Retirement

Short Fiction/Horror

Editors Note: This piece was originally published on Pulp, Pipe, and Poetry.

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For Brad Schaffer, the day was not just a Wednesday, it was THE Wednesday. The one that he had fantasized about for ten long years. He’d downloaded a little countdown timer on his laptop, oh how he hated that laptop, slick black, and underpowered. Only the best for Vantage Aerospace Solutions or VAS (pronounced V-A-S). He had downloaded that countdown timer and mapped out the date of his retirement. And for ten long years, he’d watched earnestly as the days ticked by—even as he had plotted his revenge.

He’d planned his retirement from this godforsaken place that some people still pretended was a business. It was of course, not a business, because corporations are not businesses, they are fiefdoms. Saying a corporation was a business, was like saying middle managers were leaders. It was like saying there was a free market when there was no hard money, he thought.

Regardless, this was his Wednesday, this was the day he retired for good.

He stared at the steaming cup of coffee on his desk. His last morning coffee. The mug said World’s Greatest Dad. It had been a gift from his son on a Father’s day he could no longer clearly remember.

Brad sat there and considered his life. Considered his moment of victory, and somehow, it still felt hollow. He was 55 and no longer recognized the person in the mirror every morning. It was still his face of course, but time had taken its toll. His eyes bulged slightly, and he had gained weight. His skin was sallow, and his hair thinning. Getting old was a bitch, he thought.

He took a sip of coffee. Savored it. The first sip of his last cup, on his last day.

Lisa typed away in the cubicle next to him. She hummed a tune to herself, lost in her work, the blue screen of her laptop reflecting off her store-bought readers.

“Brad,” Lisa, said. “Brad, are you ok?”

She sounded distant, muffled almost. He stood up quickly, so quickly that he felt dizzy. He did, however, feel lighter on his feet.

Had he dozed off?

“I’m fine,” Brad said quickly as he regained his bearings. Lisa stood next to him. She stared at his desk.

“Lisa, what’s wrong?” he asked, but she didn’t respond. Didn’t even acknowledge him.

He followed her eyes to his desk and then gasped in shock. His body—his own slumped form—passed out on the desk before him. He took a step back waiting for the dream to collapse like it did every time he realized that he’d been dreaming.

But it didn’t.

“Brad, wake up,” Lisa cried. She shook the slumped form harder and harder.

“Lisa, I’m right here,” he said. He reached for her shoulder, but his hand passed straight though.

He examined his hand as Lisa continued her bluster. It was a hand. It looked normal enough. He reached for the mug on his desk, absently craving more caffeine, but to his amazement his hand passed through again. Glitched through, like... interrupting a hologram. Except, he was the hologram.

He was nothing.

Brad stared in equal parts shock and horror as the EMTs worked over his empty shell. One-two-three, his ribs cracked beneath the force of the chest compressions. The EMT pinched what used to be Brad’s nose, and then clamped his own lips over the now graying body’s mouth.

How strange? It didn’t seem real.

Brad watched in horror as the show continued, and his anxiety grew as he waited for the dream to fall apart.

Weren’t you supposed to wake up when you die in a dream?

“He’s gone,” the man said at last. “Cardiac arrest.”

The EMT guided Lisa to a seat. Everyone had gathered. Brad watched Jack, his boss, as he forced what seemed like the whole office to take step back.

“Back to your seats, give the men some room,” his boss yelled.

Brad grabbed for the EMT, “But I’m right here, I’m right here I tell you.” But the man didn’t react. Brad watched as they wheeled his body away, and the full weight of the situation finally settled in—he was dead.

He watched as Jack consoled Lisa and then sent her home. He watched as Jack sat back down at his own desk, three spaces up, and just sat, and sat, and stared, and stared.

Brad made another pass at the coffee. The craving for caffeine having grown more intense. God, how he had wanted to finish that coffee. But it was no use. He could not pick it up. He could not lean against his desk. He was nothing. The material world as far away from him as he was to it.

Slowly, ever so slowly, the horror of the situation dawned. He was a ghost. He had died at work, and he was stuck here. Stuck in the very place he had always wanted to escape. And on his last day too. Oh, the irony, oh what a fucking cruel joke of a universe, he thought.

Brad tried to leave through the exit, but some barrier, invisible even to him, kept him from leaving. He pushed on it, and his limbs merely glitched through. He was trapped. This was it. This was home now.

When everyone had left for the night, he walked the halls in the dark. It was only then that he realized the depth of his mistake. The thing that he had left undone. For that was what chained the spirits of the dead to the earthly realm—things undone. He had never left. The thought had barely passed through him, when he wondered how it possible, how he could think without a brain. Unless, thoughts never came from the brain. What were thoughts anyways? Were they real? Or was the brain an antenna that drew in signals from the ether. Messages from some place beyond. Thoughts certainly existed on this side of the veil. Or was the spirit the receptor? And if so, who or what sent the messages?

If only he’d had more time.

But he’d had all the time in the world, had every day since the very first time he realized that his job was killing him. He’d waffled of course. The benefits were so good. The economy was doing badly. But when was it not? No, all those were excuses, he finally admitted to himself.

It was cowardice. Cowardice and laziness and bitterness that had held him back. He’d wasted his time, and this was his reward. He could’ve taken the leap whenever he had wanted to, but he didn’t. And so, he was here, chained to this building, this place he so loathed, bound by his very essence—a collection of vices and cravings and moral failings—all caught in the filter of his own soul.

The days passed slowly and life in the office went on more or less normally. Brad was somewhat surprised by this. He hadn’t really expected there to be a fountain of tears every day, but he had expected something... something more. The fluorescents were harsh on his astral form, their buzzing even louder this side of the veil, and since he had no use or need for sleep, his days had been extended by eight hours. The peace and quiet of after-hours was really the only time he found solace. His spirit ached with a million different cravings—for caffeine, for sugar, for sex even—like one giant itch that was impossible to scratch.

It was a week after his funeral that he saw them. His wife and son came to pick up his things. He sobbed silently as they packed up his little knick knacks and packed them away in a little brown cardboard box. He had decorated his little gray cell with them. Pictures of his family, a small bobblehead of Elvis Presley. A Pez dispenser of David Bowie. The whole of his person, his persona, packed loosely in a cardboard box.

He tried to hug them, but it was no use. But still he tried, channeling all the love in his soul in an attempt to deposit his presence.

His wife picked up the coffee mug, and she smiled gently, eyes brimming with tears, and his soul sang. She had felt his presence, he was sure of it.

His son was 19 now and had turned into a strapping young man. He had played both football and basketball throughout high school, and Brad thought of his late nights in the office that had occasionally made him miss one of the games. It hadn’t happened often. But it happened enough. Regret was the smoky discharge of tragedy, and tragedy the flame of lost potential. He was both.

And then they left, as quickly as they had come, and Brad’s ghostly form retreated to the back halls, where nobody worked anymore, and the lights were dimmed.

The following week, Brad caught a conversation between Lisa and Jack while they lounged in the breakroom.

“Are you going to replace Brad’s position?” Lisa asked.

“Not really planning on it,” Jack said, “we hadn’t needed it for a while.”

Lisa nodded dutifully and Brad drifted closer, venturing from the shadows into the violent lights.

“That job just meant so much to him, you know, I never really had the heart,” Brad continued. “But no, the answer is no. We aren’t planning on replacing him.”

Hadn’t had the heart, Brad thought. He hated this job. Hadn’t they seen that. Had they never seen him seething at his desk? Had his professional maske been that good, or had they never cared? What about his plan? They were supposed to need him. They were supposed to be crippled without him.

Brad retreated again to the back halls of the office building, and there he stayed.

A little over a month had passed since that fateful Wednesday, and the office had all but forgotten that Brad had ever worked there. There was no plaque. No stories or yarns told idly in his remembrance. It was as if he’d never existed. This had bothered Brad at first, but he made peace with the fool he’d been, the time he’d wasted, and the decisions he’d made. He had barely done so when another problem started. One with his astral form.

He was breaking down.

As he glided through the halls at night, he started to lose bits of himself on whatever he came into contact with. A wall, a desk, a cubicle, even the floor became like fly paper for his ghostly bits. Instead of glitching through them, now he left just a bit of his energy behind.

It also became harder and harder to remember things. He just had bad feelings now, and no idea why. The cravings had subsided to some extent, which he was grateful for. And he knew that he had had a family, but he didn’t remember what they looked like. Or even what their names were.

In fact, the only thing he knew for sure was that he was supposed to leave this place—that was all he had owed his own soul. The degeneration continued, and at times, he helped it along, frustrated and aching for it to end.

And after about a year of this, he was gone. Gone at last. No longer a soul, but an energy, a collection of bad vibes soaked into the masonry. And occasionally, someone in the office got a strange chill, or if they stayed late at night, reported that they heard sobbing near the back hall. Some said the office was haunted. Others said it had a weird energy. Still, others said the vibes were off. And occasionally, in a small cautious whisper, they talked about what had happened to Brad.