Holy Water

by James P. Othmer

  “Yeah. You’ve been taking these, um, painkillers for what? Six months at least, right?”

  “This time around? Sure. About that. Okay. Let’s keep it moving while we talk, Henry. Let’s keep the energy positive.”

  While they set up the incline bar, Henry stops and turns to Norman. He’s holding a forty-five-pound plate. “I don’t know what to tell you, Norman. I mean, you know you can’t do this. You know you have to quit. And Percocet, you can’t just do cold turkey. You need some kind of help.”

  “How are you set for protein powder these days?”

  “All set. What do your other clients think when you start sobbing in the middle of their workout?”

  “Well, that’s the thing . . .”

  “What do they think when you neglect to give them a spot? Or don’t pay attention to their set while they’re lifting? And your personal trainer—slash—Colombian drug dealer outfit—what do they think of that?”

  Norman tugs at the bottom of his shirt, shrugs.

  “When we first started two years ago, you were built, Norman, you had this whole sleek-white-Adidas-warmup-suit thing going. You were motivating. You shaved.”

  “I actually thought of something cool for you. Involves tossing a sort of medicine ball and tying your ankles together with a piece of string.”

  “I saw Rocky too, Norman. You can do better than that.”

  Norman watches Henry slip clamps onto the bar. He sits on a nearby bench and puts his head in his hands. The old guy is coming out of the locker room again, unshowered and in street clothes, and he is looking their way.

  “What, Norm?”

  “That’s the thing. I don’t have any other clients right now. You’re pretty much it. The owner lets me do a spinning class on Tuesdays, but since I kind of spit up in my mouth during the warm-up last month, I don’t even ride anymore. I just spin good music and talk all kinds of smack while I walk around the room with one of those Britney Spears headsets on.”

  Henry wonders if he should tell Norman that his only remaining client is about to be fired, or at the very least transferred to the bottom half of the third world. He leans back and does a set on the incline bench. The same weight as usual, but it rises and lowers with ease. After his twelfth rep he glances at Norman, who is looking somewhere far away, so he decides to keep going and bangs out another five reps. When he’s done he looks to Norman for recognition, a glimmer of positive reinforcement, but now he’s text-messaging someone. After thirty seconds Henry grinds out another set and feels even stronger. This time he doesn’t look to Norman or anyone for approval, and when he guides the weights down he feels a warm, uncomplicated, guilt-free rush of endorphins, all of his own making.

  “Where do you get them?”

  “The painkillers? Clients. Ex-clients, actually. Why? You want?”

  He thinks. Not so much about the painkillers but about his own situation at work, at home, and with his balls, and how he doesn’t know what to do, how to feel about any of it. Of course he won’t mention any of this to Norman. But if not Norman, then who?

  “I’m just kidding,” Norman says. Then: “Hey. How’s work, Henry? Still the absolute pits?”

  Norman laughs so enthusiastically at his joke that this time-the old man and angry kickboxing woman both turn to stare at them. “You’re a funny man, Henry. I mean it. Without fail, after our sessions, I always feel so much better.”

  ~ * ~

  Reverse Outsourcing

  Only when an office is consumed by the maudlin does it become remotely interesting.

  ~ * ~

  He’d tried to come up with a reason for returning, such as claiming to have forgotten a valuable document or needing to complete a mission-critical task. But unless a cruel joke has been played on him, there are no more valuable documents in his portfolio, there is no mission-critical anything to be done in the soon-to-be-extinct Underarm Research Division.

  He’s returning because he doesn’t have anywhere better to go.

  Dworik, the CEO, and three executive handlers are on the up elevator. Henry wonders if Dworik knows that one of the men he’s in the process of firing or shipping around the world for no apparent reason is standing alongside him. Then again, he wonders if Dworik even knows who he is. It’s only been seven years, after all.

  Just before the door opens on the executive floor, Dworik looks at Henry. He turns his right thumb and forefinger into a pistol. “Underarms, right?”

  “Yes, sir. At least for the moment.”

  Dworik blinks and tilts his head like a dog listening to a harmonica. He doesn’t quite understand and doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it. Has this young man been fired? Is he quitting? Or something else? This is why he usually shies away from spontaneous downward-directed small talk. Always ends up with the big guy being made to look bad, one way or the other.

  As Dworik steps off the elevator he looks to his handlers, one of whom whispers into his ear, presumably about the impending fate of the employees of the aforementioned Underarm Research Division. As he’s hustled away Secret Service—style from a potentially ugly employee-CEO confrontation, Dworik glances back one last time, and his face contorts into the most artificial smile Henry has ever seen, a smile that somehow manages to convey every type of emotion but sincerity—fear, loathing, disgust, hate, and contempt—all punctuated with a double thumbs-up gesture.

  Meredith looks up as Henry rounds the corner.

  “I had to come back,” he says, then adds with what he wants her to think of as his trademark sarcasm, “Can’t stay away from this place.”

  Her look tells him that his trademark sarcasm, always weak at best, barely qualifies as sarcasm under the circumstances. She knows, sadly, that it is true. He can’t stay away from this place. And something that is so thoroughly true cannot be considered sarcastic. She also knows that his job is not that difficult and that lately he’s been staying in his office much more than necessary because he does not want to go home. She knows that his most recent personal days were for a vasectomy and that his wife calls him with obsessive frequency and varying degrees of hysteria on his work and cell phones and that he is a paid subscriber who regularly checks in on her Web site, sometimes up to ten times a day. Her Web traffic reports tracked them right back to the corporate server and his hometown cable provider.

  “Anyone call? Anything going on?”

  Meredith also knows that he’s been given an ultimatum between China or India or wherever the hell they’re sending him and unemployment. She knows the Underarm and Eye Care Divisions are being outsourced to India. She knows that Henry knows that Dworik banged a demographer in the focus group room during a baby-wipes session last week. And she knows that Henry knew that their friend Warren in Eye Care was going to get the ax this morning yet waved at him as if everything were wonderful when he walked past his office. “Nope,” Meredith says. “No calls. And do you really want me to tell you what’s going on in this place?”

  Henry thinks about this for a second. Looks into her eyes. He’s trained himself to do this, because he’s paranoid about getting busted for staring at her breasts. “No,” he says. “I guess that’s the last thing I want to know.”

  He closes his door and stares out his window onto Park Avenue. There’s a mentally ill man standing on the median at Forty-sixth, his regular station for this time of day, waving a dog-eared Bible and screaming doomsday prophesies that Henry cannot hear. To the south, cars slide toward the traffic arch under the New York Central building and slip into its dark portal as if, he thinks, into some kind of urban genocide machine.

  When he turns around, Warren from Eye Care is standing in the doorway with Meredith. “If the windows weren’t hermetically sealed, would you?”

  Henry smiles. “The old ones in the conference room on eight open just fine. So if you don’t mind landing in an alley . . .”

  “You waved at me when you walked by this morning. Twice.”

  “The first time I didn’
t know.”

  “The second?”

  “Giffler slipped. He told me to pretend I didn’t hear it and then denied that it was going to happen at all.”

  “Which you knew was a lie.”

  “When did he tell you?” Henry asks.

  “Two minutes after he left the focus group. Right after he told you not to tell anyone.”

  Meredith backs up a step. “I guess I’ll be leaving.”

  “No,” Warren says. “Stay, Meredith. Don’t you want to know who else is getting axed?”

  “Well, for starters,” Henry replies, “I am. Or at least I’ve been given an ultimatum. But don’t worry, Meredith. I imagine you’ll be moving somewhere else once I’m gone.”

  Warren looks at Meredith, who pretends that all of this is news to her. “I feel like a jackass, Henry.”

  Henry waves him off. “They’re overhauling this division too. The deal is I can either take a call-center job in some kind of newly acquired bottled water division in a third world nation, or refuse and be fired.”

  Meredith says, “You hate to travel, Henry, and aren’t you a bit of a germphobe?”

  He smiles. Even now, all he can think of is her boobs. Boobs, boobs, boobs.

  “What will you do?” she asks.

  “One week severance per year.” Boobs. “Right, Warren?”

  “Correct. I know how I’m spending mine.”

  “Really? Giffler’s giving me two days to think about it. But I’ve already made up my mind. Beside the fact that Rachel and I are already ass-deep in debt and our house is worth half what we paid for it and I have no discernible skill beyond being guardian of the psychological secrets of parity hygiene products, I’m kind of looking forward to getting out there and maybe, you know, actually stumbling upon something that doesn’t make me feel completely ashamed of myself.”

  Warren closes the door and walks closer to Henry. “So you’re saying you didn’t like your job here?”

  “Don’t. Didn’t. Never will. You knew that, Warren.”

  Warren looks at his hands and shakes his head. “You always said it, but I thought that was just white-collar bravado.”

  “The work we do here gives white collars a bad name. We’re like bureaucratic clerks in a Kafka novel.”

  “Then why have you stayed here so long?”

  “Because I’m an asshole. Because I didn’t know what else to do. And not just with the job, with everything. You say you like it, but you’re telling me you truly enjoy what you do, Warren?”

  “Enjoy does not do justice to how I feel about my job. I love the mission statement, the product mix, the day-to-day responsibilities. I love the research, the customer interaction, the Eureka! moment that comes with a genuine insight. I never wanted a promotion or a transfer. I wanted to do this, customer insights, Eye Care, for the rest of my life. And that’s what I intend to do.”

  “But that job, if I’m not mistaken, has been assumed by a twenty-two-year-old man-child in Bangalore, India.”

  Warren nods. “Exactly.”

  “So you know of a similar job at a similar company?”

  “Not really.”

  Meredith and Henry exchange glances.

  “I’m going to get my job back, people. This exact job.”

  “Okay,” says Henry, the way he’d say it to a crazy person.

  “I’ve already done some research. I’m pretty sure I found the company in India they’re subcontracting to.”

  Meredith sits down on Henry’s black leather couch. “And you’re going to try to convince them to bring it back here?”

  “Oh, no,” Warren says, walking over to the window. “Not that. I’m going to go over there.”

  “To India?” Henry asks.

  “Uh-huh. To Bangalore. Or Mumbai. Could be Mumbai.”

  Henry looks at Meredith again, but she is staring at Warren, transfixed.

  “Listen,” Warren says. “I’m thirty. Single. Divorced. Childless. My parents are dead. My friends have all moved on with kids and spouses and midlife crises of their own. What I have . . . what I had was a job that I loved. It gave me pleasure. Fulfillment. I found it challenging. I felt as if I was helping people. Christ, Henry, listen to what you just said. And Meredith, you’ve as much as told me that if it weren’t for the medical benefits and the profit-sharing, you’d be long gone, trying to become a new media millionaire. What’s so wrong with me deciding that I want to travel halfway around the world to keep the job that I love?”

  “Warren,” Henry says. “They’ve outsourced it because it’s an unskilled job and they’re probably paying someone one tenth of what they’re paying you. You couldn’t live on that.”

  “I could in Bangalore. Besides, I’ve got one point three million dollars in the bank. One point three. With no kids and no alimony.”

  Henry does the math. The son of a bitch was here for the takeover eight years ago that he’d just missed, but still. “One point three after the crash?”

  Warren nods. “I yanked it all out way before and put half in gold, which I sold at the high.”

  “But you don’t speak the language.”

  “I’ll learn. Besides, most of the people I’ll work with speak English.”

  “I think it’s crazy, Warren,” Henry says.

  Meredith disagrees. “I think it’s adorable.”

  “I think it’s better than your plan, Henry,” Warren answers.

  Meredith nods. “Whatever that is.”

  “When Giffler told me this morning,” Warren continues, “I was devastated. But now I feel liberated, because I absolutely know what I want to do. I may not be able to do it, but knowing what that is, and being on a mission to achieve it, to make it a part of an adventure, feels incredible. What is it that you want to do, Henry?”

  Henry considers the millionaire, Bangalore-bound, reverse-outsourcing customer-service-rep pioneer and then the all-knowing, multimillionaire (probably), big-boob new-media porn star/administrative assistant in front of him and then looks back out the window. The preacher man on the median below has gone wherever he goes when this part of his shift is up. The soup line? The gym? He’s probably rich and fulfilled too. Taillights continue to flash into the black mouth of the traffic arch down the avenue before vanishing, never to be seen again. He feels the dull throbbing in his scrotal sac that the doctors said might occur for several weeks after the procedure, and in some instances for several years. As he slips his hand into his pocket to make a discreet adjustment, his phone buzzes, and the jolt of it almost causes him to leap through the supposedly unopenable window.

  ~ * ~

  Test Strip

  In the first days following your vasectomy, elevate your legs and apply ice packs liberally to the scrotal area. Lasting or significant pain is uncommon, but you should not have, and probably won’t feel like having, intercourse for several days to several weeks. Your doctor will tell you when to bring in your first semen sample for examination.

  —Snipped.com

  The pool is indeed green. A different green from the last time he’d seen it in daylight, on Sunday. Now it’s more of an Amazon jungle river green than an electric Kool-Aid, Chernobyl green, but green nonetheless.

  Henry squats and takes a test strip out of a small blue plastic bottle. He dips it in and out of the deep end of the pool and compares its small multicolored panels to their idealized version on the back label. At first he thinks he’s holding the strip upside-down, because none of the colors come close to corresponding with those on the label. But he’s wrong, it’s right. Which is sort of a relief, he thinks, because if it all lined up perfectly and the pool was still green, he’d really be screwed.

  Still, what a mess. And why does it have to be so difficult? And not just the pool but the entire, thanks to the real estate mess, drastically devalued house. So much breaking down, so much to maintain, even though it’s relatively new. Gutters to be cleaned. HVAC filters to be replaced. Furnace needing servicing, toilets clogging, wate
r-treatment systems failing, minerals building up in a $2,000 dishwasher. Cracks in the driveway, water in the foundation. Always depreciating, never easy. And no matter how well stocked his basement workbench becomes, he never seems to have the right tool for the job. And parts. The part that he’ll dedicate a Saturday morning to finding in the Home Depot’s endless aisles is always, for reasons he never finds out, wrong. Wrong length, wrong width. Wrong model, color, pattern, gauge, grit, grade, viscosity, voltage. Wrong.

  Right now, the entire house, even the parts that work, he thinks, is wrong. Four thousand state-of-the-McMansion-art square feet of wrong. Or maybe, it occurs to him, he is what’s wrong with the house. He’s the one fouling up the works, the one in need of maintenance, the one depreciating at a greater than anticipated rate. Maybe he’s the one who should be foreclosed upon.