The week dragged on like a psychological endurance test for both of them, each locked inside his own private hell.
For Rodolpho, the days became a blind, self-destructive obsession. The failure of that first night hadn't been an isolated incident, and accepting that was inadmissible to his ego. Every single night, he put on his best clothes, chose a different car from the garage, and hit the most expensive clubs and bars in the city.
He changed the script, changed the crowd — tried with women, tried with men — and spent fortunes on VIP sections and bottles. The prelude was always the same: the seduction flowed, the magnetism of his money and his bearing worked, but at the crucial moment — inside a luxury motel room or on the leather upholstery of his own car — his body simply refused to respond. Nothing worked. Not the alcohol, not the desire, not the desperation.
The physical frustration transformed into a rage he carried into the office every morning. Rodolpho spent his days locked behind his executive office door, focused on nothing but spreadsheets, signatures, and closed-door meetings.
Throughout that entire cursed week, he didn't even remember the new intern existed — his mind was too busy trying to digest his own impotence.
Meanwhile, on the floors below, Alan's routine was turning into a daily minefield. If the pranks in college had been stupid, in the corporate world the cruelty took the shape of sabotage.
His teammates — irritated by the presence of a blind intern who required system adaptations or who simply broke the competitive homogeneity of the department — decided to test his limits in the most hostile way possible.
The harassment started subtle and escalated fast. Alan would arrive in the morning and notice, by touch, that his things had been moved. For someone who can't see, the arrangement of objects on a desk is sight itself — moving a phone, for example, meant making him fumble through empty air in the middle of an urgent call. But they didn't stop there.
One day, Alan spent nearly half an hour trying to figure out why his screen reader wasn't producing any sound, only to discover that someone had physically disconnected his headphone cable from the back of the CPU.
Another afternoon, one of the female analysts announced, in a mocking tone, that his monitor had been off for hours:
"At this rate, the boss is going to think you're faking your work, Alan."
They knew he didn't need the screen on to use the voice system, but they made a point of exposing his condition to ridicule in front of anyone passing through the corridor.
Even his break time became a target. In the office kitchenette, where Alan tried to grab a coffee just to survive the exhaustion of his sleepless nights, the cruelty found its way in. Someone swapped the sugar container for one filled with table salt. When he took his first sip of the bitter, salty brew, Alan had to fight the urge to spit it on the floor while he heard stifled giggles and hurried footsteps heading out the automatic door.
He swallowed the humiliation along with the bad taste, rinsed his mouth at the sink, and walked back to his cubicle with his head held high.
His chest burned with shame. The nightmares about termination felt more and more real with each passing day. But he refused to give the saboteurs the pleasure of watching him cry or of seeing him file a complaint with HR. He knew that in this shark tank, anyone who showed weakness became instant prey.
By the end of Friday, the building started to empty. The silence of closing time crept over the floor, leaving only the echo of a few keyboards and the mechanical hum of the air conditioning.
Rodolpho finally opened his office door, tie loosened and eyes bloodshot with exhaustion, ready for yet another night of desperate attempts in the Sao Paulo nightlife.
Alan, for his part, was finishing his meticulous reorganization of his desk for the umpteenth time, making sure everything was in its place before grabbing his backpack and his cane to face the trip home.
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