Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“Okay, okay, I get it,” Pam said. Jen could hear both affection and irritation in her voice. “What exactly do you need from me?”

“Well, so you’d be on camera talking about — about the accident — your accident — and your recovery from it,” Jen said. “So that would be the adversity you had overcome. You could say a lot of the things we’ve talked about in the last year or so, about how too many healthy people in their twenties and thirties don’t have health insurance, how bike safety in the city is atrocious, how the cops don’t follow up on drivers who hurt cyclists — all that stuff. You’ve always wanted people to be more aware of all these things.”

“Yeah, I’ve just never known how to do it,” Pam said. “I don’t have any community-organizer skills.”

“Okay, but you’d be doing that just by talking about it in a public forum like this.” Jen could hear a hectoring impatience hardening her voice, and tried to knead it into something softer. A column of sweat streamed across her hairline past her ear on one side, then the other. “You could talk about your art, too.”

“I could,” Pam said.

“Your story is just so compelling because it really happened to you, and it could happen to anyone,” Jen said. A vise was tightening around her skull. “Almost like — like this was a bad thing that happened, but look at the good that could come out of it because you can take control of the situation and make meaning out of it. I mean, not that, but something like that.”

“That sounds a little Zen Rand to me,” Pam said.

“No, no, more matter-of-fact than that,” Jen said, without knowing what she meant.

“No, I get it,” Pam said, kindly. “So it’s a bunch of videos of women overcoming adversity. Who else is being interviewed?”

“Let’s see,” Jen said. “There’s a woman who spent some time in jail for substance-related charges, and now she’s in law school because she wants to become an advocate for women in prison on nonviolent drug-related offenses.”

“Oh, that’s cool,” Pam said. “So the adversity she overcame was addiction?”

“Yeah, I think so,” Jen said. Gray baubles of sweat were dropping soundlessly onto her desk. Invisible crystals of freezing rain stung her eyes. Her stomach lurched up and over. Her internal organs were calcifying into jagged rocks.

“Jen?”

“Sorry, we cut out for a second. You know, I don’t have the exact details on all of the interviewees, but I can get them for you if it’s helpful.”

“No, that’s okay, sounds like a good story,” Pam said. “Do you have just the basic info on a couple of the others?”

“Um, there’s a woman whose house burned down, and she sort of learned how to let go of her possessions, stop being so materialist.”

“That one isn’t as good,” Pam said.

“Yeah, honestly, I think yours would be the best one, by far,” Jen said. She imagined the cord on the phone as the lifeline in her grip as she disappeared into a quicksand of sewage. Revulsion flattened and stretched her facial muscles. “You know, it’s obnoxious for me to say this,” she said to Pam, “but it could be a really good platform for you. We’ll have someone do your hair and makeup, and my colleague Donna will be interviewing you, and she’s amazing—”

“Wait, Donna? The life coach?”

Jen’s stomach grumbled and reared up again, this time in dire warning. Pam had an excellent memory. She listened to what you said and remembered it. It was one of the reasons Jen loved her.

“Yeah, I know,” Jen said, “but she’s great, she really is.”

“What will the series be called?” Pam asked.

Jen rested her forehead on her desk, two hands pressing the phone to her ear. The sweat on her brow and on her desk caused her to slide forward, mashing her nose against the particleboard. “We’re not sure yet,” she said.

Jen could hear Pam thinking.

“Can I sleep on it?”

“I–I—I guess you could — but—” Jen stammered. She rested her head across from the phone receiver in a pantomime of sickbed pillow talk.

“You need to know now, I get it,” Pam said.

“Well, it’s just that we’re shooting the interviews tomorrow,” Jen said.

“I’ll do it,” Pam said. “Why not? I’ll do it.”

Behind the phone, the package of saltines swam into view, and Jen squeezed her eyes shut to make them disappear. Just palpable amid the gusts of nausea that pinned her tightly to her desk surface, Jen discerned a serene and lilting fatalism. She had willed herself to catch a disease, and then she gave it to her friend, as if it were a gift.

Jen could not account for the next twenty-four hours, not even directly after they’d elapsed. She knew there had to have been two legs of a commute, and seven or so hours of sleep, and sweaty, messy attempts at dinner and then breakfast and lunch; there had to have been conference calls and emails; there had to have been bolts to the bathroom; there had to have been some kind of frantic pitch session in Karina’s office wherein Jen marketed her friend Pam as a LIFt-worthy package of strength, vulnerability, creativity, tragedy, and good optics. She knew she had welcomed Pam into the LIFt offices, ushered her into the soundproof video studio, introduced her to Donna, and coaxed her to submit to the makeup artist’s entreaties, “just for a touch-up.” But Jen could never have sourced a single specific freeze-frame or intertitle from these twenty-four hours. In her memory’s telling, she hung up the phone with Pam and looked up and Pam was standing in front of her desk.

“What the fuck?” Pam said in a stage whisper. Her eyes, framed with heavy mascara and liner, glittered with fury; a horrified smile strained her features. She had turned a deep red, burning through the heavy pancake makeup up to her hairline. Large-eyed and large-mouthed and painted, breathless and zipped up in one of her Champion sweatshirts, her hair raked back in a makeshift knot, she summoned in Jen’s addled mind a ballerina who’d been pushed offstage to a skidding stop, still spinning with emotion and adrenaline after a truncated, tumultuous performance.

“Pam, hi, what?”

“What the fuck was that?” Pam was asking. Hissing.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Jen stood, started to reach for Pam’s arm, then thought better of it. She sensed Daisy to her left rising from her cubicle and slipping quietly away.

“I just got interrogated on camera about how God himself sent the angel Gabriel down to earth to personally pulverize my bones with his divine truck and teach me an important lesson about owning my power. The fuck, Jen?”

“The interview? Pam, I’m sorry — what—”

“You know, this is my own fault. I thought I was going to be talking about fucking health-insurance deductibles and protected bike lanes. I should have known it would be this faux-Buddhist libertarian bullshit.”

“Zen Rand,” Jen said, almost to herself.

“You knew, ” Pam was saying. She suddenly seemed calmer, more in control of herself. Her affect was reflattening. “You work here. You knew these people. Jennifer, this woman was one step away from telling me I’d invited this into my life to give me a motherfucking purpose. Do you know how infuriating that is to me?”

“I can’t even imagine, Pam. I’m sorry.”

“You tricked me into exploiting myself so that you could finish an assignment.”

“ No. No, Pam, calm down, I would never—”

“I’m perfectly calm.” Pam did sound perfectly calm. The red was fading. “You’re either too stupid not to know this would happen, or you did this with malice. I have never known you to be stupid, so that leaves malice.”