Dave’s Black Eye

The whole office was talking about Dave’s black eye.

To themselves,

“oh my god”
“holy shit”
“Jesus would you look at that”

And each other,

“Is Dave OK?”
“Did something happen, with Dave?”
“Did you see Dave’s, uh.”

But definitely not to Dave.

At Borgen & Jones people understood that when your colleague shows up to work with a black eye, you don’t stare, you don’t comment, you just say,

“Morning, Dave.”
“Happy Monday, Dave.”

And maybe, if you’re high enough in the food chain,

“Nice weekend, Dave?”

Now, if your colleague is a woman, maybe you’d need to know that she was OK, or at least that she didn’t want your help. But with a man, you have to respect his privacy.

Of course, a woman would know how to tone things down a bit with some makeup. But Dave didn’t know anything about makeup, so his black eye was naked, a striking shade of midnight purple, so busted and swollen that it hurt even to look at the damn thing. But at the same time, it was captivating. It drew you in, it made you wonder.

It certainly made Dave wonder. When the pain of it had prodded him into consciousness Sunday morning, he’d wondered about it. And today wearing it to work, no idea where it came from, he was still wondering.

And now, alone in his office, he wondered a lot of things. He wondered what the jackals at Borgen & Jones would think if they also knew about his bruised ribs and the stabby pain in his wrist, and how his whole left side felt like it had been wrenched a half-inch away from where it belonged.

Dave stared at his hands, and wondered at the absence of scrapes and bruises on his knuckles. He hadn’t put up a fight, then, at least not with his fists.

What had he done, though? Everybody at Borgen & Jones was dying to know.

But I mean, fuck. There’s just nothing. Between Saturday night at O’Malley’s and

Jerry showed up with his new girlfriend and it was her birthday, and shots, ok, and flirting with her but being good right? Not rude just flirting, it was fine, and then more shots, ok, but after that was there singing? Good god.

And then outside and fresh air and that Spring night smell that fucking righteous Spring smell of mud and life and clean.

And then nothing.

And then,

Inspecting somebody’s tires?

Those fucking tires, not bald, but the tread worn down, gone to shit. Uneven wear. Alignment probably fucked. And also, they were covered in vomit. So ok. That was probably his bad.

And then?

There must be something after the tires. Or before.

But all Dave can find is this dark velvety space, just space, just dark and empty, just not there. Whatever happened after tires is stuck in this empty, like all the words that are on the tip of your tongue, all the hours when you’re asleep but not dreaming, all the memories that are spontaneously aborted because they weren’t meant to grow into real memories real history real life, just wasted nothings never to be. God only knows what you’d find if you could see through the dark of it, see the actual experience of after tires, your actual life, all the bits of you lost to you because you are a fucking alcoholic,

Jesus fuck.

Dave places his unscathed hands on his desk and oh so gently lowers his head to rest his forehead on them. This feels slightly worse, physically, but emotionally, it’s the right thing to do.

Resting there, he finally realizes that he should have made something up. He can think of a hundred respectable reasons to have a black eye. Distracted when he was playing catch with his kid. Or he caught an elbow in a game of pick-up basketball. Polite, family-oriented, sober reasons. Perfect bullshit. Perfect if he’d opened with it. Too late now. Now it would just seem desperate.