Break in Case of Emergency Page 5

  But Jen only knew all this from pictures. The dining room was now a mobile-phone storefront. The dim, sex-soaked recesses of the conference rooms were now the fluorescent-lit dressing rooms of a T.J.Maxx. Nobody knew where the mural had gone. The lobby had shrunk radically in size over the last decade, as the building’s owners partitioned it first for a Japanese steakhouse, then an American steakhouse, and then an Outback Steakhouse.

  “Are you ever in the lobby,” Daisy once asked Jen, “when you stop and think you can smell the burning flesh of end-stage capitalism?”

  “No,” Jen replied, “but are you ever in the lobby when you hold up your keycard to the sensor on the turnstile, and instead of a beep, you hear the bleating of a little lost lamb being led to slaughter?”

  “Yes,” Daisy replied.

  Jen and Daisy worked at the geographic center of LIFt’s operations, in what Jen estimated to be the precise spot on the entire office floor that was simultaneously farthest away from the women’s bathroom, farthest from the main exit, and farthest from the nearest unobstructed window. They shared a cubicle wall, which Daisy interpreted as a canvas for her rotating collages of Shetland ponies wearing Shetland-wool sweaters, baby sloths in tiny macramé hats, and root vegetables that resembled religious icons. Sometimes Daisy would engage the baby sloths in a visual dialogue with photos cut out of gossip magazines of disheveled starlets exiting various nightclubs.

  Jen’s title at LIFt was Communications Manager and Co-Director, Special Projects. Daisy’s title at LIFt was Senior Program Officer and Co-Director, Special Projects. Neither of them could have always stated with certainty which projects they were intended to manage, officiate, or codirect, or which qualities made any particular project special. LIFt convened sporadic meetings, wherein Karina condensed her cumuli of verbiage while finger-combing her hair and Donna riffed on vision and intentionality and passion and Sunny headbanged and Jen, always by last-minute request, took notes as well as tried to think of something to say to introduce whatever new memo that Karina or Sunny had most recently asked her to draw up, whether it was the “Old Programs” memo or the “New Programs” memo or the “Building on Past Success” memo or the “International Applications of the ‘LIFt Yourself’ Concept” memo or the “Programs to ‘LIFt Yourself’ ” memo—until Leora had another appointment or, occasionally, when it became clear that Leora would not be attending at all or, on one occasion, when Sunny realized ten minutes after the scheduled start of the meeting that at that very moment Leora was in Dubai, presiding at the opening of a jewelry store as part of the promotional tour for her skin-care line, LeoraDiance™.

  As volubly pointless as these memos and meetings tended to be, preparing the memos occupied the bulk of Jen’s hours in the office, and the meetings themselves represented Jen’s only in-person time with the women she assumed were busy running LIFt. Donna, Karina, and Sunny had a block of offices on the south side of the floor, with Leora’s corner suite tucked safely behind Sunny’s perch. Jen and Daisy were stationed on the east side of the floor, estranged from the rest of the LIFt braintrust by a giant stack of empty filing cabinets, a row of empty offices, and an underpopulated maze of cubicles occupied by a smattering of other indeterminately engaged LIFt contractors, most reliably Petra, a freelance graphic designer whose metonym was the black extension cord that snaked from an electrical socket above the ladies’ room sink down to the linoleum floor and under the handicap stall, where it powered the HUNGH-guk HUNGH-guk of Petra’s breast pump twenty to twenty-five minutes at a time, three to four times a day.

  The glare from the reflected light of the glass-and-titanium beehive skin of the building opposite made Jen and Daisy’s computer screens effectively inoperative between nine-thirty and ten-thirty a.m. each day.

  If Karina was in the office, her door was closed.

  Jen—LIFt

  Wednesday, May 20 10:15 AM

  To: Karina—LIFt

  Subject: Hi!

  Hey Karina,

  I know you’ve been super-busy, but I was wondering if you might be able to spare even a few minutes in the next few days to discuss what I should be prioritizing going forward. I’m raring to get started, but want to make sure I’m pointed in the right direction first. Let me know when works for you. Thanks, Karina! And we should include Daisy, too—she’s awesome and I know she has tons of smart ideas and research.

  Looking forward,

  Jen

  Jen—LIFt

  Thursday, May 21 5:12 PM

  To: Karina—LIFt

  Subject: FW: Hi!

  Hey Karina, sorry to be a pest about this, just wanted to make sure you received my message from yesterday—thanks!—Jen

  —————Forwarded message—————

  Major Brainstorm Mode

  Daisy was on Facebook playing Socialist Revolution, where she’d just been appointed the mayor of the Politburo Standing Commission on Internal Affairs. Jen had her earbuds in to watch a video of Leora’s recent interview with British socialite and “roving entertainment correspondent” Suzy Coxswain, who had made recurring appearances on Father of Invention as Fiona, Trudy’s ribald Cockney friend.

  Suzy Coxswain: LIFt Foundation—it kind of sounds like makeup, haha!

  Leora Infinitas: Well, it’s not the LIFt Foundation—it’s just LIFt. Foundation is the F in LIFt.

  Suzy Coxswain: Too bad, haha! I could use a bit of a lift, haha. Feeling a bit jowly.

  Leora Infinitas: You are beautiful, Suzy, inside and out.

  Suzy Coxswain: Oh, bless.

  Leora Infinitas: And that’s the message of LIFt. If that sounds cheesy, well, call me cheesy! What’s wrong with being a little cheesy, anyway—what are we so afraid of?

  Suzy Coxswain: Well—

  Leora Infinitas: You know, Suzy, I think a lot about the word integration. Because women can feel torn in so many different directions. Maybe a woman is grappling with not liking what she sees in the mirror in the morning. And maybe she’s having problems with a friend, or some kind of a conflict at work. And maybe she just saw something on the news about the, you know, the humanitarian crisis in Somalia, and feeling so helpless because she wants to do something, but she doesn’t know what.

  Suzy Coxswain: She just doesn’t know! Not even where to start!

  Leora Infinitas: Right. All of these things are important. We can’t rank them. What we can do is, number one, integrate them, and number two, start a conversation about them with other women. That’s what LIFt is about. You have children, of course, Suzy?

  Suzy Coxswain: Do I! Three boys, still holding out for that girl, haha.

  Leora Infinitas: Okay, so motherhood is a fundamental strength that we somehow twist into a fundamental conflict: Am I a woman first or a mother first? Well, my answer is yes. What comes first, home or work or the world outside my window? My answer is yes. How does being a mother influence my ethics? My answer is yes. How do I put my children first and put the children of the developing world first, too? My answer is yes.

  Suzy Coxswain: Well, sure, but okay, playing devil’s advocate for a moment—your kids are your kids. They’re yours; they’re different, haha.

  Leora Infinitas: I don’t see them as so different. And I don’t see other women as so different from you and me, Suzy. I think if we come together we can be everybody’s mother. I know that sounds so presumptuous!

  “Daisy,” Jen said without removing her earbuds.

  “Hang on, I’ve been denounced as a Trotskyite,” Daisy said.

  “I think you need to see this,” Jen said.

  “Am I bothering you ladies?”

  Jen turned in her seat to see Karina standing inches away, shrugging emphatically into a lightweight trench coat. “Karina, hi!” Jen exclaimed at a high pitch. She pawed at the buds in her ears, swatting them to the floor. As she reached over to pick them up, the wheels of her chair rolled over the cord, trapping the earbuds on the carpet. Jen paused for a second, doubled over, then ho
isted her ass off the seat, pushed up at the bottom of the seat with her left hand until the wheels left the carpet, and grabbed the buds with her right hand. Jen moved to sit up again, but again the cord went taut before she was fully upright, this time because it had wound itself around the stem of the chair. Jen folded the buds in her lap and looked up at Karina from this slightly hunched position.

  “How many kulaks do you think are left in that village, Comrade Daisy?” Karina was asking in the tone of a saucy conspirator, leaning jauntily against the stack of empty filing cabinets that loomed behind Jen’s desk.

  Daisy looked over her shoulder, nodded at Karina, and turned back to her computer screen.

  Karina winked at Jen and mouthed Love her!, rolling her eyes and lashing her tongue across her front teeth on Love. Jen wondered if Karina was being sarcastic or sincere, and also if Karina herself knew.

  “Sorry for stalking you with all the emails!” Jen said. She hoped her temporary hunchback scanned as warm, inviting body language—a plant leaning toward light.

  Karina cocked her head and clucked neutrally. “Hey, can’t knock persistence.”

  “So, what I was thinking—” Jen started.

  “All I can tell you is that we—the board, the staff, the whole team—we are in major brainstorm-and-research mode right now,” Karina said. “Lightning and thunder, fire and brimstone, category-five brainstorms. And research. And I’ve gotta say”—Karina pulled her bottom lip down from clenched teeth and looked sidelong with bugged-out eyes, as if she were being groped against her will—“Leora does naahht seem too happy with how we’ve been stormin’ her brain so far.”

  “Oh, wow, okay, we can fix that,” Jen said, nodding rapidly, bugging out her eyes in mirroring solidarity. Karina looked over Jen’s stooped shoulder, and Jen wondered if Leora and Suzy were still bantering silently on the screen behind her. “Any specifics on what Leora isn’t happy with?” Jen asked, maneuvering her chair slightly with the aim of using her own bent head to block her computer screen from Karina’s view. “Does she want ideas about messaging for our programs, or messaging ideas for the website itself—should I prioritize one over the other?”

  “I really don’t see why we need to exclude,” said Karina, her gaze still trained over Jen’s shoulder. “She just wants more ideas, more research. The more the merrier.”

  “Right, of course, but what about all the ideas and research I’ve—we’ve submitted so far?” Jen asked, bobbing and weaving her head slightly in an attempt to cover more of the screen space behind her.

  “Nobody’s knocking your work, Jen,” Karina said. “It’s not about that, okay?”

  “Oh, no, I wasn’t saying that—sorry, I’m not being clear. I guess if I knew which ideas and research Leora liked and disliked so far—whether or not the research and ideas were mine!—then I would know how to proceed from here,” Jen said. “I mean, she’s so busy, maybe she hasn’t even gotten to them yet, which would be totally understandable, obviously—”

  “Your work is good,” Karina said. “Like anything else, there’s stuff that really sparkles and stuff that could be better.”

  “Right, okay, thanks, that’s good to hear,” Jen said. “What could be better?”

  “Well, I’m not a mind reader—you’d have to ask Leora,” Karina said.

  “That would be great, actually—I can ask Sunny to set up some time.”

  “Naahht too sure she’d have the bandwidth for something like that right now,” Karina said. “Though I can certainly try to bring it up with her.”

  “You know,” Jen said, “it’s crazy, but Leora and I still haven’t even met!” The second this fell out, Jen realized the error she had made.

  Karina nodded pensively. “You know, I’m curious. If you are asked for three ideas on how to message a LIFt concept, do you come up with ten ideas, and present what you think are the best three? Or do you only come up with three ideas and just present those?”

  “Oh, gosh, I don’t know. It depends.”

  “Interesting. So sometimes you’re just presenting the first things that pop into your head? Kinda seat-of-the-pants?”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. There’s probably always a whittling process.”

  “Interesting. But then there’s the question of how you determine the best three out of ten. How do you know that you’re not hiding your brightest light under a bushel? Do you trust us to see the ideas you want to hide?”

  “Oh, it’s not about hiding—it’s always different.” Jen sat up straight, still holding the earbud cord, severing it with a muffled pop. “You know, I’m sorry to harp on this”—Jen laughed right here, as she often did with Karina, and Jen always imagined these laughs as having mass and taking up space, but plush mass, deferential mass, a comfy cushion to soften any demand or contradictory opinion—“but it would be so amazing, just in terms of time management, to have a little bit of feedback on all the work I’ve done so far. I mean, if that’s possible. I completely understand if—”

  “I’m giving you feedback right now,” Karina said.

  “Of course, but—”

  “Here’s your feedback in a nutshell: More, more, more!” Karina said. “How’s that for a vote of confidence? Just assume that there’s an insatiable appetite for your ideas and your efforts right now. What you have to remember around messaging is that this is a collaboration.”

  “Oh, sure, I know—wait, what does that mean?”

  “It means that we don’t hunker down in our hidey-holes guarding our turf. We’re all in this together, sharing ideas, bouncing ideas off one another. Collaboration and sharing.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “I’ve gotta run, Jen,” Karina said, turning to leave and waggling her fingers over her shoulder. “Gotta tend to the spawn.”

  Jen cushion-laughed. “Oh, for sure, you’ve gotta do that!”

  The Existential Question of Why We Are Here

  Leora Infinitas’s fondness for fortuitous acronyms began but did not end with the name of her foundation, and often a LIFt initiative began and ended with the spark of an inspired abbreviation. Leora proposed a proposal for an “edu-preneurial summit” on the global rise of web-based autodidacticism, to be called Women Inspired for Self-Education (WISE). She proposed a proposal for a series of webinars “reintroducing busy women across the world to their neglected love affair with the REM cycle,” to be called Women’s Initiative for Sleep Hygiene (WISH). She proposed a proposal for a Skype-enabled encounter group session covering seven continents—“McMurdo Station, we haven’t forgotten you!” Sunny exclaimed—on “kicking our sex drives into top gear,” to be called Women Empowered to Love their Libido (WELL). This bounty of acronyms took a turn toward the demotic after Leora, having just served as grand marshal at a drag queen parade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, returned to the LIFt offices with an idea for a body-acceptance campaign, to be called the Women’s Endeavor for Realism and Kindness! (WERK!).

  “Have you ever suspected that you had a fake job at a fake organization, and you could be found out at any time?” Jen asked Jim.

  “If I ever did, a ten-year-old who hasn’t eaten breakfast at home in a year would kick me in the shins and snap me out of it,” Jim said.

  Karina would relay Leora’s ideas to Jen and Daisy, and Jen and Daisy would then spend many hours researching potential LIFt grantees doing work that overlapped with Leora’s acronym du jour and writing bulleted, footnoted summaries of each potential grantee and coming up with copy and branding and infographics and focus-grouping for the proposed projects, even though they knew that the acronyms were ends in themselves—game plans for a Game Over. Daisy, much more than Jen, reacted to Leora’s bounty of acronyms in a spirit of reciprocity. She ideated “a mosaic of learned spiritual responses to the existential question of why we are here” called the Women’s Ontology of Nurturing Karma (WONK) as well as a pan-global crafts-and-baked-goods bazaar called the Women’s Harvest of Outrageous Awesomeness (WHOA). Sei
zing the opportunity presented by one of Leora’s ever-more-infrequent office visits, Daisy walked right up to Leora outside the ladies’ room to pitch her acronyms—a bold, possibly unprecedented move by a non–board member, and one that Jen watched from across the office while gnawing on alternate thumbnails.

  “She’s nicer than everyone says,” Daisy later reported.

  Nonetheless, Leora had rejected WONK and WHOA on the spot, calling out WHOA in particular as “jejune.” Jen and Daisy didn’t know what jejune meant until they looked it up.

  “Maybe not knowing what jejune means is a symptom of being jejune,” Daisy said.

  Daisy later turned her attentions from acronyms to anagrams—spending the better part of one weekend crossing out the letters of LEORA INFINITAS FOUNDATION to create ADROIT FELON IS IN A FOUNTAIN—but not before designing and silkscreening T-shirts advertising Women in Crisis Constructing Acronyms (WICCA), illustrated with a kitten in a witch’s hat scrambling the letters on a Scrabble board.