Three Wednesdays in the Void

A Tale of the Great Resignation

The lobby is different now, but less different than it will become. A thin blockade of plexiglass separates Kev from the security guard, who nods at him as he passes by, but there are no signs yet, no sanitizing stations, no floor markers. The plexiglass jumps out at Kev now but within a few days it will have become normal, as unremarkable as the doorknobs.

Arriving on the tenth floor, Kev chooses to exit the elevator. He finds the office lit only by sunlight — not the morning sunlight he’s used to, beaming in from the easterly windows, but the more indirect sunlight of early afternoon. Today is Wednesday. The first Wednesday of the coronavirus. How many more will follow, Kev has no idea. Nobody does, really.

While the daily routines of innumerable workers have lurched to a halt, mail delivery remains an essential service. It will continue to arrive here at Versafix’s corporate headquarters every day even if no one is there to receive it, and must continue to depart every day even if no one is there to send it. For this and this alone Kev has chosen to remain physically present in the desiccated husk of this building.

He chooses this in part because he worked in retail until not that long ago. Compared to the situation facing his friends who remain in the service sector — an industry that still requires masses of bodies coming together in enclosed spaces — Kev still having an office to occupy strikes him as nothing less than a blessing. A delicate state of affairs, not to be interrogated too closely lest it slip away.

But even before the virus, Kev had long since traded any higher career ambitions for the simplicity and stability of a nine-to-five — any nine-to-five. He chose this because he knows a good thing when he sees it.

Only when Kev reaches his office does it occur to him to turn on any of the ceiling lights, and only then because it’s what he normally does. His “office” is technically the floor’s mail room, and while he does have his own desk the room is primarily occupied by two large copiers and a long countertop for sorting mail and print jobs. The rest of Versafix’s office looks, well, like an office. Feel free to choose your own mental image; the vibe is not pertinent to this story.

Resting his jacket on the back of his chair, Kev then chooses to gather the three days’ worth of inbound mail already waiting for him and begin methodically opening it and scanning each item to its recipient’s email. By the time he’s done, most of the day’s outgoing mail — lessened by the virus but not eliminated — will have arrived in his own inbox and he’ll perform largely the same process in reverse.

This job has had if anything a palliative effect: never too challenging, comfortable enough to dull the sting of any minor or nonspecific ailments.

The rest of his duties, most of which he can and has been doing remotely, need not be explained in detail except to say that they’re unchanged from a week ago. Kev started at Versafix a couple years ago, and it hadn’t been long before he’d found himself easing into the job like a pair of broken-in slippers. He now spends most of his day in something like a meditative state, into which even this new hiccup of scanning the mail will soon be absorbed — no longer requiring active consideration.

Which would be all well and good if only his active consideration had moved on to anything else. Though he doesn’t recognize it yet, his time in retail had been a gift in one sense: he was dissatisfied with it, and that dissatisfaction had become more and more preoccupying until he’d finally done something about it. This job, by contrast, has had if anything a palliative effect: never too challenging, comfortable enough to dull the sting of any minor or nonspecific ailments.

An hour or so later, Kev is in the restroom running a toner smudge near the waist of his dress shirt under cold tap water when he hears the elevator ding. Anticipating a coworker, Kev chooses to wander down the hall, paper towel squeezed against the wet spot, to find Carol, the woman who comes once a week to water Versafix’s plants. One more person coerced by happenstance into maintaining the illusion of a functioning workforce.

Carol is roughly double Kev’s twenty-six years and roughly half his size, but their demeanors are comparably restrained and taciturn. She and Kev have said perhaps nine words to each other up to this point; theirs is a relationship of polite nods and excuse-mes. Now, though, she lights up as she sees Kev round the corner, as if bumping into an old friend at the gas station.

“Well look at that, a familiar face!” she exclaims.

“Yeah, I’m still here to do the mail,” Kev chooses to explain, as if she’d been accusing him of something. “Is no one else in the building?”

“Not at any of my other stops, no.” Carol inclines her head to the damp handful of shirt in Kev’s right hand. “Still keeping up the dress code, huh?”

Kev looks down self-consciously at his outfit, re-tucking the white shirt where he’d pulled it out. The smudge has loosened its grip on the fabric but will require more concerted efforts later on. “Hm, I guess so. It was just muscle memory, really.”

“Well, it’s very professional of you,” Carol says with a wry smile as she passes by him on her way into the kitchen to fill her watering can. It feels vaguely like a criticism but Kev chooses to leave the interaction at that and return to work.

A short time later, Kev is standing at a copier when Carol stops outside his door. He’s got a pile of paper in his hands and is choosing to bend it repeatedly forward and backward, pinching it at alternating ends — a technique he came up with to uniformly fan out the pages so they don’t stick together when run through the copier. One more topographical feature of the meditative state, like his dress shirt, recognizable mostly by its recurrence.

Carol’s bag of botanical paraphernalia is over her shoulder, meaning she must be done with her rounds and on her way out. Kev looks up and smiles a greeting but can’t think of anything to say, so they stand there in amicable silence for a moment. “Do you like music?” Carol finally asks.

Thrown by the non sequitur, Kev takes an extra moment to shift his gear out of the meditative state. “Sure. I mean, doesn’t everyone?”

“I was just thinking that if I had this whole office to myself I would put some music on.”

Kev chooses to jog the papers back into a neat pile, then chooses to load them into the feeder. He looks up and around, as if seeing his surroundings for the first time. “That’s a good idea. I think I have some old playlists I can dig out.”

“Great! You might as well liven this place up a bit,” Carol says as she turns to go. “See you next week.”

A week later, Carol boards the elevator with her gear and brushes a sheen of chilly March rain off her Plantastic-branded windbreaker. This building always puts her a little on edge because her first stop, Percy Smith, is the law firm she used to work for. Debra the receptionist, stationed inescapably at the entrance like a riddle-dispensing troll, always insists on filling her in on the office gossip, never mind that Carol’s been gone almost a decade and half of it involves people she doesn’t know. Carol is perfectly capable of pleasant small talk, but one of her favorite things about this job is not knowing anyone well enough to get dragged into inane conversations. Debra seems not to have received that memo, but she’s a client now and it wouldn’t do to get snippy with her.

Just as they did last week, the elevator doors slide open on the seventeenth floor to reveal Debra’s empty desk, and just as she did last week Carol breathes a sigh of relief. The firm, like most of the building, remains devoid of staff, and Carol has resolved to enjoy every moment of it. She deposits her backpack in the kitchen, fills her watering can, and does her rounds in blissful silence.

A few months back the firm had temporarily dispensed with Plantastic’s services in an ill-fated attempt to care for the plants themselves; a couple of the ferns are still looking a little weak, bent and lightly browned in a way that a layman could interpret as either too much water or not enough water. Carol takes a moment to check their soil and make adjustments as needed. Attorneys can be attorneys anywhere, Carol muses, but it gives her a certain satisfaction that they’d learned Plantastic’s presence wasn’t quite so superfluous. Pity that the plants had to suffer for it.

Three stops later Carol arrives at Versafix on the tenth floor. As the elevator opens she hears the faint sound of music wafting down the hall, catching her momentarily by surprise until she remembers running into Kevin, the mail guy, here last week. Playing music had been her suggestion, come to think of it.

Kevin’s office is near the end of her route, and only as she approaches it does she identify the gentle melody of a Belle and Sebastian song coming from inside. She pokes her head into his open doorway.

“Still alive, I see.”

Kevin turns toward her. Once again he’s standing at a copier, slicing open a large envelope, with a handful of opened letters in front of him, piled neatly at alternating ninety-degree angles. Like last week, he’s wearing brown slacks and a white, tucked-in dress shirt, like a soldier at a remote outpost who hasn’t been informed that the war is over.

“Ha, yeah,” Kevin mumbles. He tilts his head back to indicate the computer on the desktop behind him. “The music helps keep the existential dread away, so good call on that.” She figures he’s probably joking.

Carol is struck now by how clean and orderly Kevin’s office is compared to the mail room at Percy. Other than the bin of mail he’s currently working his way through there are very few documents or paper products lying around. What is visible is in uniform stacks, arranged with clear intention just like the letters. Every drawer is labeled, every surface wiped clean — though the latter may be thanks to the open canister of sanitizing wipes on the counter, a sight growing more and more common these days.

On the computer, Belle and Sebastian have concluded their business and been hurried offstage in favor of Death Cab for Cutie. “Didn’t you say this was an old playlist?” Carol asks. “You can do better, I think.” She pulls out her phone and asks Kevin for his email address, then sends him a playlist of mid-nineties hip hop, the stuff she was listening to at his age. Kevin agrees to look it over but sounds noncommittal.

While he’s talking Kevin begins that strange paper-bending thing she’d seen him doing last week. Back and forth, back and forth, each repetition widening the pile. “Are you actually doing something there,” she finally asks, “or is it like a meditative thing?”

Kevin chuckles. “It’s to keep the staple holes from sticking together. But now that you mention it, it is sort of meditative. Most of this job is like that, I can do it by muscle memory and just sort of zone out. Even the scanning and stuff becomes an unconscious routine eventually. Like an assembly line.”

That rings a bell to Carol. “You said that last week, you know. ‘Muscle memory’. About your dress clothes.” She pointedly glances down. “That you’re still wearing.”

Kev shrugs sheepishly. “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”

“But even now?” Carol spreads her arms, silently underlining the empty office surrounding them. “The last week hasn’t shaken up your routine at all?”

“Well, the schedule is different but I’m still in the same place. Mentally, I mean.”

“I don’t see why you would be,” Carol pushes back. “You should stop and look around once in a while. Change in our routines creates open space in our lives. Voids of time and attention that haven’t been defined yet. I think this virus will be an opportunity for us to look at things with fresh eyes, and maybe to fill those voids with something better.”

“Put it this way: ‘work’ is a state of mind, something a group of people gets together and agrees on.”

“What about you, then?” Kevin asks, folding his arms, forgetting for a moment the papers waiting to be retrieved from the copier. “Your routine doesn’t seem very changed to me.”

“Well, it’s not, but I would say that I made that change years ago. I used to be an attorney — upstairs, actually.”

Kevin’s eyebrows go up. “At Percy Smith? No shit.”

“Yep. For almost twenty years. Plantastic was me choosing to…prioritize a different facet of myself. One that came with more breathing room.”

“What do you mean, a different facet?”

“Put it this way: ‘work’ is a state of mind, something a group of people gets together and agrees on. When you’re with family, or friends, you’re still the same person, but you’re adopting a different state of mind. Foregrounding a different part of yourself. The Percy version of me was starting to crowd out the other versions, and it got to a point where I had to either embrace that completely or let it go, so I let it go.” The full explanation is a longer story, one Carol doesn’t have time for right now, so she shifts her focus back to Kevin. “But look at the situation you’re in here: no one’s around to enforce a certain personality on you — potentially not for months to come — and it sounds like the work itself already gives you the kind of freedom I was missing.”

“I would say so. So why are you assuming I’d want to leave?”

“I’m not telling you to leave!” Carol replies with an involuntary laugh, then makes an effort to dial back her energy a bit. Kevin is his own man, she reminds herself, with his own interests and priorities. Anyway, it’s about time for her to move on. “It’s just…very easy to lose yourself in the version of you that you think the office wants and forget who else you are. Freedom isn’t really freedom if you don’t take advantage of it.”

“At the very least,” Carol says as she turns to go, “try giving the dress shirts a rest.”

“There was this guy. Little over a decade ago now.”

It’s another week later, and Carol is lounging with Kev in Versafix’s kitchen — a narrow, windowless room with three tables on one side and the usual appliances and fixtures on the other. The coffee maker is silently warming its first fresh pot in more than two weeks; Kev wasn’t sure if Carol drank coffee but he’d chosen to make some just in case.

Their chats have by now become an expected part of his Wednesday routine, and despite a little testiness last week Kev had found himself looking sufficiently forward to it that he’d chosen to pick up his usual working pace, leaving some time to just relax and talk for a bit. Judging by her early arrival on the tenth floor Carol had done the same. After carefully splitting a bag of microwave popcorn into separate paper bowls they’d retreated to opposite tables in observance of the hot new trend of social distancing.

Carol munches a few pieces of popcorn and continues her story. It’s a small enough room that her voice carries fine without making a special effort to speak up. “He went to three different bars over the course of an evening — when one turned him away he’d just show up somewhere else. On his way home he crashes his car into someone’s house. Sends them to the hospital. He goes to jail. Then from jail, he sues the bars for overserving him.”

Kev almost spits out his coffee. “You’re kidding.”

“Not one bit.” Carol sits up and flicks an index finger in the air. “Sued the city too. There’d been road work going on nearby so obviously it was their fault.”

“And you represented him?”

“Oh no, god, no. It’s a defense firm, we represented one of the bars.”

“That’s wild,” Kev says for want of a more precise adjective.

The playlist changes over and Damon Albarn moans down to them from a speaker hidden somewhere in the ceiling; last Friday Kev had renounced his tiny computer speakers and begun running the music directly into Versafix’s intercom system.

“Thing is, it’s a plaintiff attorney’s job to cast as wide a net as possible, which means filing a lot of really weak suits. All it takes is one defendant either culpable enough, or with deep enough pockets, that they’d rather just pay you to go away than spend years litigating — and then, ideally, that pays for the whole process. What I mostly spent my time doing in those days was research — digging through incidents like that to find as much mitigating detail as possible, so the settlements would be as low as possible.”

“People spend their whole lives walking back and forth in these ruts that they dig for themselves. They stop seeing all the parts of themselves that don’t fit down there with them.”

“But what made you leave? It sounds like you were at least on the more reasonable side of that.”

Kev had spent the past week mulling over his and Carol’s last conversation and this was the thing he was still the most curious about — how exactly she’d gone from an attorney to a plant lady. Her clear contentment at that transition just made it more interesting.

“No, it wasn’t a moral issue really. And I believe in the process, despite everything. I was paid well and living comfortably.” Carol massages her forehead, as if feeling the phantom pain of a long-ago migraine. It was all just so…stupid. I was getting to be middle-aged, and I realized I was spending all my time on something I just didn’t care about. People spend their whole lives walking back and forth in these ruts that they dig for themselves — maybe they’re happy, maybe not, but they stop seeing everything outside the rut. They stop seeing all the parts of themselves that don’t fit down there with them.”

“Like you said before about choosing different facets.”

“Right. Those ruts don’t just get assigned to us, they’re formed by the choices we make. Even if we don’t think of them as choices. That’s what the firm taught me. Say someone asks you a question — just, like, ‘how are you feeling today?’ — there are what, a dozen possible responses to that? A hundred? We think of the truth as this one pure thing in a field of lies, but most of the time it’s more complex than that. You might respond three different ways to three different people, but that doesn’t mean those answers aren’t equally honest, or at least defensible.”

Carol leans forward, begins gesturing with her empty paper bowl for emphasis. Kev is listening with his entire body now.

“Now imagine one of those answers potentially gets you a bunch of money — how can I, having asked the question, know you really mean it? How can you even be sure you really mean it, when your incentives are that skewed? That’s what most civil litigation is: taking a whole galaxy of truths, put forth by both sides, and winnowing it down into one everybody can live with.”

“Like collapsing a superposition,” Kev says at last.

Carol is thrown for a second. “I don’t — oh wait, that’s a physics thing, right?”

“Yeah, like a quantum particle. Something so small that we have to think of it as existing in a range of potential locations — that range is a superposition. None of them is incorrect exactly, it’s just not the whole story. And observing a quantum particle — literally just looking at it — collapses the superposition into one thing. Like choosing to speak a particular truth collapses all those possible answers.”

“That’s a cool way to put it,” Carol says, sitting up. She’ll probably have to hit the road soon. “You certainly seem like a smart guy, Kevin. You may be comfortable here but I’m sure you could be doing bigger things if you chose to.”

It’s nothing Kev hasn’t been told before. Hasn’t told himself before. He sees now that he’s been making choices all along. Choosing to run on autopilot. Choosing not to push against the boundaries of his life. He looks down at the slim-fitting sweater he’d put on this morning, purely to stave off another ribbing from Carol over his dress clothes. The truth was, no one at Versafix had ever insisted he keep wearing them, it just hadn’t occurred to him to stop.

But doing something without thinking about it doesn’t mean it’s not a choice.

“You’re probably right,” Kev says. “The funny thing is, the jobs I’ve really hated were the ones where I was too busy or stressed out to even think about how stressed out I was. Attention is a resource, I think, and what I like about this job is that it frees up most of my attention for other things — but I’ve been letting that go to waste, maybe. Taking it for granted.”

Carol stands up and walks her popcorn bowl to the trash can, then retrieves her things. “You know what helps me think? New music,” she says with a wink. “Like I said, change your routine up and you never know what might shake loose.”

Kev smirks, having expected this to come up again. “Oh, I listened to your playlist on Friday. Oldies aren’t really my thing though.”

“Oldies?!” Carol squeals. “The nineteen nineties are not oldies music. The word you’re looking for is classics.”

Kev raises his hands in surrender. “Hey, if you say so — I won’t argue with my elders.”

“You bastard,” Carol says with a grin. She lifts a stray kernel of popcorn off the table she’d been sitting at and flicks it at Kev’s head. “See you next week, Kev.”

“See you,” Kev replies, pulling out his phone. He sits motionless for a few seconds, waiting for the ding of the elevator to signal Carol’s departure, then he selects his music app and chooses a new playlist. As the staccato brass opening of an Outkast song emerges from the ceiling, Kev chooses to pull up Google, and chooses again to tap out a quick three-word search: “online mba programs”. Leaving the tab open for later, he stands up, pockets the phone, and gets back to work.

Next: Whew, this one was a lot of work. I hope you found it interesting. Now that I’ve managed a piece of actual fiction I’m going to loop back around to the essay format for next time.

One thing that surprised me about this story was how the theme of identity, of being different people in different contexts, followed me here from my last piece without my intending it to. A big part of keeping up the pace of my writing here is striking while the iron is hot, so to speak — writing about the things that are already on my mind rather than forcing myself into a whole new direction every time.

As such, for my next piece I’m going to dig more deeply into that “galaxy of truths” idea Carol mentioned — facts are facts, but what does real truth actually look like? Is it knowable? What role does it play in the era of social media, where everyone’s “following” list grants them their own bespoke reality? Something like that. See you soon!