Personal Days (20 page)

us
), someone, like a Jules, who would always have an ax to grind—who would, upon finishing the satisfactory grinding of one ax, refuse to relax but instead go back into his cavernous ax storeroom and haul out another one that needed a new edge; and to be fair, I can see why he’d think this about me—that’s the brutal thing about his job (which is now, technically, mine): You have no allies, no one you can count on even until the end of the day—definitely not among the people you supersize (that should be
supervise—
I’m starving) and especially not your assistant, who’s filing away each of your idiocies, fodder for some future grievance or gossipfest, so that you start thinking maybe it’s not such a bad idea to keep your door shut, and keep a bottle of something in your lower-left-hand drawer at all times, an emergency flask, and in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that after lunch—my usual lonely Friday lunch—I visited several establishments, including a liquor store, and since I never made it to my floor, let alone my desk, I’ve got the booze here in the elevator, and for quality control purposes
only
I’ve been taking sample nips every so often to wash down the oat bar and give me the courage to finish this letter to you and have it spell out all I want it to spell out, even in this scattershot, parentheses-prone, train-of-thought-jumping manner, but the side effects are that my vertigo is swirling full force, like the whole car is swaying (which maybe it is), and I suspect I will need,
very soon,
to pee—let me retreat from the verge of TMI and just say I think it’s going to be a long time before I get sprung from this cage: as I stepped into the elevator a few hours ago, I heard a series of shrieks that only later (as the doors of the carriage walled me in and elevation commenced) did I consider might have been
whistles,
and as I wondered, dimly, if this was the warning for the water-main blasting that they’d promised us months ago (and as I tried to recall if I’d just heard
two
whistles or
three
) a deep rumbling began, so profound it was impossible to determine whether it was coming from below or above, from within the building or without, and a moment later the elevator’s ascent halted with such force that I was airborne for a second, then slammed against the back wall, flung forward against the doors, and gently, mockingly placed into a sitting position on the floor (the impact triggering my cell phone to take about fifty pictures of the inside of my pocket, draining the battery from two bars to none), and as an arrhythmic rain of metal and masonry drizzled down on the carriage, my laptop case was ripped out of my hands and pitched to the side; watching the lights above silently go out, I thought, very calmly,
How strange, the building is collapsing;
after a few seconds I opened my eyes only to realize they
were
open, and peered into the dark, calling
Hello?
to make sure I was absolutely alone—that someone very small and very quiet hadn’t somehow slipped into the carriage when I did, because a companion would be unbearable in such close quarters as these: the proximity would ratchet up the tension, our reassuring noises to each other would just serve as a nervous prologue to some monumental freak-out involving weeping or fisticuffs, hyperventilation round-robins—not to mention how quickly two people would eat up the available air in these forty square feet (I’ve paced the perimeter, Pru, put my hands on every surface, punched every button a thousand times)—it’s so easy to lose your way in the dark, even when there’s nowhere to go: You become all ear, shaping every sound into a clue, and now I’m second-guessing what I heard last Halloween, huddled outside that chamber of horrors: Grime, the CRO, asking the Sprout if he had the slightest idea (
idear
) what the initials stood for, not waiting for a reply:
That they’ve brought in a Chief Restructuring Officer, Russell, means the
structure
here is beyond fucked,
it was a
failure
that needed immediate sorting, this last segment of Operation JASON would require cutting one person from the sixth floor and three people from the fourth, he said, and as the Sprout sputtered
But how are you getting these numbers?
Grime launched into a hissing litany of everything wrong with the company, from the shade of the stationery (too bright) to the division of labor (
redundant
came up again and again), a critique somehow ruthless and thorough-sounding yet oddly abstract at the same time, like this was the nth minor variation on a speech he gave to all his clients/victims, peppered with constant references to himself and his title
—CRO, CRO, CRO,
over and over until those initials were beaten into my head, and I started thinking of Grime as that cleverest of birds,
the Crow,
a mimicking thing with a fondness for flesh:
I’m here to make sausage, Russell,
he was saying,
toss all the useless bits into the grinder, so what comes out the other end’ll be halfway palatable—
on and on, and at last the Sprout stammered that it was hard for him to think of the office as a butcher shop or a slaughterhouse, because this place had a
reputation,
a history, an
iden——
but Grime cut him off:
See, it’s not even a slaughterhouse—I’d be
ecstatic
if it were, I’d be over the bloody
moon,
because then there’d be fresh meat hanging about, ready for market—
he was thwacking the dry-erase board for emphasis
—and I wouldn’t need to be scrounging for tasty bits, come back, come
back
here you insolent—!—
as the Sprout slipped out, and I drew my limbs in, shrinking to the size of a period, holding my breath as our depleted leader trudged past, certain he’d see me; after fifteen seconds, with the Crow cackling acidly to himself, I started to trail the Sprout, sticking to the walls like a shadow, and could swear I heard him muttering, as the elevator doors closed on him:
—fucking dead, I am so—,
a tone of shot nerves and life in sudden flux, and I almost lunged for the button to follow him but instead started formulating a plan, or at least a
structure
for thinking about what was happening in our office: by the end of the night, having fled that haunted house and elbowed through the goblin throngs and picked my way across the vomit-soaked sidewalks, I resolved to keep the Grime episode to myself for a while, and to keep my distance from you—from Crease, Lizzie, Laars, from all the other doomed cattle in the slaughterhouse—in order to figure out what Grime’s Crow role was, and the nature of the power he wielded over the Sprout; in the weeks to come I could see that behind Grime’s scatterbrained, laid-back, technophobic front, he regarded us as utterly disposable—indeed I began to suspect that he’d wanted us gone from the moment he took roost, which (I later discovered) was
not
after Jill got fired up in Siberia, as most of us assumed, but in fact nearly a year earlier: I know that this chronology will mess with your head, but I’m certain that it’s correct—I’ll explain how I pieced it all together, but for now just imagine Grime not as we knew him but as
The Crow,
working unobtrusively out of a spare cubicle in Siberia, gathering information about us in monkish silence, not even using the phone or computer, receiving reports from Maxine and the Sprout via the Unnameable, our soft-soled messenger, everything set up to be as quiet as the tomb; I imagine Jill would sometimes see mysterious shadows on the Sheetrock, or hear a footfall, a sigh, a muffled laugh, and imagine she was losing her mind; shortly after Halloween, I began to follow the Crow’s movements: Twice a week he would take a cab to a bar in what I assumed was his hotel in midtown, where he’d meet with the Sprout and “K,” our mysterious fifth-floor ice-queen overlord, and nurse a club soda while they ordered too much Scotch and revealed more than they should have, encouraged in equal measure by the midtown-hotel-bar, drinking-on-the-clock ambience and sheer psychotic terror, because to them, he was never the chummy, rumpled, winningly incomprehensible Brit who introduced himself with
Call me Grime,
but Gordon G (for
Graham = Grime
) Knott, a fact I deduced because the Sprout would sometimes call him
Gordon,
and “K” would
always
address him as
Mr Knott—
Gordon Graham Knott, I discovered easily enough, was one of the most notorious CROs in the business, held in awe for his brazen restructuring tactics and bottom-line results, a man despised not just by the legions of felled employees left floundering in his wake (who surely numbered in the thousands) but by the more conservative players in his field; aware of his reputation, I burned some shoe leather tracking the Crow’s flight to the midtown bar, noting the deteriorating mood and the glacial silences and who picked up the bill (always the Sprout or “K”); occasionally, I’d take personal days for these stakeouts, watching from a balcony seat as “K”—shaken and sometimes
sobbing
I think—left the bar for Grand Central and her train home, and though at first I assumed the Crow was staying at the hotel, on the company’s dime, eventually he’d make his way back, alone, to the office, never to reemerge, by which I mean: It became evident that Grime was not one of the hotel’s long-term guests but in fact the inhabitant of a forgotten corner of Siberia, where he would order in meals, groom (after a fashion) in the surprisingly spacious janitor’s bathroom, have his clothes picked up and laundered, and sleep on the luxuriously long couch: as far as I could tell, our office was his home, lending weight to some of the glowing praise for “Gordon G Knott” that I found online (a “take-no-prisoners” “workaholic” who “stays obsessed for months on end”); around this time, my burgeoning, dare I say glorious, thickets of facial hair, begun on a lark, now offered useful protective coloring, a full-fledged beard joining the serviceable mustache: I was going into deep cover for this mission, slipping into a new identity, sort of in the way Grime had masqueraded as a colleague instead of showing us his full Crow plumage:
I too would become unfamiliar,
so that gradually in his mind I’d be hard to place, ever strange, anonymous; some nights, slaving away, I’d take a break, put on a blue work shirt of my father’s, the one I keep on the back of my door, and walk by Grime’s desk, sweeping or spraying, scanning the ground for any tell-tale detritus, whistling like a loon, looking for all the world like a blokey member of the custodial staff; I knew my disguise was working when one evening, about a week before the holiday party, he called out to me as I pushed along my mop and pail, whistling “YMCA,” and asked if I’d mind
nipping out
and
pinching
some
fags
and beer—I grinned
—and possibly some herb?
he added with an exaggerated drag-sucking sound, if I were the sort who knew how to come by that sort of thing, and with a friendly wink he peeled off a crisp C-note, which I proceeded to convert into the requested provisions, and so we drank to each other’s health, laying into a Thai spread he’d had delivered, and I lingered for a while, listening more than talking, sipping the beer rather than downing it, fake-inhaling and letting the pot go to work on him (the same way
he’d
drink nothing stronger than club soda at his meetings in the hotel bar); after comparing English and “Yank” terms for various household items, controlled substances, and sexual positions, he began telling me the story of his life, a
real corker,
as he put it, from his beginnings in a sooty corner of London, son of a traveling ventriloquist, to his big break as a messenger boy at a barrister’s, climbing the ladder,
learning the ropes,
a year of business school, bad drugs, a
tempestuous marriage
to a British starlet, divorce, rehab, America,
a whopper of a second chance,
harder drugs, harder rehab, relearning the ropes, learning altogether
different
ropes, pilgrimage and spiritual awakening on the subcontinent, all culminating in his current runaway success as a CRO:
What you’d call a freelance hatchet man,
is how he put it, and spoke of the pleasure he took in breaking things down, determining what worked and what didn’t, amputating, say, what was to all appearances a company’s most successful branch in order to stimulate activity in the others
—Fear is the greatest administrator,
he said, and
Business is the best art,
like he was giving me, your humble mop boy, exclusive entrée into the mind of a restructuring legend; but the odd thing was that most of his insights—even his
asides—
were ones I was familiar with, right down to the wording (
My only rule is there are no rules
or
In principle I am against principles
), as if every chapter in his gripping life story, indeed every syllable he spoke, had already been quoted or described so many times in the sources I’d read, online and on paper, that it was like encountering in the light of day some artifact first uncovered in dreams; I subtly steered the talk away from twice-told biography and asked him about the actual mechanics of getting an entire company to skip to your tune, even as it’s collapsing, and the very
idea
of ye humble broom pusher evincing real curiosity about such rarefied doings delighted him, compelled him to divulge what might be called his aesthetic side, or perhaps his penchant for S & M:
The deep dark impenetrable mystery of it all is that once they hire you, they
want
to be punished
and
It’s as easy as hitting Delete
and
There’s a button called Execute for a reason
and
The beauty is that everything goes through someone else,
this last one meaning that his name, crucially, never surfaces in these affairs: The Crow soars high above the fray, and not a single scrap of paper bears his signature, he bragged; he avoids e-mails if at all possible; eccentrically, he always gets paid in cash while his operation is in progress (did I dare ask about Operation JASON?); he never gets identified by his victims as the executioner but instead works through as many of their preexisting nemeses as possible (the Sprout, “K,” Maxine), each of whom receives often contradictory information and must, at his insistence, sign off on every demotion and pay cut, carry out every suspension and firing—attend to even the smallest bits of unpleasantness—while he keeps obscure, for as long as possible, any link between himself and the gore; then as soon as he obtains his objective—upon satisfying whoever hired