Personal Days

by Ed Park

  The Sprout said that the cost cutting was a long-range goal, which they had a year to meet—as if this information would inspire Laars. Maybe he was trying to inspire him to quit. The Sprout didn’t say anything about how the workers who were left now had to do all the abandoned work, in the same amount of time and for the same amount of pay.

  Laars wondered why the Sprout was revealing so much—surely The Jilliad would have sharp words for a boss who opened up to his employees. Then he started thinking about the Post-it again: DJ. Did Jason have a talk-radio personality, or was he more of a smooth-rock navigator? Laars couldn’t remember the voice or the face.

  The elevator doors opened at seven. No one was there. Then the secret love of Crease’s life stepped aboard. Laars wanted to send Crease a text message: HABAW ELEV ASAP! But the Sprout was still talking. He said that the layoffs would be on a rolling basis for at least the remainder of the year. Then hopefully there’d be a break in the clouds.

  HABAW stared at the descending lighted numbers, tapping her toe gently.

  These things tend to be cyclical, the Sprout droned on. He was making a motion with his finger, but it wasn’t a twirling, rounded motion. It was more like a square that becomes an asterisk.

  The elevator finally reached the lobby. HABAW stepped out and in four long and fairly breathtaking strides evaporated into the sun.

  At the same moment Grime walked in the front door, bound for the office. He made a gun gesture at the security guard, who put down his Bible and mimed falling backward, bleeding, only to be resurrected with laughter.

  Join me, Russell? Grime said to the Sprout, who nodded and went back up with him, no doubt readying another Elevator Speech.

  II (I) x: No one could make head or tail of the Jason DJ memo.

  So I don’t get it, he’s on the radio now? asked Jonah. One thing he remembered was that Jason had the worst taste in music, though this statement was regarded skeptically, coming as it did from a devotee of Czech opera.

  Laars spent an hour, two hours, the rest of the afternoon doing a slow purge of his e-mail correspondence with Jenny. After a while it was too painful to read the messages, so he just stared at the subject lines.

  Hey

  Oh and

  Hey Laars

  questions

  idea

  Re: Hey Laars

  Re: Re: Jenny

  Hi!

  Re: questions

  report

  Re: report

  Potential problem(s)(??!)

  Scratch that

  Re: Scratch that

  Re: idea

  sorry

  Hey

  Re: Hey

  NEIN!

  hi

  One thing

  sproutage

  whassup

  Re: Scratch that

  Don’t forget…

  Re: Hi!

  Re: Re: report

  drinxx

  Re: sproutage

  Sproutaggio

  Re: NEIN!

  Re: Re: Re: Hey Jenny

  Re: Re: idea

  Re: Re: Re: report

  Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re

  He wondered how many e-mails he wrote a week, a month, a year. One day he was going to sit down and count. He realized he’d only written to Jenny twice since she was fired. He started typing a message to her, but couldn’t think of anything to say.

  II (I) xi: Was Lizzie the new Jenny? She said she wasn’t. The Sprout kept calling her in, though, and soon had her switch to Jenny’s old desk so that she was closer to his office. This also meant that she had to get in before he did, a situation that might have been acceptable had she been able to leave a little earlier than before. But she always wound up staying late—it was otherwise impossible to finish even a fraction of the necessary tasks. He talked to her in a voice that was barely audible. She kept saying Sorry? She hated it when people said Sorry? instead of Excuse me?—she thought it was some sort of Britishism. But somehow it was her first response.

  Was it good to be the new Jenny? Yes and no but mostly no. Lizzie now had a slightly more comfortable chair and a much better computer that didn’t sound like it was on the verge of exploding every time she opened an application. But she wasn’t getting paid extra and she was definitely doing more work. Some of it involved what she called manual labor, such as sharpening the Sprout’s pencils and printing out mailing labels. She felt herself slipping down some job-description sinkhole.

  This wasn’t quite a deprotion. It might have simply been a demotion.

  The Sprout also e-mailed Lizzie from home, at midnight, at three in the morning, asking her to print out various files and leave them on his desk so that they would be the first things he saw when he got into the office. Often he had her print out his to-do lists, cryptic commands that read like he was shouting:

  ASK LS abt next wk!

  CHECK w/K abt conf call

  NO MORE TTM?!

  CANCEL CC, M, VX ASAP

  SHEILA CAR FIX CALL!

  He would sometimes send identical to-do lists two or three days in a row, suggesting either that the items were not actually high priorities or that he wasn’t doing any work at all, just letting his mind drift into space.

  She also got sent this one:

  JASON DJ FM AM J

  The sequence was exactly the same as it was on the Post-it Laars had seen. Nobody could figure it out.

  Jason’s such a mystery man, said Pru. Who would have guessed?

  II (I) xii: Sometimes when Lizzie put printouts on the Sprout’s desk, she couldn’t help but notice things.

  The bag with all his racquetball gear was perpetually in the corner. She had never seen him take it out of the room.

  There was a pad full of doodles by his phone. Usually the Sprout drew butterflies, treble clefs, igloos attacked by flying saucers. Sometimes he drew a dense forest with birds pouring out of it, obscuring the imperfect circle of sun.

  Every so often, like a form of bureaucratic weather, Post-its appeared like scales on a corner of the Sprout’s monitor. The handwriting wasn’t his. The messages were in red pencil, written in a way that maximized the number of sharp corners in any given letter. Even O looked needlessly harsh. The Sprout’s face always fell upon seeing them.

  Where did they come from? How did they get there?

  Lizzie thought they originated with K., though she gathered that K. was in California every other week, presumably undergoing a metamorphosis into yet another bad cop.

  II (I) xiii: Lizzie was interested in the fact that Grime came by to see the Sprout so often, sometimes twice a day. Though the door was usually ajar, she could hear only murmurs, the occasional curse, the rare Hoo-hoo!

  In extra early one morning, Lizzie saw Grime leaving the Sprout’s office before the Sprout arrived.

  A few minutes later, delivering a printout to his desk, she was startled by a coating of Post-its that definitely wasn’t there before. The memos covered the monitor, the keyboard, parts of the desk itself. There were phone numbers and initials, dates and times, one-word questions underlined and repeated.

  One read: OPERATION JASON UPDATE—ASAP.

  Lizzie wondered: Was it Grime who was leaving the notes, the Post-its of Doom?

  When the Sprout arrived, he took a legal pad out of his briefcase and carefully transferred all the Post-its to the cardboard backing one by one, their edges a centimeter apart. Then he told Lizzie he was taking a personal day.

  Right before Lizzie went out for lunch, the Sprout returned to check something on his computer. Lizzie saw Grime approach. The Sprout shut down his computer, slammed the door, and hurried past Grime, saying, I’m here but I’m not here.

  II (I) xiv: It appeared that Jonah had nothing to do. While the rest of them were busy, stretching their schedules to accommodate the work that used to be done by their ex-colleagues, he listened to his Czech arias, thumbed through fat textbooks, waited for the other shoe to drop. His screen saver was a flock of black birds a
nd an opposite-facing flock of white birds, which eventually interlocked Escher style.

  Whenever someone popped in to see him, he would quickly set his book flat, half-concealed under papers, and tap his keyboard to summon his darkened craptop screen back to life.

  He was growing a beard to go along with his mustache. While the others tried not to call attention to themselves, Jonah was pretty much waving a flag, jumping up and down, and playing a tuba for good measure.

  Lately Jonah had been wearing the ratty blue work shirt that he’d kept draped over his chair for years. He wasn’t talking as much as he used to, and Pru thought he was trying to get fired, consciously or unconsciously. Perversely, they came to appreciate what he was doing—it would give them that much more time if he attracted the Sprout’s attention and got the boot. Lizzie kept saying, I mean at this point I kind of want it to be me. Everyone wanted to leave but no one wanted to be next.

  II (I) xv: Jonah’s beard grew quickly, arriving in a slightly different color than his mustache. There was less protest this time around, as the mustache was a complete failure to begin with and things could only get better for him in the facial hair department. In the Red Alcove, Pru pointed out to Lizzie that the Paul Bunyan look was in. Glassy-eyed models in Milan were going around looking like oatmeal-eating Gold Rush casualties.

  II (I) xvi: One week later, Jonah’s burgeoning resemblance to the Unabomber made them rethink their position.

  II (J): Blastoff

  II (J) i: Taped inside the elevator one morning was a notice from the Department of Environmental Protection. It looked like it had been sat on and re-Xeroxed with the wrinkles in place and then sat on again for good measure, this time by a horse.

  In order to maintain service to area water mains, and to ensure a continued high-quality water supply, the city would be conducting its regularly scheduled underground blasting this week, not exceeding two times a day. Though the actual detonations would not endanger any buildings in the area, the note informed them, noise levels might be uncomfortably high for some people, and earplugs were recommended as a protective measure.

  A system of whistles would precede each blast:

  One whistle = Blasting begins in ten minutes

  Two whistles = Blasting begins in five minutes

  Three whistles = Blasting begins in one minute or less

  II (J) ii: This startling document became an instant source of elevator banter. Someone would whistle three times and everyone would laugh. Laars told Crease he’d bumped into HABAW that morning and she’d done the whistling joke.

  What a goddess! said Crease. Admit it.

  Laars agreed and said she was a terrific whistler. Also, she called the elevator a lift. Crease was overwhelmed once again by the cuteness of that Britishism and made unironic pitter-pat motions over his heart.

  Crease asked if Laars thought HABAW was an Ernie or a Bert and he said, A little of both.

  I’m so jealous I could kill you, said Crease cheerfully.

  II (J) iii: Even without a fresh firing, the week had its built-in drama. Everyone waited for the blasts, or rather for the whistles to sound. Was the blasting related to the infinity building? It was unclear where the alarm system was based. Jonah imagined that a van would circulate through the neighborhood when the time came.

  Regularly scheduled made it sound like this had happened before, but no one could remember any blasting.

  Crease showed everyone his earplugs, which he’d been using to block out noise from the construction site, and also as part of a general program of self-isolation. They were made of yellow foam and looked like little dollhouse sponge cakes. When he stuck them in his ears, they resembled those Frankenstein neck bolts. He did a little monster lurch, arms outstretched, and wished that HABAW could witness his lively sense of humor.

  II (J) iv: Crease fantasized about a blast so loud that some of the floors collapse. Nobody’s injured, thankfully, but while everyone else escapes, he and HABAW find themselves cut off from civilization. The computers are down, there’s no e-mail, cell phones don’t function. The company is in ruins, never to restart.

  There’s a water fountain that works. For the first week no one even knows that the two are missing. They eat vending machine food and she confesses that she noticed him the very first time they rode the elevator together.

  In one variation, HABAW has lost her hearing from the blast and they must communicate using an improvised sign language, or by writing things on the wall with charred sticks. Crease’s hearing of course is preserved, thanks to the earplugs.

  II (J) v: Lizzie said maybe the whistles were the kind only dogs could hear. Whistles were going off all the time and nobody could detect them, and every day big things were happening just below the surface.

  II (K): The Destiny of K.

  II (K) i: I hate this, said Laars, on the morning of the last day of the non-blasting. Did anyone else get this?

  It was a companywide e-mail, sent out at 9:11 a.m. Some of them were beginning to suspect that a virus was shifting e-mails so that they registered that ominous time stamp.

  I don’t want to open it, said Lizzie. It’s bad luck.

  As if everything else so far had been good luck.

  II (K) ii: The e-mail was from K.

  After fifteen fantastic years, she wrote, it was time to move on. Apparently she hadn’t been absorbed by the Californians, despite all her efforts. Instead she’d been tossed out of the company altogether, an event which in her version became an opportunity to pursue other projects. This made Lizzie think of shoe-box dioramas, finger painting, the construction of piñatas.

  K. included the standard line about being proud of the staff, singling out the Sprout as a skilled manager and her temporary successor.

  That temporary was going to give the Sprout an ulcer. It was going to give his current ulcer an ulcer.

  Then there was a little paragraph in which the tone shifted, a fascinating autobiography that breezed by in three quick sentences. K. had started out, fifteen years ago, in the sixth-floor mail room—a place that no longer existed, she wryly noted—and worked her way up the ladder, serving a stint in nearly every department, and briefly overseeing the successful restructuring of the Boston branch.

  Didn’t they close the Boston branch? asked Crease.

  She had also participated in the national corporate training seminars for the past five years, including the one over the summer, held in California. She didn’t say what her future plans included beyond spending more time with my partner.

  She wrapped things up by saying how much she’d learned from dozens of generous people over the years. Most of them were no longer with the company, their names not ringing even the faintest bells.

  She signed it K. R. Ash.

  As they each reached the end of the e-mail at their separate work stations, Lizzie, Pru, and Crease could hear Laars saying: Oh. My. God.

  II (K) iii: In a flash Laars figured out the provenance of his ancient, temperamental stapler, the bandaged beast that still sat on his desk and every so often could be coaxed to fasten papers together. It had been handed down for generations within the company, migrating over the years from floor to floor, desk to desk. It couldn’t just be coincidence that the instrument had fallen to him.

  That means there’s hope, said Laars, popping out his mouth guard. He wiped a string of drool. I could be the next K.

  Jonah, leaving his cave for a rare appearance, stroked his beard but didn’t say anything. This gave the impression of a judgment, without him actually having to speak.

  Nothing could puncture Laars’s buoyant mood. It’s destiny. What else can it mean?

  Pru made a megaphone of her hands and said, Ernie alert.

  II (K) iv: At quarter to five Grime sent a mass e-mail: Ftinkd? It was like the name of some forgotten Norse god. Nobody knew how to respond. Lizzie forwarded it to Pru, adding, I’m scared.

  A few hours later Grime bumped into Crease in the hall and ask
ed why no one wanted to get drinks to celebrate or at least contemplate the big K. news. Crease discovered that Grime had meant to type Drinks? but his left hand had been misaligned on the keyboard.

  II (K) v: Where does the time go? Lizzie asked, in her poignant way. Where does the life go?

  No one could answer this.

  I can’t believe it’s already October, she said, sharpening a pencil for the Sprout.

  Pru waited as long as humanly possible. It’s November.

  Sorry? said Lizzie. December was a week away.

  II (K) vi: Lizzie was complaining to Jonah, to Big Sal, to anyone who’d listen, about Grime’s misspellings. She understood that it was part of the Grime mystique, that for a man so rumpled it stood to reason that language would not emerge with the smoothness most of the species enjoyed.

  But seriously? It’s like a medical condition. He spells sincerely with two a’s.

  There’s no a in sincerely, said Big Sal.

  Exactly.

  Another hilarious thing was that he always rendered definitely as defiantly.

  II (K) vii: Big Sal said that he’d see what he could do, and a week later he installed Glottis 3.0 on Grime’s computer. It was a more advanced version of the software that Jules had used to compose his screenplay right before he got fired.

  Big Sal replaced Grime’s computer with the one Jules used to have. It made upgrading easier.

  I just have to click on this thing, said Big Sal. One advantage of 3.0 was that it was specially designed to discern British, Australian, and Indian accents.

  II (L): Swiping

  II (L) i: Laars said that so far, this winter wasn’t as bad as the last. It took a few seconds for them to realize he was talking about the temperature.

  They all agreed, but it was based on the haziest of communal memories and a degree of tacit peer pressure. How many people really remembered what last winter was like? Winter was winter. Some days were colder than others. Some days were sunny. Some weeks were wet. Every winter had at least one blast of traffic-stopping snow, followed by a miserable stretch of slush and countless afternoons when you said I can’t believe this wind.