The Deep Whatsis (3 page)

It was a beautiful morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the air had the tiniest hint of a chill in it, the kind of perfect morning that still reminds many New Yorkers of the day the planes flew in. I will never forget the look on his face. He probably thought I wanted to talk to him about the Newtritionals project and maybe what other curiosities we might cook up together. But when he stepped into my office and saw HR Lady there with the beginnings of tears in her eyes, he knew. That’s how they all know, by the glistening. He sat in one of the two Eames chairs I had purchased online from the MoMA Design Store and he tried to chuckle as if to say, OK, I get it, and I’m fine with it, but it was obvious that he had been blindsided. Of course in some sense he knew all along but the whole Famous
Actor/Actress incident had no doubt distracted him, as it was meant to do.

I looked at him with my best sad-eyed expression and then there was a pause that could have only lasted a few seconds but seemed much longer. I saw him glance over at a stack of fashion magazines I had put on the floor waiting to be thrown away. I almost had the sense he was counting them, his mind grabbing on to anything to keep it from careening into the abyss. He crossed his legs and looked up at me.

“I’m sorry to say this,” I said, nodding with as much earnest emotion as I could muster, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”

In any good narrative, say a detective story, when at last you know who the killer is, it should be the kind of surprise that you realize was inevitable all along. What Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, what I now suppose I have no choice but to call The Henry. At that point if I were him I would have strangled me to death, but just as the urge to commit an act of senseless violence was rearing up in him—the urge to slap me on the face or smash my Noguchi tabletop with his fist—this is when HR jumps in and tells him about our generous severance package which includes his full salary and health care for nearly five weeks if he agrees to our terms. Realizing he needs the money, Henry just stares at the wall.

“Alright,” he says and that was pretty much it. A couple of them have called me a douchebag, one in a voice that was crackling with pain and hatred, he could barely speak he was
so angry, he had four children and a fifth on the way, it was tremendously moving. But mostly they’re not surprised. The initial clues having been, you know, homeopathic: they’re a tiny dollop of the disease, and then the antibodies rush in, and that’s the second set of positive clues, and so the subject has a false sense of wellbeing until the bottom drops out. But just as Henry’s lips part to speak, to say something else, perhaps a final statement, the two African-American security guards, Damon and Terry, step into my office as if on cue. Henry senses the men behind him, gets up and walks out with them toward the elevators without a word.

It’s about 9 AM
, I’m being crushed by a hangover and so I’m working out at the health club in my building, trying to sweat it out of my body, all corrupted flesh pixels needing a diagnostic, when a new text pings me. Without breaking stride I fondle my device and see it is from Intern.

She’s on eight? I can only guess that the editorial company is helping us in-house on something and that’s why she’s here
for the morning? But the tone of her text, very snarky, who does she think she is?

This should be easy. By noon she will be gone.

After concentrating on cardio for five minutes I get a ginger-wheatgrass juice and a green tea infusion and then I head for the showers. The juice girl is incredibly beautiful, she has long skinny arms that look like young birch branches that could wrap around you twice. In the showers, I notice that my cock is a bit harder than it usually is after a workout, I’m feeling pretty horny, I may have mentioned that ever since I began my medications (Adderall, Zoloft, Klonopin, Ativan, occasionally Haldol although I don’t always like to admit that) I’ve had an erection that I can’t get rid of no matter what I do. The only comforting thing about this is that I know my boner has nothing to do with Intern, it’s just a part of me now, like hair, and no amount of sex or masturbation seems to cure it. For no reason I consider hitting on birch-like juice girl but I fear there is a too-high chance she will say yes.

After my gym time I decide to take the subway to the office just for a change of pace. Usually I call a car service. I live in Brooklyn just off the Williamsburg Bridge, as I may have said earlier, in a loft-like apartment in a brand-new waterfront high-rise called Krave. I usually take a car to work because it’s a bit of a hike up Bedford Avenue to the subway and a car is more comfortable and it’s also in my contract that I have unlimited use of the Dark Car Corporate limo service. But today I felt like being outside, the weather was nice, which felt like more of an excuse than an actual reason, because I didn’t really buy
the notion that the weather being nice meant it was a good idea to be outside. It didn’t really matter to me one way or the other what the weather was like; if I felt like being outside, or if I had some reason to go outside, then I would generally engineer a way to be out of doors, it was that simple, the weather had little to do with it, except to be able say to myself, when the question arose in my head, “Why are you taking the subway, Eric?” I would have a ready answer and the answer was the niceness of the weather.

Two blocks into my eleven-block walk to the L train I realize why it is that I don’t do this very often. A virtual stream of young, fashionable white people, what the savants in our media planning department would refer to demographically as the Creative Class, are rushing toward the train. I don’t hate these professionals, since that would be disingenuous, after all I am one of them. I don’t really have any opinion about them one way or the other. They are a kind of temporary migration, they are the product of certain economic conditions. About halfway to the subway I am feeling exhausted by the tide I am swimming in and so I need a rest; the night before I had ingested eight or nine saffron-infused apple-ginger absinthe, cognac, and vodka cocktails, the name of which I can’t remember, possibly the Caribou Whisperer or the Ragamuffin or the Merkin Sniffer and I’m still feeling somewhat ill. I pop into a coffee place called Silhouette that is frequented for some reason by mixed-race French people from Paris who are living in Brooklyn because the dollar makes it cheap for them, and I order a scat coffee for twenty-six dollars and a bowl of fresh berries for twelve dollars.
I’m not in the least bit hungry but somehow the idea of fresh berries seems like a good one, like a smart idea, a smart way to start my morning, even though my morning began hours ago at some sleepless and unremarked moment between night and day. The scat coffee comes first and I take a sip and wonder if it isn’t just burnt Maxwell House. Then a bowl of fresh, locally grown berries arrives and the moment I see them I know I will not be eating them. I sit and look out the window at the pretty little fishies darting up and down the stream on their way to their exciting jobs in the worlds of fashion and art and reality TV and suddenly I don’t feel well. What is it? I ask myself, and I respond by saying “I don’t know, Eric,” out loud. “I don’t know what it is.”

And I don’t. I’ve been diagnosed before with certain somewhat common illnesses, most of them mental in nature, but that doesn’t explain why I haven’t eaten in almost three days, since the time I met her.

On the sidewalk outside a young woman in a Ted Lapidus jacket and carrying a Stella by Stella McCartney by Stella M for Talentless by Rich Daddy bag is tying her shih tzu to someone’s bicycle, and now the owner of the bike is coming up to her and saying, like, um, that’s my bike? And this woman is saying she’s just getting a Clover-press coffee to go and she’ll be back in four-point-two minutes, she promises, and suddenly I’m having a full-blown panic attack: the desire to jump in front of a bus is so strong in me I grip my chair and sit there, rigid, and hope it stops. This has happened before so I know what to do, only I don’t have any Klonopin in my Crumpler shoulder
bag. After about an hour I decide I’m not going into work today. After another hour I realize I’m not doing anything today. I am aware that I am having one of my episodes, since as I’ve said I’ve had them before, and they always do pass eventually, although this one seems a bit more persistent than the others. My phone has been ringing and buzzing from time to time because I have some important meetings, in fact I was supposed to meet with HR Lady and let two more copywriters go today, and no one knows what has happened to me, I can just imagine the concern growing with each voice mail. But I have the sudden and I realize nonsensical thought that if I answer my mobile device or even check my messages something terrible will happen to me, that all manner of doom will be unleashed upon me, from financial ruin to torture and death, which I am fully aware is silly. There is also the text from Intern that I would rather not see, even to delete it, which may be contributing to my unalterable inability to deal with my unreality.

At this point the patchouli-scented half-Senegalese woman from behind the counter comes up and asks if there’s anything wrong with my fresh berries because I haven’t touched them and I say, no, they’re absolutely delicious, I just changed my mind, I’m so sorry. I almost add that if I were to leave this place I may run headlong into a truck just to stop it from going on any longer. What from going on any longer? I don’t know, all of it. I want to laugh, and for a brief moment I do. Some people look at me and then they ignore me. After another half hour the episode subsides and I am able to get up and walk back home and play Halo for a few hours. Then I go to sleep without checking
my e-mail or returning any calls. It occurs to me that maybe I’m a) experiencing some unexplained resistance to sacking the two copywriters I was supposed to have sacked today, and b) I am semi-falling in love with her, the girl whose name I don’t know, or care to know, which is impossible, but I can deal with all that when the fires die down.

After a good many hours
of lying there trying to sleep I finally give up at 5:45
AM
and instead of going to the gym I decide to check my mail and deal with what inevitably will be the crisis of my not showing up yesterday. I am surprised to discover only two e-mails from my assistant, the first one inquiring about my travel plans for an upcoming commercial shoot in Los Angeles, California, and the second one, from about midmorning, inquiring as to my whereabouts.

“(HR Lady) was just wondering where she might locate you, Eric, she left a couple of messages, will reschedule a check-in for this afternoon?” was my assistant’s query. I checked my voice mail, and there were also two, both from HR Lady herself as had been expected, both polite and professional, and both employing the verbs “touch base” and “loop back.” What this means is it is not even 6
AM
and I’ve already decided
not to go to the gym, a plan I could easily change, as I really don’t have to be into the office for four hours, but I find it hard to rearrange a plan once it has been commenced, and besides, yesterday’s panic attack had occurred not long after going to the gym, so maybe it is a good idea to not repeat myself. The only problem is what to do with the intervening hours before I am due in the office. I could go online and search for other gyms in the area, I could just join a new one, but that seems a bit excessive. Time passes. I look out the east-facing windows at the sky, pinkish like plated salmon croquettes, and blueish like, I suppose, deskulled brains, cold enough to see steamy smoke, or was it smoky steam, rising from the oil furnaces in the three flats that lie between me and the bridge. I call and order delivery of two almond-soymilk lattes from Marlow & Sons, and then I call Silhouette, the Franco-Senegalese-Brazilian café, and try to order a bowl of fresh berries again but they don’t deliver. I hang up and look around my flat, thinking about getting some furniture one of these days and then I wait for my beverages. Waiting, I realize, isn’t the time between things, it’s the thing itself.

When the lattes finally do arrive ($14) they are less than piping hot and I refuse them, though I do pay for them and tip the guy twenty dollars for his trouble (total $34). Three and a half hours later, at the Tate headquarters in midtown, HR Lady is waiting for me in the holding area outside my office. Her name is Helen, she is not married, reputed to have a longtime boyfriend who she never speaks about, lives alone, and enjoys foreign films and getting outside the city on weekends,
according to her Match.com profile, which I looked up once. She is feigning concern about my health, wondering if I am alright.

“Are you alright?” she asks, adding, without meaning it in the slightest, “We were worried about you!”

“I haven’t had my Starbucks if that’s what you mean.” HR Lady uses “Starbucks” to mean coffee so around her I do too.

“I’m talking about yesterday!”

“Didn’t you get my text?” I lied.

“No,” she lied, pretending she didn’t know I was lying.

“Oh they musn’t have gone through. Fucking AT&T!” I thought it would be interesting to push the lie a little further and see if HR Lady would go along with it to the bitter end. “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you so I sent the same text again and I left you a voice mail? I think I left you two voice mails, in fact, I’m so sorry you didn’t get them, shit, Jesus, I don’t know what’s going on around here anymore.”

“Me neither,” she says, wondering what I was up to. “I didn’t get any of them. Did you send them from your iPhone or your BlackBerry? It’s T-Mobile, right?” For a moment I thought she meant it, that she didn’t know I was only toying with her. But she kept it up so I knew she was just playing along. “You know how telcom is around here ever since Kyle was let go,” she says with a shrug and a smile and a little wave of her hands, or is it a rolling of her eyes and a look of minory contempt? I can’t quite tell. I don’t say anything.

“Shall we do it now?” she then asks. And I say “Sure! Let’s do it! Let’s get it over with!” And then, “Ugh, what a life!” to which
she says “Here we go!” with mock-ironic morbidness. Then she asks my assistant to call the copywriters, Dave and Bill.

Meanwhile I have mail, the usual stack of bubble-wrapped DVDs from production houses touting shitty directors—“Peter Rossi Shoots Kids!” as if that’s either funny or original—and I throw them all away immediately without even considering watching a single second of this crap. There is also an interoffice envelope which feels empty. I am about to open it when Dave and Bill arrive and see HR Lady there and immediately they know.

“I guess this is it,” one of them says with a forced chuckle. They always say that, to soften the humiliation, to own it, they always chuckle, as well they should. But I’m not concerned with Dave and Bill right now because I am too pissed off at the stupidity of my assistant who called both of them in at the same time. The rules of this are, according to the lawyers, that we can only fire one at a time, unless they are a team, and Dave and Bill are both copywriters and thus not a team. Meaning one of them, either Dave or Bill, we haven’t determined the order yet, is going to have to stand there while the other one gets the news in private. It’s humiliating, but on the other hand, the gyrations that I’ve put both of them through in the past few months were much more intense.

Dave, for example, is forty-six and his wife just had a child not more than two weeks ago. Disgusting, ugly little knot of fat, frightening really, and when I first saw the picture he e-mailed to the department I thought perhaps the child was a bird-headed dwarf, which sounds like something I made up
but actually that’s a real medical term for a kind of mutation, or birth defect, related to but not entirely the same as being a pinhead. So I had my assistant, I suppose I should include her name here at some point, it’s Cheryl, or Cherie, and she is not as attractive as I’d hoped for, but it’s too late to say anything, I had Cheryl or Cherie send Dave and his wife a cute onesie and a bottle of champagne and a warm note from me personally. This could, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, that it was part of my slow turning of the spit that Dave was curing on, since I had begun dropping hints that he was getting the boot months ago, or that I was gifting him out of guilt at what I knew was his fate. Bill, on the other hand, was single and homosexual, although he doesn’t admit this publicly, but no one whose shirt is that perfectly pressed and shrink-wrapped into his trousers could possibly be straight with the exception of myself. I had called Bill into my office around the same time I was dropping hints with Dave, and I told Bill he was going to get a big promotion and a sizable raise, I just had to get approval from the holding company. Every so often he would ask how that was going and I would tell him they had a salary freeze or something but not to worry. Since we had decided long ago to fire both of them on the same day I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to compare their reactions back to back. I mean this whole business is pure evil, why sugarcoat it? In fact, why not broadcast it?

When we finish terminating them, Damon and Terry stand hulkingly by the elevators with them, waiting to take their ride of shame down to the street, and HR Lady asks me
if I want to go to lunch because there is something we need to discuss.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, thinking that it is strange I have no appetite since I haven’t eaten anything for three-point-five days now.

“What is it?”

She gets up and closes the door while I open the interoffice envelope in my hand. She immediately begins to talk about this new intern in the production department on eight when I pull a single sheet of paper from the envelope and look at it.

The printout is not signed. As I read it HR Lady is asking me if I have anything to say. “About what?” I ask. Then she says they didn’t know that the girl and I had a relationship prior to us taking her on as a production intern, and if they had they wouldn’t’ve hired her, but on her first day, which was yesterday, she comes to HR Lady and says she needs to divulge something of a personal nature for reasons of personal integrity, honesty, due diligence, and all around professionalism.

“A prior relationship?” I say as if I don’t know what the words mean.

“Yes.”

“A prior relationship with who?”

“With you.”

“She said she had a prior relationship with me? Like what did she mean by that?”

“Well she didn’t elaborate but I understood it to mean you had had some kind of …” And then she hesitates before singsonging the word “liaison” in a lurid key.

I sit there for a few moments and consider my options. I had guessed she was capable of pulling some kind of stunt like this, and I had planned on getting rid of her anyway (can you fire someone who isn’t getting paid? I think you can) but she had trumped me, now it would be impossible to remove her because it would look like retribution, but if I had been able to fire her before she said anything about it, and then she said it after the fact, that would look like revenge on her part. Meanwhile I could lie and say nothing had ever happened between us, and everyone would believe me, or at least they would believe I had the upper hand, which would amount to the same thing. Besides, it was true, pretty much nothing had happened. All this to say: she is a smart girl.

“She was working at Unkindest Cuts, which is where I met her, and then I ran into her at a bar in Bushwick and she picked me up,” I say, leaving out the part where I asked her to go into the bathroom and do some coke with me and bought her round after round of Cîrocs and then a bottle of prosecco and poured
her, as the expression goes, into a cab and peeled her shirt away when we got into my place where we made out before she barfed on my floor.

“And that’s the extent of it. I don’t even remember her name.”

“Seriously?” HR Lady says, with an expression that contained both contempt for my womanizing and, of course, admiration for it. “You don’t remember her name?”

“Is it Sarah? Saree? Marilyn? Something like that.”

“Didn’t you know how old she was?” HR asks. I don’t even honor the question with a look of feigned lack of understanding. Then HR Lady tells me that there’s nothing they can do but fulfill her internship for the summer and that I should perhaps just steer clear of the eighth floor for a while? OK, sure fine. But then:

“What did she say about me?”

“What do you mean what did she say about you?” HR says.

“I mean did she say she, like, had a thing for me?”

“No. Why? Are you saying she’s into you? Or, wait, you like her, is that it?”

I don’t bother to answer her, I just say “I’ll stay off eight. Promise you. Won’t ever step off the lift.” The less HR Lady knows about my theories regarding the dangers of this particular girl, the better. She nods, our business finished for today. But she doesn’t get up. She sighs and gives me a look. Is this her “Eric you should know better than to sleep with nineteen-year-olds” look, or is it her “Eric why are you wasting your time with nineteen-year-old girls when there are full-fledged women available to you,
living breathing
women
sitting right in front of you” look? Or is it her “Fuck, dude, you are the Man” look? I don’t know and I don’t ask. She is making me extremely uncomfortable so I pretend to get an e-mail in my phone and I swipe at it and ignore her.

“They’ll be OK” she finally says, making it clear she is talking about something else. “Won’t they?”

“Who?”

“Dave and Bill?”

“Gee, I hope so,” I say, meaning it, meaning: wanting her to know I mean it. “They’re really good guys. They’ll land on their feet.”

She gives me another one of those looks. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“You wonder if they’re good guys? They’re awesome guys!” I say. I know that’s not what she was wondering about but I just don’t want to go down any kind of quasi-moralizing or regret or second-thoughts path or anything like that with her.

“No, I mean I wonder sometimes about what we’re doing. About, you know, all the pain we’re causing. Do you believe in karma?”

The moment she says the word I picture her going all Namaste, up near the front of the yoga class, with her prayer hands, trying to get the eye of a male instructor, the one ten years younger and with a topknot. A topknot on a guy is like a sign on his forehead saying “I’ll go down on you for a really long time and make it seem totally unselfish but really I’m kind of worried that I’m gay.” So I try to look at her as if she is being overly sensitive, I get that, and I appreciate it, but.

“We’re ensuring the survival of the agency,” I say, repeating the rote justification speech that she herself handed me when we started this whole firing thing months ago. “Over four hundred people work here and if we don’t cut back significantly due to the ongoing economic situation they’ll all be out on the street, every one of them.”

She sighs again and gives me that look, which I now interpret as a look of pride mixed with shame, pride at her power in this whole thing, pride at being entrusted with so much responsibility, but all of it mitigated by pride’s shadow side. That’s a human being for you. I had neither pride nor shame in what we were doing. It was just my job. I was saving the agency and conducting a thought experiment at the same time, one that could have far-reaching implications for corporate culture. I had carefully and painstakingly created a very specific milieu, a culture of fear and paranoia, and we were watching it unfurl and grow, like something in a large and fetid petri dish, our own Milgramesque biosphere of doom. I suppose one might be justified in being proud of such a creation but that would be self-serving, and shame equally so; I was doing it for larger reasons, and I was giving it away like you would a vaccine that saves millions of lives.