by Ed Park
Laars said he was uneasy about sharing it outside their little circle.
Lizzie thought The Jilliad could be a hit on the Internet, a piece of homegrown cubicle art. Maybe Jack II could design a website. Pru agreed that it deserved to exist outside of the office, but wanted to think about what form it should take.
There was talk of detaching individual pages in order to expedite transcription, a motion voted down by the circle, but just barely.
Laars was getting the sense he wasn’t even part of the circle anymore.
II (E) xxv: Without Laars, The Jilliad would surely have disappeared forever, tossed out with the rest of the rubbish. Now he wished he hadn’t saved it. He wanted to show it to everyone because they all knew Jill, but it was quickly becoming something greater. Their real memories of her didn’t stand a chance. It was like killing her off a second time.
And what was Grime’s deal? He didn’t even know her but now he was talking as if he did.
Laars searched his computer for any photos of Jill—from nights out, from last year’s holiday party—but he couldn’t find her face. She was probably the person taking the pictures. In one, the flash was caught in the window behind a laughing Pru and a tipsy Lizzie, and you could see a pale arm and a ghost of a smile floating in the glass, the photographer capturing a sliver of herself.
But when Laars tried to reconstruct her from these hints, he only came up with Jill as he never knew her: in her last, too-sleek haircut, her chin held high, the would-be office warrior with a master plan in her refurnished head.
II (E) xxvi: Everyone devoted spare time to the transcription of The Jilliad, all except Jonah, who was missing out on the whole adventure—studying for his night school exams, using up the last of his personal days.
Grime had been asked not to assist in the typing, but he was definitely still in the loop, as it were, offering his interpretations free of charge.
It looked like Lizzie was talking to Grime again. She still hadn’t told anyone what he’d said to her that was so disturbing. She always had a minimum of two pens sticking out of her hair.
Pru borrowed The Jilliad and kept it for a long time, for so long that she usurped the librarian position from Lizzie. She buzzed with theories. She said that Jill fit into a great American tradition of outsider artists, who created purely in private. They lived superficially humdrum lives until their breathtaking work was discovered.
Laars wasn’t sure what she meant, so she gave some examples: The deaf-mute farmhand who made haunting charcoal-and-saliva sketches. The savant dishwasher with the photographic memory who drew every bird he ever saw. The prisoner who stitched tableaux of ballparks and football fields using the colored threads plucked from his socks.
The life becomes part of the art, said Pru. In such cases the dead-end existence led not to despair but to wild acts of creation. Most of these were lost forever. One had a moral duty to rescue and preserve such works whenever possible.
She alluded to friends she had, or friends of friends, people in the gallery world with names like Nico and Eduardo.
Laars didn’t think they should be exploiting Jill without her knowledge. He got catty and brought up Pru’s unfinished graduate thesis. What was it called? The Aesthetics of Boredom?
Lizzie finally removed the decayed banana from the fridge in the pantry. She held it with a paper towel, as far away from her body as possible. The shape was very unbananalike, as though the matter had liquefied and reconsolidated several times.
She refocused her eyes just long enough to see a name written in green marker on the Dole sticker.
This had been Jill’s banana, pre-Siberia. Nobody wanted to do the math.
II (F) To Recap
II (F) i: Laars came into work looking like someone had punched him in the mouth with a sock full of salt and then insulted his grandmother. He wasn’t talking much and his lips drooped so maybe it really happened. Everyone steered clear. He had a temper and once exchanged blows with a cabbie at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Before lunch he e-mailed Lizzie and told her he went to the dentist for the first time in six years and was now thoroughly depressed. All his old fillings, the fillings of his childhood, were in danger of coming loose. He could choke on them and die. They needed to be replaced. He’d hated them for years but now he was getting sentimental, lost in memories of the matronly dental technician who smelled like flowers and held his hand during the procedure.
II (F) ii: The dentist called it bruxism, the unconscious grinding of teeth. The wear was great. Certain molars needed recapping.
The dentist said that it happened at night. Laars begged to differ, but how would he know? The dentist was trying delicately to ask him whether there was someone he was sleeping with, someone who could monitor him during the night. This depressed him even more. Also the dentist didn’t explicitly say girlfriend, which suggested that Laars was giving off gay vibes again, an occasional problem he had.
I need new teeth and I need a woman, he wrote. He formally renounced the vow of chastity, probably a good move regardless. He wasn’t trying to pick Lizzie up but on the other hand he wouldn’t mind. It might do the trick. The office romance aspect didn’t bother him. His teeth were more important than Maxine’s sexual harassment guidelines.
The worst part was that he needed to wear a mouth guard every night. A lab in Michigan was making one for him, working off the plaster mold. Even with insurance, it would set him back around nine million dollars.
Most of this was in an e-mail to Lizzie, in response to a simple What’s shakin’?
II (F) iii: Lizzie multitasked as she read Laars’s lament. She was finessing a report that Jonah had written, looking for run-on sentences, and changing all the active constructions to passive ones. Jonah was a very fluid writer, maybe too fluid. If you diagrammed one of his sentences, the result would look like a subway map mating with the remains of a fish dinner. Lizzie might have been the best writer of them all, but she got none of the glory. This was because she was very down-to-earth.
Another part of Lizzie’s brain was involved in a long instant-messaging exchange with Pru about what she suspected was her blossoming Ambien addiction. Pru was the person to talk to for something like this. She was a total Ambien addict in good standing and had the lingo down cold.
II (F) iv: Stress caused the grinding, according to the dentist. Laars wrote to Lizzie that he hadn’t felt stressed before, but now he did. He felt stressed out of his mind. The high cost of the dental procedures gnawed at him. So did the idea that his body was doing stuff to itself late at night, beyond conscious control.
Maybe discovering The Jilliad had pushed him over the edge.
Bruxism’s bad enough, Laars wrote. What if I start to sleepwalk? What if I throw myself off a bridge?
Lizzie told him not to sweat it. He lived too far from significant water. There was an outside chance he’d sleepwalk downstairs and into the street and take a cab to the river. But unless he brought his wallet, he probably wouldn’t make it.
II (F) v: Later Pru walked by Laars’s desk. In the trash was a pamphlet from the dentist’s office entitled Tooth—and Consequences. It was all marked up and perhaps tearstained.
Crease tried to tempt Laars with a cigarette. Laars went outside and lit up but then remembered he was under dentist’s orders not to smoke. Crease made some crack about Grime’s teeth, the old British stereotype, to make Laars feel better. Grime flashed a set of bright, neatly aligned choppers. This made Laars feel even worse.
Grime said, Cheers, mate.
II (G) The Outside World
II (G) i: Big Sal from IT joked that he was losing weight from having to run from desk to desk. The e-mail program had been updated a week ago and now all of them were having problems. Unfortunately for Big Sal, everyone’s problem was different.
Whenever Laars or Lizzie wrote to Jonah, Pru, or Crease, all the dashes turned into this mystical cluster:
It was like some superconde
nsed commentary on the history of Europe.
All of Pru’s apostrophes turned into ™s, a chilling foretaste of the future of intellectual property law.
With Crease’s e-mails, all the dashes became question marks, so he had to remember to go through his correspondence before clicking Send and change every dash to a period, colon, or ellipses. Otherwise he wound up sounding like a Valley Girl.
Jonah complained that his period key wasn’t working. He sent his wafty prose to Lizzie, who inserted full stops wherever they felt right. Jonah called his laptop a craptop. He’d been after them for months to get him a replacement. The Sprout said he could buy one himself and expense it, but Jonah knew that if he did he would never see that money again.
II (G) ii: Worse, Jonah’s Mexican distress frog was still missing. He turned his office upside down. Who would want to steal it? Maybe it had absorbed so much grimness that it had no choice but to hop away. Even totems had their limits. The loss of the Mexican distress frog was itself distressing. Added to everything else, it was too much, and Jonah took a day off—a bonus personal day he squeezed out of the Sprout in recognition of putting in so much overtime.
II (G) iii: These days the Sprout was barely in his office. Was he upstairs, hashing out the numbers with K. and Maxine? Out west, negotiating with the Californians? Or simply at home, staring at his hands and drinking gin?
II (G) iv: Pru made what would universally be regarded as the most significant discovery in The Jilliad, in the middle of Chapter 5:
Are you an Ernie—or a Bert? You remember this comical duo from your youth. Ernie is a carefree sort, always up for a gag or a razz, ready to bust out into gales of laughter—usually at Bert’s expense. He’s a classic hysteric. Bert, on the other hand, is his exact opposite: an organized, goal-driven, no-nonsense dude. He’s an obsessive, the sort of person who probably spends a lot of time organizing his sock drawer. He’s a nebbish, and maybe a bit of a dud.
Most people like to think of themselves as Ernies—the life of the party, having a good time. That’s fine, as far as it goes. But guess what? Your boss doesn’t want an office full of free spirits. Such a workforce would get nothing done, and spend the hours from 9 to 5 blowing dandelion seeds and skipping stones. Your boss is most likely a Bert—and he’s going to want more Berts on his team. Wouldn’t you?
—Ernie and Bert in the Boardroom, by Dr. Tal Champers, Ph.D.
They spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was an Ernie, who was a Bert. It was true: Everyone wanted to be an Ernie. Tempers flared. It was decided that Lizzie, Jenny, and Jonah were Berts, and the rest were Ernies or Ernie-Bert blends. Lizzie protested, but she couldn’t sway public opinion.
Jenny was the exception. She accepted the judgment of her peers gracefully. I always liked Bert, she said. The next day she wore a shirt with vertical stripes in clashing colors. Jonah wasn’t around to weigh in but probably wouldn’t care. He’d become a total Bert.
Strangely, no one thought the Sprout was a Bert. They imagined he might be a better supervisor if he were a Bert.
K. was definitely a Bert.
Jack II used to be a hard-core Bert, but recently he’d turned into more of an Ernie, an impression supported by his progressive roundness, especially in the cheek area.
Grime, being British, wasn’t quite sure what they were talking about—he thought that Ernie and Bert were cartoon characters, or toys of some sort—and thus his colleagues spent much time reenacting various segments from yesteryear. Laars did a passable Ernie imitation, and Lizzie, though she still denied being a Bert, did a very good Bert.
There’s this thing they do where they get too close to the camera and their noses fall off, Pru explained, to Grime’s utter incomprehension.
Grime is a total Ernie, Lizzie later concluded, but he has Bert’s eyebrows.
II (G) v: Jack II never left his desk anymore. He sat like a pasha on his swivel chair, with his cuffs rolled high and each bare foot tucked underneath the opposite thigh. Any spare time got funneled into the upkeep of his blog—an Ernie activity on the surface, though blogs also encouraged a Bert-like obsessiveness. He’d been posting photos of bare-limbed trees, manhole covers, his sister’s dog, the infinity-shaped building going up next door.
The others started to avoid him. If you entered his field of vision, he’d ask, Are you going anywhere near coffee? He was acting like everyone was his servant.
Pru expressly denied him permission to post Jilliad excerpts on his blog until the entire thing was transcribed. Was this her layoff narrative—riding the discovery of The Jilliad to a curatorial position somewhere? Book deal, movie deal. She’d been hogging the notebook for weeks now. She said she was finding great new stuff every day and didn’t want to break the momentum. Laars was at the end of his rope.
Does anyone want anything from the outside world? asked Lizzie.
II (H): The New Layoff Narrative
II (H) i: How did Jack II go from meticulous Bert to freewheeling Ernie? Observers agreed that at a certain point last year, not long after Jules was let go, something shifted in his mind. He began to see the cloud of failure everywhere he turned.
All of them knew there was no way he’d get fired, but in his mind it was as if the deed were done. Hence the erratic hours, the blatant blogging, the two or three personal calls that stretched across any given afternoon. He still did his job with Bert-like precision and swiftness, but these qualities themselves galled him. They suggested that he might as well construct a Jack II robot and send it to the office every day. He could stay home in his pajamas and update his blog.
The nickname Jack II started to bug him. What was so special about the Original Jack? Why hadn’t he, Jack II, been able to supplant him as the Jack?
It took a while for them to notice, but he’d stopped giving his spontaneous massages. I kind of miss the Jackrubs, said Lizzie.
II (H) ii: He had a document, right on his work computer desktop, entitled WhatToDo.doc, a list of people to contact, possible escape routes. The most intriguing of these contacts was his uncle, a genuine oil tycoon. Jack II said his family and the uncle had been estranged for fifteen years but it might be worth a shot. For graduation the uncle gave him a pen set and a business-card holder, still in their boxes. Jack II couldn’t remember if he’d written him a thank-you note.
Now he talked about work projects in some dour variant of the conditional tense, saying that he’d do such and such a task provided I’m still around. Even his most casual e-mails came laden with doom. I’m never going to forget this place. All of them in that office felt this way to an extent, but Jack II was really bumming them out.
II (H) iii: Jack II and Lizzie got called into the Sprout’s office at just after nine one morning. Maxine was there but she was staring at the carpet. The room was already involved in what felt like the unending middle of a very long conference call with the new owners.
The Californians? Jack II scribbled on a pad to Lizzie.
They exist! she wrote back.
So they were now the property of the Californians. Exactly when the handoff happened wasn’t clear. How had they missed it? It had stretched out for months, flickering in and out of reality. Up till now none of them knew whether it would turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing, but now it seemed like it was definitely a bad thing.
Unlike the former people at the top, every word the new owners said could be heard with horrible clarity, from all the way across the country. Continuing to think of them as the Californians was probably not the best idea, conjuring as it did an image of sunglassed, zinc-nosed layabouts toting Boogie boards. From the first syllable, it was obvious these were not poolside-lounging Californians. They wanted new IDs made for every employee, a new receptionist trained at their facilities, personalized long-distance and Xerox codes, pay phones installed in the lobby for all nonbusiness calls, endless other complications. Every employee would soon be required to create a new log-on password consisting of a mix of non-sequ
ential capital letters and a three-digit prime number and a punctuation mark, and then change it once a month by sending an Excel form to a secure website in Oakland. This was just standard operating procedure.
Each demand felt like the securing of a strap on a straitjacket.
What’s in Oakland? Lizzie wrote.
The Californians were saying things like effective immediately and compliance is mandatory. Lizzie imagined there was a dartboard in that West Coast boardroom with a stern phrase printed on each wedge. The Californians were picking phrases at random. It was a new world of all sticks and no carrots.
The carrot is you don’t get fired, Lizzie whispered.
Are you sure that’s the carrot? Jack II whispered back.
What?
Nothing.
What?
Nothing.
The Sprout kept forming a fist and almost pounding the table. It looked like an exercise you would do at mime camp. His sleeves were rolled up and his tie was loose.
Didn’t you get the PDF? asked one of the Californians. Didn’t you read the file?
Maxine’s outfit could be described as psychic Catholic schoolgirl. It was like she knew something bad was going to happen before she left home today.
Lizzie decided that Maxine was a Bert about clothing, but probably an Ernie about everything else.
II (H) iv: The collective blood pressure in the room spiked when Henry from HR entered. For a second they thought maybe he’d come by on other matters, but the Sprout motioned for him to have a seat. Henry from HR stared out the window with his superhero eyes, reading omens in the clouds or looking through someone’s shirt two avenues away.
At first Lizzie and Jack II thought that the Californians were doing a good cop, bad cop scenario. But there were actually three of them on the phone, and they were doing something along the lines of bad cop, bad cop, really bad cop. They were Berts gone over completely to the dark side.
