Personal Days (14 page)

Think of the office as an ocean liner.

Lizzie put a hand on Jenny’s shoulder and steered her like that for a while. It became a procession, as more people joined them en route to the elevator.

Jack II was long gone. His cubicle already looked like a museum display,
American Worker’s Habitat, Early Twenty-first Century.
His screen saver had kicked in, a platoon of Smurf-like creatures digging luminous tunnels that crisscrossed the black of the screen.

II (I) ii:
They all rode down in silence. It was barely 3 but a drink was in order. Outside Pru was smoking and Jenny told her in a tiny voice what everyone else already knew, the full list of casualties. Pru wrapped an elbow around her in a complicated way, a hug that didn’t require abandoning her cigarette.

Where’s Maxine?
someone said.

Jenny wasn’t crying yet but it sounded like someone was. It was the crane at the construction site down the street, squeaking as it lowered a voluptuous payload. The infinity building was shaping up, with much of the curved blue glass already in place for the lower floors.

They found their faces in it as they walked by. When they looked up they saw that the snow was really coming down, so swiftly it unmoored them. It felt like the world was rushing up to meet the sky.

Over drinks Jenny was fine for five minutes and then started to break down. Chunks of her seemed to fall off and die and for the rest of the night she was crying or just about to start.
You guys are, never going to, see me again,
she said, gasping. They knew this was true but told her it wasn’t.

We see Jules all the time,
they said.
We go to his toaster-oven restaurant.

The verb tense was dubious. They went only once as a group and would never go again if they could help it.

But Jules is different,
said Jenny.
Jules is fun. I’m so boring. You’ll forget about me. It’s OK. It’s OK.

Jules is a nutcase,
said Laars.

We’ll keep in touch,
said Pru.
We’ll e-mail.
Pru was always realistic about those sorts of things.

Grime wandered in late. He made a loud offer to buy drinks for the evening and said he’d set up a tab at the bar but never got around to it.

Despite all the crying, Jenny looked pretty good, indeed noticeably better than she usually did.

Her eyes shimmered and her mouth had an appealing pout. Several of them remarked on this the next day at work.

II (I) iii:
Jenny said it sounded crazy but she thought she got fired for accidentally sending that e-mail to Kristen.

Who’s Kristen?
said Laars.

Do you mean Karen?
said Crease.

What e-mail?
said Pru.

She means K.,
said Laars.
I thought her name was Kierstin.

Grime didn’t know what was going on. Jenny explained how she had meant to forward something to Jill, but hit
K
instead of
J.
K.’s name had then appeared in the To field.

This was going to be a key component of Jenny’s layoff narrative.

She knew it was the wrong name, that
Jill didn’t even work here anymore,
but she clicked Send before her conscious mind kicked in.

Didn’t that happen months ago?
Lizzie asked. Jenny said yes but that it happened
again
a week ago.

Crease brought over another drink for Jenny. He was trying to call Jack II’s cell but no one was answering.

Please call us back if you get this,
Crease said.

II (I) iv:
Lizzie asked Jenny what it was that she’d forwarded to K.

That’s the other thing that sucks,
Jenny said. She was sending Jill the Polish joke website, to show her how crazy Maxine was. Maybe sending it had gotten
Maxine
fired.

Oh, and one other thing,
said Jenny.

She’d also attached a link for Jack II’s blog, with the note:
Check it out he’s losing his mind!

II (I) v:
Jack II’s two-week suspension ended with his termination. He never came back to the office. It was unsettling to see someone so frequently and then to lose touch altogether. Oddly, his cell phone stopped accepting messages a few days into his suspension, as if the phone company disapproved of him as well, and when one of them tried to get in touch a week later, the number no longer worked at all.
It’s like he never existed,
said Jonah.

The empty cubicles echoed. Toward evening, with the outside light failing, the office looked like the carcass of a beached whale, split open, immense and exposed and way too intimate.

Crease used to whistle as he walked from the subway to the office, but he didn’t anymore. It used to be that several times a week he’d run into Jack II approaching the building from the opposite direction. Jack II was like Crease’s uptown shadow, his mirror self.

All of Jack II’s stuff was still in his cubicle, including his bicycle. No one knew what to do. They assumed he’d return for it, but later the Kohut Brothers were back, putting everything into boxes. Even the bike went into a big box that the brothers, or whatever they were, stuffed with bubble wrap and shrouded with packing tape. Laars looked around for a CD he’d lent him but couldn’t find it.

Later they had the idea to go to Maxine’s desk, with the secret hope that they’d find smashed discs in the trash, more abandoned files for world domination, fragments that had something to do with Operation JASON or else held Maxine’s secret fantasies about them. But her space was even emptier than Jack II’s.

Laars finally received his mouth guard from Michigan. He started to wear it at his desk.

I think I’m grinding my teeth when I’m awake, too,
he said.

II (I) vi:
Now that there was no Jenny, they couldn’t get anything to work. Everything existed at a level of raging confusion. Things they all assumed they knew by heart were now forgotten.
Does anyone remember how to add up a column in Excel?

There were clusters of boxes everywhere, and file cabinets nudged out of true, giving the office the look of an apiary, hives waiting to explode. Lizzie pierced her hair with no fewer than three pens.
It’s a way to gauge her anxiety,
Pru pointed out helpfully.

II (I) vii:
After days of buildup Laars finally demanded to talk to the Sprout about the dismissal of Jenny and Jack II. Not enough people—that is, nobody—had stood up when Jill was let go. Laars didn’t want that to happen again.

The trouble was that while Laars could be articulate among equals or over a pint, he tended to either rant Tourettishly or clam up altogether when talking to the Sprout. Today he was doing the former, or else simply speaking in tongues. The crazy factor was upped by the fact that for the first half of the meeting Laars was holding his mouth guard, occasionally waving it in a threatening manner.

The Sprout laughed:
Hoo-hoo.
He held his palms up to the ceiling, at nearly shoulder level, elbows at his sides, a gesture of innocence under duress.

Think of the office as a work in progress,
said the Sprout at last.

I’m not one to point fingers,
said the Sprout.

I’m as upset as you are,
said the Sprout.

He then made the astonishing claim that, based on his best information, Jenny and Jack II were far and away the least productive people on the team.

I need everyone to bring their A game,
said the Sprout, shuffling two pieces of paper with a practiced frown.
The whole thing is really out of my hands at this point.

He didn’t
quite
show the papers to Laars, but he made it clear that they were efficiency reports of some sort, full of damning information. But it didn’t make sense. Who was writing up the reports? Jenny and Jack II were the
most
efficient workers—it was obvious to everyone. Both of them always had their work schedules mapped out weeks, even months, in advance. In truth they made the others look bad.

The Sprout kept talking, not just about A games but about a
plan B.
He wasn’t making much sense. Bogus reports aside, he was probably still stunned by the loss of Jenny, though maybe less so about Jack II, whose name he periodically forgot.

Laars was unsure how to proceed. He had grown to suspect that Maxine had been devising ways to get rid of them. But now that
she
was gone, the mystery deepened. Could it be that Maxine
had
written the efficiency reports—but so inefficiently that she herself was shown the door?

II (I) viii:
Lost in questions he couldn’t quite phrase, Laars spotted a curious memo on a Post-it, stuck on a tape dispenser:

He grew more baffled than ever. First there was Maxine’s broken world-domination disc, which had Jason’s name on it—now this.

What did
Jason
have to do with anything? Did he have a higher-level job than any of them suspected? Was
he
a double agent?

The evidence suggested, nonsensically, that he’d become a disc jockey, on both the AM and FM dials.

Even so, why should the Sprout care?

Of course, maybe the name referred to someone else entirely: a different Jason, a powerful, hidden Jason, who lived in a shed on the roof, eating instant noodles and Lorna Doones, tapping out directives in Morse code.

Allowances need to be made,
the Sprout was saying.

The message was a stumper. Not to mention the signature, the
J:
Had the memo come from Jonah? From Jenny or Jack II, RIP? Laars felt his sanity seeping away, but he managed to surreptitiously copy each mysterious letter onto his pad, pretending to take notes, nodding while the Sprout said,
The idea is to make the operation as lean as possible.

Mmm-hmming while the Sprout said,
We have to take it apart.

Smiling while the Sprout said,
Then we want to rebuild gradually.

II (I) ix:
The meeting left Laars so depressed that later, after some time at his desk, checking the hour-by-hour performance of the one stock he owned, he felt the undeniable urge to get a doughnut.

The Sprout was at the elevator. The silence doubled as they waited. What more was there to say? In the Sprout’s eyes, Laars saw his own exhaustion reflected. At last they stepped in, but the carriage was going up. Laars thought of
The Jilliad,
that passage about always having an Elevator Speech ready. He was about to say something, but then the Sprout started talking, as if picking up from their earlier conversation.

In this new environment, in this claustrophobic pen, the Sprout explained that costs needed to be cut by a certain fixed amount every month. The Californians wanted results. The quickest remedy, in the short term, was to let go of extraneous workers. Everyone was going to be scrutinized.

We’ve all got to step up to the plate,
the Sprout said.
We’ve all got to work outside our comfort zone.

Laars kept thinking about Jason, but couldn’t recall what he looked like. They had barely overlapped. Small head, pleasant features. How horrible, he thought, if someone were to remember him that way. He thought harder. He could visualize the one deep furrow on Jason’s otherwise blank brow. During moments of concentration or intense malaise it resembled a second mouth.

The Sprout said that the cost cutting was a long-range goal, which they had a year to meet—as if this information would inspire Laars. Maybe he was trying to inspire him to quit. The Sprout didn’t say anything about how the workers who were left now had to do all the abandoned work, in the same amount of time and for the same amount of pay.

Laars wondered why the Sprout was revealing so much—surely
The Jilliad
would have sharp words for a boss who opened up to his employees. Then he started thinking about the Post-it again:
DJ.
Did Jason have a talk-radio personality, or was he more of a smooth-rock navigator? Laars couldn’t remember the voice
or
the face.

The elevator doors opened at seven. No one was there. Then the secret love of Crease’s life stepped aboard. Laars wanted to send Crease a text message:
HABAW ELEV ASAP
! But the Sprout was still talking. He said that the layoffs would be on a rolling basis for at least the remainder of the year. Then hopefully there’d be a
break in the clouds.

HABAW stared at the descending lighted numbers, tapping her toe gently.

These things tend to be cyclical,
the Sprout droned on. He was making a motion with his finger, but it wasn’t a twirling, rounded motion. It was more like a square that becomes an asterisk.

The elevator finally reached the lobby. HABAW stepped out and in four long and fairly breathtaking strides evaporated into the sun.

At the same moment Grime walked in the front door, bound for the office. He made a gun gesture at the security guard, who put down his Bible and mimed falling backward, bleeding, only to be resurrected with laughter.