Personal Days (5 page)

I could live here,
jokes Jonah.

We like that it looks so clean, but by the end of the day it has a coffee stain, a gum wrapper, and a few stray ribbons of shredded lime green paper.

Let go

Jill is one of those rare people who are more timid on e-mail than in real life. Sometimes she waits till Friday to send her nonurgent business e-mails, because then she can add
Have a nice weekend!
as a tagline.
You need to pepper your messages with a little small talk,
Jill says in an android voice. There’s nothing as universal as the weekend and one’s modest hopes for it.

Before leaving the office one Friday, she stops on our floor, but we’ve already fled, away to our own lives, away to our good weekends. Walking by Jenny’s desk, she sees an index card on the floor. It reads:

3. Let go of anger! Be more efficient. Exercise more!

< 9 >

The Unnameable

This man has been here forever but has only recently coalesced into an identifiable being. We don’t know his name, though Jack II claims this person’s name is
also
Jack. This is too unsettling—the mind cannot contain three Jacks, fired Jack I a.k.a. the Original Jack and current Jack II and this supposed Jack III—and so we think of him as
The Unnameable.

The Unnameable is fiftyish, tall, with a healthy fringe of white hair and gleaming, inquisitive eyes. His ponderous gait gives the impression that he is rooted in the land: a spirit, a proud protector, an aristocrat of the corridors and cubicles. But the fact is—he’s
different.
Slow. Language eludes him. When he tries to talk, it sounds like he’s gasping. It’s hard to isolate the words in his vast loud whisper and so we just nod and smile. This seems sufficient for him, and he replies in kind. The response makes you feel good, though it’s unclear why it should.

His job, as far as we can tell, is intra-office messenger. We mark envelopes with initials and he matches these symbols to the ones on the bins by each desk. He does it so silently, moves so secretly, that often you don’t realize something’s waiting for you. His shoes must be made of feathers. Mostly you see the Unnameable only by accident. We wish he would make more noise.

We e-mail everything and there’s rarely a need to send actual pieces of paper to people, but Maxine uses him with regularity and we have gradually fallen in line.

Jill wants to use him to keep us connected.
I got some pictures developed,
she’ll e-mail one of us.
I’m putting them in my out-box.

But the Unnameable has an aversion to Siberia. He does not go to her desk, her bin, unless one of us addresses something to her, which is somehow never on the list of priorities. When Jill’s pictures finally arrive it is hard to attach meaning to them. We think they’re from that time we got drinks and ran into Jason—fired, unhappy Jason—wearing a dress, but it’s hard to say.

Pru once asked the Unnameable what his name was, but he only mumbled. Maybe he didn’t understand. Sometimes she calls him
Pops
or
Gramps.
That’s the only time he smiles.

The Mexican distress frog

Jonah goes to Mexico for a week. He sends us pictures from his cell phone. We can’t tell what it was he meant to capture. The ocean? Birds in the town square? Clouds? We have clouds here, too. One picture looks like a giant chocolate bar.

He later explains that it was the entrance to the tomb of a chieftain who ruled by confusion. He would tell his subjects that a tribe was attacking from the north, then later in the day tell them the tribe had been spotted coming from the south. The militia would be spread thin. It was a matter of debate how such puzzling tactics could benefit anyone, but this obscure pocket of civilization managed to thrive for centuries. The court artisans sculpted very tall, thin figures wearing what appear to be bell-bottoms. The tribe was wiped out not by marauding forces but by three women who stumbled into town and enchanted the men with their beauty. The chieftain claimed all three as his wives. There was a blood sacrifice involved, for the first time in the people’s history, though Jonah can’t remember who was sacrificed—the new women, the old women, the men, the chief, the children.

Jonah says he bought souvenirs for all of us but left them in his hotel room. We are not sure if he went to Mexico alone or with someone. He doesn’t offer this information. Come to that, we also don’t know whether he’s straight or gay. On one occasion he spoke out, with strange and exciting stridency, against bisexuality. He said his therapist, actually now his ex-therapist, said it was a bogus position.
Just choose one or the other and stop being so dramatic.
This outburst made us all conclude that he’s bisexual.

On his desk now is a Mexican distress frog, a wooden icon about half a foot long with a ridged back, which you stroke using a wooden rod to create a soothing, some would say irritating, noise.

It sounds like this when you stroke from tail to head:
Takata takata tak.

When you move the rod in the opposite direction, the rhythm is more
Tak-tak, kataka-ta.

He plays it practically nonstop these days.

Toastmaster

Jules, mad Jules, does many things now that he’s no longer with us.
Getting fired is the best thing that’s ever happened to me,
he says. But they all say that.

Most of his hours are spent at his much-photographed restaurant in which everything is cooked in a toaster oven. How did he scare up the money? As things went sour for him at the office, he began moonlighting as a valet at an exclusive strip club on Eleventh Avenue. The tips must have been fantastic and Pru jokes that maybe
he
was the one taking it all off.

The toaster-oven place has one of those trisyllabic names that are all the rage now. Terrapin, Parapet, Happenstance? We can never remember. We regret not making it to the grand opening. Maybe it’s just Restaurant.

Business was so brisk the first month that he bought two more toaster ovens and hired a part-time toastmaster to help out during the busy lunch hour.

Circumflex, Herringbone, Anagram?

Some of us finally visit him for lunch, a field trip. We’re happy he’s doing so well. The goodwill lasts about five minutes before we become completely jealous.

He keeps making weird remarks about the office, not to make us feel bad but because he’s still obsessed with it. He wants up-to-the-minute details on Maxine, whom he’s never even met.

You don’t know what it’s like working alone,
Jules says.
There’s no one to talk to.

Is he bored already? Now we’re disappointed. Our interest was in seeing someone thrive, post-firing. And not just doing another office gig but pursuing the creative life, if putting things in a toaster can be called creative.

We all have our little side projects that we don’t like talking about. Jack II takes blurry Polaroids of urban detritus and unusual pavement cracks. Lizzie goes to Central Park or the Met most Saturdays and sketches. Laars has lead-guitar ambitions. Sometimes when he doesn’t know you’re there you can see his left hand squeezing out imaginary notes as his head nods to a secret beat. Pru knits more than she cares to admit, sweaters and scarves and baby socks for distant nieces. When Crease took over Jason’s desk, he found a hundred poems sealed in an envelope. And surely the aloof Jonah has an alternate life—weekend woodworking, novel in drawer, libretto in its fifteenth draft.

Celery, Colophon, Venison?

All present agree that Jules looks better than before. At his low points, back in the office, he resembled someone you might find in a film for a college psychology course: sleep-deprived, robotic, convinced that it was OK to apply electric shocks to small plasticine dolls labeled
MOM
and
DAD
. Now a photo crew from a Japanese magazine arranges his collar and smoothes his hair and dabs his brow.

Cataract, Polyglot, Rolodex?

We help ourselves to more lemonade and order the eggs Benedict.
Is this how you get salmonella?
Lizzie wonders.

The photographer says,
Big smile!

The deletionists

Pru reads novels on the subway for her book club, stern-looking paperbacks with matte covers and enigmatic titles. She gets a record-breaking
four
personal days a year, which she negotiated when she was hired, and traditionally she’s used them to finish a novel she couldn’t put down. She likes curling up on the couch but she says she actually gets the most reading done while on the subway. We imagine her getting on the train with a tote bag full of books and reading as she loops around the city, from Herald Square up to Inwood, from Astoria to Coney Island.

She’s read several that have
-ist
in the title:
The Pragmatist. The Vertiginist. The Deletionist.
Then there’s a crop of books with the possessive form of a famous person’s last name, followed by a noun.
Napoleon’s Pencil. Freud’s Knickers. Shakespeare’s Quandary.

Lizzie says she hates books, which is somehow adorable. She uses her personal days for manicures and things like that. In May, Laars called in sick and went to the movies instead. It was three in the afternoon and as he put his Coke in the cup holder he saw Lizzie walk in, wearing sweatpants and a baggy sweater. It was so startling he slumped in his seat till the previews began.

Shooting the moon

Every other month a film or TV crew shoots outside the office for a couple of days. Trailers hog the curb. Preening lackeys with headsets move purposefully along the sidewalk, coffee in hand, trained to address any trespass. Laars has taken to insulting them. Pru says she once flashed them, and the thought of it makes Jonah quiver like a jelly. One summer Jules would pitch water balloons from the sixth-floor window.

Our building’s rugged façade, with its lone quizzical gargoyle, appears in advertisements for a luminous sports drink, three different cell phone plans, a financial management firm, a protein bar, and a pain reliever.

Best of all is for a website that contained thousands of easy-to-use job listings for cities across the country. It’s called Jobmilla. The camera dives through an open window into a cavernous room, very Industrial Revolution, with the sinister sound of chains clanking and liquids dripping from bare rafters. A conveyor belt transports depressed-looking, obviously jobless people along a figure-eight route. At the end they get crammed into a computer monitor—representing the Jobmilla site—and are subjected to a brisk off-camera churning. Then they pop out of the building, onto the sparkling sidewalk, holding briefcases and looking thrilled to have a job and use of a comb.

The motto is
What goes around comes around.
™

The pit

There was a parking lot that many of us used as a shortcut on our way in from the subway. On rainy days it was like one big puddle with tiny islands here and there, so far apart that disparate life-forms no doubt grew and developed independently.

This spring, or was it last year, they put up boards around it and we learned to walk the long way round, using the sidewalk like good citizens. Now we can see, through holes in the boards, that a giant pit has totally erased our former route.

The pit marks the future basement of an enormous glass-skinned building shaped like the symbol for infinity. Lizzie thinks it’s going to be turned into lofts for millionaires. Jack II hopes it’s a vertical mall, or at least that it has a few benches where he can sit down and de-stress with a coffee and a fresh cinnamon roll. He says there are surprisingly few spots in the city where you can find a proper cinnamon roll. A mom-and-pop operation in Yorkville is the only one that comes to mind. Something tells us he’s misremembering a Talk of the Town piece from an old
New Yorker.

The Red Alcove

In the office Lizzie, Pru, and Jenny sometimes eat together in the alcove by the window. They order clear plastic boxes of sprouts, sip at tinted water.
Alcove
is a nice real estate term for a disused storage closet with one of the walls knocked down. Even when Jill was on the fourth floor, she was usually too shy to join them. The alcove is directly under where Jill’s desk is on the sixth floor, so it’s sort of like she’s with them in spirit now.

They look at fashion magazines, make fun of the ads, or maybe they’re not making fun.

Do you like these velour hoodies?

They never say anything but it’s clear that this refuge is for girls only.

I hate the ones with the arrow thing on the back.

Laars has started calling it the Red Alcove. Since his vow of chastity, he has joined a book club. His ex-roommate introduced him to it, then quit, making Laars the only man left. The club just read a book called
The Red Tent,
about a special tent in which women used to hang out whenever they were getting their periods.

It was pretty interesting,
he says diplomatically.

Four attempts

Laars is about to go on vacation. He’s using two vacation days and two personal days. He asks everyone to remind him to change his outgoing message before he leaves, but how are we supposed to remember that?

He has to head out to the airport by 5:30. At 5:20 we can hear him trying to leave a suitable outgoing message. Ten minutes seems like a lot of time, but everyone thinks he’s cutting it close.

Hi, this is Laars. I’m out of the office. Until the twenty-first. So. Please leave a message, or actually
don’t
leave a message—I’ll—CRAP.

This is Laars I’ll be on vacation from the seventeenth till the twenty-first and so I’ll be out of the office on vacation aaarggg.

It’s a Tourette’s convention in there. Laars buries his head in his arms. Slivers of sweat darken his going-on-vacation shirt, the blue country-and-western-style shirt with the white piping.

I’m out of, I’m on—No, no.

This is—Laa—Fuck me,
fuck.

The backlog

It doesn’t matter what you say on your outgoing message. Having listened to you, people feel the need to comment. When Laars gets back from vacation, his voice mail is clogged anyway.

Hope you had a great time,
everyone says, even people he’s never spoken to before.
Welcome back.

He knows from the display screen whether the message was from someone important or not. For long stretches he plows through the backlog, pressing 1 to hear a new message, then 9 to erase the call without even letting the robot-phone voice tell him who it was.

Message received from 2-1-2—Message deleted.

There are long stretches in which he hits 1 and then 9 so fast, 1-9-1-9-1-9, that all the robot voice can say is
Mess—Mess—Mess—Mess—Mess—Mess.