Personal Days (22 page)

I can’t tell you because I don’t know—if I knew, I’d tell you, or if I knew and couldn’t tell you, I’d tell you that I knew but couldn’t tell you, but the truth is that I
don’t
know, and so I honestly
can’t
tell you—
it may have even gone on for a few more hairpin turns, an instant Sprout classic, but at that point I realized that the Sprout himself was not long for this office, and strangely enough a little tentacle of grief began working its way through me, and as if hoping at least to salvage his health, I schoolmarmishly suggested he put out the cigarette, advice he didn’t heed, instead telling me that it was his first cigarette in nearly a year—he’d stopped because after he fired Jason or maybe it was the Original Jack (
You’re all sort of interchangeable,
he said; I laughed), every time he went outside to light up, those already on the sidewalk outside, in the Republic of Smokistan, would be in the process of stuffing their cigarettes into the ash stand, or grinding them out underfoot, barely grunting hello as they made their way back indoors—the first few times this phenomenon didn’t register, and when he noticed it he wanted to prove to himself that this avoidance was indeed deliberate, so whenever he’d see a group of us moving toward the elevator (
this
elevator!
this
prison!) to go out for a smoke, he’d take the next one down, and observe how we’d immediately extinguish our freshly unboxed cigarettes and go back upstairs, or just start wandering off in all directions, leaving him stranded by the buoylike receptacle with yards of dead smoke rising from its hole; and after he recounted this heartwarming memory, he seemed to relax, lighting a new cigarette before talking about “your friend Graham”—to get it off his chest, I think, telling me how Mr Gordon Graham Knott had simply appeared one day, like something sprung from nightmare, with his alien accent and rumpled clothes and cold eyes like iron, marching into the Sprout’s office to announce that as the CRO, appointed by the Californians to resuscitate the company (after the comical brainless
botch
the Sprout and “K” had made of it), he would essentially be running the show from now on, and it was up to the Sprout whether he wanted to stay onboard and help implement the plan or step down immediately—Grime didn’t care which, but he had to decide quickly: And so the Sprout (
I’m a family man, you of all people know what that’s like, what the responsibilities are
) threw his weight behind this stranger for survival, but he’d also nurtured, he confessed, a vague hope that together they would dethrone “K” unfortunately, as the Sprout was about to divulge, it seemed, the exact nature of his beef with her—something we’d all been wondering about for ages (had she screwed him over? had they just plain screwed?)—the smoke detector went off, the sprinklers overhead kicked in, and he jumped to his feet in one gymnast-quality maneuver, throwing his jacket over his computer while barking for Lizzie to call Bill in maintenance (I remember her shouting above the din,
But Bill’s been fired!
), and I escaped with just a sudden slash of dampness along one arm, like I’d been cut; anyway, after that meeting I think the Sprout
really
began to lose it—working with the shades down and the lights off, misplacing things, putting Post-its on his shirt pocket, walking out of his cave and then spinning on his heel and walking right back in, leaving incredible messages on his home phone (
Russell, this is Russell! And I seem to have—forgotten what—I wanted you to remember
), and wearing the same tie every day to work—the Canada tie, with the red maple leaves falling against the white background—and the same bright green coat and those strange blue pants that look like jeans but aren’t, with a black Velcro belt: He looked like something that could have been drawn with that funky pen I bought in Mexico, the pen that Grime borrowed from me one night when we were scarfing down a sausage pizza over at his desk, illustrating a particularly tricky restructuring concept—those fat pens, did you ever use them as a kid?—a little awkward to hold, voluptuously stocked with
four
colors to choose from, giving you the insane flexibility to write in blue or black or red or green—an instrument that I’d been using regularly and to great advantage: toggling between shades to annotate with distinction, or suddenly turning a memorandum into a
rainbow,
cross-referencing, expanding the dimensions of the written word (didn’t you tell me Faulkner wanted to print
The Sound and the Fury
in four colors? is it weird that I remember pretty much everything you ever told me?) and this is totally jumping ahead, but not long after Grime’s demise (which I swear I’m going to tell you about, in gory detail—it’ll definitely be worth the wait) I walked by to see if the pen was still around: I found it underneath his desk, jammed into the spiral of a beat-up notebook in a plain black cover, which piqued my curiosity—as far as I could tell, it was some sort of homemade compendium, gathering pearls of wisdom taken from a huge assortment of business and financial-fitness books, titles you’ve never heard of (
Are We Having Money Yet, An Inside Man Thinks Outside the Box,
et cetera); my favorite was a passage from
Ernie and Bert in the Boardroom,
which basically breaks down all of humanity into fun-loving, chaotic
Ernies
and anal, fussbudget
Berts
(I think I’m a bit of both—what the author would call an
Ert—
and
this
document, pecked out in the digital dark with a full bladder and too many ideas, is like Ernie and Bert colliding: Part of me can’t wait, needs to shout out everything I know and feel in one enormous sentence, but another part is working to keep it all together—navigating the punctuation, making sure that the grammar’s well-oiled, that the commas and dashes bear the proper weight, that even though the focus shifts and the shape gets blurry, I don’t just chuck it all and give myself over to the entropy of fragments—because I need to write this right now or I’ll
never
write it, right, and what would be the point of sending you a hundred disconnected paragraphs, shattered stanzas of woe and complaint?)—but in truth most of the quotations in that notebook were insipid, even contradictory, in their advice, and written in a nearly illegible hue of orange pen to boot, like an ink made out of fruit juices; the
later
entries, curiously, were written using the cartridges of my Mexican four-color (blue followed by black followed by red followed by green, in strict, Bert-like rotation), in what was clearly a different hand altogether, all razory angles; I slowly realized that the final five pages of those business-book gleanings must have been written by Grime: computer commands (
Revert to saved
) alternated with the bromides of yesteryear (
The man who buys the hare gets to make the fur-lined hat
), periodically appended with the title of a book that kept changing, from
The Plumber’s Manual
to
CRO: Memoirs of a British Plumber
to
Making Sausage: A Master Butcher’s Five Essential Rules to Restructuring
to
Corporate Ventriloquism,
yet seemed basically the same, as if by adding his own thoughts to those already in the notebook—what I came to think of as the
Notebook of Power—
the Crow could confirm his legendary status, or give focus to his own rags-to-riches saga; my thoughts were interrupted by the Unnameable (who’d become
even stranger
since you got fired, by the way, his eyes glazed, his humming louder and sadder and creepier) and in this desolate corner of the office, at this late hour, he was free from the mute niceties the workday demanded: he
hurtled
toward me, Pru, intent for some reason on grabbing the notebook; when I pulled away from him, the black cover came off in his hands in crisp staccato, and my vertigo kicked in: I tripped backward, reeling about the barren cubicle, still clutching the now-coverless notebook, which I rolled into a tube and tucked under my arm like a football player as I spun to the right, spun the desk chair at him, and dashed down the hall, jumping with adrenaline, a ’70s cop-show sound track going off in my head as he moaned (
hhhHHH!
), clutching his shin: It was absurd and scary all at once—I heard limping but still rapid footfalls behind me as the Unnameable gave chase, so after gaining a corner, I swung open the stairwell door with as much noise as possible, throwing in a few false steps, of decreasing volume, to lay down the aural evidence that I was zipping up the stairs (though I wonder, in my blindness: Was he
deaf?
); then I tiptoed to the next corner, waiting until he took the bait and slipped, wheezing, through the narrowing gap, before I headed to the elevator with my Mexican four-color pen and the
Notebook of Power,
which I took home and read straight through, and by the time I was done, all the mercenary mantras and leadership one-liners had taken on a soul-crushing weight—I felt short of breath, bitter, unhealable, close to
tears,
Pru, because something so shameful and heartbreaking was swinging into consciousness, cutting through the fog of forced forgetting: On the surface it was simply that part of me—the “successful” part, the part that sees the future as a rosy thing, a/k/a the
false
part—wanted to inscribe two rules of my own onto those pages, two things I rarely articulate to myself but which I simply
know
and abide by, at all times—two rules my father handed down at a tender age: (1) Never let anyone see you yawn; and(2) Never say
I’m sorry;
the first rule is crucial because a yawn tells people that they’re boring you—you’re essentially broadcasting your indifference, and soon, without quite realizing it, they’ll hate you for making them feel dull, and even if they
are
as fascinating as a toothpaste ad, you should never suggest, even in this silent and unconscious manner, that such is the case (in truth I find myself in the impossible position of having to shed another worker next week—and I think it has to be Laars, who exhibits his tonsils rather too freely these days); the second rule, in some ways the opposite (in that you deny rather than appease), was never adequately explained to me, though I now understand it as a tactic to gain an imperceptible psychological edge, finding other socially acceptable phrases to express regret or sympathy without taking on even that small, almost meaningless amount of accountability packaged in those two words,
I’m sorry:
What’s weird is that I should have listened to what my father thought at all, or rather that I should have taken these laughably small
life lessons
and internalized them to such a degree (do parents realize that even a stray comment can live inside their kids for
years
?) and distorted them into
rules to get ahead,
as arbitrary as anything set down in the
Notebook of Power;
my father was intelligent, kind, elegantly educated—but in terms of money he was something of a loser, thinking about it more than he would admit, while entirely lacking even the baseline bloodlust that could help him achieve his modest financial aims: He taught French at a prep school outside Baltimore, a school with an impressive crest and inflated reputation, which I was able to attend because he was on faculty—free tuition was the one significant benefit the teachers had (provided they spawned); the salaries ran shockingly low, and so three times a week I would watch my father dismantle his tie and hang up his blazer at the end of the teaching day and drive over to A Sporting Proposition, where he’d don a bright green polyester bib and transform himself into the twentieth century’s least effective sneaker salesman, not really measuring people’s feet in the right way, never prodding potential customers into buying footwear, and on several occasions (I would sometimes go with him, ostensibly doing my homework at a price-tag-covered table in the stockroom but actually listening, listening) saying enigmatically cruel things along the lines of
If you think sneakers can change you, then maybe sneakers
can
change you,
often proffering, too, a few sentiments about the sweatshops where said footgear came from—not even to push a political point, or to deepen the customer’s inner life, but because he was so brain-decayingly bored, and
humiliated
at being so bored, at having sunk to such mundane depths—nudged by circumstance, perhaps, to take on this most anonymous of jobs, but
forced
into it only by what he must have seen as a failure in character, lack of gumption, moxie,
balls—
a job in which you’re constantly in contact with, and have to
feign expertise
about, the part of the human body closest to the ground, a site for corns and bunions and odor; but some days, and then some years, it was too awful to think of him taking off the old-boy attire he wore to conjugate
pouvoir
or whatever and putting on that wretched vest-cum-bib, part of his mind, too, endlessly outlining the book he always wanted to write on Baudelaire (I catch myself in a protective lie: he wanted to focus on an
acquaintance
of Baudelaire, whose name was barely recognized even among interested scholars, whose name completely escapes me now), the other part slipping space-age-flavored cross-trainers onto people’s feet—it was a total mind-body split, high and low; when A Sporting Proposition shut its doors for good (and could it have been anything other than the gentleman-of-leisure name that made him apply there in the first place?), the closing happened so fast that he didn’t have time to change out of his vest, and he wore it home, where it hung on the back of the closet door for ages; every so often he would say he should get rid of the thing, but somehow that green vest stayed put; as the years passed he grew ashamed of his tenure, but also perversely proud to have been, in his words,
the worst salesman in the history of the store, if not in the annals of commercial footwear,
and through the school grapevine I knew that he actually drove a few customers away without even opening his mouth: Every so often a student would go to buy sneakers only to encounter his French teacher, and the mere thought of discussing soles and arches with someone who’d be grading his vocabulary tests was so unsettling that he’d duck out as invisibly as he could, though some kids of course—real winners, these guys—would sit with smug smiles, gleefully undecided, making my father go into the storeroom for box after box, his armpits darkening with sweat, as my classmates enjoyed the slow social torture they could exact; after A Sporting Proposition went belly-up, he decided,