Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Got it! Thanks.”

“And oof, look at those bruises,” Karina said. She furrowed her brow in an effort of concern. “You okay? Need some ice?”

Jen didn’t look down. “It’s nothing. Thanks, though.”

“All right, well, I don’t mean to pry. But if you ever need to talk about anything, anything at all, I’m always here for you,” Karina said, her hands clasped in a prayerful position as she backed away and turned around. “And stay happy —look at that smile,” Karina added, her back to Jen.

“Thanks very much, Karina,” Jen called after her.

“And see ya later, Daisy,” Karina said over her shoulder. Daisy, concealed behind the cubicle wall, had been sitting two feet away from them the whole time.

“I think she thinks I’m a drug addict,” Jen said, once Karina was out of earshot.

“Uppers or downers?” asked Daisy, from behind the cubicle wall.

“Downers would make you sleep in, right?”

“It depends. Uppers could keep you up all night, so maybe you’re a speed freak or on an all-night coke binge, fall asleep around sunrise, and then you get a late start on the day. Or maybe you’re zonked on oxycodone all the time, so it’s Sunday morning every morning all day.”

“Which drugs would make you bruise easily?”

“Heroin. Steroids. Aspirin.”

“Maybe I should go public about my struggle with intravenous aspirin addiction.”

“You could write an open-letter confession to Karina.”

“Dear Karina, I am sorry I was twelve minutes late to work today…”

“…I apologize that my Aspirin Anonymous meeting went late…”

“…Because my sponsor had a slip and raided her kids’ bathroom for chewables…”

“…Last week I sneaked an Advil and all I could think was ‘I’m whoring around on my one true bride…’ ”

“…so then I emptied all my aspirin bottles into the ocean, and when the tablets washed up onto the shore they spelled out K-A-R-I-N-A…”

“I’m really sorry, but—” Daisy interrupted Jen, but then Jen realized that Daisy was on the phone now, talking to someone else.

“—but I have board members voting against that grant because one of them was over there and his taxi driver said he had three wives, and therefore they don’t think gender equality is going to happen there anytime soon,” Daisy was saying.

Jen drummed her fingers on her desktop and bounced a little in her seat before she picked up her phone to leave Jim a voicemail. “I’m sorry, I would have called you from the henhouse, but my cell was dead,” she said to the voicemail. “I’m also sorry that I didn’t go for the test right away. I am also also sorry that I am leaving this as a message. But anyway the answer is yes. We did it. Finally. Swish. Back of the net.”

“There is some serious motherfucking arbitration going down tonight,” Meg said.

Meg, Jen, and Jim clinked their glasses together as the crowd at Pam’s opening-night party swirled and heaved around them. Pam had called her show Break in Case of Emergency, and as Jen had guessed, it was an elaborate riff on the medical and bureaucratic tribulations Pam had endured after her cycling accident. Pam had had the presence of mind to record virtually every second of more than twenty hours’ worth of phone calls with WellnessSolutions and then transcribed them. She had sliced and diced both the recordings and the transcripts to make crazy quilts of health-insurance-provider jargon, stonewalling, who’s-on-first bureaucratic script, and mindless pleasantries. She’d then given the edited transcripts to a local drama student with a honeyed baritone to provide the voice-overs for parody WellnessSolutions commercials, which now played on a loop at opposite ends of Pam’s studio space. Shot on a borrowed Flip camera, they featured every trope of a WellnessSolutions TV ad campaign: silver-haired retirees dancing in slow motion at their daughter’s wedding, a dog running in slow motion across a field, a toddler toddling in slow motion at the seaside. Pam had also hired actors to perform live lip-synchs of the audio edits at three spots around the studio. The actors wore white shirts, black slacks, and headsets, and they paced and smiled and gesticulated, like hosts of a motivational webinar.

The different edits of audio and video mixed and overlapped across space, though not aggressively enough to discourage conversation among the guests, which enhanced the show’s feeling of disorientation and information overload. Adding to the sense of claustrophobia were Jen’s portraits, which were mounted around the perimeter of the studio. As she’d been working on them one by one, they’d seemed friendly, albeit overbearing; in their final resting place, they were unsettling, menacing.

“Happiness zombies of the uncanny valley,” Meg said, approvingly.

“It’s like if they smiled any harder, their faces would smash apart, like glass under pressure, to reveal the sputtering robot viscera underneath,” Jim said.

“Thanks so much, guys,” Jen said.

“You need to contact the billing department to obtain the preauthorization approval code, then contact the billing authorization department to request the preauthorization,” a woman just behind them mouthed into her headset.

Toward the back of the gallery was a chuppah constructed of hospital-bed components and wheelchair parts, with a canopy sewn out of hospital gowns; guests were invited to wrap lightbulbs in gauze pads and athletic tape and crush them underfoot. Smack in the center of the exhibit was what looked to be a cross-section of a grocery-store shelf, sliced clean out of a supermarket aisle. It displayed an enigmatic hodgepodge of items: canned beets, canned artichokes, a wine-bottle opener, slabs of vacuum-packed mozzarella, a honeycomb of bone marrow. Each item carried a unit price, a retail price, and a bar code.

“Oh, God,” Meg whispered to Jen, “the bone marrow looks like rugelach.”

“You would use the Medical Claim Form for out-of-pocket expenses before meeting the deductible, but once you’ve met the deductible you’d switch to the Medical Benefits Request,” a man’s voice said behind them.

“Ladies, good evening.” Paulo leaned in to Meg and then Jen for a two-cheek kiss. In his standard uniform of rabbinical beard, viscerally splattered overalls, weathered steel-toed boots, and gruff, laconic affect, Paulo usually brought to Jen’s mind a muzhik with a graduate degree in philosophy, or a philosophy graduate student dressed as a muzhik for Halloween. In any context — even tonight, with his beard close-trimmed, his overalls swapped for a slouchy blazer and jeans, and his features plumped in a sociable arrangement — Jen always pictured Paulo perched stone-faced atop a Belarus tractor, smoking an ironic pipe.

“You clean up real pretty,” Meg said to Paulo.

“I’m a pretty, pretty boy,” Paulo replied, showing his teeth and patting his flat belly.

“You’re even prettier since the last time we saw you, which I think was at the Turbuleers group show,” Jen said.

“I fucking hated that show,” Paulo said. “Did you fucking hate that show?”

“I met a rockabilly cowboy,” Meg said.

“That cowboy you met, his name is Taige Hammerback, he’s from San Jose but he twangs like he’s from Texas, and he’s in character all the time, ” Paulo said. “He does studio visits like that. He got married like that.”

“I remember him well,” Meg said. “He finds lots of reasons to take off his cowboy hat to show you his cowboy pompadour.”

“He probably has sex with that hat on,” Paulo said. “He goes to the grocery store with that hat on. Well, he probably doesn’t have to go to the grocery store anymore, because now Taffy French reps him.”