Depending upon where he wakes up, Henry Tuhoe’s daily train commute is either a life-affirming journey through a pastoral wonderland of lakes, woods and river palisades, or an oppressive death trek through the biggest cemetery ghetto in the world.
Today it’s all cemeteries. Gravestones of all shapes, denominations and price tags, a mile-long stretch of a half million granite guillotines on either side of the tracks, pinching in.
Lately, even on those seemingly less frequent occasions when he does happen to awaken and look out upon an apparently glorious stretch of river, the tacking sailboats and tug-drawn barges, he sees nothing. He doesn’t see or feel the beauty of any of it. Instead he sees only the slack tide of the river inside him, barely separating anxiety from despair, and the only thing that he feels is regret. Regret for not having even the smallest urge to take some kind of meaningful action, to pursue something even remotely honest or admirable regarding — shit — anything.
Which is to be expected when one is living a middle-manager, commuter life at the age of 28, when one’s wife, who has taken on an increasingly passionate interest in the occult, recently insisted that you get a vasectomy, and then rarely lets you touch her anyway.
This morning, awakening to the gravestones, Henry sits up in his window seat and sees everything. Every plot, every marker, every molded ornament in all of its excessive, maudlin detail. From the crudest unpolished stones for which even the word slab would be an overstatement to the condominium-sized mausoleums of those who felt obligated to say fuck you to their neighbors, even in death.
The song in his headphones is “Fleeing the Valley of Whirling Knives” by Lightning Bolt.
In these first waking moments, as the train jerks and shudders toward Grand Central and the sleeping businessman next to him leaks drool upon the keyboard of his laptop, oblivious to the soft-core love scene from a Hong Kong action flick playing on his screen, Henry thinks of how his life to this point has been so precisely planned and ordered, the conscientious fulfillment of limited expectations. So much so that he decides if he were to write down how the next sixty years of his life will play out, he is certain he would get a troubling amount of it right. Looking back out the window he can’t help but feel that every one of these graves is his, and that he lies rotting beneath every last piece of stone, every cross, every Star of David, every pedestal-mounted archangel twisting skyward.
He lies beneath the faded miniature military flags, the wreaths of white carnations, the single red roses and the tilted vases of flowers plastic and dead. He lies beneath the rain-smeared Polaroids, crayon letters from children and grandchildren, the yearbooks signed by teenagers who weren’t in the car that night. Beneath the Barbie dolls and baseball gloves and dog biscuits, the footprints of grave dancers and the stains of grave pissers. Beneath the paperback copies of Wordsworth and Whitman and Danielle Steel, the half-drunk bottles of fine champagne and small batch bourbon, 12 year-old scotch and brand stinking new Mad Dog 2020.
He lies beneath all of it, staring into the wet press of earth above, all of 28 years old, without the slightest inclination to rise.
Yet he does.
The world is sweating. Billions of gallons a day oozing, dripping, puddling, staining. Beading on foreheads, glistening on backs, trickling down anxious underarms. Sixty percent water with traces of sodium chloride, ammonia, calcium chloride, copper, lactic acid, phosphorous and potassium. It’s the universal metaphor for hard work. It’s sexy. It’s disgusting. And if you just happen to be the Vice President of Underarm Research for the world’s largest maker of antiperspirants, it’s gold. The world is sweating and it’s Henry Tuhoe’s job to stop it. Or at least make it smell better.
The rush-hour walk through Grand Central. Madness or beauty, entertaining or terrifying, depending upon whom you are, where you’re going, which path you choose to spit you out onto the concrete of the city, the ambiguity of career.
Not long ago, even before his unfortunate move to the suburbs, Henry would consciously alter his route to avoid the main ballroom because he was certain that it would be attacked. Smart-bombed or dirty-bombed or lit up with the rush hour gunfire of a martyr. He used to try to arrive extra early or a little late to avoid the prime-time crush of people because only an amateur would bring down a landmark off hours. He used to walk up the ramp from the lower level by the Oyster Bar, or take one of the side halls to the east or west. They wouldn’t attack there, would they? Could the Oyster Bar ramp have been in their recon photos, their crude schematics? He used to think about this kind of thing a lot. But now he just walks the shortest distance, not because he’s suddenly become courageous or defiant or because he feels invincible or the least bit safer. He does it because he’s been trying to convince himself that he no longer gives a shit.
The brush of shopping bags against his legs. The smell of fresh bagels and overpriced coffee from the market on the Lex side. A blur of suits. Hints subtle and nauseatingly acute of every varietal of sweat imaginable. Once in a workshop they made him smell it. At the base of the mezzanine stairs a crew is trying to film stop-motion footage of the crowd with an over-cranked camera for a TV commercial but, perhaps in a subconscious expression of what they think about the cinematic cliché, commuters keep bumping into and getting too close to the camera. A bustling time-lapsed Grand Central? Show us something we haven’t seen.
Some days Henry glides through the crowds in perfect sync. Sometimes he plays a game in which he tries to avoid contact with humans for his entire commute and workday. He’ll sit near the window on a three-seater on Metro North and not be bothered because on good days people would rather stand than take the middle seat. He will dodge bodies walking through Grand Central and on the sidewalks leading to his office he will slip and slide, juke and glide, eluding contact like an acrobat, a tailback, a xenophobic, germophobic, paranoid freak. However, on other days, he’ll somehow find himself jammed three across on the train and slamming into everyone off of it. He’ll attempt to bob and weave, to synchronize movement, to change speeds and anticipate the moves of others but nothing will work. On those days, he’s off stride, out of step, flat-out clumsy. Today is one of those days.
Gathering himself after blindsiding an angry businesswoman while sidestepping a bomb-sniffing dog, he wonders if there is a correlation between the cemetery-waking days and the awkward passage days, or how about between the level of difficulty of the walk to work and the level of difficulty of the day that follows? He decides to make a note of it, which means he’ll never think of it again.
He’s listening to “Subbacultcha” by The Pixies.
A trade show in the old waiting room, Vanderbilt Hall: well-scrubbed blonde white girls in old-fashioned Dutch dresses and kerchiefs, handing out tulips and travel brochures. Grand Central is so much better now than when Henry first came through it with his father in the ’80s. Transvestites beating off in the men’s room back then. Foul smelling squatters in the waiting room. The stars overhead in the main concourse buried beneath decades of train and cigarette smoke, decades away from restoration. It’s a terminal, not a station, his father had corrected him back then. Stations connect to other places. Terminals terminate. They end.
He takes a complimentary tulip from a blue-eyed, pink-cheeked girl and asks how the weather is in Holland this time of year, if it was hot and muggy or cool and dry. Armpits of the world want to know. The girl hesitates a moment, looks at the multicolored bunch of tulips in her hand as if they are a bouquet of roadkill, then over her shoulder for help from her team leader, the manager. Of course she’s not from Holland, Henry realizes. She’s just some college kid making a few bucks for a travel bureau, wearing a costume like a Disney character.
His father was 46 when he died at a teamwork offsite. Massive heart attack. Jostling and shoving amongst junior execs eager to be the first group member to administer CPR, to catch the eye of the boss. Then a dozen white collar workers in matching T-shirts that say No Limits! carrying his stretcher in a synchronized sprint to the ambulance, the medi-chopper. That’s how Henry imagines it.
He puts up his hand to retract the question, to wave off the not quite Dutch girl, but before he can speak he’s jolted by the vibrating phone in his pants. Rachel. He’d recently told her it had become illegal to use the phone on the train so now she calls him within minutes after his scheduled arrival.
“Yes?”
“Did you check did you remember to did you talk to don’t forget to…”
“Yes.”
“And the pool.”
“Yes?”
“It’s green again. Like a fluorescent radioactive green. What did you do?”
“I used the tester. I added the stuff.”
“Did you?”
“No. I’m lying. I’m lying about the pool, Rachel.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“In the dark?”
“I could do it in the day, but that would mean I’d have to quit my job to be a full-time pool boy.”
“I just didn’t notice.”
“I did it at 3 a.m. when I woke up in front of the downstairs TV. Did you also not notice that I slept on the couch?” Again.
“All I know is our pool is disgusting. Again.”
“You don’t even like to swim, Rachel.”
“It’s an embarrassment. Every other pool on this block is a perfect shade of blue but ours looks like a Superfund waste site.”
“I’ll look at it again when I get home.” He clicks off. Puts the phone in his briefcase rather than his pocket. “Actually I’m not from Holland,” the girl tells him when he looks up again. At first he has no recollection of speaking to her, no idea what she’s talking about. Rachel’s calls have a way of doing this to him, detaching him from the present, clouding reality, making him breathless with what he hopes is anxiety because he’s far too young for a heart attack. “But,” she says, “I hear it’s real sunny this time of year.”
He scrolls to Scissor Sisters’ cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” taps play.
Part Two
Four years ago they transferred Henry from Oral Care to Non-headache-related Pain Relief. Three years ago they transferred him from Pain Relief to Laxatives. Two years ago he was fast-tracked to Silicon-based Sprays and Coatings and was making quite a name for himself, but when lawsuits not of his making led to the right-sizing of the division (because discontinuing it would send the wrong signal to class-action lawyers) they transferred him to Armpits.
He has a 9:30 focus group which leaves him a few minutes to drop off his brief case and check his messages. Outside his office sits Merideth, his administrative assistant of six months. “Morning, Merideth.”
“You are a sought-after man.” Merideth is reading National Review. On her desk, already devoured, are the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Daily Racing Form. Merideth’s auburn hair is pulled back, as it is every day, in a bun. A librarian’s bun. A 1950′s librarian’s bun. She is in a loose fitting skirt suit that makes her look
short and if not exactly fat, than chunky. But Henry knows better.
“Who’s doing the sought-aftering?”
“The Emperor of Eccrine Glands.”
“The Armpit Czar.”
“AKA Doctor Sweat.”
“AKA Giffler.” He loves this machine gun give and take. He loves the way it makes him feel as if they really know each other, as if he’s one of the regular guys, a guy who is nice to co-workers above and below even though Merideth looks up to no man.
Merideth thinks the give and take is banal. “You got it. Giffler”
“His mood?”
“Blood-curdlingly chipper. He said he’ll stop in on your 9:30.”
Henry rolls his eyes. Poor me. Poor us. Merideth looks away, turns the page. The ironic rolling of eyes, the office politics of Henry Tuhoe and Giffler and the rest of them: beneath her.
His office has a decent view of Park Avenue facing east but he doesn’t bother to look anymore, unless there’s a demonstration in the street or an aerial view to a tragedy, like the runaway cab that killed three on the sidewalk last month. They’d all gathered in his office, Giffler, Merideth, the rest of the Underarm division, not because Henry is the one they all run to for calm and assurance at such times, but because his office has the best view. That is the type of thing that seems to bond them now. Fatalities on the street below. Rumored and unexpected layoffs. So and so’s cancer scare. On those occasions they’ll gather and talk. They’ll inquire about non-underarm related, occasionally personal topics. They’ll linger and joke, briefly revealing intimate aspects their own lives while the chalk lines are being drawn on the sidewalk below, the body bags zipped and lifted. By contrast, the supposedly happy occasions, the baby showers in the seventh floor conference room, the champagne toast for a job well done, and the soon to be extinct ritual of after work drinks had the opposite affect on their relationships, their morale. Those rituals bored them, crystallized the sources of anger, and were breeding grounds for future resentment. She’s making how much? He fucked whom? More cuts to come. Even the people being honored couldn’t finish their Carvel cake and warm Korbel and get out of there fast enough. Or maybe this is just how Henry had begun to see it.
He closes his door, hangs up his jacket and turns on his computer. Standing, he bends over the keyboard. He has twenty-nine emails but he’s not interested in them. Email now has all the urgency of snail mail, he thinks, yet nothing has risen to replace it. He opens his web browser and looks up to peek through his frosted glass interior windows. Merideth is standing, talking to someone. Through the lens of frosted glass she’s relegated to a vaguely defined shadow but on his desktop screen, Merideth is about to become something altogether different. On a heart-shaped ruby red splash page with an adult content disclaimer, Henry clicks Enter. He begins to ease himself into his seat, ready to enjoy the opening montage — Merideth’s alter ego, tanned, heavily made up, topless on a Harley, topless as a cheerleader, a dominatrix, schoolteacher, nurse, commando, construction worker; Merideth poolside, cceanside, in the rain forest, the cab of a bulldozer, on a mansion roof, the white passing line of Route 66 — when, to his surprise, “Steady as She Goes” by the Raconteurs begins playing on his speakers, loud enough to cause the shadow blobs outside his office to react. He quickly mutes her audio intro, peeks up at the window to make sure he hasn’t blown his cover. When the blobs outside seem to have stabilized he slouches into his multi-adjustable, lumbar-supporting swivel chair for which he feigned a chronically bad back to get from office services and begins reading the wit and wisdom of the homepage.
Welcome to the Land of EEEE. Home of EEEEVA EEEENORMOUS and her 46-EEEE Twins. And there she is, Merideth who is not at all short or fat, or even chunky — unless you’re talking about her breasts, topless — straddling some kind of missile, smiling unlike she or anyone else has ever smiled in this building. Henry clicks to the What’s New VIP page but there’s nothing new, really. At least not since end of day yesterday. Just some additional, never-before-seen shots from a months-old Naughty Accountant layout. No new message for her loyal subscribers. No breaking career news or video updates. Maybe if she’d stop reading the damned financial pages, Henry thinks. He shuts the machine down and stands back up.
Outside his office, Merideth doesn’t acknowledge him as he walks by. She continues talking to Giffler’s admin, a gay temp named Brad who could probably run the whole division if he was more interested in making a living and less interested in full time clubbing, and if he weren’t so damned snarky. If you only knew what I know about the woman to whom you’re talking, Bradley. Indeed, if anyone knew. But your secret is safe with me, Merideth.
“I’m off to the oven,” he says over his shoulder.
Merideth briefly considers Henry before turning her head and her 46EEEEs back toward clueless Brad.
Part Three
The oven is the 101-degree observation room in which focus group participants are paid in the area of $75 to spend approximately two hours applying product and having their sweat measured. An insensitive nickname, especially at a New York-headquartered company with more than 11,000 Jewish employees worldwide, but it is accurate. It is oppressively hot in the oven, but it’s a comfortable 72 degrees on Henry’s side of the glass.
He grabs an iced tea from the mini-fridge on the back wall and picks up the spec sheet on the participants. Women, 24-34, median income of $30,000. He checks them out as they file in and tries to match the specifics of their lives to their name tags. Hobbies, jobs, marital status, children. She’s probably the small business owner, the one who lists child-rearing as a hobby. None seem particularly attractive, although it’s hard to tell since most of them are wearing sweatshirts, and who looks good in a sweatshirt in fluorescent, 101-degree light? That will soon change when the heat begins to register and they have to apply the product, which in this case features an innovation called Nanoabsorbers(TM), which isn’t really an innovation as much as a new name for an old technology, which isn’t really a technology as much as it is a bunch of loosely-regulated, decades-old, sweat-blocking chemicals or ingredients, one of which is active.
Usually they’ll simply apply the product and heat the humans and measure precisely how much sweat is released but today the test is more about the word Nanoabsorbers(TM) and the perceived increase in dryness hearing the actual word and watching three short computer-generated Nanoabsorbers(TM) demo films (variations on swirling, swarming molecules sopping the damp evil from free-floating, disembodied armpits) bestows upon the subjects. Someone in name generation came up with the word and everyone creamed all over it. Moniker testing was through the roof and now it’s just a matter of finding the right ingredients, the right product to invent around the word.
When he first started in Underarms, Henry found sessions like this strange and creepy. He felt dirty when the participants, especially the women in the 24-34 demo, would glance his way through the two-way glass. That first glance, or glare, really, before they became desensitized to the environment and caught up in the throes of ego and opinion, that first glare his way always made him feel ashamed. They looked angry, as if they knew they were about to be violated and dehumanized, all for $75 and all the soft drinks and trans-fat based salty snacks they could eat. The stifling heat didn’t help their moods, either. He used to look away when they would make that initial stroll by the mirror. He used to speculate about what their lives must be like outside of the oven, beyond the spec sheet. What music they listened to, how many brothers and sisters, had they ever had an affair, where were they on 9/11? But now he just tries to predict which one of them will have the most active eccrine and apocrine glands, which one will sweat more profusely than all the others. Or less profusely. Sometimes he’d bet on it with his co-workers in the room. Five bucks a head. Draw numbers to determine who goes first. Sometimes they’d do the over/under version but usually it was sheer volume that made for the most interesting competition. Winner takes all in the sweat pool. But this morning he’s alone in the dark room as the subjects do the stroll and sulk. And even as they reluctantly start removing their sweat shirts (with yet another obligatory glare for the perv on the other side) so they can apply the product, he’s not interested in any of it. He just wants it go get over with.
The door in back of the room swings open. As yellow hall light seeps in Henry lowers his head and turns away from the group on the other side of the glass because light on his side will expose him as the solitary underarm voyeur that he is. He sees Giffler’s face for an instant before his boss shuts the door, returning the room to darkness.
At first he’s just a voice. “How do they look? Anyone fuckable?”
Henry laughs, then regrets it, then feels disgusted with himself because he knows that while Giffler’s words are offensive, particularly when spoken in the hallowed workplace, he also knows that he thought the same thing moments earlier. Giffler reaches for the volume control. “Mind if I turn this shit down?”
“Sure. If I miss something I can check the tape.”
“They tape everything now, eh? Or record, because I doubt anyone tapes much of any fucking thing anymore. What they ought to do if they want to learn anything is tape-slash-record what goes on on this side of the mirror. I heard Dworik did a moderator against the glass last week while a baby wipes group was in progress on the other side.”
“He’s quite the role model for all future division heads.”
On the other side of the glass the women are removing their shirts and jackets, revealing the sleeveless t-shirts and tank tops they had been requested to wear. “Look at the cans on her. Jesus.”
Henry turns and looks with lust. Doesn’t look. Then looks without lust. He goes through the whole outrage, guilt, self-loathing ritual again.
“I wonder if there’s a link between ta-ta size and volume of underarm sweat. Or type of odor. Do chicks with fake tits smell different? That’s a fucking piece of research I’d like to oversee.”
“I’m sure Dworik would green-light it.”
“So why am I here? you ask.”
“All the time,” Henry says, watching the women apply the generic stick product with the Nanoabsorber(TM) logo.
“Tell me that’s not erotic? Even the ugly ones. Were you here when we did the hairy group? Four weeks armpit bush minimum to get in. Even that you can’t help but find…”
“So you’ve told me.” Henry thinks if the DVDs from the hairy armpit sessions just happen to come up missing from the archives he’ll know where to look first.
“Well, I’m here to tell you that you owe me a great old big one. A hugefuckingone.”
“Okay.”
“Because…”
“Because…”
“Because I saved your ay-yass, Tuhoe. As we have this conversation that never happened your whole level, most of this division, is being outsourced to fucking Bangalore, India.”
“They can’t do that.”
“I know. It’s an outrage. Makes one sick. Blah-blah-blah.”
“India? What do they know about what we do here?”
“Parity in the pit world. They have armpits, too. Besides, most of R&D is going to be humanely put down. Should have done it long ago. They’re going to stick with basically repackaging and repositioning what we’ve got. I mean, you’re only allowed to stop 30% of the sweat by law, and we can do that in our sleep, so what other mountain is there to climb in the world of sweaty pits?”
“They can’t outsource my job. I deal with clients every day. I innovate. Some kid in India can’t do that over the phone.”
“Oh yes he can. And for one tenth the price.”
“That’s bullshit. I’m a knowledge worker. Thomas Friedman says knowledge workers are untouchable.”
“We’ve already outsourced the entire Eyecare division.”
“That’s not true. I just spoke to Warren last night. We had lunch yesterday. He’s all excited about…”
Giffler puts his hand to his mouth. “Whoopsy. I forgot that pits and eye-ballers occasionally cross-pollinate. Forgot he was your friend. So, I misspoke. Let’s forget I said that. Actually I never did say it, you lying bastard. Eyecare is rock solid. Warren is golden. Safe as ever.”
“He’s in his office. I passed it this morning. He’s not outsourced.”
“Oh yes he or the hypothetical employee whom we’ll call Warren is. Off the record, someone in Bangalore or Mumbai is doing his job right now for pennies on the dollar. We’re just being redundant for a little while to make sure it doesn’t bite us in the ass with some kind of cultural glitch, or typhoon, or Pakistani warhead. So don’t tell him.”
“He’s one of my closest friends in the company. And you should know that unlike everyone else in this place, Warren absolutely loves his job.”
“Right. That’s a real American tragedy. This goddamn outsourcing. Soon we will outsource ourselves to death as a nation. Anyway, go ahead and tell him and you’re fired too.”
“What about Nanoabsorbers(TM)?”
Giffler looks at the ceiling for cameras, mics. He bends down, cuts his flat hand across his throat. “Already causing problems in mice.”
“Too much sweat?”
“No. Massification.”
“What?”
“Growths.”
“Tumors?”
“Your word. I’m sticking with massifications.”
“Which is not a word.”
“Which is why I have a particular affinity for it.”
“But it’s the same ingredients as always, reconstituted.”
“All I know is something went kaflooey and they’re pulling the fucking plug.”
Part Four
“Your entire division is being right-sized,” Giffler said
“Laid off. Fired. Wrong-sized.”
“You think up a better word for it, a more employee and economy-sensitive phrase that big business will embrace and we’ll make millions. We’ll write a book. ”
“Pillow-fucked, Redunda-fired, Gang-Bangalored.”
“Should have seen it coming. Asia rising. China. India. Shit, I’ve already got our nanny making our two year-old watch every fucking Chinese language and Bollywood piece of shit she can get her hands on. Bend it Like My Big Fat Crouching Tiger Hindu Wedding. To understand those cultures is to be eternally wealthy.”
“So why not me?” Henry’s not sure if he should feel grateful or angry. He wonders about the package the others were given, if maybe being an outsourcing victim is just the fashionable kick in the ass his life needs right now. A chance at a fresh start. Away from focus groups, team meetings, jackasses like Giffler.
“Because you were right, is why. You are a bit of a knowledge worker. Your previous job, the one you were doing five minutes ago, was not a knowledge job, per se. Anyone can stand here and whack off while chicks apply things to their naked sweaty armpits. I did it for years. But your other skills, they can’t be replicated.”
Henry stares at the women in the focus group. He thinks one of participants is saying she feels dizzy but she’s saying it while looking into her armpit and it’s hard to read her lips. “You know,” he says. “There are probably employees who would volunteer to be, you know, right-sized if the package were enticing enough.”
“Indeed there are. And those are precisely the ones we cannot afford to lose. Those who want to leave us of their own volition, but lack the courage or bank account to do so, are indispensable. Beloved.”
“For instance, I know someone who would love that, um opportunity.”
“Not gonna happen, Tuhoe.”
“So where am I being transferred to? Dental? Bath and Body? Chemical Weapons?”
“Here’s a hint: Two-thirds of the earth is covered with it.”
“Bullshit?”
“Hint number two: Two-thirds of the people on this great planet can’t get enough of it.”
“I’m being transferred to the Department of Global Irony? Didn’t know we had one. Please right-size me, Giffler. Downsize me. Gang-Bangalore me. Offer me a package. Make me a victim of whatever euphemism for shit-canned Human Resources can come up with. Please, don’t make me have to take a shit on Dworik’s desk to make this happen.”
Giffler laughs. “If you were a chick he’d probably give you a raise if you did.”
“Water?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We don’t even have a water division.”
“Do now. Like…” Giffler counts on his fingers. “Like six. They’re buying up companies like there’s no tomorrow. Like when they had to play catch-up with the whole transfat scare. Twenty-grain this. Organic that. Some number-crunching honcho-muckety-muck must have told the C-suiters between lap dances at their favorite upscale gentleman’s sports cabaret that water was the future. A tremendous quote-unquote long-term growth driver. So they’ve been on a tear.”
“Bottled water? I’m not…”
Giffler waves him off. “Bottled water is a fucking joke. We’re talking the sustenance of billions. Filtration. Desalinization. Ultrafiltration membranes. It’s over my head but they told me that by 2025, five billion of the world’s nine billion people will be facing a scarcity of clean water. So there’s big money to be made. Every time you take a shower, a drink, or a shit, someone’s going ca-ching!”
“I have no background in water.”
“Not true. Did you not minor in Geology at Northeastern?”
“Christ, Giffler.”
“If Americans continue to use their current average of 100 gallons per day, thirty-six states will have significant shortages by 2013.”
“So I’d be focusing on what, the southwest? Arizona, California?”
Giffler shakes his head. “There’d be some traveling.”
“I hate traveling. You know that. I hate flying. I hate leaving New York. Where, then?”
“I’m not at liberty to say. But you might want to gain some proficiency with chopsticks.”
“Japan?”
“And get your malaria shot, your bird flu shot, if there is such a thing.”
“I will not go to China.”
“Not China or India per se. From what I hear. Wonderful cultures though. On the fucking rise. My guess is that any place that is polluted, draught-plagued, riddled with disease, would be your quote-unquote territory. But what do I know.”
“I have no knowledge of the industry, the languages. I know nothing about those cultures. I hate travel. Plus you know that I have a huge problem with germs.”
“These are some of the most fertile economies in the world we’re talking about. It is the Asian century, Tuhoe. I have a feeling you’ll just be a placeholder until they figure out what they’re really gonna need, but think of how you can exploit that on your resume.”
“Placeholder?”
“Let’s call it investor relations. VP of Global Water, Investor Relations, let’s call it. Talk about fulfilling. You could actually be doing something that makes a difference.”
“And a profit.”
“It’s win-win. They get to live. And the shareholders get to buy a better yacht.”
“I’m not gonna do it.”
“Fine. Just remember that refusal to accept a plum assignment like the one that has just been hypothetically proposed to you would constitute a breach of contract that would result in not a right-sizing, or laying-off, or the gift of a package or parachute golden or otherwise, but a good old-fashioned ‘You’re fired and Luther here from security is giving you six minutes to clean your sorry personals out of your desk and get your fucking ass out of the building.’ Hypothetically, of course.”
“What about you? What are they doing with you?”
“Me. I’m firing people, mostly. Until, of course the day comes when I must outsource my fucking self.”
“I’m not gonna do this, Roger. I’ve got so much shit going on at home. I was supposed to have… My wife and I aren’t even…”
Giffler puts up his hands. “Here’s what I’m gonna do: Take the rest of the day off. Go home and talk it over with Raquel.”
“Rachel.”
“Take tomorrow too if you’d like. I’ll give you two days to come to a decision. And you know why? It’s because I love you like a son.”
Henry stares at his reflection in the glass, his face ghosted over the scene on the other side. A blade of light slices the darkness then vanishes as Giffler closes the door. On the other side a body wobbles, crumples to the ground. The woman he had been watching earlier. As two other participants grab her arms and try to lift her off the floor, the moderator is gesturing wildly up at the projection booth with both hands. At first Henry thinks it’s to call for an ambulance or to tell them to lower the heat but when he sees the moderator draw her fingers across her neck he realizes that she’s telling them to kill the tape.
A thrum and trembling in his pants pocket. Rachel, making her presence felt. She knows he had the focus group and that, according to Henry, the cell phone is off limits in focus groups, so he doesn’t pick up, even though he’s no longer in the focus group, even though he’s locked in an executive bathroom staring at himself in an executive mirror. He doesn’t know how the phone got back into his pants. He remembers stashing it in his brief case but has no recollection of taking it back out, of putting it back in his pocket. Does it have a homing device? Some kind of boomerang function? He checks his watch and figures he’s got an hour, maybe two before he absolutely has to get back to her and by his calculations, if he gets it right, he can call when she’ll be unavailable in a videoconference with clients.
Not long ago, he’d have been the one calling Rachel. Seeking her council about his latest career development, telling her everything. Not long ago, if he’d gotten a chance to scoot home early, regardless of the reason — promotion, transfer, gift from the boss — he’d pounce on it. He’d pick up a bottle of cabernet and some Jarlsberg and tell Rachel to try to finish up early to meet him. Or if she couldn’t meet him, he’d go home and take his kayak out on the lake, or hike a trail in the nearby reservation and then go home and cook dinner. Or, he’d just goof off. Lie on the couch watching ESPN Classic or Tivo-ed Comedy Central shows. But now, going home early is the last thing that he wants to do, because now Rachel, a respected independent Internet security consultant, works out of the house, and rare is the day that she’s not home when Henry walks in the door. He used to joke with her that he’d go crazy if he were to spend so much time in the suburbs every day, no matter how lavish the surroundings, or how interesting the work. But she’s always answered that she’s living a dream, telecommuting, videoconferencing Kuala Lumpur in her slippers. All the shit the commercials promised, all the dreams they assigned us to live. And now of course the irony or coincidence is that she is going crazy and that she’s living a lie, not a dream, but he knows that last part of that statement would make him something of a hypocrite.
So rather than answer the phone that is once again vibrating in his pants pocket, electro-cock-therapy, he’s just now decided to name it, he unbuckles his belt and lets his still-vibrating pants drop to the floor.
Standing before the mirror in the empty locker room, wistfully appraising his enigmatic body, he feels a certain age creeping in and another slipping away.
But today his wistfulness is entirely focused upon his testicles. Almost six weeks since they were shaved in preparation for surgery, three since the last of the prescribed icings. They’re once again covered with fine brown hair, once again looking very much like Henry Tuhoe’s testicles of old. Yet, despite this superficial return to testicular form, Henry feels a rumbling churn in his lower abdomen just thinking about them, a knifing pain in the top of his head just looking at them. And when he lets his left hand drop to touch them, to gently tumble them like Queeg’s steel balls, he feels not the neutered lumps that Rachel and Merideth and even Giffler believe them to be, but two tiny bombs, planted by terrorists of the self, waiting to blow his life apart.
Part Five
Only when an office is consumed by the maudlin does it become even remotely interesting. Which is why Henry’s decided to stay.
Dworik the CEO and three executive handlers are on the Up elevator. Henry wonders if Dworik knows that one of the men he wants to fire or ship around the world for no apparent reason is standing alongside him. Then again, he wonders if Dworik even knows who he is. It’s only been five years, after all. Just before the door opens on the executive floor, Dworik looks at Henry. He turns his right thumb and forefinger into a pistol. “Underarms, right?”
“Yes, sir. At least for the moment.”
Dworik blinks and tilts his head like a dog listening to a harmonica. He doesn’t quite understand and doesn’t do a very good job of hiding it. Has this young man been fired? Is he quitting? Or something else? This is why he usually shies away from executive small talk. Always ends up with the big guy being made to look bad one way or the other. As Dworik steps off the elevator he looks to his handlers, one of whom whispers into his ear, presumably about the impending fate of the employees of the aforementioned Underarm Division. As he’s hustled away from a potentially ugly employee/CEO confrontation, Dworik glances back one last time and his face contorts into the most artificial smile Henry has ever seen, a smile that somehow manages to convey every type of emotion — fear, loathing, disgust, hate and contempt — but sincerity, all capped off with a double thumbs-up gesture.
Merideth looks up as he rounds the corner.
“I had to come back,” he says, adding with what he wants her to think of as his trademark sarcasm. “Can’t stay away from this place.”
Her look tells him that his trademark sarcasm, always weak at best, barely qualifies as sarcasm under the circumstances. She knows, sadly, that it is true. He can’t stay away from this place. And something that is so pathetically true cannot be considered sarcastic. She also knows that his job is relatively easy and that lately he’s been staying much longer than necessary because he does not want to go home. She knows that his personal days two months ago were for a vasectomy that he is pretending to have had, and that his wife calls him with obsessive frequency and varying degrees of hysteria on his work and cell phone, and that he is a paid subscriber who regularly checks in on her website, sometimes up to ten times a day. Her web traffic reports tracked it right back to the corporate server and his hometown cable provider.
“Anyone call? Anything going on?”
Merideth also knows that he’s been given an ultimatum between China or India or wherever the hell they’re sending him, or unemployment. She knows the Underarm and Eyecare Divisions are being outsourced to India. She knows that Henry knows that Dworik banged a client in the focus group room during a baby wipes session last month. And she knows that Henry knew that their friend Warren in Eyecare was going to get the axe this morning yet waved at him like everything was wonderful when he walked past his office. “Nope,” Merideth says. “No calls. And do you really want me to tell you what’s going on in this place?”
Henry thinks about it for a second. Looks into her eyes. He’s trained himself to do this because he’s paranoid about getting busted staring at her breasts. “No,” he says. “I guess that’s the last thing I want to know.”
He closes his door and stares out his window onto Park Avenue. There’s a crazy man standing on the median at Forty-sixth, right where he usually is around this time of day, waving a dog-eared Bible and screaming doomsday prophesies that Henry cannot hear. To the south, cars slide toward the traffic arch under the New York Central building and disappear into its dark portal as if, he thinks, into some kind of urban genocide machine.
When he turns around Warren from Eyecare is standing in the doorway with Merideth. “If the windows weren’t hermetically sealed, would you jump?”
Henry smiles. “They never updated the ones in the conference room on eight and they open just fine. So if you don’t mind landing in an alley…”
“You waved at me when you walked by my office this morning. Twice.”
“The first time I didn’t know.”
“The second?”
“Giffler slipped. He told me to pretend I didn’t hear it and then denied that it was going to happen at all.”
“Which you knew was a lie.”
“When did he tell you?” Henry asks Warren.
“Minutes after he left the focus group. Right after he told you not to tell anyone.”
Merideth backs up a step. “I guess I’ll be leaving.”
“No,” Warren says. “Stay, Merideth. Don’t you want to know who else is getting axed?”
“Well, for starters,” Henry says, “I am. Or at least I’ve been given an ultimatum. Don’t worry. I imagine you’ll be moving somewhere else once I’m gone, Merideth.”
Warren looks at Merideth, who pretends that all of this is news to her. “I feel like a jackass, Henry,” he says. “No wonder you…”
Henry waves him off. ” They’re overhauling this division, too. The deal is I can either take a job in some kind of newly acquired water resource division, touring the third world, or refuse and be fired.”
Merideth says, “You hate to travel, Henry, and aren’t you a bit of a germa-phobe?”
He smiles at her. Even now, all he can think of is her boobs. Boobs, boobs, boobs.
“What will you do?” she asks.
“One week severance per year.” Boobs. “Right, Warren?”
“Correct. I know how I’m spending mine.”
“Really? I don’t know what to do. Giffler’s giving me two days to think about it. But I’ve already made up my mind. Besides the fact that Rachel and I are already ass-deep in debt and I have no discernable skill beyond being guardian of the psychological secrets of parity hygiene products, I’m kind of looking forward to getting out there and maybe, you know, actually stumbling upon something that doesn’t make me feel completely ashamed of myself.”
Warren closes the door and walks closer to Henry. “So you mean you didn’t like your job here?”
“Don’t. Didn’t. Never will. You knew that, Warren.”
Warren looks at his hands and shakes his head. “You always said it but I thought that was just bravado. Why did you stay then?”
“Because I’m an asshole. Because I didn’t know what else to do. And not just with the job, with everything. You’re telling me you enjoy what you do, Warren?”
“Enjoy does not do justice to how I feel about my job. I love the mission statement, the product mix. I love the research, the customer interaction, the Eureka! moment that comes with a genuine insight. I never wanted a promotion, or a transfer. I wanted to do this, consumer research and customer relations, for the rest of my life. And that’s what I intend to do.”
“But that job, if I’m not mistaken, has been assumed by a 22 year-old manchild in Bangalore, India.”
Warren nods. “Exactly.”
“So you know of a similar job at a similar company?”
“Not really.”
Merideth and Henry exchange glances.
“I’m going to get my job back. This exact job.”
“Okay,” says Henry, the way he’d say it to for instance, the crazy person on the street with the bible.
“I’ve already done some research. I’m pretty sure I found the company in India they’re subcontracting to.”
Merideth sits down on Henry’s black leather couch. “And you’re going to try to convince them to bring it back here?”
“No,” Warren says, walking over to the window. “Not that. I’m going to go over there and do it.”
“To India?” Henry asks.
“Uh-huh. To Bangalore. Or Mumbai. Could be Mumbai.”
Henry looks at Merideth again but she is staring at Warren, transfixed.
“Listen,” Warren says. “I’m thirty. Single. Divorced. Childless. My parents are dead. My friends have all moved on with kids and spouses and mid-life crises of their own. What I have…what I had, was a job that I loved. It gave me pleasure. Fulfillment. I found it challenging. I actually felt like I was helping people. Most people are miserable in their jobs. Christ, Henry, listen to what you just said. And Merideth, you’ve as much as told me that if it wasn’t for the medical benefits and the profit sharing, you’d be long gone, trying to become some kind of internet millionaire. So what’s so wrong about me deciding that I want to travel halfway around the world to keep the job that I love?”
“Warren,” Henry says. “The reason they’ve outsourced it is they feel that it is an unskilled job and they’re probably paying someone one tenth of what they’re paying you. You couldn’t live on that.”
“I could in Bangalore. Besides, I’ve got one-point-three million dollars in my 401k. One-point-three with no kids and no alimony.”
Henry does the math. The son of a bitch was here for the takeover that he’d just missed. “But you don’t speak the language.”
“I’ll learn. Besides, English is widely spoken there.”
“I think it’s crazy, Warren,” Henry says.
“I think it’s adorable,” Merideth says.
“I think it’s better than your plan, Henry,” Warren answers.
Merideth nods. “Whatever that is.”
“When Giffler told me this morning, Henry, I was devastated. But now I feel liberated because I absolutely know what I want to do. I may not be able to do it, but knowing what that is, and being on a mission to achieve it, to make it a part of an adventure, feels incredible. What is it that you want to do, Henry?”
Henry considers the multi-millionaire, Bangalore-bound, reverse-outsourcing customer service rep pioneer and then the all-knowing, multi-millionaire (probably) big- boob web porn star-slash-administrative assistant in front of him and then looks back out the window. The crazy man on the median below has gone wherever he goes when this part of his shift is up. The soup line? The gym? He’s probably rich and fulfilled, too. Taillights continue to flash at the black mouth of the traffic arch down the avenue before disappearing, never to be seen again. He feels the dull throbbing in his scrotal sac that the doctors had said might occur for several weeks and in some instances several years. That is, if he were to have it. As he slips his hand into his pocket to make a discreet adjustment his phone buzzes, and the jolt of it almost causes him to leap through the permanently closed window.
