Our Company's “Destress” corner is making my Co-workers act... STRANGE

My office installed a “destress” corner at the end of the hallway outside the breakroom last week. It capped off a line of motivational posters hung at regular intervals down the length of the hall. The new destress space featured a giant black-and-white outline of a koi fish that staff were welcome to color in at their leisure. There was also a word search that an intern was supposed to replace daily, a whiteboard for inspirational quotes, and a picture of a hummingbird perched on a cat.

Management installed the destress corner the week after Ben Bourdin set himself on fire in our parking lot. It was around lunchtime so a lot of us saw it. Ben was a nice guy, young, only with the company for three or four years. I remember watching him walking out into the middle of the lot holding a big red jerry can and wondering if there was something wrong with his car. When he began pouring the gas down over his head, it didn’t register at first as dangerous. A few people even chuckled, like maybe Ben was about to pull some prank. Then he took out a silver Zippo from his pocket. Nobody was laughing at that point. The screaming began before the fire did.

We were closed for a week after that and when we came back, ta-da, destress corner. There wasn’t an announcement or anything; we just stumbled upon the new addition as we went to the breakroom. I saw it for the first time in the afternoon. Somebody had started coloring in the felt koi with the scented markers they left out for us hanging on yarn. For some reason, they’d colored the koi’s tail green and its eyes bright blue. Then they apparently gave up, because the giant fish was left unfinished. Un-fin-fished.

Nobody was talking about Ben when I went into the breakroom for lunch. Nobody was talking at all. Or looking at each other. We chewed and digested in silence. When I left the room to head back to my office, I noticed that a little more of the koi was painted. Now one of its fins was yellow. We were going to end up with a koi masquerading as a clownfish. One other aspect of the destress corner had changed, as well. Somebody had highlighted the phrase HELP ME in the word search. I went back to my office and stared at a blank spreadsheet for the rest of the afternoon.

The next morning I headed directly to the destress corner as soon as I got to work. I’d brought a set of markers from home and my goal was to finish the koi finish. When I reached the poster, though, I found that someone had spray-painted over the poster. Now the fish was a black smudge. The word search was gone, replaced with a crossword puzzle. Even the picture of cat and hummingbird was missing; in its place was a low-resolution printout of a single blue eye. There was a sentence written in red above the display.

Where are you right now?

I ended up taking a personal day and going home. As I was leaving the office, I kept hearing the sound of footsteps echoing my own. They grew louder and louder until the final hall leading to the parking lot. By that point, the phantom steps cracked like trees splitting in a flash frost. It felt like I was being chased, so I ran, adrenaline pumping through my veins, a scream caught in my teeth. Once I made it into the parking lot, the feeling of pursuit stopped. So did the footsteps. When I got home, I locked the front door and pushed the couch in front of it for good measure.

It was hard going back to the office after that but I didn’t have enough PTO to stay home for more than a few days. I tried calling out sick but Shannon insisted I get a doctor’s note and I hate going to the doctor. So I returned to work, determined not to even look at the destress corner. My resolve lasted until 10 am. The display was different, again. This time it was a canvas, sort of beige, sort of white. A beautiful painted sky of sapphire blues against amethyst violet and clouds and a setting sun covered the top half of the canvas. The bottom half was blank. Some of my coworkers had doodled little stick figures around the edges, smiling people crudely drawn. Then, in one unpainted corner, someone had nailed a dead rat to the canvas.

I stared at the animal for several minutes, trying to convince myself it wasn’t real. I took a few shaky steps away from the distress corner to get a drink of water from a nearby cooler. When the liquid hit my lips, I spit it out. The water was, well, it was similar to water but tasted wrong. Greasy. There was a slickness to the liquid that wasn’t right. I held the clear plastic cup up towards the fluorescents. For a brief flash, I thought I saw shapes in the water, microscopic swimmers. When I blinked and looked again, they were gone.

I poured the water out and got a diet Dr. Pepper from the machine in the breakroom. I did not look at the rat as I walked down the hall back towards my office.

Once the door was locked, I pushed my desk to block it, then went and sat in the corner. Someone started knocking on my door. It was a polite knock. If knocks could have an accent, this one would probably be English. Still, it terrified me. I began having what I guess you’d call a panic attack. My breath went so fast I couldn’t catch it, I got dizzy, I teared up a little.

The knocking went on at the same pace for half an hour. When it finally stopped, I called an Uber and climbed out of my office window into the courtyard. From there, I was able to scale the inner wall, run along the low roof, and drop into the parking lot undetected. I decided I would phone Shannon in the morning to let her know I was quitting my job.

Shannon was able to convince me that I was just stressed out, either over the Murry account or Ben’s self-immolation. I reluctantly returned to work to find that the distress corner was gone. The relief crashed over me like the Lituya Bay tsunami, which happened in Alaska and was the largest ever recorded. Only five fatalities, though. My good vibes did not survive my walk to the breakroom for coffee. That’s where I found the missing distress corner but now it occupied the entire room wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling. Outlines of koi fish as big as Teslas loomed over me, leering, only partially colored in. There were an awful lot of dead rats nailed to walls; even a few birds.

In that moment, in the distress room, I felt innumerably small and terribly present. My only choice was to fill my mug with coffee that didn’t taste like coffee (too slick), head back to my office, and get started on the Murry report.

Lenny from accounting was the first to snap. I walked in on him in the breakroom, *****, with his palms sliced open to the bone. He was smearing his blood all over a particularly benign looking koi fish drawing. Lenny turned when he heard me gasp.

“Hey, man, how’s the Murry report coming along?” he asked. “Also, can you tell me where I am right now?”

“I don’t think so,” I mumbled, backing out of the room.

Lenny nodded, then punched the wall so hard I heard his wrist snap. I locked myself in the bathroom and cried and called my parents then cried a little harder when I remembered they’d both been dead for six years. Shannon eventually dragged me out of the restroom and forced me to drink some greasy water to calm down. After I finished throwing that up, clear strings dripping down my chin, Shannon led me back to my desk and sat me down and told me to finish the Murry report by five or I was fired.

This caused me some panic because I couldn’t find the Murry report, nor did I ever remember working with a client named Murry. I had a slinking suspicion that the man did not exist. Still, I threw together a quick PowerPoint and rundown. Usually, I’ll walk a physical copy of reports over to Shannon along with an email. However, as soon as I took a step out of my office, the phantom footsteps came sprinting across the room. I retreated back behind my desk.

I heard a roar coming from the hallway attached to the breakroom. It was a ka-coffee-aknee, a wailing orchestra of raw souls shrieking in tune. I left work again via the window and courtyard route.

When I reached my apartment, the dead koi on the doorstep was my first clue I was not going to have a good night. It caused me to hyperventilate. I scooted the fish into the bushes with the heel of my boot then ran inside. That was a mistake. Every surface in my apartment was covered in white felt studded with black animal outlines like a massive, reverse constellation. I could smell the acid-bite of uncapped markers drifting from my kitchen and I could hear the knocking already starting behind me, and the footsteps pacing in the hall.

I stood paralyzed in the doorway for a very long time. My head is a little foggy, a little swishy.

I keep thinking the same question, in red-

Where am I right now?

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