The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ