Personal Days (25 page)
Authors: Ed Park
fired
by a consultant, visiting from a different firm—an experience that must have made him feel like he was stuck in some Möbius strip, or looking into a mirror and seeing his back with a knife wedged in it, with a hand much like his own gripping the handle: on that day, three years ago, when he lost his job, it touched a nerve, indeed his entire nervous system, and Davis snapped, walking out on his wife and kids in New Jersey, never to return, wandering the streets in a fugue state until repeated attempts to float in assorted fountains across the city led to a stay at Bellevue (where I imagine him muttering
CRO, CRO, CRO,
ad infinitum), and once I sniffed out the company he used to work for, a midtown outfit no longer in existence, it only took a few minutes of online searching to discover that it had been the
real
Gordon Knott, a silver-haired CRO (living in splendid contentment in Greenwich) who’d filleted Percy’s former employer in ingenious ways,
turning it around
by bleeding it dry, getting rid of Percy’s whole team (a year later, after Knott had split, the company would suddenly and utterly disappear); after Bellevue, Percy—or Grime, or whatever you want to call him—essentially lived on the road, in his SUV, eluding his family, working through his savings, until he decided to infiltrate our office, concocting an accent, impersonating the very villain, the maverick CRO, who had
deleted
his previous life—the initial aim being, I think, to run a company aground so disastrously that the
real
Gordon Knott’s name would be dragged through the mud, though in truth I think he simply thrived on the destruction he discovered he could do: having bonded with our born-again security guard by pretending to be a Holy Roller, the newly christened
Grime
coolly installed his revamped self on the barren sixth floor, then briefly on the fifth, and eventually the fourth, ingratiating himself with all as the affable, floppy-haired “Grime” smoothly convincing IT to set him up with the necessary phone and computer accoutrements and IDs and passwords; commandeering the staff to do his bidding; abusing Maxine; issuing increasingly bizarre directives to the Sprout (or as I reminded myself to say,
Russell
) and suggesting to him that by presenting these decisions as his own, he’d win the Californians’ approval, and be in a strong position to displace “K” engineering spurious data, which he’d then present to the Sprout as justification for eliminating employees; harassing Lizzie with scatological musings; sleeping (I think) with Maxine; driving “K” to total meltdown by telling her to do things like
Write the program that makes you obsolete;
carefully misspelling nearly every word he typed—on and on my tale unwound, some of it based on educated guesses, most of it entirely provable: the sum, in any case, being greater than the parts, so that three things quickly became clear to the Californians: (1) There was a criminal in the New York office, who needed to be removed as soon, and with as little noise, as possible; (2) Given that I knew the most about the situation, I would also be the one to oversee his removal; (3) If I was successful, I would immediately become the new head of operations (the new Sprout—or was it the new Crow?), reporting directly to the Californians: all of which made my head spin, my dizziness hitting me even way out there under the huge hinter-land sky with the enormous moon chalked in and the stars coming out; it was all so confusing, because I’d
hated
the Californians, despised them with a passion, but for now I needed to compartmentalize, put that anger aside—so I nodded, shook some hands, received multiple thumps between the shoulder blades, and flew back to kick off Operation Fallen Crow, Mission Eradicate Grime, The “Personal” Affair: In a cab from La Guardia to the office, I called the police and explained that there was an unauthorized person in the building, providing them with a foolproof description, and by the time my taxi arrived on the scene the last squad car was pulling out, a captured Crow limp in the backseat, eyes shut, wings clipped; afterward I walked aimlessly, dazed by the bloodless coup and by the warm night, moving north and then east and then west and then north, east and then south, west and then north again, as though circling something that wasn’t there anymore, and I was transported to a warm night last spring, the end to a grueling day packed with allergens and dread, a day on which someone was fired (it’s terrible but I can’t recall who, exactly
—you’re all interchangeable
): The situation demanded that we survivors go out for early drinks, in order to analyze the murky dynamics of it all, the usual futile dissection, and the talk drifted to other topics, Maxine’s wardrobe (specifically, did she wear a thong?), the Sprout’s sex life, a softball team of all things; and too many drinks later I walked you to your subway stop even though it wasn’t the same as mine—I came up with some story that I was going uptown to see a friend, though of course
I have no friends—
and as we waited to cross the street there came a soft clattering rush: the sound of thousands of those small white petals which fill the city for about two weeks, and now a whole army of them trundled across the pavement in the wake of the gypsy cabs and a crosstown bus, a vast carpet moving in one direction, like the tail of some immense creature whose body had already dissolved into the night, trailing delicate bits of skeleton that would reassemble in another dimension, and as the light changed the petals were still marching along, their ranks cut into parts by the Third Avenue traffic and sent whirling into eddies, and this, Pru,
this
was the evening when my dizziness started, my inconsolable vertigo, because as we crossed you touched my arm and pointed at the sky and without a word we watched a hundred more petals fall, from some point lost in the dark roof of the night, like confetti at a parade commemorating the Unknown Worker, the petals taking time to wander through the air, and when my eyes returned to street level the whole world was rubber: cars bent like taffy, the ground beneath me shuddered like a gangplank, traffic lights wobbled and smeared, even the architecture appeared to expand and contract at once, and you’d forgotten your fingers were still on my arm; I’m hoping that, now that I’ve told you this, set down my confession at last, I’ll be cured, but what I’m getting instead is a slow, cranky whir coming from beneath my overheated wrists, a sound I know well: it means that this craptop’s battery is about to go out—I’ve got three hundred seconds and counting!
—here we go!—
so I’m hitting Control-S one more time, to save this last stretch of immortal prose—I feel so strange now, like the top of my head has just floated away, or maybe it floated away hours ago and I’m only just realizing it; and now a fine mist is coating my face and hands, and I don’t know if that’s a voice I hear in the distance through the opening in the roof or a complicated wheezing, like the Unnameable has sprouted wings and is hovering somewhere above me, my unexpected guardian angel, maybe reaching down to pull me up—OK, I just tried standing and grabbing at the air above but I don’t think I’m tall enough, or else his arms aren’t long enough—obviously I’m losing my mind—and sitting back down has suddenly made me very, very tired—and maybe the computer has completely shut down already, but I’ll keep writing anyway, because I’m a little light on activities here, and in a few seconds I’ll save this one last time, shut the craptop for good, and lie on top of it to protect it from the soft but steady spray of what I hope is just water, maybe slap on a Post-it saying
PLEASE PRINT OUT FOR PRU
! in case I don’t make it out of here—but how can I be sure my handwriting won’t be completely unreadable?—oh!
oh!—
actually this just occurred to me, a genius solution:
I can send this to you as an e-mail,
even though I can’t see the screen, because (a) the wireless in this building, which we were stealing from the ad agency on the seventh floor, probably still works, and (b) Glottis understands spoken commands, provided they’re well-articulated, so when I’m all done writing I’m going to hit the function key to open Glottis, and put my mouth two inches from the mike and utter, in my clearest voice,
Select all text
and
Copy,
and then
New e-mail
and
To Pru at Sharmila dot com
and
Paste
and finally
Send—
leaving two seconds after each command, like the manual says—and the idea that you’ll get this message soon, sooner than tomorrow—that there’s a chance you’ll read this
tonight,
maybe before I’m finally released (
if
I’m released)—is incredibly comforting: The air’s getting kind of terrible now, like eggs and ammonia and gasoline, so I need to wrap things up and
—I’m sorry,
Pru, sorry I couldn’t say all that I wanted to, tonight, but in truth it was as much about imagining I was saying something to you as it was about actually saying anything: You said yourself, once, waiting for stuff by the asthmatic printer, that the office generates at least one book, no, one
novel
every day, in the form of correspondence and memos and reports, all the reams of numbers, hundreds of sentences, thousands of words,
but no one has the mind to understand it,
no one has the eyes to take it all in, all these potential epics,
War and Peace
lying in between the lines; so maybe just think of this letter as one such novel, one such book, cobbled from the data all around me, and I’m trusting that at worst you’ll ignore the
NEW E-MAIL
flashing in your in-box, bothering your screen, but at least you’ll be conscious of it, as you sit at your desk or your worktable with the sewing machine, over there at Sharmila Maternity Wear, and slowly the unread message will invade your thoughts, and curiosity will get the better of you, as you wonder what I could possibly have to say to you after all this time, and why I remain,—Your friend,—JONAH
< ACKNOWLEDGMENTS >
I’m grateful to Maureen Howard and James Browning, for years of encouragement; my eagle-eyed sister, Aileen Park; Jenny Davidson and Eugene Cho, esteemed structural and restructural advisors on this project; Julia Cheiffetz and PJ Mark and Julia once again. I’d like to salute all at
The Believer,
Team Dizzies, and the Poetry Foundation; friends from
Voice
days, especially constant interlocutor Dennis Lim; Ros Porter, Alex Bowler, and Jynne Martin; early readers and listeners, including Benjamin Strong, Nicole Bond, Rachel Aviv, and Aimee Kelley. Many thanks to my father and mother and the delightful Duncan, to friends who’ve been waiting forever, and to all my family on both coasts, other continents.
This book goes out with all my love to my wife, Sandra—not just the beauty but also the brains of the whole operation.
Ed Park
was born in 1970 in Buffalo, New York. He is a founding editor of
The Believer,
the former editor of the
Voice Literary Supplement,
and an editor at the Poetry Foundation. His articles have appeared in
The New York Times Book Review, Modern Painters,
the
Los Angeles Times Book Review,
and elsewhere. He lives with his family in Manhattan, where he publishes
The New-York Ghost.
Visit him online at
ed-park.com
.
Personal Days
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A Random House Trade Paperback Original
Copyright © 2008 by Ed Park
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House Trade Paperbacks, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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ANDOM
H
OUSE
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RADE
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APERBACKS
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., and Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Run,” words and music by Peter Hook, Gillian Gilbert, Stephen Morris, Bernard Sumner, and John Denver, copyright © 1989 by Vitalturn Co. Ltd. and Cherry Lane Music. All rights on behalf of Vitalturn Co. Ltd administered by Warner Chappell Music Ltd. All rights reserved. Used by permission of Alfred Publishing Co., Inc., and Hal Leonard Corporation.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Park, Ed.
Personal days: a novel/Ed Park.
p. cm.
1. Offices—Fiction. 2. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 3. Office politics—Fiction. 4. Corporate reorganizations—Fiction. 5. Satire. I. Title.
PS3616 .A7432P47 2008
813'.6—dc22 2007040834
eISBN: 978-1-58836-731-0
v3.0
