Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Today is the day -eee, ladies! Look sharp!”

Jen splayed her fingers and peered up through them. Sunny was beaming expectantly at Jen and Daisy.

Jen appreciated that Sunny always came around to the front of their cubicles before addressing them, whereas Karina preferred to approach silently from behind and wait until Jen’s pheromone-detection radar or latent powers of echolocation intimated her presence. To better anticipate Karina’s stealth attacks, Jen had mostly stopped using her earbuds and had changed her computer desktop background from a picture of David Bowie eating breakfast with Mick Ronson to a plain, shiny black. If Jen tilted her screen at an acute angle to her right and made sure her browser and inbox took up only the left two-thirds of the screen, the right one-third could hold up a muddy mirror to Karina’s approach, buying Jen an estimated four to seven seconds of advance warning. Of course, Jen forfeited these advantages whenever she prostrated herself before the fatigue.

Daisy, by contrast, had started wearing her bulky noise-canceling headphones most of the day, every day, sometimes even to the bathroom. Tapping Daisy on the shoulder elicited a yelp of surprise, so now whenever Jen wanted Daisy’s attention she would send her an email or instant message.

“Hey, Sunny!” Jen said, sniffling. “How’s it going?”

Daisy took off her headphones slowly and set them down on her desk, as if she were moving through water.

Sunny was pulsing her hands together in a silent clapping motion. “Are you guys ready ? Big day, big day.”

“Ready for what?” Jen asked, pulling a tissue from its box.

Sunny protruded her eyes and wagged her head. “ Lee, OH, rah, is here today!” she said, her voice percussive with rebuke. “She’ll be here in like an hour. Are you ready ?”

“Leora has been here before,” Daisy said.

“Good one, Daize,” Sunny said, giggling. “But there’s here and then there’s here. And is she ever going to be here. Are you girls ready to show some initiative on Leora’s new initiative?” Sunny called out each syllable of initiative like she was counting out the letters in the name of her favored college sports team. Her hands scissored and sliced the air as if in some half-forgotten cheerleading move.

“Um, probably!” Jen said.

“ Probably? Guys, get excited already! I’ve been thinking about this all week!”

“So there’s a meeting — today?” Jen asked.

Sunny exhaled dramatically, letting her hands fall defeated to her sides, and rolled her eyes heavenward as if in exasperated appeal. “If this is your sense of humor, you’ll have to excuse me, ’cause I ain’t laughin’, kiddo!” Sunny said, laughing, as she walked away.

“I heard Karina talking about this,” Daisy said. “Leora is coming in and we’re going to lock ourselves in a room until we help the board figure out the future of the organization, or something.”

“I see,” Jen said.

“I think there was an email, too.”

“But — I didn’t get the email!”

“So good, you’re off the hook,” Daisy said.

“Was there an assignment? Are we supposed to present ? Fuck.”

Daisy was staring at the tiny surveillance camera affixed to the nearest ceiling corner, as if she had deduced something in its reflecting eye — something demoralizing and piteous — that she hadn’t been looking for.

“I really wouldn’t sweat it,” Daisy said. “Any of it. Ever.”

Every staff meeting grew more hands: colorfully accessorized and manicured hands — Jen had lost track of how many — none of them over the age of twenty-four and all of them the goddaughter of a LIFt staffer or the niece of a friend of Leora’s or the friend of a child of a LIFt board member. Jen had been introduced to most of them, known each of their names for at least a few seconds or part of a day, each of them rotating in and out a couple of days a week, these unpaid “LIFt collaborators” erratically filling out the previously desolate maze of cubicles that stood between Jen and Daisy and the building’s southern corridor of offices. Now, lined up around the conference table, they blurred together despite their high-resolution finish of whitened smiles and poreless skin and sculpted quadriceps and shiny, shiny hair. At first, in their presentation and easeful confidence, Jen classified them as next-generation Megs, except that part of Meg’s Meg-ness was in being an outlier; these girls were Megs to a one. They also adjusted the settings on Meg’s calm but no-nonsense aptitude to find a brighter and sweeter level; they swapped Meg’s dove grays and silken blacks for lime greens and indigos, magentas and piccalillis. One of the girls was wearing a flamingo brooch on a sailor collar. Another wore jodhpurs and a bowler hat. Every one of them had at best an ornamental job and comically inflated job title, and it was endearing to Jen — moving, really — to know that their own superfluity had never crossed their minds or influenced their posture or informed their choice of Crayola-coral lipstick. Not one of them, Jen knew, ever entered a room or took a seat at a table half expecting someone to turn to her and ask the eternal question: What are you doing here?

Or maybe the eternal question was Why do you need to be here?

Or maybe Why are you here? was best and simplest.

Jen couldn’t decide.

“She was just an amazing woman. An amazing woman,” Leora Infinitas was saying from the head of the table, Donna on her left, Karina on her right. Just as an American president addressing a joint session of Congress might point out a firefighter’s widow or plucky small-business owner in the audience as support for a military action or a tax cut, Leora’s opening statements to staff meetings always invoked a land mine survivor or famine survivor or Stage IV cancer survivor whom she had met in her newish capacity as a philanthropy innovator. This new acquaintance of Leora’s served as a vivid anecdote for her audience and, for Leora, a useful plot device in a journey of fulfilled identity — a catalytic converter of self-actualization. This rhetorical woman-device was usually amazing, frequently phenomenal, redoubtably inspiring, occasionally rad.

“And I couldn’t help thinking — and look, I’d been two hours cross-legged on a dirt floor with this woman.” Leora swallowed and paused to look around the room. “I had laughed with this woman.” Pause. “I had cried with this woman.” Pause. “I had held this woman’s hand and stared into her eyes. And I just felt so honored by the power of her presence, the sheer force of her survival, and so humbled by it.” Pause. “It’s a blessing to be humbled.” Pause. “It’s a gift.” Pause. “We forget this. But we can’t forget it. It’s a gift to be humbled.”

Jen couldn’t gauge for how long she had zoned out. Donna’s hands were teepeed, her head bowed deep, her bangles clattering in sympathy. Sunny was openly weeping.

“And I couldn’t help thinking,” Leora said. “I couldn’t help thinking —even though all that thinking threatened to break, just for a second, that lunar beam of concentration and communion between her and myself, even though it took me out of the moment for a moment, only for a moment — Lord knows I’m not perfect—”

“Amen, sister,” Sunny said, and sobbed.

“—I couldn’t help thinking, Leora, what is your excuse ?”

Leora stopped and nodded as she looked around the room. A crystalline tear globule hesitated at the edge of each pair of her LeoraLashes™. Her nostrils flared with a suppressed sob, but she kept it at bay, nodding at her staff, nodding at the jade-top table, blinking, inhaling, exhaling. She shook her head. She swept an inky-black hair extension behind her shoulder. She nodded some more. An argument tossed and turned inside her.