Personal Days

by Ed Park

  The strangest vision was of his younger daughter. He saw her as having the same job he did, heading an HR department at a medium-size office. And I’m fine with that, he said.

  No one felt confident enough to ask Henry what the future held for them.

  II (B) iv (d): Grime, quiet up to that point, said good night and headed out of the bar. Big Sal studied their faces and finally asked, What’s with that guy?

  When they asked what he meant, he said, There’s a skull on his desk.

  No there isn’t, said Lizzie, who was one to know.

  I mean, there was. On his old desk.

  Jonah, whose class had been canceled, came in and had a seat right as Big Sal said that Grime used to be on the fifth floor until recently, working out of an undecorated cubicle near the broken refrigerator.

  Since when? asked Jonah.

  Big Sal didn’t know. They forgot that he hadn’t actually been with the company that long. He remembered that the first time he saw Grime was in July. The problem is, the guy refuses to stay put.

  II (B) iv (e): Henry from HR said he liked being his own boss. He didn’t consider himself accountable to the Sprout or Maxine or anyone—if anything, they had to answer to him. He knew everything about you: vacation days, personal days, sick days, address and social security, taxes. It was a radical, HR-centric view of the universe.

  He said that having a boss was infantilizing. You felt the need to please, to explain constantly, to request permission for every little thing. And even if you thought you got along fine with your boss—even if you thought you liked your boss—the possibility of punishment always hovered.

  All children are a little paranoid, he said, speaking as someone with actual children.

  Just then Big Sal’s beeper purred. He was needed back in the office. The e-mail server had to come down so he could root out a virus. The Polish joke website had sent spyware into their consoles. Every time the system crashed, he said, he was that much closer to losing his job, even though crashes happen all the time, everywhere. Dozens of small crashes happened in the office every day, he explained, crashes the rest of them knew nothing about.

  IT people are like the doctors of the twenty-first century, said Henry admiringly, as Big Sal headed back to work.

  II (B) iv (f ): Pru recapped the story of Henry’s psychic powers for Jonah, who wanted to know about his own future. Henry said he saw big things, big changes.

  Good or bad?

  Answer cloudy, try again, he said, wiggling his fingers in front of his face like a carnival mystic.

  The response satisfied Jonah, who had been at loose ends lately, ever since his Mexican distress frog went AWOL.

  II (B) iv (g): The night was fun, but none of them would ever drink and talk like that with either Henry or Big Sal again. It was a onetime workplace bonding event. Spontaneous bursts of boundary-crossing fellowship had happened before. But it was rare, like that one Christmas during World War I when the British and German soldiers climbed out of their trenches and played soccer with each other. Usually Big Sal and Henry were the distant targets of their anger—they’d stamp their feet at how slow IT was to fix things, how HR managed to bungle a date on a vacation form. Later, in the clear light of the workday, everything was awkward and they wound up wishing it had never happened.

  II (C): Return to Siberia

  II (C) i (a): One morning not long after, Laars realized he’d run out of paper clips. It wasn’t that he had a lot to clip together, but a packet had been taunting him since Friday in all its loose-leaf glory. He wanted to be a man of action. He had recently stopped saying What is the point? and had undertaken a vow of chastity and now he was going to get some paper clips.

  He additionally needed staples and, for that matter, a functioning stapler. The one he had was an ancient gray model that he’d inherited from Jules. It worked approximately every third time. It was more objet d’art than true stapler. Long ago someone had added layers of masking tape over the hood for a bit of hand cushion. The tape was sepia now and bore the ominous name KRASH. The letters had been carved deep into the tape with ballpoint—mostly red, with notes of black and blue, as though they had been traced over every day, in mindless desperation, for years on end.

  II (C) i (b): Jenny remembered that Jill used to hoard paper clips, staples, every sort of fastener and fixative. She had a huge thing of rubber cement, Jenny said.

  II (C) i (c): Pru, Grime, Jack II, and Crease joined the party as it continued its travels, heading up to Siberia, footsteps echoing in the stairwell. Grime started in with a sea shanty—droll at first, with mermaid imagery and calls for rum. Then they just wished he would stop. Lizzie and Pru kept their distance, alert to any sudden disco maneuvers. All of them were kind of holding their breath till they got upstairs.

  Turning the corner, they stepped into a flood of light, a change in atmosphere. Siberia had its own weather. A soft sound: The Unnameable was emptying the contents of Jill’s desk into a huge wheeled plastic trash bin, a thousand kinds of paper. Her chair was in there, the throne of Siberia turned upside down, silver wheels catching the early afternoon sun. It was a better chair than most of them had, but none of them wanted to be the one who lunged for it.

  Jill’s desk, said Jenny, like she was the phantom Jill’s receptionist, answering a call.

  It felt like years since Jill had been fired. They’d never even had farewell drinks for her. Everyone thought someone else was supposed to get in touch, organize. It was way too late now.

  Jill, said Crease. I can barely remember her. I can barely remember what she looks like.

  The weird thing was, everyone thought Crease had a minor crush on Jill. Even Pru could see them as a couple. It made sense. They have the same body type, Jack II said. But the advent of HABAW had completely obliterated those feelings in Crease, incinerated them and sealed the ashes off forever. She was like the Chinese emperor who built the Great Wall and burned all the books.

  II (C) i (d): The Unnameable came by wearing an air-filtration mask. Sky blue is definitely your color, Pru said, and his smile was apparent even under the rubberized cloth. He squirted a double loop of cleanser on the desktop and removed one of the clean rags from his belt. He swiped with military precision, in rectangles of decreasing size. With each pass the surface whitened dramatically. It was amazing to see something actually work the way it was supposed to work. Jonah stared at the center of the swipe area, as if a long-buried message was about to be revealed.

  The Unnameable heaved an armload of stuffed manila folders into the dumpster. Then he manned a broom too big for him, pushing a minor dirt formation down the hall a ways, where it merged with a larger cluster. If you kept going, if you turned and passed the vending machine and entered the most remote region of Siberia, you ran the risk of ambush by a creature made entirely of punched-paper holes and old hair and notebook frills.

  Up to that point the Unnameable had only been seen as a bearer of interoffice mail, a patient trudger. By contrast, his upper body now moved with freedom, even a kind of wordless, elastic joy. His concentration was tremendous. Who else in the office worked that hard, that efficiently, at anything? You could imagine strains of Vivaldi as some faded television star narrated the story of artisanal desk cleaners who have been cleaning desks for five generations.

  Jonah picked up something that had fallen off a pile of papers—a birthday card from Jason, dated March the fifth, but what was the year?

  II (C) i (e): Two other men came by to make alarming dismantling noises. They wore flannel shirts and lime green hard hats that said KOHUT BROTHERS, though they were probably not the brothers, or even brothers, themselves. One was thin, the other barrel-chested. They ripped out a patch of linoleum for some reason, so now it looked like a UFO had blasted Jill from above, capturing her in a teleportation beam. The plants, the thriving wildlife, were nowhere to be seen. A few insect skeletons lay scattered on the narrow sill, shiny and precise and sad as broken jewelry.

&n
bsp; II (C) ii (a): Everyone marveled at the ample real estate in Siberia, the generous sunlight, all the while keeping an eye out for dust monsters. Jonah had a dim memory of coming up here once, long before Jill’s exile, and seeing wood-paneled walls, plush sofas, elegant standing lamps. There had been chatty women with fun haircuts and crisp clothing, slim dudes in natty suits talking in an office argot he didn’t understand. They called each other Slick, said things like Smell ya later. A little radio played NPR while typewriters rang out thrillingly. It was weird but kind of great, a civilized oasis. He didn’t know anyone’s name, or what exactly they did. He was too shy to speak back then—four, five years ago. He remembered dropping off a file, picking up a floppy disk from a beautiful girl in a rhomboid-print dress, a girl with a wonderful, untraceable accent and the most enchanting golden hair. The next time he was up there, less than a year later, everyone was gone except a severe-looking gnome in the corner, bald and with white hair in his ears like feathered nests, a figure nearly invisible behind towering stacks of paper. Jonah wondered if it had all been a dream.

  Returning to Jill’s desk, they peered into the dumpster, as if all her trash might have summoned her into being.

  We should really call her sometime, said Jenny in a total robot voice.

  They sifted through the detritus, no longer self-conscious now that the Unnameable and the Kohut Brothers had gone. At first they turned up nothing good: a battered dictionary, chipped mugs holding pencil ends, assorted small broken women’s-hair-related items. A scattering of gray tic tacs and yards of mysterious dark green string were a running motif. Laars found a CD he’d lent her a year ago, but he didn’t want it anymore.

  II (C) ii (b): Lined up on Jill’s old desk were three staplers, all in perfect working order. One bore the name KRASH, the letters deep as runes, carved into layers of Scotch tape.

  It’s following me! said Laars, making a crucifix with his fingers.

  Laars imagined KRASH as a more desperate version of himself, toiling in Siberia, living out his days in office drudgery without even the Internet for distraction. KRASH’s main activity was adopting, naming, and losing staplers.

  II (C) ii (c): A paper clip, centered in the dark circle where a cactus pot used to be, drove a sliver of sun straight into Laars’s eyes.

  It obliterated my short-term memory, he said later, after realizing he’d forgotten to bring one of the staplers back downstairs.

  II (D) The Worst Soup in the World

  II (D) i: The cold weather was approaching. The Red Alcove didn’t get good heat, so its denizens ventured outside the office for lunch. Some of the others came along, and as the group grew, the possibilities for a mutually agreeable venue diminished. Laars had gone through an intensive burrito phase. Jonah had completed a sub phase and never wanted to see another one again. Crease voted against anything Asian, including Indian food. Already that week he’d eaten Thai, Japanese, and Burmese.

  Let’s decide on a place before we step outside, Pru said, as they puttered in the lobby.

  In the past, when they tried to order delivery together, the logistics would drive the designated order placer crazy, not to mention the order taker at the other end of the line. Jack II was a vegetarian who always wanted extra hot sauce. Lizzie eschewed carbs. Crease avoided vegetables at all costs. Someone—Jill?—didn’t like mayo. Jenny once said she was going to make a chart of who couldn’t eat what.

  Pru said she ate everything except cheese and butter.

  Oh, and eggs, she added.

  Everyone longed for either converting the sixth floor into a cafeteria or hooking up an IV drip, or boarding a random bus for a spur-of-the-moment excursion to some outer-borough culinary Xanadu that would take them all day to reach and get them fired.

  They agreed at last on soup.

  II (D) ii: Grime wasn’t with them. He was at home, taking a personal day. Before last week, he was hazy with the whole concept of personal days. Lizzie had filled him in and then he said he wanted to use them all up at once.

  Lizzie also said that she was no longer speaking with Grime.

  He told me the most disgusting thing the other day, totally out of the blue. We were walking to the subway and I was explaining the personal day thing to him. We stopped for a drink and for some reason he was talking about India and then all of a sudden he was talking about something else. So awful. I’m sorry. I really, really can’t tell you what it was.

  Is it something bad? asked Pru.

  Lizzie nodded.

  Something about who’s getting fired?

  Now everyone was listening.

  Lizzie shook her head. No, nothing like that. It’s worse, maybe. I think it’s worse. I don’t even know why he told me. It’s the filthiest thing.

  What—what? Tell us, tell us.

  I can’t. Not now. Forget it.

  II (D) iii: Laars observed how he never packed a lunch anymore. I’m a good cook, too, he claimed. Anything homemade always ended up making you a little sad. The look, the taste, the lack of colorful packaging. Occasionally someone would bring leftovers from a big dinner, but then the smell became kind of a downer, evoking decay and the passage of time. Another problem was the microwave in the pantry. Even on its lowest setting it would blacken things, smelling up the office, or otherwise cause a mess so extensive that the guilty party wouldn’t even begin to clean up.

  This soup is like water, said Jack II, unloading half a saltshaker into the bowl.

  Lizzie said Grime’s thing recently has been popcorn. He couldn’t stop raving about it. Apparently British popcorn was the absolute worst. It was a New World food. They analyzed this information for clues.

  II (D) iv: Pru wanted to change the subject. She didn’t care to hear more about what she understood to be Lizzie and Grime’s burgeoning relationship, even if it appeared the two were no longer on speaking terms.

  Remember those oat bars? asked Pru.

  For a while Jonah was bringing in about ten of these weird little snack bars every day, offering them to anyone who asked and even those who didn’t. Pru would take two and give one to the Unnameable.

  The bars tasted like they’d been dipped in V8 and left to dry atop an old radiator. The story went that Jonah’s aunt had gotten involved in a pyramid scheme with these oat bars, and he’d bought two institutional-size boxes’ worth to help her out. He still had half a box of oat bars. They were two years old now but probably tasted the same.

  II (D) v: Pru said she was at a party in Brooklyn and the Original Jack was there again. He’d been to Jules’s restaurant—Mannequin? Gallivant?—and reported that it served a deluxe toasted version of Jonah’s staple: two oat bars sandwiching a thick slice of cheddar, with a light tofu-based frosting. The chalkboard listing the house specials described it as decadent. The Original Jack also mentioned that Jules was thinking of changing his name, something about tax irregularities. Jules had asked if he could use the Original Jack’s mailing address, a request that was denied.

  II (D) vi: They talked about physical ailments, recurring nightmares, psychosomatic afflictions, all of it blamed on the job. It was pure TMI of the most compelling variety. Jonah’s carpal tunnel syndrome had been so bad he’d asked Robb, Otto’s successor in IT, to set him up with Glottis, the voice-recognition program that Jules used for Personal Daze. But then the symptoms suddenly vanished—a miracle.

  Unfortunately, he now had a form of vertigo, which he said was even worse than searing limb pain. The discomfort was more abstract and thus more worrying. He had some tests done and the doctors couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Whenever he went out of the city, even just to New Jersey to visit his aunt, the oat-bar aunt, his dizziness subsided completely. Did that mean it was purely psychological? Whenever he traveled to Mexico it evaporated almost as soon as he boarded the plane, faded even from memory as he clambered over steep Mayan ruins. It returned, like clockwork, the moment he touched down at JFK.

  II (D) vii: Crease said his left eyelid flutter
ed of its own accord. At first he thought it was from too much coffee, but he weaned himself off caffeine and the lid was still moving.

  Can you see it? Oh wait, it’s stopped. Oh there it goes.

  They stared at his eyes, but it was hard to catch such small movements under the soupery’s dim lighting. Crease said he was going bald as well, but that might just be age. He maintained that the construction from the infinity-shaped building next door was making his ears ring. Don’t you guys hear it? Most days he wore earplugs, which helped but made him think he was underwater.

  The really heavy machinery kicked in at one o’clock, he explained. Crease basically had to have his work finished by then, or at least anything that required problem-solving skills. Even with the earplugs in, he could feel the vibrations, and it became impossible to arrange his thoughts toward any productive end. He had two desks but claimed he could feel the vibrations at either one. He could even feel them at home, he said, lying in bed, staring at a shadow on the ceiling.

  The construction was not just ruining his hearing and depleting his brainpower but also shaking the hair out of his head.

  Pru said she had no sex drive and that she recently had a dream in which Grime killed the Sprout using a plastic shovel. The stuff about the sex drive was definitely TMI, but a good sort of TMI.

  II (D) viii: I’m getting fat, offered Jack II, mixing a pack of oyster crackers into the dregs of his bisque. He had been saying that for years, indeed tended to say it shortly upon meeting someone for the first time. It used to be people would tell him he was crazy, a tallish, rail-thin narcissist, but now when they looked at him, the green sweater did seem to bulge significantly.

  You look avuncular, said Lizzie. Jack II nodded grimly. He knew he was doomed. Biology had it in for him. His whole family was avuncular—not only his uncles but even his aunts.

  Laars said he’d been going to the gym every other day, where he’d run three miles, do three hundred sit-ups and a hundred push-ups, and regard himself moodily in the floor-length mirrors.