The Deep Whatsis

Henry’s fourth life began when he and Victoria moved to New York so that Henry could pursue his true love, which was art. In New York, Henry and Victoria lived in a fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn; Victoria worked in a health food store and tried to set up her nutritionist practice only to discover that people in New York didn’t really give a flying fuck about nutritition. And Henry, not coming from a wealthy East Coast or European family with deep ties to people with tons and tons of money, didn’t stand a chance in the art world. So, digging down deep and finding a gallant streak he probably didn’t know he had, Henry decided to go back to school. He had a pretty good sense of design—his paintings aren’t bad, by the way, although they’re blurry, the ones I’ve seen on his website—so he enrolled in one of those graphic design programs at the School of Visual Arts. For two years he studied advertising and he hated it but he knew it was what he had to do.

So Henry miraculously gets a job as a junior art director here at Tate at the really-for-this-business advanced fucking age of thirty-four and he and Victoria start living like human beings. Fourteen years later he’s an associate creative director and he’s making decent coin, in fact he’s pulling in $184K as of the day he was let go. He was actually the go-to guy on the Allstate Insurance account—not thrilling advertising by any means, but he’s making the clients happy doing these crappy testimonials. The campaign is doing well in the marketplace, too, but that’s not really the point. The point is, Henry was old and he wore pleated Dockers, which I told him not to wear but he did anyway.

The first step in the dance would be to let Henry know in advance that he was in danger of being fired. This was pretty common practice for human resources professionals but I took it to another level. I mean you couldn’t exactly go to someone and say “You’re going to get the boot in three months no matter what you do” because they might cause all kinds of trouble around the office in the interim, possibly even take legal action against the company, not to mention spreading their negative energy around. And at the same time you don’t want to say to them “You’re doing a great job you don’t have to worry” because then they could claim wrongful termination based on age or something. What you want to do is be considerate, give them a hint that there’s a storm coming in, give them a chance to find another job (not likely, but one can always hope) and all at once, and without adieu, give them a swift, unforgiving exit from the shitshow.

So one day as I was standing outside the fish tank (what we called the open-plan creative floor) and was waiting for an elevator, Henry came up and gave me a vaguely Reaganesque nod and earnest smile. At that moment I knew it was time to begin. He said Morning, Eric! or something equally pointless. Normally I would ask him how things were going on Allstate, when was that client presentation again? I mean just to seem interested and to pretend that I was sober or knew or cared what the fuck was going on in my department. And the elevator would come and we would ride together and then when one of us got off I would say Keep me in the loop or something like that, and Henry would get off thinking he had had a worthwhile moment with Mr. Chief Idea Officer. He would probably mention it to the dolts he worked with, saying something like Well Eric and I were talking earlier this morning … to make it sound as if he has my ear, we’re close, we’re like this.

But I just stood there and ignored him. I didn’t look up, or rather, I looked up for an instant, enough to let him know that I had heard him but had no interest in replying or engaging with him in any way. He said Morning dude again and I just stared at the wall. I could tell without looking at him that he was momentarily freaked out but immediately pretended to himself that I hadn’t heard him even though he knew I had, I guess that’s called denial. Then the elevator came and we got on and just stood there like two people who once knew each other but were no longer speaking.

And that was the beginning.

After the elevator incident, Henry started acting predictably tense around me. He would, for example, be the first to arrive at a meeting. I usually tried to arrive fifteen or twenty minutes late for anything. Partly because that was the custom in advertising for the creative people to be late and partly because I was the boss and one way of being the boss was to make everyone wait around for you. So one afternoon as Henry stood lingering outside my office I asked him what he was doing there.

“Aren’t we having that Swiffer meeting?” he replied. To which I replied, without looking away from my computer screen, “Are you working on that?”

“Yes, you asked me to chip in on the campaign, you asked me to have some thoughts ready this morning and so I spent the weekend on it,” he said in a high-pitched squeal, not wanting to seem confrontational, the raising of one’s voice by half an octave or more meant to dissuade the more powerful from attack.

“Well I think there are better uses of one’s time than stuffing more shit into that particular shithole,” I said with a chummy laugh.

“So I shouldn’t stick around for the meeting?” he mumbled, and I said nothing, and I said it without looking at him, pretending to stare at my screen but out of the corner of my eye I could see him there, his body suddenly stiff, him staring at the bare floor with an expression of both confusion and panic.

Yes, I wanted to say to him, this is happening, it is, it’s happening now. But I couldn’t for legal reasons. And then as if he could read my thoughts, he just walked away.

Post incident I let a couple of weeks slide, to both allow his feelings of terror to stew in him for a while and also to lull him into thinking that the weirdness was maybe over. I had read on the internet that they raise the toros in perfect comfort so that when they are first stabbed with the banderilla and begin to bleed and the blood is running into their eyes and there are thousands of people around them screaming but they’ve never seen more than two or three humans in their lives, these bulls, it just adds to their inability to react appropriately and so they are less of a threat. I had my assistant call Henry in for a meeting. Ten minutes before the meeting was to take place I left the agency and went for a walk. I may have gotten something to eat, I don’t remember. When I got back three hours later my assistant informed me that Henry had been by and he thought we had a meeting and I said, Yeah, I know. The next day I called Henry into my office and this time I didn’t leave him hanging. I looked him in the eye and told him he was being taken off the Allstate account. He was stunned. He hadn’t seen this coming. Frankly, neither had I, it just came out. He finally asked me Why? and I said something about the client wanting some new blood and how actually I was pleased because this meant Henry was freed up to work on various other assignments.

“What kind of assignments?” he asked me. I said I wasn’t sure but that I would think about it and get back to him.

At that point he had to know that he was being fired. But there were still nearly two months left until his end date. For a couple of weeks I just said nothing to him. I’d see him come in and sit in his cubicle and surf the internet and try to look busy. I’d see him go around to the other creative directors and ask them if they needed any help on anything, but everybody knew intuitively that he was going to be let go and they avoided him the way people do in any corporation when they sense someone has lost favor. For weeks no one would make eye contact with him or even say hello to him in the hall. It was if he were literally dying of a contagious disease and so he was being ostracized by those hoping to survive him.

Then one day I had another brainstorm. I called Henry into my office and asked him what he was working on. He tried to cover his shock at the inanity of this question and said he was trying to get on a new business pitch that he had heard was coming down the pike. “So in other words you’re not working on anything at the moment,” I said with the barest hint of indignation in my voice. He said he was pretty wide open at this point and would love to work on whatever I wanted to toss his way. I let a long silence hang in the room before informing him that it would be difficult for me to justify his salary if he wasn’t billing to any client. He sat there, a smiling rictus of fear. I told him that he ought to think about bringing some new business into the agency. Did he have any connections? He said he would think about it. When I had gotten him drunk a few weeks earlier he had spilled to me a couple of interesting facts. One, that he was separated from his wife, and two, that she was living in an apartment on the Upper West Side that had once been owned by a Famous Actor, whom she had briefly dated in LA and had helped through a rough patch.

“What about your wife’s nutrition business?” I asked him. Maybe we could do some commercials for her and get her friend to be in them? That would certainly be good for the profile of the agency. Henry agreed wholeheartedly and said he would speak to his ex. Our danse macabre was moving along.

So Henry called his ex-wife and told her that he was going to get fired if he didn’t come up with something. She agreed to let him pitch the idea of making a few web-based commercials for her consulting practice, which was called Newtritionals, LLC, and she agreed to call her friend about appearing in them. Henry told me that the actor was in Australia filming a movie and couldn’t do the spots; I knew that was a lie because I asked one of our casting people to call his agent and find out what his availability was, and they said he was living in Palm Desert and doing nothing at the moment. Nonetheless I’m sure that he had no interest in hawking food supplements on the internet for a girl he banged a few times during a dry spell. But Henry must have really laid it on thick because Victoria pressed Famous Actor, who eventually talked to an old friend of his, a Famous Actress, who played Superman’s wife in the ’80s. On a rainy night in the fall we got her to show up at a studio on Tenth Avenue. We shot improv until the wee hours and got nothing usable; throughout the ordeal I could see how much pain Henry was in. Then we spent two weeks trying to cut something; I declared the results not worthy of the agency’s name, and took Henry to lunch as a way of thanking him for coming through under pressure. And then a few days later I fired him.

It was a beautiful morning. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the air had the tiniest hint of a chill in it, the kind of perfect morning that still reminds many New Yorkers of the day the planes flew in. I will never forget the look on his face. He probably thought I wanted to talk to him about the Newtritionals project and maybe what other curiosities we might cook up together. But when he stepped into my office and saw HR Lady there with the beginnings of tears in her eyes, he knew. That’s how they all know, by the glistening. He sat in one of the two Eames chairs I had purchased online from the MoMA Design Store and he tried to chuckle as if to say, OK, I get it, and I’m fine with it, but it was obvious that he had been blindsided. Of course in some sense he knew all along but the whole Famous Actor/Actress incident had no doubt distracted him, as it was meant to do.

I looked at him with my best sad-eyed expression and then there was a pause that could have only lasted a few seconds but seemed much longer. I saw him glance over at a stack of fashion magazines I had put on the floor waiting to be thrown away. I almost had the sense he was counting them, his mind grabbing on to anything to keep it from careening into the abyss. He crossed his legs and looked up at me.

“I’m sorry to say this,” I said, nodding with as much earnest emotion as I could muster, “but we’re going to have to let you go.”

In any good narrative, say a detective story, when at last you know who the killer is, it should be the kind of surprise that you realize was inevitable all along. What Hitchcock called the MacGuffin, what I now suppose I have no choice but to call The Henry. At that point if I were him I would have strangled me to death, but just as the urge to commit an act of senseless violence was rearing up in him—the urge to slap me on the face or smash my Noguchi tabletop with his fist—this is when HR jumps in and tells him about our generous severance package which includes his full salary and health care for nearly five weeks if he agrees to our terms. Realizing he needs the money, Henry just stares at the wall.

“Alright,” he says and that was pretty much it. A couple of them have called me a douchebag, one in a voice that was crackling with pain and hatred, he could barely speak he was so angry, he had four children and a fifth on the way, it was tremendously moving. But mostly they’re not surprised. The initial clues having been, you know, homeopathic: they’re a tiny dollop of the disease, and then the antibodies rush in, and that’s the second set of positive clues, and so the subject has a false sense of wellbeing until the bottom drops out. But just as Henry’s lips part to speak, to say something else, perhaps a final statement, the two African-American security guards, Damon and Terry, step into my office as if on cue. Henry senses the men behind him, gets up and walks out with them toward the elevators without a word.

1.5

It’s about 9 AM, I’m being crushed by a hangover and so I’m working out at the health club in my building, trying to sweat it out of my body, all corrupted flesh pixels needing a diagnostic, when a new text pings me. Without breaking stride I fondle my device and see it is from Intern.

hey!?! wtf!

so i guess we won’t be working together …

no, wait!!

change of plans!!!!!

we WILL be working together!!

i’m on 8 *cum* c me...........

She’s on eight? I can only guess that the editorial company is helping us in-house on something and that’s why she’s here for the morning? But the tone of her text, very snarky, who does she think she is?

This should be easy. By noon she will be gone.

After concentrating on cardio for five minutes I get a ginger-wheatgrass juice and a green tea infusion and then I head for the showers. The juice girl is incredibly beautiful, she has long skinny arms that look like young birch branches that could wrap around you twice. In the showers, I notice that my cock is a bit harder than it usually is after a workout, I’m feeling pretty horny, I may have mentioned that ever since I began my medications (Adderall, Zoloft, Klonopin, Ativan, occasionally Haldol although I don’t always like to admit that) I’ve had an erection that I can’t get rid of no matter what I do. The only comforting thing about this is that I know my boner has nothing to do with Intern, it’s just a part of me now, like hair, and no amount of sex or masturbation seems to cure it. For no reason I consider hitting on birch-like juice girl but I fear there is a too-high chance she will say yes.

After my gym time I decide to take the subway to the office just for a change of pace. Usually I call a car service. I live in Brooklyn just off the Williamsburg Bridge, as I may have said earlier, in a loft-like apartment in a brand-new waterfront high-rise called Krave. I usually take a car to work because it’s a bit of a hike up Bedford Avenue to the subway and a car is more comfortable and it’s also in my contract that I have unlimited use of the Dark Car Corporate limo service. But today I felt like being outside, the weather was nice, which felt like more of an excuse than an actual reason, because I didn’t really buy the notion that the weather being nice meant it was a good idea to be outside. It didn’t really matter to me one way or the other what the weather was like; if I felt like being outside, or if I had some reason to go outside, then I would generally engineer a way to be out of doors, it was that simple, the weather had little to do with it, except to be able say to myself, when the question arose in my head, “Why are you taking the subway, Eric?” I would have a ready answer and the answer was the niceness of the weather.

Two blocks into my eleven-block walk to the L train I realize why it is that I don’t do this very often. A virtual stream of young, fashionable white people, what the savants in our media planning department would refer to demographically as the Creative Class, are rushing toward the train. I don’t hate these professionals, since that would be disingenuous, after all I am one of them. I don’t really have any opinion about them one way or the other. They are a kind of temporary migration, they are the product of certain economic conditions. About halfway to the subway I am feeling exhausted by the tide I am swimming in and so I need a rest; the night before I had ingested eight or nine saffron-infused apple-ginger absinthe, cognac, and vodka cocktails, the name of which I can’t remember, possibly the Caribou Whisperer or the Ragamuffin or the Merkin Sniffer and I’m still feeling somewhat ill. I pop into a coffee place called Silhouette that is frequented for some reason by mixed-race French people from Paris who are living in Brooklyn because the dollar makes it cheap for them, and I order a scat coffee for twenty-six dollars and a bowl of fresh berries for twelve dollars. I’m not in the least bit hungry but somehow the idea of fresh berries seems like a good one, like a smart idea, a smart way to start my morning, even though my morning began hours ago at some sleepless and unremarked moment between night and day. The scat coffee comes first and I take a sip and wonder if it isn’t just burnt Maxwell House. Then a bowl of fresh, locally grown berries arrives and the moment I see them I know I will not be eating them. I sit and look out the window at the pretty little fishies darting up and down the stream on their way to their exciting jobs in the worlds of fashion and art and reality TV and suddenly I don’t feel well. What is it? I ask myself, and I respond by saying “I don’t know, Eric,” out loud. “I don’t know what it is.”

And I don’t. I’ve been diagnosed before with certain somewhat common illnesses, most of them mental in nature, but that doesn’t explain why I haven’t eaten in almost three days, since the time I met her.

On the sidewalk outside a young woman in a Ted Lapidus jacket and carrying a Stella by Stella McCartney by Stella M for Talentless by Rich Daddy bag is tying her shih tzu to someone’s bicycle, and now the owner of the bike is coming up to her and saying, like, um, that’s my bike? And this woman is saying she’s just getting a Clover-press coffee to go and she’ll be back in four-point-two minutes, she promises, and suddenly I’m having a full-blown panic attack: the desire to jump in front of a bus is so strong in me I grip my chair and sit there, rigid, and hope it stops. This has happened before so I know what to do, only I don’t have any Klonopin in my Crumpler shoulder bag. After about an hour I decide I’m not going into work today. After another hour I realize I’m not doing anything today. I am aware that I am having one of my episodes, since as I’ve said I’ve had them before, and they always do pass eventually, although this one seems a bit more persistent than the others. My phone has been ringing and buzzing from time to time because I have some important meetings, in fact I was supposed to meet with HR Lady and let two more copywriters go today, and no one knows what has happened to me, I can just imagine the concern growing with each voice mail. But I have the sudden and I realize nonsensical thought that if I answer my mobile device or even check my messages something terrible will happen to me, that all manner of doom will be unleashed upon me, from financial ruin to torture and death, which I am fully aware is silly. There is also the text from Intern that I would rather not see, even to delete it, which may be contributing to my unalterable inability to deal with my unreality.

At this point the patchouli-scented half-Senegalese woman from behind the counter comes up and asks if there’s anything wrong with my fresh berries because I haven’t touched them and I say, no, they’re absolutely delicious, I just changed my mind, I’m so sorry. I almost add that if I were to leave this place I may run headlong into a truck just to stop it from going on any longer. What from going on any longer? I don’t know, all of it. I want to laugh, and for a brief moment I do. Some people look at me and then they ignore me. After another half hour the episode subsides and I am able to get up and walk back home and play Halo for a few hours. Then I go to sleep without checking my e-mail or returning any calls. It occurs to me that maybe I’m a) experiencing some unexplained resistance to sacking the two copywriters I was supposed to have sacked today, and b) I am semi-falling in love with her, the girl whose name I don’t know, or care to know, which is impossible, but I can deal with all that when the fires die down.

1.6

After a good many hours of lying there trying to sleep I finally give up at 5:45 AM and instead of going to the gym I decide to check my mail and deal with what inevitably will be the crisis of my not showing up yesterday. I am surprised to discover only two e-mails from my assistant, the first one inquiring about my travel plans for an upcoming commercial shoot in Los Angeles, California, and the second one, from about midmorning, inquiring as to my whereabouts.

“(HR Lady) was just wondering where she might locate you, Eric, she left a couple of messages, will reschedule a check-in for this afternoon?” was my assistant’s query. I checked my voice mail, and there were also two, both from HR Lady herself as had been expected, both polite and professional, and both employing the verbs “touch base” and “loop back.” What this means is it is not even 6 AM and I’ve already decided not to go to the gym, a plan I could easily change, as I really don’t have to be into the office for four hours, but I find it hard to rearrange a plan once it has been commenced, and besides, yesterday’s panic attack had occurred not long after going to the gym, so maybe it is a good idea to not repeat myself. The only problem is what to do with the intervening hours before I am due in the office. I could go online and search for other gyms in the area, I could just join a new one, but that seems a bit excessive. Time passes. I look out the east-facing windows at the sky, pinkish like plated salmon croquettes, and blueish like, I suppose, deskulled brains, cold enough to see steamy smoke, or was it smoky steam, rising from the oil furnaces in the three flats that lie between me and the bridge. I call and order delivery of two almond-soymilk lattes from Marlow & Sons, and then I call Silhouette, the Franco-Senegalese-Brazilian café, and try to order a bowl of fresh berries again but they don’t deliver. I hang up and look around my flat, thinking about getting some furniture one of these days and then I wait for my beverages. Waiting, I realize, isn’t the time between things, it’s the thing itself.

When the lattes finally do arrive ($14) they are less than piping hot and I refuse them, though I do pay for them and tip the guy twenty dollars for his trouble (total $34). Three and a half hours later, at the Tate headquarters in midtown, HR Lady is waiting for me in the holding area outside my office. Her name is Helen, she is not married, reputed to have a longtime boyfriend who she never speaks about, lives alone, and enjoys foreign films and getting outside the city on weekends, according to her Match.com profile, which I looked up once. She is feigning concern about my health, wondering if I am alright.

“Are you alright?” she asks, adding, without meaning it in the slightest, “We were worried about you!”

“I haven’t had my Starbucks if that’s what you mean.” HR Lady uses “Starbucks” to mean coffee so around her I do too.

“I’m talking about yesterday!”

“Didn’t you get my text?” I lied.