Personal Days (6 page)

Later, he worries that he erased something important, like a message from a random low-maintenance billionaire asking if he’d like to spearhead a new project, a combination art gallery–Web empire–environmental magazine–snowboarding camp–counterculture festival.

< 10 >

The confession

I can’t help it,
Jack II is saying to Lizzie as he microwaves something with a high cheese content.
I’m in love with Half Asian British Accent Woman.

He tries to get her to swear she won’t tell Crease.
He’ll kick the crap out of me,
he says, always ready to add unnecessary drama to his life. Instead she tells Pru, who tells Crease.

One if by land

Lizzie has this whole mini-rant about how British sitcoms and movies and books are overrated. In fact the whole country and all the people in it are given a free ride in the U.S. It was sort of zany-charming at first, but she needs to find a way to freshen her delivery. For starters, she could stop invoking the Boston Tea Party.

She goes on this tear again, set off by an ad for a film involving the Isle of Wight and the whimsical codgers who start a nudist colony. But we suspect it has something to do with Crease’s new obsession with HABAW, Jack II’s even newer infatuation, and the possibility that all the men in the office will follow suit.

Can’t undo

Pru’s résumé has taken on a life of its own. She thinks she’s finally solved the double-line-space problem by turning everything into a font called Lemuria, then copy-pasting it into another document. It looks like hieroglyphics, but you can see that the double line space has miraculously resolved into a single line space.

Let’s party,
she e-mails us.

Then she selects all the text to change the font to Bookman Old Style. She releases the mouse too quickly and it becomes Braggadocio, which is appropriate only for menus at restaurants that have an old-timey, organ grinder theme to the decor.

Now I can get a job with a barbershop quartet.

I hear the telegraph company is hiring,
says Crease.

She’s stuck. The dialogue box gives her a
Can’t undo.

It’s a double negative,
says Jenny helpfully.

When Pru selects the text and tries to change the font to something normal, the double line space reappears.

What goes around comes around,
says Pru, quoting Jobmilla.

Two words

Pru walks by the Sprout’s office. He’s just dialed a number and is waiting for a beep to leave a message. He says two words:
Veal stew.
Then he hangs up.

He notices her.

I’m calling myself to remind myself to go out later and buy ingredients for veal stew!

Just some old crap

Jonah listens to music while he works. He uses the CD player in his computer. He wears blue plastic headphones that are either really cheap or really expensive. We can hear sounds leak through, tiny voices squawking impotently. This isn’t so bad. It makes us think we’re working in a relaxed, groovy environment instead of a disaster area.

What we don’t like is when Jonah starts tapping a pencil to the music, or pumping his legs so hard his desk shakes. You can hear it from outside his office. Crease makes a loud show of migrating to his other desk whenever Jonah gets into his musical phase.

If you ask Jonah what he’s listening to, he’ll say,
Just some old crap.
We figure it’s country music or show tunes. But Pru corners him and learns that the CD in Jonah’s heavy rotation is a recording of a Czech opera about a woman who is three hundred years old and from a different planet or something.

Is
Jonah
from a different planet? This might account for the weirdly glowing slate-colored eyes, the sleek briefcase made of futuristic water-repellent material, the tendency to predict the future with better than average accuracy. The trips to Mexico are to deliver complex information and late-capitalist artifacts to the mothership.

Also, once Laars saw him in the office early in the morning, the lights still off, typing with his eyes closed.

Recently, Jonah explained that his name is properly pronounced
Yawner,
a Czech pronunciation perhaps, but no one’s going to make the switch. It could also be that Jonah wants the Sprout and Maxine to think he spells his name with a
Y,
since all the
J
s are getting fired these days.

FYA

Maxine e-mails some of us a link to an article she thought was funny, from a blog we’ve never heard of.
FYA,
she writes in the subject field, followed by a smiley face.

Opening the link crashes everyone’s computer, except Pru’s. We reboot. She copy-pastes us some of the photos and text. The site is devoted to images of dogs and cats nuzzling each other.

We expect more from Maxine, somehow.

After Pru hits Send, her computer crashes. Then our computers all crash again.

An hour later, Crease says,
I think it means For Your Amusement?

< 11 >

Laser Henry

Magic realism in the HR department: Henry gets the LASIK surgery and is out for a week. When he comes back, the blues of his irises have intensified fivefold.

Today he tells Jonah that he can see through things—clothes, metal, wood, brick. Not all the time, and the image goes in and out of focus. He has no control over the clarity or power. Sometimes he can see people’s inner organs. It is as much a curse as a gift.

Since when has he been totally insane?
asks Jonah.

Still, we make ourselves scarce when Henry walks by, scatter from his line of sight as fast as possible.

Background check

Periodically, Jill suffers repetitive stress disorder, though Jonah calls
his
pains carpal tunnel syndrome. They are not the same thing, though neither victim can quite delineate the difference.

She used to wonder if it was all in her mind. She gives us a synopsis of a book she’s been reading about back pain. The writer asserts that nearly all such agonies are manifestations of pent-up stress. The psychosomatic explanation is attractive but leads to problems. We all develop back pain within a week of hearing this viewpoint.

Make it stop

Another of Maxine’s FYA e-mails leads to a website showing cats curled up in bathroom sinks, gazing up with oppressive cuteness. What is wrong with her? Unless maybe it’s some sort of virus that’s hijacked her address book. We’ve heard of things like that before.

Laars read about a virus called YourPhyred that lurked around certain job websites. When you try to upload your résumé for potential employers, the virus turns it to gibberish or worse. Except
you
never know it. Your CV just hangs out there, in cyberspace, until an employer downloads it. Then it turns into a document filled with yards of random characters, or pictures of rainbows, or reviews of hard-core porn.

The humming

The Unnameable has taken to humming as he makes his rounds, picking up and dropping off paper. In another person this would annoy us, but his pitch is perfect and the songs are unfamiliar and instantly calming. Melodies from Jonah’s Czech alien opera, perhaps. Sometimes we put paper in our out-bins as bait, drawing him near in the hope that he’ll trot out a tune.

Today Jill hears someone in the stairwell for what seems like hours, humming the Cole Porter songbook with gusto.

But when she opens the door the song stops. She strains to hear any human sound: a footfall, a cough, the rustle of clothes.

I’m going crazy up here,
she e-mails Pru, who doesn’t write back, because you can go crazy on any floor.

The Republic of Smokistan

Those of us who smoke have to do it outside, creating a slovenly knot on the sidewalk about thirty times a day. Workers from other offices in the building also congregate here to light up, of course, and though at first some of us tried to make small talk, now barely a nod passes between the various factions. They are not like us.

Crease doesn’t smoke but has taken up the habit to increase his chances of seeing HABAW. Is this what stalkers do? Laars says that Jenny met her boyfriend out here. The
major tool
worked at a graphic design studio on the top floor but was laid off and started his own studio out of his apartment.

People who can barely draw a straight line are becoming graphic designers,
says Laars. His tone suggests that he’s content to wait for a time when graphic design becomes an obsolete trade and things are allowed to emerge unmediated, pure human symbols, hand-scrawled sandwich boards, everything a sort of instinctive folk art.

People knock their ashes into the tiny opening at the top of a buoy-shaped receptacle. Sometimes even when no one’s outside you can see a ghostly finger of smoke emerging from the hole as you approach the office, a signal of recent stress and despair.

Random poignancy circa 2:30

Is Excel crashing everyone’s computer?

Keep the deli on the left

Pru gets invited to parties. She always goes and always complains about them. It’s her most appealing quality. We picture her stepping out in boas and shawls. We also like that she never invites any of us to go with her. How is it that she has a whole life outside the office? Everyone must, but most days this seems like too much to ask.

More and more the parties are in strange parts of Brooklyn.
Everybody lives in Brooklyn now,
says Pru, who doesn’t realize most of
us
live in Brooklyn now. We like that she complains about Brooklyn—the distances, the erratic subways, having to take a forty-dollar car service back home. She lives uptown in a place her stepfather’s first wife snapped up as a pied-à-terre for like five dollars and some bottle caps back in the ’70s.

But she has to go to the parties, and the parties are now in Brooklyn. She has no conception of how the neighborhoods fit together, which trains go where. The directions are elaborate, vaguely ritualistic. She writes them down and fears losing them. She tries to memorize them but can’t. She keeps them in her coat pocket and refers to them repeatedly on the subway, shading the scrap of paper with her hand. Broadcasting your outsider status could be fatal.
Stay in the last car. When you exit the station, take the staircase on the right. Walk three blocks north toward the big clock, staying on the west side of the street. The deli should be on your left. If you see the laundromat, you’re going the wrong way.

Pru says,
It should be Walk three blocks and say your prayers.
She has the sense that if she doesn’t follow the directions to the letter, she will die and her body will never be found. All of us crave this sort of excitement.

Budapest

At one party Pru sees none other than the Original Jack. He looks a little rounder, but since he was rail-thin before, this means he’s basically perfect. His skin glows. He’s not exactly handsome but Pru says there’s a certain newfound allure. The baldness is a recent development but somehow it works.

We’re working on a theory that everyone looks better once they leave the office forever.

The party was thrown by someone Pru went to school with. The way she says this makes it sound like they dated briefly freshman year until he slept with her roommate. At first the party was the height of awkwardness, people sitting in a circle and pushing potato chips around their plates, but then at 11 more people showed up and things got slightly more fun. There was disco music and people who came dressed up as scientists.

The main lesson we take away is that the Original Jack is somehow a consultant and makes more money than all of us combined. When she saw him, he had just returned from a business trip to Budapest, which he pronounced in an authentically unfamiliar way.

Also, I think he was hitting on me.

Lizzie makes a how-disgusting face but Pru just shrugs.

More time with the cats

Maxine calls a meeting in the fourth-floor conference room, then cancels it. Instead she wants to meet each of us individually, one person every twenty minutes, beginning at noon. This can’t be good.

We drift toward the coffee machine. Nobody feels like making any. In truth nobody has made coffee in weeks. The pots hold bluish water, a nontoxic chemical cleanser that theoretically leaves no cleanser taste. We’re not convinced. We’ve been buying our coffee at the Bad Starbucks or at the new tasty hippie coffee van that has replaced the mobile taco stand around the corner. Laars thinks the hippie coffee van is maybe run by Scientologists.

Scientologists can’t drink coffee,
says Crease.

You’re thinking of Mormons,
says Laars.

Jonah jokes that he’s going to get fired. He
wants
to get fired, he tells us, provided he gets severance. If he does, he’ll go to Mexico again for a few months. Then he’ll come back and collect unemployment and spend more time with his cats. He blushes as he says this, which makes
cats
sound like a euphemism for something else.

He says he’s nearly done with night school. This is news to us. While we’ve been sitting around and complaining, he’s been complaining and improving himself. We feel he should have told us. Maybe we would have enrolled in night school as well.

< 12 >

That sinking feeling

Work picks up. There’s hardly time to talk. Pru doesn’t think Maxine wants to fire us. She says there’s no way the company can function if they cut anyone else.

We agree.
They must know that,
says Laars.
They can’t be
that
stupid.

But actually they can. And then time will pass, and the company will still be afloat, and we’ll wonder who’s next.

Maxine should fire herself,
says Jonah. When did he grow a mustache? It’s light, much lighter than his hair.

I’m getting that sinking feeling,
says Laars. He fiddles with the coffeemaking elements, but decides against the actual making of coffee.

I need a smoke,
says Pru, heading for the elevator. Crease is about to go with her, then remembers he’s quit smoking. He wants to hang out and see if HABAW will pass, but the other day his former student came hurtling down the sidewalk, excited shouts of
Crease!
filling the air.

We stand around nervously for another minute. Maxine struts by with a weird vicious but kind of hot smile and we all watch her as she passes.

She’s really amazing,
says Laars.
Like, different-life-form amazing.

Later we hear Jonah running the wooden rod across the back of his Mexican distress frog. The verdict is still out on his mustache.

Some percentage

There’s a meeting. It’s pretty bad. Some of us wonder if it’s a dream.

I want each of you to think about what it is you’re bringing to the table,
the Sprout says.

After work, we compare notes over drinks. It might as well have been over potato chips, though. We’re too frazzled to drink.

According to Laars, Maxine said that the company was deducting 15 percent from everyone’s gross salary to cover an unexpected rise in costs, a one-time-only thing. Jonah understood that, in order to comply with new city and state taxes, a 15 percent cut was necessary, over two pay periods, meaning 15 percent
each
paycheck, or 7.5 each for a total of 15? We are trying to remember how percentages work. On a napkin Lizzie has drawn the little hut you make when you’re about to divide a number, but she hasn’t written any numbers down.

Pru came away with the sense that the Sprout insisted on trimming 20 percent from half of the paychecks and 10 percent from the other half, but that she, Maxine, had approached him with a flat 15 percent across the board. And Laars is under the impression she had told him 1.5 percent, but for the rest of the year.

It’s like our own little
Rashomon.
We are either the victims of deliberate obfuscation or we are all complete morons.
The Californians are going to have a field day with us,
Jack II says.

Vow of chastity

Laars’s self-Googling has reached another level. He keeps turning up more stuff: more people with his name, more women he’s been involved with. Both his doppelgängers and his exes are having more fun, leading more interesting lives, than he is.

His arms hurt. He’s in a rut and needs to lift the curse. He restates his vow of chastity to Jenny, which makes everyone think that he must have recently broken it, that he’s hitting on Jenny, or preferably both.

I’ve been thinking about going to church,
he says.

In the meantime, Laars plans to stop all gallivanting and carousing, all pointless crushes and ludicrous Maxine obsessing, all shadowy self-abuse. The Googling will end. He is going to become a serious worker and a spiritual being.

The Sprout overhears this last part and laughs:
Hoo-hoo!

Valid actions

Lizzie drags an icon out of a cluttered corner of her screen but lets go too soon. It falls into the document she’s working on, which happens to be her résumé. The icon bounces back to its starting place with a
boinggg
noise she’s never heard before. She learns that
Word cannot insert a file into itself.

Word can seriously go fuck itself,
she mutters. She’s been talking to herself a lot lately but maybe we all have.

Later she’s trying to put a chart into a different document but gets scolded:
That is not a valid action for footnotes.

This is funny—the quick response, the finger-wagging strictness—but it also creeps her out. She calls up Pru except she accidentally dials her own extension and the little screen says,
You cannot call yourself.

Our machines know more than we do, Pru thinks. Even their deficiencies and failures are instructive. They are trying to tell us about the limits of the human, the nature of the possible.
Or something like that,
says Pru, who has been reading a novel about cyborgs set in the year 2012.

The message that kills us is the one that pops up on the rare occasions when we remember to shut everything down for the weekend, just before we turn the computer off.

Are you sure you want to quit?

The misrecognitions

Jonah sees Jules in a coffee shop on Twenty-second, wearing a baseball cap and glasses with enormous frames, just one millimeter away from being joke glasses. Jules says his toaster-oven restaurant is closed for renovations. Something exploded last week.

Now I have time to polish off my screenplay,
he says, thwacking a grubby stack of paper perched unsteadily on the chair beside him.

Despite a lack of interest in all but three or four films ever projected in the history of cinema, Jules was apparently hard at work on a script before he was let go. The title is
Personal Daze—
Daze
with a
z, he says, which confuses Jonah until he sees the cover page.

Jules has a younger brother whose friend is friends with one of the people who wrote the movie about the stolen horse.
You need a foot in the door,
he explains.

It all came together shortly
before
he got fired, during his brief exile on the sixth floor. Otto in IT wanted to try out Glottis, a fancy new voice-recognition program, so he hooked it up to Jules’s computer and asked him to say anything. This pretty much became his job for that last strange month. He would read newspaper stories aloud, bits of whatever book was at hand. Otto would study the results. Jules began to freestyle, yapping about the weather, lunch, things he overheard on the way to the office, childhood. He did different voices. Before long he was making up a story in which certain characters reappeared. The screenplay was born.

Jules would experiment with how low he could speak and still produce legible results on the screen. At first Glottis gave him a lot of errors, thirty misrecognitions for every hundred words. Over time it adapted to his voice, learned to negotiate the peculiar Julesian cadences and frequent slurring, and the error rate went down significantly.

Still, there was something wild about the words that would occasionally appear—surreal juxtapositions, such as when a cop character tells a perp to
Keep wool
instead of
Keep cool
or the periodic greeting
Jello!

Sometimes when Jules wanted to open a file via Glottis, words would appear on the screen:
Open fire!

The title,
Personal Daze,
also came about this way.
Let’s just say it’s the name of someone I met, a customer at the club,
says Jules.
I don’t want to talk about it.

A bad egg,
says Jonah.

Worse than that—this guy was like the bad
chicken!

How can
Personal Daze
be someone’s name? Jules won’t elaborate, as if he still fears retribution.

Jules dictated reams of material during work hours. Every night he’d boil down his ramblings to half a page. By the time he was fired he’d compiled nearly 150 pages of fast-moving, wisecracking, bittersweet dialogue.

Now he estimates he only has twenty-five pages left to go before he can stop composing and begin revising. But somehow it’s harder to write now that he doesn’t work in the office.

You need something to push against,
he says. He compares the creative process to an oyster requiring sand for a pearl.
Also, I need an ending.

He attributes his current writer’s block to the fact that he no longer has the voice-recognition system. Glottis costs a bundle, as does the brand of microphone headset with just the right sensitivity. He misses the surreptitious muttering, the magical appearance of words on the glowing monitor like a parade of ants materializing out of a pool of milk. More than anything else, he longs for the faulty wording, the slips between thought and expression. The misrecognitions had been his inspiration.

Jules is cagey at first, but then lets Jonah read certain scenes. Mostly it’s a ghost story set in a haunted gentleman’s club on Eleventh Avenue. The main character, Jude, appears to be modeled on Jules, down to the precision-cut sideburns. The rest is a little hard to follow but seems to take place in our office, except that everybody likes the boss and plays basketball with him.

I must have been reading a dream sequence,
Jonah tells us afterward.

Playing the frog

Jonah keeps his door shut lately. Is he working on his own screenplay? Listening to opera nonstop?

Sometimes we forget about him for days at a stretch, until we hear the Mexican distress frog’s plaintive call:
Takata takata takata, kat-kat ka-tak.

A mouse in the hand

Three of us meet with the Sprout. He hums tunelessly as he toggles between files on his computer desktop, smiling unhappily as he eyes various charts. Like some of us, he has a second, older computer on his desk, which he also glances at now and again.
It’s a period of transition,
he likes to say: The new system hasn’t been successfully phased in yet and no one wants to get rid of the old data, just in case. No one ever wants to get rid of anything, though once something is gone there’s a mild sensation of improved health and wide-open desktop vistas.

The IT people always look harried, barking into two-way radios, and so you don’t feel right bugging them. Old-timers like Jonah know that it’s
always
a period of transition.

At one point the Sprout has a different mouse in each hand, clicking in counterpoint. When he double-clicks on the top of a document, it flies to the bottom of his screen like a little bat. He talks while he moves from one set of data to the other.

Every time he saves something, the computer makes a sound, a coin dropped into a box of xylophone parts.

He e-mails himself an enormous Excel file from the old computer to the new one. But the new one can’t open it. He downloads some sort of Excel upgrade onto the old computer, crashing it.

I’m not sure why I did that,
he says, rebooting.

We gaze at the bookshelf. There’s now a gauzy photo of Sheila in a black wooden frame dotted with seashells. We trade glances, trying to read each other’s eyes. One of us seems to be saying,
She’s hot,
another,
Weird frame,
another,
Wait, did she die?

Some of the old books are gone. The new titles include a massive bird-watcher’s guide and a coffee-table book in which people across America take pictures of their shoes at different hours of the day.

The Sprout is still saying
hmmm.
We detect a vein throbbing on his forehead. We always forget about the vein until we see it again.

Then he relaxes. He arches an eyebrow comically as the fax machine in the far corner of the office begins receiving. It’s actually a fax from
himself.

Hoo-hoo!

He plucks the printouts from the machine.

Read ’em and weep,
he says. Like most of his statements these days, it’s either totally meaningless or somehow evil.

Random poignancy, continued

The next day, Friday, the Sprout asks Laars for a file from last year. Laars’s system of folders is so byzantine, his naming conventions so idiosyncratic, and his memory so poor, that he often has to do a global search of all the contents on his computer if he’s looking for a file more than a few weeks old. He tries to guess what word might spring up in the document title, then hits Search.

I don’t understand,
the computer says.

The air of mystery

For some reason Jonah uses a mug that says
Joan.
He’s had it for a while, but Pru just noticed the spelling recently.

Hey Joan,
Pru says.

Jonah just smiles and cultivates his air of mystery.

The letters are in a painfully dated ’80s font, a red not quite cursive, like something used on the newsletter for a dodgy Myrtle Beach time-share. The mug is white with thin multi-colored horizontal stripes above and below the name.

What’s shaking, Joan?

He looks like he’s going to reach for the Mexican distress frog.

Crease says
Joan
is the name of Jonah’s robust common-law wife, now ex, who lives in Texas with their ornery love child. He claims he heard this from Jules.

Pru keeps calling Jonah
Joan.

The long good-bye

The Sprout is leaving the office for the weekend. There’s a spring in his step, a thin jacket draped over his arm, and a bag from the Italian bakery dangling from a finger.

Have a good one,
he says to Jenny, closing his door and locking it smoothly.

Later, man,
he barks at Jonah while turning the corner by the mail room, the very picture of managerial friendliness.

Any fun weekend plans?
he asks Pru, not quite pausing as he heads to the elevator. She says she’ll probably see a movie and go to a party in Brooklyn. He nods and says,
Excellent plan—don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.

He gives Lizzie a little wink and Laars a big salute and hits the Down button. The elevator takes its time arriving. He taps one tennis-sneakered foot in time to the jaunty tune in his head.