Holy Water Read online

  That’s how Henry imagines it, anyway.

  He puts up his hand to retract the question, to wave off the not quite Dutch girl, but before he can speak he’s jolted by the vibrating phone in his pants. Rachel. He recently told her it has become illegal to use the phone on the train, so now she calls him within minutes after his scheduled arrival.

  “Yes?”

  “Did you check . . .”

  “Yes.”

  “And the pool?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s green. Again. Like a fluorescent radioactive green. What did you do?”

  “I used the tester. I added the stuff.”

  “Did you?”

  “No. I’m lying. I’m lying about the pool, Rachel.”

  “When?”

  “Last night.”

  “In the dark?”

  “I could do it in the day, but that would mean I’d have to quit my job to be a full-time pool boy.”

  “I just didn’t notice.”

  “I did it at three a.m. when I woke up downstairs in front of the TV.”

  “All I know is our pool is disgusting.”

  He takes a breath. He doesn’t want to fight. Doesn’t want to feel this way toward her. “You don’t even like to swim, Rachel.”

  “It’s an embarrassment. Every other pool on this block is a perfect shade of blue, but ours looks like a Superfund waste site.”

  “Every pool except at the houses that have been foreclosed. Look, I’ll check it again when I get home.” He moves to hang up, but reconsiders. “Listen, did you, you know, think about going back to talk to that guy? Philip?” Her shrink.

  This time she clicks off. He puts the phone in his briefcase rather than his pocket. She’s not a bitch, he reminds himself. She’s afraid.

  “Actually, I’m not from Holland,” the young woman tells him. At first he has no recollection of speaking to her, no idea what she’s talking about. Rachel’s calls have a way of doing this to him, detaching him from the present, clouding reality, making him breathless with what he hopes is anxiety, because he’s far too young for a heart attack. “But,” she says, “I hear it’s real sunny this time of year.”

  He scrolls to Scissor Sisters’ cover of Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” taps Play.

  ~ * ~

  The Land of EEEE

  Four years ago they transferred him from Oral Care to Non-headache-related Pain Relief. Three years ago they transferred him from Pain Relief to Laxatives. Two years ago he was fast-tracked to Silicon-based Sprays and Coatings and was making quite a name for himself, but when lawsuits not of his making led to the rightsizing of the division (because discontinuing it would send the wrong signal to class-action lawyers), they transferred him to Armpits.

  ~ * ~

  He has a nine-thirty focus group, which leaves just enough time to drop off his briefcase and check his messages. Outside his office sits Meredith, his administrative assistant. “Morning, Meredith.”

  “You are a sought-after man.” Meredith is reading the National Review. On her desk, already devoured, are the Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Daily Racing Form. Meredith’s auburn hair is pulled back, as it is every day, in a bun. A 1950s librarian’s bun. Her loose-fitting skirt suit makes her look short and, if not exactly fat, then chunky. But Henry knows better.

  “Who’s doing the sought-aftering?”

  “The emperor of eccrine glands.”

  “The armpit czar.”

  “Aka Doctor Sweat.”

  “Aka Giffler.” He loves this machine-gun give-and-take. He loves the way it makes him feel as if they really know each other, as if he’s one of the regular guys, nice to coworkers above and below, even though Meredith, a five-year employee of the firm, looks up to no man.

  Meredith thinks the give-and-take is banal. “You got it. Giffler.”

  “His mood?”

  “Bloodcurdlingly chipper. He said he’ll stop in on your nine-thirty.”

  Henry rolls his eyes. Poor me. Poor us. Meredith looks away, turns the page. The ironic rolling of eyes, the office politics of Henry Tuhoe and Giffler and the rest of them: beneath her.

  His office has a decent view of Park Avenue facing east, but he doesn’t bother to look anymore, unless there’s a demonstration in the street or an aerial view of a tragedy. Like the runaway cab that killed three on the sidewalk last month. They gathered in his office, Giffler, Meredith, the rest of Armpits, not because Henry is the one they all run to for calm and assurance in a crisis, but because his office has the best view. That’s the type of thing that seems to bond them now. Fatalities on the street below. Rumored and unexpected layoffs. So-and-so’s cancer scare. The collapse of a market, an industry, a way of life.

  On those occasions they’ll gather and talk. They’ll inquire about non-underarm-related, occasionally personal topics. They’ll linger and joke, briefly revealing intimate aspects of their lives while chalk lines are drawn on the sidewalk below, gurneys loaded and lifted.

  By contrast, the supposedly happy occasions—the baby showers in the seventh-floor conference room, the champagne toast for a job well done, and the soon-to-be-extinct ritual of after-work drinks—have the opposite effect on their relationships, their morale. Those rituals bore them, crystallize their sources of anger, and are breeding grounds for future resentment. She’s making how much? They had sex where? The nerve, taking the corporate jet with more cuts to come. It’s gotten to the point where even the people being honored can’t finish their Carvel cake and warm Korbel and get out of there fast enough. Or maybe this is just how Henry has begun to see it.

  He closes the door, hangs up his jacket, and turns on his laptop. Standing, he bends over the keyboard. He has twenty-nine e-mails, but he’s not interested in them. E-mail now has all the urgency of snail mail, yet nothing, not Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter, has risen to replace it. He opens his Web browser and peeks up to look through the frosted glass of his interior windows. Meredith is standing, talking to someone. Through the lens of frosted glass she’s relegated to a vaguely defined shadow, but on his desktop screen Meredith is about to become something altogether different.

  On a heart-shaped ruby red splash page with an adult content disclaimer, Henry clicks EEEEnter. He begins to ease himself into his seat, ready to enjoy the opening montage—which consists of Meredith’s alter ego, tanned, heavily made up, topless on a Harley, topless as a cheerleader, a dominatrix, schoolteacher, nurse, commando, construction worker, trial judge; Meredith poolside, ocean-side, in the rain forest, in the cab of a bulldozer, on a mansion roof, beside the broken white passing line of Route 66—when, to his surprise, “Steady as She Goes” by the Raconteurs begins playing on his speakers, loud enough to cause the shadow blobs outside his office to react. He quickly mutes her audio intro, looks at the window to make sure he hasn’t blown his cover. When the blobs outside seem to have stabilized, he slouches into his multi-adjustable, lumbar-supporting swivel chair, for which he feigned to Office Services a chronically bad back, and begins reading the wit and wisdom of the home page.

  Welcome to the Land of EEEE. Home of EEEEVA EEEENORMOUS and her 46EEEE Twins. And there she is, Meredith who is not at all short or fat, or even chunky—unless you’re talking about her breasts, still topless—straddling some kind of missile, smiling more brightly than she or anyone else has ever smiled in this building.

  Henry clicks to the What’s New VIP page, but there’s nothing new, really. At least, not since end of day yesterday. Just some additional, never-before-seen shots from a months-old naughty accountant layout. No new message for her loyal subscribers. No breaking career news or video updates. Maybe if she’d stop reading the damned financial pages, Henry thinks. He shuts the machine down and stands up.

  Back outside, Meredith doesn’t acknowledge him as he walks by. She continues talking to Giffler’s admin, a gay temp named Brad who could probably run the whole division if he were more interested in making a living and less intere
sted in full-time clubbing. If you only knew what I know about the young woman to whom you’re talking, Bradley. Indeed, if anyone knew. But your secret is safe with me, EEEEva.

  “I’m off to the Oven,” he says over his shoulder.

  Meredith briefly considers Henry before turning back toward clueless Brad.

  ~ * ~

  Nanoabsorbers™

  The Oven is the 101-degree-Fahrenheit observation room in which focus group participants are paid in the area of $75 to spend approximately two hours applying product and having their armpit sweat measured. An insensitive nickname, especially at a New York-headquartered company with more than 11,000 Jewish employees worldwide, but it is accurate.

  On Henry’s side of the glass it’s a comfortable seventy-two degrees. He grabs a Snapple from the mini-fridge on the back wall and picks up the spec sheet on the participants. Women, aged twenty-four to thirty-four, median income of $30,000. As they file in, he tries to match the specifics of their lives to their nametags. Hobbies, jobs, marital status, children. Stick, roll-on, or aerosol. Hygienic rituals. Brand affinities.

  He’s disappointed that none seem particularly attractive, although it’s hard to tell, since most of them are wearing sweatshirts and who looks good in a sweatshirt in 101-degree fluorescent light? That will soon change, when the heat begins to register and they have to apply the product, which in this case features an innovation called Nanoabsorbers™, which isn’t really an innovation as much as a new name for an old technology, which isn’t really a technology as much as it is a bunch of loosely regulated, decades-old, sweat-blocking chemicals or ingredients, one of which is active.

  Typically they’ll apply product, overheat the humans, and micromeasure how much sweat is released, but today the test is more about the word Nanoabsorbers™ and the perceived increase in dryness that hearing the actual word and watching three short computer-generated Nanoabsorbers™ demo films (variations on swirling, swarming molecules sopping up waterborne evil from free-floating, disembodied armpits) bestows upon the subjects. Someone in name generation came up with the word, and everyone creamed all over it. Moniker testing was through the roof, and now it’s just a matter of finding the right ingredients, the right product, to invent around the word.

  When he first started in Armpits, Henry found sessions like this degrading for parties on both sides of the glass. He felt dirty when the participants, especially the women in the twenty-four-to-thirty-four demo, would glance his way through the two-way mirror. That first glance, or glare, really, before they became desensitized to the environment and caught up in the throes of ego and opinion, always made him feel ashamed. They looked angry, as if they knew they were about to be violated and dehumanized, all for $75 and as many soft drinks and salty, trans-fat-based snacks as they could consume. The stifling heat didn’t help their moods, either. He used to look away when they made that initial stroll by the mirror. He used to think about what their lives must be like outside of the Oven, beyond the spec sheet. What music did they listen to, how many brothers and sisters did they have, had they ever had an affair, where were they on 9/11? But now he just tries to predict which of them will have the most active eccrine and apocrine glands. Which will sweat more profusely than all the others.

  Sometimes they bet on it. Five bucks a head. Draw numbers to determine who goes first. Sometimes they do the over/under version, but usually it’s sheer volume that makes for the most interesting competition. Winner takes all in the sweat pool. But this morning he’s alone in the dark room as the subjects do the stroll and sulk. And even as they reluctantly start removing their sweatshirts (with one more obligatory glare for the perv on the other side), he’s not interested in any of it.

  He just wants to get it over with.

  The door in back of the room swings open. As yellow hall light seeps in, Henry averts his face from the group on the other side, because anything less than total darkness on his side will expose him as the solitary underarm voyeur he is. He sees Giffler’s face for an instant before his boss shuts the door, depriving the room of light.

  At first he’s just a voice. “How do they look? Anyone bangable?”

  Henry laughs, then regrets it, then feels disgusted with himself because he knows that while Giffler’s words are offensive, particularly when spoken in the hallowed workplace, he thought the same thing moments earlier.

  Giffler reaches for the volume. “Mind if I turn this shit down?”

  “Sure. If I miss something, I can check the tape.”

  “They tape everything now, eh? Or record, because I doubt anyone tapes much of any fucking thing anymore. What they ought to do if they want to learn anything is tape-slash-record what goes on this side of the mirror. I heard Dworik did a moderator against the glass last week while a baby-wipes group was in progress on the other side.”

  “Wonderful. Quite the role model.”

  On the other side women are removing their outer garments, revealing the sleeveless T-shirts and tank tops they were requested to wear. “Look at the cans on her. Jesus.”

  Henry turns and looks with lust. Doesn’t look. Then looks without lust. He goes through the whole outrage/guilt/self-loathing ritual again.

  “I wonder if there’s a link between tata size and volume of underarm sweat. Or type of odor. For instance, do chicks with fake tits smell different? That’s a piece of research I’d like to oversee.”

  “I’m sure Dworik would green-light it.”

  “So why am I here, you ask.”

  “All the time,” Henry replies, watching the women apply the generic stick product with the Nanoabsorber™ logo.

  “Tell me that’s not erotic? Even the ugly ones. Were you here back in the day when we did the hairy group? Four weeks’ armpit bush minimum to get in. Even that you can’t help but find—”

  “So you’ve told me.” Henry thinks if the DVDs from the hairy armpit sessions just happen to come up missing from the archives, he’ll know where to look first.

  “Anyway, I’m here to tell you that you owe me a great old big one. A huge fucking one.”

  “Okay.”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because . . .”

  “Because I saved your ay-yass, Tuhoe. As we have this conversation that never happened, your whole level, most of this division, is being outsourced to fucking Bangalore, India.”

  “They can’t do that.”

  “Or Hungary. I forget. Some are going to Budapest and Prague and some to India. Anyway, I know. It’s an outrage. Makes one sick. Blah-blah-blah.”

  “India? What do they know about what we do here?”

  “They have armpits too. Besides, most of R & D is going to be humanely put down. Should have done it long ago. They’re going to stick with basically repackaging and repositioning what we’ve got. I mean, you’re only allowed to stop thirty percent of the sweat by law, and we can do that in our sleep, so what other mountain is there to climb in the world of sweaty pits?”

  “They can’t outsource my job. I deal with clients and customers every day. I innovate. Some kid in India can’t do that over the phone.”

  “Oh yes he can. And for one tenth the price.”

  “That’s bullshit. I’m a knowledge worker. A right-brainer. Even in this economy, Dan Pink and Thomas Friedman say knowledge workers are untouchable.”

  “We’ve already outsourced the entire Eye Care Division.”

  “That’s not true. I just spoke to Warren last night. We had lunch yesterday. He’s all excited about—”

  Giffler puts his hand to his mouth. “Whoopsy. I forgot that pit-sniffers and eyeballers occasionally cross-pollinate. Forgot he was your friend. So I misspoke. Let’s forget I said that. Actually, I never did say it, you lying bastard. Eye Care is rock-solid. Warren is golden. Safe as ever.”

  “He’s in his office. I passed it this morning. He’s not outsourced.”

  “Oh yes he—or the hypothetical employee whom we’ll call Warren—is. Off the record, s
omeone in Bangalore or Mumbai or perhaps Prague is doing his job right now for pennies on the dollar. We’re just being redundant for a little while to make sure it doesn’t bite us in the ass with some kind of cultural glitch, or typhoon, or Pakistani warhead. So don’t tell him.”

  “He’s one of my closest friends in the company. And you should know that unlike everyone else in this place, Warren loves his job.”

  “Right. Real American tragedy. This goddamn outsourcing. Soon we will outsource ourselves to death as a nation. Anyway, tell him and you’re fired too.”