The Enterprise - 58

The following morning an office-wide email awaited us in our inboxes. It might have been titled About last night. The moment you saw it there you knew it had to be there. Though a moment ago you had no idea. Of course. There it was. In the workplace context such a disturbance had to be noted, explained, atoned for even. Mommy and Daddy had a fight and the kids had to be reassured, even if with lies. Hindsight helps me note that the author of such an email must be the loser of the fight. The one who’s reassuring himself as much as anybody else. Things were said last night. Unfortunately many of you heard them. We apologize for this. We. We apologize. The loser adopting the first person plural, doing the dirty work of contrition on behalf of both. You could imagine an unspoken understanding, a sort of telepathy arising from the strange intimacy of a bitter and furious dispute: You’re going to send the email, motherfucker. And so he did.

And so who was the loser? Sam. Could you guess?

Alan and I may have disagreements about day-to-day decisions but that’s only because we are both so passionate about the Product and the future of the Enterprise. Blah-blah-blah, said the voice in our heads. You could almost hear it in unison as we all read the same words. Blah-blah-blah. The kids know when they’re being patronized. Rest assured we are on solid ground and exploring opportunities to grow our business. We are on shaky ground. There are no opportunities.

And that was the end of Sam.

The Enterprise - 57

Alan was among those spectral figures who are spoken of in deferential, even fearful tones, who see you as a box in the org chart with a salary below your name though you don’t see them at all, unless you did that one day they left the elevator and you were going in, you’ll never know, but they’re always hovering, watching, paying the bill for the candy, paying the bill for the heat: the VC guys.

For years I’d heard of him like a rumor. Now he was here.

Like a conquering king, he gathered us round the back of the office to declare himself the new CEO. He paced a little back and forth and spoke with a lisp that made him spit a little. In people like me such an impediment would make us tremble with shame and self-loathing; in him it seemed a mark of authority. He introduced himself, saying some of you know me, some of you don’t. He was from the VC firm, he said—SkyClimber.

“You’ve all been pretty patient and I think you’ve put up with a lot, really, honestly I do,” he said. “I think you deserve for some changes to be made.”

Alan delivered a kind of cynic’s motivational speech—one that took into account the absurdity of our industry, the fruitlessness of our efforts to date, the uncertainty of success. Promises remained vague and threats unspoken. But somehow at the end of it we didn’t feel too bad. Maybe even better.

In the days and weeks thereafter things did change. Gradually, without fanfare. I overheard Dennis and Peter chatting at Peter’s desk as I walked by. Dennis seemed shorter to me than usual.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s just, it’s time, you know,” said Dennis.

“Ah, OK,” Peter replied awkwardly.

“Things are just getting. Yeah.”

“OK.”

“You know, too…”

“Yeah, too…”

“Too… too. Too too!” Dennis concluded with a wan smile.

And that was the end of Dennis.

One evening at about six or seven, the office half empty, I sat working on code when shouting erupted from the conference room. Alan and Sam. It was about priorities, the future of the company, big-picture stuff. But they insulted each other venomously. One would assert and the other would protest NO! NO! NO! As though something deeply, personally offensive had been proposed. They went around in circles like this, stepping all over each other with ever louder interjections.

It was still going on when I left.

My Week

I burned myself on Monday, pouring water from the kettle down the bathtub drain. Hurt like a motherfucker but I didn't care. On Tuesday I sat before the camera for someone’s documentary. On Wednesday when I rode the train back home from work I tried to steal a sentence or two from what the woman next to me was reading. It was some kind of religious self-help nonsense, possibly a chapter on loss and grieving, banalities deflecting attention. Thursday J put the keyboard on the living room floor and picked out the melody from “Doctor Who.” We played guess that note and I started on dinner. And Friday is today. I had a vivid dream, what was it? Carrying something. The responsibility to carry. J’s looking through Magic cards, humming “Message in a Bottle.”

I’m often on the verge of a catastrophic gaffe, super gluing something that isn't broken, jamming the wrong-size diesel nozzle into the tank and wondering why it wouldn’t go. But I catch myself most times.

The satellite TV dish on the roof across the street waits dumbly for a sign from God.

When I work from home I follow tedious and repetitious patterns, to the coffee maker, the microwave, the guitar. The washing machine sometimes. The box cutter to open boxes. A conversation with a cat. Like a mouse on a wheel, or more than a wheel. A wheel and a colored tunnel. It’s a life of delicious misery.

When your tablet runs out of power it goes dark at once, with no regard for what you were doing, what you were watching on TikTok or YouTube. There’s nothing to click or swipe, no moving pictures, no light, no fire, just the shadowy reflection of your face.

The children proceeded to the stage when called, some glum, some happy. Some came right away and others delayed for some reason, five seconds, ten. You could learn to recognize them from their gaits, from a distance, fast or slow, slouchy or straight. A girl almost running back up the aisle holding it up for her parents to see, uncertain look on her face. Eventually whoops and hollers drowned out the echoey announcements from the stage and you couldn’t tell which kid was which, only if they’d been called before or not.

J. seemed to be occupying more of the sidewalk than a normal human being, a giant joint between his fingers. It had been years. Two, three, four maybe. Our conversation was brief and manic. He introduced me to his friend A., all quiet and smiling. I couldn’t tell if he was amused. Or what he was thinking. He was the officiant, J. said, as if no other information were needed. And none was. The officiant. At the wedding. In the Catskills! Wherever the fuck, said J. As if the location, the date, the occasion, none of it mattered.

In the bathroom of the bar the pictures on the wall, small in nice frames like it’s someone’s parents’ house. The haphazard variety. But all dated, black and white. An ancient view of Yankee Stadium from a balcony in the Bronx, the occupants waving and cheering some historic event. Fred Astaire grinning in his top hat. A view of a classroom of insolent grade-school boys. And that picture of people in a theater wearing 3-D glasses, uniform and impassive.

Crystal Palace 1, Liverpool 0.

We walked past the corner with the sidewalk wet with rain and the bitter perfume of cheap bodega flowers hit me and brought me back in time to every instant this has ever happened, three or four times a year maybe for twenty five years, always the same, a perennial odor of the City.

The moon’s a crescent, shadowed by the earth this time, but isn’t that just as remarkable when you think about it, though it happens every month not every twenty years?

I noticed the peculiar spaces of the theater, the way the steps down the side of the balcony end in a purposeless, oblique space, the haphazard old posters along the rounded walls. Twice I nearly fell in the dark, getting to my seat a minute after the lights went down. It’s no wonder people keep coming to plays. It’s to be in a space like no other as much as anything else.

Adam pointed out the backyard used to be gravel, and I remembered it was, but still I said, oh yeah, huh. Used to be gravel, before Vinny put down the boards. We used to throw pebbles into the cigarette spittoons for luck, or fun. Or competition. I didn’t. He said we did. Whoever we was, it wasn’t me. And here we are stretching the morning into a day, pretty day, after two all against Man U.

I was afraid I’d be the only one, eating alone before six, but there were a couple tables taken. Soon after I sat down the late-day sun cut through the rain clouds, catching passersby with umbrellas on their shoulders. The light came in and glinted off the table polish and the goblets and the techno music.

The Indian man to my right orders a biryani very spicy and when it arrives I wonder if it is. Soon I hear him sniffing from the heat. They asked him what he wanted to drink and he said a Coke, a Diet Coke, as if it was the same thing or he didn’t give a fuck. He devoured quickly and even had some kind of fucking dessert. I’d ordered my chicken curry medium spicy and could have stood a little more. It was good but I perceived a terrible sameness in the dish. Why do I always get chicken? Would lamb make me happier, or shrimp? Where is that magic dish out there that satisfies everything?

All I want to be is a good patient, a good customer. Good guest. To say the right, vaguely pleasant thing when called upon. Not to fuck up. I specified the garlic naan and from the look in the waiter’s eye it seemed to go over well. I was proud to remember the name of the mediocre Indian beer when I ordered a second. King Fisher. Is there any other kind?

A young couple came in, she of Indian descent, he a milk-fed American boy. She asked him if he’d ever heard of tikka masala and he said no. You order for us, he said. It became clear they’d just started going out. The tentative jibes, excessive deference. She said she told her parents about him, that he worked in finance. He reacted warily. “Finance but not finance where?” and she said no.

On my way there I passed by the 9/11 memorial and I’d never seen it before, didn’t even know it was there. I just had to look. I didn’t know what to expect as I approached the wall. And then I saw the maw, the water pouring down then down again. It brought to mind a scene in a bad science fiction movie or TV show, the hero in danger of falling to the center of the earth. It also seemed like it had been there a very long time, many decades, a century or two. On my way out the sun was gone and the wind picked up like crazy. I went to see it again.

A woman at the bar has a t-shirt that says Steak Diane.

A man sat on the train at the end seat near by the pole and the door where I was standing. Rush hour home, everyone so close you can read their thoughts. I wondered if maybe something was up with him and I felt bad for thinking so but sure enough he began to babble. I took out my earbuds to hear what he was saying. But it wasn't words, not even in another language. Just sounds. Vocalizations, high and low, with the cadence of speech. Maybe only he knows what he's saying and we're like cats or dogs who hear but cannot understand.

The disappointed supporter came out to the back garden and sat by himself at a far table with a full Guinness before him that he didn’t touch and didn’t even seem to see.

Manchester United 4, Liverpool 3. 

Margaritaville is quieter this year, no “Five O’clock Somewhere” seemingly on the hour, every hour. And no Jimmy tunes at all. It had seemed for years that they were mandated to play the one about the lost shaker of salt at a certain frequency, at a certain volume, perhaps by the fine print of the franchise agreement. And now nothing. Are they in mourning? No. They’re liberated.

I turned over unhappily in my abbreviated sleep, the wake up time of two-thirty looming over me, an oppressive, inescapable force. Then when it happened I was fine, not even really tired. 

The haphazard ordering of drinks by people, a beaujolais, what IPA do you have on tap? Uncertainly. Unknowingly. Not doing the thing I expect everyone else to always do: know what they’re doing. Well now I know. I didn’t know but now I know. 

The bartender hands me back my change, a couple bucks, I want him to keep it for a tip but he’s holding it, holding it. I realize I’m meant to accept. Fuck. It had been going so well. I always did want to be a good customer. At a bar. Like a good patient at the doctor’s.

And now the washing machine company sends me spam and I want to unsubscribe but I’m scared. What if they have an important product update? So there you go. And as always with predictive typing this text writes itself, and it writes itself, and it writes itself.

The smartphone is the refuge of the lonely.

Waiting for the bus we turn away from the street cleaner when it comes around the corner hugging the curb like it’s some shameful thing.

I saw myself as the woman on the sidewalk saw me: a middle aged asshole in jogging clothes, jacket matching shoes. Suddenly I’m a human occupying space and time.

Being on vacation really just means three things: being in a different place, doing different things, and seeing different people. Though you’re also seeing the same people—your family. But seeing them in a different plane and doing different things with them makes them different people. And you too. It’s also about slowing down your brain, even to the point of idiocy. Thinking things like toast is better than a bagel. It has a certain lightness. And things like vacation means three things.