Jessica Winter - Break in Case of Emergency

Jen sat in her LIFt cubicle, spine straight, hands folded in front of her keyboard, eyes trained on her desk phone. She picked up the receiver, replaced it, and watched the phone some more. She broke off half an Animexa tablet and swallowed it dry, watching the phone. She picked up the receiver, dialed a number, replaced the receiver, and watched the phone some more. She walked to the vending machine, procured pretzels, ate the pretzels while watching the phone. She walked back to the vending machine, procured a diet soda, drank a diet soda while watching the phone.

Jen picked up the phone and dialed and chewed the edge of the mouthpiece as it rang.

“Hi, Dakota,” Jen heard herself saying. “I’m sorry to bother you — I’m realizing that we never settled on my fee for Mrs. Durbin’s portrait, and I was hoping we could discuss it now?”

Dakota said nothing.

“I admit I should have brought this up before, and I understand that the prestige of this project and the honor of being asked to do it are generous payment in themselves?”

Dakota said nothing.

“And I’m so very grateful to Mrs. Durbin for the opportunity?”

Dakota said nothing.

“And really with all that in mind I would be happy with any fee you thought was appropriate and again I do apologize for not raising this earlier?”

Dakota said nothing. Bertha Mason laughed, then slipped both hands around Jen’s neck to silence her.

“I will discuss this with Mrs. Durbin,” Dakota finally said. “In the meantime, could you send me your bank routing information?”

When Jen hung up the phone it immediately rang again.

“Hi, Jennifer. This is Shawna from Dr. Lee’s office. We were expecting to see you during walk-in hours sometime last week. Just checking in to see that everything’s all right?”

“Oh, yes,” Jen stammered. “I’ve been meaning to — I mean — but everything’s fine.”

“We were hoping maybe — you’d had some good news on your own?” Shawna asked.

Daisy — it must have been Daisy — had pinned a photograph of a camel nuzzling a Komodo dragon to Jen’s cubicle wall. Jen watched the camel and the dragon as a puddle of absurd despair spread inside her chest.

We were hoping

Jen wasn’t even sure which one Shawna was. Nose-ring Shawna? Banana-clip Shawna? Shawna who had an expeditious rapport with the billing department? Or was that Sheila? Shana? It had never occurred to Jen that the generically pleasant people behind the henhouse desk had ever conceived of her in more than generically pleasant dimensions, certainly not to the extent that they could formulate expectations and desires on her behalf.

Good news

“Jennifer? Are you there?”

What is good news? Is a lack of good news equivalent to bad news? Is it good news if one doesn’t actually spread the news? And what about last time? When good news turned into bad news? Wasn’t the only way that bad news happened last time was because good news happened first? Doesn’t good news — sometimes, maybe, last time yes — beget the worst news you could ever imagine?

Better no news

Say nothing

Thanks for nothing

“I’ll keep you posted,” Jen said.

Above Jen’s bathroom ceiling, a hollering child repeatedly body-slammed himself to the tile, as he was scheduled to do every morning between six-fifteen and six-forty-five a.m., as Jen sat on the edge of the tub staring at the test, then at the small pile of broken tiles and unidentified black ooze collecting where the edge of the tub met the floor, then at the test again. It never seemed very scientific. It looked like something out of the play doctor’s kits her brothers had as kids — alongside the plastic stethoscope and cartoonishly oversized bandages, maybe they’d find a popsicle stick attached to a pen cap, Magic Markered in blue with a positive or negative sign.

Jen walked down the hall from the bathroom to the room for the hypothetical tiny future boarder, opening the door for the first time since the night of the LIFt party. Jim was curled in a sleeping bag atop the naked futon, his curved back to the door. Jen molded her body to the shape of his and pressed her face into the back of his neck.

“I’m sorry,” Jen said into Jim’s hair.

“I’m sorry, too,” Jim said into the sleeping bag.

“The answer is yes again,” Jen said.

“I think I knew that,” Jim said.

“I think the answer has been yes again for a while,” Jen said, “and I ignored it.”

“I think I knew that,” Jim said.

“I shouldn’t have,” Jen said. “I’ve drunk alcohol. I’ve ingested hundreds of milligrams of central-nervous-system stimulants. I’ve been on a dangerous boat. The boat was very bouncy. I got a sunburn. I was obliquely threatened with an antique machete.”

“It’s okay,” Jim said. “Early on, it’s okay. You can do pretty much anything. It’s a locked box.”

“I want to forget,” Jen said.

“Yolk sac,” Jim said. “Hermetically sealed.”

“I want to forget,” Jen repeated. “Until we know for sure.”

“Okay,” Jim said.

“Until we know everything.”

“Okay,” Jim said. “We’ll never know everything. But okay.”

They exchanged more apologies and affirmations, and rose to brush their teeth, and returned to the room.

Re: Contact Jen!

Not to sound like a stalker and I know this isn’t quite your aesthetic. But what if I gave you some photos of my ex and you did a Dorian Gray — style portrait of him? Rotting. Syphilitic. A corpse stuffed in a crawl space.

Only I want it for my walk-in closet, like a “skeleton in the closet.” Like a dreamcatcher or a gargoyle, warding off harm and evil spirits. The scarier the better. Hope I’m not freaking you out!

Re: Contact Jen!

Hey Jennifer, it’s Brian from Politics + Psychology magazine. We’re doing a special issue that’s a mash-up of history and contemporary psychology, where we’ll try to answer the question “Who was the happiest President?” We thought you could revise iconic portraits of commanders-in-chief to happyfy them: G-Wash flashing those wooden chompers, Tommy Jeff saying “Cheese,” Honest Abe cracking a grin for once in his life! If the idea appeals to you, I’d love to discuss further…

Re: Contact Jen!

3 questions 1) Do you do famous/fictitious people 2) Do you do site-specific work 3) Are you at ease in the spiritual dimension??!!? For my kitchen backsplash I would like a grid of painted “head shots” of hearth goddesses through the ages, Hestia the Greek, Frigg of Norse mythology, Julia Child, Martha Stewart, et al. I want the portraits to have a kind of dark pagan/Gothic feel. Do you know about the tradition of Slavic animism?

The words began to bob and weave on whitecaps of teary lethargy, and Jen, perched atop a closed toilet lid in a bathroom stall at LIFt, set her phone down on the tissue dispenser and rubbed her eyelids with her thumb and forefinger. During low-traffic intervals in the ladies’ room, Jen could eke out a micro-nap in relative privacy and comfort, with elbows on knees and head in hands and immediate access to at least two viable receptacles for the contents of her stomach. Jen had been hunched in this position for twenty hazy minutes or more, her nauseated trance unbroken by Petra’s wheezing breast pump or slamming stall doors or Donna’s chatty bangles or the stifled cries of a freshly humiliated intern.

The fatigue had returned just as the Animexa had to be withdrawn, of course, transforming Jen’s brain into a sulfurous swamp, wisps of anesthetic steam rising and veiling the half-submerged trees and clotted vegetation, curling in yellowish plumes around her head, then fragmenting and reassembling in an illegible typography of acid-rain skywriting.