What Happens When You’re in the Elevator with the Boss’s Son

The Boss’s Son wears fedoras to the office.

He wears them with the confidence of a man who’s never heard the things women on the internet have to say about men who wear fedoras. The Boss’s Son has a face that you’ve described to friends, bitching over goblets of cheap wine, as rat-like. You don’t mean to be mean—there are a thousand things to mock about The Boss’s Son besides his appearance—but the comparison is just right there. Every time you look at him, it’s the first thing you think: rat.

The Boss’s Son has a big beautiful office with one wall that’s all window. What does he do in there all day? You don’t know. Does anyone know? Every time you pass, he seems to be leaning all the way back in his swivel chair, feet kicked up on his desk, fingering a fidget spinner, or stretching his poor phone cord to its absolute limit to stand wide-legged at the window while he talks, lording over the city below.

It’s not safe to ask the other assistants for their thoughts on The Boss’s Son—not in the kitchen where you all gather and wait as the pod-coffee drips into your mugs; not even in the lady’s bathroom at the sinks, a sacred ground of truth-speaking. Complaints about workload have been met with commiseration; complaints about co-workers with tight-lipped smiles that refused to take a side. You’re still fairly new there, not sure who you can trust.

A Thing has started happening: You and The Boss’s Son keep ending up alone together in the elevator. It’s happened for the past three days now. A three-day streak definitely qualifies it as A capitalized Thing.

There’s an expectation, in that enclosed space, that you will make conversation. And so you do. You both talk, in general terms, about the weather, the workload.

One day, he comments on your bag, printed to look like Mondrian painting: “You might not have known, but that pattern reminds me of this French painter.”

“Oh, uh, yeah. Mondrian? He was Dutch.”

“No, that’s not it.”

Regardless of the topic, conversation always peters out around the twentieth floor, leaving the pair of you standing in awkward silence, three feet apart.

On the fourth day—a long one, a day of tedious phone calls and sloppy mistakes—you see him waiting for the elevator at six p.m. Because you just can’t do it again, you divert your path; you wait in the bathroom instead. You sit in a stall, scrolling through Twitter on your phone, until enough time has passed that you assume you’re safe. There are other people in the next stalls, so you flush the toilet you didn’t use and wash your clean hands for show.

When you exit, somehow The Boss’s Son is still there, tapping his toe in performative impatience at the elevator bay.

You can’t think of anything else you can do to buy yourself time, so you say hey with a halfhearted wave as you approach him. He smiles. He’s wearing his fedora. Rat. You can’t help it.

The elevator arrives with a ding and you both step in.

The Boss’s Son looks at you with his small, watery eyes. Glances at you and then away, at you and then away, at you and then away. He has a long, cylindrical object in his hands. Maybe four feet of solid black plastic tube.

“Is that a didgeridoo?” you ask because you have to say something and that’s what it looks like.

“No,” The Boss’s Son says with a little laugh. He opens the object at a seam you didn’t notice in its middle—a case, it turns out—and pulls out a sword. An honest to god sword in the elevator.

“It’s a sword,” he says, though that has already become quite clear. The sword is curved and mean-looking, sharp edge glinting in the elevator’s fluorescent lights.

Jesus Christ, you think. But what you say is the tamer, “Oh my god!”

It’s a long trip from the thirty-second to the ground floor. The elevator is going uncomfortably slowly. The whole way down it’s just you and The Boss’s Son and The Boss’s Son’s Sword.

He starts to tell you about the sword-based martial art he practices, about the elaborate scoring system, about the variety of ways one might attack. When you decide to write about The Boss’s Son one day, you will not be able to remember the finer details of what he says, because there’s a fucking sword in the elevator.

There’s a fucking sword in the elevator.

It’s also possible that The Boss’s Son just does a terrible job of explaining it. Whatever it is, you know you’ve never heard of it before.

“I’ve never heard of that,” you say. Which, shit, is maybe rude.

But The Boss’s Son beams at the chance to say more, to keep going, to explain something to you.

“It’s fairly obscure,” he says, “but gaining popularity. They asked us to join the Olympics.” This he says quite proudly, but you have to wonder about that pronoun us. You look at his pale, shaky hand on the hilt of his sword and think this must be some new definition of us, one that does not actually include the speaker.

“But we said no,” The Boss’s Son continues. “We really want to keep it an old boys’ club, you know?”

But you decidedly do not know. You’ve never heard someone use the phrase boys’ club as a positive before. You think that if the fedora thing hadn’t already made it clear, this would be enough to let you know that you and The Boss’s Son exist on entirely different corners of the internet.

The pair of you reach the lobby and step out together. The return of space between you is almost dizzying. Now you just have to cross the lobby, exit the building, and you’ll be free. But The Boss’s Son’s pace is ambling. He’s re-sheathed his sword now that you’re in public, but he’s got more to say about it still.

You nod along politely as he talks. Nodding along politely generates at least half of your paycheck.

That night, sometime around one in the morning, as you compulsively check your email one last time before bed, you see you have one new message from just a few minutes ago, sent by The Boss’s Son.

Subject line: “Because you seemed interested . . . ”

It’s a link to a video on YouTube. No note.

You freeze, staring for a long time before clicking through, as though confronted with a wild animal and trying to remember the protocol. Do you make yourself smaller? Do you climb up a tree?

An ad for chicken nuggets plays. You take the time to plug in your headphones because your roommates are probably sleeping.

The video finally loads and then there he is again, this time on your computer screen, a dispatch from his corner of the internet: The Boss’s Son, brandishing his sword.

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