Characters On Couches: Joss Ravid and the Mandatory Psych Assessment

So over at the Pub (Click the couch to visit!) Murphy has decided to host a blog hop.

I’m not often a participant in blog hops, but it sounded fun and I had this idea, so…

Behold! Joss Ravid gets in trouble. Well, okay, that’s nothing new. Behold! Joss cross-dresses!

Wait, that’s nothing new either. Umm…

Anyway, Joss, before the events of Queen’s Man. Because I wanted to, and because I should have been doing something else. Naturally.

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Dr. Flynn ushered the young man into the office and offered him a seat on the small couch before she moved to the chair before the desk. She picked up her reader-tablet and made a note in it. Subject presents hostile, rumpled, clutching coffee at ten in the morning. Subject does normally work evening shift.

“So, Mr. Ravid,” she said as the small man ran a hand through shoulder-length orange-red hair. “Do you know why you’re here today?”

“I’m too pretty,” Ravid said.

“That…would be one way of putting it.” Dr. Flynn put the reader on the desk and put her hands on her crossed knees. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

“Why don’t you read me the story?”

Dr. Flynn wanted his version of events, but she knew better than to get into a power struggle with a subject. She picked up the reader.

“On the date noted, Joss Ravid, employee 8-gamma-1769—” Ravid snorted. Dr. Flynn raised an eyebrow but he didn’t elaborate. She went on. “-H-546, knowingly approached his area supervisor Lars Amundsen in an after-hours location.”

“A bar,” Ravid supplied. Dr. Flynn lowered the reader but Ravid didn’t go on, so she continued with the report.

“Mr. Ravid was dressed ‘in drag’ having put on a ‘slinky’ dress and applied make-up to look feminine. Mr. Ravid lied about his identity to engage Mr. Amundsen in conversation which then progressed in natural fashion until employee Sasha Burl informed Mr. Amundsen that he was ‘feeling up’ one of his male employees.”

“Loving it, too,” Ravid put in with a smirk.

“You seem pleased with yourself,” Dr. Flynn observed.

Ravid shrugged. “I won.”

“Won?”

“Sasha bet me a case of spirit-wine I couldn’t pull off that dress. And I got felt up by a hottie with power and money.”

“Who happens to be your area supervisor.”

Ravid shrugged, a small twitch of the shoulders to show that fact meant little to him. “That was the challenge—to get a straight man to grab me. I don’t know why I’m the one in trouble. He groped me.”

“You did know who Mr. Amundsen was when you approached him?”

“We met when I got hired.” Ravid smirked. “I was sad he didn’t remember me.”

“At Milson-Hontari we have rules about fraternization.”

Another shrug. “I figured I wouldn’t make a harassment report. That would be…unsporting.” Again the smirk. “It’s not like he had a chance at resisting me.”

“Mr. Burl reports you made an ‘amazing’ woman. That Mr. Amundsen was completely taken in.”

“All I did was play dumb.”

“Do you have a lot of experience with women, Mr. Ravid?”

“Ew, no! I’m gay. Gay, gay, GAY, what about that don’t you people get?”

“I meant in a non-physical way. Have you known many ‘dumb’ women?”

“Straight guys like the dumb act, babe. Wanna get laid? Act dumb. I learned from the best.”

“The best.” Dr. Flynn picked up the reader and paged through Ravid’s employment history. “Was that while you were employed as a chorus ‘girl’ at the Wan Chun Casino?”

“One place, yeah.” Ravid leaned back, folding his arms.

Going into his past makes subject defensive, Dr. Flynn noted. “You seem to enjoy dressing in drag, Mr. Ravid,” she said. “Are you aware that Milson-Hontari has a strict non-discrimination policy? We support all orientations, genders, and sexes. If you wish to transition—”

“Ew.”

Dr. Flynn made a note. “Am I to assume then, that this incident does not result from some deep-seated need, but rather a lack of judgment tied to a foolish one-upmanship?”

“What if it’s a deep-seated lack of judgment?”

“Getting back to Milson-Hontari’s fraternization policy—though it is more often used to protect subordinates, the policy does go both ways. When you knowingly approached Mr. Amundsen, you were in violation. What do you think we should do about that?”

“I imagine it’s up to my supervisor.”

“Mr. Amundsen has requested a leave of absence and your immediate transfer off this moon-base. He suggested asteroid mining.”

“Mmm. Miners.”

Dr. Flynn took a deep breath. “Mr. Ravid, it is my assignment to make a recommendation based on my evaluation of you. At this point—”

“Look, toots.” Ravid unfolded his arms to lean forward. “It was a fun stunt on a night out. No harm, no foul. Nobody would even care, except Amundsen’s boiling over about it. Maybe you ought to be talking to him about his repressed issues, if being attracted to a man in drag is hitting him so damned hard.” He smirked. “I mean, it’s not like we even got to the blow job before Sasha snitched.”

Dr. Flynn made another note. “Babe, toots…do you usually speak to women in that fashion, Mr. Ravid?”

“Most times I don’t talk to women at all.”

Maybe she hadn’t been in practice long, but Dr. Flynn had earned most of her experience with defensive, even hostile subjects. She knew Ravid was trying to bait her. She knew she couldn’t let him succeed.

Well—perhaps a little. To see what happened.

“Do you realize that my recommendation can and may be immediate severance without pay?”

Ravid sat back, his face blank. So. Dr. Flynn tried another tack. She lifted the reader again and skimmed to Mr. Burl’s assessment of his co-worker while the silence grew in the bare little office she’d been loaned.

Joss is a great guy if you can get past the mouth, Burl’s transcription read. And the sneaky. Loves to do good sh—stuff in ways he thinks nobody notices. Throw a fit over onions in his lunch—and hand it to a hungry-looking beggar. Stuff like that.

“Hard worker,” one reference had said in the hiring process. “He’ll smart off the whole damn time, but he’ll do it while he accomplishes everything you asked and a couple things he noticed needing doing. If he thinks you’re worth his effort, anyway.”

“Little shit’s always up to something,” was what Ravid’s company-assigned bunkmate had to say. “But he’s good to have on your side. He’ll walk all over you if he can manage it, but he won’t let anybody else do it.”

Dr. Flynn looked at Ravid over the reader and saw the silence wasn’t bothering him—he’d curled sideways in the couch and apparently gone to sleep. She cleared her throat gently.

“I think there’s more to this,” she said, trusting the instinct that had made her highlight those passages. “Mr. Amundsen is the laughingstock of the entire base. Even after mandatory base-wide sensitivity training regarding trans individuals, he’ll still be a joke. He’ll have to be re-assigned. I think you knew that would happen, and that for some reason you felt it justified.”

Ravid opened his eyes and reached for his coffee on the side table.

“He gave you a good eval,” Dr. Flynn went on, flipping through tabs on the reader. She found Burl’s most recent evaluation. “And your friend Sasha has a decent one. Am I missing something?”

Ravid looked at her over his cup. Making his own assessment, she knew. She tried to look trustworthy, interested, sympathetic…

“You’re pretty quick to quote policy at me,” he said. “Did Amundsen report the name I gave him?”

Dr. Flynn searched the file. “He did not. Is it relevant?”

“I told him I was Wendy, and I worked in the cafeteria. Told him I served him steamed asparagus three times a week but since I had a hairnet on and no make-up, he never noticed me. How’s that fit into your employee rights policies?”

“That…will need investigating.”

“I was lying,” Ravid pointed out. “It’s entrapment.”

Dr. Flynn shook her head. “The important part—that you were an employee answerable to him—was the truth.” What she still didn’t know was why. She tried, but the reader didn’t have access to Amundsen’s file. He was, as she’d suspected, above her pay grade.

“Ever hear of the Mintari?” Ravid asked her. She searched that, and found a note on a young employee in housekeeping.

“No,” she said, since the note was not explained.

“It’s an ultra-conservative sect of a whacked line of Christianity. Women must obey men in all things—it’s one of God’s rules.”

“Our employee policies are very clear—”

“To someone with three college degrees, maybe. Hell, I thought all orientations meant I could do my job standing on my head, till Sasha told me to knock it off.”

Dr. Flynn opened the profile of the young woman in housekeeping and found she’d been referred for assessment by the head of maintenance who was “worried about her.” Also the young woman cleaned the section of the base where Joss Ravid lived—and where Amundsen had his office. “Do you have proof?” Dr. Flynn asked.

“That I can’t stand on my head?” Ravid asked.

“That what you’re saying—” she began, but he hadn’t told her anything, really, except an easily verifiable factoid on a minor religious sect. Seeing the housekeeper’s mental health referral, Dr. Flynn didn’t doubt where the clues he’d dropped would lead her—but Ravid had carefully made no accusations at all. Possibly since the grievance process was, in the interests of fairness, a long and complicated way to deal with anything. “Why didn’t you put your alias in your account of the incident?” she asked instead.

Ravid leaned forward. “I did.”

Dr. Flynn called up the transcription of Ravid’s incident report.

“…told him my name was Wendy,” the report read, “from the cafeteria.”

It was right there. She’d skimmed over it, looking for the deeper meaning of a man dressing in drag to hit on a heterosexual supervisor. She knew company policy backwards and forwards, knew that gender made no difference in the application of employee rights, but if Joss Ravid were a female employee, she knew she would not have missed that fact. Dr. Flynn felt her face flush.

“Miners?” she asked Ravid, skimming his employment profile. “Or…I see you’ve requested transfer to a freighter.”

“Amundsen denied it. He thought I’d be distracting in such a confined environment.”

“Mr. Amundsen may be right, but it is not Milson-Hontari policy to restrict assignment of a capable employee due to…potential personality issues. Milson-Hontari expects cooperation and teamwork from all its employees.”

“You’re really good at that policy-speak,” Ravid said.

Dr. Flynn straightened. “Thank you, Mr. Ravid, for coming to speak to me.”

“I’ll see myself out.” Ravid bounced to his feet. “Happy hunting, Dr. Flynn.”

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If you’ve enjoyed your time with Joss, you can read Fanged Bunny Slippers in the anthology Best of Turtleduck Press. Or acquire his book, Queen’s Man, in ebook, Kindle, or print. Thanks for stopping by!