Let me tell you about my boss, because once I recognized him I couldn’t stop seeing it, and it explained nine years of my life in about four seconds.
We’ve never gotten along. Nothing you could write up — he’s not a villain, he doesn’t kick dogs, he’s just got this way of needing to be the largest object in any room, and something in me goes hard and cold and competitive the second he walks in, in a way I’m not with anybody else alive. For nine years I told myself it was a personality clash. Office stuff. Everybody’s got one.
He’s the rival from the clever world. From Maldek. I knew it the way you know a song from the first two notes. We were on opposite sides of the thing that ended that planet, he and I — two brilliant frightened men, each dead certain the other was going to get everyone killed — and we were both right, that’s the joke of it, we were both exactly right — and we have apparently been booked into the same conference room ever since to keep having it out.
And here’s what got me, sitting across from him in the ten o’clock yesterday while he explained something I already knew in a tone I didn’t care for. The old thing came up in me. The reach. The I am right and he is wrong, and being right means I don’t have to be kind to him — the exact machine I described to you on the fourteenth night, the one that cracked a world. It came up smooth and familiar, and it felt, God help me, good, the way an old coat feels good. I sat there wanting to win. Over a spreadsheet. With a man I have been losing to, and beating, and losing to, since the clever world cracked.
That’s when it landed. This is the same fight. It never ended. We just keep getting handed new rooms to have it in, and every single time we both reach for the same weapon — being right — and every single time it costs us everything, and we don’t even remember why we’re so tired.
He doesn’t know. He just thinks I’m difficult in meetings.
But I know now. And the next time he makes my teeth itch, I get to do something I have never once done in all the long history of him and me. I get to not pick up the weapon.
We’ll see if I can. I’ve got a terrible track record.