secret life

Secret Lives
By: Eos

Interviewing for a new job used to be a fraught experience for me. When you harbor such an intimate secret, you must be constantly vigilant, watchful for questions you might stumble over, anything that might alert the interviewer to your dark past.
But over time, after hundreds of interviews, it does become much easier. The lies roll off your tongue smoothly, and the stories grow more concrete in detail and form. You learn to steer the conversation away from the locked doors in your history.
Eventually, it becomes so natural, so easy, that you don’t even think about it anymore. You truly become those stories; and with each telling, their narrative indelibly carves itself into the fabric of your being.
And so, after what seemed the perfect interview, I got a job; and not just any job. This was the role that would kickstart my career, put my feet on the well-trodden path towards a real future. One where I was something other than a poor student with too many secrets.
So long as nobody found out who I really was.

The first day was a predictable blur; I was shown my cubicle in the old but respectable art-deco building, then hustled through the induction process so I could be put to work as quickly as possible. Everyone in my team seemed nice. All legal secretaries like myself, we shared a four-seater pod in the cubicle farm, each workstation painfully personalized by the occupant, desperate to make some mark on the beige corporate landscape.
“Gosh, you’re tall,” declaimed Trina, the slightly chubby redhead who sat beside me, “I bet you played volleyball at school.”
“Oh yeah,” I lied smoothly, “captain of the team until a knee injury got me.”
Despite all my practice, I could feel the heat creeping into my ears and was immediately thankful I’d decided to wear my hair down that day. I know that seems like an odd thing to lie about. But the story I’d claimed as my own, the story that had now claimed me in turn, was so complete that I dared not deviate from its path, lest one wrong foot contradicted the narrative.
By the end of the day, I was exhausted. I half-dozed on the bus ride home, my energy depleted from so much social interaction, from navigating so many tiny, innocent pitfalls.
But I’d done it. I’d survived my first day of work without incident.

The weirdness began after the fourth member of our team returned from a conference, a week after I started. Deborah was an older woman, unmarried, who took an instant dislike to me. She refused to shake my hand when introduced professionally, then proceeded to pile complex work on me, before I’d had enough time to learn the basics of my role.
At first, despite creeping suspicion, I tried to write it off as simple envy. I mean, I was twenty, easy on the eye, and had a boyfriend; it didn’t take a psychology degree to figure out that she probably resented me for possessing everything that was lacking in her own life. But as things took a turn for the worse, I realized her behavior had begun to spread, and the environment in the office was growing increasingly hostile toward me. No more was I greeted with pleasantries in the break room or cheery hellos in the elevator – everywhere I went, I met scowls and uncomfortable stares. After I walked in on the third whispered conversation that day, I knew the gig was up.
My secret was out there, courtesy of Deborah, who I later discovered had worked with my sister in a previous job. The sister who didn’t exist in my new narrative; the one who delightfully informed everyone she met about her ‘brother’ and flashed around old pictures of me to anyone curious enough to look. And that seemed to be everyone.
Just like that, I went from being ‘that tall new girl’ to something less than human; an object of ridicule, suspicion, and loathing.

It was small things at first. Finding my keyboard unplugged, my papers missing, my coffee cup having an odd stain or odor. Subtle changes you could write off as nothings – accidents of no consequence. I mentioned them brightly to my team, commenting on how peculiar it was that they only seemed to happen to me. When Deb smirkingly sneered that the office ghost must not like me, my suspicions were all but confirmed.
“Must be the same ghost who was always hanging around me at school,” I shot back, with a humorless smile.
“Must be,” she retorted, “I hear this one doesn’t like men.”
“What did you just say?”
“I don’t have time for this,” Deb declared, turning back to her monitor, “I’ve got work to do.”
Forcing down the shame and anger, I swiveled my seat back around abruptly – and slammed my knees into my desk. It seemed that ‘the office ghost’ must have lowered it again while I was on my break. Concentrating on the pain as it receded from my bruised flesh, I let my rage go with it. With an ease born of practice, I watched it burn down to nothing, then extinguished it with one thought:
No matter what anyone did or said to me, they couldn’t stop me being me.

Three weeks later my swipe card stopped working on the door to the women’s toilets.
When I complained to ICT, they claimed it was a simple error, but the next morning, and the morning after that, my card access to the toilets had been canceled again.
“Maybe it would be easier to just use the men’s room,” the IT guy snarked down the phone, “there’s no swipe access on that door.”
On the fifth morning in a row that the mysterious ‘error’ occurred, I met Walt Sawyer. He found me leaning against the door to the women’s bathroom with my cellphone to my ear, wearily asking ICT to fix the fault again. Walt had been the janitor here for so long that he was practically furniture; he’d seen the company go through three mergers and countless restructures. He’d survived all of them by simply going about his business, doing his job so well he was practically invisible.
“Can’t get in again?” he asked, as I held the phone away from my ear to avoid the deafening hold music.
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think it’s right,” he mumbled, fishing in his pocket, “not right to treat a young lady like this.”
Surely the gossip must have reached even the janitor by now?
“Well, they don’t think I’m a lady, that’s the problem.”
With a small, secret smile, Walt pressed something into my hand.
“It’s my spare card. Will get you pretty much anywhere a janitor needs to be.”
Simple kindness felt so out of place in this building that I just stared at the card in my hand like it was some kind of magical token. I finally opened my mouth to thank him, but he cut me off,
“I wasn’t here. We never spoke.” He slopped a mopeful of soapy water onto the stairs. “You ain’t the only one with secrets.”
When the card reader flashed green and let me into the bathroom, I almost wept with relief.

What I expected to happen after that, I wasn’t sure. I was careful when I took my toilet breaks, making sure none of the other women saw me in the bathroom, so everyone would assume I had resigned myself to using the male facilities. You might think that this perceived win on their behalf would have de-escalated the situation, but with some bullies, any victory only emboldens them.
I saw Walt scuttling away from my office space two early mornings that week, each time carrying something under his arm. And when my colleagues arrived, after me on both those days, their behavior was even stranger than usual.
When I caught Mark – the fourth member of my cubicle family – staring at my desk, I asked him if something was wrong.
“No, nothing wrong,” he said, abrupt and defensive.
“It just that you keep staring at my desk,” I pressed, not letting it go, “as if you’re surprised about something?” But he was already typing busily, ignoring me.
Deb, especially, seemed put out. Her normal expression was less than pleasant, but today the downturned corners of her mouth practically touched her jawline, and she curled her lip like a caricature whenever I answered the phone or greeted someone entering our cubicle.

Walt was cleaning up a toner spill in one of the corridors, whistling tunelessly to himself while everyone ignored him.
“I need a word,” I hissed, when the hallway was clear, “I need to know what you’ve been doing.”
“You don’t wanna know, miss.”
“It’s Rebecca, not miss. I’m not your boss, I’m just a bottom-rung secretary. Becca, even.”
“You don’t wanna know, miss Becca,” he repeated, “they’re cruel people. You don’t need to see that stuff.”
“See what stuff?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing to see.”
My fingers gripped his shoulder, firmly, insistent,
“Walt, if they’re doing something awful, I need to see it, so I can report it. I appreciate you protecting me, I really do. But if I want to resolve this situation, I need evidence of what they’ve been doing, not just suspicions.”
He thought about that for a minute, his expression unreadable, as if he was listening to something. Then, with an abrupt nod, he headed down the corridor, beckoning for me to follow. In the janitor’s cupboard near the elevators, he gestured to the waste-paper bin beside the door.
“It’s all in there.”
Amongst the innocent rubbish were several balls of printed paper, tightly wadded up by Walt’s strong old hands. Smoothing them out on the low table against the wall, I clenched my teeth as I viewed the images.
It seemed my sister hadn’t been happy just spilling my gender history to Deb; she’d also furnished the sour old woman with intimate and painful photos from my teens – all with my old name and cartoon penises scrawled over them.
Balling them up in my fists, I threw the printouts back into the basket.
“People have done worse,” I whispered.
“They’re gonna do worse,” Walt replied, his walnut face screwed up with a concern, “this place, this building, it’s got history.”
But when I pressed him for more information, he shut down. The fear and shame I glimpsed in his eyes before he looked away reminded me of myself, and his hands shook as he hustled me out of the cupboard.

The chemical smell in the cubicle was strong and strange, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. Everything seemed in order on my desk, no more images had been taped to my monitor and chair.
When Deb arrived half an hour later, her shriek of surprise and rage startled me so thoroughly that I knocked over my coffee and smacked my knee on my desk drawers.
“You did this!” the woman shrilled, waving her hands at me above the divider. Her fingers were stained red. “You fucking did this, and I’ll see you fired for it, you pervert!”
Curious, I braved the furnace of irrational ire and walked around to her desk,
“What exactly have I done?”
But before she could sputter out any more insults, I saw for myself. Someone had slashed the seat of her office chair, through the fabric and deep into the foam, then poured a bottle of red ink into the gash. The ink which had soaked into Deb’s skirt and stained her legs as she sat down, unaware.
“Is this some kind of jealous tranny retaliation?” she squawked, waving her red hands in my face.
“Retaliation for what?” I retorted hotly, color rising in my face, “I’ve taken everything you people have thrown at me with grace and patience, yet you are accusing me of being the bad guy?”
“Pack your desk,” Deb snarled, “you’ll be gone by the end of the day.”

The HR manager looked uncomfortable as I sat, not meeting my eye. I waited patiently as he read through the statement from Deb, which she had of course embellished for maximum effect. When he was done, I calmly refuted the inaccurate details and explained that I hadn’t vandalized any office property.
“Well, nobody else had any motivation to do it,” the manager said, still avoiding looking at me directly.
“And what motivation did I have to do it?” I countered.
He shifted in his seat, glancing everywhere but at me.
“Deborah Young claims that she, ah, discovered that someone had vandalized your desk. Late last night, after you left.”
“How was it vandalized?”
Surprised, he blinked at me, actually looking at my face for the first time since I sat down.
“Well, you must have seen it.”
I squinted at him,
“Seen what? My desk was perfectly normal when I came in.”
He blustered. “I find that hard to believe.”
“Why? Why do you find that hard to believe? What the hell happened to my desk?”
“No need to be so aggressive, Joh-ah-Rebecca,” he managed, barely correcting himself.
“Did you seriously just call me my old name?”
He blanched,
“That was an honest mistake.”
I sighed, already letting it go. This was a battle I couldn’t win, no matter how unfair it was.
“Just tell me what was wrong with my desk, so we can get this shit-show over with.”
The manager swallowed, picking his words carefully now,
“On your desk is a plush toy dog, yes?”
“Blue. From Blue’s Clues. My boyfriend gave her to me.”
“The toy had, ah, been cut open. At the… crotch. And a, ah, plastic phallus had been inserted.”
Summoning everything I had, I kept my face completely neutral.
“You mean a dildo. Someone cut Blue open and put a dildo in her.”
“Yes.”
What I had wasn’t enough. The anger rose like a tidal wave, massive and unstoppable; but instead of breaking in a torrent of destruction and violence, it collapsed, flooding out of me in a wash of hot, shameful tears. As I sobbed, eyes blurred from salt and sorrow, the HR manager must have made a hasty exit, leaving me alone, clutching the edge of the table until I cried myself dry.

Walt shook his head as I showed him the meticulously stitched plush toy, the needlework is so perfect it looked like a natural seam.
“Wasn’t me,” he said, gaze darting nervously, “can’t sew. Never saw it.”
Looking at his grizzled hands, I had no doubt he was telling the truth; Walt couldn’t have threaded a needle to save his life.
“Then who, Walt? Everyone else here hates my guts.”
“Can’t say, miss. Can’t say.”
Something told me there was more to this. Someone had fixed the vandalized toy, then retaliated by attacking Deb’s chair.
”Maybe the office ghost doesn’t like you,” I remembered Deb sneering.
“Walt. You said this place had history. You said that after I saw the pictures. What did you mean by that?”
His eyes drifted to the staircase like he was planning an escape.
“Nothing. I meant nothing.”
“Who is helping me, Walt? Because if they carry on like this, they’ll get me fired, and I need this job. People like me don’t get jobs like this. People like me aren’t supposed to succeed.”
“I know.” There was agony in his voice. “But I can’t say.”
Frustrated, I left the little man to his work, determined to figure it out myself.

My second meeting with HR was called because of Deb’s car. Someone had smashed the rear window and poured what appeared to be pig’s blood over the back seat. Her car was parked within camera range in the basement carpark, but there had been a convenient CCTV ‘buffer overflow error’ for ten minutes, right around when the event had occurred.
“I’d left work by then,” I told the HR manager, “and if I’d come back into the building, there would be a security record of it. Pull my swipecard logs, if you haven’t already.”
He started speaking over me, but I cut him off,
“Yes, I’m aware that Deb was my secret Santa, and that’s why I got beard oil, a voucher for a male-only sauna and a pair of festive-print Y-fronts. Regardless, even if that counts as ‘motivation’ to vandalize her car, I wasn’t in the building, and there’s no evidence I did it.”
I stood and put my hand on the door handle,
“You know, this is pretty serious. I find it odd that she hasn’t gone to the police about it, don’t you?”
He didn’t try to stop me as I left.

The tension in the air within our cubicle was so thick that it felt like working in molasses. Every sound was amplified by paranoia, every movement scrutinized surreptitiously. The corners of everyone’s eyes were getting a real workout. I wanted to scream at them that they had caused this situation, that if they’d just left me the fuck alone, we could all at least pretend to be professionals and just do our damn jobs without their bigotry overshadowing everything.
If I thought it would have made a difference, I would have done exactly that; but experience had already taught me people like this didn’t respond to reason, that they didn’t have empathy for anyone who wasn’t like them. I would ride this bullshit out until it was resolved one way or another.
The email from Walt caught me by surprise – I wasn’t even aware he was computer literate, or that he had access to a computer. I felt shame when I realized my own assumptions were showing.
Meet me on the seventh floor in 10 minutes, the email said, go through the door on the left stairwell. I’ll tell you everything you want to know.
Reading, then re-reading the message, I hit the delete icon and emptied the recycle bin.
The seventh floor wasn’t occupied, as far as I knew. The company owned it, but it had lain unused for so long that renovations would now cost far more than the office space was worth. There were rumors that something had happened there, a long time ago, but it was all hearsay – nobody could back up any of the wild claims about the seventh floor.
But Walt might know. The man was seventy if he was a day.

I wasn’t surprised when my spare swipe card allowed me through the paint-flaked door and into the derelict gloom of the seventh-floor space. Cables hung from the roof, darkly curled like rotting tentacles, and piles of insulation foam clustered against the walls in curious drifts. Heaps of broken chairs and rolls of ancient carpet lurked amongst other scattered, skeletal furniture and sagging wooden shelves.
There was no sign of Walt, but a dim light shone from a dirty-windowed office, partitioned from the main floor space by naked chipboard walls and mildewed sacking.
“Walt?” I called as I pushed open the water-damaged door.
What hit me, I’m not sure, but the next thing I remember was trying to pick myself up from the rotten carpet, pain roaring in my skull and wrist. A crushing weight came down on my chest, and I realized someone was on top of me – Mark, by the size and smell of him; he always wore the same shitty cheap cologne.
Pinning my wrists, he looped plastic cable ties around them and pulled tight, while a voice protested from the gloom – Walt’s voice.
“You said you weren’t gonna hurt her. You said this was just to talk,” he said thickly.
“Well, I don’t see any her in this room other than me,” Deb said nastily, “just you, Mark and this cock in a frock.”
“I don’t have a cock,” I shot back miserably.
“A mutilated cock is still a cock.”
The anger swelled like a balloon but receded as I shut my eyes and willed reason to take over.
“What do you want from me?”
Mark propped me up against the damp wall, none too gently.
“A confession,” Deb said, “You’re going to state that you did all those things and we’re going to record it, then send it through to the CEO’s office and the police.”
“Good luck with that,” I spat.
“How hard do you think it would be for us to put a noose over one of these beams and hang you? Everyone will think you did it yourself. The suicide rate for you freaks is through the fucking roof, and it’s not like your loving family would investigate, now is it?”
“Just confess,” Mark growled, “you can fuck off and find another job.”
I shook my head,
“I’m in the right here. I didn’t do anything wrong! You people are the monsters, harassing an innocent person because of your own shitty prejudices.”
Walt moved for the door, but Deb closed it, holding the handle.
“And we know your secret too, Walter Sawyer. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why you never married, never had kids, and why you’re so sympathetic to this ugly shemale.”
The air seemed to ripple for a moment as she spoke the slur. Walt saw me notice it, too and closed his eyes, but it appeared that none of the others registered the odd sensation.
Mark thrust his cellphone in my face.
“Say that you did it all. Confess to all the crap you pulled, then we can all get out of this shithole and go home.”
Fixing my gaze on his hateful face, I spoke a single word.
“No.”
Shaking his head, Mark put down his phone.
“Deb, get the rope.”
As the last word left his mouth, the air swam again, as though the entire floor was filled with breathable fluid. Lights flickered and flashed in the rippling atmosphere and Deb cried out in fear as something fundamental changed in the fabric of the seventh floor.

Deb was still Deb, but she was also a young man, dressed in orange and brown, his bushy hairstyle as archaic as his clothing. She/he danced with Mark, who was also young, slender and long-haired, nothing like himself apart from a certain gleam of terror about the eyes. Their hips ground into each other as they gyrated to the heavy funk of music that belonged to another era. Around them the ghosts of other dancers – all male – moved with abandon, safe in a place that allowed them to be who they were, in a time when their kind was utterly condemned.
But they weren’t safe, and I knew it. I knew it because I knew who I was, and what I was. I was there to ensure that places like this didn’t exist, and my badge, my uniform, and my gun all meant I could do what I wanted here. They screamed like women when they saw my pistol, and I laughed at the faggots, reveling in the stink of their sweaty fear in the air.
I told them to get up against the fucking wall and they did; the queers and the sissies. The ones dressed as women I told to take their clothes off and they did as they were told, crying like babies. Well, all but one.
The narrative of my real self, bolstered by stories, yes, but built from knowledge and pain and truth, thrashed and fought against the alien mind I was occupying. I heard the voice of the police officer – my voice – yell at the offender to take off his dress.
“No.” The sissy said, eyes so bright and defiant and beautiful and… revolting.
The rage that flooded through me was far beyond anything that could be controlled. It was irrational, it was potent and it was unstoppable – the righteous rage of a person who had never really been told ‘no’. Someone who never needed to be careful with their truth, who had never wanted in life; someone who had never been dismissed as garbage for simply being.
The trigger was light under my finger and the blossom of red from the groin of the sissy filled me with such heady elation that for a moment, I stared at my pistol in wonder. Screams rent the air and the faggots ran for the door of the gay speakeasy, sobbing in terror. Two huddled under a table – Deb and Mark ghosted through them – and I kicked the table over before shooting them again and again until my gun was empty.
Out in the stairwell, I could still hear them, running and shrieking, and I followed, baton in hand. A young man in overalls ran into me, raising his arms defensively as I turned on him.
“I’m just a janitor!” he squawked, “My name’s Walt Sawyer. I-I work on the eighth floor.”
“You saw nothing,” I told him, as I pressed my empty gun to his neck, “you hear me? And if you ever tell anyone you saw me here, I’ll hunt you down. I’ll ruin you in ways you can’t even imagine.”
I saw the light of decision dawn in his brown eyes just a fraction too late. At that moment, he changed his story forever and ended mine.
The world upended as Walt’s strong young hands pushed me down the stairs. The last sound I heard was the horrifying crunch of my neck snapping on the risers as they rose to meet me, and as awareness faded, the whole scene rippled again, the air-fluid and nauseating, rank with the stench of urine and blood.

What was left of my breakfast came up quickly, splattering the fetid carpet? Walt was beside me, cutting off the cable ties with a pocket knife, apologizing over and over. Curled up on the floor beside each other were Mark and Deb, the former shivering uncontrollably and the latter whimpering like a dying animal.
We left them where they lay and stumbled out of that place, the ghosts of the massacre still clinging to us, the personas not wanting to give up their temporary flesh, even now their truths had been heard. The officer’s phantom hatred burned like a virus in my soul; the antithesis of everything I’d ever been and wanted to be. Walt seemed lost in his own recollections, of his own actions that night, barely responding when I pushed him up the stairs and back to the sanity of the eighth floor.
In the bathroom I cleaned myself up as much as I could, trembling hands blotting away mascara, quivering lips slowly stilling as I bathed my wrists in cool water. I knew that whatever happened, one way or another, my time in this place was coming to an end.
Holding my head as high as I could and straightening my skirt, I walked out of the bathroom, back into the office, and sat at my desk.
Deb’s cubicle was empty, and so was Mark’s.

Deborah Young was found dead in her apartment three days later, several empty pill bottles beside her bed, and her rigid face a blue-black rictus of agony. Mark hadn’t returned to work, but he officially resigned the day we all found out about the suicide. Trina and I watched with mixed emotions as Walt cleared out both of their desks. He didn’t look at me, but his strong hands no longer shook; they were steady and sure as he taped shut the boxes that contained all that remained of my workmates’ time in this place.
“I’m sorry I didn’t do much,” Trina explained, her lip quivering, “I tried to say they should leave you alone, but they wouldn’t listen.” She leaned in, glancing at Walt and lowering her voice like she was divulging a secret. “I think you’re really lovely.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I soothed her, “they’re gone now. They can’t do any more harm.”
Mark’s parting gift was a confession – not mine, but his. He admitted to all the harassment, and more – awful things I wasn’t even aware of, things which had inexplicably and impossibly been cleaned up before I’d even seen them. And not by Walt Sawyer. I brought an employment suit against the company and settled for a sum that I can’t disclose, though I can tell you that it was more than enough for me to go back to school and start my own business.
We’re tiny, and there’s a hell of a lot of work to do, but once I’ve finished my degree, look me up if you ever need a human rights lawyer. Or if you need really bad jokes from a really good janitor, one who’s just like a Dad. Walt’s on the payroll for life – and our new office has no stairs.
I wish the story ended there, that this wholesome fade-to-black is where we cut to the credits, but for those of you that want to sit through to the cut scene at the end, there is more.
I know exactly what Deb and Mark Felt.
I know why she killed herself. And I know why he became a homeless alcoholic, begging for booze money on Main Street. The feelings they had when they were inside those two young gay men – the unending terror and pain – wouldn’t go away. They would never go away, not with drink, nor with therapy. It would only end with their own deaths.
Just as the feelings I’d felt while I was the police officer won’t ever leave me.
The righteous anger lurks in the dark, waiting. It whispers that with a gun in my hand, with enough power, I can do anything. I can get away with murder, so long as I kill the right people. But even more than that, it remembers what it felt like to take a life of someone you have every right to hate absolutely, and the heady, intoxicating rush that comes with it. It tells me that if I kill just one person, my thirst will be quenched, and for a while, I can go back to being normal, to who I was before. To just being Becca.
I saw Mark yesterday, sleeping outside McDonald's, a tattered hat in his hand and a cardboard sign beside his head, begging for change. Ever since I saw him, there’s a picture in my head; my hand putting a gun to his stomach and pulling the trigger until the gun is empty.
I really struggled to know why the ghost of the seventh floor put me in the shoes of the cop, why I was chosen to contain the memory of him. But I think I’ve finally figured it out.
Anyone else would have given in to the hatred by now. It would have taken them over – and the mistakes of that night in the 60s would have been repeated, over and over, echoing through the ages, turning story after story into a tragedy, until its power finally faded to nothing.
But I already knew how to live with hate. I know how to rewrite it.
You might think it’s not fair, that I’ve already had enough struggles in my life. But this is a burden I will willingly bear. It’s worth it to change that narrative, even if it’s one drop in an enormous sea. And I have help, now. I gave Walt the absolution that he’s craved for the last fifty years, but he gave me family.