Viet Ham

Duckie and I have this horrible habit of preying on each others real or imagined fears. We often work late into the night and keep one another awake and amused through a lethal mixture of aggravated fear and perverted cariacatures of people we unfortunately know.

One such cariacature is Andy, a slightly gaunt, 50 year old Vietnamese male coworker. He would be completely normal and impervious to the malaise of our minds were it not for ONE disturbing mannerism: he finishes his sentences by drawing his thin lips into the corners of his mouth and produces an odd slurping-sucking sound like the one of an obnoxious child, armed with a straw, refusing to acknowledge that there’s nothing left in his drink to slurp. Right then and there, we latch onto that trait and imagine what his pillow talk would sound like, how he’d come on to us in his Vietnamese-cafe-trolling fobby way, or how his orgasm noise might meld with this nightmarish mannerism.

Take all these machinations of our minds, and multiply it by hours, days, weeks and you’d arrive at 11:30 pm, office time. Our office is divided into three parts: the lobby, the main offices, and the back cubicles. Each section has its own light switch. After about 6-7pm, we turn off the lobby lights to save power. Duckie and I get up from our desks, head toward the lightswitch for the back area. The moment that happens, there’s a mad dash for the second light switch at the end of the hall way. There’s no telling who’ll be the victim on any particular night. Like the daily life and death struggle on the Serengeti plains, the weak and ill are the first to go. The moment Duckie and I sense a twitch or scuffle of laptop carrying bag, we strive to make sure the other will be the one left behind.

So the mad dash. It’s a few seconds that can seem like an eternity. I see Duckie’s fingers, in slow motion, reach for the second light switch and I brace myself for the damp shroud of darkness. After a whole day under the fluourescent lights, it’s so dark that I can feel a ripe, violet glow lingering on my lashes, blinding me further. In the next epic second, my mind brings back all the monsters we created that day for an encore.

*thhhwwwiiickkkkkkkkk*
*thhhhwwwiiwwwwwiwiwwiccccckkkk*

Good God. I can imagine the grinning Andy, sucking on his toothpick in happy anticipation of me…touching me. The fear is nearly paralyzing, but I work myself into a frenzy of mental counterstrike and I BECOME that monstrous creation. I hear Duckie’s girlish, nervous giggling, and I lunge blindly forward to avoid being the victim. I hear myself making that awful sucking sound with my teeth and lips as I swaddle my irrational fear in the monster’s mannerisms.

It’s a perversion of the archetypal romantic lovers’ nighttime meeting. Our fingers almost meet and the electricity of our proximity charges our symbiotic fear of Andy. We grope the darkness in a futile Kurosawan manner, hoping to locate the other, yet dreading the contact. When we finally grapple each other and are able to negate each other’s stealthy evil, there is a flurry of attacks and childish squealings of delight as we collectively conquer Andy. Yes, we’ve made it to the front door and all is well as the moonlight reveals us in our multi-splendored absurdity, real or imagined.