Personal Days (24 page)

the guy had been coming into Vlad’s two or three nights a week for over a year, didn’t drink anything stronger than 7UP, didn’t appear high, usually just watched the main stage, but every couple months he’d get a room, and something would happen, something different every time—Duke had been on the verge of barring him but hoped he’d learned his lesson; then one night when Jules was making the rounds he had to deliver his patented warning rap, not because of any overly lewd contact but because—there was this guy
choking
a girl; and then two nights later, it was a different girl
—choking the guy;
Duke came around, threatening to bar him from the premises; the next week, the man and yet another girl were
choking each other simultaneously—
all of these permutations necessarily arranged in cash beforehand: this time they were gasping, locked in a horrible death embrace, eyes bulging like grapes, bodies flailing, the scant room accents knocked to the ground and getting smashed by their uncontrollable stampings—and Jules barged in, trying to pull the man off the girl (Vera, someone he’d been dating, against Duke’s advice); as two guys from security detached her (she was weeping and even in the bad mood lighting he could tell her color was off) and sat on the guy’s legs, Jules went to find the man’s SUV, which he’d had the displeasure of parking earlier, and left a long key mark across one side, then the other, then all across the hood, not letting the key leave the surface, even as it traveled across glass, and then jogged around the lot to let off steam, throwing punches in the air; ten minutes later, the guy came out of Vlad’s for a smoke, looking calmer and a shade less ruddy, and offered Jules a cigar and a
No hard feelings?
which Jules, surprising himself, accepted, realizing as soon as the stogie was lit that the valet on duty must have been on break, because he was all alone in the parking lot with the man whom he’d just grappled with, the man who’d been engaging in a little mutual asphyxiation society with his semi-girlfriend (Vera was a dead ringer, Jules also said, for Maxine), and though the guy wasn’t a weight lifter, he had shown impressive energy, a boundless will to try to relieve his aggressors of their facial features; self-preservation kicked in, there on the desolate pavement, and Jules introduced himself and shook his hand, at which the man said,
The name’s Percival Davis, call me Percy if you like;
Percy asked how he got hooked up with the strip-club gig, and Jules explained how he wasn’t making enough money at his office job, and so he’d found work at a nightclub through Jobmilla-dot-com (
I sounded like I was in an ad,
Jules told me), and all the rest, and Percy didn’t know what he meant until he remembered Jobmilla’s motto—humming the jingle till he found the words,
What goes around comes around!
(laughter); but when Jules asked Percy what
he
did for a living, he grew silent, and time dragged uncomfortably until the cigars were done; Percy said it was just about time for him to head out, and apologized for the fisticuffs; since the other valet hadn’t shown, Jules nervously fetched the freshly vandalized vehicle and said good night, really, really wishing he hadn’t scraped it up, listening to Percy whistle the Jobmilla jingle again as he drove off, and for the next few days he waited for the other shoe to drop, his appetite vanishing, notes for his last will and testament breaking into his thoughts with alarming frequency; just when he thought he was in the clear, and that he might have a future on this earth, he was greeted at the club by the news that a “Mister Davis” had stopped by earlier and left a note: The gist was that he knew what Jules had done to his car, and that the next time he saw Jules, he would choke
him—
Jules quit the gig that night, figured he’d find something else on the Jobmilla site, or through the temp agency he’d hooked up with when he first came to the city, and in the meantime keep polishing his screenplay—dictating new dialogue, revising an important heist scene—and when he found he needed a name for a villain, Percival Davis came to mind, which Glottis instantly turned into “Personal Daze,” a perfect title: More than anything, Jules was relieved to be away from Vlad’s, amazed that he’d even done the job for as long as he had—he was certain he’d gone briefly insane, really, and resolved to get his act together, stop drinking (especially in the mornings), work up a serious business plan for the toaster-oven restaurant he’d always wanted to run, go to the gym a little more (or even
once
)—he had faith in himself, faith in his future; so it happened that one Friday not long after his escape from clubland, while heading for the elevator up on the sixth floor, Jules saw a figure moving in the opposite direction, and his blood froze:
Percival Davis—
!!—the face was the same, a little paler, the eyebrows pruned perhaps, the hair cut short—and Jules began throbbing with the fight-or-flight impulse; in a daze he coughed to get Davis’s attention, but when the man turned around, he just said
Cheers,
in a friendly British accent (at first Jules thought he’d said
Chairs
), and Jules sputtered what must have sounded like a bizarre pickup line (
Don’t I know you from somewhere?),
losing his grip on reality, for although this new resident of Siberia
looked
like Percival Davis, he smoothly gave his name as Graham: But as he walked away, he was whistling the Jobmilla tune,
What goes around comes around,
that catchy paean to the zero-sum nature of employment and unemployment (which strictly speaking didn’t make a whole lot of sense but which presumably tapped into people’s latent belief in karma), a melody that looped in Jules’s head all weekend and into the following Monday, when he toured Siberia in terror, looking for Percy/Graham, finding in one brightly lit cubicle things that he could have sworn weren’t there before, a mound of crumpled paper garnished with fresh red rubber bands, a coffee cup bearing thin stains in progressively wider-spaced rings, like a tree trunk, which he studied as if it could offer clues as to when a human had last drunk from it, some time frame to work with; but there was no one around, the Firings had claimed so many victims up there, and the floor remained empty all afternoon, and so he sat at his desk, anxiously awaiting a burst of violence, a gunshot, a sudden scissor blade to the heart; over the coming weeks he became a wreck, even less capable of work than before—something even Jules would have deemed impossible—and when the Sprout abruptly fired him a month later, he was secretly relieved; Jules finished his tale by saying that at first he was sure Percy had tracked him down to the office, but now wonders if it was all a coincidence—if during a drive in his mobile home, that scratchitti’d SUV, he recognized our building from its starring role in that old Jobmilla commercial (all the unemployed slobs on the conveyor belt) and decided to get a job
here
; his motivation remained mysterious to Jules until I told him how
Grime
(as we know him) had pretended to be one of us, an illusion sustained for all save me, ever since that October night when I discovered he was working as an outside consultant, as the CRO (Jules nodded, fully in the know, comfortable with business-world acronyms) hired by the Californians to slash away at budgets, firing people behind a protective screen consisting of the Sprout, Maxine, and “K” but having pursued Gordon Graham Knott for several months, I was starting to wonder who Grime really was—if he was not even
Knott,
the famed chief restructuring officer, the hungry Crow, but someone else entirely; I told Jules how, when I inadvertently opened Grime’s Glottis document,
Personal Daze,
I knew, instantly, that he was someone else, someone whose name
sounded
like “Personal Daze”: But now that I knew he was Percival Davis, the mystery deepened—who
was
Percival Davis, and why had he taken on the character of Gordon Graham Knott (a bona fide CRO, whose name regularly crops up in the industry rags)?: Though Jules was busy with his various restaurants and bars, he agreed to help me gather information on our slippery interloper, even going back to Vlad’s and quizzing the dancers and bouncers, getting the license plate number from the valet’s log; what we discovered was as sad as it was shocking, and I waited for the right time to blow the whistle, but it’s harder than you think—there’s the question, first of all, of who to trust: even though I’d wanted to go to the Sprout with my newfound knowledge, he was deep in exit mode and visibly disturbed—every time I came to his door it looked like he’d been crying or drinking, or
punched
really, and what he said was barely coherent: half aphorisms and repetitions on a good day, but mostly mumbling, an unprovoked
Hoo-hoo!,
his eyes darting from my head to my feet like he was sizing me up for a little pick-up aikido session; I noticed that all his personal effects were gone, his bookshelves bare, his plants dead; the only thing on his desk was a large-screen computer with a tiny laptop hooked up next to it in such a way that anything that happened on the large screen happened simultaneously on the small one, and I’d watch documents blossom in duplicate, hear beeps chime in near stereo, the purpose of it all completely hidden; my fear was that if I
did
bring all my information to the Sprout, he simply might not believe me, and instead see the opportunity to get back into Grime’s good graces (let’s keep calling him Grime for now) by dismissing me on the spot, a preemptive action that would be perfectly legitimate since it never came from the Crow at all: But if it was difficult figuring out what to do, every day also brought new information, another piece of the puzzle, and I used more personal days to make fact-finding trips, sometimes with Jules; finally I was forced into action when, about two months after you left, Grime pulled his most dangerous stunt yet—telling the Sprout to contact a headhunter to
replace himself:
His capacity for self-debasement finally exhausted, the Sprout tendered his resignation to the Californians the next week, and the Crow perched at last, alone, in the vacated office, calling Crease and Laars and Lizzie in for interminable, hectoring meetings, either individually or ensemble, and when one of them wondered aloud (innocently? not?) why
I
wasn’t there, the Crow got confused
—Who’s Jonah?—
and, muttering that he thought I’d been fired months ago, he picked up the phone in front of everyone and called my extension, and I caught up with his rage on voice mail: I was to meet him at nine o’clock sharp the next morning, the tone suggesting a fatal dressing-down; things were coming down to the wire and I didn’t bother to swipe out, breathing deeply as the elevator made its sluggish way up to meet me, eyeing the swipe box crazily and wondering,
What if—
and gently plucking the box from the wall, as light as a box of tissues, and in the elevator (
this
elevator!) I saw that there was
nothing in the box,
no wiring at all, no strip reader, just a few cubic inches of air, and I marveled at the sheer sadistic psychology behind the routine (I know Grime had started telling people that swiping in was the Sprout’s idea, but we all knew that it wasn’t): For months we’d been fretting about our hours, fitting a card into a slot so that the Californians could keep tabs on us, but it turns out we were swiping just to swipe, the whole contraption never even registering our moves—then the elevator opened and I was free: On the way home I threw out my janitor’s shirt, got my beard and mustache removed by a barber in the subway station, and bought new shoes, fresh clothes, strong cologne, and a box of contact lenses, so that when I met Grime the next day I had the advantage of confusion—I could sense him wondering if he’d seen me before; as he talked, distractedly, about the terrible job the Sprout had done all these years, how a new age was about to begin, I caught a change in his thinking: though he’d never really talked to me while sober (we’d had a half dozen late-night boozefests), there was
something
about me that was familiar, and he knew that not only had I been operating under false colors but I was circling around his secret; after the meeting fizzled to a close without incident (his parting words, believe it or not, were
Keep me in the loop!
), I rushed back to my desk to call Lizzie:
Don’t say anything,
I warned,
just pretend I’m a friend, pretend I’m Pru, just calling from Sharmila Maternity for a chat,
and I asked her if she could very quickly, very subtly e-mail me the contact information for whichever one of the Californians the Sprout used to talk to the most—I’d explain it all to her and Laars and Crease later; my heart was going triple time as I punched the numbers; my Californian took my call—as it happened, he was in a meeting with the others, so they put me on speakerphone, and listened, rapt, as I gave the streamlined version of what I thought was going on with Grime/Graham/Percy, and when I was done there was pure silence—you could have heard a pin drop anywhere between us, you could have heard an eyelash fall in Nebraska—and then the Californians confirmed what I had so recently figured out:
They’d never hired a CRO,
it wasn’t their style, they were still planning on coming to New York and giving us the ax themselves (laughter)—and as the chuckles faded I got the nervous feeling that the Crow might be making his way toward my office, so I dashed out the back stairway and in two hours, miraculously, I was on a flight to what the Californians determined to be the halfway point: Bozeman, Montana, where we convened in a sub-rosa club room near the Northwest terminal, sipping a Shiraz that smelled like an expensive shoe and eating tender venison sandwiches, juice dripping down our chins, as I told them everything Jules and I had dug up about the man who wasn’t
Grime
or
Graham
or anyone even vaguely resembling Gordon Graham Knott (president of GGK Restructuring)—a name that, in any case, did not immediately register with the Californians—but the phantom of a phantom, someone with the odd name of Percival Davis, age 42, a former midlevel management consultant who was ultimately