Chapter 3: Strange Tidings

Inklings that she might be fired for the patch on her bag haunted Eliza. Surely, the ACLU would take up for her. No one would get fired for espousing antireligious sentiments in this day and age. She wasn't even certain that her employer was a Christian. And that is what she would have thought, had the dread that lurked in the back of her mind taken enough shape to be addressed. As it was, Eliza just felt a little bit *off*. Hypotheticals did not gain form. At best, she fantasized about being fired so that she could go onto bigger, better things. At worst, she cleaned things in her apartment that it was not her turn to clean. Eliza’s roommates did not complain. A week later, her stress found a new home.

“Your boy has really lost it now,” said Beth, her college roommate who had become her post collegiate roommate. The freelance pilates and yoga instructor passed her smartphone across the kitchen island of their Brooklyn apartment. Eliza glanced at it, expecting to see something sensational and damaging about any of the various progressive politicians whom she followed, supported, and for whom she had canvassed. It didn’t.

“‘Hell Is a Real Place,’ Raves Former DC Reporter,” proclaimed the newspaper’s section header.

“What the…” started Eliza as her eyes registered a picture of Sam Zimmermann. Her favorite political news correspondent looked as though he hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep for the month. He looked like he might have uncovered, in that hypothetical sleepless month, that the nation of Russia did not actually exist. Clothes visibly wrinkled and hair unkempt, Zimmermann’s mouth was gaping in the picture, an image of manic rictus, frozen in time.

“Yeah, he’s really lost it, man,” said Beth.

Eliza’s eyes scanned the article. In the era of the twenty-four hour news cycle, she had seen takedowns of celebrities before, unhinged famous people let loose on social media, blood in the water with actors and politicians. This was different. This was a man who had stared down Presidents. He had taken on the fossil fuel industry. Sam Zimmermann had even taken the fight to the military industrial complex and knocked divots out of their stock. Eliza’s roommate smirked at her in an apparent internal frenzy of schadenfreude.

The article lacked detail, but Eliza could glean that Sam Zimmermann had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown. What direct quotes the article had were nearly incoherent on their own, but no reasonable interpretation of them presented itself. Eliza handed Ellie her phone and sighed.

“I gotta get to work,” Eliza muttered.

“On Saturday?”

“It’s a half day. And, I make a full day’s pay.”

“Sixteen tons and a-whaddya get?” chanted Beth. Eliza didn’t take the bait. “Keep on fighting the fight! Someday, you’ll bring down those capitalist bastards from the inside!”

Eliza said nothing. Beth had been acting more combative and libertarian recently. She had been seeing a guy who had a stars and stripes porcupine sticker on his laptop. Eliza shuffled out of the door, down to her bike, locked in the stairwell below. It was an hour ride to Midtown Manhattan, and she generally enjoyed it. Something about the fall of Sam Zimmermann had struck a chord with her. Her English major brain tried to attach it to the incomprehensibility of existence, the horror of the universe’s unpredictability… but nothing really worked. She felt distracted and was nearly killed four times by various cabs and bellicose pedestrians. The fog still hung around her head when she arrived at the Monte Salute building. It followed her into the elevator. It was part of the habitual reverie and blurred her vision as she looked at the letters outside of the office where she worked.

“Marketing is everything, and everything is marketing.”

“Good call on your prediction,” said Greg. “Markus got his promotion. He’s on that retreat right now. They promoted Kasey.”

Greg slid past Eliza into the office, leaving her in the hallway with her thoughts. Was the world comprehensible? What difference did it make? She was going to be in marketing for the rest of her life, letting the nectar leak from her sieve. Rolling her eyes at her own thoughts, Eliza entered the office for a productive Saturday.

She tried to talk to Greg about Sam Zimmermann, but her colleague was unresponsive, save for saying, “Damn, wonder what drugs that was.”

Concentration came to her in the repetitive cadence of reading lines of copy that had been written by the production company. Every sentence needed to be rehashed, reworded. She had even gotten good at looking up translations of the various red herring words in every paragraph. Between that and a thesaurus, Eliza felt that she could divine the original message, even if she didn’t speak the native language of the woefully underpaid workers who had put together the original copy. If a giant like Sam Zimmermann could be brought low by the caprices of fate, who was Eliza Latimer? She was a copywriter and editor for the biotech wing of a multinational corporation. Replaceable. Interchangeable. All the cliches of serial numbers and industrial production. She was nothing.

“Ohhhh,” crooned Greg. “Markus is probably hiking with his eyes on Neroni’s assistant’s amazing ass right now. ASSistant. He’s probably watching that bobbing in front of him on a trail somewhere. Bam, bam, bam… You know, I hear that the nights there are open-bar – top shelf? Damn, that sounds amazing. I bet it’s like an upper management orgy. You know that there’s like weird sex hazing. I bet everyone’s gotta bang, like, a gimp or something.”

Eliza tried very hard to pretend that she hadn’t even heard Greg’s word vomit, but she couldn’t help but grimace.

“Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I remember the days when you were noticed by our closest scion of power.”

“I sort of wish that he had fired me.”

“He’d have had to notice you first. Like you said, he was really only noticing that patch.”

“Right. Also, die in a fire.”

And then, Eliza’s hands did something that they had never done before. They typed an e-mail to the company directory. They wrote, on company time, a scorching indictment of everything that Monte Salute meant to the working class, to the developing world, to the poor, to the powerless, to everyone who was not, essentially, Alessandro Neroni. At first, she thought that maybe, just for fun, she would let it sit in her drafts folder. Then, as it took shape, it felt like the sort of thing that might be too dangerous even for that. It might be the kind of thing that you just deleted when it was finished. Too late, she watched her fingers tack-tack across the keyboard, entering the e-mail addresses of every corporate officer she could find in the company directory. She couldn’t afford to do it. Rent in a small place in Brooklyn was unyielding, even with two roommates. Eliza was a human being with needs, like food and shelter. She needed money to afford both of them. But she was also a human being with dignity, and that dignity would be fed by sending this e-mail.

Before she knew what she was doing, Eliza had clicked send.

Her breath came fast. She shivered. Her reveries at the stupid sign outside of her department would end. She would lose her job. Certainly. She only wished that she hadn’t biked to work because there was no way to port home the things. She looked at her desk. The realization dawned on Eliza that there was nearly nothing there that she actually owned. The desk was a serfdom. An imprint on her seat that would fade moments after she stood up would be all she left when she left.

Eliza took another deep breath, held it in her lungs as a demonstration to herself of some modicum of control, and released it, understanding that it was not a sigh. The difficult part was over. This was one of the largest cities in the world. She would find something different. She would get out of marketing. She would take Sam Zimmermann’s place, speaking truth to power of the Alessandro Neronis of the world. As soon as they fired her. Just as soon as she lost her job.

And so, she left the office.

“Checking out a bit early for today, yeah?” said Greg. “You, uh, finish with the copy from the Novamere pages?”

“Someone’s gunning for Kasey’s job already, huh?” replied Eliza.

Greg eyed her back quizzically.

“I mean, Markus’ poor corpse is barely cold, and you’re already pretending to be in management.”

“No, I just don’t want to have to clean it up for our department because of your irresponsible ass.”

“When has that *ever* happened?”

“Hondo percent,” said Greg. “You’re too boring to actually put some action to any of that revolutionary theory. That’s why it will always stay a theory.”

Eliza didn’t answer because she was already on her way down the stairs. She felt like she had to run down flight after flight before she came to her senses and ran back into the office to claw at the circuitry of her computer in an absurd attempt to get the fateful e-mail back. This had been her Rubicon. She was across. She just needed to spend the entire weekend worrying about what she might do instead of writing horrendous copy for a biotech company.

That was exactly what she did.

Eliza accounted for not having received a summary termination e-mail over the weekend by chalking it up to the fact that the office was closed. She decided that, perhaps, it was that her insurrection hadn’t rattled down the various power structures to Kasey whose job it would be to give her the impersonal ax. After that, something made her go to work on Monday. They’d owe her a salary for any day that she showed up, right? So, maybe, she could get a few more days’ rent out of her job if she just continued to appear. So, she walked past The Words outside the office without stopping for even a moment. She sat at her desk and wrote more e-mails to people whom she detested within the company. She signed them, “Bad Patch.” Eliza felt, for the first time in years, that she was free. Monday came and went. Tuesday did, too.

On Wednesday, Greg was trying to comprehend Eliza’s new carefree façade.

“Have you finally decided to assert yourself as a woman and set up an OnlyFans account?”

Eliza contorted her face at Greg and gestured as if she were introducing him to himself. Greg realized that he had finally stepped across a boundary that he hadn’t seen, hadn’t even understood to exist.

“Yeah, you could probably report me to human resources for even having said that.”

Eliza said nothing.

“Dude, you aren’t seriously going to report me for that, are you? Come on, you’re, like, cool. We joke back and forth, I thought that that was who we are.”

“Do you think that HR would be able to find that between all the ecological suits and workers rights disputes?” asked Eliza.

It was Greg’s turn to stare at her. Was he staring past her?

“You know you can’t just say something like that.”

It was a strange thing for Greg to say, especially under the circumstances.

“Excuse me?” came a voice from behind Eliza.

She turned to see a familiar face. An immaculately primped woman looked around their office with great purpose. Clothed in the business dress of their superiors but with the air of someone used to being expected to do things, rather than expecting others to do them, the woman regarded them with attentive eyes framed by large glasses. Eliza could feel Greg loading a sexist joke while she tried to remember how she knew that face. She was an assistant. Whose?

“I’m looking for a Ms. Eliza Latimer,” she said.

Eliza swallowed. She remembered her voice, her glasses, and her style. She was Alessandro Neroni’s personal assistant.