There were no full-time positions open.
“Will there be an opening sometime soon?”
“Perhaps,” the gods said. “Soon is relative in the grand scheme of our enterprise.”
“Will there be an opening sometime soon?” the First Temp asked after another hundred years.
“Soon is relative.”
“Soon?” She asked, when her calendar reminded her to check again.
“Soon is relative.”
“Soon?”
“Soon.”
The First Temp rolled herself out of the gods’ office and into the bathroom at the end of the hall. It wasn’t really a hallway, you’ll understand, but more the approximation of those emotions associated with walking and arriving. It wasn’t really a bathroom, either, but it felt the way office bathrooms do. Fluorescent, echoing, cold and tiled.
The First Temp locked herself in a bathroom stall and became the First Temp to Cry in the Bathroom at Work, the very first of her kind. The hot tears fell down her face, and she used her sleeves to blot them away. She sat on the toilet seat in her dress, tapping her foot, waiting for the moment to subside. She was undone, and that’s when a handful of tissues appeared under the door.
The First Temp emerged and found herself surrounded by her temporary colleagues. They held mugs of tea and tubes of mascara and pouches of chocolates. “It’s OK!” they said, patting her shoulders and fixing her hair. “We’ll wait until you’re feeling better. We’ve got nothing else to do. We have nowhere else to be, only here with you.”
After she had collected herself, she returned to her desk with an escort of temporaries. Then they dispersed again, through the office, out into the world.
“We’re so sorry!” said the gods, hovering over the First Temp’s desk. She felt their sorrow was genuine. She knew when they were genuine because she was built to feel the world through active, staggered checks of compassion. She could not help but understand where they were coming from, because it was where she came from, too, because she was meant to begin where other people ended. She lived in the acute angle that forecasted the world’s limitations. If they had locked her in a room made of ice, she would have probably seen their side of things, shimmering in her own reflection.
She filled in when the gods went for long weekends. She filled her days until none were left, and then she started over. She watched her colleagues while they slept, and prayed for them to find their steadiness, even if she could not. The lunch breaks were short and staggered. There was always a small sandwich in a small sandwich bag. There was always a deadline or a timeline. There was always a brightly colored pen and a fresh notebook. She could find glimmers of joy in this ephemeral life.
She guided the temporaries through their placements, preserved their infinite time in this infinite world. To perhaps ensure for them something more sacred than survival.
POST WORK
I’m drinking ale with Darla on the hundredth voyage of her unmarked vessel.
“We never got around to picking out that logo,” she says, her mermaid hair swept into a messy bun.
The ship makes a swipe across the sea, rocking through rickety waves. A series of storms has wrecked the crew, and many faces are missing from the crowd.
“Like bombs falling from the sky,” Darla says, trying to describe the blasts that sent waves up and over the sails. You nod at the simile, which is perhaps closer to the truth than Darla can imagine. “And then, all the prisoners, released. Not to mention that dragon. Is it a dragon or something worse?”
The pirate captain’s wife sits alone at the mast of the ship, watching an old movie projected on the sails.
“It’s been a rough time.”
“Pearl?” I ask.
Darla shakes her head.
Two Pearls lost, none remain. When everyone is gone, it doesn’t matter who came first, who was original, who was not.
My first instinct: secure myself to the prow in protest of my grief. My second instinct: race to the dungeon, find the boy’s missing mother. But no, there are new captives here, new people, new problems, the old captives gone long ago. It’s been ages. There’s a crease that runs along my brow, and I’m not sure where it’s from. Darla serves me a plate of grub and forces it down my throat. Maurice flies overhead, the real Maurice, squawking at the fading sunlight.
“How are your grandparents, the ones who live in Florida?” I ask Darla.
“Dead.”
Safe at my old porthole, I spot a human barnacle riding the back of a whale. A special kind of breed. I wonder where it goes. Where I will go next, what I will do, what kind of adhesive I am made of, if any kind at all. I think I finally know something, but the knowledge slips away. And then the sea mist and the clouds and the fog return, the trusty dispersion and reconstitution of water.
I tie the knots required of me and file the daily logs. I drink coffee with the executive assistant, sitting on the plank with our legs dangling free. It’s like nothing happened, like nothing changed, like I’ve been sitting here all along, right where I started. My world, done and undone.
“Never would Darla do to others as they would do to her,” I say.
“I do them one better,” Darla says, and we laugh like crazy. Or no, not like crazy. Just like friends. When I’m in a rush to file the daily logs, Darla cleans my bunk for me, makes my bed, organizes my cabin. I do the same for her. We do this thing for each other. We make gestures at the world that ricochet toward an intended person. I thought I understood Darla. I thought I had practiced the kind of empathy that would allow me to replace her. But there are new pieces of information every day. She does this thing with her ears when she thinks no one is looking. She wiggles them. How long does it take to accurately replace a person, I wonder? Certainly longer than a life. An eye patch doesn’t replace the eye, it just provides temporary coverage.
“To Pearl,” she says.
“To Pearls,” I say.
Sitting in the middle of the sea, we eat under the stars, the sky reflected in the water, an infinite display of light.
Darla invites me to serve as the new first mate of human resources.
“Permanently?”
“Sure,” Darla says, thumbs in her pockets. “We have so many people to replace.”
It would be easy. How long have I been here, anyway? I consider the roughness of my hands, the soreness in my throat. “I’ll think about it,” I say, but I’ve already thought about it. It’s the only thing I think about, the ways in which I can’t stay. I close my eyes and wait for the steadiness to arrive, but it never does.
On a beautiful afternoon in spring, when the air hits my skin at just the right temperature, with just the right distribution of breeze and sun, the port accepts our ship with a quake. I jolt awake from where I nap in the crow’s nest and find myself positioned at eye level with the sign that hangs over this part of the harbor, a billboard of sorts, a beacon painted in large block letters, stomping across the sky.
“Our parent company,” says Darla.
Something familiar after so much time away.
Major Corp.
I can’t go to my old apartment, my apartment no longer mine. So I walk across town to the Major Corp offices. Major proportions, minor distinctions. The building seems to acquiesce to my visit. The lobby soothes me in a way I can’t describe. I don’t have a keycard to swipe, but I’m allowed to enter all the same, just as I expected.
“We’ve been waiting for you,” a woman says, holding the door for me. She looks like the woman I fired all those years ago.
“Are you the woman I fired all those years ago?” I ask.
She laughs and smiles, then holds an outstretched arm to the elevators. Those fabulous, fabulous arms.
It’s something that Darla said, sticking in my throat, that brings me to this place. I clutch my necklace and make my way through the halls, past the snack pantry, the cubicles, the corner office. And there, just as I remembered, the boardroom. The portrait of th
e Chairman. The long, shiny board table. The coffee service in the corner. The high-backed leather chairs.
My necklace burns. “What are you waiting for?” the Chairman asks, standing near the windows, the skyline as a backdrop. His voice goes straight from the necklace to my head, and I follow his instructions.
I stand on the table, and it is just high enough that I can touch my fingers to the boardroom ceiling. With a long stretch of pinky, I poke it gently, then harder, then with a punch, it rises. A small square of plaster pops free, a bracket, a tomb. I use my arms to lift myself up and up and into the sky.
For it is here, in this extra room above the highest floor, where I find my inheritance: boxes of company documents, Major Corp suddenly mine. A long letter from the Chairman of the Board explaining how to run a business, how to run a business very fairly. Here are my passwords and credentials. Here are my favorite foods. Here is a list of acceptable office attire. Here is what you do when someone undermines your authority. Here is the key to the office, and here is the key to a secret office. Here, all for you.
And I’ve been with you the whole time, he says, in his beautiful penmanship. There he was, in my apartment. There he was, in the box in the back of my closet. There he was, on a pirate ship and in a murder shack and the vault deep within the bank. There he was in the blimp, in the tunnels, when I tried to be a mother. In the hospital, the man as tall as a crane, hovering over my own mother, covering her hand like a tarp for the tubes and needles. Making her laugh. Her tallest, favorite boyfriend. No judgment, just here, just there, not for your survival. For support. A man about town, to look after me. There, in the dust on the chain I wear above my heart like a duty.
Parent company, Darla had said.
My father.
I climb back down into the boardroom, but he’s gone. I try to summon him through my necklace, but no, he’s not a genie. My necklace runs cold now, and always.
That lump in the back of my throat again. I try to swallow it, but the feeling stays.
EXIT INTERVIEW
Can you tell us more about this lump in your throat, in relation to your job performance?
The lump grew larger during my years here at Major Corp. It was a good lump, like a weight applied to my life. Like an emotion always reinforcing my decisions. I learned how to run a business, and I ran it very fairly. On Mondays and Fridays, I interviewed potential hires. I hired Darla full-time, and she set aside her life at sea. I hired some of the boyfriends. I finally saw them again.
How would you describe your reunion with your boyfriends?
“You!” we said, and we ran toward each other. We embraced. It wasn’t the hug I expected. It was a nesting doll of affection, an act of warmth that contained all previously lost warmth.
Did this present any unexpected challenges?
“How’s Farren?” I asked them. “Oh, you know,” they said. They weren’t my boyfriends anymore, but we were friends all the same. “You’re one of us,” they said. They left their mugs in their cubicles, scrubbed and buffed and always clean. “Good morning,” they said when they walked past my open office door. “Good morning,” I responded, kicking my feet up on my desk. Our reconciliation only augmented the lump in my throat.
What would your mother say?
Something about being sensible, something about an honest day’s work. Something about the size of my office.
Can you name a specific challenge you had to tackle?
Under my supervision, we wrestled the Director of Pamphlets back into her cave. It took seven pirate ships and three boyfriends. They guarded her cave until she returned to her human form. “I know it’ll probably kill me,” she said, “staying here all alone.” “This will kill her,” a doctor said, and then it did. The doctor knew what he was talking about. At Major Corp, we give great benefits, and of course, the Director of Pamphlets was an employee of one of our subsidiaries. I thought, When I die, it will be like leaving a job without time to clear my desk.
Can you name a specific instance where you felt unqualified for your position?
I’ve never felt qualified for anything other than lacking qualifications. When I water my plant, I feel especially unqualified, because she’s always on the brink of death.
Were you able to achieve the steadiness?
One afternoon, the lump in my throat went down. As in, I swallowed it. It felt like a glowing rock moving through my body, past my heart, down into my core. I was sitting at my desk, doing nothing. It was just like Anna said. I’d given up, so steadiness was given to me. When I wasn’t looking. For a while, I was so happy I could’ve burst like a dirigible. For a while.
And how did you handle the setbacks?
To be honest, I didn’t notice at first. Everyone was growing old. Everyone was dying. When everyone was dead, I was still alive. And then the thought settled like a new lump, this time on the back of my head. I held my head and it started to hurt. I’d always thought permanence meant I would be like everyone else. What it meant was something else entirely. What it meant was permanence. Actual forever permanence. I would get sick and instantly get well. I would cut my finger and watch the skin seal itself shut.
In your leather-bound planner, you frequently refer to feeling like a fossil. Can you elaborate?
I mean to say that I’m a literal fossil. I’m a rock formation, holding many impressions from many objects, many beings, many times. I am a walking remembrance. When the city streets finally filled with water, when the water continued to rise, I would sometimes take a canoe out through the opening in the upper parking garage. I would go looking for Anna, for other permanents like me. What I found wasn’t Anna, not anyone at all. And then, back up to the top of the Major Corp tower, the only part of the city unsubmerged. Amazing how the sun continues to set, how I remain.
Are you also writing the questions in this exit interview?
Yes.
Did you feel adequately equipped to deal with death?
It didn’t get easier, but with time, I was able to hold more death inside me. When my favorite boyfriend died, I was only as deep as a closet. There was no room to contain my grief. When cows went extinct, I was perhaps as deep as a basement. When the human race disappeared, I was as deep as the sea.
The Last Temporary lived on the top floor of the highest skyscraper in an empty, flooded city. Every morning, she rowed her canoe down Canal Street, now an actual canal, gliding past the avenues, no rush hour to speak of, no traffic jams anymore. Above and around the carcasses of real estate, she searched for proof of life.
The Last Temporary was not a temporary at all. She was permanently here, a permanent, keeping watch, filling in for all that was gone. The gods had long abandoned things, but the Last Temp remained, the remains of the world, the remainder of a job unfinished. Whether or not the job of humanity was completed adequately was not for her to say. She witnessed the brutal unmaking of the earth, the tasks unspooled, the people undone, the mazes unwound, the houses unfolded, laid flat like paper swans, the knots at the bottom of the ocean, unraveled into long skeins of rope, thin straight lines trailing for fathoms where once there had lived tangled signs of existence.
“It’s always possible that I will ferry someone to shore,” the Last Temp thought, “someone like me.”
She summoned the strength of the very First Temp, of her mother, of her grandmother, too, all the people now departed. When she closed her eyes, she could muster the force to fill in for every single person, and for their favorite people, and for their enemies, and for their boyfriends, and for their children, and for their employers, their wives, their wardens, their supervisors, their supervisees, their acquaintances, fugitives, fathers, fiancés, friends, even me, even you. She could steal everyone’s shoes, never return them, wear them forever.
On the roof of the skyscraper, listening to the breeze between their bodies: the Last Temp and every single person who had ever lived. The infinite world on its axis, the axis of her spine pointed toward the
irs, and theirs, and theirs. To hold the entire history of everything. Something more sacred than just survival. “It’s the least I can do,” she thinks, “While You Are Out.”
Acknowledgments
For the work of fearless navigation and dedication, thank you to my brilliant agent, Monika Woods. To Ruth Curry and Emily Gould for the work of mending words and cracking open sentences. I am so grateful to you, guardians of this book’s nouns and verbs and strange little spirit.
Thank you to the effervescent team at Coffee House Press. To Anitra Budd, Nica Carrillo, Lizzie Davis, Annemarie Eayrs, Daley Farr, Laurie Herrmann, and Carla Valadez, thank you for your guidance and enthusiasm, for the work of building a beautiful paper home where my novel can live.
For the work of encouragement, thank you to my mentors and professors, especially Ben Marcus, Sam Lipsyte, Diane Williams, and Timothy Donnelly. To Daniel Menaker, for equal parts advice, wisdom, and kibitzing.
Thank you to Mary and Hank, wherever you are, my very first employers in New York. Thank you to Alec Guettel for (still) being the coolest boss. It’s nice work if you can get it.
For the business of shelter, inspiration, solitude, camaraderie, and financial support, I am grateful to Columbia University, Haverford College, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Table 4 Writers Foundation, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. And thank you to n+1 for giving the short-story version of Temporary its original home.
For the labor of reading my many drafts, of hand-holding and dog-earing, of tempering work with play, I am devoted to and filled with admiration for my dear colleagues and friends: Dennis Norris II, Xuan Juliana Wang, Ruchika Tomar, Diane Cook, Mary South, Rebekah Bergman, Aaron Allen, Jessamine Chan, Emma Copley Eisenberg, Brendan Embser, Liana Finck, Sasha Fletcher, Rosie Guerin, Anna Krieger, Ethan Hartman, Adam Levy, Ashley Nelson Levy, Monica Lewis, Mandy Medley, Steve and Emma Nelson, Elizabeth Reinhard, Wendy Salinger, and Sara Sligar.
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