Falling Sideways

  Jaeger had forgotten why he wanted so badly to be part of this inner circle. Claus Clausen, now in his tiny windowless alcove-office across the corridor, was no doubt staring at the CEO’s closed door, hearing these notes of shared laughter, and lifting an index finger to flick a pearl of sweat from his brow.

  It intrigued Jaeger to consider that Clausen, although physically larger and more imposing than he, was now a little bit afraid of him. Jaeger had a definite edge there and could back Clausen down when they disagreed on something. He had tried it just to see. All he had to do was level his gaze and say something curt like That’s not how things work here, Claus. Or That’s not how we play the piano here. Clausen was probably his closest friend in the Tank, maybe his closest friend period, maybe his only friend, and Jaeger never hesitated to protect his comrade, as best he could, if he sensed any threat to him, or to put in a good word when he could do so without being too obvious. He enjoyed Clausen’s respect and camaraderie. Clausen was divorced, too, after a very brief marriage to a schoolteacher, though childless, and he and Jaeger spent time together occasionally, especially in the summer at the beach, where they sat on the sand behind dark glasses, watching the topless, even sometimes totally naked, women sunbathers, or at serving houses—as they had done last night. Clausen had clearly consumed more draft beer than he could handle, in fact, and had come on too strong to a woman at the bar, who had turned her back and ignored him.

  Jaeger was also more successful with women and enjoyed Clausen’s little-brother admiration of that success. Clausen was a reader, too, though he seemed mostly to read thrillers, and they both liked films and jazz. Clausen didn’t drink as well or fuck as much as Jaeger did, which amused Jaeger, made him feel that he had mastered access to some of the prime skills of manhood that Clausen could only sniff around the edges of. He sometimes suspected that Clausen was deeper than he, that his intellectual range was greater, but that was all right, it was okay that his friend had some strengths greater than his own, especially—well, admit it—less significant ones.

  Jaeger’s eyes lingered on Birgitte Sommer’s narrow burgundy ones, took in those sexy black curls, then dropped to her smooth, slender, eminently kissable neck and lower still to her breasts, so wonderfully large for such a slim body. He remembered the backless dress she had worn to the office Christmas dinner last year. Her back was completely naked so you could see clear down to where the split of her rump began, and the dress somehow held tight up just over the nipple line of her wonderful breasts. How did she keep it up? Some kind of tape, maybe, two-sided tape in the bra cups. No visible straps. Her husband was tall and gawky and wore a stupid-looking pearl gray bow tie, and Jaeger caught him shoving a finger way up his nostril between courses. Jaeger could not help but wonder why Birgitte wanted to look so sexy while her husband looked so drab. Wanted to be admired? Was she lonely? Neglected? Jaeger danced with her a couple of times, and she smiled so nicely into his eyes as they moved around the floor, but when he tried to get close enough to show her how she made him feel, she shifted expertly, blocking him discreetly. Funny how some women let you, even if nothing is to come of it, and some women don’t. Maybe she was afraid it might get her excited? God, he would love to bury his fingers in those black curls! Why else would she dress so sexy unless she wanted to be desired? But her husband was there, too. Maybe she did it for him. Maybe he got his jollies watching other men ogle the goods?

  For nearly ten years now, he had felt sexual desire for Birgitte. What excited him about her was the thought of how her face might unfold in an intimate situation, how the surface of those sharp small burgundy eyes might crack, emit a dazzling light. He imagined looking down into those eyes as they mounted to orgasm, saying something to her that would make her inhale sharply through an open mouth, issue a pleading moan. He felt that he could please her sexually, could surrender to a profound desire if she was open to it. If she was not open to it, however, the whole experience might be regrettable.

  Imagine failed love with a fellow manager. Imagine sitting here in the Mumble Club next day knowing suddenly so much about each other, knowing a failed touch.

  Could be the opposite, of course. Eyes meeting as their pulses mounted unbearably. You! Yes! What, then, next day across the table? Shared secret of a glance? Plots? Assignations? Meetings in a hotel—perhaps over in the Palace Hotel, looking out onto the Town Hall Square? Lengthy lunches. Cocktails, cigarettes afterward, nakedness, the raw language that excites, his face between her gorgeous breasts, her slender thighs, and her joyous groans as he buried his face in the essence of her?

  That heady feeling at the annual banquet seeing her with her husband, Lars. Jaeger shaking Lars’s hand in greeting, a tall, thin man with a scrawny throat who wouldn’t have a clue. Or would he? What then? Narrowed eyes? Hostile words in the cloakroom?

  The head of the legal department, Signe Cress, was now interjecting a word, and this no doubt was what she had been jotting with her silver Cross pen. A prepared statement. Annoying, for now she had spoken, others would feel required to speak as well, to assert their presence, and this meeting could drag on for another hour, for God’s sake! Jaeger too began plumbing his mind for some worthy comment.

  I could thrash you, he thought, hearing Signe Cress’s words, her grainy voice, seize your pad and tear off that sheet of notes and crumple it into a ball and pitch it into your face. He was immediately ashamed of his excessive, inappropriate, and uncharitable thought.

  A stomach rumbled in the silence between words. Stomachs already thinking of lunch. He tried to concentrate on the words being conveyed in the grainy voice of Signe Cress, whose mumble was as unclear as the CEO’s, but he could not stop thinking about how he hated these meetings even as he knew he must guard his place here. People were always saying, “It is important that we talk, that we communicate.”

  The CEO had invited in a communications expert to address them all once, and after a lengthy presentation about the importance of open, honest, direct communication, Jaeger had chanced a question. An honest, if ill-considered question, the intention behind which seemed to have been misinterpreted.

  “I’ve always wondered,” said Jaeger, “why and how it is that when we close a letter by writing ‘With friendly greetings,’ it is actually less friendly than if we write just ‘Greetings’? Just as in English I understand that writing ‘Yours truly’ is sort of less true, so to speak, or ‘Sincerely yours’ less sincere, than if you just write ‘Yours’?”

  Jaeger thought it an interesting question, even a perceptive, clever one, but everyone cracked up laughing, and the presenter shot him a sarcastic smile, then said to the audience in general, “Are there any sincere questions?” and didn’t bother to answer. Jaeger noticed then the CEO smiling at him in the way the CEO always smiled—ungaugably. Did that smile say, You and I, Jaeger, know just how much pig trash this all is. You and I, Jaeger, know the depth of distrust that exists among all of us. You and I know, Jaeger, how we keep this pecking order in function, with tiny withholdings and tiny alleviations. Or even—could it be?—Jaeger, I see right through you, you piddling lower middle manager, which is all you’ll ever be. You skirt-chasing waste of a human being who is useful to me and therefore tolerated but by no means nonexpendable, by no fucking means, Jaeger. So watch your back.

  It seemed to Jaeger that people here were always talking, always meeting, always communicating over a cup of coffee and a piece of cake or a bottle of sparkling water. Every day, at least once, sometimes twice, even three times. And in between the meetings, people dropped by one another’s offices to chat. He noticed that when people came in to chat, most of them said the same thing three times: once when they came into the office, once again after they sat down, and then once more to signal that they were about to leave.

  Jaeger had many such visitors. He was considered a good listener because he didn’t speak much. He didn’t speak much because he had found that if you also spoke instead of only listening, the chats w
ere twice as long. If you remained silent and only listened, it was finished in half the time, and then he had peace to try to do some work and get it over with so he could have some time to himself.

  But when he was finally alone after all that chatting and listening, all he usually wanted to do was gaze out his window or contemplate the quality of the light on his crème-colored walls or think about some of the women in the office whose smiles or bodies or way of moving down the hall or glancing at him filled him with hope and pleasure or who asked how his daughters were doing and really seemed to care, really seemed to want him to tell them about the cute things they said or the things they were interested in. And why shouldn’t they be interested? He wanted to hear about their children, wanted to see their little darlings if they popped in for a visit, wanted to crouch down and smile at them and ask their names and enjoy their shy little faces and big wide eyes, offer them a mint if he had one or colored pencils and paper to draw pictures on or say preposterous things to them that made them smile skeptically at him, suddenly trusting him because he was so clearly teasing to win their trust with outlandish statements.

  Sometimes he wondered if anybody actually did anything at all in the Tank. They must have, though, because some things did get done. Even his own work got done despite all the meetings and talking and communication and “chats.” The quality of his work was even complimented occasionally by a higher-level manager or member of the board of trustees, although he could never quite remember having actually done the work or what it might mean in the long run or in the overall scheme of things.

  All the talk and the words and the chatting and the shuffling of paper and the composing of reports, and half the time, most of the time, perhaps, he felt like a fake hiding in the bush, wondering if he would ever make sense of it at all.

  Actually, it suddenly occurred to him, he loved it here. He loved this place. He loved these people. Nothing was perfect. No one had the right to expect perfection. He was one lucky asshole to have this job, and he was eternally grateful for having it. Only a fool would be an ingrate! What was wrong with him?! He looked up, beaming, in the grip of his sudden epiphany and gazed around the Piet Hein table from face to face, loving them each and all.

  But something was happening now.

  He could sense a tension rising along the table. Eyes were going tight. The CEO picked up on something or other that Signe Cress had said, and it seemed at once to Jaeger that her words were a setup, agreed upon before the meeting between her and the CEO to start a scene no one had expected.

  The CEO’s face was now almost fully visible as the light behind him slanted over the faces across from Jaeger. Only one eye of the CEO was in shadow and a fragment of his forehead, one ear. His lip moved firmly over words that now fell clearly onto the tabletop between them.

  “It hasn’t hit us yet, but there will be a substantial deficit in the last quarter of this year. It might be as high as one hundred and fifty million. So I have to ask every one of you to draft a plan for cutting costs, to absorb the loss.”

  The narrow burgundy eyes of Birgitte Sommer were rigid. Jaeger wondered how the chief of finance could have failed to know this.

  Holger Hansen, chief of the public relations department, asked through his sinuses, “How could this happen, Martin?”

  The CEO’s eyes fixed on him. “You all know—or should know—what has been happening these past many months with foreign investments as well as that both the state and the county have decided to cut our subsidies.”

  “We discussed that nearly two years ago,” Breathwaite said. “And again last year. It was not seen as a threat.”

  The CEO’s gaze was almost casual on Breathwaite’s jowly face. The corners of his mouth drew out into a little smile. “The possibility was clear.”

  “Then we knew it was coming and—”

  “The possibility was clear.”

  “But then …” Breathwaite didn’t finish the question Jaeger would himself have liked to ask: Why did we just let it happen, then?

  7. Harald Jaeger

  Claus Clausen watched from behind his desk across the corridor as the department heads straggled out of the CEO’s office. Jaeger avoided Clausen’s eyes, hurried through the anteroom where his secretary sat outside his own office.

  “Anything of interest …,” she began to ask, peering at him with tense blue eyes from behind the big frames of her blue plastic spectacles.

  “Nothing special,” Jaeger said curtly, and closed his door behind him. He could see from her eyes she already knew something, was trying to get more out of him, information, especially gossip, but anything would do, to feed those around her in the lunchroom. Gossip was the currency of importance. Unfair. She had a right to know.

  But not from me. Not just yet. No doubt she already knew some of it, maybe all of it, maybe more than he himself had. Maybe go see what she has? No, find your own footing first. A voice from within offered instruction: You can survive this. Just turn the spotlight on someone else. Be the guy focusing the beam. And be seen to be. Show you want to help cut away the deadwood. Then he heard his own thoughts and shuddered. He would not be that person. Kill or be killed. No. Live and let live. Live to fuck another day. The image of Birgitte’s black curls rose to the screen of his mind. Oh, Birgitte, Birgitte! Her slender chest and lovely round breasts! It occurred to him that after a while the splendor of a woman’s body was kind of used up. The glow dimmed from use. The aura of each of its parts wore out. But with Birgitte it might be different. It would be different. The real thing. This was a woman he could truly love forever.

  He sat over his opened laptop, elbows on the desk, mouth pressed against his fists. He was sweating. Am I going to get fired? He thought of his little girls, his little angels. What would happen to them? What would happen to him? No, no. Work. Prove your value. Work.

  He hit the mail receive on his laptop and watched the new messages fall into place. Spam, mostly. Few that needed action. Favors, mostly. Easy stuff. After all these years, he knew most of the answers without having to think. He directed a query from the secretary of a member of the board to a fellow whose name he knew in a parliamentary tourism committee. Good one. Answered three more in a row. Greetings. Friendly greetings. Best greetings. Loving greetings in response to one who had signed off with “MKH”—with loving greetings. Modern type. The subject line of the next mail was, Check out my wife’s butt and tell me it’s not hot! Click here. With regret, Jaeger deleted. Can’t risk a virus on a ruse like that. He continued scrolling down.

  Spam.

  Spam.

  Sex spam.

  Political spam.

  Political spam.

  Sex spam.

  Jaeger had once been surfing porn sites and got into a series of pretty hot S&M pages that he checked out at some length. Later that day, in the canteen, he glanced across the room and saw a young woman from IT, big lovely butt and blond braids piled atop her head, smiling at him. Then, eyeing him, she casually clapped her open palm against her bottom and winked at him. This was a woman he had never said boo to. She didn’t know him well enough to seek his eyes with a smile like that. What was she thinking? Of him checking out the butt of some spam man’s wife? Did this mean the IT people could amuse themselves watching what he was watching online?

  He didn’t like it.

  No more surfing on the job.

  8. Frederick Breathwaite

  Across the hall and two doors down, Breathwaite’s telephone rang. He was tipped back comfortably in his five-footed hydraulic safety chair and did not feel like making the effort to reach for the telephone. The view out the window of the yellow wisps of a weeping willow on the other side of the street was soothing to his eyes. He did not want to think, he wanted only to gaze upon the shadows and light on that tree and the grass around it. But the phone did not stop. Normally on the fourth ring it would channel automatically over to his secretary if he didn’t take it, but now it was ringing five times, six times
. He jerked forward and reached for it.

  Quiet voice: “Don’t you read your e-mail?” Kampman.

  “Uh, no, I have to admit, not yet today, I haven’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m not the biggest gadget guy in the world. Was there one from you, Martin?” Using Kampman’s first name reminded Breathwaite of the fact that his boss very rarely addressed him by his name, either first or last. Occasionally he spoke to others about him in his presence as “Fred Breathwaite.” Sign of respect, or distance?

  “Never mind. Why don’t you come on in here. And would you bring the Irish file with you?”

  “That’s not really a file so much, just a couple e-mails.”

  “Well, then, why don’t you bring the e-mails? That is, if you’ve looked at them, being that you don’t always do. Look, I mean. At the e-mail.” Followed by a “heh heh heh” that Breathwaite recognized would be accompanied by a rhythmic lift and fall of shoulders, simulating laughter.

  Before Kampman’s desk, Breathwaite remained standing and handed the e-mails across to his CEO.

  “That’s it?” Kampman asked. “Two sheets of paper? No file?”

  “It’s … so far it’s been pretty informal. These are people I’ve known for some time. I can tell they want to open a cooperation, and they have a fat European Union grant. Green tiger and all. We’re talking many millions of euros.”