Personal Days (16 page)

That means there’s hope,
said Laars, popping out his mouth guard. He wiped a string of drool.
I could be the next K.

Jonah, leaving his cave for a rare appearance, stroked his beard but didn’t say anything. This gave the impression of a judgment, without him actually having to speak.

Nothing could puncture Laars’s buoyant mood.
It’s destiny. What else can it mean?

Pru made a megaphone of her hands and said,
Ernie alert.

II (K) iv:
At quarter to five Grime sent a mass e-mail:
Ftinkd?
It was like the name of some forgotten Norse god. Nobody knew how to respond. Lizzie forwarded it to Pru, adding,
I’m scared.

A few hours later Grime bumped into Crease in the hall and asked why no one wanted to get drinks to celebrate or at least contemplate the big K. news. Crease discovered that Grime had meant to type
Drinks?
but his left hand had been misaligned on the keyboard.

II (K) v:
Where does the time go
? Lizzie asked, in her poignant way.
Where does the life go?

No one could answer this.

I can’t believe it’s already October,
she said, sharpening a pencil for the Sprout.

Pru waited as long as humanly possible.
It’s November.

Sorry?
said Lizzie. December was a week away.

II (K) vi:
Lizzie was complaining to Jonah, to Big Sal, to anyone who’d listen, about Grime’s misspellings. She understood that it was part of the Grime mystique, that for a man so rumpled it stood to reason that language would not emerge with the smoothness most of the species enjoyed.

But seriously? It’s like a medical condition. He spells
sincerely
with two
a’
s.

There’s no
a
in sincerely,
said Big Sal.

Exactly.

Another hilarious thing was that he always rendered
definitely
as
defiantly.

II (K) vii:
Big Sal said that he’d see what he could do, and a week later he installed Glottis 3.0 on Grime’s computer. It was a more advanced version of the software that Jules had used to compose his screenplay right before he got fired.

Big Sal replaced Grime’s computer with the one Jules used to have. It made upgrading easier.

I just have to click on this thing,
said Big Sal. One advantage of 3.0 was that it was specially designed to discern British, Australian, and Indian accents.

II (L): Swiping

II (L) i:
Laars said that so far, this winter wasn’t as bad as the last. It took a few seconds for them to realize he was talking about the temperature.

They all agreed, but it was based on the haziest of communal memories and a degree of tacit peer pressure. How many people really remembered what last winter was like? Winter was winter. Some days were colder than others. Some days were sunny. Some weeks were wet. Every winter had at least one blast of traffic-stopping snow, followed by a miserable stretch of slush and countless afternoons when you said
I can’t believe this wind.

Inside the office it didn’t make too much difference, except that Lizzie’s desk and both of Crease’s were near drafts. The cold air poured in mysteriously from above. They kept calling Ray in maintenance, only to discover that the Sprout had fired Ray back in the summer. Lizzie’s lips were a corpsey blue. She was wearing two sweaters and sometimes put her winter coat over her shoulders. The Sprout told her that he’d handle it.

They had a vision of him in the basement, rolling up his sleeves and manhandling the boiler, his trusty wrenches and tongs arrayed on a makeshift workbench. But all he did was tell Lizzie to go to Kmart and buy herself a portable heater and expense it.

Now everyone who didn’t have a heater wanted one. Even people who were warm wanted a heater.

II (L) ii:
Winter really kicked in a few days later, snow up to
here,
thuggish winds. Laars said,
This is like two winters ago.

Winter, two winters, two years.
Where does the time go? Where does the
life
go?

Laars said to Crease,
I have the worst hat head and I wasn’t even wearing a hat today.

II (L) iii (a):
On Thursday some of them were at the Good Starbucks talking about Jules. No one had seen him in a while but Pru heard through the Original Jack, whom she seemed to be encountering with remarkable frequency, that he’d closed the toaster-oven place and had just opened a club done up ’70s ski-lodge style. The name escaped her. Gondola? Snow-mobile? Bunnyhill?

Laars wondered if Jules had ever finished his screenplay,
Personal Daze.

Jonah might know,
he said. Jonah wasn’t with them—holed up studying as usual, getting smarter, growing hairier.

Crease was excited about
Personal Daze,
the movie, and hoped there were lots of office scenes. He fantasized that it was about him—the unrequited love of the Greek girl could make a good subplot. He thought Jules might have a better chance with producers if he changed the title to
Jobmilla.

I can imagine what the poster would look like,
he said.

II (L) iii (b):
Lizzie explained to Grime that Jules had written most of the screenplay using an earlier version of Glottis.

Glottis is bloody brilliant,
said Grime.
It’s like magic.

True, his spelling had improved. They were still scared of his e-mails, as Glottis tended to go all caps without warning, so that IT LOOKED LIKE HE WAS SHOUTING AT YOU. But the trade-off was worth it.

Grime’s headset had an attachment that transmitted his voice up to fifty yards—it was overkill, but he liked the freedom to pace. It helped keep the ideas fresh. Pru said she’d seen him jawing away contentedly, musing over by the windows, and asked what project he was working on.

Oh, just writing me memoirs,
he joked.

II (L) iv:
The next morning they slung off satchels and handbags, settled at their desks, sorted through new e-mail, stared at their coffees. The Unnameable was making his shuffling rounds, dropping an interoffice-mail envelope into everyone’s in-box. The missive came courtesy of Henry from HR, and even before they started reading, they knew something bad was happening.

At around the same time, at each desk on the fourth floor, a piece of black plastic, about the size and shape of a credit card, slipped out of an envelope and clattered to rest.

It had no name or number, no markings at all. Its power was entirely invisible.

Henry’s note said that, beginning tomorrow, everyone would be required to swipe in and out whenever they started or stopped working. Each floor was equipped with a box that would take a digital time stamp.

You can’t even see the magnetic strip,
said Crease, studying his card under the light.

Strip or stripe?
said Lizzie.

A black box was affixed to the right of the elevator, a thin metal box as blank and unyielding as their new cards. A somewhat crudely cut slit extended vertically down the center of the box, the space their cards would pass through two or more times a day—five inches that seemed to stretch to the length of the entire wall. Jonah approached the box cautiously and after a moment rapped it with his knuckles. They listened for any sound of life: gears turning, a hidden clock ticking away.

Silence.

Then the congregation headed for the Sprout’s office, a united front.

But the Sprout just shrugged.
You can all thank your friend Graham for that,
he said and pointedly turned his attention back to his screen.

Graham?
Grime?

The Sprout typed a line with exaggerated clatter, intent on ignoring them. Then he picked up the phone and left a message for Lizzie—who was standing in his office with everyone else—to look up various numbers and e-mail addresses.
Whenever you get a chance,
he said.

The Sprout swiveled his body to face the window and kept talking to Lizzie until his visitors eventually went away.

After looking up the information, Lizzie came into the office, where she saw the Sprout peering at his own swipe card.
I don’t see where the magnetic stripe is, do you?

II (L) v:
Grime, conveniently, wasn’t in the office. He’d phoned the Sprout that morning, off to England for a spell.

Everyone wound up staying later than normal that day, in thrall to the new swipe box, the heartless new regime. Minutes, seconds, were being counted by the Californians. Pru bore down on Lizzie, wagging her card.
Is this the thing that you didn’t want to tell us before, the plan that Grime told you about?

What?

The thing so awful you couldn’t say what it was?

This is totally separate,
she said.
I swear I had no idea.
But Pru didn’t believe her. No one did.

I bet Grime’s not even on vacation,
said Crease.
I bet he’s with the Californians somewhere.

Pru demanded that Lizzie spill the beans.

II (L) vi:
If you want me to tell you, I’ll tell you,
said Lizzie.
But you’re going to wish I hadn’t.

Tell us,
said Laars.

It doesn’t even make sense. I don’t even know why he told me.

Just tell us already.

I can’t even tell my therapist. It would mean I’d have to be in therapy another five years. It’s just so awful and I don’t want to think about it.

Don’t be such a Bert,
said Pru.

Lizzie insisted she needed three drinks before she could even
start
to tell it.

II (L) vii:
The jukebox was loud. They humored Lizzie, playing a drinking game that they constructed on the fly—you had to knock one back any time you used a word with a
g
in it. It was a difficult thing to stay sober, hard to pick words as you grew tipsier.

Laars, attempting to drink with his mouth guard in, avoided talking altogether. Pru, too. Crease and Lizzie were three sheets to the wind. Before long Crease had taken his shiny new swipe card out and was making it do a little dance on the table to an old Van Halen song.

I feel dirty just thinking about it,
said Lizzie.
You’re going to hate me.

We
already
hate you.

That’s what I thought.

Everyone kept quiet until she began.

II (L) viii:
So this is what Grime said that night. Grime—his
name
! Grime! It makes total sense now in a cosmic linguistic, linguistico-cosmical way. It’s karma or—right. So we were talking about vacations, my buddy Grime and I, I suppose this was right after I explained the whole crucial concept of
personal days
to him, the Lizzie definition of personal days, how they weren’t vacation days—you were supposed to spend them at
home,
doing
personal
things like reading a book or watching an old movie, or I suppose theoretically at least having nonstop sex with someone off Craigslist, and anyway I mentioned that I wanted to take a big vacation someday, possibly next year, to India—which I realize is kind of what I say whenever I don’t know what to say. Not that it’s not true. I suppose this was all a clumsy way of seeing what his idea of a vacation was, more to the point, whether he was single or had a girlfriend or whatever. I asked him if he’d ever been to India. He said yes, actually, he
lived
there for a year, working in strategy for Goneril. I had no idea what Goneril was, or really what strategy was, so I just nodded. I Googled it later, it’s this pharmaceutical company that I think is bankrupt now. Grime was telling me about all the places he’s been. He was sort of flirty. It both was and wasn’t sleazy. What he was saying wasn’t particularly risqué but something about him got me hot and bothered. The truth is I didn’t really mind.

TMI,
Pru said.

OK, well, Pru? If you think
that’s
TMI, I should just stop right here. I mean, let’s talk about something else. Let’s talk about climate change or waterfront development or maybe the stick up your butt. Because this whole story? This whole story is
premised
on TMI. It’s the most TMI exchange in the history of TMI.

Sorry.

Anyway I asked Grime if he liked it and he said he didn’t get to do much sightseeing, the work was relentless, but one time he took a trip out to a temple somewhere in, I don’t know the name, I don’t even think the temple was famous at all. Oh wait, it was famous for something, for its beveled something. It was a few hours from the city and he was on a bus and the bus was falling apart. He’d had some bad food the night before—tried to cook something and it turned out strange. Basically he’s not feeling so great all of a sudden, trapped on this rickety bus. There’s still almost an hour to go. He’s sweating. He said that in India you’re always sweating but this was sweating of a higher order. Higher odor? Something like that. It’s hard to figure out everything he’s saying.

II (L) ix:
He manages to fall asleep. When he gets off the bus, he isn’t quite at the temple yet. He exited too early or too late. No village in sight. Cars go by, a few trucks. Across the road is a sign. He figures out using the bad map in his guidebook that he’s a mile away. A mile! He’s in agony and all of a sudden he feels like he’s going to die—he
knows
he’s going to die. He starts weeping. Who will find his body? He can imagine the vultures picking his bones. He thinks, How sad, how sad, to just disappear like that. The Goneril people don’t care, they’ll try to find him for a few days but after that they’ll give up. Nobody even knows he’s made this trip. So he’s slumped and sweating by the side of the road and he just spontaneously sends up this prayer, sort of half-moaning, half-praying. He’s not even sure if he’s praying to the Christian God or whatever or some Indian god that happens to be hovering in the area. It doesn’t matter. He just says, If you let me survive this, I’ll always be grateful. Show me a sign and I’ll worship you in my own way, is the gist. He’s saying this out loud now, tears in his eyes, the words coming from who knows where: I’ll worship you in my own way.