I swear: if you charge me a rush fee, I’ll break your goddamn neck! I’ll stick a gun in your mouth! I would never do that! I love you, Baby. Call me!”
BEEP!
They are a culture of emergency. In response, I have transformed the phone lines at Bumble and Maw into a theater of deprivation. Before customers are forwarded to voicemail, they are placed on hold for several minutes as minimalist music plays.
If a customer insists that I must call him back by the end of the day, I will call him back the following one. If a customer leaves two desperate messages in a row, her name is moved to the bottom of the callback list. If she leaves a third, a thick and indelible black mark is drawn across her name and number. Some days I cross off so many names with that sharpie I get high off the fumes.
I am so enveloped in the world of the office I cannot imagine myself outside of it. I don’t know who I would be if I were not here between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. every weekday. I’m afraid I might have a breakdown if I found myself in my Brooklyn apartment at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday. Such a life resides in my mind at the very outskirts of possibility, the dragon at the edge of a flat world. And I cling to the perks of the job, which are, I imagine, the Wite-Out and paper clips I steal. For a year I’ve been telling friends that I’m going to quit. Each time I say it my eyes get a little darker. I’m like Pirate Jenny, the washer woman invoked in the Threepenny Opera. She claims to be pirate royalty and plots vengeance against her customers as she scrubs the floors and waits for her ship to come in, that black freighter with the skull on its masthead. I imagine myself as her, speaking in a rough, showy cockney accent. That’s right! No more five days a week for THIS one. I’m gonna get ME a catering gig! Gonna make time for me work. Me art work. They’ll see. Aw, they’ll all seeee!
One of my eyes is kept on the psychic ocean. I’m waiting to catch the first glimpse of that skull on that masthead, appearing on the misty horizon.
My other eye is kept on Google. I Google myself compulsively, hoping to find that I’ve been up to something, hoping to discover some encomium to me on a blog somewhere. Today, though, I Google brain aneurysm. I find a message board of survivors. They share experiences of the slow recovery process after surgery, and exchange little anecdotes about memory loss. One woman jovially recounts having temporarily forgotten who her husband was. Another responds with a story about how, one evening, she absent-mindedly made multiple trips to the grocery store and awoke the next morning to discover five cartons of milk in her refrigerator.
I begin to think of my grandmother, who sat in a chair for fifteen years without speaking or making eye contact. Her brain began to deteriorate when I was a child. I remember that my mother had a talk with me one day. “Joseph,” she said. “If anything like what has happened to your grandma ever happens to me I have an instruction for you. Are you listening?”
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