The Toad
by Owen Sykes

It’s not so bad here. Not really.

And I can’t complain—he might be upstate in Sing-Sing by now, getting his ass pounded by some convict.

I can’t even remember how long it’s been. I thought the other day maybe a year, but it seems longer.

Could be two years, for all I know.

Could be five.

But, as they say, it seems like just yesterday.

The main thing was that my boss didn’t like him. Can’t say I was too fond, either.

Don’t get me wrong. He was good for the company, if that counts for anything. ‘Fact, I had just given him his review—as high as policy allowed, all B’s.

He was just so goddamned arrogant. Kept expecting raises instead of letting the team take the credit. As if any of those ideas would ever have seen the light of day if I hadn’t sold them to the board. Jesus, what an asshole.

I have to admit, he was productive, and the rest of the lab rats liked him. And he did make us some fairly serious coin. Christ, I probably owe my house to that penicillin substitute he came up with.

"Just hit me," he said, like it was no big deal. "Just sitting on the can, and it came to me."

Fucking arrogant. I spent five years in research, and the only thing that hit me on the can was a bad case of the skitters. I can’t stand liars.

And that was the worst part. The way he worked. Couldn’t do normal hours. Had to come in at 5 AM or midnight or every weekend for six months, then off for a week. Never went to meetings. Never did the company thing. I didn’t like it either, but it was my—it was our job.

And the weird shit he would come up with. Get this—he puts in a company memo—a company memo—that some horseshit story about some Buddhist-Nepalese-Tibetan-witch-doctor freaks and meditation inspired his research into Sleepodone. I had a hell of a time explaining that to the board. They weren’t satisfied until I made up something about an inside joke and him relying on my notes.

He was always into that weird crap—ghosts and crop circles and cattle mutilations. One time—he was working on Tranquilocine—he told me he was studying a toad—a fucking toad—that some Limeys had dug up in a coal mine. Not just dug up, but found, alive, inside a chunk of carboniferous coal. Like it had been there for millions of years or something, just biding its time under 300 feet of rock.

No skepticism for him. No, he had take all this shit on face value.

Anyway, I put up with it as long as I could. When Tranquilocine hit the market, and the bucks started rolling in—Jesus, how they rolled in—he had the fucking temerity to stick his ass in my office and demand a share.

Right, so just like every time before, I explained that he signed an inventions clause when he was hired, and everything he used company equipment to develop belonged to the company.

He gives me some song and dance about sure, he knows that, but the TQ was different, best muscle relaxant the market had ever seen, it was making three times the money anything else had ever made, and would it be all right for maybe a half a percent of the net, or just a bonus. Then he throws in something about a baby, and how his slacker brother finally got a job pouring concrete at some new bridge project and would be moving out soon, but that a little extra would be so helpful. Whiney shit like that. Like the rest of us don’t have car payments and mortgages too.

So I explained as patiently as I could that employees received as much as the company could afford, and if a four percent increase a year wasn’t good enough, maybe he wasn’t happy working here anymore.

Then later I tell my own boss about it, and he just flat out tells me to fire the guy. Not a company man. Doesn’t appreciate all we do for him. Besides, cutbacks were coming, and it wouldn’t hurt for the board to see that I was being proactive.

I had no choice, right? I called him in and put him on a "performance plan," which is a damned convenient little invention of HR’s. You don’t fire anyone, you just put them on a probation so restrictive that they quit on their own. You make it so they can’t shit without approval and a detailed debriefing.

He was pissed. But fuck him, I have a job to do.

Funny thing, though. He stayed. I told him he had to work eight to five, Monday through Friday, no weekends. And he did it. I told him he had to go to every scheduled staff meeting, required or not, and he did. I told him I wanted daily status reports, and he did them. I told him he had to email me whenever he left or came into the labs, and goddamnit, he did!

So, for a while, everything seemed fine. I had IT check his computer now and then on the weekends, and except for a few bullshit notes about that damned toad (which were expressly done on his lunch hour, and duly noted), he seemed to be doing acceptably well.

But my boss starts giving me heat, and explaining that the board doesn’t promote softies, and I had better damn well start acting like I had a pair and fire the asshole.

Wasn’t too tough, really. This little piece down in HR helped me out. It was those toad notes—yeah, we usually look the other way if people use the computers on their own time, but there was, after all, an official policy against it. So we pulled the files, showed him the policy, and security walked him out the door.

Then, the last time I saw him, must have been at that farewell party for Cohen (another "performance plan"). He had the balls to crash it. Anyway, he comes up to me fairly late, and apologizes for "putting me in a difficult position." Hands me another margarita, and proceeds to crow about his new daughter, and his brother’s new place, and all that crap. Goes on and on. Everybody else takes off, even the HR tail that had been tying cherry stems in knots with her tongue all night, and this asshole is just droning on about the company, and how he decided to do the right thing, and how we all had to do what we thought was best.

Anyway, I guess I’d had a few, so at some point I remember hiking to the men’s room and puking like a fiend, and he’s right there, like my best buddy, clapping me on the back and telling me to drink water, and breathe, and let it all out, I’ll feel better if I do.

That’s about the last thing I remember.

When I woke up, I felt wet. And it was dark.

I couldn’t move. For a while I thought I couldn’t breathe. Then I realized I don’t really need to.

Which is good, because concrete smells like shit.

Sometimes I can feel the traffic overhead. I used to try to count the days by it—it slows down at night—but that’s hard to do when all you have is memory.

No, all I really need to do now is wait.

I’ve gotten pretty good at waiting.

©2002 Owen Sykes