The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei

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СКАЧАТЬ I shouldn’t stick around for the meeting?” he mumbled, and I said nothing, and I said it without looking at him, pretending to stare at my screen but out of the corner of my eye I could see him there, his body suddenly stiff, him staring at the bare floor with an expression of both confusion and panic.

      Yes, I wanted to say to him, this is happening, it is, it’s happening now. But I couldn’t for legal reasons. And then as if he could read my thoughts, he just walked away.

      Post incident I let a couple of weeks slide, to both allow his feelings of terror to stew in him for a while and also to lull him into thinking that the weirdness was maybe over. I had read on the internet that they raise the toros in perfect comfort so that when they are first stabbed with the banderilla and begin to bleed and the blood is running into their eyes and there are thousands of people around them screaming but they’ve never seen more than two or three humans in their lives, these bulls, it just adds to their inability to react appropriately and so they are less of a threat. I had my assistant call Henry in for a meeting. Ten minutes before the meeting was to take place I left the agency and went for a walk. I may have gotten something to eat, I don’t remember. When I got back three hours later my assistant informed me that Henry had been by and he thought we had a meeting and I said, Yeah, I know. The next day I called Henry into my office and this time I didn’t leave him hanging. I looked him in the eye and told him he was being taken off the Allstate account. He was stunned. He hadn’t seen this coming. Frankly, neither had I, it just came out. He finally asked me Why? and I said something about the client wanting some new blood and how actually I was pleased because this meant Henry was freed up to work on various other assignments.

      “What kind of assignments?” he asked me. I said I wasn’t sure but that I would think about it and get back to him.

      At that point he had to know that he was being fired. But there were still nearly two months left until his end date. For a couple of weeks I just said nothing to him. I’d see him come in and sit in his cubicle and surf the internet and try to look busy. I’d see him go around to the other creative directors and ask them if they needed any help on anything, but everybody knew intuitively that he was going to be let go and they avoided him the way people do in any corporation when they sense someone has lost favor. For weeks no one would make eye contact with him or even say hello to him in the hall. It was if he were literally dying of a contagious disease and so he was being ostracized by those hoping to survive him.

      Then one day I had another brainstorm. I called Henry into my office and asked him what he was working on. He tried to cover his shock at the inanity of this question and said he was trying to get on a new business pitch that he had heard was coming down the pike. “So in other words you’re not working on anything at the moment,” I said with the barest hint of indignation in my voice. He said he was pretty wide open at this point and would love to work on whatever I wanted to toss his way. I let a long silence hang in the room before informing him that it would be difficult for me to justify his salary if he wasn’t billing to any client. He sat there, a smiling rictus of fear. I told him that he ought to think about bringing some new business into the agency. Did he have any connections? He said he would think about it. When I had gotten him drunk a few weeks earlier he had spilled to me a couple of interesting facts. One, that he was separated from his wife, and two, that she was living in an apartment on the Upper West Side that had once been owned by a Famous Actor, whom she had briefly dated in LA and had helped through a rough patch.

      “What about your wife’s nutrition business?” I asked him. Maybe we could do some commercials for her and get her friend to be in them? That would certainly be good for the profile of the agency. Henry agreed wholeheartedly and said he would speak to his ex. Our danse macabre was moving along.

      So Henry called his ex-wife and told her that he was going to get fired if he didn’t come up with something. She agreed to let him pitch the idea of making a few web-based commercials for her consulting practice, which was called Newtritionals, LLC, and she agreed to call her friend about appearing in them. Henry told me that the actor was in Australia filming a movie and couldn’t do the spots; I knew that was a lie because I asked one of our casting people to call his agent and find out what his availability was, and they said he was living in Palm Desert and doing nothing at the moment. Nonetheless I’m sure that he had no interest in hawking food supplements on the internet for a girl he banged a few times during a dry spell. But Henry must have really laid it on thick because Victoria pressed Famous Actor, who eventually talked to an old friend of his, a Famous Actress, who played Superman’s wife in the ’80s. On a rainy night in the fall we got her to show up at a studio on Tenth Avenue. We shot improv until the wee hours and got nothing usable; throughout the ordeal I could see how much pain Henry was in. Then we spent two weeks trying to cut something; I declared the results not worthy of the agency’s name, and took Henry to lunch as a way of thanking him for coming through under pressure. And then a few days later I fired him.

      It was a beautiful morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the air had the tiniest hint of a chill in it, the kind of perfect morning that still reminds many New Yorkers of the day the planes flew in. I will never forget the look on his face. He probably thought I wanted to talk to him about the Newtritionals project and maybe what other curiosities we might cook up together. But when he stepped into my office and saw HR Lady there with the beginnings of tears in her eyes, he knew. That’s how they all know, by the glistening. He sat in one of the two Eames chairs I had purchased online from the MoMA Design Store and he tried to chuckle as if to say, OK, I get it, and I’m fine with it, but it was obvious that he had been blindsided. Of course in some sense he knew all along but the whole Famous Actor/Actress incident had no doubt distracted him, as it was meant to do.

      I looked at him with my best sad-eyed expression and then there was a pause that could have only lasted a few seconds but seemed much longer. I saw him glance over at a stack of fashion magazines I had put on the floor waiting to be thrown away. I almost had the sense he was counting them, his mind grabbing on to anything to keep it from careening into the abyss. He crossed his legs and looked up at me.

      “I’m sorry to say this,” I said, nodding with as much earnest emotion as I could muster, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”

      In any good narrative, say a detective story, when at last you know who the killer is, it should be the kind of surprise that you realize was inevitable all along. What Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, what I now suppose I have no choice but to call The Henry. At that point if I were him I would have strangled me to death, but just as the urge to commit an act of senseless violence was rearing up in him—the urge to slap me on the face or smash my Noguchi tabletop with his fist—this is when HR jumps in and tells him about our generous severance package which includes his full salary and health care for nearly five weeks if he agrees to our terms. Realizing he needs the money, Henry just stares at the wall.

      “Alright,” he says and that was pretty much it. A couple of them have called me a douchebag, one in a voice that was crackling with pain and hatred, he could barely speak he was so angry, he had four children and a fifth on the way, it was tremendously moving. But mostly they’re not surprised. The initial clues having been, you know, homeopathic: they’re a tiny dollop of the disease, and then the antibodies rush in, and that’s the second set of positive clues, and so the subject has a false sense of wellbeing until the bottom drops out. But just as Henry’s lips part to speak, to say something else, perhaps a final statement, the two African-American security guards, Damon and Terry, step into my office as if on cue. Henry senses the men behind him, gets up and walks out with them toward the elevators without a word.

      1.5

      It’s about 9 AM, I’m being crushed by a hangover and so I’m working out at the health club in my building, trying to sweat it out of my body, all corrupted flesh pixels needing СКАЧАТЬ