Orientation (15 page)

Her lunch hours, once easeful respites from the office, were now taken up with escape maneuvers from the Beast. She trekked as far from the hospital grounds as possible, hoping the malign presence of the Jobless Beast would diminish. It did, a little. She found scant relief at whatever bench or stoop would accommodate her, where she managed to eat her lunch: several raw brussels sprouts, a slice of apple on a bagel, a fistful of toasted soy nuts. An hour later she was back at her station behind the phone console. And after just a few calls her gut would begin to fill with a sadness so bloating that whatever she had managed to get down her throat at lunch would come right back up by afternoon break. As she dashed for the bathroom, the hospital benefactors regarded her from their ornate, theft-proof frames with undisguised pity.

Midway into Week Two, Clarissa Snow had spoken to a lonely retiree looking for part-time clerical work—“
Any
thing!” he laughed—who kept her on the phone for twenty minutes; to a recently laid-off medical transcriptionist whose wrist tendons had been surgically severed to alleviate her pain; and to a man who wept that he had been looking for a job for two and a half years. “I’m sorry,” Clarissa Snow began whispering into her mouthpiece, “but I
can’t
help you. I’m just the receptionist.” At which point many of her callers said, “Let me talk to the other one, then.” They did this so frequently that the other receptionist had a little chat with her.

“How do you do it?” Clarissa Snow pleaded. “How do you talk to them?
No
body can help these people.”

“But they have no one else to call,” the other receptionist said. And then, more firmly: “We— … are the department of last resort. This— … is Human Resources.” Clarissa Snow nodded wearily. “Human Resources,” she wrote in her notepad. And under that, “Last Resort.”

For the rest of that morning Clarissa Snow made a fragile alliance with the tenets of mission and service that her job demanded. “Well, military service may be a viable job option,” she told one caller, “but is it the option for
you
?” “No,” she told another, “I don’t think a second opinion is
always
necessary, although it can
sometimes
be necessary.” “Yes,” she agreed with another, “divorce
is
a tough row to hoe, isn’t it?” For a while at least, she was getting the hang. It did not last.

“Can you help me?” Line Two said. “Because, you see, I’m at my wit’s end here.” It was a woman’s voice, flat and uninflected. It came from a pure, dead silence, without background noise of any kind, and it gripped Clarissa Snow’s innards like a fist. “So I was wondering,” the voice continued. “I was wondering if you could help me. Because, you see, you’re my last hope.” Clarissa Snow shuddered. The buttons on the phone console winked at her. She quietly slipped the handset into its cradle and told the other receptionist that she was leaving a little early for lunch.

Outside, it was high noon in midsummer. The air was thick, and you could see the heat moving through it, rising visibly off the pavement, corrugating everything in the distance, and lending to the concrete-and-steel permanence of high-rises and overpasses a disconcerting waviness. It was a sweltering day, an unbearable day, but a day borne nonetheless. Lunchtime throngs swarmed the sunlit streets in search of food. Clarissa Snow zigged and zagged among them.

From a pay phone in front of a mini-mart four blocks away, she called her Placement Counselor. While on hold, she pulled out a cigarette; she’d started smoking again. Her hand shook as she lit it. “Now, now,” Mrs. D. told her when she came on the line. “I want you to get a grip. Get a grip and tell me all about it.” Clarissa Snow begged for a new assignment—anything, anywhere, she didn’t care. “Why, of course, dear,” Mrs. D. said. “I can do that. I can do that for you. But you see—” And from the modulations and pauses in Mrs. D.’s voice, Clarissa Snow knew that she, too, was lighting a cigarette, pausing now to draw the smoke into her lungs. Clarissa Snow inhaled with her. “You see, that puts us in quite a pickle.” She was their best girl, Mrs. D. said, their cream of the cream, and what would it look like if their cream of the cream curdled on an assignment? Then she wouldn’t be their best girl anymore, would she? No, Clarissa Snow had to agree, she sure wouldn’t. She dropped her cigarette on the ground and stepped on it. She thanked Mrs. D. for the pep talk and hung up.

A bank of tall, narrow trees stood along the edge of the mini-mart parking lot. Their topmost leaves shimmered in the sun, and Clarissa Snow—for sheer want of knowing what to do next—stood peering up at them as if they were her last hope. She then searched her bag for another coin, dropped it into the pay phone, and made another call. She was briefly put on hold. And when the other receptionist thanked her for holding and asked how she might help her, Clarissa Snow told her everything.

II.

Autumn in the city was crisp and clear and bright. It was a time of year when the windows in the high-rises flamed yellow-gold and the sunlight burnished every reflective surface to a painful gloss: the marble columns and cornices of building exteriors, trolley wires and turnstiles and door pulls, the brass filigrees on handrails and drinking fountains and trash receptacles. Windshields of passing vehicles flashed like gunfire, and broken bottles glittered in the street. The air was scattered with needles of light that made Clarissa Snow squint.

She was sent on a four-week assignment to an insurance company. Her job was to type and edit a Secret Report for the Executive Vice President, and this was her routine. At 8:00 a.m. she took the elevator to the Claims Unit on the twelfth floor and unlocked the door to an office that had been converted to file storage. Sagging boxes filled the room, leaning in precarious columns against the walls and each other. Just enough space remained for a desk and chair and computer and printer. She spent the day typing and revising and editing the Secret Report, and at 5:00 p.m. she delivered a computer disk and a manila envelope with her revisions to the Executive Vice President’s Assistant on the twenty-ninth floor. Between 5:00 p.m. that day and 8:00 a.m. the next morning,
some
one would slip an envelope with new copy and revisions under the door of her office.

The Executive Vice President’s Assistant was a tiny, no-nonsense woman, impeccably attired and of indeterminate youthfulness; she looked like a dour little girl playing dress-up for the day. She instructed Clarissa Snow not to socialize with anyone on the twelfth floor. “I’ve memoed them to not talk to you,” she said. “Eat lunch alone,” she told her. “Take your breaks outside the building or in your office. Keep your door locked. This is a
Secret
Report. That’s why we hired an outsider for the job.” She placed one of her perfect miniature hands—pallid and smooth—upon one of Clarissa Snow’s, which by comparison seemed a vast, bony landscape of knuckle and joint. “The Agency says you’re their best girl,” the Executive Vice President’s Assistant said. “So we’re counting on you.” Clarissa Snow nodded conspiratorially. She was thrilled with the secrecy. It excited her.

Although no one on the twelfth floor was supposed to talk to Clarissa Snow, adherence to this directive broke down quickly. During Week One of her assignment, Claims Unit employees winked at her in the elevator and put their index fingers to their lips in gestures of complicity. After one of the Claims Analysts mouthed a silent “Good morning!” to her in the ladies’ restroom, other employees began to greet her in hushed tones. “How are you!” they whispered. “Fine! Thank you!” Clarissa Snow whispered back. Soon the Claims Unit Manager was knocking on her door, inviting her to potlucks in the lunchroom. “We know you’re not supposed to,” he’d say, then, looking up and down the hallway and dropping his voice, add, “Do it anyway!” He was an affable, red-faced man who wore wide, ugly ties, but wore them with irony; there was an ongoing contest among the men in his unit for who could wear the ugliest ties. The Claims Unit employees held birthday parties and years-of-service celebrations and maternity leave bon voyages on a regular basis, and they invited her to all of them. When she didn’t show up, they came looking for her, knocking urgently at her door: “Are you all right in there?” They were kind and solicitous, eager to make her a part of things, and Clarissa Snow wanted none of it. She did not want to partake of their lives. She attended their gatherings under duress, making a brief appearance before returning to her Secret Report, often laden with paper plates of macaroni salad or potatoes au gratin. But for the most part, they left her alone. They did not take her aloofness personally.

Clarissa Snow was an extraordinary typist and often finished her work well before 5:00 p.m. On these days, she spell-checked the Secret Report, proofread it two or three times, then spent the rest of the afternoon thumbing through magazines she had smuggled in her bag. Her interests were varied and sundry, and wholly vicarious. Because she was afraid of flying, she bought travel magazines, wherein she browsed the pictures of exotic lands she would never visit. She read gourmet magazines, as she did not cook; gardening magazines, as she had no garden; dog- and cat-breeding journals, because her apartment building did not allow pets.

When she was done with her magazines, she stared out the window. She’d heaved some file boxes out of the way and discovered a floor-to-ceiling panel of tinted shatterproof glass. It gave her an unobstructed view of the high-rises across the street, and the high-rises beyond them, and the dim yellow mist that obscured everything in the distance. When this bored her, she snooped around. A narrow linoleum trail wended its way through the file boxes, which were labeled by fiscal year—FY72–73, FY71–72, and so on—some going all the way back to the 1930s. The older boxes were filled with brittle, yellowed claim forms. They were smudged with carbon-paper stains and freckled with typos. The signatures and countersignatures were elaborate and ornate, and Clarissa Snow imagined the signatories trying to outdo each other, engaged in inked battles of loop and filigree across the bottoms of their staid documents. She looked forward to her late-afternoon forays into the company’s past, perusing the archives of a world without correction fluids and highlighters and Post-it notes, a world where—in Clarissa Snow’s rude, romantic vision—policies were never canceled and claims were never rejected. Whenever she came across a previously unexplored file box, her heart would thump. When she lifted the lid and peered inside, the dust motes of sixty years would waft up and dance around her head.

Because she received sections of the Secret Report out of sequence, Clarissa Snow was at first baffled by its contents. One section discussed the technical specifications for computer networks and telecommunications protocols. Another section consisted of pages and pages of balance sheets, the figures unlabeled. And another delineated the agenda and minutes of a business conference in Ireland. (
Ireland!
she thought, unable to imagine business being conducted in Ireland.) But one morning during Week Four—the last week of her assignment—Clarissa Snow received the opening pages of the Secret Report and discovered its secret. It was a proposal to eliminate the Claims Unit and to transfer all of its functions to an overseas vendor. In two months, the twelfth floor would become a records storage facility, and everyone in the Claims Unit would be out of a job.

Clarissa Snow snapped her eyelids shut, but it was too late. She could not unread the paragraph she had just read. She slapped at her skull with the palms of her hands, but neither hand nor fist, neither brick nor rock, could dislodge what she did not want to know. Inside the lids of her closed eyes she saw the terrain of her office multiplied a thousandfold, column after column of file boxes looming in a dense fog of gray dust.

That afternoon she locked her door and made some additional changes to the Secret Report. Using the search-and-replace function of her computer, she substituted all occurrences of the Executive Vice President’s name with the word “Dickhead.” Other Executive Vice Presidents became “Bunghole” and “Pedophile” and “Pig-bitch.” She changed “downsizing” to “butt-fucking,” “remuneration” to “masturbation,” and “capital outlays” to “steaming piles of shit.” She printed a copy and read it aloud. She hoped this would make her feel better. It didn’t. She reversed these changes, of course, and destroyed the adulterated copy. She moved on to the file boxes. She selected one of the oldest ones—FY29–30—and poured diet soda into it, just enough to soak in and ruin the contents without seeping out. There was no relief in this, either. But Clarissa Snow—while ashamed at inflicting such petty vengeance upon these venerable and innocent artifacts—was nonetheless resolved to petty vengeance. What else could she do?
Some
body had to be punished. So she carefully poured the rest of her soda into several more boxes.

That afternoon, on her way up to the twenty-ninth floor, the Unit Manager cornered her at the elevator. “We hear tomorrow’s your last day,” he said. He was wearing a tie that looked like a rainbow trout, its tail fin knotted tightly beneath his chin and its head hanging wide over his belly. “You know,” he said, “we’re really going to miss you.” Clarissa Snow’s stomach churned. She thanked him.

The next day, she finished the Secret Report, assembling and formatting its sections until it was the perfect and uniform document she was hired to create. She downloaded and inserted graphics, cross-referenced an index, printed out and assembled the required number of copies, bound them into their gray report covers, and slipped them all into a box, which she was instructed to tape tightly shut and leave locked in the office along with her office key. She was done by 3:00 p.m. and was gathering her things to make her escape—the stairwell was only two doors away; no one would see her if she timed it right—when there was a knock at the door. It was the Unit Manager. “We’re having a little birthday party,” he told her. “And you’re invited.”

A banner taped to the lunchroom wall read
GOODBYE CLARISSA!
A cake on the table was decorated and frosted to resemble the screen of a computer terminal. The message on it read
WE
’
LL ALL MISS YOU!
Everyone from the Claims Unit was there: the Analysts and the File Clerks, the Specialists and the Secretaries, and all the ugly-tied men. People she had never met before hugged her and handed her slices of cake and told her how
wonderful
it was having her. “We hope you come back!” they said. “We’ll get you a job here!” they said. And who, who should Clarissa Snow see at this moment among the press of well-wishers but the Executive Vice President’s Assistant, arising out of the crowd as if from a hole in the floor, head weaving at shoulder level—toward her—like a predatory balloon, and who, upon reaching her, executed the following in seconds: a brisk, professional hug; the cool touch of a doll-like hand upon her own; and—to Clarissa Snow’s horror—an impish wink of the eye, a wink like the shutter-click of an insidious camera, a dirty little flicker of implication passed from one to the other like a pornographer’s contraband. And then she was gone, slipping into the mob around the table and gliding away with a plate of cake in her hand and—to the delight of the Claims Unit employees—a creamy blue smudge of frosting on her chin. And then attention was called for—the clang of a spoon against a coffee mug—and presentations to the guest of honor were made: a bouquet of flowers, an immense tin of homemade oatmeal cookies, and, after the Unit Manager stammered through a little speech, a card signed by everyone in the Claims Unit. Clarissa Snow started to cry. Three women she didn’t know cried with her.