Other than having to deal with the Beast, Ronald’s mornings were quiet. Though University employees were to be at their seats promptly by nine o’clock, almost all of them followed the unwritten rule of not bothering each other until well after ten. This allowed Ronald to prepare the IDs from the day before and get them ready to send out. It was a simple process: after the Beast digested the image of a person, It sent the remains to a small printer that quietly spit out an ID every thirty seconds. Ronald didn’t like that kind of efficiency, though. He found it cold and sterile and completely inappropriate. So he paused the printer each time after an ID was ready as a way of showing his respect for the unknowing victims whose images fed the Beast.
On the morning Bettina came to his office, Ronald’s solemn ceremony was cut short. Just as he turned the printer on, as the minute hand made its way to the nine o’clock hour and his fellow employees dashed to get to their desks, just then, he heard the door knob turn and the door slam open. It was Bettina.
She had a habit of treating doors violently though in every other respect, she was gentle and unassuming. The explanation for this discrepancy had to do with simple physics. She moved through the world with great energy, and as a result, doors slammed open before her without her meaning anything by it.
When Ronald thought back on it later that day and for days afterward, it was almost as if she’d flown toward him. Ronald knew that the employees who came to his office had no idea they were offering themselves to the Beast. They were often hesitant and had to be encouraged through the process. But Ronald assumed it was just some kind of primordial instinct that made them cautious. The way early cavemen knew that certain plants or animals would do them harm. Bettina was different, though. She zoomed right into the office with her hand stretched out, ready and willing to have her picture taken. This was bravery, Ronald thought as he took in the long, slender arm thrust in front of him. Or was it foolishness? He liked her too much to figure out which.
“Hello, Donald. We met last week in the hallway. You’re Donald, right?” Bettina’s voice was less a voice than it was a series of bleeps and chirps - something Ronald noticed and appreciated as well. She was an optimist for the digital age. “That’s not your name, is it?” Bettina chirped when he didn’t respond. Underneath the many short brown hairs that covered her forearm, pale skin was now turning the slightest shade of pink.
“Close,” he said, forcing himself to look up at her. “It’s Ronald, actually.”
Bettina bent forward slightly, the pink of her arm now turning a pale violet that was spreading up her neck, quickly working its way toward her face. She apologized, but Ronald didn’t understand because her long, spindly fingers were pressed against her mouth.
At first, Ronald thought she wasn’t breathing. The clock ticked away seconds as he looked on, desperate to see if she needed help. Forgetting himself for a moment, he looked to the Beast for advice, but as always, It just sat there on Its three legs, indifferent to anything but Its own selfish needs. Ronald half got up and then sat down again, and then stood up completely, his hands all the while taking on a life of their own, fluttering, looking for a resting place but lost in indecision: should they reach out and touch this woman’s back, or should they stay at his side?
Bettina, of course, was not in need of Ronald’s help. She wasn’t breathing because she was laughing hysterically and when she finally recovered, she pulled her hands away from her mouth and a long stream of drool stretched like taffy from them. “I was just thinking of you in a Ronald McDonald outfit,” she said, her voice still thick with saliva. “You probably get that a lot,” she added, wiping her hands on her pants.
Ronald decided then and there that he liked Bettina more than any other person he’d ever met. It wasn’t her overly active salivary glands or the thick weed-like hair covering the lower third of her arm, or the breathless, mute laugh, even - though he did like these things. It was the fact that she wasn’t awkward or embarrassed in any way.
“It’s not a bad office,” she said, looking around. “But don’t they let you put pictures up? A picture would be nice right there,” Bettina said pointing at a wall that was painted in a University-approved shade of blue.
Ronald couldn’t see what she was getting at. He didn’t like pictures - he hated them, actually.
“Ronald McDonald,” Bettina chirped, “you’re not very talkative, are you?” She looked at the clock above his desk. Next to it was a seemingly homemade sign declaring that re-takes were harmful, and discouraged. “I’d like to talk more,” she said, which made Ronald smile, “but I think I need an ID, right?” She said this as she clapped her hands together, giving Ronald the impression that she was happy and unconcerned. But for Ronald, there was nothing to be happy about. Her request made him want to punch something. Like Bettina, he was not a violent person, but punching something seemed right, all the same. If not that, at the very least he wanted to run around the room and cry out that this was unfair, that the Beast should not be able to feast on someone as special as he thought Bettina was.
But this was part of the deal he’d made when he started working at the University. He knew that. The Beast had to be fed; employees needed their IDs. And as much as he didn’t want to, it was his job to tell Bettina where to stand and unhappily train the Beast’s Cyclops eye upon her. As the shutter clicked, and Bettina’s lovely image fed the Beast, it was all Ronald could do not to wince.
On any given day, between twelve and one in the afternoon, the neighborhood surrounding the University went through a transformation. University policy and tradition dictated that this was the time allotted to administrative staff for lunch. The otherwise quiet restaurants in the area usually visited by students nursing caffeinated drinks and junior faculty wanting to seem forever young were, for that one hour, inundated by hungry men and women desperate to make the most of their time off. After whole mornings inspecting the clocks hanging in their offices, convinced that hours had to be more than sixty minutes long, they became equally convinced that the hour for lunch was somehow shorter. Some even went as far as accusing their bosses of a kind of chronological misconduct, though these complaints were never pursued with any vigor.
As for the students and professors, they knew that for that one hour they should stay clear. From behind their thick books and from their dusty study carrels, they braced themselves as the campus was overrun by men in cheap suits and women in bright sneakers and panty hose. During most of the workday, these people were their docile and obedient employees - secretaries, budget managers, personal assistants - but during the lunch hour without the need for professionalism to hold them back, they morphed into something more aggressive and ferocious. There were always a few brave souls among the faculty, some graduate student in the Sociology Department who didn’t heed the warnings, who went out among the staff while the lunch rush whooshed by, but they never lasted long. The smell of effort alone that arose from so many people trying to do more in one hour than anyone should made watching the lunch rush unbearable.
And yet, watching the staff rush about was the highlight of Ronald’s day. He believed that the world was more and more the domain of the Beast, where every day, cameras taught people to watch each other without ever seeing each other. Ronald took joy in going against the grain. He watched the sway and swoosh of his fellow staff members. The way they would grimace as they ran about, the way they talked to themselves, no doubt exhorting their legs to move faster, their arms to pump faster - he took it all in and couldn’t help but smile. From a number of different vantage points he’d discovered over the years, he sat and watched them, never looking for anyone in particular. But on the day he met Bettina, he felt himself hope that maybe, just maybe, he’d get lucky and see her amidst the waves of people passing by.
In the end, that wasn’t to happen. At some point, just as he saw Tim, his boss, and Rekha Joy, a new employee whose photo he’d taken that day zoom past, a feeling overtook him. It wasn’t pain. If one had to describe it in terms of temperature, it was neither hot nor cold. In fact, it was as if somehow he’d been drenched in tepidness. There was no joy and no sadness to what he felt. He didn’t feel sick, he couldn’t say that, because sickness would’ve meant he was connected to something. The only emotion he could muster was a sense of relief that the next day was Saturday so he’d have the chance to get over whatever he was suffering from.
That night, he went to sleep early. Usually his dreams recapped all the faces he’d seen that day, as if his mind were cataloguing them by expression and shape. But that night, there were no faces, only looping images that seemed unconnected to him. In one dream, a balloon was shown floating up and away until it popped. In another dream, water in a tea kettle slowly evaporated until it boiled away to nothingness.
When he woke up, he realized that he’d slept the weekend away. He felt better, almost normal, but still when he got to the office, the Beast sensed he was weak and spent the morning testing him. Nothing obvious, of course, but Ronald could feel It probing him. He decided to spend a little extra time during lunch to make sure It didn’t get the wrong idea. Weak or not, he was still the boss.
During the lunch hour, as he sat in his office staring the Beast down, there were a couple times when he heard someone walk up to the door of his office, pause, and then turn away. This was odd considering that it was lunchtime and no one ever stayed in, but he didn’t let himself think about it too much. Watching the Beast required his full attention, after all.
Then the door slammed open. “Ronald McDonald, why are you inside on such a nice day?” Bettina chirped.
“I’m not feeling well,” Ronald said, not wanting to explain the true reason for his being there.
“Why don’t you go home, then?”
“I don’t know. I guess,” he paused, flustered for a moment, “I can’t leave…” He stopped in mid-sentence and pointed at the bag hanging from her shoulder. “Is that a camera?
“Do you wanna see it?” she asked.
“Why?” Ronald stammered.
“Why what?” Bettina asked.
“That,” Ronald said. “Why do you have that?”
“Don’t tell me you don’t like pictures?” Her body, usually amped and erect, now sagged under the weight of disappointment. “Well, this is for you anyway.” She handed Ronald an envelope with his name on it.
Ronald didn’t answer at first. He was too busy staring at her camera, warning It that he would deal with It later if any harm came to Its owner. He picked the envelope up. “For me?” But when he opened it and saw a glossy 4x5 image of himself, all the excitement he felt gave way to a tingling sensation that started at the tips of his fingers and moved through blood vessels and arteries to his stomach and then to his head.
“Do you like it?” Bettina asked. “Sometimes when you shoot people, it doesn’t seem real or fresh. But I thought I captured who you are.”
“When did you take this?” Ronald’s hands began to tremble noticeably.
“Last week. I saw you sitting alone in the lunch room.”
Ronald excused himself and ran out the door. He got as far as the men’s room down the hall before the bomb ticking in his mouth exploded into a variety of yellows and greens.
“Ronald,” Bettina knocked on the door. “Ronald, are you OK?” She came in slowly, for once treating the door gently. “Do you need an ambulance?”
“I hate those things,” he whispered.
“Ambulances?” she asked.
“Leave me alone,” Ronald said, now almost growling.
“Why? What did I do?”
“You shouldn’t be taking people’s pictures without letting them know.” He tried to get up. “It isn’t good.”
“The picture’s not that bad.”
Ronald managed to push himself off the floor and walk to the sink. He asked Bettina to call Maintenance to get someone to clean up his mess, but really, he just wanted her to leave him alone.
For almost a week after that, Ronald came and went to work, fearful that Bettina would show up again, or worse, take his picture. There was no avoiding the truth: she was a defender of the Beast, an ally, someone who thought nothing of stealing other people’s images. She betrayed his trust, even if she didn’t know it. And yet each day that she didn’t come by his office - and this was what he couldn’t figure out - he missed her.
The five o’clock rush at the end of each workday was not unique to the campus. Many people make for the doors of their offices at the end of a workday. But the intensity with which the University employees left campus on Friday nights - that was something altogether different. There had been reports of people being injured (some even used the word crushed) by the relentless rush of people filing out of the campus and down into the subway station. Though it looked like bedlam to the untrained eye, there were actually two groups that made up the crowd.
Down the steps and onto the main path that led to their trains, the Optimists left every Friday as if they never were coming back, while the Pessimists (some called themselves Realists) already felt the impending moment of Monday morning as soon as they left their offices. These individuals were marked by the way they moved, slowly, indifferently, unlike their optimistic colleagues who moved quickly and without reservation.
Ronald made it a habit to wait behind on Fridays. He enjoyed walking through the aftermath, seeing how those left on campus behaved. Like small animals after a flood, the faculty and students began poking their heads out of their book-cluttered holes to make sure everything was fine. Ronald could see them flinch as he walked out of the administration building. They looked at their watches and asked themselves if somehow they’d mistimed their return to campus and if they should go back and hide. After a moment, they’d see that Ronald was alone and that it was OK - they were safe.
Sitting on the train on one of those Fridays, a little more than two weeks after the incident in the bathroom, Ronald heard Bettina’s voice and he felt the muscles in his stomach clench. “Are you ignoring me?” she asked as she scooted him over. He didn’t know how he’d missed her on the platform, but now she was standing over him and all he could do was make room for her on the seat.
“Are you OK?” Bettina asked.
“You have that thing with you, don’t you?”
“What? This?” Bettina produced a camera out of her bag.
“I have to go,” Ronald said, as the train pulled into the next station.
“Why?” Bettina grabbed his hand. “Why are you acting so weird? It’s just a camera.”
“I just have to go,” he said and walked off the train.
The sun was setting by the time he got up to street level, and there were more people than usual walking around. The opportunity to see so many faces dash by, the endless number of expressions and ways of walking that people had when they didn’t know they were being watched, normally made Ronald giddy. But after seeing Bettina on the train, he felt something closer to jealousy. People didn’t worry about things like cameras and pictures. They kept their albums full of photos, never knowing what they were doing to each other. For a moment, Ronald wished he didn’t know what he knew.
He stopped walking and closed his eyes so he could see Bettina’s face. For a few moments he took solace in going over every aspect of it, remembering the symmetry of the two dimples on either side of her mouth when she smiled, and the flower’s perfect shade of pink that her cheeks turned whenever she laughed.
He heard a clicking noise coming from behind him, but didn’t let himself turn to look. Instead, he closed his eyes tighter, trying to remember other things about her - things that no camera could capture: the cluck of her tongue when she teased him, the way she smelled that first day when she walked into his office - a little bit like play-dough, a lot like soap. There was more, so much more he could describe about Bettina even though he’d only seen her a few times. But the clicking noise was starting to distract him and he opened his eyes.
There were more people on the sidewalk. Their faces were as varied in shape and expression as that of any group, but Ronald still wasn’t interested. CLICK, he heard the sound again this time realizing what it was but still deciding not to look. And then, as he expected, everything started to fade around him: the people passing by, the trees and the plants, the awnings and the cars parked on the streets. Deep reds and browns, blues and greens had all started to blend into a pallid gray.
CLICK, and then again, CLICK.
Ronald heard his name being called out and turning, found what he already knew would be there: Bettina with her camera pointed at him. She waved and smiled as the shutter clicked again. She was anxious, he could see that. And if things were different, he would’ve loved this new expression that he’d never seen before on her face and would’ve dreamed about it that night. CLICK, the shutter went. CLICK and CLICK again. She told him she couldn’t help herself; she felt an uncontrollable urge to take his picture. She apologized all the while but Ronald wasn’t angry. Something terrible, something that he he’d feared his whole life was happening to him, but now it was too late to care. Within a few moments, there was nothing left - no concerns or worries - nothing that made him who he was remained.
The following Monday, work went on as it always did at the University. Employees filed in promptly at nine, left for lunch at twelve, and at five, they rushed from their cubicles to the trains that would take them home. Ronald, however, did not arrive that day or any other day after for that matter. Aside from Bettina, no one thought about him or even mentioned his name. There was no official rule about this, but as a habit, University employees never spoke about people after they were gone. Within the week, a temp was hired to take his spot and a month later, a permanent replacement was found.
Months passed until one day, Bettina stopped looking at the pictures she’d taken of Ronald. She made a stack of them - each frame showing Ronald fading into the background - and then dumped them into a box along with the pictures of other people who, at some point in her past, she’d also forced herself to forget.
