The 2:00 PM

So punchable…

The meeting starts at 2:00 PM and Greg is already doing the thing with his mouth.

Not talking. Not yet. Just the pre-talk mouth situation. The slight part of his lips, the tongue doing something preparatory behind his teeth, the whole apparatus warming up like he’s about to deliver keynote remarks when you know he’s going to say something like “I think we should circle back on that.”

I’m trying to focus on the budget deck. Slide three: Q4 projections. Important information. Numbers that matter. But Greg’s face is four seats down and slightly in my peripheral vision and it’s there. The fact of it. The ongoing tragedy of its existence in this conference room, in this building, in this timeline.

He does the head tilt.

You know the one. The one that says “I’m listening thoughtfully” but the eyes are doing something else entirely. The eyes are already planning his interjection. The eyes are waiting for the exact wrong moment to contribute the exact wrong thing. The head tilts approximately 15 degrees to the left and the eyebrows do this sympathetic lift like he’s a therapist and not a senior analyst who’s about to derail this entire meeting with a thought he should have kept to himself.

Sarah from Finance is talking about variance analysis. She’s saying something about month-over-month trends. I should be listening. I’m paid to listen. But Greg’s breathing has entered the auditory space and now I can’t unhear it.

It’s not loud. That’s not the problem. The problem is the rhythm of it. Slightly irregular. A breath through the nose, then a pause, then a smaller breath, then this tiny mouth-breath that shouldn’t be audible but is. Like his respiratory system is running on outdated firmware. Like his lungs are buffering.

He shifts in his chair. The whole body moves but the face stays locked in that engaged-listening position. The performance of attention. The theater of giving a shit. I can see him preparing. The mouth parts slightly more. The tongue does another lap. He’s going to talk.

Don’t talk, Greg.

Don’t do it.

“I think—”

He did it.

“—we should maybe consider the broader context here.”

The broader context. The broader context… As if Sarah hasn’t spent three slides establishing context. As if we’re all just floating in a void waiting for Greg to arrive and contextualize our existence.

But it’s not what he said. It’s how his face moved while he said it. The little upward inflection at the end like he’s uncertain, except you can see in his eyes he’s not uncertain at all. The slight squint that happens when he says “broader” like the word itself is too bright to look at directly. The way his upper lip pulls back just slightly from his teeth on “context” revealing that one tooth that’s slightly more forward than the others.

That dead tooth.

I’ve spent cumulative hours thinking about that tooth. The angle of it. The way it catches light. The fact that it exists at all in a mouth that’s already doing too much. Sometimes I’m alone in my apartment and I’ll remember that tooth and my whole body will contract with irritation.

Marcus is responding to Greg now. Something about methodology. I should track this conversation. There will probably be action items. Someone will ask me a question and I’ll have to admit I wasn’t listening because I was conducting a forensic analysis of Greg’s stupid facial structure.

Greg nods. Oh god, the nod. It’s not a normal nod. It’s this slow, exaggerated thing like a dashboard bobblehead, like he’s physically downloading Marcus’s words through his skull. Down, pause, up. Down, pause, up. The chin doing this little jut on the upswing. The neck tendons visible for just a flash.

His hand comes up. He’s going to touch his face. I know he’s going to touch his face.

He touches his face.

Thumb and forefinger on the jawline, like he’s contemplating something profound. Like we’re in a philosophy seminar and not a budget meeting. The fingers rest there for three full seconds. I count. Then they slide down slightly, pulling the skin, distorting the whole geography of his lower face before releasing.

Why did he do that? What purpose did that serve? What in his central nervous system said “now is the time for a thoughtful face-drag”?

Sarah’s moved to slide seven. I’ve missed slides four through six. Somewhere in my brain there’s a small voice saying you need to focus, this is your job, these are work hours, you’re being paid right now but that voice is no match for the fact that Greg just did the thing with his eyebrows again.

Both of them. Simultaneously up. But not all the way up. Just enough to create these little forehead ripples, these flesh-ridges of false interest. They stay elevated for a beat too long. Like the muscles got confused about when to release. Then they drop and his whole face resets to neutral but it’s not neutral, nothing about Greg’s face is neutral, neutral would imply the absence of offense and Greg’s face is a presence.

He uncrosses his legs. Recrosses them the other way. The face bobs slightly with the movement. For a flash I see him from a different angle and it’s worse somehow. The three-quarter view reveals new problems. The specific slope of his cheek. The way his ear sits against his skull. The fact that he has pores.

Everyone has pores. This is not newsworthy. But Greg’s pores are visible from here, from four seats away, and I can see them and now I’m thinking about them, about the specific texture of his skin, about the ongoing biological processes happening on his face right now, cells dying and replacing themselves, oils being secreted, the whole disgusting machinery of having skin.

He’s doing the mouth thing again.

Preparing.

Loading.

“Can I just—”

No. No you cannot just.

“—push back on that a little?”

He’s smiling. Why is he smiling? This isn’t smile-appropriate content. We’re discussing budget allocations. His mouth is doing this crooked thing, higher on the left side, and I can see too many teeth now. Not just the problem tooth but its neighbors, the whole community of teeth, and they’re slightly coffee-stained, and the lighting in here is making them look more yellow, and his tongue flashes pink behind them when he talks.

I’m not listening to what he’s saying. I’m watching his face say it. The lips forming shapes. The small spray of saliva that must be happening but I can’t see from here but I know it’s happening because human speech involves moisture and Greg is speaking and therefore—

Sarah’s talking again. Or maybe Marcus. Someone’s voice is happening. The meeting continues around me. There’s probably a SharePoint being updated somewhere. Decisions are being made. The work persists.

But I’m here. In this chair. Four seats from Greg’s face. And he just did this thing where he runs his tongue along his bottom lip, quick, reflexive, and it’s the worst thing I’ve seen today and I’ve seen a lot of things today but this is the worst, this tiny unconscious gesture that he doesn’t know he’s doing, that he’s probably done ten thousand times, that I’ll remember when I’m trying to fall asleep tonight.

His hand goes up. He’s going to contribute again.

The meeting is forty-seven minutes long at this point. I’ve absorbed zero information. My entire consciousness has been dedicated to cataloging the ongoing disaster of Greg’s stupid stupid face existing in my sight line.

He opens his mouth.

I imagine I can hear the small wet sound of his lips parting.

I can’t, obviously. I’m four seats away and Sarah’s still talking. But my brain supplies the sound anyway. A tiny tch of moisture and movement.

“Just one more thing—” Greg says.

His face does the entire routine. The eyebrows, the squint, the head tilt, the sympathetic smile, the tongue behind the teeth. Everything. All of it. The whole performance.

Somewhere in my professional brain there’s a awareness that I’m supposed to be tracking deliverables.

But Greg’s doing the thing where he touches his chin while he talks, and his finger is actually pulling his bottom lip down slightly, distorting his whole mouth, and I’m watching it happen in real-time, this casual disfigurement, this thoughtless face-violence, and I realize with absolute clarity:

I hate him.

Not his ideas. Not his contributions. Not his role or his function or his work product.

His face.

The irredeemable fact of it.The meeting ends at 2:49.

Greg stands up. His face does standing-up things. Relaxing from meeting-face into hallway-face. The transformation is subtle but I see it. I see everything now.

“Good meeting,” he says to no one in particular.

His mouth smiles.

His tooth winks at me.

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