Personal Days (17 page)

And just like that he has a moment of clarity. His stomach is in total revolt and he knows that he has to find the loo as he calls it ASAP.

But there’s nothing around him. He bolts in what he guesses is the direction of the temple but it’s just not going to happen. He’s seeing double, his legs respond stiffly. And then he can’t help it and he just—he—you know. He loses it and he just
goes.

II (L) x:
At this point everybody screamed.

II (L) xi:
That’s not actually the bad part,
said Lizzie.
He’s a mess but he’s feeling a hundred times better. He’s taken a few steps back from death’s door. He keeps walking to the temple, where hopefully he can clean himself up. He’s uncomfortable and soiled but at least he’s not dead. In his mind the Judeo-Christian God or some random local deity has spared his life. He prayed and his prayer was answered. So now every year he has to keep his promise, to do it again, no matter where he is, as a sign of his devotion and thanks.

Do what?
asked Pru.

Nobody said anything.

In his—pants?
asked Pru.

Lizzie nodded, and everybody screamed again.

I so did not have to hear this,
said Crease.

Grime says he’s done this in all sorts of places since then. The time comes and he just
knows.
He’s done it in Berlin and Tokyo, Wichita Falls and Syracuse. One of the conditions is that he can’t
plan
to be somewhere alone. He could be at home or he could be out in public. It has to be a natural thing. And he’s had good luck ever since, he says, his career has taken off. He thinks the ritual keeps things real, hooks him up to the cycle of consumption and waste, matter and decay, Ernie and Bert, yin and yang. And I don’t know, part of me was freaking out but part of me somehow wasn’t. Until, OK, let me finish this drink. Until he said, You’re a down-to-earth girl, I can tell—I knew that from the beginning. He said, You probably understand where I’m coming from. And I said, London? Because I was getting this weird feeling, I’m probably crazy, but I’m just remembering now that I was getting this really weird vibe.

II (L) xii:
That he wanted me to do it with him. And I don’t mean sleep with him.

Everybody screamed.

II (L) xiii:
Pru went to the bar and bought another round for the table. Grime!
Crazy!
Yes!
Of course!
They didn’t know whether this made him the biggest Ernie or the biggest Bert. The Ernie-Bert paradigm was shattered. Drinks! Drinks! Lizzie looked both relieved and totally mortified that she had told the Grime story.

This all sounds like an urban legend,
said Crease.
The corporate coprophile, or whatever you call them. People who, you know. Poopy people.

It makes sense either way,
said Pru.
On the one hand, Grime’s eccentric. We knew that from the start. This behavior could be the tip of the iceberg. I mean I’m shocked but I’m not surprised. On the other hand, he
could
just be feeding Lizzie a line of—well. I don’t think I trust him.

He hasn’t been an out-and-out
liar, said Crease.
Has he?

But he’s kept us in the dark about what it is he’s actually doing for the company, or doing to the company,
said Laars. The alcohol made them talk in circles, forget the point.
And now, starting tomorrow and thanks to him, we have to swipe in like a bunch of assembly-line workers.

My father had to swipe in for his job, every day for thirty years,
said Lizzie morosely.

OK, sorry. But my point is that this sucks.

I can’t believe you’re still talking to him,
Crease said to Lizzie.

Not after today,
she said.
I agree. The swiping is the last straw.

Every straw is the last straw,
said Pru.

II (M): Who Moved My Mouse?

II (M) i:
They swiped in the next day, groggy from drinks and uneasy Grime-tinged slumbers. They weren’t sure they were doing it right. The black box by the elevator didn’t beep or click or otherwise acknowledge that the card had successfully gone through. There was barely any friction. It was like waving your hand through the air.

No one could figure out whether up-down or down-up was the preferred direction. Some of them swiped again, inadvertently swiping themselves
out,
perhaps creating the impression that they’d worked a forty-second shift.

Laars got in late because he had to go to the dentist. It was a bruxism emergency. He’d left his mouth guard at the bar last night, and apparently they threw it away. They must have thought it was a big horseshoe of hardened chewing gum.

I’m fucking so getting fired,
he said, swiping in, out, in.

II (M) ii:
Waiting in everyone’s in-box was this message from IT, sent out at 9:11 a.m.:

Dear Staff,

Yo…

I will be making administrative changes to your systems today. I’m going to be connecting to your desktops remotely, so don’t be freaked out if/when your mouse starts behaving erratically and windows start popping up! I need to make sure everything is flowing and need to pinpoint problem areas. Hopefully in a few months we won’t be having as many crashes etc.

I will do my best to be as unobtrusive as possible and not interrupt your workflow! The changes should only take a minute or two, in most cases, though in some cases I might need a little more time. (I’m also trying to weed out this latest virus.)

Any questions, please let me know ASAP—

Later dudes/dudettes,

Wynn in IT

II (M) iii:
What happened to Big Sal?
asked Laars. He disapproved of Wynn’s casual greeting, the surfer sign-off. His inner Bert kicked in.

Laars had imagined that there was potential for further bonding with Big Sal, but alas. It wasn’t worth dwelling on. These IT people came and went, much like information itself.

II (M) iv:
Lizzie said she got an e-mail from Jill, who was writing from an Internet café in Sebastopol. She was there with Ben for three months. None of them knew who Ben was, or to be honest where Sebastopol was.

At least she
thought
the message was from Jill. The e-mail address was cryptic and the message was signed
J.
Maybe it was from Jenny, or Jason for that matter. But the tone sounded more like Jill’s.

Pru said it was the return of the repressed, but she said that about everything.

In her carefully constructed reply Lizzie mentioned the discovery of
The Jilliad,
relating their appreciation of that precious document. But the message bounced back.

Lizzie called up the original e-mail again and noticed that her name was actually misspelled
Lizzy
and that there was an attachment: a bizarre request for money involving a spendthrift uncle and a hospital in Burkina Faso. She wasn’t able to read the whole thing because her computer crashed.

II (M) v:
Grime left a message for the Sprout on Lizzie’s voice mail.
I’m at the airport,
Grime said, speaking quickly between squawks of echoing terminal announcements. He was extending his vacation.

II (M) vi:
The transcription of
The Jilliad
was nearly complete. Pru basically took over the last third. Now she was trying to track down the books that the quotations came from. But Google and Amazon searches failed to turn up any of the titles or authors cited. Lizzie asked a librarian friend to try more specialized lists for the texts in question, but without success.

II (M) vii:
Crease was working on Excel when he suddenly lost control of the cursor. He flipped over his mouse for answers and the red light streamed into his eye. He wondered if he’d develop superpowers like Henry from HR, or at least 20/20 vision.

The cursor zipped about wildly for a while as if tied to a horsefly. Then it slowly floated to the upper left corner, cruised to the upper right, and twirled across the middle of the screen in a languorous figure eight.

When Crease tried to return to his spreadsheet, the arrow remained inert. Then he remembered Wynn’s memo.

He waited to see what would happen. After about a minute, the arrow rose again, clicked through to the Web, and started calling up sites from his browser history. Each screen lasted for barely a second—assorted news sites, some blog about Indian food, Craigslist, Amazon. Then a succession of unfamiliar URLs filled the address field. Wynn was taking the browser places Crease had never seen. Most of these were horror movie sites. Some were porn sites. One was a fansite constructed around the heavy metal band Dio.

Finally it was over. The mouse was responding. He found the spreadsheet cell he had been working on. He positioned the cursor and double-clicked. Then his computer crashed.

II (M) viii:
Her research exhausted, Pru was forced to come up with a new theory: Jill had simply made up all of the books quoted in
The Jilliad.
She hadn’t planned to read up on the rules of the game, for her own future benefit. Nor had she really been critiquing the way these sorts of books were written. It was all a lark, pure invention. And the new haircut was just that: a new haircut.
A bad one, too,
added Pru.

They imagined Jill during her last days: bored to tears in Siberia, drowning in misery, aware that her career was grinding itself to dust. She’d messed up somewhere along the way. No one wanted her. No one even wanted to
look
at her. She was just trying to distract herself before the deathblow came.

Lizzie asked what this meant, in terms of their plans for
The Jilliad.
Pru sighed and said that now its value as a work of outsider art was virtually nil. Its main appeal
—its heterogeneous, magpie nature,
as Pru had once put it—had vanished completely. You
could
think of it as a piece of fiction, she explained, but no one would want to read it.

Lizzie didn’t see why that should make any difference. But Laars was happy.
The Jilliad
wasn’t supposed to be read in the first place, after all.
So anyway, I guess I’ll take it back now,
he said.

That’s the other thing I meant to tell you guys,
said Pru.
It’s not in my desk anymore.

I don’t understand.

I mean I think someone stole it.

II (N) Voice Recognition

II (N) i:
Rumor flowed from one cubicle to the next, like water poured into one corner of an ice tray, spilling over to fill every mold.

It was said that the Californians were basically going to get rid of everyone, from top to bottom, and sell the machines for scrap.

It was said that they were doing it gradually for the sheer sadistic pleasure of it, and that they liked to tell companies that a third of the employees would remain. This encouraged amazing feats of self-promotion, all sorts of entertainingly vicious one-upmanship.

They’d done it before, in Boston, Cleveland, Nashville.

It was said that the Sprout had been interviewing for jobs as far away as Eugene, Oregon. It was said that Sheila was on the verge of leaving him.

It was said that K. was fired because she was a lesbian.

It was said that one of the Californians was also a lesbian, but the kind of lesbian who hated other lesbians.

It was said that because the company had lost so many people, this year’s holiday party would include guests from the other offices in the building, which had also shed personnel. Maybe the whole building was cursed. This had the makings of the most depressing holiday party ever, held at a new club downtown with a retro-chalet motif.

Worst idea ever,
said Pru.

So they would share the party venue with a bunch of strangers. Only Crease was happy, for it brought up the distinct possibility that he would finally get to see HABAW for a period exceeding that of an elevator ride.

II (N) ii:
The following Monday, Crease didn’t want to talk to anyone. Rather, he
couldn’t
talk to anyone. He’d lost his voice over the weekend.
A weird bug,
he sputtered. There was no pain, just an inability to speak in his normal register. He could produce either a gasp or a very deep monotone, incapable of affect. Both were totally creepy.

He sent e-mails detailing his condition on an almost hourly basis.

I wish I’d taken sign language,
he wrote. He remembered a movie in which a guy had gone mute and had to write stuff down on a chalkboard he kept around his neck.

When Pru ran into him in the hall, he tried to speak, but the air caught futilely, a miniature gale welling up in his throat. He went low for one syllable, then switched tracks abruptly. It ended in a disastrous screech. Some of them wanted to comfort him, clap him on the back, but there was the fear of contagion.

II (N) iii:
By late Tuesday afternoon his voice was slightly better, but he still avoided talking. He smiled a lot and nodded. He was turning into the Unnameable. On Wednesday his voice had come back. He talked a little too much, mostly about HABAW and what he’d say if
—when—
he saw her the following evening. Everyone weighed in on which lines sounded best. Laars and Lizzie said they’d help out if necessary. Crease insisted he’d be fine. He debated what to wear. He thought a beret might provide a rakish touch, but the others asserted their veto power.

II (N) iv:
Grime was keeping a low profile, walking around his desk with his wireless Glottis headset, mumbling away. When Lizzie brought a fax over to him, he raised his eyebrows devilishly but kept muttering, with the unpleasant suggestion that he was dictating hostile little thoughts about her.

Pru thought it might be useful for some of them to distract him while one person snuck onto his computer and looked at what he was saying, but she couldn’t find any volunteers for the mission.