by Emily Anglin
Bringing up the dictionaries at the interview had also taken time away from questions I didn’t want to be asked about certain credentials I’d listed on my resumé. I had hoped these details—dates, schools, company names—would have an impressionistic effect, blurring rather than focusing readers’ eyes: I had genuinely started the degree the resumé listed, but hadn’t finished it; “communications specialist” was also a misleading title for some of the work I’d done in the past.
Truth be told, in my thirtieth year, I’d hit a wall; my marriage ended and I returned to a previous job I’d had at a company that specialized in offering debt consolidation advising services over the phone, before my manager told me I didn’t have a knack for making people trust me. “It’s like you’re here, but you’re not,” he’d said. I left that job and got a job at a third-party market research company, where I called businesses and covertly gauged and cultivated opportunities to sell them software packages that our company knew were overpriced and ineffective. I still live with the knowledge that I was part of something wrong. The best I can say is that at least I was a bad salesperson. I wasn’t a gifted talker. No one—at least not many—had ever actually decided to consolidate their loan or buy a product because of me; but more people could have, if I’d caught them off guard, or had been communicating in writing instead of over the phone.
In my new position, I was so overwhelmed by Iris’s choice to give me a break that I didn’t have time to think about what I was helping to sell; I focused on the words, on the sound of the name Eidolon, and not what the software would be used for. The technology changes so quickly, people often said around the office; this software we’re writing about will be obsolete in a year anyway. Employee-monitoring tools mushroom, meld, and grow subtler, more transparent: from GPS systems and electronic timers locked onto vehicles that make workers streamline routes and jog through errands; to innocuous cameras in the corners of company rooms that offer neutral comments on productivity; to software—like Eidolon—installable on computers, and that can count WPM, read email, see what keys are pressed, and look at all the employee looks at, storing glances, doubts, desperate search terms, and the theft of time. I picture the manuals and booklets I write turning to ribbons in the shredder when I take breaks from working on fitting words together.
But when I’m inside the words, I don’t think, except about the words. I look up the origins and meanings of all new words I learn, including names: it’s become my trademark in the workplace as well as in my personal life. Iris’s name, whose etymology I’ve researched, means “Goddess-messenger”
and then joins the Latin roots for wondrous (mira) and beautiful (bellus) into a single word, her last name. Her parents had been generous.
And Iris had been generous to me. After three months on the job, she invited me to the conference in New York, our chance to make a real name for the improved Eidolon. “Away is the only place to decompress,” she said. “Let’s go there.”
After those ten minutes of Iris’s window-gazing, during which I’d gradually succumbed to regular glances at her hair, she turned to me. Had she known that I would be facing her? She met my gaze dead-on, with the same certitude with which she’d claimed the window seat for herself, and answered questions about firearms and hotel addresses at customs. Her face had disappeared—that is, the face I had long strained to peer through to see the face that I thought certainly must lie beneath.
But the face beneath, as I’d imagined it, one flocked with marks of private sadness and fear, was nowhere to be seen. Below her professional face was an identical face, but one without dissembling, without smiling, without that certain angling to the side—that angle some women learn to adjust their heads to instantly when their picture is taken—that she adopted any time you looked at her, the small token of a living portrait of herself, a profile to be tucked in the mind like a business card.
But now, she turned to look at me straight on. She sighed.
“I feel generations-old. Like I’ve seen the risings and settings of eras,” she said.
Before I could ask her what she meant, we were interrupted by the flight attendant asking us to fasten our seat belts. The plane rattled up through the clouds into the part of the sky where only nighttime could stop the sun from shining. When the flight attendant came by again, in the warmth of the yellow light that flooded the plane’s cabin, Iris ordered glasses of white wine for both of us, despite the early hour. When they came, they looked like glasses of light.
However odd the trip was proving to be, it was good to get away from my routine. I keep what I think of as a copy of my own mind at work, a section of my mental self reserved for use, at that time, only for the creation of the Eidolon communications. I was happy to leave that copy of me behind, along with the work of creating Eidolon’s image in written words. Yet the work was so focused that part of my mind had become stuck in a kind of middle dimension made only of words.
Sometimes, when I needed kindling for the dry work of conveying the procedures for the deployment and use of the Eidolon system, I would look the word eidolon up in the dictionary to refresh my sense of it.
The meaning of the word that the software’s name plays on is ghost or phantom. This name was chosen in a competitive spirit, since the most successful analogue of our product currently on the market, the leader among such software, is called Spectre. Their name is better than ours in some ways; the sound of their word connotes not only ghost, to suggest an unseen presence (the monitoring software), but also derives from the Latin for to look; so it sounds like familiar words such as spectator or spectacles that imply the act of seeing. But Eidolon sounds less harsh; it’s more mellifluous. And Iris had pointed out that it sounds more refined, less crass. And although it might not be as clearly connected to looking as the word spectre is, the word eidolon does come from the Greek for I see.
What is the experiential difference, the poetic difference, between the meanings of the phrases to look and I see? I ask this of myself when I’m trying to capture how our product is different from, and superior to, Spectre.
The word eidolon can also refer to an idealized person or thing. For example, the dictionary told me through its sample sentence, Petrarchan poetry makes the love object into an eidolon rather than a real person.
Once when I was in a marketing meeting chaired by Iris, I mentioned this other meaning of eidolon; I even brought up Petrarch and courtly love. “I wonder if we could do anything with that,” Iris said.
I tried to recall any lines I could dredge up from when I’d studied Petrarch in a university class. I remembered that his poetry was all about paradox, burning and freezing at the same time, love imagined as both prison and freedom. When I got home that night, I looked up and found some lines:
Love kills me not, nor breaks the chains I wear,
Nor wants me living, nor will grant me ease.
I have no tongue, and shout; eyeless, I see;
I long to perish, and I beg for aid;
I love another, and myself I hate.
I made a note of the lines but didn’t see what we could do with the context of love, aside from deepening my brain’s relationship with the name of the product I needed to explain to our customers, which had some value, as I sought to think of the word and the product in all its facets at once. For a second, as I stared at the lines on my desk at home with tired eyes, my brain came unstuck from my work and drifted to Iris, and why I cared about her so much even though I knew we could never really get to know each other.
Iris’s torpor on the plane was contagious, and was reinforced by the hum of the recycled air. By the time we landed in New York, we moved like a unit, circling through customs, pulling our shoes off together automatically, putting them in the same plastic box, watching them slide together down the belt through rubber flaps into the X-ray box. We collected our bags when they went past us on the belt on the other side.
Out on the sidewalk, Iris flagged a cab and we went to the hotel where the conference was being held. The hotel lobby was full of milling name-tagged people who looked like they wanted to be holding drinks. The many eyes of groups of men reflected Iris as we walked by. “Our event is on the terrace,” Iris said. We climbed onto an escalator that took us in tall zigzags through the hollow centre of the building, past stands of potted plants and trees that had been growing since at least the 1980s. On the top floor, Iris took my arm and led me through a set of glass French doors onto the roof.
Under a large black fabric tent, people in suits stood in small groups drinking and talking, clustered around heat lamps that made the cold evening feel balmy. A banner stood in one corner, on a pedestal: “Rich Text VIII Welcomes You,” it said in gold lettering. “I guess this is the eighth annual conference,” Iris had explained. “But it’s my first time. It’s still a new world for me.”
We drifted slowly through the crowd, through the tented warmth, and out the other side. We stopped at the ledge on the edge of the roof. I looked down onto the street, at the cabs pulling up to the door of the hotel and pulling away, far below.
“Look straight ahead, in front of you,” Iris said.
I looked straight ahead into and beyond the clouds at the base of the sky, through the cobalt and silver glint of the tall buildings, where a galaxy-shaped whorl of orange, fuchsia, and lavender bloomed.
I turned to Iris on the roof, and away from the sight of the sun setting on the edge of the city. I pulled my thin jacket around me.
“Sunset,” I said, not knowing what else to say, overwhelmed by the sound of many conversations around us.
“Yes.” She turned to me. She grabbed drinks for us from a tray passing by with glasses of white wine on it. “Here,” she said. “A toast, maybe? I’ve been meaning to tell you something, anyway. That is, I’d like to see both of us freed, to think fully creative thoughts. I really have appreciated the chance—”
“Iris?” A voice from behind us cut Iris off.
Iris turned. A tall, tired-looking woman in black stared at her face like she’d seen a ghost. The woman held a glass of clear liquid that smelled like gin.
“Tonya,” Iris said. “Hi. How are you? It’s been a while, hasn’t it? We were just talking about going in, but tell me how you are. Julie, this is Tonya, a former colleague. Tonya, this is Julie.”
I wondered why Iris didn’t introduce me as a colleague, or as her employee.
“What are you doing here?” Tonya asked. I was stunned by the directness of her tone, and by her unwavering gaze.
“Why wouldn’t I be here?” Iris said.
“I thought you’d been away,” Tonya said.
“You can’t keep a good woman down,” Iris said, with a laugh.
“No, I guess not.”
“Tonya, I see you have a drink. We need a drink ourselves. That’s what people do at these things, right?”
“Those who know,” Tonya said. She turned to me. “Iris was my boss in another lifetime. Is she yours?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I don’t think of it that way,” Iris said, “as boss and employee, one over the other. Work is shared. We’re all together.”
“Maybe for you two, but not for me,” said Tonya.
“Well, we’re at the top together now whether we like it or not, literally,” Iris said, with a short laugh, gesturing out toward the view of the city. “There’s no getting out of that.”
“I’m not here, though. Just my body is. My soul’s down there, running down the sidewalk.”
Iris laughed. “Did I mention Tonya likes words? We always had that in common. Let’s go to our rooms, Julie. It’s cold. We can mingle in the morning. Have a good night, Tonya.”
“It was nice to meet you, Tonya,” I said. Iris turned to go. Tonya looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
Iris took my arm and led me back through the crowd, but bypassed the escalator, heading into the stairwell. We circled down one floor, then another. “Tonya’s a direct person,” Iris said, her voice echoing. “We knew each other at a complicated time. Being close to colleagues makes things better but sometimes it can be hard.” A tattered white streamer lay on the concrete floor at one landing of the stairs, the last remnant of someone else’s party; Iris kicked at it with the toe of her shoe, so that it fell into the space in the middle of the stairwell, straight down the centre of the identical, descending rings of stairs, and disappeared. She opened the door at the seventh floor.
Iris pulled out a key card and opened her room, 716. A large painting over the bed showed a winter field stretching into a white sky, with one thin grey tree on the periphery, so faint it looked translucent. It reminded me of the pendant that hung at the end of a chain around Iris’s neck. I’d been staring at it on the plane. It looked like a tree branch or a gold antler.
“I’ll go with you to your room and make sure you have everything you need. But first, I need to rest. Sit down,” she said, gesturing toward a chair next to the head of the bed. I sat. To my surprise, she threw herself roughly on the bed, face down, diving into it, her arms above her head, her face buried in the pillow. She sighed. Her hair covered her back again, and I couldn’t see anything of her face.
“It’s good to get away,” she said. She turned her head to look at me with one eye. She looked worried. “I can see some of your question marks, Julie: the ones you see around my head, and the ones I see floating around yours.”
“Who is Tonya?” I asked.
“She’s part of the past. I have a policy of keeping the past taped shut. I know you worry about your past too. I’ve looked you up. It’s not exactly easy to hide these days. We’re all rewriting our stories on tracing paper; you can see right through it to the old version.”
“I’m not sure about that. I’m feeling confused, actually. How do you know Tonya?” I willed myself to get up and just end the conversation, but I couldn’t. I wanted to know who Tonya was, and who Iris was.
“A lot less than she thinks she does. Anyway, I thought we had a deal,” she said. “An unspoken one. We don’t talk about my past if we don’t talk about yours. That’s what you hoped for, right? That I would take you as you are, no questions asked? Now, we’re here to relax. Turn on the TV. Please. Put on a movie. Let’s listen to it with our eyes closed.”
I found the remote control in the drawer of the bedside table next to the Bible, and turned on the massive TV with an electronic sound that echoed like a droplet falling from the tip of a stalactite high above us. I flicked through the channels.
“Slower,” Iris said. “So that I can hear the voices.” I slowed the speed of my channel-changing. “This one,” she said. “Stop. Let’s listen. Here, this half of the bed is yours. She moved a bit further to the edge of the side she was on. Carefully, I sat down, propping myself among the pillows, my legs hanging off the edge of the bed.
“Are your eyes closed?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. But I kept them open.
I can’t believe I sat there and watched that movie beside Iris on her bed, but I did. The movie, called The Inheritance, was a psychological thriller, and I let the mechanics of suspense play on the surface of my brain as my other thoughts whirred like background programs. The story was set in San Francisco, about a young woman who works at an investment firm, and her mentor at the company. The protege grows attached to the mentor, who promises her advancement in the company and also offers her friendship and eventually a place to live. In the end, the mentor is led off in handcuffs, as the protege watches from the window, thinking in a voice-over about how they could have arrested anyone at the company but had somehow just chosen one person, her person.
I glanced at Iris ten minutes into the movie, and saw that she was asleep. In her sleep, Iris looked worried. When the movie was over, I checked the TV’s guide screen and saw
that it had been based on a true story, but that names and details of certain characters had been changed. I resented the way the characters and meanings had been reduced, and wondered how the story had really happened.
I let myself out of her room and padded along the thick white carpet toward my own room. It occurred to me as I stood in front of the door to my room that I could make a run for it, down the stairs or to the escalator, and go out into the night, anywhere, into the second-biggest city in the world; it also occurred to me that I could go back to Iris’s room and wake her up and ask to talk about what had happened on the trip. Instead I let myself into my own room and sank into the bed, already almost asleep.
When I’d left my old life, my marriage, my immoral jobs, I just walked away. Walking away in itself felt like an admission that none of it had been real, that who I’d seemed to be and could no longer be had been an imposter. But none of that life had been fake; it had just ended. I was still looking for something to replace it.
Alden
Last summer, I decided to drop everything and move to a small town called Alden, which I’d never been to before, to start a new job. It was a one-year contract, so I figured I could leave after the first year if it didn’t work out. After all, when I say I dropped everything, there wasn’t much to drop—a fact illustrated by the amount of time I spent talking on the phone to my new boss, Grant, in the weeks leading up to my move. Grant seemed to love the phone, and my days were open—almost as open as Alden itself, as Grant described it.
Alden was a former railroad town two hours’ drive away from the big city I was living in. “There’s one thing we have a wealth of here in Alden,” Grant told me several times on the phone, “and that’s space. We’re rich in space.” I’d lie in my undershirt on the floor of my small basement apartment in the hot, August city, talking to Grant about Alden. I would try to picture the space he was describing, the idea of freely moving air, open streets, and empty buildings. During the month-long lead-up to my move, we talked a couple of times a week. It was a lonely time, but also a time of anticipation.