Personal Days (13 page)

The others started to avoid him. If you entered his field of vision, he’d ask,
Are you going anywhere near coffee?
He was acting like everyone was his servant.

Pru expressly denied him permission to post
Jilliad
excerpts on his blog until the entire thing was transcribed. Was this
her
layoff narrative—riding the discovery of
The Jilliad
to a curatorial position somewhere? Book deal, movie deal. She’d been hogging the notebook for weeks now. She said she was finding great new stuff every day and didn’t want to break the momentum. Laars was at the end of his rope.

Does anyone want anything from the outside world?
asked Lizzie.

II (H): The New Layoff Narrative

II (H) i:
How did Jack II go from meticulous Bert to freewheeling Ernie? Observers agreed that at a certain point last year, not long after Jules was let go, something shifted in his mind. He began to see the cloud of failure everywhere he turned.

All of them knew there was no way he’d get fired, but in his mind it was as if the deed were done. Hence the erratic hours, the blatant blogging, the two or three personal calls that stretched across any given afternoon. He still did his job with Bert-like precision and swiftness, but these qualities themselves galled him. They suggested that he might as well construct a Jack II robot and send it to the office every day. He could stay home in his pajamas and update his blog.

The nickname Jack II started to bug him. What was so special about the Original Jack? Why hadn’t he, Jack II, been able to supplant him as
the
Jack?

It took a while for them to notice, but he’d stopped giving his spontaneous massages.
I kind of miss the Jackrubs,
said Lizzie.

II (H) ii:
He had a document, right on his work computer desktop, entitled WhatToDo.doc, a list of people to contact, possible escape routes. The most intriguing of these contacts was his uncle, a genuine oil tycoon. Jack II said his family and the uncle had been estranged for fifteen years but it might be worth a shot. For graduation the uncle gave him a pen set and a business-card holder, still in their boxes. Jack II couldn’t remember if he’d written him a thank-you note.

Now he talked about work projects in some dour variant of the conditional tense, saying that he’d do such and such a task
provided I’m still around.
Even his most casual e-mails came laden with doom.
I’m never going to forget this place.
All of them in that office felt this way to an extent, but Jack II was really bumming them out.

II (H) iii:
Jack II and Lizzie got called into the Sprout’s office at just after nine one morning. Maxine was there but she was staring at the carpet. The room was already involved in what felt like the unending middle of a very long conference call with the new owners.

The Californians?
Jack II scribbled on a pad to Lizzie.

They exist!
she wrote back.

So they were now the property of the Californians. Exactly
when
the handoff happened wasn’t clear. How had they missed it? It had stretched out for months, flickering in and out of reality. Up till now none of them knew whether it would turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing, but now it seemed like it was definitely a bad thing.

Unlike the former people at the top, every word the new owners said could be heard with horrible clarity, from all the way across the country. Continuing to think of them as
the Californians
was probably not the best idea, conjuring as it did an image of sunglassed, zinc-nosed layabouts toting Boogie boards. From the first syllable, it was obvious these were not poolside-lounging Californians. They wanted new IDs made for every employee, a new receptionist trained at their facilities, personalized long-distance and Xerox codes, pay phones installed in the lobby for all nonbusiness calls, endless other complications. Every employee would soon be required to create a new log-on password consisting of a mix of non-sequential capital letters and a three-digit prime number and a punctuation mark, and then change it once a month by sending an Excel form to a secure website in Oakland. This was just
standard operating procedure.

Each demand felt like the securing of a strap on a straitjacket.

What’s in Oakland?
Lizzie wrote.

The Californians were saying things like
effective immediately
and
compliance is mandatory.
Lizzie imagined there was a dartboard in that West Coast boardroom with a stern phrase printed on each wedge. The Californians were picking phrases at random. It was a new world of all sticks and no carrots.

The carrot is you don’t get fired,
Lizzie whispered.

Are you sure that’s the carrot?
Jack II whispered back.

What?

Nothing.

What?

Nothing.

The Sprout kept forming a fist and almost pounding the table. It looked like an exercise you would do at mime camp. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie was loose.

Didn’t you get the PDF?
asked one of the Californians.
Didn’t you read the file?

Maxine’s outfit could be described as
psychic Catholic schoolgirl.
It was like she knew something bad was going to happen before she left home today.

Lizzie decided that Maxine was a Bert about clothing, but probably an Ernie about everything else.

II (H) iv:
The collective blood pressure in the room spiked when Henry from HR entered. For a second they thought maybe he’d come by on other matters, but the Sprout motioned for him to have a seat. Henry from HR stared out the window with his superhero eyes, reading omens in the clouds or looking through someone’s shirt two avenues away.

At first Lizzie and Jack II thought that the Californians were doing a good cop, bad cop scenario. But there were actually three of them on the phone, and they were doing something along the lines of bad cop, bad cop,
really
bad cop. They were Berts gone over completely to the dark side.

The worst cop said she wanted Maxine out. She said her name as
Maxie,
without the
n.
The Sprout shook his head while saying,
Of course,
his right hand clutching the edge of the desk.

Effective immediately,
snapped one of the new people.
Is Maxie still in the room?

Maxine was looking like she’d just lost a fairly important limb in addition to a consonant. The Sprout told the Californians that she wasn’t in the room anymore.
She’s meeting with a client.
The spur-of-the-moment, completely pointless lie was touching in its own way. He said that he’d tell Maxine about the change in her employment status right after the call. Lizzie strained to hear if he pronounced the
n.

The Californians started insulting Maxie’s work, describing her as subpar,
sub-
subpar,
the pits.
Maxine didn’t say a word. Her plans for world domination had come to an end, at least in that office.

Henry from HR, his face an undertaker’s mix of sympathy and purpose, opened a folder and wordlessly handed a piece of paper to Maxine. The Sprout was scrolling through some file on his computer, tilting the screen for the exact right angle, as if that could make any difference to anyone now. Lizzie heard a
thwack
sound: a tear had rolled off Maxine’s cheek and hit the form she was just given. Without lifting her head, Maxine asked in the smallest voice possible if she could borrow a pen. Lizzie handed over her prized Japanese Gel-Magik 8000, a gift from Jason, knowing she’d never see it again.

More tears hit the paper, hit the paper like rain.

It went on. Nobody was ready for this sort of crying, not from Maxine. She finished filling out the form and Henry led her out the door. She looked devastated but also amazing.

II (H) v:
One of the Californians, the middle bad cop, started talking about Phoenix, apparently one of their cities. He asked the Sprout if he knew what Phoenix was. Not
where,
but
what.

It was all prelude to a tagline they’d probably been using for years.

Phoenix is not just a city,
said the middle bad cop. He asked if everyone on the New York end was familiar with the story of how the phoenix rose from the ashes.
That’s exactly what we’re going to do with this place.

They’re going to burn it down first!
Lizzie whispered, but Jack II didn’t respond. She noticed that he’d gone dangerously pale, his head weaving a bit. A cold sore had formed on the corner of his mouth, and he kept licking his lips, lingering on the tiny painful vesicles.

II (H) vi:
The other Californians pointed out, in extreme but vague terms, the way the office had mishandled New York, as if the city had been dropped, kicked to the curb, dented beyond repair. New York—all of New York?—had become
dysfunctional.

It’s snowing,
Lizzie mouthed at Jack II. She could see the edges of him tremble and wondered if she should be trembling, too.

On the phone came K.’s voice, a touch louder than the voices of the Californians. She was upstairs, in her own glass-enclosed office, no doubt looking at a dry-erase board with numbers written in different colors. She spoke without hesitation, in complete sentences, her phrasing seamless. The Sprout inched away from the phone as she talked until he was part of the wall.

At first it sounded like she was defending the Sprout and his team. She’d conceded Maxine, but maybe she was going to draw the line at any further firings. It was a skeleton crew, and at this rate all that would be left were a couple of ribs, a portion of kneecap. But then she directed a question at the already pale Sprout, who went a few shades whiter before sputtering
I don’t know.
She asked him something else, and something else, and something else, and he said,
I really don’t know. I’ll check. I just don’t know right now.

K. didn’t say anything.

The Californians didn’t say anything.

Lizzie was in a pink sweater and looking at the snow.

Then K. said:
Well,
know
already!

The Sprout agreed that he
should
know, swore that he
would
know, that everything would be known very shortly. He became a spokesperson for knowledge and its virtues. Ignorance was not part of his makeup. The rest of the call went by like the last writhings of a bad dream, the falling snow inappropriately beautiful, the Sprout blanching, K. aligning firmly with the Californians, or so she thought.

II (H) vii:
When it was over, the Sprout told Jack II that he had to suspend him for two weeks. He said that this was his decision, not based on anything the California crew wanted, but this sounded instantly like a lie.

Lizzie gasped. Jack II looked at his hands so long they took on the appearance of moist vinyl. By this point the cold sore had colonized much of his upper lip. He couldn’t say a word, as if the wound had welded his mouth shut.

The Sprout told Lizzie to leave and to ask Jenny to come in. Instantly it occurred to Lizzie that the Sprout had meant for
Jenny
to be at the meeting from the beginning, rather than herself, but had mixed up their names somehow. He always got them confused, despite the fact that Jenny did roughly half his work for him.

Jenny came in and Lizzie lingered by the door, just out of sight, listening. The Sprout told Jenny to have a seat. There was silence for ten seconds. Then he told her to go see Henry in HR. Why had he told her to sit down first? Maybe protocol required the expendable party to be seated, to prevent lawsuits based on fainting-related injuries.

Does this mean I’m fired?
Jenny asked, hands on armrests, ready to rise.

It means you should go see Henry in HR.

I’m not going to cry if you fire me,
she said, rising and banging her knee on the edge of the desk and sitting back down.

II (H) viii:
When Jenny finally left, she was breathing in a scary, untrackable rhythm, like she’d just rolled down a flight of stairs. The speakerphone blipped and K.’s voice returned. Lizzie could hear it all. At first she thought K. was saying something to Jenny, condolences of some sort, but in fact she had moved on to a completely different subject. Jenny apparently realized this, too, and stumbled out to see Henry in HR.

K. was scolding the Sprout for mishandling the conference call. She said it was a crucial test and he’d failed it.

How was that a test?
the Sprout asked.

I don’t know what I expected from you, but I didn’t expect
that, said K.

I said, How was that even a test?

K. laughed.
Do you know that you’re an embarrassment? This has been the most embarrassing day.
She stayed on the phone with him for another ten minutes, using
embarrassment
twenty-seven times. Crease kept count.

II (I): American Worker’s Habitat, Early Twenty-first Century

II (I) i:
Weaving her way out of HR, Jenny knocked over a wastebasket, stopped to set it aright, then didn’t. It was like the biggest transgression of her adult life, and she took a moment to acknowledge the enormity. It suggested a sudden rupture in her moral universe, a heady escape into a life of crime. Next thing you knew she’d tossed her stringy, tear-soaked Kleenex to the floor and let it stay there. It could stay there forever, for all she cared, fossilize for centuries, perplex future archaeologists with its high salt content.

Her small hands were in tight red fists and her face had gone a vivid pink, cheeks nearly the shade of Lizzie’s sweater.

I should smile,
said Jenny, choking back tears.
Right?

Futile lines from
The Jilliad
came to mind. She stared at her stuff.

If your boss is in the way, get a new boss.