Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“You know, mercado, machines, merchandise, mechanical reproduction — the moment was just so rich in meaning,” Leora was saying. “I don’t have the machinery to deconstruct it.”

“Haha wow, ” Sunny said.

Swaying on her feet, Jen tried to catch Karina’s eye to plead mutely for an assist. But in each of the rapt faces around the table, Jen recognized the temporary tunnel vision that she herself had adapted and perfected in high school as an overtaxed waitress at a casual-dining franchise. She arranged a grin on her face that was intended to convey merry diffidence and backed out of the room.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Daisy asked when Jen returned to her desk.

Jen flopped theatrically into the chair behind her desk. “Wait, I have no idea why I just did that,” she said. “I’ve been sitting for days. ” She stood up, then sat down again, more daintily.

“We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to,” Daisy said. “You only infiltrated a board meeting.”

Daisy was flipping through a perfect-bound, magazinelike tome titled Fur-Lined Teacup: Animals Fashion • Feminism. The cover depicted, against a white backdrop, an impassive Russian blue cat in a trilby.

“I infiltrated nothing — they just needed someone to take notes,” Jen said. “And it would be my honor to talk about it. Leora broke her toe paragliding in Turks and Caicos, which her guru told her was a metaphor for a fundamental incompatibility between her jingmai and her luomai, so when the nail falls off her toe she has to wear it in a titanium locket around her neck until Mercury enters Virgo. Karina was at a party with the Russian billionaire who is building the cyborg clone of himself, and he asked her what she was going to bequeath to her brain in her will and she said ‘fish oil,’ and then he asked her out on a date. Donna bought a tapestry in Siem Reap and had it made into a pantsuit. Sunny has a new pizza stone.”

Daisy tore out a page from Fur-Lined Teacup and handed it to Jen. It depicted a llama lounging in a square gazebo, reading a book.

“Is that llama wearing bifocals?” Jen asked, rubbing her fingers along the creamy, textured paper stock.

“Are they all still talking about the financial apocalypse?” Daisy asked.

“Of course,” Jen said, handing the page back to Daisy. “All anyone ever does is talk about the financial apocalypse. Sunny is putting some money into gold. Leora said she’s still considering letting a couple of her house staff go because of the financial apocalypse.”

“Do you think she’ll let us go because of the financial apocalypse?” Daisy asked, picking up a pair of scissors.

“Not if we keep looking busy,” Jen said, watching as Daisy cut a careful silhouette around the bookish llama’s ears.

Before LIFt, Jen had worked as a communications officer at the revered Federloss Family Foundation, which focused on women’s reproductive health initiatives in developing countries. When the foundation was blindsided by the compound effects of the economic crisis and significant investments impaled on Bernard Madoff’s Ponzi schemes, Jen couldn’t help but admire the balletic elegance of its subsequent budgetary adjustments, which absorbed the trauma by eliminating only positions, not the future budgets of pending initiatives. Midwife training schemes and prenatal-care pilot programs would go forward untouched. Jen’s dental coverage and pretax deferred savings program would not.

“I always thought that if I ever got laid off I would at least enjoy a degree of purgative moral outrage,” Jen said to her husband, Jim, on the day in January she was let go. She was calling him from the street just outside the foundation’s dowdy offices in the East Thirties, one unmittened hand clasping her woolen coat to her unscarfed throat, the other clasping her phone to her unhatted ear. “I always thought there would be tears and recriminations. Rending of garments. But these layoffs are judicious and correct. I would have absolutely laid me off.”

“It kind of takes all the fun out of it,” Jim said.

Jen turned her face into the wind and squinted at the street, naked trees standing mournful watch over blackened geodes of day-old slush and stalled, sagging cars. “There’s no one anywhere,” she said. “Everyone’s gone home. Does anyone live here anymore?”

Despite her statements to the contrary, Jen would have absolutely not laid herself off, because her salary was a rounding error, an irrelevant scrawl of marginalia in any organization’s bookkeeping. Just the rent on Jen and Jim’s two-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, the Brooklyn neighborhood where Jim taught fifth grade at a local public school, was equivalent to well over half of her monthly take-home pay. The apartment had been advertised as being located within the historic boundaries of Ditmas Park, home to a smorgasbord of Victorian and Queen Anne and neo-Tudor and Colonial Revival detached houses in various states of grandeur and disrepair, but you could not have found a single Spanish tile roof or Ionic column or stone lion guardsman on Jen and Jim’s block, not a balustrade nor a gabled dormer nor a single oriel window, just a hulking quadrant of hundred-unit brick boxes whose signature architectural flourishes were the air-conditioning units — replete with company logo — installed beneath each window, which gave the reiterative impression that these buildings were not family residences at all but instead warehouses-cum-marketing experiments in service of FEDDERS AIR CONDITIONING.

Not Ditmas Park, as Jim took to calling their immediate area, was home to a Ditmas Avenue but not to a park or parklike domain, a source of perverse delight to Jim.

“The name itself is a broken promise,” Jim had said, “and thus it’s an honest and forthright guarantee of all the broken promises that Not Ditmas Park can offer its citizens in terms of amenities, community spirit, and educational opportunity. The name tells a meta-lie in service of a greater truth.”

“It’s smart to get in on the ground floor of an emerging district,” the real estate agent had said. “Or, in this case, the fourth floor. You guys are ahead of the curve!”

“We don’t really need the second bedroom,” Jen had told the real estate agent. “But, you know, we’re married now, and—”

“And aspirations, ” said the real estate agent with a wink. “You’re young!”

“We’re not that young,” Jen said.

Their closest subway station stood atop a perpetually dripping overground train line, where the fronts included a dollar store, a liquor store, and a “development corporation”; the indignities of time, weather, and pigeon droppings had chiseled the development corporation’s fabric awning into a trompe l’oeil of corrugated tin. What Jen and Jim guessed to be an exposed sewer pipe snaked past one end of the hoarding fence around the train tracks. Behind the plaza sat a mysterious brick-and-concrete hut that evoked an armored-car repair depot near Checkpoint Charlie. The annihilating climate of Eastern Bloc filthy-slipshod brutalism was encapsulated in their nearest post office, which looked and smelled like it had been excavated from the rubble of a gas main explosion, replete with broken metal locks hanging from its doors and service windows, as if smashed in haste to rescue trapped survivors.

Jen and Jim lived within cardboard-thin walls and floors and ceilings unencumbered by insulation, all echoing beams and sound-conducting metal. If you pushed back a chair or Franny the cat batted your keys off the coffee table, the downstairs neighbors heard it. If you coughed or flushed a toilet, your upstairs neighbors heard it. To play recorded music with a bass line was a premeditated act of revenge. Residents who rarely met one another’s eyes in the elevator or vestibule would register displeasure with their neighbors’ squeaky hinges and furniture-rattling footfalls by leaving cans of WD-40 and fuzzy bedroom slippers on one another’s welcome mats, offerings shot through with the sinister supplication of a cat dropping a headless field mouse on the back porch. Jen and Jim gingerly maneuvered around on their toes at all times to avert the wrath of their downstairs neighbor, a replica in pallid flesh-folds of an Easter Island statue perched in a motorized wheelchair who had spent much of Jen and Jim’s move-in weekend pounding her own ceiling with a broom handle in protest.