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<strong>Homeland</strong><br />
the management contract for the FOB she'd been fired from.<br />
It was ugly.<br />
As I lay in bed with my thoughts swirling, I wondered if Carrie Johnstone had snatched<br />
Masha because the leaks file had so much embarrassing material about her, personally,<br />
or whether she'd been hired to retrieve them for the U.S. government. How could the Army<br />
fire her one day and then re-hire her to do the same job at ten times her old salary a month<br />
later? Were they on crazy pills?<br />
-..-<br />
I couldn't afford to drag my ass around work the next day, so I didn't. I pounded the Turk's<br />
coffee and munched chocolate espresso beans and finished my inventory and network<br />
map. Joe surprised me by scheduling me for lunch. The first I heard of it was when he<br />
showed up at my desk at 12:30 and stood over it, smiling expectantly at me.<br />
“Hi, Joe,” I said.<br />
“Lunchtime, Marcus?”<br />
We went to a nice veggie place where they knew him by name and seated us right away.<br />
He knew their names, too, and greeted everyone from the waiter to the guy who filled<br />
up our water glasses personally, switching to Spanish as necessary and asking sincere,<br />
friendly questions about their wives and husbands and kids and health.<br />
The sincere part was the weirdest thing. When I was really on fire and feeling very, very<br />
sociable, I might remember half of the names of the people I saw. I just sucked at names.<br />
And when people told me about their kids or parents or siblings or whatever, I tried to be<br />
interested, but I mean, how interested can you really be in the lives of people you barely<br />
know or have never met at all?<br />
But Joe had the uncanny ability to seem really, genuinely interested in people. When he<br />
talked to you, you felt like he was also listening to you, carefully, thoughtfully, and not<br />
waiting for you to finish talking so that he could say whatever he was going to say next. It<br />
made him seem, I don't know, holy or something, like one of those people out of a religious<br />
story who overflows with love for his fellow man.<br />
And the weirdest part? He didn't make me feel like a dick for not being that interested<br />
myself. Instead, he made me want to try to be more like him, more caring.<br />
After our water glasses were full and we'd put in our orders, he said, “Thank you for making<br />
the time to see me today. I know you must be busy.”<br />
If it was anyone else, I'd have thought he was blowing smoke up my ass, but he really<br />
sounded like he thought being the webmaster/sysadmin/net guy was the hardest job in the<br />
world and he felt lucky that all he had to do was run around and try to get elected.<br />
<strong>SiSU</strong> www.sisudoc.org/ 90
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