Why Are You So Sad? by Jason Porter

Author:Jason Porter
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-01-27T16:00:00+00:00

Do you hear voices?

Dead people. Little versions of me bundled in rope, struggling to formulate sentences. Sometimes the trees and clouds.

Lorraine LaFevre, Jerry’s assistant, was on the phone, and it didn’t sound like business. “And then what? . . . Uh-huh . . . Well, I wouldn’t take that . . . You know he wouldn’t get away with saying that kind of junk to me . . . Yeah, but he doesn’t know it isn’t his . . . No, you didn’t! . . . You did? . . . Oh my.” Her hair was formatted with chemicals into the shape of a swirling shrub.

She held her hand over the phone, protecting her personal conversation, and said, “Is Jerry expecting you?”

“He said ASAP, and”—I motioned to the mug in my hand—“I brought him coffee.”

“Mary, I’ll have to call you back.”

I stood and waited.

“Why don’t you take a seat?”

A little coffee spilled onto my hand as I lowered myself into one of the five beanbags in the waiting area. The beanbags looked like the deflated eggs of a two-hundred-foot salmon. We were pushing the items in our summer catalogs. There was a tendency to promote inside the company whatever new products we were hustling on the outside, to cultivate an enthusiasm from within. Sitting lopsided on an orange pink sack was not cultivating an enthusiasm from within.

Lorraine opened the door into Jerry’s office and stuck her head in while keeping the rest of her body in the reception area. She was wearing a blue skirt. Her calves looked like bowling pins.

She came back to her desk and told me Jerry was expecting me.

I said, “How are you feeling today?”

“Busy.” She started clicking on her mouse and staring at her screen.

I said, “Would you like to help me get out of this beanbag?”

She raised one eyebrow. That was all the response I got.

• • •

Jerry had a corner office. Square. The two halves that made the corner were all window. It looked onto the imitation brook that ran through the campus. He was at his desk listening to space shuttle music. It was a composition designed to keep astronauts motivated as they tightened bolts on satellites. Without the music, according to the liner notes, the space workers were more likely to drift off into prolonged dream states. Jerry had told me once that it increased his efficiency and at the end of the same conversation offered to sell me a copy at cost.

“Just one second, bud.” He was fiddling with a phone tablet thing, organizing his communicating. I set the coffee down next to him, trying not to distract him.

A bird flew into one of the windows and crashed to the ground outside.

“Fucking birds,” said Jerry, without looking up from his gadget. “Don’t they get that it’s glass?”

I was on the bird’s side. I happen to love birds. They have small hearts. They have song. They can scream when they are in their cages, alone with the child of the house; scream when they smell fire and tell the child to get the fuck out.

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