Personal Days (21 page)

him—
he takes wing, disappears for months, even a year, with every trace shredded away, until he lands another assignment at another wheezing outfit, giving him a fresh chance to orchestrate the same chaos, to tighten the bottom line; one strategy that he was especially fond of,
a bit of a risk to be honest but well worth it,
involved elevating a low-profile drudge to his second in command—the most dramatic effects, he said, resulted when the worker was someone whom at least 75 percent of the others secretly disliked (“Oh, they hate
me,
” I said), and better still if it was someone who’d been with the company for a long time, a lifer whose chances for upward progress had dropped to nil; you get someone who has deep institutional knowledge and harbors deep reserves of pent-up wrath and ambition; at the same moment that this person, this unlikeliest of candidates, was anointed, the Crow would fire whoever was in charge, a maneuver he executed without any malice (he said) but did simply because sometimes a sharp shock is just what’s needed, a
major disorientating episode
that
triggers the adrenaline
(I’d come across these phrases before, in industry reports explicating his philosophy) and forces all the people in the middle to find their bearings and in most cases do their best work in years, which is what he planned to do to our
shambles of an office
(how many other offices, I wondered, had he described as
shambles
?); he said one never feels too bad for the people knocked off the top—they were inevitably
arseholes
anyway and
What goes around comes around, eh?;
we discussed at great stoned length the theory of office karma, and I joked that maybe
I
could be put in charge—after all, I’d been around for nine years!—which made him laugh so hard he spit his drink, and he pounded his desk and said,
Why not? The janitor! Why the bloody hell not?—————
(OK, Pru: I just spaced out for five minutes, maybe closer to ten, sitting here with the computer exhaling hotly and my eyes still drinking in nothing, fingers tingling with the promise of connection, and now I can’t remember the last word I wrote, only that I was describing my lovely little tête-à-tête with Grime, and that it ended with a question—so I’m regrouping here, in the safety of these parentheses; even though I’d intended to get this all down in one single serpentine sentence,
allowances need to be made,
as the Sprout used to say, and so I’m allowing myself a little breathing room, these parentheses like little emergency lungs, because it’s getting hard to concentrate: Someone’s shouting at me through a megaphone, it’s hard to tell from what distance or direction, and I can make out maybe every third word—JONAH zzzhhhh ffffff! CAN zzzzhhhh
krrrr?—
but I don’t recognize the voice at all; maybe it’s someone from the rescue team trying to convey the important information that he’s going to pry open the top or drill through the sides or blow the thing up
—Sorry, buddy!—
but whenever I call out, there’s no response, and though enough time has passed for me to be reasonably confident that no catastrophe is imminent—there’s ample air, the carriage hasn’t crashed to the ground, the structure has yet to crumble—I’m still going to race to finish this letter, Pru, and I’m making a solemn vow right now
not
to drag this document into the trash once I’ve escaped this vertical casket and got my craptop screen fixed but to hit Print and get your snail-mail address from Lizzie or—if you two
still
aren’t talking—the Original Jack, or just look it up (Sharmila Maternity—you have no idea how many times I’ve Googled you—and I’ve been meaning to ask: So you’re designing baby clothes now? using hemp?) and
send it off
before I have a chance to reflect, reconsider, retreat; I don’t think I can even risk proofreading it, despite the errors this sort of eyeless composition inevitably invites, indeed I fully expect that skeins of scolding red understitching have wormed their way through this document, courtesy of the MS Word grammarians—and I would insist that proofreading in general is a sign of
bad faith,
faith being not irrelevant to the situation at hand, for right now the only thing keeping me going, the only thing stopping me from charging at the walls until I knock myself out cold, is faith that you’ll read this to the end)—and now it’s time to jump out of the parentheses, Pru: Part of the elevator roof
has
come off, I believe, because a cool column of air now penetrates the carriage; my shouts (
Hello?
and
It’s Jonah
and
I’ve been here since three!
and again
Hello?
) still go unanswered, echoing up and down the spine of the building, and I wonder if the maintenance squad has simply decided to take a break until morning; or maybe it’s just that the heat gets turned off in the evening—is it evening, now?—which reminds me to tell you how I figured out that Operation JASON had nothing to do with our old friend Jason (by the way I heard from him recently, a random e-mail that said he’d been working in Spain but couldn’t stand it and is now working in Philly but can’t stand it): I was at home on Christmas, paying an overdue Con Ed bill, thinking about that EB White passage you once showed me, back when you were new here and we used to talk for hours—the swooning bit where he says that it’s the native New Yorkers who give the city its stability, and the commuters who give it a daily tidal rhythm or something, but it’s those dreamers from elsewhere, the striving poets and wannabe circus performers and so forth, who power it with enough heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison company—I always liked that bit, even though if I think about it for half a second it seems like the purest BS—and I noticed on the bill the small bar graph that shows kilowatt-hours per month, and the first five letters along the bottom were
J, A, S, O, N,
for July, August, September, October, and November—and I had a eureka moment, as the blood left my face: I flashed back to that mysterious, anxiety-stirring Post-it that Laars saw on the Sprout’s desk, the famous note that ran
JASON—DJ, FM/AM?
and was signed
—J,
and realized that it hadn’t been a cryptic message from some unknown J still among us, but just the Sprout’s idle scratchings, punctuating the initials for the remaining months (DJ = December, January) with no reason beyond simple distraction, but it dawned on me, looking at the bill, that the kilowatt bars were high in the summer (reflecting air-conditioning expenses), then low for a bit, and now that it was winter they would rise again (heating, more lights)—and I wondered if this corresponded at all to how many people were being fired here, if every month the number of folks let go by the Sprout (at the Crow’s command) was
somehow determined by the electricity bill—
and I recalled how the Crow put slashes through the letters of JASON, on that dry-erase board on Halloween, and I knew in a flash that my guess was correct, that he was playing a horrible game with us, that he could have just as easily rolled a pair of dice, and the Sprout had
no idea
that this was how Grime was coming up with his figures, he was simply following orders, firing whomever Grime indicated (maybe even submitting “reports” to the Californians on Jack II and Jenny that said they weren’t pulling their weight, feigning shock when they got rid of Maxine); and of course after
J, A, S, O,
and
N
came
D,
December, and I got thoroughly depressed, thinking for the hundredth time how the last time I saw you was at the holiday party, a/k/a the night before your firing, and wondered if it could have played out differently, me in my incredibly studly sweater with the giant snowflake, as you’ll recall, and you in a green cocktail dress that basically gave me a seizure whenever I looked your way—whenever I so much as
thought
about it, and reminded myself that you were there with the Original Jack, whom I was surprised to see; so demoralizing was his presence, and what I presumed was your affection for him and his shaved head that when a buxom elf (there is no other description) interrupted my unseasonable stewing with a jolly
Hey, Snowflake
and asked what I was drinking, I thought she’d asked what I was
thinking,
and so I told her about you, your way with words, your hair and your smile and your purposeful walk, and as her eyes glazed over and she was on the verge of leaving, dissolving back into the crowd, I decided to change course—I became that rarest of creatures, Charming Jonah: what can I say but that I’ve been living with a default vow of chastity for longer than I care to divulge here, a span that would turn Laars green with envy, then pink with laughter; I guess one of the
major points
I want to get across today (tonight?) is that it took me a while to realize that
this was the girl from the elevator,
Crease’s Half Asian British Accent Woman, his “HABAW”!—this somewhat, no, I would say empirically
extremely
attractive (but not Pru-caliber attractive) denizen of the seventh floor whose actual, human name is Tracy, or
Trace—
and all that happened was that, about an hour later, we stumbled into a cab, stumbled into a karaoke bar, where with some of her oddly gnomelike but genial co-workers we stumbled through the repertoires of a half dozen ’80s haircut bands and too much treacly Bacharach and an ill-advised foray into Aerosmith, occasionally passing the mike to members of a very good women’s volleyball squad from Duluth; then Trace and I stumbled crosstown, stumbled uptown, stumbled to her doorstep, where I learned (as she
tugged my beard
) that Trace was leaving in a week for, my God I can’t remember, Prague or Paris (one of those pesky
P
cities) for a month or a year or forever; and then I, Jonah, incapable of taking a hint, said
So nice meeting you!
and shook her head and then very much
alone
and without so much as a phone number or e-mail address (and basically broke from karaoke) stumbled down into the subway station—did I mention
alone?—
and to think that
this
was the night I last set eyes on you (a glaring, totally pissed off you, no less) still kills me, makes me want to
turn back time
in the manner of the poet Cher, whose vocal stylings were replicated ad nauseam that evening, but instead what happened was this: I took the next day, the Friday, as a personal day, to rewhite my aging bloodshot eyes (my big discovery, possibly the discovery of the century, is that
nobody keeps track of personal days:
before he was fired, Henry from HR sabotaged the program so that these babies get filed differently than vacation days, and basically
never get tabulated,
ever), and when I returned to work late on Monday, you were long gone, and Crease wasn’t talking to me because of my HABAW transgression, and Grime was looking awfully satisfied about something, and Lizzie had profound crying-too-much rings around her eyes, and when I finally got the story of your dismissal, I couldn’t understand why no one was
doing
anything, why everyone was so quiet; I know in the past we’d write letters of protest when someone was fired or suspended, and for the most part the Sprout would nod and file away these strongly worded beauties or probably just slip them into the shredder, and neither side would speak of the matter again (the civilized thing had been done, points of view had been exchanged, and it was time to move on), but at some point we stopped even this pathetic performance—we didn’t do it for Jill, and the Jenny-and–Jack II joint firing (not to mention the elimination of Maxine) had sapped us of all power: When Lizzie told me that
Grime
had fired you, had stepped out of the shadows and swung the ax in person, I knew it was time to build a case against him—to shoot down the Crow, or get shot down trying; I knew I needed an ally, and the kicker of course is that you were the only one I could think of who might pursue this with me till the end; I took a walk around the block, left messages on your cell, pondered my next move: I couldn’t confront the Crow just yet—I needed him to
not know
me for a little while longer, to see me and think
Janitor with Beard—
and so instead I decided to hear what the Sprout had to say; but when I got back to the office and pushed open his door, I found him lying on the carpet, tossing and catching a racquetball with one hand, a lit cigarette in his mouth, with the rest of the pack on his chest and a pencil holder for an ashtray, as the winter air from the open window swept up the smoke and subverted the fire alarm; I sat down in his chair and asked him point-blank if he truly believed that getting rid of you could be construed as a smart move—as anything but a horrible mistake—and he sent up a cone of smoke and stopped the ball tossing and sighed,
Not my idea,
both a confession that he wasn’t the one calling the shots and a blanket refusal to answer any more questions, and I figured that the best way to get him to talk was to not say anything—the equivalent of giving him a blank sheet of paper and locking him in a room (or maybe trapping him in a stuck elevator with a laptop and telling him
Type whatever
)—and sure enough, after his cigarette burned out, and the rubber ball lay balanced in his open palm, he said,
I’m going to have to take a hit on this one
and
Let’s gut it out for the next few weeks,
he said,
Try to turn it around
and
Need to get on the same page—
and it wasn’t clear whether these were things he or I was supposed to do, but I figured this patchwork of vague determination was enough of a welcome mat for me to start asking questions again as he lit a fresh cigarette;
I don’t know
was his refrain uttered in a range of tones—prickly, insulting, sympathetic, but mostly just exhausted—as the wind died down and the smoke kept creeping toward the ceiling and the ball was going up and down again, and when I asked if
my
job was on the line—if I was going to be replaced by someone hand-picked by the Californians, or if my position was simply going to be erased, the way all the rest had been—he replied,