I started when Mol knocked even though I was expecting it. I closed the door and asked her to sit down. Though she usually shambled around the office in a casual, tripping manner and threw herself down so loud the springs could be heard in my office, this time she smoothed her skirt and lowered herself primly into the chair.
“I’d like you tell me about how you think your job has been going these past few weeks.” I cleared my throat in an officious way as I cast around for how to proceed. “I think I need to hear about how you’re perceiving your role here. I know you’ve missed quite a few days …”
Mol leaned forward in her chair and cracked her knuckles. She looked at the ceiling and blew a breath out of her undershot jaw and up her face, causing her bangs to momentarily hover. “The thing is I’ve …” A floating network of her frizzed hair fell between us like a scrim. “I’ve had a death in the family.”
I had prepared for every possible excuse but this. Despite my considerable training in addressing the bereaved, I found myself stammering, full of guilt over my readiness to fire her even though a recent death in the family no way explained the months of unexplained absences and spotty performance.
“I’m … so sorry. I had no idea. I mean, you were working so well earlier … if I had known. Who—who was it? I mean, if you don’t mind me asking.”
“It was my great uncle. Just a few days ago, in fact. We were really close. It was totally unexpected. There he was and then—poof—he’s gone.”
Mol put down her head and her shoulders shook. I looked around the office as if for some clue as to how to react. I knew I should go to her and comfort her in a way befitting of my expertise, but the dynamic had shifted so quickly from resolute boss and about-to-be-fired worker to a sheepish boss and grieving worker that I was utterly thrown. I eventually walked over to her and patted her shoulder.
“These are some of the most intense moments in a life,” I began, falling back on stock phrases out of my repertoire. “Nothing can prepare us for it.”
Mol’s shoulder jerked up and down under my hand. She sniffed and made gargling sounds. I wanted to move my hand away from her shoulder, but I realized I would have to say something at the moment I moved my hand to somehow wrap up the encounter, and I had no idea what to say. I obviously couldn’t fire her at this moment—that would be cruel. The reprieve was honestly a relief, but I had to still fire her. Her great-uncle dying made her no better worker. The other staff had begun to murmur about who would get her computer, office chair, and shelving—the inevitable was in motion.
I couldn’t bear to look down at her, so my eyes were fixed on the clock on the opposite wall, which was in battery-dying indecision: the second hand ticking between the same two seconds. Mol’s blubbering petered out with nerve-wracking gradualness, like a roulette wheel ticking to the next number every time it seemed to have stopped. My palm was sweating to the point that I worried it could be felt through her shirt. I pulled away and wiped it discretely on my pants and walked back behind my desk.
“Mol, I think you should take the rest of the day off and regroup.” The thought was I could then call her and ask her not to come back. She looked up at me with a sort of wincing panic with one eye half shut as if expecting a blow.
“I want to work. I want to make up for the days I missed. It will help me get my mind off things …”
“If you think you can handle it, that’s fine. However—” I had to somehow regain my footing. “You need to clean those flowers out ASAP.”
Mol looked up and met my eyes with an unnerving steadiness. She rose from her chair and took a low crouching step toward me, as if I were a wild woodland animal, easily startled. She stopped in front of my desk, lifted her right arm, and drew the whole length of her sleeve across her eyes. When she pulled her arm away, a black streak of mascara linked her eyes duct-to-duct, giving the impression that she was peering down at me through a tiny pair of opera glasses.
“I’ve been saving those flowers ever since my uncle got sick,” Mol said, her voice steadying each word so the last phrase sounded so certain as to be a challenge. At the mention of the uncle I let out a syllable of understanding, even though I saw nothing reasonable about saving flowers from strangers’ funerals for an ailing relative. “And I’ve been spritzing them with water. So no worries.” She smiled in a poignant sunbeam-through-the-storm manner and tapped my desk with her forefinger as if her next point warranted special emphasis. “Nothing wet can burn.”
I began to protest but cut myself off with a grunt that probably sounded like a concession. There was no way to exert power over her at this moment without seeming brutish. I would simply wait until later in the day for her to recover, bring her into my office, and fire her then. These few hours would be a magnanimous offering on my part, a mercy, really, and there was no need to dilute that by harping on the flowers. Let her enjoy her flowers for her last few moments, I rationalized, as I repeated my condolences and saw her out with the requisite pat on the back.
The rest of my day would be busy, and there would thankfully be few opportunities to interact with Mol until I had to call her back into the office for our final conversation, which I mentally slated for four p.m. I spent the rest of the morning in the editing room, watching rough cuts of videos and jotting my comments down on the evaluation forms. Good work, trim down family’s narration, adjust color palette—subject looks sallow in last frame, music too dirge-like, work on youth-to-adult transition. Mol’s video was last in the bunch. She had made the unfortunate choice of overlaying an image of a map over Great Aunt Halson’s face so that the roads and streams lay precisely on her deep frown lines, creating a moment where her wrinkles were made monumental and grotesque before her face receded and the video ended on the map alone. Needs to be reworked, I wrote for whoever would take over her caseload.
By early afternoon I was back in my office, waiting for a consultation with a new client, when I caught sight of Mol walking down the hall and heard the drag-flop of her loose pumps. Her skirt was twisted tight across her hips, and her pantyhose sagged at her ankles. Right before she turned into her office, we were close enough to meet one another’s eyes, and I saw her smile and part her lips as if readying for my inevitable greeting. But I quickly looked down and began shuffling files until she was safely out of sight. I could hear her in her office—the squeak of her chair as she threw herself down, the sound of her typing, which was so aggressive that it seemed she was rolling her fist over all the keys, the crunch-suck as she ate her chips and cleaned up her fingers afterward, even her flower-spritzing. She existed here at this moment only because of what I did not say. By all rights, she should be shoving her flowers in Xerox boxes, yanking the phone from the wall, sifting through her papers, calling HR, making the back-and-forth downcast trek from office to car trunk. I had the absurd sense that I was responsible for not just her continued presence at the job but her existence itself. Every sound I heard from Mol’s office seemed to originate with me.
I saw Mol only in my peripheral vision for the next few hours—the hovering blur of her skirt appearing like the spots that swim in your eyes after a glimpse at the sun. Her immanent removal gave her presence a kind of flickering unreality, as if she were an embodied memory of her working self, haunting her old routines. When I saw the dark blip of the back of her head in the viewing room, I almost convinced myself that she wasn’t there, that the hazy shadow orb of her hair was simply a halo caused by my astigmatism and the weak light. I foolishly wandered in, and when she turned to greet me I was so startled I jumped and stumbled into a multimedia cart loaded up with editing equipment. Several objects slid off. “Did I spook you?” Mol called cheerily as she walked over and bent down to grope around the dark floor to find what had fallen. Crouched and lit only by the shifting blue light of the screen, she seemed completely altered to me, a posthumous being.
At four p.m., I walked over to Mol’s office with the idea of asking her to come see me, but when I got there she
ushered me in. “What can I do you for?” she asked as she picked up an old plastic chair, dumped the petals from it, and patted it to invite me to sit. I obliged, thinking that she might be more comfortable hearing the news in her own office among the comfort of her flowers. Since morning, there seemed to be more of them. Sprigs of baby’s breath were tucked in the inner wheels of old master tapes on a bottom shelf, and a row of minuscule pink blooms floated in the open trough of an empty stapler. Behind Mol’s desk, a sunflower bowed under the weight of its enormous face, the great frilled void looking servile. I ran my hands over the sides of the chair, and when I pulled them away they were covered with apricot-colored dust: pollen.
“Look, before you say anything I want you to know how sorry I am for missing work. Things with my uncle were crazy.” A petal on the floor was caught between the crosswind coming from the hall and the upwind from the vent; it swung up, dove, tried to settle, and was shot up again.
“I mean, he was sick for a long time and I was taking him to his appointments and a lot of times I didn’t know about his appointments until it was really late so I wouldn’t call work but that’s what was going on.”
Instead of looking Mol in the eye, I watched a vertical crease of flesh on her cheek by her ear deepen and jerk flat with the movement of her jaw. It went loose and tight, like someone playing with the lash of a whip, pulling it so it snapped flat as a kind of threat. A shaft of midday sun barred us from each other; the sun lit each particle of pollen and petal so that it appeared a sparkling densely textured wall had fallen between us.
“I mean, I realize I should have called work. I should have come in. But I was always so spent after Uncle’s appointments that I couldn’t call, or even think of calling. I mean, when you’re dealing with life and death stuff everything else just fades back … in a way it seemed disrespectful to call work when my uncle was heaving on a hospital bed, I mean, he would have given anything to be energetic enough to have a job to be truant from. I thought it was sort of rubbing it in his face to reach over his body, grab the hospital phone, dial his number and say ‘sorry I missed work,’ when here’s a guy who would give anything to have the life of work and missing work back in his universe. Instead it’s meds and missing meds, it’s white cell count missing white cells, antibodies and no antibodies … I just couldn’t call …”
Mol was running her hands through her bouquets as if through a lover’s hair. Up and down, from bloom to vase, she rubbed. She tried to catch my eye but I was still looking off a bit, unable to meet her glance. The firing—the inevitability of it—it seemed something apart from me or my actions, something that hung above us, something that so altered the scene between us that I no longer knew how to think or act; and indeed, thinking and acting seemed beside the point when there was only a single possible outcome. By the time I stood up she would be fired; it seemed a future apart from me. Mol went on.
“Every time I missed work I would be thinking about it so much it was almost like being more at work than actually being there, you know? I’d be thinking of Halson’s videos, of just how to cut it when my uncle would be ringing his bell for water or pills or morphine … and I’d be so distracted I’d bring him the wrong thing or what he wasn’t supposed to eat on a tray and he’d flip the tray when I put it in his lap, and I’d be squeezing peas in between paper towel bent over and I’d be so angry but also relieved he had the energy to be so angry and I’d be thinking, you know what, it’s just this kind of thing I could use in a video at work. That spirited moment in a life. I kept thinking that I was really developing as a memorial videographer right then even though I couldn’t be at work. So it was like job training, so to speak.”
I nodded as if I were hearing her out. I kept thinking that I was about to change her life with the crushing finality of the news. That these few moments of rambling in her office would be the last few moments she was an employee, and the last few moments that the firing from this job would not be a part of her life story. I thought of something a client once told me about having to break the news of someone’s death. I don’t remember who he had to tell, or what his relationship was to the deceased, but he told me how he went to the woman’s house to tell her the news and caught sight of her through the window. She was doing dishes, and he told me he stood there watching her, thinking that this was the last time she was to do the dishes without the knowledge of the death, that from then on all her dishwashing would be informed by the loss, and that he should let her wash and dry each dish before he told her. So he stood outside the window watching her, and it turns out this was a really big load of dishes she was hand washing, and he ended up having to stand there for nearly an hour as she soaked, scrubbed, dried, and stacked. But he relished every minute, he said, because he knew he was watching a version of her soon to be extinct.
I could smell Mol’s sweat—I thought I could—it was the smell of a stove burner turned on in a abandoned house, the decades-old dinners coming back in smoke. Or it was the reek of the soupy stems, too long left in water, brought out by the humidity of her speech. She kept talking, and the uncle’s illness became a kaleidoscope of details that shifted every which way but into a coherent picture. She was beginning to lose it; I could feel her watching me, trying to gauge if I bought what she was saying, trying to see if she should abandon this strategy or keep it up. Under her desk, her left foot wormed out of her high heel and set about trying to pull her right shoe off, as if her two feet were trying to free each other and make a run for it. She was in her last throes of trying to convince me. She knew what was to come.
I kept my eyes at her feet to avoid her face. I remembered a time I caught a mouse for my mother when my dad wasn’t home. She had seen it dart from under the stove to behind the laundry basket and had shoved a clear glass bowl at me with a “Hurry go get it!” I ran over, ready to play the hero, and after a chase and a cornering I brought the bowl down. For a moment I was exhilarated. Then I saw the mouse. It was zipping back and forth in the confines of the bowl, running up the sides and falling on its back, jumping and hitting the top and smacking back to the floor, stunned. Finally it stood still, simply whipping its head back and forth so fast it was almost a blur. It was a seizure, an electric buzz of fear making the mouse almost a mechanical thing, a tripped-up nerve. I let it go. My mother clucked and called me a softy, but it had nothing to do with that. The mouse’s fear was so vivid, and so unseemly was its breakdown, that I felt that by being the cause I was somehow implicated in the mouse’s desperate, stupid acts. I felt a part of that whipping senseless head.
“I love this job, my uncle loved that I had this job and in fact if I had any footage of him I would pay to have his video made … he would be the perfect subject, he was always grinning and laughing, always sitting in a lighted spot so we wouldn’t have to even adjust the color.”
I coughed, then pretended to cough. I couldn’t speak. I had a feeling of being out of body, of hovering above the scene of boss and underperforming worker mid-termination; the situation began to look to me as a diorama of all unavoidable human relations; I could see myself, the small bald dot on the top of my head and Mol, rolling a petal between her thumb and forefinger until it became an oily little talisman from which she would not part. She pressed her fingers down around it and drew in a shuddering sigh, waiting.
The moment was poised, the dead flowers unmoved. I was on the verge of saying something; I felt the heat and pinpricks in my arms, the loss of air. Not a petal fell. I thought of standing, one afternoon, in the checkout line behind my mother, plotting my avoidance of the cashier woman (by ducking behind the cart, pretending to be occupied with the candy display, etc.). No matter what, though, I knew she would say something to me or my mother, something about how cute I was or if I was always such a handful. For whatever reason, this was a great source of stress. But this one afternoon, I suddenly felt a lifting of my worry even as the line thinned ahead. I had the strong feeling that I was not really myself, that my consciou
sness was unattached to my physical being, and that even as the checkout woman reached over and ruffed up my hair, I was not truly the recipient. I felt as if my own self were something that had been arbitrarily assigned to me, and that I needed only recognize this to avoid all discomfort in the world.
ELEGANTLY, IN THE LEAST NUMBER OF STEPS
Behind a windowed storefront full of live butterflies, Aaron sat at an old Formica table surrounded by numbers. It was night, and the only light in the whole declining strip mall (the sub shop next door was now a check-cashing outfit, the laundromat gutted and for rent) came from his desk lamp. In his mind, the numbers around him were hardly numbers. He had done a lot of thinking about numbers and what they meant, and he had come to the conclusion that no number was valid that did not correspond, exactly, to something in the world. One of his favorite stories about himself as a child, and one that he liked to tell to prove this point, was that up until early second grade he had been taught mathematics using objects such as beans or seeds or marbles. Once he hit second grade, his teacher had made him do a mathematical equation with simply a paper and pen. He had, in his teacher’s telling, thrown himself to the ground and demanded beans. Ultimately he had been forced to do the equation without the beans, which was of course easy for him. Still he had glued small beans all over his math homework as an act of protest.
The numbers that surrounded him corresponded to nothing. There was a checkbook with checks torn out from the front, back, and middle, leaving only checks 2442, 2451, and 2485. There were receipts for unknown items. There was a torn box top with a large figure written on it followed by the letters I.O.U. The buttons on the solar calculator they set out for him were worn smooth and the numbers displayed only from their middles up. He held the calculator under the lamplight but still the numbers were no more than curves and lines, like the spine of an old hull revealed by shifting sand. He had brought his own calculator with him, as always, but he still hated when something didn’t work. A few times he accidentally tapped an equation into their calculator and smacked the edge of the table when he saw the unreadable result.
Bright Shards of Someplace Else Page 6