Jason M. Jones

iv.

            I leave the doctor’s office hungry. I’d watched the needle going into my arm. What trust, I thought. They could fill it with anything. The simple acts of faith we engage in day-to-day. I’d filled out their form. No, I wasn’t allergic to eggs. No, I hadn’t been running a fever the last twenty-four hours. Yes, I’d had a flu shot before. They called me in. There was a man in green scrubs. Intern? Resident? He told me to make a fist. I balled my hand, held it out. He picked up a tiny vial of liquid, a syringe. He poked the syringe through the top, pulled the liquid in. What are his qualifications? Who is he? I’d never met this man, and there I was, letting him stick me.

He swabbed the upper region of my bicep and pushed the needle in. I watched a moment, then looked away. He pulled the needle out and pressed a piece of gauze down and covered it with a Band-Aid. It’s done, I thought. I’d be safe from most flu viruses this season. I rolled down my sleeve, and suddenly, it struck me: an audit! That’s what it was. The reason I hadn’t received a bill before their “final notice” was that they’d never sent one. They hadn’t known they’d mischarged me until right before the move. I looked around at the updated equipment, the higher floor, the nicer office. They must have hired a company to review their books and look for extra cash. It didn’t matter. But I wasn’t crazy. Thirty dollars. That was lunch, a nicer lunch than I could afford right now, but only lunch. Why am I holding onto it?

Let it go, I think.

I glance at my phone. I’ve only been out of the office for fifteen minutes. I can still take lunch. I look in my wallet. There’s a twenty. I’m not sure I want to spend it, but then I figure, why not? I’ve got my flu shot. I’ve finished most of what I planned to do this morning. Justine’s mad at me. I need something to lift my spirits. Around the corner, there’s Talula’s. I can grab a sandwich and sit in the park. Or hit El Fuego, the Mexican joint. I’m not sure what I want. I consider heading back, working another hour, leaving again. This would split the day more evenly. Give me time to decide. One of the benefits of being at the same job for this long is that I know how to juggle my schedule and rearrange tasks, to find time for the things I want to do, like going to lunch or writing or visiting the doctor. I can push my absence to an hour and a half. Anything beyond that becomes risky. It never crosses my mind that I’m shortchanging the company. Rather, they take advantage of me, and this is settling the score. It’s one of the things that happens when a company doesn’t give merit-based raises. It reduces incentive, makes employees find ways of gaming the system. When they ask for extra effort, uncompensated hours, I give it to them, then take it back elsewhere. Ethan knows this, the tendency to extend lunch breaks, to drift away from the office and come back at odd times. I’m not the only one who does it, and I suspect he overlooks it as long as we perform. After all, with morale low and a lack of pay increases, to watch us like hawks and monitor everything we do would drive us out the door that much quicker.

The expectation that we have to sit here for seven hours a day with a one-hour lunch break to earn our keep infantilizes us. But then, the world of education began this. No matter how well you perform in school, the goal is simple: memorization of rote knowledge for repetition of standardized tests. This carries on into the adult world, the thinking of companies being that, if I finish my rote tasks more quickly than expected, I’m to seek out other tasks, as rote and meaningless. We’ve been conditioned for this, repetition with little thought.

In high school, when I worked in a nursing home, one of the bosses, if he saw me talking to another employee, would say something along the lines of, “You got time to lean, you got time to clean,” and hand over a mop or a rag. So, I’d disappear and avoid that boss. And this practice hasn’t changed from the nursing home to the office. We’re expected to keep working regardless of whether the work proves profitable, whether it falls within our job description, and this is more wasteful than anything else. These hours are spent, more often than not, in a clandestine fashion that numbs the brain. At the nursing home, I discovered that out of sight was out of mind, so I’d go to the kitchen and watch TV or  slip out front and sit on the benches and daydream. Even if I was doing nothing but thinking, it felt productive, more productive than work, because thinking means more to me than the polishing refrigerators, thinking and dreaming keep me alive, vital.

In the office, it’s hard to disappear. Instead, we surf the web, shop the sites, social network, which is far from dreaming, far from thought, which deadens the mind, and still, we do it to pass the time. They’ve tried blocking these sites, but it never results in greater productivity. Why won’t they let us leave when we complete our tasks for the day? Wouldn’t we be happier, more motivated to complete our work with attention and efficiency? Knowing we have to stay eight hours, regardless of what we complete, encourages procrastination, and I don’t believe the solution is piling on more work. Why not let us have lives beyond the office, time to ourselves? If I have four hours of work to complete, and I’m allowed to leave after I finish to go to the museum or sit in the park and read a book or watch a movie or go home and nap, I’ll appreciate the company more. I’ll be more inclined to work for them. Instead, I’m bitter. I engage in cloak and dagger maneuvers, and I’m not the only one to extend a lunch break.

My favorite place to go, back before I had a child, was National Mechanics on 3^rd, between Chestnut and Market. They have a decent veggie burger, fries, beer. I used to like leaving with a book and notepad, and sitting and having a beer and eating a burger. I’d read and scribble out ideas, work on a story or essay. They had a beautiful bartender there, too. Sari. She had long brown hair and high prominent cheeks, a lovely smile, straight white teeth. She was tall, lean. I liked watching her work. She was friendly, efficient, warm to customers.

I start walking toward work. It would be nice, I think, to go there, to have that again.

My arm aches at the injection site, nothing unusual in that. I’ve read you should choose your dominant arm—since you’re using it more frequently, the ache will be less. It won’t stiffen up. But I never do. I always go left, non-dominant. There’s something satisfying in the ache. It means something happened today, something that doesn’t happen all the time.

I wander past the park without going inside, keeping close to the red brick wall. Inside, I see the woman who asked me for change after I fell, the one who’d picked up the newspaper binding and threw it in the trash. She’s near the fountain, empty now in preparation for the cold. She’s standing on the west side near the George Washington statue, the flame for the unknown Revolutionary war dead. “Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness.” She’s asking for change. I’m not sure why I thought this would be any different. As though she’s subsisted on my dollar the whole month. As if my accidental act of altruism changed her circumstances. Was it a magical dollar? A fairy tale currency? Such are the pitfalls of ego, the ways we can’t get past ourselves, the importance we attribute to our acts, no matter how insignificant. I haven’t thought of her since that day. But as I bemoan my working-man’s plight, she’s here, doing this, and seeing her gives rise to guilt, confounds my self-righteous inner monologue. I can’t get outside myself unless shaken by extreme reminders, and even then, empathy fails. I have difficulty humanizing her. But why? What is it about her? The fact of her homelessness? Does that make her foreign to me? An object I look past without seeing? Do I only see her when it’s convenient? Had I expected her to disappear because she’d ceased to exist in my mind? I’d forgotten her as soon as she was out of sight. Yet, she’d played a vital role in a moment of change, not because I’d fallen, but because the fall had seemed inevitable, and questions of inevitability have surfaced in my mind ever since.

I’d never reflected on what it meant—inevitability. The inevitability of my fall, which leads to questions of acting out predetermined roles, husband/wife, parent/child, employer/employee, powerful/powerless. How many couples, at the outset of their relationship, assure themselves they’ll never become the bickering cliché of disunion, then do? Is it encoded into middle-class marriage? Love and time plus children equals fading love, diminishment. You no longer have time for each another. You look around and see other couples struggling, trying to balance their own needs with the needs of their children and other demands. I remember my mother taking care of her mother, who was dying of emphysema. My mother was moody all the time. Four kids, a husband, and then her own mother, dying.

My grandfather died when my mom was four, and my grandmother shut herself in. She’d wanted her children to live at home all their lives, not because she cared for them, but because she needed them to pay room and board, and one of my uncles did, which made him useless. He couldn’t take care of himself, let alone his mother, so my mom took care of her. We lived around the corner, and my mom would make her mother’s meals and clean. She’d empty her bedpan and come home. I was in my teens and so was my brother. My sisters were younger. We needed things from our mother, too. She cooked dinners and made sure our clothes were clean. My father helped where he could. He washed dishes, did laundry, cooked, but even with help, my mother was irritable, radiating misery without a full awareness of how it was affecting us. I didn’t know this at the time, but I see it now, the way her emotions swirled inside her, conflicting. Here was a woman, my mother’s mother, who’d never done anything deserving of love. She’d been critical of my mother’s choices, demeaned her. She’d kept a record of all the money she’d spent raising my mom and expected remuneration. Yet, my mom loved her in the way we can’t escape loving our parents, even when they’re cruel. She loved her in spite of herself and wanted approval.

My grandmother, to me, was a wisp of a woman. She wore lacey blouses. She spoke in short terse bursts, riddled with nervous laughter. Her hair was off-white, washed out and sooty-looking, as though stained by nicotine. She’d smoked for many years, and now wheezed. She wore dentures she clacked as she sat at the dining room table reading the newspaper. She walked at a snail’s pace from one room to another, and in the end, she was hooked up to an oxygen tank. The rooms of her house were drab, dark. The sofa was velvet, crimson; the shades drawn. It wasn’t a place of life, but of resignation. For years, the doctor had been saying she didn’t have long, and for years, she’d proven him wrong. Her will to live was strong. And even in the end, she fought, and in the end, my mother wept and was glad. It must have been strange to weep and feel glad all at once. And my father endured it. He measured her moods, withstood the storms, stayed at her side. He loved her, and that’s what you do with love: ride it out.

I see this happening now with Justine and her dad. He’s ailing. Her father doesn’t have one illness but many—diabetes, failing kidneys. He’s in his late-seventies and lives alone in a small, nicotine-stained apartment. He, too, smokes. He, too, has done little to earn her love since she was a child. He took her to casinos when she was little. He gambled away large sums of money. He hadn’t been there when she’d needed him, through high school and college. Yet now that he’s sick, she’s there. They’d reconnected after a long spell of not talking. Justine’s mother had died. She’d lain on the bathroom floor for a day, maybe two, until someone found her, stroke. And Justine never got the chance to confront her, to say what she needed to say.

Her mother had suffered from bipolar disorder. She’d done things to hurt Justine, things that weren’t clear to me. And when she died, it shook my wife. She didn’t want the same thing to happen with her father. So, she’s started to go to his apartment on weekends to make sure his pills are organized, prescriptions filled. She cleans for him, makes sure he’s fed, and in turn, he’s offered support. He gives her cash, which we used for our wedding. He walked her down the aisle, too. But it isn’t easy. He’s a narcissist. He can’t apologize for the things he’s done, because he isn’t aware of them. She wants his love, and he gives it. But his love will never be fulfilling, because the narcissist can’t see past himself. He can go through the motions. He tells her he’s proud of her. He delights in Sadie, but all with an air of disingenuousness because this love has come on his terms, when he’s decided to give it, and not when she needed it most.

Yet, I wonder if he could have done anything else, acted differently. Was it within his power when he was young to give and he’d withheld? Or did the sum total of his experience and choices, his genetic predispositions and neural wiring, push him to act the way he did? Was it even possible for him to have chosen otherwise? Compulsive gambling, they say, is an addiction, a disease over which the addict has little control. They say it’s inherited. If he didn’t know to seek help, if he didn’t recognize the problem, how much responsibility does he bear?

And my grandmother, can we blame her for what was likely a debilitating depression brought on by her husband’s death? I’ve seen pictures of her, young, smiling, pretty; pictures of her and my grandfather. He was apparently fun to be around. He liked to crack jokes, entertain, to have company over and make mixed drinks. Manhattans, my mother tells me, were his specialty. “If we were good, he’d let us eat the Maraschino cherries.” But then, this man left them. And this woman, who’d spent her formative years in the Great Depression, this woman who’d lost her husband at a time when women didn’t enter the workforce, she’d had to face the prospect of raising four children alone. How else could she respond? Perhaps she could have prevailed, retained attachments to friends, relied on neighbors, looked for work, asked for help with childcare. But then, she wouldn’t have been the woman she was. And I see traces of this in us, in me and Justine.

Sometimes I worry what would happen if I passed away at forty-four. No one can tell me what he died of: flu, heart failure. My mother doesn’t know. Yet, her descriptions of him—fun-loving, warm—remind me of her. At my best, it reminds me of me, too. I’d won Justine’s love through nothing more than my warmth, my attentions, my ability to care for her. Before this, she’d been solitary. Most of the friends who came to our wedding started as mine. Most of the parties we’d gone to back in our early years were ones to which I’d been invited. What would happen to them—to her and Sadie—if I weren’t there? Would she become like my grandmother? Are we destined to repeat the roles of former generations? Can our lives be reduced to the combination of genetics, demographic factors, chance events? Before I fell, I’d always believed I had a say over my life, my actions, my choices. But now I look around and see this woman, the one in the park, panhandling, the one who’d seen me fall, the one who I’d forgotten about as soon as I went back inside, and the questions compound. How much control do I have? The things I think of as me—artistic inclinations, politics, thoughts on religion, choice of spouse, decisions about the way I raise my child, how many children to have—is it based on demographics, genetics, age, geography, date of birth, me as an algorithm?

Maybe it’s all inevitable, but we have to take responsibility, because there’s nothing else to do. It’s that or bail out. Run and keep running. Or curl up into a ball and take to bed and die.

And I think my father understood this at an age long before it’s dawned on me. And maybe that’s why he looked after us with such selflessness, maybe that’s why he endured my mother’s moods when she radiated misery, a misery her mother bequeathed her from a misery made long ago. Maybe this is why we need to forgive and continue to care for the people we love, even when they seem to deserve it least.

There are other people in the street now, people I recognize from my building, people heading to lunch and doctor’s appointments. I decide to go back to work, to check my mail, to see if Justine has written me. I want to tell her everything, everything I’ve discovered during this walk. But I can’t do it over email, and I worry I can’t do it verbally, that it won’t make sense. A letter, then. I can write it now. Or do it at lunch. Bring a notebook, pen. Sit and scribble it out. This breakthrough seems profound, but is it? Am I fooling myself?

I sit in my cube, open my personal mail, but she hasn’t written. An immense loneliness washes over me, as though I’d expected her to have the same thoughts at the same time, shed her anger, write. I switch to my work email and see that Jules Horton has written me. I lean back, take a long, deep breath. Jules Horton is an economics professor based out of a university in Australia. He’s the editor-in-chief of one of my employee’s marketing journals. An email from him means stress, anger, frustration. Even before I read it, I know that whatever he wants will create extra work, unnecessary work. I’ve never met the man. He could be charming, friendly, but over email, he’s graceless, demanding. When he doesn’t get his way, he hurls unfounded accusations and goes up the chain of command with complaints, and when he finally works his way up high enough and annoys the right person, we give in and he compliments us as empathically as he’d insulted us. He must spend nights combing the journal’s online archives, reviewing content from before he took over, looking for what he sees as errors: a blurry cover image, the wrong shade of green or blue, ignoring the fact that colors onscreen appear differently depending on the monitor you’re using. Whenever he finds deviations, he contacts my employee, copies me, sends us on a chase to see whether we have the power to fix these supposed errors. And we always have the power, but it takes time, and since no one reviews the archives as closely as he does, it’s useless. If it were merely a matter of quality, I’d understand, but his comments are about minutiae, his emails pages long, and his attitude makes it difficult to want to help him. Whenever I see his name on my screen, I dream of the day he’ll step down, retire, pass the torch to someone else. In darker moments, I wish he’d die. I know it’s wrong, but I imagine it anyway. An illness, a plane crash. I hate him, and there’s no good reason for this, other than that he makes my life difficult.

People shouldn’t have to die because they inconvenience you, I think. But I can’t feel it.

There are five departments in our company—production, where I work; editorial, which handles contracts; marketing, which handles promotion; customer service; and sales. I’d been forewarned when Dr. Horton’s journal was assigned to my group that he wasn’t easy, and my first exchange with him soured our relationship from the start. What happened was he asked for something, and I said no. I can’t remember what it was—the addition or elimination of serial commas maybe. He presented himself as an arbiter of grammar, but changed his mind issue-to-issue. If this was his complaint, I would have responded in my usual fashion: we don’t change the online version once published, which was, in fact, true. But having reached a dead-end with me, he emailed marketing to see if he could talk them into doing it. Marketing forwarded his email to editorial; editorial forwarded his email to the online team in production; and the online team in production returned it to me. During these exchanges, the contacts in other departments made jokes at Dr. Horton’s expense. As I read the chain, it was obvious what I’d been told was true: no one in the company liked working with him. But I decided to cut it off, take the lead.

I hit reply all and wrote: “Leave it to me. I already told him we couldn’t do this. I’ll take care of Dr. Horton.”

It was dealing with a child. Dad said no, so he was going to ask mom, hoping the answer was different. If left to me, who knows what course our relationship would have taken. I might have been able to reason with him, forestall his complaints, address his concerns. My plan was to write and reiterate what I’d originally said, what I’d told him was company policy. I’d enter into the usual negotiations, tell him I couldn’t fix the published issue, but offer suggestions about how we could avoid such incidents in the future. It’s one of my strengths—the ability to talk my way out of cumbersome professional situations. Yet, the marketing assistant who’d received his original email preempted my reply. She hit forward and sent the entire chain to Jules with a message that read: “Jason Jones will be in contact soon.”

This was all the ammunition he needed to lodge a complaint with department heads, to ensure I’d fail in my fight against him. The only reason I was fighting in the first place was that giving in meant he’d continue to do this. If I didn’t stop him now, it would never end. In the email he’d returned, he highlighted the jokes we had made at his expense in bright yellow, but he didn’t refer to it. Rather, he addressed my tone, which he didn’t appreciate. For someone like him, the implication that I had him in hand, that I could push his requests aside, bury his desires in a stream of bureaucratic double-speak, must have stung more. He didn’t like not being on top, not having the final word, and he threatened to go above me, to contact the president of the company.

I decided to consult Ethan and Monica. I told them what had happened, what was said. I stopped by their offices, explained the situation. I didn’t send them Horton’s email, since I didn’t want to get the other employees—the ones who’d made fun of him—in trouble. But I did stop by the cube of the marketing assistant who’d forwarded the chain. She was new, and new employees make mistakes. I didn’t think she needed to be chastised, but she needed to be told what she’d done. She was apologetic, embarrassed.  “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” “It happens,” I said. I went back to my desk and tried composing the email I’d initially intended to send to Dr. Horton. Ethan agreed with my original plan and suggested I stick to it.

I must have reread the email I’d written thirty times, changing words, reconsidering inflections, tone, to make it a peace offering. For as much as his response had incited my anger, I knew it wouldn’t do to make enemies with someone I’d have to continue working with. Yet, I had to stand my ground. I ran a draft by Monica, revised, ran it past Ethan. When done, I hit send, and Dr. Horton came back, angrier than ever. He had searched our website to find Ethan’s boss’s email address and copied him on the reply. He wasn’t going to concede to policy whether company-initiated or industry-wide if it affected the quality of his journal. He said he’d go above Ethan’s boss to the CEO if necessary. As I read his response, I sat rubbing my forehead. I wanted to shout at the screen, “No one gives a shit!” But I couldn’t say this. And right then, reading this tantrum, I wished he would disappear, dissolve. I got up, walked around the office, stopped to see Monica.

“Just do what he’s asking us to do,” Monica said.

“What?” I said.

“At this point, it isn’t worth going to war over, so give him what he wants.”

“I disagree,” I said. “We need to stand our ground. I need you or Ethan to tell him no. If we back down on this, he’ll never take ‘no’ for an answer again.”

“We’ll have to evaluate that on a case-by-case basis,” she said.

So, it turned out I was the one being pushed aside with bureaucratic double-speak. Dr. Horton could act with impunity. I had to remain professional. Complaints and threats had worked. I was angry with Monica. She’d used “we,” but meant me. I would have to evaluate and decide in each situation, and as long as he shouted loud enough, Dr. Horton got what he wanted.

The decision probably wasn’t hers. She’d probably consulted Ethan, whose boss had told him to make this guy go away. All we needed was a “no” from someone who mattered, but the company was so scared of bad publicity, they gave in. If we said “no,” Dr. Horton would go online, talk trash, and online trash talk was the company’s biggest fear. Bad word-of-mouth, a sullied reputation. But people talk shit anyway. It doesn’t matter how much effort you put in, someone’s going to be displeased.

Over the next few years, I danced with Dr. Horton. He led, and I followed. Or maybe, I should say that he engaged in a solo performance while I sat on the sidelines, reading a magazine, distractedly clapping my hands, every once in a while, murmuring something along the lines of, “That’s great, dear.” I was only interested in keeping my correspondence with him to a minimum, reducing contact to a quarterly exchange of, “Okay, what’s wrong now, fine we’ll go ahead and fix that.” When the task proved simple enough, I did. Usually, if I ignored him long enough, he’d forget, but in the last few months, he’s become more vigilant. So, I sigh and open his latest, “Dear Mr. Jones.” I scan to see what he wants. He’s attached a number of changes he believes we should make to the website. I open it up: an eight-page itemized list. He must have been at this for months. It’ll take forever to make the changes he’s requesting. In certain cases, he’s right. I open the website and check. Links aren’t linking. This is legitimate. In other cases, the complaints are his usual obsessive-compulsive nitpicking. Alignments of text aren’t to his liking, flush right when they should be flush left; semicolons where he prefers commas. I’ll have to go through all eight pages, identify the things I can fix, then tell him no for the things I can’t. No, that word he dislikes hearing. I hit reply but then close the window. I don’t have anything to say. Not yet. I glance at the clock and run a hand through my hair. It’s almost noon. Fuck it, I think. I’m going to lunch.