Nothing Happens Until It Happens to You Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Terence Shine

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shine, T. M.

  Nothing happens until it happens to you: a novel / T. M. Shine.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Self-perception—Fiction. 3. Unemployment—Fiction. 4. Florida—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3619.H576N68 2010

  813′.6—dc22 2010011023

  eISBN: 978-0-307-58987-3

  v3.1

  For my people

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Week 1

  Week 2

  Week 3

  Week 4

  Week 5

  Week 6

  Week 7

  Week 8

  Week 9

  Week 10

  Week 11

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  WEEK 1

  manwich … all over the walls

  I love this part. Everyone is busy, occupied, happily employed. One person is even working.

  The office is split into three distinct divisions—sales, editorial, administrative—and as I cut across the billing department to use the fax machine I’m reveling in the snippets of disjointed conversation bombarding me from every direction.

  Josie, who writes a fashion column, “Glamazon,” for our South Florida weekly—she’s freakishly tall and glamorous—is relating to the temp receptionist how she fainted at the Muvico movie theater over the weekend. “And, of course, I get the one uncute paramedic on the planet,” she says. “I’m sorry they even revived me.”

  Our new intern is nervously pacing around a small conference table and talking into his cellphone. “Yeah, this place is lame but that’s not the worst of it,” he’s saying. “My pants are driving me crazy. They won’t let me sit still.”

  I enjoy these walks. My desk is off in its own little Siberia in a corner right beside a storage closet. When the big oak door is carelessly left open—about a thousand times a day—I’m totally obscured from the rest of the employees. I used to constantly reach over and shut it but that gets old around the four-hundred mark. So, to keep from feeling too isolated, I create reasons to get up and cruise the office, like a Peeping Tom in a cul-de-sac of cubicles.

  I take an unneeded detour through the art department because I relish glancing at their workstations to see half-finished sketches and experimental photo layouts that the public will most likely never see. There’s a small crowd around illustrator Gregg’s desk. I stop to peek over the huddle and see he is excitedly putting the finishing details on …

  “A commuter roller coaster,” Gregg says. “I took the Tri-Rail one day last week and everybody is sitting there zonked out, taking baby sips of coffee and doing sudoku. Then I envisioned them all on a roller coaster heading to work—newspapers flying in the air, coffee splashing into people’s hair, laptops crashing off treetops. This beast could take you from here to Miami in eleven minutes.”

  “I like the four-mile corkscrew between Boynton Beach and Delray,” a coworker with her chin resting on his drawing board says.

  “Check out this facedown drop into a fog-filled hole right out of the gate in West Palm,” Gregg says, trailing his finger across the route.

  Gregg’s pencil is splintering under extreme creative pressure, adding curves and loops as he spits out the details. It’s as if the whole image is busting out of him. He couldn’t stop it if he wanted to. I know this is just one of Gregg’s fleeting ideas that will never appear in our publication, but I can see it. I can really see it. Where does talent like that come from? It’s just not in me, I know that, but I’m still buoyed by seeing it in others.

  I feel like I’m soaring and swooping as I approach my true destination: the fax machine. Nicole, whose desk butts up against the copier, spots me briskly walking toward her and says, “It’s hard to keep a good man down.”

  “I’m the exception,” I say.

  That’s our exchange. I mean, really, that’s it—for the past six years. Nicole is sweet but she’s one of those people who constantly repeat lines in the realm of “Working hard or hardly working?” It took me three years to come up with my comeback, so I really shouldn’t talk.

  “Jeffrey,” Eileen says, stopping me as I begin to circle back to my desk. “What should I do tonight?”

  “Regina Spektor at the Cameo,” I say without skipping a beat. “Costs twenty-eight fifty. Doors open at eight-thirty. For more information visit cameoconcerthall.com.”

  “Awesome, I love her,” Eileen says.

  I guess that’s my talent. I’m the go-to guy if you want to know what’s going on in town—from samba lessons to what ex–sitcom star is appearing at the Improv to what time the Coral Gables Health Clinic is scheduling skin cancer screenings. My title, which I received in lieu of a raise four years ago, is Universal Calendar Editor. I know, it sounds grand and intergalactic but it’s really pretty mundane. Still, I like being the go-to guy, even if it’s only for someone who needs to know where to get her cat spayed on a Tuesday night. (Paws City, 1222 Belevedere Road, Margate. The first Tuesday of every month.)

  I stop just before my desk to close the storage closet door, but get a quick “Hey, leave that open. I’m hiding.”

  Gillian is sitting cross-legged on the corner of my desk, which is not a surprise. I actually keep the one area clear for her visits, so she’ll always feel welcome. A couple of years back I put out a coffee mug full of Slim Jims in that exact spot and all the employees began coming by to say hi, and make some obligatory small talk. I eventually ran out of meat sticks and that was the end of my massive popularity, except for Gillian. She continues to stop by periodically, sitting on the end of my desk crunching on carrot sticks, guzzling Diet Coke, and basically complaining about her day.

  She is so comfortable with her own beauty you almost forget about it. But our art department never does. Whenever they need a model on the cheap for a photo illustration, they turn to Gillian. I think I still have a copy of the special food issue where they have her in thigh-high waders, fly-fishing for Chilean sea bass off a diner’s plate in a crowded dockside restaurant.

  “I think my head is going to explode,” she says.

  As copy editor Gillian is in charge of correcting all the punctuation and grammatical errors before they go to print, so I immediately try to envision the shrapnel from the blast—commas boomeranging off the walls, asterisks hurtling through the air and cutting our throats like ninja death stars, clouds of periods bursting over our cubicles and unleashing a dark, nasty, prickly rain. And everyone covered in Diet Coke.

  “The sales department is having their big awards dinner tonight,” Gillian says. “They have, like, six of the actual awards on display outside the director’s office. It’s called the Excalibur. It’s very regal—a miniature sword that looks like the most expensive martini-olive skewer you’ve ever seen, imbedded in a rock, and it’s all encased in a glass cube. Nothing like the slabs of Lucite and the
Target gift cards the company pawns off on editorial.”

  As I’m talking to Gillian I see Artie coming toward us with an odd grin on his face. Bearded, disheveled, and wearing shirts that should have been retired in 1984, Artie is one of those beloved characters who endear themselves to everyone by just being themselves. When my eleven-year-old niece and a friend visited the office, they simply said, “We like Artie. He reminds us of Jack Black.”

  Artie stops by regularly, too, but it’s just part of his MO. He lives by the philosophy that if he visits everybody at their desks and “regales” each of them with identical anecdotes for twelve minutes twice a day, he can automatically cut four and a half hours out of his workday. He forced me to try it once, but I fizzled out after two stops and six minutes. I’m just not that good a talker, especially if it involves regaling.

  Oh, Artie’s the talented music writer who is forever trying to profile some old blues hound playing the Bamboo Room when he is supposed to be getting an eight-minute interview with Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz. If his head suddenly exploded, the shrapnel would certainly include bottom-shelf whiskey, hash browns from a twenty-four-hour diner, varnish from a stage-worn stool, and at least a bucketful of highway dust from the mythic crossroads where people sell their souls to the devil for unearthly musical ability.

  “What’s with the face?” Gillian says the second she sees Artie.

  “I moved somebody,” he says.

  “Where to?”

  “No, emotionally,” he says, holding up a small postcard adorned with a picture of a bird outside a cage looking in. “A reader wrote in that they were totally moved by the story about the street performers.”

  “I wish I could move somebody,” I say. “Other than into a new apartment or something, I mean.”

  “I told you that story was heartbreaking,” Gillian says. “That’s great.”

  “Anyway, that’s not why I’m here,” Artie says.

  “The Excaliburs, right?” Gillian says, lowering her voice.

  “Right out in the open,” Artie says excitedly. “I bet we could send Jeffrey over there to swipe one and they wouldn’t suspect a thing.”

  I want to question why he picked me, but I usually don’t get included in stuff like this, so I act as if I’ll go along.

  “Yeah, I bet he could pull it off,” Gillian says.

  The salespeople are flighty—always deep in conversation with some transsexual who owes money for placing a personal ad, or out back smoking More menthols and throwing rocks at squirrels—so I think I can do it.

  “Artie, can I see you for a minute?” our boss, Mark, says from across the office.

  “Sure,” Artie says, heading off. “You guys got this, right?”

  “Oh yeah, we got it,” Gillian says.

  “What do you think would come out of the boss’s head if it exploded?” I ask Gillian.

  “That one’s easy,” she says. “Manwich … All over the walls.”

  Gillian hops off the desk, looks around, and says, “Ten minutes and we do this.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Let’s wait until …”

  “Eight minutes. I’ll meet you by the marketing partition.”

  I stare at the clock for eight minutes and then walk over to the marketing partition. “Are you coming with me?” I ask Gillian.

  “No, but I’ll be the lookout. And one thief tip: Wherever you are, act like you belong.”

  For me, that really will be an act. I hesitate, but then, right on the other side of the wall, the delivery manager starts repeatedly banging a stapler on his desk. “Damn this thing. It’s the goddamn staples. And they’re from Staples! How the hell do you name your company Staples and then serve up the shittiest staples ever created?”

  I can’t let the unplanned diversion go to waste. I round the corner and am this close to acting like I belong when I hear Artie’s voice about ten feet behind me loudly announce, “OK, it’s been nice working with everybody.”

  I turn and all I catch is his back heading toward the front door; he is awkwardly waving to everyone as he exits.

  What the …?

  Normally, I’d just assume it was Artie, regaling us all with nothing more than a mundane departure. But there was something in the throatiness of his voice, an awkward gulp at the back of his words, that made me cringe. Clearly I wasn’t the only one who’d heard it. Several employees in our department instinctively flow into the parking lot, drifting along on Artie’s uncertain wake.

  “They told me not to say anything, that I couldn’t even go back to my desk, but I’m not going to work with people for thirteen years and not wave goodbye,” Artie says as coworkers surround him on the blacktop before he even reaches his car.

  What the …?

  The media company we all work for owns two large and eleven small papers in the Southeast (the kind that lie on people’s lawns until they’re soaked by the rain and then shredded by lawnmowers) and has not been impervious to downsizing. But it has been happening so slowly and subversively that the rest of us simply spent our days lingering in denial. Most of us didn’t even notice until the vending company came and took the snack machines out of our break room because there weren’t enough employees in our bureau to make it worth the trouble anymore. Hadn’t Artie just said this morning, “I miss my Twizzlers”? So we’ve been sitting here while positions slowly evaporated around us, but the usual MO involved the doomed employee getting a call at home to report to our main office on Green Road, aka the Green Mile, where one would be disposed of quietly.

  This is something new. I feel a gulping vacuum where my stomach should be.

  I focus on Artie as if I’m taking a final snapshot. More of a “why not me?” than a “why me?” guy, Artie seems to be graciously accepting his fate along with several languishing parking-lot-in-broad-daylight farewell hugs from the office ladies. As I wait my turn (just to shake his hand), I think of how he is made of the good stuff. Whatever they use to puff up those unbelievably comfortable Natuzzi couches or cram into the extraordinarily delicious grande burritos at the Mexican place down the road, that is what Artie is made of. His interior is high-grade.

  But before I can blurt out, “Artie, you are one high-grade SOB,” the boss is yelling out the front door of our office complex. “You all need to get back inside,” he barks.

  What? We can’t talk to Artie now?

  What an absurd thought. That’s all we do most of the time.

  Artie smiles and tells us to go inside, he’ll call everybody later. But as we file back in on command, the boss plucks Gillian out of the line with a clipped “Gillian, can I see you for a minute?”

  It takes only a second for the realization to set in: If they can dispose of Gillian, who would have been last on everybody’s hit list, no one is safe. Instantly we are gazelles at the water hole after lions take down a buck. Multiple brainstems pulse with a single primal thought: Who’s next?

  We’re engulfed by whispery screams. They don’t let you come back to your desk! They don’t let you come back to your desk.

  The herd bolts. It’s all going—family photos, thermal coffee cups, knickknacks from the trip to Amsterdam, Thai takeout menus, SpongeBob action figures … We are frantically sweeping off our desks into makeshift boxes, cloth sacks, and plastic shopping bags.

  Thumbtacks pop off cubicle walls as faded magazine shots of Bradley Cooper’s smile and 50 Cent’s abs are stripped away. Two employees race to the bathroom to split a mini bottle of tequila that had been smacked out of a monkey piñata at a holiday office party two years ago, then get right back to it—loading plastic crates, making runs to the car, returning for more. A life-size promotional cardboard cutout of our regional VP cradling a penguin in his arms is knocked to the ground and spiked by coworker Josie’s purple high heels—a quick casualty of a corporate stampede.

  Everyone is preparing for the worst. “I’m glad I wore my cargo pants today,” Gregg says, climbing over his own desk to get to the sto
ckroom. “I’m swiping Post-its. You know how much Post-its cost in the real world? You don’t want to know.”

  “I was specifically told I had to be here today,” says Eileen, a longtime employee who usually works from home on Wednesdays. “If I had to be here, it must be because …”

  We are all going down. The human resources department doesn’t have time to be subtle anymore. They are not concerned that an employee will make a scene or set off the fire sprinklers on the way out the door. No, this time the cuts will be swift and multiple, consequences be damned.

  “Oh, I know the company doesn’t really need me. I don’t want to go into that little office,” Josie mutters as artifacts swept from her desk pile up at her feet.

  Does the company really need any of us? Couldn’t we all be replaced by a Bangalore phone bank? “You’re right,” I say. “Let’s disappear.” (Who wouldn’t want to disappear at a time like this?)

  “Yeah, why make it easy for them,” Eileen says, pumping her tiny fist.

  In seconds, we are all back in the parking lot, slapping a stolen Post-it on Gillian’s car—“Meet us at Rotelli’s”—and fleeing a quarter mile down the street on foot. When the boss comes back out, there will be no one to fire.

  “Run! Run! Run!” Josie is screeching hysterically. We have to cut along the shoulder of the main highway and, even now, I wonder how drivers in passing cars are summing us up—this weird band of nine-to-five refugees trying to escape the corporate ax.

  “Gregg is strong,” Eileen shouts as we drop down a grassy reservoir gully and he swiftly pulls everybody up the other side. As I reach for Gregg’s outstretched hand he shouts, “Go! Go! Go!” Jack Bauer–style, and we’re frantically trailing up the sidewalk half scared, half doubled over from exhaustion.

  “I’m not in good enough shape to be fired,” Eileen says. “Someone carry me.”

  By the time we make it to the front doors of the Italian restaurant, Gillian, who always carries herself regally, is getting out of her car, beaming and primly clutching the severance package to her chest as if it’s an award for valor, which in her case it may very well be.