The Fermata by Nicholson Baker Read Free Book Online Page B

her. And for a few weeks after that, until my supply from that first bag of bands ran out, I was able to do a fair number of intricately filthy Foldy things. The nice unforeseen quality of that machine, now that I think of it, was that it had a high degree of risk associated with it, since a rubber band could snap suddenly, without warning, causing time to resume and potentially exposing me at a very awkward moment—the sex-in-public-places risk. But I was careful. Eventually I incorporated some redundancy into the design by stretching two rubber bands in each direction rather than one, even though it meant I ran out quicker.
    This problem of remembering names, which just came up in connection with the MIT woman, is a particularly acute one for the career temp. I may work as many as forty differentassignments in a given year—some for a week or two, some for a few days. At each assignment, there are typically three to five names to learn the first day (and occasionally many more); ten or more the second day. Depending on how heavy the phone action is, the number of names I end up finally mastering per job can go considerably over one hundred. Per year, I am being exposed to roughly three thousand names, of which (scaling back again) perhaps five hundred belong to individuals I get to know a little, talk to, work fairly closely with. Over ten years, that makes five thousand personalities, about each one of whom I must develop a little packet of emotion, a liking, a disliking, a theory about their feelings for some colleague, a mental note about their taste in clothes, a memory of how they like things done, whether they are of the opinion that state names ought to be spelled out in full or given the two-letter abbreviation, whether they like the document name or number included on the letter or think that this is a vulgarity, whether they want me to amuse myself when I’ve caught up with my work or prefer that I come bounding into their office asking for more to do. In college I was impressed by how well some very popular professors kept up with the particulars of their students’ lives—but the fact is that I master just as much raw humanity each year as the most hotshot celebrity professor. And the difference is that in my lowly case, all these people, or most of them, continue to work downtown, just as I do. They aren’t going to graduate and go away.
    What this means, practically speaking, is that every few days I will almost certainly run into someone with whom I have worked closely at some company at some time in the past. And I will want so much to remember his or her name! They usually remember my name, and in some cases I can detect a faint hurt look in their eyes when they perceive, through myjoshing and bluster, that I don’t remember theirs, since together we did work very hard and beat impossible deadlines and joke around only six months ago, or a year and a half ago, or five years ago. And—they and I both secretly think—they were higher-ranking than I was, they were salaried, I was a temp, so it is a duty in keeping with my subordinate station to remember their names, while it is only noblesse oblige for them to remember mine.
    Yet if they took a moment to do the arithmetic of my work life versus their work life, as I have, they would perhaps understand and absolve, for they see the same people every day, their universe of clients and contacts and colleagues is relatively confined and stable, so that a new temp like me in their office is a novelty, a topic of conversation, a person to whom they can “give a leg up,” an outsider in whom they can confide hatreds and old wounds. I stick in their mind because they are pleased that they were able to put aside class differences and treat me as an equal. “Arno, hi!” And there I am, standing in front of Park Street Station, unable to reciprocate properly, feeling like a waiter asked to remember an order from a table he served months before.
    The name