Personal Days (7 page)

Crap,
says the Sprout just as the doors open. He’s forgotten something. He trots back the way he came, not saying anything to the people he’s just passed. He unlocks his door and grabs his briefcase and sprints back to the elevator, which has long since gone.

The layoff narrative

We have assorted dietary restrictions and particular aversions, which makes group meals untenable, generally speaking, and so the decision to lunch together is sort of impulsive.

Jill is in Siberia and no one feels like going up to get her. She sits too far from the elevator. We could e-mail her, but no one does. Pru says she thinks Jill might be out, taking a personal day to help a friend move into an apartment. This relieves us of guilt.

Our high hopes for the new Chinese restaurant are dashed by the time the soup arrives. Everything tastes a little like soap.
At least we know it’s clean,
Jonah says.

Whatever you say, Joan,
says Pru.

Oh, stop it,
says Lizzie.
Seriously.

We talk about how getting fired might not be the worst thing. We calculate severance, add it to how much we’d get in unemployment. The sum would be distressingly close to how much some of us are making as it is.
It’s inhumane,
someone says.

I’d be OK for three months,
says Laars.
Unless I got in an accident.

Define
OK, says Lizzie.

They always try to wriggle out of paying severance,
says Jonah. There’s a disobedience clause that they like to use. Jules made out decently, but Jason didn’t get a penny. The Original Jack signed a nondisclosure agreement and made out so-so. You can’t get him to tell you what happened, why he was fired, even if you say
I promise I won’t tell anyone.

Pru says what we’re doing is constructing a layoff narrative. The idea is that you look back on your period of employment, highlight all the abuses suffered, tally the lessons gained, and use these negatives and positives to mentally withstand what you anticipate will be a series of events culminating in expulsion. You look to termination as rebirth, liberation, an expansion of horizons.

Once you start constructing the layoff narrative, it’s only a matter of time. It starts to feel like a fait accompli.

Nobody knows what to say. Suddenly we wish we’d invited Jill, a collective guilt twinge. We talk about Jules and his screenplay,
Personal Daze.
We speculate, a lot, about Maxine’s sex life. Laars describes a TV show he saw last night, some stalker drama or cancer drama, possibly stalker cancer drama, with that guy from the
X-Files
spin-off and the woman from a French movie none of us have seen.
I should write a pilot,
he says. It’s his new thing to say.

Jack II says he’s started a blog. He tells us the address, but nobody writes it down.

Pru’s fortune is a good one:
You are the master of every situation.

On the back it gives the Chinese word for
ninety.
We aren’t sure of the pronunciation, though there are accent marks galore. It seems like a singularly useless piece of information. Imagine going to China knowing how to say a single number. Someone in the fortune cookie factory was clearly slacking, perhaps just translating all the numbers from one to a hundred.

Pru puts the slip of paper carefully in her wallet. She says she’s been reading her horoscope every day this week.

We remember that Jules used to eat fortunes if he wanted them to come true. Once he got one that said
What goes around comes around.
We can’t remember whether he ate it or not. A month later we saw that it had become the motto for Jobmilla.

The punctuationist

When we return to the office, Jill’s gone. We wouldn’t have known—it could have been like one of those situations where a dead body isn’t found for weeks, and then suddenly there’s a smell—except she’s left a very brief note on Jenny’s desk. It’s on Hello Kitty stationery. She writes that she wanted to message all of us individually but her e-mail account’s already been eliminated and she’s being escorted out of the building.

I’m sad to go. Please water my plants

Who does the escorting? None of us has ever witnessed the actual exits of any of our former co-workers, as if the removals were precisely timed to minimize visibility. Does the Sprout press a button to summon men in dark uniforms, wielding biceps and Tasers? Maybe the Sprout himself grabs you by the arm, doesn’t say a word as he pushes you out the door.

Already we’re thinking of Jill in the past tense.

Please water my plants

There’s no period. Somehow this is the worst thing—Jill was always the most meticulous punctuationist. We imagine her getting yanked out of her seat, a firm hand at her back. The terminal
s
seems to be swooping upward in an unnatural way.

The mail cart stands unattended in the hallway.

It’s because she didn’t complete the self-evaluation,
says Crease. We remember Jill’s blank essay. Why hadn’t she written anything down?

Jenny feels a chill. She has a sudden premonition that she’ll be moved to Jill’s freshly vacated Siberian desk. In five minutes Jenny looks like she’s lost ten pounds. She’s not wearing any makeup and her hair stands up in places.

Please water my

Jenny says she saw something yesterday, a Post-it on the Sprout’s desk. All it said was,
Jill?
The name was underlined. The handwriting was not the Sprout’s. Was it
K.’s
decree?

Please water

Jenny says she also put together a conference call between K., the Sprout, and a number in California. It only lasted ten minutes. The door was closed and she couldn’t hear a word. She didn’t think anything of it at the time.

The Sprout walks by, whistling. He halts the tune when he sees us, his eyes doubling psychotically. Then he bolts down the corridor and tries to disguise that he’s bolting by doing weird circular motions with his head. This is supposed to represent the natural, spontaneous movement of a carefree individual, someone out for a nonthreatening, non-guilt-filled turn about the office. We hear him crash into the abandoned mail cart and let out a
fuck.

Please

Pru mumbles her Chinese word,
ninety,
an impotent mantra. Jonah goes to his desk. Laars is looking at the walls, hands tightening into fists.

Jenny stares at the Sprout’s door, listening to the ventilation system’s roar. She feels like she’s waiting for the last straw. But every straw these days is the last straw.

We hear:
Takata-takata-tak.

< II >

REPLACE ALL

II (A) Asylum

II (A) i:
That’s crazy!—It was an
insane
idea.—I’m so
crazed
right now I can’t even think.—It was like total
insanity
.—Hysterical.

II (A) ii (a):
They often talked like that in the office, everything nudged to the rhetoric of the breaking point.

II (A) ii (b):
But nothing was ever
that
crazy. It was a badge they hadn’t earned. If someone ate two bagels—watch out.
That’s some freaky shit.

II (A) ii (c):
Any minor eccentricity could be deemed
wild
or
out of control.
Such language convinced them they were more interesting than they suspected they really were. It was crucial that they never contemplated the possibility of their inherent, overwhelming dullness.

II (A) iii: Grime

II (A) iii (a):
This analysis held true, mostly. Except that after Grime came onboard, they started monitoring his behavior, and it turned out he
was
crazy, crazy in what was actually a bad way.

II (A) iii (b):
It wasn’t so obvious at first.

II (A) iii (c) 1:
He was Grime because after a few weeks working there, during which they had only a distant notion that someone new was on the floor, he rang Pru with an urgent PowerPoint question. Her phone extension and that of the IT department differed by one digit.

II (A) iii (c) 2:
He said,
It’s Grime, from down the hall, the one with glasses.
Pru went searching for the punch line.

II (A) iii (c) 3:
He was saying
Graham
but his thick British accent got in the way. She’d never actually used PowerPoint before, but she went to help him anyway.

II (B) i: A New Kind of Sleeping

II (B) i (a) 1:
That whole area where Grime had his cubicle was an obstacle course, a treacherous maze. There were monitors coated with dust, upturned scraps of radiator shielding. Abandoned poster tubes littered the floor in a manner anticipating vaudeville pratfalls. There was half a bike chained to a pipe with the insulation falling off. Everything was a shade darker there, and grainy to the touch. A wine bottle with no label held a plastic flower. It was like the prop room for a theater company based in Pompeii.

There used to be more people in that area but three of them fell in a wave of firings two years before, back when the Sprout thought he was a sea captain. He’d say things like
We’ll have to run a tighter ship
and
I don’t like the cut of her jib,
and often invoked the
Titanic.
Even his clothes had a nautical bent, lots of navy, lots of stripes. Jules offered odds on when the Sprout would adopt an eye patch.

He also started using words like
fungible
and
egregious,
which he got from his word-a-day e-mail. More recently, expressions like
As the crow flies
and
We’ll just have to eat crow
had worked their way into Sproutian rotation.

They couldn’t remember the names of those ex-workers of yore. There had maybe been a David, a Dawn or a Donna, and a Marlboro Man type whose name was something like
Dirk.

You are running out of memory,
Jonah’s computer warns him every few weeks.

II (B) i (a) 2: The weirdest thing:
an ax.
It looked about twenty years old. Laars once picked it up, thinking it would be made of Halloween plastic. He dropped it and the heavy handle crushed his toe purple. Everyone thought someone else would get rid of it but no one ever did.

II (B) i (b):
At last Pru found Grime, slumped at his desk, his glasses on top of his monitor. He had a screen saver of the city going up in flames.

Grime had one eye open. He explained that he was trying to sleep like a duck. A duck can shut down half its brain at a time. It’s harder for humans, he said, because our eyes are on the same plane. He said bullfrogs never close their eyes.

II (B) i (c):
That thing about the sleeping and ducks and bullfrogs—that monologue alone was doing things to Pru that she didn’t understand.

II (B) i (d) 1:
Plus he was dressed in a pin-striped shirt that looked like it had been stepped on, with a loosened tie that also looked like it had been stepped on. Two cute little impromptu horns rose from his mop of hair. His appearance could best be described as
rumpled.

II (B) i (d) 2:
This comported with Pru’s idea of how British people should look. The next day she said she was in love. The one drawback was that Grime thought she was with the IT department. He kept calling her with minor queries. She wasn’t sure how to break the news.

Later in the day Grime stopped Lizzie in the hall and asked where the watercooler was, except he called it something else—whatever was British for
watercooler. Aquifer? Thirst-station? Liquids dispens’ry?

Lizzie told Pru that she was charmed as well, despite her abiding hatred of all things British. They were joking but they weren’t joking. It was clear Lizzie thought Pru should refixate on Crease, but of course Crease was intoxicated with Half Asian British Accent Woman.

Aren’t we still supposed to be in mourning?
asked Laars.

Pru and Lizzie stared, bullfrog style.

For Jill,
he said.

Jill?

II (B) i (e):
That Friday, Grime called Pru but she was away from her desk. He left a message, thanking her again for her PowerPoint assistance and asking for her help with a different program. His voice was at once chipper and lazy, and soon he got tangled up in the words. The message was an amusing shambles. He concluded with:
Well…what I mean to sigh is…Oil just toke to ya afta lunch!

II (B) i (f ):
Pru kept that message on her machine for over a week. It was so adorable. She hadn’t mastered the voice-mail system after nearly three years on the job and didn’t know how to skip over a message, or how to archive it. This meant that when she got other, newer messages, she had to listen to the first Grime message in full. She didn’t mind and in fact she sometimes listened to it just to listen to it. She played it once for Jonah, who said,
That’s pathetic.

II (B) i (g):
Lizzie and Pru had a friendly, imaginary, passive-aggressive bet about which one of them Grime would ask out first.

What if it’s Jenny?
asked Lizzie.

Who?

II (B) i (h):
It might be noted that, several years ago, Lizzie and Pru had been roommates for about five minutes. They didn’t like to talk about it. Lizzie had been working at the office for six months when Pru started staying with her. Pru’s half sister and Lizzie’s brother’s best friend had been friends in forestry school.

Pru had come from Boston to New York for grad school. She eventually moved out of Lizzie’s place because she wanted to be closer to campus. Or so she said. The rumor was that Pru’s then-boyfriend, a gravel-voiced graffiti artist, had taken a shine to Lizzie, and Pru wanted to squash any flowering side romance. It wound up not mattering, because shortly after Pru moved out, he joined the Peace Corps or said he joined the Peace Corps.

II (B) i (i):
So there was that history between them. They were very different people, or so they wanted Grime to believe. Lizzie was very down-to-earth, though that might have been largely by reputation. Someone would say to a new hire,
She’s so down-to-earth,
cementing her personality in the newcomer’s mind.

Lizzie gave the impression of being very organized. At meetings she was constantly creating one-week to-do lists in a little notepad, six boxes marked M, T, W, Th, F, S/S, which she filled with tasks in minuscule handwriting. Actually what it meant was that the meeting was putting her to sleep and that she had to keep the pen moving in order not to collapse.

She had a toothbrush in a crazy little ’60s glass by her desk, which said to the world that the office was her home.

II (B) i (j):
Pru on the other hand kept a spartan cubicle, all the easier to abandon at a moment’s notice. She always radiated a faint but definite socialite vibe, like she was slumming in that dead-end environment by day and moving around in glamorous circles by night. This might explain her belated discovery of Brooklyn. Jules claimed he saw her in the society pages, posing at a medical gala with two oldsters and a stethoscope carved out of ice. Maybe one of them was a baron.

II (B) i (k):
Pru had a different surname than her second stepfather, who they thought was the guy whose name was preceded by
real estate developer and philanthropist
when it was in the newspapers. He was about five times her age and in articles was regularly described as boarding his private jet, relaxing on it, or disembarking from it.

It was the departed Jules, of course, who’d kept the mental file on Pru, so some of the facts were shaky. Jason had also been fixated on her pedigree, back when he was still at the office, and claimed she paid five hundred dollars for a haircut.

It was believed that Pru went to college in the Boston area. They were all pretty sure it was Harvard, but she never said one way or the other. Laars, the Aorta College grad, had an anti-Harvard chip on his shoulder, for no real reason except maybe that his father and brother went there and he hated them.

II (B) ii: Not-flinching

II (B) ii (a) 1:
Grime never called Russell by his recognized nickname, The Sprout. He would just laugh and say
Ahhh, HA-ha
when one of the others used it. New employees were typically uneasy about participating in all the name-calling and the grievous, pointed sighing. Even Laars had been that way at first. Same with Crease. Same with Jill. They all had to be broken in.

You could understand a newcomer’s position. On the surface, the Sprout didn’t seem totally evil. His evilness was subtle, deep-seated, inconsistently revealed, to the extent that on occasion they wondered if they’d had him pegged all wrong. A Jekyll and Hyde element was proposed.
It’s his job that’s made him evil,
Lizzie sometimes said.

II (B) ii (a) 2:
For a while they were all fascinated by Grime. He was like a new toy. He ate constantly yet remained enviably trim. He always had a tweed or corduroy blazer in the vicinity, slung across a shoulder or molded to his chairback. His glasses were never on his face but tucked in his shirt pocket like a giant sleeping insect or dangling from his mouth. Sometimes when he talked he cleaned the lenses using a soft gray cloth.

His hair was full and dark save for a shock of white at the very back, about an inch square. Pru pegged Grime as in his mid-thirties. Possibly he was as old as his mid-forties, but a
young
mid-forties.

He might have been partly deaf. He always asked you to repeat things, and in any conversation would invariably cock his head a few degrees to the right, like a dog discovering a new form of food. When compelled to walk, he moved like he’d just come out of a disco, the music still swirling in his good ear.

Grime’s first words to Laars, to Jonah, to Jack II were not
Hello
or
Nice to meet you
but
What’s today?
He never knew the date. It wasn’t clear that he knew the
year.
And he seemed to find the men more or less interchangeable.

He told anecdotes that usually hinged on names none of them knew—British stage actresses from the ’40s and football greats, Fleet Street legends and MPs.

Laars had to Google
Fleet Street.
He could have sworn it was where Sherlock Holmes lived and even bet Pru five bucks, but he was so wrong.

II (B) ii (a) 3:
A couple weeks in, Grime made a big production of going to each person and grilling them playfully about what it was they did.
So basically you’re a useless piece of crap,
he joked, at the end of each encounter. His delivery was excellent and it was very funny at the time but a little unnerving about two minutes later. There should be a French term for that, along the lines of
esprit d’escalier.

II (B) ii (a) 4:
They could listen to Grime talk forever, but it was hard to read anything he’d written. His e-mails were amazing. Sometimes nearly every word would be misspelled or find itself adjacent to incorrect punctuation.

Thnaks, for the heads-op! Aprecite it.

I can’t priny this docment.

I;m gong out for coffee will be bacj in 10.

Sometimes the meaning was completely obscure. They would either call him or ignore the message.
Its not clar how I shold stile sit.

The most memorable line, the one some of them repeated when he wasn’t in earshot or even when he was, was
Keep me in the lopp.
He’d written this to Crease regarding some project that none of them would start thinking about till the spring.

II (B) ii (a) 5:
Crease joked that Grime must put his outgoing correspondence through a turbo-powered spell-check, some program developed by the military that cost four hundred dollars an hour to operate and needed to be supplemented twice a year.

Whenever the fluorescent lights flickered, someone would say,
Grime’s spell-checking again.

II (B) ii (a) 6:
Grime found something better than an industrial-grade spell-check. He asked Lizzie if she could help him proofread his stuff. He said he wasn’t used to the keyboards in their office. Maybe he was trained on those non-QWERTY ones or the kind that looked broken, fingers meeting at a ninety-degree angle. Maybe his hands were too big or too small.

He said he was going to ask Pru but she seemed a little uptight.

Uptight and whatnot
was the actual phrase.

An hour later Lizzie was sorry she’d said yes. Grime’s write-ups and summaries—documents that he had to send out on actual paper, with an actual signature—reminded her of the second half of
Flowers for Algernon.
He kept looking at her while she proofread, and she could feel sweat break out across her brow. Looking up, she saw him licking the corners of his lips, and later she wondered whether she liked that or not. It was getting hard to be
down-to-earth.