Timothy John had two first names. They were easily interchangeable, the first from the last, but most of the time this only occurred at doctor appointments. The nurse would slide open the door and announce, “John Timothy?” and Tim would get up, knowing who she meant. He’d gotten so used to being called by his last name first and his first name last, that he no longer bothered correcting people. Even though he lacked the creative ability to think this on his own, the names acted as different aliases he could reveal to different people. Not that he went around introducing himself as ‘John,’ but more metaphorically speaking, he could be one way to some and another to others, but the bulk always in question was this thing called Tim that existed not independently, but only within the fluttering impressions of others. 

    Tim John had only been with one woman. He had only been with one woman, and she was his wife. Not only was she the only woman he ever had sex with, she was the only woman he had ever kissed, even. He was a little embarrassed by this fact, and mostly liked to keep this sort of information to himself. Often when he liked getting together for a ‘boys night’ of poker, when his other male friends would speak of their sexual experiences, Tim’s stories would pale in comparison. He liked to claim that he was not the sort to ‘kiss and tell’ as the saying goes, and for the most part, his male friends accepted that, albeit still made fun of him when he wasn’t around. Tim’s friends weren’t really friends, but co-worker friends. There is a difference. Most of the guys said in private to one another that if it wasn’t for them having already worked with Tim, that none would willingly choose to hang out with him. He was just sort of a drag. Everyone at work knew that Tim had been a virgin up until he met his wife, and that no girl had ever seriously considered him before her. How they knew this was on one occasion, during one of their poker games, the guys forgot to bring the cards and instead broke out the tequila, which by the end of the night, Tim was drinking it straight from a wine glass. This got him quite drunk and quite talkative, so it was during this fiesta how this tidbit that he’d been so embarrassed by, sort of slipped out.

    Why hadn’t Tim been with any other women? He wasn’t ugly- he was alright looking, six feet tall with thin spectacles meant to make him look intelligent, brown eyes and dark, almost black hair. He had just turned 30 and was finishing up his master’s degree in developmental biology. He liked to shop at Banana Republic- almost too much. Girls, when asked by the guys what they thought of Tim, all said it wasn’t that he was ugly, but just sort of a prick. Throughout his youth, he had always been thin, but over the years had put on a slight paunch at his middle from all the Thai food he liked to eat. His arms and legs were skinny, and his shoulders weren’t broad. But there were worse guys to look at. He loved Thai food so much that he married a Thai woman- she was from somewhere up north, and the two had met online in a dating chat room. They wed when he was only 23 and she 22. She was a bit heavy, but he didn’t mind. Tim was just glad he found somebody.

    But one might suppose the real reason women never found him attractive was for his insecurities, mainly regarding his intellect. He entered college as an engineering major, but was forced to drop it when he could not pass the second level calculus class. He switched to cell biology, which he liked, because it was something respectable and something that made people stare at him in awe whenever he spoke about enzymes and stem cells. He liked looking smart. Plus, biology was mostly pictures and memorizing: peptides and proteins, ligands and lysosomes. He needed to just know their functions, and the places they went. He was good at that. The tests involved very little essay writing, in fact none really at all, and he’d much prefer filling in the little bubbles on his test sheet than write a sentence to its completion. He was never very good at writing, even basic, functionary writing, or anything with words for that matter. Words were abstractions, a string of letters that carried with them an idea, and how to arrange them: i before e except after what? Or where does an apostrophe go on a plural possessive? He could never remember. Spelling was his weakness. It was very common for him to try to avoid writing words down in front of people, because even the most simple words he goofed on. He was consistent in his misspellings, although not consistent in the ways they were misspelled- that would change. “Before” he spelled as befer, “Restaurant” as restrante, “Delicious” as dilicous, and so on. And if that wasn’t bad enough, there just had to exist those words that are spelled the same but have different meanings, or just change completely when set into a different context. Why did anyone have to infer anything? Why couldn’t people just say what they meant? Being forced to drop engineering as his major, lest result in a transcript of all F’s, he had to admit as well that math was not his strength, for it was not uncommon for those with poor writing skills to rely on math as their confirmation for their intelligence, and vice versa. What one lacks in one area, one mentally makes up far excessively in another, even if what is rationalized isn’t true. But Tim didn’t even have that, and for this he resented quite a number of things.

    So outside of work, Tim didn’t really have any friends. People just didn’t like him. They didn’t hate him, but he lived in a world where people merely tolerated him, and a part of him knew this, including his wife. He had grown up in a wealthy suburb of Minneapolis, went to private schooling, had nothing really to complain about. Some liked to give him the benefit of the doubt, so to speak, trying to believe that one human being couldn’t possibly be as shallow as he. But after any time speaking with him, there was no mistaking it- he really was that shallow.

    Soon after his marriage, his wife and he bought a newly built home in a rich suburb of Minneapolis- not terribly far from the one he grew up. They were only in their mid- 20’s and had already signed away their future decades to a mortgage that would tower to over half a million dollars once fully paid off, and that’s assuming they paid their bills on time. He bought himself a BMW for Christmas one year, and the year after that, the two of them went on a two-week trip to Paris. He complained for months to his co-workers that it felt like an eternity till his deck in his back yard would be finished, (the workers were Mexican and very slow) and when it was finished, and when he finally got that wide screen T.V. put into the basement downstairs like he planned, he promised to have everyone from work over for a welcoming party. His co-workers found it odd that Tim refused to let anyone over to see his house before it was completed, almost like he was fearful of it looking too empty, or not arranged properly, or like something was missing. No one was really sure. Whenever he wasn’t around, people made fun of him, calling him ‘gay’, because he was one of the few guys to ever notice people’s shoes and what brand names they were wearing. One of his traits was to reach up for his thin designer spectacles and readjust them onto the bridge of his nose. He did this every time someone challenged or questioned him on something. People began to notice it, and it grew to be one of the things people did when they wanted to make fun of him: just pull on your imaginary glasses, and let out a fake laugh. There was even a snapshot of Jason, one of Tim’s co-worker ‘friends’ distorting his face while sitting in Tim’s chair, pasted onto the laboratory refrigerator. Tim thought it funny, ‘what’s with the face, Jason?’ he’s ask, but had no clue who the object of the joke really was.

    But Tim’s obsession for status did not end there. Tim never brought his lunch into work, unless it was leftovers from some steakhouse, or some fancy dish his wife had made the night before. For the most part though, he did not like leftovers. Vikki, his one co-worker who shared a cubicle with him, would bring her own lunch because she enjoyed reading while eating during her lunch hour. Trying to eat healthy, her lunch would consist of yogurt and fruit, and some crackers. Tim really got on Vikki’s nerves, because it was not uncommon for him to peer over her shoulder while she was trying to chew her apple and read her book, and comment on what it was she had brought that day.

“Apple today, Vikki?” he asked, while opening his drawer to remove his keys.

“Yeah, what about it?”

“I’m going to Ming Garden,” he’d tell her.

“Good for you,” she said in between the chews.

    Grabbing his coat, Tim was feeling happy that day because he was mid way though his last credit course for his master’s degree, and soon he would have those initials at the end of his two first names. Tim John, MS. Another reason he felt pleased was because he had saved the easiest class for last- it was a bio stats class, and he tried whatever he could to get into an evening class, since the people who took evening classes tended to be, ‘more stupid’ than those who took day classes. Where he got this rationale, no one knew.

    “Say, you know 9/11 is going to be one of those days you always remember what you were doing on that day, just like The Challenger explosion and the Oklahoma City bombing,” Vikki said one day when the lab was engaged in a discussion about the current War on Terror.

    “Yeah, I was only in like fifth grade for the Challenger thing, but I remember being a freshman in college when the whole Oklahoma City thing got out of control. It was crazy,” Jason commented.

    “Sorry, I don’t remember much of where I was on the day of the Oklahoma City bombing. I didn’t hear about it till I spoke to my parents later that week, when they told me about it,” Tim said.

“Why is that?” Vikki asked.

    “I was in Spain,” Tim said proudly, while still having his back turned to Vikki as he said it. He often did that- would speak to you or answer your questions without ever putting the effort to even turn around and look you in the eye.

“Oh,” Vikki said, sounding unadorned.

    “I was studying abroad,” he boasted again, but everyone around him knew well enough to not ask any further questions on the issue, since that’s exactly what he wanted. It wasn’t his having lived abroad in Spain that was so annoying, but the way he spoke about it, or rather, what he was trying to project onto others who might be listening. It wasn’t necessarily that he was trying to impress them, although that was part of it, but it was more about him finding a way to reassure his assertion within the context of the conversation. He wanted people so badly to envy him, and yet no one did, which only made seem it all the more worse.

    “So did everyone get the Jeopardy question right? Vikki, you should know this, it’s literature, that’s your thing,” one of the co-workers said. The lab shared a Jeopardy calendar that every day posed a question, and it gave them something to extra to talk about during their already mundane jobs.

“It was a stupid answer,” Tim said.

“That’s only because you didn’t get it,” Jason said.

“No, it was a poorly designed answer. There’s no way anyone could know the question with the lame clue they gave,” Tim said.

    “What was the question?” another co-worker asked. Then one of them pulled the question off from the calendar and began to read it. The category was literature, and the answer read something like, “In this Classic, Franz Kafka makes his protagonist wake after having been transformed into a piece of vermin.” The question was of course, ‘What is The Metamorphosis?’

    “See, that doesn’t make any sense. If they had said moth or butterfly, then that would make sense, but not vermin,” Tim objected.

“Tim, it’s the name of the novella they are speaking about. Kafka’s novella,” Vikki said.

    “But still, that doesn’t make any sense. Nothing metamorphoses into vermin. Things metamorphose like moths and butterflies and…,” he rambled.

    “But in the book, the guy doesn’t turn into a moth or butterfly. He turns into a bug,” Vikki corrected. Tim got very silent then he readjusted his frames onto the bridge of his nose.

“It still doesn’t make any sense,” he added.

    “If you know the work it does.” But Tim didn’t know the work. Literature had always intimidated Tim because he wasn’t able to ever understand any of it. Symbolism? Bah! Metaphor? What’s the point? Why didn’t writers just come out and say what they meant, rather than trying to flower it up all the time? How badly he wanted to badmouth it! When did those writers ever have jobs? What science did they discover? Why didn’t they just say what they meant? O to belittle it, but he knew better than to reveal his ignorance. He’d always resented writers in a way, those people with an ability to see beyond him. He was smart enough to know there were pockets on this planet, these other worlds that his mind could never be part of because he simply lacked the facility for them. He resented those who had glimpses into those other places that he could never go to, and for this he desperately wanted to badmouth books, and say how useless they were, but he knew there was a certain amount of ‘status’ in the arts, and for that he kept his mouth shut. After all, it was not above him to see a Shakespeare play- he had gone with his wife to see Othello, but of course had nothing to say about it afterwards. What was there to say? He’d read the play in high school (actually it was the Cliff’s Notes) and that was that. One did not need to be well read, or even read well, or hell- even spell well to get ahead in this world. So he had to find other things to rely upon, things more routine, expected of, and safe in its predictability. Things such as the State Fair, that he and his wife would attend each year, not because they necessarily wanted to, but because it was time.

    “I can’t wait till I get some of those cheese curds and meat on a stick- mmm,” he’d say while rubbing his hands together. “I hear they’re also having a pumpkin carving contest, so that should be interesting to watch. Just in time for Halloween too. You plan on going to the fair this year Vikki?” he asked while his back was still turned to her, elevating his voice in a somewhat towering, yet non-intimidating tone. He’d speak using this tone whenever asking Vikki how her weekend had been, hoping she’d disclose something, wanting to know not because he was genuinely interested in how she spent her time, but to ensure within his mind that his life was better.

    “I didn’t go last year, so why would I go this year?” she said. Tim just couldn’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want to go to the dirty, hot, sticky, trash-filled, full of fat people State Fair.

“I just thought that maybe you’d want to go since you’ve never been.”

    “Yeah, that pumpkin carving thing- that sounds like a real hoot,” she said. Tim had no response. Later some of his co-workers got together to laugh over the idea of any grown man getting thrills at watching a pumpkin get gutted. They continued to laugh about it, and only quieted once Tim was around.

                ******

    Every so often, the shared lab equipment would break down. One of Tim’s favorite things to do was to stand behind the repairman, whenever the scientific equipment had to be repaired or calibrated. The equipment involved lasers and moving parts, and Tim liked that. Often on days when the repairman would come in to take a look at the machine, his co-workers would laugh as they watched Tim stand behind the guy the entire time, asking questions and pretending to know what was going on. He would stand rather fey, with both his hands on his hips and nod in agreement to whatever the man said, feeling somehow a false sense of authority in knowing, (or convincing himself that he knew) something that his other co-workers didn’t. Ooh, the laser went here and did that. The data is collected and goes there. He did this, and yet, a month before when they had to call the maintenance department to fix one of the centrifuges that was acting up, Tim paid the man no mind. Why? Because a centrifuge was just that, it served a functionary purpose and only moved in one direction and there was nothing spectacular about it. But Tim was on a first-name basis with the scientific repairman, calling him Al whenever they met.

“Looks like Al and I fixed the machine,” he’d tell his co-workers upon returning to his lab bench. “Someone should buy me Starbucks,” he’d add.

“Well now that you’re done pretending, maybe you can do some actual work for a change,” Vikki said.

“I’m the one who does everything around here, and I take night classes,” he reminded her, readjusting his frames.

“I think Al is the one who deserves the Starbucks,” she said.

    Just what was it about males, and their need to eternally fuck things up? Anytime a piece of equipment was having trouble, Tim would be there, taking the label machine apart, then putting it back together again, solving absolutely no problem whatsoever, only confirming what everyone beforehand already knew: that it was broken.

    “It’s broken, we need to have it repaired. Someone call maintenance,” he’d say. It gave him an added sense of self, one might suppose, upon being the one to finally  ‘decide’ it was broken, and then having to ‘tell someone’ to call maintenance, rather than just getting off his ass and doing it himself. It’s the same type of person who wants to become a doctor just so this person can be the one to confirm one is sick, and to ‘tell the pharmacy’ what prescription is needed. ‘Yep, yer sick alright. Let me just write out this little prescription for you here…’

    After the repairman left, a couple of the guys were in the lab imitating Tim and his know-it-all stance. They each went through their own round of impressions, adjusting their imaginary frames, taking shots and mocking. ‘I deserve Starbucks for standing around and doing nothing,’ they’d say. Tim had disappeared for a short time, having gone upstairs for some supplies. But upon returning, he managed to catch the end of their comedy routine, albeit none knew he was nearby. No one went without being talked about- Tim had spent so much time badmouthing Vikki and Jason as well as others, yet still he craved this approbation from them.

    Tim stood in one of the corners, listening as he held onto the bag of pipet tips and cell culture plates. He did not need to see what was going on, for the sounds of it was enough. He listened while they laughed at his expense, making jokes that were they not at his expense, he would have laughed himself. A part of him hurt, and he couldn’t deny that. They said some pretty cruel things. He wanted to walk into the room to let them know that he’d been listening this whole time, just so he could embarrass them, and watch as they scuttle and grow quiet upon his presence. He’d often notice how sometimes a group of them would be laughing, only to hush upon his arrival. It was as though he had become the sour part of the party, that one thing that breaks apart all humor, and scatters the impression that everything is alright.

    They went through some more of their jokes, till after a while even they grew bored. The crowd dispersed on its own accord and once they had all gone to other parts of the lab, Tim walked in, pretending nothing had happened. Although he would have loved to confront them, such would be social suicide, since he knew one person stood no chance against the all of a group. One had to gain the support of the group, not work against it. He did not want to be against the group. Sitting back at his lab bench, he spent the rest of the quiet morning working, writing up his lab reports and being modest in his approach. By the time lunch came around, he was hoping for some sort of reconciliation, and so he offered to drive his co-workers to lunch, (in his new BMW) to his favorite place Ming Garden. And although all of them took him up on the offer- and even thanked him later for driving, he felt it was the least he could do.

    As the day neared its end, his co-workers were talking to him again, and all the morning’s spiteful humor seemed to dwindle with the afternoon. Nothing was ever said about the incident, for Tim was not about to mention it. Instead, it didn’t matter now, since they had all turned their attention to this woman down the hall that no one liked, commenting how fat she looked in her new dress. Tim laughed too, and he was glad to be back in the circle of jokes. It did not matter that a part of him knew that earlier that afternoon they just wanted to be seen riding in his convertible BMW, have lunch, and then ride back in the warm air. It did not matter. Such was good enough for him.

Comments (1)

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written by craig on January 23, 2007

jessica schneider is an awesome writer her characters are funny and feel real i can recognize this situation

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