by Jason Porter
When was the last time you felt happy?
I am happy. I am, really, and when I am not happy, I just make myself happy. I buy a diet soda and listen to classic rock.
Was it a true, pure happy or a relative happy?
I would never be dishonest about my happy.
Do you realize you have on average another 11,000 to 18,250 mornings of looking in the mirror and wondering if people will find you attractive?
That’s why I have a really big mirror with vanity bulbs.
Karl Flannigan walked into the break room. He was tall. Too tall for the Winnebago. Hunched over, he gave the vending machine a long stare, jingled his change in his hand deliberatively, and waved over at me without taking his gaze away from the machine.
I read more.
Do you believe in life after death?
Of course. I can’t wait to meet Jesus. I hear he talks to you for as long as you want up there. He’ll go on walks with you. He’s just got a lot of time for communicating, and you can put your head on his shoulder, and he’ll whisper you a joke, and it’s totally appropriate, and it makes you feel better, even though you already feel great, because you are in heaven and heaven is number one.
Do you believe in life after God?
That is a sad thought. I hope God never dies. Who’ll take care of us?
Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?
Only until the wound heals.
Do you think we need more sports?
Hard to say. There are some pretty great sports out there. Maybe a sport to include the larger people, because I feel like they don’t appreciate sports, because they don’t know how fun they can be, because they are larger, so they think sports are stupid, but they aren’t. Is it bad to say that? I don’t think anybody here is too large, and even if I did, I think that’s great. I was just talking about sports is all. For sports it can be a problem. I love all people. I’m not perfect either.
Have you ever fallen in love?
I love my dad. I loved my coach, but that got us into trouble. I love somebody else right now, and I think he loves me, but he isn’t able to give me everything. But he will by this spring vacation, which I planned for us. So the answer is yes.
I wasn’t sure what to make of her survey. I don’t think she is happy. I don’t believe her. She wants to go to Dallas. That in itself is a sign that something is askew. But the bulk of her answers were corrupted by the context of the survey. She was looking at it like an exam rather than a chance to get to know her malady.
I folded Nora’s survey so Karl couldn’t see what I was reading, and went back to the counter to create a new cup of coffee for Jerry. Karl was heating something in the toaster oven and tapping his finger to an internal rhythm.
I said, “Whatcha heating, Karl?”
“An Asian breakfast burrito.”
“Smells good.” It didn’t.
Do you hear voices?
Dead people. Little versions of me bundled in rope, struggling to formulate sentences. Sometimes the trees and clouds.
Lorraine LaFevre, Jerry’s assistant, was on the phone, and it didn’t sound like business. “And then what? . . . Uh-huh . . . Well, I wouldn’t take that . . . You know he wouldn’t get away with saying that kind of junk to me . . . Yeah, but he doesn’t know it isn’t his . . . No, you didn’t! . . . You did? . . . Oh my.” Her hair was formatted with chemicals into the shape of a swirling shrub.
She held her hand over the phone, protecting her personal conversation, and said, “Is Jerry expecting you?”
“He said ASAP, and”—I motioned to the mug in my hand—“I brought him coffee.”
“Mary, I’ll have to call you back.”
I stood and waited.
“Why don’t you take a seat?”
A little coffee spilled onto my hand as I lowered myself into one of the five beanbags in the waiting area. The beanbags looked like the deflated eggs of a two-hundred-foot salmon. We were pushing the items in our summer catalogs. There was a tendency to promote inside the company whatever new products we were hustling on the outside, to cultivate an enthusiasm from within. Sitting lopsided on an orange pink sack was not cultivating an enthusiasm from within.
Lorraine opened the door into Jerry’s office and stuck her head in while keeping the rest of her body in the reception area. She was wearing a blue skirt. Her calves looked like bowling pins.
She came back to her desk and told me Jerry was expecting me.
I said, “How are you feeling today?”
“Busy.” She started clicking on her mouse and staring at her screen.
I said, “Would you like to help me get out of this beanbag?”
She raised one eyebrow. That was all the response I got.
• • •
Jerry had a corner office. Square. The two halves that made the corner were all window. It looked onto the imitation brook that ran through the campus. He was at his desk listening to space shuttle music. It was a composition designed to keep astronauts motivated as they tightened bolts on satellites. Without the music, according to the liner notes, the space workers were more likely to drift off into prolonged dream states. Jerry had told me once that it increased his efficiency and at the end of the same conversation offered to sell me a copy at cost.
“Just one second, bud.” He was fiddling with a phone tablet thing, organizing his communicating. I set the coffee down next to him, trying not to distract him.
A bird flew into one of the windows and crashed to the ground outside.
“Fucking birds,” said Jerry, without looking up from his gadget. “Don’t they get that it’s glass?”
I was on the bird’s side. I happen to love birds. They have small hearts. They have song. They can scream when they are in their cages, alone with the child of the house; scream when they smell fire and tell the child to get the fuck out. And they have a delicately wound biological mechanism within them, like an elaborate clock made out of miniature bones, or so I imagine it, that allows them to fly up and down the globe without getting lost.
I waited in a chair across from Jerry. I watched him. Forgetting about the bird’s death as soon as it happened, he was hunched over, tapping at his device, unhappy with the information it was relaying back to him. I looked at his huge forehead. There was room on it for a second face. I started to draw his forehead’s face on a piece of paper while I waited for him. This second face was looking down at the first face wondering when the first face would stop tinkering with the gadget.
“Sorry about this, Ray,” he said, gesturing to the device, “but it’s ten minutes before race time, and I’m just trying to breathe a little air into the revenue growth of one of our Latin operations.”
I started to feel a hiss at the base of my jaw. Jerry always spoke in an unintelligible business vernacular, but this was the first time I could recall the words triggering a physical reaction in my body.
“Ouch,” I said. Not to Jerry, but because my jaw hurt.
“Fair enough. Fair enough, Ray. You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t be wasting your time, what with the secret little project you have going on.”
My head followed this approximate line of thought: The survey. Bob Grasston. Sauna. Project incomplete. Shit. Snitched on. Fired. Problems. Mad Brenda. Brenda leave me. Feelings? Hug Don. Kiss Nora. Fight Charlie. Confess? Whimper? Flee. Correction: Take pens from supply closet, then flee.
“Secret project?” I said.
“Bob Grasston told me. I think he’s jealous.”
“One of his graphs?”
“Ray, stop being coy. I haven’t time to beat around the bush. I have things to implement. Wars to wage. Armies to creep up on in the night, and one of them is in Bangalore of all places.”
Jerry was fond of using military metaphors to describe our work. He al
ways asked Don and me how things were down in the trenches. Once, while firing somebody, he likened the man’s dismissal to amputating a soldier’s gangrenous leg.
“Would you like a drink?”
“Is that allowed?”
“It is if I offer you one.”
“Are you having one?”
He got out some highball glasses with bright pink Ls on them and filled them with something whiskey-colored.
“You should have checked with me first, Ray. There are legal steps we could have taken. If people had signed releases, we could have had a lot more flexibility with this data. Some of these questions aren’t very professional.”
“I thought all the surveys were on my desk?”
“Come on, Ray. These things spread. You know that. Somebody asked me about the survey, and I said I’d never heard of such a thing, and could he forward the e-mail, and he said there was no e-mail. No e-mail? Smells fishy is what I thought.”
I couldn’t respond.
“No offense, and credit where credit is due,” he continued, “but I’m going to hire a firm to do this right. The whole gamut. Quizzes. Puzzles. Ink-blob free association. Polygraphs. I don’t care what it takes.”
He was looking at me like he was making music just for me. He kept talking in weird patterns that went up and down and curled around themselves like roller coasters. I stopped listening to the words themselves and instead tried to figure out what shapes the words might have. Very odd shapes. Chocolate shapes. Strawberry shapes. Barnacle shapes.
He sipped on his drink. I pretended to sip on mine.
He kept talking. He said what I did takes balls. He said he likes balls, though not in those very words. He talked about growing up in these buildings, living his life here, having a feel for the job, seeing a lot of things—beautiful things, horrific things—fighting a lot of fights, sleeping under the stars, eating grubs off the jungle floor, pulling himself up by his bootstraps, carrying wounded men miles, pulling the pins out of hand grenades, crying in tidal waves when one of his men went down, flying a chopper with both arms in a sling. The whole speech, slippery as it was, had an end in sight that somehow pertained to me. That was clear.
At the very first opening I said, “I’ve been thinking of taking a leave of absence.” I was surprised that saying it didn’t surprise me. I knew that on some level the job was killing me, but I also knew that leaving the job would cause Brenda to kill me.
Jerry had an awkward swallow that transitioned into a misshapen laugh.
“I see what you are doing,” he said. “You’re trying to gain a little leverage. I like it, but don’t push it. A man like me likes to feel charitable, not cornered. We get cornered, we lose our charity.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.”
“Back to the coy games, I see. Raymond, what do you want? I’ll pay you double—well, not double, but more than you make now. You can have your own apartment here on campus. I’ll make Nora your personal assistant. How does that sound?”
I began to speak, but he said, “Shh. Let’s drink a little first. You need to let this sink in.”
He poured the remainder of the liquor into his glass. Looking at the empty state of the decanter, he said, “This won’t do,” and started riffling through his drawers, and then searched his coat closet.
“Ray, what do you have to do? Can you hold on while I get another bottle?”
“I was going to finish up the proofs for the LCD mailboxes.”
“Nonsense.”
He rushed out. I could hear him in the waiting room saying something to Lorraine.
I walked over to the corner of his office, where the windows meet, to pour out the remainder of my whiskey into a potted palm. Looking out the windows I saw traffic buzzing along, the shine of identical buildings, a current of energy that looked habitual rather than purposeful. I saw the bird on the ground, its neck broken. Poor fellow. It had tried to kiss its reflection and that was its crime. Little drops of bird blood splattered at the beak. Dying eyes looking for an explanation.
Turning around to head back to my seat before Jerry got back, I spied a survey on his desk. Could it be? Could this man honestly deny his sadness in the face of my questions? Was it accurate to call him a man? Did he even know what feelings were? I grabbed it and rushed back to my seat. I began to fold it, to conceal it, but then I quickly began reading instead, because I could not help myself.
Are you single?
I am married to Gayle Samberson, the mother of my children.
Would you prefer to be someone else?
If I had an identical twin, I would consume him to be even more like myself.
Are you similar to the “you” you thought you would become when as a child you imagined your future self?
I imagined this very nameplate that sits on my desk when I was thirteen. I didn’t have the title down, but I could see my name inset in white letters.
I heard something outside. I sat on the survey and pretended to be doing nothing. I waited. I was still. I looked at the walls. A photo of Jerry cutting a ribbon in front of a commercial outlet. Next to the photo was a map of the world with the names of countries replaced by the names of our biggest-selling products. The continents were pink and the oceans were green. Iceland was as big as Africa.
Nobody came in, so I read some more.
Do you think people will remember you after you die?
I doubt that I will die anytime soon.
For how long after you die?
How long does a bronze statue stand erect in a corporate garden?
Do you believe in life after death?
I will recline on a cloud and look down on all of the work I have accomplished in my life. An angel will hand me a telescope to witness my legacies. I will smoke a cigar. You can’t get cancer in heaven, either because they have cancer-free cigar technology or more likely because you aren’t technically alive.
Are you for the chemical elimination of all things painful?
If we could secure manufacturing rights.
Do you think we need more sports?
I think we may need more sports-related furniture.
I heard Jerry talking to Lorraine again. I folded and stuffed the survey into my pocket and swirled my glass around and started whistling to myself. Jerry entered and noticed my empty glass.
“Good man! Not to worry. Reinforcements have arrived,” he said, waving a full bottle. “I’m glad you are unwinding, Raymond. Very glad. You know, I was quite enjoying our talk. We all work so much, sometimes we need these little rap sessions.”
Jerry’s friendliness made me uncomfortable. He was acting like he trusted me. Like he was going to give me the keys to his kingdom. A friendly overture from the school bully. I didn’t want to step over to his side, nor did I fully trust the gesture, but the protection had some allure. But then as I considered the allure, I could feel something inside of me shrinking, or preparing to shrink. Some aspect of myself.
“Are you married, Raymond?” He poured himself some more. He poured me some more. I pretended to take a sip. I made a sound I imagined I would make if I were enjoying it, an appreciative sigh.
“Yes, I am. I believe you met my wife at one of the Christmas parties. Brenda. Dark hair. Glasses. Sharp wit.” I could tell he wasn’t listening. His eyes were somewhere else.
“Yes, yes. Nice work. Lovely woman,” he said, and then, “What about something on the side?”
“Excuse me?”
He paused, wondering perhaps if I was truly a member of his platoon.
“You are accepting the promotion, correct?” he said.
“I suppose so,” I said. I felt cold. I was shivering somewhere just under the skin.
“You suppose so?”
“How could I not?” I started to think about fire exits. Where the nearest one w
as. I began to miss the interior of my car. I began to miss my wife, or at least the time when I used to miss my wife. I thought about my childhood: soft foods, familiar blankets, bath toys I missed deeply.
“Some of your questions in this survey got me thinking about the past. Certain indiscretions. Things I haven’t told people. Things I shouldn’t tell people. Things people could use against me.”
“I think it is the things we use against ourselves that are the real killers.” It sounded like nonsense as I said it, but I tried to relax anyway. Let go a little. Enjoy the discomfort of our exchange as best I could. I thought about our thoughts—my thoughts, Jerry’s thoughts, everybody’s thoughts—swirling around in outer space, an astro-cloud of ideas and emotions, a celestial storm light-years away, and our bodies acting as receivers. We were like radios sitting next to each other, picking up programming that wasn’t necessarily related, simulating a conversation, because our bodies were in a close proximity, and sounds were coming out, and at times our meanings intersected, if only slightly.
He walked from his desk over to the love seat, which was closer to the leather chair I was sitting in. A conversation pit, minus the pit, made of sample furniture. We were much closer now. Direct eye contact was difficult to avoid.
“Do you remember Debbie Rayburn?”
“Vaguely.”
“She worked as my assistant. In Lorraine’s position. Real sharp dresser. Loved the color cyan.”
“That sort of rings a bell.” In my memory all of his assistants blended together into one big mound of makeup and overburdened hair arrangements.
“Well, she had a mole on her upper lip. The kind that drives a man wild. It wasn’t something I could control. Which was liberating in a way—to have no choice but to yield to the urge and pounce.”
“Like an animal?”
“Like a savage,” he said, with the glee of a child deciding on the ideal Halloween costume.