Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

“You could look at it this way: It’s not really your business whether Mrs. Flossie Durbin gets it or not,” Jim said. “Arguably it’s not even your business to define what there is for Mrs. Flossie Durbin to get.”

“Do you think there are surveillance cameras in here?” Jen asked.

“Your job is to make the stuff, and then it belongs to the world and it’s out of your hands,” Jim said.

“You’re right,” Jen said. “And it’s not like Mrs. Durbin’s portrait is going to have that same feeling of—”

“—of delirious happiness that you’ve been impaled on an electric fence,” Jim said.

“This will be a pleasant and benign portrait of a benign and pleasant woman. It’s just weird to think that a happy false façade was just what we needed after the financial apocalypse. If we’re all openly unhappy, then at least we know what we’re dealing with.”

“That part of your grant proposal might hold up if we weren’t all pretty openly unhappy already,” Jim said. “Also, Jen.”

“What?”

“Look around you for a second.”

Jen laughed again and shaded her eyes with her hand. “I know.”

“No, seriously. Look around you.”

Jen lowered her hand, rolled her eyes, then rolled them around the room.

“Look at where you are. Look at what you’re doing, and who you’re doing it for.”

“I know. I don’t understand how this happened,” Jen said.

“Let’s go have some towel sex,” Jim said.

“Okay,” Jen said. “But not here.”

Jim bolted up from the armchair and Jen winced. As she grabbed her things, she saw a new email on her phone.

Pam

Thursday, Dec 24 6:31 PM

To: Jen

Subject: Please fwd to Franny

Dear Jen,

Do you want to get lunch sometime after the holidays? Paulo and I are back from Colombia on the 2nd. Also, I’m attaching a photo of a new friend for Franny. She should arrive in the spring.

Love,

Pam

Jen opened the attached image and at first she thought she was looking at the sonar footage of the wreckage of the flight that had disappeared without a trace the previous summer. Then she realized her mistake, and she yelped with honest and unguarded delight even as a narrow seam of dread began to open up inside her.

“Have you looked at our website today?” Daisy asked Jen over the cubicle wall in lieu of a morning salutation. It was their second day back at work after the New Year.

“Let me guess,” Jen said, peeling off her coat. “Donna wasn’t happy with the pictures of the girls from the São Paulo self-defense project, so we ran a slide show of Gisele Bündchen-Brady’s workout regimen instead.”

“I turned your computer on already so that you could waste no time looking at our website today,” Daisy said.

Jen nudged her mouse to wake up her monitor. “Did Leora commission her makeup artist from Father of Invention to give the Nigerian scholars Seven-Minute Magic Makeovers featuring the LeoraDiance skin-care line?” Jen asked as she typed in her password.

“I think you’re giving your immediate future short shrift,” Daisy said. “Your immediate future is bright and full of possibility and available to you on our website today.”

Jen opened the LIFt home page. She blinked hard, once, then rapidly in succession.

“Take all the time you need,” Daisy said. “Live in the moment.”

Jen clicked on the top-right link, which took her to a page topped with a full-column horizon shot of a man in a baseball cap and tight polo shirt, standing knee-deep in a lush field of greens against a verdant backdrop and grinning hard at some rhapsodic vision just past the camera’s sight line.

Meet Our New Board Member: Travis Paddock

Travis Paddock is the entrepreneur behind the barnstorming fitness and nutrition startup BodMod™ International, and he smiles a lot, as if to offset the deep, dark recesses of pure concentration he brings to every endeavor. He’d be intimidating — if it weren’t for that mischievous flash in his eyes.

Right now, those striking eyes — as cerulean blue as the brilliant Belizean sky creating a picture-postcard backdrop behind Paddock — are trained on, of all things, a mealy clump of whiteish pulp from a calabash tree. He has traveled thousands of miles to Belize’s Cayo District for what might seem like a sad and soggy reward, until you remember that this is the man who also answers to the name “the Healthy Huntsman,” who searches high and low for the purest, most nutritiously dense “superfoods” the world has to offer. Whether he’s on or off the field of discovery, Paddock radiates a tousled, effortless cool — a “Look Ma, No Hands” persona that has jazzed his business from the get-go.

He palms the pulp from hand to hand and laughs, his perfect piano-key teeth flashing…

“Are you looking at our website today?” Daisy asked from behind the cubicle wall.

Jen half-stood up and craned her neck around to make sure Karina wasn’t in the vicinity.

“His body parts sure do flash a lot,” Daisy said. “Good communications work there, Jen.”

Jen sat down again.

jenski1848: Switching to chat. This is like an infomercial.

whatDaisyknew: LOOK MA NO HANDS

jenski1848: How is this in service of “empowering women”?? Honestly, is this where we are in this organization right now?

whatDaisyknew: I THINK OF IT AS A PLACE WHERE I CAN DEVELOP MY TOUSLED, EFFORTLESS COOL

Jen closed the instant-message window and broke off half an Animexa tablet that she’d stashed in her wallet. Three hours had to elapse before she could leave the office to meet Pam for lunch, and if she didn’t assign a powerful central-nervous-system stimulant to monitor her thoughts and actions vigilantly during those three hours, she risked dissipating each of the 180 minutes with righteous IMing, idle brooding, and mindless Internet browsing, when in fact the best and most efficient available use of her time would be to line-edit Hedge Fund Judy 2’s newly filed essay for LIFe Lines on resolving not to make New Year’s resolutions:

The word resolution . It’s a funny one. My thesaurus offers synonyms such as firmness, immovability, and staunchness. And yet my dictionary tells me, paradoxically, that the word itself is pliable. Flexible. Resolution could mean “a firm decision to do or not do something,” of course. That’s the way we mean it when we make New Year’s resolutions. It could mean “the action of solving a problem,” which also sounds like a New Year’s resolution to me. It could mean “the degree of detail visible in a photographic or television image.” That likewise feels of a piece with our New Year’s resolutions, since the beginning of a New Year prompts us to look at ourselves in finer detail and helps bring our lives into sharper focus.

But my favorite version of resolution is “in music, the passing of a discord into a concord during the course of changing harmony.” Now, that’s exactly the kind of New Year’s Resolution I resolve to make this year. Not necessarily the firm, immovable, or staunch kind of resolution. Instead, I urge us all to make resolutions that acknowledge the push-and-pull messiness of everyday life. Resolutions that find pliable, flexible solutions to problems we face all the time. Resolutions that honor and cherish the fact that every single day represents “a passing of a discord into a concord.” A search not for one resolved melody, but an ever-changing harmony.

Jen scrolled down on the file to confirm that the essay continued for about 1,100 more words on this theme. She then pasted Hedge Fund Judy 2’s untouched text into the content management system, found and uploaded a stock image of revelers at a New Year’s Eve party, published the essay to the LIFe Lines blog, and sent a congratulatory email to Hedge Fund Judy 2. Then Jen spent the next two hours and forty-five minutes reading the Nastygram Ladyparts archives and trying not to eavesdrop on Daisy.