What If We Were Somewhere Else

  Stories from this collection have appeared in or are forthcoming from:

  Book of Names, a Spreadsheet Rougarou; When You Talk About the Weather, Ragazine;

  The Old Country, Crack the Spine; Pivot—Table; Four Way Review (published as Pivot); The

  Circle, BlueEarth Review; Tornado Watch, Euphony; The Empathy Chart, Bayou Magazine;

  Wish in the Other, Paragon Press; Pivot—Feather, Broad River Review; The Center of the

  Circle, FRiGG; More Terrible Ways to Make a Living, Apricity Magazine

  Copyright © Wendy J. Fox 2021

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or

  by any means electronic or mechanical including photocopying recording or any

  information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Fox, Wendy J., author.

  Title: What if we were somewhere else : stories / Wendy J. Fox.

  Description: Santa Fe, NM : Santa Fe Writers Project, [2021] | Summary:

  “What If We Were Somewhere Else is the question everyone asks in these

  linked stories as they try to figure out how to move on from job losses,

  broken relationships, and fractured families. Following the employees of

  a nameless corporation and their loved ones, these stories examine the

  connections they forgee and the choices they make as they try to make

  their lives mean something in the soulless, unforgiving hollowness of

  corporate life. Looking hard at the families to which we are born and

  the families we make, What If We Were Somewhere Else asks its own

  questions about what it means to work, love, and age against the

  uncertain backdrop of modern America”—Provided by publisher.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020047716 (print) | LCCN 2020047717 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781951631055 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781951631062 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3606.O97 A6 2021 (print) | LCC PS3606.O97 (ebook) |

  DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047716

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020047717

  Published by SFWP

  369 Montezuma Ave. #350

  Santa Fe, NM 87501

  (505) 428-9045

  sfwp.com

  To everyone who didn’t let the door hit them in the ass on the way out.

  Contents

  The Book of Names, a Spreadsheet

  When You Talk About the Weather

  The Old Country

  Pivot, Table

  The Circle

  The Crow

  Not Us

  Tornado Watch

  The Empathy Chart

  Wish in the Other

  Pivot, Feather

  The Center of the Circle

  The Human

  Not Me

  More Terrible Ways

  Kate

  The Book of Names, a Spreadsheet

  In our office, there were sounds. One of the sounds was like a fighter plane taking off, the abrupt swirling of violent winds, the whoosh of air being displaced, but we all knew it was only the HVAC, which we pronounced in what we believed to be the expert way, H-vack, and so we did not worry about it in particular, we only complained. Indeed, the thermostat was an ongoing source of tension between us and the faces of the building maintenance crew, Barry and Terry. (We called them Berry and Tarry.) To them, depending on the season, we moaned of aching with heat or withering under cold.

  We pay on the lease, and so we have the right to climate control, we said, and they nodded, and fiddled with the thermostat, and crawled into the ductwork while we typed.

  We were perplexed at why it was so complicated. When we were in our own homes, we did not have this problem. We were able to adjust the temperature up or down to meet our whims, respond to cool weather with a pleasant wave of warmth, or to our night sweats with a blast of properly directed cold, smelling prettily of Freon. Yet, in the office, they worked regularly above us or in the mechanical room on the other side of us, their shared ladder like a bread crumb in a trail that would help them to find their way out from the innards of the building. The rattling of their wrenches, their urgent hammering, and their muffled swears could not rival the sounds of our fingertips on our keyboards.

  The building was old and so some of the vestibules and corridors, we learned, were meant to be safe spots, built to function as a tornado shelter or to resist a bomb. Both weather and war were different when Denver’s oilmen’s club had raised the funds for the structure that eventually became our building. Their fourteenth-floor lounge was now a co-working space. And while we were not sure the aging construction could withstand cyclone or drone, they, the first owners, must have believed when the building was the tallest standing under Colorado’s big sky, that they were immune to bad luck because unlike hotels and apartments, they had included a floor thirteen.

  One of my employees, Melissa, took the stairs every day, all the way to our place on the twelfth floor, because she was young and fit, hiking the stories with her gazelle legs and her curtain of curly hair. We all envied her slim thighs.

  Business suddenly got very good. We doubled, and then doubled again. We put some desks against the backs of cubes and in our interior hallway. We had never done anything special, like decorate with inspirational posters or corporate graffiti, and after we crammed desks up against the wall and then added chairs and people, we noticed the nice side effect of mitigating unproductive queuing for the microwave.

  Our operations were lean and our staff prolific, and for this we congratulated ourselves during the all-hands company update meetings. Our CFO, for one, was frugal. For example: she got her lunch packets at a grocery outlet, a month’s worth at a time, and her towers of low-fat chicken with broccoli and mild tandoori rice with chickpeas took up most of the freezer. If anyone was sore about it, they never said so. She had set an example by offering to accommodate two more desks in what had been her own private office, and we heard she was a good workmate—she brought snacks and didn’t take too many phone calls.

  Still, we ran out of room and people who we assumed were the colleagues of B & T scheduled a demolition—demo, we called it, new authorities in construction lingo—and when we returned on Monday morning, one wall had been cut away to reveal another office space with the same white paint and same gray carpet—but smaller, like a fraternal twin who had gotten the bad half of the genes—with only a half row of cubicles and even greasier whiteboards. Though the furniture and decor were identical, it was empty of any evidence of recent work, and a fine layer of powdered gypsum that had sprayed from the contractor’s sawing of the drywall coated everything. It wasn’t the posh designs of the original oilmen, but it worked for us.

  One thing that we all liked was that the demo had revealed a backup kitchenette for the microwave, complete with a tiny dorm fridge. One of us said we should put beer in it, like college, but no one ever put beer in it.

  Along with Melissa, and Michael, and Sabine, we had a new COO, Dave. He was a raw vegan, and he also did not eat gluten or soy or nightshades. He loved filtered water. He did not drink alcohol, of course, because of its dangerous properties, but also because of the sugar. I only knew nightshades from fairy tales, but when I looked it up, I found peppers and tomatoes were in this category. We were okay with him beca
use he was not jumping the queue for the microwave (because he frowned on the microwave). He put bananas and apples and oranges in the candy bowl on the reception desk, but the administrative assistant was very good at her job, and because no one was eating the fruit, each day Rachel, the admin, removed one or two pieces from the dish and discarded it in the ladies’ restroom, where the COO would not see it. I was concerned this was only attracting more roaches, but I complimented her on her thoughtfulness anyway. She kept the remaining candy in the dish at an even level, so it looked like no one had been touching it, even though she refilled the dish by the handful several times a day from a bag that the CFO had gotten on a trip to the grocery outlet.

  At this time, things were not going well for me at home. I had a husband, and my husband was yelling at me—Yes, you are yelling; no, you are not just saying, you are yelling; can’t you hear yourself?—about my mood when I came home from the office, and the piles of whiskey and wine bottles collecting by the recycling—So take out the fucking recycling, I would think, but I would not say it, I would only shrug about the piles of clinking glass and about everything.

  Even though I was on the other side of the office, the miniature side, everything felt larger. Melissa’s earbuds loomed, a bloom of creamy polycarbonate. The clatter of last night’s dishes and the filmy leftovers of half and fully articulated fights felt like curtains on rails too tacky to draw.

  A low hum started to permeate the office, and the conference room had a quality like old television sets being powered up or down—there was the sense of a frequency. Like a tube radio, Roger, the accountant whose father collected them, said of the interior corridor. In many of the cubicles, it was less vintage electronic and more preindustrial commerce, the muted snorting of horse breath and the muffled stamping of hogs. At least that is what I thought I heard.

  In those days, B & T were even more challenged, with one side of the office polar and the other equatorial. We all noticed that the place the wall was removed was perfect, a conjunction of temperature zones. Yes, a bit gusty at the exact point where the two currents met, but certainly not unpleasant. Both my heavy knits and gauzy dresses seemed to fit here, and we started to hold meetings in the convergence zone to accommodate both sides of the office, and here, too, was where the hum was the least noticeable. We could hear it on either side of us, but at the seam, it was quiet.

  Heather, our most talented analyst, had moved a portable, freestanding screen and positioned it in front of a projector. Once I had asked her if she thought I should keep growing my bangs or keep them short, and she made a spatial model of how it would impact me over time, and showed me how I had the potential for a neck injury, because I already had the habit of tossing my head to get the just barely too-long fringe out of my eyes. Heather was a risk analyst. “Don’t cut,” she had said.

  Christian from IT added power strips and an Ethernet cord, and I did not contribute, other than to pantomime approval and ask Melissa to tidy up after the meetings, which she did not do, so I collected the scraps of paper and used coffee cups myself.

  On the day my husband served me with divorce papers, the COO announced the official contraction. He said the markets had slowed, and that we had been somewhat untrue to our original governing policies and had grown too quickly. Heather had a chart that looked on one end like a highly manicured lawn and on the other, a lake full of milfoil.

  It was our last meeting, and then those who had been on the list—Melissa, Michael, Tabatha, Mariette, Brian, Julie, Christian, Laird, Jorge, Dwayne, D’Shawn, Sabine, Trung, Roger, and Sommer—packed their desks into bankers boxes and rode the elevator down one last time, though Melissa, because she always took the stairs, said on her way out that it would be her first time.

  Occasionally, I’d meet some of the fired employees for drinks, though never Heather, and I would tell them that the wall had been put back up, this time in brick, for ambiance, and the hum had stopped on the same day as the firings, and also, there had been more firings. We were back down to a half dozen, and the office was very quiet.

  The H-vack was still a troubler, I said, but we weren’t spending too much time on it. We were trying to grow.

  Heather

  When You Talk About the Weather

  You and I are at a party somewhere, and first we have to talk about the weather, because we live in Denver, Colorado, where the skyline is unsettled and the temperature swings in wide dramatic swaths. Residents take some pride in it, even. I was wearing shorts and sandals yesterday, and today this! they say. (A scarf is tossed dramatically across a fuzzy cap, boots are stomped, snow shaken from a puffy vest; there is laughter.)

  You, like nearly everyone who lives here, are an amateur weather person. At the party, when we hear the wind picking up outside, you have a gentle look, a don’t worry look.

  “It’s coming from east,” you say. “I don’t think it will snow. And conditions aren’t right for hail, so that’s good news.”

  I tell you that I am not concerned about snow. It’s May, so snow is possible, of course. Historically there has been snow in May, but mostly I don’t worry about what I cannot control, mostly I do not give these things time.

  At this party, we’re both a few steps removed from the host, and whomever we have respectively come with has gone off to hide in the bathroom, or simply never arrived, or is outside smoking cigarettes in rapid succession because it is quiet back by the garbage cans and the recycling, where the only interruptions are the flick of the lighter and an occasional barking dog.

  “I don’t smell Greely, either,” you say. Greely, sixty miles north of Denver, is where the beef slaughterhouses are. Conventional wisdom says that if there is cow dung on the wind from Greely, snow is coming. The smell of Commerce City, where the dog food factory is, visible from downtown, means rain.

  We move on a bit, and we talk about work—that other, constantly unavoidable thing that surrounds us—and I tell you I work in an office with creaky plumbing and questionable ventilation, and you think this is quaint, and you say, Oh, startups, like you know something about it. You say gig economy. You say maker culture.

  I am not participating in any of these tech trends, just working in a shitty office.

  At my office job, I am a risk analyst, and I do beautiful things with numbers. Yes, I say, beautiful.

  I tell you that we, the staff, try not to mind the accommodations—if not technically a startup, it is a growing company. I want to help it grow. You nod your head when I tell you this, and you probably think I am a little naïve, maybe money-hungry, but you don’t say anything.

  I tell you that my work life is not very calm, but I manage to apply a lot of order there.

  You are an accountant, so I think you could get into my numbers talk, that we could find some consensus.

  “I just think it’s so much more of a true meritocracy in tech,” you say.

  “Maybe,” I say. “I mean, people like to think that. I’m not sure it’s true.”

  Now there are other people, whom neither you nor I are either with or not with—just people, in a loose circle—one originally from the Eastern Plains who says how easy we have all had it in Denver, because the tornadoes never touch the ground. One from the mountains who had lived in a draw of trees savaged by pine beetle, the ground so dry and the forest so brittle her family did not dare to light the barbecue, and her father started smoking the pot he scored from the nearby commune inside, in case a breeze took even a small ember from his joint to the forest floor.

  Urbanites now, their gardens have been tarped and tomatoes have been bagged.

  The people whom you don’t know and I don’t know now work in the credit or energy market. They are far from their old outhouses and former heirloom gardens.

  And you.

  You do not understand these country people who have become market people. You do back-office work, so you are not acquai
nted with the way they talk, uncomfortable with how they do not cease to remind you how you are benefiting their work by keeping your lights on, by ensuring your mortgage goes through. Yes, you have graduated and maintain your CPA, but you are young enough to still think that these onlookers will be interested in your stories from college. They are not.

  These people are making money, and this is why they can afford a second round of red mulch when the first is destroyed in a spate of freezing rain.

  You are trying to be polite—I see you trying to be polite—but you are wondering why they care about mulch so much, so much to do it twice. You live in a townhouse.

  “I mean, if I had a yard,” you say, “people would think they could bring their dogs over.”

  I can see you at work, your only slightly rumpled suit, your naturally stylish hair—it is tall and full in a way that is unanticipated but also not contrived—I can see you arguing about rev rec, making references to GAAP that no one else is interested in.

  While the market people gab, I am admiring the fizz of my drink. I’m not a scientist, but I know that effervescence is the escape of gas from an aqueous solution, and the foaming or spraying that results is from release.

  In my numbers work, I am given sheep by these market people and am expected to deliver a sweater—shear the beast, comb the thread, dye the fibers, spin the wool, knit it neatly and quickly and in the right size.

  I told you, beautiful things.

  *

  We never find the people whom we were supposed to have come with, but we’ve stayed as the party dwindles. We are on a sofa, now that the bodies have thinned out and there are some places to sit, and I am starting to like something about you, but I don’t know exactly what it is, and this is rocky terrain for me. I want to be enamored of the precise color of your shirt or the exact timbre of your voice or the specific way you hold your glass, but it’s cloudier.

  “Wait, so what do you really do, like in the everyday,” you say.