Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Where do you work now?”

“I work at, um, a start-up?” Jen said. “I am so sorry, Sue, but I need to run to the ladies’ room — I’ll come find you later, okay?”

When Jen came out of the bathroom, Jim was jotting down notes in the narrow margins of a copy of The Nation in front of the giant teenaged orthodontics patient, a half-full glass of wine cradled between his forearm and ribs.

“This portrait made me realize something,” Jim said as Jen carefully extracted the glass of wine from its precarious berth. “I have this kid in my class, Stevie, who’s really happy and cooperative all the time. He’s great, but I kind of file him away in a drawer in my mind, like, ‘I don’t have to worry about this one.’ But maybe it’s all a front. Maybe it’s a façade of happiness masking horror and mania and giant metal weaponry.”

“I’m sorry that my picture of a kid with braces made you diagnose Stevie with mental illness,” Jen said.

“Stevie doesn’t even have braces,” Jim said, taking back the glass of wine.

“My whole mouth tastes like braces,” Jen said. “Even my tongue.” She thrashed her tongue around, attempting to air out her mouth like a musty duvet.

“Oh, wait, you should hold this,” Jim said, handing back the glass of wine. “For show.”

Jen took it and teethed the rim of the glass intently. “My tongue is mighty, it is made of iron, ” she said.

“Did you tell Pam yet?” Jim asked.

“No, I’m waiting until after the craziness around the show has died down a little.”

“You should tell her,” Jim said.

“I will totally tell her as soon as— hi! ”

Meg and Pam stood before them, wearing smiles evocative of the teenaged orthodontics patient and/or Stevie. “Jen,” Meg was saying, “Mrs. Durbin wants to talk to you. ”

“Okay, sure!” Jen said, handing the glass of wine to Jim.

“Not right now, because she left, but she wanted you to have this,” Pam said, handing Jen a business card. “You’re supposed to call her assistant.”

“Okay, but why?” Jen asked.

“I’m afraid I cannot provide you with that information at this time, ma’am,” a man behind them murmured into his headset.

“Mrs. Flossie Durbin is a woman of few words,” Meg said. “But you are definitely, definitely supposed to call her.”

“Okay, but what did Mrs. Durbin think of Pam’s show?” Jen asked.

“Mrs. Durbin said the show was proficient, ” Pam replied, taking the glass of wine from Jim and draining it triumphantly.

“Holy fuck,” Jim said.

“Are you serious?” Jen said.

“I was there, man,” Meg said. “I saw it. I heard it.”

“Recommend! Recommend!” Jen said.

“This is the greatest night of my life,” Pam said. “Let’s go smash some lightbulbs.”

The train was all messed up again. The lines frequently refused to venture past the southern tip of the park, thwarted by “planned maintenance” or “signal problems” or other vague but official-sounding exigencies. Jen and Jim waited a while in the muggy night air for a shuttle bus.

“Good God, they sent a cattle car,” Jim said when the overcrowded bus rolled into the stop twenty minutes later. “Call the USDA.”

“I am dunzo,” Jen said. “Let’s walk home.”

“Are you okay walking past the Deli of Death at”—Jim checked his watch—“one in the morning?”

“No,” Jen said, “but if I die tonight, I don’t want the last thing I see on earth to be somebody’s armpit.”

“You’d rather it be a rack full of expired Honey Buns.”

Located on an infamous street corner equidistant from the train station and Jen and Jim’s apartment, Brancato’s Grocery, aka the Deli of Death, was not only the region’s preeminent cocaine and methamphetamine marketplace but also a locus of neighborhood nightlife ranging from armed robbery to dogfights to quarterly shootings. Brancato’s rarely closed, and the Staffordshire terriers guarding the door after ten p.m. rarely stopped barking.

“It’s kind of unfair to call it the Deli of Death, because no one has ever died there,” Jen said. “That we know about. Since we’ve lived here.”

Jen’s heels made a solitary clop-clop on the uneven sidewalk as she walked arm in arm with Jim.

“How are you feeling?” Jim asked.

“I’m fine, fine,” Jen said quickly. “Let’s not talk about it — we’ll jinx it. Wasn’t tonight great?” she asked, inhaling the humidity index through her nostrils theatrically. “Great turnout, Pam was on point. Everyone seemed really happy to be there and slightly freaked-out, which is what I think she was going for.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Jim said. “And that lady, the Fozzie woman. You’re going to be best friends with her now.”

“Mrs. Flossie Durbin. Yeah, well, I doubt much will come of that.”

“You’re going to call her, though.”

“Sure, sure.”

“Maybe I’ll call her,” Jim said. “We have a lot in common, Flossie Durbin and I. We like the same stuff.”

“ Anyway, I think this was a big night for Pam. This could change everything for her.”

Jim said nothing.

“Don’t you think?” Jen asked.

“I guess so,” Jim said.

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Didn’t you think it was kind of contrived?”

“The show? No, I thought it was a matter-of-fact way of dealing with a really messy, emotive topic. It was smart and honest.”

Jim said nothing.

“What do you mean by contrived, anyway?” asked Jen, unlinking her arm from Jim’s and turning to look at him. “Anything anybody makes is contrived. By definition.”

“It just seemed like she was exploiting it.”

“Exploiting the accident? Why shouldn’t she exploit it? It happened. It was a big deal. Why shouldn’t she have something to say about it?”

“But it’s like it precludes anyone from criticizing it. Because if you criticize it, you’re criticizing someone who has suffered — no, you’re criticizing their suffering, actually. And nobody wants to do that, so they praise it.”

“But who are all these people praising it?”

“Whoever was there. Mrs. Flossie Durbin. You.”

“Well, of course the people at Pam’s opening would say nice things about her opening!”

“No, it’s not just that. You’ll never really know how people really feel about work like that, because the nature of the thing means you have to respond to it in a certain way or you’re an asshole.”

“But that’s not Pam’s fault. Is she not supposed to make stuff out of concern that you won’t feel comfortable criticizing it?”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“And wait, back up, I still don’t know what you mean by exploit. You mean the work is exploitative?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“So it was cynical somehow? And who or what was she exploiting? Herself?”

“You know what, forget it, because you’re always going to be better at arguing this stuff than I am.”

“Don’t be like that, honey. I’m interested in what you think.”

“Yeah, well,” Jim said.

They walked in clop-clop silence. They could hear the dogs barking now.

The fatigue was the heel of a hand, pressing steadily and insistently against Jen’s forehead, fingers palming and compressing the deflated basketball of her skull, shading her eyes and darkening her field of vision. The fatigue was a chloroform air freshener, affixed someplace under her desk where Jen couldn’t reach it, every inhalation of its scent making her eyes water and her nose run and her lower jaw crack under the tensile pressure of gaping, heaving yawns. The fatigue could not, of course, be placated by a second cup of coffee or half an Animexa tablet. Or even a quarter of an Animexa tablet, perhaps ground into a fine dust to be sprinkled in decaffeinated tea or dotted on Jen’s tongue for a largely psychosomatic effect. Jen had considered all these possibilities, repeatedly. Sometimes — now — Jen could answer the fatigue only with a supplicant’s pose: elbows propped on her desk, face hidden in her hands, the pads of her fingers making pleading circles against her closed, weeping eyes.