The assistant editor sat and tried desperately not to sweat as he waited for the girl to arrive. The way he tried not to sweat was to distract himself by humming out loud, as any attempt to consciously not sweat perversely resulted in increased sweating. He didn’t hum any recognizable tune or melody, and an outside listener could only come to the conclusion that this was not your run-of-the-mill innocuous humming, that rather this was Humming With Intent. Which of course it was.
The girl was ten minutes late. The assistant editor worried that the Old Spice brand body-spray he’d applied twenty minutes earlier in the narrow sort of alley between Sound Stages Five and Seven had started to dissipate, washed off his skin by what was probably, no, yes, definitely a rising tide of dampness. He had chosen this particular variety of Old Spice because it came advertised as The Official Scent of Confidence™ and because his father had worn Old Spice Cologne, the kind that came in those odd little bottles that were always cool to the touch.
The company was shooting on location today, and on location days the girl brought all the editors their lunch from a nearby restaurant that was selected by vague consensus and which provided enough cheap menu items that the department could come in under their budget of twelve dollars a person.
The assistant editor leaned back squeakily as he tried to affect an air of non-chalance. He worried that his slowly-worsening body odor was beginning to pervade his cave-like work-space, which was part of the reason he felt the need to apply the body-spray between Sound Stages Five and Seven. Discharging the aerosol canister in an enclosed space tended to overpower the senses in an unpleasant way, and he was deeply wary of doing anything that might appear to the girl as “trying too hard.” A few gentle spritzes, applied outside and with ten minutes in which his fragrance could gently acclimate with his office’s ambient scent did just the trick. But now too much time had elapsed, and the signals from his stomach were drowning out even his hitherto moisture-and-odor-centric consciousness.
The girl, who was the Post-Production Production Assistant, had been what he would call a “person of interest” to the assistant editor since her first day, but he had only fallen head-over-heels in capital-L Love with her eight days ago, when she brought him what he’d heard called a Dirty Coke and which had been the only thing to habitually get him over the post-prandial torpor he always fell into after lunch due to his constant over-eating. The assistant editor had grown up poor, and the instinct to finish everything on his plate had never left. Working at a job with free, catered lunches with unlimited seconds was his till-then precariously maintained diet’s death-blow. In three months of work, he had ballooned up twenty pounds, which he attempted to conceal in a series of L then XL then XXL hooded sweatshirts, the donning of which necessitated his cranking the cave’s climate control all the way down to Arctic in order to control sweating.
He had first ordered a Dirty Coke in the café on the studio lot, intrigued by the combination of espresso and soda. It was love at first heart palpitation. Since then he mimicked them in the production office’s kitchen, though he was unsure in which order he was supposed to combine the ingredients. First he tried adding the Coke to the espresso, then the espresso to the Coke, but both attempts resulted in higher-than-ideal-fizzing, in a process which the assistant editor remembered was called nucleation, as the espresso broke the surface tension of the soda, unlocking the CO2 and allowing the gas bubbles to bind to the espresso. He considered pouring the espresso over ice, but ruled that out as it would water down the solution too much. In the end, he resigned himself to fizz, and just combined the ingredients in an extra-large tumbler in which there was room for soda, ice, espresso, and fizz.
The Post Production Production Assistant (whose name was Ellen), had observed him doing his chemistry experiment and her curiosity prompted him to show her how to make them. The next day was eight days ago: the day on which she’d brought him a Dirty Coke she’d made herself, which prompted the whole falling-in-love, covert body-spray-spraying business.
She was now twenty-five minutes late, and the assistant editor’s anxiety transformed into panic as he realized that he’d requested a salad in response to her telephoned lunch-order request. He had been craving a cheeseburger, but the sound of her voice on the line had shamed him into a healthy choice that he now realized could not begin to assuage what was revealing itself to be just really a world-class hunger. It became clear that he would need the appetite-smothering effects of a Dirty Coke’s nuclear caffeine blast in order to function at all, heart murmurs and shaky hands be damned. The assistant editor took a deep breath and attempted to soberly consider his situation. He exhaled and tried to mentally take stock. Instantly, his poor neurons were overloaded with somatic diagnostic data until he imagined that he would soon actually dissolve into a pool of Old Spice-tinged sweat. This fever-dream image was what first sparked the thought in the editor’s mind that he was indeed coming down with something, the anxiety of which thought got in line and took a number, so to speak.
The assistant editor realized that no amount of fragrance-spritzing would conceal to Ellen the fact that he was having what was at best a panic attack. Flight was his only option. The assistant editor flipped his hood onto his head and burst out of his cave. He slid quickly past the other editing bays, the doors of which all the other editors elected to keep open, which the assistant editor found strange as he believed the best thing about editing was the isolation from other people. He emerged onto the lot, cursing at the dazzling sunlight and wave of summer heat that engulfed him. As he ran blindly forward across the little studio street, narrowly avoiding being smashed by a Teamster moving a star trailer, his addled brain composed the rudiments of a plan. He would quickly make a sandwich and an economy-sized Dirty Coke, then hide out in the rarely-used east stairwell until he could be fairly positive Ellen had left his (and here, the assistant editor shuddered) salad and departed. He reached the production office building and climbed the stairs to the second floor, tossing a curt salute to the office PA who functioned as gatekeeper to the production office. His brief run, coupled with the heat and his jaunt up the stairs and the jumbo-sized hooded sweatshirt, had caused him to sweat torrentially from every pore. He no longer cared. He barreled towards the kitchen, forcing ambient PAs to leap from his path.
The assistant editor’s hands shook violently from hunger and caffeine deprivation as he inserted the little pod into the automatic espresso maker. While the water heated up, a pleasant smell of cold cuts turned his head and he brought his sights to bear on the refrigerator out of which one of the producers had just pulled a soda. The assistant editor waited until she left the room and then yanked the door open and groped blindly in the meat drawer, pulling out a plastic deli bag. He grabbed the yellow mustard out of the shelf in the door and twirled in a circle, kicking the fridge shut with the side of his foot.
He dumped a few slices of bread onto the table, sprayed one slice liberally with mustard and slapped an entire thing of gourmet turkey onto it. He applied the other slice of bread and crammed half the sandwich into his mouth. He tried ineffectively to muster enough saliva to chew, and crumbs tumbled from his open, wheezing mouth as he grabbed a Coke from the fridge and poured it into the tumbler with the now-brewed espresso. In his haste his shaking hand slipped and dropped the entire can into the glass, catalyzing the nucleation process and causing brown liquid to foam up over the glass onto his sweater sleeves as he hurried to the sink.
Mid-rush, one of his sandals stepped into spilled Dirty Coke and time slowed down as his foot kicked out in front of him and all of a sudden he was looking at the ceiling and then it was rushing away from him and he felt the air leave his lungs as his head crashed on the ground. In that first second, the assistant editor felt all of his anxiety and somatic distress suddenly extinguish. He felt rather than heard the footsteps running towards him down the hallway, but he didn’t care.
He slowly brought himself to his knees and then his feet. Ellen stood in front of him, her eyes questioning. Someone expressed concern, and the assistant editor held out his hand to signal that he was all right with all the dignity he could muster. He walked deliberately out of the kitchen, not making eye contact with anyone. As he passed Ellen, she reached out and patted his shoulder: a gesture, he well knew, of pity. In that instant he knew she would never love him, and he accepted that with the casual emotional paralysis that he did not yet understand came with the total abandonment of hope.
