John Henry Days (42 page)

But until Technology delivered the new Tool, he continued, abruptly dispelling this magnificent dream with a strategic conjunction, they would need all the bodies they could get. Have fun with it, he added, and left the room, sneakers squeaking on the new tile. The new hands picked up slim cardboard rectangles from the stack by the door. The writing on them read, Office in a Box. The box contained tape, scissors, scratch paper and pens. Anything a person might possibly need.

Instead of the modular Ls and Ts and Us of cubicle labyrinth she had expected, her workspace was an open room. In an industry that chose its terminology with an astounding lack of irony, the nickname for the room was refreshing. With people, for example, when they talked of visitors who might come to the site instead of human beings they talked about the hits, the eyeballs, the clicks. It sounded like a bill of bad garage bands. But her room was simply called the Box. Ten workstations lined the walls, leaving the center of the room open for hypothetical pacing, which remained hypothetical for they generally remained in their ergonomic chairs. The ten members of the team faced the walls. There was ample space between each workstation and available wall space for items or totems of personal significance one might tape up or tack up, but no one had essayed such a thing.

Once the people on her team got their morning coffee, they sat at their workstations and put on their headphones and started their workday. Everyone had CDs they brought to work. They put them in the CPU’s CD-ROM drives and listened to them through headphones. They all listened to different kinds of music, which seeped out of the cheap earpads of the office-issue headphones and overlapped. She was forced to bring some music from home because if she didn’t all day she felt as if she was lost between stations.

No one talked in the Box. If you wanted to borrow your neighbor’s stapler,
you sent them an email and waited. They sent you back an email in the positive or negative. Only then did you reach over to the next workstation for the stapler or whatever. In this system, by design perhaps, there was little eye contact, and the rest of the team was almost as anonymous as the people whose web pages they wrote up. Who knew what those people looked like out there. If it said Herbert’s Pet Rock Shrine, Herbert could be a pseudonym, a nom de web, and the pet rock fanatic is really a Bob or an Orville. It took some getting used to. Occasionally the ergonomic consultants laid hands on her, tilting her limbs, modifying.

Anticipation of stock splits trembled the premises, tremors became tumultuous expansion. The company leased two and half floors, and then leased another two, and then the half floor, which had been shared with a law office, was also leased after a long negotiation. Now they had five floors, and periodically the construction caused problems. This server or that server might go down for a few hours while they rewired, and no one on the team could work for a while. It was a handsome prewar building and everything had to be ripped apart for the new power requirements and the T1 lines. The voice mail system went crazy. Sometimes she would see the red light on her voice mail go on even though the phone had not rung. She would check the message and it would be someone she didn’t know trying to reach someone she didn’t know, a person who was not on the new, frequently updated phone list and there was no record. The messages dated back weeks. Sometimes they were urgent but she had no other recourse but to delete them. I’m at the airport and where are you? Mom’s sick, you should give her a call but don’t say I said anything. The people were gone. The red lights winked out. Maybe they were temporary like her.

While she had never been on the internet before coming to work there, it did not take her long to familiarize herself. For such a big thing, it was actually pretty small once you spent an hour or two on it. The websites they were supposed to write up appeared in her email each morning, delivered by bots. The bots were lines of code that prowled the internet at night searching for keywords of interest to each team’s area of ontology, night owls. Then other specialized lines of code randomly assigned the new websites to each team member. If you ran out of sites to cover halfway through the afternoon, the bot could send you new ones to work on. The bot worked in the daytime, too. Day and night. It did not tire like people. How could one not admire a bot?

Pamela didn’t know why everyone got excited the morning the wipeboards appeared over the desk of each computer, but once she saw how the rest of the
team hurried to write in red or green or blue their to-do lists, she realized that a void had been filled. The wipeboards were like a little bubble of hope inside each person that they had been unaware of. They made charts on the wipeboards, some people just lists, and when an item had been achieved, it was crossed out or wiped away. In some ways these to-do lists were the only outward markers of the progress made each day. Everything else was held tight by the database in cells, rows, columns.

For lunch she went to overpriced salad bars in search of the unwilted. No matter how far she walked, everything was overpriced. Because of all the renovations the elevators were slow and filled with the mysterious remains of heavy moved things, bits of plastic or insulation, and the delays cut into her lunch hour. Once she was past the doors of the building, she never ran into anyone she recognized from the office. They all went somewhere else for lunch. The mid-town lunch hour streets were a welter of trundling dry cleaning.

Around the coffee machine people talked about who was going to be laid off once the Tool arrived. Since the office was anonymous, you could offer your own contribution without fear. They could have been standing in line in the bank discussing why aren’t there more tellers on duty or at the departure gate of a delayed flight in communal bitch about the fucking airlines. The kind of honest and fleeting camaraderie you only get with strangers. One guy said half the ontology team would get the pink slip once the Tool arrived— that was how efficient the Tool was. Another said it wouldn’t happen all at once—that was how insidious the Tool was. Some people would be kept on to keep things running smoothly during launch week, to look out for glitches. But most people understood that some people were going to be let go. A lot of this talk didn’t interest her because she knew she would move on, Tool or no. That was the nature of being temporary.

A negative article appeared on one of the internet news sites, dubious as to the viability of their venture. No one liked it when financial analysts were quoted. There was the stock to think about. Most of the staff had enrolled in the stock plan and they checked the stock market throughout the day searching for dips. The goddamned dips. Plus the investors. An email with a link to the article was in her inbox when she booted up that morning. By noon a dozen interoffice counter-emails had joined the negative email, disputing some of the points in the piece. The Project Manager promised a pizza party. This cheered everyone up a bit.

One night, just before she left for home, she got an email saying that due to shifting priorities and the great flood of new hires, her team was going to
be relocated to a more strategic location in the building. She put on her coat and left the building for the day. The next morning when she walked into the Box, it was filled with people she had never seen before. This was an entirely new collection of bad posture. Where the skinny skater-type had been, a beer-bellied former athlete hunched. The aerobics addict had been replaced by a teenager with braces, and so on. The email had not informed them that the move was going to happen overnight. She noticed a sign on the door offering directions. When she walked into the new Box, which was just next door to the old Box, all the members of her team were at their workstations. The workstations were in the same configuration, in the same order along the walls, but now there was a window. She turned her computer on and it was the same one she had used for the last few weeks. They’d moved it all overnight, like that. Even the wipeboards. She sat and attacked the next item on her to-do list. The window looked out on corporate slabs.

The worst thing was when the bot sent her to a place that didn’t exist. She would cut and paste the URL from the bot’s list, but when she got there the site would be gone. The browser could not find the page. It had been taken down, or abandoned, who knew what. It happened pretty frequently. Someone said, that’s the information age for you. Here today and gone tomorrow. And indeed one day she came in and was informed that the Tool had arrived. It worked to specifications and that was her last day there. She was only temporary.

T
he old connections re-form, and Lucien is reminded of how to eat an ice cream cone on a hot day. “Mmm, this is really good,” Lucien says, extending a cold tongue to newly minted double scoop. “This is Rocky Road, right? This is really good,” he says, tilting the cone to catch with his tongue a cascade. The old skills come back. The smell of cotton candy, the cheers swirling out in a tornado of joy and fear from the Tilt-a-Whirl, these particulars remind him of the mechanics of ice cream. It’s the day, he can’t help himself. Everything is unironic, sincere, even. Canned preserves! He read an article about the magical process in a lifestyle magazine recently. The photo-spread for the piece featured color-saturated shots of a runway model with tight pigtails, dressed in a blue pinafore. She made the apples into jelly and rendered them airtight, bent provocatively with dripping fingers. It must have cost twenty, thirty thousand dollars to produce. Drop in the bucket of their art budget. He could have given that preserve lady back there a dollar and gotten change back.

Lucien and the ice cream melt in the heat at deviating rates. He could have gone incognito in jeans and a T-shirt, perhaps a ribbed T-shirt of combed cotton, opted instead for his usual attire. His undershirt sops and he regrets his decision but not out of discomfort. He regrets his suit because he looks at the people around him and feels envy. He has a theory of course. He is accustomed by the necessities of his job to think of civilians as a herd to be shepherded by those of his elite. There is no real way to do his job if he thinks of these people as peers. Peers know what you’re up to, understand if not the specifics then the generalities of your schemes, the clients and press and p.r. men are in on the joke. Even the damned caterers will give you a wink now and then at an event. But every so often an Olympian must gaze down through clouds at mortal pastures and see his face in those faces and envy their simple bliss. They can enjoy. They can wear a T-shirt and a baseball cap and not consider it an ironic gesture. They can mess up their hair without dashing for the spritzer. The little things in life.

Lucien feels dampness between his fingers. He unbandages the bottom of the cone and sucks out the melted ice cream through the hole. Lawrence watches this as if apprenticing to an alchemist: rapt and respectful and calculating the years to the coup. The conjure ends with a flourish as Lucien pops the cone into his mouth and crunches. He instructs Lawrence to ask the ice cream stand who their distributor is, and to make arrangements for a tub to be sent up to the New York office.

Free of his familiar, Lucien relaxes and takes in the beautiful crowd. Normal folks, what they call families, kids and the like. They’re all dressed naturally, like they picked out their favorite clothes and stepped into them, like that. Even the USPS men have relaxed for the occasion, Lucien notices. They wear navy-colored polo shirts of the same manufacture, possess the same Middle American faces as the majority of the fair-goers. In their identical khaki pants with sure pleats, they resemble undercover police in this crowd, but they look comfortable. Lucien spies Parker Smith, their leader, by the dunking booth, weathering the taunts of the insolent drenched lad, and he waves. Parker catches this, volleys a greeting at Lucien and then a baseball at the bull’s-eye. His theatrical windup is justified. The boy falls into the water to applause.

Parker’s underlings clap him on the back and launch hands to high five. Parker has his platoon here, and Lucien has his. Lucien imagines a war room away from the front where they moved colored pins over a satellite map of Summers County but of course all the planning for the operation had been conducted over the phone, Parker’s long distance charges paid for by taxpayers and Lucien’s tucked neatly into the overhead. It had all been Parker’s doing. The start of it. Lucien had been recommended to Parker by a friend in the judicial branch whom Lucien had flattered once. Parker described the unique dimensions of the event with the honesty of a professional, much to Lucien’s appreciation. It was a weird gig, no doubt about it, a new paradigm. Public relations were only a small part of the USPS’s goals. Target Marketing, he explained, had decided that community events such as this, tied into popular innovations like limited, commemorative stamp series, were a small but significant means of getting the people involved with their government again. Tepid, downright embarrassing voter turnout was only one example of a widespread public disaffection with the national apparatus. He had the figures right in front of him; through the speakerphone Lucien heard a tapping noise. Like surly teenagers, the people of the country holed up brooding, bedroom doors shut against the invitations and entreaties of national life.

But ever since they opened the selection process for commemoratives to the public, the number of responses had astounded. Post Office statisticians tabulated and correlated the numbers on government-issue ledgers and hypothesized. It went far beyond the stamp collectors. The Post Office announced the category and the people voted. All types of people. A jumbo crayon box of ethnicity. They voted for flowers. Everyone had a favorite flower, maybe it was a gift once from a true love or something worried over in the back garden that finally blossomed for two days before the slugs got to it, but everyone had a favorite flower and they voted. They voted for the dead in order to see their faces on stamps. As if the particular dead celebrity on the stamp watched over the passage of the letter to its recipient, blessing the correspondence, the top right-hand corner of the letter a perch in heaven. In some ways it was an exploration of the American psyche, and keep it under your hat, Parker whispered, but they’ve been getting calls from the CIA. They think the data can be useful somehow. Parker explained this to Lucien. The kind of power a red convertible had on the people, hands down the favorite in the classic car commemorative. Sometimes the artist responsible for the image received fan letters whose freight had been paid by his particular creation. That was the funny thing: they used stamps to mail in their choices, like it had all been planned in some boiler room pyramid scheme. These commemoratives had a hold on the people. Combine it with local events such as this and you had an important experiment in progress with implications.

Lucien inspected his fingernails while Parker erupted from the speaker-phone.

And Talcott, Parker elaborated on the phone that day, Talcott is the perfect partner. An event like John Henry Days is a slice of Americana. It is a window into true lives that men like Parker and Lucien never get to see. Sure there had been some bellyaching when Talcott contacted them and demanded that they hold the stamp ceremony in their little town. Fact-finding had already occurred in Pittsburgh. The home of steel. Foundries already scouted out for photo ops and overtures made. Nothing signed but an inconvenience nonetheless. Then—a small town! Someone proposed a motion to table irritation for the moment and raise the issue of serendipity. It was seconded and many said aye. Talcott was planning an annual festival whose inaguration would coincide with the release of the John Henry commemorative. The timing was perfect. It was almost a scheme, it might appear as a scheme to the cynical observer, fast food cups tied to the big summer blockbuster, something concocted by men who neither ate fast food or patronized
big summer blockbusters. One of the Quality boys pointed out that this kind of event was the type of thing they had set out to accomplish from the beginning of their late public relations push. Synergy. One mind, one people. If no one got excited about presidential candidates anymore, they certainly came out in droves to support their beloved heroes and artifacts. On stamps. If Talcott wanted some funding to help publicize their festival (for how does something exist without decent publicity) how could the Post Office not oblige? There were all sorts of different kinds of disbursement forms at the ready, in reserve, for such eventualities.