You cross the street, a little bit excited and a little anxious at the same time. Your posture is erect because she might be watching you from the window. What is it about your voice? No one’s ever said anything about it before. What’s a real voice anyway?
A black shape looms from the right. It’s filling the edge of your vision and you vault forward to evade it. There’s a thunk against the heel of your shoe and air billows the back of your jacket. You catch sight of your terrified reflection in the glass of a parked car.
You’ve fallen against it now. It's silver, coated in a gray film, some of which has transferred to your hand. You push yourself up, trying to catch your breath. She might be watching from the café, thinking you look pathetic. An enormous black Megaclass SUV with tinted windows makes a right turn without slowing. How is it possible this idiot didn’t see you?
The realization that you’ve held on to your coffee cup makes you feel a little bit better about yourself. You wonder if anyone else has seen your near-catastrophe—someone who might have caught the license number, someone who’s impressed that you didn’t spill your coffee, someone who shares your outrage. But the three people on the sidewalk in front of your building are all looking intently down at their phones.
The lobby is sheathed in brown marble and the air feels colder here than it did outside. The young security guard with the physique of an athlete is sitting behind the counter at the center of the room looking impassively beyond you. You scribble your name, your floor in the book just as you always do, and make a dash through the doors of the nearest elevator, almost crashing into Jack Seminole himself, with his Don Draper suit and flowing silver mane. He doesn’t seem to notice. He doesn’t acknowledge your stammering apology. As the elevator rises, he lifts a wrist to look at an enormous illuminated watch with smaller watches embedded in its glowing blue face so that his features are tinted by it. He exhales. It requires three floors for him to do so. There are only the two of you hurtling upward. You feel uncomfortable so, to break the tension, you say, “I thought the Victoria Secret campaign turned out really nicely.” Two more floors go by. It’s your stop. There’s a ding and the doors slide open. Jack Seminole has not responded. You can’t tell if he’s heard you. You can’t tell if he notices that the elevator has stopped moving.
You step out of the car and into the bluish ambient light. All five of the lobbies of Goolsby, Seminole and Blunt are bathed in bluish light that matches the shade of the company logo. The receptionist’s gaze is aimed at the five elevators facing her desk. No one gets on or off without her scrutiny. She’s a blue-haired British woman who has never once acknowledged you in the four years you’ve worked here. She appears both solemn and wise, looking right through you.
“An interesting insight,” you say for her benefit, finishing your side of a fictive conversation with Jack Seminole.
She continues to stare straight ahead as you pass by. Under normal circumstances this would be a depressing moment for you, but because of what happened a few minutes before—because of your appointment with Alana—you’re able to weather this newest humbling non-event of your day.
Swiping your fob at the sensor, the big maplewood door to the right of her desk swings open and you thread your way to the center of the big room. The space is shared by Art Buying, Production, and Editorial so that most people in the agency refer to the 21st Floor as “Ape.” It’s a large open space with an acre or so of five-foot-tall beige-colored cubicles. A couple of pillars break up the airspace between the tops of the cubes and the acoustic-tile ceiling, and there’s a mylar balloon shaped like Sponge-Bob with the Valedictorex logo—Keep the ADHD Bully Away—suspended motionless, tethered to someone’s lamp three rows beyond. Two or three yellow stickies as well as a plush-toy frog can be seen along the top edges of walls, navigational aids put there by their inhabitants. Glassed-in offices rim the room. Half the doors are opened and half are closed. The offices generally fill up later. You might be the first to arrive, or maybe there are forty people hidden among the gray boxes. It’s hard to tell.
You squeak off the lid and look down at your cratered cappuccino. As the warm foam meets you tongue, you remember having bypassed the cinnamon and chocolate and fake sugar. You smile. Anticipation is more delicious than chocolate. Even your thoughts have begun to sound like advertising slogans.
You don’t have your own cube. You share this one—six feet of counter space along one side, subdivided with a vertical piece of foam core, taped crookedly in place by the IT guy named Ross. You sit on the left. The territory on the right belongs to Myrna Phelps—a forty-year-old anorexic who subsists on Chia Pet seeds. She’s not here yet. As usual, you’ve arrived first.
The two of you are one half of the permanent staff of editors and your job is to carefully and diligently read and correct every line of copy that passes through the offices of Goolsby, Seminole and Blunt. You sit down at your computer—it’s been on all night like all the others—and you log on.
The end of the small intestine comes before the bowels, you think. It’s called the ileum, and it syphons off the very last bit of nourishment that can be extracted from the molecules that make up our culture—a hair color ad or one for gluten-free shampoo, a tweet about a trending breakfast cereal, a webpage devoted to a halitosis remedy. This nourishment comes to you in the form of groceries, your rent, your gym membership, your cable bill, while the residue you pass downstream magically takes the form of a newly polished turd—New!—to be launched on the unsuspecting world, even while you’re busy polishing, and gaining a little more nourishment, from another one.
Early as it is, one of the traffic girls has already stacked a tall pile of job jackets on the floor between Myrna’s chair and yours.
A job jacket is a big plastic envelope, 20 inches wide, holding a stack of color printouts of an ad or billboard or website with its various sizes and multiple revisions, the latest on top. There’s a pouch in the front of it with a Word file that you need to proof against. After satisfying yourself that there’s nothing in your email inbox you need to respond to, you pick up the top job jacket and lay these two documents side by side on your too-small desk.
A spot-lit picture of a box of condoms in an otherwise dark environment. In the background, an out-of-focus woman in black lingerie reclines on a tiger skin bedspread.
“When you work like a dog, you get to celebrate like a tiger. Vivre®
When her joy comes your joy.
Only Vivre® employs duraRib™ for ultimate satisfaction.”
You question whether the second “you” is necessary in the headline. In green pen, you write, “Consider simplifying to: Work like a dog. Fuck like a tiger.”
You look at this while you take a sip of your cappuccino that’s reduced itself to luke-warm slurry.
With a black Sharpie, you carefully eradicate what you’ve just written and rewrite it in green as, “Consider: Work like a dog. Celebrate like a tiger.”
You note that “joy” appears twice in the same sentence fragment. Otherwise, you have no comment. You put a tic on the box marked editor and add your initials.
As you’re putting everything back into the job jacket, Myrna shows up.
You glance up at her, but she’s not looking in your direction. She looks angry which isn’t unusual. She’s struggling to get out of her heavy coat. It’s the one she always wears, an overcoat with a salt and pepper weave of frizzy-looking wool. It looks like it was designed for Siberia, and you don’t know if Myrna likes it for its warmth or to hide her boney figure. She has a hat on this morning too. Something you haven’t seen before. A big amorphous green knit hat filled up with her crazy hair. It’s pulled down over her ears.
You and Myrna rarely talk. It’s hard to say exactly why. Maybe it’s because you’re almost always busy. Maybe it’s simply because nobody on this floor talks very much. The cubicles have walls, but everybody can hear everything from any part of the room. People tend to whisper, and anyway, you think Myrna’s a weirdo. She scares you a little bit. She’s like a witch in green stockings and skimpy dresses. Myrna likes green. Not a witch—a stork, with her frighteningly skinny legs and beak-like nose and her vampy makeup. Her sunken features are accentuated by the fuchsia lipstick and mascara she always wears—the brand name for this makeup should be, Bad Idea. Her auburn-colored hair is unkempt, frizzy, usually piled high on her head. You can’t tell if this is style or neglect.
A little girl is laughing at the camera, submerged to her shoulders in a bathtub filled with breakfast cereal.
“Krinkles at FunTime™
Freshness, Crispness, Flavor. Now with NEW M&M Minnies®
Krinkles brand cereal is the one cereal both kids and parents can feel awesome about. Why? Because Krinkles takes nutrition, fun, and fantasy, and morphs them into FunTime™.
Hey, Mom. After-school snack time can be FunTime™ too!”
You question the letter spacing in front of the ™ in FunTime. You note that the ® and the ™s are not the same size. You put a tic on the box marked editor and add your initials.
When Myrna finally flops down in her chair, her elbow topples the foam-core divider. “Oh god,” she says, peering over at you with a look of panic.
“It’s okay,” you say.
She tries to put it back. The tape adheres to the desk but it won’t stick to the fabric-covered wall.
You can tell how anxious Myrna feels as she tries to fix this. Is she embarrassed because she broke it? Or, can she tell you’re a little bit fascinated by her bony fingers, the movements of her ropey arms. “I don’t care if you leave it off,” you say, though you’re not sure you really mean it. You sit too close to Myrna as it is, nearly rubbing elbows.
“It’s ridiculous we don’t have our own space,” she hisses—just loud enough for you to hear.
“It’s because they hired all those new Flowbee people,” you whisper, as if she didn’t know that already.
“I’d complain, but I really need this job right now,” she whispers back. “I’m late already. I’m just going to put it on the floor, okay?”
“No worries.”
“I was up all night.”
“Insomnia?”
“No. Yes. But I got a lot of work done on my novel. That’s the reason.”
“I didn’t know you were writing a novel,” you say, while picking up your third job jacket from the floor.
“It’s my fifth one,” she says. “I can’t believe it.”
“That’s fantastic,” you whisper.
“Yeah, just great,” she says sarcastically.
“It’s impressive.”
“It’d be impressive if I actually got one published.” She grabs a job jacket from the top of the pile.
“I’m sure—”
“They’ll never publish any of them, Neville!” She is speaking in more than a whisper now. The ad that she’s trying to pull out from the bag is stapled to something else and it rips in her hand.
“No one’s read them. Not a single one of them. I’ve sent them to a whole shitload of publishers and agents and I don’t think anybody read any of them.”
“That’s weird,” you say. “Maybe—”
“I know what you’re going to say, maybe they’re not any good, right?”
“I wasn’t going to say that!” You take a break from reading about Avodent’s paradigm-smashing solution to diabetic gingivitis, and look at her. She looks, as always, just a little bit crazy.
“It’s the end of civilization is what it is,” she whispers, and turns back to her work. “My novels are fucking awesome.”
You can’t think of what to say exactly, but you’re pretty sure you’d never want to read a novel by Myrna Phelps.
“The humiliation,” she says almost beneath her breath. “Sitting here everyday with this drivel.” She’s looking at the color proof laid crookedly across her lap.
“Vagisil? Really? I have four groundbreaking novels sitting in my drawer at home while I spend my day marking up this pussy itch shit.”
“Well—”
“Sometimes I think that there’s some sort of power on the other side. Some sort of ghost manipulating the affairs of the world. That’s what I feel like.”
Up until this point you were just making nice. You set down your green pen. “That’s so weird,” You say. “That’s how I feel too, and—”
She interrupts you again. “It’s more than just my writing. It’s a whole bunch of weird shit. Partly, it’s all this fucking mediocrity.”
She slaps the front of the Vagisil proof and grabs a handful of Chia Pet seeds from a bowl next to her computer. Before she pops them into her mouth, she says, “Have you noticed it, Neville? Have you noticed how everybody’s all apeshit for mediocrity these days?”
“I guess so,” you say.
Ajani, the traffic girl, shows up.
“Hey, Sweetie,” she says to Myrna, glancing sideways at you. “Hey, you guys.” You both look up at her without saying anything.
“I’m just glad to see you’re here all bright eyed and bushy-tailed,” she says. ‘Cause I got a hottie.”
Ajani Izabal is a bit of a hottie herself, you think, with long dark hair and skinny bare arms that currently hold a job jacket that appears empty—just a stack of letter-size sheets in the front pocket. Based on her war stories, you’ve concluded she must be 35 or so, but she looks like a high school kid to you, partly because she’s almost always chewing gum. “Can you take care of these?” she says to Myrna. “You’ve done them before.”
“We’re already slammed—” Myrna starts to say.
Ajani gestures towards you with her elbow. “It’s okay. Let him work on the other stuff. These are really hot. It’s just a bunch of tweets, okay?”
Myrna makes a sour face.
“I know,” Ajani says as she hands it over to Myrna. “I know you think it’s stupid,” she whispers. “They’re just freaking tweets. But we have a process, sweetheart.” After a pause she leans over to make eye contact, “Ten o’clock drop dead. Okay, Angel?”
She pivots. “How you doing on the other stuff, Navel?”
“Neville,” you say.
“I know that,” she says. “I was just reading your coffee.”
The cappuccino cup sits on the chrome base of your desk lamp. “They don’t know how to spell at Starbucks.”
She’s looking at you with her eyebrows raised.
“I can finish this stuff by noon,” you say. These two are done.”
“Okay, Navel.” She picks up the two job jackets from where they’re leaning against the cube wall and turns back to Myrna. “Do me a solid okay, Sweetie? Full attention on the tweets.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Myrna says.
As soon as she’s out the door, Myrna starts whispering again.
“Hashtag go fuck yourself,” she says.
“Yeah,” you whisper back, “It’s annoy—”
Ajani pokes her head over the wall right next to you.
“I’m just going to call you Navel from now on.”
“Jesus, Ajani!”
“Myrna, I forgot to tell you, they need a character count on all those tweets.”
“You know they can get it off the Word file,” Myrna says. “I’ve only got the printout.” “Just do it for the team, Sweetie. It’s part of the process,” Ajani says. “Be a doll, okay?”
Ajani blissfully disappears. You go back to what you were doing and Myrna starts going over the tweets.
Quiet reigns.
A color photo of a middle aged woman cowering in the corner of a cramped room, too small to stand up in. The walls and ceiling of the room are coated with grainy black and white photos of the same woman looking older. She’s in various poses: eating a meal with a man, each staring off in different directions; sitting at a desk overflowing with papers; sleeping in a chair in front of a TV showing a shopping channel with a close up of a woman’s hand modeling a wedding ring.
Headline: I guess I’m just getting old. I don’t think there’s anything left to look forward to.
Subhead: There’s a way out of the corner if you only know where to look.
Santiva is indicated for moderate to severe anxiety and coexisting depression. Ask your physician if Santiva is right for you.
You promised Ajani you’d get through the stack by noon without knowing there were drug ads. Beneath the sub-headline, are four paragraphs of densely worded prose with contraindication and safety messages as well as a paragraph’s worth of legal disclaimers that need to be proofed against the stylesheet for the brand. This ad by itself could take an hour and you decide to put it aside. You’re sliding it back into its folder when Myrna starts up again.
“What the hell is this Twitter shit anyway?” she whispers. Why would anyone voluntarily want to follow somebody’s shit? If somebody ever told me this was going to take off, I ‘d have said you’re out of your fucking mind.”
“I know,” you say.
“Listen to this, Neville: Last time to vote before they’re gone forever hashtag SaveDeepfriedBaconDonutWithColossalCoke. Can’t you just totally imagine some obese teenybopper scratching his ass and staring at his phone? ”
“I know.”
“Quench your thirst for dirty dancing hashtag www.KickAssMalt. Strippers delivered to the privacy of your phone, I guess.”
“Myrna, I agree with you, but I gotta finish these by noon.”
“I know. I know. I’m just fricking tired, Neville. I apologize.”
You look over at her. She’s making marks with her green pen, probably counting characters. Her hair, frizzy and pushed upwards, piled on her head, illumined by the desk lamp beyond her, looks like a flaming volcano.
I love Myrna and her hair.
Let me be gauche...and state the obvious: this is hilarious! The world of Goolsby, Seminole and Blunt perfectly captures the enjoyment-in-loathing of the bullshit job; I almost feel nostalgic. But then I remember next Wednesday's departmental meeting; the grant proposal protocol, and my Republican accountant. And the ads are hum-dingers.