Personal Days (19 page)

Oh shit.

It hung to the wall by a single nail and swung for a sickening second.

Nobody had seen what happened. Pru instinctively slapped the Down button. The elevator opened immediately and she went back in, back to the lobby, and back up to four again, a form of time travel. She would start her day over and everything would be okay.

II (P) iv:
Grime was obnoxiously chipper that post-party day, Glottis headset on, great power as he paced. He had his smug face on, his hair in some semblance of order. He tried to talk to Lizzie but Lizzie wasn’t talking to him. Every time he came by she was on the phone talking or pretending to talk with Pru or her mom or Liz, the secretary of the Californians.

Grime had the swipe box in his hand, shaking his head.
This was all Russell’s bright idea,
he told no one in particular. When Laars made a coffee run at two he saw that the box was back in place.

II (P) v:
Crease contemplated loose ends. No one wanted to tell him what had happened, or must have happened, between HABAW and Jonah, who appeared to be absent today—Jonah, his alleged friend.

It didn’t matter. Crease could imagine the scene. He’d spied them leaving together while cowering, voiceless and impotent. There had always been something untrustworthy about Jonah.

He passed Pru in the Red Alcove and took a seat among the catalogs and magazines. He drifted asleep as the women talked, inhaling the perfumed ads, his head almost but not quite on Pru’s shoulder, then almost but not quite on her lap. Pru went back to her desk as he started to softly snore.

Time melted away. He felt a blanket about his shoulders and wondered,
HABAW? Could it be…?

He struggled to open his eyes, nabbed the foggiest glimpse of someone moving away. Not a woman, no, but the Unnameable, shuffling, mumbling. Crease managed a smile of thanks, tucked the blanket tighter, and sank back to sleep.

II (P) vi:
Lizzie was trying to type something as loud as she could so she didn’t have to listen to the sound of the Sprout swearing in his office. Something was definitely wrong. Were the Californians on the warpath? Every so often he’d ask her for a phone number, a printout, in a tone he might have used if asking for a new job, a new life. Most of the things he wanted were things she didn’t have. She was trying to go through Jenny’s old files, both paper and electronic, but it was all an impossible maze. She tried a global search on the network, and her computer said:
I don’t understand.

A little bit later it sounded like he was flinging books across the room, the famous Sprout syllabus, the contents of the most boring bookcase ever stocked. She heard paper ripping, muffled snarls, desperate laughter.

Hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo.

Now Grime’s voice was on the Sprout’s speakerphone. The volume was too high and the words got so distorted that Lizzie couldn’t even make out his accent.

II (P) vii:
Laars tried to do some work for about ten minutes and then decided that the day was shot. He was too restless. He was happy about his repaired tooth. The loss of the mouth guard was liberating. He rewarded his good mood by going online and buying three hundred dollars’ worth of assorted gear, and bidding another four hundred on more things he didn’t have space for in his apartment.

I totally suck,
he said. He took himself down a few pegs on the Ernie scale and canceled all the orders. He hoped he would be outbid on eBay, except maybe on the vintage tracksuit.

As the afternoon dragged on, Laars craved contact, gossip, pointless chat. Wasn’t that the one good thing about being in an office? The human connection. It almost always beat being alone, except when everyone got so negative that you wished they would just shut up, which lately turned out to be most of the time.

There wasn’t anyone for Laars to talk to at the moment. Jonah was nowhere to be found.
Jonah! With HABAW!
Who knew his beard was so attractive? Laars was seriously impressed. He rubbed his chin and mulled over his own beard potential.

He kept walking through the silent office. He didn’t like hearing his footsteps echo.

Lizzie sat at her desk with the phone clamped to her ear, nodding but not saying anything. Crease was deep in slumber.

Laars went to find Pru.

At her cubicle, the Unnameable was making neat piles. There was a blue dumpsterette, half full. A broom and dustpan.

What’s going on?
Laars asked, forgetting the man’s muteness.

Pru’s computer was on but the screen was blank—no words, no icons, just a field of gray. A plastic postal-service bin the color of skim milk held a stack of files. An abandoned knitting project had been tossed ignominiously on the trash heap: a glove, brown yarn with a touch of sky blue. Laars noticed that Pru had accidentally knit only three fingers.

Pru,
he said to the Unnameable.
The girl who sits here—

The Unnameable stopped sweeping and shook his head slowly. He slid his thick hand over his heart, and Laars could see, for the first time, that the Unnameable lacked a finger.

The Unnameable made an erasure movement across his mouth, to mark that what followed was secret information. Then he pointed to the end of the corridor. A light burned in the distance. Laars started walking, winding through the labyrinth at the center of which Grime resided.

II (P) viii:
Later Laars called Lizzie on her cell.
I don’t even understand what just happened,
he said.
I think Grime fired Pru.

II (Q)–II (Z): DELETED

< III >

REVERT TO SAVED

FROM: [email protected]

TO: [email protected]

RE: DEAR PRUNE

The following message was received by mailer-daemon at 21:11 on Fri May 19 and could not be delivered because no username “Prune” exists.

Tip: Check the address. Make sure you meant “jobmilla.com.”

Do not reply to this message.

—

Dear Pru—It feels weird writing a letter that’s a
letter,
rather than a drunken 2 AM e-mail (my usual
métier
), all lowercase and punctuation out the window, and doubly weird writing to someone I don’t even write drunken 2 AM e-mails to anymore, but my management style, I learned at the retreat, is all about following hunches, giving in to chance, throwing crumpled paper at the wastebasket by the door and thinking
If this goes in then the answer is yes,
and so I figure there must be a reason why, after deciding five minutes ago to break my forbiddingly stringent nondisclosure clause, I typed “Dear Pru” rather than “Dear Lizzie” or “Dear Crease” or “Dead Laars” (that should be “Dear”); and though past performance strongly suggests that I’m not to be trusted, I’m hoping that if this letter ever gets to you—if, for starters, the words I’m typing now are being preserved in anything close to legible form, and if I have the balls, once my ordeal’s over, to actually print the thing out and drip it in the mail, the old-fashioned way (for
drip,
read
drop,
and while we’re at it, let’s change
balls
to something less TMI; this is probably a fantastic time to explain that I can’t risk backpedaling and correcting stuff, for fear of losing my place, because what’s been happening is that for the past three hours—more?—I’ve been stuck in the elevator, suspended in utter coffin blackness somewhere between the third and fourth floors—listening to the cables quiver, and every so often hearing the distant shouts of emergency workers saying,
Hang in there, buddy!
or what sounds like a very heavy wrench clanking on assorted beams as it tumbles into the abyss—and even though my laptop’s on, it sheds no light, alas: when the elevator jerked to a stop, my feet left the ground, and a second after I hit the floor I heard another thump—the computer had slid out of its case and was making a disconcerting clicking sound, like it had turned into a large and talkative insect; it was warm to the touch, so I waited for the noise and heat to die down—counting out loud, pacing my cell—and put my mind to more pressing matters, but in the end the thing was busted: Shortly after I flipped open the screen, cracked my knuckles, and opted to write a letter to you rather than mull over whatever appalling spreadsheet Lizzie’d e-mailed this morning, the document started to dim: I could still make out characters forming beneath the pixilated fog, but right as I finished typing “Dear Pru, It’s weird to write a letter that’s a
letter,
” the whole screen went as dark as the air around me, making it impossible for me to see these words; luckily, I’m better at this sort of blindwriting than most, thanks to my regimen: most mornings, after getting to the office early, veins jumping with that good hippie-truck coffee, or a slug of “Sexpresso” from the Bad Starbucks, I’d type with my eyes closed, five minutes of
first thought, best thought—
it focused me, and at the same time re-created a little test my father would give me as a kid, seating me at his impressive, meticulously maintained Shalimar (which was this antique typewriter that gleamed like gold—they show up on eBay once in a blue moon, the Sasquatch of writing machines, the price so high it aggravates my vertigo), on which I’d peck out whatever came into my head—advertising jingles, lines from cop shows, names of presidents—an exquisite corpse for him to pore over and correct, like the teacher he was; and all this Ninja touch-type training is coming back to me here in my metal, or is that mental, cocoon—for example, I know that part of the trick is to establish a rhythm, to imagine the text as a musical score that I simply have to perform, even though it doesn’t exist till my fingers touch plastic, and if I
have
to pause I should count it out like a rest, imagine measures of those black bricks hanging like bats from power lines for as long as I require, and meanwhile find the little nipples on the F and J keys, return my fingers to the home row, and pretend that I’m ten years old again and communing with the Shalimar; it would be useful if I were, say, the sort of savant who automatically keeps track of how many keystrokes he’s deployed, registering every letter, space, and comma in some otherwise underutilized fold of the brain, so that he—I—could cleanly zip back via the arrow keys and change
drip
to
drop,
the
Dead
to the
Dear,
switch
balls
to
courage
or
moxie
or that Sprout special,
cojones,
expelled with gruesome south-of-the- border gusto; and while we’re discussing keyboard matters, I should mention that last week, after months of touch-and-go performance, the period key on this dilapidated craptop gave out completely, just a few days after the Return button decided to jam, which means that I can end each sentence with an exclamation point!—or a question mark?—but what I’ll probably do is just let it all unfurl in one soul-sweeping go, the better to dislodge every memory of this place, every possible bit of evidence in my favor, so that you can see why I had to do what I had to do; and I have the dim realization that this parenthetical account of my current blindness and typographical deficiencies has long ago eclipsed the letter proper—so let’s wriggle out of these braces before we do anything else)—I’m hoping, Pru, you’ll at least read through to the end and hear me out despite my jumpy style
—Hang in there, buddy!—
because without the prospect of contact my present situation leaves much to be desired: I’m sitting on the rubbery, vaguely canine-redolent elevator carpet, eating the last of my oat bars, forcing myself not to panic, blocking out visions of roaches creeping down the walls, ignoring the phantom whiff of fumes seeping from the shaft—and thus I’m dedicating what’s left of the battery (I should have a good two hours, though I have no way of telling the time) to run roughshod over the nondisclosure agreement and fill you in on what’s happened since you left, how it all went down with the dreaded unseen Californians, with Operation JASON and Grime and the Sprout, all the latest hair-raising and literally insane developments—not to lure you back but simply to suggest the possibility that I might, in fact, be something other than your garden-variety
backstabbing creep
(as Laars, in the midst of his daily ass kissing, said you once called me, not that I could blame you) or a run-of-the-mill
royal prick
(Crease passed that one along)—and not a day goes by when I don’t dream up an alternate sequence of events, one in which I can look into the future, like Henry from HR, and instantly comprehend how all the pieces will interlock, letting me sound the alarm earlier, so that everyone is saved—so that, for starters, you’re no longer
not here;
I can’t help thinking that if I’d been just a
little
bit sharper, and had put two and two together a few weeks sooner, I could have prevented all the backbiting and bad-mouthing, the nervous second-guessing as we broke up into ever-shifting groups of two or three, theorizing with hushed voices in remote cubicles or outside in the smokers’ purgatory, or at the Good Starbucks, or over one drink too many down the street, basically placing bets on who’d be next to get the shaft, the boot, the ax, the short end of the stick, the old heave-ho—the gallows humor reaching the end of its rope as people trotted out the Nazi imagery (Crease saying Lizzie’d make a good lampshade, Laars pointing to the ceiling:
This is where they drop the Zyklon-B;
though come to think of it, did you ever notice how the dividers of the abandoned four-unit cubicle clusters resemble anorexic swastikas when seen from above?)—but I should stop telling you what you already know and tell you something you don’t, the story of Grime, which was weirder than any of you thought (even Lizzie doesn’t know the half of it), and which my legal gag has stopped me from revealing— I guess I’ll start by going back a few months, after we’d come to know Grime a bit: One night I returned to the office after my class let out (the class where I was learning how to be an effective manager, taught by someone who was like a carbon copy of the Sprout, even down to the soap-clean smell) because I’d forgotten a file—I remember it was Halloween and I just wanted to get home, avoid the horde of skeleton pirates and Martian reapers and hobo vampires who were already whooping it up ominously on the sidewalks, in the streets, spreading out in all directions, as sirens and car alarms rang out in sympathy, in a demented symphony, but en route to my desk I heard a curious cross fire of shouts coming from somewhere
inside
the office, and I went to investigate, treading softly, cupping my ears to capture every sound, until I was right by the abandoned former conference room around the corner from Grime’s lair, the one with the empty propane tanks and furry bundles of computer spaghetti and the single
Psycho
lightbulb: I caught a glimpse of Grime and the Sprout (I’d know that back-of-the-head anywhere) and slid into the shadow of a huge blue trash bin, keeping a sliver of sight line, hunkering down so close to the action that I caught the sickly smell of Sharpies as Grime wrote
Operation JASON
on the dry- erase board and put slashes through the
J, A, S,
and
O,
so that only the
N
remained unmarked, its corners razor-sharp—his handwriting was as cleanly formed as his typing was muddy—and he told the Sprout that the last phase of Operation JASON was about to begin and that he needed his full cooperation in order for it to work; to stumble on the homestretch would be fatal, would erase the progress made in the previous months, to which the Sprout replied, in his most conciliatory voice, that of
course
he’d do
ev
erything in his power to ensure the smooth implementation of Operation JASON, which he realized was an important component of the plan, but he didn’t know, frankly, if things had to move
quite
as rapidly as Grime required—he knew Grime had his work cut out for him as the CRO (the
what?
), but he felt that there were some things even the most radical, ravenous CROs needed to be aware of: We (
we!
) were down to our last reserves—this wasn’t too long after Jill was let go—and it was crucial that no more staff get terminated for the next six months
minimum,
a demand that had the undesired effect of making Grime laugh, with such spite that the Sprout immediately backtracked with
Four months?
and Grime slapped the dry-erase board so hard it rattled and he shot back, in a murderous monotone,
Why don’t you do your job, Russell, or I’ll do it for you—
at which point the Sprout (so weird to hear him called
Russell
) clarified that he wasn’t trying in any way to interfere with Grime’s job (he understood
completely
the gravity of the situation, the delicacy, the need for discretion—which must have been why they were meeting at 8:30 in the evening) but simply wanted to put a word in for a few people, a stay of execution for those who most needed sparing; but when Grime demanded to know
which
people, specifically, required such treatment, Russell—rather, the Sprout—hedged until Grime told him to rank us, from most valuable to least: I couldn’t see the half of the board that the Sprout was using, but felt sure he was placing me either at the very bottom of the roster or at the very top, so that either way, fingered as the worst or hailed as the best, I would stick out—too obviously useless, or else too much in the Sprout’s good graces: That reeks of paranoia (or narcissism—it’s a fine line), especially since on the surface the Sprout and I got along just fine, with both of us always ready with a bit of banter, a level of friendliness that even survived my weeklong suspension two years ago (a penalty levied after I protested his suspension of
Crease,
itself a result of Crease defending
Jules,
after Jules “accidentally” set Jill’s computer on fire, to replay for you the whole sparkling chain of events)—the weird thing was that the Sprout had opened up to me in the first place, years ago, because he had inexplicably gotten it into his head that I had a daughter, and thus assumed I was a family man like himself, and as time passed it became harder to inform him that I was in fact not only childless but morbidly single, and it became near impossible to come clean after he confided in me that he and Sheila had been trying to adopt a second child, a little girl from China (a companion for their first child, half black like me), but the paperwork was taking so long—a practically satirical series of lost files, misaddressed forms, and crucial information mangled on both sides of the translation—that what had started out as a yearlong process had now become a three-year nightmare, and though it was awful to admit, they no longer wanted the child they’d picked, the girl they’d gone all the way to China to see, because she was now speaking Mandarin and (on their second visit) displayed only cursory interest in them, if not complete disdain, and additionally had replaced her button nose with an enormous honker and her oyster-like ears with satellite dishes, facial developments so dramatic that they suspected that perhaps this was
not the same baby;
the adoption agency, alas, had quickly caught on to their cold feet and begun barraging them with daily faxes and an impressive array of threatening documents in triplicate, insisting that the Sprout and Mrs Sprout were legally bound to take the child, while at the same time intimating that the actual adoption would not happen any time soon, probably due to their bad Yankee behavior, and as a consequence they would be required to send ever-increasing monthly “maintenance” fees to the agency, in addition to the regular bookkeeping charge, and it had occurred to the Sprout that perhaps he and Sheila would simply be raising Ting-Ting this way, remotely and with regularly spaced infusions of cash, for the rest of her life, a perfect child of bureaucracy: So I had this intimacy with the Sprout, based entirely on a misunderstanding, but I’m certain that he thought less of me after my suspension, that I’d become one of
them
forever (his
them
is pretty much a mirror image of our