by Ed Park
II (P) ii: Laars was able to wake up early and go to the dentist, who put a temporary cap over his broken tooth. He’d left his mouth guard in the restroom at Schüssmeisters, but he wasn’t going to bother trying to get it back. At least his lip was down to its normal size.
II (P) iii: Pru got off the elevator and swiped through, or thought she did. The box was unresponsive as usual. No click, no beep, no sign that the card had left any impression. Out of nowhere she raised her leg and connected with a solid kung fu kick. Her heel hit it from the side, knocking it loose.
Oh shit.
It hung to the wall by a single nail and swung for a sickening second.
Nobody had seen what happened. Pru instinctively slapped the Down button. The elevator opened immediately and she went back in, back to the lobby, and back up to four again, a form of time travel. She would start her day over and everything would be okay.
II (P) iv: Grime was obnoxiously chipper that post-party day, Glottis headset on, great power as he paced. He had his smug face on, his hair in some semblance of order. He tried to talk to Lizzie but Lizzie wasn’t talking to him. Every time he came by she was on the phone talking or pretending to talk with Pru or her mom or Liz, the secretary of the Californians.
Grime had the swipe box in his hand, shaking his head. This was all Russell’s bright idea, he told no one in particular. When Laars made a coffee run at two he saw that the box was back in place.
II (P) v: Crease contemplated loose ends. No one wanted to tell him what had happened, or must have happened, between HABAW and Jonah, who appeared to be absent today—Jonah, his alleged friend.
It didn’t matter. Crease could imagine the scene. He’d spied them leaving together while cowering, voiceless and impotent. There had always been something untrustworthy about Jonah.
He passed Pru in the Red Alcove and took a seat among the catalogs and magazines. He drifted asleep as the women talked, inhaling the perfumed ads, his head almost but not quite on Pru’s shoulder, then almost but not quite on her lap. Pru went back to her desk as he started to softly snore.
Time melted away. He felt a blanket about his shoulders and wondered, HABAW? Could it be…?
He struggled to open his eyes, nabbed the foggiest glimpse of someone moving away. Not a woman, no, but the Unnameable, shuffling, mumbling. Crease managed a smile of thanks, tucked the blanket tighter, and sank back to sleep.
II (P) vi: Lizzie was trying to type something as loud as she could so she didn’t have to listen to the sound of the Sprout swearing in his office. Something was definitely wrong. Were the Californians on the warpath? Every so often he’d ask her for a phone number, a printout, in a tone he might have used if asking for a new job, a new life. Most of the things he wanted were things she didn’t have. She was trying to go through Jenny’s old files, both paper and electronic, but it was all an impossible maze. She tried a global search on the network, and her computer said: I don’t understand.
A little bit later it sounded like he was flinging books across the room, the famous Sprout syllabus, the contents of the most boring bookcase ever stocked. She heard paper ripping, muffled snarls, desperate laughter.
Hoo-hoo. Hoo-hoo.
Now Grime’s voice was on the Sprout’s speakerphone. The volume was too high and the words got so distorted that Lizzie couldn’t even make out his accent.
II (P) vii: Laars tried to do some work for about ten minutes and then decided that the day was shot. He was too restless. He was happy about his repaired tooth. The loss of the mouth guard was liberating. He rewarded his good mood by going online and buying three hundred dollars’ worth of assorted gear, and bidding another four hundred on more things he didn’t have space for in his apartment.
I totally suck, he said. He took himself down a few pegs on the Ernie scale and canceled all the orders. He hoped he would be outbid on eBay, except maybe on the vintage tracksuit.
As the afternoon dragged on, Laars craved contact, gossip, pointless chat. Wasn’t that the one good thing about being in an office? The human connection. It almost always beat being alone, except when everyone got so negative that you wished they would just shut up, which lately turned out to be most of the time.
There wasn’t anyone for Laars to talk to at the moment. Jonah was nowhere to be found. Jonah! With HABAW! Who knew his beard was so attractive? Laars was seriously impressed. He rubbed his chin and mulled over his own beard potential.
He kept walking through the silent office. He didn’t like hearing his footsteps echo.
Lizzie sat at her desk with the phone clamped to her ear, nodding but not saying anything. Crease was deep in slumber.
Laars went to find Pru.
At her cubicle, the Unnameable was making neat piles. There was a blue dumpsterette, half full. A broom and dustpan.
What’s going on? Laars asked, forgetting the man’s muteness.
Pru’s computer was on but the screen was blank—no words, no icons, just a field of gray. A plastic postal-service bin the color of skim milk held a stack of files. An abandoned knitting project had been tossed ignominiously on the trash heap: a glove, brown yarn with a touch of sky blue. Laars noticed that Pru had accidentally knit only three fingers.
Pru, he said to the Unnameable. The girl who sits here—
The Unnameable stopped sweeping and shook his head slowly. He slid his thick hand over his heart, and Laars could see, for the first time, that the Unnameable lacked a finger.
The Unnameable made an erasure movement across his mouth, to mark that what followed was secret information. Then he pointed to the end of the corridor. A light burned in the distance. Laars started walking, winding through the labyrinth at the center of which Grime resided.
II (P) viii: Later Laars called Lizzie on her cell. I don’t even understand what just happened, he said. I think Grime fired Pru.
II (Q)–II (Z): DELETED
< III >
REVERT TO SAVED
FROM: [email protected]
TO: [email protected]
RE: DEAR PRUNE
The following message was received by mailer-daemon at 21:11 on Fri May 19 and could not be delivered because no username “Prune” exists.
Tip: Check the address. Make sure you meant “jobmilla.com.”
Do not reply to this message.
—
Dear Pru—It feels weird writing a letter that’s a letter, rather than a drunken 2 AM e-mail (my usual métier), all lowercase and punctuation out the window, and doubly weird writing to someone I don’t even write drunken 2 AM e-mails to anymore, but my management style, I learned at the retreat, is all about following hunches, giving in to chance, throwing crumpled paper at the wastebasket by the door and thinking If this goes in then the answer is yes, and so I figure there must be a reason why, after deciding five minutes ago to break my forbiddingly stringent nondisclosure clause, I typed “Dear Pru” rather than “Dear Lizzie” or “Dear Crease” or “Dead Laars” (that should be “Dear”); and though past performance strongly suggests that I’m not to be trusted, I’m hoping that if this letter ever gets to you—if, for starters, the words I’m typing now are being preserved in anything close to legible form, and if I have the balls, once my ordeal’s over, to actually print the thing out and drip it in the mail, the old-fashioned way (for drip, read drop, and while we’re at it, let’s change balls to something less TMI; this is probably a fantastic time to explain that I can’t risk backpedaling and correcting stuff, for fear of losing my place, because what’s been happening is that for the past three hours—more?—I’ve been stuck in the elevator, suspended in utter coffin blackness somewhere between the third and fourth floors—listening to the cables quiver, and every so often hearing the distant shouts of emergency workers saying, Hang in there, buddy! or what sounds like a very heavy wrench clanking on assorted beams as it tumbles into the abyss—and
even though my laptop’s on, it sheds no light, alas: when the elevator jerked to a stop, my feet left the ground, and a second after I hit the floor I heard another thump—the computer had slid out of its case and was making a disconcerting clicking sound, like it had turned into a large and talkative insect; it was warm to the touch, so I waited for the noise and heat to die down—counting out loud, pacing my cell—and put my mind to more pressing matters, but in the end the thing was busted: Shortly after I flipped open the screen, cracked my knuckles, and opted to write a letter to you rather than mull over whatever appalling spreadsheet Lizzie’d e-mailed this morning, the document started to dim: I could still make out characters forming beneath the pixilated fog, but right as I finished typing “Dear Pru, It’s weird to write a letter that’s a letter,” the whole screen went as dark as the air around me, making it impossible for me to see these words; luckily, I’m better at this sort of blindwriting than most, thanks to my regimen: most mornings, after getting to the office early, veins jumping with that good hippie-truck coffee, or a slug of “Sexpresso” from the Bad Starbucks, I’d type with my eyes closed, five minutes of first thought, best thought—it focused me, and at the same time re-created a little test my father would give me as a kid, seating me at his impressive, meticulously maintained Shalimar (which was this antique typewriter that gleamed like gold—they show up on eBay once in a blue moon, the Sasquatch of writing machines, the price so high it aggravates my vertigo), on which I’d peck out whatever came into my head—advertising jingles, lines from cop shows, names of presidents—an exquisite corpse for him to pore over and correct, like the teacher he was; and all this Ninja touch-type training is coming back to me here in my metal, or is that mental, cocoon—for example, I know that part of the trick is to establish a rhythm, to imagine the text as a musical score that I simply have to perform, even though it doesn’t exist till my fingers touch plastic, and if I have to pause I should count it out like a rest, imagine measures of those black bricks hanging like bats from power lines for as long as I require, and meanwhile find the little nipples on the F and J keys, return my fingers to the home row, and pretend that I’m ten years old again and communing with the Shalimar; it would be useful if I were, say, the sort of savant who automatically keeps track of how many keystrokes he’s deployed, registering every letter, space, and comma in some otherwise underutilized fold of the brain, so that he—I—could cleanly zip back via the arrow keys and change drip to drop, the Dead to the Dear, switch balls to courage or moxie or that Sprout special, cojones, expelled with gruesome south-of-the- border gusto; and while we’re discussing keyboard matters, I should mention that last week, after months of touch-and-go performance, the period key on this dilapidated craptop gave out completely, just a few days after the Return button decided to jam, which means that I can end each sentence with an exclamation point!—or a question mark?—but what I’ll probably do is just let it all unfurl in one soul-sweeping go, the better to dislodge every memory of this place, every possible bit of evidence in my favor, so that you can see why I had to do what I had to do; and I have the dim realization that this parenthetical account of my current blindness and typographical deficiencies has long ago eclipsed the letter proper—so let’s wriggle out of these braces before we do anything else)—I’m hoping, Pru, you’ll at least read through to the end and hear me out despite my jumpy style—Hang in there, buddy!—because without the prospect of contact my present situation leaves much to be desired: I’m sitting on the rubbery, vaguely canine-redolent elevator carpet, eating the last of my oat bars, forcing myself not to panic, blocking out visions of roaches creeping down the walls, ignoring the phantom whiff of fumes seeping from the shaft—and thus I’m dedicating what’s left of the battery (I should have a good two hours, though I have no way of telling the time) to run roughshod over the nondisclosure agreement and fill you in on what’s happened since you left, how it all went down with the dreaded unseen Californians, with Operation JASON and Grime and the Sprout, all the latest hair-raising and literally insane developments—not to lure you back but simply to suggest the possibility that I might, in fact, be something other than your garden-variety backstabbing creep (as Laars, in the midst of his daily ass kissing, said you once called me, not that I could blame you) or a run-of-the-mill royal prick (Crease passed that one along)—and not a day goes by when I don’t dream up an alternate sequence of events, one in which I can look into the future, like Henry from HR, and instantly comprehend how all the pieces will interlock, letting me sound the alarm earlier, so that everyone is saved—so that, for starters, you’re no longer not here; I can’t help thinking that if I’d been just a little bit sharper, and had put two and two together a few weeks sooner, I could have prevented all the backbiting and bad-mouthing, the nervous second-guessing as we broke up into ever-shifting groups of two or three, theorizing with hushed voices in remote cubicles or outside in the smokers’ purgatory, or at the Good Starbucks, or over one drink too many down the street, basically placing bets on who’d be next to get the shaft, the boot, the ax, the short end of the stick, the old heave-ho—the gallows humor reaching the end of its rope as people trotted out the Nazi imagery (Crease saying Lizzie’d make a good lampshade, Laars pointing to the ceiling: This is where they drop the Zyklon-B; though come to think of it, did you ever notice how the dividers of the abandoned four-unit cubicle clusters resemble anorexic swastikas when seen from above?)—but I should stop telling you what you already know and tell you something you don’t, the story of Grime, which was weirder than any of you thought (even Lizzie doesn’t know the half of it), and which my legal gag has stopped me from revealing— I guess I’ll start by going back a few months, after we’d come to know Grime a bit: One night I returned to the office after my class let out (the class where I was learning how to be an effective manager, taught by someone who was like a carbon copy of the Sprout, even down to the soap-clean smell) because I’d forgotten a file—I remember it was Halloween and I just wanted to get home, avoid the horde of skeleton pirates and Martian reapers and hobo vampires who were already whooping it up ominously on the sidewalks, in the streets, spreading out in all directions, as sirens and car alarms rang out in sympathy, in a demented symphony, but en route to my desk I heard a curious cross fire of shouts coming from somewhere inside the office, and I went to investigate, treading softly, cupping my ears to capture every sound, until I was right by the abandoned former conference room around the corner from Grime’s lair, the one with the empty propane tanks and furry bundles of computer spaghetti and the single Psycho lightbulb: I caught a glimpse of Grime and the Sprout (I’d know that back-of-the-head anywhere) and slid into the shadow of a huge blue trash bin, keeping a sliver of sight line, hunkering down so close to the action that I caught the sickly smell of Sharpies as Grime wrote Operation JASON on the dry- erase board and put slashes through the J, A, S, and O, so that only the N remained unmarked, its corners razor-sharp—his handwriting was as cleanly formed as his typing was muddy—and he told the Sprout that the last phase of Operation JASON was about to begin and that he needed his full cooperation in order for it to work; to stumble on the homestretch would be fatal, would erase the progress made in the previous months, to which the Sprout replied, in his most conciliatory voice, that of course he’d do everything in his power to ensure the smooth implementation of Operation JASON, which he realized was an important component of the plan, but he didn’t know, frankly, if things had to move quite as rapidly as Grime required—he knew Grime had his work cut out for him as the CRO (the what?), but he felt that there were some things even the most radical, ravenous CROs needed to be aware of: We (we!) were down to our last reserves—this wasn’t too long after Jill was let go—and it was crucial that no more staff get terminated for the next six months minimum, a demand that had the undesired effect of making Grime laugh, with such spite that the Sprout immediately backtracked with Four months? and Grime slapped the dry-erase board so hard it rattled and he shot
back, in a murderous monotone, Why don’t you do your job, Russell, or I’ll do it for you—at which point the Sprout (so weird to hear him called Russell) clarified that he wasn’t trying in any way to interfere with Grime’s job (he understood completely the gravity of the situation, the delicacy, the need for discretion—which must have been why they were meeting at 8:30 in the evening) but simply wanted to put a word in for a few people, a stay of execution for those who most needed sparing; but when Grime demanded to know which people, specifically, required such treatment, Russell—rather, the Sprout—hedged until Grime told him to rank us, from most valuable to least: I couldn’t see the half of the board that the Sprout was using, but felt sure he was placing me either at the very bottom of the roster or at the very top, so that either way, fingered as the worst or hailed as the best, I would stick out—too obviously useless, or else too much in the Sprout’s good graces: That reeks of paranoia (or narcissism—it’s a fine line), especially since on the surface the Sprout and I got along just fine, with both of us always ready with a bit of banter, a level of friendliness that even survived my weeklong suspension two years ago (a penalty levied after I protested his suspension of Crease, itself a result of Crease defending Jules, after Jules “accidentally” set Jill’s computer on fire, to replay for you the whole sparkling chain of events)—the weird thing was that the Sprout had opened up to me in the first place, years ago, because he had inexplicably gotten it into his head that I had a daughter, and thus assumed I was a family man like himself, and as time passed it became harder to inform him that I was in fact not only childless but morbidly single, and it became near impossible to come clean after he confided in me that he and Sheila had been trying to adopt a second child, a little girl from China (a companion for their first child, half black like me), but the paperwork was taking so long—a practically satirical series of lost files, misaddressed forms, and crucial information mangled on both sides of the translation—that what had started out as a yearlong process had now become a three-year nightmare, and though it was awful to admit, they no longer wanted the child they’d picked, the girl they’d gone all the way to China to see, because she was now speaking Mandarin and (on their second visit) displayed only cursory interest in them, if not complete disdain, and additionally had replaced her button nose with an enormous honker and her oyster-like ears with satellite dishes, facial developments so dramatic that they suspected that perhaps this was not the same baby; the adoption agency, alas, had quickly caught on to their cold feet and begun barraging them with daily faxes and an impressive array of threatening documents in triplicate, insisting that the Sprout and Mrs Sprout were legally bound to take the child, while at the same time intimating that the actual adoption would not happen any time soon, probably due to their bad Yankee behavior, and as a consequence they would be required to send ever-increasing monthly “maintenance” fees to the agency, in addition to the regular bookkeeping charge, and it had occurred to the Sprout that perhaps he and Sheila would simply be raising Ting-Ting this way, remotely and with regularly spaced infusions of cash, for the rest of her life, a perfect child of bureaucracy: So I had this intimacy with the Sprout, based entirely on a misunderstanding, but I’m certain that he thought less of me after my suspension, that I’d become one of them forever (his them is pretty much a mirror image of our us), someone, like a Jules, who would always have an ax to grind—who would, upon finishing the satisfactory grinding of one ax, refuse to relax but instead go back into his cavernous ax storeroom and haul out another one that needed a new edge; and to be fair, I can see why he’d think this about me—that’s the brutal thing about his job (which is now, technically, mine): You have no allies, no one you can count on even until the end of the day—definitely not among the people you supersize (that should be supervise—I’m starving) and especially not your assistant, who’s filing away each of your idiocies, fodder for some future grievance or gossipfest, so that you start thinking maybe it’s not such a bad idea to keep your door shut, and keep a bottle of something in your lower-left-hand drawer at all times, an emergency flask, and in the interest of full disclosure I should mention that after lunch—my usual lonely Friday lunch—I visited several establishments, including a liquor store, and since I never made it to my floor, let alone my desk, I’ve got the booze here in the elevator, and for quality control purposes only I’ve been taking sample nips every so often to wash down the oat bar and give me the courage to finish this letter to you and have it spell out all I want it to spell out, even in this scattershot, parentheses-prone, train-of-thought-jumping manner, but the side effects are that my vertigo is swirling full force, like the whole car is swaying (which maybe it is), and I suspect I will need, very soon, to pee—let me retreat from the verge of TMI and just say I think it’s going to be a long time before I get sprung from this cage: as I stepped into the elevator a few hours ago, I heard a series of shrieks that only later (as the doors of the carriage walled me in and elevation commenced) did I consider might have been whistles, and as I wondered, dimly, if this was the warning for the water-main blasting that they’d promised us months ago (and as I tried to recall if I’d just heard two whistles or three) a deep rumbling began, so profound it was impossible to determine whether it was coming from below or above, from within the building or without, and a moment later the elevator’s ascent halted with such force that I was airborne for a second, then slammed against the back wall, flung forward against the doors, and gently, mockingly placed into a sitting position on the floor (the impact triggering my cell phone to take about fifty pictures of the inside of my pocket, draining the battery from two bars to none), and as an arrhythmic rain of metal and masonry drizzled down on the carriage, my laptop case was ripped out of my hands and pitched to the side; watching the lights above silently go out, I thought, very calmly, How strange, the building is collapsing; after a few seconds I opened my eyes only to realize they were open, and peered into the dark, calling Hello? to make sure I was absolutely alone—that someone very small and very quiet hadn’t somehow slipped into the carriage when I did, because a companion would be unbearable in such close quarters as these: the proximity would ratchet up the tension, our reassuring noises to each other would just serve as a nervous prologue to some monumental freak-out involving weeping or fisticuffs, hyperventilation round-robins—not to mention how quickly two people would eat up the available air in these forty square feet (I’ve paced the perimeter, Pru, put my hands on every surface, punched every button a thousand times)—it’s so easy to lose your way in the dark, even when there’s nowhere to go: You become all ear, shaping every sound into a clue, and now I’m second-guessing what I heard last Halloween, huddled outside that chamber of horrors: Grime, the CRO, asking the Sprout if he had the slightest idea (idear) what the initials stood for, not waiting for a reply: That they’ve brought in a Chief Restructuring Officer, Russell, means the structure here is beyond fucked, it was a failure that needed immediate sorting, this last segment of Operation JASON would require cutting one person from the sixth floor and three people from the fourth, he said, and as the Sprout sputtered But how are you getting these numbers? Grime launched into a hissing litany of everything wrong with the company, from the shade of the stationery (too bright) to the division of labor (redundant came up again and again), a critique somehow ruthless and thorough-sounding yet oddly abstract at the same time, like this was the nth minor variation on a speech he gave to all his clients/victims, peppered with constant references to himself and his title—CRO, CRO, CRO, over and over until those initials were beaten into my head, and I started thinking of Grime as that cleverest of birds, the Crow, a mimicking thing with a fondness for flesh: I’m here to make sausage, Russell, he was saying, toss all the useless bits into the grinder, so what comes out the other end’ll be halfway palatable—on and on, and at last the Sprout stammered that it was hard for him to think of the office as a butcher shop or a slaughterhouse, because this place had a reputation, a history, a
n iden—— but Grime cut him off: See, it’s not even a slaughterhouse—I’d be ecstatic if it were, I’d be over the bloody moon, because then there’d be fresh meat hanging about, ready for market—he was thwacking the dry-erase board for emphasis—and I wouldn’t need to be scrounging for tasty bits, come back, come back here you insolent—!—as the Sprout slipped out, and I drew my limbs in, shrinking to the size of a period, holding my breath as our depleted leader trudged past, certain he’d see me; after fifteen seconds, with the Crow cackling acidly to himself, I started to trail the Sprout, sticking to the walls like a shadow, and could swear I heard him muttering, as the elevator doors closed on him: —fucking dead, I am so—, a tone of shot nerves and life in sudden flux, and I almost lunged for the button to follow him but instead started formulating a plan, or at least a structure for thinking about what was happening in our office: by the end of the night, having fled that haunted house and elbowed through the goblin throngs and picked my way across the vomit-soaked sidewalks, I resolved to keep the Grime episode to myself for a while, and to keep my distance from you—from Crease, Lizzie, Laars, from all the other doomed cattle in the slaughterhouse—in order to figure out what Grime’s Crow role was, and the nature of the power he wielded over the Sprout; in the weeks to come I could see that behind Grime’s scatterbrained, laid-back, technophobic front, he regarded us as utterly disposable—indeed I began to suspect that he’d wanted us gone from the moment he took roost, which (I later discovered) was not after Jill got fired up in Siberia, as most of us assumed, but in fact nearly a year earlier: I know that this chronology will mess with your head, but I’m certain that it’s correct—I’ll explain how I pieced it all together, but for now just imagine Grime not as we knew him but as The Crow, working unobtrusively out of a spare cubicle in Siberia, gathering information about us in monkish silence, not even using the phone or computer, receiving reports from Maxine and the Sprout via the Unnameable, our soft-soled messenger, everything set up to be as quiet as the tomb; I imagine Jill would sometimes see mysterious shadows on the Sheetrock, or hear a footfall, a sigh, a muffled laugh, and imagine she was losing her mind; shortly after Halloween, I began to follow the Crow’s movements: Twice a week he would take a cab to a bar in what I assumed was his hotel in midtown, where he’d meet with the Sprout and “K,” our mysterious fifth-floor ice-queen overlord, and nurse a club soda while they ordered too much Scotch and revealed more than they should have, encouraged in equal measure by the midtown-hotel-bar, drinking-on-the-clock ambience and sheer psychotic terror, because to them, he was never the chummy, rumpled, winningly incomprehensible Brit who introduced himself with Call me Grime, but Gordon G (for Graham = Grime) Knott, a fact I deduced because the Sprout would sometimes call him Gordon, and “K” would always address him as Mr Knott—Gordon Graham Knott, I discovered easily enough, was one of the most notorious CROs in the business, held in awe for his brazen restructuring tactics and bottom-line results, a man despised not just by the legions of felled employees left floundering in his wake (who surely numbered in the thousands) but by the more conservative players in his field; aware of his reputation, I burned some shoe leather tracking the Crow’s flight to the midtown bar, noting the deteriorating mood and the glacial silences and who picked up the bill (always the Sprout or “K”); occasionally, I’d take personal days for these stakeouts, watching from a balcony seat as “K”—shaken and sometimes sobbing I think—left the bar for Grand Central and her train home, and though at first I assumed the Crow was staying at the hotel, on the company’s dime, eventually he’d make his way back, alone, to the office, never to reemerge, by which I mean: It became evident that Grime was not one of the hotel’s long-term guests but in fact the inhabitant of a forgotten corner of Siberia, where he would order in meals, groom (after a fashion) in the surprisingly spacious janitor’s bathroom, have his clothes picked up and laundered, and sleep on the luxuriously long couch: as far as I could tell, our office was his home, lending weight to some of the glowing praise for “Gordon G Knott” that I found online (a “take-no-prisoners” “workaholic” who “stays obsessed for months on end”); around this time, my burgeoning, dare I say glorious, thickets of facial hair, begun on a lark, now offered useful protective coloring, a full-fledged beard joining the serviceable mustache: I was going into deep cover for this mission, slipping into a new identity, sort of in the way Grime had masqueraded as a colleague instead of showing us his full Crow plumage: I too would become unfamiliar, so that gradually in his mind I’d be hard to place, ever strange, anonymous; some nights, slaving away, I’d take a break, put on a blue work shirt of my father’s, the one I keep on the back of my door, and walk by Grime’s desk, sweeping or spraying, scanning the ground for any tell-tale detritus, whistling like a loon, looking for all the world like a blokey member of the custodial staff; I knew my disguise was working when one evening, about a week before the holiday party, he called out to me as I pushed along my mop and pail, whistling “YMCA,” and asked if I’d mind nipping out and pinching some fags and beer—I grinned—and possibly some herb? he added with an exaggerated drag-sucking sound, if I were the sort who knew how to come by that sort of thing, and with a friendly wink he peeled off a crisp C-note, which I proceeded to convert into the requested provisions, and so we drank to each other’s health, laying into a Thai spread he’d had delivered, and I lingered for a while, listening more than talking, sipping the beer rather than downing it, fake-inhaling and letting the pot go to work on him (the same way he’d drink nothing stronger than club soda at his meetings in the hotel bar); after comparing English and “Yank” terms for various household items, controlled substances, and sexual positions, he began telling me the story of his life, a real corker, as he put it, from his beginnings in a sooty corner of London, son of a traveling ventriloquist, to his big break as a messenger boy at a barrister’s, climbing the ladder, learning the ropes, a year of business school, bad drugs, a tempestuous marriage to a British starlet, divorce, rehab, America, a whopper of a second chance, harder drugs, harder rehab, relearning the ropes, learning altogether different ropes, pilgrimage and spiritual awakening on the subcontinent, all culminating in his current runaway success as a CRO: What you’d call a freelance hatchet man, is how he put it, and spoke of the pleasure he took in breaking things down, determining what worked and what didn’t, amputating, say, what was to all appearances a company’s most successful branch in order to stimulate activity in the others—Fear is the greatest administrator, he said, and Business is the best art, like he was giving me, your humble mop boy, exclusive entrée into the mind of a restructuring legend; but the odd thing was that most of his insights—even his asides—were ones I was familiar with, right down to the wording (My only rule is there are no rules or In principle I am against principles), as if every chapter in his gripping life story, indeed every syllable he spoke, had already been quoted or described so many times in the sources I’d read, online and on paper, that it was like encountering in the light of day some artifact first uncovered in dreams; I subtly steered the talk away from twice-told biography and asked him about the actual mechanics of getting an entire company to skip to your tune, even as it’s collapsing, and the very idea of ye humble broom pusher evincing real curiosity about such rarefied doings delighted him, compelled him to divulge what might be called his aesthetic side, or perhaps his penchant for S & M: The deep dark impenetrable mystery of it all is that once they hire you, they want to be punished and It’s as easy as hitting Delete and There’s a button called Execute for a reason and The beauty is that everything goes through someone else, this last one meaning that his name, crucially, never surfaces in these affairs: The Crow soars high above the fray, and not a single scrap of paper bears his signature, he bragged; he avoids e-mails if at all possible; eccentrically, he always gets paid in cash while his operation is in progress (did I dare ask about Operation JASON?); he never gets identified by his victims as the executioner but instead works through as many
of their preexisting nemeses as possible (the Sprout, “K,” Maxine), each of whom receives often contradictory information and must, at his insistence, sign off on every demotion and pay cut, carry out every suspension and firing—attend to even the smallest bits of unpleasantness—while he keeps obscure, for as long as possible, any link between himself and the gore; then as soon as he obtains his objective—upon satisfying whoever hired him—he takes wing, disappears for months, even a year, with every trace shredded away, until he lands another assignment at another wheezing outfit, giving him a fresh chance to orchestrate the same chaos, to tighten the bottom line; one strategy that he was especially fond of, a bit of a risk to be honest but well worth it, involved elevating a low-profile drudge to his second in command—the most dramatic effects, he said, resulted when the worker was someone whom at least 75 percent of the others secretly disliked (“Oh, they hate me,” I said), and better still if it was someone who’d been with the company for a long time, a lifer whose chances for upward progress had dropped to nil; you get someone who has deep institutional knowledge and harbors deep reserves of pent-up wrath and ambition; at the same moment that this person, this unlikeliest of candidates, was anointed, the Crow would fire whoever was in charge, a maneuver he executed without any malice (he said) but did simply because sometimes a sharp shock is just what’s needed, a major disorientating episode that triggers the adrenaline (I’d come across these phrases before, in industry reports explicating his philosophy) and forces all the people in the middle to find their bearings and in most cases do their best work in years, which is what he planned to do to our shambles of an office (how many other offices, I wondered, had he described as shambles?); he said one never feels too bad for the people knocked off the top—they were inevitably arseholes anyway and What goes around comes around, eh?; we discussed at great stoned length the theory of office karma, and I joked that maybe I could be put in charge—after all, I’d been around for nine years!—which made him laugh so hard he spit his drink, and he pounded his desk and said, Why not? The janitor! Why the bloody hell not?————— (OK, Pru: I just spaced out for five minutes, maybe closer to ten, sitting here with the computer exhaling hotly and my eyes still drinking in nothing, fingers tingling with the promise of connection, and now I can’t remember the last word I wrote, only that I was describing my lovely little tête-à-tête with Grime, and that it ended with a question—so I’m regrouping here, in the safety of these parentheses; even though I’d intended to get this all down in one single serpentine sentence, allowances need to be made, as the Sprout used to say, and so I’m allowing myself a little breathing room, these parentheses like little emergency lungs, because it’s getting hard to concentrate: Someone’s shouting at me through a megaphone, it’s hard to tell from what distance or direction, and I can make out maybe every third word—JONAH zzzhhhh ffffff! CAN zzzzhhhh krrrr?—but I don’t recognize the voice at all; maybe it’s someone from the rescue team trying to convey the important information that he’s going to pry open the top or drill through the sides or blow the thing up—Sorry, buddy!—but whenever I call out, there’s no response, and though enough time has passed for me to be reasonably confident that no catastrophe is imminent—there’s ample air, the carriage hasn’t crashed to the ground, the structure has yet to crumble—I’m still going to race to finish this letter, Pru, and I’m making a solemn vow right now not to drag this document into the trash once I’ve escaped this vertical casket and got my craptop screen fixed but to hit Print and get your snail-mail address from Lizzie or—if you two still aren’t talking—the Original Jack, or just look it up (Sharmila Maternity—you have no idea how many times I’ve Googled you—and I’ve been meaning to ask: So you’re designing baby clothes now? using hemp?) and send it off before I have a chance to reflect, reconsider, retreat; I don’t think I can even risk proofreading it, despite the errors this sort of eyeless composition inevitably invites, indeed I fully expect that skeins of scolding red understitching have wormed their way through this document, courtesy of the MS Word grammarians—and I would insist that proofreading in general is a sign of bad faith, faith being not irrelevant to the situation at hand, for right now the only thing keeping me going, the only thing stopping me from charging at the walls until I knock myself out cold, is faith that you’ll read this to the end)—and now it’s time to jump out of the parentheses, Pru: Part of the elevator roof has come off, I believe, because a cool column of air now penetrates the carriage; my shouts (Hello? and It’s Jonah and I’ve been here since three! and again Hello?) still go unanswered, echoing up and down the spine of the building, and I wonder if the maintenance squad has simply decided to take a break until morning; or maybe it’s just that the heat gets turned off in the evening—is it evening, now?—which reminds me to tell you how I figured out that Operation JASON had nothing to do with our old friend Jason (by the way I heard from him recently, a random e-mail that said he’d been working in Spain but couldn’t stand it and is now working in Philly but can’t stand it): I was at home on Christmas, paying an overdue Con Ed bill, thinking about that EB White passage you once showed me, back when you were new here and we used to talk for hours—the swooning bit where he says that it’s the native New Yorkers who give the city its stability, and the commuters who give it a daily tidal rhythm or something, but it’s those dreamers from elsewhere, the striving poets and wannabe circus performers and so forth, who power it with enough heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison company—I always liked that bit, even though if I think about it for half a second it seems like the purest BS—and I noticed on the bill the small bar graph that shows kilowatt-hours per month, and the first five letters along the bottom were J, A, S, O, N, for July, August, September, October, and November—and I had a eureka moment, as the blood left my face: I flashed back to that mysterious, anxiety-stirring Post-it that Laars saw on the Sprout’s desk, the famous note that ran JASON—DJ, FM/AM? and was signed —J, and realized that it hadn’t been a cryptic message from some unknown J still among us, but just the Sprout’s idle scratchings, punctuating the initials for the remaining months (DJ = December, January) with no reason beyond simple distraction, but it dawned on me, looking at the bill, that the kilowatt bars were high in the summer (reflecting air-conditioning expenses), then low for a bit, and now that it was winter they would rise again (heating, more lights)—and I wondered if this corresponded at all to how many people were being fired here, if every month the number of folks let go by the Sprout (at the Crow’s command) was somehow determined by the electricity bill—and I recalled how the Crow put slashes through the letters of JASON, on that dry-erase board on Halloween, and I knew in a flash that my guess was correct, that he was playing a horrible game with us, that he could have just as easily rolled a pair of dice, and the Sprout had no idea that this was how Grime was coming up with his figures, he was simply following orders, firing whomever Grime indicated (maybe even submitting “reports” to the Californians on Jack II and Jenny that said they weren’t pulling their weight, feigning shock when they got rid of Maxine); and of course after J, A, S, O, and N came D, December, and I got thoroughly depressed, thinking for the hundredth time how the last time I saw you was at the holiday party, a/k/a the night before your firing, and wondered if it could have played out differently, me in my incredibly studly sweater with the giant snowflake, as you’ll recall, and you in a green cocktail dress that basically gave me a seizure whenever I looked your way—whenever I so much as thought about it, and reminded myself that you were there with the Original Jack, whom I was surprised to see; so demoralizing was his presence, and what I presumed was your affection for him and his shaved head that when a buxom elf (there is no other description) interrupted my unseasonable stewing with a jolly Hey, Snowflake and asked what I was drinking, I thought she’d asked what I was thinking, and so I told her about you, your way with words, your hair and your smile and your purposeful walk, and as her eyes glazed over and she was on the verge o
f leaving, dissolving back into the crowd, I decided to change course—I became that rarest of creatures, Charming Jonah: what can I say but that I’ve been living with a default vow of chastity for longer than I care to divulge here, a span that would turn Laars green with envy, then pink with laughter; I guess one of the major points I want to get across today (tonight?) is that it took me a while to realize that this was the girl from the elevator, Crease’s Half Asian British Accent Woman, his “HABAW”!—this somewhat, no, I would say empirically extremely attractive (but not Pru-caliber attractive) denizen of the seventh floor whose actual, human name is Tracy, or Trace—and all that happened was that, about an hour later, we stumbled into a cab, stumbled into a karaoke bar, where with some of her oddly gnomelike but genial co-workers we stumbled through the repertoires of a half dozen ’80s haircut bands and too much treacly Bacharach and an ill-advised foray into Aerosmith, occasionally passing the mike to members of a very good women’s volleyball squad from Duluth; then Trace and I stumbled crosstown, stumbled uptown, stumbled to her doorstep, where I learned (as she tugged my beard) that Trace was leaving in a week for, my God I can’t remember, Prague or Paris (one of those pesky P cities) for a month or a year or forever; and then I, Jonah, incapable of taking a hint, said So nice meeting you! and shook her head and then very much alone and without so much as a phone number or e-mail address (and basically broke from karaoke) stumbled down into the subway station—did I mention alone?—and to think that this was the night I last set eyes on you (a glaring, totally pissed off you, no less) still kills me, makes me want to turn back time in the manner of the poet Cher, whose vocal stylings were replicated ad nauseam that evening, but instead what happened was this: I took the next day, the Friday, as a personal day, to rewhite my aging bloodshot eyes (my big discovery, possibly the discovery of the century, is that nobody keeps track of personal days: before he was fired, Henry from HR sabotaged the program so that these babies get filed differently than vacation days, and basically never get tabulated, ever), and when I returned to work late on Monday, you were long gone, and Crease wasn’t talking to me because of my HABAW transgression, and Grime was looking awfully satisfied about something, and Lizzie had profound crying-too-much rings around her eyes, and when I finally got the story of your dismissal, I couldn’t understand why no one was doing anything, why everyone was so quiet; I know in the past we’d write letters of protest when someone was fired or suspended, and for the most part the Sprout would nod and file away these strongly worded beauties or probably just slip them into the shredder, and neither side would speak of the matter again (the civilized thing had been done, points of view had been exchanged, and it was time to move on), but at some point we stopped even this pathetic performance—we didn’t do it for Jill, and the Jenny-and–Jack II joint firing (not to mention the elimination of Maxine) had sapped us of all power: When Lizzie told me that Grime had fired you, had stepped out of the shadows and swung the ax in person, I knew it was time to build a case against him—to shoot down the Crow, or get shot down trying; I knew I needed an ally, and the kicker of course is that you were the only one I could think of who might pursue this with me till the end; I took a walk around the block, left messages on your cell, pondered my next move: I couldn’t confront the Crow just yet—I needed him to not know me for a little while longer, to see me and think Janitor with Beard—and so instead I decided to hear what the Sprout had to say; but when I got back to the office and pushed open his door, I found him lying on the carpet, tossing and catching a racquetball with one hand, a lit cigarette in his mouth, with the rest of the pack on his chest and a pencil holder for an ashtray, as the winter air from the open window swept up the smoke and subverted the fire alarm; I sat down in his chair and asked him point-blank if he truly believed that getting rid of you could be construed as a smart move—as anything but a horrible mistake—and he sent up a cone of smoke and stopped the ball tossing and sighed, Not my idea, both a confession that he wasn’t the one calling the shots and a blanket refusal to answer any more questions, and I figured that the best way to get him to talk was to not say anything—the equivalent of giving him a blank sheet of paper and locking him in a room (or maybe trapping him in a stuck elevator with a laptop and telling him Type whatever)—and sure enough, after his cigarette burned out, and the rubber ball lay balanced in his open palm, he said, I’m going to have to take a hit on this one and Let’s gut it out for the next few weeks, he said, Try to turn it around and Need to get on the same page—and it wasn’t clear whether these were things he or I was supposed to do, but I figured this patchwork of vague determination was enough of a welcome mat for me to start asking questions again as he lit a fresh cigarette; I don’t know was his refrain uttered in a range of tones—prickly, insulting, sympathetic, but mostly just exhausted—as the wind died down and the smoke kept creeping toward the ceiling and the ball was going up and down again, and when I asked if my job was on the line—if I was going to be replaced by someone hand-picked by the Californians, or if my position was simply going to be erased, the way all the rest had been—he replied, I can’t tell you because I don’t know—if I knew, I’d tell you, or if I knew and couldn’t tell you, I’d tell you that I knew but couldn’t tell you, but the truth is that I don’t know, and so I honestly can’t tell you—it may have even gone on for a few more hairpin turns, an instant Sprout classic, but at that point I realized that the Sprout himself was not long for this office, and strangely enough a little tentacle of grief began working its way through me, and as if hoping at least to salvage his health, I schoolmarmishly suggested he put out the cigarette, advice he didn’t heed, instead telling me that it was his first cigarette in nearly a year—he’d stopped because after he fired Jason or maybe it was the Original Jack (You’re all sort of interchangeable, he said; I laughed), every time he went outside to light up, those already on the sidewalk outside, in the Republic of Smokistan, would be in the process of stuffing their cigarettes into the ash stand, or grinding them out underfoot, barely grunting hello as they made their way back indoors—the first few times this phenomenon didn’t register, and when he noticed it he wanted to prove to himself that this avoidance was indeed deliberate, so whenever he’d see a group of us moving toward the elevator (this elevator! this prison!) to go out for a smoke, he’d take the next one down, and observe how we’d immediately extinguish our freshly unboxed cigarettes and go back upstairs, or just start wandering off in all directions, leaving him stranded by the buoylike receptacle with yards of dead smoke rising from its hole; and after he recounted this heartwarming memory, he seemed to relax, lighting a new cigarette before talking about “your friend Graham”—to get it off his chest, I think, telling me how Mr Gordon Graham Knott had simply appeared one day, like something sprung from nightmare, with his alien accent and rumpled clothes and cold eyes like iron, marching into the Sprout’s office to announce that as the CRO, appointed by the Californians to resuscitate the company (after the comical brainless botch the Sprout and “K” had made of it), he would essentially be running the show from now on, and it was up to the Sprout whether he wanted to stay onboard and help implement the plan or step down immediately—Grime didn’t care which, but he had to decide quickly: And so the Sprout (I’m a family man, you of all people know what that’s like, what the responsibilities are) threw his weight behind this stranger for survival, but he’d also nurtured, he confessed, a vague hope that together they would dethrone “K” unfortunately, as the Sprout was about to divulge, it seemed, the exact nature of his beef with her—something we’d all been wondering about for ages (had she screwed him over? had they just plain screwed?)—the smoke detector went off, the sprinklers overhead kicked in, and he jumped to his feet in one gymnast-quality maneuver, throwing his jacket over his computer while barking for Lizzie to call Bill in maintenance (I remember her shouting above the din, But Bill’s been fired!), and I escaped with just a sudden slash of dampness along one arm, like I’d been cut; anyway, af
ter that meeting I think the Sprout really began to lose it—working with the shades down and the lights off, misplacing things, putting Post-its on his shirt pocket, walking out of his cave and then spinning on his heel and walking right back in, leaving incredible messages on his home phone (Russell, this is Russell! And I seem to have—forgotten what—I wanted you to remember), and wearing the same tie every day to work—the Canada tie, with the red maple leaves falling against the white background—and the same bright green coat and those strange blue pants that look like jeans but aren’t, with a black Velcro belt: He looked like something that could have been drawn with that funky pen I bought in Mexico, the pen that Grime borrowed from me one night when we were scarfing down a sausage pizza over at his desk, illustrating a particularly tricky restructuring concept—those fat pens, did you ever use them as a kid?—a little awkward to hold, voluptuously stocked with four colors to choose from, giving you the insane flexibility to write in blue or black or red or green—an instrument that I’d been using regularly and to great advantage: toggling between shades to annotate with distinction, or suddenly turning a memorandum into a rainbow, cross-referencing, expanding the dimensions of the written word (didn’t you tell me Faulkner wanted to print The Sound and the Fury in four colors? is it weird that I remember pretty much everything you ever told me?) and this is totally jumping ahead, but not long after Grime’s demise (which I swear I’m going to tell you about, in gory detail—it’ll definitely be worth the wait) I walked by to see if the pen was still around: I found it underneath his desk, jammed into the spiral of a beat-up notebook in a plain black cover, which piqued my curiosity—as far as I could tell, it was some sort of homemade compendium, gathering pearls of wisdom taken from a huge assortment of business and financial-fitness books, titles you’ve never heard of (Are We Having Money Yet, An Inside Man Thinks Outside the Box, et cetera); my favorite was a passage from Ernie and Bert in the Boardroom, which basically breaks down all of humanity into fun-loving, chaotic Ernies and anal, fussbudget Berts (I think I’m a bit of both—what the author would call an Ert—and this document, pecked out in the digital dark with a full bladder and too many ideas, is like Ernie and Bert colliding: Part of me can’t wait, needs to shout out everything I know and feel in one enormous sentence, but another part is working to keep it all together—navigating the punctuation, making sure that the grammar’s well-oiled, that the commas and dashes bear the proper weight, that even though the focus shifts and the shape gets blurry, I don’t just chuck it all and give myself over to the entropy of fragments—because I need to write this right now or I’ll never write it, right, and what would be the point of sending you a hundred disconnected paragraphs, shattered stanzas of woe and complaint?)—but in truth most of the quotations in that notebook were insipid, even contradictory, in their advice, and written in a nearly illegible hue of orange pen to boot, like an ink made out of fruit juices; the later entries, curiously, were written using the cartridges of my Mexican four-color (blue followed by black followed by red followed by green, in strict, Bert-like rotation), in what was clearly a different hand altogether, all razory angles; I slowly realized that the final five pages of those business-book gleanings must have been written by Grime: computer commands (Revert to saved) alternated with the bromides of yesteryear (The man who buys the hare gets to make the fur-lined hat), periodically appended with the title of a book that kept changing, from The Plumber’s Manual to CRO: Memoirs of a British Plumber to Making Sausage: A Master Butcher’s Five Essential Rules to Restructuring to Corporate Ventriloquism, yet seemed basically the same, as if by adding his own thoughts to those already in the notebook—what I came to think of as the Notebook of Power—the Crow could confirm his legendary status, or give focus to his own rags-to-riches saga; my thoughts were interrupted by the Unnameable (who’d become even stranger since you got fired, by the way, his eyes glazed, his humming louder and sadder and creepier) and in this desolate corner of the office, at this late hour, he was free from the mute niceties the workday demanded: he hurtled toward me, Pru, intent for some reason on grabbing the notebook; when I pulled away from him, the black cover came off in his hands in crisp staccato, and my vertigo kicked in: I tripped backward, reeling about the barren cubicle, still clutching the now-coverless notebook, which I rolled into a tube and tucked under my arm like a football player as I spun to the right, spun the desk chair at him, and dashed down the hall, jumping with adrenaline, a ’70s cop-show sound track going off in my head as he moaned (hhhHHH!), clutching his shin: It was absurd and scary all at once—I heard limping but still rapid footfalls behind me as the Unnameable gave chase, so after gaining a corner, I swung open the stairwell door with as much noise as possible, throwing in a few false steps, of decreasing volume, to lay down the aural evidence that I was zipping up the stairs (though I wonder, in my blindness: Was he deaf?); then I tiptoed to the next corner, waiting until he took the bait and slipped, wheezing, through the narrowing gap, before I headed to the elevator with my Mexican four-color pen and the Notebook of Power, which I took home and read straight through, and by the time I was done, all the mercenary mantras and leadership one-liners had taken on a soul-crushing weight—I felt short of breath, bitter, unhealable, close to tears, Pru, because something so shameful and heartbreaking was swinging into consciousness, cutting through the fog of forced forgetting: On the surface it was simply that part of me—the “successful” part, the part that sees the future as a rosy thing, a/k/a the false part—wanted to inscribe two rules of my own onto those pages, two things I rarely articulate to myself but which I simply know and abide by, at all times—two rules my father handed down at a tender age: (1) Never let anyone see you yawn; and(2) Never say I’m sorry; the first rule is crucial because a yawn tells people that they’re boring you—you’re essentially broadcasting your indifference, and soon, without quite realizing it, they’ll hate you for making them feel dull, and even if they are as fascinating as a toothpaste ad, you should never suggest, even in this silent and unconscious manner, that such is the case (in truth I find myself in the impossible position of having to shed another worker next week—and I think it has to be Laars, who exhibits his tonsils rather too freely these days); the second rule, in some ways the opposite (in that you deny rather than appease), was never adequately explained to me, though I now understand it as a tactic to gain an imperceptible psychological edge, finding other socially acceptable phrases to express regret or sympathy without taking on even that small, almost meaningless amount of accountability packaged in those two words, I’m sorry: What’s weird is that I should have listened to what my father thought at all, or rather that I should have taken these laughably small life lessons and internalized them to such a degree (do parents realize that even a stray comment can live inside their kids for years?) and distorted them into rules to get ahead, as arbitrary as anything set down in the Notebook of Power; my father was intelligent, kind, elegantly educated—but in terms of money he was something of a loser, thinking about it more than he would admit, while entirely lacking even the baseline bloodlust that could help him achieve his modest financial aims: He taught French at a prep school outside Baltimore, a school with an impressive crest and inflated reputation, which I was able to attend because he was on faculty—free tuition was the one significant benefit the teachers had (provided they spawned); the salaries ran shockingly low, and so three times a week I would watch my father dismantle his tie and hang up his blazer at the end of the teaching day and drive over to A Sporting Proposition, where he’d don a bright green polyester bib and transform himself into the twentieth century’s least effective sneaker salesman, not really measuring people’s feet in the right way, never prodding potential customers into buying footwear, and on several occasions (I would sometimes go with him, ostensibly doing my homework at a price-tag-covered table in the stockroom but actually listening, listening) saying enigmatically cruel things along the lines of If you think sneakers can change you, then maybe s
neakers can change you, often proffering, too, a few sentiments about the sweatshops where said footgear came from—not even to push a political point, or to deepen the customer’s inner life, but because he was so brain-decayingly bored, and humiliated at being so bored, at having sunk to such mundane depths—nudged by circumstance, perhaps, to take on this most anonymous of jobs, but forced into it only by what he must have seen as a failure in character, lack of gumption, moxie, balls—a job in which you’re constantly in contact with, and have to feign expertise about, the part of the human body closest to the ground, a site for corns and bunions and odor; but some days, and then some years, it was too awful to think of him taking off the old-boy attire he wore to conjugate pouvoir or whatever and putting on that wretched vest-cum-bib, part of his mind, too, endlessly outlining the book he always wanted to write on Baudelaire (I catch myself in a protective lie: he wanted to focus on an acquaintance of Baudelaire, whose name was barely recognized even among interested scholars, whose name completely escapes me now), the other part slipping space-age-flavored cross-trainers onto people’s feet—it was a total mind-body split, high and low; when A Sporting Proposition shut its doors for good (and could it have been anything other than the gentleman-of-leisure name that made him apply there in the first place?), the closing happened so fast that he didn’t have time to change out of his vest, and he wore it home, where it hung on the back of the closet door for ages; every so often he would say he should get rid of the thing, but somehow that green vest stayed put; as the years passed he grew ashamed of his tenure, but also perversely proud to have been, in his words, the worst salesman in the history of the store, if not in the annals of commercial footwear, and through the school grapevine I knew that he actually drove a few customers away without even opening his mouth: Every so often a student would go to buy sneakers only to encounter his French teacher, and the mere thought of discussing soles and arches with someone who’d be grading his vocabulary tests was so unsettling that he’d duck out as invisibly as he could, though some kids of course—real winners, these guys—would sit with smug smiles, gleefully undecided, making my father go into the storeroom for box after box, his armpits darkening with sweat, as my classmates enjoyed the slow social torture they could exact; after A Sporting Proposition went belly-up, he decided, Now I will write my book, and turned the basement into his book-writing bunker, taping notes to the concrete walls, gradually moving all the relevant texts from the upstairs rooms to the simple plank shelving belowdecks, carefully polishing the Shalimar, that bright brass tank of a typewriter, stocking up on the machine’s peculiar, rose-smelling ribbons, spending what seemed like hours sharpening a quiver of pencils, clearing off his desk in order to concentrate while my mother brought him mugs of tea and one cigarette every two hours, which she’d only let him half-finish; but his day job left him too drained—it wasn’t rocket science, as they say, it was teaching high school French, but he was not the kind of man who could give the lessons by rote, and the additional duties every teacher at this rather fancy school, this school with seemingly baronial ambitions, had to take on—from overseeing a table of students at lunch to monitoring study halls to advising the recalcitrant to coaching sports teams (or in his case, managing them, whatever that meant—filling water bottles?)—all had a deleterious effect on his ability to focus on his book, this book about some forgotten friend or half friend or half-hour acquaintance of Baudelaire, this nonentity whose name my father (I remember now) wouldn’t even tell me, as if to protect me from the curse it had placed him under (though I wonder, was she or he perhaps a prostitute?), and I remember in those months after he lost the shoe-selling job, he would say, I just need to make it to the summer, meaning he just had to keep working on the book until the long summer break (J—J—A, in Con Ed speak), when he would have the energy to attack the project from morning till night, or through the night and into the wee hours, whatever schedule worked best from day to day—but the summer turned out to be the hottest on record, and lethargy set in as the electric fans spun, and by Thanksgiving he had lost all hope; the writing had been going terribly—had barely been going at all; the only thing that he had to show for it was his gaunt face and seething mood, a new potbelly, a consumptive cough; just as bad, or worse, was that the money from teaching alone was being stretched thin—even I could tell that my clothes were looking shabby, and though I knew I shouldn’t complain, I did, first to my mother, then to my father, in a shouting manner that came out of nowhere, completely surprising me and my parents—the shock couldn’t have been greater had I produced a handgun and shot out, one by one, the windows in the house across the street; that Saturday, I went to the basement to say good morning, and to apologize, expecting to see him shuffling his notes and sharpening his pencils, and I noticed there was no paper on the walls, just a neat stack on the desk, about twenty pages trapped under an old brick, a threadbare handkerchief shrouding the typewriter; I didn’t dare read what he’d written, outlandishly imagining it would be a list of my sins and shortcomings; when I emerged upstairs my mother explained that he had gone back to A Sporting Proposition, or rather to the business that had taken over the space—an endlessly aisled, blindingly illuminated drugstore—and had found a job there, a higher-paying one than the shoe-selling gig; at first I had the insane notion that he had secretly been training to be a pharmacist, squeezing in extra classes between teaching and shoe selling and book writing; but alas, he was the janitor, the janitor, which meant that he had to work Saturday and Sunday mornings, and on weekdays he’d come home from school and watch the news while he ate dinner and then grade papers for an hour before my mother would drive him to the store at 9, as the last customer was being turned out, and he’d wash the floors and scour the toilets and bag the trash until nearly midnight, when she’d pick him up and bring him home; on that first day he brought me a present from the 99-cent store that inhabited the same plaza with the drugstore: a mug with my name on it—except it wasn’t my name because, he explained, they were all out of Jonah, and he knew I didn’t like it when people misspoke or miswrote my name as John, so he picked Joan, which made me laugh, and I forgot momentarily about his new job, and his new, nauseating smell, a marinade of mop water and sweat, and instead I poured some orange juice into my hilarious new cup and silently vowed, smiling all the while, that I would never follow this path, his path—I would resist all temptation to help people or promote understanding, I would never teach anyone anything, reject entirely the little sad life my father had carved out for himself, one in which my mother and I were embedded: We would not think of criticizing him, and at the same time we had to bear his agonies, his genteel desperation, and that was something which just had to stop—yet still, still, I remember not to yawn, and I never, ever say I’m sorry, and it so happens that these ironclad points of conduct have served me well (though perhaps I give them too much credit, out of a sentimental need)—this is all a roundabout way of saying that when circumstances dictate, I can be a machine, even a monster—and here we get to the main event, Pru: The day I discovered you’d been fired—that Grime had deleted you—I resolved to look deeper, punch lower, rethink everything that had happened in the office over the past year; on my personal days, I wouldn’t stay home but would come in early and sit at my desk, my door shut and my lights off, nursing a flowerpot-size coffee and penciling intricate diagrams, sometimes so hard that the point would break, spending most of the rest of the winter this way; on one of these I’m-here-but-I’m-not-here days, immersed in pointless activity and wasted motion, I shouted to/at myself, SHAPE UP, JONAH! and after a deep hum a document opened up on the screen of my computer, and CHEZ PAJAMA! materialized in 18-point Times New Roman; it took me a full dumb minute to realize that my craptop was still equipped with an old version of that voice-recognition software, Glottis, which Bernhard (the IT guy right before Big Sal, for about twenty seconds) had installed for me, at the peak of my carpal tunnel distress, back in the daze (sorry, days) when my wris
ts would tighten angrily even before I opened the door to my office, and though I’d never had the patience to “train” it—my words always emerged garbled (Jonah was regularly rendered as Joan, ahh and Joaner and occasionally sho nuff)—I never bothered to have the program removed; in my post-Pru haste that morning I must have accidentally tapped one of the mystical “function” buttons at the top of the keyboard, just north of Delete, and activated Glottis, which interpreted my cri de coeur, SHAPE UP, JONAH! as the cuddlier CHEZ PAJAMA!—this, of course, led to hours of experimentation, a welcome (if too early) respite from my plotting; my vertigo would wax as my statements triggered reams of Dada-ready sentences, leading to all sorts of glum pensées about the inadequacy of words, the impossibility of communication, and the like, but I prattled on, talking up a storm, and when I made a remark about someone (well, you) having a penchant for cute clothes, it must have registered as EXECUTE CLOSE, because a dialogue box popped up and asked, rather smarmily, Do you want to save the document “Chez Pajama”? the document’s default title derived from its first two words—thinking back on it, had I clicked No, my life would be different now: After choosing to preserve my file of nonsense, I saw it transform into a little icon inside a vast folder on the server entitled GLOTTIS, to which my laptop was somehow connected and which now lay open on my screen; I proceeded to study its contents, not really sure what I was trying to find—maybe just my earlier, long-forgotten attempts at spoken-word composition, stabs at correspondence that had rapidly derailed—and as I scanned the names of the various files, a strange feeling came over me: Surely I hadn’t written, or dictated, this many documents, during my brief Glottis phase; about a third of the names resembled the masking gibberish with which spam salesmen infiltrate your in-box (django heartbreak liter and steakhouse wurlitzer divot), and the rest were simply dates—dates which didn’t correspond to my previous Glottis usage, nor to Jules’s earlier stint (that is, they were all fairly recent, created within the past three or four months)—and then it hit me: These documents were the work of Grime, the only person in the office currently using the voiceware—Big Sal in IT had never bothered to set up a private folder for him, not thinking that anyone else used Glottis; and while I had no moral compunction about reading Grime’s private documents, I worried that Grime might try to access one of his files and learn that it was in use by someone else in the office, so instead I opened up a doc entitled PERSONAL DAZE—what I imagined was a draft of Jules’s screenplay, the one he wrote by dictation; but as I double-clicked, it struck me as unlike him to leave any Julesian traces behind (after every lunch he’d make sure all crumbs were neatly swept into a napkin, all spills were sopped up—once I even saw him picking crumbs off the floor), and when the document opened it was immediately clear that this was something entirely different, something that didn’t originate from Jules’s hand (or mouth), a massive block of insanity-inducing text that began (I have the first sentence by heart—I wish I could just copy and paste the whole thing for you): Personal Daze here, in the vinyl face of a Parisian chastened, with everything going accordion too bland—now what you have to do is read final phase for “vinyl face,” Operation JASON for “a Parisian chastened,” according to plan for “accordion too bland”: this gives you a sense of what I had to go through, decoding pages’ worth of misrecognized words; it was obvious, right from that first sentence, that I wasn’t looking at Jules’s screenplay at all, but a sort of diary in code, a war journal, kept by Grime, our resident Crow; the title of the file came from the first two words, his real name, which Glottis misheard as “Personal Daze”—and it was this discovery that shook me: Jules had said, months ago at his restaurant, that he came by his screenplay title, Personal Daze, because it was the mangled moniker of someone he knew, which meant—didn’t it?—that he knew Grime, that he had somehow met him before, knew him by another name—as you know, Jules is very difficult to talk to these days, running his various eateries, uttering only the bare minimum of words, but that night I tracked him down at one of his establishments—Demagogue, the politically themed bar, up on Sixty-ninth—and sat him down in the back room, blocking the door with a chair, refusing to let him out until he told me Grime’s real name (how had it transformed into “Personal Daze”?), thrusting a printout of Grime’s Glottis document; Jules didn’t look like he was going to spill the beans, and I worried that we’d be there for hours, staring ferally at each other, and that I’d have to start slapping him with the manila folder that was resting on the table; finally I said, “Jules, come on—this is for Pru,” and after he asked what you were doing (“Maternity wear? You mean she’s a seamstress?”), he began to unfold the story: During his last months at the office, after having been hit with a huge pay cut, Jules looked on that Jobmilla website (remember that weird commercial?) for some extra cash to make ends meet—it was the most depressing thing, he said, because he realized he had no skills beyond typing thirty not-very-reliable words per minute; still, he needed money, and found a gig moonlighting as a restroom attendant at a nightclub, in which role he proved so popular that the owner transferred him, with a big bump in salary, to Vlad’s, an adult-themed space on Eleventh Avenue, where Jules did triple duty as a valet, tout, and (his newfound talent, he supposed) restroom attendant; also a few times a night he peered into the private rooms, where strategic gyrations and heavy petting were part of the menu but more intense contact, in danger of breaking state and local laws, needed to be dispelled by a rap on the jamb, a warning tattoo that had to be instantly recognizable as such—Jules’s rapidly expanding new skill set included a sharp roll of the knuckles that would make the sensation-drunk client pay heed without wrenching him too far from his fantasy world: This was of course not the most pleasant aspect of the job, and in some cases the violator would ignore him, requiring further, louder warning raps and, if noncompliance continued, the quick summoning of one of the beefy security guards, who got pissy if you took them away from their sudoku; every so often chaos, even minor melees, would ensue, but Jules was never in any danger, and after a few weeks began to warm to other aspects of his job: the women were sweet, for the most part; the patrons tipped generously when he handed out towels and mouthwash; as a valet, he got to know some of them well when they came out for their frequent smoking breaks, shooting the breeze as the northbound traffic whizzed past, men of all ages, some of them fresh out of business school, others leathery vets, white-haired wiseguys—and before too long a few of these regulars, over cigarettes, encouraged him to start his own business, and would eventually invest in his first venture, that toaster-oven restaurant (Balustrade? Cellophane? Tenement?)—this was all very interesting, but I needed him to focus: With a big sigh he said, So this is for Pru, and went back to telling me about those private pleasure chambers, and what went on there—most of it you can imagine, but every so often—Well, there was this guy, middle-aged, who drove a well-maintained but very close-smelling SUV, which you got a lungful of when you had to park it, and Jules’s boss (a melancholy barrel-chested man called Duke, who called everyone Ace or Commander), told him, Keep an eye on this one, Ace—usually he’s fine but sometimes he’s not—the guy had been coming into Vlad’s two or three nights a week for over a year, didn’t drink anything stronger than 7UP, didn’t appear high, usually just watched the main stage, but every couple months he’d get a room, and something would happen, something different every time—Duke had been on the verge of barring him but hoped he’d learned his lesson; then one night when Jules was making the rounds he had to deliver his patented warning rap, not because of any overly lewd contact but because—there was this guy choking a girl; and then two nights later, it was a different girl—choking the guy; Duke came around, threatening to bar him from the premises; the next week, the man and yet another girl were choking each other simultaneously—all of these permutations necessarily arranged in cash beforehand: this time they were gasping, locked in a horrible death embrace, eyes bulging like grapes, bodies flailing, the scant ro
om accents knocked to the ground and getting smashed by their uncontrollable stampings—and Jules barged in, trying to pull the man off the girl (Vera, someone he’d been dating, against Duke’s advice); as two guys from security detached her (she was weeping and even in the bad mood lighting he could tell her color was off) and sat on the guy’s legs, Jules went to find the man’s SUV, which he’d had the displeasure of parking earlier, and left a long key mark across one side, then the other, then all across the hood, not letting the key leave the surface, even as it traveled across glass, and then jogged around the lot to let off steam, throwing punches in the air; ten minutes later, the guy came out of Vlad’s for a smoke, looking calmer and a shade less ruddy, and offered Jules a cigar and a No hard feelings? which Jules, surprising himself, accepted, realizing as soon as the stogie was lit that the valet on duty must have been on break, because he was all alone in the parking lot with the man whom he’d just grappled with, the man who’d been engaging in a little mutual asphyxiation society with his semi-girlfriend (Vera was a dead ringer, Jules also said, for Maxine), and though the guy wasn’t a weight lifter, he had shown impressive energy, a boundless will to try to relieve his aggressors of their facial features; self-preservation kicked in, there on the desolate pavement, and Jules introduced himself and shook his hand, at which the man said, The name’s Percival Davis, call me Percy if you like; Percy asked how he got hooked up with the strip-club gig, and Jules explained how he wasn’t making enough money at his office job, and so he’d found work at a nightclub through Jobmilla-dot-com (I sounded like I was in an ad, Jules told me), and all the rest, and Percy didn’t know what he meant until he remembered Jobmilla’s motto—humming the jingle till he found the words, What goes around comes around! (laughter); but when Jules asked Percy what he did for a living, he grew silent, and time dragged uncomfortably until the cigars were done; Percy said it was just about time for him to head out, and apologized for the fisticuffs; since the other valet hadn’t shown, Jules nervously fetched the freshly vandalized vehicle and said good night, really, really wishing he hadn’t scraped it up, listening to Percy whistle the Jobmilla jingle again as he drove off, and for the next few days he waited for the other shoe to drop, his appetite vanishing, notes for his last will and testament breaking into his thoughts with alarming frequency; just when he thought he was in the clear, and that he might have a future on this earth, he was greeted at the club by the news that a “Mister Davis” had stopped by earlier and left a note: The gist was that he knew what Jules had done to his car, and that the next time he saw Jules, he would choke him—Jules quit the gig that night, figured he’d find something else on the Jobmilla site, or through the temp agency he’d hooked up with when he first came to the city, and in the meantime keep polishing his screenplay—dictating new dialogue, revising an important heist scene—and when he found he needed a name for a villain, Percival Davis came to mind, which Glottis instantly turned into “Personal Daze,” a perfect title: More than anything, Jules was relieved to be away from Vlad’s, amazed that he’d even done the job for as long as he had—he was certain he’d gone briefly insane, really, and resolved to get his act together, stop drinking (especially in the mornings), work up a serious business plan for the toaster-oven restaurant he’d always wanted to run, go to the gym a little more (or even once)—he had faith in himself, faith in his future; so it happened that one Friday not long after his escape from clubland, while heading for the elevator up on the sixth floor, Jules saw a figure moving in the opposite direction, and his blood froze: Percival Davis—!!—the face was the same, a little paler, the eyebrows pruned perhaps, the hair cut short—and Jules began throbbing with the fight-or-flight impulse; in a daze he coughed to get Davis’s attention, but when the man turned around, he just said Cheers, in a friendly British accent (at first Jules thought he’d said Chairs), and Jules sputtered what must have sounded like a bizarre pickup line (Don’t I know you from somewhere?), losing his grip on reality, for although this new resident of Siberia looked like Percival Davis, he smoothly gave his name as Graham: But as he walked away, he was whistling the Jobmilla tune, What goes around comes around, that catchy paean to the zero-sum nature of employment and unemployment (which strictly speaking didn’t make a whole lot of sense but which presumably tapped into people’s latent belief in karma), a melody that looped in Jules’s head all weekend and into the following Monday, when he toured Siberia in terror, looking for Percy/Graham, finding in one brightly lit cubicle things that he could have sworn weren’t there before, a mound of crumpled paper garnished with fresh red rubber bands, a coffee cup bearing thin stains in progressively wider-spaced rings, like a tree trunk, which he studied as if it could offer clues as to when a human had last drunk from it, some time frame to work with; but there was no one around, the Firings had claimed so many victims up there, and the floor remained empty all afternoon, and so he sat at his desk, anxiously awaiting a burst of violence, a gunshot, a sudden scissor blade to the heart; over the coming weeks he became a wreck, even less capable of work than before—something even Jules would have deemed impossible—and when the Sprout abruptly fired him a month later, he was secretly relieved; Jules finished his tale by saying that at first he was sure Percy had tracked him down to the office, but now wonders if it was all a coincidence—if during a drive in his mobile home, that scratchitti’d SUV, he recognized our building from its starring role in that old Jobmilla commercial (all the unemployed slobs on the conveyor belt) and decided to get a job here; his motivation remained mysterious to Jules until I told him how Grime (as we know him) had pretended to be one of us, an illusion sustained for all save me, ever since that October night when I discovered he was working as an outside consultant, as the CRO (Jules nodded, fully in the know, comfortable with business-world acronyms) hired by the Californians to slash away at budgets, firing people behind a protective screen consisting of the Sprout, Maxine, and “K” but having pursued Gordon Graham Knott for several months, I was starting to wonder who Grime really was—if he was not even Knott, the famed chief restructuring officer, the hungry Crow, but someone else entirely; I told Jules how, when I inadvertently opened Grime’s Glottis document, Personal Daze, I knew, instantly, that he was someone else, someone whose name sounded like “Personal Daze”: But now that I knew he was Percival Davis, the mystery deepened—who was Percival Davis, and why had he taken on the character of Gordon Graham Knott (a bona fide CRO, whose name regularly crops up in the industry rags)?: Though Jules was busy with his various restaurants and bars, he agreed to help me gather information on our slippery interloper, even going back to Vlad’s and quizzing the dancers and bouncers, getting the license plate number from the valet’s log; what we discovered was as sad as it was shocking, and I waited for the right time to blow the whistle, but it’s harder than you think—there’s the question, first of all, of who to trust: even though I’d wanted to go to the Sprout with my newfound knowledge, he was deep in exit mode and visibly disturbed—every time I came to his door it looked like he’d been crying or drinking, or punched really, and what he said was barely coherent: half aphorisms and repetitions on a good day, but mostly mumbling, an unprovoked Hoo-hoo!, his eyes darting from my head to my feet like he was sizing me up for a little pick-up aikido session; I noticed that all his personal effects were gone, his bookshelves bare, his plants dead; the only thing on his desk was a large-screen computer with a tiny laptop hooked up next to it in such a way that anything that happened on the large screen happened simultaneously on the small one, and I’d watch documents blossom in duplicate, hear beeps chime in near stereo, the purpose of it all completely hidden; my fear was that if I did bring all my information to the Sprout, he simply might not believe me, and instead see the opportunity to get back into Grime’s good graces (let’s keep calling him Grime for now) by dismissing me on the spot, a preemptive action that would be perfectly legitimate since it never came from the Crow at all: But if it was difficult figuring out what to do, every
day also brought new information, another piece of the puzzle, and I used more personal days to make fact-finding trips, sometimes with Jules; finally I was forced into action when, about two months after you left, Grime pulled his most dangerous stunt yet—telling the Sprout to contact a headhunter to replace himself: His capacity for self-debasement finally exhausted, the Sprout tendered his resignation to the Californians the next week, and the Crow perched at last, alone, in the vacated office, calling Crease and Laars and Lizzie in for interminable, hectoring meetings, either individually or ensemble, and when one of them wondered aloud (innocently? not?) why I wasn’t there, the Crow got confused—Who’s Jonah?—and, muttering that he thought I’d been fired months ago, he picked up the phone in front of everyone and called my extension, and I caught up with his rage on voice mail: I was to meet him at nine o’clock sharp the next morning, the tone suggesting a fatal dressing-down; things were coming down to the wire and I didn’t bother to swipe out, breathing deeply as the elevator made its sluggish way up to meet me, eyeing the swipe box crazily and wondering, What if— and gently plucking the box from the wall, as light as a box of tissues, and in the elevator (this elevator!) I saw that there was nothing in the box, no wiring at all, no strip reader, just a few cubic inches of air, and I marveled at the sheer sadistic psychology behind the routine (I know Grime had started telling people that swiping in was the Sprout’s idea, but we all knew that it wasn’t): For months we’d been fretting about our hours, fitting a card into a slot so that the Californians could keep tabs on us, but it turns out we were swiping just to swipe, the whole contraption never even registering our moves—then the elevator opened and I was free: On the way home I threw out my janitor’s shirt, got my beard and mustache removed by a barber in the subway station, and bought new shoes, fresh clothes, strong cologne, and a box of contact lenses, so that when I met Grime the next day I had the advantage of confusion—I could sense him wondering if he’d seen me before; as he talked, distractedly, about the terrible job the Sprout had done all these years, how a new age was about to begin, I caught a change in his thinking: though he’d never really talked to me while sober (we’d had a half dozen late-night boozefests), there was something about me that was familiar, and he knew that not only had I been operating under false colors but I was circling around his secret; after the meeting fizzled to a close without incident (his parting words, believe it or not, were Keep me in the loop!), I rushed back to my desk to call Lizzie: Don’t say anything, I warned, just pretend I’m a friend, pretend I’m Pru, just calling from Sharmila Maternity for a chat, and I asked her if she could very quickly, very subtly e-mail me the contact information for whichever one of the Californians the Sprout used to talk to the most—I’d explain it all to her and Laars and Crease later; my heart was going triple time as I punched the numbers; my Californian took my call—as it happened, he was in a meeting with the others, so they put me on speakerphone, and listened, rapt, as I gave the streamlined version of what I thought was going on with Grime/Graham/Percy, and when I was done there was pure silence—you could have heard a pin drop anywhere between us, you could have heard an eyelash fall in Nebraska—and then the Californians confirmed what I had so recently figured out: They’d never hired a CRO, it wasn’t their style, they were still planning on coming to New York and giving us the ax themselves (laughter)—and as the chuckles faded I got the nervous feeling that the Crow might be making his way toward my office, so I dashed out the back stairway and in two hours, miraculously, I was on a flight to what the Californians determined to be the halfway point: Bozeman, Montana, where we convened in a sub-rosa club room near the Northwest terminal, sipping a Shiraz that smelled like an expensive shoe and eating tender venison sandwiches, juice dripping down our chins, as I told them everything Jules and I had dug up about the man who wasn’t Grime or Graham or anyone even vaguely resembling Gordon Graham Knott (president of GGK Restructuring)—a name that, in any case, did not immediately register with the Californians—but the phantom of a phantom, someone with the odd name of Percival Davis, age 42, a former midlevel management consultant who was ultimately fired by a consultant, visiting from a different firm—an experience that must have made him feel like he was stuck in some Möbius strip, or looking into a mirror and seeing his back with a knife wedged in it, with a hand much like his own gripping the handle: on that day, three years ago, when he lost his job, it touched a nerve, indeed his entire nervous system, and Davis snapped, walking out on his wife and kids in New Jersey, never to return, wandering the streets in a fugue state until repeated attempts to float in assorted fountains across the city led to a stay at Bellevue (where I imagine him muttering CRO, CRO, CRO, ad infinitum), and once I sniffed out the company he used to work for, a midtown outfit no longer in existence, it only took a few minutes of online searching to discover that it had been the real Gordon Knott, a silver-haired CRO (living in splendid contentment in Greenwich) who’d filleted Percy’s former employer in ingenious ways, turning it around by bleeding it dry, getting rid of Percy’s whole team (a year later, after Knott had split, the company would suddenly and utterly disappear); after Bellevue, Percy—or Grime, or whatever you want to call him—essentially lived on the road, in his SUV, eluding his family, working through his savings, until he decided to infiltrate our office, concocting an accent, impersonating the very villain, the maverick CRO, who had deleted his previous life—the initial aim being, I think, to run a company aground so disastrously that the real Gordon Knott’s name would be dragged through the mud, though in truth I think he simply thrived on the destruction he discovered he could do: having bonded with our born-again security guard by pretending to be a Holy Roller, the newly christened Grime coolly installed his revamped self on the barren sixth floor, then briefly on the fifth, and eventually the fourth, ingratiating himself with all as the affable, floppy-haired “Grime” smoothly convincing IT to set him up with the necessary phone and computer accoutrements and IDs and passwords; commandeering the staff to do his bidding; abusing Maxine; issuing increasingly bizarre directives to the Sprout (or as I reminded myself to say, Russell) and suggesting to him that by presenting these decisions as his own, he’d win the Californians’ approval, and be in a strong position to displace “K” engineering spurious data, which he’d then present to the Sprout as justification for eliminating employees; harassing Lizzie with scatological musings; sleeping (I think) with Maxine; driving “K” to total meltdown by telling her to do things like Write the program that makes you obsolete; carefully misspelling nearly every word he typed—on and on my tale unwound, some of it based on educated guesses, most of it entirely provable: the sum, in any case, being greater than the parts, so that three things quickly became clear to the Californians: (1) There was a criminal in the New York office, who needed to be removed as soon, and with as little noise, as possible; (2) Given that I knew the most about the situation, I would also be the one to oversee his removal; (3) If I was successful, I would immediately become the new head of operations (the new Sprout—or was it the new Crow?), reporting directly to the Californians: all of which made my head spin, my dizziness hitting me even way out there under the huge hinter-land sky with the enormous moon chalked in and the stars coming out; it was all so confusing, because I’d hated the Californians, despised them with a passion, but for now I needed to compartmentalize, put that anger aside—so I nodded, shook some hands, received multiple thumps between the shoulder blades, and flew back to kick off Operation Fallen Crow, Mission Eradicate Grime, The “Personal” Affair: In a cab from La Guardia to the office, I called the police and explained that there was an unauthorized person in the building, providing them with a foolproof description, and by the time my taxi arrived on the scene the last squad car was pulling out, a captured Crow limp in the backseat, eyes shut, wings clipped; afterward I walked aimlessly, dazed by the bloodless coup and by the warm night, moving north and then east and then west and then north, east and then south, west and then north ag
ain, as though circling something that wasn’t there anymore, and I was transported to a warm night last spring, the end to a grueling day packed with allergens and dread, a day on which someone was fired (it’s terrible but I can’t recall who, exactly—you’re all interchangeable): The situation demanded that we survivors go out for early drinks, in order to analyze the murky dynamics of it all, the usual futile dissection, and the talk drifted to other topics, Maxine’s wardrobe (specifically, did she wear a thong?), the Sprout’s sex life, a softball team of all things; and too many drinks later I walked you to your subway stop even though it wasn’t the same as mine—I came up with some story that I was going uptown to see a friend, though of course I have no friends—and as we waited to cross the street there came a soft clattering rush: the sound of thousands of those small white petals which fill the city for about two weeks, and now a whole army of them trundled across the pavement in the wake of the gypsy cabs and a crosstown bus, a vast carpet moving in one direction, like the tail of some immense creature whose body had already dissolved into the night, trailing delicate bits of skeleton that would reassemble in another dimension, and as the light changed the petals were still marching along, their ranks cut into parts by the Third Avenue traffic and sent whirling into eddies, and this, Pru, this was the evening when my dizziness started, my inconsolable vertigo, because as we crossed you touched my arm and pointed at the sky and without a word we watched a hundred more petals fall, from some point lost in the dark roof of the night, like confetti at a parade commemorating the Unknown Worker, the petals taking time to wander through the air, and when my eyes returned to street level the whole world was rubber: cars bent like taffy, the ground beneath me shuddered like a gangplank, traffic lights wobbled and smeared, even the architecture appeared to expand and contract at once, and you’d forgotten your fingers were still on my arm; I’m hoping that, now that I’ve told you this, set down my confession at last, I’ll be cured, but what I’m getting instead is a slow, cranky whir coming from beneath my overheated wrists, a sound I know well: it means that this craptop’s battery is about to go out—I’ve got three hundred seconds and counting!—here we go!—so I’m hitting Control-S one more time, to save this last stretch of immortal prose—I feel so strange now, like the top of my head has just floated away, or maybe it floated away hours ago and I’m only just realizing it; and now a fine mist is coating my face and hands, and I don’t know if that’s a voice I hear in the distance through the opening in the roof or a complicated wheezing, like the Unnameable has sprouted wings and is hovering somewhere above me, my unexpected guardian angel, maybe reaching down to pull me up—OK, I just tried standing and grabbing at the air above but I don’t think I’m tall enough, or else his arms aren’t long enough—obviously I’m losing my mind—and sitting back down has suddenly made me very, very tired—and maybe the computer has completely shut down already, but I’ll keep writing anyway, because I’m a little light on activities here, and in a few seconds I’ll save this one last time, shut the craptop for good, and lie on top of it to protect it from the soft but steady spray of what I hope is just water, maybe slap on a Post-it saying PLEASE PRINT OUT FOR PRU! in case I don’t make it out of here—but how can I be sure my handwriting won’t be completely unreadable?—oh! oh!—actually this just occurred to me, a genius solution: I can send this to you as an e-mail, even though I can’t see the screen, because (a) the wireless in this building, which we were stealing from the ad agency on the seventh floor, probably still works, and (b) Glottis understands spoken commands, provided they’re well-articulated, so when I’m all done writing I’m going to hit the function key to open Glottis, and put my mouth two inches from the mike and utter, in my clearest voice, Select all text and Copy, and then New e-mail and To Pru at Sharmila dot com and Paste and finally Send—leaving two seconds after each command, like the manual says—and the idea that you’ll get this message soon, sooner than tomorrow—that there’s a chance you’ll read this tonight, maybe before I’m finally released (if I’m released)—is incredibly comforting: The air’s getting kind of terrible now, like eggs and ammonia and gasoline, so I need to wrap things up and—I’m sorry, Pru, sorry I couldn’t say all that I wanted to, tonight, but in truth it was as much about imagining I was saying something to you as it was about actually saying anything: You said yourself, once, waiting for stuff by the asthmatic printer, that the office generates at least one book, no, one novel every day, in the form of correspondence and memos and reports, all the reams of numbers, hundreds of sentences, thousands of words, but no one has the mind to understand it, no one has the eyes to take it all in, all these potential epics, War and Peace lying in between the lines; so maybe just think of this letter as one such novel, one such book, cobbled from the data all around me, and I’m trusting that at worst you’ll ignore the NEW E-MAIL flashing in your in-box, bothering your screen, but at least you’ll be conscious of it, as you sit at your desk or your worktable with the sewing machine, over there at Sharmila Maternity Wear, and slowly the unread message will invade your thoughts, and curiosity will get the better of you, as you wonder what I could possibly have to say to you after all this time, and why I remain,—Your friend,—JONAH
