Personal Days (9 page)

Confiding something to Laars and Pru pretty much ensured that everyone would know about it. Most of them had yet to see HABAW, but they imagined she was out of his league, if she looked anything like the way Crease described her.

II (B) ii (c) 5.2:
Was Jack II’s parallel obsession in jest? He was living with his girlfriend, an office manager in midtown. Pru described her as a
real character,
meaning she had a thick Queens accent.

At last year’s holiday party she did shots with the Sprout, commenting every few minutes,
So
you’re
the SPROUT!
It was very strange. Of course none of them had ever called him
the Sprout
to his face. But clearly he knew. He kept bellowing
Hoo-hoo!
and the shots kept coming.

They wondered if she now knew about HABAW.

II (B) iii (a):
Initials had a way of getting out of control. Pru kept saying TMI, even if all you said was that you’d meet her at the elevator in a minute because you wanted to wash your hands first.

Jason used to say DGT, or
Don’t Go There.
That one never caught on.

Crease was fond of scrawling ASAP on everything, most recently on a Post-it addressed to the janitorial staff:
Please fix soap dispenser in bathroom ASAP. This is a good way to spread germs, flu, etc.

FYI was what Lizzie said for something as simple as the sun coming out.
FYI, I think it’s not going to rain today.

Jonah put HFS into e-mails, usually trailed by a long string of ellipses. Nobody wanted to ask him what it meant. Crease thought it stood for
Holy fucking shit.
It tended to appear after some account of the Sprout’s particular brand of spineless evil.

II (B) iii (b):
Maxine’s thing was still FYA—For Your Amusement. She sent another message with that subject line. It had a link to a website full of Polish jokes.

Weird,
said Lizzie.

Polish jokes are so Elks club 1978,
said Pru. She theorized that it was the rise of Solidarity and the ascension of Pope John Paul II that killed the Polish joke.

It seemed like Maxine meant to send this only to Grime, because she prefaced it with a jaunty reference to England. There was also a line about bed linens that was totally DGT and TMI and, if you thought about it, OMFG.

The website froze everyone’s screens. IT sent a faintly amused message via voice mail:
Please don’t send, open, or even think about Polish jokes.

II (B) iv (a):
In the office, new alliances were forged from time to time. One Wednesday some of them were talking to Big Sal from IT and Henry from HR in the elevator, and all of a sudden Lizzie said,
Come grab drinks with us.

It was strangely not that awkward. They learned that Big Sal had just started a few months ago. He’d overlapped with Bernhard, whom he then replaced. He liked the office but thought he was due to get canned soon.
The problem is, you guys have like three different systems and they’re not really talking to each other,
he explained. He began half his sentences with
The problem is.
His job was to make all lines of communication interact smoothly, a pretty much impossible task.
Your office is like the Bermuda Triangle of IT jobs,
he said.

Pru was expecting a whole big layoff narrative, but Big Sal said that was just how IT was. He didn’t seem too worried about his imminent canning, prospects for reemployment, or life in general.

II (B) iv (b):
They learned that Henry from HR was married, had three kids, one of whom had just graduated from college, and conceivably could have been part of their little office gang. Henry was older than they thought.

His son had an internship with the Parks Department but what he really wanted to do was dance.
The kind where you wear rolls of toilet paper and walk backwards.

They all nodded and tried to look like they respected that sort of dancing, or even knew what he was talking about.

II (B) iv (c):
Henry had a daughter in high school and a daughter who was only five. He was obsessed with the LASIK surgery he’d gotten. Most people had forgotten that he used to wear enormous glasses in which you could see your whole head and torso, glasses with frames the color of ice-diluted cola.

He said he loved not having to wear them but sometimes his eyes took in too much information. First was the X-ray vision. Now he received random glimpses into the future. Whole lives played out in his gaze. He looked at his son and saw an old man in a plastic loincloth, doing somersaults on a stage meant to evoke a windswept plain. His older daughter, twenty years hence, was wearing a welding mask—she’ll become a mechanic, or maybe a sculptor.

The strangest vision was of his younger daughter. He saw her as having the same job he did, heading an HR department at a medium-size office.
And I’m fine with that,
he said.

No one felt confident enough to ask Henry what the future held for them.

II (B) iv (d):
Grime, quiet up to that point, said good night and headed out of the bar. Big Sal studied their faces and finally asked,
What’s with that guy?

When they asked what he meant, he said,
There’s a skull on his desk.

No there isn’t,
said Lizzie, who was one to know.

I mean, there
was.
On his old desk.

Jonah, whose class had been canceled, came in and had a seat right as Big Sal said that Grime used to be on the
fifth
floor until recently, working out of an undecorated cubicle near the broken refrigerator.

Since when?
asked Jonah.

Big Sal didn’t know. They forgot that he hadn’t actually been with the company that long. He remembered that the first time he saw Grime was in July.
The problem is, the guy refuses to stay put.

II (B) iv (e):
Henry from HR said he liked being his own boss. He didn’t consider himself accountable to the Sprout or Maxine or anyone—if anything, they had to answer to
him.
He knew everything about you: vacation days, personal days, sick days, address and social security, taxes. It was a radical, HR-centric view of the universe.

He said that having a boss was infantilizing. You felt the need to please, to explain constantly, to request permission for every little thing. And even if you thought you got along fine with your boss—even if you thought you
liked
your boss—the possibility of punishment always hovered.

All children are a little paranoid,
he said, speaking as someone with actual children.

Just then Big Sal’s beeper purred. He was needed back in the office. The e-mail server had to come down so he could root out a virus. The Polish joke website had sent spyware into their consoles. Every time the system crashed, he said, he was that much closer to losing his job, even though crashes happen all the time, everywhere. Dozens of small crashes happened in the office every day, he explained, crashes the rest of them knew nothing about.

IT people are like the doctors of the twenty-first century,
said Henry admiringly, as Big Sal headed back to work.

II (B) iv (f ):
Pru recapped the story of Henry’s psychic powers for Jonah, who wanted to know about his own future. Henry said he saw big things, big changes.

Good or bad?

Answer cloudy, try again,
he said, wiggling his fingers in front of his face like a carnival mystic.

The response satisfied Jonah, who had been at loose ends lately, ever since his Mexican distress frog went AWOL.

II (B) iv (g):
The night was fun, but none of them would ever drink and talk like that with either Henry or Big Sal again. It was a onetime workplace bonding event. Spontaneous bursts of boundary-crossing fellowship had happened before. But it was rare, like that one Christmas during World War I when the British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches and played soccer with each other. Usually Big Sal and Henry were the distant targets of their anger—they’d stamp their feet at how slow IT was to fix things, how HR managed to bungle a date on a vacation form. Later, in the clear light of the workday, everything was awkward and they wound up wishing it had never happened.

II (C): Return to Siberia

II (C) i (a):
One morning not long after, Laars realized he’d run out of paper clips. It wasn’t that he had a lot to clip together, but a packet had been taunting him since Friday in all its loose-leaf glory. He wanted to be a man of action. He had recently stopped saying
What is the point?
and had undertaken a vow of chastity and now he was going to get some paper clips.

He additionally needed staples and, for that matter, a functioning stapler. The one he had was an ancient gray model that he’d inherited from Jules. It worked approximately every third time. It was more objet d’art than true stapler. Long ago someone had added layers of masking tape over the hood for a bit of hand cushion. The tape was sepia now and bore the ominous name
KRASH
. The letters had been carved deep into the tape with ballpoint—mostly red, with notes of black and blue, as though they had been traced over every day, in mindless desperation, for years on end.

II (C) i (b):
Jenny remembered that Jill used to hoard paper clips, staples, every sort of fastener and fixative.
She had a huge thing of rubber cement,
Jenny said.

II (C) i (c):
Pru, Grime, Jack II, and Crease joined the party as it continued its travels, heading up to Siberia, footsteps echoing in the stairwell. Grime started in with a sea shanty—droll at first, with mermaid imagery and calls for rum. Then they just wished he would stop. Lizzie and Pru kept their distance, alert to any sudden disco maneuvers. All of them were kind of holding their breath till they got upstairs.

Turning the corner, they stepped into a flood of light, a change in atmosphere. Siberia had its own weather. A soft sound: The Unnameable was emptying the contents of Jill’s desk into a huge wheeled plastic trash bin, a thousand kinds of paper. Her chair was in there, the throne of Siberia turned upside down, silver wheels catching the early afternoon sun. It was a better chair than most of them had, but none of them wanted to be the one who lunged for it.

Jill’s desk,
said Jenny, like she was the phantom Jill’s receptionist, answering a call.

It felt like years since Jill had been fired. They’d never even had farewell drinks for her. Everyone thought someone else was supposed to get in touch, organize. It was way too late now.

Jill,
said Crease.
I can barely remember her. I can barely remember what she looks like.

The weird thing was, everyone thought Crease had a minor crush on Jill. Even Pru could see them as a couple. It made sense.
They have the same body type,
Jack II said. But the advent of HABAW had completely obliterated those feelings in Crease, incinerated them and sealed the ashes off forever. She was like the Chinese emperor who built the Great Wall and burned all the books.

II (C) i (d):
The Unnameable came by wearing an air-filtration mask.
Sky blue is definitely your color,
Pru said, and his smile was apparent even under the rubberized cloth. He squirted a double loop of cleanser on the desktop and removed one of the clean rags from his belt. He swiped with military precision, in rectangles of decreasing size. With each pass the surface whitened dramatically. It was amazing to see something actually work the way it was supposed to work. Jonah stared at the center of the swipe area, as if a long-buried message was about to be revealed.

The Unnameable heaved an armload of stuffed manila folders into the dumpster. Then he manned a broom too big for him, pushing a minor dirt formation down the hall a ways, where it merged with a larger cluster. If you kept going, if you turned and passed the vending machine and entered the most remote region of Siberia, you ran the risk of ambush by a creature made entirely of punched-paper holes and old hair and notebook frills.

Up to that point the Unnameable had only been seen as a bearer of interoffice mail, a patient trudger. By contrast, his upper body now moved with freedom, even a kind of wordless, elastic joy. His concentration was tremendous. Who else in the office worked that hard, that efficiently, at anything? You could imagine strains of Vivaldi as some faded television star narrated the story of artisanal desk cleaners who have been cleaning desks for five generations.

Jonah picked up something that had fallen off a pile of papers—a birthday card from Jason, dated March the fifth, but what was the year?

II (C) i (e):
Two other men came by to make alarming dismantling noises. They wore flannel shirts and lime green hard hats that said
KOHUT BROTHERS
, though they were probably not
the
brothers, or even brothers, themselves. One was thin, the other barrel-chested. They ripped out a patch of linoleum for some reason, so now it looked like a UFO had blasted Jill from above, capturing her in a teleportation beam. The plants, the thriving wildlife, were nowhere to be seen. A few insect skeletons lay scattered on the narrow sill, shiny and precise and sad as broken jewelry.

II (C) ii (a):
Everyone marveled at the ample real estate in Siberia, the generous sunlight, all the while keeping an eye out for dust monsters. Jonah had a dim memory of coming up here once, long before Jill’s exile, and seeing wood-paneled walls, plush sofas, elegant standing lamps. There had been chatty women with fun haircuts and crisp clothing, slim dudes in natty suits talking in an office argot he didn’t understand. They called each other
Slick,
said things like
Smell ya later.
A little radio played NPR while typewriters rang out thrillingly. It was weird but kind of great, a civilized oasis. He didn’t know anyone’s name, or what exactly they did. He was too shy to speak back then—four, five years ago. He remembered dropping off a file, picking up a floppy disk from a beautiful girl in a rhomboid-print dress, a girl with a wonderful, untraceable accent and the most enchanting golden hair. The next time he was up there, less than a year later, everyone was gone except a severe-looking gnome in the corner, bald and with white hair in his ears like feathered nests, a figure nearly invisible behind towering stacks of paper. Jonah wondered if it had all been a dream.