Personal Days by Ed Park Read Free Book Online Page A

supposed Jack III—and so we think of him as
The Unnameable.
    The Unnameable is fiftyish, tall, with a healthy fringe of white hair and gleaming, inquisitive eyes. His ponderous gait gives the impression that he is rooted in the land: a spirit, a proud protector, an aristocrat of the corridors and cubicles. But the fact is—he’s
different.
Slow. Language eludes him. When he tries to talk, it sounds like he’s gasping. It’s hard to isolate the words in his vast loud whisper and so we just nod and smile. This seems sufficient for him, and he replies in kind. The response makes you feel good, though it’s unclear why it should.
    His job, as far as we can tell, is intra-office messenger. We mark envelopes with initials and he matches these symbols to the ones on the bins by each desk. He does it so silently, moves so secretly, that often you don’t realize something’s waiting for you. His shoes must be made of feathers. Mostly you see the Unnameable only by accident. We wish he would make more noise.
    We e-mail everything and there’s rarely a need to send actual pieces of paper to people, but Maxine uses him with regularity and we have gradually fallen in line.
    Jill wants to use him to keep us connected.
I got some pictures developed,
she’ll e-mail one of us.
I’m putting them in my out-box.
    But the Unnameable has an aversion to Siberia. He does not go to her desk, her bin, unless one of us addresses something to her, which is somehow never on the list of priorities. When Jill’s pictures finally arrive it is hard to attach meaning to them. We think they’re from that time we got drinks and ran into Jason—fired, unhappy Jason—wearing a dress, but it’s hard to say.
    Pru once asked the Unnameable what his name was, but he only mumbled. Maybe he didn’t understand. Sometimes she calls him
Pops
or
Gramps.
That’s the only time he smiles.
    The Mexican distress frog
    Jonah goes to Mexico for a week. He sends us pictures from his cell phone. We can’t tell what it was he meant to capture. The ocean? Birds in the town square? Clouds? We have clouds here, too. One picture looks like a giant chocolate bar.
    He later explains that it was the entrance to the tomb of a chieftain who ruled by confusion. He would tell his subjects that a tribe was attacking from the north, then later in the day tell them the tribe had been spotted coming from the south. The militia would be spread thin. It was a matter of debate how such puzzling tactics could benefit anyone, but this obscure pocket of civilization managed to thrive for centuries. The court artisans sculpted very tall, thin figures wearing what appear to be bell-bottoms. The tribe was wiped out not by marauding forces but by three women who stumbled into town and enchanted the men with their beauty. The chieftain claimed all three as his wives. There was a blood sacrifice involved, for the first time in the people’s history, though Jonah can’t remember who was sacrificed—the new women, the old women, the men, the chief, the children.
    Jonah says he bought souvenirs for all of us but left them in his hotel room. We are not sure if he went to Mexico alone or with someone. He doesn’t offer this information. Come to that, we also don’t know whether he’s straight or gay. On one occasion he spoke out, with strange and exciting stridency, against bisexuality. He said his therapist, actually now his ex-therapist, said it was a bogus position.
Just choose one or the other and stop being so dramatic.
This outburst made us all conclude that he’s bisexual.
    On his desk now is a Mexican distress frog, a wooden icon about half a foot long with a ridged back, which you stroke using a wooden rod to create a soothing, some would say irritating, noise.
    It sounds like this when you stroke from tail to head:
Takata takata tak.
    When you move the rod in the opposite direction, the rhythm is more
Tak-tak, kataka-ta.
    He plays it practically nonstop these