always has her phone out or pressed to her ear to deflect conversation. There’s no way to figure out who she is. I decide she must be a consultant, or a freelancer, or maybe even a client representative. Not a Spencer & Sterns employee at all.

Several days go by without any sightings, and then at the end of the day one Thursday, later than usual, I catch the elevator by myself, down, down, down, until it stops at the fifteenth floor. The doors yawn open like the gates to hell, and there she is.

She wears a black dress with a neat white collar under her open coat, and her lipstick makes her look like she’s just finished devouring some poor man’s heart, raw. She steps into the miasma of elevator Muzak with me, presses B, and turns to face me—a slow, graceful pirouette, her arms extending as she leans back on the handrail. Her sharp nails rasp the metal of the rail and the hairs on the back of my neck stand at attention. Then she cocks her head to one side, exposing the bareness of her own neck, and she looks like a vampire offering herself up to her lover. The elevator doors close, her eyes meet mine, and there’s that lurching fairground drop in the bottom of my stomach again, except the elevator hasn’t started moving yet.

“Ted Bundy,” she says.

I blink. “My name is—”

“Your Halloween costume,” she says. “You’re dressed as Ted Bundy.”

I’m not wearing a costume. I glance down at my arm in its sling. Yesterday I fell, and Grant—well, it was a whole thing. After Verity moved in, the large box she brought with her had to be carried out, and lending a helping hand is the nice, roommatey thing to do. Everyone at the office today was very solicitous. Deb-from-IT, in a disturbing cat costume, parts of which may have been sourced from an adult store, even gave me a double handful of Halloween candy.

“You’re the first to guess. But what about you? You’re just wearing your usual vampire nun getup.”

She narrows her eyes at me. “Vampire nun?”

“You’re always in black and covered up like a sister wife, except your legs.”

She looks thrown for a moment, like she doesn’t know whether she likes that I’ve made an observation about her. “I told you. I’m going for a Black Widow aesthetic.”

I want to know who she is.

“I’m Jake Ripper.”

She snorts contemptuously. “That’s definitely not your name.”

“It is. What’s yours?”

She doesn’t give me her name. She doesn’t say a thing. She is a wall. A stone. A—

The doors slide open, and my clinically stupid supervisor, Doug, enters at the ninth floor. In the jocular voice he uses to disguise the fact he has no idea what’s going on, he says, “Jack! And if it isn’t the lovely Dolly.”

She startles and shoots him a venomous look, but my stomach pinches pleasantly, and I file away my first little bit of data. Her name. I visualize it being typed across the blank screen in my head, the cursor blinking patiently, waiting for a surname.

“That’s not my name,” she says, and her tone makes it clear this idiot is taking his life into his hands calling her “Dolly.”

Backspace, backspace, backspace…

“Haha, yes. Yes. Dolores dela Cruz.”

Bingo. Entered and saved. I never forget a name. Here, her eyes dart toward me. The game is up.

Doug continues obliviously. “Haha, ?cómo Esteban?”

She stares at him in disbelief. “?‘?Cómo Esteban?’?”

His grin slips. “You don’t speak Spanish?”

She says, “I’m Filipina.”

It’s not going well for Doug. He still has no idea what’s going on, and his HR-mandated sensitivity training only got far enough into his skull to create a generalized impression that the conversation is turning dangerous. He scurries off at the third floor when the doors open to let someone in. The third floor isn’t even leased by our company.

I watch Dolores dela Cruz’s profile for the remaining two floors down to Ground, where I get off.

“Good night,” I say in my boring human voice.

“Buenos nachos,” she says flatly without looking up from her phone.

—

The next morning, I wake at 4:53 a.m. and stare at the dim gray square that is my ceiling and think about Dolores dela Cruz. I drink five cups of coffee in the dark, and I don’t even feel annoyed about Verity anymore. I have a name. Now I need to find out where she works. I need to know her department.

At work, after serving two weeks as photocopy bitch, Doug finally gives me some data entry to do.

“How long did this job usually take the last person?” I ask him.

Doug sweats and fidgets. “A week?”

I nod mournfully. “It will take me longer because I’m learning.”

Then I request permission to relocate to the empty annex so that I can take advantage of the quiet to really focus , i.e., write a script that will automate the entire process, completing one week’s work in five minutes, allowing me to spend the rest of the day working on my list. Or staring into space and imagining shoving every person I ever knew off a tall building. Or thinking about a slight figure in a black trench coat.

Permission is granted, and off I gambol to claim a cubicle in the annex, a deserted corporate postapocalypse frozen in time after the chaotic bloodbath of the last round of layoffs two years ago. The conspicuous absence of the warm bodies that left pens and papers scattered about and chairs half turned from their desks pleases me. The fluorescents hum at the edge of hearing, the dry air tickles the throat, and the sensory pleasures of greasy melamine surfaces and polyester upholstery beckon.

I plug in my computer, line up my pens, square my Post-its, purposefully press the power button…and as my computer makes the sound of an angel chorus sighing, I look up, and there’s Dolores dela Cruz herself.

Ensconced in a corner office, her long blue-black hair twirled into a perfect knot on the nape of her neck, her winged eyeliner like little black knife blades, her lipstick the only splash of color in this monochrome environment, she’s been watching me through the floor-to-ceiling window that makes up one wall of her office with a stony expression.

I smile a bright, fake, shit-for-brains grin at her.

Fancy seeing you here!

She doesn’t even blink. She holds my gaze for five seconds, then turns back to her computer.

—

Now, my life is like this:

On Monday, Dolores walks in with lips as red and sticky and sweet as a Halloween candied apple with a razor blade inside, plucks up the coffee labeled Dolly from her desk, and holds my eye while she drops it in the trash. Which is fair. I wouldn’t drink a coffee bought by me, either.

On Tuesday, my Post-its and pens are smacked out of order when I arrive at work, and the pervasive pong of fish reveals itself to be one of Jared-from-Accounts’s dirty tuna cans, taken from the kitchenette and hidden in my waste basket.

On Wednesday, my user account has been wiped from the computer. I make eye contact with Dolores as I pull a flash drive out of my messenger bag and restore my lost files.

On Thursday, I festoon my cubicle with strings of braided garlic and pour a salt ring onto the carpet around my desk.

On Friday, she cranks up her true crime podcasts to full tilt, daring me with a glance to protest. But the grisly podcasts just make the place feel homier. I decide to stay, and dear old Doug, pleased with my productivity, lets me.

It’s clear she isn’t happy about my intrusion. She never asks me what I’m doing here or how long I’ll stay. In the beginning she doesn’t talk to me at all, but some days I look up from my desk, my gaze drawn as if by an industrial magnet, and there she is, staring right at me through the glass window of her office with a bored, dissatisfied expression, like an apex predator considering something quite beneath her on the food chain.

When she’s not there, I pick the lock of her office door with a pair of paper clips and snoop her computer. It wakes when I touch the space bar, and she’s left open a browser tab for me: a Google search for How to tell the office nutjob you know he’s snooping on your computer after hours. I leave a new search for her: How do I gently let down an infatuated coworker?

There’s nothing personal on her computer, and I can’t make out anything work related, either. She spends all her time on her laptop, and that goes home with her.

I look up her podcasts and download an episode of Murderers at Work on my phone. I press play, and that eerie, now familiar opening jingle tinkles like a mallet sweeping over a skeleton’s ribs. I open her drawers and look through each one, just as she did to me, and as I lean back in her chair, I notice that the black stone vase sitting on her desk is angled just right so that she can see my workstation reflected in one of its flat, rectangular sides.

It’s a mystery to me what Dolores does. She doesn’t participate in any meetings. She doesn’t seem to be afflicted with a recurring appearance of paunchy middle management knocking on her door to “check in.” I watch her all day, and see nothing.

And all the while, there’s something . Something irresistible. I feel like a kid who keeps teasing the cat that scratches him. I feel like a cold, rubbery lab frog twitching to life every time she jabs me with an electrode.

—

At the end of the first week, we find ourselves alone in an elevator again.

“Dolores,” I say.

“Jake,” she says, stiffly.

And in my best imitation of a normal human being, setting aside for the moment that she poured an entire cup of coffee on my messenger bag earlier, I ask, “Plans tonight, Dolores?”

“No. But I know what you’re doing.”

“What?”

“Putting the finishing touches on your human skin suit. I’m an expert on serial killers. I can always spot one in the wild. It’s the stench of bleach and the aura of despair.”

“Don’t have time tonight,” I say. “I’m defrosting my freezer for my next victim.”

“Do you use your fake golden retriever to lure them in?”

“My fake golden retriever?”

“The one whose picture you have as your desktop image.”

“What makes you think he’s fake?”

“You never have any dog hair on your clothes. And because it’s a stock image. It’s the first picture that comes up when you google ‘golden retriever.’ I checked.”

I would never be that obvious. It’s the third image.

“Is this part of your pretending-to-be-normal disguise?” she asks.

“Yes. Is your cat part of yours?”

She swivels on me. “Cat?”

Earlier, I heard her asking her neighbor to feed her cat. I can hear all her phone calls from where I sit, and I’m fascinated by the rare details of Dolores’s out-of-office life that come my way. I collect them, polish them up, appraise their value, and sort them into neat, meager piles. Pets resemble their owners, and I can picture the cat: vicious, sharp-fanged, black. Because of course she’s black.

She narrows her eyes dangerously at me. “Nothing gets past you, Jake. You’re a real bunny boiler, you know that?”

“What?”

“Am I going to come home someday to you making rabbit stew in my kitchen? Wearing my clothes? Blood smeared all over the cabinets? You picked the lock to my office. You went through my drawers.”

Just look at this little hypocrite.

“You went through my desk first. Maybe I should file an HR complaint.”

The split second of hesitation after my response gives her away. For a fleeting moment her face is afraid. Drawing the attention of HR scares the bejeesus out of her. A tiny, doubtful seed of suspicion morphs rapidly into a plant on time lapse. Her reluctance to tell me her name, her secret agent tactics, her remote office apart from everyone else—it all comes together. Suddenly I understand everything. I know her secret.

“What makes you think I haven’t beaten you to it?” she says airily. “I already spoke to HR.”

“You haven’t. And you won’t.”

“Don’t be so sure. I’ve been advised to keep a log.”

She hasn’t, and I’ve never been so sure about something in my life. I get off at Ground, and one backward glance reveals Dolores staring after me with a small line between her eyebrows.

“?‘Grief,’?” I say over my shoulder. “It’s a good name for you.”

“A more accurate translation would be ‘pain,’?” she calls out. She says it like she’s cautioning me not to forget it.

The next morning I pull up my list. I create a new one every time I start at a new office. It’s my list of expendables, my list of people to be eliminated.

Dolores dela Cruz

I tuck her name in neatly at the bottom, under two dozen other names. My fingers hover over the mouse. What the heck. Why not? I cut her name and paste it at the top.