The Deep Whatsis

by Peter Mattei

  “Wait. How’d you know I was going to be at the opening?” I ask.

  “From your e-mail,” she says. I wondered for a nanosecond if maybe I had sent out a mass e-mail to the creative department touting the Rodney “Show Me Your Tits!” opening (my mass e-mails sometimes making it onto Agency Spy because they are so entertaining) but of course I hadn’t.

  “My e-mail? What e-mail?”

  “You should change your password,” she says, and looks away in what appears to be shame.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I drink too much when I’m around you,” she says. “I drink too much and I talk too much, I don’t know why.”

  “So next time drink less and talk less.”

  She just says, “The car is waiting.”

  “Yeah, maybe, I mean, whatevs,” I say.

  At this point coherent communication has broken down, and I don’t know what else to do so I open the door and let her out. She goes into the hallway and turns around and looks at me. She pulls something out of her Freitag messenger bag. It’s a tiny little cactus.

  “Here,” she says. “For you.”

  “What is it?” I say. She gives me a look.

  “It’s a cactus.”

  “I don’t like plants,” I say.

  “It isn’t a plant. It’s a Mammillaria,” she says. “It doesn’t even need water. It gets whatever moisture it desires from the air. Meaning it lives on nothing, no sustenance at all. Isn’t that cool?”

  When she is gone I go to the bathroom and turn the light back on (she had turned it off) and put the mini nonplant on my kitchen island. I stare at it for a long time, wondering if indeed she had meant to give it to me all along, why she hadn’t earlier, why she thought it was a gift I would appreciate, what it meant, if anything, and so on. Then I call my assistant and leave a message saying I have a family emergency and won’t be in. I turn off my phone and spend the rest of the day and most of the night either staring at the cactus, playing Halo, or reworking the opening sentence of my screenplay.

  At some point I realize I should eat something and so I save and close the Final Draft doc and go up the street to Marlow & Sons and sit at the bar and order the Brick Chicken. I look around at everyone there. Two young women next to me are talking about whether commodities like gold and silver make good investments these days, because they are based in real things, instead of unreal things, and I push my plate away without touching the chicken or the brick, leave a hundred dollar bill on the bar, and go back across Kent Avenue to my place. Once I get there I smoke two bowls of primo sensi and take an Ambien and then a Xanax and go to sleep with my clothes on.

  1.10

  On the way to the office in the morning as I’m riding in the car service over the Williamsburg Bridge I decide to call the great dramatist and future creator of his own religion Seth Krallman; he is after all my only friend. The views out my window and over the bridge down to the Navy Yard to the south and Wall Street to the southwest are some of the most sweeping in the city; for some reason I dislike them: they’re trying too hard.

  I call Seth because I know that though he has been asleep for only a couple of hours he’ll take my call anyway, hoping that I am inviting him to come up to the agency and have a look around, prelude to my hiring him. While his phone is ringing I try to think of something to say to him; I decide I will say I am interested in purchasing his Range Rover. There’s a certain rightness to the idea, I realize; I could drive to work every morning, there’s parking in my contract. Seth doesn’t pick up, incredibly, and I leave him a message.

  “Dude. It’s Eric, I was just thinking, we should start a business or something. Call me.”

  Then in my mind I run through all the things I have going on in my life: my headhunter keeps calling me about a job in the Midwest, we’re in a pitch for a new meningitis vaccine, and there’s a new round of layoffs that demand some more of my and HR Lady’s undivided attention.

  Such as Juliette. We were supposed to fire her while I was home dealing with my “crisis.” I also remember that I have to call IT and get my password changed and the whole thing with Intern sorted out; if she hacked into my e-mail that will be grounds to fire her, too. It’s shaping up to be a decent day.

  Juliette Chang is fifty-two. She’s had some good years but she’s simply an old horse that has run out of gas. I hate to say that but it’s true, and that’s not her fault, it’s just what this business does to people. So for the past few months I’ve been giving her some bogus assignments at the very end of the day just to keep her busy. I will stop by her cubicle around 7:45 PM just as she is thinking of leaving (in general, no one leaves until I do; if I am not in, like yesterday, the place will be a tomb by 6:15, but if I stick around till midnight virtually everyone will stick around till midnight) and I’ll say that I got a call from the Smirnoff guys and they need some new ideas for in-store point-of-sale pieces; they were thinking of a life-size cardboard cutout of a Russian girl with a thought balloon only they didn’t know what the girl would be thinking in the thought balloon, could she come up with a bunch of options for a meeting tomorrow morning at 8 AM? Then she would micro-sigh, realizing that any plans she had that night were fucked, not that she had anything to do other than hang out with her cat, then an instant later she would light up with a big smile and say, “Oh sure! That sounds like a fun assignment!” I think she must have known that I was only playing with her, poking her to see if she would growl, which I was, and she never did, poor girl. At times I would think about the toxic effect I was having on her life and I would feel a form of compassion for her, and even begin to regret what I was doing. But that was not a feeling that was conducive to the financial health and wellbeing of the agency.

  There’s some kind of accident on Delancey and so I tell the driver to take a right on Bowery. We go north toward Houston, past the new boutique hotels and art galleries that are flocking to the area; I notice a condo tower underway and there are about two guys working there, doing nothing. I take out my phone and look at all the e-mail I didn’t respond to yesterday and delete most of it. One from HR Lady says we have to meet first thing about an item of importance and she won’t say what, and I assume it is about Juliette. Maybe HR went and fired her solo but I know it can’t work like that, you have to have at least two company representatives in the room. Finally the traffic lightens up a bit past Fifth and from here it’s a straight shot west to the Tate building.

  When I get to my office she is waiting for me.

  “We have something we have to talk about,” HR Lady says with a mock-serious look that hides a smirky smile.

  “Is she suing us for age discrimination?”

  “What?”

  “Juliette. Is she suing us for age discrimination?”

  “Ssshh,” HR Lady says, annoyed that I would even speak such words outside of our cone of silence. “No, it’s not her. Something else.”

  We get into my office and she closes the door and looks at me.

  “She’s doing fine,” she says.

  “So you fired her?”

  “No, no, she’s still at the hospital.”

  “Wait, she tried to kill herself? What are you saying?” HR Lady has this way of talking around the truth; I’ve noticed it’s a common advertising-based personality meme.

  “Not Juliette, Sabi,” she says.

  Sabi? “Who’s Sabi?”

  “Eric,” she says, giving me a look. “The production intern.”

  Her name is Sabi? Did I know that? “What happened to her?”

  “Why don’t you tell me?” she asks in a tone that I don’t appreciate. I don’t appreciate the barely veiled news it conveys that we are no longer on the same team. I think about it and then I say, “You know, I don’t really appreciate that tone,” my mind lurching in and out of clichés perhaps due to the fact I haven’t eaten and I’m still as always demihard from my meds.

  “Look, just tell me what happened. She’s got a mass
ive bruise on her face and she wouldn’t say how she got it but she did say that she spent the night with you. Then she teared up and walked away. I realized we potentially have a situation here and so I sent her to the hospital to have it looked at.”

  “To have what looked at?”

  “Her face.”

  I thought about it and decided the only thing to do was tell the truth, or as close to the truth as I could muster.

  “I saw her last night,” I say. “At a party. That’s all there is to it.”

  HR Lady looks at me knowing full well that I’m witholding the sexual relations part but I’m guessing she knows better than to go there right at this moment. I am wrong.

  “Did you fuck her?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Did you have sex with her, Eric? I know this is uncomfortable but if you want me to get Barry involved in this I’ll have to. Actually, I could get my ass in a sling for not having done so already.” Barry is the company’s general counsel, and the de facto president of the agency since the former president had quit, and he was one of two people in the entire building who could actually get me fired, the other being the chairman of the entire Tate Worldwide agency network. I didn’t like Barry and he didn’t like me. He had worked here for thirty years and was the kind of person who was loyal to the people he came up with, and he didn’t like me for reasons I totally understand; I’m an asshole and not loyal to anyone, not even myself.

  “No, I did not have sex with her, we just hung out a bit at my place,” I say to HR.

  “Are you kidding me?” she says.

  I pause for a moment to watch her body twitch almost imperceptibly. “And as far as her bruise goes,” I continue, “she was fucking wasted and she slipped and fell and hit her head. It had nothing to do with me.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Where were you at the time?”

  “I was standing about ten or twelve feet from her.”

  “Doing what?” she asks. Do I tell her I was modeling her sock on my penis? Her sock she had transmogrified into something anthropomorphic?

  “OK I’ll tell you the truth,” I say with a laugh. “We did some meth and went back to the trailer and I found out she’d been screwing my cousin Elrod and so I beat the shit out of her. Come on, this is ridiculous.”

  “A black eye is not ridiculous, Eric, and if a doctor says she’s been, you know, abused …”

  “You mean like hit? Like I hit her? You can’t be serious.”

  “And if she says she was, you know, raped—and the doctor does a test …”

  “A test? You mean like a DNA test? Jesus this is really getting silly.”

  “Of course I don’t think you punched her,” Helen finally says, maybe 80 percent believing it. “She fell. Or something. And I’m sure it was consensual. My God. What am I doing? I can’t even think the thoughts I’m thinking right now.” She sits down and looks at the floor.

  “Well, she didn’t have a black eye, at least when I left her this morning. She had a slight welt. Are you sure it was a black eye and not just some hip new makeupy Amy Winehousey thing?”

  “I saw it,” she says. “And it is a black eye. A bad one, too.”

  I stand and suddenly the blood leaves my head and goes directly into my stomach and sits there, all of it, pooling up like a superfund site. I feel like I’m going to barf so I sit back down.

  “She’s been hacking my e-mail,” I finally say, realizing this could be my best and only defense at this point.

  “What?”

  “She told me this morning as she was leaving. She’s admitted to stalking me. The whole thing is ugly. I think she may have caused the black eye herself. In fact, she may be insane.”

  “Oh great.”

  HR Lady looks out the window, staring at the glass curtain wall of a neighboring skyscraper, which at this time of day with the sun angling like that is just a reflection, revealing nothing. She’s probably wondering why it is that guys, some guys at least, are so drawn to Crazy Girls, think about it, there’s even a strip club named for them in LA, on La Brea, they go for Crazy Girls when there are good, honest, sane, all-American women sitting right in front of them. That’s what I’d be thinking if I were her. My half sister, raised Episcopalian like me, is now a Muslim and living in Cairo, married to an Egyptian taxi driver, and she doesn’t remember Mom being so nuts, but consider the source. My therapist, the one time I did go to a therapist, ended our one and only session by declaring that we as a family had some issues to work out in terms of our relationship to our manic-depressive matriarch, and I didn’t disagree, but still I never went back, mostly because I was just telling him stories that weren’t really true so how would he know. My point is that it’s possible I am somehow attracted to women who are on the other side of tilt, without even knowing it, just by looking at them, one glance as it were, which is kind of how it happened that night at the bar when Intern looked at me and smiled her smile of abject joy. I felt something go wrong inside, like a glitch, or some data got hung up somewhere and never made it past the initial instruction to the OS, where I might have seen it, an error message that would have read “404: Stay Away.” Instead what I get is a kind of involuntary Come Hither, a wobbly twitch in the loins, and I do go hither and with haste. What can I say? Does it really make a difference, if one chooses to be with so-called Healthy Women or so-called Total Nutjobs? We’re all a little off if you ask me, it’s a spectrum, which is why I initially thought HR and I were talking about Juliette Chang and the difficult time she’s heading toward, thanks to me. Maybe if I spare her the karma thing, if I believed in it, that would help me out in other areas of my life; now fuck me I sound like Seth. But maybe my trouble with Intern is a sign; maybe we shouldn’t fire Juliette after all? Maybe we should reconsider the whole plan?

  Finally HR Lady looks back to me and says, “Well at any rate we have a situation here, we need to talk to Barry, Eric, you know that.”

  “You don’t believe me, do you?” I moan.

  “Believe you?”

  “About her being crazy and hacking into my e-mail.”

  She pauses for about a minute and then speaks. “No, I don’t really believe you. How could she do that? Is she a computer genius or something?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know anything about her, I didn’t even know her name. All I know is she’s smart as hell, I can tell you that much. She skipped two years of high school, she said, she had a perfect grade point average and even studied philosophy and cultural theory and film. She told me she made out with Slavoj Žižek. See?”

  “Who?”

  Now there are two things I need to say about what I just said, first being that it’s not true, she never said she made out with Slavoj Žižek, she said to me that she had met him once and I understood by the look in her eye when she said it that she meant she had maybe slept with him or thought about it. And two, I know that HR Lady has absolutely no idea who Slavoj Žižek is, has probably never heard of postmodern post-Lacanian post-French Slovenian cultural theory, probably could not find Ljubljana on Google Maps.

  “Who?” she says.

  “This semi-Eurotrashy intellectual guy from NYU, it’s not important, I’m just saying, she’s a very smart girl, it’s possible she’s a computer hacker or knows someone who is.”

  I could tell that HR Lady was thinking I was a little paranoid. And, true, if you asked me to describe myself in a word or phrase I would probably say “a little paranoid.”

  “Maybe you’re being a little paranoid,” she finally says.

  “I’m not! She as much as admitted it!” I say. “Why don’t we get Tan to look into it?” Tan is one of our IT guys. He’s autistic, or rather he has Asperger’s syndrome, so he’s able to hold down a job but can’t really figure out the whole human interaction thing. He likes to talk to himself in the elevator, which is strange if you’re the only one in it with him and you think he’s talking to you. Peopl
e are freaked by him and some of the younger guys had begun to call him “Cho” after that Asian dude who shot everybody up at Virginia Tech. To counter their perception and prejudice I made some posters and buttons that said TAN IS THE NEW BEIGE™ and put them around. I love the man. He’s from Cambodia, his parents were killed by the Khmer Rouge. I do think he’s capable of walking in here with an AK-47 and shooting the place to bits and killing us all but, first of all, so am I, and second of all, maybe that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.

  “Why don’t we get Tan to look into it?” I say again.

  “Yes, if you think so,” replies HR Lady. Then she gets up and walks out. I sit there for a minute and then I go to Faco and drink three glasses of Sancerre. Then I go to Uniqlo and buy a hoodie because the temperature is dropping.

  When I get back to the office I locate Tan and ask him if he could tell if someone had hacked into my e-mail. He says he most definitely was going to be there but it was raining and so he had to take the subway. I wave my hand in front of his face and then he says he could look at the log-ins. He goes onto some kind of odd-looking site, a back door into the Entourage servers that Microsoft provides for admins. He scrolls through lots of rows of numbers that I take to be the times and file sizes and so on of my e-mail. He keeps shaking his head.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask him.

  “The way they configured this is all screwy! It’s crazy!” he says in his accent. Then he dives into a diatribe about Bill (he means Gates) and Nathan (Myhrvold, the former Microsoft CTO) and how they had de-something-somethinged the preferences folder in 2002 and should never have upgraded the server-side admin features without talking to the Linux side. Then he looks deeper into the information and is reading the exact IP addresses of the people who sent me e-mail and the computers from which I checked it. It was kind of like watching your doctor stare at your X-rays while going “hmmmm.”

  “What is it?”

  “You use your phone for e-mail?” he is asking me.

  “Yes.”

  “And you have BlackBerry?”