Break in Case of Emergency (13 page)

“Dad emailed to say how upset you were that I hadn't called in a while,” Jen was saying to her mother. “I'm really sorry.”

“What?” Jen's mom asked, twisting the word out to three syllables, phlegmy with incredulity. “I never said that. Your
father,
for goodness' sake!” Jen's mom sighed and regained her composure.

“Well, in any case, I'm sorry, Mom.”

“You have a
lot
going on.”

“No, it's not that—I just—haven't been feeling well.”

“Oh? Are you eating right? Exercising?”

“I—no, I guess I haven't been doing those things as much as I should.”

“You should see a doctor,” Jen's mom said. “There's not a whole lot your old mom can do for you if you're not taking care of yourself. Go talk to a doctor.”

“I hadn't thought of that,” Jen said.

Jen was at work, leaving a voicemail for Jim.

“In the dream, I'm in a simple Lutheran church, everything's wood; hard, cold pews; hard, cold everything, but lots of leg room. You're on the aisle and I'm sitting beside you. I know you're you, but you don't look like you; you look like Max von Sydow in
Through a Glass Darkly.
On my lap, sitting up like a regular person, is the embalmed and neatly dressed corpse of a middle-aged English woman named Dolly. Everyone else in the pews also has an embalmed corpse on their lap, except you. There's a small, shuffling group of mourners that stops by each pew to pay their respects to the deceased. One of them is Dolly's dad. Dolly's dad leans over to see his daughter, kind of awkwardly bent over you. He's wrecked, just totally destroyed by this whole ritual, but he's trying his best to put on a good face, and the result is that he's doing this kind of high-pitched, hooting-crying thing, and he keeps saying in his posh British accent, ‘Goodbye, Dolly, goodbye, we love you, Dolly, bye-bye, now, Dolly, that's our girl, Dolly, goodbye.' Over and over. Dolly's mother stands by his side, silent, just watching Dolly with this fathomless expression. I keep apologizing to you for how difficult this is, and you are silent. As the mourners are dispersing, I notice that Dolly is picking at her face. I say ‘No, no, Dolly, don't do that, sweetheart.' I turn her toward me—now I'm cradling her—and she's scratching and pulling really hard. Her skin is breaking and bleeding. I try to pull her hands away, but she's too strong for me. Then I think,
What does it matter if she picks her face? She's dead.
That was the end of the dream.”

Jen pushed the button to listen to her message, then pushed the button to erase the voicemail from Jim's inbox, then hung up.

The online launch of the Leora Infinitas Foundation and its “web channel,” known as LIFe Lines, proceeded as scheduled. (“
Website
seems stale to me, and
blog
seems so limiting,” Leora, or maybe Donna, wrote in Leora's Welcome Letter to readers. “
Web channel
feels like a network that is also a conduit—a sticky-sweet yet liberating web of endless possibilities.”) Also publishing on schedule was LIFe Lines's flagship video suite, “Overcoming Adversity.” (Six segments, edited down from seven.) LIFt's kickoff campaign, the interactive Total Transformation Challenge (TTC), likewise launched on time, and by the end of day one had attracted 1,137 entries—each of which contained seven vows toward improvement in the assigned areas of Mind, Body, Spirit, Space, Earth, Mission, and Heart. Altogether the launch was an unqualified success insofar as it was not a total disaster, a dichotomy captured on the morning of day one, when Sunny rushed over to Jen and asked her if they could unlaunch the site.

“That would be like un-born-ing a baby,” Daisy said.

“Um,
inappropriate,
Daisy,” Sunny said, looking at Jen.

“Un-birthing a baby, I guess,” Daisy said.

“Daisy is right,” Jen said. “But let's fix what we can.”

Some of the rationales for an unlaunch were sound. For example, two of LIFt's newly announced grants, one to support teaching computer skills to girls in Colombia and one to support a girls' entrepreneurship program in Rio de Janeiro, hadn't actually been signed off by their underwriter, which was in both cases the Bluff Foundation.

Some of the rationales for the unlaunch seemed somewhat less sound, such as Leora's reported dissatisfaction with the background color of the logo.

“We're seeing
plum
when we're really going for
amethyst,
” Sunny explained.

Part of the reason Leora may have been distracted from the finer details of her website launch was that she had spent much of September lining up off-the-record breakfast meetings in New York City and Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., with small groups of female journalists convened for maximum hybrid vigor, from veteran foreign bureau chiefs to young feminist bloggers, in the chambers of downtown cafés and brasseries more frequently reserved for upmarket baby-shower brunches. In some cases, the breakfasts—which, as far as the public was concerned, never actually happened—resulted in positive coverage of LIFt and TTC where otherwise there would have been none; in other cases, they turned what would have been snarky or withering coverage into positive coverage or, at the very least, peaceably ribbing coverage. Babette Exley, proprietor of the influentially cruel blog
Nastygram Ladyparts
and undisclosed invitee to one of Leora's undisclosed breakfasts, headlined her post on the launch
I CAN'T TOTALLY HATE LEORA INFINITAS' WELL-MEANING NEW LADYVENTURE, AS MUCH AS I WANT TO
.

In a bittersweet twist, a lone note of inadvertent critique of the LIFt launch and the TTC campaign came from Ruby Stevens-Meisel, whose effectively anonymous public status and undetermined off-the-grid location ensured that her name, or rather her pseudonym, would be left off the breakfast invitations. It was Ruby Stevens-Meisel who first publicly acknowledged the unfortunate double life of the TTC acronym.

“Is the rebranding of TTC—the mutation of the yearning admission ‘Trying to Conceive' into the gauntlet-throwing ‘Total Transformation Challenge'—a form of poetic license or fruitful coincidence?” Stevens-Meisel asked. “Even in launching an Internet venture, it is not Leora Infinitas's responsibility to learn every corner of Internet jargon and parlance. I doubt she knew about the dual meaning of TTC, which has become a rueful badge of belonging for the infertile community. But to acknowledge Leora's blissful ignorance—not only of any darker recesses of the online experience in general, but also, specifically, of the private agony, shame, and frustration of infertility—is not necessarily to discount the strange serendipity at play here. What she is asking of women with the TTC campaign is what she has constantly asked of herself: to nourish and incubate a better version of oneself. She is asking her audience to conceive who they are and give birth to that woman, bring her squalling triumphantly into the world. She is merely the midwife, the humble attendant. Leora Infinitas is the doula of the self.”

TOTALLY TERRIBLY CONFUSED: LEEZA INFANZIA DOESN'T KNOW IT, BUT SHE JUST GOT EVERYBODY PREGNANT
was Nastygram Ladyparts' subsequent headline.

“You know, I have to be honest with you, I
didn't
actually know about this coincidence,” a benevolent Leora said during one morning-show appearance, inclining toward the question as if it offered a fond embrace. “One of the really exciting things about this new adventure is learning about all this stuff and really getting in touch with the online community. I have so much to learn. I've always been here as a student as well as a teacher. It's humbling. Luckily, it's also a
lot
of fun.”

“It's just such a huge oversight,” Sunny said at a staff meeting that same week.

“No, if we'd had proper oversight in place this wouldn't have happened,” Donna corrected Sunny.

“That's exactly what I'm saying!” Sunny said.

Jen looked at her phone.

Pamela Radden

Thursday, Oct 8 11:24 AM

To: Jen

Subject: Re: Hi

Dear Jen

I got your note and I appreciate it. Look everyone fucks up once in a while including me. There will come a time when I'm not angry about this and we can be friends again It might not even take that long I'll get in touch with you then. I hope you can understand

All my love

Pam

“It feels to me as though we're
inhabiting
a space without first
learning the language
of that space,” Leora was saying. “I can't do
everything.
I'm not interested in micromanagement. But how did this happen?”

Jen put aside her phone and stared openly at Karina. Chin in one hand and pen in the other, Karina looked up at Leora, ducked her head to take a few notes, and looked up again. Jen had never seen Karina take notes in a staff meeting before. Karina's expression was unreadable, save for a legible sympathy with Leora's predicament.

“It makes us seem out of touch with what our audience hungers for,” Leora said.

Out of touch,
Jen wrote in her notebook. She watched the letters, waiting in vain for them to reassemble themselves in her mind as flowers or animals or random strangers that she could coax out with her pen.

Sunny was headbanging. Jen resumed staring at Karina.

“It is so crucial that we understand the needs of our audience, perhaps even before
they
do,” Leora said. “Is there someone on the staff who knows Internet jargon? One of us who speaks that language?”

“I would nominate Daisy,” Karina said, putting down her pen and running her fingers through her hair. “She's always up on the latest trends.”

Daisy—up on latest trends,
Jen wrote in her notebook. The curved lines and crosses refused to turn or sprout or bloom.

“
Oversight
is a contronym,” Daisy said, after Jen returned to their cubicles and delivered an abridged transcript of the meeting. “A contronym is a word that means its opposite. Like
cleave.
Or
garnish.
”

“Like
sanction,
” Jen said.

“Like
left,
” Daisy said.

“Wait, how is
left
a contronym?” Jen asked.

“Like if I said
all I have left,
that could mean the stuff I still have or the stuff I don't have anymore,” Daisy said.

“Ohhh, I thought you meant like
turn left at the stop sign,
” Jen said.

“I have work left,” Daisy announced to the overhead fluorescent lights. “I have left work.”

Jen rummaged around in her handbag for her recently resumed semi-daily allowance of Animexa. At Sunny's request, Jen would be spending the rest of today and many todays in the future skimming Total Transformation Challenge essay submissions for what Sunny defined via email as “potentially defamatory or offensive language or any content that otherwise does not conform with the Total Transformation Challenge (TTC) project and/or LIFt's standards.” The rolling task had seemed endless, monotonous, a vehicle of seething resentment. Whenever she was about to embark on another skimming session, Jen broke off half of an Animexa tablet, swallowed it with coffee from the Starbucks half a block away, and felt instantly soothed by the sheer anticipation of the mild tachycardia that would follow in fifteen to twenty minutes' time to confirm the completed blockade of her dopamine and norepinephrine transporters, which in turn booted up the same automaton-Jen that Animexa had so skillfully programmed to write LIFt memos.

This automaton-Jen could register neither disdain nor affection for the women who participated in TTC, although she suspected that, were she not presently located behind the glass partition of Animexa, she might be touched by their earnestness, by their apparent lack of acquaintance with irony or cool. These women kept vision boards and gratitude journals. They drew up and signed household-maintenance contracts replete with chore wheels and no-nagging clauses. They scheduled me-time and followed mindful-eating rules and wrote essays about how their own regular attendance at yoga classes was really a gift they gave to their kids and about the importance of feeling compassion for themselves even when they broke their mindful-eating rules.

Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page, containing empty text boxes for each of the seven TTC mission categories. She had drafted these herself, though the final template was the product of three subcommittee meetings and seven interminable rounds of revision. But Jen had never tested the template herself, because the TTC mission statements hewed too closely to the act of journal-keeping. Embarrassment had always thwarted Jen's attempts to keep any kind of journal. She was embarrassed by the mundane nature of the events she was recording in the moment, or she would happen upon an old notebook or computer file and feel embarrassed at the preoccupations and pretensions of her former self. This latter form of post-facto embarrassment was largely a function of style, as Jen's contemporary eye tended to scan her past entries as seesawing between prolix melodrama and an inadvertently comic affectlessness—the personal journal as grocery list. Jen knew that she had let embarrassment excuse her carelessness with the precious concrete and cognitive artifacts of her own life, entire months and years she could never retrace, and for this, too, she was embarrassed.

Pam, by contrast, was a master self-archivist, every smallest passage of her life logged and filed, and many of these passages repatterned and digested into art, which in Jen's view turned both Pam's work and Pam herself into case studies in disciplined self-respect. Just as Meg's self-respect was expressed in her careful and constant appraisal of time to come, Pam's self-respect was expressed in her careful and constant recording of time already spent. Yet Jen herself could not escape the conviction that there was an egotistical audacity to private record-keeping, albeit one that applied only to her own exceptional—that is to say, her own exceptionally unexceptional—case.

She considered the instructions for the first Total Transformation Challenge category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 1: MIND

How can you challenge your mind to look hard at its own blind spots and push past negative thinking? How can you conjure new ways of sharing your own unique joy, outlook, and personhood with the world in order to help others?

Your response here:

I challenge my mind to help my brain figure out how Animexa modulates my levels of dopamine and norepinephrine and recalibrate itself accordingly so that I never want or need to take it again.

Jen stopped typing to shade her eyes with her fingers, because her bulging pupils were gulping and sucking at the fluorescent overhead lights.