Reconstituted (novel excerpt)

I knew I was about to be fired when the new submanager asked, “So what is it you do here, Mr Finch?” Almost ten years in my job, nearly that many submanagers come and gone over time, and he was the first one to open my file or notice me working in his department. I'd had a long string of good luck.

“Brand awareness,” I said. “I'm Assistant to the Director of Brand...”

“I know your title. But what do you actually do?” He tapped a fingertip hard on the manila folder spread open on his desk, and it made a sharp crack because there were only two or three sheets in my file including the resumé I'd applied with all that time ago, when resumés were still sent on paper. My resumé looked almost as old as the new submanager, but if I updated it -- when I updated it, the way things seemed to be going -- it wouldn't change very much. There was only my current (for the moment) position to add, along with its start and end dates. A decade of my life would be condensed into a couple of lines aimed at convincing some other submanager in some other office to lay claim to my remaining years.

What could I tell him that he didn't know, that it didn't say in my slim file? I'd been charged by one of his predecessors with making our plastic plants (we preferred “hyperefficient”) into household names. My employers at Second Nature Modern Greenery envisioned a world in which trees and rosebushes reminded consumers of our reproductions and comparisons were made in our favor. “Look at the spots on those leaves,” we wanted the plant-buying public to say. “My Second Nature trees never have spots.”

When I started with the company, I spent my days writing letters to newspapers and trade magazines, sowing word of our products wherever I could. A letter to Paper Products Quarterly, for instance, about how breathtaking the new corporate headquarters of some company was, might mention in passing a potted plant spotted on the mezzanine level and refer to it as one of ours. Even if the actual plants in the actual building weren't Second Nature, even if there weren't any plants or mezzanines in the building at all, the brand had still taken root in the readers of that magazine and their lives.

Over time the arrows in my quiver changed. I frequented newsgroups about business and gardening and home decoration, trolling for any topic I could connect our Greenery to, however tenuous that connection might be. A science fiction forum on which some green moon arose in conversation allowed me to mention our greenest of greens, and arguments about urban planning in some city I'd never been to were were fertile ground to suggest hyperefficient trees on their traffic islands.

Later I kept dozens of weblogs, and post after post shared intimate memories of the imaginary lives I'd created. Sometimes my bloggers left comments on each other's sites, and they commented on other sites, too, drawing more traffic and potential plant buyers into my marketing web. Unless those commenters weren't actual people, but the inventions of others with jobs just like mine, the whole blogosphere a soapbox for a few busy schemers selling plastic palm trees and flavored milk drinks and guides to selling products online. Each of my imaginary bloggers had a backstory, a family or else an explainable lack, a history of successes and failures. Second Nature's viral campaign spanned the gamut of human behavior from borderline psychotic to contemplative, fractured English to erudition, and all of those voices and vices were mine.

And the more I said through my cyphers, the less I spoke in real life. My cube was in a far corner of the department, near some filing cabinets to which the keys had been lost, so apart from occasional walks to the bathroom and my twice-daily route between front door and desk, I was easy to miss. The faces changed around me without introduction and in time no one knew who I was. There was no Director of Brand Awareness for me to assist, and no one asked what I was doing. I was forgotten, become furniture in my far corner, and that's how I held onto the job for as long as I did even after I'd stopped writing about Second Nature and had let my online shills take on lives of their own. Their weblogs grew longer, spanned months and then years as they made projects for high school and graduated from college, grumbled or raved about various jobs, and enjoyed visits from growing grandchildren. They took trips to Hawaii and endured bouts with cancer, spent good days at work and suffered blind dates. Some gave birth and others died, their comment inboxes filling with sympathy notes they would never read (but I did). Commenters asked where flowers could be sent, and others suggested -- success! -- hyperefficient arrangements.

Years went by offline, too. Computers and carpets upgraded around me, but always at night so I never saw how or by whom it was done. The restaurant across the street from our office changed from sub shop to low carb to noodles to salads, then back to sub shop again, and I ate whatever they sold. I gave up my newspaper subscription and read only the headlines from my browser's homepage, then I stopped reading news altogether because the headlines were the same ones they'd been all my life.

Sometimes I post-dated a batch of blog posts so they'd appear across upcoming days, then I left my computer sleeping while I sat at my desk. I spent days watching a trickle of water rise up and wash over the cairn of reconstituted brown stone in my desktop fountain (a decoration I'd claimed after its owner, the woman in the cubicle beside me years earlier, never returned from vacation). The same few cubic inches of liquid flowed by again and again, until the soft sound of water and the whir of the fountain's electric pump carried my mind away from Second Nature and plastic plants to more or less nothing at all.

So for this new submanager to notice my name in his files, to ask himself what, exactly, I was being paid for out of his budget... it was less of a shock to be fired than to hear someone speaking my name, or to hear my telephone ring when he called me into his office. The shock was being reminded that I had a job so long since I'd actually done it.

First he took a stab at small talk, speculating about the year's Wimbledon prospects for a player who had been retired at least a decade by then. Years earlier, before I was forgotten, before this particular submanager's time, a rumor somehow started that I was a big tennis fan, which I wasn't and never have been. One of the best things about being forgotten at work was the cessation of tennis-themed holiday cards and questions about tournaments and players I'd never heard of but felt obliged to offer cryptic opinions on each time I was asked, and for the sake of which I began reading up on the world of tennis so I wouldn't let down my side of those forced conversations. I pretended to have insider knowledge I wasn't able to share, and most people seemed excited to believe that about me so they deferred to whatever I told them even though I made it all up. Maybe it was more satisfying to know me as “the tennis guy” than to wonder who I actually was, and then it was easier not to know me at all. It was easier for me, certainly.

Once he'd exhausted the tennis chat that I'm sure he'd planned out in advance, the submanager asked about my role at Second Nature and I knew where the conversation was headed. We sat for a moment, neither one of us speaking, each hoping for silence to carry our message. I couldn't tell him what I did at Second Nature because, really, I didn't do much of anything and the file didn't say otherwise. He was hoping, I'm sure, that I would understand his silent intentions to prevent the need for him to actually fire me in his own voice. So we played our game of silent chicken, avoiding each other's eyes until the awkwardness had done its job and I grew tired of waiting to be told what I already knew.

“Ah,” I said, and rose from my chair.

The submanager continued without showing the least hint of surprise or acknowledging a long silence had passed. “You have two weeks of vacation pay coming, and a generous...,” he paused to shuffle some papers and find the one he was looking for, “a not unreasonable severance package.” He stood and reached a hand toward me across his desk, and his forearm knocked over a framed photograph of an ugly little girl who, for some reason, was facing the visitor's chair instead of his own.

“It's not you, of course, Finch. Tough times. You know how it is. And you should be proud that you've done such a fine job with...,” he scanned his papers again, “at brand awareness. You should interpret this... readjustment as testimony to how valuable you've been to the Second Nature family. How effectively you've fulfilled our goals. And, naturally, if there's anything we can do for you in the future...”

I nodded as the submanager pumped away at my hand, grinding my knuckles against one another like a fistful of marbles. Then I walked back to my cube, past coworkers intensely interested in computer screens flickering with meaningless spreadsheets, conspicuous in their casual attempts to avoid looking at me as I passed. I sat in my chair for a moment, rolling back and forth on the semi-opaque plastic carpet protector, wondering if there was a way I could steal it -- it was, in fact, a very comfortable chair; the carpet protector I could do without. There wasn't much else in the cube I wanted to keep, not that I could sneak out of the building. There weren't any photographs tacked on my walls, no figurines, statuettes, or novelty trophies standing on the desk or adjustable shelves. Not a single piece of promotional swag from the sales conferences I never attended, not even a totebag or obscenely outsized golf umbrella. I kept no extra shoes under my desk and no spare sweater for days when the office was cold -- and the office had never been cold I realized then for the first time, and it had never been hot for that matter; it was always generically, uncomfortably tepid. There was just the computer, not actually mine, and a filing cabinet overstuffed long ago with paper versions of all the same documents stored in the computer and backed up in several locations both onsite and off. And there was a plastic model of the company logo which I suppose was some sort of plant but had always looked to me like a martian.

In the end I took only my miniature fountain in its gray basin not actually made of concrete but made to look like it was. I pulled the fountain's plug from the overcrowded powerstrip under my desk, and the whir of the electric motor had never seemed so loud as when it went quiet. The water flowed for a split-second longer due to leftover force from the tiny vacuum the pump had created, then it settled into the basin, becalmed.

The computer had fallen asleep during my meeting with the submanager, but I bumped the mouse while moving the fountain and the monitor came to life with a ping. I might have made final postings for each of my online personas, bringing their imaginary lives to some closure, but the idea of dozens of people who had never existed simply vanishing all over the web had an appeal of its own -- and, indeed, all of those voices falling silent at once, having said everything they had to say, remains the most satisfying accomplishment of my tenure at Second Nature. So I set the fountain down on the desk and went online one more time to erase all my records of fake usernames and their passwords, removing bookmarks to those many sites created by me but belonging, most likely, most legally, to Second Nature. I didn't know then if anyone would replace me, and I don't know if anyone did, but I know they were never able to make my congregation of characters speak to sell plastic plants or to celebrate birthdays or just to vent about a bad day at work. All the lives I'd created and lived in those years went into stasis for as long as they stayed on their servers.

When I had finished erasing my online tracks, I lifted the fountain in both hands and wove through the cubicle maze toward the exit, trailing a dark thread of water across gray industrial carpet. As I walked to my car, I smiled to think that the trail, too, would vanish within a few minutes and I would go back to being forgotten.