by Steve Himmer
So for this new submanager to notice my name in his files, to ask himself what, exactly, I was being paid for out of his budget… it was less of a shock to be fired than to hear someone speaking my name, and to hear my telephone ring when he called me into his office. The shock was being reminded that I had a job so long since I’d actually done it.
First he took a stab at small talk, speculating about the year’s Wimbledon prospects for a player who had been retired a decade at least. Years earlier, before I had been forgotten, before this particular submanager’s time, a rumor had somehow started that I was a big tennis fan, which I wasn’t and never had been. One of the best things about being forgotten at work was the cessation of tennis-themed holiday cards and questions about tournaments and players I’d never heard of but felt obliged to offer cryptic opinions on each time I was asked. I had even taken to reading up on the world of tennis so I wouldn’t let down my side of those forced conversations, and pretending to have insider knowledge I wasn’t able to share. My co-workers seemed to enjoy that I knew things they didn’t, so they deferred to whatever I told them even though I made it all up. Maybe it had been more satisfying to know me as “the tennis guy” than to wonder who I actually was, and then it became easier not to know me at all.
Once he had exhausted the tennis chat I’m sure he’d planned out in advance, the submanager asked about my role at Second Nature, and I knew where the conversation was headed.
We sat for a moment, neither one of us speaking, and perhaps he was hoping as hard as I was for silence to carry the message. I couldn’t tell him what I did at Second Nature because I didn’t do much of anything, not anymore, and the file wouldn’t say otherwise. He might have been hoping to avoid firing me in his own voice. So we played our game of silent chicken, avoiding each other’s eyes until the awkwardness had done its job and I grew tired of waiting to be told what I already knew.
“Ah,” I said, and rose from my chair.
The submanager spoke without showing a hint of surprise or acknowledging that a long silence had passed. “You have two weeks of vacation pay coming, and a generous…,” he paused to shuffle some papers and find the one he was looking for, “a not unreasonable severance package.” He stood and reached a hand toward me across his desk, and his forearm knocked over a framed photograph of an ugly little girl who, for some reason, was facing the visitor’s chair instead of his own.
“It’s not you, of course, Finch. Tough times. You know how it is. And you should be proud that you’ve done such a fine job with…,” he scanned his papers again, “at brand awareness. You should interpret this… readjustment as testimony to how valuable you’ve been to the Second Nature family. How effectively you’ve fulfilled our goals. And if there’s anything we can do for you in the future, naturally…”
I nodded as the submanager pumped away at my hand, grinding my knuckles against one another like a fistful of marbles. Then I walked back to my cube, past co-workers intensely interested in computer screens flickering with meaningless spreadsheets, conspicuous in their casual attempts to avoid looking at me as I passed. I sat in my chair for a moment, rolling back and forth on the semiopaque plastic carpet protector, wondering if there was a way I could steal it. It was, in fact, a very comfortable chair; the carpet protector I could do without. Of the things in the cube I might actually be able to take out of the building, there wasn’t much I wanted to keep. There weren’t any photographs tacked to my walls, no figurines, statuettes, or novelty trophies standing on the desk or on the adjustable shelves. Not a single piece of promotional swag from the sales conferences I never attended, not even a tote bag or obscenely outsized golf umbrella. I kept no extra shoes under my desk and no spare sweater for days when the office was cold—and the office had never been cold, I realized then for the first time, and it had never been hot for that matter; it was always generically, uncomfortably tepid. There was just the computer, not actually mine, and a filing cabinet overstuffed long ago with paper versions of all the same documents stored on the computer and backed up in several locations both on-site and off. And there was a plastic model of the company logo, which I suppose was some sort of plant but had always looked to me like a Martian.
In the end I took only my miniature fountain, in its gray basin made to look like concrete, whatever the material actually was. I pulled the fountain’s plug from the overcrowded power strip under my desk, and the whir of the electric motor had never seemed so loud as when it went quiet. The water flowed for a split-second longer due to leftover force from the tiny vacuum the pump had created, then settled into the basin, becalmed.
The computer had fallen asleep during my meeting with the submanager, but I bumped the mouse while moving the fountain and the monitor came to life with a ping. I might have made final postings for each of my online personas, bringing their imaginary lives to some closure, but the idea of dozens of people who had never existed simply vanishing all over the web had an appeal I couldn’t resist. And all of those voices falling silent at once, having said everything they had to say, remains—even all these years later—the most satisfying accomplishment of my tenure at Second Nature. So I set the fountain down on the desk and went online one more time to erase all my records of usernames and their passwords, removing bookmarks to those many sites created by me but belonging, most likely, most legally, to Second Nature. I didn’t know then if anyone would replace me, and I don’t know if anyone did, but I know they were never able to make my congregation of characters speak to sell plastic plants or to celebrate birthdays or just to vent about a bad day at work. All the lives I’d created and lived in those years went into stasis for as long as they stayed on their servers. For as long as their archives existed and their permalinks worked.
When I had finished erasing my online tracks, I lifted the fountain in both hands and wove through the cubicle maze toward the exit, trailing a dark thread of water across gray industrial carpet. As I walked to my car, I smiled to think that the trail, too, would vanish within a few minutes, and I would go back to being forgotten.
3
The first weekend of my unemployment passed like any other: I watched reruns of shows I couldn’t remember from when they were new, and I went grocery shopping in the middle of the night and washed clothes in the quiet hours of morning when the laundry room of my apartment complex was otherwise empty.
Saturday night I went to the movies; I bought my ticket online then fed my credit card to a machine in the lobby to claim it. The movie was a sequel. I hadn’t seen the original but that didn’t matter—it was an action thriller, full of explosions and car chases just like the explosions and chases in other movies, only more so because this one was newest. Right away I knew what would happen and also what wouldn’t, so I could settle into the film like I might settle into a long bus ride through a landscape that never changes and is familiar from the first moment on. I stayed awake through the whole movie, but when it was over I felt like I’d had a restful night’s sleep because it had passed through me as easily as a dream, only smoother because there were fewer surprises.
After being out late at one movie, then watching another one at home on TV that was more or less the same as the first, I slept through most of Sunday and it wasn’t until evening that I remembered I had no job to show up for the next morning. Sunday nights I usually watched TV and thought about what all the people I’d invented and spoken for on the company’s marketing blogs were doing over the weekend, and what they would share with the world the next day, but none of that mattered now. They weren’t doing anything anymore, and they would have nothing to share and no means of sharing. I could have kept on writing their lives at home, with my own computer, but they’d always lived on the company’s time, stolen time, and that made their lives worth living alongside my own.
I ironed my shirts for the week ahead, per usual, as if I would need them, and I scrubbed the floors in the kitchen and bathroom of my bland, boxy apartment—a kitchen, a bedroom, a f
amily room all to myself. I did all the chores I could think of, even sorting the pantry full of canned goods and packaged meals, until I was finally tired enough to fall asleep without thinking for too long in bed.
I’d turned off my alarm clock, but Monday morning I awoke at the same time as always, at the time routine had trained my body to wake. I had my coffee and oatmeal then sat at the kitchen table for hours. I needed to look for a job but I knew there weren’t any to find. Everyone knew that, because we’d been told and reminded by TV and by papers and by each other for months. So I thought I might take some time, a few days at least, to do something I’d always wanted to do but had never found the time for, or I might go somewhere new in that city I knew only vaguely despite living there for my whole life. But after a few hours’ trying I still hadn’t thought of anything I wanted to do or anywhere I wanted to go. Not one idea, not one buried desire or secret scheme came to mind, though I sat at the table until I was hungry for lunch. So I ate a sandwich instead.
During the afternoon I wondered, out of habit, what my bloggers were doing and then I remembered again they were gone. So I wondered instead what my former co-workers were doing. I didn’t know their names or what their jobs were, but I knew that in the afternoon the man with the mud-flap mustache on his red face would stand at the window and pretend he was looking through files. The bird-legged woman who always wore sneakers and ankle-high socks would power walk laps around the department after eating lunch in a rush at her desk. I imagined this Monday going ahead like any other for them, perhaps so ordinary they hadn’t noticed the absence of my invisible presence in the far corner where they never went. To them, I might exist no more or no less than I had a few days before.
After a few days my inner clock and calendar were so screwed up that I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t know when I was hungry. I stopped putting the shades up or opening the curtains, and I rarely had a sense of what time it was, day or night, except when a TV show—morning news, or late-night talk—gave the hour away.
I watched the news about how many people were losing their jobs, and I pictured them all alone in apartments with the shades down and watching the news like I was. I watched reports about companies going bankrupt and employees losing pensions, and owners disappearing with billions of dollars or giving themselves massive retirement payouts. People complained and the news anchors shared their pain and the next day was the same thing all over. There were aerial shots of job fairs at malls, where crowds of the unemployed, papers flapping in their hands, stretched across parking lots like an invading army. And there were also stories about the rich—the very rich, wealth on a scale no one else could imagine—paring back their lifestyles, at least in public, for fear of anyone knowing how rich they still were.
There were stories about the very young, the just starting out, graduating college with no hope of finding a job. They were interviewed and sounded genuinely disappointed they might not be able to work, and I thought if they only knew. Other stories showed older workers, close to retirement but not there quite yet, who knew they wouldn’t be hired again because of their age. There weren’t many stories about people like me, people at neither the top nor the bottom, too young to retire but long past starting out.
I thought of how my bloggers would write about that, blaming the recession on people like me, on companies like Second Nature creating too many products nobody needed and employing too many people who produced nothing but blog posts that had no real need to be written or read. Then it became a bit much so I imagined turning off a computer and making those voices go quiet again.
With so many offices closing, and no new tenants moving into their left-behind spaces, I pictured acres and acres of Second Nature greenery abandoned in cedar-chip beds and on the banks of lobby lagoons, the plastic plants as green and efficient in an empty building as they had been with people around. No water, no sunlight, no pruning, no problem. Whatever happened, whoever came or went in the offices and hallways around them, those self-sufficient plants I had rooted there would be fine.
The news said attacks by fired workers were on the rise, people returning for revenge on the companies they’d been fired from, so I tried blaming the submanager for my lost job and for my boredom. I tried to work myself up with fantasies of storming his office, guns blazing, or of filling his desk drawers with snakes and with bombs, or of a scorched-earth email and online campaign to destroy his credit, his family, his reputation, his life. All my dozens of bloggers teaming up to drive the poor bastard into ruined submission. I pictured myself breaking into his house and waiting there for him, his wife and his children hog-tied and duct-taped around me. But I didn’t know if he was married, or if he had kids, and as much as I tried to convince myself all of this was his fault, I couldn’t get angry at someone whose name I didn’t know and who hadn’t been part of my life before or after the few minutes in which I was fired. He hadn’t hovered in the background of my working days, waiting for me to slip up. He wasn’t an archenemy, just a middle-management toady with no more control over his own fate than I had.
I lay on the couch thinking about all the different ways from relief to violence in which a person might respond to losing a job, and I decided which of my bloggers would respond in which ways. I drafted posts in my head about their newfound freedom to pursue pottery or poetry or Zen Buddhism. Others I imagined hurt and betrayed, missing their co-workers and blaming their bosses, and one of my bloggers—a middle-aged man, single and older than he expected to be without a family or a genuine, productive direction in life—I imagined buying a gun on the way home from work, nursing his anger all weekend, but cooling down before storming the office on Monday. I imagined he was a triumph for all those HR experts who advise that terminations should happen on Friday, for exactly the reasons my blogger had shown. Not that they’d ever know how close I’d imagined he’d come.
Some of my bloggers weren’t as stable or steady as others. One of them, I knew right away, would kill himself instead of hurting anyone else. But he would have a hard time working out how. I stared at the plaster swirls on the ceiling and thought of pills, and of trains, and of bombs strapped to chests. But none of that would appeal to him. He wasn’t selfish, just sad. He had two rules: number one, no mess left behind, and number two, no shocking discovery of a body that might damage someone for life.
It took me all night to settle on the most polite, selfless suicide I could muster on his behalf: he would sneak into a restaurant’s kitchen after closing and enter its walk-in freezer with a body bag and sleeping pills. Before taking the pills, he’d hang a note on the outside of the door asking restaurant staff not to open the freezer themselves but to call the police to do so. Then, in the freezer, he would take all the pills and zip himself into the bag. The opaque body bag would prevent anyone but trained professionals from accidentally seeing the corpse, and the freezer would keep it from decaying and creating a stench.
Satisfied with the suicide I’d scripted for my cipher, secure in knowing it would meet his needs and give him the end he most wanted, I fell asleep on the couch and snuck through the longest part of the day, one day among many, a long string of days stretching far out before me without a job or a prospect of finding one soon, and not sure I wanted a new job at all. I only knew I had more time than I knew what to do with, and there was nothing I wanted to do.
4
Those hikers I hid from have stayed. I thought they passed by yesterday afternoon, but the sounds I heard last night must have been the two of them setting up camp. I might have known, I should have realized what I was hearing as I sat in the glow of my fire, but it’s been so many years since I heard the clatter of two people working together that human labors were far from my mind as I guessed at the source of those sounds. The rustling of unnatural fabrics, the whisper of sleeping bags, backpacks, and tent, were like the wind in high leaves, and the chatter of voices was lost in the murmur of the river that carries all the way up to my cave, when the wind blows
the right way. So I didn’t think anything of it until the half-risen sun told the truth of those sounds and showed me those hikers this morning.
Just before dawn I stepped out of my cave for the morning’s first piss, that glorious relief more worth rising for with every day older I get, and the orange dome of their tent shone through the mist off the river like a mushroom cloud on the horizon. My eyes were a bit better that morning. Bright as it was I didn’t notice at first, too busy stretching eyes-closed in my doorway, fingertips playing my xylophone ribs, scratching the thick brown calluses of my feet—like overshoes of my own skin, I was thinking the other day—against the rough rocks of the fire ring outside my cave, and it’s a wonder they didn’t wake at the creaks and the cracks of my back or the rattling of my old bones.
I can’t say how old exactly, but neither too old nor too young, somewhere in between; I was forty-three or perhaps forty-four when I moved to this cave and stopped counting, but it must be much more than a decade since then. Without a calendar, without holidays marking the passage of time, and without anyone else to tell me it’s passed, one day is the same as another. In this land more or less without seasons, my only clocks are the sun’s daily arc and the moon’s wax and wane, and the whitening of my own whiskers—and those bleached white as bones so quickly after I came here that it may well have happened all at once on the day I arrived. So if I went by my whiskers to measure time, they’d tell me I’ve been here much longer than I think I have, and that I’m older than I think I am.
I’m sure those hikers know what year it is, in their bubble as orange as the sunrise behind it, on the edge of the blackberry patch that’s crept toward my garden for years, the brambles that fence in my food. I had to blink a few times before I could be sure that blurred orange blot wasn’t a strange second sun. My eyes take longer and longer to wake every morning, even on one of their better days, and I had to creep close to find out the shape was a tent.