“Hey,” a dark-skinned hand, with a golden band wrapped round its ring finger, taps against the gray-speckled wall of my cubicle. The barrier trembles, starts to fold in on me, and I look up. “Just wanted to check-in on those progress reports. See how they’re doing. The ones for SimCycle. Gonna be meeting with the management team on Monday. Want to make sure there’re no problems before I do.”
I am startled by the figure looming overhead, but I try not to shake—mentally hold myself in place. It’s just Paul, checking in. It’s not so bad, anyway. It’s nice, every once in a while, to have the barriers broken, to look up and see the sunlight coming in. Sometimes I feel like my cubicle. My head bowed down. Kept low and closed, in this immense, open room. The windows are two-stories tall. The mid-afternoon sun lengthens rectilinear shadows along the linoleum floor. The potted plants are nearly the height of full-grown trees.
Paul smiles while he talks. His lips move like a current, cycling through a closed loop: a warbled wave, passing along the edges of his teeth.
“Yeah. I’ve gone through 30 employee-summaries so far, and the staff is only 35, so I should be done before I clock out tonight.”
“Great. No pressure. Just wanted to check in before Monday. Keep up the great work, Rob. Hey,” he pauses, then nudges me on the shoulder with a balled-up fist—fake-fighting to hide the insecurities of his fake-friendliness. “We’re glad to have you with us.”
Whenever he calls me Rob, I try to smile back. Some kids in school used to call me Bob or Bobby—still, never Rob. At least he remembered my name. Sorta.
I know he only fakes it to try and make these awkward interactions a bit easier—because he has a fear of seeming threatening, and because he knows I have a fear of being threatened—but his smile disappears as soon as he’s done speaking, and it makes the whole thing much creepier. Once his back is turned, I let out a small shudder, and shake my head—as if to prove my disgust to myself, as if to write the truth of my frustration on an unseen page.
As Paul walks away, he waves to Brenda from Accounting, and she waves back—also smiling. His pace quickens, and, as he approaches her, he makes some joke I cannot hear. She squeals—at a pitch high enough to communicate with seagulls—and lightly grabs him by the arm, just above the elbow. The touch lasts for an indeterminate, liminal duration—somewhere between a jab and a caress. I watch them, and try to figure out if they’re fucking, and how long they’ve been fucking.
I imagine the two of them, meeting after work, in Brenda’s finely-furnished, velvet-lined apartment. Brenda, like a bitter bird, had spent the years of her isolation adding twigs to her nest, hoping somebody would land. I imagine the upholstery bending beneath the weight of their bodies, warping the very space between them, as they speak in hushed tones—excited for the future, now that they finally decided to elope; cautious that, should they be heard by some unseen outsider, their dreams might disappear.
I imagine Paul going back home that very night, for what he hopes to be the last time. I imagine Paul’s posture: the way his proud shoulders slowly slacken when he confronts his wife. All that confidence gone, under the gaze of his once-beloved. All those brilliant dreams—brighter than the life he’d always lived, realer than this humdrum routine called reality—nothing more than absurd mutterings, when forced to be spoken aloud.
I imagine Brenda saying that she understands, perhaps even believing it, though she truly never could. I imagine the water-cooler chats continuing on, as Brenda tries to pluck from Paul whatever gripes or secrets she can, to somehow stay relevant in his life. And Paul—still-loving, but feeling guilty for his cowardice, and becoming all the more cowardly for his guilt—building stone by stone the walls around his heart. Paul shifting his gaze about the room, rotating the mug within his hands, twisting the ring around his finger, whenever Brenda asks her prying questions.
I imagine going to the monthly dinner parties, hosted by Paul. Brenda attending, to look at Paul’s home; eyeing the furniture, to mimic the décor in her own apartment, to be more accommodating for Paul, should he ever come back to her. His wife, twisting the knife ever-deeper, pretending (much like Paul and Brenda) that nothing had happened. As if, after the rain, those passionate fires had never even burned. I imagine engaging in the idle banter of these parties, totally unaware of the pain beneath the glossy, suburban faces. I imagine a world lined with barren, embittered houses, similarly silent.
I imagine asking a co-worker: “What’s the deal with Paul and Brenda?” Being told that I’m reading too much into things, and that nobody likes a gossip. Just a lonely pervert, making things up for attention. Cause he’s a slacker. Cause he’s bored, with no one to talk to.
This imaginary admonishment awakes me from my daydreaming, and I turn my head back to the screen in front of me.
The entry is on Vladimir K., and has been written by his supervisor, Miguel (though he wrote the entry under the name “Michael,” as if I wouldn’t see his username). The entry is nicely worded; but, essentially, Miguel has an awful time understanding what the fuck Vlad is trying to tell him half the time. Prone to a rather prominent Eastern European accent, Vlad enunciates consonants like a pig chews slop. “That being said,” the supervisor demurs in closing, “there have been no incidents since Vlad took over the forklift, and he came with great references.”
Unfortunately, Vlad is a dad, and his supervisor can’t write a negative review without feeling a pang of guilt—watching the scene unfold as Vlad comes home to his curly-haired, doe-eyed cherub (he keeps a photo of her in his wallet, and is fond of showing off to his buddies at work). He sees her eyes, bright and wide, devour the sight of her father, broken before her. An American through and through, she is spared the worst of Vlad’s Slavic profanities, which are shouted between spasmodic sobs.
His supervisor also worries about a possible law suit—unsure if Vlad could prosecute him for discrimination. Sidestepping any legal issues, I check a box for “Communication Skills,” and move on to the next entry.
At first, I couldn’t imagine writing a review as heinous as all the ones I receive, especially if I knew that a stranger would read it. I thought proudly to myself: “None of them would dare say these things aloud; none of them would dare confront their colleagues in person.” But, then again, that’s what I’m being paid for.
Chris suspects Cynthia of sleeping with her brother. He could never ask his brother, who is married with children, directly; and he could certainly never ask Cynthia, for obvious reasons. Chris is rather peeved about the whole thing, because he had only hired Cynthia to get laid. A potential sexual harassment claim hadn’t phased him—he knew he could quash it. But he has some inferiority complex about his older brother, whom he never names, but whom he references in every other clause. Chris seems intent on finding a replacement so that he can start again; he also seems weirdly excited about the prospect of sticking it to his brother. The whole report feels way too detailed (there’s also enough punctuation missing to give it the rabid, mouth-frothing quality of a rant).
Suppressing a shudder, I check a box for “Interpersonal Relations,” and try to tell myself that Cynthia will find work soon, and that she’s better off taking her severance and going to a new office, instead of staying any longer in that hellhole, where she might end up as a photocopy on corkboard, with an interwoven network of red yarn over it.
Saraiyah is a lesbian. As in “hardcore” lesbian. As in never seen a penis in her life kind of lesbian. As in has intense phallophobia and never wants to see a mushroom cap in her life kind of lesbian. As in happily married with 8 corgi children, and even some grandchildren on the way kind of lesbian. As in takes her fluffy-butt army of mutts to the dog park and quite flatly rejects any tubby-tummied jogger who has the audacity to ask her out because of his male privilege and proclivities for canine relations kind of lesbian. Queue a freshman-level gender studies aside on why doggy style discriminates against both women and dogs.
Anyway, Saraiyah grew up in a hippy-dippy dreadlock kind of family, one that holds a particular affinity for all things Reggae, Bob Marley and Rastafarian—one that takes a keen, almost personal interest in the plight of African-Americans (she has a black-and-white photo of her grandmother participating at a sit-in, which was taken in some red, white and blue—she’s guessing, because of the lack of widespread Kodachrome use pre-1960—diner serving flapjacks with a side of institutionalized racism). So when Devon came to apply for a job at her junior tennis academy with even the slightest hint of a patois accent she thought she was in employer-heaven. But Devon came to his interview in khakis, a tie and a dress-shirt, and now works in short-shorts which have an awful habit of outlining his genitals—nylon nuggets on full display.
The girls take an interest in the view which she says no pre-pubescent adolescent should ever have, but which is the unfortunate, performative outcome of our heteronormative society. The boys are too intimidated to say anything. Her partner is similarly phallophobic, turning green and squeamish whenever she brings up this particular topic of conversation. Which is really frustrating because—as stupid as this particular debacle is—it really bothers her and even makes her wander down that anxious, self-questioning spiral where she asks herself “am I the asshole?” “am I being weird?” and she could really use someone to talk-through and process this whole thing with. She’s concerned that if she brings the matter up to Devon, he could take it the wrong way, and that he could ask her if it’s a race thing, or that he might not even ask but take it as such and then not even want to bother anymore and leave hot-headed in a miasma of misunderstanding. And, frankly, she’s been asking herself if it’s a race thing and has been unable to answer that question in a way that she finds satisfactory, such that the question keeps marauding through her head.
At the same time, she thinks it would be irresponsible to let Devon keep getting so close to the children. She’s taken to biting her nails down to the skin and even moved her desk closer to the window so that she can watch him from 3:45 – 4:45 p.m., as he teaches his students how to kick-serve with a continental grip, holding their arms from behind and mimicking the form and follow-through, which—she has to admit—he does very well: his students are all able to pull off an intimidating kick-serve then rush to the net aggressive style of play, where the ball lands right at the service line and then wizzes with enough topspin to get their opponents fleeing to the fences, so that sometimes when she’s not looking she hears that clanging chime which tells her that some kid just set off the resonant frequency in the ivy-green wiring, leaving a nice imprint of honeycombed hexagons down their side.
This is a fine specimen of those manic, taken-between-doses-of-Zoloft kind of entries that, to be honest, are enjoyable to read. (Sometimes even illuminating; you’d never believe how honest and forthcoming people are willing to be when they’re on the knife’s edge of a panic attack but still have a few days until they can go to their next appointment and get their prescription re-filled). But, as fun as they are, cases like these tend to be the most difficult to diagnose. I imagine that at some future point in time these are the kind of cases that will be discussed at conferences, with panels on such topics as “How to Handle Privileged People Who Are Trying to Handle Race-Relations,” “What To Expect When You’re Divorcé Client is 50 and Still Not Expecting,” and “Things My Parents/Shrink Should Not Have Told Me.”
This one is a real chin-scratcher; my pen keeps flying through the air, rotating through the same positions: poking its rounded end at my canines, spinning about my fingers, travelling box-by-box alongside my checklist. “Professional Conduct” could never work for this one, because then that would just make Devon ask Saraiyah why she thinks his behavior is unprofessional, and Saraiyah would probably be unable to deal with the whole race thing, and would just start hyperventilating or gnawing on her fist as soon as he starts talking, so that he would probably rather quit than deal with her red-faced, oxygen-deficient insanity, but then that would just make her upset on the perceived self-image front. We’ve already had too many “Clientele Response” cases this week, and frankly that one just feels like a bit of a cop-out; I also don’t think Saraiyah would do well with the whole “it’s not me, it’s them” excuse, because she really seems less like the sorry-my-hands-are-tied and more like the if-you-got-a-problem-with-that-then-I-don’t-want-your-business type. As I hover over “Budgetary Constraints,” I think I’ve found the only plausible defense, so long as there’s no quick turnover and Saraiyah just runs the lessons herself and has someone else watch the corgis on Thursdays after 4.
Terrence is on the fence, because Nicole is his best friend’s niece, but he absolutely hates being called Terry, and can’t imagine why a newbie, basically an intern with a raise, would have the audacity to call him by a nickname, especially because nobody calls him Terry. He doesn’t ever give her anything more than busywork; and, taking double-length lunch breaks, she’s never really complained about the work. Every day, she waltzes in a half-hour late, calls him Terry, he asks her to call him Terrence, and she just laughs: “Oh, Terry, you’re a riot!” In a kind of way where Terry—err, Terrence—can’t really tell if she’s parodying some 50s secretary kind of character, or if she really just is that ditzy.
Terry had even taken to calling her Nicki, so that she’d be the one to get frustrated, and then she’d see how it feels, and then she’d have to ask him to stop, and then, after she learned the error of her ways, they’d both survive their mutually-assured-diminutive-nickname-destruction. But, even worse than her 50s secretary routine, Nicki didn’t take the hint at all; instead, she started to like the attention, and has taken to twirling her hair round her finger, and repeating that unbearable phrase “Oh, Terry,” every time he calls her Nicki. Each time she seems to get a kick out of what she perceives to be Terry’s attempts at flirting, in a kind of way where it seems that Nicki likes the whole forbidden atmosphere of the event more than she is actually interested in having an affair with Terry, and just what kind of psychopath would actually try to have an affair with their employee anyway, and what kind of sick employee would expect him to be flirting with her?!! (Terry really ought to meet Chris).
The review then goes on a long, misogynistic tirade, making the pit stops that I’ve come to expect, and it seems like Terry has a whole series of inferiority complexes. He has this mentality where he’s attracted to Nicki, but assumes that she could never be attracted to him, and so he attempts to get over his feelings of rejection by pre-empting them, by denying his attraction on moral grounds, but he’s really making Nicki suffer over his inability to come to terms with his rejection, a rejection that has been haunting him ever since he got served the divorce papers from his prom date in his mid 30s, which has left him to wonder if he’s a worthwhile, handsome man, or if he was just lucky to find someone in his late teens, and now will spend the rest of his life alone—the fear of which scenario makes him kind of hate his ex-wife Karen, even though he’d take her back without a second thought, because he has to think that she somehow wronged him, because the alternative—that he let himself go, that he hasn’t amounted to much, that he stopped caring about her and about his own health—seems too awful a thought to bear. The thought never crossed his mind that he and Karen just drifted apart, as many couples who get together in their early adolescence do; that neither of them is a miserable failure; that Karen, making up for lost time, just like he fears, really is having intense, passionate sex with strangers; that Nicki really is fantasizing about sleeping with her boss; and that if he could muster up the courage to put himself back out there, he would realize that he’s not as bad or as unlovable as he fears he might have become.
While I can sort of sympathize with Terry’s attempt to deploy male victimhood—the meninist excuse—as a way of dealing with his overwhelming insecurity, it’s also tempting to cross out the options and write-in “Overly Blond” as Nicole’s reason for termination, just to see what would happen to Terry. But, ever the professional, I decide not to stir up trouble, and instead write in “Structural Changes,” so that Nicki can be moved to the mailroom, where Terry will never see her, and where she won’t have much to do anyway. Terry’s secretary, Harper (who’s a man, by the way, and who had a one-night stand with Karen after meeting her at a bar, though nobody—not Karen, not Terry, and certainly not Harper—knows it) can pick up all of his mail and messages for him anyway.
“Lois is the lowest of the low.” It’s a good start to a review—an almost literary one, really. I sometimes wonder if reviewers sit on their submissions, if they let their frustrations and grievances build up over time, checking their punctuation and adding what they perceive to be key points—if the literary quality of the review is ameliorated slightly in each new iteration, as they continuously say to themselves “oh, just-one-more-time-and-I’ll-show-you!,” and as that ‘one time’ morphs into two, three, no four, no actually five times. However, in a literalist twist that I could not have expected, Lois suffers from a congenital disorder, and, not quite 4’10’’, quite literally is the “lowest of the low.”
Lois has a rather protrusive forehead, and the irony of the whole thing—that her physical deformity is matched by an opposed mental deformity; that her augmented intelligence makes her more aware of her lesser appearance; that her intelligence grants her the capacity to know only that our misogynistic society does not and will not reward female intelligence over beauty; that she shouldn’t care about the opinions of such Neanderthals, even though, despite their barbarism, she craves their company—is not at all lost on her. In fact, Lois has taken on a rather depressive mood lately. Crying at work should really be a one-time offense.
In fact, Lois’s looks were never a problem w/r/t the employment front until her looks started to severely influence her mood, and her ever-worsening mood made her performance tank. It’s not like she’s working retail at Sephora, somewhere she has to look pretty—Jesus Christ, hold it together. After making the mistake of asking what’s wrong, relatively early in Lois’s tenure at the firm, Lois’s employer (whose name is Betty, by the way, and who, funnily enough, was named after the early 2000s, internationally syndicated TV-sitcom Ugly Betty) had the uniquely unfortunate privilege to hear Lois’s story, which was prolonged by her shallow, sputtering inhalations between words. To make matters worse, Lois started at the beginning—like the very beginning, like the Freudian analyst who thinks that their clients need to re-live the uterine slide into the universe (boogying down the vaginal canal) in order to overcome their childhood traumas and Oedipal complexes kind of very beginning.
To abbreviate: Lois’s father, Louis, had been perfectly affectionate. Their relationship had some Hugo-esque, Romantic sublimity to it where—instead of the father being the unseemly monster, and the cherub daughter being his Christian, Mariological redeemer—he was the belle and she the beast. Lois’s father had been in hospice at the start of her tenure at the firm, and his final descent into organ failure affected also his brain, so that his vocabulary slimmed as quickly as his feeble figure. He was never able to offer the sustaining last words of wisdom that she so desperately wanted. In his final weeks, he seemed closer to his hospice nurse than to Lois, as she was better able to make sense of his poetic gurgles of non-speech, could keep together his body’s collapsing form, and offer Lois a translation when necessary. His hair vanished into wisps, his flesh broke out in liver spots and pockmarks, and his skin grew so thin as to nearly reveal the bones, with his cranial structure peering out at her like a mad skeleton. He died as ugly as she had always feared herself to be. The open-mouthed corpse remains a persistent image in her mind, and she kept waiting for it to speak. She often wakes to sweat-soaked sheets, after nightmares which feature her looking in a mirror, only to find his deceased father where her face should be.
With only a few years under my belt, I’d still like to consider myself a professional. But honestly I couldn’t keep reading. I wonder if my superiors would be stronger.
I checked the box for psychosocial development, write in “depressive symptoms, possible self-harm.” The form provides a referral for psychiatric evaluation; and, as a mandatory reporter, I had to sign, date and stamp the review.
My bag swings along an arch, bumps against my side, as I pick up my scarf and leave. The elevator doors open just as I toss the cloth about my neck; at 4:30pm, nobody else is leaving yet. Nobody has come in from the upper floors. Nobody is checking in with me before I leave. I feel as though I am sneaking out, as if I were cheating my hours (even though I’ve already clocked out), as if I were going to have to explicate myself—the only one leaving—to some suddenly arriving interrogator, to some eager-eyed visitor, keen to know what life is like as a lowly epistle reviewer. The elevator clicks at each floor. I explain myself to someone who isn’t there, and even in my head I’m awkward and stuttering.
At the ground floor, I nod my head to the doorman, whose eyes never leave the screen before him (he puts his phone in front of the security cam footage—as if nobody could notice, as if he wasn’t working in a building whose primary tenant is a business that fires people for meaningless misdemeanors and interpersonal conflicts—I think about the fact that I ought to put the “inter” in inter-personal in quotes, because nothing is really shared between them, just an empty, dense space that floats over, that coats, every surface like smog). I walk outside and am gathered into a lifeless, sunken-eyed swarm; it’s like a grey static, a cloud of atoms spilling through the streets; it’s a long parade of nothing.
I had studied Melville in college, but I never really got how a bunch of tweedy profs at Indiana U could say that Moby Dick was the American novel par excellence, as if the turbid seas and its great white inhabitant had anything meaningful to offer to a landlocked state—even one with a morbid, blubbery obsession with obesity. I’d rather not be a Bartleby who always prefers not to, but I guess what we’d rather is always something else anyway, so as long as we are all rather-ing, then there’s no point in comparing preferences, err, rather, we’re all just disappointed, sad sacks of shit.
I imagined her on welfare, locked within a room, her daily bread assured, but with no clue as to when the next friendly face would come, her agoraphobia worsening even as the air of her “living” room grew stale.
The stairwell down into the subway is empty, but with each descending step, an echo calls—the voice of my unknown spectator, who knows my every secret, who continues to trail me no matter where I go. I could never escape myself; I know all my mistakes. In the shame of my loneliness, I fear that this may be another one.
A hispanic man with a beanie, a thorny tattoo, and a generally disgruntled demeanor, holds in his lap before him—his legs splayed so that his knees touch the tights of his adjacents—yellow flowers that have already begun to wilt over the course of his subterranean travels. I wonder if his lover is Persephone or Eurydice, stolen or lost. Surprisingly, his death stare begins to shimmer, and a pool forms on the precipice of his eyelids. Eurydice, I would guess. Through my headphones, I hear over a balladeer’s strained chorus the announcement for my stop, and leave my daydreams behind the closing doors.
The path back to the earth’s surface is slick. There are puddles of algae sheen. They have been dammed up by the metal clip on the vertex of each step, with horizontal ridges that prevent even the flattest dress shoe from hydroplaning—a subtle touch that is difficult to explain, that must be numerically insignificant to an insurer, but which represents the charitable intentions, an almost maternal care, of some suited bureaucrat.
I open my umbrella, and try not to step in the potholes of my street. The restaurants have closed their outdoor seating, folded their umbrellas down. Watching the translucent beads drain to the eight tips of the weatherworn fabric, I realize that they can only be accurately called parasols. It’s a fifth floor walk-up, but my calves can’t complain—my commute is my only exercise.
Vegetal curls abound in my wallpaper landscape. The same food that sustains me wafts carcinogenic fumes; life and death, forever at war. Virtual phantoms, transmitting opalescent flashes onto the walls above my headboard, keep me company until my eyelids can no longer support themselves.
I can’t remember when it started raining. I can only tell you that I’m scared.
Along the city skyline, Fellini waltzes with an androgynous model, a sculptured figure whose soaked fabric stays in form with each twist and turn. From beyond my window, they speak to me in unknown Italian tones, each word punctuated by vowels, the short evocations echoing through the pane, reverberating through my palm. Each step lands on an invisible platform just above the last: a stellar spiral staircase. Leaving ripples in the air, the dancing pair ascend to liquid clouds like cataracts in heaven’s eye, where stingrays—fluidly flapping—fly by.
I place my umbrella spokes down, leaving my ledge, my narrow dock, stepping out onto the celestial sea. Floating into the street, I rest on the handle like a gondolier, the spirit of Osiris surveilling the Nile. A rainbow pact from beyond the grave, a gift from Lady Isis, my ship has been named after her old madame, christened with the tears at my mother’s funereal rites, my damned psychosis: metempsychosis. Thousands of sullied souls sing like still submerged sirens, shouting supernatural sounds, stretching their limbs from the bottom of waves, sliding their scaly skin across the rough asphalt.
In sudden shocks and shudders, my craft climbs vertical rapids, passing windows seven stories tall, and offices more vacuous than the sky. At the peak, my mother waits, clinging to a skyscraper’s spire. With one free hand, immaculate, saved from the stigmata of her old IV, she reaches for me.
Tantalus licks his lips, but the fruit’s flesh flees from every failing finger. The mirage dissolves.
I wake up. I go back to work.