I - When Jesse Lost Everything (Starting With His Car Keys)
A Story for Anxious Times
Chapter 1
Jesse was nervous. He had found out he may lose his job the week his father had found out he’d be in the hospital at least a few more days. His hip replacement had resulted in an infection, and his dad, already weak from decades of being a dad and concurrent decades of work in a warehouse, was not looking good.
Could he go to the hospital today, like he’d planned? The plan, so-named because the agent of its construction, one Jesse Henderson, a meticulous and conscientious taxpayer and 5-minutes-early-arriver, was a planner, had been simple. He would not take a lunch (he almost always went to the Mexican place 0.8 miles away, thanks Google Maps), and leave one hour early, putting him at the hospital at 5:00 or 5:15. He could then do the hugging followed by small talk followed by awkward silence (periodically punctured by his dad muttering a complaint about what was on his hospital TV) that some human beings call a “visit,” and still be home by 6:45 to eat dinner with Janie and help Jeremiah do his homework before putting him to bed.
But a problem with the world such as it is for the meticulous and conscientious taxpayers and 5-minutes-early-arrivers like Jesse among us is that we don’t truly control anything. Hence his white face and fluttering heart and clammy left hand rubbing the back of his cold, tired neck as he tried to focus on the Excel spreadsheet in front of him. His company was being bought. And bought companies, by definition, don’t stay the same since, by definition, they had previously been un-bought companies. The Excel file was actually looking blurry, now. Had he ever passed out before? No, never. Not even when his younger brother had hit him in the head with the aluminum baseball bat when he had been 7 or 8 and his brother 5 or 6. Can you faint for the first time as an adult? Well, maybe, but if he passed out who would finish producing the spreadsheet on last quarter’s vendor rebate dollars? So fainting wasn’t an option. Just will that fuzzy triangle to turn back into a 4 and get back to it. But you need both hands to type, so get that left hand back on your keyboard.
Jesse’s cubicle was sparse. He had a picture of Janie and him on their wedding day in a brown frame to the left of his monitor, because Janie had given it to him 2 or 3 anniversaries ago. And he had a picture of Jeremiah in a much smaller black frame that he had bought at Office Depot on a whim while looking for a new day planner February of last year (he always got day planners in February or March because he could get a nicer one for the same amount of money he would have paid for an average one in December). There was a printout of dates for quarterly reports being due thumbtacked to his right cubicle wall (those dates were in blue, matching the fabric of the wall) and a memo with the dates of this year’s auditing thumbtacked to the left wall (red, to the fury of Jesse, who had put it up three days ago and had no blue thumbtacks left). His computer desktop background was a beautiful picture of a natural arch in Utah, but only because that is what it had been when IT had given it to him, replacing his prior larger, older (but immaculately clean) laptop. But what he was seeing now was surreal, because the cubicle was taking on a very tie-dyed look as the colors swirled and blended. He had never had an acid trip, but he imagined that this is what one must be like. He was anxious, tingly, alternately hot and cold, and his cubicle was starting to resemble the images in a kaleidoscope. Did people actually pay for this experience in the 60s?
Focus.
That was his thought now. And Jesse’s, despite his mild manner (the girl at his favorite coffee shop, where he stopped 4.5 times a month, thank you online banking, called him “milquetoast” to her co-worker last week when he’d left with his iced coffee, shot of espresso, and coconut milk), was a will that could very often bend things to its desired shape, most often his own body. But here was his body, sweating a layer of salty dew from both palms and changing temperatures drastically like a small hotel room and refusing to make its sense of sight turn that triangle back into a 4 or that swimming (or drowning) red-brown whirlpool back into the Utah arch it was supposed to be.
Had Jesse been a saner man, he might have reached into his right hand office supply drawer, pulled out one of the free bank pens he stored there because he liked to click them, and written a list like the following:
THINGS I CAN’T CONTROL
1) Whether my dad dies.
2) Whether I lose my job.
3) Whether I lose my job as a part of this company purchase.
4) Whether Jeremiah can ever have normal friendships.
5) Everything else.
This is principally saner because it would have been true, but secondly because writing fears out in a plain, logical fashion has a way of calming the soul. But Jesse was not a saner man, though he was the picture of what 21st century America would call “sane” (or “milquetoast,” to borrow a descriptor from Cara at the coffee shop, who was at that moment smoking weed in her car and listening to an All American Rejects song). So what he did instead was stare at the hallucinogenic mess that had previously been his workstation, dig his fingernails into the back of his neck so hard that he drew blood, and screamed, at the top of his lungs.
Jennie in the next row spilled her soup on her keyboard.
It’s amazing how quickly decisions get made in an office when people scream.
Jesse had been asked into his manager’s office within ten minutes of his vocal cords dancing to the tune his heart had been playing, and been politely told by Dave the polite boss to take the rest of the day off. Told. Even though it had been an audible conversation, Jesse had heard the parentheses around the words, “Why don’t you,” and the underlining of the word “off.” And so within 31 minutes of “Screamgate” he was walking out the door to his Nissan sedan when he realized he did not have his keys.
Now, for the social dynamic philosophers out there, here is an exercise: You have five minutes to complete your response. Ready? Here we go.
You have just been told (“asked”) to leave work for the day because of an out-of-character and painfully public emotional outburst. By now everyone in the office (except for Sherry, who has headphones in and is watching American Idol) is talking to each other in hushed and excited tones about what you did, what it means, and what will happen to you, since of course none of them know what you know about the company being bought, because you were, until 31 minutes ago, a young rising star who was in executive management’s confidence. Everyone thinks you’re having a breakdown, half think your marriage is collapsing, four think you will be fired, and all (except Sherry) are talking about you. You have forgotten your car keys. They are sitting on the right side of your desk, where you always put them. And that set of keys also happens to contain your key fob that allows you entry back into the building.
Okay, do you:
A) Buzz for the receptionist, sheepishly tell her who you are and try to ignore as she waves over Mandy at the coffee machine to listen in to Jesse the nervous breakdown man call in a bomb threat or whatever it is you’re about to do
B) Buzz reception and say you’re Jimmy Johns and hope she doesn’t recognize your voice
C) Wait for someone who was at lunch (and so mercifully wasn’t here during your occupational suicide attempt) to use his key fob, politely explain that you forgot your keys inside as they let you in, and army crawl to your desk so that you don’t have to witness the instantaneous cessation of noise (except for Sherry, who would be laughing at what Randy Jackson just said on her computer screen) as you reenter the Admin cubicle area
You may begin writing your answer.
For the rest of us, I will now tell you that Jesse opted for option D): Begin walking down the grass that lined the street of the industrial park with no particular place to go and no way to get there other than the two legs God gave him.
The second thing Jesse thought after realizing he now had no transportation was that he was surprised to see cigarette butts. He had never noticed them before. You don’t notice cigarette butts when you’re driving. But the first thought had been that his plan for the day was destroyed now. If he never got his car keys, he’d have to get a hotel room down here by the office. Which doesn’t sound like a huge deal when you’re contemplating suicide (he was). Even if he did go in and get the keys, eventually, he certainly didn’t want to drive down and see his father, and so with no work and no drive to St. Andrew’s Regional Health Center (#1 in spinal surgery in the region, at least according to the metro bus he’d seen at the red light next to him this morning), Jesse still had no idea how to spend the rest of his day.
Plans were a sacred thing to Jesse. They had a religious significance. He honored his plans the way his Roman Catholic neighbor honored the Virgin Mary. His neighbor had a statue of her in his backyard under his fifty-foot maple tree and just in front of his flower garden. In Jesse’s heart stood a small, tasteful monument to his plans, ready to be looked at and prayed to in times of anxiety or great pain. Now what was out there in his backyard? A big empty spot and some dead grass, though if you got close enough you could see his car keys laying right in the middle of the spot his idol used to cover.
One of the marvelous things about the way God has made the world is that when our idols are taken away we are, at least for a moment, more ourselves. There were two things Jesse had forgotten about himself that he was being forced to remember right now. One was that liked to take walks (thank you, desk holding his car keys). The other was that he had never had any idea what his life was for (thank you, everything else).
Everything, even that cigarette butt with the formerly gold lettering on it, had a reason for being what it was. But Jesse had never stumbled across his own. He had never looked much for it, because graduating at the top of his class in high school had led to a scholarship for college which had led to a better degree at a better school than any of his siblings had which had led to marrying someone prettier than he thought was possible so that he could prove to his siblings he really did somehow merit that degree at that college which led to a son for whom he would die who had been diagnosed with autism which led to denial and fights with Janie laced with the most impossibly hurtful things said (by each of them) which led to him sleeping on the couch for the last eighteen months. In all of this careening down approximately twenty years of effort (to control) and fear (that he couldn’t control), Jesse had been just happy enough, just healthy enough and just busy enough to not blow his brains out or run screaming into the night to ask God what in His holy Name he was for.
How that plays into his decision about whether to kill himself is interesting. Jesse was aware that there were now two good reasons he might lose his job, both of which overlapped (“Well, firing a guy who just screamed at the top of his lungs and had a nervous breakdown right in the middle of the office is an easy way to cut payroll at this company we just bought…”), and his marriage was an open and infected wound on his life, not a source of joy or comfort. But he also had a nagging sense of wanting to solve this mystery before he died. It was kind of comical in a dark way. He was crippled and devastated by how his life was turning out, but he wanted to at least know its purpose before ending it with a bullet to the head or a handful of pills. It felt like having to see the end of a terrible movie before throwing your laptop across the room and busting it for having spent three dollars renting it on Amazon Prime. Of course, a fundamental difference is that you can figure out the point of a bad movie just by sticking around to the end; but to figure out the point of a life you need some outside help.