Personal Days by Ed Park Read Free Book Online

Firings.
    We don’t even like when we look at the clocks on our computers and they say 9:11.
    The Sprout told her that Henry in HR was doing a search for a Jack replacement. Three months passed. Then he started asking Jenny to print out schedules and drafts and PDFs, keep the supply closet filled with highlighters, and call the IT department whenever the Internet went down, which it did—which it does—every other week.
    A year went by, Jenny subbing for the Original Jack. Then everything was set in stone.
    Things grow in Siberia
    We all visit Jill bearing iced coffee, cookies, and about a dozen packs of sugar, as if she lives in a land where sugar is used as currency. We want her to stockpile the sugar and use it sparingly because we don’t want to visit her again. There is something forcefully sad about her elaborately decorated cubicle. She has pinned up pictures of all of us from our short-lived softball days. We look slightly deranged, wide-eyed, and well-fed and for some reason not depressed. It’s weird to see Laars holding a bat and pointing proudly to the Finnish clip-art logo on his jersey.
    Who’s that?
asks Jenny.
    Otto,
says Laars.
I should give that guy a call.
    Things grow here: a spider plant, a scary cactus thingy, a healthy aloe. We joke about her green thumb. But all the personal effects that we remember from when she was closer to us now look sad and infected. It hurts too much to look at pictures of her family, her dog, an alarmingly good-looking guy who is probably her brother but maybe is her boyfriend. There is a strong citrus scent in the air, a swarm of chemical lemon fighting against all the dust that begins to surround her encampment at a radius of ten feet or so.
    All I’ve done today is check e-mail,
she says.
    Later Crease asks if we noticed that there was ink all over her hands.
    Pru hadn’t, but did notice the odd new haircut and the flashy new scarf. The scarf looked awkward, like an eel from the future, or something worn by a vampire victim.
Like if you unraveled it, her head would fall off and roll away.
    Help wanted
    Every few minutes Pru e-mails us her keyboard woes:
I can’t make an exclamation point or question mark anymore. Help. HELP.
We can all sympathize. The decay of punctuational capability is a common theme here. The Sprout promised us new computers. But that was two years ago.
    Elevator revelations
    We sense something new in the elevator today. We smell it before we see it: a stone gray, footstep-muffling carpet.
    By late afternoon we have forgotten what the floor looked like before. We’re transfixed by the bits of color hiding in the dull gray weave, visible only upon prolonged inspection. We stare at it as if hoping to induce an optical illusion, something we can believe in, a secret porthole into another world.
    I could live here,
jokes Jonah.
    We like that it looks so clean, but by the end of the day it has a coffee stain, a gum wrapper, and a few stray ribbons of shredded lime green paper.
    Let go
    Jill is one of those rare people who are more timid on e-mail than in real life. Sometimes she waits till Friday to send her nonurgent business e-mails, because then she can add
Have a nice weekend!
as a tagline.
You need to pepper your messages with a little small talk,
Jill says in an android voice. There’s nothing as universal as the weekend and one’s modest hopes for it.
    Before leaving the office one Friday, she stops on our floor, but we’ve already fled, away to our own lives, away to our good weekends. Walking by Jenny’s desk, she sees an index card on the floor. It reads:

    3. Let go of anger! Be more efficient. Exercise more!

< 9 >
    The Unnameable
    This man has been here forever but has only recently coalesced into an identifiable being. We don’t know his name, though Jack II claims this person’s name is
also
Jack. This is too unsettling—the mind cannot contain three Jacks, fired Jack I a.k.a. the Original Jack and current Jack II and this