Break in Case of Emergency (7 page)

Pam was the only person not assigned to the Project who knew about its existence. Jen and Jim were the Project's principal architects (“I prefer
product managers,
” Jim said). By mutual tacit agreement, Jen and Jim never spoke in explicit terms about it; the first, unspoken rule of the Project was not to call any procedure, implement, or site related to the Project by its actual name. Jen and Jim had grown fastidious about this rule without interrogating why they had ever instated it in the first place. In the beginning it was just a nervous tic, or a way of imagining themselves apart from their situation. Now the rule was like protective outer gear. A shield against inclement weather. A prophylactic.

They embarked on the Project with some degree of ambivalence, propelled forward largely because Jen, having breached the threshold of thirty without yet crossing the Rubicon of thirty-five, thus found herself in the epoch that women's magazines, morning talk shows, mutual acquaintances, miscellaneous cousins and sisters-in-law, and occasional prolix strangers on the subway had agreed on as the preferred window for all Project launches. Jen and Jim's ambivalence tipped into bland relief when the Project did not launch immediately, granting them more time to adjust to the idea of a hypothetical tiny future boarder. But as month after month passed, and as months somehow metastasized into years, relief curdled into tantric panic. They had not known what they wanted, or how much they wanted it, until they discovered that it was not necessarily theirs for the taking.

At first, Jen and Jim worked on the Project in the traditional manner: by themselves, in secret, mostly at home. After about a year, they had tapped outside consultants with medical degrees to explore methods for expediting the Project. The Project halted during Jen's sojourn in the valley of joblessness, but gainful employment and, more to the point, gainful employer-provided health insurance had redoubled her enthusiasm for the Project. They referred to Jen's many Project-related appointments as “trips to the henhouse” and sometimes as “black-box testing.” Jim's significantly less frequent Project-related obligations were “swim meets” or occasionally “speed trials.”

Gainful employment and gainful employer-provided health insurance had also redoubled Jen's enthusiasm for her Animexa prescription, although licensed professionals had warned her that even small doses of central-nervous-system stimulants would be incompatible with Project completion. Meanwhile, Jim prepared for his swim meets by taking up a diet of sautéed spinach and lean chicken and adopting an at-home wardrobe of size-too-large boxer shorts and the occasional sarong, all the better for producing “new obsolete stock” stored at subzero temperatures in “Han Solo's Carbonite Tomb.”

Jen told herself that she had designated Pam as the Project's sole outside observer because she knew all Pam would do is lend an ear, observe without judgment. She knew that Pam's still-ongoing medical odyssey would keep in check Jen's self-pity or irritation about the endless trips back and forth to the henhouse. Jen also knew that if she had designated the only other viable candidate, Meg, as a Project observer, that Meg probably would have urged her to take trips instead to a newer, swankier, more high-tech, probably out-of-network henhouse, and switch to a diet largely made up of kale, cranberries, almonds, and peanut butter, and do other things for which Jen had no energy such as acupuncture and cognitive behavioral therapy and not chewing gum and not occasionally breaking off half an Animexa tablet before writing a research memo for an upcoming LIFt meeting.

But if Jen was being honest, she would admit she picked Pam, not Meg, because she doubted Pam-the-real-artist was interested in a Project of her own—and even if Pam was interested, she would be in an even worse financial position than Jen to undertake one.

“That Sharon is having another baby,” Jen's mom was saying. “Did you see the reveal?”

Sharon was one of Jen's sisters-in-law. After seven years of marriage to Jen's brother and two children and one incubating fetus, Sharon had not yet danced into Jen's mother's affections with sufficient vigor to shake off the
that.
Betsy, Jen's other sister-in-law, had shed the
that
just three and a half years and two children in. Jim theorized that Sharon lagged behind Betsy because Jen's mother preferred what she saw as Betsy's homespun and low-budget approach to the social-media arms race of gender-reveal cakes, a war that Sharon waged by proxy on multiple tiers with hand-piped fleur-de-lis, blowtorched meringue, and frosting carved and shaped into pink-and-blue pairs of pacifiers, partridges, and baby booties.

“I don't think she makes those herself,” Jen's mom said, her tone sniffing of conspiracy. “I think she has
outside help.
”

“Mom, of course she does,” Jen said. “You can't make your own gender-reveal cake. It defeats the purpose of having a gender reveal.”

“Hmmpf,” Jen's mom said.

“You know,” Jen said, trying to keep her tone playful, “you have got to be the only mother of a married childless woman I know who doesn't give her daughter a hard time about delivering grandchildren on schedule.”

Jen's mom was silent. “It's none of my business,” she said after a moment.

“I guess there's no pressure on me, huh, since your boys have been so prolific.”

“It's none of my business,” Jen's mom said again.

“It can be your business if you want it to be,” Jen said. “I don't mind if you ask me about it. It would be nice to—”

“That's your private business,” Jen's mom said with finality.

Jen had never asked her mother for her privacy, and Jen's mother freely gave it to her nonetheless.

“Hey, Jen.” Karina was standing directly behind Jen, slouching against the empty filing cabinets, holding a slim folder between two fingers, as if it were sticky or flammable.

Jen carefully took out her new earbuds, set them carefully on her desk, and turned carefully away from her computer screen, which currently showed the Grand Rapids Miss Congeniality, Lady Sally Mineola, wrapped in a roller-derby bondage ensemble—helmet estranged from the top of her wig line by a teetering Marie Antoinette pouf—and sipping champagne from a stiletto held in the teeth of a heavily muscled man wearing nothing but Y-fronts, tanning oil, and a bejeweled
luchador
mask.

“Leora sure has fun friends!” Jen said brightly.

“No idea, no idea,” Karina said. “None of my business.”

“Oh, just so you know, this is for WERK!, the—”

“You were a little late again getting in this morning,” Karina said. “Everything okay?”

“Oh, yes,” Jen said. “I had a doctor's appointment.”

“Another one, yes, I can see that,” Karina said, chinning toward the cotton ball plastered to the crook of Jen's arm with a Band-Aid. “Hope all is well?”

“Ah, this is nothing, just a bit of medieval bloodletting to balance the humors, no biggie.”

“Phlebotomy,” Daisy said from behind the cubicle wall.

“Phlebotomy,” Jen said.

“Good to know,” Karina said. “In the future, though, do make sure to give the team a heads-up if you're going to be late. Otherwise we'll be worried about you.”

“I did—”

“We need to discuss this, uh,
sex thing
you wrote up,” Karina said. “Leora is a little, well, let's just say she's not happy.”

“Sex thing?”

“ ‘Not happy'
may
be a bit of an understatement,” Karina said.

“What sex thing?”

“It was for”—Karina checked her notes—“Women Empowered to Love their Libido. W-E-L-L, WELL.” She set the folder down on the filing cabinet and dusted her fingers, as if some grime or grit had rubbed off.

“Oh, that one was fun. There's actually quite a wonderful program happening in—”

“This is not how you should be spending your time,” Karina said. “I'm frankly surprised that you couldn't come to that conclusion on your own.” Karina tilted her head and shook it slightly as she gazed at Jen, more in sorrow than in anger.

“Ah, got it,” Jen said.

“You need to remember—and gosh, this is a good reminder for me, too, and for all of us—that we need to leave ourselves a lot of room to be able to speak to a lot of different people, with different, oh, you know,
standards of discourse
—not to get all college-seminar-intellectual on ya.”

“Oh, no, not at all, I got it,” Jen said.

“You got it,” Karina said.

“Totally got it,” Jen said.

Karina blinked twice and folded her arms. “Is that it?” Karina asked. “Anything you want to tell me?”

“About—women's sexual empowerment?”

Karina puffed sharply through her nose. “Just trying to make sure we're all on the same page now,” she said. “You know, I don't know what really happened here, but it's important that we're on the right track, that we know what direction we're headed in.”

“What happened,” Jen said, “so far as I can tell, is that you asked me to work on an idea that came from Leora and the board, and now Leora has decided that she doesn't like the idea. Right?” Jen smiled and laughed to indicate that she was happy and engaged and LIFting herself, no matter what kinds of challenges or friendly misunderstandings might present themselves along the way.

“Interesting way to put it,” Karina said.

Jen laughed again for reasons unknown to her.

“I just think it's good to keep in mind that we need to be careful,” Karina said. “We have to set the highest standards for ourselves, and then
raise
those standards. You know, it's so amazing to work at an organization like LIFt, where we can just let our imaginations go wild, and in service of a greater good—it's just such an amazing opportunity, that freedom. But with that freedom comes responsibility. Especially with hot-button issues like sex, relationships, female sexuality, reproductive…
issues.
Do you know what I mean?”

“Totally,” Jen said. “Totally hear you, totally agree. It's great to have feedback! But just to be clear—you asked—I was asked to work on this. I didn't go off and make it my own thing. I can show you the email you sent—I mean, the email I received—”

“You don't have to do that.”

“No, it will only take a few seconds, just so we can reconstruct—” Jen started to turn back to her computer.

“Please, don't let me distract you any longer from Lady Sally Mineola, ‘Rebelle Without a Flaw,' ” Karina said.

Jen turned back. “Ha, you got me there, but I just wanted to make sure we—”

“Look,
no one
is blaming you, Jen,” Karina said. “It's
not
about blame. You haven't been here long and you've already made a big impact. I'm proud of you! I just wanted you to know that Leora, well, she just expects us to reach a little higher.” Karina reached up her hand and waved like a pageant contestant. “She would never want us to settle for the lowest common denominator.”

“Well, I admit it wasn't my favorite idea of the stack so far,” Jen said, in a spirit of agreement and same-page-ness.

“Well, there you go—there's a lesson in this: Trust your instincts. That's a key message for us to send as an organization, but we can only
send
the message if we ourselves have gotten the message! So if you're working on a project and you don't think it's working, speak up. We can collaborate on a solution, or we can walk hand in hand back to the drawing board.” Karina was nodding now, but regret still shone in her eyes.

“Sure thing, Karina, thanks for that.”

“Awesome. You're a smart cookie, Jen,” Karina said. “You don't have to prove that to anyone. But you do have to trust yourself. It's just so important.”

“So true,” Jen said, but Karina was already walking away.

Saturdays and Sundays at the henhouse were always the most crowded, for reasons Jen couldn't comprehend. Jim speculated that other clients of the henhouse had cracked some code of inbound logistics, allowing them to time their production orders so as to pursue their respective Projects without interfering with a high-pressure workweek.

“It's possible, right?” Jim murmured, shifting in his beige seat at the beige back wall of the beige-carpeted waiting room. “Like how female roommates sync up their menstrual cycles.”

“That is a myth,” Jen said.

If one of Jen's visits fell on a weekday, sometimes she could get out of the henhouse in time to get to LIFt by nine a.m. But not always, and never when it was Jim's day of the month to come in. Too much had to happen.

First, they would wait for Jim's name to be called. The name-calling nurse was invariably the most petite and sweetest-looking staffer on duty that morning, and would read from the sign-in log apologetically, half smiling, half cringing.

“We should have pseudonyms,” Jim whispered.
“Noms de guerre.”

“Don't worry, we both have generic names,” Jen said. “No one will ever know who we are.”

Jen spotted one of Pam and Paulo's onetime temporary roommates across the waiting room. The roommate had arrived too late to snag a seat, and instead leaned against a wall, arms crossed over the dark leather satchel held to her chest, and wearing not the telltale hunted, haunted look that marked out most of Pam and Paulo's tenants, but the calm, empty expression that most visitors to the henhouse cultivated.

Jen looked away, heat in her cheeks. Embarrassment, she had learned through hours of study in the henhouse waiting room, was conspicuous. Whispering, too, was conspicuous, because of its correlation with embarrassment; most henhouse clients, if they spoke to one another at all, opted for a low conversational hum. In impassivity lay anonymity. The key was to present not a closed book, but an open book full of bright, blank pages.

“We should use our porn names,” Jim whispered. “You have a great porn name.” Jen's porn name was Cuddles Greenacres. Jim's porn name was Fishy Thirty-second.

When Jim finally heard his name, he would ease his way past piles of crossed legs and close-squeezed chairs toward the nurse, who would usher him through two sets of doors and down a beige-on-beige hallway into a small, windowless room, its beigeness somehow more profoundly beige. Jen was not permitted inside the room, and had only fragmentary, Jim-filtered impressions of it: the scent of water damage and fruity air freshener, the listing stacks of cracked DVD cases, the streaked screen of the television bolted to the wall, the box of disposable plastic sheets for covering the recliner chair that didn't recline, the green exit buzzer next to the doorknob that visitors such as Jim were not permitted to touch. The plastic vase of dead flowers.

“In the henhouse, I'm a patient,” Jen once said to Jim. “But are you—a client?”

“I'm an executive assistant,” Jim replied.

Usually Jim would rejoin Jen in the waiting room after just three to five minutes inside the Garden of Earthly Delights.

“BACK OF THE NET,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 1, before he reappeared in the waiting room wearing his best bright, blank expression.

“SWISH,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 2.

“TYGER TYGER BURNING BRIGHT,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 4.

There was one instance, during Project Acute Phase No. 3, that Jim did not return for more than twenty minutes, no texts.

“Sorry,” he said, sitting down next to Jen. His brow was shiny with sweat. “Delay with the production order.”

Jen rubbed his back reassuringly. “But it shipped?”

Jim swigged from a bottle of water with a lustiness tipped with anguish. “Ohhh, it shipped.” He exhaled. “Delivery truck got held up by three nurses discussing last night's episode of
The Bachelor.
”

“The nurses were
in the Garden
?!?”

“No, no, they were just outside the gates of the Garden. Right at the door. If they'd come into the Garden, I'd have texted you to ask permission.”

“That's so romantic, honey.”

Perhaps an hour later, Jen would be called in to a different room, where a physician would administer Jim's speed-trial results. Jim named this room Eugenics Incorporated. Jen didn't like that name at all.

Inside Eugenics Incorporated, a henhouse staffer always presented Jen with paperwork recording Jim's speed-trial results for Jen's confirmation and signature. One staffer in particular always handed over the paperwork with a countenance of blushing pride, as if she couldn't believe her luck—and the numbers
were
excellent, as all that spinach-eating and sarong-wearing had given Jim the aquatic profile of a sprightly teenager. But the results also carried a more troubling message, as Jen would reflect afterward during her assigned five to ten minutes of repose on the examining table, legs flung superstitiously up in the air.

Here is the swimmer.

Where is the shore?

It was understood—although a henhouse staffer always reminded Jen of the understanding, just to be sure—that Jen and Jim were to convene as many all-hands meetings as possible during the forty-eight hours immediately following Jen's trip to Eugenics Incorporated.

Confirmation that yet another round of visits to the henhouse would be necessary came in the form of what Jen had rather unimaginatively named the Monthly Adverse Development. At seven a.m. the morning after every Development, Jen found herself in line with the other henhouse regulars, filling in the identical admission form she had the previous month, proffering her arm for an identical round of phlebotomy, receiving an identical-looking prescription for an even higher dose of Sermoxal. The Sermoxal prescribed to Jen in service of the Project had thickened and exploded the Adversity of said Monthly Developments, draining and choking off her serotonin, scrambling her beta-endorphin, crashing the servers of her frontal lobes, and stoking a sourceless, objectless rage that throbbed inside her at a cellular level. The rage wasn't even always subcutaneous; Jen could break out in a sweat from it, her hypothalamus triggered for thermoregulation simply because, say, Jim had left a half-spooned yogurt cup on the bedroom floor or because the upstairs neighbors had installed a pop-up bowling alley directly above Jen and Jim's bedroom, open from six a.m.

“This isn't me,” Jen said to Jim in their kitchen one morning. “I'm not really upset about anything. My nervous system is just misfiring.”

“But it's perfectly okay to be upset,” Jim said. “You've been through a lot, and—”

“I'm
not
upset,” Jen barked, slamming her fist onto the countertop. A strip of veneer, peeling away from the countertop's edge, flapped in distress. In the silence that followed—silent save for her downstairs neighbor's howls of protest—Jen stared in puzzlement at her unclenching fist, and thought it entirely possible that another entity had taken up temporary residence in her body, although not the entity she had anticipated or wished for.

Directly above Jen and Jim, a screaming child began jumping up and down in place, feet landing flat on the tiles to command maximum surface area.