Karina puffed sharply through her nose. “Just trying to make sure we’re all on the same page now,” she said. “You know, I don’t know what really happened here, but it’s important that we’re on the right track, that we know what direction we’re headed in.”
“What happened,” Jen said, “so far as I can tell, is that you asked me to work on an idea that came from Leora and the board, and now Leora has decided that she doesn’t like the idea. Right?” Jen smiled and laughed to indicate that she was happy and engaged and LIFting herself, no matter what kinds of challenges or friendly misunderstandings might present themselves along the way.
“Interesting way to put it,” Karina said.
Jen laughed again for reasons unknown to her.
“I just think it’s good to keep in mind that we need to be careful,” Karina said. “We have to set the highest standards for ourselves, and then raise those standards. You know, it’s so amazing to work at an organization like LIFt, where we can just let our imaginations go wild, and in service of a greater good—it’s just such an amazing opportunity, that freedom. But with that freedom comes responsibility. Especially with hot-button issues like sex, relationships, female sexuality, reproductive…issues. Do you know what I mean?”
“Totally,” Jen said. “Totally hear you, totally agree. It’s great to have feedback! But just to be clear—you asked—I was asked to work on this. I didn’t go off and make it my own thing. I can show you the email you sent—I mean, the email I received—”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“No, it will only take a few seconds, just so we can reconstruct—” Jen started to turn back to her computer.
“Please, don’t let me distract you any longer from Lady Sally Mineola, ‘Rebelle Without a Flaw,’ ” Karina said.
Jen turned back. “Ha, you got me there, but I just wanted to make sure we—”
“Look, no one is blaming you, Jen,” Karina said. “It’s not about blame. You haven’t been here long and you’ve already made a big impact. I’m proud of you! I just wanted you to know that Leora, well, she just expects us to reach a little higher.” Karina reached up her hand and waved like a pageant contestant. “She would never want us to settle for the lowest common denominator.”
“Well, I admit it wasn’t my favorite idea of the stack so far,” Jen said, in a spirit of agreement and same-page-ness.
“Well, there you go—there’s a lesson in this: Trust your instincts. That’s a key message for us to send as an organization, but we can only send the message if we ourselves have gotten the message! So if you’re working on a project and you don’t think it’s working, speak up. We can collaborate on a solution, or we can walk hand in hand back to the drawing board.” Karina was nodding now, but regret still shone in her eyes.
“Sure thing, Karina, thanks for that.”
“Awesome. You’re a smart cookie, Jen,” Karina said. “You don’t have to prove that to anyone. But you do have to trust yourself. It’s just so important.”
“So true,” Jen said, but Karina was already walking away.
Summer
The Garden of Earthly Delights
Saturdays and Sundays at the henhouse were always the most crowded, for reasons Jen couldn’t comprehend. Jim speculated that other clients of the henhouse had cracked some code of inbound logistics, allowing them to time their production orders so as to pursue their respective Projects without interfering with a high-pressure workweek.
“It’s possible, right?” Jim murmured, shifting in his beige seat at the beige back wall of the beige-carpeted waiting room. “Like how female roommates sync up their menstrual cycles.”
“That is a myth,” Jen said.
If one of Jen’s visits fell on a weekday, sometimes she could get out of the henhouse in time to get to LIFt by nine a.m. But not always, and never when it was Jim’s day of the month to come in. Too much had to happen.
First, they would wait for Jim’s name to be called. The name-calling nurse was invariably the most petite and sweetest-looking staffer on duty that morning, and would read from the sign-in log apologetically, half smiling, half cringing.
“We should have pseudonyms,” Jim whispered. “Noms de guerre.”
“Don’t worry, we both have generic names,” Jen said. “No one will ever know who we are.”
Jen spotted one of Pam and Paulo’s onetime temporary roommates across the waiting room. The roommate had arrived too late to snag a seat, and instead leaned against a wall, arms crossed over the dark leather satchel held to her chest, and wearing not the telltale hunted, haunted look that marked out most of Pam and Paulo’s tenants, but the calm, empty expression that most visitors to the henhouse cultivated.
Jen looked away, heat in her cheeks. Embarrassment, she had learned through hours of study in the henhouse waiting room, was conspicuous. Whispering, too, was conspicuous, because of its correlation with embarrassment; most henhouse clients, if they spoke to one another at all, opted for a low conversational hum. In impassivity lay anonymity. The key was to present not a closed book, but an open book full of bright, blank pages.
“We should use our porn names,” Jim whispered. “You have a great porn name.” Jen’s porn name was Cuddles Greenacres. Jim’s porn name was Fishy Thirty-second.
When Jim finally heard his name, he would ease his way past piles of crossed legs and close-squeezed chairs toward the nurse, who would usher him through two sets of doors and down a beige-on-beige hallway into a small, windowless room, its beigeness somehow more profoundly beige. Jen was not permitted inside the room, and had only fragmentary, Jim-filtered impressions of it: the scent of water damage and fruity air freshener, the listing stacks of cracked DVD cases, the streaked screen of the television bolted to the wall, the box of disposable plastic sheets for covering the recliner chair that didn’t recline, the green exit buzzer next to the doorknob that visitors such as Jim were not permitted to touch. The plastic vase of dead flowers.
“In the henhouse, I’m a patient,” Jen once said to Jim. “But are you—a client?”
“I’m an executive assistant,” Jim replied.
Usually Jim would rejoin Jen in the waiting room after just three to five minutes inside the Garden of Earthly Delights.
“BACK OF THE NET,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 1, before he reappeared in the waiting room wearing his best bright, blank expression.
“SWISH,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 2.
“TYGER TYGER BURNING BRIGHT,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 4.
There was one instance, during Project Acute Phase No. 3, that Jim did not return for more than twenty minutes, no texts.
“Sorry,” he said, sitting down next to Jen. His brow was shiny with sweat. “Delay with the production order.”
Jen rubbed his back reassuringly. “But it shipped?”
Jim swigged from a bottle of water with a lustiness tipped with anguish. “Ohhh, it shipped.” He exhaled. “Delivery truck got held up by three nurses discussing last night’s episode of The Bachelor.”
“The nurses were in the Garden?!?”
“No, no, they were just outside the gates of the Garden. Right at the door. If they’d come into the Garden, I’d have texted you to ask permission.”
“That’s so romantic, honey.”
Perhaps an hour later, Jen would be called in to a different room, where a physician would administer Jim’s speed-trial results. Jim named this room Eugenics Incorporated. Jen didn’t like that name at all.
Inside Eugenics Incorporated, a henhouse staffer always presented Jen with paperwork recording Jim’s speed-trial results for Jen’s confirmation and signature. One staffer in particular always handed over the paperwork with a countenance of blushing pride, as if she couldn’t believe her luck—and the numbers were excellent, as all that spinach-eating a
nd sarong-wearing had given Jim the aquatic profile of a sprightly teenager. But the results also carried a more troubling message, as Jen would reflect afterward during her assigned five to ten minutes of repose on the examining table, legs flung superstitiously up in the air.
Here is the swimmer.
Where is the shore?
It was understood—although a henhouse staffer always reminded Jen of the understanding, just to be sure—that Jen and Jim were to convene as many all-hands meetings as possible during the forty-eight hours immediately following Jen’s trip to Eugenics Incorporated.
Confirmation that yet another round of visits to the henhouse would be necessary came in the form of what Jen had rather unimaginatively named the Monthly Adverse Development. At seven a.m. the morning after every Development, Jen found herself in line with the other henhouse regulars, filling in the identical admission form she had the previous month, proffering her arm for an identical round of phlebotomy, receiving an identical-looking prescription for an even higher dose of Sermoxal. The Sermoxal prescribed to Jen in service of the Project had thickened and exploded the Adversity of said Monthly Developments, draining and choking off her serotonin, scrambling her beta-endorphin, crashing the servers of her frontal lobes, and stoking a sourceless, objectless rage that throbbed inside her at a cellular level. The rage wasn’t even always subcutaneous; Jen could break out in a sweat from it, her hypothalamus triggered for thermoregulation simply because, say, Jim had left a half-spooned yogurt cup on the bedroom floor or because the upstairs neighbors had installed a pop-up bowling alley directly above Jen and Jim’s bedroom, open from six a.m.
“This isn’t me,” Jen said to Jim in their kitchen one morning. “I’m not really upset about anything. My nervous system is just misfiring.”
“But it’s perfectly okay to be upset,” Jim said. “You’ve been through a lot, and—”
“I’m not upset,” Jen barked, slamming her fist onto the countertop. A strip of veneer, peeling away from the countertop’s edge, flapped in distress. In the silence that followed—silent save for her downstairs neighbor’s howls of protest—Jen stared in puzzlement at her unclenching fist, and thought it entirely possible that another entity had taken up temporary residence in her body, although not the entity she had anticipated or wished for.
Directly above Jen and Jim, a screaming child began jumping up and down in place, feet landing flat on the tiles to command maximum surface area.
If Your Skull Was a Club
Waiting for Jim during his first, mercifully brief sojourn in the Garden of Earthly Delights, Jen absentmindedly looked up from her careworn copy of the September 2008 issue of Condé Nast Portfolio and saw her first-floor neighbors, Nadya and Natasha, seated directly across from her. Jen locked eyes with Nadya, then Natasha, then looked down again.
Jen never would have admitted this to herself, much less to anyone else, but if an electroencephalograph had been able to translate the tickertape of mentalese launched by the Nadya-and-Natasha sighting, the Chyron caption scrolling behind Jen’s eyes would have read: They are older than you and rounder than you and they come from somewhere else and they spoke another language first You are ahead of them You were always ahead of them You will be fine It will all work out You will be fine You will be fine You will be fine
It was in moments like these that Jen found herself recoiling from her own mind.
“What’s the Woody Allen line? ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have me as a member’?” Jen asked Jim once. “Do you ever feel like that about your own brain? Like, if your skull was a club, you wouldn’t try to get in?”
“Groucho Marx said that,” Jim said.
Now, months later, sitting in the same beige seat in the same freezing beige waiting room—the soothing constancy of its climate maintained by poor insulation in winter and, now, an overzealous air-conditioning unit in summer—with the same copy of Condé Nast Portfolio visible in the same scuffed magazine rack hanging next to the same sooty windowsill, waiting for Jim as he journeyed through the Garden of Earthly Delights in service of Project Acute Phase No. We’ve-Lost-Track-by-Now, Jen shivered in her sleeveless dress and sandals and checked her phone for the first time since the previous evening. Her hands trembling, she found herself scrolling through a long email thread on her apartment building’s listserv, swiping past variations and permutations of “Congratulations!” and “So happy for you!” and “Mazel tov!” to the originating email from Nadya, who thought maybe people had noticed Natasha looking a little different lately and anyway she just wanted everyone officially to know their happy news and thank you so much.
Jen returned her phone to her tote bag, dropped her chin to her chest, and wrapped her bare arms tightly around herself, organizing her body in a more compact, better-calibrated, more heat-efficient form.
But this more hospitable form was itself conspicuous, so she unwrapped her arms, fished The New Yorker out of her tote bag, opened it to a random page, and pretended to read, clenching her teeth, squeezing her crossed legs together in an awkward hug of goose-bumpy limbs.
Then she rolled up The New Yorker, stuffed it into her tote, fished out her phone, and tapped out a “Congratulations from Jen and Jim on the fourth floor!” and stared at the screen, contemplating whether or not to add more exclamation points, whether they would enhance or belittle the enthusiasm conveyed in her joyous reply-all.
She decided on four exclamation points, then deleted one of them, then sent.
You will be fine It will all work out You will be fine You will be fine You will be
Evidence
The train from the henhouse to LIFt halted without explanation two stops from the station closest to the office, so Jen speed-walked seventeen blocks to work in the hazy, sweet-sick morning heat. As she hustled into the elevator, the viscose lining of her dress clung to her with what she hoped was not an indecent moistness. In the henhouse, Jen’s constricted veins had cowered from two different nurses, and so a third—older, less openly stumped by Jen’s venous incompetence—had slipped a series of smaller needles just under her skin, pushing in and out in search of purchase. Jen watched blood leak and seep from her veins into the surrounding tissue as the nurse threaded and pulled, threaded and pulled, a brackish purple blooming under her skin. She imagined the needle as an anteater, flicking its spiked tongue every which way on a promising lump of tree roots. No, better: She imagined her blood as a tiny sea creature—some as-yet-undiscovered species of amniotic ray—easing through her body’s channels, caressing over her capillaries, pulsing and blooming with oxygen, with messy, colorful life.
In the elevator, perspiration wallowed at the base of her spine and streaked down the backs of her thighs. Heat and sweat had begun to peel the Band-Aids away from the wilted cotton balls stuck in the crooks of her arms. As the elevator pinged into place on the thirty-eighth floor, she ripped the bandages off simultaneously in a crossed-arm choreographic move—a little private flourish visible only to Jen and the unblinking eye of the security camera—and stuffed them into her tote bag as the elevator doors gug-flumped open.
She had gotten up so early, and she was late.
It’s All About the Team
She had gotten up so early, again, and she was late, again. Weeks, months, had gone like this.
“Jen, look, the last thing we want is for people to feel as though they’re punching in and out on a clock,” Karina was saying. “On the other hand, a team can’t start out on the field a man down, can they?”
The atmosphere at LIFt rumbled with agitation in triplicate. So far as Jen could tell, Leora Infinitas was 1) not satisfied with the pace of progress at LIFt; 2) not frequently available to communicate with her staff at LIFt about her unhappiness with the pace of progress at LIFt; and 3) not forthcoming about the projects on which her staff were meant to be making progress. Leora’s discontent had not filtered from her board down to the rest of the staff by any direct means. Instead it had faded i
n slowly, like a hissing ambient static.
Whhooooossshhhhh
You could hear it even when Leora wasn’t in the office, which was most days. Today, Leora was with Sunny in San Diego, giving a talk titled “The Work-Love Balance.”
“Leora Infinitas and her new-ish foundation have been exhorting women worldwide to ‘LIFt Yourself,’ which in their view requires the usual menu of charity and volunteer work as well as savvy career choices: If you love what you do, you never have to work,” wrote DOPENHAUER’s Ruby Stevens-Meisel, who often made note even of Leora’s most mundane public appearances. “The ‘work-love balance’ is therefore a zero-sum game—an aggressive reformulation of Karl Marx’s zero-sum theory of wealth, labor, and power, although one that Leora, the people’s polemicist, would never put in such academic terms.”
“I know, I was late, I’m sorry,” Jen was saying to Karina. She was finding her breath and her hands were shivering and she was smiling so hard her face hurt. “I had a—”
“A team can’t start out with a woman down on the field, I should say.” Draped across the empty filing cabinet behind Jen’s desk, Karina rested her chin thoughtfully on her fist.
Amid other Pavlovian conditioned responses that Jen had acquired since joining LIFt, the sight of Karina leaning against the empty filing cabinets triggered cravings for an Animexa tablet. Karina leaning against the empty filing cabinets conveyed that a memo would have to be conceived and researched and written, or a meeting would have to be convened at which a memo would be formulated or discussed or autopsied or, most likely, ignored. An Animexa tablet replicated and improved on the effects intended by the whhooooossshhhhh and by Daisy’s noise-canceling headphones. The physical side effects of Animexa were diverse, inconsistent, and, most important, minor—the slightly dilated pupils, the cottonmouth, the clams-on-ice fingers—but to Jen its main pharmacological effects were aural. The drug seemed to create its own sound waves, which were 180 degrees out of phase with any interfering waves signaling boredom, embarrassment, and existential futility.
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