Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

All my love

Pam

“It feels to me as though we’re inhabiting a space without first learning the language of that space,” Leora was saying. “I can’t do everything. I’m not interested in micromanagement. But how did this happen?”

Jen put aside her phone and stared openly at Karina. Chin in one hand and pen in the other, Karina looked up at Leora, ducked her head to take a few notes, and looked up again. Jen had never seen Karina take notes in a staff meeting before. Karina’s expression was unreadable, save for a legible sympathy with Leora’s predicament.

“It makes us seem out of touch with what our audience hungers for,” Leora said.

Out of touch, Jen wrote in her notebook. She watched the letters, waiting in vain for them to reassemble themselves in her mind as flowers or animals or random strangers that she could coax out with her pen.

Sunny was headbanging. Jen resumed staring at Karina.

“It is so crucial that we understand the needs of our audience, perhaps even before they do,” Leora said. “Is there someone on the staff who knows Internet jargon? One of us who speaks that language?”

“I would nominate Daisy,” Karina said, putting down her pen and running her fingers through her hair. “She’s always up on the latest trends.”

Daisy — up on latest trends, Jen wrote in her notebook. The curved lines and crosses refused to turn or sprout or bloom.

“ Oversight is a contronym,” Daisy said, after Jen returned to their cubicles and delivered an abridged transcript of the meeting. “A contronym is a word that means its opposite. Like cleave. Or garnish. ”

“Like sanction, ” Jen said.

“Like left, ” Daisy said.

“Wait, how is left a contronym?” Jen asked.

“Like if I said all I have left, that could mean the stuff I still have or the stuff I don’t have anymore,” Daisy said.

“Ohhh, I thought you meant like turn left at the stop sign, ” Jen said.

“I have work left,” Daisy announced to the overhead fluorescent lights. “I have left work.”

Jen rummaged around in her handbag for her recently resumed semi-daily allowance of Animexa. At Sunny’s request, Jen would be spending the rest of today and many todays in the future skimming Total Transformation Challenge essay submissions for what Sunny defined via email as “potentially defamatory or offensive language or any content that otherwise does not conform with the Total Transformation Challenge (TTC) project and/or LIFt’s standards.” The rolling task had seemed endless, monotonous, a vehicle of seething resentment. Whenever she was about to embark on another skimming session, Jen broke off half of an Animexa tablet, swallowed it with coffee from the Starbucks half a block away, and felt instantly soothed by the sheer anticipation of the mild tachycardia that would follow in fifteen to twenty minutes’ time to confirm the completed blockade of her dopamine and norepinephrine transporters, which in turn booted up the same automaton-Jen that Animexa had so skillfully programmed to write LIFt memos.

This automaton-Jen could register neither disdain nor affection for the women who participated in TTC, although she suspected that, were she not presently located behind the glass partition of Animexa, she might be touched by their earnestness, by their apparent lack of acquaintance with irony or cool. These women kept vision boards and gratitude journals. They drew up and signed household-maintenance contracts replete with chore wheels and no-nagging clauses. They scheduled me-time and followed mindful-eating rules and wrote essays about how their own regular attendance at yoga classes was really a gift they gave to their kids and about the importance of feeling compassion for themselves even when they broke their mindful-eating rules.

Jen opened the Total Transformation Challenge submission page, containing empty text boxes for each of the seven TTC mission categories. She had drafted these herself, though the final template was the product of three subcommittee meetings and seven interminable rounds of revision. But Jen had never tested the template herself, because the TTC mission statements hewed too closely to the act of journal-keeping. Embarrassment had always thwarted Jen’s attempts to keep any kind of journal. She was embarrassed by the mundane nature of the events she was recording in the moment, or she would happen upon an old notebook or computer file and feel embarrassed at the preoccupations and pretensions of her former self. This latter form of post-facto embarrassment was largely a function of style, as Jen’s contemporary eye tended to scan her past entries as seesawing between prolix melodrama and an inadvertently comic affectlessness — the personal journal as grocery list. Jen knew that she had let embarrassment excuse her carelessness with the precious concrete and cognitive artifacts of her own life, entire months and years she could never retrace, and for this, too, she was embarrassed.

Pam, by contrast, was a master self-archivist, every smallest passage of her life logged and filed, and many of these passages repatterned and digested into art, which in Jen’s view turned both Pam’s work and Pam herself into case studies in disciplined self-respect. Just as Meg’s self-respect was expressed in her careful and constant appraisal of time to come, Pam’s self-respect was expressed in her careful and constant recording of time already spent. Yet Jen herself could not escape the conviction that there was an egotistical audacity to private record-keeping, albeit one that applied only to her own exceptional — that is to say, her own exceptionally unexceptional — case.

She considered the instructions for the first Total Transformation Challenge category and typed a response.

TTC CATEGORY 1: MIND

How can you challenge your mind to look hard at its own blind spots and push past negative thinking? How can you conjure new ways of sharing your own unique joy, outlook, and personhood with the world in order to help others?

Your response here:

I challenge my mind to help my brain figure out how Animexa modulates my levels of dopamine and norepinephrine and recalibrate itself accordingly so that I never want or need to take it again.

Jen stopped typing to shade her eyes with her fingers, because her bulging pupils were gulping and sucking at the fluorescent overhead lights.

“Maybe we should start a business just for Judy,” Daisy said to Jen.

“We could work out of the guest quarters of Judy’s guest quarters,” Jen replied.

“Judy could pay us in spa coupons and bichon puppies,” Daisy said.

Judy was Jen and Daisy’s shorthand name for any and all Friends of Leora Infinitas, or F.O.L.I., which sounded out as Folly but quickly transmogrified into Fawley — in tribute to the comprehensively unfortunate Jude Fawley of one of Jen and Daisy’s shared favorite novels, Jude the Obscure —and had then whittled itself down to Jude, and finally Judy. In the days and weeks after LIFt’s official launch, Jen spent a plurality of her work hours talking on the phone with Judy, going to coffee or lunch with Judy, and, most important, editing Judy’s contributions to the LIFe Lines web channel, which had originated as a blog of updates about programs around the world that LIFt supported but which increasingly devoted itself to Judy’s own personal thoughts on women’s education, entrepreneurship, and empowerment. Despite all these hours Jen logged with Judy, Judy did not occupy space or have mass (not with any constancy, at least), nor could she be said to be a discrete entity. She was instead an abstract and composite character, or rather a liquid set of characteristics — there was typically an artisanal flourish to her charitable interests, a vested interest in offsetting her carbon footprint, and a stated commitment to public schools that coexisted with her two to three children not being enrolled in them — and these characteristics took on the shape and volume of her assigned vessel, which was invariably and conspicuously and extremely thin, bespeaking a fragility, as well as a volatility, that in turn bespoke the vessel’s value. Judy could be capricious and prickly; she could be stubborn about basic points of grammar; and her breadth and depth of everyday knowledge rose and fell according to no known scale. She could, Jen imagined, name-check a jeweler’s cut or the season and year of a vintage handbag on sight, yet she seemed unsure if, for example, people who were not recipients of public assistance programs could access the city’s public transportation system.