Steve Himmer
The first weekend of my unemployment passed like any other: I watched reruns of shows I couldn’t remember from when they were new, and I went grocery shopping in the middle of the night and washed clothes in the quiet hours of morning when the laundry room of my apartment complex was otherwise empty.
…..Saturday night I went to the movies; I bought my ticket online then fed my credit card to a machine in the lobby to claim it. The movie was a sequel. I hadn’t seen the original but that didn’t matter — it was an action thriller, full of explosions and car chases just like the explosions and chases in other movies, only more so because this one was newest. Right away I knew what would happen and also what wouldn’t, so I could settle into the film like a long bus ride through a landscape that never changes and is familiar from the first moment on. I stayed awake through the whole movie but when it was over I felt like I’d had a restful night’s sleep because it had passed through me as easily as a dream only smoother because there were fewer surprises.
…..After being out late at one movie, then watching another one at home on TV that was more or less the same as the first, I slept through most of Sunday and it wasn’t until evening that I remembered I had no job to show up for the next day. Sunday nights I usually watched TV and thought about what all the people I’d invented and spoke for on the company’s marketing blogs were doing over the weekend, and what they would share with the world the next day, but none of that mattered now. They weren’t doing anything anymore, and they would have nothing to share and no means of sharing. I could have kept on writing their lives at home, with my own computer, but they’d always lived on the company’s time, stolen time, and that made their lives worth living alongside my own.
…..I ironed my shirts for the week ahead, per usual, as if I would need them, and I scrubbed the floors in the kitchen and bathroom of my bland, boxy apartment — a kitchen, a bedroom, a “family room” all to myself. I did all the chores I could think of, even sorting the pantry full of canned goods and packaged meals, until I was finally tired enough to fall asleep without thinking for too long in bed.
…..I’d turned off my alarm clock, but Monday morning I awoke at the same time as always, at the time routine had trained my body to wake. I had my coffee and oatmeal then sat at the kitchen table for hours. I needed to look for a job but I knew there weren’t any to find. Everyone knew that, because we’d been told and reminded by TV and by papers and by each other for months. So I thought I might take some time, a few days at least, to do something I’d always wanted to do but had never found the time for, or I might go somewhere new in that city I knew only vaguely despite living there for my whole life. But after a few hours’ trying I still hadn’t thought of anything I wanted to do or anywhere I wanted to go. Not one idea, not one buried desire or secret scheme came to mind though I sat at the table until I was hungry for lunch.
…..During the afternoon I wondered, out of habit, what my bloggers were doing and then remembered again they were gone. So I wondered instead what my former coworkers were doing. I didn’t know their names or what their jobs were but I knew that in the afternoon the man with the mudflap mustache and red face would stand at the window and pretend he was looking through files. The bird-legged woman who always wore sneakers and ankle-high socks would powerwalk laps around the department after eating lunch in a rush at her desk. I imagined this Monday going ahead like any other for them, perhaps so ordinary they hadn’t noticed the absence of my invisible presence in the far corner where they never went. To them, I might exist no more or no less than I had a few days before.
…..After a few days my inner clock and calendar were so screwed up that I couldn’t sleep and I didn’t know when I was hungry. I stopped putting the shades up or opening the curtains and I rarely had a sense of what time it was, day or night, except when a TV show — morning news and late night talk — gave the hour away.
…..I watched the news about how many people were losing their jobs, and I pictured them all alone in apartments with the shades down and watching the news like I was. I watched reports about companies going bankrupt and employees losing pensions, and owners disappearing with billions of dollars or giving themselves massive retirement payouts. People complained and the news anchors shared their pain and the next day was the same thing all over. There were aerial shots of job fairs at malls, and crowds of the unemployed, papers flapping in their hands, stretching across parking lots like an invading army. And there were also stories about the rich, the very rich, wealth on a scale no one else could imagine, paring back their lifestyles at least in public for fear of anyone knowing how rich they still were.
…..There were stories about the very young, the just starting out, graduating college with no hope of finding a job. They were interviewed and sounded genuinely disappointed they might not be able to work, and I thought if they only knew. Other stories showed older workers, close to retirement but not there quite yet, who knew they wouldn’t be hired again because of their age. There weren’t many stories about people like me, people at neither the top nor the bottom, too young to retire but long past starting out.
…..I thought of how my bloggers would write about that, blaming the recession on people like me, on companies like Second Nature creating too many products nobody wanted and employing too many people who produced nothing but blog posts that had no real need to be written or read. Then it became a bit much so I imagined turning off a computer and making those voices go quiet again.
…..With so many offices closing, and no new tenants moving into their left behind spaces, I pictured acres and acres of Second Nature greenery abandoned in cedar chip beds and on the banks of lobby lagoons, the plastic plants as green and efficient in an empty building as they had been with people around. No water, no sunlight, no pruning, no problem. Whatever happened, whoever came or went in the offices and hallways around them, those self-sufficient plants I had rooted there would be fine.
…..The news said attacks by fired workers were on the rise, people returning for revenge on the companies they’d been fired from, so I tried blaming the sub-manager for my lost job and for my boredom. I tried to work myself up with fantasies of storming his office, hands full of guns, or filling his desk drawers with snakes and with bombs, a scorched-earth email and online campaign to destroy his credit, his family, his reputation, his life. All my dozens of blogs teaming up to drive the poor bastard into ruined submission. I pictured myself breaking into his house and waiting there for him, his wife and his children hogtied and duct taped around me. But I didn’t know if he was married, or if he had kids, and as much as I tried to convince myself all of this was his fault, I couldn’t get angry at someone whose name I didn’t know and who hadn’t been part of my life before or after the few minutes in which I was fired. He hadn’t hovered in the background of my working days waiting for me to slip up. He wasn’t an archenemy, just a middle-management toady with no more control over his own fate than I had.
…..I laid on the couch thinking about all the different ways from relief to violence in which a person might respond to losing a job, and decided which of my bloggers would respond in which ways. I drafted posts in my head about their newfound freedom to pursue pottery or poetry or Zen Buddhism. Others I imagined hurt and betrayed, missing their coworkers and blaming their bosses, and one of my bloggers — a middle aged man, single and older than he expected to be without a family or a genuine, productive direction in life — him I imagined buying a gun on the way home from work, nursing his anger all weekend, but cooling down before storming the office on Monday. I imagined he was a triumph for all those HR experts who advise that terminations should happen on Friday, for exactly the reasons my blogger had shown. Not that they’d ever know how close I imagined he’d come.
…..Some of my bloggers weren’t as stable or steady as others. One of them, I knew right away, would kill himself instead of hurting anyone else. But he had a hard time working out how. I stared at the plaster swirls on the ceiling and thought of pills, and of trains, and of bombs strapped to chests. But none of that would appeal to him; he wasn’t selfish, just sad. He had two rules: Number one, no mess left behind; and, number two, no shocking discovery of a body that might damage someone for life.
…..It took me all night to settle on the most polite, selfless suicide I could muster on his behalf: He would sneak into a restaurant’s kitchen after closing and enter their walk-in freezer with a body bag and sleeping pills. Before taking the pills, he’d hang a note on the outside of the door asking restaurant staff not to open the freezer themselves but to call the police to do so. Then, in the freezer, he would take all the pills and zip himself into the bag. The opaque body bag would prevent anyone but trained professionals from accidentally seeing the corpse, and the freezer would keep it from decaying and creating a stench.
…..Satisfied with the suicide I’d scripted for my cypher, secure in knowing it would meet his needs and give him the end he most wanted, I fell asleep on the couch and snuck through the longest part of the day, one day among many, a long string of days stretching far out before me without a job or a prospect of finding one soon and not sure I wanted a new job at all. I only knew I had more time than I knew what to do with, and there was nothing I wanted to do.
–
Steve Himmer’s stories have recently appeared or are forthcoming in PANK, The Los Angeles Review, and Amoskeag, among other places. “A Landscape That Never Changes” is excerpted from his novel The Bee-Loud Glade. He also edits the webjournal Necessary Fiction.
Pingback: Twitted by fictionaut