Thursday Is Migraine Day
He shows up every Thursday at 9 a.m. sharp, like goddamn clockwork. He saunters right into the building without so much as a greeting. He looks like a trenchcoat-clad Bela Lugosi, sort of. The workers call him Thursday Man. Dave, the foreman, once called him Ol' Rotwang. Everybody laughed, assuming it was some saucy, vulgar nickname. But Dave didn't even crack a smile.
That' when I first found out Dave was a cinephile, by the way. See, Rotwang was a mad scientist character in 1927's Metropolis. More importantly, though, that's when I took an interest in Thursday Man. The film reference made me suspicious, so I started noticing things about him. Weird things.
For as long as anyone can remember, the man only comes to work on Thursday morning and never leaves before it's dark. He has a whole storage room to himself nobody's ever been into - Room 108. He keeps it under lock and key even when he's in there himself. As for what his business is, your guess is as good as mine.
Althea from accounting says he's on payroll, but there's no mention of his name , address or what he does anywhere. She just slides an envelope full of fifties under his room's door twice a month. She says it's what her predecessor taught her to do when she got the job. She also says she crunched the numbers and his pay comes out our "R&D Fund". Why a building material storage firm has something called a "R&D fund", though, I don't know.
What I do know, however, is that he must drink ungodly amounts of coffee. Do you think I'm highballing it? I'm not. There was this time I had to cover for Dave because he had the flu. It was a Friday, so I went into his office to check whether there was some urgent memo or something before we closed up for the weekend. On top of the pile of papers that usually littered the foreman's office, I found an unmarked manila envelope.
The memo was handwritten in Indian ink with what must have been a quill, of all things. The penmanship was pristine and calligraphic, but there was something off-putting about it I couldn't exactly put my finger on. The coffee machine was broken, the memo said, and he needed a new one of the same brand and model - one of those bulky, 2-gallon monstrosities they have at hotel buffets. Again, there was no name. The memo was simply signed "Room 108".
All this is fine and dandy, I tell myself. Only it's not. Has nobody really noticed that at least five or six workers leave work with a migraine on Thursdays? Has nobody noticed that Friday is the day of the week people are more likely to call in sick? Boss says they probably fake it to get an extended weekend, but I'm not so sure.
Who is he?
What's he doing in there?
We have a right to know.
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