Personal Days (10 page)

Returning to Jill’s desk, they peered into the dumpster, as if all her trash might have summoned her into being.

We should really call her sometime,
said Jenny in a total robot voice.

They sifted through the detritus, no longer self-conscious now that the Unnameable and the Kohut Brothers had gone. At first they turned up nothing good: a battered dictionary, chipped mugs holding pencil ends, assorted small broken women’s-hair-related items. A scattering of gray tic tacs and yards of mysterious dark green string were a running motif. Laars found a CD he’d lent her a year ago, but he didn’t want it anymore.

II (C) ii (b):
Lined up on Jill’s old desk were three staplers, all in perfect working order. One bore the name
KRASH
, the letters deep as runes, carved into layers of Scotch tape.

It’s following me!
said Laars, making a crucifix with his fingers.

Laars imagined
KRASH
as a more desperate version of himself, toiling in Siberia, living out his days in office drudgery without even the Internet for distraction.
KRASH
’s main activity was adopting, naming, and losing staplers.

II (C) ii (c):
A paper clip, centered in the dark circle where a cactus pot used to be, drove a sliver of sun straight into Laars’s eyes.

It obliterated my short-term memory,
he said later, after realizing he’d forgotten to bring one of the staplers back downstairs.

II (D) The Worst Soup in the World

II (D) i:
The cold weather was approaching. The Red Alcove didn’t get good heat, so its denizens ventured outside the office for lunch. Some of the others came along, and as the group grew, the possibilities for a mutually agreeable venue diminished. Laars had gone through an intensive burrito phase. Jonah had completed a sub phase and never wanted to see another one again. Crease voted against anything Asian, including Indian food. Already that week he’d eaten Thai, Japanese, and Burmese.

Let’s decide on a place before we step outside,
Pru said, as they puttered in the lobby.

In the past, when they tried to order delivery together, the logistics would drive the designated order placer crazy, not to mention the order taker at the other end of the line. Jack II was a vegetarian who always wanted extra hot sauce. Lizzie eschewed carbs. Crease avoided vegetables at all costs. Someone—Jill?—didn’t like mayo. Jenny once said she was going to make a chart of who couldn’t eat what.

Pru said she ate everything except cheese and butter.

Oh, and eggs,
she added.

Everyone longed for either converting the sixth floor into a cafeteria or hooking up an IV drip, or boarding a random bus for a spur-of-the-moment excursion to some outer-borough culinary Xanadu that would take them all day to reach and get them fired.

They agreed at last on soup.

II (D) ii:
Grime wasn’t with them. He was at home, taking a personal day. Before last week, he was hazy with the whole concept of personal days. Lizzie had filled him in and then he said he wanted to use them all up at once.

Lizzie also said that she was no longer speaking with Grime.

He told me the most disgusting thing the other day, totally out of the blue. We were walking to the subway and I was explaining the personal day thing to him. We stopped for a drink and for some reason he was talking about India and then all of a sudden he was talking about something else. So awful. I’m sorry. I really, really can’t tell you what it was.

Is it something bad?
asked Pru.

Lizzie nodded.

Something about who’s getting fired?

Now everyone was listening.

Lizzie shook her head.
No, nothing like that. It’s worse, maybe.
I
think it’s worse. I don’t even know why he told me. It’s the filthiest thing.

What—what? Tell us, tell us.

I can’t. Not now. Forget it.

II (D) iii:
Laars observed how he never packed a lunch anymore.
I’m a good cook, too,
he claimed. Anything homemade always ended up making you a little sad. The look, the taste, the lack of colorful packaging. Occasionally someone would bring leftovers from a big dinner, but then the smell became kind of a downer, evoking decay and the passage of time. Another problem was the microwave in the pantry. Even on its lowest setting it would blacken things, smelling up the office, or otherwise cause a mess so extensive that the guilty party wouldn’t even begin to clean up.

This soup is like water,
said Jack II, unloading half a saltshaker into the bowl.

Lizzie said Grime’s thing recently has been popcorn. He couldn’t stop raving about it. Apparently British popcorn was the absolute worst. It was a New World food. They analyzed this information for clues.

II (D) iv:
Pru wanted to change the subject. She didn’t care to hear more about what she understood to be Lizzie and Grime’s burgeoning relationship, even if it appeared the two were no longer on speaking terms.

Remember those oat bars?
asked Pru.

For a while Jonah was bringing in about ten of these weird little snack bars every day, offering them to anyone who asked and even those who didn’t. Pru would take two and give one to the Unnameable.

The bars tasted like they’d been dipped in V8 and left to dry atop an old radiator. The story went that Jonah’s aunt had gotten involved in a pyramid scheme with these oat bars, and he’d bought two institutional-size boxes’ worth to help her out. He still had half a box of oat bars. They were two years old now but probably tasted the same.

II (D) v:
Pru said she was at a party in Brooklyn and the Original Jack was there again. He’d been to Jules’s restaurant—Mannequin? Gallivant?—and reported that it served a deluxe toasted version of Jonah’s staple: two oat bars sandwiching a thick slice of cheddar, with a light tofu-based frosting. The chalkboard listing the house specials described it as
decadent.
The Original Jack also mentioned that Jules was thinking of changing his name, something about tax irregularities. Jules had asked if he could use the Original Jack’s mailing address, a request that was denied.

II (D) vi:
They talked about physical ailments, recurring nightmares, psychosomatic afflictions, all of it blamed on the job. It was pure TMI of the most compelling variety. Jonah’s carpal tunnel syndrome had been so bad he’d asked Robb, Otto’s successor in IT, to set him up with Glottis, the voice-recognition program that Jules used for
Personal Daze.
But then the symptoms suddenly vanished—a miracle.

Unfortunately, he now had a form of vertigo, which he said was even worse than searing limb pain. The discomfort was more abstract and thus more worrying. He had some tests done and the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Whenever he went out of the city, even just to New Jersey to visit his aunt, the oat-bar aunt, his dizziness subsided completely. Did that mean it was purely psychological? Whenever he traveled to Mexico it evaporated almost as soon as he boarded the plane, faded even from memory as he clambered over steep Mayan ruins. It returned, like clockwork, the moment he touched down at JFK.

II (D) vii:
Crease said his left eyelid fluttered of its own accord. At first he thought it was from too much coffee, but he weaned himself off caffeine and the lid was still moving.

Can you see it? Oh wait, it’s stopped. Oh there it goes.

They stared at his eyes, but it was hard to catch such small movements under the soupery’s dim lighting. Crease said he was going bald as well, but that might just be age. He maintained that the construction from the infinity-shaped building next door was making his ears ring.
Don’t you guys hear it?
Most days he wore earplugs, which helped but made him think he was underwater.

The really heavy machinery kicked in at one o’clock, he explained. Crease basically had to have his work finished by then, or at least anything that required problem-solving skills. Even with the earplugs in, he could feel the vibrations, and it became impossible to arrange his thoughts toward any productive end. He had two desks but claimed he could feel the vibrations at either one. He could even feel them at home, he said, lying in bed, staring at a shadow on the ceiling.

The construction was not just ruining his hearing and depleting his brainpower but also shaking the hair out of his head.

Pru said she had no sex drive and that she recently had a dream in which Grime killed the Sprout using a plastic shovel. The stuff about the sex drive was definitely TMI, but a good sort of TMI.

II (D) viii:
I’m getting fat,
offered Jack II, mixing a pack of oyster crackers into the dregs of his bisque. He had been saying that for years, indeed tended to say it shortly upon meeting someone for the first time. It used to be people would tell him he was crazy, a tallish, rail-thin narcissist, but now when they looked at him, the green sweater
did
seem to bulge significantly.

You look avuncular,
said Lizzie. Jack II nodded grimly. He knew he was doomed. Biology had it in for him. His whole family was avuncular—not only his uncles but even his aunts.

Laars said he’d been going to the gym every other day, where he’d run three miles, do three hundred sit-ups and a hundred push-ups, and regard himself moodily in the floor-length mirrors.

Crease said that his eyelid didn’t flutter when he was at the gym. It kicked in when he waited for the elevator in the morning, anxious and hopeful that HABAW would arrive.

II (D) ix:
Lizzie said she’d been dreaming of sharks again, but that these were friendly sharks, with big happy eyes, or at least not the sorts of sharks that attacked her. This was an improvement over earlier in the year, right around when Jason and the Original Jack were fired, when it seemed that every night she was torn apart, by one shark or two or twenty. Back then, sleep had been like tuning in to a particularly gruesome radio serial.

This is the worst soup in the world,
said Laars.

Speaking of food,
said Lizzie,
there’s a banana in the fridge that’s seriously been there since Labor Day.

II (E): The Jilliad

II (E) i:
In flowing greatcoat and knit black skullcap, with a fat black notebook clamped under his arm, Laars presented a distinctly monklike aspect as he stepped outside on that crisp autumn afternoon.

He asked the smokers huddled on the pavement for a piece of gum. He’d just gorged on a chicken curry lunch special, chased by some pungent unagi from the day before.

I have the most amazing breath.

Pru proffered an Orbit.
What’s in the notebook?

How much time do you have?
Smoke escaped from the upright ash stand as he laid out a curious episode against the dying light.

II (E) ii:
Laars explained to those gathered outside that he had just returned from a solo expedition to Siberia—having remembered, as it were, that he’d forgotten to take a stapler the other day. Several weeks had passed since that first journey, and now Siberia was starting to live up to its name. The heat was off, and you could see your breath against the wan light from the windows. The vending machines stood empty and dark. It was so quiet you could hear the clock tick.

Dust touched everything, as if it had traveled from every corner of the sixth floor to gather around Jill’s desk, a silent pilgrimage. Laars shuddered as he noted the cobwebs now softening the edges. His nape hairs detected a spectral presence and at one point he actually said Jill’s name aloud, half-shutting his eyes in fear of who knows what.

Alas, Jill’s three staplers were nowhere to be found.

Most of the old junk had been carted away, and a new heap of things lay in the dumpsterette: five pairs of sunglasses, a disposable camera, and a small bookcase that must have been tucked under her desk.

The stout dark wood shelves held a dozen titles, books that promised to help you navigate the workplace, negotiate from a position of power, and otherwise claw your way to the top. In other words, titles that would have found their most timid reader in Jill, whose idea of asserting herself at work was answering the phone after the first ring. Each text appeared carefully read—dog-eared and heavily underlined in three different inks. Her microscopic notes clouded the margins, and the endpapers teemed with page numbers and keywords. Her elaborate outlines went beyond the standard markings—Roman numerals, capital letters—and into Greek symbols, decimal places. A flurry of red arrows tied the information together in a swirling, almost three-dimensional mass.

Laars concluded that Jill, exiled and scared, had been trying
—really
trying—to get back on track. Not only that: She was determined to advance
beyond
her previous station. If her fate was to be stuck in an office, she would arm herself with the cutthroat wisdom of sages from Moses to Bill Gates to the guy who invented that new vacuum cleaner. She would study the way of moguls. She would sell out former friends, volunteer for onerous tasks, anything to
get a leg up.
She would become a winner for maybe the first time in her life.

Had anyone noticed, toward the end, her confident new haircut, fortified with power highlights, set off by those hypnotic scarlet earrings?

II (E) iii:
Maybe the Sprout had. Maybe he’d read the same books, memorized the same guru-sanctioned moves, and knew—as soon as he saw that overpowering pair of pendulous ear decorations—what was in store: a power play from below. Decisive action was called for, and he ruthlessly cut her loose before she could do any damage.

II (E) iv:
It’s heartbreaking,
said Pru as a twister of receipts and Styrofoam take-out containers blew past.

Seriously,
Lizzie agreed.

That’s what I thought—at first,
said Laars.
Listen.