Personal Days

by Ed Park

  He said he was going to ask Pru but she seemed a little uptight.

  Uptight and whatnot was the actual phrase.

  An hour later Lizzie was sorry she’d said yes. Grime’s write-ups and summaries—documents that he had to send out on actual paper, with an actual signature—reminded her of the second half of Flowers for Algernon. He kept looking at her while she proofread, and she could feel sweat break out across her brow. Looking up, she saw him licking the corners of his lips, and later she wondered whether she liked that or not. It was getting hard to be down-to-earth.

  II (B) ii (a) 7: Lizzie soon reverted to the style of dress she wore when she first started there. Pru described the look as Eccentric Librarian. A pencil could always be found tucked behind Lizzie’s ear, or impaling her scrappy chignon.

  II (B) ii (b) 1.1: Jonah and Laars were the first to be disenchanted by Grime.

  Laars thought it was obscene that the Sprout hired someone so soon after getting rid of Jill. Admittedly Jill wasn’t the most dazzling human being, but she was solid, a hard worker who got the job done. Grime’s role was unclear, and Laars imagined he was getting paid more than Jill ever did.

  The thing is he won’t shut up, Jonah complained to Crease. Also I have no idea what he’s saying half the time.

  Jonah was also probably upset because he used to say Cheers when getting off the phone. With the appearance of an actual British person on the premises he couldn’t say it without feeling fraudulent.

  II (B) ii (b) 1.1.1: Actually, when Grime said it, it sounded more like Chairs.

  II (B) ii (b) 1.2: Most of them were used to Jonah’s mustache by that point. That did not mean they liked it. Jonah wasn’t sure he liked it, but shaving it off would be admitting defeat.

  II (B) ii (b) 2.1: Laars was suspicious of Grime’s connection to the Sprout. Were they friends? It seemed like they’d worked together somewhere before. Also he’d seen them both toting athletic bags on the same day—did they face off every week on the racquetball court?

  II (B) ii (b) 2.2: They heard the Sprout say How’s the Cracker? to Grime. It took a second to figure out: Graham. The Sprout never bestowed nicknames on any of them, a fact that left them curiously dejected.

  Jenny said she overheard the Sprout saying to Grime, Operation JASON—working like a charm!

  Operation JASON? Naturally they assumed it had to do with the broken CD of files that Maxine threw in the trash.

  Jonah asked Jules to get in touch with Jason, but he didn’t know how to anymore. He thought Jason might have moved to Madrid.

  They began to doubt that Jenny heard what she heard. She began to doubt it. She said her boyfriend was renting all these spy movies.

  II (B) ii (b) 2.3: One day Pru received a mysterious message from Grime:

  floor?ds////////////// JAS////////////////////////////////////////////

  It went on like that for a while, winding up with

  ]////////////////O

  ???????///////

  It was like typographical Rorschach. Later Grime explained that he thought he’d already sent the message and then saw that his slash key was absolutely filthy, so he started scrubbing it with a wad of paper.

  That still didn’t explain floor?ds.

  Or JAS.

  II (B) ii (b) 3: Grime and Lizzie went out to lunch together once, alone, accidentally. She bumped into him at the post office and they decided to stop by the new fish and chips stand, sample his native fare. The chips were presented in fresh copies of the Telegraph and The Guardian, adding to the overall cost. The lunch went fine, a few laughs, maybe not as many sparks as she’d hoped. Lizzie was so cute when she said sparks. The food was pretty bleh but at least her Diet Coke was properly carbonated.

  What killed her was that on the way back, about half a block from the office, Grime picked up speed. She asked where he was going as she raced to keep up. He said it was probably a good idea for the two of them to enter the building separately. He didn’t want people to get the wrong idea about them.

  Was Grime playing hard to get? There was nothing to do but laugh nervously. In truth she wanted to cry or kick him in the shins, but his sudden skittishness also made him that much more attractive. She tried to imagine the kind of woman he went for and in her mind she conjured up Pru in a leopard-skin teddy.

  Lizzie favored pencil skirts and pencils in her hair and those shirts with cuffs that buttoned up halfway down the forearm.

  II (B) ii (b) 4.1: The next day Grime swung by the Red Alcove after lunch. Pru and Lizzie were studying the Victoria’s Secret catalog in a non-ironic manner. Jenny was sipping a green tea latte and looking through last month’s Allure, stopping on an article about green tea lattes.

  Grime did a fake-embarrassed cough and said, Ladies. He said he had an important question, maybe the most important question ever.

  They all straightened up, chins thrust fetchingly forward, eyes widening.

  I don’t know how to describe it…

  Yes…?

  II (B) ii (b) 4.2: He wanted to know what it meant when there was a red toolbox pulsating on the menu bar of a Word document.

  Lizzie wished Pru wasn’t around at the moment, and vice versa. They both offered to take a look. Jenny stayed behind because she had to go back to her desk in a second. She was becoming a little wary of Grime.

  Grime led them to his lair, loping. His head was at an unnatural angle, as if he had a crick in his neck from pubbing till the wee hours. His gait was mellow, a beachcomber’s stride. Unseen waves lapped his toes. His harem converted to his dreamtime pace as he detailed additional problems he was having with his document.

  II (B) ii (b) 4.3: En route they nearly collided with Maxine, who emitted a perfectly calibrated squeal of delight.

  She was wearing something that none of them could really describe. She’d been in full plumage of late, inspiring daily fashion rundowns by the rest of the office. Jack II even started devoting part of his blog to the study of Maxine, craftily changing her name to Minnie. Someone was leaving lewd comments on the site. He suspected Jules.

  Maxine’s new outfit was completely inappropriate for winter, in fact for any season or situation, with the possible exception of world domination. It had two kinds of pink going on, and ornate beaded strappy things, and a fairly explicit bondage motif. There were parallelograms of exposed flesh that were illegal in most states, a bow in the back that looked like a winding key. One area involved fur. Her hair had a fresh-from-salon bounce that clashed with the rest of the getup, but this being Maxine, everything kind of went together in the end.

  II (B) ii (b) 4.4: Pru and Lizzie instinctively flinched. They might as well have been rolling on the ground like bowling pins, with xs for eyes.

  With the female competition out of the way, Maxine leveled her extremely hot gaze right at Grime, who stood his ground. He swayed in place, gently rocking on one heel. Maxine was saying something about Wednesday, but it wasn’t clear whether she meant tomorrow or last Wednesday.

  Grime’s not-flinching was making Maxine flinch. It looked like a nod but it was actually a flinch. Lizzie and Pru saw it all unfold. They’re filing away the subtleties for Jack II and his blog. Maxine lost the thread of what she was saying, eyes gleaming in panic. She could have been talking about the general concept of Wednesday, its status as hump day, its complicated spelling. No one had seen her quiver like this before. It was like she’d been set in italics.

  There was a historical vibe to the scene. Lizzie got so nervous just from watching that she stuck another pen into her hair.

  Time was upended. Wednesday derived from Wotan or Odin, god of the victorious, god of the dead.

  The air grew thick with non-flinches. Then the flinches burst forth. Lizzie looked away from Maxine. Maxine looked at Pru and then at Lizzie and then, finding no moral support, back at Grime.

  From down the hall came a loud tinkle of coins. A can of soda fell from its perch in the sad old vending machine, the one with half it
s red sold-out lights always on.

  The can’s tumble sounded loud as thunder.

  II (B) ii (b) 4.5: Maxine reflexively clasped Grime’s shoulder and murmured something unintelligible. It was a good reminder that she could be quite touchy, though she hadn’t been in a while, not to her regular admirers. When this did happen, traditionally, most of them were unable to stop at mere flinching. They would gasp and stagger away, extremities shaking. They would take a long slow drink at the watercooler and generally need to lie down on Jonah’s sofa for a couple of minutes, staring at the ceiling as strains of his Czech opera laced the air. On these occasions, Jonah would lend his Mexican distress frog.

  But Grime barely responded to the surprise caress. A corner of his mouth rose a micrometer. The encounter had already bored him and he wanted to get back to his Word document and the mystery of the pulsating toolbox. The shoulder touching was just a neutral thing that happened. Maxine’s arsenal had failed to make a dent. Maxine’s arsenal had imploded.

  She mentioned a mandatory seminar in two weeks, hoped he would help lead it. Another sexual-harassment seminar! The words caused no change in affect. His face betrayed no sign that he would attend, let alone lead it. With increasing discomfort Lizzie and Pru watched Maxine try to make an impression. An attempt to gaily link arms with him came to grief. He just stood there without any sort of accommodating elbow movement. Nothing in her experience had prepared Maxine for such pure indifference. She reversed course and disappeared.

  II (B) ii (b) 5: Appendix I: Potential Problems

  A semi-important development: Just when it seemed like Grime was the walking embodiment of cool, so unaffected by maximum Maxining that Lizzie and Pru wondered for the first time if maybe he was gay, he stopped and did this brisk John Travolta dance-floor maneuver, one index finger pointing up, the other pointing down.

  Lizzie’s and Pru’s irritating maybe-he’s-gay thoughts were quickly replaced by So that’s sort of weird, sort of something you don’t see every day.

  Grime pumped away in his disco stance for two seconds, flexing a little. A barely discernible melody played on his lips.

  Maybe this is what they do in England, Lizzie thought. Maybe this is how they walk.

  Pru believed she was simply witnessing the age-old English tradition of fierce eccentricity.

  They took a step back and observed him as he froze, smiled, and let out a deep baritone fart.

  II (B) ii (b) 6: It was totally deliberate. It wasn’t an embarrassing slip. It wasn’t the chance rubbing of a shoe against the linoleum or anything like that.

  It was like the loudest thing imaginable, louder than the falling can of soda. Geiger counters in Japan went haywire. Satellites got shaken out of orbit, crashed into the sun.

  Pru and Lizzie weren’t sure how to react. They needed a seminar for this, special counseling. They kept walking, blushing, feeling like nuns. Grime’s computer mouse was dangling off the desk edge, its infrared eye beaming out at them as though passing judgment. They helped him fix his Word document—he had opened a document header and didn’t know how to get out—and then the two of them walked back in silence, still in their mental wimples.

  Later they said, He’s insane. Pru said it so that the last syllable trilled out as two notes, a full octave higher. Jack II offered to start a new blog devoted to the subject. Pru finally deleted the two-week-old Grime message from her phone, not without sadness.

  II (B) ii (c): Appendix II: Pronouns and Abbreviations (a.k.a. P & A)

  II (B) ii (c) 1: Somehow Crease thought that Grime, being British, must know Half Asian British Accent Woman, but how to bring it up? Crease liked to refer to her in e-mails as HABAW or .5ABW or even just AB. They always had to pause and untangle the abbreviations.

  In conversation he would just say she and her and expect them to know who he was talking about.

  II (B) ii (c) 2: Three weeks and two days have passed since he last saw her. He noted that patience had always been his strong suit. It was how he had managed to stay at his job for seven years, weathering storms, rising slowly through the ranks. Crease said he’d been there so long he remembered when people got excited by Minesweeper. Now it was just e-mail, surfing the Web, and good old-fashioned erotic reverie.

  II (B) ii (c) 3: Crease admitted he would be devastated if he were fired, not because he loved the job, obviously, or even because of the stop in cash flow, but because it would mean losing all hope of seeing HABAW again.

  Pru said he needed to work a little harder on his layoff narrative.

  At this point I’d give it a C/C-, she said.

  II (B) ii (c) 4: Crease nearly flipped out two days ago because as he was waiting to take the elevator up, the door opened and the Sprout and HABAW got out, chatting comfortably about the weather. Their paths diverged, but he still sensed some connection between the two.

  Crease’s small-talk skills needed a polish. He would carry out a HABAW conversation in his mind and get stumped after the first short sentence. He needed to be prepared. He bookmarked a weather report website and checked it every two minutes.

  So if she says, It’s so nice out, what do I say?

  You agree, and then you compliment her on an article of clothing, said Jonah.

  Then you ask for her number, said Pru. A wave of fear and excitement passed over Crease. No, actually, you definitely don’t.

  Later he confessed to Pru, I’m not used to beautiful women.

  She gave him a what-am-I-chopped-liver look, but he was oblivious.

  II (B) ii (c) 5.1: Jack II confided to Laars and Pru about his own mini-crush on HABAW and said not to tell the rest of them, who already knew about it from Lizzie. He forgot that he’d been writing about her on his blog, in the style of a blind-item gossip column.

  Confiding something to Laars and Pru pretty much ensured that everyone would know about it. Most of them had yet to see HABAW, but they imagined she was out of his league, if she looked anything like the way Crease described her.

  II (B) ii (c) 5.2: Was Jack II’s parallel obsession in jest? He was living with his girlfriend, an office manager in midtown. Pru described her as a real character, meaning she had a thick Queens accent.

  At last year’s holiday party she did shots with the Sprout, commenting every few minutes, So you’re the SPROUT! It was very strange. Of course none of them had ever called him the Sprout to his face. But clearly he knew. He kept bellowing Hoo-hoo! and the shots kept coming.

  They wondered if she now knew about HABAW.

  II (B) iii (a): Initials had a way of getting out of control. Pru kept saying TMI, even if all you said was that you’d meet her at the elevator in a minute because you wanted to wash your hands first.

  Jason used to say DGT, or Don’t Go There. That one never caught on.

  Crease was fond of scrawling ASAP on everything, most recently on a Post-it addressed to the janitorial staff: Please fix soap dispenser in bathroom ASAP. This is a good way to spread germs, flu, etc.

  FYI was what Lizzie said for something as simple as the sun coming out. FYI, I think it’s not going to rain today.

  Jonah put HFS into e-mails, usually trailed by a long string of ellipses. Nobody wanted to ask him what it meant. Crease thought it stood for Holy fucking shit. It tended to appear after some account of the Sprout’s particular brand of spineless evil.

  II (B) iii (b): Maxine’s thing was still FYA—For Your Amusement. She sent another message with that subject line. It had a link to a website full of Polish jokes.

  Weird, said Lizzie.

  Polish jokes are so Elks club 1978, said Pru. She theorized that it was the rise of Solidarity and the ascension of Pope John Paul II that killed the Polish joke.

  It seemed like Maxine meant to send this only to Grime, because she prefaced it with a jaunty reference to England. There was also a line about bed linens that was totally DGT and TMI and, if you thought about it, OMFG.

  The website froze everyone’s screens. IT sent a faintly am
used message via voice mail: Please don’t send, open, or even think about Polish jokes.

  II (B) iv (a): In the office, new alliances were forged from time to time. One Wednesday some of them were talking to Big Sal from IT and Henry from HR in the elevator, and all of a sudden Lizzie said, Come grab drinks with us.

  It was strangely not that awkward. They learned that Big Sal had just started a few months ago. He’d overlapped with Bernhard, whom he then replaced. He liked the office but thought he was due to get canned soon. The problem is, you guys have like three different systems and they’re not really talking to each other, he explained. He began half his sentences with The problem is. His job was to make all lines of communication interact smoothly, a pretty much impossible task. Your office is like the Bermuda Triangle of IT jobs, he said.

  Pru was expecting a whole big layoff narrative, but Big Sal said that was just how IT was. He didn’t seem too worried about his imminent canning, prospects for reemployment, or life in general.

  II (B) iv (b): They learned that Henry from HR was married, had three kids, one of whom had just graduated from college, and conceivably could have been part of their little office gang. Henry was older than they thought.

  His son had an internship with the Parks Department but what he really wanted to do was dance. The kind where you wear rolls of toilet paper and walk backwards.

  They all nodded and tried to look like they respected that sort of dancing, or even knew what he was talking about.

  II (B) iv (c): Henry had a daughter in high school and a daughter who was only five. He was obsessed with the LASIK surgery he’d gotten. Most people had forgotten that he used to wear enormous glasses in which you could see your whole head and torso, glasses with frames the color of ice-diluted cola.

  He said he loved not having to wear them but sometimes his eyes took in too much information. First was the X-ray vision. Now he received random glimpses into the future. Whole lives played out in his gaze. He looked at his son and saw an old man in a plastic loincloth, doing somersaults on a stage meant to evoke a windswept plain. His older daughter, twenty years hence, was wearing a welding mask—she’ll become a mechanic, or maybe a sculptor.