The New Order

by Karen E. Bender

  We buttoned our coats tightly as we considered this.

  “Mine pretended to whisper something to his worker and then slipped a hand into her shirt, just for a second. Sometimes just before meetings. He believed they’d be distracted when he did that. But not in the way he thought.”

  “That’s nothing,” whispered Marianne, who seemed to derive a kind of status when she described her cases. “I had two different women in one office file claims about the same guy. He pretended to go into the wrong bathroom, grab the worker who was in there, kiss her, and rush out. I’m not kidding.”

  “Where was this?” asked Kayla, as though searching for regional logic.

  “Nebraska,” said Marianne.

  “Nebraska,” said Kayla, nodding. Our talk about complaints were a sort of armor—if we talked about them, if we learned something, perhaps these incidents would not happen to us. For as we gathered by the elevator, sharing what we knew, housed in the shelter of our own alleged generosity, we did not confess what kept us staring into the dark at night—that we did not know how to stop any of this. And we had no idea how reimbursing these women would help.

  The elevator wheezed, tiredly, away from the basement.

  “How much do you think they’ll get?” I asked.

  “Depends on the complaint,” Marianne said. “Gross comments, I don’t know, a hundred dollars. If the comments were made just once or constantly—more then. Actual physical contact, a thousand dollars. Worse things, I don’t know. What is the department’s budget?”

  “Not big enough,” Jana said.

  “Do you have trouble reading them?” I asked.

  The complaints floated into my dreams. I woke up some nights and heard myself calling out; it seemed that a cool, disembodied hand was reaching inside every bit of me. I woke up, embarrassed by the yelp I made. The women making the complaints were entering my body in their own way and engaging in a variety of behaviors, which included screaming at the people who harmed them and sometimes stabbing them with large knives. When I woke up, it never felt as though I had slept.

  “I think about how much we can give them,” said Kayla, sounding hopeful. “I imagine their happiness when they hear me say how much they will get.”

  “Why can’t they just move them to other jobs?” asked Jana. “Get them out of there.”

  “Jana, quiet,” whispered Kayla. “Where would they go?”

  The elevator stopped, with a shudder, and the force jolted through my bones.

  “But,” said Jana.

  The doors of the elevator opened. We walked out into the street’s glaring light and arranged our faces into the delicate expressions of workers who wanted to be identified as workers, but not definitively so; we did not want to attract jealousy or violence.

  After hours in the low, false light of the basement, it took a few minutes to adjust to the sun, the clamorous bustle of the street. Each time I walked out of the building, it was difficult to look closely at anyone. There was a silent code governing the actions of others, and I wanted to understand it, through the smallest gestures—the way the man stood behind me at the stoplight, waiting for me to step first, the way the woman at the deli counter handed me a coffee, the way we walked around each other on the sidewalk. There was nothing to learn. The air was silent, but full as a balloon. People scrubbed the sides of the buildings so they shone. Pale soap bubbles glittered in the gutters. My coworkers and I walked together for a block or two before going to our different train stations, and I could tell the others were looking at people’s faces the way I was—wondering not just which workers were real, not just that, but imagining what light or darkness everyone held inside of them, and what our deep and capacious generosity could do.

  The first reimbursements were ready, and we gathered in Kayla’s office around a large stack of yellow envelopes. We were very interested in what the Office of Happiness and Reimbursement thought the remuneration for these complaints should be.

  We each opened one. My fingers trembled.

  $53.

  $40.

  $125.

  $15.

  Jana gasped.

  I checked these reimbursements against the complaints. They seemed surprisingly meager compared to the amounts I had distributed previously. We looked at the amounts and though none of us wanted to be designated as too generous (we did not want to be viewed as extravagant), we could not hide our reactions; we were shocked.

  “Maybe these are typos,” Kayla said.

  “I think we should check,” said Jana. “For accuracy.”

  “You really think this is wrong?” asked Marianne. “Ha. I think this is what they are going to get.”

  Marianne folded her arms in front of her, a gesture of authority. She liked to appear the most realistic of the group, which meant the harshest; it gave her a certain standing among us. But her comment made us anxious.

  “If this is what we are telling them,” said Kayla, “at least they should pay us more.”

  We decided that one of us should go talk to Mr. Watson, and they decided that person should be me. Kayla told me how to ask. Not with anger. Reasonably. We wanted, of course, to be accurate. Perhaps the reimbursements were missing one zero or even two.

  I took the elevator to the sixth floor, Mr. Watson’s office.

  “I received these,” I said, holding out the first reimbursements, “and our department wondered if they were correct.”

  Mr. Watson took the files from me and looked them over. He nodded and handed them back.

  “What do you think they should be?”

  “I don’t know. They appeared to us as a bit low—”

  Mr. Watson smiled, a smile that implied great patience.

  “Miss Windham, you do know how many complaints of this type we are getting in each week,” he said.

  “Yes. I read them,” I said.

  “And you know that our budget is limited,” he said. “Certainly we would like to help them, of course, we know they have had a terrible experience, or so they claim. Let me tell you in confidence that the number of these complaints, or the deluge of them, has led to, well, some questioning in upper levels of our department of their authenticity. We are drowning in these complaints, Miss Windham. We have to be realistic. We have, in fact, a budget. I can’t just snap my fingers and create money. We simply cannot spend much, even if, and I say if, every single one of these claims is true.”

  He did not look at me as he said this. I turned just slightly to see where his gaze was going—it fell on a window, the light a glowing square within it, nothing.

  “I am concerned that these reimbursements are not enough,” I said.

  “Well, they will have to be,” he said. “We all have things we wish were different. When my mother looks at me, Miss Windham, she sees my brother. It has been a year since she has remembered my name. I do not know why.”

  He glanced at his hands, which were clasped tightly together; they appeared glossy, made of glass.

  “This is just to say that we all have our unhappiness and seventy-two dollars is a lot for some people. A nice dinner. A pair of shoes. A little something that will make them feel better. Do you know the power of these rewards, Miss Windham? The brain reacts in a positive way. It can erase negative thoughts and experiences. You know that people cling to their discomfort,” he said. “I believe it’s a form of amusement. Life is hard. People have to just embrace the good.” He stood up, suddenly, went to the file cabinet, opened one up, and brought out a handful of letters. “Here,” he said. “People are glad to get something. For example, I can tell that you are glad for this job, Miss Windham.” He leaned toward me across his desk. “I can see it in the efficient way you work through your files. That gives me hope.”

  “Thank you,” I said. My heart was the size of a grapefruit. “I have hope, too. We were thinking, perhaps, that the size of the reimbursements might be met with resistance from those filing their compl
aints. We hoped that perhaps our own salaries might be raised, for this may be challenging to deal with.”

  Mr. Watson unclasped his hands.

  “I will look into our budget for possible bonuses,” he said. “Thank you for alerting me. The reimbursements, though, will have to stand.”

  My coworkers were encouraged to hear about our possible bonuses, though they still could not believe the reimbursements were correct. Jana wondered if I had asked Mr. Watson the right question, which I found insulting. Kayla wondered if he had misheard, and Marianne was the only one who believed his answer was true. We each had a stack of packets. No one wanted to start calling the women about their reimbursements. We each claimed we would start calling that day, but across the office I saw various forms of procrastination—Kayla moving a hand vacuum over her carpet, Jana alphabetizing her files and asking if she could organize mine as well, Marianne making a thorough survey of her office supplies. We were a frenzy of activity around nothing.

  We spent one Friday afternoon, when no one stopped by the basement, watching Your New Home. A man from Texas won that day. The host of the show, Harry Cash, was taking Mr. Plummer and his family to see a mansion in California, in Malibu, the sort of house that resembled a giant ice cube, with dark gray glass, set right on the beach.

  From Marianne’s office we watched Mr. Plummer and his wife, four children, his mother, an aunt, and two cousins stroll through the rooms, faces turned in an almost painful wonder, at the display of luxury—the bathrooms with porcelain Jacuzzi tubs overlooking the ocean, the bedrooms with beds the size of boats, the balconies where the ocean wind dramatically lifted their hair. They had made it. They would never worry again about work or money. They began to cry, all of them, and the elderly mother dropped to her knees and kissed the marble floor and cried, “Thank you, Lord!” and the children began to run onto the beach, running and running, the sun glinting on the ocean in a way so painfully beautiful it made my forehead hurt with longing. Harry Cash put his arm about Mr. Plummer, who looked at his new home and said, “Thank you. Thank you.”

  His gratitude rose off him like a terrible heat. We all cried. Kleenexes floated through the room. We were all reverent, ridiculously moved by Mr. Plummer’s relief, by the vision of him walking, dazed, through the enormous house, by the sight of him standing barefoot on his private beach gazing out at the ocean, by the idea (imagine!) that he and his family might never again feel fear.

  We began to make the calls telling the women of their reimbursements. A worker appeared on our floor, pushing a cart mysteriously filled with foods that we all liked; she came to the basement throughout the day, handing us chocolate chip cookies, potato chips, jelly beans; someone knew we needed to be nourished. We spent most of the day shut in our offices. Sometimes I walked to the water fountain and I checked to see what the others were doing. I saw Kayla splayed on the floor between calls, eyes closed, her arms stretched out, palms grasping the carpet; she had told me that she couldn’t sleep. Jana asked for a punching bag for her office, and I saw her, between calls, lunge toward it again and again. Marianne had drawn the blinds on her office and through her door, I heard a soft sound that might have been weeping. The mail person dumped file after file on our desks.

  Before each call, I ate one candy. The sweetness in my mouth was supposed to prepare me. I tried to conjure whatever in my voice I had been hired for: “We are delighted to offer you this reimbursement,” but I did not know how to respond when they answered:

  “That’s it?”

  “You’re kidding, miss, right?”

  “Is this an amount I will get weekly?”

  “You fuckers. I still have to work here. No. No.”

  At the end of the day, we stood by the elevator, quiet now. Jana was looking increasingly fit from her bouts with the punching bag. My clothes were getting tight from my extensive consumption of chocolate. Despite her attempts at napping, Kayla looked like she had not slept in a year. Marianne’s face was discolored when she reached the elevator, her eyes swollen; she had been crying most of the day.

  We did not discuss our work. However, we did notice that our salaries were rising. The first week, by a hundred dollars. The second week, by two hundred. We brought this up, casually, with each other. The third week was different.

  “Three hundred,” said Kayla.

  “I got one twenty-five,” said Jana.

  “Three seventy-five,” I said.

  “Mine didn’t go up at all,” said Marianne.

  “What’s going on?” said Kayla.

  Waiting for the elevator, we were now alert in a new way. This information gave us a focus, something else to talk about. Why did each of us receive a different raise? We could not quit; no one ever quit anything ever, because, of course, there was nowhere to go; now, every Friday, when we received our paychecks, we met at the elevator and whispered our salary increases to one another:

  One hundred dollars.

  Seventy-five dollars.

  Four hundred dollars.

  We received our paychecks at four p.m. each Friday, and I tore open my envelope, my heart ablaze, to see what I got that week; by five p.m. we gathered by the elevator, telling each other what we had received. We revealed that week’s salary with a beautifully calculated casualness, Kayla twisting her hair, Jana reaching her arms back in a stretch, none of us looking the other in the eye. We were not supposed to care, but our interest in these distinctions was a sort of spell. Now this was all we talked about.

  When we began, I thought Marianne would be the worker least affected by the complaints and the meager reimbursements, but this was not the case. Marianne was looking worn out; she had cried about the complaints and reimbursements for some weeks but still worked through them with surprising and deliberate speed. I was tired myself, but I said I would take some of her files.

  This is how I came to open Packet 3784. Her name was Joanne. She was from Southern California. She was my age, twenty-three, and she named the company where she worked. It was an advertising firm I had heard of, and she was a junior executive there.

  She had an idea for an advertising campaign to promote a citrus soft drink, a good idea, and a guy working with her stole it. He saw it on her computer screen and took a screenshot and sent it to her boss. He received a bonus, five thousand dollars. She went to his office to insist on credit for her idea.

  He started to beg; apparently he needed the bonus for his kid’s medical bills. He almost wept but then his tone changed and he locked the door.

  I read on.

  After I read the packet, I had to get out of my office. My chest felt constricted, and the room suddenly seemed very small. I walked over to the water fountain past Kayla and Marianne and Jana, all of them at their desks and speaking into their phones with their kind voices. It was the sound I had become accustomed to each day, almost like a stream of running water, but suddenly the rush of their voices sounded like a language I did not understand. This frightened me. I remembered how excited I was to get this job, and looking down the dark hallway, I understood, with a sharp iciness in my heart, the finite quality of our lives, and that this would be the only job I would ever hold. For the first time, I wondered if I could do it.

  I did not want to see what Joanne would ask for. I read further through the packet. The line where she was supposed to indicate an estimated reimbursement was blank. This was odd, and I didn’t know how she could send in her complaint without that number; I imagined she was so distraught she had forgotten to include this. I thought of consulting Mr. Watson, but then remembered this was actually Marianne’s packet, so I did not. I decided to call Joanne myself.

  I dawdled for a couple of days, calling instead those with other reimbursements, speaking with a couple workers who thanked me (sincerely) for their thirty-four dollars and sixty-two dollars and asked me to please send on our list of recommended regional restaurants, which I did (lower price range).

  Finally, I called
her. My script sat in front of me.

  “Yes,” a voice said, very quietly.

  “May I speak to Joanne Trotman,” I said, warmly.

  A long, stretchy silence. “Who is this?”

  “My name is Miss Windham,” I said. “I am calling from the Department of Workplace Grievances. We are glad you have submitted your claim to us. This is a preliminary call to check in. I wanted to see how you are doing.”

  She said nothing for a long moment.

  “Hello?” I asked.

  “Why are you calling,” she asked, softly.

  “I am calling because our great nation values your contribution to our workforce,” I said, following the script. My voice, to me, sounded surprisingly loud.

  “Our workforce,” she said. “Is that what you call it.”

  The script did not indicate how I should answer a comment like this.

  “I am speaking with Ms. Trotman?” I said.

  “Of course you are,” she said.

  I decided to continue. “I am calling also because you left line forty-three, your request for reimbursement, blank on our official form,” I said. “We cannot yet provide an exact estimate of what we can obtain for you, but we can assure you that your claim will be—”

  There was a sound coming from her end of the line. A sharp honking, a knife slicing the air—no. A laugh. She was laughing, but not the kind of laughter I was invited to join; it was laughter that had the swooping cadence of crying, and I had the uncomfortable sense that she was laughing at me.

  “Miss Trotman,” I asked, “are you okay?”

  “Okay,” she whispered, fiercely. “Okay!”

  “Are you?” I asked.

  “Sometimes I feel like my office is full of bombs,” she said. “There is one behind the potted palm. There is one in the stall in the women’s restroom. There is one by the coffee machine. If they ever go off, the whole office will burst into flames and everyone’s bones will melt as they run for the door—”

  “Miss Trotman,” I said, “I have to put something on line forty-three of your claim. To send it to our appraisal department—”