The Deep Whatsis. Peter Mattei
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the weather had little to do with it, except to be able say to myself, when the question arose in my head, “Why are you taking the subway, Eric?” I would have a ready answer and the answer was the niceness of the weather.
Two blocks into my eleven-block walk to the L train I realize why it is that I don’t do this very often. A virtual stream of young, fashionable white people, what the savants in our media planning department would refer to demographically as the Creative Class, are rushing toward the train. I don’t hate these professionals, since that would be disingenuous, after all I am one of them. I don’t really have any opinion about them one way or the other. They are a kind of temporary migration, they are the product of certain economic conditions. About halfway to the subway I am feeling exhausted by the tide I am swimming in and so I need a rest; the night before I had ingested eight or nine saffron-infused apple-ginger absinthe, cognac, and vodka cocktails, the name of which I can’t remember, possibly the Caribou Whisperer or the Ragamuffin or the Merkin Sniffer and I’m still feeling somewhat ill. I pop into a coffee place called Silhouette that is frequented for some reason by mixed-race French people from Paris who are living in Brooklyn because the dollar makes it cheap for them, and I order a scat coffee for twenty-six dollars and a bowl of fresh berries for twelve dollars. I’m not in the least bit hungry but somehow the idea of fresh berries seems like a good one, like a smart idea, a smart way to start my morning, even though my morning began hours ago at some sleepless and unremarked moment between night and day. The scat coffee comes first and I take a sip and wonder if it isn’t just burnt Maxwell House. Then a bowl of fresh, locally grown berries arrives and the moment I see them I know I will not be eating them. I sit and look out the window at the pretty little fishies darting up and down the stream on their way to their exciting jobs in the worlds of fashion and art and reality TV and suddenly I don’t feel well. What is it? I ask myself, and I respond by saying “I don’t know, Eric,” out loud. “I don’t know what it is.”
And I don’t. I’ve been diagnosed before with certain somewhat common illnesses, most of them mental in nature, but that doesn’t explain why I haven’t eaten in almost three days, since the time I met her.
On the sidewalk outside a young woman in a Ted Lapidus jacket and carrying a Stella by Stella McCartney by Stella M for Talentless by Rich Daddy bag is tying her shih tzu to someone’s bicycle, and now the owner of the bike is coming up to her and saying, like, um, that’s my bike? And this woman is saying she’s just getting a Clover-press coffee to go and she’ll be back in four-point-two minutes, she promises, and suddenly I’m having a full-blown panic attack: the desire to jump in front of a bus is so strong in me I grip my chair and sit there, rigid, and hope it stops. This has happened before so I know what to do, only I don’t have any Klonopin in my Crumpler shoulder bag. After about an hour I decide I’m not going into work today. After another hour I realize I’m not doing anything today. I am aware that I am having one of my episodes, since as I’ve said I’ve had them before, and they always do pass eventually, although this one seems a bit more persistent than the others. My phone has been ringing and buzzing from time to time because I have some important meetings, in fact I was supposed to meet with HR Lady and let two more copywriters go today, and no one knows what has happened to me, I can just imagine the concern growing with each voice mail. But I have the sudden and I realize nonsensical thought that if I answer my mobile device or even check my messages something terrible will happen to me, that all manner of doom will be unleashed upon me, from financial ruin to torture and death, which I am fully aware is silly. There is also the text from Intern that I would rather not see, even to delete it, which may be contributing to my unalterable inability to deal with my unreality.
At this point the patchouli-scented half-Senegalese woman from behind the counter comes up and asks if there’s anything wrong with my fresh berries because I haven’t touched them and I say, no, they’re absolutely delicious, I just changed my mind, I’m so sorry. I almost add that if I were to leave this place I may run headlong into a truck just to stop it from going on any longer. What from going on any longer? I don’t know, all of it. I want to laugh, and for a brief moment I do. Some people look at me and then they ignore me. After another half hour the episode subsides and I am able to get up and walk back home and play Halo for a few hours. Then I go to sleep without checking my e-mail or returning any calls. It occurs to me that maybe I’m a) experiencing some unexplained resistance to sacking the two copywriters I was supposed to have sacked today, and b) I am semi-falling in love with her, the girl whose name I don’t know, or care to know, which is impossible, but I can deal with all that when the fires die down.
1.6
After a good many hours of lying there trying to sleep I finally give up at 5:45 AM and instead of going to the gym I decide to check my mail and deal with what inevitably will be the crisis of my not showing up yesterday. I am surprised to discover only two e-mails from my assistant, the first one inquiring about my travel plans for an upcoming commercial shoot in Los Angeles, California, and the second one, from about midmorning, inquiring as to my whereabouts.
“(HR Lady) was just wondering where she might locate you, Eric, she left a couple of messages, will reschedule a check-in for this afternoon?” was my assistant’s query. I checked my voice mail, and there were also two, both from HR Lady herself as had been expected, both polite and professional, and both employing the verbs “touch base” and “loop back.” What this means is it is not even 6 AM and I’ve already decided not to go to the gym, a plan I could easily change, as I really don’t have to be into the office for four hours, but I find it hard to rearrange a plan once it has been commenced, and besides, yesterday’s panic attack had occurred not long after going to the gym, so maybe it is a good idea to not repeat myself. The only problem is what to do with the intervening hours before I am due in the office. I could go online and search for other gyms in the area, I could just join a new one, but that seems a bit excessive. Time passes. I look out the east-facing windows at the sky, pinkish like plated salmon croquettes, and blueish like, I suppose, deskulled brains, cold enough to see steamy smoke, or was it smoky steam, rising from the oil furnaces in the three flats that lie between me and the bridge. I call and order delivery of two almond-soymilk lattes from Marlow & Sons, and then I call Silhouette, the Franco-Senegalese-Brazilian café, and try to order a bowl of fresh berries again but they don’t deliver. I hang up and look around my flat, thinking about getting some furniture one of these days and then I wait for my beverages. Waiting, I realize, isn’t the time between things, it’s the thing itself.
When the lattes finally do arrive ($14) they are less than piping hot and I refuse them, though I do pay for them and tip the guy twenty dollars for his trouble (total $34). Three and a half hours later, at the Tate headquarters in midtown, HR Lady is waiting for me in the holding area outside my office. Her name is Helen, she is not married, reputed to have a longtime boyfriend who she never speaks about, lives alone, and enjoys foreign films and getting outside the city on weekends, according to her Match.com profile, which I looked up once. She is feigning concern about my health, wondering if I am alright.
“Are you alright?” she asks, adding, without meaning it in the slightest, “We were worried about you!”
“I haven’t had my Starbucks if that’s what you mean.” HR Lady uses “Starbucks” to mean coffee so around her I do too.
“I’m talking about yesterday!”
“Didn’t you get my text?” I lied.
“No,” she lied, pretending she didn’t know I was lying.
“Oh they musn’t have gone through. Fucking AT&T!” I thought it would be interesting to push the lie a little further and see if HR Lady would go along with it to the bitter end. “I was surprised I didn’t hear from you so I sent the same text again and I left you a voice mail? I think I left you two voice mails, in fact, I’m so sorry you didn’t get them, shit, Jesus, I don’t know what’s going on around here anymore.”
“Me neither,” she says, wondering what I was up to. “I didn’t get any of them. Did you send them from your iPhone or your BlackBerry? It’s T-Mobile, right?” For a moment I thought she meant it, that she