Personal Days

by Ed Park

  The toaster-oven place has one of those trisyllabic names that are all the rage now. Terrapin, Parapet, Happenstance? We can never remember. We regret not making it to the grand opening. Maybe it’s just Restaurant.

  Business was so brisk the first month that he bought two more toaster ovens and hired a part-time toastmaster to help out during the busy lunch hour.

  Circumflex, Herringbone, Anagram?

  Some of us finally visit him for lunch, a field trip. We’re happy he’s doing so well. The goodwill lasts about five minutes before we become completely jealous.

  He keeps making weird remarks about the office, not to make us feel bad but because he’s still obsessed with it. He wants up-to-the-minute details on Maxine, whom he’s never even met.

  You don’t know what it’s like working alone, Jules says. There’s no one to talk to.

  Is he bored already? Now we’re disappointed. Our interest was in seeing someone thrive, post-firing. And not just doing another office gig but pursuing the creative life, if putting things in a toaster can be called creative.

  We all have our little side projects that we don’t like talking about. Jack II takes blurry Polaroids of urban detritus and unusual pavement cracks. Lizzie goes to Central Park or the Met most Saturdays and sketches. Laars has lead-guitar ambitions. Sometimes when he doesn’t know you’re there you can see his left hand squeezing out imaginary notes as his head nods to a secret beat. Pru knits more than she cares to admit, sweaters and scarves and baby socks for distant nieces. When Crease took over Jason’s desk, he found a hundred poems sealed in an envelope. And surely the aloof Jonah has an alternate life—weekend woodworking, novel in drawer, libretto in its fifteenth draft.

  Celery, Colophon, Venison?

  All present agree that Jules looks better than before. At his low points, back in the office, he resembled someone you might find in a film for a college psychology course: sleep-deprived, robotic, convinced that it was OK to apply electric shocks to small plasticine dolls labeled MOM and DAD. Now a photo crew from a Japanese magazine arranges his collar and smoothes his hair and dabs his brow.

  Cataract, Polyglot, Rolodex?

  We help ourselves to more lemonade and order the eggs Benedict. Is this how you get salmonella? Lizzie wonders.

  The photographer says, Big smile!

  The deletionists

  Pru reads novels on the subway for her book club, stern-looking paperbacks with matte covers and enigmatic titles. She gets a record-breaking four personal days a year, which she negotiated when she was hired, and traditionally she’s used them to finish a novel she couldn’t put down. She likes curling up on the couch but she says she actually gets the most reading done while on the subway. We imagine her getting on the train with a tote bag full of books and reading as she loops around the city, from Herald Square up to Inwood, from Astoria to Coney Island.

  She’s read several that have-ist in the title: The Pragmatist. The Vertiginist. The Deletionist. Then there’s a crop of books with the possessive form of a famous person’s last name, followed by a noun. Napoleon’s Pencil. Freud’s Knickers. Shakespeare’s Quandary.

  Lizzie says she hates books, which is somehow adorable. She uses her personal days for manicures and things like that. In May, Laars called in sick and went to the movies instead. It was three in the afternoon and as he put his Coke in the cup holder he saw Lizzie walk in, wearing sweatpants and a baggy sweater. It was so startling he slumped in his seat till the previews began.

  Shooting the moon

  Every other month a film or TV crew shoots outside the office for a couple of days. Trailers hog the curb. Preening lackeys with headsets move purposefully along the sidewalk, coffee in hand, trained to address any trespass. Laars has taken to insulting them. Pru says she once flashed them, and the thought of it makes Jonah quiver like a jelly. One summer Jules would pitch water balloons from the sixth-floor window.

  Our building’s rugged façade, with its lone quizzical gargoyle, appears in advertisements for a luminous sports drink, three different cell phone plans, a financial management firm, a protein bar, and a pain reliever.

  Best of all is for a website that contained thousands of easy-to-use job listings for cities across the country. It’s called Jobmilla. The camera dives through an open window into a cavernous room, very Industrial Revolution, with the sinister sound of chains clanking and liquids dripping from bare rafters. A conveyor belt transports depressed-looking, obviously jobless people along a figure-eight route. At the end they get crammed into a computer monitor—representing the Jobmilla site—and are subjected to a brisk off-camera churning. Then they pop out of the building, onto the sparkling sidewalk, holding briefcases and looking thrilled to have a job and use of a comb.

  The motto is What goes around comes around.™

  The pit

  There was a parking lot that many of us used as a shortcut on our way in from the subway. On rainy days it was like one big puddle with tiny islands here and there, so far apart that disparate life-forms no doubt grew and developed independently.

  This spring, or was it last year, they put up boards around it and we learned to walk the long way round, using the sidewalk like good citizens. Now we can see, through holes in the boards, that a giant pit has totally erased our former route.

  The pit marks the future basement of an enormous glass-skinned building shaped like the symbol for infinity. Lizzie thinks it’s going to be turned into lofts for millionaires. Jack II hopes it’s a vertical mall, or at least that it has a few benches where he can sit down and de-stress with a coffee and a fresh cinnamon roll. He says there are surprisingly few spots in the city where you can find a proper cinnamon roll. A mom-and-pop operation in Yorkville is the only one that comes to mind. Something tells us he’s misremembering a Talk of the Town piece from an old New Yorker.

  The Red Alcove

  In the office Lizzie, Pru, and Jenny sometimes eat together in the alcove by the window. They order clear plastic boxes of sprouts, sip at tinted water. Alcove is a nice real estate term for a disused storage closet with one of the walls knocked down. Even when Jill was on the fourth floor, she was usually too shy to join them. The alcove is directly under where Jill’s desk is on the sixth floor, so it’s sort of like she’s with them in spirit now.

  They look at fashion magazines, make fun of the ads, or maybe they’re not making fun.

  Do you like these velour hoodies?

  They never say anything but it’s clear that this refuge is for girls only.

  I hate the ones with the arrow thing on the back.

  Laars has started calling it the Red Alcove. Since his vow of chastity, he has joined a book club. His ex-roommate introduced him to it, then quit, making Laars the only man left. The club just read a book called The Red Tent, about a special tent in which women used to hang out whenever they were getting their periods.

  It was pretty interesting, he says diplomatically.

  Four attempts

  Laars is about to go on vacation. He’s using two vacation days and two personal days. He asks everyone to remind him to change his outgoing message before he leaves, but how are we supposed to remember that?

  He has to head out to the airport by 5:30. At 5:20 we can hear him trying to leave a suitable outgoing message. Ten minutes seems like a lot of time, but everyone thinks he’s cutting it close.

  Hi, this is Laars. I’m out of the office. Until the twenty-first. So. Please leave a message, or actually don’t leave a message—I’ll—CRAP.

  This is Laars I’ll be on vacation from the seventeenth till the twenty-first and so I’ll be out of the office on vacation aaarggg.

  It’s a Tourette’s convention in there. Laars buries his head in his arms. Slivers of sweat darken his going-on-vacation shirt, the blue country-and-western-style shirt with the white piping.

  I’m out of, I’m on—No, no.

  This is—Laa—Fuck me, fuck.

  The backlog

  It do
esn’t matter what you say on your outgoing message. Having listened to you, people feel the need to comment. When Laars gets back from vacation, his voice mail is clogged anyway.

  Hope you had a great time, everyone says, even people he’s never spoken to before. Welcome back.

  He knows from the display screen whether the message was from someone important or not. For long stretches he plows through the backlog, pressing 1 to hear a new message, then 9 to erase the call without even letting the robot-phone voice tell him who it was.

  Message received from 2-1-2—Message deleted.

  There are long stretches in which he hits 1 and then 9 so fast, 1-9-1-9-1-9, that all the robot voice can say is Mess—Mess—Mess—Mess—Mess—Mess.

  Later, he worries that he erased something important, like a message from a random low-maintenance billionaire asking if he’d like to spearhead a new project, a combination art gallery–Web empire–environmental magazine–snowboarding camp–counterculture festival.

  < 10 >

  The confession

  I can’t help it, Jack II is saying to Lizzie as he microwaves something with a high cheese content. I’m in love with Half Asian British Accent Woman.

  He tries to get her to swear she won’t tell Crease. He’ll kick the crap out of me, he says, always ready to add unnecessary drama to his life. Instead she tells Pru, who tells Crease.

  One if by land

  Lizzie has this whole mini-rant about how British sitcoms and movies and books are overrated. In fact the whole country and all the people in it are given a free ride in the U.S. It was sort of zany-charming at first, but she needs to find a way to freshen her delivery. For starters, she could stop invoking the Boston Tea Party.

  She goes on this tear again, set off by an ad for a film involving the Isle of Wight and the whimsical codgers who start a nudist colony. But we suspect it has something to do with Crease’s new obsession with HABAW, Jack II’s even newer infatuation, and the possibility that all the men in the office will follow suit.

  Can’t undo

  Pru’s résumé has taken on a life of its own. She thinks she’s finally solved the double-line-space problem by turning everything into a font called Lemuria, then copy-pasting it into another document. It looks like hieroglyphics, but you can see that the double line space has miraculously resolved into a single line space.

  Let’s party, she e-mails us.

  Then she selects all the text to change the font to Bookman Old Style. She releases the mouse too quickly and it becomes Braggadocio, which is appropriate only for menus at restaurants that have an old-timey, organ grinder theme to the decor.

  Now I can get a job with a barbershop quartet.

  I hear the telegraph company is hiring, says Crease.

  She’s stuck. The dialogue box gives her a Can’t undo.

  It’s a double negative, says Jenny helpfully.

  When Pru selects the text and tries to change the font to something normal, the double line space reappears.

  What goes around comes around, says Pru, quoting Jobmilla.

  Two words

  Pru walks by the Sprout’s office. He’s just dialed a number and is waiting for a beep to leave a message. He says two words: Veal stew. Then he hangs up.

  He notices her.

  I’m calling myself to remind myself to go out later and buy ingredients for veal stew!

  Just some old crap

  Jonah listens to music while he works. He uses the CD player in his computer. He wears blue plastic headphones that are either really cheap or really expensive. We can hear sounds leak through, tiny voices squawking impotently. This isn’t so bad. It makes us think we’re working in a relaxed, groovy environment instead of a disaster area.

  What we don’t like is when Jonah starts tapping a pencil to the music, or pumping his legs so hard his desk shakes. You can hear it from outside his office. Crease makes a loud show of migrating to his other desk whenever Jonah gets into his musical phase.

  If you ask Jonah what he’s listening to, he’ll say, Just some old crap. We figure it’s country music or show tunes. But Pru corners him and learns that the CD in Jonah’s heavy rotation is a recording of a Czech opera about a woman who is three hundred years old and from a different planet or something.

  Is Jonah from a different planet? This might account for the weirdly glowing slate-colored eyes, the sleek briefcase made of futuristic water-repellent material, the tendency to predict the future with better than average accuracy. The trips to Mexico are to deliver complex information and late-capitalist artifacts to the mothership.

  Also, once Laars saw him in the office early in the morning, the lights still off, typing with his eyes closed.

  Recently, Jonah explained that his name is properly pronounced Yawner, a Czech pronunciation perhaps, but no one’s going to make the switch. It could also be that Jonah wants the Sprout and Maxine to think he spells his name with a Y, since all the Js are getting fired these days.

  FYA

  Maxine e-mails some of us a link to an article she thought was funny, from a blog we’ve never heard of. FYA, she writes in the subject field, followed by a smiley face.

  Opening the link crashes everyone’s computer, except Pru’s. We reboot. She copy-pastes us some of the photos and text. The site is devoted to images of dogs and cats nuzzling each other.

  We expect more from Maxine, somehow.

  After Pru hits Send, her computer crashes. Then our computers all crash again.

  An hour later, Crease says, I think it means For Your Amusement?

  < 11 >

  Laser Henry

  Magic realism in the HR department: Henry gets the LASIK surgery and is out for a week. When he comes back, the blues of his irises have intensified fivefold.

  Today he tells Jonah that he can see through things—clothes, metal, wood, brick. Not all the time, and the image goes in and out of focus. He has no control over the clarity or power. Sometimes he can see people’s inner organs. It is as much a curse as a gift.

  Since when has he been totally insane? asks Jonah.

  Still, we make ourselves scarce when Henry walks by, scatter from his line of sight as fast as possible.

  Background check

  Periodically, Jill suffers repetitive stress disorder, though Jonah calls his pains carpal tunnel syndrome. They are not the same thing, though neither victim can quite delineate the difference.

  She used to wonder if it was all in her mind. She gives us a synopsis of a book she’s been reading about back pain. The writer asserts that nearly all such agonies are manifestations of pent-up stress. The psychosomatic explanation is attractive but leads to problems. We all develop back pain within a week of hearing this viewpoint.

  Make it stop

  Another of Maxine’s FYA e-mails leads to a website showing cats curled up in bathroom sinks, gazing up with oppressive cuteness. What is wrong with her? Unless maybe it’s some sort of virus that’s hijacked her address book. We’ve heard of things like that before.

  Laars read about a virus called YourPhyred that lurked around certain job websites. When you try to upload your résumé for potential employers, the virus turns it to gibberish or worse. Except you never know it. Your CV just hangs out there, in cyberspace, until an employer downloads it. Then it turns into a document filled with yards of random characters, or pictures of rainbows, or reviews of hard-core porn.

  The humming

  The Unnameable has taken to humming as he makes his rounds, picking up and dropping off paper. In another person this would annoy us, but his pitch is perfect and the songs are unfamiliar and instantly calming. Melodies from Jonah’s Czech alien opera, perhaps. Sometimes we put paper in our out-bins as bait, drawing him near in the hope that he’ll trot out a tune.

  Today Jill hears someone in the stairwell for what seems like hours, humming the Cole Porter songbook with gusto.

  But when she opens the door the song stops. She strains to hear any human sound: a foo
tfall, a cough, the rustle of clothes.

  I’m going crazy up here, she e-mails Pru, who doesn’t write back, because you can go crazy on any floor.

  The Republic of Smokistan

  Those of us who smoke have to do it outside, creating a slovenly knot on the sidewalk about thirty times a day. Workers from other offices in the building also congregate here to light up, of course, and though at first some of us tried to make small talk, now barely a nod passes between the various factions. They are not like us.

  Crease doesn’t smoke but has taken up the habit to increase his chances of seeing HABAW. Is this what stalkers do? Laars says that Jenny met her boyfriend out here. The major tool worked at a graphic design studio on the top floor but was laid off and started his own studio out of his apartment.

  People who can barely draw a straight line are becoming graphic designers, says Laars. His tone suggests that he’s content to wait for a time when graphic design becomes an obsolete trade and things are allowed to emerge unmediated, pure human symbols, hand-scrawled sandwich boards, everything a sort of instinctive folk art.

  People knock their ashes into the tiny opening at the top of a buoy-shaped receptacle. Sometimes even when no one’s outside you can see a ghostly finger of smoke emerging from the hole as you approach the office, a signal of recent stress and despair.

  Random poignancy circa 2:30

  Is Excel crashing everyone’s computer?

  Keep the deli on the left

  Pru gets invited to parties. She always goes and always complains about them. It’s her most appealing quality. We picture her stepping out in boas and shawls. We also like that she never invites any of us to go with her. How is it that she has a whole life outside the office? Everyone must, but most days this seems like too much to ask.