4 The First Task

"What in hell are you screaming about?" Mr. Tan's face is beet red—and so is Claire, who's hiding behind the chair, as though shielding her eyes from some vicious attack. "Are you crazy?"

"I'm not crazy! You were taking your clothes off!" Claire is hyperventilating, averting her eyes, trying not to see her semi-naked boss.

"Yes, of course! But I am doing this professionally," he says, matter-of-factly. "Because from now on this is part of your job." He picks up his clothes and tosses everything to her. "Bring these over to Leed's. They'll take care of it."

"These are soiled clothes?"

"Well, yes, soiled, but not in the same sense of the word you peasants use the word 'soiled'." Mr. Tan presses a button on his desk, and an entire panel of the office's wall slides open, revealing a walk-in wardrobe. "If you must know, I came from a very long and boring meeting. They should have called it Bored Meeting, and not Board Meeting, because it was full of insufferable bores."

Claire opens his eyes a peep and lets out a squeak. "You're still naked, sir!"

"Am I?" Mr. Tan theatrically looks at his body reflected on the glass wall, seemingly admiring his buffed physique. "As far as I know it, I'm still wearing undies. So technically, I'm not naked, Miss Monteverde. So stop being such a virgin and do your job."

"But sir—"

Mr. Tan enters the walk-in wardrobe and, out of view, falls silent for a moment. Then he says, "Claire?"

"Yes, sir?" Claire stands up. A white fabric thing flies out of the wardrobe's entrance and lands right on Claire's feet. She stares at it. Her eyes widen when she realizes it's her boss's boxers, the very same pair he was just wearing a moment ago.

Does this mean he's totally naked right now, inside that room?

"Please include that, will you," she hears his voice say. "And when you return, bring me a coffee."

Claire squirms as she stands there, unable to bring herself to pick up her boss's underwear. She looks around for anything to pick it up with—a stick, a pair of tongs, anything she can use to pick it up without having to use her actual hands! She hears him humming some tune while inside the wardrobe, some familiar tune she couldn't yet name. So this is the monster. This is how he does it, terrorizing his secretaries and assistants. Doesn't this count as sexual harassment? If she sues him, would she win? Mr. Tan's probably so powerful, with half the city in his pocket or something, that whatever she files against him would go nowhere. After all, what does she have apart from emotional turmoil and a really, really awkward situation?

She stares at the boxers. It has that expensive-looking sheen, as if it's made of silk. If this is actual silk, and Mr. Tan farts through it, then isn't that so cliché, the rich farting through silk and all that?

Claire had to snicker at the thought, if only at her own expense.

So what does she do? Where is a pair of tongs when you need one?

She gazes over at his desk. There's the usual stuff you'd find on any office desk. A stack of documents awaiting his signature. A laptop. A couple of pens… Wait! That's it! A pen could do for now! She tiptoes over his desk, plucks the first pen she sees, then uses it as a stick of sort to pick up Mr. Tan's immaculately white boxer shorts. She holds it against the faint light streaming through the glass walls. She catches a whiff of his manly scent. Some expensive cologne she, of course, could not name. For a moment, even if she tries not to, she notices the creases on the fabric where his crotch would have been. She doesn't want to think of his manhood, but her brain eagerly runs to that area and occupies it: his manhood was just here, enclosed by this sheer fabric. Could she catch a whiff?

Then as she's holding it up, she notices something: a black line, like a tear drop, slowly streaming down the length of the boxer shorts' fabric. Her eyes follow its source, then to her shock, she realizes the black line is the pen's ink! It's leaking ink! It's leaking ink and now the boxer's ruined! Her boss's expensive looking silk boxers! Oh, my God!

"Is there a problem here?" Mr. Tan's voice could have given her a heart attack.

She turns around and sees her boss, standing there fully dressed in an elegant suit, a dashing debonair of a man.

He presses a button and the walk-in wardrobe behind him slides shut. "Why are you staring so intently at my boxers?"

"Oh!" In one quick motion, she swoops up the rest of Mr. Tan's soiled clothes, tucking the ruined boxers within the pile. "I was just looking at the, uhh, designer label. Uhh, I'm checking the size. It's quite large."

Mr. Tan's brow knits in confusion. "What is quite large?"

"Uhh, the crotch area….I mean! Nothing! I was just…Nothing! Did you say I'm supposed to bring this over to Leed's?

He nods, gazing at her with that bemused look on his face. "Yeah."

"Then I should get going." She heads to the door, steps out. But a second later, her head reappears. "Sir," she says. "Where is Leed's again?"

Mr. Tan pinches the bridge of his nose. "I am dying here, Miss Monteverde, and you are the cause of it. Leed's is my laundry guy. Four blocks away, at the corner of Lacson and 104th."

"Okay!" she chirps, then disappears.

But a second later, she reappears again. "Sir?"

"What is it this time?"

"Shouldn't your chauffeur bring me over there so that I'd get there quickly?"

"No, I need him for something else. You can walk. It's just four blocks. You look like you could use some exercise. And bring me a coffee, will you?"

It's just four blocks away, she thinks. Should be easy. But when she walks out of the TXCI building right after quickly signing the Red Contract Mrs. Gomez almost shoved to her face (she didn't even read it--what if she just signed over her kidney!), the noon sun pounding hard upon her head, she realizes this must be some practical joke. One block in this city stretches so far out on the horizon. It must be a mile or so per block. And she's walking all the way to God-knows-where. She should take a cab, but she needs to take it easy on the spending. Remember, he's not paying her for a month. And if she really messes it up, she might not get paid at all at the end of this month. So Claire starts walking, carrying the plastic bag of her boss's clothes, dodging the incoming rush of people and traffic, thinking hard about the choices she has made in her life, wondering if there is, indeed, a light at the end of this tunnel.