by Ed Park
More and more the parties are in strange parts of Brooklyn. Everybody lives in Brooklyn now, says Pru, who doesn’t realize most of us live in Brooklyn now. We like that she complains about Brooklyn—the distances, the erratic subways, having to take a forty-dollar car service back home. She lives uptown in a place her stepfather’s first wife snapped up as a pied-à-terre for like five dollars and some bottle caps back in the ’70s.
But she has to go to the parties, and the parties are now in Brooklyn. She has no conception of how the neighborhoods fit together, which trains go where. The directions are elaborate, vaguely ritualistic. She writes them down and fears losing them. She tries to memorize them but can’t. She keeps them in her coat pocket and refers to them repeatedly on the subway, shading the scrap of paper with her hand. Broadcasting your outsider status could be fatal. Stay in the last car. When you exit the station, take the staircase on the right. Walk three blocks north toward the big clock, staying on the west side of the street. The deli should be on your left. If you see the laundromat, you’re going the wrong way.
Pru says, It should be Walk three blocks and say your prayers. She has the sense that if she doesn’t follow the directions to the letter, she will die and her body will never be found. All of us crave this sort of excitement.
Budapest
At one party Pru sees none other than the Original Jack. He looks a little rounder, but since he was rail-thin before, this means he’s basically perfect. His skin glows. He’s not exactly handsome but Pru says there’s a certain newfound allure. The baldness is a recent development but somehow it works.
We’re working on a theory that everyone looks better once they leave the office forever.
The party was thrown by someone Pru went to school with. The way she says this makes it sound like they dated briefly freshman year until he slept with her roommate. At first the party was the height of awkwardness, people sitting in a circle and pushing potato chips around their plates, but then at 11 more people showed up and things got slightly more fun. There was disco music and people who came dressed up as scientists.
The main lesson we take away is that the Original Jack is somehow a consultant and makes more money than all of us combined. When she saw him, he had just returned from a business trip to Budapest, which he pronounced in an authentically unfamiliar way.
Also, I think he was hitting on me.
Lizzie makes a how-disgusting face but Pru just shrugs.
More time with the cats
Maxine calls a meeting in the fourth-floor conference room, then cancels it. Instead she wants to meet each of us individually, one person every twenty minutes, beginning at noon. This can’t be good.
We drift toward the coffee machine. Nobody feels like making any. In truth nobody has made coffee in weeks. The pots hold bluish water, a nontoxic chemical cleanser that theoretically leaves no cleanser taste. We’re not convinced. We’ve been buying our coffee at the Bad Starbucks or at the new tasty hippie coffee van that has replaced the mobile taco stand around the corner. Laars thinks the hippie coffee van is maybe run by Scientologists.
Scientologists can’t drink coffee, says Crease.
You’re thinking of Mormons, says Laars.
Jonah jokes that he’s going to get fired. He wants to get fired, he tells us, provided he gets severance. If he does, he’ll go to Mexico again for a few months. Then he’ll come back and collect unemployment and spend more time with his cats. He blushes as he says this, which makes cats sound like a euphemism for something else.
He says he’s nearly done with night school. This is news to us. While we’ve been sitting around and complaining, he’s been complaining and improving himself. We feel he should have told us. Maybe we would have enrolled in night school as well.
< 12 >
That sinking feeling
Work picks up. There’s hardly time to talk. Pru doesn’t think Maxine wants to fire us. She says there’s no way the company can function if they cut anyone else.
We agree. They must know that, says Laars. They can’t be that stupid.
But actually they can. And then time will pass, and the company will still be afloat, and we’ll wonder who’s next.
Maxine should fire herself, says Jonah. When did he grow a mustache? It’s light, much lighter than his hair.
I’m getting that sinking feeling, says Laars. He fiddles with the coffeemaking elements, but decides against the actual making of coffee.
I need a smoke, says Pru, heading for the elevator. Crease is about to go with her, then remembers he’s quit smoking. He wants to hang out and see if HABAW will pass, but the other day his former student came hurtling down the sidewalk, excited shouts of Crease! filling the air.
We stand around nervously for another minute. Maxine struts by with a weird vicious but kind of hot smile and we all watch her as she passes.
She’s really amazing, says Laars. Like, different-life-form amazing.
Later we hear Jonah running the wooden rod across the back of his Mexican distress frog. The verdict is still out on his mustache.
Some percentage
There’s a meeting. It’s pretty bad. Some of us wonder if it’s a dream.
I want each of you to think about what it is you’re bringing to the table, the Sprout says.
After work, we compare notes over drinks. It might as well have been over potato chips, though. We’re too frazzled to drink.
According to Laars, Maxine said that the company was deducting 15 percent from everyone’s gross salary to cover an unexpected rise in costs, a one-time-only thing. Jonah understood that, in order to comply with new city and state taxes, a 15 percent cut was necessary, over two pay periods, meaning 15 percent each paycheck, or 7.5 each for a total of 15? We are trying to remember how percentages work. On a napkin Lizzie has drawn the little hut you make when you’re about to divide a number, but she hasn’t written any numbers down.
Pru came away with the sense that the Sprout insisted on trimming 20 percent from half of the paychecks and 10 percent from the other half, but that she, Maxine, had approached him with a flat 15 percent across the board. And Laars is under the impression she had told him 1.5 percent, but for the rest of the year.
It’s like our own little Rashomon. We are either the victims of deliberate obfuscation or we are all complete morons. The Californians are going to have a field day with us, Jack II says.
Vow of chastity
Laars’s self-Googling has reached another level. He keeps turning up more stuff: more people with his name, more women he’s been involved with. Both his doppelgängers and his exes are having more fun, leading more interesting lives, than he is.
His arms hurt. He’s in a rut and needs to lift the curse. He restates his vow of chastity to Jenny, which makes everyone think that he must have recently broken it, that he’s hitting on Jenny, or preferably both.
I’ve been thinking about going to church, he says.
In the meantime, Laars plans to stop all gallivanting and carousing, all pointless crushes and ludicrous Maxine obsessing, all shadowy self-abuse. The Googling will end. He is going to become a serious worker and a spiritual being.
The Sprout overhears this last part and laughs: Hoo-hoo!
Valid actions
Lizzie drags an icon out of a cluttered corner of her screen but lets go too soon. It falls into the document she’s working on, which happens to be her résumé. The icon bounces back to its starting place with a boinggg noise she’s never heard before. She learns that Word cannot insert a file into itself.
Word can seriously go fuck itself, she mutters. She’s been talking to herself a lot lately but maybe we all have.
Later she’s trying to put a chart into a different document but gets scolded: That is not a valid action for footnotes.
This is funny—the quick response, the finger-wagging strictness—but it also creeps her out. She calls up Pru except she accidentally dials her own extension and the little screen say
s, You cannot call yourself.
Our machines know more than we do, Pru thinks. Even their deficiencies and failures are instructive. They are trying to tell us about the limits of the human, the nature of the possible. Or something like that, says Pru, who has been reading a novel about cyborgs set in the year 2012.
The message that kills us is the one that pops up on the rare occasions when we remember to shut everything down for the weekend, just before we turn the computer off.
Are you sure you want to quit?
The misrecognitions
Jonah sees Jules in a coffee shop on Twenty-second, wearing a baseball cap and glasses with enormous frames, just one millimeter away from being joke glasses. Jules says his toaster-oven restaurant is closed for renovations. Something exploded last week.
Now I have time to polish off my screenplay, he says, thwacking a grubby stack of paper perched unsteadily on the chair beside him.
Despite a lack of interest in all but three or four films ever projected in the history of cinema, Jules was apparently hard at work on a script before he was let go. The title is Personal Daze—Daze with a z, he says, which confuses Jonah until he sees the cover page.
Jules has a younger brother whose friend is friends with one of the people who wrote the movie about the stolen horse. You need a foot in the door, he explains.
It all came together shortly before he got fired, during his brief exile on the sixth floor. Otto in IT wanted to try out Glottis, a fancy new voice-recognition program, so he hooked it up to Jules’s computer and asked him to say anything. This pretty much became his job for that last strange month. He would read newspaper stories aloud, bits of whatever book was at hand. Otto would study the results. Jules began to freestyle, yapping about the weather, lunch, things he overheard on the way to the office, childhood. He did different voices. Before long he was making up a story in which certain characters reappeared. The screenplay was born.
Jules would experiment with how low he could speak and still produce legible results on the screen. At first Glottis gave him a lot of errors, thirty misrecognitions for every hundred words. Over time it adapted to his voice, learned to negotiate the peculiar Julesian cadences and frequent slurring, and the error rate went down significantly.
Still, there was something wild about the words that would occasionally appear—surreal juxtapositions, such as when a cop character tells a perp to Keep wool instead of Keep cool or the periodic greeting Jello!
Sometimes when Jules wanted to open a file via Glottis, words would appear on the screen: Open fire!
The title, Personal Daze, also came about this way. Let’s just say it’s the name of someone I met, a customer at the club, says Jules. I don’t want to talk about it.
A bad egg, says Jonah.
Worse than that—this guy was like the bad chicken!
How can Personal Daze be someone’s name? Jules won’t elaborate, as if he still fears retribution.
Jules dictated reams of material during work hours. Every night he’d boil down his ramblings to half a page. By the time he was fired he’d compiled nearly 150 pages of fast-moving, wisecracking, bittersweet dialogue.
Now he estimates he only has twenty-five pages left to go before he can stop composing and begin revising. But somehow it’s harder to write now that he doesn’t work in the office.
You need something to push against, he says. He compares the creative process to an oyster requiring sand for a pearl. Also, I need an ending.
He attributes his current writer’s block to the fact that he no longer has the voice-recognition system. Glottis costs a bundle, as does the brand of microphone headset with just the right sensitivity. He misses the surreptitious muttering, the magical appearance of words on the glowing monitor like a parade of ants materializing out of a pool of milk. More than anything else, he longs for the faulty wording, the slips between thought and expression. The misrecognitions had been his inspiration.
Jules is cagey at first, but then lets Jonah read certain scenes. Mostly it’s a ghost story set in a haunted gentleman’s club on Eleventh Avenue. The main character, Jude, appears to be modeled on Jules, down to the precision-cut sideburns. The rest is a little hard to follow but seems to take place in our office, except that everybody likes the boss and plays basketball with him.
I must have been reading a dream sequence, Jonah tells us afterward.
Playing the frog
Jonah keeps his door shut lately. Is he working on his own screenplay? Listening to opera nonstop?
Sometimes we forget about him for days at a stretch, until we hear the Mexican distress frog’s plaintive call: Takata takata takata, kat-kat ka-tak.
A mouse in the hand
Three of us meet with the Sprout. He hums tunelessly as he toggles between files on his computer desktop, smiling unhappily as he eyes various charts. Like some of us, he has a second, older computer on his desk, which he also glances at now and again. It’s a period of transition, he likes to say: The new system hasn’t been successfully phased in yet and no one wants to get rid of the old data, just in case. No one ever wants to get rid of anything, though once something is gone there’s a mild sensation of improved health and wide-open desktop vistas.
The IT people always look harried, barking into two-way radios, and so you don’t feel right bugging them. Old-timers like Jonah know that it’s always a period of transition.
At one point the Sprout has a different mouse in each hand, clicking in counterpoint. When he double-clicks on the top of a document, it flies to the bottom of his screen like a little bat. He talks while he moves from one set of data to the other.
Every time he saves something, the computer makes a sound, a coin dropped into a box of xylophone parts.
He e-mails himself an enormous Excel file from the old computer to the new one. But the new one can’t open it. He downloads some sort of Excel upgrade onto the old computer, crashing it.
I’m not sure why I did that, he says, rebooting.
We gaze at the bookshelf. There’s now a gauzy photo of Sheila in a black wooden frame dotted with seashells. We trade glances, trying to read each other’s eyes. One of us seems to be saying, She’s hot, another, Weird frame, another, Wait, did she die?
Some of the old books are gone. The new titles include a massive bird-watcher’s guide and a coffee-table book in which people across America take pictures of their shoes at different hours of the day.
The Sprout is still saying hmmm. We detect a vein throbbing on his forehead. We always forget about the vein until we see it again.
Then he relaxes. He arches an eyebrow comically as the fax machine in the far corner of the office begins receiving. It’s actually a fax from himself.
Hoo-hoo!
He plucks the printouts from the machine.
Read ’em and weep, he says. Like most of his statements these days, it’s either totally meaningless or somehow evil.
Random poignancy, continued
The next day, Friday, the Sprout asks Laars for a file from last year. Laars’s system of folders is so byzantine, his naming conventions so idiosyncratic, and his memory so poor, that he often has to do a global search of all the contents on his computer if he’s looking for a file more than a few weeks old. He tries to guess what word might spring up in the document title, then hits Search.
I don’t understand, the computer says.
The air of mystery
For some reason Jonah uses a mug that says Joan. He’s had it for a while, but Pru just noticed the spelling recently.
Hey Joan, Pru says.
Jonah just smiles and cultivates his air of mystery.
The letters are in a painfully dated ’80s font, a red not quite cursive, like something used on the newsletter for a dodgy Myrtle Beach time-share. The mug is white with thin multi-colored horizontal stripes above and below the name.
What’s shaking, Joan?
He looks like he’s going to reach for the Mexican distress frog.
Crease says Joan is the name of Jonah’s robust common-law wife, now ex, who lives in Texas with their ornery love child. He claims he heard this from Jules.
Pru keeps calling Jonah Joan.
The long good-bye
The Sprout is leaving the office for the weekend. There’s a spring in his step, a thin jacket draped over his arm, and a bag from the Italian bakery dangling from a finger.
Have a good one, he says to Jenny, closing his door and locking it smoothly.
Later, man, he barks at Jonah while turning the corner by the mail room, the very picture of managerial friendliness.
Any fun weekend plans? he asks Pru, not quite pausing as he heads to the elevator. She says she’ll probably see a movie and go to a party in Brooklyn. He nods and says, Excellent plan—don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
He gives Lizzie a little wink and Laars a big salute and hits the Down button. The elevator takes its time arriving. He taps one tennis-sneakered foot in time to the jaunty tune in his head.
Crap, says the Sprout just as the doors open. He’s forgotten something. He trots back the way he came, not saying anything to the people he’s just passed. He unlocks his door and grabs his briefcase and sprints back to the elevator, which has long since gone.
The layoff narrative
We have assorted dietary restrictions and particular aversions, which makes group meals untenable, generally speaking, and so the decision to lunch together is sort of impulsive.
Jill is in Siberia and no one feels like going up to get her. She sits too far from the elevator. We could e-mail her, but no one does. Pru says she thinks Jill might be out, taking a personal day to help a friend move into an apartment. This relieves us of guilt.
Our high hopes for the new Chinese restaurant are dashed by the time the soup arrives. Everything tastes a little like soap. At least we know it’s clean, Jonah says.
Whatever you say, Joan, says Pru.
Oh, stop it, says Lizzie. Seriously.