Everything Changes

buddies, same as always, make your way through the honeycomb of partitions to the sanctuary of your cubicle, and drop into your worn, ergonomically correct, mesh-backed chair, a knockoff of a popular German design, looking around your office with a stupefied expression. There’s your L-shaped workstation, your monitor and keyboard, a metal wire frame that holds your current files in graduated elevations, a Toshiba telephone, and a picture of Hope in the Crate and Barrel frame she supplied because no way was she going to have you pin her to the cubicle wall, to be lost amidst the various CAD renderings from the engineering department. This is it. This is the extent of the niche you’ve managed to carve out for yourself after almost a decade in the workforce. Your voice mail light blinks urgently; your computer emits a low chime heralding the arrival of each new e-mail with a disturbing frequency that borders on rhythmic. This is the job you’re supposed to refer to in interviews with
Entertainment Weekly
as the soulless drudgery you engaged in before you realized your dream of becoming a screenwriter. Beyond that, of what use can it possibly be?
    The dull clatter of my coworkers’ scurrying fades to white noise and I stare at my walls, locked in a state of suspended animation, waiting for something, some cosmic intervention, to push me in one direction or another. My eye falls on the snapshot of Rael, Jed, and me dressed in black tie and leaning against the bar at Rael and Tamara’s wedding: Rael in the middle, looking flushed, happy, and only a little drunk; Jed on one side, looking customarily dapper, a young James Bond; and me on the other side, distinguishable from the waitstaff only due to the shredded boutonniere pinned to my lapel.
    Hey, Rael. What the fuck do I do now?
    Between my cancer fears and thoughts of a meaningful career in something, I find myself completely unable to focus on anything. I am filled with an intense nervous energy that shakes my legs and makes me drum my fingers ceaselessly on the laminated surface of my desk. I’m thinking I don’t want to end up like Clay, driven to madness by a nebulous career in a nonexistent field. I want to do something I care about. I sit twitching at my desk, staring into nothingness, while something undefined broils ominously inside me. My brain seems too big for my head, my organs pressed against the sides of my body. The upholstered walls of my cubicle suddenly seem claustrophobic to me, and I know I have to get out of here.
    Tamara calls me on my cell phone. “My Zack alarm was going off,” she says.
    “Your timing is impeccable.”
    “What’s up?”
    “I’m going a little crazy,” I say.
    “I’m downstairs.”
    “Thank God.”

    Tamara’s in the lobby, dressed in jeans, a long, belted sweater coat, and boots that add a good two inches to her height. I practically dive into her hug. Lately, I’ve noticed that the nature of our hugs is changing. Where we used to simply hug and separate, we now cling for a few extra moments, and there’s significantly more body contact. And then there’s the way her cheek rests against mine, and the way her arm wraps itself over my shoulders so that she can curl her fingers around my neck, which seems somewhat telling and, I don’t know, just a tad naughty. These hugs have become something else, a nonverbal expression of an unspoken feeling of . . . what, exactly? I don’t know, but the fact that she hugs me like this is terrifying and thrilling, and though we’ve never discussed it, not once, it’s become an integral part of our ritual. These hugs are no accident. They’re neither a greeting nor a farewell, but a destination all their own.
    “So, how’d it go?” she asks me.
    “That’s still unclear,” I say. “They might have found something.”
    Something petty and needy in me shivers gleefully as her expression falters. “What?” she says softly.
    I tell her about the spot and the biopsy, leaving out the gory details of the procedure. “So it’s still probably nothing,” she says.
    “The statistics are in my favor,” I say.
    “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”
    I look at her. “I went there to hear that it was nothing. Statistically speaking, that would be a lot better, wouldn’t you say?”
    “I see your point,” she says, grinning lightly. For some reason, I am uncharacteristically transfixed by her today, dwelling on all of her individual features instead of the whole