The Deep Whatsis

“No,” she lied, pretending she didn’t know I was lying.

“Oh they musn’t have gone through. Fucking AT&T!” I thought it would be interesting to push the lie a little further and see if HR Lady would go along with it to the bitter end. “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you so I sent the same text again and I left you a voice mail? I think I left you two voice mails, in fact, I’m so sorry you didn’t get them, shit, Jesus, I don’t know what’s going on around here anymore.”

“Me neither,” she says, wondering what I was up to. “I didn’t get any of them. Did you send them from your iPhone or your BlackBerry? It’s T-Mobile, right?” For a moment I thought she meant it, that she didn’t know I was only toying with her. But she kept it up so I knew she was just playing along. “You know how telcom is around here ever since Kyle was let go,” she says with a shrug and a smile and a little wave of her hands, or is it a rolling of her eyes and a look of minory contempt? I can’t quite tell. I don’t say anything.

“Shall we do it now?” she then asks. And I say “Sure! Let’s do it! Let’s get it over with!” And then, “Ugh, what a life!” to which she says “Here we go!” with mock-ironic morbidness. Then she asks my assistant to call the copywriters, Dave and Bill.

Meanwhile I have mail, the usual stack of bubble-wrapped DVDs from production houses touting shitty directors—“Peter Rossi Shoots Kids!” as if that’s either funny or original—and I throw them all away immediately without even considering watching a single second of this crap. There is also an interoffice envelope which feels empty. I am about to open it when Dave and Bill arrive and see HR Lady there and immediately they know.

“I guess this is it,” one of them says with a forced chuckle. They always say that, to soften the humiliation, to own it, they always chuckle, as well they should. But I’m not concerned with Dave and Bill right now because I am too pissed off at the stupidity of my assistant who called both of them in at the same time. The rules of this are, according to the lawyers, that we can only fire one at a time, unless they are a team, and Dave and Bill are both copywriters and thus not a team. Meaning one of them, either Dave or Bill, we haven’t determined the order yet, is going to have to stand there while the other one gets the news in private. It’s humiliating, but on the other hand, the gyrations that I’ve put both of them through in the past few months were much more intense.

Dave, for example, is forty-six and his wife just had a child not more than two weeks ago. Disgusting, ugly little knot of fat, frightening really, and when I first saw the picture he e-mailed to the department I thought perhaps the child was a bird-headed dwarf, which sounds like something I made up but actually that’s a real medical term for a kind of mutation, or birth defect, related to but not entirely the same as being a pinhead. So I had my assistant, I suppose I should include her name here at some point, it’s Cheryl, or Cherie, and she is not as attractive as I’d hoped for, but it’s too late to say anything, I had Cheryl or Cherie send Dave and his wife a cute onesie and a bottle of champagne and a warm note from me personally. This could, of course, be interpreted in a number of ways, that it was part of my slow turning of the spit that Dave was curing on, since I had begun dropping hints that he was getting the boot months ago, or that I was gifting him out of guilt at what I knew was his fate. Bill, on the other hand, was single and homosexual, although he doesn’t admit this publicly, but no one whose shirt is that perfectly pressed and shrink-wrapped into his trousers could possibly be straight with the exception of myself. I had called Bill into my office around the same time I was dropping hints with Dave, and I told Bill he was going to get a big promotion and a sizable raise, I just had to get approval from the holding company. Every so often he would ask how that was going and I would tell him they had a salary freeze or something but not to worry. Since we had decided long ago to fire both of them on the same day I thought it would be an interesting juxtaposition to compare their reactions back to back. I mean this whole business is pure evil, why sugarcoat it? In fact, why not broadcast it?

When we finish terminating them, Damon and Terry stand hulkingly by the elevators with them, waiting to take their ride of shame down to the street, and HR Lady asks me if I want to go to lunch because there is something we need to discuss.

“I’m not hungry,” I say, thinking that it is strange I have no appetite since I haven’t eaten anything for three-point-five days now.

“What is it?”

She gets up and closes the door while I open the interoffice envelope in my hand. She immediately begins to talk about this new intern in the production department on eight when I pull a single sheet of paper from the envelope and look at it.

What’s a girl to do? Well, the sensible thing is to disappear. But some girls are not so sensible, are they? Some grrrls get so drunk they can’t remember things & then they get kicked out of the lair (so maddeningly rude & annoyingly kewt all at once) & then they try to stay in touch but that doesn’t work & then—life is strange & beautiful all at once is it not?—they go & get a new internship—where?—OMG what a coincidence!!!!

The printout is not signed. As I read it HR Lady is asking me if I have anything to say. “About what?” I ask. Then she says they didn’t know that the girl and I had a relationship prior to us taking her on as a production intern, and if they had they wouldn’t’ve hired her, but on her first day, which was yesterday, she comes to HR Lady and says she needs to divulge something of a personal nature for reasons of personal integrity, honesty, due diligence, and all around professionalism.

“A prior relationship?” I say as if I don’t know what the words mean.

“Yes.”

“A prior relationship with who?”

“With you.”

“She said she had a prior relationship with me? Like what did she mean by that?”

“Well she didn’t elaborate but I understood it to mean you had had some kind of …” And then she hesitates before sing-songing the word “liaison” in a lurid key.

I sit there for a few moments and consider my options. I had guessed she was capable of pulling some kind of stunt like this, and I had planned on getting rid of her anyway (can you fire someone who isn’t getting paid? I think you can) but she had trumped me, now it would be impossible to remove her because it would look like retribution, but if I had been able to fire her before she said anything about it, and then she said it after the fact, that would look like revenge on her part. Meanwhile I could lie and say nothing had ever happened between us, and everyone would believe me, or at least they would believe I had the upper hand, which would amount to the same thing. Besides, it was true, pretty much nothing had happened. All this to say: she is a smart girl.

“She was working at Unkindest Cuts, which is where I met her, and then I ran into her at a bar in Bushwick and she picked me up,” I say, leaving out the part where I asked her to go into the bathroom and do some coke with me and bought her round after round of Cîrocs and then a bottle of prosecco and poured her, as the expression goes, into a cab and peeled her shirt away when we got into my place where we made out before she barfed on my floor.

“And that’s the extent of it. I don’t even remember her name.”

“Seriously?” HR Lady says, with an expression that contained both contempt for my womanizing and, of course, admiration for it. “You don’t remember her name?”

“Is it Sarah? Saree? Marilyn? Something like that.”

“Didn’t you know how old she was?” HR asks. I don’t even honor the question with a look of feigned lack of understanding. Then HR Lady tells me that there’s nothing they can do but fulfill her internship for the summer and that I should perhaps just steer clear of the eighth floor for a while? OK, sure fine. But then:

“What did she say about me?”

“What do you mean what did she say about you?” HR says.

“I mean did she say she, like, had a thing for me?”

“No. Why? Are you saying she’s into you? Or, wait, you like her, is that it?”

I don’t bother to answer her, I just say “I’ll stay off eight. Promise you. Won’t ever step off the lift.” The less HR Lady knows about my theories regarding the dangers of this particular girl, the better. She nods, our business finished for today. But she doesn’t get up. She sighs and gives me a look. Is this her “Eric you should know better than to sleep with nineteen-year-olds” look, or is it her “Eric why are you wasting your time with nineteen-year-old girls when there are full-fledged women available to you, living breathing women sitting right in front of you” look? Or is it her “Fuck, dude, you are the Man” look? I don’t know and I don’t ask. She is making me extremely uncomfortable so I pretend to get an e-mail in my phone and I swipe at it and ignore her.

“They’ll be OK” she finally says, making it clear she is talking about something else. “Won’t they?”

“Who?”

“Dave and Bill?”

“Gee, I hope so,” I say, meaning it, meaning: wanting her to know I mean it. “They’re really good guys. They’ll land on their feet.”

She gives me another one of those looks. “Sometimes I wonder.”

“You wonder if they’re good guys? They’re awesome guys!” I say. I know that’s not what she was wondering about but I just don’t want to go down any kind of quasi-moralizing or regret or second-thoughts path or anything like that with her.

“No, I mean I wonder sometimes about what we’re doing. About, you know, all the pain we’re causing. Do you believe in karma?”

The moment she says the word I picture her going all Namaste, up near the front of the yoga class, with her prayer hands, trying to get the eye of a male instructor, the one ten years younger and with a topknot. A topknot on a guy is like a sign on his forehead saying “I’ll go down on you for a really long time and make it seem totally unselfish but really I’m kind of worried that I’m gay.” So I try to look at her as if she is being overly sensitive, I get that, and I appreciate it, but.

“We’re ensuring the survival of the agency,” I say, repeating the rote justification speech that she herself handed me when we started this whole firing thing months ago. “Over four hundred people work here and if we don’t cut back significantly due to the ongoing economic situation they’ll all be out on the street, every one of them.”

She sighs again and gives me that look, which I now interpret as a look of pride mixed with shame, pride at her power in this whole thing, pride at being entrusted with so much responsibility, but all of it mitigated by pride’s shadow side. That’s a human being for you. I had neither pride nor shame in what we were doing. It was just my job. I was saving the agency and conducting a thought experiment at the same time, one that could have far-reaching implications for corporate culture. I had carefully and painstakingly created a very specific milieu, a culture of fear and paranoia, and we were watching it unfurl and grow, like something in a large and fetid petri dish, our own Milgramesque biosphere of doom. I suppose one might be justified in being proud of such a creation but that would be self-serving, and shame equally so; I was doing it for larger reasons, and I was giving it away like you would a vaccine that saves millions of lives.

She still sits there and doesn’t move, or won’t. I want her out of my office. If I am being completely honest I would say her body language means she wants me to hold her and cuddle her and tell her everything is going to be fine. A week ago I might have entertained the thought of such things, cuddling or at least making out, but I feel nothing for HR Lady today, not a shred of interest even as she crosses her legs and fails to readjust her skirt. They really are great legs, and it isn’t that she’s unattractive, as I have said, it’s just that for the past several days, whenever I catch a glimpse of a thigh or a breast the only thing I can think of is Intern’s fecund, glowing lips, her shining eyes, her breasts. It’s driving me nuts and I don’t know what to do about it but jerk off into the trash basket for the second time today, only I can’t do that at the moment without a certain degree of embarrassment because there’s someone in my office.

When she finally leaves (was that a backward angry jealous glance she gave me on the way out? yes) I check my stocks as a means of killing a few minutes and then I go up to eight.

1.7

The eighth floor houses our production department. At any given time, the New York office of Tate Worldwide (New York being the largest of our fifty-six offices around the world) will be in the midst of producing eight or ten commercials for our various clients. The way advertising works is simple: we charge huge companies millions and millions of dollars a year to come up with the big ideas that will help them to grow their businesses, to define for themselves an expandable niche in their market, to give them something to stand on, a mission to purport, a flag to wave. Ad agencies exist for the same reason that mercenaries do. An oil company can’t be in the business of, say, executing the popular leader of a left-wing opposition group in some Central American democracy, that just isn’t a job description that they can put up on their LinkedIn page. So they have to hire a consultant who hires a global risk-management firm who hires a mercenary unit who hires a local criminal gang to get the job done. It’s the same with what we do. XXX Pharmaceuticals wants to believe that it is in the business of making the world a better place, not of convincing people to take overpriced drugs they don’t need (and that can’t be proven to be much more effective than a placebo). So they outsource their lying to us. We then pretend to help them make the world a better place. All we really do is enable their fantasies about themselves by holding their hand through the difficult years-long process of bringing a drug to market. In the course of that, it’s our job to pretend to be coming up with ideas when really all we are doing is taking the ideas that they have already given us in their PowerPoint documents and making them look like they were ours in the first place and therefore worth the many millions they are paying us. It’s useless but in the end what human endeavor isn’t? We have meeting after meeting and write draft after draft of a single fifteen-second commercial, exposing these scripts to real people to get their feedback, in what is known as qualitative or “qual” testing, before gauging the spot’s real-world CPI—Consumer Persuasion Index—in quantitative or “quant” testing, in which each commercial is assigned a numerical value supposedly indicating its true effectiveness, the entire process meant to ultimately determine whether it would be more effective to frighten people into buying a drug because without it their children might die or frightening them into buying a drug because if they don’t their peers will ostracize them for being terrible parents. Once real moms and dads have signed off on our concept, we hand these so-called ideas to a director and a production company and ask them to “add value,” which means, “Can you try to take this mind-numbingly boring piece of machine-made bullshit and force-fit a modicum of humanity into it?” Normally this is done via casting, trying to find human-looking people to stand in front of the camera and smile and give the thumbs-up to life. That usually works. Then when the commercial is finished, we celebrate ourselves and our achievements at an awards banquet from which we take home prizes in categories such as “Best Editing for a Fifteen-Second Unbranded Direct-to-Consumer Web-Based Pharmaceutical Campaign” and so on.

I always get confused on the eighth floor. When you get off the elevators you can go one of two ways: toward the bathrooms or toward the receptionist. Having made that decision you can then go either right or left, ultimately giving you the option of the four compass directions. I can never remember where anyone’s office is and so I always end up just walking around the perimeter of the building until I find who I am looking for. Today I get off the elevators and decide to go toward the receptionist, who is on her break apparently, as there’s a temp sitting in her spot and he looks like a young Paul Rudd with facial hair, obviously an actor who doesn’t have a trust fund; i.e., hopeless. From the receptionist’s desk I randomly choose left, and I walk toward the Twenty-ninth Street side of the building. When I get to the row of offices that rings the floor I randomly choose to turn right and I start walking. Everyone sees me and looks up from their desks and waves or grins; this isn’t something they would do for anyone who walked down the hall, but one of the consequences of creating a dynamic of fear is a high degree of sycophancy resulting in a good deal of performative smiling. Our poor wannabe-actor temp thinks that by sitting there stone-faced and not participating in these corporate rituals he will save his soul; what he doesn’t understand is that all of the phoniness required of his soulless peers takes far more acting skill, courage, and devotion to craft than he will ever see on any not-for-profit stage in his entire life.

If asked I will say I am looking for Tom Bridge, but I happen to know that Tom is in Prague shooting a series of spots for a tire company. I get to the corner of the building and turn right (the only way I can go unless I want to retrace my steps) and then I see Tom’s assistant, a hipster clown named Jake. I call him a clown because he is one; he works on weekends at a children’s hospital in Westchester. Apparently he was a drug addict and then he became a clown as a part of his recovery program; we even honored him with our Actually Good Person We Mean It of the Month Award.

Jake the Clown sees me walking toward him and says, “Are you looking for Tom?” I don’t know if I should lie and say yes since that is the ostensible reason I’ve come to this floor in the first place or if I should lie and say no since that’s the truth but it means I must have another reason for being here and that one I don’t want to divulge.

“Isn’t he in Prague?” I say, splitting the difference.

“He was supposed to leave last night but his flight got canceled can you believe that it was a nightmare he’s leaving in an hour do you want to see him I can maybe squeeze you in just kidding.” I’m staring at Clown, who’s in full ’80s mode today, parachute pants and one of those Palestinian scarves and a Members Only warm-up jacket, and I’m wondering what his getup is, does he put on a big pink wig and a red nose and paint his face white, or does he know he already looks enough like a clown to make a sick child laugh? Just then Tom’s voice is heard from inside his office.

“Eric!” he is yelling. “Eric you douchebag come in here don’t go away I need to talk to you before my car comes!” I go into Tom’s office. He is sitting amid a pile of DVD reels that is almost as large as he is, which is considerable.

“Yo, asshole,” I greet him, closing the door, “why aren’t you getting your knob sucked by a Czech hooker right now?” This is how Tom and I talk to each other; the day I learned that I would have to terminate him in Q2 of the next fiscal I considered not being so buddy-buddy with him, then I changed my mind. “Close the door,” he says, even though I already have. He tosses a DVD of work from an animation company called Phawg into the trash basket and takes his earphones off. “Did you say something?”

“No,” I say. The sounds of a live Rush concert are coming from his iPhone. Rush is Tom’s favorite band; he turns off the trollish sounds and looks up at me.

“I can’t believe you fucked her,” he says.

“Fucked who, your wife?” I say. “Ha ha just kidding, in case you were wondering.”

“Funny,” he says. “I’m talking about that very hot girl we just hired.”

“First of all, she may be funny and smart and all but she’s insane,” I inform him, “so you might want to stay away from her entirely, or find a way to fire her before I do. And second of all, I didn’t have sex with her.”

“Which is not what she’s telling everyone.”

“Oh bullshit she’s a drug addict,” I say.

“So are you,” he says.

“Have a nice trip, dickhead,” I say to him as I open the door and head out, turning back to ask him what he’s doing with the DVD cases. He says he doesn’t know he just felt like saving them.

“See you in lala,” he is saying as I leave.

“What?”

“I’m flying directly from Prague to LA for the FreshIt thing. I’ll be there for callbacks.”

“Cool,” I say, “that’s awesome, but I’m not going to that shoot.”

“No?” he says. “I thought you were.”

“Why would I waste my time with that shit?” I say.

“Because the account is in trouble.”

“Not my problem,” I say. Then as I am closing his door he says, “By the way, she’s uploading some spots to the FTP, I’d try the dub room. I mean, assuming you want to find her.”

“I don’t, actually,” I lie. “I want her out of here by EOD.”

“Right,” he says. “Will do.”

I walk out of his office and down the hall I hadn’t walked down before, hoping for a random encounter rather than having to actually set foot in the dub room which would be too obvious. I end up circling the floor two times but I don’t see her. I probably would have kept doing it all afternoon except my phone rings and it’s Seth Krallman, my old friend whom I hate.

“What up, gangsta?” I say into my phone as I head toward the elevator. “Why’d you stand me up the other night, dog?” One of the reasons I hate Seth Krallman is because he talks like he’s from the ghetto when actually he is from Greenwich, Connecticut, and I tend to talk that way when I’m with him just to mask the fact I dislike him so intensely. I’ve hated Seth Krallman ever since he got clean and became a yoga teacher and changed his name to Hanuman or Ganesh or something. No, the truth is I always hated him; we shared a big house together at Brown and he thinks this means we have some kind of Special Bond. He’s a pretentious idiot, a so-called avant garde playwright who had twelve or thirteen seconds of notoriety in the East Village in the late ’90s when he chained himself to the stage of a tiny theater for a month as some kind of protest slash performance, peeing in a crystal bowl and mixing it with champagne and drinking it every night at precisely midnight, while reciting some poetry. I avoided him for years but he friended me recently and keeps wanting us to hang out, I’m pretty sure that he’s gearing up to ask me for a job. He comes from a rich family, as I alluded, but his father invested badly and lost most everything in ’08 so Seth’s monthly automatic deposit has dwindled away—he has to work now to pay his rent and his medical bills, because he is bipolar, and without his meds and his therapy the man is useless. So he wants to invite me to this really cool opening and after-party in the ’wick and maybe, I’m guessing, that’s when he’ll ask me if I can help him get into advertising. I have nothing to do tonight and need to take my mind off myself and maybe talk to people so I say yes. Then I immediately regret it but he doesn’t know that yet. So he starts to ask me how work is going and I pretend that the elevator is killing my reception even though I am not in the elevator.

1.8

I get to the opening before Seth does. It’s at a storefront gallery on an industrial section of Johnson Avenue; the space used to be a skateboard shop and now it’s rented out by the three guys who started Rodney magazine, and they show art in it. Rodney is considered the epicenter of cool in Bushwick right now and since Bushwick is the epicenter of cool in New York that makes Rodney the most boring thing on the planet. Normally the thought of the Fucking Rodney Scene would send me into an uncontrollable rage and thus I would avoid it entirely, but I am here to see the hateful ex-junkie yoga master and hang out with him and listen to him go on about how avant garde theater is dead, seriously, it’s a tragedy, I mean Heiner Müller wouldn’t even get his work seen today. His shtick is really one of the saddest things ever and maybe that’s why he cheers me up so easily.