The clear unknown. I thought a lot about that phrase as I sat in my parked car in the office’s parking structure twenty minutes later. I was late for work -- almost two hours late -- and I had to circle all the way to the top, uncovered floor to find an open place to park. It was always cold and breezy up there, and I felt the winds buffeting the car as I slipped it into park and turned off the ignition.
The clear unknown. It really was an interesting turn of phrase. Unknown I understood all too well. Looking back to the soon-to-be old job or looking forward to the soon-to-be new job, either way there was unknown aplenty. But clear? Nothing was clear -- unless by clear you meant empty. An empty void surrounding you, like a tight-rope walker on the thinnest of wires stretched between two skyscrapers.
I suddenly felt dizzy. I could feel my heart racing in my chest, and my vision seemed to splotch and sparkle in the corners. It was another migraine -- it had to be -- coming on to debilitate me just when I needed to be most on my toes. And I had thrown the medicine away. In my fear and petulance I had thrown the medicine the doctor had given me away, and now I was going to sink deep into a terror I would never be able to climb out of.
I closed my eyes, placed my forehead on the steering wheel, and started taking some deep breaths. I was okay. I was going to be okay. I told myself that over and over, pushing the words out with every exhale. I was okay … I was okay … I was going to be okay.
But was I? That, ultimately, was the question, wasn’t it? That was always the question, for every one, I supposed, throughout all of time. Was I going to be okay? In our world, and through all those ages, there were those who would always depend on things outside themselves to provide the answer to that question: to relationships, to status, to possessions. Those things, in some incalculable combination, would determine whether or not I would be okay. And that, I knew, was how I had always felt, always striving for some external validation that I was good, that I was smart, that I was okay. In those long and painful moments, perched at the top of a steel and concrete tower in my twenty-thousand dollar used car that needed new tires and was regularly leaking oil, I thought about all those external forces. They were people, yes, people, no doubt, forever asking themselves the same ultimate question that now debilitated me, but they were forces, too, forces interacting with me and the force I represented in ways that none of us could ever control or predict.
I thought about Jenny, Jacob, and the new baby, about Meredith, about Mary and Don, about Bethany, about Gerald Kreiger, Michael Lopez, and Susan Sanford, about Amy Crawford and Wes Howard, about Caroline Abernathy, about Eleanor Rumford and Paul Webster, even about Steve Anderson, Pamela Thornsby, and Mister Richard Thompson -- all of them floating with me in my mindspace, and all of us orbiting and affecting each other in some impossible n-body problem that the greatest physicists in the world couldn’t solve with a hundred supercomputers.
It was overwhelming. So many expectations. So many ways of not measuring up.
But I knew there were others in this universe, seemingly few and far between, who did not depend on things outside themselves in order to resolve the ultimate question. To them, understanding whether or not they were okay was not something mediated by others, but by themselves, by their own sense of themselves and their purpose in the events and forces that surrounded them. To these people, being okay wasn’t something transient, something buffeted to and fro by the external winds of expectations. To these people, being okay was something stable, permanent, and internal. They did not have to chase others and take the feeling of being okay away from them. They were okay. Always. No matter what happened. They were okay just being who they were.
I’m not one of those people. I certainly wasn’t on that strange and difficult day, and even now, years later, I’m still not. But I’ve met people like that. They’re real. They exist. They prove it is possible to be okay, no matter what, or at least to act like you are -- and I think it was that knowledge that helped bring me down off the ledge I had suddenly found myself on. Slowly, I began to calm down and the migraine, if that is what it was, retreated into the background. I kept breathing deeply, my mantra never changing, and when I felt ready, I gathered the few things I had brought with me, exited my vehicle, and began making my way to the little glass alcove that surrounded the top level of the parking structure elevators.
It was deep in the middle of a busy morning when I emerged onto the office floor. I remember people being scattered about in their different workstations -- but fortunately for me, Mary’s office door was closed and Ruthie was not at her desk. That allowed me to slip through generally unnoticed and make my way down to my office.
There, I dropped my briefcase on my desk, fished out the contract that I had signed at my dining room table, and without any other preamble and flourish, took the eight pieces of paper down to the server room.
Jurgen was there poking around on a panel with more flashing lights than a Christmas Tree.
“Hi, Jurgen,” I said.
“Da,” he said, without giving me a glance, absorbed in, or perhaps mesmerized by, the lights and the countless ethernet cables that seemed to feed them.
I went over to the copy machine, put it on the scanning function, and one by one placed each of the eight pages -- each with my blue-inked initials in the lower right-hand corner and the last with my and Steve Anderson’s bold signatures on it -- on the glass. In forty-five seconds I was done, and I hit save and with a few more taps on a few more buttons, had the machine send a copy of the saved file to my email address, my private one, not the one owned by the company. Then, I deleted the remaining file off the server.
“So long, Jurgen,” I said, scooping up my papers and leaving the small and poorly ventilated room.
“Da.”
I made my way back to my office, nodding to a few people that I passed along the way, only one of whom looked at me as if I didn’t belong there. Once back in my office I shut my door, sat down behind my desk, and fired up my desktop computer. I waited in silence for the sign-in screen to appear, and then I logged on and opened my personal email program. There I found a new message from the company scanner, with a single attachment, a fully executed and legally binding employment contract between me and my new employer.
I hit the forward button, and began editing the message to make it and its subject line and proper piece of correspondence to Steve Anderson, accepting his offer of employment and attaching the signed and countersigned version of the contract. I didn’t rush it, but I also didn’t overthink it. It was a short message, professional, conveying only the information that was needed, and finishing with an optimistic note on working together. I proofread it, made one small edit, and then clicked the send button. Then I closed my email program and went into the browser and deleted the session from its history.
After all that was completed, I took a moment to just breathe and sit quietly by myself. I was only a little surprised that no one had stopped me from doing what I had just done. I mean, no one, I knew, would be able to physically restrain me from taking these actions, but here I was, more than two hours late for work after abandoning one of my professional responsibilities over the previous weekend, and not a single person had so far confronted me or even asked me what was going on.
It gave me a strange feeling of disquiet, but I pushed it out of my mind. I had only one more thing I needed to do and then I would be leaving the office, maybe just for the rest of the day, or maybe for the rest of my life.
I shut off my computer, extracted a sealed envelope from my briefcase, and then zipped the bag up and slung it over my shoulder. Almost as an afterthought, I looked briefly around at my office, and slowly realized that this might be the last time I would ever see it. I had just a handful of personal effects -- a few books that were technically mine and not the company’s and, in quiet violation of the company’s office decoration policy, a small framed picture of Jenny and Jacob that one would have to be seated at my desk to see in full. On impulse, I picked up that picture, studied the small and smiling faces for a moment, and then placed it in the outside pocket of my briefcase.
I made my way down to Mary’s office with what felt like determination. Unlike earlier, Ruthie was back at her desk, guarding the inner sanctum as was her role. Behind her, also unlike before, the door to Mary’s office stood open.
“Hi, Ruthie.”
I startled her. She had been absorbed in some task and had not seen me approach. “Alan!” she cried out, looking up from an expandable file stuffed with more paper than it was designed to hold. “Oh, god, I didn’t see you. When did you come in this morning?”
I was about to give some glib answer, but before I could get the words out, we both heard Mary’s voice erupt from within. “Alan!” it said. “Is that Alan Larson, out there?” And then there was some shuffling of feet and then Mary herself appeared in the doorway behind Ruthie. She wore a tan skirt and white blouse and her eyes seemed to blaze with fury, at first unfocused, and then quickly sharpening on me. “Alan!” she said again, anger but also some measure of desperation in her voice. “Where the hell have you been?!”
Where the hell have you been. Six small words, but the way Mary said them told me a lot about what she had been thinking -- and not thinking -- since I had last seen her in Denver. What struck me immediately was that she was NOT surprised to see me -- as she would have been if she had spent any time thinking about the possibility that I might quit. After everything that had happened, with a wife and premature baby still in the hospital, she thought I still should have been there at my desk at eight o’clock that morning. No, she was not surprised to see me crawling back into her lair. Instead, she was angry -- ANGRY -- that I was late returning for the abuse she evidently planned to continue visiting upon me. She was angry, yes, but her tone of voice said that she was also a little afraid. Afraid, I supposed, that, as this long Monday morning crept closer to afternoon, my lack of return had meant something other than what she had planned. That maybe, just maybe, I wasn’t planning to come back to her at all, that perhaps I had finally had enough of her shit.
In other words, I had her. She had no idea what I was about to do. She had never even entertained the idea that I would wriggle free of her grasp.
“Answer me!” she shouted, exactly as my father used to do when I was slow in responding to one of his inexplicable questions. “Where have you been? It’s almost eleven A.M. and no one has heard a word from you all morning.”
I held up the envelope I was carrying. “Mary,” I said. “I think we should talk in your office.”
She looked at me, her angry stare so focused on my face that I don’t think she even saw the envelope I was holding. She certainly didn’t give any indication that she suspected what such an envelope might hold. “Fine,” she said, turned on her heel and disappeared into her office.
I looked at Ruthie, who still stood there like a sentinel, and her face wore an entirely different expression from Mary’s. She knew. Ruthie knew what I was about to do. She could see the bag draped over my shoulder, the envelope in my hand, the determination in my face. She knew -- and she gave me a bittersweet look and then stepped aside to give me full access to her boss’s office.
Once inside, I didn’t bother to close the door behind me. Mary had retreated and was sitting behind her desk, glaring at me through her steepled fingers.
“I’ll make this quick,” I said, marching across the thick carpet and dropping the envelope in front of her. “I’m quitting. That’s my resignation letter. I’m giving my two weeks’ notice.”
I hadn’t rehearsed anything. I had no speech to make. The three simple facts came out of my mouth in quick succession and seemed to lay as flat on Mary’s awareness as the envelope that I had just dropped on her desk.
“Huh?” she said, stupidly, like a stubborn old, deaf person long used to tuning things out. “What did you just say?”
“Open it,” I told her.
Her arms were down on her desktop now, laying uselessly on either side of the envelope containing my resignation letter. Her look of anger and frustration was now gone. To me, she simply looked confused, off her game, helpless.
“Open it,” I commanded her, this time pointing to my envelope.
She slowly complied, slicing the envelope open with a shiny letter opener and unfolding the single sheet of paper she found within. I watched as her eyes skimmed over the handful of words I had placed there, her lips moving silently in tandem with the concepts that they were meant to communicate.
“Alan!” she cried suddenly, her eyes widening, but still down on the paper. “This is a resignation letter!”
“Yes,” I said viciously. “I’m quitting. I’m leaving to pursue a better opportunity for me and my family.”
I put special emphasis on that last word, and I saw from Mary’s now-upturned face that the message had gotten through.
“That’s right, Mary. My family. Half of which, by the way, is still in the hospital right now, thanks for asking. And I’m on my way there now. I plan to work my last two weeks with you from home or from the hospital, whichever is more convenient for me. Hope that’s okay.”
Mary was staring at me blankly now, utterly stupefied, and probably only hearing half of the sarcastic words I was throwing at her. But I didn’t care. Finally, gloriously, I was past caring.
“Unless, of course, you’d prefer me to leave your employ immediately. Because, frankly, that would be just fine with me.”
She looked back down at the document I had given her. Somewhere, near the end of its solitary and short paragraph there was a date, two weeks into the future, which was my proposal for my last day of employment. I imagined that she was searching for that, and running whatever calculations her concussed brain could manage at this point.
“Which one, Mary? Today? Or two weeks from now? You need to tell me.”
She looked at me, eyes blinking and head shaking, likely in an attempt to understand how the tables had been so dramatically turned on her. “Um,” she said, softly and repeatedly. “Um, two… two weeks will be, um… will be fine… I guess.”
“Great,” I said. “You have my cell phone number. Call me if you need something.”
And with that I turned and left her alone in her office. Once outside, I headed immediately for the elevators, but could see a small gaggle of staff people who had gathered at a discrete distance, evidently to witness my departure. Ruthie, oddly, was among them, no longer at her desk and standing like a shepherd among her wayward flock. Fortunately for me, the elevator car opened immediately upon my calling for it. I gave the group a polite wave, and then left them all behind.
+ + +
“Dragons” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. For more information, go here.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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