Orientation

by Daniel Orozco

  A bank of tall, narrow trees stood along the edge of the mini-mart parking lot. Their topmost leaves shimmered in the sun, and Clarissa Snow—for sheer want of knowing what to do next—stood peering up at them as if they were her last hope. She then searched her bag for another coin, dropped it into the pay phone, and made another call. She was briefly put on hold. And when the other receptionist thanked her for holding and asked how she might help her, Clarissa Snow told her everything.

  II.

  Autumn in the city was crisp and clear and bright. It was a time of year when the windows in the high-rises flamed yellow-gold and the sunlight burnished every reflective surface to a painful gloss: the marble columns and cornices of building exteriors, trolley wires and turnstiles and door pulls, the brass filigrees on handrails and drinking fountains and trash receptacles. Windshields of passing vehicles flashed like gunfire, and broken bottles glittered in the street. The air was scattered with needles of light that made Clarissa Snow squint.

  She was sent on a four-week assignment to an insurance company. Her job was to type and edit a Secret Report for the Executive Vice President, and this was her routine. At 8:00 a.m. she took the elevator to the Claims Unit on the twelfth floor and unlocked the door to an office that had been converted to file storage. Sagging boxes filled the room, leaning in precarious columns against the walls and each other. Just enough space remained for a desk and chair and computer and printer. She spent the day typing and revising and editing the Secret Report, and at 5:00 p.m. she delivered a computer disk and a manila envelope with her revisions to the Executive Vice President’s Assistant on the twenty-ninth floor. Between 5:00 p.m. that day and 8:00 a.m. the next morning, someone would slip an envelope with new copy and revisions under the door of her office.

  The Executive Vice President’s Assistant was a tiny, no-nonsense woman, impeccably attired and of indeterminate youthfulness; she looked like a dour little girl playing dress-up for the day. She instructed Clarissa Snow not to socialize with anyone on the twelfth floor. “I’ve memoed them to not talk to you,” she said. “Eat lunch alone,” she told her. “Take your breaks outside the building or in your office. Keep your door locked. This is a Secret Report. That’s why we hired an outsider for the job.” She placed one of her perfect miniature hands—pallid and smooth—upon one of Clarissa Snow’s, which by comparison seemed a vast, bony landscape of knuckle and joint. “The Agency says you’re their best girl,” the Executive Vice President’s Assistant said. “So we’re counting on you.” Clarissa Snow nodded conspiratorially. She was thrilled with the secrecy. It excited her.

  Although no one on the twelfth floor was supposed to talk to Clarissa Snow, adherence to this directive broke down quickly. During Week One of her assignment, Claims Unit employees winked at her in the elevator and put their index fingers to their lips in gestures of complicity. After one of the Claims Analysts mouthed a silent “Good morning!” to her in the ladies’ restroom, other employees began to greet her in hushed tones. “How are you!” they whispered. “Fine! Thank you!” Clarissa Snow whispered back. Soon the Claims Unit Manager was knocking on her door, inviting her to potlucks in the lunchroom. “We know you’re not supposed to,” he’d say, then, looking up and down the hallway and dropping his voice, add, “Do it anyway!” He was an affable, red-faced man who wore wide, ugly ties, but wore them with irony; there was an ongoing contest among the men in his unit for who could wear the ugliest ties. The Claims Unit employees held birthday parties and years-of-service celebrations and maternity leave bon voyages on a regular basis, and they invited her to all of them. When she didn’t show up, they came looking for her, knocking urgently at her door: “Are you all right in there?” They were kind and solicitous, eager to make her a part of things, and Clarissa Snow wanted none of it. She did not want to partake of their lives. She attended their gatherings under duress, making a brief appearance before returning to her Secret Report, often laden with paper plates of macaroni salad or potatoes au gratin. But for the most part, they left her alone. They did not take her aloofness personally.

  Clarissa Snow was an extraordinary typist and often finished her work well before 5:00 p.m. On these days, she spell-checked the Secret Report, proofread it two or three times, then spent the rest of the afternoon thumbing through magazines she had smuggled in her bag. Her interests were varied and sundry, and wholly vicarious. Because she was afraid of flying, she bought travel magazines, wherein she browsed the pictures of exotic lands she would never visit. She read gourmet magazines, as she did not cook; gardening magazines, as she had no garden; dog- and cat-breeding journals, because her apartment building did not allow pets.

  When she was done with her magazines, she stared out the window. She’d heaved some file boxes out of the way and discovered a floor-to-ceiling panel of tinted shatterproof glass. It gave her an unobstructed view of the high-rises across the street, and the high-rises beyond them, and the dim yellow mist that obscured everything in the distance. When this bored her, she snooped around. A narrow linoleum trail wended its way through the file boxes, which were labeled by fiscal year—FY72–73, FY71–72, and so on—some going all the way back to the 1930s. The older boxes were filled with brittle, yellowed claim forms. They were smudged with carbon-paper stains and freckled with typos. The signatures and countersignatures were elaborate and ornate, and Clarissa Snow imagined the signatories trying to outdo each other, engaged in inked battles of loop and filigree across the bottoms of their staid documents. She looked forward to her late-afternoon forays into the company’s past, perusing the archives of a world without correction fluids and highlighters and Post-it notes, a world where—in Clarissa Snow’s rude, romantic vision—policies were never canceled and claims were never rejected. Whenever she came across a previously unexplored file box, her heart would thump. When she lifted the lid and peered inside, the dust motes of sixty years would waft up and dance around her head.

  Because she received sections of the Secret Report out of sequence, Clarissa Snow was at first baffled by its contents. One section discussed the technical specifications for computer networks and telecommunications protocols. Another section consisted of pages and pages of balance sheets, the figures unlabeled. And another delineated the agenda and minutes of a business conference in Ireland. (Ireland! she thought, unable to imagine business being conducted in Ireland.) But one morning during Week Four—the last week of her assignment—Clarissa Snow received the opening pages of the Secret Report and discovered its secret. It was a proposal to eliminate the Claims Unit and to transfer all of its functions to an overseas vendor. In two months, the twelfth floor would become a records storage facility, and everyone in the Claims Unit would be out of a job.

  Clarissa Snow snapped her eyelids shut, but it was too late. She could not unread the paragraph she had just read. She slapped at her skull with the palms of her hands, but neither hand nor fist, neither brick nor rock, could dislodge what she did not want to know. Inside the lids of her closed eyes she saw the terrain of her office multiplied a thousandfold, column after column of file boxes looming in a dense fog of gray dust.

  That afternoon she locked her door and made some additional changes to the Secret Report. Using the search-and-replace function of her computer, she substituted all occurrences of the Executive Vice President’s name with the word “Dickhead.” Other Executive Vice Presidents became “Bunghole” and “Pedophile” and “Pig-bitch.” She changed “downsizing” to “butt-fucking,” “remuneration” to “masturbation,” and “capital outlays” to “steaming piles of shit.” She printed a copy and read it aloud. She hoped this would make her feel better. It didn’t. She reversed these changes, of course, and destroyed the adulterated copy. She moved on to the file boxes. She selected one of the oldest ones—FY29–30—and poured diet soda into it, just enough to soak in and ruin the contents without seeping out. There was no relief in this, either. But Clarissa Snow—while ashamed at inflicting such petty vengeance upon these
venerable and innocent artifacts—was nonetheless resolved to petty vengeance. What else could she do? Somebody had to be punished. So she carefully poured the rest of her soda into several more boxes.

  That afternoon, on her way up to the twenty-ninth floor, the Unit Manager cornered her at the elevator. “We hear tomorrow’s your last day,” he said. He was wearing a tie that looked like a rainbow trout, its tail fin knotted tightly beneath his chin and its head hanging wide over his belly. “You know,” he said, “we’re really going to miss you.” Clarissa Snow’s stomach churned. She thanked him.

  The next day, she finished the Secret Report, assembling and formatting its sections until it was the perfect and uniform document she was hired to create. She downloaded and inserted graphics, cross-referenced an index, printed out and assembled the required number of copies, bound them into their gray report covers, and slipped them all into a box, which she was instructed to tape tightly shut and leave locked in the office along with her office key. She was done by 3:00 p.m. and was gathering her things to make her escape—the stairwell was only two doors away; no one would see her if she timed it right—when there was a knock at the door. It was the Unit Manager. “We’re having a little birthday party,” he told her. “And you’re invited.”

  A banner taped to the lunchroom wall read GOODBYE CLARISSA! A cake on the table was decorated and frosted to resemble the screen of a computer terminal. The message on it read WE’LL ALL MISS YOU! Everyone from the Claims Unit was there: the Analysts and the File Clerks, the Specialists and the Secretaries, and all the ugly-tied men. People she had never met before hugged her and handed her slices of cake and told her how wonderful it was having her. “We hope you come back!” they said. “We’ll get you a job here!” they said. And who, who should Clarissa Snow see at this moment among the press of well-wishers but the Executive Vice President’s Assistant, arising out of the crowd as if from a hole in the floor, head weaving at shoulder level—toward her—like a predatory balloon, and who, upon reaching her, executed the following in seconds: a brisk, professional hug; the cool touch of a doll-like hand upon her own; and—to Clarissa Snow’s horror—an impish wink of the eye, a wink like the shutter-click of an insidious camera, a dirty little flicker of implication passed from one to the other like a pornographer’s contraband. And then she was gone, slipping into the mob around the table and gliding away with a plate of cake in her hand and—to the delight of the Claims Unit employees—a creamy blue smudge of frosting on her chin. And then attention was called for—the clang of a spoon against a coffee mug—and presentations to the guest of honor were made: a bouquet of flowers, an immense tin of homemade oatmeal cookies, and, after the Unit Manager stammered through a little speech, a card signed by everyone in the Claims Unit. Clarissa Snow started to cry. Three women she didn’t know cried with her.

  Forty-five minutes later, in the thinning light of late afternoon, she sat hidden in her office. She was on the floor, with her knees to her chest, in a far corner of the file-box labyrinth. There were occasional knocks on the door from potential well-wishers, which Clarissa Snow ignored. She was listening for the Claims Unit stragglers to just go home, her ear attuned only to the inevitable sound of an empty office—the enormous quietudes of Friday that roll through the corridors and lap into the conference rooms and cubicles like a submerging tide. And then she could slip away, slip down the stairwell and outside and into the din and clamor of the evening exodus, leaving behind a tin of cookies that she would never taste, flowers that would be dead by Monday, and a tightly taped box heavy with Clarissa Snow’s best work.

  The sun was gone, and a cold wind gusted, sending trash into whirlpools on the pavement. As she walked along, Clarissa Snow set herself to the task of tearing up the going-away card. It was filled with signatures, black with names and phone numbers and congenial exhortations: “Let’s do lunch!” and “Come visit!” and “Give me a call!”—forays into a world of easy acquaintance that Clarissa Snow (alas!) would never make. She tore the card into bits thoroughly and well, but left in her wake a confetti trail. It fluttered and capered behind her as she bobbed and weaved through the rush hour teem, racing for her bus. And to the momentary amusement of passersby racing for their own buses, Clarissa Snow looked like a woman in flight, like a fugitive pursued by a tiny, relentless parade that, no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t shake.

  III.

  Winter came and went. Weeks of heavy rains, sheeting down concrete slopes and declivities, gushing in cataracts from gutters, sputtering from downspouts and roiling into storm drains—all of it subsided, then ceased. The sewers now sang with the rush of winter runoff, and the city, having hunkered down for the rains, seemed now to lay itself out to dry, its sidewalks steaming contentedly in the sun.

  Spring was here, and progress was abloom in the Municipal Clerk’s Office. A major project was under way; it was called the Conversion, and it was exactly that—the conversion of all records into a computerized database management system. Birth and death, marriage and divorce, the purchase and sale of home and property, the licensing of business entities and the bankruptcies of same—the paper trail of perfidious Fortune’s sway over the lives of the inhabitants of the city would be represented as coded entries on a data field screen, tagged and cross-indexed for easy access and retrieval.

  Clarissa Snow was assigned to this project, which was expected to last through the summer. The job was a plum, and Clarissa Snow—having gotten Mrs. D. out of many a job pickle—was now reaping a bounty of plums. Life in the Agency had tempered her into a loyal and hardworking employee. Her evaluations were impeccable, and her reputation was beyond reproach. She had moved into an echelon of temporary service attained by few, which conferred upon her the Agency’s most coveted emblems of appreciation: the Exceptional Performance Pin and the assurance of permanent temporary employment.

  Her workday in the Municipal Clerk’s Office began at 8:00 a.m. This was her routine. A doughnut, an orange, and a cup of coffee at her desk accompanied her review of the contents of her in-box, which contained the previous day’s Data Entry Error Run (her error stats down, always down) and the current day’s Municipal Records Register Inventory. Then she was off, inventory in hand, to pull her Registers for the day. They were kept in an abandoned conference room next to the Conversion Manager’s office and were stacked everywhere: on the table and the chairs, on the floor, on the wide sill along the window. Entering the dim, silent room, Clarissa Snow always felt for a moment as if she were interrupting a secret meeting. The Registers were narrow books half a yard long, with brown leather covers. Some of them had become dark and stiff and webbed with cracks, while others had been worn to a dull gold. She ran her hand over the pebbled surface of one Register, along the fissured length of another. Something stirred inside her. If she lingered, she would have imagined things about these books: that their covers, for instance, felt like maps coming to tactile life, their topographies—puckered and stubbly with age—emerging beneath her fingers; or that they looked like tiny church doors, the weathered portals to miniature cathedrals. If she lingered, she would have wondered about who filled these pages with their crabbed entries, about the lives of clerks long gone who scrivened day after day in witness to the transactions of others long gone. But Clarissa Snow did not linger. She logged out two Registers and returned to her desk.

  Morning break was signaled by the appearance of the Database Systems Coordinator, who stopped by on his way to the kitchenette, his head hovering like a benevolent planet just above Clarissa Snow’s cubicle partition. A twenty-second stroll to the lunchroom together, empty mugs aloft; idle chat while waiting for coffee to brew, about the Conversion—its glitches and bugs, its progress and its promise; the preparation of their coffees with creamers and sweeteners; and the return stroll to Clarissa Snow’s desk, whereupon the Database Systems Coordinator, a kind and shaggy-haired bear of a man, thanked her and trudged off to his own desk. This was morning break.


  She took lunch at 1:00 p.m., a late lunch to avoid the crowds. She had discovered, at the top of a multistoried parking structure, an abandoned rooftop park. There were untrimmed trees and a weed-spattered lawn. Moldy concrete benches surrounded a scummed-over pond that once contained fish. Skinny pigeons lurched about. No one else ever came here. This was her respite. Fifteen minutes to get to the park and fifteen minutes to get back to work left her with a half hour. She spread a newspaper on a bench and sat on it. She ate her bag lunch: sliced pineapple rounds, a handful of green olives, a bran cupcake, a can of vegetable juice. She closed her eyes. She listened to the rumble of cars moving beneath her and the rustle and whisper of neglected trees, still damp with rain.

  She was back at work by 2:00 p.m. And upon her return every afternoon, she found sitting in the geographic center of her desktop a piece of candy, a foil-wrapped chocolate coin. (Computer monitor and keyboard were attached to an insectlike ergonomic device that suspended them in the air next to her chair. Her desktop, save for an in-box and a yellow legal pad and the day’s Registers stacked neatly, was thus blissfully bare. There was no phone.) Sometimes, while settling in for the afternoon’s labors, she unwrapped and ate the coin. But because chocolate held no power over her—it was merely sticky, then chalky, in her mouth, and hard to swallow—she more often than not tossed the coin into her bag and forgot about it. The mystery of the chocolate coin—Who left it? Why her?—niggled at Clarissa Snow for only the first few days of its appearance; thereafter, the regularity of its appearance on her desktop slipped easily into the regularities of her afternoon routine.