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Sick Days
By
Jon Alan Carroll
Somewhere in an anthill skyscraper, Krawchuk was talking to Sarah over the partition wall of Cube 427a-3.
The basic colors of Graham & Wilkins were Migraine White and Eyestrain Green. Coffee spills and corpo-art made the place look like a mid-level insurance carrier without the charm.
"No, no," Sarah said. "Seriously, Krawchuk, what happens when the Druid takes over?" Since the official announcement on Monday, the rumor mill was roaring full-blast.
"IDG is fully financialized," Krawchuk said. "They kill half the pubs and fire half the staff. Low pay, high turnover. That's why they call it the Gulag Editorial."
"Damn," she said. Sarah McKie had earned her MFA and spent long afternoons dreaming of becoming the next Toni Morrison. Somehow, she'd ended up at Graham & Wilkins instead.
"I don't care," Krawchuk said. "I came from a poor family and learned how to survive."
"Krawchuk, both your parents were tenured professors," Sarah said. She chortle-snorted, sure, like
he fought his way home from school everyday.
"My family was so poor we had to eat raw sewage for dinner," Krawchuk said.
"Sittin' around the dinner table on warm summer evenings...Grandma, pass the sludge."
A couple of tickle-laughs came over from Sarah's side. This would be his third layoff, so Krawchuk had been vampiring on Sarah's laughter for months. He could feel his energy running out of the dog-door in his brain.
He put on his headphones and turned back to the PC screen. Krawchuk ran EditAll and Dek-4 on one of his files and moved it over to the printer's directory.
Krawchuk's business card said Editor, but mostly what he did was process files. He comforted himself with the fact that he was a lackey, not a flunky.
He puttered around the cube and listened to DV-9 on the Internets. Without the music, he would have gone nuts long ago.
DV-9 was giving this song "Teach a Man to Fist" a lot of play lately. One of the musicians had beaten up a critic or something.
"Give a man a cliche," Blunt Object sang, "and he'll have fun for hours."
Around noon, Krawchuk cut through the office over to the elevators. Arise, ye wretched of the cubes, he thought, but Krawchuk wasn't overthrowing anybody today. In fact, he'd be lucky to make it through the day.
His friend was waiting and smoking on the sidewalk outside the building lobby.
Michael Dean had spent his whole career trying to look like anything except Another IT Guy. Krawchuk watched Michael go through Solid Black and Professor Data and No-Nonsense Button-Down and Retro-Fauxhemian. Lately, Michael had been spiraling back into Undergrad Slobhood.
Michael and Krawchuk ate carnitas at El Haro and then walked over to the Mica Bar on First Street.
The Mica Bar, aka Lou's Losers Lounge, was an old waterfront watering hole. The bar was filled with afternoon drunks and stunk of piss and ruin. For mysterious reasons, it was decorated with ceramic ducks.
Krawchuk drank a couple of Mexican beers and Michael wanted to go outside for another smoke. The morning fog was starting to burn off.
Michael pulled out a red pack and lit a cigarette. "But if you go nuts and kill them all, it's
you who gets in trouble," he said. "There's no justice in this goddamn world."
A woman fake-coughed and waved her hand in the air as she walked by. Where they lived, smokers were about as popular as meter maids and infectious hepatitis.
"You can't smoke on the job, you can't drink on the job," Krawchuk said, "yet they still call this a free country."
Michael nodded as if a truer truth had never been said.
Back in the bar, Krawchuk said the Druid was coming soon and he'd have to trudge back to the sweatshop.
Michael asked him to stay and have a couple shots, his treat.
Krawchuk looked at his friend's screw-it haircut and slumping shoulders and said,
All right, set 'em up.
His friend Michael had a serious case of Bad Capitalism, which was going around. Michael had worked 65 hours a week for two years, but now funneled his severance pay into the cash registers of various city bars.
As for Krawchuk, there was no medication for what was wrong with him, because nobody thought it was a disease in the first place. Everyone agreed that his symptoms would disappear if he just pulled up his socks.
There were several emails and vmails waiting for him back in Cube 427a-3. He ignored all of them except for one from his boss, Erlacher. The boss wanted his whole team at the town hall meeting,
suited up and ready to play.
Yeah, put me in, Coach Iago, Krawchuk thought.
His boss Erlacher always spoke in football-talk, although no one knew why.
Step up and run the slant, he'd say. Through the gap, Krawchuk, through the gap. We're third and long, fourth quarter, season on the line.
Krawchuk's view of the matter was not that complicated. When you feel, life is a tragedy. When you think, life is a comedy. And if you never think or feel, life is a football metaphor.
A pop-up from the tyrant Outlook reminded Krawchuk of the town hall meeting. He walked over to Sarah's cube and they marched to the elevator banks.
Sarah was looking good in her new gray suit. The elevator dinged and they got on.
Jill Faine, another editor headed to the meeting, smiled hello to Sarah. Jill had earned two degrees in Art History and kicked herself everyday for such a poor life-choice.
Krawchuk said that once IDG took over, Graham & Wilkins would become Hell on Earth.
Jill was all right with that. "Instead of the same old crap, it'll be the same new crap," she said.
They got off on 32 and sat in the main conference room. Krawchuk and Sarah talked as the room filled up.
Ms. Anna Choi from HR came over and sat in front of him. In addition to being a skilled professional, Ms. Anna Choi from HR had the finest ass Krawchuk had ever seen. It was truly incredible.
While Ms. Anna Choi had made it clear that she was 5,000 miles out of his league, that didn't make her rear any less magnificent. Like a brilliant artist who happens to be insane, it didn't really distract from the accomplishment.
Windingham, the Vice President for Editorial, stood up and treated them to one of his professional-grade smiles.
An adroit office politician, VP Windingham hadn't done a lick of work for 15 years. Krawchuk used to resent the VP a six-figure salary for doing nothing, but now he saw the hard, awesome beauty of it.
"Contrary to the rumors you've heard," the VP said, "no layoffs are anticipated at this time."
Krawchuk leaned over to Sarah and said, We're screwed.
The VP introduced the Druid and the object of their corporate affection lumbered up to the podium.
The Druid wasn't much to look at. Mousey hair, middle-aged blub-chub, both crying out for diet and dye-it. The man's chin would never be lonely.
"Hello," the Druid said. "I'm Bill Murek."
So the legend had arrived. Profits in trade paperbacks usually ran 1-4%, but the Druid posted an incredible 23.9% last quarter. This was a true publishing miracle, like a poet picking up a lunch check.
Krawchuk knew the Druid was going to fire them all, he accepted that. And, of course, the Druid was going to lie about firing them before he did it. This was standard procedure.
But the Druid was wearing a rugby shirt. It was a hard fist in the face, the man flaunting his casual-cred to the editor-peasants.
The Druid had both a law degree and an MBA, so he'd been born in a suit. And yet there he was, right out in the open, wearing
a fucking rugby shirt.
Krawchuk would have to rethink his criteria for what was most repulsive in human nature.
There were a few unremarkable remarks and the lights went out and the PowerPoint presentation began.
The Druid spoke with all the flash and zeal of a computer repair manual. He droned as if he were translating Heidegger from Rumanian into Esperanto.
The Druid went on at extreme length about something called "the actionable intersect of the drill-down." Each sentence followed logically to the next one, but somehow it all made no sense whatsoever.
Right now, right here in this room, the Druid was creating a whole new linguistic form: perfectly lucid gibberish.
Now, Krawchuk enjoyed senseless management chin-music as much as the next guy. He understood it was the price of living in a free society.
It's just...the room was so stuffy and dark...and there must have been 150 people crammed in there, each insisting on breathing and radiating body heat.
And the Druid's endless sentences...plopping out, one after another...as slow as a thermos filled with pus...
...like Michael said, any day you don't shoot the bastards is a good day and if he murdered the Druid for wearing the rugby shirt, no San Francisco jury would convict him, but he'd have to hear the reporter interviewing the shocked witnesses and the anchor intoning that the tragic shooting left three dead and two seriously introspective and the death gurney and Ms. Anna Choi would never go out with a death-row convict and management was a virus from space and blah branding and blah duopoly market segmentation....
Sarah jabbed him in the ribs. "Krawchuk," she said. "Wake the fuck up. You're
snoring."
Krawchuk rubbed his side where Sarah had poked him. For a little thing, she was pretty damn strong.
When he got back from drinking that night, his roommate was gone and he had the place to himself. Krawchuk was only 85% drunk, so he got another beer from the refrigerator.
He turned on the TV and surfed around for a while. Casablanca, the Giants v. the Dodgers, an angry mob waving Kalashnikovs, a documentary on the history of cement.
He went into the bedroom and got the bong. Michael kept insisting that Americans made the best bongs, but Krawchuk argued the Chinese were moving up fast.
Michael also kept suggesting that Krawchuk could get a job as an agent. There was an opening at the agency where his friend did all the IT work.
All they ever do is read and talk on the phone, Michael said. You can do both of those things.
Up to that point, he'd been under the illusion that Michael Dean was his friend.
A movie called Love's Soaring Something, Nazi propaganda techniques, Mexican soccer.
He took a couple of hits on the bong and checked the messages on the landline.
Ms. Phillips from Global Bank had clearly had enough. Her voice quivering with rented outrage, Ms. Phillips lectured him on his poor manners for not returning her calls.
Sarah called again, sounding apathetic but not too unhappy. She was still at Graham & Wilkins, but headed to law school in the fall.
VP Windingham and the editor-managers had made spontaneous decisions to spend more time with their families.
Sarah's voice loosened up a little. "Anyway, Krawchuk, I was talking with Anna in the break room--Anna Choi in HR--I know you remember her--and Anna caught her husband cheating again. She said she always thought you were cute. No accounting for taste, Krawchuk. Why don't you call her?"
Krawchuk continued clicking the remote and hit the bong a couple more times. After he'd forgotten about himself, the disease that wasn't a disease had disappeared completely.
He was relaxed now. This was his best disaster ever.
Since he'd overthrown the tyrant Outlook, his schedule had become much more civilized. His new philosophy was pretty basic: Anything worth doing was worth doing tomorrow.
Krawchuk clicked to the Horror Channel and paused for a minute. He'd quit watching the Horror Channel several months ago, mostly because it reminded him of work.
In a large castle room, a prisoner in chains was dragged before the Zombie King. The prisoner began to blubber and beg for mercy.
Krawchuk laughed harder than he had for months. Ha, only a fool would expect mercy from the Zombie King.
Copyright © 2007 Jon Alan Carroll
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