Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“In the henhouse, I’m a patient,” Jen once said to Jim. “But are you — a client?”

“I’m an executive assistant,” Jim replied.

Usually Jim would rejoin Jen in the waiting room after just three to five minutes inside the Garden of Earthly Delights.

“BACK OF THE NET,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 1, before he reappeared in the waiting room wearing his best bright, blank expression.

“SWISH,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 2.

“TYGER TYGER BURNING BRIGHT,” Jim texted Jen from the Garden of Earthly Delights during Project Acute Phase No. 4.

There was one instance, during Project Acute Phase No. 3, that Jim did not return for more than twenty minutes, no texts.

“Sorry,” he said, sitting down next to Jen. His brow was shiny with sweat. “Delay with the production order.”

Jen rubbed his back reassuringly. “But it shipped?”

Jim swigged from a bottle of water with a lustiness tipped with anguish. “Ohhh, it shipped.” He exhaled. “Delivery truck got held up by three nurses discussing last night’s episode of The Bachelor. ”

“The nurses were in the Garden ?!?”

“No, no, they were just outside the gates of the Garden. Right at the door. If they’d come into the Garden, I’d have texted you to ask permission.”

“That’s so romantic, honey.”

Perhaps an hour later, Jen would be called in to a different room, where a physician would administer Jim’s speed-trial results. Jim named this room Eugenics Incorporated. Jen didn’t like that name at all.

Inside Eugenics Incorporated, a henhouse staffer always presented Jen with paperwork recording Jim’s speed-trial results for Jen’s confirmation and signature. One staffer in particular always handed over the paperwork with a countenance of blushing pride, as if she couldn’t believe her luck — and the numbers were excellent, as all that spinach-eating and sarong-wearing had given Jim the aquatic profile of a sprightly teenager. But the results also carried a more troubling message, as Jen would reflect afterward during her assigned five to ten minutes of repose on the examining table, legs flung superstitiously up in the air.

Here is the swimmer.

Where is the shore?

It was understood — although a henhouse staffer always reminded Jen of the understanding, just to be sure — that Jen and Jim were to convene as many all-hands meetings as possible during the forty-eight hours immediately following Jen’s trip to Eugenics Incorporated.

Confirmation that yet another round of visits to the henhouse would be necessary came in the form of what Jen had rather unimaginatively named the Monthly Adverse Development. At seven a.m. the morning after every Development, Jen found herself in line with the other henhouse regulars, filling in the identical admission form she had the previous month, proffering her arm for an identical round of phlebotomy, receiving an identical-looking prescription for an even higher dose of Sermoxal. The Sermoxal prescribed to Jen in service of the Project had thickened and exploded the Adversity of said Monthly Developments, draining and choking off her serotonin, scrambling her beta-endorphin, crashing the servers of her frontal lobes, and stoking a sourceless, objectless rage that throbbed inside her at a cellular level. The rage wasn’t even always subcutaneous; Jen could break out in a sweat from it, her hypothalamus triggered for thermoregulation simply because, say, Jim had left a half-spooned yogurt cup on the bedroom floor or because the upstairs neighbors had installed a pop-up bowling alley directly above Jen and Jim’s bedroom, open from six a.m.

“This isn’t me,” Jen said to Jim in their kitchen one morning. “I’m not really upset about anything. My nervous system is just misfiring.”

“But it’s perfectly okay to be upset,” Jim said. “You’ve been through a lot, and—”

“I’m not upset,” Jen barked, slamming her fist onto the countertop. A strip of veneer, peeling away from the countertop’s edge, flapped in distress. In the silence that followed — silent save for her downstairs neighbor’s howls of protest — Jen stared in puzzlement at her unclenching fist, and thought it entirely possible that another entity had taken up temporary residence in her body, although not the entity she had anticipated or wished for.

Directly above Jen and Jim, a screaming child began jumping up and down in place, feet landing flat on the tiles to command maximum surface area.

Waiting for Jim during his first, mercifully brief sojourn in the Garden of Earthly Delights, Jen absentmindedly looked up from her careworn copy of the September 2008 issue of Condé Nast Portfolio and saw her first-floor neighbors, Nadya and Natasha, seated directly across from her. Jen locked eyes with Nadya, then Natasha, then looked down again.

Jen never would have admitted this to herself, much less to anyone else, but if an electroencephalograph had been able to translate the tickertape of mentalese launched by the Nadya-and-Natasha sighting, the Chyron caption scrolling behind Jen’s eyes would have read: They are older than you and rounder than you and they come from somewhere else and they spoke another language first You are ahead of them You were always ahead of them You will be fine It will all work out You will be fine You will be fine You will be fine

It was in moments like these that Jen found herself recoiling from her own mind.

“What’s the Woody Allen line? ‘I would never want to belong to any club that would have me as a member’?” Jen asked Jim once. “Do you ever feel like that about your own brain? Like, if your skull was a club, you wouldn’t try to get in?”

“Groucho Marx said that,” Jim said.

Now, months later, sitting in the same beige seat in the same freezing beige waiting room — the soothing constancy of its climate maintained by poor insulation in winter and, now, an overzealous air-conditioning unit in summer — with the same copy of Condé Nast Portfolio visible in the same scuffed magazine rack hanging next to the same sooty windowsill, waiting for Jim as he journeyed through the Garden of Earthly Delights in service of Project Acute Phase No. We’ve-Lost-Track-by-Now, Jen shivered in her sleeveless dress and sandals and checked her phone for the first time since the previous evening. Her hands trembling, she found herself scrolling through a long email thread on her apartment building’s listserv, swiping past variations and permutations of “Congratulations!” and “So happy for you!” and “Mazel tov!” to the originating email from Nadya, who thought maybe people had noticed Natasha looking a little different lately and anyway she just wanted everyone officially to know their happy news and thank you so much.

Jen returned her phone to her tote bag, dropped her chin to her chest, and wrapped her bare arms tightly around herself, organizing her body in a more compact, better-calibrated, more heat-efficient form.

But this more hospitable form was itself conspicuous, so she unwrapped her arms, fished The New Yorker out of her tote bag, opened it to a random page, and pretended to read, clenching her teeth, squeezing her crossed legs together in an awkward hug of goose-bumpy limbs.

Then she rolled up The New Yorker, stuffed it into her tote, fished out her phone, and tapped out a “Congratulations from Jen and Jim on the fourth floor!” and stared at the screen, contemplating whether or not to add more exclamation points, whether they would enhance or belittle the enthusiasm conveyed in her joyous reply-all.