The survivalists, p.15
The Survivalists, page 15
She waited four weeks. On the twenty-ninth day, she rose before dawn to eat her bran flakes and report to the train so she could arrive at work early to finish up the summary judgment brief for the Hurricane Sandy case. Both sides had produced, in total, five million documents, and those documents had been sorted like hair under a fine-toothed comb into neat little electronic piles called helpful and unhelpful. This stubborn-ass case had survived a motion to dismiss and thirty million smaller motions about what documents and witnesses to produce and where the witnesses should be deposed. Aretha and Mum and the other mid-level associate on the case had flown around the country to do the depositions, which forced Aretha to miss Nia brunches to wake up in dull hotels and eat eighteen-dollar client-subsidized eggs and report to windowless conference rooms and ask the same questions in dumber and dumber ways to try to get witnesses to fall for them. At least she could add too busy flying around the country to the list of reasons why she never got around to telling Aaron about her gun run.
But that was all over, and they were down to the absolute last set of arguments and documents that might prevent them from having to stand trial over the issue of whether her clients would have to pay out insurance claims that they didn’t deserve to have to pay out for people who’d unluckily lost their houses to a hurricane in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with the people who were paying her to defend them. The only problem was that somewhere along the way she’d started thinking of the plaintiffs, and their houses, and their now houseless, beached-whale-like lives, full of temporary apartments that contained the tenth of their stuff that they were able to save. Or the plaintiffs who’d saved nothing. Living in the Vanderbilt house had fucked her up by making her sweet on houses.
The Vanderbilt house didn’t matter, she told herself as she double-checked every argument in the brief. These people’s houses don’t matter either. Behind her, the first ray of morning sun crawled up from the horizon to lick her computer screen, which contained fifty pages of perfect words that would win it for them. And maybe take those people’s houses, whispered a part of her she could tamp down. It was control time, after all, where with enough effort she could get rid of everything that bothered her. It was just a job, she said to the section of her head that went back to the depositions she’d taken, how people described living after they lost their homes, even though she’d filled the pauses in their answers about living two or five or ten or thirteen people to an apartment with objections about relevance.
She took another hour to look over the brief before she declared it done, saved it, drafted the email to the head partner and attached it, and slipped outside to wait the hour until it would be acceptable to send the email. Around her, Midtown woke up. The first morning round of halal meat hit the grill. The juice trucks smashed fruit and vegetables into plastic cups. The by-the-pound delis sold plates of breakfast to tourists who videotaped them, determined to play back the videos for their families who were less convinced of the mystifying powers of twenty-two-dollar yogurt deemed magical because it was eaten in NYC. The office workers crawled out of the subway and found new purpose when they hit the sidewalk, their shoes clicking determinedly past everyone standing in groups waiting outside a bakery to eat cake at eight a.m. because a television show had once dressed its characters in the kind of tulle that showed everyone who didn’t eat that bakery’s eight a.m. cake that they were idiots. Aretha turned into the Diamond District, where its vendors gently placed trays of diamonds in window displays that, to her, usually looked exactly the same as all other trays of diamonds. But finishing that summary judgment brief meant she and the diamonds matched. They were both glittering and perfect.
She floated back to the office on that diamond air, ready for another day under her control. Even the office lobby was with her. Its normally dull tan carpet sparkled. Its usually generic framed landscapes chose today to remind her of the limitless scope of photography. She sat down at her computer, sent the email, and enjoyed the bubble of accomplishment that sets in after sending really important emails for a good three hours.
For their lunch Mum picked a new fast-casual place near the office called bumblehive, specializing in bee-pollen-based foods, which were said to strengthen the immune system by exposing the body to the powerful biological moment when bee met flower. She ordered a bee-pollen salad. Aretha ordered a bee-pollen-flavored meat loaf slice, and the two of them sat down for another round of firm gossip.
“The smoker looks very orange today,” Mum said, referring to a corporate partner who’d taken out all of his frustration with the custody dispute part of his divorce in an indoor tanning booth.
“He’s a week away from being a tangerine with a hairpiece,” Aretha said.
She tried to remember the days when she hated Mum, but they’d faded into this new world where they had lunch together. Aretha had reluctantly decided that Mum made for OK company, as another person who watched everyone else in the office closely enough to understand the appeal of gossiping about them. The male lawyers barely had time for Aretha; they spent their days and their happy hours working on winning Olympic gold for sucking up, and their weekends doing ridiculous shit like playing golf with one another free from the company of any of the women in the office. And Aretha knew it would look bad if she hung with any of the female junior associates, who were beneath her. But Mum understood the appeal of partners’ bad tans and male associates’ terrible striped dress shirts and the once-in-a-while hilarity of some lawyer finding some way to insist they were cool, as if there was some hip way to wear wingtips while arguing about sections of the U.S. Code. Besides, as the associate who’d just written the brief for the most important case in the department, Aretha was feeling generous.
“Orange partner wants those kids that badly?” Mum said.
“I think he just wants it to stop,” Aretha said.
Their food came. Aretha took a bite of her meat loaf, which tasted just like everyday meat loaf if everyday cooks coated their beef in wax, and gave what she thought was a pretty damn good dramatic performance by pretending it wasn’t gross. Mum’s salad had waxy-looking cubes all over it that she swore tasted delicious.
They moved on to the litigation partner neither of them ever worked with who’d lost a case in front of the Second Circuit last week, and the first-year corporate associate who wore white sneakers with her skirts, a power move that said she was completely unafraid of being fired, no matter how many times everyone pointedly looked at her feet in meetings. Aretha felt odd, like someone had turned on a space heater in the middle of her chest, but she took a fresh bite of meat loaf anyway.
“Someone’s going to have to spill coffee on them,” Mum said.
“Oh no. Then she’ll come back to work with a spotless new pair of white sneakers. She’s never going to let anyone mess with her look,” Aretha said.
“I can’t believe she has time to worry about making that much of a fashion statement at work.”
“Especially in a profession where the frontier of fashion is starched jeans on casual Fridays with ironed creases so sharp you could cut your lip on them.”
“I should mess with everybody by wearing white shoes when I argue the summary judgment motion.”
“Which motion?” Aretha said.
Maybe the feeling crawling up her chest into her throat was suspicion. She’d turned in a fifty-fucking-page summary judgment motion that it took her two weeks to write and circulate to the partners and edit and polish, and Mum was not fucking going to tell her that she was going to argue that motion. Her motion. Nope. She crossed her arms and sat back, waiting for Mum to tell her all about the other fucking case she was going to do it for. The other case where Mum wrote the brief. They had a rule at work. If you wrote the brief it was your motion, unless a partner took it from you because, say, that partner wanted to notch a Supreme Court argument under his belt. But not everyday federal district court motions like the Sandy one. These were not stolen from the Arethas of the world.
“The Sandy one.”
“Congratulations,” Aretha said, taking care to avoid clenching her teeth. Her throat moved to full-blown hot from merely irritated. She put down her fork and went for her glass of water, which didn’t solve the problem. “Have you ever argued a motion before?”
“No,” Mum said brightly. “It’ll be my first time.”
“That’s so cool,” Aretha said.
She choked.
“Aretha?” Mum said.
Aretha couldn’t breathe. This was what happened when you dared to trust other lawyers enough to go to lunch with them instead of doing the right thing and never leaving your office or speaking to anyone else unless you had to. Who the fuck knew losing at work could literally close your throat? She clutched at hers with both hands.
“I’m going to call 911,” Mum said.
Aretha slumped over in her chair. Fuck Mum, the bitch who could even win at getting an ambulance to show up. And the fuckers who stared at her with their bugged-out eyes, as if not being able to breathe was an act that should be watched with total concentration, like a solar eclipse. One minute they were all gaping at her in a big semicircle, and the next minute she wasn’t looking at anything at all.
•
SHE WOKE UP IN A BALL OF LIGHT WITH A NEEDLE IN HER LEFT arm, facing a doctor who held a clipboard. She tried to get up, but the needle held fast.
“Thanks for everything,” she said, “but I have to go back to work.”
“Don’t worry,” the doctor said, “they know you’re here.”
She looked deep into the doctor’s long white beard, angry that Rip Van Winkle didn’t seem to get it.
“I think you think that’s a good thing,” Aretha said.
“Everyone understands an allergic reaction, Aretha.”
“Right. So what the hell am I allergic to?”
“Bee pollen.”
“Fuck.”
“Just don’t eat it. It’s pretty easy to avoid. Unfortunately, you’re also allergic to bees.”
“So I can’t eat them either.”
“Unfortunately not.”
“I’m going to have to cancel tonight’s dinner plans.”
“We want to keep you here overnight for monitoring, anyway.”
“No,” Aretha said, picturing the twelve hours of work that would go on without her, alongside the rumors. “Aretha had some kind of breakdown,” the senior associates who didn’t like her would whisper to the juniors. “Some people just can’t handle the workload,” the partners would say to one another in the backs of their hired cars. Here she comes, a fired weakling unable to gut through swelling and a blackout at the office. Complete with unfixed hair and sweatpants she’d never change again, with nothing else to do but come up with a new name so her student loan company couldn’t find her.
“Yes,” the doctor said. “Sometimes these reactions come back a few hours after we first treat them, and we’d like to keep an eye on you to make sure we can treat you right away if that happens.”
“Fine.”
The doctor left. Aretha picked up her un-needled arm to test it, and her legs. She felt a little light-headed. Not affected enough that she couldn’t go back to work, just a hair off. Without the doctor, the only sound left in the room was the low rumble of medical equipment. Where the fuck was her phone? She scanned the room until she spotted her work purse sitting on a chair near the door in all its acceptably office tan, flat-bottomed glory, way out of reach.
Aretha had spent almost all of the last six years looking at her phone, a legal document, or someone else, and had no idea what to do with herself if all three were taken away. What did people do who were stuck in hospitals longer than overnight? How many hours a day could a person spend trying to entertain themselves by listening to machines beep? She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, trying to put herself to sleep, but she felt the restlessness that meant she’d probably spent too many hours passed out already. The doctor had shut her door on his way out, which meant she couldn’t ride this out by listening to other people’s conversations, and no one had the decency to discuss something salacious while glued to the area right outside her door. Not that she had any idea what salacious hospital conversation might be. Hot Band-Aid tips?
When Aaron walked in after she didn’t know how many hours of boredom, she teared up out of relief. He leaned in to hug her around her IV. Under his weight she felt real again.
“What happened?” he said.
She took him from the finished brief to the bee-pollen meat loaf, to Mum’s assignment, to the summary judgment argument in no time at all, the words falling out of her mouth like drool.
“First things first,” he said. “You need to give Mum a nickname that makes you feel at least kinda better.”
“That’s what you think is first?”
“C’mon, hun. You’ve had a day. Are we callin’ her Mute, or Silent, or Dandelion, or what?”
Aretha laughed.
“Can we do all three? I’ll hold up cue cards and you’ll flip through them? I’ll draw a mute, silent dandelion? I’ll carve one out of clay and stick needles in it,” she said.
“I’ll go huntin’ for clay. You should probably find another job.”
“No.”
“They took your motion.”
Aretha groaned. For some reason she’d imagined that solving boredom by dropping off guns with James would knock out the key issue in her life. But now she pictured the future, all covered in shit. The recruiters who never had leads on anything any self-respecting lawyer would want to do. The interviewing partners who hadn’t seen sunlight in seven years and carefully scrutinized everything she said to make sure she’d never heard of hobbies or having free time. The smaller firms, excited enough by the prestige of her law degree to offer her the scintillating possibility of doing the same property disputes and divorces over and over again. Was there a company someplace, or better yet, one of those government jobs where she could work nine to five, make a decent amount of cash, and not kill herself mimicking the sheer effort it seemed to take to practice law at her current firm? Never mind that the fucking president had put a hiring freeze on government lawyers. There had to be someone down there with the feds who could hire her under the table.
Who she envied the most were the born-rich types who could just take a year off to “figure it out” and end up in Bali teaching yoga part-time while painting homemade mugs and taking the exact same picture of the ocean every day. She would love to kill a year doing the kind of shit people looked cool doing on Instagram, without bothering to put any of it on online. Instead she was going to hope she had a year left at her firm to take bad recruiter phone calls, sock away as much of her salary as humanly possible, and be thankful she didn’t have to pay rent.
“You wanna come work for us?” Aaron said.
“Maybe,” Aretha said. “What would you have me do?”
“How do you feel about spendin’ your days up to your waist in fresh coffee beans?”
“I don’t know.”
“Sleep on it.”
“The second I make it home, I’ll stick a bag of beans under my side and pass out.”
“That’s my girl. Well, hun,” he said, “I have to make it back to put the beans in for the evening roast, and do a round of deliveries, but you’re goin’ to be fine.”
They kissed.
“Could you hand me my bag?” she said.
He did, and left.
She took a few minutes to think about bathing in coffee beans. Surrounding herself in that smell would be sublime. Right up until she got sick of being alone with the roaster. She’d waved hi to Aaron sitting alone next to the roaster too many times. On top of that, she’d never wanted to fuck a single one of her bosses, ever. It was a form of losing. A concession that they held the cards by fucking you and you’d never replace them because they only saw you as someone they fucked. But really, roasting coffee beans would feel like taking the L. No one to compete with, nothing to win. Aaron went to South America and Africa and Asia to try to outtravel his competitors in the battle for the best-tasting coffee, but on the roasting side she’d mostly be battling her own boredom, sitting in that room, smelling coffee beans heat up.
She dug out her phone. A flurry of texts, mostly from Aaron, and forty fresh emails. She ignored the juniors, scanned the mid-levels for the traces of glee that she expected, and found them in not-so-cleverly-camouflaged expressions of support, and memorized every word of the head partner’s “srry to hear this.. be well soom,” the typos expected in an email that didn’t have to go to someone outside the office and could therefore be dashed off in his trademark “I have thirty seconds tops to deal with you” way. They didn’t give a shit. No one she worked with gave enough of a shit that she’d had an allergic reaction bad enough to send her to a hospital to send an email or a text that sounded like they cared that she hadn’t died. Mum had sent four worried, long-winded emails, as was her style, but Aretha had no time for those who won at work. If she ever had lunch with Mum again, it would be because Mum held a gun to her head. James had sent her two puzzling texts. “Where are you,” read the first one, as if they were tight enough for him to be updated on her every location, and “We’ll talk soon,” which, since they didn’t really talk, made her cold enough to futilely hunt for a blanket warmer than the millimeter-thick one that lay on top of her legs.
