by Ed Park
At his desk the pieces fit together quickly, and the mock-grandiose title snaps into view: MAXINE’S TOP SECRET FILES FOR WORLD DOMINATION. Penned beneath, in smaller letters, is the name of our former colleague, Jason.
Jonah is so perplexed by this discovery he closes his door and takes a nap.
< 6 >
Greek tragedy
Long ago, in another life, Crease taught English and social studies at an all-girls’ school on the Upper East Side. He left because he felt he was in a rut. Why he thought a fresh start at our office would be even marginally more interesting is not known. Everyone can make a bad career decision but we wonder if there’s something he’s not telling us.
He’s called Crease instead of Chris because last year an ex-student, part of a wealthy Greek kitchen-counter-manufacturing family, began stalking him, saying Crease, I love you, nonstop. Perhaps he did not remember her so well? But she had been able to think of nothing but Crease for the past seven years. She had returned to Athens to be with her family but was now back, to study communications at NYU but really to be closer to him. Nonstop. It had the makings of classical tragedy. She would stand in the lobby, telling her story to anyone who would listen, including the Sprout, while Crease snuck in through a side door and took the freight elevator up.
One afternoon Laars saw her chasing our hero down the street, shouting, Crease, Crease! collapsing in sobs at the corner as he jumped into a cab. Pru began taking an interest in Crease. She’d hardly noticed him before the stalking started.
Apostasy
Of course, Crease was already a Maxine worshiper by then. But now he’s announced that he’s breaking away from the pack.
Laars says that in feudal Japan they would suspend Jesuit missionaries by their feet and dangle them in pits of offal. The people in charge would cut little notches behind the ears so that blood would get in their eyes and noses until they broke down and renounced their faith.
Laars thinks this is what must have happened to Crease, Crease who once showed us a sonnet he wrote that used the letters of Maxine’s name to head each line.
Crease reports that those days are over, finis. Yesterday he took the elevator up with the most beautiful woman in the world. He felt extremely self-conscious because of his allergies. He had just concluded a prolonged sequence of sneezing, nose blowing, and eyedrop application. There was the uncomfortable sensation that all his head orifices were leaking in assorted unspeakable ways.
He wanted to say something but couldn’t think of the words. All air had left his lungs. He looked at her profile for one second. Then he looked at the ground. It was just too much beauty in too small a space.
She hit 7.
The seventh floor is shared by a small ad agency, a nonprofit dedicated to giving pets to the homeless elderly, and a vaguely menacing telemarketing concern called Robodial Unlimited or something.
Crease blithely ignores the last option and deduces that she’s therefore either a creative type or a saint.
I think I’ve seen her before, says Jonah. She’s sort of average height, skinny?
Thin, says Crease. Thin and tall. And Eurasian, do people still say Eurasian?
Thin and tall is Crease’s type, though he himself is on the short side and skews endomorphic. And she has this amazing British accent.
Apparently she had asked him to hold the lift.
Is she the one with a lot of makeup? asks Pru.
Pru might have a crush on Crease. Some days it’s clear that she does. Other times, not so much. She is thin but not terribly tall. She might have a chance if she lost the nose ring, but the rest of us are not sure that a chance with Crease is the key to happiness. In the past some of us thought we detected sparks between them. But the days of possible reciprocation seem to have come to an end.
I can’t stop thinking about Half Asian British Accent Woman, he e-mails Laars at 3 in the morning. Laars forwards the message to all of us.
The haunted résumé
Pru says, I have this phantom line-space dilemma and it’s driving me nuts. She’s working on her résumé but the computer keeps giving her a double line space in certain sections, though she only wants a single. There’s no way around it. She’s tried copying the text, scrubbing it with the freebie scrubbing application she’s downloaded, and pasting it into a fresh document. She’s tried changing the font, bolding it, shrinking it. She’s tried rebooting. She’s tried e-mailing it to her home computer and then re-e-mailing it to herself at work, hoping the bugs will fly off in transit.
Twice Pru has simply started new documents, new résumés, typing everything in as if for the first time, and as soon as she tries to save it, the double line spaces pop up. It’s as if the computer loves her and doesn’t want her to leave. The computer wants her to stay in her cubicle within earshot of the vending machines and be miserable for three more years, for five, for ten.
Pru doesn’t want to call the IT guy, because then he’ll know she’s planning to leave and can blackmail her. His name is Giles and none of us trust him. There’s a newer IT guy, Robb with two bs, but we’re not sure about him, either. Some of us bonded with Otto, others avoided him. We’ve only unanimously liked Lisa, but that was four IT people ago.
Jenny, who knows something about everything, takes a look at the document and says the problem might be a sequence of letters somewhere in the résumé that’s being read as a command by the word-processing program, causing it to throw in the unwanted extra line space.
In other words maybe it’s her name that’s messing things up. Maybe P-R-U launches some sort of word-processing monkey wrench.
This is possible, since we use an obscure program called Microsoft Word.
Pru says she’s not going to change her name just so she can have a clean résumé. But all of us think that maybe she will. Or at least use her full name, Prudence, which she hates and which would only get her a job at a library in a nunnery on Nova Scotia.
The point
For the past three months Pru’s been saying, I have to get out of this place. Lizzie started muttering similar sentiments two weeks ago. Jonah has been saying Time to leave for six months now. We have all been saying it, in some fashion, at assorted volumes, without quite realizing it. Perhaps we’ve all been saying it ever since we started here, in our dreams, in our strained and silent thoughts, the right brain murmuring it to the left, or is it the other way around.
Laars has a different mantra. You can hear him say it as he slices through his junk mail every morning with an old butter knife: What is the point?
Long-term strategies
It can’t be stressed enough: You never want the Sprout to call you in and tell you what a terrific job you’re doing. The Original Jack and Jason and Jules all had these meetings, and then were gone inside a month.
The Sprout calls you in, intercoms invisible bigwigs, chortles about fantastic results and brilliant numbers. He praises you to the skies, says your work is fabulous. Where did that come from? We all hate that word and want to kill it.
The speakerphone static is so bad that only the Sprout can understand what they’re saying. He laughs at what you imagine are jokes, turns serious at what might be grim statements of purpose, pulls a face in inscrutable fake alliance with you when the entities on the other end say something ludicrous. But of course you can’t make out a word. That room is torture. You smile and stare out the window, hallucinating insane methods of escape.
Lizzie has survived two such meetings this year but knows she won’t make it through another. She has started backing up various work files by e-mailing them home, in case she needs to look for other employment. She does it surreptitiously. Her résumé is all typed up and suffers no double line spaces, though Laars has noticed that most of it is in Baskerville except for two lines that are in Baskerville Old Face. He was going to mention this to her but she’d already made a hundred copies on expensive heavy bond.
Ideally such a job hunt will be superfluous. Lizzie’s long-term strateg
y is to marry a handsome Swedish baron or win the lottery. Pru also wouldn’t mind marrying a baron, though she has never specified a country of origin. Maybe they’ll fight over the same one—a slumming baron looking to get fixed up with a bitter but peppy American girl in a faded Almond Joy T-shirt, a girl with her hair in a ponytail. Laars says that’s a recognized fetish in some parts of the world.
The Original Jack used to express interest in dating a socialite. A socialite or a Rockette, was his line. We wonder what he’s up to these days.
The lottery
We all play the lottery. We buy our tickets individually because we don’t want to have to divvy up all that loot in case the numbers come up right.
Another plan
Laars says, I want to be a househusband.
The wording
Lizzie and Crease are on the elevator with three people who are going up to seven, Starbucks in hand. Crease is on the verge of asking if they know his half-Asian mystery woman. He’s working on the wording, figuring out how to be charming rather than creepy, but there’s no way. I am a lonely man, he might begin.
Lizzie and Crease reach our floor. He casts a wounded-sheepdog look as the door shuts and the carriage continues its ascent into paradise.
< 7 >
Don’t forget the files for the thing
Upon initial acquaintance, the Sprout displays the ingratiating optimism characteristic of all Canadians. Twice a year, on Canada Day and at the holiday party, he wears his maple-leaf tie. We think he’d like it if one of us were from Ottawa or wherever, to talk about forgotten hockey teams and spell colour with a u.
Baking-soda-white teeth glint behind thin, disturbingly kissable lips. He has a superb, full head of hair, sleek, except when that famously unruly sprig is driven to express itself.
He doesn’t have a mustache, but possesses the sort of meaty upper-lip real estate that suggests a mustache once thrived there and might return.
Some of us have noticed that he smells very nice—a faint clean soap smell basically but also something else. He and Maxine should form a rare-good-smell club. The Sprout is not conventionally handsome but not ugly, which for men of his age means handsome. He went to a community college, transferred to Hamilton, then to Cornell. Or possibly he’s from Hamilton, Ontario? Jules used to think the school was Colgate, but that was because of the teeth. The community college thing also came from Jules, who said he got it from Emma, the former receptionist who supposedly had a crush on the Sprout. None of this is necessarily true.
Passing his office we often hear him say, Memorandum, then start talking, a stream of numbers and abbreviations, with very little in the way of actual sentences made up of words. Other times we’ve heard him call his home phone and leave a message for himself: Hey Russell, it’s Russell, don’t forget to bring the files for the thing.
It’s possible he wants us to hear how casual he is: The files for the thing.
Sometimes he leaves messages for himself that are just scattered words: showerhead or onions or Napoleon thing at nine.
We’ve deduced that the Sprout’s cell phone plays Pachelbel’s Canon when Sheila calls. It plays Chopsticks when his kid calls.
He has an MBA that he got through distance learning. At least three times a year he is sent to a management seminar in some place like Syracuse. Last year he went to Australia all by himself. Nobody knows why.
Don’t start liking the Sprout too much
Jules was there when the Sprout fired Emma. She was in the middle of answering a call and he told her to put the phone down and come into his office. It was over in less than a minute. She was never replaced, and for a while the Sprout actually handled the switchboard calls from his desk. Most historians consider this episode part of the Firings, even though it happened several weeks before the real slaughter began.
The Fates
The Sprout lives with his wife, Sheila, and their kid, out in a leafy suburb that recently split off from a longer-standing one. Sheila is taller and older than him, a very attractive redhead we’ve glimpsed exactly once, at a holiday party. She is a VP at an investment bank and additionally has family money, according to Jules.
We wonder if Maxine has a disc on her.
Right out of college Sheila acted in a B movie, Tempting Fate, that we haven’t been able to get our hands on. We think it’s the same Sheila. She plays Angie Fate, the skeptical younger sister of the hot astrologer heroine, Linda Fate. Both Jack II and Laars have plugged Tempting Fate into their eBay alert lists but the movie is not available on videocassette let alone DVD and never will be.
Jules claims he saw it as a teenager, though admits this could be a false memory implanted by his last therapist. He thinks there was a nude scene, not at all impossible given the genre, light teen sex comedy. That it should involve horses, horseshoe crabs, or a hearse—Jules can’t quite remember which—is altogether less likely.
The syllabus
Books on the Sprout’s shelf:
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu
Analects, by Confucius
The Prince, by Niccolò Machiavelli
Prophecies, by Nostradamus
Something called How to Sell Yourself Every Time
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, 9th edition
The American Heritage Dictionary, 4th edition
Roget’s Thesaurus
Complete Idiot’s Guide to Microsoft PowerPoint 2000
The inventory
Other items in or atop the Sprout’s bookcase include a framed photo of Sheila, a battered candleholder without a candle, an unidentified liqueur, a plastic ukulele, and the White Pages from two years ago with the shrinkwrap still on.
A shorter Maxine
We imagine that the Sprout has a mistress. This is a regular topic over drinks. We drink and visualize a shorter Maxine, someone with eyes like Sheila’s, someone much younger or fifteen years his senior. The mistress wears her sunglasses on top of her head.
All of us have imagined the Sprout having sex. This just must be the way it is everywhere, an occupational hazard for Sprouts in offices nationwide: You become a permanent installation in your underlings’ minds. Every night the odds are that at least one of them dreams of you.
All of us have imagined him with Maxine. Some of us have imagined ourselves with Sheila. Even Pru—especially Pru. For Pru it’s a fantasy that culminates in her inheriting all of Sheila’s old family money. The Sprout is demoted to groundskeeper and occasional sex slave.
Pru would never tell her therapist this but she’s happy to give us the details.
Mathemating
Laars says there’s a mating rule: You can go out with someone half your age, plus seven years—that’s your lower limit. By the same formula, your upper limit would be determined by doubling your age and subtracting seven. This is not helpful, really, or even relevant, but we amuse ourselves with calculations for a while. For the rest of the afternoon.
Last names first
Every payday we go to Henry in HR and he asks who we are, last names first, though he should know us by now. We oblige him, as if bringing up the issue would risk stoppage of pay. He must have attended an HR meeting in which it was stressed that check disbursers must orally confirm the identity of each recipient. Still, Henry invariably confuses the two Asian workers, giving one the other’s check before stopping himself, finding the right one. He also did this to the two black workers, before one of them was fired. He used to apologize for the confusion but even he realizes how ridiculous it’s become.
Does anyone remember anything about Jason?
Jonah is still trying to figure out the mystery of the CD that Maxine broke into pieces and threw away, her plan for world domination lost forever. Jason, it said. He still has the shards in his desk drawer and every so often will stare at them moodily, his reflection evocatively fractured.
Surely the title was tongue in cheek. But why did it say Jason underneath? He’s been gone since the Firings, a late October v
ictim. Jill was close to him but she says the last time she saw him was at the holiday party. He had crashed it, dressed like the Sprout.
Wait, he was at the holiday party? asks Lizzie.
We remember Jules had a love-hate relationship with Jason. One time they didn’t speak to each other for a month, a dispute over a paper jam. Actually, there was rarely any love—it was more or less hate all the time. Both of them are long gone now. The rest of us liked Jason but now we can’t remember a thing.
He punched the wall that one time, offers Jenny. Way too intense.
Laars coughs. That was me.
Pru wonders if Maxine has a disc for each of us. She imagines files full of closed-circuit footage from tiny cameras hidden in our monitors.
Jack II floats a theory: that Maxine and Jason were lovers, and the disc has highlights of their afternoon romps. Lizzie points out the obvious.
Wait, says Jack II. Jason was gay?
Crease puts up his hand for a high five.
Jonah points out that Maxine only started in the office earlier this year—February, maybe March. Meaning she wouldn’t have been around at all while Jason was still here. It can take a while for new presences to make themselves felt, but Jonah’s chronology seems sound. Maxine and Jason never overlapped. Jack II still thinks we should try to glue the pieces together and see if the thing will play.
< 8 >
Major tool
Jenny has stopped coming out with us for drinks, either on the advice of her life coach or because she has a serious boyfriend. We’ve met him, though his name escapes us. He has a baby face and incipient dreadlocks and favors the loose-fitting, heavily braided clothes associated with the better class of sherpa. He tutors inner-city kids in math. That’s so great, Pru says. They have the most difficulty with division, though this is of course true for everyone.
He splits a huge loft with a roommate, an actress who is never around. Pru went to a New Year’s bash there and can’t imagine how he affords it.