Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

She decided on four exclamation points, then deleted one of them, then sent.

You will be fine It will all work out You will be fine You will be fine You will be

The train from the henhouse to LIFt halted without explanation two stops from the station closest to the office, so Jen speed-walked seventeen blocks to work in the hazy, sweet-sick morning heat. As she hustled into the elevator, the viscose lining of her dress clung to her with what she hoped was not an indecent moistness. In the henhouse, Jen’s constricted veins had cowered from two different nurses, and so a third — older, less openly stumped by Jen’s venous incompetence — had slipped a series of smaller needles just under her skin, pushing in and out in search of purchase. Jen watched blood leak and seep from her veins into the surrounding tissue as the nurse threaded and pulled, threaded and pulled, a brackish purple blooming under her skin. She imagined the needle as an anteater, flicking its spiked tongue every which way on a promising lump of tree roots. No, better: She imagined her blood as a tiny sea creature — some as-yet-undiscovered species of amniotic ray — easing through her body’s channels, caressing over her capillaries, pulsing and blooming with oxygen, with messy, colorful life.

In the elevator, perspiration wallowed at the base of her spine and streaked down the backs of her thighs. Heat and sweat had begun to peel the Band-Aids away from the wilted cotton balls stuck in the crooks of her arms. As the elevator pinged into place on the thirty-eighth floor, she ripped the bandages off simultaneously in a crossed-arm choreographic move — a little private flourish visible only to Jen and the unblinking eye of the security camera — and stuffed them into her tote bag as the elevator doors gug-flump ed open.

She had gotten up so early, and she was late.

She had gotten up so early, again, and she was late, again. Weeks, months, had gone like this.

“Jen, look, the last thing we want is for people to feel as though they’re punching in and out on a clock,” Karina was saying. “On the other hand, a team can’t start out on the field a man down, can they?”

The atmosphere at LIFt rumbled with agitation in triplicate. So far as Jen could tell, Leora Infinitas was 1) not satisfied with the pace of progress at LIFt; 2) not frequently available to communicate with her staff at LIFt about her unhappiness with the pace of progress at LIFt; and 3) not forthcoming about the projects on which her staff were meant to be making progress. Leora’s discontent had not filtered from her board down to the rest of the staff by any direct means. Instead it had faded in slowly, like a hissing ambient static.

Whhooooossshhhhh

You could hear it even when Leora wasn’t in the office, which was most days. Today, Leora was with Sunny in San Diego, giving a talk titled “The Work-Love Balance.”

“Leora Infinitas and her new-ish foundation have been exhorting women worldwide to ‘LIFt Yourself,’ which in their view requires the usual menu of charity and volunteer work as well as savvy career choices: If you love what you do, you never have to work, ” wrote DOPENHAUER ’s Ruby Stevens-Meisel, who often made note even of Leora’s most mundane public appearances. “The ‘work-love balance’ is therefore a zero-sum game — an aggressive reformulation of Karl Marx’s zero-sum theory of wealth, labor, and power, although one that Leora, the people’s polemicist, would never put in such academic terms.”

“I know, I was late, I’m sorry,” Jen was saying to Karina. She was finding her breath and her hands were shivering and she was smiling so hard her face hurt. “I had a—”

“A team can’t start out with a woman down on the field, I should say.” Draped across the empty filing cabinet behind Jen’s desk, Karina rested her chin thoughtfully on her fist.

Amid other Pavlovian conditioned responses that Jen had acquired since joining LIFt, the sight of Karina leaning against the empty filing cabinets triggered cravings for an Animexa tablet. Karina leaning against the empty filing cabinets conveyed that a memo would have to be conceived and researched and written, or a meeting would have to be convened at which a memo would be formulated or discussed or autopsied or, most likely, ignored. An Animexa tablet replicated and improved on the effects intended by the whhooooossshhhhh and by Daisy’s noise-canceling headphones. The physical side effects of Animexa were diverse, inconsistent, and, most important, minor — the slightly dilated pupils, the cottonmouth, the clams-on-ice fingers — but to Jen its main pharmacological effects were aural. The drug seemed to create its own sound waves, which were 180 degrees out of phase with any interfering waves signaling boredom, embarrassment, and existential futility.

As Jen reminded herself even now, Animexa’s sound waves were also out of phase with the Project, although at that moment it could not have mattered less.

“Right, right, I’m sorry,” Jen said. The smile on her face was genuine and absentminded, a smile acknowledging and addressing someone across the room whom only Jen could see. “I had a doctor’s appointment. I did email you about it last night. I always—”

“But you would have known about a doctor’s appointment before last night. ”

“Well, it’s—”

“It has not escaped my attention that all your many, many doctor’s appointments are in the morning.” Karina’s face twitched. Jen’s frequent albeit slight tardiness had never, to Jen’s knowledge, even remotely impacted a single item of business at LIFt — and indeed she lacked clarity on what, if any, business LIFt had to itemize and her own role in achieving those items of business. And yet Karina’s face had just unmistakably twitched, and for a second Jen feared that her tardiness had driven Karina past some critical physiological threshold, that her belated arrival times could somehow jam Karina’s feedback nerves, drain her electrolyte supply, jab her myofascial trigger points.

But actually, Karina had winked at her.

“Yes, yes, the morning,” Jen said. She remembered her needle marks and bruises, and placed her hands in piano-player position on her knees, elbows pulled in, aiming to hide her wounds or at least cast them in shadow.

“Are you a night owl, Jen?” Karina asked, cocking her head and approximating a tone of friendly conspiracy. “Lot of late ones ? Not a morning person?”

“Sorry?” Jen hoped that Karina wouldn’t wink again.

Karina wriggled her nose, as if jesting with a toddler. “I get it, I get it,” she said, bucking her chin at Jen. “ Believe me, I get it, because I’m pretty nocturnal myself. Or I used to be. Kids are an alarm clock you really can’t hit snooze on.”

“Oh, no, I’m not — I’m not lying — not that I’m accusing you of — sorry—”

“You are so smiley this morning,” Karina said. “I kind of love it.”

“Well—”

“So these doctor’s appointments, ” Karina said, enunciating each syllable as if for an audience of lip-readers. She paused and sighed. “Okay, problem-solving time: Maybe you could stagger them out — sneak out early once in a while instead of coming in late.”

“This doctor — these — I need to go in the morning. I can always stay at the office late.”

Karina shrugged. “Again, it’s about the team. Do you expect the rest of the team to stay at the office late?”

“Oh, no, of course not, I just meant—”

“Look, don’t even worry about it,” Karina said. “It’s just something to keep in mind.” She tapped her index and middle fingers to her brow. “Nine, ay, em!”