Aftermath

I want to tell you about this, but I have no idea where where to begin. And that says a lot about me right there. I don’t know what I’m going to do one minute to the next. And now I have a lot of minutes to do one thing or another with, what with having been laid off just this last Monday. No, let me correct that — it was the Monday before last.

I suppose I could mention the company I worked for and how long I was there. Seventeen point seven five years. That’s the sort of fact I wouldn’t have known two hours before they called me in. So there was Jim, slumped at his desk, shoulders down, in his little office on the second floor. Beside him, on a chair pulled up to the side of his desk, sat a squat, round-faced girl from human resources with a folder of papers open in front of her. Jim had this look on his mug, halfway between guilty-as-hell and woe-is-me, as if the bad news was for him instead of me. It was right there on one of the papers. Seventeen point seven five. It seemed neither a large nor a small number. It seemed, oddly enough, a sad number.

As I said, it wasn’t a fact that I could have conjured up on my own. When it comes to the chronology of my own life, I’m no less vague about what happened before than about what happens next. Something happened; something will happen. Events come toward me out of one cloud, cross the threshold of the present moment, and fade quickly into the mists of another.

I had jobs. The last one for seventeen point seven five years, apparently. The one prior for something less than that. I could guess that number, but my guess would not pass for actual information, so I won’t bother. I suppose there’ll be more jobs. I’ll apply to some number of them, and I’ll be offered some small fraction of them, and I’ll take one of those. I’ll have to.

They gave me severance. The HR girl said it was based on the number of years of service. She said something about minus something or other, but I was distracted watching Jim look at everything in his tiny office except me. So it wasn’t for the whole seventeen point seven. And even if it was, it wouldn’t make much difference. I’m glad they counted any of it. At least someone was counting.

So anyway, they’re giving it to me in one lump sum. I’ve more or less figured out how much rent that will cover. Not quite a year. I guess I could move to a cheaper place. Maybe I will. But I just moved here, and it’ll take some time for me to push past my own inertia for yet another move like that. Of course, rent is not my only expense. I have some savings. My car needs some repair. I suppose I need a car. I can get unemployment after the severance period runs out. How long will all that last me? I could do the math. But it’s just this sort of math that exhausts me. So figure something between one and two years. Let’s say one point seven five.

My plan, if it could be called such, is simply to spend as little as possible. I don’t want another job any more than I wanted my last one. I appreciated that job, of course—I’m aware the world is full of people far less fortunate, countless even to those inclined to count such things. And though the work itself gave me no sense of satisfaction or accomplishment, I did value the security it offered. Only now does it occur to me how false that sense of security really was.

I was going to say “yanked out from under me.” That would be hyperbole. And it would reveal a petulance at these turns of events that I’d rather not have, much less exhibit. I shouldn’t complain, but alas, now and then I do.

I’m used to it. I’ve come to expect that whatever I get used to will eventually go missing.

Nothing has been yanked out from under me. Was I surprised? Only a little. If I’m surprised at any given juncture, it’s only another indication that I haven’t quite been paying attention. I could do the math more often, and with more care. That would make nearly everything that happens more or less predictable—perhaps not to the minute or the hour, or even the day, but predictable enough. The carpet isn’t yanked; instead there’s a knock on the door. Someone says, “I’ve got to roll this carpet up. They sent you a memo about it a while back.” And most likely I did get the memo. I even saved it, along with countless others. I probably stuffed it into the back of some drawer, like I always do with certain memories I’m not likely to recall again.

So then the carpet is rolled up. And in no great hurry. People who do that sort of thing know how to stretch a simple task to its fullest plausible length—just as I intend to stretch my severance for as long as it can be credibly made to last.

I do wonder how long it took Jim to decide to let me go. Jim counts. He always has. His habit of pretending otherwise these last few years was pretty transparent, at least in retrospect. The irony is that my own job consisted of nothing but counting. Let’s say it was beans I counted. My difficulty lay in remembering why the beans mattered. They were only beans to me, and that made the work oddly slippery. One bean is just like the last, no? What’s that word… fungible. So I dropped the ball now and then. I dropped beans. Or added in ones that had no business being there. And I did so more and more often, if anyone else cared to keep track.

It was Jim’s job to keep track of how many times I lost count. And apparently he did, despite assuring me at each of our monthly meetings that everything was fine. Now and then he’d mention an incident, but only in passing, as though he merely wanted confirmation that I’d corrected the record and fixed the account. So perhaps, when they told him he had to lose x number of people, you could have counted the number of seconds—on point seven five fingers—it took him to place one of those x’s beside my name.

So now I no longer count.