Personal Days (12 page)

Crease was in charge of making photocopies of
The Jilliad
for everyone, but the machine was having trouble reading the unusual ink. So Lizzie kept the notebook in her desk for safekeeping, and the rest of them took turns borrowing it from her, transcribing a page or two each time. The idea was to merge all the finished pieces into one master file, which they could then annotate, print, e-mail, and otherwise control.

Laars said he was uneasy about sharing it outside their little circle.

Lizzie thought
The Jilliad
could be a hit on the Internet, a piece of homegrown cubicle art. Maybe Jack II could design a website. Pru agreed that it deserved to exist outside of the office, but wanted to think about what form it should take.

There was talk of detaching individual pages in order to expedite transcription, a motion voted down by the circle, but just barely.

Laars was getting the sense he wasn’t even part of the circle anymore.

II (E) xxv:
Without Laars,
The Jilliad
would surely have disappeared forever, tossed out with the rest of the rubbish. Now he wished he hadn’t saved it. He wanted to show it to everyone because they all knew Jill, but it was quickly becoming something greater. Their real memories of her didn’t stand a chance. It was like killing her off a second time.

And what was Grime’s deal? He didn’t even know her but now he was talking as if he did.

Laars searched his computer for any photos of Jill—from nights out, from last year’s holiday party—but he couldn’t find her face. She was probably the person taking the pictures. In one, the flash was caught in the window behind a laughing Pru and a tipsy Lizzie, and you could see a pale arm and a ghost of a smile floating in the glass, the photographer capturing a sliver of herself.

But when Laars tried to reconstruct her from these hints, he only came up with Jill as he never knew her: in her last, too-sleek haircut, her chin held high, the would-be office warrior with a master plan in her refurnished head.

II (E) xxvi:
Everyone devoted spare time to the transcription of
The Jilliad,
all except Jonah, who was missing out on the whole adventure—studying for his night school exams, using up the last of his personal days.

Grime had been asked
not
to assist in the typing, but he was definitely still in the loop, as it were, offering his interpretations free of charge.

It looked like Lizzie was talking to Grime again. She still hadn’t told anyone what he’d said to her that was so disturbing. She always had a minimum of two pens sticking out of her hair.

Pru borrowed
The Jilliad
and kept it for a long time, for so long that she usurped the librarian position from Lizzie. She buzzed with theories. She said that Jill fit into a great American tradition of outsider artists, who created purely in private. They lived superficially humdrum lives until their breathtaking work was discovered.

Laars wasn’t sure what she meant, so she gave some examples: The deaf-mute farmhand who made haunting charcoal-and-saliva sketches. The savant dishwasher with the photographic memory who drew every bird he ever saw. The prisoner who stitched tableaux of ballparks and football fields using the colored threads plucked from his socks.

The life becomes part of the art,
said Pru. In such cases the dead-end existence led not to despair but to wild acts of creation. Most of these were lost forever. One had a moral duty to rescue and preserve such works whenever possible.

She alluded to friends she had, or friends of friends, people in the gallery world with names like Nico and Eduardo.

Laars didn’t think they should be exploiting Jill without her knowledge. He got catty and brought up Pru’s unfinished graduate thesis.
What was it called? The Aesthetics of Boredom?

Lizzie finally removed the decayed banana from the fridge in the pantry. She held it with a paper towel, as far away from her body as possible. The shape was very unbananalike, as though the matter had liquefied and reconsolidated several times.

She refocused her eyes just long enough to see a name written in green marker on the Dole sticker.

This had been Jill’s banana, pre-Siberia. Nobody wanted to do the math.

II (F) To Recap

II (F) i:
Laars came into work looking like someone had punched him in the mouth with a sock full of salt and then insulted his grandmother. He wasn’t talking much and his lips drooped so maybe it really happened. Everyone steered clear. He had a temper and once exchanged blows with a cabbie at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.

Before lunch he e-mailed Lizzie and told her he went to the dentist for the first time in six years and was now thoroughly depressed. All his old fillings, the fillings of his childhood, were in danger of coming loose. He could choke on them and
die.
They needed to be replaced. He’d hated them for years but now he was getting sentimental, lost in memories of the matronly dental technician who smelled like flowers and held his hand during the procedure.

II (F) ii:
The dentist called it
bruxism,
the unconscious grinding of teeth. The wear was great. Certain molars needed recapping.

The dentist said that it happened at night. Laars begged to differ, but how would he know? The dentist was trying delicately to ask him whether there was someone he was sleeping with, someone who could monitor him during the night. This depressed him even more. Also the dentist didn’t explicitly say
girlfriend,
which suggested that Laars was giving off gay vibes again, an occasional problem he had.

I need new teeth and I need a woman,
he wrote. He formally renounced the vow of chastity, probably a good move regardless. He wasn’t trying to pick Lizzie up but on the other hand he wouldn’t mind. It might do the trick. The office romance aspect didn’t bother him. His teeth were more important than Maxine’s sexual harassment guidelines.

The worst part was that he needed to wear a mouth guard every night. A lab in Michigan was making one for him, working off the plaster mold. Even with insurance, it would set him back around nine million dollars.

Most of this was in an e-mail to Lizzie, in response to a simple
What’s shakin’?

II (F) iii:
Lizzie multitasked as she read Laars’s lament. She was finessing a report that Jonah had written, looking for run-on sentences, and changing all the active constructions to passive ones. Jonah was a very fluid writer, maybe too fluid. If you diagrammed one of his sentences, the result would look like a subway map mating with the remains of a fish dinner. Lizzie might have been the best writer of them all, but she got none of the glory. This was because she was very
down-to-earth.

Another part of Lizzie’s brain was involved in a long instant-messaging exchange with Pru about what she suspected was her blossoming Ambien addiction. Pru was the person to talk to for something like this. She was a total Ambien addict in good standing and had the lingo down cold.

II (F) iv:
Stress caused the grinding, according to the dentist. Laars wrote to Lizzie that he hadn’t felt stressed before, but now he did. He felt stressed out of his mind. The high cost of the dental procedures gnawed at him. So did the idea that his body was doing stuff to itself late at night, beyond conscious control.

Maybe discovering
The Jilliad
had pushed him over the edge.

Bruxism’s bad enough,
Laars wrote.
What if I start to sleepwalk? What if I throw myself off a bridge?

Lizzie told him not to sweat it. He lived too far from significant water. There was an outside chance he’d sleepwalk downstairs and into the street and take a cab to the river. But unless he brought his wallet, he probably wouldn’t make it.

II (F) v:
Later Pru walked by Laars’s desk. In the trash was a pamphlet from the dentist’s office entitled
Tooth—and Consequences.
It was all marked up and perhaps tearstained.

Crease tried to tempt Laars with a cigarette. Laars went outside and lit up but then remembered he was under dentist’s orders not to smoke. Crease made some crack about Grime’s teeth, the old British stereotype, to make Laars feel better. Grime flashed a set of bright, neatly aligned choppers. This made Laars feel even worse.

Grime said,
Cheers, mate.

II (G) The Outside World

II (G) i:
Big Sal from IT joked that he was losing weight from having to run from desk to desk. The e-mail program had been updated a week ago and now all of them were having problems. Unfortunately for Big Sal, everyone’s problem was different.

Whenever Laars or Lizzie wrote to Jonah, Pru, or Crease, all the dashes turned into this mystical cluster:

It was like some supercondensed commentary on the history of Europe.

All of Pru’s apostrophes turned into ™s, a chilling foretaste of the future of intellectual property law.

With Crease’s e-mails, all the dashes became question marks, so he had to remember to go through his correspondence before clicking Send and change every dash to a period, colon, or ellipses. Otherwise he wound up sounding like a Valley Girl.

Jonah complained that his period key wasn’t working. He sent his wafty prose to Lizzie, who inserted full stops wherever they felt right. Jonah called his laptop a
craptop.
He’d been after them for months to get him a replacement. The Sprout said he could buy one himself and expense it, but Jonah knew that if he did he would never see that money again.

II (G) ii:
Worse, Jonah’s Mexican distress frog was still missing. He turned his office upside down. Who would want to steal it? Maybe it had absorbed so much grimness that it had no choice but to hop away. Even totems had their limits. The loss of the Mexican distress frog was itself distressing. Added to everything else, it was too much, and Jonah took a day off—a bonus personal day he squeezed out of the Sprout in recognition of putting in so much overtime.

II (G) iii:
These days the Sprout was barely in his office. Was he upstairs, hashing out the numbers with K. and Maxine? Out west, negotiating with the Californians? Or simply at home, staring at his hands and drinking gin?

II (G) iv:
Pru made what would universally be regarded as the most significant discovery in
The Jilliad,
in the middle of Chapter 5:

Are you an Ernie—or a Bert? You remember this comical duo from your youth. Ernie is a carefree sort, always up for a gag or a razz, ready to bust out into gales of laughter—usually at Bert’s expense. He’s a classic hysteric. Bert, on the other hand, is his exact opposite: an organized, goal-driven, no-nonsense dude. He’s an obsessive, the sort of person who probably spends a lot of time organizing his sock drawer. He’s a nebbish, and maybe a bit of a dud.

Most people like to think of themselves as Ernies—the life of the party, having a good time. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But guess what? Your boss doesn’t want an office full of free spirits. Such a workforce would get nothing done, and spend the hours from 9 to 5 blowing dandelion seeds and skipping stones. Your boss is most likely a Bert—and he’s going to want more Berts on his team. Wouldn’t you?

—
Ernie and Bert in the Boardroom,
by Dr. Tal Champers, Ph.D.

They spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was an Ernie, who was a Bert. It was true: Everyone wanted to be an Ernie. Tempers flared. It was decided that Lizzie, Jenny, and Jonah were Berts, and the rest were Ernies or Ernie-Bert blends. Lizzie protested, but she couldn’t sway public opinion.

Jenny was the exception. She accepted the judgment of her peers gracefully.
I always liked Bert,
she said. The next day she wore a shirt with vertical stripes in clashing colors. Jonah wasn’t around to weigh in but probably wouldn’t care. He’d become a total Bert.

Strangely, no one thought the Sprout was a Bert. They imagined he might be a better supervisor if he
were
a Bert.

K. was definitely a Bert.

Jack II used to be a hard-core Bert, but recently he’d turned into more of an Ernie, an impression supported by his progressive roundness, especially in the cheek area.

Grime, being British, wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about—he thought that Ernie and Bert were cartoon characters, or toys of some sort—and thus his colleagues spent much time reenacting various segments from yesteryear. Laars did a passable Ernie imitation, and Lizzie, though she still denied being a Bert, did a very good Bert.

There’s this thing they do where they get too close to the camera and their noses fall off,
Pru explained, to Grime’s utter incomprehension.

Grime is a total Ernie,
Lizzie later concluded,
but he has Bert’s eyebrows.

II (G) v:
Jack II never left his desk anymore. He sat like a pasha on his swivel chair, with his cuffs rolled high and each bare foot tucked underneath the opposite thigh. Any spare time got funneled into the upkeep of his blog—an Ernie activity on the surface, though blogs also encouraged a Bert-like obsessiveness. He’d been posting photos of bare-limbed trees, manhole covers, his sister’s dog, the infinity-shaped building going up next door.