Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  “Well, until recently I worked at the, uh, the Federloss Foundation?”

  “Where do you work now?”

  “I work at, um, a start-up?” Jen said. “I am so sorry, Sue, but I need to run to the ladies’ room—I’ll come find you later, okay?”

  When Jen came out of the bathroom, Jim was jotting down notes in the narrow margins of a copy of The Nation in front of the giant teenaged orthodontics patient, a half-full glass of wine cradled between his forearm and ribs.

  “This portrait made me realize something,” Jim said as Jen carefully extracted the glass of wine from its precarious berth. “I have this kid in my class, Stevie, who’s really happy and cooperative all the time. He’s great, but I kind of file him away in a drawer in my mind, like, ‘I don’t have to worry about this one.’ But maybe it’s all a front. Maybe it’s a façade of happiness masking horror and mania and giant metal weaponry.”

  “I’m sorry that my picture of a kid with braces made you diagnose Stevie with mental illness,” Jen said.

  “Stevie doesn’t even have braces,” Jim said, taking back the glass of wine.

  “My whole mouth tastes like braces,” Jen said. “Even my tongue.” She thrashed her tongue around, attempting to air out her mouth like a musty duvet.

  “Oh, wait, you should hold this,” Jim said, handing back the glass of wine. “For show.”

  Jen took it and teethed the rim of the glass intently. “My tongue is mighty, it is made of iron,” she said.

  “Did you tell Pam yet?” Jim asked.

  “No, I’m waiting until after the craziness around the show has died down a little.”

  “You should tell her,” Jim said.

  “I will totally tell her as soon as—hi!”

  Meg and Pam stood before them, wearing smiles evocative of the teenaged orthodontics patient and/or Stevie. “Jen,” Meg was saying, “Mrs. Durbin wants to talk to you.”

  “Okay, sure!” Jen said, handing the glass of wine to Jim.

  “Not right now, because she left, but she wanted you to have this,” Pam said, handing Jen a business card. “You’re supposed to call her assistant.”

  “Okay, but why?” Jen asked.

  “I’m afraid I cannot provide you with that information at this time, ma’am,” a man behind them murmured into his headset.

  “Mrs. Flossie Durbin is a woman of few words,” Meg said. “But you are definitely, definitely supposed to call her.”

  “Okay, but what did Mrs. Durbin think of Pam’s show?” Jen asked.

  “Mrs. Durbin said the show was proficient,” Pam replied, taking the glass of wine from Jim and draining it triumphantly.

  “Holy fuck,” Jim said.

  “Are you serious?” Jen said.

  “I was there, man,” Meg said. “I saw it. I heard it.”

  “Recommend! Recommend!” Jen said.

  “This is the greatest night of my life,” Pam said. “Let’s go smash some lightbulbs.”

  Signal Problems

  The train was all messed up again. The lines frequently refused to venture past the southern tip of the park, thwarted by “planned maintenance” or “signal problems” or other vague but official-sounding exigencies. Jen and Jim waited a while in the muggy night air for a shuttle bus.

  “Good God, they sent a cattle car,” Jim said when the overcrowded bus rolled into the stop twenty minutes later. “Call the USDA.”

  “I am dunzo,” Jen said. “Let’s walk home.”

  “Are you okay walking past the Deli of Death at”—Jim checked his watch—“one in the morning?”

  “No,” Jen said, “but if I die tonight, I don’t want the last thing I see on earth to be somebody’s armpit.”

  “You’d rather it be a rack full of expired Honey Buns.”

  Located on an infamous street corner equidistant from the train station and Jen and Jim’s apartment, Brancato’s Grocery, aka the Deli of Death, was not only the region’s preeminent cocaine and methamphetamine marketplace but also a locus of neighborhood nightlife ranging from armed robbery to dogfights to quarterly shootings. Brancato’s rarely closed, and the Staffordshire terriers guarding the door after ten p.m. rarely stopped barking.

  “It’s kind of unfair to call it the Deli of Death, because no one has ever died there,” Jen said. “That we know about. Since we’ve lived here.”

  Jen’s heels made a solitary clop-clop on the uneven sidewalk as she walked arm in arm with Jim.

  “How are you feeling?” Jim asked.

  “I’m fine, fine,” Jen said quickly. “Let’s not talk about it—we’ll jinx it. Wasn’t tonight great?” she asked, inhaling the humidity index through her nostrils theatrically. “Great turnout, Pam was on point. Everyone seemed really happy to be there and slightly freaked-out, which is what I think she was going for.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Jim said. “And that lady, the Fozzie woman. You’re going to be best friends with her now.”

  “Mrs. Flossie Durbin. Yeah, well, I doubt much will come of that.”

  “You’re going to call her, though.”

  “Sure, sure.”

  “Maybe I’ll call her,” Jim said. “We have a lot in common, Flossie Durbin and I. We like the same stuff.”

  “Anyway, I think this was a big night for Pam. This could change everything for her.”

  Jim said nothing.

  “Don’t you think?” Jen asked.

  “I guess so,” Jim said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know. Didn’t you think it was kind of contrived?”

  “The show? No, I thought it was a matter-of-fact way of dealing with a really messy, emotive topic. It was smart and honest.”

  Jim said nothing.

  “What do you mean by contrived, anyway?” asked Jen, unlinking her arm from Jim’s and turning to look at him. “Anything anybody makes is contrived. By definition.”

  “It just seemed like she was exploiting it.”

  “Exploiting the accident? Why shouldn’t she exploit it? It happened. It was a big deal. Why shouldn’t she have something to say about it?”

  “But it’s like it precludes anyone from criticizing it. Because if you criticize it, you’re criticizing someone who has suffered—no, you’re criticizing their suffering, actually. And nobody wants to do that, so they praise it.”

  “But who are all these people praising it?”

  “Whoever was there. Mrs. Flossie Durbin. You.”

  “Well, of course the people at Pam’s opening would say nice things about her opening!”

  “No, it’s not just that. You’ll never really know how people really feel about work like that, because the nature of the thing means you have to respond to it in a certain way or you’re an asshole.”

  “But that’s not Pam’s fault. Is she not supposed to make stuff out of concern that you won’t feel comfortable criticizing it?”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “And wait, back up, I still don’t know what you mean by exploit. You mean the work is exploitative?”

  “Yeah, kind of.”

  “So it was cynical somehow? And who or what was she exploiting? Herself?”

  “You know what, forget it, because you’re always going to be better at arguing this stuff than I am.”

  “Don’t be like that, honey. I’m interested in what you think.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jim said.

  They walked in clop-clop silence. They could hear the dogs barking now.

  Initiative

  The fatigue was the heel of a hand, pressing steadily and insistently against Jen’s forehead, fingers palming and compressing the deflated basketball of her skull, shading her eyes and darkening her field of vision. The fatigue was a chloroform air freshener, affixed someplace under her desk where Jen couldn’t reach it, every inhalation of its scent making her eyes water and her nose run and her lower jaw crack under the tensile pressure of gaping, heaving yawns. The fatigue could not, of course,
be placated by a second cup of coffee or half an Animexa tablet. Or even a quarter of an Animexa tablet, perhaps ground into a fine dust to be sprinkled in decaffeinated tea or dotted on Jen’s tongue for a largely psychosomatic effect. Jen had considered all these possibilities, repeatedly. Sometimes—now—Jen could answer the fatigue only with a supplicant’s pose: elbows propped on her desk, face hidden in her hands, the pads of her fingers making pleading circles against her closed, weeping eyes.

  “Today is the day-eee, ladies! Look sharp!”

  Jen splayed her fingers and peered up through them. Sunny was beaming expectantly at Jen and Daisy.

  Jen appreciated that Sunny always came around to the front of their cubicles before addressing them, whereas Karina preferred to approach silently from behind and wait until Jen’s pheromone-detection radar or latent powers of echolocation intimated her presence. To better anticipate Karina’s stealth attacks, Jen had mostly stopped using her earbuds and had changed her computer desktop background from a picture of David Bowie eating breakfast with Mick Ronson to a plain, shiny black. If Jen tilted her screen at an acute angle to her right and made sure her browser and inbox took up only the left two-thirds of the screen, the right one-third could hold up a muddy mirror to Karina’s approach, buying Jen an estimated four to seven seconds of advance warning. Of course, Jen forfeited these advantages whenever she prostrated herself before the fatigue.

  Daisy, by contrast, had started wearing her bulky noise-canceling headphones most of the day, every day, sometimes even to the bathroom. Tapping Daisy on the shoulder elicited a yelp of surprise, so now whenever Jen wanted Daisy’s attention she would send her an email or instant message.

  “Hey, Sunny!” Jen said, sniffling. “How’s it going?”

  Daisy took off her headphones slowly and set them down on her desk, as if she were moving through water.

  Sunny was pulsing her hands together in a silent clapping motion. “Are you guys ready? Big day, big day.”

  “Ready for what?” Jen asked, pulling a tissue from its box.

  Sunny protruded her eyes and wagged her head. “Lee, OH, rah, is here today!” she said, her voice percussive with rebuke. “She’ll be here in like an hour. Are you ready?”

  “Leora has been here before,” Daisy said.

  “Good one, Daize,” Sunny said, giggling. “But there’s here and then there’s here. And is she ever going to be here. Are you girls ready to show some initiative on Leora’s new initiative?” Sunny called out each syllable of initiative like she was counting out the letters in the name of her favored college sports team. Her hands scissored and sliced the air as if in some half-forgotten cheerleading move.

  “Um, probably!” Jen said.

  “Probably? Guys, get excited already! I’ve been thinking about this all week!”

  “So there’s a meeting—today?” Jen asked.

  Sunny exhaled dramatically, letting her hands fall defeated to her sides, and rolled her eyes heavenward as if in exasperated appeal. “If this is your sense of humor, you’ll have to excuse me, ’cause I ain’t laughin’, kiddo!” Sunny said, laughing, as she walked away.

  “I heard Karina talking about this,” Daisy said. “Leora is coming in and we’re going to lock ourselves in a room until we help the board figure out the future of the organization, or something.”

  “I see,” Jen said.

  “I think there was an email, too.”

  “But—I didn’t get the email!”

  “So good, you’re off the hook,” Daisy said.

  “Was there an assignment? Are we supposed to present? Fuck.”

  Daisy was staring at the tiny surveillance camera affixed to the nearest ceiling corner, as if she had deduced something in its reflecting eye—something demoralizing and piteous—that she hadn’t been looking for.

  “I really wouldn’t sweat it,” Daisy said. “Any of it. Ever.”

  What Is Your Excuse?

  Every staff meeting grew more hands: colorfully accessorized and manicured hands—Jen had lost track of how many—none of them over the age of twenty-four and all of them the goddaughter of a LIFt staffer or the niece of a friend of Leora’s or the friend of a child of a LIFt board member. Jen had been introduced to most of them, known each of their names for at least a few seconds or part of a day, each of them rotating in and out a couple of days a week, these unpaid “LIFt collaborators” erratically filling out the previously desolate maze of cubicles that stood between Jen and Daisy and the building’s southern corridor of offices. Now, lined up around the conference table, they blurred together despite their high-resolution finish of whitened smiles and poreless skin and sculpted quadriceps and shiny, shiny hair. At first, in their presentation and easeful confidence, Jen classified them as next-generation Megs, except that part of Meg’s Meg-ness was in being an outlier; these girls were Megs to a one. They also adjusted the settings on Meg’s calm but no-nonsense aptitude to find a brighter and sweeter level; they swapped Meg’s dove grays and silken blacks for lime greens and indigos, magentas and piccalillis. One of the girls was wearing a flamingo brooch on a sailor collar. Another wore jodhpurs and a bowler hat. Every one of them had at best an ornamental job and comically inflated job title, and it was endearing to Jen—moving, really—to know that their own superfluity had never crossed their minds or influenced their posture or informed their choice of Crayola-coral lipstick. Not one of them, Jen knew, ever entered a room or took a seat at a table half expecting someone to turn to her and ask the eternal question: What are you doing here?

  Or maybe the eternal question was Why do you need to be here?

  Or maybe Why are you here? was best and simplest.

  Jen couldn’t decide.

  “She was just an amazing woman. An amazing woman,” Leora Infinitas was saying from the head of the table, Donna on her left, Karina on her right. Just as an American president addressing a joint session of Congress might point out a firefighter’s widow or plucky small-business owner in the audience as support for a military action or a tax cut, Leora’s opening statements to staff meetings always invoked a land mine survivor or famine survivor or Stage IV cancer survivor whom she had met in her newish capacity as a philanthropy innovator. This new acquaintance of Leora’s served as a vivid anecdote for her audience and, for Leora, a useful plot device in a journey of fulfilled identity—a catalytic converter of self-actualization. This rhetorical woman-device was usually amazing, frequently phenomenal, redoubtably inspiring, occasionally rad.

  “And I couldn’t help thinking—and look, I’d been two hours cross-legged on a dirt floor with this woman.” Leora swallowed and paused to look around the room. “I had laughed with this woman.” Pause. “I had cried with this woman.” Pause. “I had held this woman’s hand and stared into her eyes. And I just felt so honored by the power of her presence, the sheer force of her survival, and so humbled by it.” Pause. “It’s a blessing to be humbled.” Pause. “It’s a gift.” Pause. “We forget this. But we can’t forget it. It’s a gift to be humbled.”

  Jen couldn’t gauge for how long she had zoned out. Donna’s hands were teepeed, her head bowed deep, her bangles clattering in sympathy. Sunny was openly weeping.

  “And I couldn’t help thinking,” Leora said. “I couldn’t help thinking—even though all that thinking threatened to break, just for a second, that lunar beam of concentration and communion between her and myself, even though it took me out of the moment for a moment, only for a moment—Lord knows I’m not perfect—”

  “Amen, sister,” Sunny said, and sobbed.

  “—I couldn’t help thinking, Leora, what is your excuse?”

  Leora stopped and nodded as she looked around the room. A crystalline tear globule hesitated at the edge of each pair of her LeoraLashes™. Her nostrils flared with a suppressed sob, but she kept it at bay, nodding at her staff, nodding at the jade-top table, blinking, inhaling, exhaling. She shook her head. She swept an inky-black hair extension behind her shoulder.
She nodded some more. An argument tossed and turned inside her.

  “And later on in, you know, the really grotesque comfort of my hotel room,” Leora said, her voice breaking and healing itself in one phrase, “later on, that question came up again. What is your excuse? The question reverberated through my dreams. In the morning, I heard that question, I felt it, I saw it as if it were written in steam across my bathroom mirror: What is your excuse?”

  Leora raised her palms toward the ceiling. “Now,” she said. “What do I mean by this? What is this question?” Like Donna, she teepeed her hands together on the jade-top table. “What I mean is that if I can look this person in the eye, after all she’s shared with me, after all she’s been through, and knowing all that, and yet also knowing that she somehow finds the strength to get up in the morning, to work, to provide for her family, to cook and clean and mend and comfort, to care for herself and her babies and her community when the whole world seems to have been so careless with her—has she not earned my gratitude for sharing so much of herself with me?”

  She held her hand to her chest. “My gratitude. I think we can agree that she’s earned it. My gratitude, which I log as faithfully as an accountant, ladies, and so should you. Like a doctor keeps a patient’s chart, like the captain of a ship keeps a log to show the distance he’s come and the miles he’s yet to go, the latitude and longitude of my life I mark with gratitude, always gratitude. And there, right there, a debit in the gratitude column. Make no mistake.”

  Jen tried to survey the room without moving her head. She thought of an oil painting with the eyes cut out in a Scooby-Doo haunted mansion.

  “So how do I pay that debt?” Leora asked. “Well, let’s start with how not to pay it. Let’s start by facing my greatest fear, and my greatest fear is to be ungrateful. To lose track of my gratitude. To run up a gratitude debt.” The t of debt was a puff of air. “How could I be ungrateful? Wouldn’t the height of ingratitude be if I did not work to earn, to pay back, what this amazing woman gave me? If she can do all that, if she can be that strong, that powerful—and it is the weakest among us, you see, who must summon the most power, because that power is not simply handed to them—if she can be that powerful, what is stopping me from fulfilling my full potential? Aren’t I required by natural law to do right by her? Do I have a choice not to learn and grow and live a bigger, better life owing to her example? How could I not? Do I even have the option? Do I?”