Personal Days

by Ed Park

  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 nam
e, 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 PLANS2. 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.

  I could live here, jokes Jonah.

  We like that it looks so clean, but by the end of the day it has a coffee stain, a gum wrapper, and a few stray ribbons of shredded lime green paper.

  Let go

  Jill is one of those rare people who are more timid on e-mail than in real life. Sometimes she waits till Friday to send her nonurgent business e-mails, because then she can add Have a nice weekend! as a tagline. You need to pepper your messages with a little small talk, Jill says in an android voice. There’s nothing as universal as the weekend and one’s modest hopes for it.

  Before leaving the office one Friday, she stops on our floor, but we’ve already fled, away to our own lives, away to our good weekends. Walking by Jenny’s desk, she sees an index card on the floor. It reads:

  3. Let go of anger! Be more efficient. Exercise more!

  < 9 >

  The Unnameable

  This man has been here forever but has only recently coalesced into an identifiable being. We don’t know his name, though Jack II claims this person’s name is also Jack. This is too unsettling—the mind cannot contain three Jacks, fired Jack I a.k.a. the Original Jack and current Jack II and this supposed Jack III—and so we think of him as The Unnameable.

  The Unnameable is fiftyish, tall, with a healthy fringe of white hair and gleaming, inquisitive eyes. His ponderous gait gives the impression that he is rooted in the land: a spirit, a proud protector, an aristocrat of the corridors and cubicles. But the fact is—he’s different. Slow. Language eludes him. When he tries to talk, it sounds like he’s gasping. It’s hard to isolate the words in his vast loud whisper and so we just nod and smile. This seems sufficient for him, and he replies in kind. The response makes you feel good, though it’s unclear why it should.

  His job, as far as we can tell, is intra-office messenger. We mark envelopes with initials and he matches these symbols to the ones on the bins by each desk. He does it so silently, moves so secretly, that often you don’t realize something’s waiting for you. His shoes must be made of feathers. Mostly you see the Unnameable only by accident. We wish he would make more noise.

  We e-mail everything and there’s rarely a need to send actual pieces of paper to people, but Maxine uses him with regularity and we have gradually fallen in line.

  Jill wants to use him to keep us connected. I got some pictures developed, she’ll e-mail one of us. I’m putting them in my out-box.

  But the Unnameable has an aversion to Siberia. He does not go to her desk, her bin, unless one of us addresses something to her, which is somehow never on the list of priorities. When Jill’s pictures finally arrive it is hard to attach meaning to them. We think they’re from that time we got drinks and ran into Jason—fired, unhappy Jason—wearing a dress, but it’s hard to say.

  Pru once asked the Unnameable what his name was, but he only mumbled. Maybe he didn’t understand. Sometimes she calls him Pops or Gramps. That’s the only time he smiles.

  The Mexican distress frog

  Jonah goes to Mexico for a week. He sends us pictures from his cell phone. We can’t tell what it was he meant to capture. The ocean? Birds in the town square? Clouds? We have clouds here, too. One picture looks like a giant chocolate bar.

  He later explains that it was the entrance to the tomb of a chieftain who ruled by confu
sion. He would tell his subjects that a tribe was attacking from the north, then later in the day tell them the tribe had been spotted coming from the south. The militia would be spread thin. It was a matter of debate how such puzzling tactics could benefit anyone, but this obscure pocket of civilization managed to thrive for centuries. The court artisans sculpted very tall, thin figures wearing what appear to be bell-bottoms. The tribe was wiped out not by marauding forces but by three women who stumbled into town and enchanted the men with their beauty. The chieftain claimed all three as his wives. There was a blood sacrifice involved, for the first time in the people’s history, though Jonah can’t remember who was sacrificed—the new women, the old women, the men, the chief, the children.

  Jonah says he bought souvenirs for all of us but left them in his hotel room. We are not sure if he went to Mexico alone or with someone. He doesn’t offer this information. Come to that, we also don’t know whether he’s straight or gay. On one occasion he spoke out, with strange and exciting stridency, against bisexuality. He said his therapist, actually now his ex-therapist, said it was a bogus position. Just choose one or the other and stop being so dramatic. This outburst made us all conclude that he’s bisexual.

  On his desk now is a Mexican distress frog, a wooden icon about half a foot long with a ridged back, which you stroke using a wooden rod to create a soothing, some would say irritating, noise.

  It sounds like this when you stroke from tail to head: Takata takata tak.

  When you move the rod in the opposite direction, the rhythm is more Tak-tak, kataka-ta.

  He plays it practically nonstop these days.

  Toastmaster

  Jules, mad Jules, does many things now that he’s no longer with us. Getting fired is the best thing that’s ever happened to me, he says. But they all say that.

  Most of his hours are spent at his much-photographed restaurant in which everything is cooked in a toaster oven. How did he scare up the money? As things went sour for him at the office, he began moonlighting as a valet at an exclusive strip club on Eleventh Avenue. The tips must have been fantastic and Pru jokes that maybe he was the one taking it all off.