Break in Case of Emergency

by Jessica Winter

  All my love

  Pam

  “It feels to me as though we’re inhabiting a space without first learning the language of that space,” Leora was saying. “I can’t do everything. I’m not interested in micromanagement. But how did this happen?”

  Jen put aside her phone and stared openly at Karina. Chin in one hand and pen in the other, Karina looked up at Leora, ducked her head to take a few notes, and looked up again. Jen had never seen Karina take notes in a staff meeting before. Karina’s expression was unreadable, save for a legible sympathy with Leora’s predicament.

  “It makes us seem out of touch with what our audience hungers for,” Leora said.

  Out of touch, Jen wrote in her notebook. She watched the letters, waiting in vain for them to reassemble themselves in her mind as flowers or animals or random strangers that she could coax out with her pen.

  Sunny was headbanging. Jen resumed staring at Karina.

  “It is so crucial that we understand the needs of our audience, perhaps even before they do,” Leora said. “Is there someone on the staff who knows Internet jargon? One of us who speaks that language?”

  “I would nominate Daisy,” Karina said, putting down her pen and running her fingers through her hair. “She’s always up on the latest trends.”

  Daisy—up on latest trends, Jen wrote in her notebook. The curved lines and crosses refused to turn or sprout or bloom.

  “Oversight is a contronym,” Daisy said, after Jen returned to their cubicles and delivered an abridged transcript of the meeting. “A contronym is a word that means its opposite. Like cleave. Or garnish.”

  “Like sanction,” Jen said.

  “Like left,” Daisy said.

  “Wait, how is left a contronym?” Jen asked.

  “Like if I said all I have left, that could mean the stuff I still have or the stuff I don’t have anymore,” Daisy said.

  “Ohhh, I thought you meant like turn left at the stop sign,” Jen said.

  “I have work left,” Daisy announced to the overhead fluorescent lights. “I have left work.”

  Jen rummaged around in her handbag for her recently resumed semi-daily allowance of Animexa. At Sunny’s request, Jen would be spending the rest of today and many todays in the future skimming Total Transformation Challenge essay submissions for what Sunny defined via email as “potentially defamatory or offensive language or any content that otherwise does not conform with the Total Transformation Challenge (TTC) project and/or LIFt’s standards.” The rolling task had seemed endless, monotonous, a vehicle of seething resentment. Whenever she was about to embark on another skimming session, Jen broke off half of an Animexa tablet, swallowed it with coffee from the Starbucks half a block away, and felt instantly soothed by the sheer anticipation of the mild tachycardia that would follow in fifteen to twenty minutes’ time to confirm the completed blockade of her dopamine and norepinephrine transporters, which in turn booted up the same automaton-Jen that Animexa had so skillfully programmed to write LIFt memos.

  This automaton-Jen could register neither disdain nor affection for the women who participated in TTC, although she suspected that, were she not presently located behind the glass partition of Animexa, she might be touched by their earnestness, by their apparent lack of acquaintance with irony or cool. These women kept vision boards and gratitude journals. They drew up and signed household-maintenance contracts replete with chore wheels and no-nagging clauses. They scheduled me-time and followed mindful-eating rules and wrote essays about how their own regular attendance at yoga classes was really a gift they gave to their kids and about the importance of feeling compassion for themselves even when they broke their mindful-eating rules.

  Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page, containing empty text boxes for each of the seven TTC mission categories. She had drafted these herself, though the final template was the product of three subcommittee meetings and seven interminable rounds of revision. But Jen had never tested the template herself, because the TTC mission statements hewed too closely to the act of journal-keeping. Embarrassment had always thwarted Jen’s attempts to keep any kind of journal. She was embarrassed by the mundane nature of the events she was recording in the moment, or she would happen upon an old notebook or computer file and feel embarrassed at the preoccupations and pretensions of her former self. This latter form of post-facto embarrassment was largely a function of style, as Jen’s contemporary eye tended to scan her past entries as seesawing between prolix melodrama and an inadvertently comic affectlessness—the personal journal as grocery list. Jen knew that she had let embarrassment excuse her carelessness with the precious concrete and cognitive artifacts of her own life, entire months and years she could never retrace, and for this, too, she was embarrassed.

  Pam, by contrast, was a master self-archivist, every smallest passage of her life logged and filed, and many of these passages repatterned and digested into art, which in Jen’s view turned both Pam’s work and Pam herself into case studies in disciplined self-respect. Just as Meg’s self-respect was expressed in her careful and constant appraisal of time to come, Pam’s self-respect was expressed in her careful and constant recording of time already spent. Yet Jen herself could not escape the conviction that there was an egotistical audacity to private record-keeping, albeit one that applied only to her own exceptional—that is to say, her own exceptionally unexceptional—case.

  She considered the instructions for the first Total Transformation Challenge category and typed a response.

  TTC CATEGORY 1: MIND

  How can you challenge your mind to look hard at its own blind spots and push past negative thinking? How can you conjure new ways of sharing your own unique joy, outlook, and personhood with the world in order to help others?

  Your response here:

  I challenge my mind to help my brain figure out how Animexa modulates my levels of dopamine and norepinephrine and recalibrate itself accordingly so that I never want or need to take it again.

  Jen stopped typing to shade her eyes with her fingers, because her bulging pupils were gulping and sucking at the fluorescent overhead lights.

  Judy and the Really Fabulous Guy

  “Maybe we should start a business just for Judy,” Daisy said to Jen.

  “We could work out of the guest quarters of Judy’s guest quarters,” Jen replied.

  “Judy could pay us in spa coupons and bichon puppies,” Daisy said.

  Judy was Jen and Daisy’s shorthand name for any and all Friends of Leora Infinitas, or F.O.L.I., which sounded out as Folly but quickly transmogrified into Fawley—in tribute to the comprehensively unfortunate Jude Fawley of one of Jen and Daisy’s shared favorite novels, Jude the Obscure—and had then whittled itself down to Jude, and finally Judy. In the days and weeks after LIFt’s official launch, Jen spent a plurality of her work hours talking on the phone with Judy, going to coffee or lunch with Judy, and, most important, editing Judy’s contributions to the LIFe Lines web channel, which had originated as a blog of updates about programs around the world that LIFt supported but which increasingly devoted itself to Judy’s own personal thoughts on women’s education, entrepreneurship, and empowerment. Despite all these hours Jen logged with Judy, Judy did not occupy space or have mass (not with any constancy, at least), nor could she be said to be a discrete entity. She was instead an abstract and composite character, or rather a liquid set of characteristics—there was typically an artisanal flourish to her charitable interests, a vested interest in offsetting her carbon footprint, and a stated commitment to public schools that coexisted with her two to three children not being enrolled in them—and these characteristics took on the shape and volume of her assigned vessel, which was invariably and conspicuously and extremely thin, bespeaking a fragility, as well as a volatility, that in turn bespoke the vessel’s value. Judy could be capricious and prickly; she could be stubborn about basic points of grammar; and her breadth and depth of everyday knowledge rose and fell ac
cording to no known scale. She could, Jen imagined, name-check a jeweler’s cut or the season and year of a vintage handbag on sight, yet she seemed unsure if, for example, people who were not recipients of public assistance programs could access the city’s public transportation system.

  “I’m not lying,” Jen told Daisy at the time. “My MetroCard fell out of my coat at the coat check, and as I picked it up, Judy kind of chucked me on the arm and said, ‘So glad we still have a safety net in this society.’ ”

  “That doesn’t mean anything,” Daisy said. “She could have meant the carpet was the safety net.”

  “I was there, man,” Jen said.

  This particular iteration of Judy—she would be forever after known as Safety Net Judy—had just filed a LIFe Lines essay to Jen about her volunteer work with a reading initiative for elementary-school girls and how it reminded Judy of the time her fourth-grade teacher had caught Judy cheating during the Great Lakes Read-a-Thon Contest by asking her about a crucial plot point in Harriet the Spy and thus teaching young Judy a lifelong lesson in the importance of authenticity. In order to avoid reading Safety Net Judy’s essay, Jen tabbed to another Judy’s essay that she was also avoiding reading and saw Daisy’s muddy reflection on her screen.

  “Who wrote this—Hedge Fund Judy?” Daisy asked, reading over Jen’s shoulder.

  “Hand-Sanitizer Heiress Judy,” Jen said.

  “Is the piece really called ‘Learning to Lasso the Lingo of the Fertility Rodeo’?” Daisy asked, peering more closely.

  “For now.” After all the confusion over what TTC actually stood for, Leora had requested the commissioning of a suite of LIFe Lines essays about women’s experiences with the decision to have children. Hand-Sanitizer Heiress Judy was the first to file her contribution.

  “It’s jargon-y,” Daisy said.

  “For real. I’ve been spending all this time on infertility websites—you know, just to figure out all the nomenclature in this piece—and it’s truly a whole dialect unto itself,” Jen said. “For instance, what do you think BFP stands for?”

  Daisy considered. “Baby for Purchase.”

  “Nope, Big Fat Positive. That means you’ve got a positive pregnancy test. Oh, this one comes up a lot, too—OPK. What do you think OPK stands for?”

  “Ovary Place Kicker.”

  “Close—Ovulation Predictor Kit. You buy a kit, you pee on a stick, and it tells you when to have sex.”

  “And there are lots of numbers here, too,” Daisy said.

  “Some of those tell you the diameter of a follicle before it ruptures,” Jen said.

  “Ruptures to release an egg?”

  “Not necessarily—you can test to see when the follicle is going to rupture, but you don’t necessarily know whether or not there’s an egg in there.”

  “So it’s like the bullpen gate swings open, but maybe there’s no bull in there,” Daisy said.

  “You know,” Jen said, “I’m all for printing whatever is on Judy’s mind, but I’m wondering if there’s a mixed message here. In one section of the site, we’re writing about projects LIFt is funding to help women not get pregnant, and in another, we’re writing about how we can’t get pregnant.”

  “Maybe we could fund a grant to cover the shipping costs of mailing all the surplus babies to the Judys,” Daisy said.

  “Is fertility a rodeo?” Jen asked.

  “Maybe a mixed message requires mixed metaphors,” Daisy said.

  “With fertilization I think of salmon swimming upstream,” Jen said. “I guess that’s clichéd.”

  “But in a rodeo you’re in, like, a dusty arena, and you’re trying to lasso—it is a bull, right?” Daisy asked. “Or sometimes it’s a pig?”

  “A steer, maybe?”

  “So is the lasso the sperm and the steer is the egg? Where are the salmon? What’s the vagina?”

  “It’s hard to find a vagina at the rodeo,” Jen said.

  “So this Judy was thirty-three when she decided to go to a fertility doctor,” Daisy said. “That’s not so old.”

  “It’s not all about age,” Jen said. “It can be so many different things.”

  Daisy picked up her ringing phone. Jen, intending to wander back to Safety Net Judy’s essay, instead lingered over the Total Transformation Challenge submission page.

  “They’re asking us to do a head count of all the people whose lives were transformed by the program, then divide the organization’s budget by that number of people served,” Daisy was saying into the phone. “This is not humanities—this is math. Are you an addition sign or a subtraction sign?”

  Jen considered the instructions for the second category and typed a response.

  TTC CATEGORY 2: BODY

  How can you challenge yourself to love your body, to treat it as a temple? How can you find ways to express your gratitude for all the amazing things your body can do?

  Your response here:

  I challenge my body to love itself enough to harvest from the Garden of Earthly Delights.

  “That’s because he thinks of his foundation as a vending machine,” Daisy was saying into the phone. “You put your money in the top slot and structural change comes out of the bottom slot with your Diet Coke.”

  Jen’s inbox pinged.

  Karina—LIFt

  Thursday, Oct 22 5:54 PM

  To: Jen—LIFt

  Subject: Come to Belize with me

  Hi Jen

  I have a delicious proposition for you. I’m traveling to Belize in December with one of our new board members. Really fabulous guy who—well, I’ll tell you all about it in person. I’m going to have a lot of ground to cover while I’m there, and I’m afraid I just won’t be able to do it all by myself. And that’s where you come in, dear girl!

  And look, not to get into this too much, but you should have a break. You deserve one!

  Say yes,

  K.

  Just then Jen identified the physiological components of pleasure, satisfaction, and joyful anticipation whirling into kaleidoscopic coordination with one another before just as quickly spinning away, their limbic messaging scrambled by a sharp retort from Jen’s prefrontal lobes affirming that Jen’s entire stimulus-response network, in order to maintain a gray and anxious homeostasis, was catastrophically dependent on the reactions and approval of indiscriminately selected third parties.

  Jen stared at Karina’s “Say yes” long enough that the letters began to twist away from their semiotic attachments, evoking nothing but their own shapes, then switched back to the Total Transformation Challenge submission page. She considered the instructions for the third category and typed a response.

  TTC CATEGORY 3: SPIRIT

  How can you challenge your spirit to come into full flower and experience maximum connection with the people and values you cherish most?

  Your response here:

  I challenge my spirit to locate itself and announce itself to me, because I don’t know what it looks like, or what it does, or if I have one.

  Particularizing

  The really fabulous guy, as Karina later explained, turned out to be Travis Paddock, aka “the Healthy Huntsman,” CEO and cofounder of the fitness company BodMod™ International and face of the BodMod Nutritionals™ line of shakes, smoothie blends, snack bars, and sports gels, all of which used a proprietary blend of ingredients that Paddock sourced from indigenous communities around the world.

  “His area of expertise is known as ‘particularizing,’ ” explained Karina, grabbing a BodMod Green Goodness Stack-a-Maca Bang!™ Bar from a box under her desk and handing it to Jen.

  To unwrap a BodMod Green Goodness Stack-a-Maca Bang!™ Bar was also to unwrap the weathered Anglo-Saxon terrain of Travis Paddock’s grinning face, which adorned all of his products and which Karina had inevitably described as “ruggedly handsome” and which, to Jen’s eyes, bumped awkwardly against the Malibu-bleached locks that flopped onto his deep-lined forehead from a hairline of uncertain geographi
c coordinates. But Jen understood that, to BodMod™’s intended audience, Paddock’s decapitated head atop a one-pound canister of BodMod Pro-Team Protein Pow!Der™ instantly signified rude health and complicatedly clean living, and presented a useful stand-in for the intricately managed physique that was showcased in BodMod™’s promotional videos, in which Paddock, in tight-fitting T-shirts and cargo pants, might be glimpsed gripping the husk of a pedicab in Quito to create a bas-relief of his triceps or dashing across the Peruvian highland at twilight, hauling a backpack full of maca in order to illustrate its invigorating qualities.

  “A Quechua wife would feed her groom maca on the eve of battle, ensuring that her man would return from the front lines triumphant and unscathed, to greet a bride proudly pregnant with his warrior son,” Paddock explained in voice-over as his silhouette jogged into the sunset.

  “He’s just old-school man’s man’s man, you know?” Karina asked Jen. “The surfer as hunter-gatherer, board over one shoulder and a clean-shot wildebeest over the other.”

  “This is really exciting,” Jen said, “but didn’t Leora say recently that she wanted to stick with an all-female board?”

  “Quite the contrary,” Karina said, biting her lip flirtatiously. “Leora has been saying that she wants more men, plural, on the board, to send the message that women’s issues are everybody’s issues. You know, that word integration—she said it was important to her, and Leora doesn’t say anything she doesn’t mean.”

  “Wow, cool-guy casting alert,” Jen said, nodding emphatically.

  “For every single nourishment that we choose to put inside our body,” Paddock intoned to the camera in another promotional video, standing alongside a startled-looking Bolivian farmer whose shoulder tensed in Paddock’s manful grip, “you have to ask yourself one question: What are the medicinals?” Then the camera cut to Paddock at an unidentified farmers’ market, in a different country and a different shade of tight-fitting T-shirt, peering up from a close inspection of a batch of yacón roots to tell the camera: “BodMod answers that question. Think of it as Superfoods, Simplified.”