by Ben Marcus
He says that it’s about her son and would she please call him.
The boy won’t nap, but he doesn’t cry. He sits in his crib quietly, and Mather notices that his breath is coming heavily, with a faint whistling sound. Under the boy’s dark hair, Mather thinks, the scalp looks unusually red, and when he touches it the boy flinches. He gives him the humidifier mask and the boy takes hungry gulps of the wet air. When Mather tries to remove him from the crib, the boy protests, points back to his mattress, so Mather leaves him there, and the boy crawls under the tank of the humidifier.
Mather checks on him later and he is still awake, but he cries when Mather tries to pick him up. The tank is empty, so Mather rinses it out and fills it with more distilled water. The boy returns the mask to his face and Mather can hear a whinny in his breath now. Is he getting worse? The redness on the boy’s scalp has spread beyond his hairline, down his face.
Mather’s mother, before she retired, was a nurse, so he calls her.
“You worry too much,” she says. “Leave him alone. Children are remarkably strong. They’re much stronger than us. You never got sick, never once. You never caused us any problems.”
The next morning the car-pool vehicle does not come. Mather has been up for hours and is packed and ready to go. He’s lost track of whose turn it is to drive today, so he can’t even make a phone call. He’s been so grateful to be part of the car pool, since he has no car of his own, that he’s paid more than his share of the gas, to be sure that nothing goes wrong. He tries not to make trouble, particularly on days when he has the boy. But there’s no car today, and if he doesn’t leave right away he will be late for work.
On the bus there are no empty seats, so Mather stakes out a position for himself against a pole. The boy is pale inside his snowsuit. His face is dry and peeling. His skin seems nearly translucent. His cough is small and weak, and it could be that he’s dehydrated.
The bus lets him off downhill from the Faraday gate. With the boy in his arms, Mather hikes up the side of the road as a stream of cars pass them on the way to work. He sees some people he knows, but no one stops. He’s never hiked this road, and it’s much steeper than he would have thought. He’s drenched inside his winter coat, and the boy’s face is flushed, even though he’s not exerting himself. At the gate, Mather has to show his credentials and they ask to pat down the boy, who goes with one of the guards without complaint. He doesn’t even seem to notice that someone else is carrying him.
The nursery is closed again this morning. Someone has taped a notice to the door, but it’s since been ripped down, leaving the tape fastened over a shred of blank paper. Mather brings the boy up to his office and there are two temps sharing his desk. He stands there holding the boy, needing to put him down so that he can figure out what to do.
“All right,” he says to the temps, trying to sound cheerful. “I guess I have to get in here.”
He has no idea what he’s going to do with Alan today, but at least if he gets his desk back he can settle in and maybe make a play area for him on the floor.
The temps look up at him and blink. “We’re here until noon,” the young man says. Probably he’s in his early twenties, but he looks like a boy.
“Well,” Mather says, “you need to move to the conference room or somewhere else, because this is my desk.”
He shouldn’t have to say this.
“Mr. Ferguson told us to work here,” the other temp says impatiently, a young woman who is so striking he’s afraid to look at her.
The boy wriggles out of Mather’s grasp and sets off away from him, not even looking back, so Mather excuses himself to follow him, until they bump into Ferguson, who is speaking with some executives outside the conference room.
“Well, who do we have here?” Ferguson says, addressing the boy.
Mather leans over the boy, as if he needs to formally present him to his supervisor. “This is Alan,” he says.
“Alan. Is that right? Are you helping your father get his stuff, Alan?”
“My stuff?” Mather asks. “What do you mean?”
“I had a note that you were leaving.”
The executives standing with Ferguson smile at Mather. Ferguson smiles, too.
“No, no, no,” Mather protests. “I had to take a personal day yesterday. His mother is supposed to have him and the nursery was closed. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding. I’m not leaving.”
“Well, that is a misunderstanding,” Ferguson says. “That contradicts the note I received.”
His face has clouded over. When someone like Ferguson exceeds the allotted time for encounters with employees in the hallway, he does not try to hide it.
“No,” Mather says. “I’m here, I’m here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“Okay,” Ferguson says, and he looks down at the boy, who’s still in his snowsuit, pressed against the glass of the conference room. “But what about today?” Ferguson wants to know. “What’s your plan?”
What he’s going to do is check the nursery again, Mather tells Ferguson, because maybe they’ve opened it by now, and then he’ll be right back. But of course the nursery is still closed when he gets there, locked and dark, with no note on the window. He asks the security guards if they know anything, but they don’t. From the guard booth, they look over at the unlit nursery room as if they’ve never seen it before. So Mather has no choice but to go home with the boy in his arms, who is so light it feels to Mather that he is carrying an empty snowsuit.
At home he calls Maureen again, but her voice mail is full and she’s not picking up. Mather would try Robert, to reach Maureen, but if he was ever told Robert’s last name he can’t remember it now. Mather knows nothing about him, let alone where his hometown is.
There are a few of Maureen’s friends to try, but Alma is the obvious one, the loyalist, whose negative forecasts about Mather were always, according to Maureen, 100 percent accurate.
“If Alma is so smart,” Mather once asked, “then why is she fat and alone?” He wanted to think that this was an innocent question, prompted by irreconcilable pieces of information.
“Of course you’d ask that,” Maureen said, smiling. “Of course.” She always seemed genuinely happy when Mather was at his worst.
And of course you’d have no answer, Mather thought, back at her, in the unspoken way he often fought with her, but then Maureen did have an answer, at least about Alma’s weight. A gland or a duct or perhaps an entire organ had begun to work overtime, could not stop laboring inside Alma, as if there were always unfinished work to do. Or was it the reverse? The result was that incredibly pale skin Alma had and, yes, it was true, some extra weight. A depressed metabolism, because Alma actually ate less than the rest of us. But Mather didn’t even deserve to know that, Maureen assured him. He wasn’t even worthy of knowing that about Alma.
She picks up on the first ring, stating her full name, Alma Ryan, which everyone does at her office, a publishing house specializing in children’s books. Mather quickly says that it is him, and that she shouldn’t hang up, because this is about Alan, and does Alma know where Maureen is?
“What happened to Alan?” Alma asks in a careful voice.
Mather explains that nothing has, but Maureen is still not back and this isn’t like her and it’s causing problems for him. He’s home with the boy now when he needs to be at work. He might even lose his job because of this.
“I’m sorry to hear that your child is an inconvenience to you,” Alma says.
Mather curses at her, freely and at length, and Alma hangs up. Then he calls her right back.
“Alma Ryan.”
Mather explains that he is sorry and he needs her help. Alan is no inconvenience to him. Alan is his son and he loves him. Alma has to believe that, no matter what she thinks of him. But the boy needs his mother, too. Mather explains that Alan is too little to be away from his mother for this long, with Mather not even knowing where she is or when she’s coming back. Maybe Alma does n
ot know the details, but Alan is not well. His asthma. This is not fair to Alan.
He explains this to Alma, but when he waits for her to respond she isn’t there. The line is dead. It is possible that Alma hung up as soon as she heard Mather’s voice. She doesn’t pick up again.
In the late afternoon, the boy won’t breathe through his mask. He covers his mouth with his hands and turns away. Mather tries to listen to his breath, but the boy won’t stay put. Still, Mather hears a whistle in the boy’s lungs, and he pictures them shriveling inside the boy’s small chest, as dry as paper curling up in the heat. He knows that if the boy would inhale the vapors from the mask his lungs would lubricate and he would feel better, but the boy is stubborn and the more Mather tries to press the mask over his face, the more he twists out of reach.
Mather reminds himself that it isn’t serious. The treatments are supposedly optional, meant to increase the boy’s comfort. It is only asthma. But the boy is pale and certainly too little for his age, and he sits listlessly on the rug after his nap, uninterested in the toy cars that Mather has arranged around him.
Mather schedules a sitter, and the next morning he shows her around the apartment while the boy clings to him. Mather demonstrates the ventilator to the sitter, but it is clear that she has already decided that it is too complicated for her to operate.
Mather was going to leave early for the bus stop, to be sure that he wasn’t late for work, but then his doorbell rings, and he runs downstairs to the car-pool vehicle, the boy crying behind him in the sitter’s arms. A proper good-bye would only have made it worse, and the boy will recover faster this way. In any case, Mather needs to go to work. This is how it has to be.
In the dark car, no one so much as looks his way. Mather wonders what happens day after day in this car before he is picked up that makes for such grim silence. They stare ahead while he settles in and buckles his seat belt, and for a moment Mather feels the enormous relief of traveling alone, even if there are mute coworkers pressed against him. He has no one to take care of and he can relax.
Mather lowers his window when they pull out of the garage, and the woman beside him huffs. He’ll consider himself scolded. They turn onto the Hills Parkway and the car picks up speed. Outside, it’s a flat, gray morning, but the air is warm, and Mather lets the wind cover his face. There are sweet, smoky streaks in the sky, the kind of clouds that scatter if a bird so much as flies through them. Mather almost feels that he could sleep, and he wishes the ride were longer. He’d love to stay in the car like this all day, driving around town, sleeping a little, looking out the window, doing nothing, while someone else keeps the boy busy at home.
The temps are at his desk when he gets to work.
“Okay, guys, break it up,” he says, wanting to sound jovial.
They’re engrossed in their work and don’t look up. It’s the same two temps from yesterday, and a third one leans over them, staring at the computer screen. They have coffees and food wrappers cluttering the desk, and Mather’s own inbox is nowhere to be seen. There’s hardly room for him to put down his briefcase.
“I’m back,” Mather says, this time more softly.
“We’re pretty hunkered down,” the young man from yesterday says. Mather isn’t sure, but the young man’s hand motion may be waving him away.
Mather says, “I can see that.” It’s important to stay friendly, extend an olive branch. He was a temp once. There’s no reason to lord his rank over them. “Would you guys like to take a minute to find another place to work?”
The young man seems to consider this but mentions their deadline and how settled in they are at Mather’s desk. He says that they’re good where they are, but thanks for the offer.
Of course it’s a misunderstanding, and a small one, but Mather feels that he hasn’t been at his desk in ages and he’d like things to return to normal. How long has it been since he’s had a normal workday? He looks around for some sort of backup, commiseration from the other full-timers, but his colleagues are hopelessly entranced by their computers. Unfortunately, he has to go higher up on this one. He’d have liked to avoid that, but the temps have given him no choice. Ferguson’s assistant tells Mather that his appointment isn’t until eleven.
Mather says, “I didn’t make that appointment. Remember? I need to see him now. The temps are at my desk and I have to get to work. It’s already after nine.”
“So are you canceling the eleven o’clock?” the assistant asks, crossing something out in his book.
“No,” Mather says quietly, “because I never made it.”
“Never made what?” a voice booms behind him.
It’s Ferguson walking in, acting as though he’d missed the beginning of a joke. Mather wonders if Ferguson ever gets tired, smiling like that. The assistant disengages, returns to his work.
“I never made an appointment with you,” Mather explains, realizing that this will only confuse Ferguson, but Ferguson has the ability not to show confusion, perhaps not to even experience it. A man like Ferguson can remain impervious to all messages beyond his own internal script, which drives him with purpose from room to room.
Ferguson pats Mather on the back.
“So you got rid of him, huh?” he asks.
“Who?” Mather says.
“Who!” Ferguson laughs. “The kid! You finally fobbed him off! Good work!”
“Oh,” Mather says. “I did. Yeah.”
“Just a quick thing,” he says to Ferguson, using a serious, professional tone.
He would like Ferguson, if possible, to resolve this situation with the temps, he says, because he needs to get back to work, and why does he always have to vacate people from his desk every morning? It’s stressful, if Ferguson wants to know the truth, and Ferguson nods with sympathy. The temps should have marching orders and time frames before they even sit down at someone else’s desk. Mather explains that it creates tension and it’s maybe not a great idea for office morale.
“The temps left at eight today,” Ferguson says, “as usual. But let me introduce you to our new team. We’ve made some pretty killer hires. Morale couldn’t be better.”
At Mather’s desk, Ferguson presents the three new hotshot employees, but Mather doesn’t listen to their names. Ferguson is boasting about the marketing initiative they took as temps and how they’re the first temps in a year to move up the ladder like this. Straight up the ladder. Fire at their heels.
The three of them, still caught up in the seriousness flowing from Mather’s computer, are flushed with Ferguson’s praise, as if they believe that soon they’ll be running the company. And somehow Mather is supposed to feel happy for them, which he tells Ferguson he is, but of course, this is his desk, where his unfinished projects remain and can’t the new team work somewhere else?
Ferguson says that he and Mather should go talk at the elevator. His voice is soft, and he tries to shepherd Mather away, placing an arm around him.
Mather imagines Ferguson obeying his internal voice: Walk employee to a quiet place. Present bad news in positive terms.
About the only way that Mather can have an edge on Ferguson is to hold his ground and force this conversation to happen right here. He can feel his coworkers pretending not to look at him.
Ferguson says, “I think the next step is a good strategy talk down in H.R. They’ll have a really tactical perspective on what might be next for you. It’s never a bad time to talk strategy. You think you’ve considered all your options, but you never have. There’s always something you haven’t thought of.”
Mather’s cell phone rings and he doesn’t recognize the number, but he feels he must pick up, even though the timing is bad. It could be Maureen calling from someone else’s phone. Maybe she lost her phone, which is why she hasn’t picked up for so long. Maybe she’s calling to say she’s sorry, and how is baby Alan, and can she see him soon?
Except it’s not Maureen, it’s someone with poor English, on a poor connection, who asks several times f
or Mr. Mather.
“This is he,” Mather says, as Ferguson and the new employees look at him with polite curiosity.
The caller asks again for Mather, and again he says, “This is he,” until it occurs to him that she doesn’t understand the expression.
“This is Mr. Mather. Who’s calling, please?” Without people watching him, he might have hung up already.
Mather figures out that it’s the sitter, and what she’s saying to him, over and over, is the name of his boy. She’s saying “Alan,” except with her accent it sounds like “Allah.” She has little ability to elaborate. Something is wrong with the boy. She needs him to come home right away.
Mather stays calm.
“I have to go. It’s my son.”
“I guess you can’t get rid of him that easy!” Ferguson laughs.
Mather rushes to the elevator, and behind him Ferguson calls out that business about H.R. again and scheduling an appointment.
“Strategy!” Ferguson shouts, as the elevator doors close.
It’s not until Mather gets on the bus that he realizes precisely what has happened. This is how it’s done. No doubt Ferguson took a workshop to learn the exact language. Perhaps he was excited to practice it on Mather. Firing is an opportunity, the start of something wonderful and new.
While Mather is on the bus, the sitter calls again, but there’s nothing he can do. He’s on his way, she has to hold tight, and he will be there as soon as he can.
His phone rings once more as he approaches the back of his building. This time it’s Maureen.
“Finally,” he says. It’s as if the whole crisis were over, simply because she has called. He’s not even mad, just relieved.
“Where are you?” Maureen demands.
“Where am I? Where am I?” Mather can’t believe it. “Are you kidding me? Where the fuck are you?”
Then he sees, across the parking lot, at the entrance to his building, Maureen talking on her phone. Robert is with her, and he’s got the boy. Next to them is the sitter, and even from here Mather can see that she’s crying hysterically.
