Personal Days (4 page)

< 7 >

Don’t forget the files for the thing

Upon initial acquaintance, the Sprout displays the ingratiating optimism characteristic of all Canadians. Twice a year, on Canada Day and at the holiday party, he wears his maple-leaf tie. We think he’d like it if one of us were from Ottawa or wherever, to talk about forgotten hockey teams and spell
colour
with a
u.

Baking-soda-white teeth glint behind thin, disturbingly kissable lips. He has a superb, full head of hair, sleek, except when that famously unruly sprig is driven to express itself.

He doesn’t have a mustache, but possesses the sort of meaty upper-lip real estate that suggests a mustache once thrived there and might return.

Some of us have noticed that he smells very nice—a faint clean soap smell basically but also something else. He and Maxine should form a rare-good-smell club. The Sprout is not conventionally handsome but not ugly, which for men of his age means handsome. He went to a community college, transferred to Hamilton, then to Cornell. Or possibly he’s from Hamilton, Ontario? Jules used to think the school was
Colgate,
but that was because of the teeth. The community college thing also came from Jules, who said he got it from Emma, the former receptionist who supposedly had a crush on the Sprout. None of this is necessarily true.

Passing his office we often hear him say,
Memorandum,
then start talking, a stream of numbers and abbreviations, with very little in the way of actual sentences made up of words. Other times we’ve heard him call his home phone and leave a message for himself:
Hey Russell, it’s Russell, don’t forget to bring the files for the thing.

It’s possible he wants us to hear how casual he is: The files for the
thing.

Sometimes he leaves messages for himself that are just scattered words:
showerhead
or
onions
or
Napoleon thing at nine.

We’ve deduced that the Sprout’s cell phone plays Pachelbel’s Canon when Sheila calls. It plays Chopsticks when his kid calls.

He has an MBA that he got through distance learning. At least three times a year he is sent to a management seminar in some place like Syracuse. Last year he went to Australia all by himself. Nobody knows why.

Don’t start liking the Sprout too much

Jules was there when the Sprout fired Emma. She was in the middle of answering a call and he told her to put the phone down and come into his office. It was over in less than a minute. She was never replaced, and for a while the Sprout actually handled the switchboard calls from his desk. Most historians consider this episode part of the Firings, even though it happened several weeks before the real slaughter began.

The Fates

The Sprout lives with his wife, Sheila, and their kid, out in a leafy suburb that recently split off from a longer-standing one. Sheila is taller and older than him, a very attractive redhead we’ve glimpsed exactly once, at a holiday party. She is a VP at an investment bank and additionally has family money, according to Jules.

We wonder if Maxine has a disc on
her.

Right out of college Sheila acted in a B movie,
Tempting Fate,
that we haven’t been able to get our hands on. We
think
it’s the same Sheila. She plays Angie Fate, the skeptical younger sister of the hot astrologer heroine, Linda Fate. Both Jack II and Laars have plugged
Tempting Fate
into their eBay alert lists but the movie is not available on videocassette let alone DVD and never will be.

Jules claims he saw it as a teenager, though admits this could be a false memory implanted by his last therapist. He thinks there was a nude scene, not at all impossible given the genre, light teen sex comedy. That it should involve horses, horseshoe crabs, or a hearse—Jules can’t quite remember which—is altogether less likely.

The syllabus

Books on the Sprout’s shelf:

The Art of War,
by Sun Tzu

Analects,
by Confucius

The Prince,
by Niccolò Machiavelli

Prophecies,
by Nostradamus

Something called
How to Sell Yourself Every Time

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary,
9th edition

The American Heritage Dictionary,
4th edition

Roget’s Thesaurus

Complete Idiot’s Guide to Microsoft PowerPoint 2000

The inventory

Other items in or atop the Sprout’s bookcase include a framed photo of Sheila, a battered candleholder without a candle, an unidentified liqueur, a plastic ukulele, and the White Pages from two years ago with the shrinkwrap still on.

A shorter Maxine

We imagine that the Sprout has a mistress. This is a regular topic over drinks. We drink and visualize a shorter Maxine, someone with eyes like Sheila’s, someone much younger or fifteen years his senior. The mistress wears her sunglasses on top of her head.

All of us have imagined the Sprout having sex. This just must be the way it is everywhere, an occupational hazard for Sprouts in offices nationwide: You become a permanent installation in your underlings’ minds. Every night the odds are that at least one of them dreams of you.

All of us have imagined him with Maxine. Some of us have imagined ourselves with Sheila. Even Pru—especially Pru. For Pru it’s a fantasy that culminates in her inheriting all of Sheila’s old family money. The Sprout is demoted to groundskeeper and occasional sex slave.

Pru would never tell her therapist this but she’s happy to give us the details.

Mathemating

Laars says there’s a mating rule: You can go out with someone half your age, plus seven years—that’s your lower limit. By the same formula, your upper limit would be determined by doubling your age and subtracting seven. This is not helpful, really, or even relevant, but we amuse ourselves with calculations for a while. For the rest of the afternoon.

Last names first

Every payday we go to Henry in HR and he asks who we are, last names first, though he should know us by now. We oblige him, as if bringing up the issue would risk stoppage of pay. He must have attended an HR meeting in which it was stressed that check disbursers must orally confirm the identity of each recipient. Still, Henry invariably confuses the two Asian workers, giving one the other’s check before stopping himself, finding the right one. He also did this to the two black workers, before one of them was fired. He used to apologize for the confusion but even he realizes how ridiculous it’s become.

Does anyone remember anything about Jason?

Jonah is still trying to figure out the mystery of the CD that Maxine broke into pieces and threw away, her plan for world domination lost forever.
Jason,
it said. He still has the shards in his desk drawer and every so often will stare at them moodily, his reflection evocatively fractured.

Surely the title was tongue in cheek. But why did it say
Jason
underneath? He’s been gone since the Firings, a late October victim. Jill was close to him but she says the last time she saw him was at the holiday party. He had crashed it, dressed like the Sprout.

Wait, he was at the holiday party?
asks Lizzie.

We remember Jules had a love-hate relationship with Jason. One time they didn’t speak to each other for a month, a dispute over a paper jam. Actually, there was rarely any love—it was more or less hate all the time. Both of them are long gone now. The rest of us liked Jason but now we can’t remember a thing.

He punched the wall that one time,
offers Jenny.
Way too intense.

Laars coughs.
That was me.

Pru wonders if Maxine has a disc for each of us. She imagines files full of closed-circuit footage from tiny cameras hidden in our monitors.

Jack II floats a theory: that Maxine and Jason were lovers, and the disc has highlights of their afternoon romps. Lizzie points out the obvious.

Wait,
says Jack II.
Jason was gay?

Crease puts up his hand for a high five.

Jonah points out that Maxine only started in the office earlier
this
year—February, maybe March. Meaning she wouldn’t have been around at all while Jason was still here. It can take a while for new presences to make themselves felt, but Jonah’s chronology seems sound. Maxine and Jason never overlapped. Jack II still thinks we should try to glue the pieces together and see if the thing will play.

< 8 >

Major tool

Jenny has stopped coming out with us for drinks, either on the advice of her life coach or because she has a serious boyfriend. We’ve met him, though his name escapes us. He has a baby face and incipient dreadlocks and favors the loose-fitting, heavily braided clothes associated with the better class of sherpa. He tutors inner-city kids in math.
That’s so great,
Pru says. They have the most difficulty with division, though this is of course true for everyone.

He splits a huge loft with a roommate, an actress who is never around. Pru went to a New Year’s bash there and can’t imagine how he affords it.

Laars misses Jenny. He might even like her. He refers to her boyfriend as a
tool
or occasionally a
major tool.

All we do is stare

Most of us are in therapy. Occasionally one of us will quit for a while, laughably convinced we are better, before realizing there’s no such thing as
better.
Haven’t we learned that by now? Nothing will ever get better, nothing will ever be fixed. Fixing is not even the point.
What is the point?

Jules used to see a sketchy Lacanian but we hear that he’s now seeing a very good Brentian. It’s a slow process because a Brentian session is conducted entirely in French. Jules’s French is actually
pas mal
but his therapist’s isn’t so great.

Jenny scoffs at the method, even as she confesses to Pru that her relationship with her life coach is deteriorating.
All we do is stare at each other,
she says.

The situation in the workplace is stressful enough without worrying about her life coach. She doesn’t need this. She almost wants to see a therapist about it. Maybe the answer to her problems is to quit her job and become a life coach herself.

Jules in disguise

About a month after Jules was laid off, he happened to see the Sprout and Sheila at a diner. The Sprout had coffee. Sheila drank water. They sat on the same side of the table but said nothing, just stared straight out at the traffic going downtown. It was the
American Gothic
of breakfasts.

They left after ten wordless minutes. Jules paid his bill and walked out. He had nowhere to go and so followed them up to Seventy-second. They walked west. Jules slipped on his sunglasses and mussed his hair for a disguise, using saliva as a stiffener. Then he started moving his jaw in a gradually more spastic manner suggesting, to any witnesses, that though his clothes looked neat, he was most likely a mentally unstable drifter.

The Sprout and Sheila slipped into the vestibule of a brownstone halfway down the block. He counted to a hundred before going up for a closer look at the sign.

He e-mailed Jonah with the news that the Sprout and Sheila were getting couples therapy. Now almost every week he finds himself lingering down the block, waiting for a glimpse of them, occasionally cackling before dashing around the corner, out of sight. Some of us are worried about Jules.

Fictional damage control

Don’t tell Jonah about HABAW,
Crease says to Jill as she’s shaking crumbs out of her keyboard.

HA-wha?

Half Asian British Accent Woman.

Who?

Elevator lady!

He can’t remember whom he’s told and whom he hasn’t. His need to control the information is puzzling, as he has yet to speak to the object of his obsession. It’s been weeks since he’s seen her. Talking about her to others, imagining that they are likewise obsessed and even competitive, gives him a thrill that’s safer than actually talking
to
her. It also helps him believe that she still exists.

Middle of the pack

Our latest Maxine theory has nothing to do with the Californians. We believe she is a corporate spy, working for the competition. The
Jason
disc, then, was her evaluation of the work done by a former member of the team.

Her retroactive evaluation,
Laars clarifies.

The theory wobbles upon examination. Spy? On
us
? Our company is hardly a trailblazer. Its MO is to follow the industry norm as closely as possible, sticking to the middle of the pack to ensure its survival.

Also, if Maxine
were
a spy, wouldn’t she be making more of an attempt to get to know us—more specifically, hanging out/sleeping with us?

Jules implies that Maxine’s the one who got him fired last November, but it’s not clear that she even knew who he was. Jules had tardiness issues and walked around scowling all the time. He also had padded his expense account to include office supplies that were actually groceries. Once he not only stole a whole bunch of office supplies but FedExed them to his home so he wouldn’t have to carry them on the subway.

Siberia

At noon on Monday the Sprout moves Jill to Siberia. It’s a spacious cubicle on the sixth floor, miles from anyone else, next to the door leading to the fire exit.

It wasn’t always like this. Before the Firings, a large team worked here, and traces of their residence can still be found. We knew some of them, though not well. We don’t really recognize the scattering of remaining employees, who sit hunched with their backs toward us as if awaiting the death blow. Supposedly there are more survivors on the fifth floor, but not too many. These are people whose tasks never intersect with ours, people we never even need to e-mail.

The Sprout’s reasons for relocating Jill are opaque, even more mysterious than his usual reasons for doing anything. At first he makes it sound like a promotion. Then he adds that the HR department will be taking over her former desk area. This seems dubious. The HR department now consists of one person, Henry. They fired everyone else.

No one wants to mention that, shortly before Jules was canned, the Sprout praised him and then moved him up to six and gave him a pay cut.

This is turning out to be the Mother of all Deprotions.

The days pass.
I’m dying here,
she e-mails, and we e-mail back,
We’re coming—be right there!!
or
OK hold on…!
but we don’t visit for hours, if we visit at all.

Space shapes psychology, psychology shapes behavior, according to Pru. We imagine Jill roasting pigeons over a space heater, carving pictograms into the side of her monitor and then coloring them with blood from her perpetual hangnails.

Jill boldly e-mails Jack II,
Shoulders are killing me, I could use a backrub!
But he doesn’t write back.

Going to Siberia is an event. We gird ourselves for the climb, make sure our schedules are clear, pack provisions. Then we get distracted by a phone call and fail to swing by. Maybe once a week, at the end of a slow afternoon, one of us will make the journey. From Jill’s desk you can hear the yawning of ancient door hinges coursing through the stairwell. People from other offices head to the stairs for an illicit cigarette or silent sob session. In Jill’s mind they grope each other under twitchy fluorescent lighting, mouths slack with pleasure, all this lust right outside her door.

I don’t dare open it,
Jill e-mails us, sounding like a child in a book to whom something very bad or very fun is going to happen.

I’m fantasizing about the Sprout,
she e-mails us a few hours later, when the phantom groans get too much.
He’s in the stairwell with Maxine.

And Sheila,
reply-alls Pru, who is obsessed, intellectually, with threesomes.

And Laars,
reply-alls Laars, who is obsessed, despite the vow of chastity, with foursomes.

K.

We shouldn’t discuss Sprout-Maxine relations on e-mail,
Jenny writes to Jill. Except she mistypes a
K
in the to-field, which causes Kristen’s name to automatically appear. Jenny sees this
—Kristen?—
but the error doesn’t register until a split second after she clicks send.
KRISTEN!
Now she’s a nervous wreck.

Kristen is the Sprout’s supervisor.

We know her, if at all, by her initial, K., which periodically appears at the bottom of certain petrifying memos that the Sprout photocopies for us.

Jenny has always lived in fear that the company could monitor our e-correspondence, but it’s only when trying to alert others that she puts herself in jeopardy.

Moral:
Don’t try to help people.

The feminine mystique

Only a few of us have ever even
seen
K. before. She must have access to a private elevator or else get teleported in. One time, about a year ago, Pru said she was shocked to see her at the Good Starbucks. We all said,
Who?

She’s never at meetings, though sometimes we suspect she’s listening in remotely.

K. sits in an enclosed office on the fifth floor, one above us, one below Jill. Her door is always shut, the venetian blind impenetrable. No one knows what goes on in there. We can imagine her scolding the Sprout and Maxine via speakerphone, sipping Diet Cokes and throwing the empties out the window.

We are so removed from her realm that when we say her name, sometimes we say Karen or Kiersten, and no one’s a hundred percent sure if a correction is in order. Lizzie thinks that
any
name would sound too feminine, masking her power. Better just to think of her as K.

Police blotter

The top magenta Post-it of the stack on Crease’s southern desk bears a message:
Please stop stealing me.
Nobody has been stealing them, but now some of us start, just to confirm his fears. We keep removing the top Post-it, taking a few of the ones beneath, and replacing the one with Crease’s request.

He can always tell. The edges are never perfectly aligned.

Eight blank pages

Maxine e-mails the Sprout a PDF titled
PLANS
2. The Sprout somehow can’t deal with PDFs. He’s reasonably tech-savvy otherwise, so this amounts to a superstition or weird phobia. Maybe the initials
PDF
remind him of a lost love or buried trauma. He always asks Jenny to download the files and print them out.

The Sprout has a fax-printer in his office, but it doesn’t connect to Jenny’s computer. She has to use the asthmatic printer in the mail room, practically a time zone away.

She opens the PDF. She hits print and goes on her journey, only to find eight blank pages. She spends the next hour fiddling with the document until the Sprout phones her and asks how it’s going. She thinks he thinks she forgot. She brings the pages in and tries to explain, but the Sprout doesn’t seem to be listening.

Eight blank pages.
He turns white when he sees them, as if a horse head has been deposited on his bed. He leaves early and the next morning there’s a message on Jenny’s voice mail saying he’s taking a personal day.

The worst time in the world

Jenny is essentially the Sprout’s assistant now, on top of her other duties. The position was formerly filled by the Original Jack, who was fired on 9/11. Not
the
9/11, but the fourth anniversary. A Sunday. The Sprout called him at home. We consider this the unofficial start of the Firings.

We don’t even like when we look at the clocks on our computers and they say 9:11.

The Sprout told her that Henry in HR was doing a search for a Jack replacement. Three months passed. Then he started asking Jenny to print out schedules and drafts and PDFs, keep the supply closet filled with highlighters, and call the IT department whenever the Internet went down, which it did—which it does—every other week.

A year went by, Jenny subbing for the Original Jack. Then everything was set in stone.

Things grow in Siberia

We all visit Jill bearing iced coffee, cookies, and about a dozen packs of sugar, as if she lives in a land where sugar is used as currency. We want her to stockpile the sugar and use it sparingly because we don’t want to visit her again. There is something forcefully sad about her elaborately decorated cubicle. She has pinned up pictures of all of us from our short-lived softball days. We look slightly deranged, wide-eyed, and well-fed and for some reason not depressed. It’s weird to see Laars holding a bat and pointing proudly to the Finnish clip-art logo on his jersey.

Who’s that?
asks Jenny.

Otto,
says Laars.
I should give that guy a call.

Things grow here: a spider plant, a scary cactus thingy, a healthy aloe. We joke about her green thumb. But all the personal effects that we remember from when she was closer to us now look sad and infected. It hurts too much to look at pictures of her family, her dog, an alarmingly good-looking guy who is probably her brother but maybe is her boyfriend. There is a strong citrus scent in the air, a swarm of chemical lemon fighting against all the dust that begins to surround her encampment at a radius of ten feet or so.

All I’ve done today is check e-mail,
she says.

Later Crease asks if we noticed that there was ink all over her hands.

Pru hadn’t, but did notice the odd new haircut and the flashy new scarf. The scarf looked awkward, like an eel from the future, or something worn by a vampire victim.
Like if you unraveled it, her head would fall off and roll away.

Help wanted

Every few minutes Pru e-mails us her keyboard woes:
I can’t make an exclamation point or question mark anymore. Help. HELP.
We can all sympathize. The decay of punctuational capability is a common theme here. The Sprout promised us new computers. But that was two years ago.

Elevator revelations

We sense something new in the elevator today. We smell it before we see it: a stone gray, footstep-muffling carpet.

By late afternoon we have forgotten what the floor looked like before. We’re transfixed by the bits of color hiding in the dull gray weave, visible only upon prolonged inspection. We stare at it as if hoping to induce an optical illusion, something we can believe in, a secret porthole into another world.