First Impressions Can Be Tough
The thing about a door is that it’s supposed to stay a door.
Regina had a whole speech ready. She’d built it on the commute — extend hand, state name, two intelligent questions, project the unmistakable impression of a woman who absolutely did not relocate across four dimensions to escape a man she was technically still friends with. She’d practiced the handshake against the strap of her bag.
She raised her hand. Three crisp raps, the professional kind.
The door stopped being there.
So did the wall it had been set in. So did the office behind the wall, and the tall pale figure she’d half-glimpsed at a desk inside it — there for the length of a knock, then simply not, the architecture closing over the space like water over a dropped stone. No seam. No debris. A faint smell of standing water where a man had been.
Regina stood in the hallway with her hand still up.
“Okay,” she said, to the wall.
The wall did not respond, on the grounds that it was now just a wall.
She lowered her hand. In the half-second before he ceased to exist, she had registered exactly one fact about the man — an unhelpful one, surfacing now with the bad timing of all her best observations: he had been, infuriatingly, the most attractive person she’d ever seen. Tall in a way that looked structural. A wrecked-pretty face, dark fringe, eyeliner too precise for someone radiating that much fragile.
He had then deleted himself from reality rather than say good morning to her.
“Great,” Regina told the wall. “Lovely. Thank you.”
The hallway filled the way a kitchen fills when the smoke alarm goes — fast, loud, choreographed. Three of them, maybe four; hard to count, because at least one kept being slightly more or fewer than one person depending on the angle. Someone produced a clipboard. Someone else was talking into a device that might have been a phone and might have been a small, patient animal.
“—full deletion, office and all—”
“Time?”
“Nine-oh-one.”
"Again?"
“Last Time he was gone three hours.”
They said Last Time with capital letters in it — the voice of an office that had a Last Time, had built procedures around it, had a drawer somewhere with its name on the label.
“The ten a.m.,” someone said, with real grief.
“It’s been moved six times. We move it a seventh, they’ll—”
“I know what they’ll do.”
And then, with the smooth inevitability of a thing that has to land on somebody, all of them turned and looked at her.
“What,” said the one with the clipboard, “did you do."
“I knocked,” said Regina.
The clipboard stared.
“On the door.” She gestured at where the door wasn’t. “Politely. It’s — in most workplaces that’s the encouraged option.”
“You knocked,” the clipboard repeated, in the tone of someone writing it down, because they were writing it down.
“He was right there. I saw him. He was at a desk.” She heard her own voice doing the thing it did when she was rattled, going brisk and slightly too reasonable. “Is this — does he do this? Is this a regular—”
“What did you knock like?" This from the maybe-four-people one, leaning in, genuinely curious. “Soft? Sharp? Was there intent in it?”
“There was — it was a knock. I don’t have a range of knocks. I have the one.” Regina looked between their faces, all of which were waiting, none of which were joking. “Is he okay? Where did he — where do they go, when they—”
“Oh, he’ll reform,” said the clipboard, already losing interest in her in favor of the report.
“He always reforms,” said another, comfortingly.
"Mostly always,” said the maybe-four-people one, and the others gave it a look, and it subsided.
This was the part Regina would circle back to, later, when it mattered: not the door. The door she could file. A man with anxiety and some reality-adjacent condition — fine, unusual, the mechanism didn’t bother her.
What bothered her was the looking. Four faces swinging her way in unison, the new variable, the thing that wasn’t here yesterday, and some old reflex in her chest going yes, this, here too. Ninety seconds, and already the problem in the room. She’d crossed four dimensions specifically to stop being the problem in the room and the universe had packed it in her carry-on.
There had been a man. The man had been lovely. The breakup had been amicable, the worst kind, no villain — just the slow unbearable awareness of having been seen being ridiculous, and then having to keep getting coffee with the person who’d seen it. So she’d taken a job as far from that as a job got. Another reality entirely.
So far the cure was not outperforming the disease.
“It’s fine,” the clipboard was saying to the others. “We get him back, he signs off, we make the ten a.m., nobody has to tell the—”
“HE'S GOING TO NEED THE BILLING REPORT FROM LAST QUARTER,” bellowed something enormous, from somewhere down the hall, at what was — for it — apparently an ordinary conversational volume.
Regina’s left eardrum ruptured.
It didn’t hurt the way she’d have guessed. There was a wet pop, very close, very interior, and then the left side of the world went lopsided and muffled and warm, and something began to trickle down her neck that she recognized, distantly and clinically, as blood. My blood. Coming, specifically, from inside my head.
She pressed two fingers below her ear. Assessed the flow. Came to the calm professional conclusion that she was not in danger, merely leaking.
Nobody else had so much as blinked. The volume that had breached her actual skull was, for the rest of the room, simply Tuesday. She was the only thing in the building soft enough to break, and it had taken the building four minutes to prove it.
And the thought that arrived — arrived with far more urgency than the blood, shouldering the blood out of the way — was:
Is it unprofessional to bleed on your first day?
Because that was the crisis. Not the eardrum. The eardrum would heal; she’d done this once before, you just waited, the world came back over a week or two. No, the crisis was the impression. Ninety seconds in, she’d already deleted her boss, and now she was visibly hemorrhaging in a hallway, and there was no version of hi, I’m the new hire that survived and also I appear to be dripping. They’d think she was high-maintenance. They’d think she came apart at the slightest —
“Oh,” said the clipboard, noticing the neck. “Oh, you’re—” A pause. A recalibration. “Right. You’re the squishy one.”
“I’m the new one,” said Regina, with as much dignity as a leaking person can hold.
“Can you still hear out of that side?”
“Perfectly.” She could not hear anything out of that side. “I’m completely fine. Genuinely. This happens.” It had happened exactly once, in college, over a concert, and it had not involved blood. “You don’t have to — please don’t make it a thing. I’d really rather it not be a thing.”
“It’s already a thing,” said the clipboard, not unkindly, turning the clipboard around so she could see. “It’s this thing. It’s got a number.”
The report, it turned out, was the actual emergency. Not her ear. Not the deleted boss.
“Open injury incident,” the clipboard explained, “logged against an employee who’s been here”—it consulted the page—“five minutes. Needs sign-off from the supervising entity.”
“Which is—”
“Him. The one who’s currently not extant. Can’t close the loop without him.” The clipboard’s expression did something grim. “And the longer it stays open, the more it—”
The wall, very softly, made the standing-water smell stronger.
“He’s coming back,” someone breathed. “Brace.”
Regina, holding her own ear together, watched the wall re-member itself — door, frame, room, all of it folding back into being with the reluctance of a thing that did not especially want to be here — and the man was at the desk again, exactly as before, except now he was vibrating, a fine high hum she felt in her molars, and the temperature in the hallway dropped a clean ten degrees, and the room went very carefully still around her. The coworkers stopped moving. Not afraid of her. The way you’d stand near a tarp over something that was breathing.
His eyes — there seemed, for a moment, to be more than two of them — went to the clipboard. To the open report. To the words on it.
She watched him read injury and employee and day one, and watched the precise instant he understood that the squishy thing in his hallway had broken on his watch inside its first five minutes. And then he started to go again, the door behind him flickering, half-committing to nonexistence.
"Boss,” said the room, all of them at once, a single word like a hand on a shoulder.
He held.
It cost him. She could see that it cost him — the white-knuckle of it, a thing that wanted very badly to not be here making itself stay. And whatever else she’d decided about him in the last four minutes, this part she got wrong on purpose and corrected without meaning to: the vibration wasn’t a small creature shivering. It was a large one, leashed.
Then he did the thing she had no file for.
Before the report. Before a single word to the staff who’d just called him back from wherever the deleted go. The barely-holding-together thing in the doorway turned its head, looked directly at the blood on Regina’s neck, and went completely, perfectly still — the way a room goes still, the way water goes still — and she had absolutely no idea why, and she would have given a great deal, in that moment, to be able to hear out of both ears.
“Sorry,” she said, into the silence, because someone had to and it wasn’t going to be him. She lifted the sleeve she’d been pressing to her neck, a quarter-inch, an apology and a confession. “I think I’m getting blood on your floor.”
He looked at the floor. He looked at her. Something moved in him at a register she couldn’t read.
“That’s alright,” he said.
And his voice came up out of him like water out of a deep place, and went straight down her spine like a hand she hadn’t agreed to, and Regina thought, with the sinking clarity of a woman who has just identified the precise location of her own next mistake: oh, no.
